Socio-spatial Processes Research Articles

Towards a socioeconomic profile for areas vulnerable to soil compaction? A case study in a Mediterranean country

The present study assesses the spatial distribution of 133 socioeconomic indicators compared with indexes of land vulnerability to natural/human-induced soil compaction in 8101 municipalities in Italy using an exploratory data analysis. The aim is to ascertain if local municipalities classified at high soil vulnerability are also characterized by a specific territorial profile. More than 30 indicators correlated with soil vulnerability to compaction reflecting the long-established interactions between rural communities and the landscape in turn shaped by latest socioeconomic changes. The present study has showed that factors discriminating vulnerable from non-vulnerable areas include demographic and socio-spatial processes (population concentration and aging), economic factors (specialization in tourism, industry and agriculture), environmental variables (i.e. soil erosion, salinization and sealing, forest fires and overgrazing) and landscape attributes (agricultural land-use diversity, crop intensity, land tenure). Land-use intensity, crop fragmentation, population density in rural areas and, more generally, human pressure variables are the factors mostly associated with high levels of (both natural and human-induced) soil vulnerability to compaction. Assessing latent relations between socioeconomic factors and soil vulnerability to compaction provides an in-depth understanding of the overall risk for soil compaction. Soil conservation strategies may benefit from improved knowledge of socio-ecological systems informing a more sustainable land management against soil degradation.

A társadalmi-térbeli marginalizáció folyamatai a leszakadó vidéki térségekben

Tanulmányunkban a szakmai diskurzusokban hátrányos helyzetűként megjelenített rurális térségekre fókuszálunk, azok marginalizációs folyamataira helyezve a hangsúlyt. Kiindulópontunk az, hogy a marginalitáskoncepció releváns értelmezési keret a „leszakadó” vidéki térségek társadalmi problémáinak megértéséhez. Az ilyen térségekben élő-működő, marginalizált helyzetű társadalmi csoportok – helyi lakosok és gazdasági szereplők – napi gyakorlatain keresztül vizsgáljuk azokat a mechanizmusokat, amelyekkel újratermelődnek a gazdasági-társadalmi hátrányok, a függőségek és a kirekesztettség. Írásunkban amellett érvelünk, hogy egyrészt a társadalmi marginalizálódás és a térbeli hátrányok halmozódása nem választhatók el egymástól; a vidéki terek marginalizálódása az ott élő-működő egyének, csoportok marginalizálódását is eredményezi, tovább rontva a térség helyzetét; másrészt hogy a vidéki terekben élő, marginalizált helyzetű társadalmi csoportok maguk is arra kényszerülnek, hogy napi gyakorlataikkal fenntartsák/újratermeljék saját (marginalizált) helyzetüket a fennálló társadalmi-térbeli struktúrák keretei között. Következtetéseinket négy magyarországi – a társadalmi és a térbeli marginalizáció számos összetevőjét hordozó – terepen végzett empirikus vizsgálatra alapozzuk.

Центро-периферійна організація суспільства та адміністративно-територіальна реформа

Ihor Pylypenko. The Core-peripheral Organization of Society and Administrative-territorial Reform. This thesis reveals the conceptual basics for geographical analysis of core-peripheral processes and structures along with the scientific and methodological basics of their spatial localization, parameterization, and formalization. The mechanisms of social and geographical peripheral formation in the context of dynamic regional management conceptions were explored. The major differences in the current socio-spatial processes in the center-peripheral structures were shown. Special attention is paid to the integral processes of centralization and peripheralization in the socio-spatial systems of different scales that determine the hierarchical order of the geographical objects multitude and play the role of a universal model, explaining the heterogeneity of geospace. The author proposes principles for applying basic provisions of the “core-periphery” concept during the administrative and territorial reform in Ukraine.

Gentrificação e políticas de reabilitação urbana em Portugal: uma análise crítica à luz da tese rent gap de Neil Smith

O artigo problematiza o papel que as políticas de reabilitação urbana no centro histórico das cidades portuguesas detêm no facilitar do processo de gentrificação, afirmando-se como condições necessárias, não sendo, todavia, por si só suficientes para induzir tal processo socioespacial. Ainda assim, os programas de reabilitação urbana, ao visarem estimular a requalificação de edifícios e criar condições favoráveis à atração de capitais privados para a regeneração das áreas da cidade centro, constituem um fator estratégico para a fixação das novas classes médias, contribuindo, em última análise, para a expulsão de antigos moradores, promovendo segregação residencial e desenvolvimento urbano desigual. A problemática será enquadrada pela tese de rent gap de Neil Smith mobilizando os aspectos estruturais do processo de acumulação de capital (e dos seus movimentos cíclicos) e relacionando-os com o (re)desenvolvimento urbano e com a produção de ambiente construído pela gentrificação.

Mobilidade da produção na metrópole

As transformações na organização produtiva, acentuadas nas últimas décadas, implicaram o crescimento dos fluxos de bens e mercadorias, que, ao afetar a circulação geral, repercutem na mobilidade das pessoas e na organização espacial. Tais transformações, também decorrentes de inovações na organização dos próprios serviços de transporte de carga, fizeram surgir novos serviços, atividades e equipamentos, que podem ser relacionados a processos socioespaciais característicos da formação metropolitana contemporânea e a diferentes formas de distribuição espacial das atividades econômicas. É pressuposto que arranjos, redes e estruturas de produção e de circulação configurem novas formas de polarização da metrópole, e que tais mudanças se vinculem a dinâmicas de transformação do espaço metropolitano, confirmando ainda mais a força de polarização e articulação concentrada nessas formações que abrangem regiões e cidades e cidades-regiões.

Merevitalisasi Tradisi: Mengadopsi Desa Adat di Bali sebagai Unit Perancangan Kota

Urban design projects aim at achieving better environments in the sense that they are supportive of the culture of the inhabitants. Careful consideration of socio-cultural aspects of a space is a precursor to approach this goal. The existence of traditional settlements (i.e. desa adat) as spatio-cultural units in a Balinese setting has never been accommodated in the contemporary projects of urban spatial design. In this respect, the opportunity to achieve supportive environments is certainly become remote. Long known for the extensive traditional and religious role it has played in the life of the Balinese, the desa adat is central to that culture. Essentially, this unit is cosmologically independent and socio-religiously meaningful, and thus needs to be treated accordingly in a socio spatial manipulation process. With regard to the spatial design of the Balinese space, this cosmological unit (Geertz 1959, 1980) determines land use, street layout, location of settlement's elements, and the like (Parimin 1985; Samadhi 2001).This paper aims to explore the existence of desa adat as a Balinese cultural institution, and argues for its utilization as an urban design unit. Ultimately, it tries to promote multiculturalism and pluralism in the urban design as a socio-spatial process in the Indonesian planning system.

Google Earth as a Reflection of Cultural Changes and Socio-Spatial Processes in the Digital Age

The paper describes the change undergoing in maps and map-making, in the move from modern printed maps to digital, online maps, emphasizing the changing status of the cartographer and the changing nature of information represented on the maps. Taking Google Earth as its main example, the paper demonstrates the cultural changes embedded in this environment in terms of three main spatial themes: the global culture, the culture of openness and collaboration, and the virtualization of the cultural products and practices. It contributes to the understanding of the broader context of the changes in the modes of production and knowledge politics in the digital age.

The rut and the gutter: space and time in graphic narrative

This paper brings together comics studies and geography to consider how space operates both on and off the comics page. We integrate discussion of comics’ formal properties with a site-specific comics installation (Dave McKean’s The Rut) to show the intertwining of these spaces. Our argument is articulated through juxtaposition of the literature on space-time in comics with our case study. This montage speaks to graphic narratives’ formal properties, especially its alchemic, emergent nature. Our argument begins by introducing The Rut as an example of how space and narrative can be intertwined. Our argument tacks back to the literature, discussing the pluralization of time-space(s) throughout recent writing within human geography and how this can help us think with The Rut. We then briefly describe the way The Rut is physically laid out. Returning once again to the literature, we argue that the topological figuration of comics is mediated by readers’ practices of relation-building and narrative construction, which are in turn impacted by the irreversible nature of time. This is demonstrated for The Rut through experience of the art as well as participant observation. Finally, we highlight how actual spaces are overlaid with virtual spaces that help shape the actualized version; we illustrate this by showing how the embodied experience of The Rut’s materiality was productive of a multiplicity of experiential spaces, both actual and virtual. We close by drawing three conclusions: the first about the implications of graphic narrative’s relational ontology for how social scientists narrate socio-spatial processes; the second, a call for more empirical work examining the emergence, evolution, and dissipation of topological spaces; and the third about the political possibility of initiating new practices of ‘reading’ spaces and times to produce and access new ways of being in the world.

The urban process under financialised capitalism

Over half a decade has passed since the first global financial crisis of the 21st Century, and political economists are still trying to make sense of its causes and ramifications. In a major recent intervention Costas Lapavitsas argues that what was thrown into relief was the sheer penetration of the financial process into all facets of everyday life. Financialisation represents, Lapavitsas says, nothing less than a historic transformation in the structural process of capital accumulation itself: one which has been globally unfolding and locally evolving over the last three to four decades, and has now installed itself at all levels and dimensions of everyday life. At the centre of this argument is an analysis which focuses on the way financial intermediaries have been able to draw people, and the social infrastructure people depend on, deep into the circuit of financial accumulation. To a considerable degree this thesis backs up Lefebvre and Harvey's analysis made some four decades earlier: that financial capitalism was liable to mutate into a new urban form, based on the intensification of ‘secondary’ circuits of exploitation operating both inside and outside the realm of production. In this paper I try to connect the financial and geographical frameworks of Lapavitsas and Harvey to see what new light is cast on emerging urban forms of rent-extraction. Through an examination of the financialisation of the urban landscape I argue that urbanism does not merely reflect or represent the culture of financial accumulation, but has been a crucial socio-spatial process enabling the permeation and penetration of finance into the fabric of daily life.

Marginalisation and integration within the informal urban economy: the case of child waste pickers in Kaduna, Nigeria

This article examines how age shapes the positions and choices of child waste pickers in Kaduna, Nigeria. There is a special interest in the Almajirai, or young male pupils of the Islamic education system. Drawing on empirical data, the article reports that child waste pickers have limited access to the most valuable recyclables, largely because they are excluded from the spaces where such materials are found. Their access is further reduced by limited mobility and a lesser amount of time spent on waste picking. In a reflection of the socially stratified and highly dependent relations found, child waste pickers have little bargaining power when recyclables are traded. They remain active in waste picking due to its significance as a poverty reduction strategy but in spite of this and the contributions towards resource recovery, child waste pickers are not acknowledged by the government. The lack of recognition and the failure to formalise the informal system reinforce their vulnerability due to increased susceptibility to exploitation and exposure to health risks. At the broadest level, the study confirms on-going socio-spatial processes of exclusion in African cities, both as a result of urban governance practices and the power dynamics within the informal economy.

The adoption of soccer in southern Brazil: the influences of international boundaries immigrants

Soccer spread throughout the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul between 1900 and 1920. This state was one of the first to adopt and organize the regular practice of soccer. This process of diffusion and adaptation was heavily influenced by socio-spatial processes in the region of the Rio de la Plata of Uruguay and the eastern side of Argentina. Also, influential was the contribution from German immigrants, whose societal position and sporting traditions were prominent in the society of Rio Grande do Sul at the end of nineteenth century. This essay analyses the introduction of soccer in this part of Brazil, against the backdrop of above mentioned influences.

The socio-spatial (re)configuration of legitimacy, knowledge, and practice in chemical risk governance: integrating boundary-work and scale-frame analytics

In multiple jurisdictions, diverse stakeholders are increasingly challenging where, how, and by whom environmental health risks from chemicals should be governed. Using the case of Bisphenol A assessed under Canada’s Chemicals Management Plan, we analyse how political and epistemic legitimacy is being (re)configured, situated, and contested. We conceptually integrate distinct literatures on ‘politics of scale’, ‘scale frames’ and ‘boundary work’ to examine the role of socio-spatial processes in shaping ‘legitimate’ expertise, evidence, and policy action. Textual documents and key informant interviews reveal disputes over ‘scaling’ perceived risk problems, constituent variables, requisite expertise, interventions and associated interrelationships with legislative and scientific ‘boundary-objects’ produced through hybrid deliberations. Tensions over distinguishing the role of stakeholder knowledge and impartial expertise, and differentiated access given to technical details and normative rationales driving the operationalisation of regulatory/scientific principles are discussed. Stakeholders seeking to shape policy must gain the legitimacy to access jurisdictional and epistemic spaces in which knowledge, evidence, and rationales become institutionalised.

Allyson Mitchell’s Lesbian Cultural Activism in Politicized Urban Space

This article examines Allyson Mitchell’s activist art projects at the Gladstone Hotel in the district of Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario. Whereas current writings focus on the lesbian feminist aesthetics underlying Mitchell’s installations and performances, I provide a geopolitical analysis of her critical cultural practices. I suggest that her collaboration with creative communities at the Gladstone Hotel contributes to urban regeneration in the neighbourhood of Queen Street West. These city-renewal schemes result in the eviction of people living in poverty who cannot afford the rental increases in gentrified districts. In analyzing the socio-spatial processes surrounding Mitchell’s art, I argue that she disrupts gender and sexual ideologies through transgressive feminist politics. While she coordinates cultural-activist projects in politicized urban space, she re-articulates practices of marginalization and disenfranchisement in ways that both enable and disenable geographies of power and resistance.

Ciudad y hábitat informal: Las tomas de terreno y la autoconstrucción en las quebradas de Valparaíso

This paper aims to highlight the urban phenomenon of illegal occupation of land in the ravines of Valparaiso, Chile, being this action an appropriation method common to these areas of the city. The concept of informal city is revised for the purpose of categorizing the illegal occupation of land within the group of Latin American informal dwellings. Likewise, this paper offers the findings from interviews to the dwellers of these settlements and reveals the main reasons that led to such occupations: successive earthquakes and family mobility. Lastly, this contribution develops the concept of Family Residential Complexes (FRC), which is the particular name given to the occupation or invasion of land in Valparaiso ravines. This appropriation method is carried out by family groups and represents evolutionary socio-spatial processes that influence the consolidation of these urban spaces.

Thinking through non-representational and affective atmospheres in planning theory and practice

This article engages with recent debates surrounding non-representational theory and the affective turn in the social sciences, arguing that such thinking offers a particularly useful set of concepts for the discipline of planning. This includes a widened notion of agency to the inclusion of more-than-human bodies (i.e. material agency) and a focus on daily practice and the embodied experience of place. Calling upon the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the author puts forward affective atmospheres as a post-humanist way of studying socio-spatial processes associated with place identity and the spatial imaginaries that animate planning activity. Recognising the co-constitutive nature of research and social worlds, the article offers a performative methodology that situates researchers directly within the material and discursive environments they seek to investigate.

Sketch Maps and Qualitative GIS: Using Cartographies of Individual Spatial Narratives in Geographic Research

Mental and sketch maps have a long tradition in modern geography. Little theoretical and methodological distinction has been made, however, between different hand mapping approaches. Mental maps emerged from behavioral geography of the spatial science tradition as a technique to understand human behaviors based on peoples’ perceptions of their spatial environment. More recently, sketch maps have been used in participatory and qualitative geographic information systems (QGIS) to develop cartographies of group and individual spatial narratives. They are a tool that helps achieve QGIS's objectives of collecting unique spatial data of individual experiences, visualizing socio-spatial processes, breaking down particular barriers of positionality in research, and developing new uses of GIS. Two case studies illustrate the use of sketch maps in research, including a project examining job accessibility among working poor individuals and a study of the experiences of fear and safety in public spaces among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community members. Sketch maps in QGIS have many methodological merits. They add an invaluable dimension to the qualitative interview process, offer countermapping perspectives, generate detailed spatial information of individuals, and facilitate data interpretation.

Implications for socio-spatial segregation in urban theories

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, our understanding of cities has gone through important changes due to major sociospatial processes. Specifically, over the last few decades processes like globalisation and decolonisation have produced significant consequences in cities and these have attracted the attention of prominent urban scholars. Of these consequences, segregation has become infamous in the discourse of numerous disciplines, including governmental debates and policies. However, sociospatial transformations have been a source of new challenges for urban theory makers throughout history. At a certain point, the physical focus of early urban theories was no longer sufficient to interpret the city, causing a shift towards process-oriented theory-making. The central theme of this paper is to investigate this shift by analysing the evolution of urban theories with regard to their implications for urban social geography. In this context, the analytical focuses of main urban theories are evaluated and their explanatory power for socio-spatial segregation is stressed. Such a developmental perspective enables us to observe urban theories’ receptiveness to changing circumstances, as well as their power to guide urban scholars. The evaluation reveals that urban theories capture the spirit of their time (zeitgeist) through their own lenses and explain the social geography of the city either partially or fully with regard to these lenses. In conclusion, it may be said that urban theories which have implications for segregation are not generated universally, but rather in specific frameworks which might or might not be explanatory for other circumstances. All in all, it is believed that this evaluation will provide guidance for future studies that aim to understand and/ or develop the role of urban theories in explaining socio-spatial segregation in the city.

Dis/Articulations and the Hydrosocial Cycle: Postapartheid Geographies of Agrarian Change in the Ceres Valley, South Africa

This paper analyzes the role of the hydrosocial cycle in producing and sustaining uneven geographies of capitalist agriculture in the Ceres Valley, a major center of South Africa's high-value deciduous fruit industry I explore ways in which the mobilization, appropriation, and transformation of water resources become intertwined with and reinforce the radicalized capitalist relations that have characterized the local political economy of export fruit production since the 19th century These relations have solidified over time as they have been able to adapt to shifting political–economic and political–ecological dynamics. Focusing on the postapartheid period, I examine how white agrarian capital has been able to maintain and even strengthen its dominance over the regional economy despite the dramatic shuffling of political and economic priorities. I pay particular attention to how the fatal combination of the liberalization of agricultural markets and the financialization of water supply becomes articulated through interconnected sociospatial processes of dispossession, devaluation, and disinvestment. I argue that questions of access to and control over the hydrosocial cycle not only reveal how marginalized and radicalized social actors—farm workers, small-scale farmers, township residents—become differentially articulated with and disarticulated from existing and emerging circuits of capital accumulation. It also opens promising analytical and political avenues through which to illuminate and confront uneven geographies of capitalist development in ways that highlight the linked sociospatial processes of production and social reproduction.

SPATIAL DECISIONS AND FRAGMENTATION IN THE AMAZON

Our study addresses emergent forest fragmentation resulting from logging road networks, with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF-GSS-0822597, Territorializing Exploitation Space and the Fragmentation of the Amazon Forest; NSF-GSS0243102, Socio-spatial Processes of Road Extensions and Forest Fragmentation in the Brazilian Amazon). Although the research is model oriented, it has required field campaigns to obtain information on road-building activities. As a consequence, authors Arima, Walker, and Pereira have travelled the Amazon Basin extensively to conduct interviews with loggers and others knowledgeable about the sector. One trip took them entirely across the Transamazon Highway, in search of the new logging frontier.

Neue sozialräumliche Entwicklungstrends in innerstädtischen Wohnquartieren des mittleren und östlichen Europa?

Since the early 1990ies, investigations about socio-spatial change in Central Eastern European (CEE) urban regions were focused on large scale housing estates and suburban developments. Subsequently, the attention was directed on the upgrading of CEE inner cities as attractive living places and focal points of sociospatial change. In many cases the socio-spatial changes in the inner cities were viewed unilaterally regarding the gentrification aspects. In addition the investigations failed to integrate their results in the respective urban regional context. Moreover, international comparative studies are missing. Based on primary data in five CEE urban regions, the paper aims to analyse the socio-spatial developments of inner cities in a more multifaceted way by comparing them intraand inter-regionally. On the one hand, it will be discussed, if there is a general trend of socio-structural and socio-cultural upgrading in CEE inner cities. On the other hand, the diversity and simultaneity of socio-spatial processes in CEE inner cities will be scrutinised. The current sociospatial development trends of the investigated CEE cities will be discussed in reference to the discourse about the socialist development phase and the concept of re-urbanisation, known from Western European cities. English Title: New socio-spatial developments of inner cities in Central and Eastern Europe?