MetaTOC stay on top of your field, easily

Geographical Research

Impact factor: 0.783 5-Year impact factor: 1.204 Print ISSN: 1745-5863 Online ISSN: 1745-5871 Publisher: Wiley Blackwell (Blackwell Publishing)

Subject: Geography

Most recent papers:

  • Keeping cool: practicing domestic refrigeration and environmental responsibility.
    Catherine Phillips, Gordon Waitt.
    Geographical Research. October 11, 2017
    Domestic refrigerators have become symbols of climate change in energy efficiency campaigns; they are equipment that both permits and prohibits the performance of environmental citizenship. However, little is known about how subjectivities and practices interact, particularly with regard to questions about refrigeration and domestic energy. What might those of us interested in household sustainability learn from the relationships among refrigerators, energy, subjectivities, and practices, and from what these may reveal about environmental responsibility? We draw on data from mixed‐method qualitative research conducted with 28 households in Wollongong, Australia, and frame the analysis in terms of social practice theory, with additional attention to subjectivity. This framing helps us develop thinking about how refrigeration is done and consider whether and how things become waste by paying closer attention to the spatial imperatives underpinning these practices. It also assists us in considering how the ongoing relationships of social and material aspects of refrigeration co‐constitute a range of subjectivities. Further, our analysis advances discussions on how household practices and identities relate to public campaigns about environmental responsibility, particularly as the latter is constructed in terms of ‘energy efficiency’.
    October 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12251   open full text
  • Urban commons are more‐than‐property.
    Miriam J. Williams.
    Geographical Research. October 11, 2017
    Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.
    October 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12262   open full text
  • Assembling attachments to homes under bushfire risk.
    Charishma Ratnam, Danielle Drozdzewski.
    Geographical Research. October 10, 2017
    This research, conducted in the Blue Mountains, New South Wales, Australia, explores attachment to the home in the context of bushfire risk. The paper builds on existing research that has focused both on the home and on emplaced and mobile methods therein and seeks to understand the range of human and non‐human attachments. We situate our examination of attachment in the context of a bushfire‐prone suburban area to consider whether attachments to home may be influenced by an external risk. We use a mix of verbal, visual, and sensory methods (walking and image‐led interviews) to examine both verbal and sensorial articulations in place and in the home. We report on a stepwise analysis of place attachments, home, and bushfire risk. First and while interviewing, we moved with the participants inside and outside of their homes to understand how attachment to those sites was constructed and maintained. Second, we considered those encounters as assemblages of attachments to place. Finally, we studied those assemblages of home‐bound attachments in the context of the risk of bushfire in proximate suburbs.
    October 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12250   open full text
  • Globalisation, soft power, and the rise of football in China.
    John Connell.
    Geographical Research. September 13, 2017
    Sport, especially football, has rapidly acquired global cultural, commercial, and also political prominence. China recently and belatedly has sought to acquire international recognition in sport and participate in global development by linking soft power, national status, and football. Market principles have been adopted, football clubs are owned by wealthy corporations, partly directed by government, and expensive coaches and players have been transferred from Europe. Conversely, Chinese corporations have invested in European football clubs. State plans are oriented to success in the World Cup and the adoption of the ‘world game’ throughout the nation, but cannot easily be implemented from above in a team sport with weak ‘grassroots’. Successfully developing the ‘people's game’ in the People's Republic has proved difficult. In this sporting arena, soft power has been limited because of domestic and international failings.
    September 13, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12249   open full text
  • Identification of limits and barriers to climate change adaptation: case study of two islands in Torres Strait, Australia.
    Karen E. McNamara, Ross Westoby, Scott G. Smithers.
    Geographical Research. September 04, 2017
    Communities living on remote islands are often viewed as among the most exposed and vulnerable to climate change impacts. This study uses the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework to investigate how indigenous communities living on two physically different islands in Torres Strait, Australia, experience what they consider to be the impacts of climate change in relation to their daily lives. During this process, a series of natural, physical, and socio‐cultural limits and barriers to climate change adaptation were identified on Boigu, a low‐lying mud island inundated by the sea during high tides and storm surges. As a volcanic island, Erub's elevation is higher but significant community infrastructure, housing, and cultural sites are located on the low coastal fringe. No immediate limits to climate change adaptation were identified on Erub, but physical and socio‐cultural barriers were revealed. ‘Limits’ to climate change adaptation occur when adaptation actions fail to protect the things valued by those affected, or few adaptation options are available. ‘Barriers’ to climate change adaptation may be overcome if recognised and addressed but can become entrenched limits if they are ignored. Within the participating communities, such limits and barriers included (a) restricted adaptation options due to limited access to particular livelihood assets; (b) difficulty engaging with government processes to secure external support; and (c) people's place‐based values, which evoke a reluctance to relocate or retreat.
    September 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12242   open full text
  • Locational disadvantage and the spatial distribution of government expenditure on urban infrastructure and services in metropolitan Sydney (1988–2015).
    Ilan Wiesel, Fanqi Liu, Caitlin Buckle.
    Geographical Research. August 11, 2017
    Provision of public services by state governments rather than municipalities is considered an important urban governance factor preventing deeper levels of socio‐spatial inequality in Australian cities. The paper examines the spatial patterns of investment by the New South Wales state government in a wide range of services and infrastructure in metropolitan Sydney over 28 budget years from 1988/89 to 2015/16. We examined the relationship between volume and type of investment in infrastructure and services, and considered a local area's socioeconomic characteristics, distance from the central business district, and designation as a strategic site in metropolitan plans. Despite an overall redistributive approach favouring relatively disadvantaged areas, the most disadvantaged suburbs in metropolitan Sydney had significantly lower levels of investment. When funding was directed to the most disadvantaged suburbs, it was often in the form of new social housing development, reinforcing both the concentration of poverty and disadvantage in resource access. The findings suggest that this is a case of under‐investment by the state government in areas already populated by disadvantaged communities rather than a market‐driven process whereby disadvantaged households move into poorly resourced neighbourhoods.
    August 11, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12245   open full text
  • Understanding ethnic differences in perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours: a study of domestic water use in Sydney.
    Liping Yan, Phil McManus, Elizabeth Duncan.
    Geographical Research. July 31, 2017
    There is growing realisation among environmental and social studies researchers that people's decision‐making about water use conforms to their internal norms and beliefs, which are developed in social and cultural contexts. Little research, however, has addressed the possible impacts that ethnic and cultural diversity may have on domestic water use and management. This paper presents the results of a study conducted in Sydney, with specific reference to questionnaire findings. Among respondents from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, significant differences were observed in terms of perceptions, specific knowledge, attitudes, and self‐reported behaviours in relation to water use and conservation. The disparities identified were not masking socio‐demographic and economic characteristics but were the result of a series of constructs closely tied to ethnicity, including cultural value, environmental experience, language preference, and information access. As a factor explaining variation in the engagement of pro‐conservation behaviour, ethnic status was found to be more useful than some socio‐economic factors. The study highlights the importance of including ethnicity and cultural sensitivity issues in the decision‐making process of environmental management.
    July 31, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12244   open full text
  • My experiences with Indigenist methodologies.
    Katherine MacDonald.
    Geographical Research. July 21, 2017
    Traditionally, geographic research and engagement with Indigenous communities have largely been developed within a western research paradigm and have historically been linked to colonial practices such as extraction and/or domination. The consequences of these research practices and paradigms have been the further marginalisation of Indigenous people globally. However, geographers are increasingly being influenced by a range of Indigenous scholars from both within and beyond the discipline who highlight the colonial foundations of geographic knowledge and the ongoing production of colonial relations, and who are calling for a decolonisation of knowledge through the use of Indigenist methodologies. After exploring this shift, this paper moves to a discussion of my engagement with research in Indigenous communities using Indigenist methodologies, including the emotions and thought processes that emerged during my own research journey, which led me to southern Guyana and the Makushi and Wapishana peoples who reside in the northern savannah environments of the Amazon basin. I conclude by sharing how I am continuing that journey using Indigenist approaches in my work in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, and by encouraging future scholars to challenge traditional geographic research methods.
    July 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12241   open full text
  • Spatial inequality and dynamics of foreign hypermarket retailers in China.
    Ling Zhang, Yehua Dennis Wei.
    Geographical Research. June 22, 2017
    The globalisation of retailing has intensified since the mid‐1990s with the rise of a group of international retailers. Foreign retailers have greatly impacted the Chinese retail market since the opening up of the retail sector in 1992. This study aims to examine spatial inequality and dynamics of foreign hypermarket retailers at different geographic scales in China. Although the relative gaps in foreign hypermarkets among Chinese regions are narrowing, the absolute gaps are widening. Logistic regression models are used to identify locational determinants of foreign retailers Carrefour, Wal‐Mart, and RT‐Mart at the intercity level. Carrefour prefers cities with larger urban district populations, longer time of being open to international retailers, and more foreign investment. While urban district populations are significant to Wal‐Mart and RT‐Mart as well, they favour cities where people have higher annual salaries and aim to achieve internal economies of scale at the provincial level. The three leading foreign retailers also have different first‐city and city size preferences in their provincial expansions.
    June 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12235   open full text
  • Getting yourself out of the way: Aboriginal people listening and belonging in the city.
    Neil Harrison, Rebecca McLean.
    Geographical Research. June 20, 2017
    Much is known about the meaning of Country to Aboriginal people living in northern Australia. Discourse abounds in various disciplines about how Country provides people in remote locations with a sense of belonging and place. Yet little is known about what Country means to Aboriginal people living in large urban locations such as Sydney, Australia. The two authors conducted a series of interviews with nine Aboriginal people about what Country and belonging mean for them in the city. A methodological relation between the two authors is explored as a means of reflecting on the role of mentoring in a research partnership, and on the transferal of research capacity through that collaboration. Older participants identify how listening and belonging are each governed by the other to the extent that there can be no belonging without listening. We draw on the frames of both human geography and philosophy to argue that listening depends on an ability to get yourself out of the way.
    June 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12238   open full text
  • The segregation of generations: ancestral groups in Sydney, 2011.
    Ron Johnston, James Forrest, David Manley, Kelvyn Jones.
    Geographical Research. May 06, 2017
    Most models of immigrant minority enclave formation in cities represent their situation as relatively transient elements in urban residential mosaics. As minority group members become both economically integrated and socially–culturally assimilated into the host society, so they move away from the enclaves where they initially concentrated. Such shifts are especially likely in the second and later generations of group members, who are more likely to overcome the disadvantages experienced by many of the original settlers with regard to human capital. This paper evaluates that model using data on the residential distributions of three generations of those claiming one of 19 different ancestral groups in Sydney in 2011, at four nested spatial scales, deploying a recently developed inferential method for evaluating the intensity of residential segregation. The findings are not consistent with the model: in general, members of the second and third generations in any ancestral group are as segregated as the first generation (that is, those born outside Australia) at both regional and neighbourhood scales.
    May 06, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12233   open full text
  • The role of urban‐based agriculture on food security: Kenyan case studies.
    Samuel Onyango Omondi, Willis Oluoch‐Kosura, Magnus Jirström.
    Geographical Research. May 04, 2017
    Kenya is rapidly urbanising. In the growing cities and towns, there is an increasing need for food supplies, creating demand for agricultural products. High unemployment rates, urban poverty, and food and nutrition insecurity force some urban dwellers to partly adopt livelihood strategies based on urban agriculture. Presently in Kenya, urban and peri‐urban agriculture plays an important role in urban food system, because it enhances livelihood strategies for urban households, not least the poor. Using a sample of 2,009 households, this study characterised urban farming and urban‐based rural farming in medium‐sized towns of Thika and Kisumu, Kenya. It further assessed food security levels of urban households engaged in farming and households that do not farm. Results demonstrate that more than half of the households produced part of their food, either in urban or rural areas. About 37 per cent and 25 per cent of the respondents produced food in rural and urban areas, respectively. Generally, more of the households engaged in both urban farming and urban‐based rural agriculture are more food secure compared with the non‐farming households. Urban farming has a potential of improving household food security and provision of fungible income; hence, the practice should be included in the urban food policies.
    May 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12234   open full text
  • Critical review of desalination in Spain: a resource for the future?
    Álvaro‐Francisco Morote, Antonio‐Manuel Rico, Enrique Moltó.
    Geographical Research. May 02, 2017
    There have been significant territorial changes in the Spanish Mediterranean in the last few decades because of the important growth of residential tourism functions. The Spanish National Hydrological Plan () and, to a greater extent, the Action for Management and Use of Water Programme () advocated large‐scale desalination of seawater to guarantee a supply for urban, tourism, and even future agricultural demands. The paralysis of urban development planning caused by the financial crisis (2007/08), together with the downward trend in the consumption of drinking water in the last decade, highlighted a capacity to produce desalinated water that was far superior to actual needs. This study reviews the current context in which desalinated water is produced in Spain, weighs up the advantages and disadvantages of this method of water management, and considers the potential role that this non‐conventional source of water could play as a strategic resource in the future. The main findings of the study are that desalination is not a panacea; rather, it should be considered in terms of technological parameters tailored to the circumstances of each geographical and socioeconomic environment.
    May 02, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12232   open full text
  • Engaging with risk (or not): shared responsibility for biosecurity surveillance and the role of community gardens.
    Matt Curnock, Carol Farbotko, Kerry Collins, Cathy J. Robinson, Kirsten Maclean.
    Geographical Research. April 01, 2017
    Governance of risks to native flora and fauna and agriculture from disease and pests increasingly emphasises the importance of a ‘shared responsibility’ for biosecurity. Few studies, however, have examined factors that influence stakeholders' engagement with such risks and responsibilities, particularly in community, rather than agricultural, settings. In this paper, we focus on a group of stakeholders in a context of heightened regional biosecurity activity, in northern Queensland, Australia. We explore the role that community garden actors may or may not play in biosecurity surveillance. Through interviews with 16 community garden group leaders and local government representatives, we unpack external social factors that contributed to stakeholders' engagement, unengagement or disengagement with and from biosecurity risks. These factors included institutional characteristics such as land tenure and the presence or absence of management policies and guidelines. However, we found that less formal institutional characteristics such as social networks played a greater role in shaping stakeholder engagement. Unengaged stakeholders were typically unaware of risks posed by plant pests and diseases and had limited network connections to relevant government agencies but expressed an interest in learning and participating in biosecurity surveillance networks. Disengaged stakeholders were more knowledgeable of biosecurity risks and had established network connections but expressed a low interest in or willingness to report a potential biosecurity threat. This case study provides insights into important social dimensions of governing risk among stakeholders and offers recommendations to improve stakeholder engagement within biosecurity surveillance networks.
    April 01, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12231   open full text
  • Household agricultural activities and child growth: evidence from rural Timor‐Leste.
    Pyone Myat Thu, Debra S. Judge.
    Geographical Research. March 20, 2017
    Childhood under‐nutrition and malnutrition are prevalent in low and middle‐income countries. Where agriculture is the primary source of food production, consumption, and cash income, it has a close relationship with health and nutrition in these emerging economies. Although Timor‐Leste achieved lower middle‐income status in 2011, national economic growth has not delivered anticipated nutritional dividends. Seeking to redress a lack of research that clearly demonstrates how agriculture impacts on nutrition in Timor‐Leste, we investigated the links between household agricultural activities and children's physical growth in two agro‐ecologically varying field sites: lowland Natarbora and mountainous Ossu. Children in both sites were below World Health Organization standards in height, weight, and body mass index. Coastal children recorded better growth than upland children. Livestock production was linked to poorer growth in the upland, but not coastal communities, which may be linked to specific differences in husbandry practices. In both communities, access to a plantation was somewhat associated with children's (0–10 years) increased weight‐for‐age. As simple agricultural indicators do not fully explain growth outcomes, a livelihood security approach is proposed to better understand how households address food and nutritional needs in relation to broader livelihood concerns.
    March 20, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12221   open full text
  • Ageing in remote and cyclone‐prone communities: geography, policy, and disaster relief.
    Sandra Astill.
    Geographical Research. March 05, 2017
    Focussing on the experience of independent‐living older adults, this study explored how those in regional Australian coastal communities have coped with repeated natural disasters. Using an exploratory, mixed‐method, and phenomenological approach, an array of non‐probability snowballing techniques was used to seek participation from residents aged 65 years or more, and from emergency services officers, disaster managers, and community health care providers located in regional communities affected by Cyclone Larry (2006) and Cyclone Yasi (2011). The research found that post‐disaster political decisions have had a negative long‐term impact on local economies, causing outmigration by those seeking employment, and resulting in many elderly residents facing a future without family support. As government policies encourage ageing‐in‐place by providing subsidised in situ care, increasingly older adults are remaining in exposed vulnerable locations, reliant on authorities for their survival both day‐to‐day and during an emergency. Findings also uncovered inconsistent disaster management policies between neighbouring local government councils and an unrealistic reliance on in situ care organisations by disaster managers during preparation and recovery stages of a natural hazard. These results highlight the need for those charged with emergency management to reassess both the future natural hazard adaptive capacities of ageing regional communities and policy responses to such challenges.
    March 05, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12228   open full text
  • Examining the physical and human dichotomy in geography: existing divisions and possible mergers in pedagogic outlooks.
    Rajarshi Dasgupta, Priyank Pravin Patel.
    Geographical Research. March 04, 2017
    The physical‐human dichotomy in geography is long standing, revolving around the topics studied and outlooks adopted by the two groups of geographers. Three reasons are identified for its continuation—the present structure of academic geography, constrained interactions between physical and human geographers, and their publication strategies. Critics suggest that physical and human geography have become divergent strains because the physical environment has been accorded little relevance in human geographic studies, also putting forward the failure of physical geographers to integrate the human influence on physical processes and neglecting space in their studies. Citing examples, this paper argues that physical and human geography influence each other. It also demonstrates that physical geographers have sufficiently considered both space and time, and even space‐time, through the concepts of scale and ergodicity. Some measures have been proposed to resuscitate the links between these two branches. These are reconnecting university and school geography, merging departments, teaching courses on geographical philosophies and theory building, engaging in integrative discourses, innovative classroom strategies, joint fieldwork, using geoinformatics, and conducting collaborative research. The paper concludes that physical and human geographers must communicate with each other more and engage in cross‐disciplinary studies. Otherwise, they might undermine their responsibilities as geographers and spatial thinkers/analysts.
    March 04, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12220   open full text
  • Geomorphic reconstruction of formation and recession processes of waterfalls of the Kaminokawa river basin on Osumi Peninsula, southern Kyushu, Japan.
    Hidetsugu Yoshida, Yuichi S. Hayakawa, Shintaro Takanami, Akira Hikitsu, Saki Ohsaka, Ryo Ishii.
    Geographical Research. February 28, 2017
    To assess the geomorphological importance of waterfall recession in volcanic bedrock, we examined recession rates of six waterfalls in the lower reaches of Kaminokawa river basin on the Osumi Peninsula in southern Kyushu. The examination was performed with an empirical equation that uses a dimensionless parameter obtained by dimensional analysis of relevant measured factors, including erosive force, size of waterfall, and bedrock resistance. Welded Ata ignimbrite, formed at approximately 110 ka, may have played an initiating role to maintain such waterfalls because it resists weathering more than other local rocks. Estimated recession rates for the six waterfalls range from 0.2 to 3.0 cm/y, which compare with estimated rates for waterfalls in another region characterised by welded ignimbrite. Comparison of equation‐derived recession rates of waterfalls with actual recession distances from confluences supports the idea that an original waterfall will subsequently split into two distinct waterfalls when it recesses past an upstream junction of two channels. Our findings revealed that all six waterfalls likely would have been at almost the same point lower in the watershed in the past, marking the general site of the original waterfall. Moreover, the ancestral original waterfall is highly likely to have started from a point between the caldera rim and present river mouth. There, a knickpoint was likely caused by the river dropping into an inner part of the caldera, possibly just after the eruption of the Ata ignimbrite. The waterfall erodes upstream away from the caldera basin, and this happens to be to the east.
    February 28, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12229   open full text
  • The effects of food price changes on smallholder production and consumption decision‐making: evidence from Bangladesh.
    Katharina Molitor, Boris Braun, Bill Pritchard.
    Geographical Research. February 27, 2017
    There is still no consensus in academic debate about the impacts of food price changes on smallholder farmers' food and nutrition security. This paper aims to show how food price changes affect food and nutrition security of smallholder households in the Rajshahi district in north‐western Bangladesh. To better understand smallholders' adaptive capacity with respect to uncertainties regarding food price changes, it is crucial to look more closely at the decision‐making processes of smallholder households in their dual role as producers and consumers of food (prosumers). Smallholder farmers report in focus group discussions that they diversify their cropping practices to be more resilient against food price uncertainties. However, this strategy can be only successful if they are able to invest in inputs. Farmers face several constraints when seeking to make use of opportunities to sell diverse crops given their dependence on different types of local and regional buyers of food commodities. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that an increase in food prices does not automatically relate to an increase in farm‐gate prices.
    February 27, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12225   open full text
  • Understanding the linkages between migration and household food security in India.
    Chetan Choithani.
    Geographical Research. February 24, 2017
    This paper argues for the need to integrate migration in future food policy research and practice and, in doing so, examines the role of internal migration as a livelihood strategy in influencing food security among rural households. Migration has become a key component of livelihood strategies for an increasing number of rural households across the developing world. Importantly, there is emerging consensus among academics and policy makers on migration's potentially positive effects in reducing poverty and promoting sustainable human development. Concurrently, the significance of the catch‐cry ‘food security for all’ as an important development objective has been growing, particularly since the 2007–08 global food crisis. However, academic and policy discussions on these two issues have tended to proceed largely in silos, with little attention devoted to the relationship they bear with each other. Using primary survey data collected from 392 rural households from a district in western Bihar in India, this paper seeks to fill this gap in relational dynamics. It first reviews plausible reasons for this disconnect between migration and food security in the wider developing countries' context, and then draws on a primary survey of rural Indian households to provide empirical household‐level insights on the linkages between people's movements and households' capacity to secure food. In particular, the paper focuses on the often‐overlooked role of migrants' remittances for food security of rural households at points of origin. The findings show that, by equipping households with improved purchasing power and enabling investment in agriculture, remittances contribute positively to household food security.
    February 24, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12223   open full text
  • Privatising the suburbs: examining the trends and implications of 20 years of private residential development in Sydney, Australia.
    Therese Kenna, Robin Goodman, Deborah Stevenson.
    Geographical Research. February 22, 2017
    Master planned estates have been the subject of considerable academic interest since the publication of Blakely and Snyder's () typology. The growing provision of private assets, facilities, and infrastructure in such estates has been documented and discussed. However, the extent of this form of residential estate in Australia has yet to be systematically documented. This paper seeks to contribute to knowledge in this field by reference to findings from an investigation in Sydney, Australia, using data from 300 private residential estates constructed under the New South Wales Community Land Development Act, 1989 (community title) over a 20‐year period. The aim is to understand the broad trends emerging in relation to the nature and extent of these types of developments and to consider some of their potential implications. This research suggests that there has been a quiet revolution in residential development and postulates that the extent of privatisation of essential neighbourhood infrastructure has been considerable. The study finds that master planned residential estate development has proliferated, particularly in the outer suburbs and in areas of relative disadvantage, and resulted in enclaves of comparative affluence disconnected from surrounding areas. In addition, the restrictive covenants usually applied in these estates are often designed to prevent change, including future densification or environmental adaptation. To this extent, the privatised nature of these estates puts them beyond the reach of broader urban planning goals.
    February 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12224   open full text
  • The state and food security discourses of Indonesia: feeding the bangsa.
    Jeff Neilson, Josephine Wright.
    Geographical Research. February 22, 2017
    This paper examines the ways in which discourses of food security and food sovereignty are articulated in Indonesia, exploring their emergence within particular historical episodes and considering how this change has informed their current deployment by state‐based actors. Looking first to the wider global discourses that encompass perspectives on food security and food sovereignty, this paper attempts to map a specifically Indonesian perspective on ‘food security’ (ketahanan pangan), and its relationship with ‘food sovereignty’ (kedaulatan pangan). Kedaulatan pangan emerges as a fundamentally endogenous political construct in Indonesia; that is, only marginally related to the broader global discourses of food sovereignty as espoused by organisations such as La Via Campesina. As presented by the Indonesian state, kedaulatan pangan is not oppositional to ketahanan pangan, as sometimes is portrayed elsewhere, but should instead be understood primarily as a rhetorical device to strengthen the role and function of the state and to reinforce existing associations between food security, state control, and national scale food self‐sufficiency. The Indonesian notion of kedaulatan pangan responds primarily to the scalar notion of feeding the bangsa, the abstract Indonesian word for ‘the nation’. The dominant discourse has been embraced and projected by political actors to further vested interests and also appears to be contributing to policy interventions with negative food security outcomes for some of Indonesia's most vulnerable individuals.
    February 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12210   open full text
  • Household vulnerability to food price increases: the 2008 crisis in urban Southern Africa.
    Cameron McCordic, Bruce Frayne.
    Geographical Research. February 22, 2017
    Volatile food prices represent a common hazard to the food security of poor urban households. In trying to understand the impact of this hazard, income poverty is widely accepted as the principal predictive variable. But could other variables be important in understanding household vulnerability to food price shocks? This analysis uses survey data collected from 11 cities in Southern Africa by the African Food Security Urban Network during the 2008 food price crisis. As expected, the data show that household income is a significant predictor of the negative impact of rising food prices on household food security. However, other variables are significant predictors of household vulnerability to food insecurity as a result of food price increases. The analysis demonstrated how these diverse variables facilitated our classification of different households according to food price shocks using a CHAID decision tree. Demonstrating that household income is not the only significant predictor of household vulnerability to food price volatility, these findings broaden our understanding of the complex factors that can predispose households to food insecurity in the context of rising food prices.
    February 22, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12222   open full text
  • Age‐differentiated impact of land appropriation and resettlement on landless farmers: a case study of Xinghua village, China.
    Weiming Tong, Pingyu Zhang, Kevin Lo, Tiantian Chen, Ran Gao.
    Geographical Research. February 21, 2017
    Land appropriation and subsequent resettlement of rural inhabitants are central to urbanisation in China. Often, the result is the impoverishment of landless farmers, who are a principal source of social unrest in the country. In the literature, landless farmers are often wrongly assumed to be a homogeneous group. In contrast, this paper presents the age‐differentiated experiences of land appropriation and resettlement among farmers. Using the case study of Xinghua village in China, and by reference to data collected via surveys and interviews, we show that even within a single community, there can be significant age‐related differences in terms of compensation, livelihood changes, income, living conditions, and satisfaction. Older farmers tend to receive more compensation, and the negative impact of land appropriation is felt most acutely by middle‐aged farmers. Viewed from a broader theoretical perspective, this study demonstrates the importance of understanding the impact of land appropriation and resettlement and shows how this impact is distributed unevenly across the affected communities.
    February 21, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12208   open full text
  • Academic work as radical practice: getting in, creating a space, not giving up.
    Yvonne Te Ruki‐Rangi‐O‐Tangaroa Underhill‐Sem.
    Geographical Research. January 10, 2017
    This paper makes three key points. First, beginning with a personal narrative on the radical practice of getting into the academy, it argues that scholars with non‐traditional academic trajectories must still be able to be competitive in employment rounds. Second, it outlines three particular pedagogies of radical practice: focussing on subjectivities; using local languages; and developing peer learning. Finally, it argues that active scholarly citizens bring intellectual agility that allows for creative, imaginative and just development thinking and practice.
    January 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12202   open full text
  • Contested geographies: competing constructions of community and efficiency in small school debates.
    Michael Corbett, Leif Helmer.
    Geographical Research. January 10, 2017
    The history of rural education in North America can be understood as a history of school closure, amalgamation, and consolidation of schools. Typically, historical and geographical arguments have converged in debates about whether or not to close small community schools, which are positioned as the victims of the march of time and reconfiguration of space. In this paper, we analyse the archetypical positioning of rural parents in the ‘school wars’ as emotional and irrational participants who want to turn back time and who fail or refuse to understand and accept what is alleged to be the inevitable transformation of rural space. We then analyse the political strategy and tactics engaged in by school governance officials and community agents in these struggles over the meaning and future of rural space. We argue that the confrontational politics that ensues do not support strong rural development conversations and that the unilateral search for what we call ‘trump cards’ to settle arguments with data and rational or emotional ‘appeals’ has led to ongoing tension in rural communities.
    January 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12209   open full text
  • Thinking ‘differently’ about a feminist critical geography of development.
    Kuntala Lahiri‐Dutt.
    Geographical Research. January 10, 2017
    This paper makes a case for grounding the global in feminist, anti‐racist, and post‐colonial scholarship in order to foreground questions of race, colonialism, and history in critical geographies of development. I argue that the process of ‘doing development’ involves the imposition of power; hence, geographers' critical engagements with development need to consider the intersectionality of sex, race, and ethnicity that comprises identities of the subjects of development and of those who ‘do development’. This consideration would entail questioning the homogeneity of ‘Third World women’ as a singular category in need of development and recognising the normativity of women from the global North who, so far, have been the ‘doers’ or the key actors in global interventions.
    January 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12211   open full text
  • Urban households' engagement in agriculture: implications for household food security in Ghana's medium sized cities.
    Hayford Mensah Ayerakwa.
    Geographical Research. January 10, 2017
    Urban and peri‐urban agriculture plays an important role in meeting the food and nutrition needs of those living in the increasingly urbanised cities in Africa. The extent and scope of the practise of urban and peri‐urban agriculture differs from one city to another depending on the economic, environmental, socio‐political, and contextual conditions at play. Using household data drawn from urban Techiman and Tamale in the Brong Ahafo and Northern regions of Ghana respectively, this paper descriptively analyses the contribution of households' engagement in agriculture on urban households' food security. The results show that, nearly half (43%) of urban residents are involved in the production of food either in the urban or rural areas or both, primarily for household consumption and sale of surplus produce. Households who do not engage in agriculture raise their cash incomes through engagement in informal businesses. The picture is however different for households that engage in urban and rural agriculture. For such households, income raised from agriculture (rural and urban combined) is the highest in both cities contributing nearly half (43%) and about a third (33%) of total cash incomes in Techiman and Tamale respectively. The results underscore the need to place the discussion on the contribution of urban agriculture to urban food security in the broader context of the different food production arrangements available to urban households, both in urban and rural areas.
    January 10, 2017   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12205   open full text
  • Land ownership, agriculture, and household nutrition: a case study of north Indian villages.
    Bill Pritchard, Anu Rammohan, Madhushree Sekher.
    Geographical Research. December 06, 2016
    In the rural global South, it is increasingly the case that the relationship between landholding status and household nutrition is intermediated by complex associations between intervening variables. These include changes to agricultural practices, the dynamics of how decisions about food are prioritised within household budgets, the gendering of household power relations, the breadth of non‐farm livelihood portfolios, and the effect of landholding status on access to social welfare schemes. This article demonstrates this complexity using a mixed‐methods assessment of livelihoods and nutritional status in two north Indian villages. The study finds that in these villages the role of land for household nutrition is expressed through significantly greater milk consumption by landholding households, but insignificant differences in the consumption of most other major food items. Landholding households' greater consumption of milk is hinged to an ability to grow fodder in between cropping cycles, and manage these activities via prevailing agricultural gender norms in which women and girls are charged with responsibilities for livestock husbandry. In the context where milk provides a crucial source of protein for the mainly vegetarian diets in these villages, landholder households' greater access to milk represents a vital aspect of the local patterning of food and nutrition security. This finding underscores how greater complexity and diversity in the rural social landscapes of the global South are creating increasingly intricate, locally distinctive configurations of food and nutrition (in)security. Such local nuance cannot be readily observed within research traditions that rely on large‐scale national datasets. Mixed‐methods geographical research in the tradition of livelihoods analysis gives important voice to these considerations.
    December 06, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12199   open full text
  • Rural livelihoods and food security: long‐term insights from Sierra Leone's Eastern Province.
    Tony Binns, Jerram Bateman.
    Geographical Research. November 25, 2016
    Sierra Leone is one of the world's poorest countries, which in the last two decades has suffered from a devastating civil war and, more recently, an epidemic of the deadly Ebola disease. Both economy and livelihoods have suffered considerably, and the government and local communities are now working hard to rebuild these. Food insecurity has been a longstanding issue among Sierra Leone's rural households. This article considers some of the main parameters in the food security debate and then examines food security in the context of the country's rural development policies. Using data collected from field‐based research undertaken in two Eastern Province communities in the 1970s, and more recently in 2014, a valuable long‐term perspective is provided in relation to seasonal and intra‐household food insecurity and the impact of certain shocks in exacerbating the situation. The article concludes that further rural extension support, increasing cash crop production, and community education programmes could help to raise awareness of food insecurity issues and possibly lead to an improvement in nutritional levels in communities and within individual households.
    November 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12204   open full text
  • Geo‐spatial analyses in education research: the critical challenge and methodological possibilities.
    Christopher Lubienski, Jin Lee.
    Geographical Research. November 22, 2016
    The usefulness of spatial perspectives in education research is well known, particularly in fields such as school choice that are operationalised in multiple institutional, demographic, and local geographies. But the modes of spatial inquiry, even as they can potentially lend themselves to integrated research strategies, tend to be fragmented and isolated, failing to take into account multiple dimensions of contextual factors. Our purpose is to provide critical deliberations on geo‐spatial methods in school choice research and suggest an integrative approach to enhance research on school choice from a geographic perspective. This paper first demonstrates the linkage of spatial approaches to school choice, and then surveys geo‐spatial research as typically leveraged on this issue. We argue that there are inherent limitations to the typical conceptions of space in geo‐spatial analyses and discuss two of the major challenges to these conceptions as provided by critical theorists and geographers. But we also point out that these challenges suggest alternatives that themselves have serious shortcomings. The concluding discussion sets out some of the possibilities of a more integrated approach to spatial inquiry in education research, and school choice more specifically.
    November 22, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12188   open full text
  • Education in a mobile modernity.
    Martin Forsey.
    Geographical Research. November 21, 2016
    The main contention of this paper is that education helps frame a modernity in which individual progress and achievement are increasingly linked to the sheer physical act of movement. Thinking of modernisation as a trajectory of progress and development symbolised by industrialisation and a reordering of ‘traditional societies’ through rational forms of governance, we can begin to recognise the importance of the disembedding of people and communities from local institutions and relations that these modernising processes continue to require. Individual education stories are filled with movement that often reflect a commitment to the mobility imperatives of modernity. Reflecting the different scales of practice evident in this mobile modernity, the empirical focus ranges from rural settings to urban mobilities and then out to transnational mobilities and the educational choices exercised by the global middle classes. The paper explores the profound and the mundane ways in which educational structures affect family and individual mobilities.
    November 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12189   open full text
  • Geographies of inequalities in an area of opportunities: ambiguous experiences among young men in the Norwegian High North.
    Gry Paulgaard.
    Geographical Research. August 24, 2016
    Research within the field ‘geography of education’ points to the importance of studying the relationship between social and spatial variations in educational provision and attainment. This research has mainly focused on the spatial segregation of different social groups in urban settings. There has been limited research on how geography influences youth and education in rural settings. Youth research in general is criticised for an unacknowledged ‘metrocentricity’, referring to the invisibility of how place and geography represent changeable and contingent conditions in young people's lives. This paper is based on interviews with young, unemployed men living in small places that can be termed the marginal edge of the northern periphery, in the northern part of Norway. By combining a geographical approach with theories on social learning, the paper discusses how changes in the local world of education and work are experienced by a group of young men, and how the changes influence their choices, and lack thereof, in specific rural communities. The overall aim of this paper is to demonstrate how place and geography matter, and how gender and place intersect, when it comes to young people's experiences of opportunities and options.
    August 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12198   open full text
  • Can space teach? Theorising pedagogies of social order.
    Megan Watkins.
    Geographical Research. August 24, 2016
    Space affects bodies but to what extent does it teach? This paper explores the pedagogic dimensions of space and its various permutations. Engaging critically with phenomenological accounts of body/space relations, it examines how certain aspects of space—what here are termed non‐human didactics—equip the body with skills that have application in terms of a broad notion of social order requisite for cohabitation and the sharing of social space. As Theodore Schatzki (2002, p.1) points out, ‘Order is a basic dimension of any domain of entities’. He foregrounds the notion of Zusammenhang or ‘hanging together’ as a crucial element of social life. Such ‘hanging together’, however, does not just happen; it involves individuals acquiring certain ways of being, to navigate social space and to operate as part of a larger whole. Importantly, this process of acquisition is not just a matter of learning, it also involves teaching but understood in broad terms as pertaining to the many ways in which, as Raymond Williams (1966, p.15) explains, ‘the whole environment, its institutions and relationships, actively and profoundly teaches’. This paper explores these processes. It focuses on the neglect of pedagogy within theorisations of space and draws on examples from within the institutional space of the school to exemplify their role in the spatial formation of social order.
    August 24, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12197   open full text
  • Examining student's night‐time activity spaces: identities, performances, and transformations.
    Mark Holton.
    Geographical Research. August 10, 2016
    It has become increasingly clear that social activities play an important role for many UK undergraduate students in informing identity and place attachment through interactions with their term‐time location. While attention has been given to the ways in which students construct ‘exclusive geographies’ through self‐segregation from non‐students, thus far there has been very little discussion of how students' identities may be affected by their changing activity spaces and how this may blur the boundaries between student and non‐student spaces. Exploring these transformations over the duration of the degree is important as they highlight how identity performances may be influenced by students' transitions through university and their changing mobility patterns. This paper will address such matters by considering the following: (1) how first year activity spaces may constitute a student bubble for new undergraduates; (2) how, in subsequent years, these activity spaces adapt as students hone their social practices and explore environments less associated with student life; and (3) how ‘local’ student's activity spaces can become complex as they contemplate locating their multiple identities during term time.
    August 10, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12187   open full text
  • Bondi's Big Rock: explanations and representations in coastal geomorphology.
    Douglas Booth.
    Geographical Research. July 21, 2016
    Sitting on the shore platform at Ben Buckler, the north‐east headland of Bondi Beach, Sydney, is a large isolated boulder, weighing around 235 tons. In this article I analyse geomorphological explanations for, and historical representations of, the boulder, locally known as the Big Rock. Explanations for and representations of Bondi's Big Rock typically appear in discussions and debates about changes to the New South Wales coast and the impact of storm waves and tsunami. Geomorphologists date the Big Rock from a storm in July 1912 and have identified a range of wave sizes and forms to explain its presence. Yet, neither their explanations nor evidence have convinced a number of local residents who claim the rock existed before the 1912 storm. Bondi's Big Rock is thus a valuable reminder that geomorphological features are not fully formed subjects. Rather, they must be defined and contextualised in inordinately complex processes of explanation and representation that ultimately are always interpretations.
    July 21, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12194   open full text
  • Valued outcomes in the counter‐spaces of alternative education programs: success but on whose scale?
    Vicky Plows, Dorothy Bottrell, Kitty Te Riele.
    Geographical Research. April 27, 2016
    For marginalised young people, alternative education settings—referred to here as flexible learning programs (FLPs)—are thought to provide a powerful ‘counter‐space’ to damaging experiences of mainstream schooling. Such programs are inherently contradictory, with potential to also reproduce stigma and disadvantage. The provision of secondary schooling via FLPs is significant. In Australia, for example, the sector serves over 70,000 students. A better understanding of student experiences and outcomes in these educational spaces is needed. Drawing on interview data with staff, students, and graduates from two FLPs in Victoria, this paper employs Soja's ideas about conceived, perceived, and lived space to explore what outcomes are valued and to consider how success is measured in these programs. The paper shows that FLP staff and students valued a diverse range of academic, social, and personal outcomes that support a more expansive vision of education and monitoring student success than dominant perspectives. The paper also suggests that these FLPs are both a counter‐space and a space that connects back to the mainstream, optimally understood as third space, a hybrid place, bringing together the conventional and the alternative to create a valued and valuable education for marginalised young people.
    April 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12186   open full text
  • Household economic resilience to catastrophic rainstorms and flooding in a Chinese megacity.
    Alex Y. Lo, Bixia Xu, Faith Chan, Ruixian Su.
    Geographical Research. April 08, 2016
    Megacities situated on flood plains face escalating risks of waterlogging and inundation. Tianjin is one of these megacities in China where residents are exposed to these risks and not well prepared for their consequences. Government policies should support the most vulnerable and less resilient groups. This study can inform policy‐making by identifying the socio‐economic characteristics of those who are financially better prepared for the consequences of catastrophic rainstorms and flooding. A structured questionnaire survey was administered to 332 Tianjin residents. Results confirm that financial conditions crucially determine household resilience to these natural hazards. Lower‐income and less educated urban residents have lower resilient capacity. Weak engagement in the community, including residential committees and other organisations, is related to lower capacity to cope with the economic consequences of extreme weather events. Less resilient groups are therefore those who are subject to urban poverty and have limited social capital. Tianjin and other cities in the developing world require resilience strategies that attend to this segment of urban population.
    April 08, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12179   open full text
  • Intergenerational and intercultural civic learning through storied child‐led walks of Chiang Mai.
    Louise Gwenneth Phillips, Wajuppa Tossa.
    Geographical Research. April 04, 2016
    Recent times have witnessed global trends of increased protection of children in public spaces. The participatory arts project The Walking Neighbourhood hosted by Children renegotiates child agency in public spaces by inviting primary school aged children to curate and lead adult audiences on walks of local neighbourhoods. Multiple cities across Australia, Asia, and Europe have hosted The Walking Neighbourhood since 2012. This article focuses on one aspect of that initiative: the Australian‐Thai research collaboration for the Chiang Mai child‐hosted walks. Through storytelling, the Australian and Thai authors share their sensorial ethnographic encounters of two child‐led walks in Chiang Mai to provide lived sensorial affective accounts of children's perceptions and engagement with public spaces. These stories demonstrate how the project provides education for children's independently mobile engagement with their neighbourhoods and public spaces, in that the children competently managed responsibility for their adult audiences, and embraced responsibility for sharing their emplaced connections with a neighbourhood locale. Through participatory arts practice, artists, child hosts, and adult audience members co‐construct and interpret exploratory walks of local neighbourhoods to enable enhanced independent mobilities for children, challenging the norms that assert controlled childhoods. Such interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and intercultural experiences can enable reconceptualisation of children and public spaces and new realities for civic engagement and learning for all. © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers
    April 04, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12182   open full text
  • It's the Lungfish, stupid: knowledge fights, activism, and the science–policy interface.
    Edward A. Morgan, Natalie Osborne.
    Geographical Research. April 03, 2016
    Since the post‐positivist turn in the 20th century, many scholars and philosophers have argued for the importance of Other Ways Of Knowing – including local, embodied, situated, partial, and indigenous knowledges – in developing a better understanding of the world. This argument has been further stressed by a large subset of scholars working in the fields of geography, policy, planning, natural resource management, and community development, yet in practice, positivism retains its epistemological dominance. Drawing from a case study of a dam proposal at Traveston Crossing, Queensland, Australia, this paper will explore these epistemological tensions from the perspective of those whose first/primary ways of knowing about the issue were marginalised, namely the local activists who opposed the proposal. Using data gathered from document analysis and interviews, the paper will explore how these activists implicitly understood this epistemological marginalisation, how they adopted and employed positivist knowledge and language to further the exposure and credibility of their campaign, how this credibility was mediated by their identities, how they strategically deployed different forms of knowledge at local, national, and international scales, and how their successful navigation of these epistemological tensions was critical to the ultimate success of their campaign.
    April 03, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12181   open full text
  • Regional development in a resource production system: long distance commuting, population growth, and wealth redistribution in the Western Australia Goldfields.
    Kirsten Martinus.
    Geographical Research. March 20, 2016
    Resource towns often exist on a knife‐edge, largely depending upon global demand for their resource/s and, at the same time, playing a critical role in the development of a nation. The transition from single resource towns to diversified economies has been modelled on several occasions, but their application to other resource locales is difficult given the unique interplay of geographic, political, social, and economic factors. Nonetheless, Innis' Canadian staples theory may explain the political motivations of resource extraction and exportation, not least in relation to the Western Australia Goldfields. This paper seeks to explore the theory's potential in this context by examining the implications of high labour mobility. It employs a two‐step process using, first, a social network analysis to map the entire Australian labour commuting network and, second, a regression analysis of commuting, regional wealth, and population size against population change. While the Goldfields historically grew in line with processes described by Innis' theory, contemporary high labour mobility has created a variegated landscape of different development dynamics and trajectories. This finding carries implications for network patterns of residence and work. Labour acts to extend the distribution of wealth by sending incomes to the metropolitan core and to amenity‐rich regional towns across the State and nation. In such light, regional development scholars must view the resource town in its broader urban system of distinct but interlocked, and sometimes overlapping, activity nodes.
    March 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12173   open full text
  • Shadows on the landscape: an inquiry into the value of some Australian places.
    Ray Sumner.
    Geographical Research. February 28, 2016
    In 1922, Australian places connected with a solar eclipse were of world‐historical significance as they were associated with empirical confirmation of Einstein's general theory of relativity. They also formed a major part of Australian national consciousness, although they have since reverted to lost geographies. An exploration of Australian reception of eclipse science leads to questions of official heritage construction and stereotypical national identity. An argument is presented for the importance of intangible heritage at national, communal, and individual levels. At the complex intersection between memory and identity, place value is investigated within wider social‐political formations with emphasis on participation across perceived boundaries of social class, gender, and ethnicity, including the valuable role of Aboriginal peoples.
    February 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12172   open full text
  • Applying the technique of image classification to climate science: the case of Andalusia (Spain).
    José Gómez‐Zotano, Jorge Alcántara‐Manzanares, Emilio Martínez‐Ibarra, José Antonio Olmedo‐Cobo.
    Geographical Research. February 23, 2016
    This paper proposes an empirical climate classification method based on the application of multivariate statistics. In this method, the technique of supervised and unsupervised image classification is used to classify the data and define climatic units. envi software is used to perform the image classification, specifically, the Iterative Self‐Organizing Data Analysis Technique algorithm. Supervised classification is also applied based on reference variables, fundamental parameters and a classifier. The obtained results display greater objectivity, reliability, operability, accessibility and reproducibility than previous climate classifications devised for the region of Andalusia (Spain), taking into account that these previous classifications were not based on quantitative criteria.
    February 23, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12180   open full text
  • The pelican slaughter of 1911: a history of competing values, killing and private property from the Coorong, South Australia.
    Emily O'Gorman.
    Geographical Research. February 15, 2016
    In 1911, approximately 2000 pelicans were slaughtered on a group of islands within the Coorong lagoon in South Australia. The islands were a favoured nesting site, and a group of people had waited until the eggs hatched to kill both adult and young birds in order to collect the maximum payout from a 1 penny bounty that had been put on the head of each pelican by the South Australian Fisheries Department. The killings prompted advocates of bird protection, particularly ornithologists, to seek security for the rookeries against future raids by leasing the islands. A range of other interests became entangled in this decision, as some ornithologists also sought to prevent local Aboriginal people from harvesting bird eggs in the area. Examining these events and their consequences, this article has two related goals. The first goal is to show the role of animals and their environments in co‐shaping legal geographies. The second is to examine the contours and histories of competing ideas about protection, killing, and private property that shaped the legal geography of the Coorong.
    February 15, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12169   open full text
  • Legal geography and coastal climate change adaptation: the Vaughan litigation.
    Tayanah O'Donnell.
    Geographical Research. January 28, 2016
    The impacts on the Australian coast of a changing climate include environmental and property damage arising from increased frequency and severity of coastal weather events, storm surge, coastal erosion, and coastal flooding. Coastal management policies and planning laws are often relied upon to manage both the impacts and competing interests in the coast. The existence of these policies and laws, and their interpretation by the courts, bears a weight of expectation upon them to deliver in the face of climate change which merits further consideration. Indeed, a rich field is open from which to consider the constitution and construction of law in and across different places, in the context of climate change adaptation. The Australian coast is a unique and locally specific context from which to explore the relationship between law and place as performed in the Vaughan litigation, and this paper considers such important potential as it gains expression in the Vaughan litigation. © 2016 Institute of Australian Geographers
    January 28, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12170   open full text
  • People, plants, place, and rules: the Nagoya Protocol in pacific island countries.
    Daniel F. Robinson, Miranda Forsyth.
    Geographical Research. January 27, 2016
    This paper considers the rules informing the use of plants and associated knowledges in the Pacific, particularly Vanuatu, in the context of the introduction into the Pacific region of the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization to the Convention on Biological Diversity. The Nagoya Protocol, which entered into force in October 2014, brings both new international regulatory dimensions and new recognition and re‐framing of local and customary levels of regulation over genetic resources and traditional knowledge. Whilst generally seen as a positive step to protect genetic resources and traditional knowledge from misappropriation, at an implementation level the Nagoya Protocol gives rise to a range of issues. These issues go to the heart of questions about power, agency, and resource allocation, the bounded nature of communities and their relationship with land or sea; the fluidity and dynamism of customary law; challenges stemming from multiples sites of agency and the potentials of pluralism in many respects. We explore these issues with specific reference to some examples in Vanuatu, the Cook Islands and Samoa.
    January 27, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12178   open full text
  • Developing tourism products and new partnerships through participatory action research in rural Cameroon.
    Serge Schmitz, Dieudonné Lekane Tsobgou.
    Geographical Research. January 25, 2016
    At present, several obstacles to tourism development have been identified in developing countries. These include: poor infrastructure; shortage of facilities; a weak tourist image; a lack of know‐how with regard to how to welcome visitors and market tourism services; and the scarcity of available capital. In the research reported on in this paper, we explore the involvement of microcredit institutions to alleviate these issues. Because tourism is not yet developed in our study area of West Cameroon, action research was considered the only way to validate (by action) the recommendations of both the actors and the researchers. Action research permits the researchers to study the complex issues that typify the management of tourist destinations, including, for example, governance problems. It allows for networking and capacity to change the ways in which actions are carried out. The paper explores possible synergies between microfinance institutions (MFIs) and small and medium tourism businesses in an African rural community. First, we emphasise the obstacles to the formation of partnerships between MFIs and tourism businesses and we suggest ways to minimise them. Second, we describe how we facilitated networking between tourism actors and MFIs, which enabled the development of tourism products through new partnerships. As a result, four businesses are currently operating. From a research perspective, we point out the strengths and weaknesses of different types of associations and list the challenges. The results indicate that asymmetry of information and a lack of entrepreneurial spirit emerge as key concerns. The action research has promoted place and community based development. However, we underline that proper tourism development also requires the participation of stakeholders acting at different spatial scales.
    January 25, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12174   open full text
  • Obscure oases: natural, cultural and historical geography of western Queensland's Tertiary sandstone springs.
    Jennifer L. Silcock, Harry Macdermott, Boris Laffineur, Roderick J. Fensham.
    Geographical Research. January 20, 2016
    The distribution of surface water dictates human and animal activity in arid zones. Although typically small, hidden, and inaccessible, springs and wells fed by local aquifers were the only sources of reliable water across vast areas of inland Australia until the last century. Compared to larger, more accessible water sources such as riverine waterholes and Great Artesian Basin discharge springs, their history is sketchy and poorly documented, although rich in intrigue and mythology. Since the expansion of artificial waters and motorised transport, many of these small oases have been forgotten, and their location and permanence are now less well‐known than for thousands of years. We examine the distribution, hydrogeology, cultural history, and biological values of Tertiary sandstone springs in western Queensland based on a review of historical literature, interviews with long‐term residents, and extensive field surveys. One hundred and sixty springs were documented, and nearly 40% of these have declined in flow or become inactive since pastoral settlement for reasons that are not well understood. While their decline in some areas seems related to shallow bores sunk into their local aquifers, it is possible that some smaller springs owed their existence to regular human maintenance. Others are probably naturally dynamic over decadal time scales. This study documents an almost‐forgotten aspect of Queensland's natural and cultural history.
    January 20, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12175   open full text
  • Land suitability assessment for locating industrial parks: a hybrid multi criteria decision‐making approach using Geographical Information System.
    Reza Arabsheibani, Yousef Kanani Sadat, Abbas Abedini.
    Geographical Research. January 18, 2016
    Industrial areas play a critical role in urban and regional planning, especially for developing countries where reliable strategies for these areas can promote economic and environmental efficiency. The present study provides an integration of hybrid multi‐criteria decision‐making (MCDM) theories and Geographical Information System (GIS) processes in order to assess the suitability of an industrial location. Unlike traditional models, an efficient decision analysis demands handling uncertainties and considering dependencies between criteria. The proposed MCDM framework uses fuzzy theory because of the vagueness of experts' judgements. Moreover, Decision‐Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) is employed to investigate interrelationships among the criteria. In the proposed empirical solution, analytic network process (ANP) principles are used to deal with systematic interactions. We considered several factors such as accessibility, topography, proximity, and socioeconomic characteristics in the decision‐making procedure for a sustainable industrial park. The system is applied to Hamadan province, Iran to determine appropriate locations that are the results of the aggregation of criteria maps in a GIS environment. The results demonstrate that accessibility and economic indicators are essential for choosing an industrial park's location. Additionally, the proposed method can be applied for an efficiency evaluation of available industrial parks.
    January 18, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12176   open full text
  • Becoming‐urban, becoming‐forest: a historical geography of urban forest projects in Australia.
    Ryan Jones, Lesley Instone.
    Geographical Research. January 16, 2016
    In recent times, local governments in Australia's major cities have embraced the idea that the trees in their streets, parks, and private gardens are parts of a collective urban forest that can be managed to address complex policy problems and create more liveable and sustainable cities. In light of this proposition, applied and critical urban forest researchers have typically focused on questions of quantity with regard to some of the factors that influence the density and distribution of urban tree cover. In a few cases, however, researchers have documented qualitative changes to the urban trees and woodlands that ostensibly constitute the urban forest, suggesting that it might be apprehended in a more mutable and dynamic way. Building on these accounts, we turn to Deleuze and Guattari's theory of becoming to read the urban forest in an active and malleable light, developing a historical geography of urban forestry in Australia that discerns three urban forest projects we call the ‘forest in a city’, the ‘city forest’, and a new but not yet realised, ‘city in a forest’. This finding renders the urban forest in more contingent, multiple, and mutable terms, leading us to finish the paper with a consideration of what seeing the urban forest as becoming means for future research. There, we suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's becoming directs us to different kinds of empirical, political, and ethical concerns that haven't received significant interest in the current literature. These include asking how, why, and with what consequences do particular styles of urban forestry emerge at particular space‐times. How is qualitative difference and urban forest multiplicity dealt with in practice, as well as focusing on affect and everyday embodied encounters between people and trees in different urban places.
    January 16, 2016   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12177   open full text
  • Facilitating native land reacquisition in the rural USA through collaborative research and Geographic Information Systems.
    Holly R. Barcus, Laura J. Smith.
    Geographical Research. December 21, 2015
    A large proportion of American Indian reservation lands are owned by non‐Indian entities. A Geographic Information System (GIS) is a powerful tool for visualising land tenure changes, and public participation GIS (PPGIS) is one approach for using spatial technologies to facilitate the identification and reacquisition of reservation lands by tribes. While some tribes have successfully harnessed GIS for land management and for systematically identifying lands for reacquisition, others struggle to implement land management systems such as GIS for these purposes. This paper situates PPGIS in relation to other forms of participatory action research and outlines our use of a PPGIS framework to engage undergraduate geography students in the mapping of land tenure status on ten rural Minnesota Indian reservations as part of a collaborative partnership with the Indian Land Tenure Foundation (ILTF). A PPGIS framework allowed us to collaboratively define research goals in response to tribal community needs and provided structure for student work with partner reservations to develop and implement tailored mapping and analysis techniques. Two sets of findings are significant. First, the assembly of a standardised set of maps for American Indian reservations in Minnesota provides a tremendous visual and analytical resource for ILTF and individual tribes to pursue land reacquisition within reservation boundaries. Second, from a PPGIS perspective, we found that working with a coordinating or ‘bridging’ organisation provided key benefits by enabling education of both the student–faculty partners and the individual tribes. The PPGIS model empowered both partners by allowing tribes to harness a powerful technology to assist in visualising land‐based assets and allowing students to contribute to native land reacquisition efforts through application of their GIS skills. This mapping helps facilitate economic and cultural viability in tribal communities by providing an important visual catalogue of existing land‐based assets, in support of future land acquisition and economic development planning.
    December 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12167   open full text
  • Shooting up illicit drugs with God and the State: the legal–spatial constitution of Sydney's Medically Supervised Injecting Centre as a sanctuary.
    Jason Prior, Penny Crofts.
    Geographical Research. December 21, 2015
    In 1999, the Uniting Church opened a Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) at the Wayside Chapel in the inner Sydney suburb of Kings Cross. The Uniting Church justified this overt act of civil disobedience against the State's prohibitionist model of drug usage by invoking the ancient right of sanctuary. This invocation sought to produce a specific sort of spatialisation wherein the meaning of the line constituting sanctuary effects a protected ‘inside’ governed by God's word – civitas dei – ‘outside’ the jurisdiction of state power in civitas terrena. Sanctuary claims a territory exempt from other jurisdictions. The modern assertion of sanctuary enacts in physical space the relationship between state and religious authorities and the integration and intersections of civitas terrena and civitas dei. This article draws upon conceptions of sanctuary at the intersection of the Catholic Christianity tradition and the State since medieval times to analyse the contemporary space of sanctuary in the MSIC, exploring the shifting and ambiguous boundaries in material, legislative, and symbolic spaces. We argue that even though the MSIC has now been incorporated into civitas terrena, it remains and enacts a space of sanctuary.
    December 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12171   open full text
  • Geographies of adult multigenerational family households in metropolitan Sydney.
    Ian Burnley, Edgar Liu, Hazel Easthope.
    Geographical Research. December 21, 2015
    This paper investigates spatial trends of multigenerational adult families in metropolitan Sydney. Australia's immigrant gateway city, Sydney has high housing costs and infrastructure pressures, and planning policies support higher residential densities. In this context, the accommodation of persons living in multigenerational families is examined, by major region of origin, their geographies in Sydney, and by housing costs and constraints. Results highlight that cultural origins were influential in multigenerational household formations, and such formation is higher in areas of first and second ethnic community formation areas. Multigenerational living is also more common in middle ring and outer areas of cheaper housing. Implications are drawn for more nuanced housing policies in Sydney and comparable cities, given that detached and semi‐detached houses were favoured by these households, whereas two‐fifths of new housing constructed in Sydney in 2011 consists of two or less bedroom apartments.
    December 21, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12168   open full text
  • Human–animal relations and the celebration of place‐identity: A case study of the Scone Racing Carnival, New South Wales.
    Raewyn Graham.
    Geographical Research. November 10, 2015
    Festivals and carnivals are social‐cultural assemblages of human and non‐human entities. This paper investigates interactions between humans and animals by focusing on the Scone Racing Carnival, a key event in the Scone and Upper Hunter Horse Festival. This paper contributes to existing studies of non‐metropolitan festivals and animal–human relations by questioning how and why non‐humans are enrolled in these cultural events, and the impact this has on place identity. The central argument is that the relationship between humans and thoroughbred horses, in particular, has played a significant role in the creation of a distinctive landscape, a regional identity for the Upper Hunter region of New South Wales, and a local identity for Scone. In turn, the carnival has assisted in maintaining an ‘eque‐cultural’ identity through the marketing and annual public celebration of human–horse relationships.
    November 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12163   open full text
  • Gendered responses to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria, Australia.
    Joshua Whittaker, Christine Eriksen, Katharine Haynes.
    Geographical Research. November 10, 2015
    This paper presents findings from a gendered analysis of resident responses to the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires (wildfires) in Victoria, Australia. One hundred and seventy‐three people lost their lives in the bushfires and more than 2000 houses were destroyed. Previous research on Black Saturday has largely focused on issues of resident preparedness and response, with limited consideration of the role of gender in household decisions and actions. This paper examines the gendered dimensions of risk awareness, preparedness and response among households affected by the bushfires. Data were collected through in‐depth interviews with over 600 survivors and a questionnaire of 1314 households in fire‐affected areas. Analysis revealed that women more often wanted to leave than men, who more often wanted to stay and defend property against the bushfires. Nevertheless, findings suggest that broad‐brush characterisations of staying to defend as a masculine response and leaving as a feminine response are misguided. Although some women expressed a strong desire to leave, others were resolute on staying to defend. Equally, while some men were determined to stay and defend, others had never considered it an option. Despite this, the research identified numerous instances where disagreement had arisen as a result of differing intentions. Conflict most often stemmed from men's reluctance to leave, and was most apparent where households had not adequately planned or discussed their intended responses. The paper concludes by considering the degree to which the findings are consistent with other research on gender and bushfire, and the implications for bushfire safety policy and practice.
    November 10, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12162   open full text
  • Shall we tell the Minister? Scale matters in public policy: place is a geographic institution.
    Robert Gale.
    Geographical Research. November 02, 2015
    I present an argument with a number of interlocking aims. The main aims are to show that geographic scale matters in policy making and that place is a geographic institution with policy relevance. Management experience working inside the public sector has taught me that geography, compared with law and economics, lacks policy effective operational definitions to enhance a geographer's communication abilities in policy circles. To counter this difficulty, I make the case that geographers in the social and environmental social sciences need a scalar, reflexive, and apolitical policy‐oriented praxis to make geography more policy relevant. Drawing on a foundational geographic insight, I show how policy analysis and policy making are affected when what seems evident at one geographic scale may be absent or not evident at another. In addition, I make the argument that policy can give rise to ‘place effects’ which give the place actor/agency status and strategic intent. Place can therefore be considered as a geographic institution. Scalar analysis and deliberative place‐based reasoning about policies of scale (scalar policies) could be applied systematically and strategically within the public sector and by academic geographers for the public sector. Reflexive analysis about geographic scale and place in policy deliberations could enhance a role for geography as a policy‐relevant discipline.
    November 02, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12147   open full text
  • Catch 22: wetlands protection and fishing for survival.
    Josephine Gillespie.
    Geographical Research. October 28, 2015
    Environmental regulation of biodiversity hotspots, including wetlands, is of increasing importance in an era when species and habitat loss is common. A number of global environmental protection regimes attempt to set up processes that protect vulnerable species and their habitats. One such regulatory regime, the Ramsar Convention (Convention on Wetlands of International Importance, especially as Waterfowl Habitat), provides overarching protection for hundreds of wetlands around the world. In this paper, one Ramsar listed wetland, Southeast Asia's and Cambodia's largest freshwater lake, the Tonle Sap, is subject to a legal geographical analysis. A legal geography approach – one that puts front and centre an examination of both the environmental protection regulations for the wetlands and the people subject to them – enables the complexity of the legal‐human–environment dynamic in this unique wetlands to be revealed. Measuring the success, or otherwise, of environmental protection regulations requires an understanding of both the biophysical and social dynamics of the place subject to that protection. Geographers, particularly legal geographers, are well placed to document the human–environment dimensions of place and to expose fragilities or disconnections between regulations and place. Regulations that do not take adequate account of complex people–place dynamics are likely to fall short of expectations and run the risk of becoming self‐defeating, giving rise to a potential catch‐22 scenario.
    October 28, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12160   open full text
  • A history of changing aesthetic values in the Yarra Valley landscape, Victoria.
    Jane L. Lennon.
    Geographical Research. October 13, 2015
    Aesthetic responses to landscape may be emotional, sensory, or experiential, or a combination; it is a difficult value to identify and assess. This paper considers changing perceptions of the aesthetic values of the Yarra Valley landscape using a heritage methodology that involves examining artistic, creative, and published sources accounting for a lengthy period of changing land use. Scenic quality mapping, where available, is used as a support, and extensive reference is made to Australian impressionist art. Artworks for Yarra Valley landscapes may be considered as being among the cultural heritage indicators of significance and there is a new aesthetic of land art in private venues for the visiting public. The paper also illustrates how aesthetic values have been more broadly recognised in the post‐World War II era and become the domain of planning authorities as well as artists. It is for regional planners to be aware of and maintain these aesthetic values in the landscape.
    October 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12149   open full text
  • Property and place attachment: a legal geographical analysis of biodiversity law reform in New South Wales.
    Robyn Bartel, Nicole Graham.
    Geographical Research. October 05, 2015
    Environmental indicators suggest that the legislation regulating land clearing in NSW should be strengthened. However, reform has moved in the opposite direction, continuously weakening the law in response to the marginal but politically significant argument that the Act undermined sacrosanct private property rights. The cultural mythology around property and the legal discourse of property dephysicalise relations between people and place, transforming them into categories of abstract and predominantly commercial rights, and foster a vocabulary of entitlement to land as a civil and political right. Opponents to the existing legislation have also argued that it insufficiently accommodates vernacular knowledge regarding locally specific conditions and variations, and creates disrespect and mistrust between government and landholders. This paper interrogates the relationships between the key arguments of opponents to the existing legislation with place attachment. Place attachment describes the bond between people and place and is usually regarded as being positive for environmental protection. However, it may also underpin reactionary place‐protective behaviours including NIMBYism, the preservation of degraded landscapes and inappropriate place management practices, including the institution of private property itself. Paradoxically, while place‐protective resistance may appear to conflict with conservation, potential for resolution to this ongoing legal and geographical crisis in biodiversity conservation may be found through highlighting the common ground of place connection and inter‐dependence, and by rephysicalising law to better articulate shared interests in healthy environments beyond the narrow prism of individual property rights. This endeavour may be best achieved through a multi‐scalar and poly‐vocal participatory process, to ensure such narrow and monological interests do not hold disproportionate sway and address path dependency and legacy issues.
    October 05, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12151   open full text
  • Transforming cross‐cultural water research through trust, participation and place.
    Emma Woodward, Patricia Marrfurra McTaggart.
    Geographical Research. August 13, 2015
    Indigenous voices in government‐led natural resource management planning processes are often marginalised, misinterpreted, or excluded. Third parties, including government‐employed geographers, can act as knowledge brokers in defining Indigenous values and interests so they might be included in government planning processes. This paper reviews and assesses a research partnership that evolved to document the complex and diverse ecological and hydrological values held by Ngan'gi speakers about the Daly River and connected water places in the Northern Territory, Australia. The development of trust through the slow building of a relationship based on place‐based dialogue, a key aspect of participatory action research (PAR), created the foundation from which a mutually beneficial and respectful research partnership was able to, and continues to, evolve. Both research partners' perspectives are revealed here to articulate why the research partnership was deemed a success. Key lessons learned from the research partnership include the importance of trust, respect for place‐based learning, researcher and institutional flexibility, and awareness of the intricacies of relationship building and the benefits that research engagement can bring to Indigenous people and communities. We aim to further dialogue among geographers and interested disciplines as to the potential for PAR methods to foster mutually beneficial Indigenous–non‐Indigenous research partnerships.
    August 13, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12136   open full text
  • The integration of action research and traditional field research to provide sustainable solutions to maintaining periurban agriculture.
    Antonia D. Bousbaine, Christopher R. Bryant.
    Geographical Research. July 29, 2015
    Maintaining periurban agriculture and prime periurban farmland has become a leitmotiv in land use planning and management around many cities in North America and Western Europe since the 1960s. This article focuses on the changing perspectives associated with these planning and management initiatives as well as changing research approaches. Initially, periurban farmland was often seen by planners as a land reserve for urban development. Subsequently, concern was expressed about maintaining the prime agricultural land resource via farmland protection programmes, especially in North America in the 1960s and 1970s. Early research into periurban agriculture involved statistical analyses of farmland losses and changing agricultural production systems, and farmer interviews to identify pressures and opportunities facing periurban agriculture. Gradually, it became clear that maintaining farmland resources and farm activities required more than just ‘protecting’ them from urbanisation. Two types of initiatives developed: (1) the construction of agricultural development plans to ensure sustainable farm development, e.g. in Quebec since 2008, in France since the mid‐1970s and more recently in Wallonia (Belgium) in 2014; and (2) a change in the research approach to support periurban agricultural sustainability. While still using interviews with farmers and other actors, more important is the emergence of action research to provide support to farmers, their neighbours, elected officials and professionals in developing agricultural development plans, with the aim of achieving a better integration of periurban agriculture into the regional urban system. This paper develops this reasoning using research in Canada, France, and principally Belgium to illustrate the argument.
    July 29, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12134   open full text
  • Action research and reducing the vulnerability of peri‐urban agriculture: a case study from the Montreal Region.
    Christopher Robin Bryant, Ghalia Chahine.
    Geographical Research. June 19, 2015
    Important pressures still increase the vulnerability of peri‐urban farming despite initiatives to protect agricultural land and activities since the mid‐1960s in several jurisdictions in the USA and Canada. Often, farmland is still removed from agricultural reserves for the ‘good of society’ (for example, creating industrial parks). In 2008, an action research project was initiated to attempt to reduce agricultural vulnerability in several peri‐urban and rural areas near Montreal by emphasising the importance of the appropriation of the value of these farmlands by non‐farm citizens and actors. The action research roles involved accompanying the farmers, facilitating meetings, mobilising non‐farm actors, and informing farmers of possibilities when asked to do so. In this article, one specific project is analysed in Senneville (in the west of Montreal Island). While the project was initiated by the farmers to guarantee their long‐term future, they also sought to involve other, mostly non‐agricultural, actors. In a colloquium, a collective vision for the project was constructed, integrating other functions of farmland such as conservation and leisure activities. Many meetings were organised over a three‐year period and formal presentations were made to the municipality. The project is ongoing, including new farm operations and the reinforcement of local markets for marketing mainly organic produce. The area is now an integral part of an emerging ‘green belt’ of the Montreal agglomeration and is already part of a ‘green coalition’ of both urban and peri‐urban actors (farmers and non‐farmers), and an emerging food system movement which represents a more holistic approach to food production.
    June 19, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12119   open full text
  • Action research for tourism planning in rural areas? Examining an experience from the Couto Mixto (Galicia, Spain).
    Valerià Paül, Juan‐Manuel Trillo‐Santamaría, Paula Pérez‐Costas.
    Geographical Research. April 17, 2015
    This paper reviews a tourist planning experience developed for the Couto Mixto in 2007–2008. The Couto Mixto is a small territory of three hamlets situated in Galicia (Spain) and bordering Portugal that, until the end of the 19th century, used to be a virtually independent state of 25 km2. This tourism planning process is compared and contrasted with the well‐described Action Research (AR) approach. The paper begins by providing the conceptual foundations of tourism planning which were used as a framework for the research. Then, the tourism planning experience is introduced in detail, focussing on the results of the interviews conducted to identify the tourism resources of the area. Therefore, 23 resources were inventoried and further audited to determine their various degrees of potential for the purposes of tourism planning. Previous AR experiences and the tourism planning initiative developed for the Couto Mixto share a common objective to facilitate change in communities in trouble. However, the case‐study tourism planning experience was not fully compliant with genuine AR in several respects. We conclude by recommending AR as a worthy approach for tourism planning as a way to effectively put the local community in focus.
    April 17, 2015   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12108   open full text
  • A legal geography of property, tenure, exclusion, and rights in Cambodia: exposing an incongruous property narrative for non‐Western settings.
    Josephine Gillespie.
    Geographical Research. November 28, 2014
    The scholarship of legal geography provides an alternative way of conceptualising human–environmental relationships. While laws determine access to and regulate use of land through practices of bounding and excluding, geographical studies provide insights into the way that both physical and social processes create places. The meeting of these perspectives is invaluable. Legal geography perspectives are coming of age in an era when transdisciplinary perspectives on human/nonhuman–landscape interactions are of core concern to wider land use policy considerations. This paper draws on legal geography scholarship about property framed around three key concepts (1) tenure security, (2) exclusion, and (3) rights to reveal the social complexity surrounding these issues. This complexity is magnified in non‐Western settings, and in this paper, the legal geography perspective of analysis is extended to a developing country context. Using Cambodia as the primary setting, this paper challenges the unquestioning exportation of a dominant ‘Western’ property model into non‐Western contexts.
    November 28, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12094   open full text
  • Earth Sciences Comparative Matrix: A Comparative Method for Geoheritage Assessment.
    Susan White, Gresley A. Wakelin‐King.
    Geographical Research. April 21, 2014
    Geological heritage is insufficiently recognised in Australia; it should be considered in its own right, not as an addendum to other heritage values. The lack of a suitable robust and repeatable methodology has seriously constrained the assessment of geological sites suitable for the National Heritage List (NHL). A desktop assessment of Australian desert landscapes required intrinsic natural values of a diverse group of sites, spread over a vast area, to be assessed against NHL criteria. The Earth Sciences Comparative Matrix (ESCoM) was developed for this study. In the ESCoM, sites are grouped in process themes. Each is assessed against NHL criteria then compared with other similar places, according to degree of unusualness, integrity, and authenticity. A site scoring well across multiple themes has increased heritage significance. The overall values of a site are quantified, leading to a qualitative judgement on whether it achieves the threshold of outstanding heritage value. Examples of assessment using this method are given. In this methodology, significance determination is based on rigorous comparisons of specific values. It is semi‐quantitative, repeatable, and robust. It differs from other geoheritage assessment methods in its combination of process‐based groupings (facilitating the separation of site type from heritage criteria), matrix structure (minimising complexities of scale or diversity), and use of numerical rankings as an aid in decision‐making. While the study for which ESCoM was developed was focused on landforms, it can be used for other types of geoheritage (e.g. fossils, tectonic processes), with modification of matrix theme headings.
    April 21, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12062   open full text
  • Fishing Livelihoods, Seashore Tourism, and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict, Multi‐Functionality, and Juxtaposition.
    Scott William Hoefle.
    Geographical Research. April 04, 2014
    Critical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.
    April 04, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12061   open full text
  • Recent Change in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Population and Housing Geographies.
    Nicholas Biddle, Sarah Prout.
    Geographical Research. February 24, 2014
    The intercensal period (2006–2011) was a time of significant policy and population change in Indigenous affairs. The aim of this paper is to document the changing distribution of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population and housing geographies over that period. We use the Indigenous Region structure developed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics to show that Indigenous Australians grew at a rate that significantly outstrips the non‐Indigenous population with an increasing concentration of the Indigenous population on the urban eastern seaboard and particularly among older people. We present results that show that for certain measures, the housing situation of the Indigenous population in 2011 had improved relative to the Indigenous population in 2006. A smaller proportion of Indigenous households were estimated to live in an overcrowded dwelling compared with Indigenous households in 2006. There were also significant increases in the per cent of Indigenous households that owned or were purchasing their own home. Other results might be seen as less positive with community housing (a tenure type identified as having benefits in both qualitative and quantitative analysis) declining in importance. In net terms though, Indigenous households continue to experience a high degree of housing need. Compared with other households, they were 3.7 times as likely to live in an overcrowded dwelling.
    February 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12047   open full text
  • Risk and the Arborist in the Remaking of the Australian Urban Forest.
    Aidan Davison, James Barrie Kirkpatrick.
    Geographical Research. February 24, 2014
    The emerging profession of arboriculture has influenced Australian urban landscapes over the past decade. Arborists manage the urban forest as a core component of urban sustainability. We analyse qualitative interviews with 53 professionals involved in tree management in six eastern Australian cities to determine the ways in which a concern with risk management has shaped both the urban forest and the professional status and role of arborists. We found tree‐related risk has, in part, worked against urban greening by reducing tree size. However, an emerging risk culture has encouraged the development of the profession of arboriculture, which, in turn, has pioneered sophisticated ways, familiar to neither engineers nor ecologists, of ensuring the cohabitation of people and trees.
    February 24, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12043   open full text
  • Politically Engaged Geographical Research with the Community Sector: Is It Encouraged by Australia's Higher Education and Research Institutions?
    Sue Jackson, Louise Crabtree.
    Geographical Research. February 18, 2014
    With the application of neoliberal thinking to the higher education sector, measures of research quality and utility have proliferated in efforts to increase academic accountability, innovation, and contributions to public policy. We intend to reignite discussion about community activism and the role of the academic in response to trends in higher education policy and recent debate in Australia about research quality assessment and policy relevance. We challenge the common portrayal of the public sector as the sole locus of policy‐making and argue the case for greater recognition of the role of the community sector and its research partners in policy development and implementation – one that is not given due attention in the discourse on or in measures of research value and impact. Informed by recent literature on governance and interpretative approaches to policy analysis, we draw on our combined experience conducting research with two Australian movements at the forefront of reforms to property rights institutions, legal standards, and norms relating to social and economic equity to outline the institutional tensions and structural impediments facing researchers working with the non‐government sector. The paper documents the progressive roles the academic can play in such work, arguing that institutional change is required within the tertiary sector to support researchers to build closer, more trusting research partnerships in which due attention is given to social impact and relevance.
    February 18, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12057   open full text
  • Belonging to Bad: Ambiguity, Parramatta Girls and the Parramatta Girls Home.
    Corrinne Franklin.
    Geographical Research. January 29, 2014
    From 1887 to 1974, ‘corrupt’ adolescent girls were incarcerated in Parramatta Girls Home, a New South Wales state government facility charged with their ‘care and protection’. This paper examines the experiences of former inmates of Parramatta Girls Home (PGH) and explores their ongoing connections to the Home. Using the narratives of former inmates and submissions to public inquiries, the relationship that these women have with the Home and each other is explored. There is a strong thread of connection to place amongst former inmates, with their identity as ‘Parra girls’ shaping aspects of their post‐incarceration lives. For those women who were incarcerated at PGH, the connection to people and place focuses on the Home and is a powerful influence on their subsequent experiences of security and belonging.
    January 29, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12056   open full text
  • Dog Waste, Wasted Dogs: The Contribution of Human–Dog Relations to the Political Ecology of Australian Urban Space.
    Lesley Instone, Jill Sweeney.
    Geographical Research. January 29, 2014
    The city is increasingly recognised as a complex more‐than‐human space where the lives of humans and non‐humans entwine in consequential ways. Human–animal encounters constitute sometimes convivial and sometimes challenging relations that reflect wider pleasures and tensions in urban society. This paper grapples with concerns about the place of dogs in Australian urban public space and urban life more broadly. Adopting a relational political ecology approach, we ask what pet dogs tell us about the political, emotional, and material struggles that surround multispecies urban cohabitation. Following two human–dog urban waste streams – one concerned with dog waste, the other with dogs as waste – we consider how human–animal relations of both attachment and disposability shape the material flows that constitute urban political ecologies. In particular, by focusing on the ‘shadow ecologies’ of dog waste and disposal, we uncover the dynamic practices of care, disgust, violence, and love through which dogs, their waste, and their bodies are sanitised, controlled, and ultimately concealed from our everyday urban spaces.
    January 29, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12059   open full text
  • Renting Over Troubled Waters: An Urban Political Ecology of Rental Housing.
    Kathleen J. Mee, Lesley Instone, Miriam Williams, Jane Palmer, Nicola Vaughan.
    Geographical Research. January 29, 2014
    In this paper we explore the urban political ecologies (UPEs) of rental housing through the lens of water to draw attention to the different conditions of access to ‘resources for adaptation’ in the material relations of public and private rental housing provision in a world of changing climate. Climate change introduces a profound dimension of uncertainty in the socio‐material relations of urban life. However, the capacity of urban residents to make changes to their housing is uneven, and this uncertainty is amplified by the limited access of many tenants to ‘resources for adaptation’ such as gardens, water efficiency, and alternative energy and is exacerbated by regulatory practices, including leases, insurance, and capital investment, that help shape the socio‐natural relations of tenure. UPE emphasises the hybrid nature of cities and the flows of people and materials that constitute the built environment. We draw on the insights of UPE alongside an appreciation of the dynamics of normal standards of comfort, cleanliness, and convenience in the home to reveal the complexities of attempts to engage more sustainably with water in rental property. This paper draws on a case study of rental property managers and tenants in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, to explore social and cultural processes that are both shaped by and shape rental housing provision. We reveal a suite of practices, materials, and discourses that assemble to make ‘resources for adaptation’ and simultaneously render water useful, troubled, or troublesome.
    January 29, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12058   open full text
  • Layers of the Landscape: Representations and Perceptions of an Ordinary (Shared) Sports Landscape in a Haitian and Dominican Community.
    Nicholas Wise.
    Geographical Research. January 14, 2014
    Over the last decade, much research has assessed sport in relation to geographical perspectives of place, landscape, and identity. Using multiple qualitative methods, including mental maps, interviews and conversations, and participant observation, this inductive study attempts to better understand local perceptions of an everyday landscape. This work was conducted in Villa Ascension, a rural community in the Dominican Republic consisting of Haitian and Dominican residents. Football is a strong component of Haitian identity, and baseball is likewise important to Dominicans. Currently, the community has one site where two sports are actively played. Given the community's heterogeneous ethnic composition, Villa Ascension's sports landscape is recognised as having multiple layers of meaning. Knowledge produced in this case study revealed the emergent themes of perceived interpretations of ordinary landscapes, the forging of boundaries, communal relationships and support, and hazards and modification of limited spaces for play. The landscape being a layered one with multiple representations of place and identity, the Haitians' broader perceptions suggest that they view the site as a place of primary importance. Alternatively, the Dominicans are attempting to forge and maintain their sense of sporting identity in the landscape.
    January 14, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12055   open full text
  • Australia's Indigenous Carbon Economy: A National Snapshot.
    Cathy J. Robinson, Emily Gerrard, Tracey May, Kirsten Maclean.
    Geographical Research. January 09, 2014
    Many Indigenous communities in Australia are well situated to provide greenhouse gas abatement and carbon sequestration benefits, but little is known about the factors affecting the capability of Australia's Indigenous organisations to participate in climate change mitigation strategies. This paper provides a ‘snapshot’ summary of certain aspects of Australia's Indigenous organisations' participation in carbon offset schemes. The snapshot provides insight into the degree to which Indigenous organisations are aware of carbon market opportunities in Australia, the level that these Indigenous organisations participate in or engage with carbon‐based economic enterprises, and the key pathways through which Indigenous carbon market opportunities are pursued. Analysis of data collected from a national survey conducted between 2011 and 2012 show that most obstacles to Indigenous participation in carbon offset schemes relate to land tenure arrangements; geographic and biophysical factors; low levels of requisite technical, human and financial resources; and appropriate recognition of Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsibilities. The snapshot also highlights the value of supporting regionally specific capacity‐building strategies to enable Indigenous people to participate in emerging carbon offset activities and the generation of associated ecosystem services. Cultural, socio‐economic or demographic factors that are also likely to influence the ability of many Indigenous communities to participate in carbon market opportunities are identified as important areas for further research.
    January 09, 2014   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12049   open full text
  • Coupling Hydrotoponymy and GIS Cartography: A Case Study of Hydrohistorical Issues in Urban Groundwater Systems, Porto, NW Portugal.
    Liliana Freitas, Maria José Afonso, Nicole Devy‐Vareta, José Manuel Marques, Alberto Gomes, Helder I. Chaminé.
    Geographical Research. December 20, 2013
    The aim of this multidisciplinary study is to retrospectively examine hydrohistorical issues, namely hydrogeographic, hydrotoponymical and hydrogeological features, in order to assess the evolution of the Porto urban groundwater system (NW Portugal). To achieve these goals, the comparison of two main field inventories in a large urban region was performed by (i) historical mapping of sources and groundwater data from scientific reports spanning the late 17th century to the early 20th; and (ii) hydrogeologic and hydrotoponymical field inventory performed under current conditions. These field inventories permitted the location of springs, dug wells, fountains, public washing places and underground water galleries, which collected groundwater to supply the population of Porto until the early 20th century. This study also allowed the development of a hydrotoponymical classification for urban areas and a field hydrotoponymical inventory data sheet. This research integrated several techniques based on historical hydrogeography, hydrogeology and urban geosciences. The results of the field inventories were combined into both a database and a Geographical Information System (GIS) platform. This unified methodology allowed a cross‐check and analysis of several levels of information, namely hydrotoponymy, hydroclimatology, hydrogeology, structural geology and geomorphology. This perspective led to an assessment of the evolution of the quality of water resources in large urban areas over time. In addition, the role of hydrotoponymical features is presented in order to support the hydrogeological conceptual model for large urbanised areas.
    December 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12051   open full text
  • Protecting Sydney's Peri‐Urban Agriculture: Moving beyond a Housing/Farming Dichotomy.
    Sarah W. James.
    Geographical Research. December 20, 2013
    In Australia, as in other Western countries, peri‐urban farmland is increasingly being considered a public good, contributing to urban sustainability and climate change mitigation. To retain local food production, advocates have called for the implementation of farmland protection policies that restrict urban development, such as exclusion zoning. Many such policies have been abandoned due to protests, often from the very people the policies are ostensibly intended to protect – farmers. Examining the failure of Sydney's latest ‘green zones’ through a political ecology lens, this paper challenges the prevailing narrative that these protests indicate a lack of community support for the ideal of farmland protection. The failure of the green zones was one of political process, specifically the lack of consultation with Sydney's culturally and linguistically diverse small‐scale farmers, rather than community rejection of the principle of protection. Interview responses from farmers suggest that a bottom‐up approach to policy‐making would have yielded alternative and more successful approaches to maintaining farming on the fringe. This paper concludes that ensuring small‐scale farmers have access to and agency in the environmental decision‐making process generates options for farmland protection policy that move beyond a housing‐versus‐farming dichotomy.
    December 20, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12048   open full text
  • Excavating the Pilbara: A Polanyian Exploration.
    Jamie Peck.
    Geographical Research. July 26, 2013
    Taking its cues from the ‘substantivist’ economics of Karl Polanyi, the paper retraces a socio‐economic history of the Pilbara from the pastoral capitalism of the region's initially tenuous colonial settlement to the contemporary regime of extractive capitalism. Spatial fixes have been etched deeply into the landscape of this heterogeneously ‘productive’ region, but crises of social reproduction have remained endemic. Since the nineteenth century, disequilibrium has been the reigning principle, as successive failures of commodification and marketisation have marked a long and non‐linear history of double movements.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12027   open full text
  • Licit Narcotics Production in Australia: Legal Geographies Nomospheric and Topological.
    Stewart Williams.
    Geographical Research. July 26, 2013
    Licit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy crop restricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Its legal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about ‘the nomosphere’ and ‘topology’ developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respectively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinct new entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiating between the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identified in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses are used to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to the traditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. A renewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant can inform possible transformation around narcotics production.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12025   open full text
  • Climate Change and the Management of Fire‐Prone Vegetation in Southwest and Southeast Australia.
    Neal J. Enright, Joseph B. Fontaine.
    Geographical Research. July 26, 2013
    Mediterranean regions worldwide, and southwest (SW) Australia in particular, are characterised by their high plant biodiversity, fire‐prone vegetation, and substantial conservation challenges in relation to human land use, expanding populations and changing climate. Recent climate change is evident in SW Australia, with markedly decreasing rainfall and increasing temperatures since the 1970s. Fire management in SW Australia, historically focused in the southern forests, but now also engaged with a rapidly expanding wildland‐urban interface, is faced with the formidable challenge of increased fire likelihoods due to increased fire danger weather under a warming climate, and more human‐caused ignitions as population growth proceeds. Here, we review key components of the fire–environment relationship, the use of fuel reduction burning as a wildfire mitigation strategy, and the potential impacts of changing climate on fire regimes and fire management in the SW, including ecological impacts. We draw comparisons between SW and southeastern (SE) Australia, contrasting the recent history of fire in these two regions, how they differ, and how this helps us to understand the circumstances under which planned fire may be an effective approach to fire hazard mitigation in SW Australia. Evidence suggests that fuel reduction burning in wildlands produces little benefit for wildfire control. While wildfire sizes differ between regions, a concentration of resources and fire management near human infrastructure and not in wildlands seems warranted with increasing emphasis on fire suppression and fuels management.
    July 26, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12026   open full text
  • Destroying the Joint and Dying of Shame? A Geography of Revitalised Feminism in Social Media and Beyond.
    Jessica Mclean, Sophia Maalsen.
    Geographical Research. July 23, 2013
    Has feminist geography really lost all relevance? This paper examines what the revitalisation of interest in feminist thought and practice, especially in Australia, means for geography. We illuminate the trajectory of the feminist revitalisation in new media and beyond through developing a spatial analysis influenced by Rose and Fincher. Notions of paradoxical space and issue publics inform this reading of two pivotal moments in the feminist revitalisation: first, the creation of Destroy the Joint, a campaign launched and maintained in Facebook and Twitter spaces; and second, the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's speech against sexism and misogyny in Parliament in October 2012. Both these moments, coming from political and public spaces, received worldwide interest, and we critically examine the context and ramifications of these instances while situating the institutional processes surrounding them within the growing feminist revitalisation. In so doing, we argue that these Australian‐based cases indicate a growing feminist movement that is open and multiply focused, connecting personal politics to public campaigning, and achieving material impacts. We conclude that developing a feminist geography of new media is a challenging task, as these spaces circumvent and renegotiate traditional spatial dimensions – including scale and place – through their dynamic networks. It is, nevertheless, a task worth doing.
    July 23, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12023   open full text
  • From Simplicity to Complexity: The Changing Geography of Land Vulnerability to Degradation in Italy.
    Luca Salvati.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Although territorial disparities in land quality are commonly observed in Mediterranean‐type ecosystems, how different geographical gradients impact the changing distribution of land vulnerable to degradation over time and space is poorly investigated in southern Europe. The present study assesses the spatial distribution of vulnerable land according to a composite index that describes the degree of land vulnerability to degradation in Italy along eight gradients during two time periods (1960–1990 and 1990–2010), representing distinct socio‐economic and environmental conditions. While the degree of land vulnerability increased at similar paces from 1960 to 1990 and from 1990 to 2010, the spatial distribution of vulnerable land changed considerably. From 1960 to 1990, the area of vulnerable lands increased in coastal areas, lowlands, and areas with moderately high population density, mainly owing to the increased climate aridity. By contrast, peri‐urban areas experienced, especially in northern Italy, the highest vulnerability from 1990 to 2010 owing to increased human pressure on land generating, e.g. land‐use changes. Results indicate that the importance of the gradients shaping the distribution of vulnerable land in Italy is reflected in the (changing) role of climate, vegetation cover, and human pressure as factors predisposing land to degradation. Finally, policy implications of the changing geography of vulnerable land in the Mediterranean region are discussed.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12024   open full text
  • Trade Fairs as an Export Marketing and Research Strategy: Results from a Study of Korean Advanced Machinery Firms.
    Ronald V. Kalafsky, Douglas R. Gress.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Manufacturers pursuing information on potential customers in distant, dynamic markets confront myriad obstacles. To address this, many firms attend international trade fairs in order to market their products, to meet with prospective customers, and to tap into buzz related to potential international opportunities. In many ways, moreover, such exhibitions can serve as short‐term agglomerations of same‐industry activity, particularly important for producer–user interface geared towards innovation. The goal of this paper is to explore how Korean machine tool manufacturers utilise a major global trade show in Seoul to minimise the difficulties associated with accessing a global customer base, inclusive of their activity at this show geared towards innovation. Evidence from firm‐level surveys and interviews suggest that the amount of importance placed on trade fair attendance as part of a firm's internationalisation strategies is related to export growth. Additionally, a new insight generated is that firms that participate in trade shows as part of their innovation process also demonstrate higher rates of export intensity. Finally, we may be witnessing newly discovered, technology‐driven, symbiotic relationships between online portal sites, vendors, and potential customers at these trade fairs, where virtual services are nonetheless augmented by a need for a continued onsite presence at these exhibitions.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12019   open full text
  • Scaling‐Up, Scaling‐Down, and Scaling‐Out: Local Planning Strategies for Sea‐Level Rise in New South Wales, Australia.
    Bruce M. Taylor, Ben P. Harman, Matthew Inman.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Globally, sea‐level rise is expected to impact on many coastal regions and settlements. While mitigation of global greenhouse gas emissions remains an important task, adaptation is now seen as a critical component of the policy equation. Local government is a key player in adaptation planning and managing risk through their mandated role in land use planning and development control. Yet, managing the predicted impacts of climate change is proving to be a complex and difficult task for planners and policy makers. This paper reports on a case of local government deliberation on possible planning responses to address future sea‐level rise impacts in New South Wales, Australia. Using structured, expert opinion of planners and other technical experts engaged in a collaborative network in the Sydney region, we explore the feasibility of implementing planning and policy measures at the local and regional scales to respond to inundation risk as a result of sea‐level rise and storm surge events. Our research shows how local governments employ specific scale‐oriented strategies to engage private and public actors at different scales to manage legal, financial, and technical risks in coastal adaptation.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12011   open full text
  • Legal Geographies of Intellectual Property, ‘Traditional’ Knowledge and Biodiversity: Experiencing Conventions, Laws, Customary Law, and Karma in Thailand.
    Daniel F. Robinson.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    This article explores the existence of customary laws relating to ‘traditional’ knowledge of plants in Thailand through micro‐ethnographic case studies. This is juxtaposed against global and national frameworks of intellectual property laws that have a privatising effect on knowledge under the rubric of discovery or ‘invention’, as well as liability rights approaches of compensation and benefit‐sharing for research access. By understanding scale and legal jurisdiction as socially and politically constructed phenomena, we explore how laws at different scales and in different jurisdictions may override each other, discriminate against foreign laws and practices, and ignore customary laws. In doing so, the paper presents complex legal geographies of plants and associated knowledge, which suggest that the customary laws and norms of Indigenous groups and traditional healers are often ignored by ‘outsiders’. The paper notes that the possibility of ‘injury’ to traditional healers remains considerable without appropriate consent and given the discriminations surrounding knowledge made by patent laws. However, the ethnographies also point to the possibility of local remedies to these injuries through ritual processes, and we note resistant co‐constitutions of law and scale through the Nagoya Protocol.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12022   open full text
  • The Effects of Climate and Socio‐Demographics on Direct Household Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Australia.
    Sonia Graham, Heinz Schandl, Liana J. Williams, Tira Foran.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Household CO2 emissions are a significant contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions and consequently climate warming. Despite this, there has been little consideration of how household CO2 emissions may be affected by changes in climate. The aim of the present study has been to investigate the way climate, as well as socio‐demographic characteristics, may affect household CO2 emissions produced from energy use. A national online survey was conducted to determine current household CO2 emissions in Australia as well as capture the ownership and use of household appliances and installations. Electricity and gas‐based emissions as well as the ownership of a variety of household appliances and installations were found to be strongly associated with temperature. Electricity and gas emissions were found to decrease as annual average temperatures increase. However, as temperatures continue to rise under climate change this pattern may be reversed owing to increased reliance on air conditioners. One option for preventing this from occurring is to encourage houses to adopt more solar‐passive installations. Although this may be expensive, households with higher emissions tend to have higher incomes, indicating that they may have the capacity to pay for such installations.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12012   open full text
  • Experiences of ‘Community’ in a Gated Residential Estate.
    Therese Kenna, Deborah Stevenson.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Gated residential estates have become common features of the landscapes of cities around the world. The proliferation of these estates has attracted significant critical attention from urban scholars who have focused in particular on their contribution to urban segregation. Many commentators also question the possibility and existence of the neighbourhood‐based community that is promised to potential residents by estates developers. They argue that it cannot be delivered primarily because meaningful community does not form in circumstances of privatism. In this paper, we examine what community means to the residents of Macquarie Links, a gated residential estate in the Australian city of Sydney. To this end, the paper traces the interplay of contradictions that define the expectation and experience of community and argues that rather than being in conflict, the experience of community for many in this gated estate is actually underpinned by the structures of private governance that define the estate. In other words, not only is community said to exist in this neighbourhood, but also it is not homogeneity and everyday neighbouring that are pivotal but the governance structure of the estate.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12014   open full text
  • An Analysis of Monthly Rainfall and Its Relationship to the Occurrence of Mass Movement and Flooding in Pedra Branca Massif in the City of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
    Marta Foeppel Ribeiro, Vivian Castilho Da Costa, Newton De Magalhães Neto, Marcos Aurélio Vasconcelos De Freitas.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    Mass movements and floods triggered by rainstorms are considered some of the most serious environmental problems and are quite often able to cause great disasters in large tropical cities. This has been occurring due to anthropic activities which change natural drainage and stability of slope in urban areas. However, lower monthly rainfalls which occur with high frequency can also cause mass movements and floods. The direct and indirect effects of less intense but continuous rainfall mainly affect less privileged communities, which occupy areas more sensitive to mass movements and flooding, such as locations along river margins, coastal lagoons, mangroves, and steep slopes. This manuscript highlights the important contribution of the lower monthly rainfall totals in triggering mass movements and floods on the east side of Pedra Branca Massif in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Geoprocessing was used to estimate the total monthly rainfall in rain gauges managed by the local authority; create surface interpolation and choropleth maps; and conduct a comparative analysis of histograms of the total monthly rainfall and flooding and mass movement records provided by the City's Civil Defence. The results confirmed the direct relation between higher monthly rainfall totals and mass movements and floods, and also showed that lower monthly rainfall totals can trigger a significant occurrence of such events. Moreover, the monthly rainfall limit that could trigger mass movements and floods was confirmed on the east side of Pedra Branca Massif.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12015   open full text
  • Reflecting on a Decade of Australian Social Housing Policy: Changes in Supply and Geography, 2001–2011.
    Lucy Groenhart.
    Geographical Research. July 09, 2013
    This paper compares the intent of three Australian social housing policy interventions in the decade to 2011 with outcomes shown in time series data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Census. The three policy interventions are the supply stimulus that occurred in 2009 with funding to construct almost 20 000 new social housing dwellings by 2012, the push to diversify social housing supply through the transfer of public housing stock to community not‐for‐profit housing providers, and the physical renewal of public housing estates to reduce concentrations of social deprivation. Its aims are threefold: to understand how the supply and geography of social housing dwellings has changed over the past decade; to relate these changes to the objectives of social housing policy in the time period; and to identify issues for the future of social housing in Australia emerging from identified disparities between policy rhetoric and supply reality. The paper employs quantitative analysis of social housing supply for all of Australia and mapping of social housing supply changes in the east‐coast mainland state capital cities. This analysis reveals the overall stagnation of social housing supply in Australia over the previous decade, combined with evidence of stock loss in areas of renewal in some cities.
    July 09, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12020   open full text
  • Exploring the Personal Histories of the Top Executives of US Firms Using a Quantitative Approach: Is There a Geographical Relationship with Corporate Headquarters, and Does It Influence Firm Performance?
    Sean B. O'hagan, Murray Rice.
    Geographical Research. February 14, 2013
    This paper analyses where top executives were born and where they attended university to uncover regional groupings of the most influential executives that shape corporate culture and strategy in the United States. Within the context of this paper, it is argued that the personal histories of top executives influence their decision‐making abilities, and thus corporate culture. It was found that intra‐regional, intra‐state, and intra‐city links were noteworthy factors in executive selection. Distances were higher, and percentages of intra‐regional links were lower for more profitable and higher growth firms. This indicates that more competitive firms acquire executives that have experienced different institutions during their lives and university educations. On the other hand, less profitable and lower growth firms are more likely to obtain executives embedded in similar institutions that already exist within the firm. The results suggest that key choices made by corporate America are influenced in part by geography far more complex than its own operations.
    February 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12004   open full text
  • Investigating Private Motorised Travel and Vehicle Fleet Efficiency: Using New Data and Methods to Reveal Socio‐Spatial Patterns in Brisbane, Australia.
    Tiebei Li, Neil Sipe, Jago Dodson.
    Geographical Research. February 14, 2013
    Australian cities have seen continued long‐term growth in private motor vehicle travel that has imposed increasing vehicle energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper investigates the spatial patterns of vehicle energy consumption on urban areas through an analysis of vehicle travel and of vehicle fleet efficiency in Brisbane, Australia. This is achieved by combining motor vehicle registration records and Australian government's ‘Green Vehicle Guide’ of vehicle fuel efficiency database. The results of a spatial analysis of the private vehicle trip distances derived from journey to work data and fuel energy consumption associated with the private‐owned vehicles decomposed to local areas show that private vehicle energy use tends to increase with increasing distance from the city centre (e.g. central business district). This analysis demonstrates that differences in vehicle trip distances and lower proportions of high‐efficiency vehicles in the outer suburbs aggravate vehicle energy consumption in those locations. The paper further compares vehicle energy use results for Brisbane against spatial patterns of suburban socio‐economic disadvantage. The paper demonstrates that access to vehicle fleet technology may compound other forms of socio‐economic disadvantage and vulnerability.
    February 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12001   open full text
  • Redfern as the Heart(h): Living (Black) in Inner Sydney.
    Wendy S. Shaw.
    Geographical Research. February 14, 2013
    Before the arrival of the ‘white fella’ over 200 years ago, the Gadigal people and others of the Eora Darug occupied the place where the city of Sydney now stands. At the heart of this second tier global city, the inner‐city suburb of Redfern has become a mainstay of urban Aboriginal identity. Yet, this troubled and stigmatised focal point of populist media representations and government policy does not reflect the diversity of urban Aboriginal life in inner Sydney. This paper draws on a range of sources about living in Redfern, from the difficult politics of establishing and retaining an Aboriginal urban space and place in the contemporary gentrifying city – achieved in large part through the establishment of now long‐standing service provision – through to the rise of alternate visions and lives and many more ‘ordinary’ ways of living in the city. This paper seeks to highlight that Aboriginal people variously inhabit, occupy, and sometimes thrive in Australia's first colonial city and the site of invasion. It also provides several of the author's personal experiences of engagement with some of these processes.
    February 14, 2013   doi: 10.1111/1745-5871.12000   open full text