Socio-spatial Experiences Research Articles

Children and Young People’s Experiences and Understandings of Gambling-Style Systems in Digital Games: Loot Boxes, Popular Culture, and Changing Childhoods

Developing current geographical debates on children’s digital geographies and popular culture, this article examines children and young people’s experiences and understandings of gambling-style systems in digital games. Chance-based mechanisms such as loot boxes are a growing feature of the global gaming industry. This article examines the space between gaming and gambling and provides new perspectives to this emerging field, drawing on empirical research from video ethnography game-play sessions with children and young people. This article uniquely foregrounds these accounts, giving room for their voices in a debate dominated by adults. We argue gambling-style systems must be understood within children’s everyday sociospatial experiences, including friendship, family, and curating collections. We provide a fuller picture of children and young people’s situatedness and negotiations around digital gaming through interviews with parents and game designers. We demonstrate the conceptually striking ways they narrate generational change, mobilizing powerful social constructions of childhood. We advance understandings of children’s popular culture and nostalgia in academic debates on digital childhoods, arguing that loot boxes are a new and important lens through which to view wider anxieties. Furthermore, we reveal potential risks associated with these systems and offer recommendations for a timely international policy debate.

Im/mobilising bus travel as an infrastructure of care: student experiences in a mid-size city

Many universities are transforming campuses by responding to globally significant, locally specific, economic, political, and social imperatives. Some are implementing urban and regional transformations in higher education delivery to increase student access and diversity. Their success can depend upon infrastructures provided by other parties. Public transport is an example. Transit accessibility and equity affect quality of life, livelihoods, life course, and liveability in cities. Growing numbers of international studies consider factors shaping student travel to and from university campuses by public transport; fewer address local socio-spatial experiences of travel. Informed by debates about differential accessibility of suburban and city campuses, we examined student experiences at an Australian regional university undergoing transformation. We report on a study assessing multiple trips to and from two campuses to five destinations. Rich insights were drawn from experiences of antisocial behaviour, vulnerability, and sub-optimal service provision and reveal why some students think public transport is a mode of last resort. Universities and their stakeholders need to know more about student experiences of mobility. Such knowledge could inform tailored transport interventions and universities’ willingness to encourage public transport providers to view their services as infrastructures of care.

Socio-Spatial Experience in Space Syntax Research: A PRISMA-Compliant Review

Characterising and predicting socio-spatial experience has long been a key research question in space syntax research. Due to the lack of synthesised knowledge about it, this review conducts the first systematic scoping review of space syntax research on the relationships between spatial properties and experiential values. Adopting the “Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses” (PRISMA) framework, this review of space syntax research identifies 38 studies that examine socio-spatial experiences in architectural, medical, and urban spaces. The data arising from this systematic review are used to identify trends in this sub-field of research, including the growth of socio-spatial methods and applications in urban analytics since 2016 and key methodological approaches, characteristics, and factors in space syntax research about socio-spatial experience. The research identified using the systematic framework employs a mixture of descriptive, correlation, and regression methods to examine the dynamic effects of spatial configurations on human experiences. Arising from the results of the review, the article further identifies a collective, predictive model consisting of five syntactic predictors and three categories of experiential values. This article, finally, examines research gaps and limitations in the body of knowledge and suggests future research directions.

Urban economy circuits and Latin American territorial-heritage. Xochimilco Market, Mexico City

Traditional markets in Latin American metropolises may mitigate the risks of urbanization-commercialization in historical sites and mediate rural-city and ancestral-contemporary interactions. Considering that the Xochimilco Market (Mexico City) generates centripetal-centrifugal forces which activate the local economy (formal and informal), the goal of the article is to analyze the indissolubility of its neighboring internal and external trade spaces (producer zones, informal trade, chinampas), creating a territory of supply, labor, and subsistence of the impoverished population. A mixed methodological design is adopted, with participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative spatial analysis. The decolonial concept of " territorial heritage" and the theory of "circuits of urban economy" applied to the Global South helps verify the socio-spatial experiences and permanence that, from the market, subjects and families have maintained, in a scenario of selective modernization of metropolitan territories and growth of informality onto the continent.

From Sociospatial Experiences to Well-Being: Implications for Aging in Place

Acquiring sociospatial experiences at nested geographical scales is a lifelong meaning construction process, and this has great implications for aging in place. Various experiences trigger older people’s attitudinal and sentimental reflections regarding how they evaluate and attach themselves to where they live; this invokes residential satisfaction, and subsequently, place attachment. Through a questionnaire survey of 501 community-dwelling individuals aged sixty-five and older in Hong Kong, an ultra-high-density Asian city, this article examines the relationship between sociospatial experiences and well-being through a sequential path analysis model. It identifies five dimensions of sociospatial experiences: “homes and housing estate,” “social environment,” “living convenience,” “pedestrian experience,” and “blue and green” features. All dimensions predict emotional, social, and psychological well-being via residential satisfaction and then place attachment. Place attachment is a more robust mechanism than residential satisfaction in the environment–well-being association. Developing a satisfying relationship, and subsequently, functional and emotional links with the place of residence, is conducive to achieving well-being. This uncovers an important mechanism of person–environment interactions for aging in place.

The other side of the story: Intended parents' surrogacy journeys, stigma and relational reproductive justice.

Current surrogacy research primarily focuses on commercial surrogacy with a particular emphasis on experiences of surrogate mothers, whereas intended parents' voices are dominated by western perspectives. Indigenous voices are only a whisper. This study presents another side of the surrogacy story by including the voices of intended parents residing in India, elicited through eight in-depth interviews. We assert there is need to understand Indian intended parents' socio-spatial experiences in the presence of a changing surrogacy law in India and the socio-cultural importance of childbearing and parenthood to move towards relational reproductive justice. By recognising the relational nature of surrogacy reproduction and drawing on the concepts of ethics of care in light of power and stigma discussions, this paper demonstrates how stigma is experienced by intended parents, its effect on their reproductive journey and wellbeing, as well as how stigma hinders achieving the vision of relational reproductive justice. We suggest that, in order to make surrogacy a positive experience for the people involved in surrogacy, there is a need to address stigma and view surrogacy as a relationship.

Affective registers of favela infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro

ABSTRACT Infrastructural projects in Brazilian favelas have long elicited complex meanings and emotions amongst those living with the new built systems. In this paper, I discuss residents’ everyday engagements with a major slum upgrading project in Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro – a gondola system called the teleférico – in order to understand the multiple affective dimensions of this infrastructural project. Drawing on the work of anticolonial theorists and feminist geopolitical scholars, alongside participant observation and semi-formal interviews, I explore two main affective registers of the gondola. First, the teleférico – as a physical infrastructural means of territorial integration – is shaped and made meaningful to residents by a long history of territorial and geopolitical racialized fear. The teleférico here becomes a symbol of integration and modernity that transforms understandings of what Complexo is and who community residents are in relation to the rest of Rio. Second, and interrelated, the teleférico is not simply a physical infrastructure but also has affective dimensions itself for those who engage it daily: the way it is understood by and materializes to community members is a function of their socio-spatial experiences of racialized neglect, fear, and hope for less violent futures.

The Cities, Security and Poverty

The 2013 Meeting of the World Society for Ekistics was held in Ankara, Turkey under the theme of ‘The Cities, Security and Poverty’. The proceedings of this international meeting, edited by Meltem Yılmaz and H. Çağatay Keskinok, forms an overarching perspective for the changing power relations of the global world and its socio-spatial implications on human settlements with reference to the key issues of weakening public sphere and communality, increasing socio-spatial fragmentations and inequalities, and emerging security problems related with both political insurgences and environmental risks and degradations. Although the content of the proceedings book is not structured under certain sub-headings and themes, it is possible to categorize the contributions of the compilation of 18 distinctive articles as follow: (i) changing power relations and its implications on society and public sphere; (ii) spatial manifestations of changing power relations, spatial transformation and segregation; (iii) crime and security problems in urban spaces; (iv) ecological transitions and sustainability issues; (v) disaster risks and security concerns. The review of this valuable book would bring forward the problematic issues of security and poverty by especially highlighting the recent socio-spatial experiences in Turkish cities and hopefully offer a humble contribution for the upcoming Special Issue: Turkey, Urbanism and the New Habitat.

Age-friendly urbanism: intertwining ‘ageing in place’ and ‘place in ageing’

Urbanisation and population ageing are two critical trends identified in the New Urban Agenda. Understanding the relationship between environment-related experiences and well-being is conducive to achieving an age-friendly urbanism. We argue that place, as a location, a material form and an expression of value, is an essential component of this relationship. Physical and social environments shape socio-spatial experiences and hence one’s well-being, bearing significant implications for the current policy movement of ageing in place. Environment comprises contexts whereby older people develop sentimental and emotive links to the place they live. Such links give rise to residential satisfaction and place attachment, the psychological experiences that highlight the importance of place in ageing. The article calls for research and planning practices to shed light on policies concerning age-friendly urbanism.

“Colleague postgraduate supervision” and the production of space in higher education: a duoethnographic analysis

PurposeIn this paper we contribute knowledge to the postgraduate supervision discourses by reflecting on our socio-spatial experiences of being supervised by colleagues, a process that we refer to as colleague postgraduate supervision (CPS).Design/methodology/approachWe followed a duoethnographic research design by dialogically presenting and exploring our lived experiences of CPS and critiquing and questioning the meanings we give to those experiences. The experiences shared arose from two different contexts: a contact university and an open distance learning university.FindingsThe reflection suggests that social values of trust, compassion and care in CPS can outrun the spatial constraints for the benefit of the supervisees in the relationship. However, the colleagues in the CPS can also experience some subtle power dynamics and tensions that produce a constraining space, if the CPS process is not well communicated.Originality/valueWhile CPS is a common practice in some universities, there is limited research that pays attention to its socio-spatiality, that is, the interaction between the social and the spatial aspects of this practice.

As Territorialidades Insurgentes do Gigante Desperto: Jornadas de Junho de 2013 no Brasil e suas Dinâmicas Territoriais

Em 2013, protestos de iniciativa do Movimento Passe Livre contra o aumento da tarifa de transporte público na cidade de São Paulo tornou-se o estopim para a eclosão de manifestações sistêmicas por todos os estados brasileiros, o Distrito Federal e cidades do exterior. As vozes eram polissêmicas e vocalizavam por demandas sociais como transporte, saúde, educação, bem como protestos contra a corrupção. As manifestações com escopo ampliado se difundem pelo território nacional arregimentadas pela autonomia da comunicação via redes sociais, fazendo do mês de junho uma odisseia de insurgência: as jornadas de junho. Objetivou-se aqui analisar as dinâmicas territoriais destas manifestações. A pesquisa se apoia na análise documental de conteúdo noticioso para refletir sobre os contextos dos atos como sua difusão pelo país, a participação de cada estado, a conjuntura de sua territorialidade, multiescalaridade, suas redes e ativismos on-line. A mobilização de junho de 2013 compreendeu a formação de territorialidades de insurgência, fortalecidas pela comunicação autônoma proporcionada pelas redes sociais, difundindo suas mensagens e integrando os sentimentos de insurgência. O movimento apropriando-se do espaço pela tomada das ruas, desenvolveram uma mobilização reticulada que encontrou ressonância em todos os locais onde os atos se concentraram de modo multiescalar. O usufruto da comunicação digital como indumentária fez do ciberespaço um novo meio com o qual experiências socioespaciais podem se desencadear, como no ativismo despertado nas jornadas de junho.

Digital geographies of grassroots securitisation

Digital surveillance and securitisation technologies are becoming an increasingly ubiquitous part of everyday lives. Constellations of hand-held devices, smartphone applications and partnerships between police, the security industry and civil society shift responsibility for preventing and recording risk and crimes onto citizens. This development suggests substantial changes to the relationship between state and citizens and is likely to have profound effects on socio-spatial relationships and experiences in place. Until this point, geographers have demonstrated little engagement with these developments. This provocation focuses on particular strengths of theoretical and empirical research traditions in social and cultural geography to suggest ways in which the discipline might constructively engage with the digitisation of citizens’ securitisation practices. It foregrounds four areas in which empirical work on digitally inflected surveillance and securitisation practices will enable a rethinking of key geographical concepts in ways that will further the conceptualisation of digital technology and security. The provocation calls on social and cultural geographers to be mindful of the potential of grassroots securitisation to empower disfranchised communities while considering that these technologies and cognate policies might facilitate the further hollowing out of the state under ongoing processes of neoliberalisation.

Shopping, social inclusion and the urban geographies of people with intellectual disability

In this paper, we examine the social geographies of people with intellectual disabilities. We focus particular attention on the significance of shopping and spaces of consumption as they relate to questions social inclusion and belonging in the lives of PWID. The focus on consumption offers a useful counterpoint to a prevailing policy emphasis on social inclusion through productive activities. The paper also contributes to the literature on intellectual disability within social and health geography, shedding light on the varied socio-spatial experiences of people beyond the confines of community-care facilities and other separate spaces. Our analysis draws on data collected from a participatory research project in Toronto (Canada). The project involved a small but diverse group of people with intellectual disabilities, who led academic researchers on a series of excursions designed to explore those places and routes that make up their everyday social geographies. Shopping emerged as a significant but often ambivalent theme in the context of these geographies, and the analysis demonstrates the complex interplay of autonomy and control, pleasure and restraint, care and support that shape people’s experiences of consumption. We conclude by discussing the significance of these findings for notions of social inclusion and belonging.

The Importance of Spaces to Sustain Open Source Innovation

The way of doing innovation is changing, organizations are opening organizational boundaries and new models of collaboration take place in emerging innovation spaces such as FabLabs and hackerspaces. I undertake a qualitative case study research that explores the relation between spaces and innovation with four Open Source Hardware (OSHW) organizations. From the finding I developed a framework that link organization’s objectives with socio-spatial experiences. The findings suggest that efficiency, productivity and collaboration with local communities are the main drivers and I argue that by crafting liminality organizations convey experiences that create the conditions and potentiality of new idea generation and collaboration with skilled resources. The implication for managers and public policy makers are to first define clear objectives to guide the creation of innovation spaces and find resources with the ability to manage them.

A socio-spatial analysis of urban transformation at a neighborhood scale: The case of the relocation of Kadifekale inhabitants to TOKİ Uzundere in İzmir

Particularly in the last two decades, urban governors have presented urban transformation projects as ideal solutions to help low-income urban residents improve their living conditions. However, the way they have been carried out and their consequences mean that these projects do not, in most cases, bring the expected improvements. Most projects involve relocating residents to new, more peripheral districts of the city, which causes social isolation and certain socio-spatial incompatibilities between their previous and new habitats.Using a case from Izmir in Turkey, this study aims to analyze such socio-spatial incompatibilities in the lives of low-income residents that are caused by relocation within the framework of urban transformation projects. One of Izmir’s earliest inner-city gecekondu neighborhoods, Kadifekale was chosen by Izmir Metropolitan Municipality as a site for urban transformation due to the risk of landslide in the area. Before the start of the project, the neighborhood contained 7324 housing units accommodating rural-to-urban migrants, mainly from the southeast of Turkey. This urban transformation project aimed to relocate at least some of the inhabitants from their homes in Kadifekale to recently constructed apartment blocks in the TOKİ Uzundere Public Housing Project on the periphery of the city. Although many residents were reluctant to exchange their houses for new apartments, some were persuaded to move to TOKİ, which was presented as the ideal solution by the municipal officials.This study critically evaluates the Kadifekale urban transformation project, particularly with regard to the relocation of some Kadifekale residents from their one- or two-story houses in Kadifekale to apartment blocks on the periphery of the city. The analysis is based on a comparison between the socio-spatial experiences of migrants in Kadifekale and their recent experiences in Uzundere and the possibility of certain incompatibilities in these two experiences. The argument aims to demonstrate the changed conditions of social life and daily life practices as a result of altered spatial properties at a neighborhood scale: their use of outdoor spaces, the meanings they attributed to neighborhood space (“intimacy of place” within categories of sensual (visual and olfactory) recognition), and their sociospatial network. The argument draws both implicitly and explicitly on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad and De Certeau’s conceptualization of tactic versus strategy as the major conceptual inspirations for this study.

Between Flows and Places: Using Geodemographics to Explore EU Migration Across Neighbourhoods in Britain

During the past decade, the growing significance of EU migrants in Britain has attracted considerable media and policy attention. While the rhetoric and public policy debate has focused on national and regional levels, surprisingly, little is known about the emerging settlement patterns of EU migrants at the local level. This paper sheds some light on this important issue by exploring the socio-spatial characteristics of the places of destination/residence of EU migrants and, in doing so, reveals the extent to which the concentration-dispersal framework applies to their settlement pattern. To evaluate whether and in what ways EU migrants have settled across neighbourhoods in Britain, 2001 and 2011 census estimates as well as geodemographic data are used. The findings suggest that EU migrants have consolidated their national presence in Britain because of their growing numbers and unprecedented geographical dispersal. While EU migrants’ settlement does not seem to translate into strong clustering patterns, diverging socio-spatial experiences are found among the largest groups (Polish, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish).

Arab integration in Jewish-Israeli social space: does commuting make a difference?

Urban research on segregation and integration has been dominated by an obsessive focus on ethno-racial residential patterns, obscuring the multidimensional facets of separation versus encounter that define contemporary urban experience. In this study, we develop an explicitly multidimensional theoretical perspective that relates segregation/integration not only to residential location, but also to daily activity spaces, social networks, transnational media and communications environments, and aspects of identity and sense of place. To disentangle residential location from other facets of segregation/integration, we use GPS and interview data to analyze the socio-spatial experiences of 60 Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel who live in ethnically homogenous Arab towns—divided equally between “localists” versus “commuters” who spend most of their daytime hours working in Jewish-Israeli spaces. While results highlight many important consequences of commuters’ long hours of daily exposure to Jewish urban mileux, daily activity spaces are only marginally associated with other dimensions of socio-spatial integration. Our analysis reveals evidence of complex relations amongst the multiple dimensions of segregation and integration. Partial integration on a few of these dimensions is insufficient to overcome the structural stratification of Arabs in contemporary Israeli society.

THE SOCIAL PRODUCTION OF SPACE IN TOURISM ENCLAVES: MAYAN CHILDREN’S PERCEPTIONS OF TOURISM BOUNDARIES

This paper adopts an interpretive approach to investigate children’s perceptions of their socio-spatial surroundings. It focuses on two tourism service towns, Akumal Pueblo and Chemuyil, and two major tourism centers, Akumal Playa and Bahia Principe, all located in the Mexican Yucatan Peninsula. Drawing on scholarship related to tourism’s role in demarcating and segregating space and Lefebvre’s trialectics of space production, this inquiry focuses on ways in which Mayan children residing in Akumal Pueblo and Chemuyil render their surrounding spaces intelligible, while reproducing or challenging the boundaries, symmetries and inclusions/exclusions created by the tourism industry. Tourism scholarship has tended to ignore children. By contrast this study engages the geographies of childhood to understand the lived socio-spatial experiences of this demographic group.

Campus, City, Networks and Nation: Student‐Migrant Activism as Socio‐spatial Experience in Melbourne, Australia

Abstract‘Education–migration nexus’ policies in Australia between 1998 and 2010 linked international education with different forms of temporary and permanent migration. This resulted in a blurring of boundaries around student, worker, consumer, migrant and ethnic identities. While the exploitation, marginalization and vulnerability of international students in Australia has gained a great deal of media and scholarly attention, less consideration has been given to the varied forms of subsequent protest undertaken by student migrants in Australian cities. This article analyses three case studies of protests involving student migrants in Melbourne: a protest against unfair assessment; a fight for a campus prayer room; and labour protests within the retail service and taxi industries. It draws on theoretical work on new social movements and social transformation in urban spaces to find ways to conceptualize this activism in relation to the scales of campus, city and nation. In doing so, it argues primarily that these sites of protest are socio‐spatial experiences that encompass shifting and socially produced spatial scales, as well as complex networks of association across different communities, which in turn reflect different student‐migrant identities.

The Limits of Spatial Assimilation for Immigrants’ Full Integration

Residential integration with the dominant native-born population is believed to be a crucial stage in immigrants’ overall assimilation process. It is argued that without residential integration it would be difficult, if not impossible, for immigrants to achieve full incorporation into the host society. This article compares the sociospatial experiences of African immigrants in the United States and Ireland. Results show that African immigrants in Ireland have achieved spatial integration with Irish nationals, while their counterparts in the United States remain spatially separated from white Americans. The extent to which African immigrants’ integration in Ireland can produce other forms of assimilation is questionable, however. Likewise, despite being segregated from whites, African immigrants in the United States have made some modest spatial gains that may facilitate their integration. The cross-national comparison draws into question the generally accepted notion that residential integration is an important intermediary substage in the assimilation process.