Human Geography Research Articles

Places as refrains: A non‐constructive alternative to assemblage thinking

AbstractOver the past 20 to 30 years, relational, post‐humanist, processual, and non‐representational approaches to space and place have gained an increasing purchase within anglophone human geography, whether underpinned by academic engagements with Western philosophy, anthropology, or indigenous thinking and praxis. One approach by anglophone geographers has been to incorporate assemblage thinking into constructivist and representational accounts of the building, settling, and/or disassembling of places, but here I argue that assemblage may not be the best way to do this if we wish to foreground process and the dynamism of places. Assemblage theories place too much emphasis on the structural logics and thing‐like qualities of identifiable places, even when they aim to focus on the processual or verb‐like qualities of places. I suggest that geographers who are keen to advance processual and dynamic understandings of place can usefully (re)focus their attention on Deleuze and Guattari's writings on the ritournelle (refrain) because they articulate many of the rhythmic, repetitive, differentiated, intensive, affective, eventful, and performative qualities of placing and emplacement, while resisting any easy assimilation into constructivist and representational ‘building’ perspectives which foreground the assembly and disassembly of worlds. I outline the usefulness of Gilbert Simondon's writings on individuation and crystal growth for understanding individual‐milieu relations, before discussing Deleuze and Guattari's description of the refrain as being like a ‘glass harmonica’, which captures the reverberative, refractive, and rhythmic aspects of the concept. I then revisit a series of well‐established debates about the relationship between place and placelessness, or places and ‘non‐places’, suggesting how placelessness and non‐places can be linked to either a failed process of individuation or to uneventful expressions of a series of circulating, deterritorialising, and territorialising refrains which have differing rhythmic effects.

Human Geographies in Action: Insights into Migration, Development, Culture, and Sustainability

Human geography today goes beyond traditional mapping, integrating environmental, social, and economic factors to tackle real-world issues [...]

The urban footprint of rural forced displacement

AbstractThe rapid growth of marginal settlements in the Global South, largely fueled by the resettlement of millions of internally displaced people (IDPs), underscores the urgent need for tailored housing solutions for these vulnerable populations. However, prevailing approaches have often relied on a one-size-fits-all model, overlooking the diverse socio-spatial realities of IDP communities. Drawing on a case study in Medellin, Colombia, where a significant portion of the population consists of forced migrants, this interdisciplinary study merges concepts from human geography and urban theory with computational methods in remote sensing and exploratory spatial data analysis. By integrating socio-spatial theory with quantitative analysis, we challenge the conventional housing paradigm and propose a novel framework for addressing the housing needs of IDPs. Employing a three-phase methodology rooted in Lefebvre’s theoretical framework on the production of space, including participatory mapping, urban morphology characterization, and similarity analysis, we identify distinct patterns within urban IDP settlements and advocate for culturally sensitive housing policies. Our analysis, focusing on Colombia, the country with the largest IDP population globally, reveals the limitations of standardized approaches and highlights the importance of recognizing and accommodating socio-cultural diversity in urban planning. By contesting standardized socio-spatial practices, our research aims not only to promote equality but also to foster recognition and inclusivity within marginalized communities.

Sedimentary relations: cultures of access and the matter of shallow seabed coring

Contemporary cultural geographies have increasingly addressed subterranean and deep spaces through questions of access to earthly materials and the politics of resource extraction. This article engages with these themes through an investigation into the ‘doings’ or practices of seabed access. It does so by following the embodied and material experiences of two human geographers, an artist, a scientific coordinator and a microbiologist, who together undertook a day trip to learn shallow sediment coring in the Wadden Sea mudflats of Northern Germany. Stemming from a research project concerned with the accessibility of the seabed in international waters (how society can access its ‘common heritage’), we examine how taking samples from even the most accessible type of seabed – a shallow coastal mudflat within national waters that is not covered by seawater during low tide – presents a myriad of considerations, challenges and complications. We argue these are vital in examining the cultures of access – the embodied and material limits that define and shape participation in environments in which you and I have rights. These considerations, challenges and complications ranged from physical strength and balance requirements to an understanding of tidal movements, access to simple but specific equipment, appropriate clothing and private transport. We use ethnographic reflections and our photographic engagements to consider sedimentary relations: how we can and do relate to the seabed.

Revisiting the Aral Sea crisis: a geographical perspective

ABSTRACT The Aral Sea crisis is one of the greatest ecological and socio-economic disasters of the 20th century. The main cause was the large-scale diversion of water for cotton cultivation. This article examines the crisis with a human geography perspective and emphasises the need for a comprehensive and multidisciplinary approach. It highlights the importance of sustainable water management, regional cooperation and active community participation. The study also discusses the role of integrated water and energy management supported by strong policies to prevent future water scarcity and address climate change. Finally, this article emphasises the significance of empowering local communities through traditional ecological knowledge and education to promote resilience and sustainable development. The conclusions focus on solutions to resolve the Aral Sea crisis that would ultimately improve the well-being of people in the region and beyond.

Smart ignorance: Instrumentalising useful unknowns to bureaucratise and rescale power in the city

Critical geography inextricably associates smart cities with modalities of entrepreneurial governance, the privatisation of government assets and functions, and an effectively diminished role of the state in urban governance. In this article, I argue that this is an incomplete examination of ‘actually existing smart cities’ as it overlooks the bureaucratisation of city government through rescaling, which occurs via the instrumentalisation of ambiguity and ignorance. Furthermore, the existing literature focuses on the rescaling of power in ‘spaces of exception’ or enclave developments, but does not adequately address what happens when these corporate parastatal entities land in ‘actually existing’ cities where urban spatialities and political geographies are alreacy established and do not need to be formulated afresh. I draw on rich qualitative research in one case study of an ‘actually existing’ smart city – Pune in western India – to explore how the implementation of a smart cities programme results in a bureaucratisation of city government through existing useful unknowns, and generates further ambiguity around issues of authority and power in city government. This article offers a significant conceptual contribution to the understudied political geographies of city government by moving beyond the examination of zones of exception and investigating the dynamics of integrating privatised governance mechanisms into a historical ‘actually existing smart city’ with a formalised city government dating back to the late 19th century.

System-wide health needs segmentation: innovating integrated care for complex needs households

Abstract Background Health needs segmentation is increasingly used in healthcare delivery and health policy planning to cater for diverse population groups and develop effective and equitable health policies. But existing models often lack a systemic approach, focusing instead on single conditions or settings. This leads to fragmentation, gaps and inefficiencies in service provision and inequities in health outcomes, particularly when addressing complexity, and specifically for children, as adversity clusters in families. Aims To develop a household health needs segmentation model to identify those households with children with high levels of complex cross-sectoral needs, to plan for integrated care services. Methods Data linkage of primary, secondary, mental, community and social care services, mortality records, residential information, and small-area multiple deprivation measures was used to design a rule-based model to identifying households with children with the most complex needs in the UK region of Cheshire and Merseyside (C&M), with large variation in demography, (human) geography, and deprivation. Results Of 2,645,329 individuals in C&M (97% of the registered population in 2021), 1,022,840 lived in 266,939 households with children aged 0-16: 21,527 households had complex needs. This 8% of families accounted for an estimated 34% of health and social care costs for families, £362 million in total, 42% of which spent on children in care of local authorities. Implications The model identified a specific group of families with complex service use patterns, high mental and physical comorbidity and socioeconomic vulnerabilities. These exhibit potential for improved outcomes through better integration of services and targeting of community building and family support resources. Conclusions Our model represents a significant innovation in health needs segmentation. By using whole system linked data, it provides a pragmatic way of profiling complexity for proactive care. Key messages • Complex health and social problems in children cluster in families with adults also having complex needs, so we need to transform fragmented services to support the whole family to improve outcomes. • Household level segmentation using cross-sectoral, whole system data is an innovation to identify households with complex needs with respect to their locality to improve integration of support.

Take root among the stars? Emancipatory homemaking as critical worldbuilding in Octavia Butler’s Parables

This paper draws on geographical literature on home to explore two strategies of emancipatory homemaking in the Science Fiction novels of Octavia Butler. It examines, homemaking as a strategy, first, of persistence and, second, of adaptability. Analyzing these two strategies in the way they combine, we argue, allows us to define the home as a critical place that links various geographical scales, from the most intimate to the planetary. We build our argument by tracing the ways in which the protagonists of Butler’s Parables build homes in respect of a necessary negotation between persistance vis-a-vis violence and threats on the one, and the necessity to adapt to the precarious social institutions that surround them on the other hand. Such critical, multiscalar geography of home is proposed as a middle ground between extraterrestrial escapist tendencies, and the introvert isolationism of the homely enclave. Butler’s novels help critical geographers frame the paradoxical space of the home as a productive tension: Home is as much a place of loss, instability, and uncertainty as it is a locus of political agency, counteracting violence and liberating (inter)subjective kinship.

Challenges and opportunities for open access book publishing: A perspective from a society publisher in the geosciences

AbstractThe American Geophysical Union (AGU), a scholarly society serving the Earth and space sciences, has a conventional books portfolio with their publisher, Wiley, and a new partnership with the Geological Society of London for an open access (OA) book series. The latter serves authors who need (because of funding mandates) or want to publish OA and comes with added benefits, including a production workflow to facilitate faster times to online publication. Flexibility in how the costs of individual volumes can be covered aims to encourage uptake, but challenges lie ahead in ensuring that all authors can equitably choose OA for their book project. This commentary contributes to the collection in Area about the evolving OA books landscape, addressing many of the challenges described by Gandy, and describing the start of AGU's journey towards OA books. It brings a perspective from the sciences, where books are mostly large, edited volumes with many international contributors, many of them physical geographers. Their experiences of funding, motivation and recognition for contributing to books may be quite different to human geographers more familiar with the sole‐authored monograph format.

Amorphous infrastructure: Contesting the proposed Yuam River water diversion project in the Salween River Basin

Recent studies in human geography and political ecology have examined the anticipatory politics of proposed infrastructure and their effects. Less work analyses how speculation and rumour are mobilised to promote or resist such infrastructures. In this paper, I examine how speculative ideas about long-proposed hydropower dams and transbasin water diversions in the Salween River Basin are strategically deployed by differently placed actors working towards project development or demise. I draw on empirical research on the proposed Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand and near the Thai–Myanmar border. I develop a conceptualisation of proposed infrastructures as amorphous as they constantly change form and enrol a shifting network of actors, and development plans and imaginaries. The Yuam diversion becomes amorphous through the contested ‘facts’ of the case and over time. I illustrate this using two longitudinal examples. First, infrastructure is made amorphous through protracted development processes for the Yuam diversion and earlier iterations. Second, I examine speculative ideas about how the Yuam diversion is intertwined with proposed dams in the Basin including the Hatgyi Dam in Myanmar. In this case, the lack of confirmed project developers and financiers for the Yuam diversion, and rumours of Chinese actors’ involvement under the Belt and Road Initiative, creates strategic space for project promotion and resistance. What is at stake is not just theorising proposed infrastructures as speculative ideas but how the ‘amorphous’ qualities of infrastructure are deployed strategically, by whom, and to what effect.

When the ‘inclusive turn’ fuels the entrepreneurial city: Critical perspectives from Singapore

The rise of the notion of ‘inclusion’ in urban planning, seen in phrases like inclusive city, calls for a critical analysis of its evolving meaning and its spatial, social and political implications. Paradoxically, the meaning of urban inclusion has narrowed such that it now primarily refers to accessibility for people with disabilities. At the intersection of urban studies and critical disability studies, our article investigates the conceptions, criteria and modes of production underlying the implementation of urban inclusion in Singapore's ‘Enabling Village’, a purportedly inclusive space opened in 2015. We use a mixed‐methods approach, analysing official narratives and conducting site visits to understand the site as both an appropriated and a branded space. We show that, in Singapore, the inclusion agenda interacts with the city‐state's distinctive approach to planning and governance, where social issues are ‘engineered’ and give rise to replicable operational models. Our hypothesis is that implementing the inclusive city through the production and promotion of ‘inclusive’ urban projects such as the Enabling Village fuels the expansion of Singapore as a state‐led ‘entrepreneurial city’ (Harvey, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 1989; 71(1):3–17). In particular, operationalising ‘urban inclusion’ in this way allows for the reinvention of Singapore as a global urban model.

Alternative organization without vertical hierarchies of spatial scale?

Vertical hierarchies of spatial scale—where society in general, and organizations in particular, are differentiated into levels of spatial size—have often been criticized by those encouraging alternatives to capitalist organizing. These vertical scalings are said to promote authoritarianism, a monolithic capitalist economic system, uneven concentrations of social and organizational power and wealth, and ecologically destructive organizational growth. Consequently, so the argument goes, alternative organizing must scale horizontally whereby smaller organizations autonomously associate together into loose networks or federations. The aim of this contribution is to problematize such critiques of vertical hierarchies of scaling for alternative organization. To do so, I combine Management and Organization Studies (MOS) scholarship on scaling alternative organization with two theorizations of the politics of scale in human geography—namely those derived from Neo-Marxist Political Economy and Actor-Network Theories. My argument is that all those looking to understand and encourage the scaling of alternatives to capitalist organizing should engage with and not simply reject vertical scalar hierarchies.

Critical geographies of the circular economy

Critical geographies of the circular economy

Advocating a place-space duality for an accounting research agenda

PurposeThe paper proposes a place-space duality, rather than a dualism, for accounting research.Design/methodology/approachThe discussion is informed by the literature in human geography, which, while developing the concept of space, has made an important distinction between abstract space and place as a site of experiential learning and memory.FindingsThe lack of a concept of place is a serious omission in the accounting literature and perpetuates an abstract sense of space, which can restrict the scope of accounting research.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper calls for further research to study accounting in place and to explore both the collective and individual senses of place, as well as conscious and unconscious place associations. We recognise that there is limited prior accounting research on this topic and that there are challenges in conducting such interdisciplinary research, especially as there is a lack of common ground between research in human geography and accounting and little integration of the two literatures.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes an accounting research agenda based on a place-space duality, which reflects the strength of people-place relationships, including place identities, place attachment and place dependence.Originality/valueThe paper provides a critique of the conceptualisation of space in accounting research, identifies place-space as a duality (rather than a dualism) and suggests a novel distinction between studying accounting in context and in place.

Critique beyond relation: The stakes of working with the negative, the void and the abyss

AbstractThe ‘relational turn’ has been widely embraced in Human Geography and related fields over the last couple of decades as an alternative to the hubris of modern and colonial reasoning. Yet, increasingly, concerns over the extent that contemporary conceptualisations are overly ‘generative’, ‘productivist’ and ‘affirmational’ has come to the fore. There is significant interest in the possibilities for more negative understandings, highlighting failure, attrition, voiding, exhaustion, impotentiality, incompleteness and attributes of ‘non‐relation’. We draw out how, to date, most of these approaches have developed a hermeneutic approach, seeking to bring the negative and the non‐relational into the world as forces of disruption and refusal, holding open other possibilities of knowing and being in the world and enabling alternative political imaginaries. This paper seeks to outline an alternative mode of critique, one that places both relational and negative approaches under the scrutiny of an ‘abyssal’ approach. Here, after Fanon, the world violently forged into the global colour line is bifurcated via the construction of the modern subject, capable of reading itself as a subject in the world and through Human Geography as a field of study. In this always already antiblack world, the goal of ‘Abyssal Geography’ is not to continue worlding the modern subject in new ways, but to analyse and critique the mechanisms and shifts in critical thought through which Human Geography continues to salvage and to redeem the purchase of the modern subject and the world.

The impossible and its vicissitudes

In this response, I address the commentaries by Friedrich and Tups and Allahyari on my paper, ‘Geographies of the Impossible’, by engaging with their main arguments, highlighting some key commonalities, and identifying further aspects that could be considered when exploring the impossible in human geography.

Henri Lefebvre and the spatial revolution that never ends: Towards the reconciliation of anarchist and Marxist approaches in geography?

AbstractIt is widely accepted that Henri Lefebvre's Marxism had anarchistic traits, but few have tried to specify what these traits are, or what they mean. This paper argues that Lefebvre's work should be seen as first and foremost an anti‐authoritarian theory that uses space, rather than a spatial theory. Written from a position that refuses to be either just ‘Marxist’ or just ‘anarchist’, this paper makes a claim to the possibility of a radical geography that can engage with and beyond both.

DCV2I$\text{DCV}^2\text{I}$: Leveraging deep vision models to support geographers' visual interpretation in dune segmentation

AbstractVisual interpretation is extremely important in human geography as the primary technique for geographers to use photograph data in identifying, classifying, and quantifying geographic and topological objects or regions. However, it is also time‐consuming and requires overwhelming manual effort from professional geographers. This paper describes our interdisciplinary team's efforts in integrating computer vision models with geographers' visual image interpretation process to reduce their workload in interpreting images. Focusing on the dune segmentation task, we proposed an approach called featuring a deep dune segmentation model to identify dunes and label their ranges in an automated way. By developing a tool to connect our model with ArcGIS—one of the most popular workbenches for visual interpretation, geographers can further refine the automatically generated dune segmentation on images without learning any CV or deep learning techniques. Our approach thus realized a noninvasive change to geographers' visual interpretation routines, reducing their manual efforts while incurring minimal interruptions to their work routines and tools they are familiar with. Deployment with a leading Chinese geography research institution demonstrated the potential of in supporting geographers in researching and solving drylands desertification.

Geography of research networks in the Big South of Russia

The geography of research and innovation activity is a traditional topic of research in human geography. Classical studies of the clustering and diffusion of innovation in the 1960s and 70s received a new impetus in the 21st century with the understanding of the openness of innovation and the importance of interregional collaborative networks. Digitalization has played an important role, providing access to new sources of large geocoded data on the movement of key elements of the knowledge economy, including publications as a formalized outcome of scientific activity. The purpose of the article is to identify the center-periphery research ties of one of the largest macroregions of Russia – the Big South of Russia. The aim was to assess the territorial patterns of interregional research networks with the identification of gravity poles and interconnections at the local and national levels. The study uses the method of spatial scientometrics. Geocoded data on publications from the Scopus bibliographic database were used. In the course of the study the hypotheses of “Moscow-centricity” and “St. Petersburg-centricity” of the knowledge domain of the macroregion are tested, the influence of the factor of geographical proximity and the role of the diversity of interregional ties are evaluated, and the “heights-lowlands” of the landscape are revealed. The results of the research have shown a high degree of connectivity between the regions of the Big South of Russia in the research area. The hypothesis about the presence of several centers of gravity of scientific activity in the macroregion was confirmed. First of all, the peaks of the “scientific ridge” of the Big South form Rostov oblast with the largest urban agglomeration in the south of the country, the Rostov urban agglomeration, as well as the Krasnodar krai and Volgograd oblast. The hypothesis of the existence of several centers of scientific activity in the macroregion was confirmed. The influence of the factor of territorial proximity in the formation of research ties is not high and is manifested mainly in the southern Russian regions with relatively low indicators of research output (primarily, it is typical for national republics). Interregional research cooperation between advanced regions is not limited to immediate geographical proximity but is due to a combination of non-territorial factors. The “Moscow-centricity” of the scientific agenda of the regions of the Big South of Russia is true for most of the southern regions of the Russian Federation, which is particularly pronounced in regions with low internal scientific potential and in new regions undergoing a period of transformation of their scientific systems.

A JOURNEY THROUGH PLACES OF BELONGING

Via a journey through the academic background of the author, this article aims at articulating the importance of places of belonging for an older migrant population. This work focuses on the sense of attachment to and the identification with places inhabited in later life from the perspective of older Italians in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. This work offers reflections on ethnography, video documentary and oral history approaches for researchers in the field of social sciences, social gerontology and human geography. Keywords: Ageing, Migration, Place Attachment, Place Identity.