Showing papers in "Annals of The Association of American Geographers in 2000"

Revealing the Vulnerability of People and Places: A Case Study of Georgetown County, South Carolina

Abstract: Losses from environmental hazards have escalated in the past decade, prompting a reorientation of emergency management systems away from simple postevent response. There is a noticeable change in p...

Rethinking Environmental Racism: White Privilege and Urban Development in Southern California

Abstract: Geographic studies of environmental racism have focused on the spatial relationships between environmental hazards and community demographics in order to determine if inequity exists. Conspicuously absent within this literature, however, is any substantive discussion of racism. This paper seeks to address this shortcoming in two ways. I first investigate how racism is understood and expressed in the literature. I argue that although racism is rarely explicitly discussed, a normative conceptualization of racism informs the research. Not only is this prevailing conception overly narrow and restrictive, it also denies the spatiality of racism. Consequently, my second goal is to demonstrate how various forms of racism contribute to environmental racism. In addition to conventional understandings of racism, I emphasize white privilege, a highly structural and spatial form of racism. Using Los Angeles as a case study, I examine how whites have secured relatively cleaner environments by moving away from older in...

Land‐Cover‐Change Trajectories in Southern Cameroon

Abstract: The objective of this study is to better understand the complexity of deforestation processes in southern Cameroon by testing a multivariate, spatial model of land-cover change trajectories associated with deforestation. The spatial model integrates a spectrum of independent variables that characterize land rent on a spatially explicit basis. The use of a time series of high-spatial-resolution remote sensing images (Landsat MSS and SPOT XS), spanning two decades, allows a thorough validation of spatial projections of future deforestation. Remote sensing observations reveal a continuous trend of forest clearing and forest degradation in southern regions of Cameroon, but with a highly fluctuating rate. A significant proportion of the areas subject to a land-cover conversion experienced other changes in the following years. The study also demonstrates that modeling land-cover change trajectories over several observation years allows a better projection of areas with a high probability of change in land-cover than projecting such areas on the basis of observations from the previous time period alone. Statistical results suggest that, in our southern Cameroon study area, roads mostly increased the accessibility of the forest for migrants rather than providing incentives for a transformation of local subsistence agriculture into market-oriented farming systems. The spacial model developed in this study allows simulations of likely impacts of human actions, leading to a transformation of the landscape (e.g., road projects) on key landscape attributes (e.g., biodiversity). Currently, several road projects or major logging concessions exist in southern Cameroon.

Racism out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium

Abstract: (2000). Racism out of Place: Thoughts on Whiteness and an Antiracist Geography in the New Millennium. Annals of the Association of American Geographers: Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 392-403.

World‐City Network: A New Metageography?

Abstract: (2000). World-City Network: A New Metageography? Annals of the Association of American Geographers: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 123-134.

The Reworking of Conservation Geographies: Nonequilibrium Landscapes and Nature-Society Hybrids

Abstract: (2000). The Reworking of Conservation Geographies: Nonequilibrium Landscapes and Nature-Society Hybrids. Annals of the Association of American Geographers: Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 356-369.

Reencountering Development: Livelihood Transitions and Place Transformations in the Andes

Abstract: Neither poststructural nor neoliberal interpretations of development capture the full extent and complexity of rural transformations in the Andes. Poststructural critiques tend to view development as a process of cultural destruction and homogenization, while neoliberal interpretations identify a different development ‘failure’ that inheres in ‘inefficient’ patterns of resource use, and the ‘nonviability’ of large parts of the Andean peasantry. In each case, the state is seen as a problem: as an agent of dominating modernization, or as a brake on market-led transformation. The paper reviews these positions in the light of the transformations in governance, livelihoods, and landscape that have occurred in the regions of Colta, Guamote, and Otavalo, all centers of indigenous Quichua populations in the Ecuadorian Andes. These transformations question the accuracy of arguments about cultural destruction or nonviability. Instead they suggest that people have built economically viable livelihood strategies that...

Performing cultures in the new economy

Abstract: This paper provides a provisional diagram of modern capitalist business. I argue that modern business managers are under greater and greater pressures of time. They are expected to work to sterner, more extensive, and shorter-term measures of performance, and they must cope with a general speed-up in the conduct of business. These pressures are, in turn, forcing managers to be more innovative. In this paper, I argue that these imperatives are linked through attempts to interpellate ‘fast’ managerial subjects who are able to take the strain of permanent high performance. These subjects are being produced through three types of active and performative space which, taken together, constitute a new geographical machine, able to make new qualities and quantities visible and therefore available to be worked upon. I consider each of these spaces in turn: new spaces of visualization, represented here by the business magazine Fast Company; new spaces of embodiment, represented here by the use of performative ideas...

Institutional Adaptation to Environmental Risk under the Transition in Vietnam

Abstract: This paper develops a theoretical perspective on institutional adaptation to social vulnerability to environmental risks. Institutions encompass both socialized ways of interacting and underlying worldviews, as well as structures and organizations that influence resource allocation. The adaptation of institutions that mediate vulnerability to environmental change can be observed by examining actual resource allocations and the processes of decisionmaking and nondecisionmaking, as well as by examining changing perceptions of vulnerability. Institutional adaptation is evaluated in Nam Dinh Province in northern Vietnam, a country presently undergoing rapid economic and political transition. The case study highlights local-level institutional adaptation to environmental risks associated with flooding and typhoon impacts in the coastal environment. It is carried out through fieldwork involving qualitative household surveys and interviewing to elicit present and recent coping and adaptation strategies in the co...

Environmental Discourses and the Ivorian Savanna

Abstract: The African continent is portrayed in development texts as experiencing environmental crises of staggering proportions. Despite a lack of reliable data, the World Bank considers environmental degradation to be so widespread that the ‘business’ of environmental planning and regulation is now seen as a global affair. It currently requires low-income countries receiving its financial assistance to develop National Environmental Action Plans (NEAPs) which, in assembly-line fashion, are being produced according to a blueprint. Taking the West African case study of Cote d'Ivoire, this paper argues that the planning process, specifically the identification of environmental problems, is based on a poor understanding of the nature and direction of environmental change. We confront this data problem by contrasting the image of a deforested savanna landscape found in the Cote d'Ivoire NEAP with the more wooded landscape experienced by farmers and herders and confirmed by our analysis of aerial photographs. Our secon...

‘People Who Talk Together Vote Together’: An Exploration of Contextual Effects in Great Britain

Abstract: Many students of British voting patterns have tested for the existence of contextual effects, which postulate that voters are influenced by events and people in their local milieux. One of those contextual effects is the neighborhood effect, whereby individuals are influenced by the nature of the politically relevant information circulating within their social networks, many of which are spatially constrained to their local area. Although ecological analyses have identified patterns consistent with this hypothesis, there have been virtually no direct investigations of the effect, largely because of the absence of relevant data. Using information from a large, clustered survey of voters at the time of the 1992 general election, this paper uncovers clear evidence of such effects: people are much more likely to change their votes in a particular direction if those with whom they discuss political issues support that direction, especially if they are members of the respondent's family and are the individuals ...

Mapping the “Unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal Family

Abstract: This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the “oedipal” family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being “colored”– typically “black.” I argue racism’s immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect, a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed (“unconscious”). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattari's oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are int...

Communicating Geographic Information in a Digital Age

Abstract: ieter Brueghel the Elder painted three versions of “The Tower of Babel,” but it is the second version, painted in 1563 (Figure 1) and currently hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, that is perhaps best known. In it, Brueghel depicts events described in the eleventh chapter of the Bible’s Book of Genesis . The people conceived of a project to build a tower so high it would reach to Heaven. The style is immensely detailed, and gives a fascinating account of such matters as European construction methods of the sixteenth century. Early human society spoke one language, according to the story. The allegory becomes more compelling when one realizes that no one in the picture is holding a plan, or in any way controlling or coordinating the effort. There is a prince or king, shown in the lower left, but he is facing away from the tower, and there is no indication of power over its construction or design. This is humanity united in a common purpose, and communicating through a common language—in the words of the King James edition, “and now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do” ( Genesis 11:6). God was displeased by the P

Geography and Computational Science

Abstract: (2000). Geography and Computational Science. Annals of the Association of American Geographers: Vol. 90, No. 1, pp. 146-156.

Visuality, Aurality, and Shifting Metaphors of Geographical Thought in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract: (2000). Visuality, Aurality, and Shifting Metaphors of Geographical Thought in the Late Twentieth Century. Annals of the Association of American Geographers: Vol. 90, No. 2, pp. 322-343.

Restructuring and Spatial Change of China's Auto Industry under Institutional Reform and Globalization

Abstract: This paper employs an embeddedness approach to study the restructuring and spatial change of China's auto industry since the 1980s. The two major dynamics behind these processes are discussed in detail: (1) institutional reform, which has resulted in a mixed regulation mechanism composed of both market competition and legacies of the past command economy, and which has also allowed more freedom in the decisionmaking of indigenous auto firms, and (2) globalization of production in terms of a huge inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI), mainly in the form of joint ventures. As a result, a new geography of the industry has emerged, with clear features of decentralization of production and a shift of production toward the coastal region. The paper concludes that the gradual institutional reform in China has led to a ‘path-dependent’ development of its auto industry and that auto-producing FDI has been deeply embedded in the Chinese institutional environment. This involvement in China's auto production can ...

National Monumentalization and the Politics of Scale: The Resurrections of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow

Abstract: This paper analyzes the link between the changing geographical scale of dominant ideologies in Russian society and the architectural scales of different versions of the preeminent national monument, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. The history of this process of national monumentalization in Russia is profiled by focusing on mutual influences between processes at these two scales, and the interplay between the state, society, and the Russian Orthodox Church. Within the context of the new Cathedral, ongoing but nevertheless underestimated pre-Soviet and post-Soviet antireligious practices are revealed through an analysis of the politics of scale that shaped the monumentos meanings at different historical periods. Thus, the paper also attempts to contribute to the understanding of the importance of scale in politicogeographical studies.

Sage Scrub Revolution? Property Rights, Political Fragmentation, and Conservation Planning in Southern California under the Federal Endangered Species Act

Abstract: In the U.S., conservation planning under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) has increasingly applied to species and habitats located on private property in urbanizing regions. Under the ESAs Section 10(a), habitat conservation plans (HCPs) provide mechanisms for local governments, private landowners, and other stakeholders to proceed with development plans while at the same time undertaking conservation measures for federally listed species. Using a “reconstructed urban regime theory” approach to local policymaking, this paper examines the development of a subregional HCP for the protection of the federally listed Stephens’ Kangaroo Rat (SKR) in western Riverside County, Southern California. Empirically, we demonstrate problems of incorporating property externalities into a subregional planning process and the various ways in which landowners and local progrowth interests have mobilized in response to HCPs developed within the federal ESA framework. Theoretically, we emphasize uneven development wit...

In Search of Synthesis

Abstract: The American scientific community currently is being challenged to provide the basic and applied research that is necessary for the nation to make better decisions related to the environment. Concern with the environment has led to the demand for a more synthetic perspective, one that identifies linkages among the cultural, social, political, economic, physical, biological, chemical, and geological systems that govern our world. Geography has a historic opportunity to position itself at the nexus of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and to lead the search for synthesis. In order to achieve this goal, however, we must leave the isolated intellectual realms into which we have retreated, dampen the fires of criticism that have polarized us, rethink the way graduate education is structured, foster new networks of communication, and develop a disciplinary culture that values both specialized analytical research and broader integrative research.

Geographic Information Engineering and Social Ground Truth in Attappadi, Kerala State, India

Abstract: The use of geographic information systems (GIS) and related technologies by private organizations or government agencies toward applied objectives may be defined as geographic information engineeri...

Community Worldview and Rural Systems: A Study of Five Communities in Iowa

Abstract: Rural geography has gone through profound changes over the decades. Dissatisfaction with traditional emphases on population distribution, landscape features, labor markets, and economic restructuring has led to a recent focus on the construction of meanings associated with rural landscapes and social constructions of rurality. Included in this new turn is a willingness to consider the concept of worldview, or metaphysical frameworks, in geographic study. These new studies, however, often address culture and religious constructs apart from more traditional topics of rural geography. This study of five Iowa farm communities attempts to put such metaphysical frameworks in the context of their everyday settings and connect them to rural agricultural systems. Each of the five communities had a particular vision of society, challenging the monolithic assumptions about rural places. Fundamental to these communities’ worldviews was their range from communitarian to individualistic. Communitarian groups tended tow...

Can King's Ecological Inference Method Answer a Social Scientific Puzzle: Who Voted for the Nazi Party in Weimar Germany?

Abstract: Book reviewed in this article: Gary King, On A Solution to the Ecological Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data

Geography, Statistics, and Ecological Inference

Abstract: Book reviewed in this article: Gary King, On A Solution to the Ecological Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data

Postglacial Landscape Evolution of Northeastern Lower Michigan, Interpreted from Soils and Sediments

Abstract: In this study, we used spatial data on soils, near-surface stratigraphy, and paleotopography to reinterpret part of the Late Pleistocene history of northeastern (NE) lower Michigan. We determined the relationships between various soil series and their likely sedimentary environments. Maps of these soil series for two counties in NE lower Michigan were then prepared within a geographic information system (GIS) to interpret the spatial patterns of the sedimentary environments on the paleolandscape which had been ‘downwarped’ within a GIS to account for isostatic rebound. Our primary finding centers on the origin and distribution of clayey, lacustrine sediments in the region. These clays are found in swales between drumlins and on ground moraines. They occur, however, at elevations up to 60 m above any previously known paleolake. Although it is widely known that low-lying, clay-dominated areas near the Lake Huron and Lake Michigan basins were inundated by paleolakes in the Late Pleistocene, thick deposits of...

New Directions in Ecological Inference: An Introduction

Abstract: Book reviewed in this article: Gary King, On A Solution to the Ecological Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data

A Bluffer's Guide to A Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem

Abstract: Book reviewed in this article: Gary King, On A Solution to the Ecological Problem: Reconstructing Individual Behavior from Aggregate Data

Spatial analysis in the new millennium

Abstract: Econometric theory is like an exquisitely balanced French recipe, spelling out precisely with how many turns to mix the sauce, how many carats of spice to add, and for how many seconds to bake the mixture at exactly 474 degrees of temperature But when the statistical cook turns to the raw materials, he finds that hearts of cactus fruits are unavailable, so he substitutes cantaloupe; where the recipe calls for vermicelli he uses shredded wheat; and he substitutes green garment dye for curry, ping pong balls for turtle’s eggs, and, for Chalifougnac vintage 1883, a can of turpentine (Valavanis 1959: 83, quoted in Kennedy 1979: 2)