Physical Territory Research Articles

The Metaverse Territorial Brand: A Contemporary Concept

The “Metaverse Territorial Brand” integrates core and interconnected elements into a virtual, interactional, experiential, and immersive space known as the metaverse. This type of brand encompasses the connection with immersive territories that may or may not be digital twins of real territories. It also encompasses two interconnected physical scales: the territorial and the regional, involved in another type of emerging territorial scale, known as the metaversal scale. Therefore, the “Metaverse Territorial Brand” is a digital-immersive extension of the territorial brand of physical territories, encompassing specific geographical and cultural aspects, but directed to the metaverse environment. This brand is a symbolic digital construction, but also a multifaceted one that incorporates discursive and visual elements, articulated by the social actors of the immersive territory, aiming to create a specific and distinct identity for a space in the metaverse. When talking about social actors in the metaverse (users), we highlight that this set of actors may or may not be the same as the physical territory. It is also important to highlight that both the territorial brand directed to physical territories and the “Metaverse Territorial Brand” are formed from the power relations of a given set of social actors. Therefore, without the strategic intention of a plurality of social actors that stimulate these relationships, there is no type of territorial brand involved.

The spatiality of a military base as urban geographical entity: the case of ‘The Pikkud’ in Beersheba, Israel

Urban studies have increasingly engaged in understanding the role of the military in co-producing the city. Yet, the spatial role of an individual military base within a particular city has largely been overlooked. This deficiency is particularly acute as, due to contradictory governance regimes, a military base constitutes a contradictory non-democratic interface with a liberal urban civil space. This deficiency is due primarily to failure to view a military base as a concrete ‘geographical entity’ with a geographical agency. The Lefebvrian spatial trialectic (perceived conceived and lived spaces) is employed here as a framework for analyzing the relationships between the base and the city. We bind it theoretically and analytically with the concept of a geographical entity carrying a geographical agency. Based primarily on a qualitative methodology, we studied the spatiality of an urban military base in Beersheba, Israel, analyzing the three facets of spaces. The analysis reveals that neoliberal concepts held by urban planning professionals regarding urban space as conditioned by the presence of the military base (conceived space) are not necessarily congruent with those of the public which routinely lives and experiences (lived space) the concrete materiality of the base (perceived space). Thus, as a geographical entity within the city, a military base exists apart yet concurrently there are overlapping relations and entanglements with community life, suggesting a spatiality that extends beyond its physical territory. With these conceptual and methodological approaches and insights this study adds to the recently growing field of urban military geographies which hitherto overlooked these spatial perspectives of the military.

People and places

AbstractSeveral authors have argued that socially significant places such as countries, cities and establishments are immaterial objects, despite their being spatially located. In contrast, we aim to defend a reductive materialist view of such entities, which identifies them with their physical territories or premises. Accordingly, these are all material objects; typically, aggregates of land and infrastructure. Admittedly, our terms for these entities may also sometimes be used to denote their associated groups of people. But as long as countries, cities and establishments are understood as places, we submit, they are all material objects: the physical territories or premises of their associated groups.

The Keeper of the Imperial Body: The Russian Geographical Society as an Entrepreneur of Imperial Nationalism

Abstract The goal of this article is to show Russia’s civilizational turn in the broader context of imperial nationalism. The “turn” is a manifestation of imperial nationalism that today feeds not only on political ideas and history but also on geography. In the mass perception, geography is seen as an objective, non-ideologized scientific discipline less prone to political manipulation. Because of this, it can be employed to influence the Russian self-identification process in a much more subtle and efficient way than references to the more abstract notion of civilization. This article presents the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) as an identity entrepreneur managed by the ruling elite with a well-developed regional structure. It functions as a community of imperial practice. With its discursive and material practices, the RGS contributes to reproducing imperial nationalism, including in its civilizational version. The RGS is the keeper of the imperial body. By referring to the imperial body, I mean not just the physical territory but also the ways it is imagined in discourse and made material in numerous practices.

The disputed territories of information: The case of alleged war crimes during the Kosovo War

This article analyses participants’ sense-making and demonstrates procedural consequentially and relevance, and makes the data on which observations are based available to readers. By looking at a TV interview, in Albanian, of Hashim Thaçi, the former PM of Kosovo, given to respond to allegations against him regarding involvement in war crimes, the focus will be not only on what it is said but also on the epistemic positions occupied by the participants, with a particular interest in knowledge as a norm-governed domain and in the practices of language usage. We will highlight strategies like repetition, repair, code selection and code switching that are used by participants as a means to claim and govern knowledge. Such knowledge can become the basis of contestation and one speaker may seek to impose their knowledge of some facts or events over another’s and thereby establish a territory of knowledge in a series of moves, not entirely unlike the way that physical territory may be defended or attacked; held or occupied.

Формування інструментарію маркетингових комунікацій щодо просування освітнього продукту

Modern progress in technological development and the emergence of innovative products in the field of digitalization have contributed to the emergence of new organizational capabilities and instruments in the field of communications. The progress of innovative development in the field of digital technologies opens up wide opportunities for their use for the exchange of information in the field of economic education. The emergence of new digital methods of communication provides wider opportunities for the use of new forms for the exchange of information in the field of education. The aim of the study is to form a instrumentarium of marketing communications for the promotion of an educational product. The emergence of new means of communication as instruments of the educational process creates qualitative changes in the conditions of educational activity. American and English scholars devoted their efforts to studying the theory of public communication, they noted that marketing communications are expanding and covering more and more audiences, thereby developing into integrated communications. An example is the theoretical model of the persuasive act, or the Lasswell model, in which the communication process is presented as an act considering five basic questions: «Who?», «Says what?», «In what channel?», «To whom?», and «With what effect?». This model is considered to be a reflection of the «theory of political propaganda». Taking into account some difference between the orientation of the «theory of political propaganda» and the consideration of the communication process from the point of view of marketing, because it is more complex and multifaceted, an algorithm for building communication is proposed. The provided algorithm for constructing communication, in contrast to the Lasswell model, is more detailed and therefore can be more widely used in various spheres of educational and economic activity, as well as in public life. Modern innovative inventions of online educational platforms contribute to the globalization of the education market. Educational activities go beyond the physical territory through the use of the Internet. The process of globalization of education is accompanied by increased competition among training providers. Among the modern effective marketing activities of educational activities, the introduction of digital technologies in the educational process can be noted.

The time variable in the Territorial Digital Twin: The case of Guadalajara (Spain)

The growing importance of Territorial Digital Twins (TDT) in the built environment is becoming increasingly apparent. The TDT can play a crucial role in helping governments make informed decisions based on a thorough understanding and interpretation of the evolution of both the physical territory and its urban, social, and economic development. This study develops the Territorial Digital Twin of Guadalajara (Spain), within the knowledge domain of urban planning and architectural and natural heritage. It allows the analysis of the evolution of the city, using the variable time, taking as origin an unpublished flight of Guadalajara from 1934. To be able to count on the widest possible time span, it is essential to recover the unpublished documentation that remains in historical archives. In this sense, aerial images have proved to be invaluable source for the recovery of historical heritage and territorial analysis. During the study, different techniques of image georectification have been combined, and a historical vector graphic base with topology has been created, plus an associated database accompanied by files with town planning and heritage information. As a result, the changes produced in the urban planning of the city are analysed and shown on the open-source website developed for the consultation of Territorial Digital Twin by all the stakeholders (collectivity, public bodies, university, investigation bodies, etc).

Everyday human rights practices in the Colombian Caribbean

ABSTRACT This article addresses the everyday human rights practices of Villa Gloria, a Black community located in the Colombian Caribbean. What do these practices consist of, what elements underlie them, and what implications do they have for the exercise of citizenship? Through interviews, timeline mapping workshops, and a review of different secondary sources, I argue that these practices contribute to the survival of a community that is anchored to its physical territory. These practices are critical if the community is to be included in the project of modern Colombia, that is, adapting to the changes brought by a new constitution in the 1990s and later to the project of post-conflict as a result of the peace dialogues between the state and the FARC-EP guerrilla between 2012 and 2016. Instead of policies of differentiation, Villa Gloria demands inclusion. To validate these arguments, I critique linear time and analyse three practices: the defence of territory, the search for recognition as ethnic people and as victims of the armed conflict, and peaceful resistance. These analyses provide empirical evidence to demonstrate the exercise of human rights by Black people on the margins of the nation-state.

Editorial

This first issue of Fashion Highlight marks the birth of a new journal in the fashion studies landscape, with the aim of sharing advances in scientific research in fashion nationally and internationally, contributing to current and future debates, disseminating original and innovative research, and supporting scenarios under construction in the digital and physical territories of the contemporary. The space of fashion in design cultures in academia is increasingly relevant and recognized, although it is the outcome of a rather recent path, which is nourished by the constant dialogue with historical, social, legal and scientific disciplines. There are many aspects that bring fashion, with its practices and research, closer to other dimensions of the project, such as design and architecture, but equally numerous are the elements of specificity, starting with its connection to the body and the issues of gender identity that this implies. For these reasons, it is important to identify spaces dedicated to the complex territory that characterizes academic fashion research, spaces that Fashion Highlight aims to inhabit, to further strengthen this process of defining identity, of identities.

Cities and Territorial Brand in The Metaverse: The Metaverse SEOUL Case

Cities involve units of time and space, being part of historical, social, economic, cultural, and tourist imaginary constructions. The goal is to understand how the territorial brand, based on regional development theories, is being used in the metaverse city of Seoul, South Korea. The method used was a case study associated with bibliographic and documentary research, using a protocol with four analytical categories. The main results referred to a metaverse territorial-regional brand, bringing discussions about a new geographical-virtual-immersive metaverse scale. It also addressed the use of recognition and competitiveness strategies between interactive-immersive territories. The conclusion confirms that Seoul’s metaverse territorial-regional brand is strategically divided into three situations: (1) For city marketing purposes, positioning it as the first metaverse global city; (2) in city branding to strengthen the reputation and identity of the territory; and (3) to drive the transformation of physical territory with urban revitalization projects from the metaverse environment. Moreover, it serves Metaverse Seoul as an interactive and immersive field laboratory in virtual reality.

Embodied geographies of environmental justice: Toward the sovereign right to wholly inhabit oneself

I introduce insights from Latin America and across disciplines to advance our understanding of environmental injustices as written on women's bodies. This paper will entice environmental justice scholarship into conversation with geography to stress how embodied geographies of environmental justice are necessary to understand the geographical, gendered, sexualized, and racialized arrangement of environmental injustices. Expanding Environmental Justice to incorporate the body through Segato's understanding of cuerpo-territorio, a concept that blends geography, territory, and the body, we blur the lines between public and private—emphasizing the role of the state and global capitalism in the subjugation of women and people of color. By asking who reproduces, what is reproduced, and where, in environmental justice work, we underscore that environmental matters are reproductive, and the disproportionate embodied consequences of environmental injustices on sexualized, gendered, and racialized bodies. This violence against feminized bodies is explained as the unintended consequences of global capital accumulation, but decolonial, queer, Black, and feminist geographical insights show how these are central for capital accumulation. Attending to the body as an important geopolitical site allows us to articulate mundane, everyday instances of environmental justice and reproductive justice as geopolitically important. I propose that Embodied Geographies of Environmental Justice that center the concept of cuerpo-territorio underscore that the physical territory of both environmental justice and reproductive justice struggles is in racialized and feminized bodies. By bringing in feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial understandings of production and reproduction, I provide a framework that allows for a global and nuanced understanding of gendered geographies of violence, environmental, and reproductive justice. A reading of a Moraga poem toward the end of the paper, demands that we attend to women of color theorizing their own experiences in radical and innovative terms that resist and transform oppressive relations offering possibilities for renewal, regeneration, and healing.

Spatial Territoriality Characteristics in a Waterfront Slum Settlement (Case Study: Karabba Village, Makassar)

Humans use territorial behavior to meet their privacy needs while carrying out their activities. The use of spatial in slums, particularly those on the water, is extremely limited, which indirectly influences their behavior of human activities in creating their outdoor spatial as territorial space. Based on field observations, this study aims to analyze the spatial territoriality of slum settlements on the water in terms of form and characteristics, as well as gender activities. The method used is rationalistic research, with the approach being to see the truth not only from empirical data but also from interviews as part of the cognitive construction. The results show that the territorial space formed above the air is strongly influenced by the activities that occur above it, as well as the boundaries of the physical territory that are formed intentionally or unintentionally and are motivated by social and kinship characteristics that emerge as a result of the time of the activities that occur. Women’s activities are still strongly influenced by personal distance and distance from home, as well as the nature of kinship that occurs. Men are more active outside the home because they have little space for social activities, so they carry out their activities on the road. Because of their inquisitive nature, children are looking for a place for wide activity, a shady place, and other places that are not used for activities.

Introduction: Digitizing Borders, Cities, and Landscapes

This special issue asks what digital state-making means in border zones, cities, and landscapes. As a complement to discussions of such processes in cyberspace and virtual territory, we elaborate by exploring connections to physical territory. Authors provide firsthand accounts from a number of global locations where tech surveillance is especially apparent: the US-Mexico border; the city of Los Angeles; and the Uyghur borderlands of Northwest China. In these contexts, physical territory is important as a crucial linking point between massive databases in the cloud and technical systems on the land. It is where the state can surveil bodies and movements in order to identify them, codify them, and enter their features as data to be used later. This is happening at multiple levels of governance from national, regional, to city departments. And the differential impact on marginalized groups is evident throughout.

Planting flags in water

In this commentary, I respond to James Riding and Carl Dahlman's article, ‘Montage space: borderlands, micronations, terra nullius, and the imperialism of the geographical imagination’. I build on their arguments about ‘more-than-dry landscapes’ to consider how the relationship between fluid and non-fluid landscapes sheds light on the construction and contestation of political space. To do so, I offer additional examples of how people plant flags in water, shedding light on the political implications of how physical territories are imagined, claimed, and sometimes, simply created at the fluid/non-fluid interface.

Exploring the grammar of othering and antagonism as enacted in terrorist discourse: verbal aggression in service of radicalisation

The social, discursive practice of othering in violent extremist discourse serves to present outgroups as distant yet real threats to the ideological and physical territories of an ingroup which a terrorist claims to represent. However, the role of grammatical choices (namely, non/transactive construction, voice, and mood) in enacting the othering act within the context of radicalisation to terrorism remains to be empirically verified. This paper explores the patterning and pragmatic functions—namely in framing situations, coercing into violence, and legitimising hostile actions against Others—of the syntactic structure of the othering utterances. The othering utterances, as realized in a set of eight public statements produced by former al-Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, were sorted manually and analysed qualitatively to help understand and showcase how grammar was strategically leveraged in the process of radicalisation. Results show that the act of othering in the dataset operates within the victimization and injustice frameworks to morally sanction antagonism and aggression via: (i) overt othering, where transactive construction, only declarative mood and active voice are used, and (ii) covert othering, in which nontransactive construction, any mood type, and passive voice are utilized. Overt othering foregrounds, through assertions and statements of presumed facts, the negative agentive role of Others and the diagnostic framing of the causal relationships between Others and negative experiences. Covert othering backgrounds this agentive role to place prominence on immoral actions and to serve in the motivational function of framing. The grammatical patterns provide evidence of the strategic character of OBL’s verbal aggression and how different mood types tend to construct the directive, illocutionary point of the utterances and to enact prognostic framing. The analytical strategy aids in threat assessment and preventing radicalisation by sensitizing assessors to, first, the kind of semiotic clues to engagement in the social and discursive process of radicalisation where utterances count as calls for action and activators of a reality of deontology, and, second, to the social functioning of terrorist texts in: (i) promoting putative readers’ awareness of particular outgroups, and (ii) ideological positioning and encouraging and legitimating violence that is liberty, loyalty and care metavalues-based.

From global to neo-global: Mapping the ‘tele’-visual geography of South Asia through a transnational lens

ABSTRACT Globalization and transnationalism have expanded the physical territory of television and are responsible for global reshaping of media industries and cultures. In the contemporary mediascape, Indian television industry is an interesting site for excavating new transnational patterns wherein the circulation of Indian TV content extends beyond the diaspora and caters to non-diasporic audiences, especially, in South Asia and South-east Asia. The popularity of Hindi language TV soaps in Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, etc., have aided in mapping a new ‘tele’-visual geography of popular culture that deems Western media influence as almost insignificant, if not absent. Chronicling the success of two Indian TV programmes – the story of a ‘child-bride’ Balika Vadhu (2008–16) in Vietnam and a Hindu mythological Mahabharat (2013–14) in a Muslim-populated Indonesia; this paper traces the transnational circulation of Indian TV content amongst non-diasporic markets in South-east Asia. Drawing from Daya Kishan Thussu’s notion of ‘contra-flows’ and Brian Larkin’s conception of ‘parallel modernities’, the paper argues that the success of Indian television programmes in non-West media markets diverts our attention towards new kinds of transnational media flows which I have termed ‘neo-global’ flows that operate amongst emerging centres of media production and need not be mapped against dominant Western flows.

“this is my space / I am not movin”

ABSTRACT Throughout their literary careers, Langston Hughes and Ntozake Shange used poetry as a vehicle to address the prevalent social ills that affected the African American community during their time. In particular, they were concerned with the threat of the recolonization of Black spaces (minds, bodies, and/or physical territories) by white leaders in Jim Crow society. Tracing the ways in which their poetry not only archives the oppression of the Jim Crow era but resists it enables us to understand the resounding impact that Hughes and Shange alike have had on transforming the image of Black Americans in the US cultural imagination even today. This article therefore probes key works by these two literary lights in order to trace the thread of progressive activism in their works, their response to the threat of recolonization, and their representation of the beauty of Blackness as both a social and political act.

Análise da Educação Remota como uma alternativa emergencial durante a pandemia da Covid-19 (Sars-Cov-2): Analysis of Remote Education as an emergency alternative during the Covid-19 pandemic (Sars-Cov-2)

In view of the coronavirus pandemic, several security measures were necessary, among them, the on-site suspension of educational activities, thus generating the obligation for teachers and students to migrate to the online reality, transferring and transposing methodologies and pedagogical practices atypical of the physical territories of learning, in what has been called remote or synchronous emergency teaching. With the uncertainties that the current scenario presents, the idea to develop this work arose with the objective of carrying out analyzes on the feasibility of implementing emergency remote education at the State University of Alagoas - UNEAL. This is a study, based on an opinion poll, through an online questionnaire Google® Forms, carried out with teachers and students of the Licenciatura Courses in Biological Sciences and Chemistry.103 people participated, being 89.3% students and 10.7% teachers. The majority 73.8% agreed that the implementation of emergency remote education is feasible. Through analysis of the current context and the results obtained, it is recommended that teachers and students discuss the best strategies that enable a good quality remote or synchronous teaching.

"Right to the city": experience of analysis of courtyard communities from the position of critical theory (by the example of Minsk)

Traditionally, the Soviet courtyard was presented in urban studies as a sphere of attraction for the interests of most neighbours. However, the changes in the post-Soviet period (the commercialisation of public space, the stratification and segregation of citizens) significantly weakened the activity of courtyard communities. Recently, under the influence of a number of factors (the Covid-19 pandemic, the growth of socio-political activity), cities, on the contrary, are experiencing a significant civic upsurge, the traditions of spending time together in residential courtyards are gradually being renewed. The revival of the activity of courtyard communities actualises the study of issues related to the perception of citizens of their "right to the city", the boundaries and possibilities of its practical implementation, as well as the influence of communicative factors. The neo-Marxist interpretation of critical theory (A.Lefevre, D.Harvey, D.Mitchell) has been used as the methodological basis for the analysis of courtyard communities. The empirical materials collected in the course of the study (results of a questionnaire survey, supplemented by the analysis of the content of neighbours chats) revealed a number of fundamental differences between “new” courtyard communities and traditional (“Soviet”) ones. In the "Soviet" courtyard communities, urban participation was not so much the realisation of the "right to the city" as an example of communal (rural) cooperation (a form of grassroots self-organisation to achieve the set goals at the lowest cost). In the case of the "new" courtyard communities, the driving force is "urbanity" as the ability to define oneself as a city dweller, the desire to leave one's mark in the urban environment. At the same time, the "right to the city" goes beyond its utilitarian understanding (as the improvement of the urban environment) and acquires the features of symbolic self-determination, becomes the right to produce one's own identity. Courtyard communities formed on the basis of the realisation of their own “right to the city” are characterised by the ability to reach a compromise and develop generally accepted rules of communication. If such trends continue, the “right to the city” will be closely correlated with such concepts as “communication”, “public sphere”, “forum”, and its practical implementation will be less and less tied to the direct “reconquest” of physical territories and will increasingly begin to unfold in the communicative plane.

Revealing the circularities in farmers’ market networked infrastructure of Western Anatolia

ABSTRACT The research goal herein was to characterize the innovations on which the building of circularities in the Western Anatolian Farmers’ Market Network was founded. In other words, rather than new circular economy research, this is the revelation and reconstruction of a highly networked food infrastructure that has been a locally rooted activity in daily life for centuries in different geographies, in different spatial and social forms, which neoliberal agricultural and marketing policies have recently attempted to displace. With this research, the nature of the food chain of these market territories, and the characteristics of their creators, were analysed in order to reveal how it transforms the physical and social territory. It was sought to explore and reveal the internal and external dynamics that form and foster the circularities while investigating the food network. This article attempted to contribute to discussions on ‘circularities in territories’ in the context of Western Anatolia. The main focus was on the farmers’ market networked infrastructure of the Küçük and Büyük Menderes River Basins due to their intertwined relationship with territories, rich product range, and deeply rooted market network. Farmers’ markets were inspected using the six ReSOLVE action plans.