Human Geography Research Articles

Compensation landscapes

In this contribution, I explore compensation landscapes as a concept through which we can question the nature of ecological urbanism today, as an alliance of environmental degradation, urban development and landscape design. In urbanism and landscape studies, there is currently almost no debate on the spatial dynamics created by the compensation of environmental harm. This is remarkable, as green urban landscapes are increasingly developed through biodiversity offsetting, i.e. the process where open space assets that have been destroyed through urban development are replaced elsewhere. While the literature on these topics is booming in critical geography and political ecology, I explore three scopes in which biodiversity offsetting can be studied as part of urbanism and landscape studies. Through the spatialization of compensation, the linking of offsetting to planning research, and by giving attention to landscape design, this paper frames compensation as a socio-spatial urbanisation project.

Watt sense of community? A human geography agenda on energy communities

Energy communities can potentially advance just transitions towards low-carbon systems by devolving energy production and consumption to local scales. During vibrant debates on evolving energy geographies for more than a decade, human geographers have engaged with conceptualization and emergent models of energy communities in generative ways. We argue for a research agenda where these understandings of space, place and scale enhance research on energy communities. Three points hold particular importance and relevance for this agenda: (a) Pluralising understandings of energy communities, (b) Spatializing perspectives on the potential of energy communities to advance just transitions, and (c) Contextually situating technological-energy innovation strategies.

Cartografía temática y recursos TIC en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de la Geografía regional de Europa

In this article, we present a classroom experience with university students in training to be secondary school geography teachers. It is based on a didactic proposal using thematic cartography (Eurostat, ESPON, ESPON-SIESTA and the Information Society Atlas in Galicia) and ICT resources (statistical sources, free picture banks, aerial photography, Google Earth and Google Maps). The proposal´s aim is to use contents from the regional geography of Europe as a base or starting point to show a series of didactic recommendations for the teaching and learning of geography and social sciences. What is more, everything is with a clear idea, from a descriptive and rote geography to an active and critical geography, in which students participate in the construction of knowledge and increase their ability to reflect on geographical issues. The results of the experience will highlight the value of these tools in secondary education. We had also previously assessed the presence of thematic cartography and ICT resources within the required official Galicia curriculum to teach geography in compulsory secondary education. The idea is to deepen the value of the curriculum in didactic code, to know what tools it offers, how it offers them and with what intentions. This solution, among other opportunities, will allow us to identify a curriculum offering a specific teaching model. On the other hand, it will also give us the opportunity to firmly rebuke all the proposals considered to be erroneous, repetitive, or of little didactic value.

Critical pedagogical engagement with Muslim geographies

In this commentary, I delve into critical pedagogical engagement with Muslim geographies and the Dīn of Islam, daring to go beyond the decolonial. I begin with an exploration of Sidaway's (2023a) discussion of ‘decolonising Muslim Geographies’ in the context of the pedagogical engagement of a female Muslim teacher of geography. I will develop an argument which will encourage critical geographers to ‘learn’ from Muslim geographies in deep and meaningful ways through the rich influential and intellectual traditions within the Dīn of Islam. My reflections will directly respond to Sidaway's call for a possible paradigm shift within the parameters of Eurocentric thinking to share Islamic epistemologies embedded in my own pedagogical approach. This will encompass rich and diverse intellectual traditions of Islam and geographical understanding of the concept of al-Mizān (balance) for the world that we all share.

Geográfia és turizmus. Interjú Hanusz Árpád professzorral [Interjú] = Geography and Tourism: Interview with Professor Árpád Hanusz [Interview

Árpád Hanusz was born in 1946 in Ipolytölgyes. His talent was noticed early on, and at the recommendation of his headmaster, he continued his secondary school studies at the Sztáron Sándor High School, where he graduated in 1964. He completed his higher education at the Nyíregyháza Teacher Training College, majoring in Geography and Biology, and even when he was a college student he considered it important that, in addition to acquiring theoretical knowledge, it is also necessary to make use of practical experience. In 1994, he defended his PhD thesis and successfully completed his habilitation. He was appointed university professor in 2001 in recognition of his decades of teaching and research work of an exceptionally high standard. His field of research changed over time, his interest turned from caving to exploring the issues in human geography. This is how he became a nationally recognized specialist on the socio-economic effects of tourism and its consequences on rural development. Professor Hanusz, known as the ”Teacher of Szatmár”, did a lot for the development of rural tourism not only in Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county, but also beyond the borders of Hungary.

Navigating research ethics during COVID-19 in authoritarian Southeast Asia: a feminist approach to combining online and in-person qualitative methods

ABSTRACT In-person data collection remains the cornerstone of much critical feminist and human geography research, while online and in-person methods are rarely positioned as complementary. Conducting fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic prompted me to combine multiple online and in-person qualitative methods in ways that extend methodological debates in human geography. Guided by feminist research ethics, I developed a methodological approach that was necessarily flexible, reflexive, and collaborative to navigate the dilemmas of conducting qualitative fieldwork during COVID-19 and in authoritarian Southeast Asia. Inspired by Guasco’s ‘ethic of not (always) going there,’ I show how online methods can generate meaningful long-term collaborations with civil society actors and build the foundations for engaged in-person fieldwork, if the researcher chooses to ‘go there.’ In-person fieldwork can enrich online methods by providing different embodied experiences and opportunities to build rapport ‘outside’ the formal interview. These research findings are relevant as geographers increasingly turn to online and hybrid methods in a range of contexts where in-person fieldwork is restricted. The ethical considerations outlined here are important for different modes of fieldwork and across contexts, authoritarian or otherwise.

Unbounding the future: New directions for climate‐changed geographies

AbstractThis commentary reflects on the contributions that human geography has made to climate change research, as well as future directions for human geographic work on climate change. I suggest that one of the key achievements of the field is to render climate change a boundary object: an entity whose interpretive flexibility allows it to become a shared object of knowledge that, in principle, facilitates collaboration across disparate communities of practice. However, the ways in which that contribution has been made, and made possible, have effects that ripple elsewhere. While the subfield of political ecology and its historiographical methods have played vital roles in laying the intellectual foundations for human geographic work on climate change, and thus its ability to construct climate change as a boundary object in the first place, I suggest that they and other neo‐Marxian approaches to the study of the (climate‐changing) environment tend to diminish human geographic engagement with the future as an object of scholarly inquiry. To address that limitation and help push climate‐changed geographies in novel directions, I suggest that climate‐changed futures be engaged problematically. I then conclude with a discussion of key empirical domains—chiefly climate reparations and climate adaptation—where such problem‐oriented work may be productively applied.

Sense of Place in Latin America: Mobilities, Territorialities, and Fear

ABSTRACTSense of place has become relevant in Latin America in recent decades. Although many scholars have looked at people‐place relationships there, language barriers have limited the international exposure of these studies. By assembling a collection of works mainly published in Spanish and Portuguese, we trace the fields of research where the concept has taken root and reflect upon the regional characteristics of sense of place. Overall, this review provides empirical insights into the human experience of place in a culturally diverse region marked by historical injustices, inequalities, and instability. These structures have created specific, often ambivalent senses of place, organized around resistance and adaptation. A more nuanced understanding of sense of place, which emphasizes the richness and complexities of people‐place connections, will help avoid oversimplification and idealization in future theories. To frame our analysis, we investigate sense of place from the perspective of humanistic geography. Overlapping with other non‐representational inquiries, the humanistic lens focuses on human‐environment relationships—encompassing experiences, behaviors, ideas, and feelings—to deepen our understanding of the intricate and multifaceted human condition and the essential role of place in human life. Our review shows that sense of place has proven helpful in shedding light on critical Latin American socio‐spatial phenomena such as mobilities, territorialities, and fear. Regionally, researchers center on marginalized and oppressed senses of place framed by longstanding structural inequalities stemming from a colonial legacy, capitalism, and neoliberalism. We highlight “geographies of terror,” “diabolic places,” and “necroplaces” as powerful categories that address the grim reality in the region.

Unraveling urban dynamics: Scaling laws of human mobility across the cityscape divide

The scaling laws of human mobility are one of the key theories of human geography. They also have important policy implications for urban-rural integration and regional economic growth. Although scaling laws of human mobility have been widely discussed, the allometric growth between urban and rural areas is overlooked. This study aims to fill the gap by investigating scaling laws and power-law distribution across urban and rural areas during urban growth with individual people's trajectory information of 13 million mobile phone users. The analysis identified a turning point at a population of 1.8 million in the Greater Bay Area, where the growth rate of aggregate travel demand stabilizes. The results show that human mobility exhibits segmented allometric growth, with superlinear growth transitioning to sublinear beyond this turning point. The disparities of travel behaviour patterns between urban and rural populations increase as cities grow. These findings would enhance the existing knowledge of the allometric scaling of human mobility.

Animal geographies at the limits: introduction to a special issue

ABSTRACT This piece introduces a special issue tackling the theme of ‘animal geographies at the limits’. An opening section argues that work on ‘animal geography’ in its older zoogeographical guise, but with suggestions of a growing interest in human-animal relations, has long been a feature of the Scottish Geographical Journal. It continues by outlining the background to the current special issue, explaining what the guest editors understand by the ‘limits’ of (now-not-so-) ‘new animal geographies’ as a subfield rooted in academic human geography but with many interdisciplinary connections. It concludes by mapping across from the limits that we have identified into the contributions that follow.

Flâneuserie of "In Treatment"’s Laila Green:

The Parisian flâneur is a figure whose indulgent urban loitering is shaped by straight white male privilege. In contrast, this essay introduces the concept of the Blackqueer flâneuse, highlighting the radical imagination’s role in maneuvering through heavily surveilled and controlled spaces. By weaving together intersecting theories of waywardness (Hartman) and willfulness (Ahmed), it examines Black flâneuserie —both as an imaginative and tangible mode of mobility— that ingeniously subverts or sidesteps the violence of capture. Focusing on Laila Green, from the series In Treatment (2021), the essay unveils her outlaw imagination, her yearning for liberation, and her everyday practices of wandering as alternative expressions of flâneuserie. Employing the concept of queer failure (Halberstam), the analysis frames Laila’s persistent attempts at escape alongside her history of facing setbacks as a practice of flâneuserie. With the help of critical geography (de Certeau, Tuan, Cosgrove, Cosgrove and Dora) and Jungian theory, it conceptualizes Laila’s passion for high places and mountains and ultimately the realization of her passion as evidence of her individuation. Akin to the paradoxes of white male flânerie, Black flâneuserie in Laila’s case unfolds as a paradoxical journey of self-discovery, complicated by her privilege and the entanglements of her wanderings within the logic of racial capitalism.

Urban displacement and placemaking in public space for wellbeing: a systematic review of global literature

Cities and towns are critical geographies of refuge for a globally unprecedented number of forcibly displaced people. Yet urban processes also expose these groups and the local urban poor to recurrent displacements. While such experiences are shared, studies often treat these populations as distinct. Drawing on Yiftachel’s notion of displaceability, this paper systematically reviews and synthesizes a global literature on diversely displaced people’s placemaking in urban public space. Observing a significant analytical gap regarding cities of the so-called global South, the paper identifies a heuristic, and key analytical dimensions shaping divergent access and uses of public space by variously displaced populations. These concern: temporal patterns; powerful meta-narratives of people and place; and complex multi-scalar and multi-actor configurations of regulatory regimes governing public space. Simultaneously, acquisition and deployment of urban knowledge and a practice of (in)visibility enable differentially displaced populations’ everyday claims to public space for wellbeing.

Geography Teachers' Views on Harm De Blij's Book 'Why Geography Is Important'

Books written for academic purposes have a great impact on the development and progress of science branches. In addition to these, popular books written about the field of science make important effects and contributions. One of the books that affect the recognition and agenda of the science of geography is the book titled "Why Geography is Important" by the famous US geographer Harm De Blij. The data of this study, which was carried out using case study, one of the qualitative research designs, were collected through the Turkish translation written by Blij. The scope of the book on geography subjects, what it tells and its usability in geography teaching were evaluated with 50 geography teachers working in different cities of Türkiye who voluntarily participated in the study. After the volunteer participants read the book, the data of the study were collected through an online focus group interview moderated by the researchers. The data transcribed after the recording with the consent of the participants were subjected to content analysis with MAXQDA software. As a result of the research, it was determined that the physical geography sections of the book were scientifically sufficient. It was concluded that the relevant work contains good examples and definitions in terms of geography education, but the human geography sections are sometimes biased due to ideological approaches but have satisfactory information. It is recommended that geography teachers and individuals receiving geography education should read the book with the idea that it will be useful.

An Analysis of the Protagonist’s Behavior in <i>Herzog</i> from Yi-Fu Tuan’s Escapism

The novel <i>Herzog</i> by the American writer Saul Bellow has received wide attention since its publication in 1964. It centers around the protagonist Moses Herzog’s life after his second divorce, in which he is often in a state of uneasiness, going from place to place to avoid problems, writing unsent letters to express dissatisfaction, seeking comfort from others when in trouble, and losing himself in memories when frustrated. According to the Chinese-American humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan’s escapism theory, the behavior is in fact escapism. What Herzog really wants to escape is society, others, and himself, and escaping from place to place or person to person, and creating material world and spiritual world, are the different ways of his escapism. And during the process of escape, with embarrassment, pains, impulse and constant self-introspection, he gradually gains strength, and evolves from negative escapism to positive escapism, temporarily achieving reconciliation with reality. There are many reasons for Herzog’s escapism, among which his American Jewish identity, the turmoil of the American society in 1960s, the decline of the intellectuals’ status and the rise of feminism at that time all play a key role. Herzog’s escapism is actually a product of his time, a process of reconstruction of relationship between male and female, and a seeking-existence journey of an intellectual with different ethnicity in American society, with positive escapism born out of negative one.

Sky-Scanning for Energy: Unveiling Rural Electricity Consumption Patterns through Satellite Imagery’s Convolutional Features

The pursuit of the Sustainable Development Goals has highlighted rural electricity consumption patterns, necessitating innovative analytical approaches. This paper introduces a novel method for predicting rural electricity consumption by leveraging deep convolutional features extracted from satellite imagery. The study employs a pretrained remote sensing interpretation model for feature extraction, streamlining the training process and enhancing the prediction efficiency. A random forest model is then used for electricity consumption prediction, while the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) model assesses the feature importance. To explain the human geography implications of feature maps, this research develops a feature visualization method grounded in expert knowledge. By selecting feature maps with higher interpretability, the “black-box” model based on remote sensing images is further analyzed and reveals the geographical features that affect electricity consumption. The methodology is applied to villages in Xinxing County, Guangdong Province, China, achieving high prediction accuracy with a correlation coefficient of 0.797. The study reveals a significant positive correlations between the characteristics and spatial distribution of houses and roads in the rural built environment and electricity demand. Conversely, natural landscape elements, such as farmland and forests, exhibit significant negative correlations with electricity demand predictions. These findings offer new insights into rural electricity consumption patterns and provide theoretical support for electricity planning and decision making in line with the Sustainable Development Goals.

Teaching Human Geography Sustainability: The Concept of the Anthropocene as a Didactic Tool for Higher Education

Thesis. This critical reflection outlines the didactical challenge of teaching human geography in higher education, focusing on the concept of the Anthropocene as a tool for highlighting sustainability issues. Concepts. The critical reflection discusses the diverse knowledge production traditions, including modernist, postmodernist, and post-postmodernist approaches. It highlights the importance of understanding the ontological and epistemological assumptions underlying these frameworks, in relation to human geography, the concept of the Anthropocene and sustainability. Results and conclusion. The suggestion is a fourfold strategy for improving human geography education: emphasizing the relevance of knowledge production, understanding its impact on the student-teacher relationship, enriching teaching with epistemological discussions, and presenting the Anthropocene as a contested ontological concept rather than a predefined framework. Originality. This critical reflection offers a novel perspective on human geography higher education in how the concept of the Anthropocene can be used for didactic purposes. The paper argues that the concept of the Anthropocene can function as a didactic tool for higher and human geography education, by drawing out the human element within scientific knowledge production.

Mapping Secular Choirs in Sweden

Abstract The role of religion in Western societies has gained renewed attention in recent years. While choirs have been studied to varying extents in the social sciences, the geography of choirs has received little attention, particularly in human geography. Using questionnaire responses from secular choir members, this exploratory study examines the possible differences and/or similarities of secular choir’s sacral and/or secular activity in urban and rural spaces in Sweden. The study reveals two primary findings. First, it reveals that secular choir members engage in a mixture of secular and sacred activities, suggesting that these activities can be considered postsecular. Second, the data challenges the geographical perception of rural environments as more sacred/traditional, as they have a high proportion of secular activities. Likewise, the results questions the geographical perception of urban environments as secular/modern, as they demonstrate an even distribution of sacred activities.

Ophiolites: Geological Heritage with Multifaceted Cultural Values

Cultural geomorphology is a very recent discipline that studies the geomorphological component of a territory which embodies both a cultural feature of the landscape and its interactions with cultural heritage: this cultural approach concerns the dialogue and cultural integration between humanistic and scientific disciplines and can be extended to all the fields of Earth Sciences. Ophiolite rock masses strongly characterize the landscape: their greenish-black, sometimes red-brown colour; the steep profile of the slopes, which results from their greater resistance to erosion than the surrounding softer sedimentary rocks; the scarce or even absent vegetation cover. The value of ophiolites is not only related to scientific and aesthetic interests, but is also due to historical–geographical, cultural and socio-economic issues. In this research, we present the elements of cultural and landscape value related to the ophiolites of the Northern Apennines, and how these geological and geomorphological features have led to specific relationships with humankind and human geography. Indeed, ophiolites represent characteristic elements of popular culture with immediate reference to toponymy, local legends and religion. Ophiolites are also an element of great strategic importance, as they are crucial for human settlement, with specific reference to defence, and for mining and quarrying activities. The landscape of ophiolites is of great geological, geomorphological, hydrogeological and pedological interest, resulting in a high concentration of geosites, hence on the one hand the opportunity for enhancement and potential geotourism, and on the other hand the need for their protection and geoconservation.

Could deep-sea mining sustain sustainability? The international seabed authority and the UN 2030 agenda

Madureira et al. (2023)published a timely article about the role of deep-sea mining in sustainable development – UN Agenda 2030. We take the opportunity to join the discussion initiated by the authors and highlight the known challenges in deep-sea mining discussions using rich, empirical social and natural science literature. Our premise is the following: sustainable development depends on careful assessment of pressing, known issues that need attention. Local problems require context-specific, local solutions to make propositions about the future and sustainability unambiguous and workable. Meaningful discussions on sustainability in relation to ocean and terrestrial mining depend on engagement with a broad body of literature, from anthropology to human geography, policy and governance research, among others. In sum, we hope to contribute to a more comprehensive interdisciplinary discussion on the contested topic of deep-sea mining and its role in sustainability.

Corporations and climate change: An overview

AbstractCorporations are primary emitters of greenhouse gases yet are also portrayed as key agents in responding to climate change. This overview article explains corporate responses to the climate crisis at three levels of analysis: (i) political (shaping the climate debate and influencing climate policy); (ii) organizational (enacting strategies and practices to address climate change); and (iii) individual (managers and employees caring about and acting on climate change in their personal and professional lives). Our synthesis of the burgeoning literature on corporations and climate change in the fields of management and organization studies, human geography, and political economy highlights how and why particular corporate responses have been enacted, encompassing managerial as well as more critical and radical understandings of business activities.This article is categorized under: Climate, History, Society, Culture > Disciplinary Perspectives Climate Economics > Economics and Climate Change The Carbon Economy and Climate Mitigation > Decarbonizing Energy and/or Reducing Demand Vulnerability and Adaptation to Climate Change > Institutions for Adaptation