Development Of Geography Research Articles

Game Design for a Fiverr: Precarity, Regionality, and Platform-Mediation in the Gig Economy

In this article, we investigate users who sell complete design services (i.e., ostensibly creating a full, original game for a client) on the gig economy platform Fiverr. By studying the platform’s affordances and analyzing user profiles, we construct two central arguments: First, we contend that gig economy platforms facilitate, shape, and moderate labor in ways that vary from more commonly discussed models of game design. Second, we push back against Fiverr’s claims of a boundaryless workforce by analyzing local conditions that concentrate labor in particular jurisdictions. After briefly reviewing the history of gig labor, we use the walkthrough method to analyze Fiverr: reviewing registration processes, protocols between buyers and sellers, and platform governance structures. We then survey fifty seller listings to determine what services are available, how much they cost, and how they are clustered geographically. Next, we address the prevalence of Pakistani users among our sample of sellers by scrutinizing global wage inequities and regional initiatives that may push workers toward the gig economy. To close, we reflect on Fiverr’s place in the game design ecosystem, investigate how gig economy labor is framed in educational institutions, and touch upon our research limitations. While gig economy platforms are often critiqued for labor exploitation or mocked for providing poor-quality services, these are both oversimplifications of complex economic, institutional, and policy assemblages. Ideally, this article will serve as a first step in better understanding game development on gig economy platforms and their power to reshape geographies of game development.

Historical geographies of grid city development: Mandalay from Burma to Myanmar

This paper critiques Mandalay city's gridded urban development within historical urban geography, providing a non-Western perspective in an increasingly global field that transcends the Eurocentric paradigm of urban form. The study combines historical and spatial analysis, literature review, and interviews to understand how Mandalay's urban grid embodies the shifting political landscapes. King Mindon's original grid, drawn from Burmese astrology and Buddhism respectively to legitimize his ruling power and reinforce social class division. British rule shifted the grid towards administrative and economic exploitation. Under socialism, adaptations to Mandalay's grid and land redistribution efforts, while seemingly equitable, primarily benefited the elite rather than marginalized squatters. Subsequently, the State Law and Order Restoration Council manipulated the grid for real estate purposes, reflecting monarchical practices. Mandalay's grid serves as a physical expression of power and governance, symbolizing the city's evolving political landscape from Burmese kingship to contemporary Myanmar under a top-down governance system. This research enriches historical geography by revealing the interplay between political history, symbolism, and urban geographic development.

Deglobalization and China’s Visions for Reconfiguring Development Space

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen proliferating media references to ‘deglobalization’, frequently drawing historical analogies with periods of crisis and dislocation, such as the 1930s. At the same time, scholars have traced shifting geographies of development as a multi-centred unfolding of capitalist dynamics, entanglements and worldmaking projects, amidst failures and crises in/of development, sometimes discussed in terms of ‘abjection’. Negotiating these conjunctures and narratives, this paper re-considers and contextualises media debates about deglobalization, placing them in discussion with how Chinese narratives are re-visualising global development. In tracing the rise of ‘New Development Thinking’ (新发展理念) in China, we consider how global development as a project has increasingly come to occupy centre-stage in China’s sense of repositioning itself as a world power. Our conclusions reflect on the resultant consequences and challenges.

Regional Development and Climate Change Response from the Perspective of Development Geography

The impact of global climate change on diverse regions is significantly influenced by their geographical location, resource distribution, energy availability, and socio-economic development level. Currently, there is a prevailing emphasis on climate change mitigation over adaptation measures, a trend prominently observed in global governmental policies. This inclination is rooted in a widespread lack of awareness among governments and the public regarding the imperative of adapting to global climate shifts. This study investigates how climate change shapes developmental patterns and adaptation strategies across various regions through the lens of development geography. Addressing the lag in climate change adaptation measures compared to mitigation efforts is crucial from both regional and economic development perspectives. Nations must undertake proactive measures to mitigate the adverse impacts of climate change on ecosystems and societies, fostering regional sustainable development to ensure holistic regional prosperity. This paper examines the implications of climate change on agriculture, water resources, human health, energy dynamics, disaster risk, and employment within the framework of development geography. Finally, drawing upon principles of development geography, this article proposes strategies for mitigating the impacts of climate change and advancing regional development and adaptation efforts

Pivot to the South: Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals through China's Belt and Road Initiative

AbstractWhilst China's aid and development model has been traditionally understood as divergent from the dominant post‐1945 liberal development model, scholars are also increasingly exploring convergence between features of the two development models. Recently, scholars from a range of disciplines including development studies, development geography and international (business, environment and legal) studies have explored a process whereby China's Belt and Road Initiative and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals converge (‘BRI‐SDG integration’). This paper brings these multidisciplinary strands of scholarship together and places them in dialogue with social sciences convergence theory to understand how BRI‐SDG integration aligns with or challenges previous conceptualisations of Chinese‐dominant development convergence. The paper first demonstrates that BRI‐SDG integration proposes a novel and deliberate convergence process ‐ which the paper names ‘complementary convergence’. However, BRI‐SDG integration also underscores the need for more multidirectional frameworks that reject Eurocentricity for evaluating the contemporary Chinese‐dominant relationship, and an enhanced focus on how China is influencing dominant development institutions. Finally, BRI‐SDG integration reiterates the methodological difficulties of delineating between ‘development models’ in an increasingly interrelated global governance of development.

An entity alignment approach coupling NGBoost and SHAP for constructing spatio-temporal evolution knowledge graph from historical atlases

The historical atlases provide a wealth of information about the evolution of geography over time and space. The alignment of geographical entities across varying time periods is a crucial aspect of extracting meaningful insights into the spatio-temporal dynamics of geography. This paper proposes a geographic entity alignment approach coupling Natural Gradient Boosting (NGBoost) with SHapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP). Taking the historical atlas of China as a case study, a geographic entity alignment model based on NGBoost is constructed considering the different kinds of similarity features of geographic entities, including semantic, distance, shape, size and topology. The contribution of similarity features in the NGBoost model is analyzed using the SHAP framework so as to improve the explanatory capacity of the model. The spatio-temporal evolution relationships of geographic entities are generated by association rules depending on alignment types and represented as quadruples, for constructing geographic knowledge graphs. The proposed NGBoost method was found a superior accuracy by comparing with BP neural networks, random forests, and other alternative methods for aligning geographic entities. The constructed geographic spatio-temporal evolution knowledge graphs offer valuable support for the queries of evolutionary knowledge.

State Strategy, Diamond Mining, and Indigenous Dispossession in Botswana

In a world-system built through dispossession and exploitation of African and Indigenous peoples, the case of the San in Botswana is significant. The government of Botswana recently led a protracted campaign of dispossession of the Indigenous San, likely due to there being diamond reserves near and within the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. This article argues that synthesizing critical theories of accumulation, dispossession, and State strategy can help us understand how and when dispossession of the Indigenous San led to commodification and/or proletarianization, while also helping to understand what became of the dispossessed. It expands theorizing on the sociology, geography, and political economy of (under)development, Indigenous rights and sovereignty, and State-Capital relations in Africa. The structural pressures for States in the periphery to cultivate extractive economies while seeking integration within the circuits of global capitalism remain present, decades after achieving colonial independence. This highlights the tensions, limitations, and illusions of successful ‘development’ in the stratified world-economy. Finally, the findings in this article critically challenge the story of Botswana being the ‘miracle’ of post-colonial Africa.

Reimagining self-determination: Relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives

Self-determination language and practice are increasingly perplexing in the 21st century. Historically linked to decolonization processes and post-imperial transformations of the international system, self-determination has espoused both violent and non-violent resistance, and supported both existing and emergent sovereignty. With the Janus-faced relationship between self-determination and colonialism continuing to this day, the contemporary moment is an opportune time to take stock of self-determination. However, as conventional jurisprudence and international legalism framings have, in many ways, hampered its emancipatory potential, alternative ways of reimagining self-determination are needed. Bringing together scholars from the fields of political and development geography, indigenous studies, international relations, and sociology, this intervention demonstrates how articulations of self-determination in specific sites offer powerful critiques of the state system and the liberal world order and unsettle hegemonic forms of knowledge production. These articulations open up conceptual space to push self-determination beyond the realm of rights, allowing us to reimagine self-determination as a vision and practice, and to recover and reconceptualize the hopeful, emancipatory and aspirational politics that have always underpinned self-determination. This intervention seeks to re-envision self-determination from three novel and interlinked angles: decoloniality, intersectionality, and relationality. Drawing on a range of examples of contemporary and historical self-determination claims and contestations, each author focuses on one or more of these angles to examine the extent to which current practices of and visions for self-determination engender novel understandings of emancipation from ‘foreign’ domination and/or colonial systems of governance.

Book Review of Introduction to the Geography of Development

Development geography is a branch of geography that studies the level of human development and the quality of life, focusing on the issue of balance in the process of development convergence or human well-being enhancement in underdeveloped and underdeveloped regions under the constraints of environmental conditions. As one of the emerging subdisciplines of geography, development geography is typically interdisciplinary and cross-cutting in character, with its core research focusing on the mechanisms of global underdevelopment, imbalance and large-scale poverty, as well as attempting to find out the relationship between development and the economic, political and social factors, so as to play a scientific role in guiding the practice of social development. Divided into three parts and 13 chapters, Introduction to Development Geography systematically introduces the overall framework and research objectives of development geography, proposes relevant methodological practices for the mechanisms and strategies centered on China􀆳s sustainable development, and conducts in-depth research on balanced inter-regional development, sustained development of underdeveloped regions, and paths for improving the quality of life in developed regions, with the aim of helping readers to better understand the practical significance of development geography.

Consuming the creative city: gastrodevelopment in a UNESCO creative city of gastronomy

ABSTRACT Scholars have recently coined the term “gastrodevelopment” to refer to the increasingly visible relationships between food, food culture, and processes of urban development. As a paradigm, gastrodevelopment is premised on the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. In this article, drawing on a case study of Tucson, Arizona – the United States’ first UNESCO City of Gastronomy – we use the lens of gastrodevelopment to examine how food culture is transformed into a form of symbolic capital that animates a broader project of urban development. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, we trace how everyday food heritage, traditions, and practices are transformed into gastronomic capital in an effort to attract tourists, new residents, and investment. We show how this transformation encodes differentials of value that are racialized and racializing and risk contributing to Tucson’s geographies of uneven development. We then turn to community visions of food-based development to imagine alternative trajectories for the Creative City of Gastronomy designation and gastrodevelopment more broadly.

Geography of inequality, geography of development: Water politics in India

Based on fieldwork conducted in Kerala, India, in this article, I focus on the micropolitics of water – both its infrastructure creation and management strategies. I argue that water becomes a means of social control through its role in reproducing existing social hierarchies. Focusing on Jalanidhi, a world-bank-led water management program and connecting this to the history of development in my fieldsite, I show that structural inequalities of caste and gender are inscribed on development and infrastructure geographies. The article highlights the limitations of both left-led and neoliberal ideas of development and necessarily trouble the dominant narrative about Kerala being an alternative to mainstream ideas of development.

Securing development: Uneven geographies of coastal tourism development in El Salvador

Over the last ten years, El Salvador has emerged as a popular coastal tourist destination known for its beautiful beaches and world-renowned surf. Riding this wave, the government, international donors, and investors have championed tourism as a strategy to alleviate poverty, promote sustainable development, and address the country’s long-standing migration and security crises. Yet, while tourism has brought novel economic opportunities to coastal communities, it has also increased pressures on local people, land, and resources, as well as complicated gang-state security dynamics in complex ways. This paper contributes to geographic scholarship on tourism in the Global South by examining the uneven social and environmental impacts of tourism development on rural coastal communities in El Salvador. I use a mix of ethnographic and survey methods to analyze socio-spatial reconfigurations in livelihoods, land and resource access, and the securitization of space in a case study site from the country’s rapidly touristifying western coast. The results find that inequalities are produced through development-driven processes of socioeconomic and resource stratification between mostly affluent, White foreigners and domestic elites and poor Salvadoran residents. The benefits of job growth in tourism-related sectors are largely undermined by the loss of access to land, economic power, and community identity through the foreignization of space. These impacts are compounded by uneven geographies of securitization, which protect wealthy tourist spaces while exposing poor rural residents to both gang and state-sponsored violence. Advancing a critical framing of tourism (in)securities, the paper argues that rather than promoting sustainable development, tourism contributes to the insecurity and unsustainability of life for many poor rural residents, reinforcing rather than reducing incentives to migrate. By highlighting the socio-spatial production of inequalities in the context of tourism, the research calls for policies ensuring more just and inclusive tourism development in El Salvador and other Global South destinations.

Care and the academy: Navigating fieldwork, funding and care responsibilities

AbstractThis commentary reflects on research jointly conducted by the Development Geographies Research Group (DevGRG) and the Gender and Feminist Geographies Research Group (GFGRG) of the RGS‐IBG, which aimed to understand the challenges faced by academics with care responsibilities. We set out the effects of research funding policies and practices on researchers' ability to combine careers as academic geographers with care responsibilities, highlighting the specific effects in a field‐based subject such as Geography. We gathered data about a range of research funders' policies and how these are implemented (in various ways) in UK Geography departments. We also surveyed all UK university Geography departments to understand experiences of parental and adoption leave, including support from employers, impacts on career progression, and recommendations for support. Our data show that there is a need for a more consistent and comprehensive approach to recognising the costs of academics' caring responsibilities, to support their career progression and to mitigate the impacts disproportionately experienced by women. Funders and higher education institutes (HEIs) need to work collaboratively to develop policies and practices to address the individualised way in which (predominantly female) academics currently experience navigating the provision of funding for parental leave, and for covering costs of care during fieldwork. Our research highlights the need for consistent and progressive policies in relation to care and parental leave across all funding bodies – that can subsequently be embedded into institutional frameworks – in order to provide equity and consistency for staff across the UK higher education (HE) sector. We also emphasise the need for these policies to be more visible and transparent, making the task of navigating them more manageable for staff at an often uncertain time in their working lives.

Urban space distribution: The case for a more equitable mobility system

Cities everywhere are struggling to establish more sustainable transport systems to reduce accidents, congestion, pollution and improve overall urban environments for human well-being. Due to increased mobility, particularly with private motorized vehicles, there is pressure and conflicts over space allocation in limited city roads and open spaces. There is also evidence that different transport modes are favoured over others in the allocation of and access to space. In urban planning, there are increasing efforts to allocate more space to the car, promoting rapid urbanisation at the expense of the space for more sustainable modes of transport. This process is leading to negative externalities, making the road environment unsafe for those outside the car. This space distribution is also dynamic and responsive to political agendas that change over time and geography. This research provides a comparative of urban space allocation in three cities, distinguishing between motorized (private and public transport) spaces and spaces allocated to non-motorized modes (walking and cycling). The research builds on analysis across different geographies of development taking examples from Europe, South America and Africa as case studies. We approach the cities of Bogotá (Colombia), Valletta (Malta) and Freetown (Sierra Leone) as examples of high density urban areas from both the global south and global north. The methodology entails the use of high-resolution satellite images and the application of geographic information systems to derive the necessary measurements in each city. Results show how space is unevenly distributed in many parts of the case study cities in the context of their own social, economic and political contexts, reflecting on the distribution of space in relation to other inequalities that might manifest in the urban space. Such inequalities lead to inequities in the transport system and the availability and use of open and public space. The study hopes to raise awareness of the equity issues surrounding urban transport systems, and the need for more sustainable urban designs for public and open spaces, identify commonalities and structural drivers of spatial inequalities, as well as context-specific determinants of urban space distribution.

The colonizers, the developmental state, and uneven geography of development: Reclamation of South Korea's tidal flats, 1900s-1980s

South Korea's tidal flats, called getbol, are muddy and grayish coastal wetlands under the tidal influence that constitute the predominant landform of South Korea's west and southwest coasts. Today, getbol is appreciated for its biological and geological diversity, for which it recently earned UNESCO's World Heritage status. Yet, throughout the 20th century, more than 50% of getbol areas were lost due to coastal reclamation, a civil engineering practice of enclosing and filling in getbol. This paper closely examines the history of getbol from the 1900s to the 1980s. While being messy and complex, the history shows a tendency for reclamation to have evolved from small to large in terms of scale and from private-led to state-led initiatives. In popular imaginations, the reclamation of getbol is thought to have been driven top-down by governing authorities, particularly by the “developmental state” that roughly governed from the 1960s through the 1980s. While this explanation aligns with the general trend, this paper highlights that the state did not act solely upon its own will but responded to the desires of those that the state had to satisfy to gain political legitimacy. Ultimately, within the context of South Korea's uneven geography of development, this paper argues that the reclamation of getbol transitioned from a project for the entire nation to a project for the rural populations and the agricultural sector, which lagged behind the country's tantalizing economic growth.

For conjunctural geography: From method to counter-hegemonic practice

Conjunctural analysis makes an important addition to the conceptual toolbox for understanding the contours of China's (capitalist) regional economies. In this commentary, we concur with Peck's suggestion that the conjunctural approach can animate economic geography's engagement with ‘thick’ theorization without foregoing context-rich inquiry. However, we also emphasize Stuart Hall's commitment to counter-hegemonic politics and his use of the conjunctural approach to explore – and ultimately facilitate – historical breaks in social structures of dominance. Through a brief exploration of ways of engaging the region in China area studies and Chinese geography, we discuss how the conjunctural approach can be mobilized to (re)politicize geographies of regional development.

Geography and the Political Economy of Pre-colonial Ehugbo

Geography is often a major determinant of economic activities. Traditional African economic activities such as hunting, gathering, fishing, animal rearing, crop production and local industries were often determined by the geographical environment. In turn, economic activities could become instrumental in the formation and shaping of political institutions and social relations. By focusing on creating a cash crop economy and integrating African economies into the world capitalist system, European colonialism altered the longstanding economic and political base of African traditional societies. This article discusses the place of geography in the pre-colonial economic development of Ehugbo and shows how various economic activities influenced the formation of organised political and social institutions among the people in pre-colonial times.

Legal geographies of water

AbstractLegal geography seeks to understand the complex interactions between people, law, and space. It exists as an interdisciplinary endeavor, incorporating intellectual threads from critical legal studies, political geography, sociology, and related work. The purpose of this focus article is to introduce legal geography to water scholars as practical means to study law and space to human–water relationships (i.e., hydrosocial relations). We start by tracing a history of legal geography's development as a field and highlight important works in legal geography past and present. We then focus on ways legal geography has been utilized to explore four broad topics within the scope of human water: rights to water, water governance, water as imagined and represented, and value of water. We conclude that legal geography frameworks applied to water research may be useful for furthering the understanding of many of the issues important to WIRES Water readers.This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Rights to Water Human Water > Water Governance

An evolving migration-development nexus: DfID and British politics of race and belonging

The last three decades have witnessed increasing interest in the connections between migration and development. Within this body of work less attention has been paid to the ways in which ideas of race and racialised histories and geographies shape the migration-development nexus. Focusing on diasporic communities as key actors within this nexus and using empirical material from Great Britain’s Department for International Development (DfID), this paper explores the shifting constructions of ‘the diaspora’ within the global development context from DfID’s inception in 1997 to its demise in 2020. Constructions of the diaspora-development nexus can be framed as a (shifting) assemblage, bringing together contemporary post-colonial politics of belonging, the racialised histories and geographies of development and the changing (neoliberal) architectures and cultures of development. The paper concludes that in this context, diasporic-centred development can be considered a racialised socio-political mechanism, shaped by the shifting politics of race and belonging, which are themselves bound to colonial pasts and contemporary colonialities. This attends to processes of inclusion (and exclusion) in the global development sphere in contemporary Britain and speaks to the need to think more widely about how race intersects with the migration-development nexus.

The geographical dynamics of global R&D collaboration networks in robotics: Evidence from co-patenting activities across urban areas worldwide.

The focus of this study is on the geography of robotics Research and Development (R&D) activities. The objectives are, first, to identify hotspots in robotics R&D worldwide, and second, to characterise structures and dynamics of global robotics R&D collaboration networks through detailed geographical lenses of global urban areas. We use patents as marker for R&D activities, and accordingly focus on technologically oriented R&D, drawing on information from patents applied for between 2002 and 2016. We employ an appropriate search strategy to identify relevant robotics patents based on detailed levels of the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC) and assign patents to more than 900 global urban areas based on the inventor addresses. The co-patent networks are examined from a Social Network Analysis (SNA) perspective by means of robotics co-patents, contributing to a global network where urban areas are the nodes inter-linked by joint inventive activities recorded in robotics patents. Global SNA measures illustrate structures and dynamics of the network as a whole, while local measures indicate the specific positioning and roles of urban areas in the network. The results are original in characterising the global spatial emergence of this generic new industry, highlighting prominent urban hotspots in terms of specialisation in robotics R&D, pointing to a global shift reflected by the increasing role of emerging economies, in particular China. The global robotics R&D has grown significantly both in total patenting and also in terms of R&D collaboration activities between urban areas. Also, for the networks, growth is not equally distributed, but is rather characterised by significant spatial shifts, both in terms of cities declining or climbing up the specialisation ranking, but even more in terms of the spatial network structure.