Marxism as a tool for uncovering hegemonic discourses on nature

Since its origins, geography has prioritized the study of nature. However, more recently the discipline has made advancements in studying power as a fundamental element in the social production of space and territory. What can Marxism offer to such investigations? In this brief article, I highlight some of the contributions of Marxist thought that I have found useful for geographic analysis and that stand out from the discipline’s other forms of analysis. Firstly, I recover elements from the thinker Antonio Gramsci that I consider important for debates regarding the social production of space and territory as an expression of power relations. Secondly, I retrace some aspects of Marx's concept of nature to examine certain notions that prevail in today's environmental debates. In this way, I look to denaturalize the hegemonic thought with which institutions and dominant classes exercise power in this area.

A Geographic Theorization of Zongos in Urban Ghana: A Complex Systems Approach

While Zongos have become a permanent abode for many people, especially migrants in urban Ghana, the dynamics of these communities are quite poorly understood. This paper provides a geographic analysis of the formation of Zongos, drawing heavily on a complex systems approach to explore how various variables, including space, ethnicity, class, citizenship, migration and environmental processes intersect to form and sustain Zongos in Ghana. Essentially, the paper throws more light on the key factors that contribute to the spatial concentration of the urban poor in Zongos and concludes with the consequences of having the urban poor living in highly segregated and economically depressed neighbourhoods in Ghanaian cities. The paper argues that the formation of Zongos is not solely attributable to the fondness of migrants from northern Ghana to live among people of like background while in southern cities, but also because of the exclusionary machinations of the majority and their housing gatekeepers.

NOSSO MUNDO GLOBALIZADO ATRAVÉS DO CINEMA À LUZ DE HARVEY E SANTOS

Resumo: O presente trabalho tem como objetivo trazer uma reflexão sobre aspectos sócio-espaciais da globalização contemporânea à luz dos “Espaços de esperança” de David Harvey (2004) e “Por uma outra globalização”, de Milton Santos (2000), dialogando com quatro filmes que foram debatidos em aula no ensino da disciplina “Aspectos Sociológicos da Análise Geográfica” do Curso de Licenciatura em Geografia. Os filmes são: “Um Filme falado”, “Babel”, “Ensaio sobre a cegueira” e “Era o Hotel Cambridge”; entendendo o cinema como uma importante ferramenta audiovisual para a compreensão do espaço geográfico como uma construção histórico-social; e a globalização como reestruturação geográfica do capitalismo (HARVEY, 2004) que apresenta como fábula o que é vivido como perverso, mas poderia ser outra globalização (SANTOS, 2000). O trabalho termina reflexivamente trazendo um breve balanço das perspectivas da globalização na pandemia do COVID-19. Palavras-chave: Civilização Ocidental. Globalização. Unicidade da técnica. ­­OUR GLOBALIZED WORLD TROUGH THE CINEMA TALKING WITH DAVID HARVEY AND MILTON SANTOS Abstract: This paper aims to bring a reflection about social-spacial aspects of contemporanean globalization through Spaces of hope, by David Harvey, and Toward another globalitation, by Milton Santos, in dialogue with four films debated in class during the teaching of “Sociologist Aspects on the Geographic Analysis”. The films are: “A talking picture”, “Babel”, Blindness and “The Cambridge squatter”; understanding cinema as an important audiovisual tool for the comprehension of geographic space as a social-historic construction, and the globalitation as geographic reestruturation of capitalism (Harvey) that shows as fable what is lived as perversion, but it could be “another globalitation” (Santos). The paper ends up bringing a brief balance and perperstives about globalitation in the pandemia of COVID-19. Keywords: Ocidental civilitation. Globalitation. Technique Unicity.

Exploring Access to Independent Living Services for People With Disabilities Through a Transportation Network Analysis

Centers for Independent Living (CILs) are nonresidential, nonprofit agencies that provide independent living services to people with disabilities across the nation. The services CILs provide are invaluable to people with disabilities living independently in the community. Accessing CIL services can be challenging for people with disabilities, particularly for individuals in rural areas. A geographic analysis called a transportation network analysis is one method for assessing access to CIL services. We draw on the distribution of CILs across the country and in two rural states (Montana and Arkansas) to assess levels of geographic access using travel distance along national and local road networks. Incorporating data from the American Community Survey allowed us to estimate the number of people with disabilities living within certain distance thresholds from CILs. We saw increased access in urban areas where there is a higher concentration of CILs, suggesting that people with disabilities in rural areas have limited access to CIL services. We explore how partnering with Area Agencies on Aging has the potential to expand access to services for people with disabilities in rural areas, highlighting the utility of geographic analysis in social service provision.

Opening Thirdspace: Cultivating critical geographies in art teacher education

Pre-service teachers new to a field placement need the opportunity to orient themselves in relation to their larger teaching contexts and configure geographies that resonate with the lives of their students. Soja’s Thirdspace offers a lens through which teachers might explore place multi-dimensionally. Building upon a previous arts-based educational research study assessing the potential of arts-based inquiry for supporting pre-service teachers in exploring their teaching contexts, this study, through a second curricular iteration, focused explicitly on art pre-service teachers’ critical geographic analysis, in the form of Thirdspace. In mapping their school zones, pre-service teachers began to identify illusory impressions and conceptions of students, schools and communities and then began to deconstruct them. Such Thirdspace journeys offer space for pre-service teachers to hone their perceptions, to retrain their gazes to see their students’ physical and lived worlds in their complexity and plurality, and to re-imagine the relation between place and pedagogy.

A Data Cube Metamodel for Geographic Analysis Involving Heterogeneous Dimensions

Due to their multiple sources and structures, big spatial data require adapted tools to be efficiently collected, summarized and analyzed. For this purpose, data are archived in data warehouses and explored by spatial online analytical processing (SOLAP) through dynamic maps, charts and tables. Data are thus converted in data cubes characterized by a multidimensional structure on which exploration is based. However, multiple sources often lead to several data cubes defined by heterogeneous dimensions. In particular, dimensions definition can change depending on analyzed scale, territory and time. In order to consider these three issues specific to geographic analysis, this research proposes an original data cube metamodel defined in unified modeling language (UML). Based on concepts like common dimension levels and metadimensions, the metamodel can instantiate constellations of heterogeneous data cubes allowing SOLAP to perform multiscale, multi-territory and time analysis. Afterwards, the metamodel is implemented in a relational data warehouse and validated by an operational tool designed for a social economy case study. This tool, called “Racines”, gathers and compares multidimensional data about social economy business in Belgium and France through interactive cross-border maps, charts and reports. Thanks to the metamodel, users remain independent from IT specialists regarding data exploration and integration.

Open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning

Geographic analysis has long supported transport plans that are appropriate to local contexts. Many incumbent ‘tools of the trade’ are proprietary and were developed to support growth in motor traffic, limiting their utility for transport planners who have been tasked with twenty-first century objectives such as enabling citizen participation, reducing pollution, and increasing levels of physical activity by getting more people walking and cycling. Geographic techniques—such as route analysis, network editing, localised impact assessment and interactive map visualisation—have great potential to support modern transport planning priorities. The aim of this paper is to explore emerging open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning, with reference to the literature and a review of open source tools that are already being used. A key finding is that a growing number of options exist, challenging the current landscape of proprietary tools. These can be classified as command-line interface, graphical user interface or web-based user interface tools and by the framework in which they were implemented, with numerous tools released as R, Python and JavaScript packages, and QGIS plugins. The review found a diverse and rapidly evolving ‘ecosystem’ tools, with 25 tools that were designed for geographic analysis to support transport planning outlined in terms of their popularity and functionality based on online documentation. They ranged in size from single-purpose tools such as the QGIS plugin AwaP to sophisticated stand-alone multi-modal traffic simulation software such as MATSim, SUMO and Veins. Building on their ability to re-use the most effective components from other open source projects, developers of open source transport planning tools can avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ and focus on innovation, the ‘gamified’ A/B Street https://github.com/dabreegster/abstreet/#abstreet simulation software, based on OpenStreetMap, a case in point. The paper, the source code of which can be found at https://github.com/robinlovelace/open-gat, concludes that, although many of the tools reviewed are still evolving and further research is needed to understand their relative strengths and barriers to uptake, open source tools for geographic analysis in transport planning already hold great potential to help generate the strategic visions of change and evidence that is needed by transport planners in the twenty-first century.