Video methodologies and engaging with mobilities

The use of video in geographic research is becoming increasingly common, particularly in the study of bodies, practices and mobilities. It is being employed as one of a number of research methods to access and engage with movements as they are occurring in place. This article reviews the literature surrounding methodological developments and discussions of the role of video. A short video clip of people climbing Croagh Patrick, Co. Mayo Ireland, on a main pilgrimage day, is explored and interpreted as an example of a way in which video can be used in this type of research. The movements and moments in the recording will be analysed and related to themes with in the geographies of mobilities.

Irish Urban Planning Under a Neoliberal Agenda

Much academic attention and debate has been given to the use of and imposition of a Special Purpose Development Authority (SPDA) to Irish urban planning in the 1980s and 1990s to redevelop the Custom House Docks (later enlarged to encompass Dublin docklands). This newly-created agency marked a radical shift in the philosophy guiding urban planning in Ireland towards more overtly facilitative entrepreneurial systems of engagement with the property-development sector. Vested with planning powers to ´fast-track´ planning and development, the Irish SPDA expropriated planning powers entirely from the local authority marginalising planners´ functions in certain locations. Few studies have, however, attempted to document turn-of-the-century shifts in Irish planning by examining more recent changes in the planning code. This paper will attempt to demonstrate how recent changes in the Planning and Development Acts since 2000 only serve to illustrate the inherent bias of Irish urban planning towards favouring private capital over the interests of the ´common good´ by providing an exploration Irish urban planning under a neoliberal agenda.

Planning and the Significance of Built and Cultural Heritage in Urban Centres

Currently, there is a development proposal being put forward for Moore Street, Dublin. The site of the Provisional Irish Government during the 1916 Rising is now subject to a large redevelopment project that will mainly incorporate retail and residential development. This subject area merits research now more than ever as the critical issue that must be addressed in the development outlined above is; how is a site that represents so much to the Irish psyche addressed respectfully? Therefore, there is an inherent tension involved in allowing much needed retail/commercial development in town and city centres to maintain vibrancy and vitality and this is commonly stated in Development Plans across the country, when equally, Irish towns and cities are normally where the greatest concentrations of our built and cultural heritage are found. Inevitably, as urban areas progress, more and more pressure builds on historic areas to deal with the rigours of development. Adaptation and a willingness to protect and introduce longevity to our built and cultural heritage is essential where profitability is not the only primary goal. This paper seeks to review the literature supporting the significance of built and culture heritage in society and its importance within the Planning Process.

Can Ireland’s emigration past inform the

No other European country has experienced such high and sustained levels of emigration per capita over the past two centuries as Ireland, with over 10 million having left the island between 1800 and 2000. Since the late 1990s and especially after the expansion of the EU in 2004, Ireland has received an unprecedented number of immigrants. According to the 2011 census, almost 17 percent of the Republic of Ireland’s population was born outside the state and over 12 percent held a different nationality. Thus far, the Irish state has taken a laissez-faire approach to incorporating immigrants into Irish society. To offset some of the integration problems that have developed in other Western European countries that welcomed sizeable amounts of immigrants in earlier decades, this paper argues that Ireland’s extensive history of emigration might be a useful tool to help the country include its increasingly large immigrant community because of the similar migration experience that both communities have encountered in their transnational pasts.

Suburbia: social and spatial trends that emerged in Celtic Tiger Ireland.

Long after the roar of the “Celtic Tiger” has become inaudible; its effects remain in the form of ghost estates, incomplete rural development and inadequate service provision across the Irish landscape. This paper will give a brief account of suburban housing development in Ireland as a whole, followed by a detailed discussion of development in a specific Irish case study, Clerihan, Co. Tipperary. Through the analysis of data produced from resident questionnaires, an evaluation and discussion of the key motivations of Clerihan’s “Celtic Tiger” in-migrants shall emerge for the purpose of comparison with international suburban migration incentives. These incentives shall be addressed under four overarching themes; suburbia as an idyllic space and place, suburbia as an exclusive community while maintaining previous social networks, suburbia as a product of social and economic competition, and suburbia as an interdependent product of transport availability.

Migration of businesses in the case of the Morvian-Seleian Region

This article deals with the assessment of the status and development of the distribution of economic activities in the Moravian-Silesian Region (MSR) in 1999-2009. The aim of this paper is to research the development of the geographical distribution of economic activities in relation to migration processes of these activities. In the case of this study, we focus on the monitoring of changes, particularly in the manufacturing industry, which is currently undergoing a process of deindustrialization. Migratory population movements are very important objects of interest for demographers. In fact, it is, together with the natural movement of the population (births, deaths), a key variable used for the description and prediction of demographic structures. These demographic indicators can be easily applied to monitor the development of economic activities in terms of their establishment, extinction, and movement in the study area.

Coastal Monitoring: A New Approach

Monitoring changes in the morphology of coastal environments is important for understanding how they function as systems and how they can be most effectively managed to offer maximum protection of the coastal hinterland. The quick, precise, and efficient method of topographic data capture associated with a remote sensing (RS) technology called terrestrial laser scanning (TLS), also known as ground-based Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), facilitates improved monitoring of morphological changes to coastal environments over traditional survey methods. Terrestrial laser scanning systems are capable of providing extremely detailed 3-dimensional topographic information in the form of a “point cloud” – a densely packed collection of x,y,z coordinates that collectively represent the external surface (often the ground) of a surveyed area. Such detailed elevation information is useful for coastal research, resource management and planning, hazard and risk assessment, and evaluating the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise on the coast. This paper introduces TLS and its applications in a coastal setting and addresses some of the challenges associated with its use as a monitoring tool in vegetated coastal dune environments. Such challenges include optimising time spent in the field, working with large datasets, classifying simple and complex scenes, and analysing multi-temporal datasets.

“Our publications are available worldwide”

In the second half of the 19th century, printing was an important sector in the North German city of Hannover. The city was the world leader in the industrial production of account books; the product itself had been invented there. It is all the more surprising that the fourth-largest printing works in the city in the 1920s should have been almost entirely forgotten by the early 21st century. As a Jewish-owned firm, the family business of A. Molling & Comp. had been forced to sell during the Nazi dictatorship and its owners emigrated in the late 1930s. In the absence of the more obvious sources such as company records, much of the history of the firm could only be traced through its products. Unusually for Hannover, as well as printing colour advertising and packaging for many well-known companies, Molling had specialised in children’s picture books, which were marketed worldwide. Editions of their books were sold as far afield as Indonesia, Estonia, South America and the USA. This article presents a brief account of the firm, highlighting the analysis of surviving products to trace the ramifications of Molling’s international contacts, including work for world-famous companies such as Raphael Tuck of London. The study is of interest to historical geographers, economic and urban historians and book historians. The research fills a gap not only in the specific, local historical geography of Hannover, but also in our knowledge of aspects of globalisation in the early twentieth century.