Gender,Place, and Social Contacts: Understanding Awareness of Vulnerability to Terrorism

Abstract

Creating resiliency, accomplished in part by individuals preparing for disaster, is the primary strategy outside of law enforcement for responding to the threat of urban terrorism. Individuals prepare when they perceive a need to do so, yet little is known about what shapes a person's awareness of vulnerability to terrorism. Because evidence indicates that social contacts act as conduits of information and affect perception of risk to natural hazards, it is possible that such contacts also affect terrorism vulnerability awareness. Because social contacts are also known to be systematically segmented by gender and location, we hypothesized that conversations about terrorism vary by gender and place, specifically the home and work place. Drawing on data from 93 interviews with householders in Boston, the study demonstrates that: (1) family networks generated discussions of home preparedness, whereas workplace networks engaged a wider variety of topics; (2) women discussed terrorism more frequently and in greater depth than did men; and (3) women heard more preparedness messages for the home than did men, whereas men undertook preparedness activities external to the home. The findings bridge geography and terrorism studies by theorizing emplaced and subjective human experiences that prompt conversations about terrorism. These conversations, in turn, help urban emergency managers and risk-hazards geographers promote rational dialogue and action vis-à-vis terrorism. Hazards researchers have shown that the more people discuss terrorism, the less they seek extreme and unwarranted responses.     

A Tripartite Conceptualisation of Urban Public Space as a Site for Play: Evidence from South Bank,London

Public space is a feature of the urban built environment that has received increasing attention in recent years. Discussion has focused on the theoretical decline of public space, as private and institutional forces take on increasing influence. At the same time, many such “in-between spaces,” even privately owned ones, are used and experienced as public on a daily basis. Few studies, however, have explored how spaces understood as public are used and practised as such. To address this gap in the literature this paper draws upon ethnographic data collected on the “South Bank” in London (United Kingdom) to argue that “play” is a recurrent trait of sociospatial practices enacted in public space. Three interrelated typologies of playful practices in public space are discussed: child's play, plays on meaning, and play as simulation.     

Social Movements in Urban Society: The City as A Space of Politicization

Recent anti-systemic social movements have illustrated the central role of cities in social movement mobilization. We not only highlight the characteristics of urban social relations that make cities fertile ground for mobilization, but also point to the disjunctures between the geographies and spatialities of social relations in the city, and the geographies and spatialities of many systemic processes. Struggles for a more just society must consider the broad geographies and spatialities of oppression, which we illustrate with a brief analysis of the Occupy movement. Finally, we introduce the next five articles in this special issue, all illustrating the importance of the geographies and spatialities of urban social struggle.     

丽江市古城周边“城中村”更新的社会经济发展策略研究

丽江作为历史文化名城旅游开发的成功案例,经济快速发展,近年来,古城的旅游市场已趋于饱和,其周边土地的开发活动频繁,“城中村”现象显现出来.以研究丽江古城周边“城中村”的更新改造为目标,针对丽江“城中村”的特殊性,从社会学的视角探讨古城周边“城中村”地区在更新过程中社会经济结构的转变,研究如何构筑城乡一体的新型经济、社会空间格局.     

Exploring space–time paths in physical and social closeness spaces: a space–time GIS approach

Exploring the evolution of people’s social interactions along with their changing physical locations can help to achieve a better understanding of the processes that generate the relationships between physical distance and social interactions, which can benefit broad fields of study related to social networks. However, few studies have examined the evolving relationships between physical movements and social closeness evolution. This is partially related to the shortage of longitudinal data in both physical locations and social interactions and the lack of an exploratory analysis environment capable of effectively investigating such a process over space and time. With the increasing availability of sociospatiotemporal data in recent years, it is now feasible to examine the relationships between physical separation and social interactions at the individual level in a space–time context. This research was intended to offer a spatiotemporal exploratory analysis approach to address this challenge. The first step was to propose the concept of a social closeness space–time path, which is an extension of the space–time path concept in time geography, to represent evolving human relationships in a social closeness space. A space–time geographical information system (GIS) prototype was then designed to support the representation and analysis of space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed concept and design in gaining insight into the impact of physical migration on online social closeness was demonstrated through an empirical study. The contributions of this study include an extension of the time–geographic framework from physical space to social closeness space, the development of a multirepresentation approach in a GIS to integrate an individual’s space–time paths in both physical and social closeness spaces, and an exploratory analysis of the evolving relationships between physical separation and social closeness over time.     

The convergence of GIS and social media: challenges for GIScience

It is hard to believe that 10 years have passed since we wrote our guest editorial for IJGIS (Sui and Goodchild 2001 Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. 2001. Are GIS becoming new media?. International Journal of Geographical Information Science, 15(5): 387–390. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Using the nascent evidence that emerged in the late 1990s, we speculated back in 2001 that geographic information systems (GIS) were rapidly becoming part of the mass media. On the basis of the proposition of GIS as media, we were able to link GIScience with theories in media studies such as Marshall McLuhan's law of the media, which considers modern media as modifiable perceptive extensions of human thought (Sui and Goodchild 2003 Sui, D.Z. and Goodchild, M.F. 2003. A tetradic analysis of GIS and society using McLuhan's law of media. Canadian Geographers, 47(1): 5–17. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). Remarkable conceptual and technological advances in GIS have been made during the past 10 years. The goal of this review is to provide an update on the ‘GIS as media’ argument we made 10 years ago and to discuss the new challenges for GIScience posed by the growing convergence of GIS and social media.     

Ancient dams,settlement archaeology and Buddhist propagation in central India: the hydrological background

Abstract

A group of ancient dams (c. second—first century BC) was located during an archaeological study of the Sanchi area in central India. Comparison of reservoir volumes with estimated inflows suggests that their design was based on hydrological understanding.     

Social Mix and the Problematisation of Social Housing

Social housing in Australia is at a significant juncture. High levels of housing stress, increasing levels of socio-spatial polarisation and reduced government funding are posing complex policy challenges. Social mix policies are one response to these challenges, arising from the problematisation of social housing estates as socially excluded. This problematisation is examined through case studies of two Sydney social housing renewal projects: Telopea and Riverwood North. Drawing on interviews with government, private-sector and not-for-profit housing practitioners, the paper identifies two distinct discourses of social exclusion within this problematisation—culture of poverty discourse and equity discourse—that shape the implementation of social mix. These discourses reveal that implementing social mix is more complex than simply managing the cohabitation of residents in different tenures. Rather, the practice of social mix is embedded within discourses about the nature and causes of social exclusion. These discourses, in their turn, inform the multiple and sometimes conflicting aspirations pursued through social mix policies.     

Understanding the potential relationship between the socio-economic variables and contributions to OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap (OSM) has seen an exponential increase in the last few years and large volumes of geodata have been received from volunteered individuals. The collected geodata are heterogeneous in terms of different dimensions such as spatial patterns of contributions, quality, patterns of contributing individuals, and type of contributions. Because contributors’ personal information is anonymously stored by the OSM administrators, alternative methods are needed to investigate the role of contributors’ characteristics on their mapping behavior. This study is intended to explore the potential socio-economic characteristics of contributors in highly contributed areas to have better insights about the latent patterns of involved individuals in a highly dynamic state of the most active country in OSM, Germany. A logistic regression model (LRM) is applied to discover the potential correlations between dependent and independent variables. The findings explain that the areas with high population density, middle level of education, high income, high rate of overnight stays, high number of foreigners, and residents aged from 18 to 69 are more likely to be involved in OSM. Furthermore, the degree of dynamism in OSM is a function of proximity to built-up areas. Finally, concluding remarks concerning the independent variables and model sensitivity are presented.     

“Belonging” in the gentrified Golden Horn/Halic neighbourhoods of Istanbul

Mainstream gentrification research predominantly examines experiences and motivations of the middle-class gentrifier groups, while overlooking experiences of non-gentrifying groups including the impact of in situ local processes on gentrification itself. In this paper, I discuss gentrification, neighbourhood belonging and spatial distribution of class in Istanbul by examining patterns of belonging both of gentrifiers and non-gentrifying groups in historic neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn/Halic. I use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a methodology rarely used in gentrification research, to explore social and symbolic borders between these two groups. I show how gentrification leads to spatial clustering by creating exclusionary practices and eroding social cohesion, and illuminate divisions that are inscribed into the physical space of the neighbourhood.