Socio-spatial Context Research Articles

‘Choosing’ Participatory Research: Partnerships in Space–Time

Participatory action research has increasing attention in geography in recent years, with numerous discussions about how best to proceed and lessons learned from past efforts. There has been less interest, though, in critically probing the circumstances under which participatory research takes place: in other words, the sociospatial contexts within which such research approaches are chosen. One explanation may be that participatory action researchers sometimes infer that the reasons for their choices are primarily ethical and political. In this paper, I consider this and other assumptions about participatory action research, drawing upon my own involvement in two action research projects in Ottawa, Canada. I argue that reflecting on this question is a particularly timely undertaking, given the ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ in which professionalization and partnerships are becoming more prominent. I begin by reviewing what has been said about participatory action research and the circumstances under which this approach is likely to be selected, and reflect on how these discussions might be enhanced by linking their circumstances specifically to emerging analyses about spaces of neoliberalism. Using these insights, I then examine the sociospatial context for the two studies and how their characteristics had specific effects on their methodological choices. All of these elements provide the scaffolding for consideration of the rationalities that supported the usage of participatory research in one study and the lack of engagement with this approach in the other.

Localised Social Networks, Socialisation and Social Mobility in a Low-income Neighbourhood in the Netherlands

The assumed negative effects of living in a low-income neighbourhood on the social mobility of already-poor residents are central to the current political debate about disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. A case study in The Hague addresses the question of which social mechanisms in the daily life of residents might contribute to reduced social mobility in the long run. On the basis of interviews with neighbourhood experts and residents about local social networks, job search strategies and work ethics, evidence can be found for limited opportunity structures and negative socialisation processes. However, the findings suggest that these mechanisms work more subtly than generally assumed in the research literature, as the specific socio-spatial context also provides opportunities and negative effects are selective rather than generic.

Locality deprivation and Type 2 diabetes incidence: A local test of relative inequalities

There is increasing evidence that the socio-spatial context of the local area in which one lives can have an effect on health, but teasing out contextual influences is not a simple task. We examine whether the incidence of Type 2 diabetes in small areas in Tayside, Scotland is associated with deprivation in neighbouring areas, controlling for the deprivation of the area itself. As such, this is a genuinely ‘contextual’ variable situating each small area in the context of surrounding places. We test two opposing hypotheses. First, a ‘psycho-social’ hypothesis might suggest that negative social comparisons made by individuals in relation to those who surround them could lead to chronic low-level stress via psycho-social pathways, the physiological effects of which could promote diabetes. Thus, we would expect people living in deprived areas surrounded by less deprived areas to have an increased risk of diabetes, compared to those living in similarly deprived areas that are surrounded by equally or more deprived areas. Alternatively, a neo-materialist approach might suggest that the social, cultural and environmental resources in the surrounding environment will influence circumstances in a particular area of interest. Poorer areas surrounded by less deprived areas would benefit from the better resources in the wider locality, while less deprived areas surrounded by poorer areas may be hampered by the poorer resources available nearby. We refer to this as the ‘pull-up/pull-down’ hypothesis. Our results show that, as expected, area deprivation is positively related to diabetes incidence ( p<0.001), whilst deprivation inequality between areas and their neighbours is negatively related ( p=0.006). Type 2 diabetes is more common in deprived areas, but lower in deprived areas that are surrounded by relatively less deprived areas. On the other hand, less deprived areas that are surrounded by relatively more deprived areas have higher diabetes incidence than would be expected from the deprivation of the area alone. Our model results are consistent with a pull-up/pull-down model and lend no support to a ‘psycho-social’ interpretation at this local scale of analysis.

Constructing Racism in Sydney, Australia's Largest EthniCity

Contemporary Australia is in a contradictory situation as a nation where multiculturalism co-exists with various forms of what are collectively called racisms. Based on a survey of Sydney residents, this study uses a social constructivist approach to investigate the nature and sociospatial context of racist attitudes in Sydney, Australia's largest EthniCity. Results show a mix of compositional (aspatial) and contextual (spatial) associations with racisms. The former indicate a general but inconsistent relationship between socioeconomic status and tolerance, and also between cultural diversity and tolerance. The latter, however, reveal place-based cultures of tolerance and intolerance cutting across compositional relationships. A geography of racism in Sydney therefore adds a level of understanding which cannot be obtained from aspatial analysis alone. This helps to understand the complexity of local political cultures and can assist with the formulation of anti-racism interventions.

Legal Geographies—Legal Sense and Geographical Context: Court Rulings on Religious Activities in Public Schools

This article analyzes the role of geographical context in five leading U.S. Supreme Court cases on religious activities in public schools. These cases are part of a broader, highly controversial jurisprudence that has had the effect of secularizing public education, in large part through the creation of boundaries intended to protect the individual conscience from collective and governmental action. Three types of spatial context are found to be central to judicial reasoning in this area: the school, the community, and the nation. The Court has debated the contemporary and historical characteristics of each of these environments at length, although for an outspoken minority, the only context relevant to constitutional interpretation concerns the words and actions of the Founders in the late 18th century. Even this division, however, lends support to the notion that judicial reasoning may turn more on issues of sociospatial context, than on strictly legalistic questions.

Productivity among older people in The Netherlands: variations by gender and the socio-spatial context in 2002–03

Productivity among older adults manifests in engagement in paid work, voluntary work, giving support to others, home maintenance and housekeeping. This paper reports an investigation into the extent to which levels of participation in the different productive activity types in The Netherlands are associated with age, gender and the settings in which older people live. The regional and urban–rural dimensions of variation are examined. The data were derived from the European Study of Adult Well-Being survey (ESAW). The results show that the oldest women tended to restrict their productivity to the private domain of housekeeping, while the oldest men were more often productive in the community, and that regional variations were stronger for women than for men. Traditional gender roles particularly affected the way in which older women living in a peripheral region participated in productive activities. In contrast, the urban–rural dimension was more important for men than for women, partly because a group of older men in the cities were not involved in paid work. Overall, strong gender influences on the variations in productive engagement were found. Processes of age-related contraction and convergence in patterns of participation in productive activities were imputed from the cross-sectional data. A full understanding of the ageing and cohort effects underlying the reported patterns would require much more detailed information on the spatial and temporal dimensions of older people's activity patterns.

Gated communities, commodification and aestheticization: The case of the Lisbon metropolitan area

This paper focuses on the commodification processes and the aestheticization practices that shape gated communities and on the way these are connected to their segregational dimension, which is illustrated through the case of the Lisbon Metropolitan Area (LMA). First, I discuss the (increasing) aestheticization of commodities, emphasising some of the more problematic theoretical issues it involves. Following this discussion I present and analyse the ‘Lisbon case’. I provide a brief overview of gated communities in the LMA and then present and analyse the results obtained through a content analysis of LMA gated community advertisements and observation of their site semantics as conveyed through general built form, including physical location, planning, architecture, landscaping, and toponymy. I relate these findings to the LMA gated community market characteristics and to the broader prevailing socio-spatial context regarding their emergence.

Children's Experiences of Migration: Moving in the Wake of AIDS in Southern Africa

Despite the recent significance children's geographies have been afforded within many geographical subdisciplines, their experiences of migration have received relatively little attention. However, children do migrate and their migration is often distinct from that of entire households. In this paper we explore children's migration in southern Africa within the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, focusing in particular on the impacts of moving house on children's sociospatial experiences. Migration has consequences for several areas of children's lives, and the nature of those consequences is shaped by the context within which migration takes place. In southern Africa AIDS is an unavoidable aspect of the sociospatial context, but the impact it has on children varies. This exemplar has wider implications for two areas of geographical research. First, in the paper we advocate the importance of including children's experiences of migration within culturally informed studies of migration. Second, there is a need for research in children's geographies to extend beyond the microlevel. We advocate a refocusing of research beyond children's static relationship to environments to also encompass children's transient geographies in discussions of their life experiences.

Socio-spatial opportunities and the power of place : Bankwatch-NGOs in Washington, D.C.

Abstract. For quite some time. social science has been dealing with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from different empirical and theoretical angles (Frantz 2002). However, one aspect is severely underdeveloped in this research: the role of the socio-spatial context conditions under which NGO actors operate. Using the example of Bankwatch-NGOs in Washington, D.C, who have been advocating World Bank reform for more than two decades, the present paper elaborates on this deficit in NGO research. Following Action and Structuration Theory, it is argued that their embeddedness in an institutionally rich context provides them with access to a distinct set of power resources. Furthermore, it is suggested that such privileged access to resources puts the Washington, D.C. based NGOs in a favorable position in terms of influencing the processes of hegemony formation in this particular subject matter. In conclusion, the unique Washington, D.C. context is conceptualized as an action enabling socio-spatial opportunity structure.

Ecological analysis of the distribution and socio-spatial context of homicides in Porto Alegre, Brazil

Over the last decade, the number of homicides in Porto Alegre has increased to the point where external causes are now the main group of causes of death in the 5–34-year age group. Preventing these deaths depends fundamentally on identifying factors related to excess violence in population groups. The overall aim of this study is to analyse the spatial distribution of homicide victims by place of residence in Porto Alegre, the capital of the southernmost Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul, in 1996, in order to identify and understand the socio-spatial context. Demographic and socioeconomic indicators based on the 1991 census and 1996 population count were used to build a multivariate classification characterizing the 1851 census tracts. Homicides occurring in 1996 were located using the municipality's Geographic Information System. Four socioeconomic groups were identified, mainly differentiated by housing indicators. Small areas on the urban periphery in which slums ( favelas) are concentrated presented higher homicide rates. Homicide rates were lower in the two groups with higher income and educational level. The second step was to classify the census tracts according to the homicide indicator. In this case, areas were differentiated by the number of household inhabitants per room, income, schooling, and median age. We conclude that the multivariate socioeconomic classification presents a limited capacity to identify populations exposed to homicides, suggesting that socioeconomic conditions themselves do not determine violent behaviour. On the other hand, the spatial methods allowed us to identify small areas where deaths are concentrated and whose populations should receive special attention in planning measures to prevent violent deaths.

Balkan Immigrants in the Greek City of Thessaloniki

This paper aims to explore aspects of the contemporary phenomenon of immigration from Balkan countries into Greece, linking it to wider developments taking place at the international level and locating transnational elements. More precisely, it focuses on contradictory processes of social incorporation of Albanian and Bulgarian immigrants in Thessaloniki, based on empirical material deriving from fieldwork research. The analytical framework used in the paper is built upon: (a) the political, institutional and cultural context, with particular reference to the social and political responses to immigration; (b) the socio-economic context of the local labour market where immigrants work; and (c) the sociospatial context, seen in relation to the city’s social geography and the transformation of the urban space.

Personal and commercial networks in an English port: Chester in the early eighteenth century

Family and community have long been seen as key social structures, but economic historians increasingly recognise their importance in to the structure and success of business in the early-modern period. New institutional perspectives view such networks as central to business integration, not least because of the relationships of trust and information exchange that they comprise. This paper attempts to reconstruct the broad parameters of the social webs that drew together towns in north-west England in the early 18th century. These form the socio-spatial context in which to place detailed analysis of the social and business networks of Chester's merchant community. Family was central to the social lives of these men and framed their strategies of wealth distribution, but it was the local, civic and wider merchant community that structured their economic worlds of wealth creation. The last of these was the most important, providing the dispersed web of trusted links essential to successful long-distance trade. The exchange of information within these networks helped to reduce transaction costs and served to cement the relationships of trust between merchants. But networks did not happen automatically or accidentally: they were contingent on interaction and communication, making these business links intensely personal and further blurring the distinction between social and economic spheres.

Collaborative Visioning or Urban Planning as Therapy? The Politics of Public-Private Policy Making

One aspect of a recent restructuring of urban economies, societies, and spaces has been a change in urban planning practice. Planning is increasingly privatized and decentralized in U.S. cities. Private planning consultants are often hired by public-private coalitions in order to shape the future of cities, while the planning processes they institute are frequently claimed to be consensus-based, collaborative, and inclusionary, rather than elite-centered and expert-driven. This paper discusses the use of “visioning”—an increasingly popular technique that develops goals for the future of a city through consensus-based meetings, open to all parties—as developed by New Century Lexington, a public-private planning initiative in Lexington, Kentucky. It argues that: (1) new public-private planning procedures, incorporating collaborative techniques, frequently become the institutional sites of political struggle over how future urban geographies are produced; (2) in order to understand the role of visioning in contemporary urban politics and in policy making outcomes, we must recognize the sociospatial context in which it is deployed; and (3) in the case of New Century, the way in which local elites controlled the mechanics of the visioning process made dissent difficult and, therefore, produced a vision of the future largely parallel to their standard economic development models.

GROUNDING HIERARCHIES OF ACCEPTANCE: THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF DISABILITY IN NIMBY CONFLICTS

The NIMBY syndrome remains a complex and costly social problem. Research into public attitudes toward disability and difference using “hierarchies of acceptance” has provided considerable insight into the underlying causes of NIMBY reactions. However, hierarchy of acceptance studies have several limitations, most notably their reliance on quantitative survey research to gauge respondent reactions to disabled persons. In this paper, I use data from an in-depth case study in Southern California to explore public reactions to disability and difference as they are expressed “in place.” Case study data support some findings from existing research, but they also provide additional insights. These concern the dynamic and contested nature of public perceptions, the way in which attitudes are mediated by place, the conflation of different disabilities, and the intersection of disability with other dimensions of difference. A dynamic, place-based hierarchy of acceptance is constructed to represent public attitudes expressed during the conflict. Together, insights from the case study help to demonstrate the myriad factors that shape public attitudes toward disabilities within a particular sociospatial context. [Key words: disability, social construction, NIMBY, public attitudes, locational conflict.]

Gender, Class and Home Ownership: Placing the Connections

This paper contributes to understandings of how gender interacts with the social class implications of home ownership. It is argued that the connections between gender, class and home ownership have only been partially elaborated, and suggested that a more specific focus on identity and the socio-spatial context facilitates a more complex portrayal of these connections. Using material from in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 60 men and women in two neighbourhoods in Vancouver, British Columbia, it will be demonstrated that, contrary to common expectations, home ownership is an important component of both middle-class masculinity and middle-class femininity. However, there is no singular or linear connection between gender, class and home. Instead, there is conflict between familial and status expressions of home, conflict that varies for men and women and according to geographical location.

The geography of educational disadvantage in Glasgow

The changing nature of work and growing competition for access to the core labour force has attached a premium to the value of education in advanced capitalist societies. Socio-spatial variations in the quality of the educational environment exert a major influence on individual life chances. This paper first examines the relationship between educational attainment and sociospatial context and then maps the differential incidence of educational disadvantage with reference to the city of Glasgow. The research findings inform the formulation of an education policy aimed at providing a socially sensitive response to the problem of educational disadvantage within the city.

A Schema for Using Records of Geographer's Careers in the Study of Geographic Thought

The aim of this article is to bring into awareness some major dimensions of interpretation in geographic thought. Several contextual and epistemological dimensions of interpretation are mentioned. Among them are scholars' roles, activities, fields of interest, styles of approaching the subject matter, modes of narrative, and formal modes of argument. It is argued that interpretations arise out of geographers' biographies within their sociospatial context, and are institutionalized in each historical period into several incompatible world views. Each of them consists of different concepts, methodologies, and practices. It is argued also that the discipline as a whole may be enriched by all the perspectives that prove themselves as relatively adequate.