Highlighting: The Federation of Malaysia

Abstract

The connotations and meanings of the term “frontier” have undergone several transitions, mainly from border areas through advance settlement regions to developing regions. These transitions are highlighted in several ways: tracing the idea of the frontier back to its original meanings; providing a critical perspective on experiments for redefinitions of frontiers; and, finally, drawing some conclusions from these redefinitions, notably in light of the evolving global economy.     

THE LEGENDARY “REDISCOVERY” OF GEORGE PERKINS MARSH

The conventional narrative regarding the American reception of George Perkins Marsh, author of Man and Nature (1864), is that his work and ideas were “lost,”“forgotten,” or “neglected” until Lewis Mumford “rediscovered” him and introduced him to geographers at the University of California‐Berkeley through The Brown Decades (Mumford [1931] 1955) and until Carl Sauer made him known to the profession at large beginning in 1938. This article upends the conventional narrative by looking at earlier references to Marsh's later versions of Man and Nature, which were published as The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874 to 1907. Analysis reveals that a number of geographers and historians cited these editions between 1875 and the early 1950s. Examining the legend of loss and rediscovery suggests the value of methods utilized in reception studies for research on the history of geography.     

COMPARING INVASIVE NETWORKS: CULTURAL AND POLITICAL BIOGRAPHIES OF INVASIVE SPECIES*

ABSTRACT. Under what cultural and political conditions do certain species become successful invaders? What impact does species invasion have on human culture and politics? The work assembled in this special issue of the Geographical Review suggests complex interspecies interactions that complicate any answer to these questions. It demonstrates the need to advance a more integrative human/environment approach to species invasion than has hitherto been seen. Reviewing the concepts demonstrated in these articles and applying them to case histories of Mimosaceae (a family that includes genera such as Acacia, Prosopis, and Mimosa) invasion, two general principles become clear. The status and identification of any species as an invader, weed, or exotic are conditioned by cultural and political circumstances. Furthermore, because the human “preparation of landscape” is a prerequisite for most cases of invasion, and because species invasions impact local culture and politics in ways that often feed back into the environmental system, specific power‐laden networks of human and non‐human actors tend to create the momentum for invasion. It is therefore possible to argue a more general cultural and political account of contemporary species expansion: It is not species but sociobiological networks that are invasive.     

“Story-Networks” of Livestock and Climate Change: Actors,Their Artifacts,and the Shaping of Urban Print Media

Despite widespread media coverage of livestock-related issues and growing scientific evidence linking meat production and climate change, systematic content analysis of this relationship in media coverage has been surprisingly minimal. In this article, we combine actor-network theory with framing theory to develop the basis for “story-networks”—networks of actants and artifacts that shape how a media report or “story” is framed. We coded livestock-related articles from a major U.S. newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, over the 1999–2010 period to understand how various actants and artifacts shaped different story-networks. Just 5% of all livestock articles addressed connections with climate change; these articles focused on technology, lifestyle, or policy. Distinctive story-networks characterized each category, framing the livestock–climate change linkage as an issue to be addressed through either technological innovation, individual lifestyle choices, or policy action. In each story-network type, varying configurations of actants and artifacts were involved, including the cattle themselves.     

思维科学与地理思维研究

思维科学是研究人脑对信息加工、处理过程的科学。电脑实际上是仿人脑的 ,但是与人脑还有许多差别。地理思维在运用大脑时 ,比较全面 ,抽象思维、形象思维、和创造性思维 ,运用都很多 ,对开发大脑具有特殊的意义。文中概括地阐述了思维科学的主要内容 ,结合地理思维给出了具体的地理逻辑思维、地理图像思维和地理创造性思维的内容。     

中国地理科学进展与展望——与美国地理学战略方向的比较(英文)

Understanding the Changing Planet: Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences(UCP),published by the National Research Council(USA),and its comments in The Professional Geographer propose that uppercase and plural "Geographical Sciences"(GS) is the strategic direction for geography in the next decade for better understanding of our rapidly changing planet. According to these comments,UCP valued technologies and tools excessively("task"),and did not pay much attention to methodology("discipline"). Actually,both"task" and "discipline" are geographical wings,especially in the time of "big science".Enlightenment from UCP and its comments is the strategic direction that should be balanced between "task" and "discipline",GS should be a three-dimensional construct of a disciplinary system,methodology,and technologies and tools,and this system should be scientific humanism based on scientific spirit and directed by humanism. During the last 60 years,Chinese geographers devoted themselves to GS,including practice and theory. Obviously progress and outlook are proposed as interdisciplinary GS,Earth Surface Sciences(ESS) and Geographical Construction(GC). The disciplinary system of GS is very complex,and is composed of such human knowledge domains as sciences,technologies,engineering,and philosophy. The main mission is to research the open,complex,and macro earth system(not only scientifically,but also humanistically),and one significant methodology is "comprehensive integration of qualitative and quantitative means"(CIQQM). At the same time,another changing direction in Chinese geography is Human-Economic Geography(HEG).     

北京市电子地图集的设计与技术实现

在电子地图设计的研究中,“用户界面设计”、“三维景观表达”、“多媒体的使用”、“动态注记”、“图形冲突”和“屏幕地图的交互功能”等都是至关重要的问题。然而在电子地图日益普及的今天,对这些问题的认识还需进一步的研究。本文结合《北京市电子地图集》的创作实践,详细讨论了电子图集的功能设计和界面设计,对以上问题提出了切实可行的的解决方案,并给出了较为理想的试验结果     

从新宅居生活看网络虚拟旅游的前景和方向

随着信息化技术和网络技术的快速发展,居家服务系统的越来越完善,不愿或不能出门实现旅游目的的人群越来越庞大。对于数量巨大的不愿或不能外出旅游的“宅居”人群来说,通过网络实现虚拟旅游是最理想的方案。网络虚拟旅游在中国起步晚,但近年来发展快,已表现出产品多样化、技术集成化、需求娱乐化、用户大众化、功能休闲化等特点。目前要解决的主要问题集中在：① 3D高清动态仿真效果提质的技术实现问题;② 运用AR等新技术优势解决现场体验感不足的问题;③ 解决景区如何在网络虚拟旅游中受益的问题。未来的网络虚拟旅游方向是：① 在线产品越来越真实化和高清化;② 客源市场越来越大众化和多元化;③ 产品内容越来越多样化和分众化;④ 展示平台越来越普及化和共享化。     

“Clusters” or “communities”? Analysing the spatial agglomeration of video game companies in Australia

In this paper, I question whether agglomerations of video game companies in Australia function as clusters (spatially bound) or rather as communities (not spatially bound). The two case studies included in the analysis are the main agglomerations of video companies in Australia—Brisbane and Melbourne. The data have been collected through 21 semi-structured interviews performed between 2012 and 2014. The main findings are as follows: (1) the primary reason that video game companies come together is to share tacit knowledge and skilled labour; (2) these agglomerations do not have the attributes of “creative clusters”; and (3) new technologies enable experienced game developers to operate at the geographic periphery of the main agglomeration of developers. Therefore, to paint a more accurate picture of why some video game companies are successful—beyond simply positive externalities associated with co-localization—I propose the term “networked communities.” This recognizes that social networks at varying scales (local, national, international) are being developed by video game firms in order to thrive and reach a global audience.     

大陆台资跨界生产网络的空间组织模式及其复杂性研究——基于大陆台商千大企业数据

基于中华征信所数据库中大陆台商千大企业数据中1988~2014年的台资母子企业注册时间、详细地址、行业类型、主营业务等数据,运用复杂网络分析方法,采用GIS、Matlab和Gephi等技术手段,考察大陆台资跨界生产网络的空间组织模式及其复杂性拓扑结构特征。研究结果表明：1）台商千大企业的时空演进具有明显的区域差异性和行业指向性,即整体上呈“南密北疏”“东高西低”的格局,集中分布于以上海、广东、福建、重庆为代表的长三角、珠三角、海西区、西三角等地区,分别以制造业中的电子信息、机械和石化产业、以服务业中的一般批发零售业和信息传输、计算机服务与软件业等生产性服务业为主;2）大陆台资跨界生产网络的空间结构特征表现为：网络联系覆盖地域广泛;呈三轴放射状空间结构;网络联系键的空间异质性显著;3）大陆台资跨界生产网络处于随机网络向无标度网络分布的过渡期,并表现为出明显的小世界网络特征。     

Bio-gentrification: vulnerability bio-value chains in gentrifying neighbourhoods†

In this paper, I develop the concept of “bio-gentrification” as a way to broaden critical theoretical debates on the relationship between gentrification and “social mixing” policies. Bio-gentrification weds urban Marxist political economic insights to the neo-Foucauldian notion of biopower. The former stresses spatial tactics of removal and displacement and value generated through land and property. The latter assesses a wider terrain of spatial tactics, their relationship to knowledge produced about humans as living beings, and their alignment with capitalist urbanization. The Vancouver example illuminates how social mixing “truths” and practices to which they are tied generate value by naturalizing human insecurity in situ and transforming the biological existence of disadvantaged peoples into raw material for profit through a process that can be conceptualized as a “vulnerability bio-value chain.” Bio-gentrification refers to the tension between removal and embedding of disadvantaged peoples and points to the need for a bio-gentrification politics to confront this dynamic.     

RECONSTRUCTED PRODUCTION LANDSCAPES IN THE POSTMODERN CITY: APPLIED DESIGN AND CREATIVE SERVICES IN THE METROPOLITAN CORE

Applied design and creative services are central to the formation of metropolitan landscapes and urban culture (both in historical and contemporary contexts), as well as to the production of the full range of industrial and consumer goods. More specifically, applied design firms are essential to the development of advanced industrial systems, and facilitate the operation of flexible production regimes by (1) enabling production differentiation in segmented markets, (2) improving productivity, (3) promoting production synergies, (4) enhancing short-run customized production, and (5) contributing to the condensing of longer-run style cycles. A case study of design and creative services firms in Vancouver discloses that such firms exhibit important commonalities with other producer services industries (e.g., intermediate market orientation, clustering propensity, divisions of labor). At the same time, firms engaged in the production of design may be differentiated from “mainstream” business or corporate service firms in terms of (1) location and milieu, with a clear affinity for the CBD fringe and inner city, rather than the CBD proper; (2) function, with an emphasis on creativity as both raison d'etre and operating characteristic; and (3) services-goods interface (design services are not “arms length” from goods production, like most business services, but are directly concerned with the style, configuration, and identity of end products). Finally, the clustering of design and creative service firms exemplifies the “internal specialization of the production spaces of the large metropolis” (Scott, 1988), although empirical evidence from the Vancouver case asserts the significance of sociocultural, as well as economic, features of agglomeration. [Key words: design, production, inner city, clustering, agglomeration.]     

Time out and Worlds Apart: Tradition and Modernity Meet in the Time‐Space of the Gravesweeping Festivals of Hong Kong

This paper focuses on Hong Kong's Gravesweeping Festivals, Qingming and Chongyang. The practices carried out in urban cemeteries at these Festivals are over two thousand years old, and represent “time out” from modern “clock time”. They are examined in the context of Giddens' (1985) reworking of Hägerstrand's time‐space geography, and of Douglas' (1966) discussion of pollution. It is suggested that the cemeteries are regarded as dangerous places because they represent liminal spaces. Giddens' dimension of span enables a distinction to be made between, on the one hand, the long‐established cultural significance of the grave, and, on the other, the recentness of the urban cemetery. The dimension of form(redefined from Giddens' original concept), applied to some details of cemetery landscapes, reveals the “worlds apart” of the non‐material worlds of the spirits and of fengshui. By considering the Festivals in the light of Giddens' dimension, character, it emerges that the Gravesweeping Festivals are, as they have been for centuries, firmly embedded in Hong Kong's social system, where routines of ancestor veneration continue to renew and strengthen the family bonds that are at the heart of Confucian values. Furthermore, their continued observation may well represent practices that are of deep ontological significance to the predominantly immigrant community of Hong Kong.     

Situating the Anthropocene: planetary urbanization and the anthropological machine

The anthropological machine is the discursive framework, the dispositif that grounds “Western man” in a sense of civility, secured through a violent division within and between the human and nonhuman: not the after-effect of the civilizing act but its very foundation. This paper explores Agamben’s machine at multiple sites: in its expression in everyday lives of urban citizens, and its legitimation of capitalist urbanization on broader spatial and temporal scales, its “worlding” through planetary urbanization and normalization of climate change. Complicit in capitalist urbanization and climate change, the anthropological machine has acted as a “switch point” since the 1600s. It now frames an emergent response: triage as the inevitable sacrifice of some peoples and parts of the planet to preserve others. If the urban is to become the site of mondialization, confronting the apparent inevitability of triage we must think beyond the either-or of a people or a planet. Thought in relation to the urban, the anthropological machine offers a meeting ground between urban political economy and assemblage urbanism. It enables us to situate the Anthropocene and differentiate the urban. But it also exposes a deep divide between scholars reframing the human beyond “Western man”: between those for whom the more-than-human expresses the dreams of a biophilic city and those for whom the less-than-human is increasingly its living nightmare.     

Cities within cities: intra-urban comparison of infrastructure in Mumbai,Delhi and Cape Town

Comparison is now taken as vital to the constitution of knowledge about cities and urbanism. However, debate on comparative urbanism has been far more attentive to the merits of comparisons between cities than it has been to the potential and challenges of comparisons within cities—to what we call “Intra-Urban Comparison” (IUC). We argue that a focus on the diverse forms of urbanism located within cities may generate critical knowledge for both intra- and inter-urban comparative projects. IUCs highlight the diversity inherent in the category “city,” revealing dimensions of the urban that are central to how cities work and are experienced. We mobilise fieldwork within three cities: Mumbai, Delhi and Cape Town, and consider both how these cities have been historically understood as different urban worlds within a city, and discuss key findings from IUCs we have conducted on infrastructures. We find that IUCs can enhance comparative work both within and between cities: reconceptualising urban politics; attending to the varied and contradictory trajectories of urban life; and bringing visibility to the diverse routes through which progressive change can occur.     

Life Geography from the Child's Point of View

Abstract

A second look is taken at “The Geography of the U.S. in the Year 2,000.” A new interplay is seen of the countervailing pressures to disperse and to agglomerate. Polynucleated urban regions are seen, organized within and around a global poly center. There are certain imperatives: those of demographic cycles and of the economic long wave. These will interact with information-age technologies to change family structures, life styles, and locational preferences. The unexpected also should be expected: “catastrophes” in which existing arrangements are transformed and new structures put into place to replace them. A key to understanding is to continually probe the second derivatives: change in the nature of change.     

Spartinas kolonisation og udbredelse langs Ho Bugt

Spartina sp. (“townsendii” and anglica) was introduced in the Ho Bugt area at Esbjerg in 1931. The investigation is based on a study of a sample area on the peninsula Skallingen during the years 1957, 1960, 1965 and 1970, on litterature and on a survey of the whole bay in 1971. The colonization in the different parts of the bay is described.

“Spartina shows an extremely plastic morphological response to the varying conditions of tidal submergence and exposure on different parts of the marsh. This enables it to occupy a wide range of zones occupied in other areas by a series of different plant communities.” (Ranwell, 1964).

“It has, in fact, not only taken possession of a vacant ecological niche, but has spread from this to form a serious competition to other salt marsh species of long standing.” (Goodman a.o., 1959).     

MUEBLES RÚSTICOS IN MEXICO AND THE UNITED STATES

ABSTRACT. Sales of muebles rústicos, or rustic wooden furniture made in Mexico, have grown rapidly in the United States since 1994. Analysis of the recent rise of the industry tracks manufacturing and marketing methods in major production areas of Mexico. Consumer taste for “authentic” handmade goods of simple design and the vogue of the “Santa Fe” style across the American Southwest mesh with Mexican producers' need to seek foreign markets during an economic crisis. Changing style preferences, along with the furniture's handcrafted appearance, its competitive cost, and the makers' flexible production methods, are reasons for the increased popularity of this folk commodity.     

Policy Boosterism,Policy Mobilities,and the Extrospective City

Abstract

This study develops the notion of “policy boosterism,” a subset of traditional branding and marketing activities that involves the active promotion of locally developed and/or locally successful policies, programs, or practices across wider geographical fields as well as to broader communities of interested peers. It is argued that policy boosterism is (1) an important element of how urban policy actors engage with global communities of professional peers and with local residents, and (2) a useful concept with which to interrogate and understand how policies and policy knowledge are mobilized among cities. A conceptualization of policy boosterism and its role in global-urban policymaking is developed by combining insights from the burgeoning “policy mobilities” literature with those of the longstanding literature on entrepreneurial city marketing. It is supported by illustrative examples of policy boosterism in Vancouver: the city's Greenest City and Green Capital initiatives, the use of the term “Vancouverism” among the city's urban design community, and demonstrations of new urban technologies during the 2010 Winter Olympics that were used to market a particular vision of the city's governance to people from elsewhere, but also—crucially—to local audiences. The article concludes by highlighting four foci that might frame future work at the intersections of policy boosterism and policy mobilities.     

How Does Castells's The Rise of the Network Society Contribute to Research in Human Geography? A Citation Content and Context Analysis

Manuel Castells seminal work The Rise of the Network Society (RNS) is one of the top ten most frequently cited publications in human geography. RNS comprehensively investigates the theory of network society, which is of great significance to human geography. Citation count, however, cannot reflect the specific contribution of RNS to human geography. By jointly using citation content and context analysis on 898 journal articles on human geography, this study examines the citations of RNS to clarify the contribution. Results show that (1) “space of flows” is most frequently cited and (2) citations of RNS serve nine citation functions in human geography studies. Eight of them reveal three types of knowledge development contribution, namely, knowledge dissemination, knowledge inheritance, and knowledge innovation. Among the nine citation functions, the critique function is most thought-provoking, revealing the deficiencies of RNS: (1) spatial dualism is abstract and impersonal, (2) “space of places” is as important as “space of flows” in the network society, and (3) the lack of abundant data limits the development of empirical research on the space of flows and network of city. These critical citations provide implications for the development of network society theory in human geography. Key Words: bibliometric analysis, citation context analysis, content analysis, knowledge development, network society.