Spatial Divisions Research Articles

A new snow cover mapping algorithm for Chinese geostationary meteorological satellite FY-4A AGRI data

ABSTRACT China’s second generation of geostationary meteorological satellites Fengyun-4 (FY-4) are equipped with the Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager (AGRI) which has the advantages of large number of spectral bands and high temporal resolution. To fully leverage these features, a new snow cover (SC) mapping algorithm was proposed, which firstly derives SC map from a single scene image and then combines multi-temporal SC results within one day into a daily SC composite. The novelty of the proposed algorithm includes the utilization of small spatial and temporal divisions to avoid the use of complex kernel-driven models for the correction of bidirectional effects of surface reflectance and a novel framework to merge multi-temporal SC maps by weighting the solar illumination conditions. The SC results were validated against in-situ snow depth measurements, Landsat 8 derived SC data and MODIS SC products. Results indicate that merging multi-temporal SC data can reduce cloud obscuration with the average daily cloud coverage percentage decreasing from about 47.03% for single scene to 35.62% for merged one and slightly improve snow detection accuracy. The overall accuracy (OA) ranges from 95.00% to 96.19%, and the F-score (FS) varies from 77.78% to 87.14% when compared to different reference data, suggesting an overall good performance.

Subverting Gender Bias: "The Manly Woman" in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love

This paper examines the representations of the white woman in cross-cultural marriage in Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love in a contemporary deconstructive theory. The paper applies Judith Butler's revolutionary theory of gender and identity constructivism and performativity to clarify how the protagonist fights the gender norms and performances by having masculinity codes as a revolting means for emancipation. The paper tends to explore how colonial hegemony can create a cultural distance which is forced against the white woman by this marriage. It investigates the sociopolitical spatial divisions through the eye of the white woman who struggles because she chooses an ethnic husband. The paper applies a feminist theoretical framework to describe the prejudice and bias that appear after this marriage. "The manly woman" is the white woman who wears masculine features to subvert and oppose the gender bias which applies to her femininity.

Dwelling and healing with saints and jinn in the haunted landscapes of Palestine

The Jinn of Islamic and Middle Eastern popular mythology play a role in maintaining spatial divisions between sacred and profane space, public and protected areas, and acceptable and exceptional behaviour. Though research on jinn continues to be of importance in cross-cultural psychology, the rich relationship between jinn and place has largely been lost or severed. This paper seeks to restore this link through an examination of the relationship between unseen spirits and place in Palestine and throughout the Levant ( Bilad ash-Sham). Drawing upon both European and Palestinian historical ethnographic writing, as well as oral history interviews with Palestinian elders, this paper examines spatial practices that can attract, prevent, or heal harm from jinn and other unseen forces, as well as places where such spirits dwell, including graveyards, caves, wells, sacred trees, and shrines. Jinn play a dual role in helping to protect the sanctity of these places, while also threatening to violate the intimate space hearth and home. In this way, jinn play an important role in both establishing, and at times blurring and negotiating social mores and their related physical boundaries. In examining how jinn threaten the sanctity of homes and bodies, but also how place-dwelling spirits help to heal bodies and sooth souls, this paper moves beyond mere metaphorical understandings of spectral geographies to understand the material implications of unseen and imagined forces. By doing so, this paper builds upon recent research exploring the deep connection between the environment and spiritual/sacred understandings of place.

Socio‐spatial differentiation and residential inequalities in Chinese cities

AbstractChina has experienced unprecedented economic development and urbanization in the past four decades, which has reshaped the Chinese city's physical and social landscape. This article reviews research on socio‐spatial differentiation and residential inequalities in urban China. The market transition and institutional changes have led to cities with escalating spatial divisions of socioeconomic groups since the 1990s. The legacy of a planned economy, unique socialist institutions, growing social disparities, migration, and globalization are essential mechanisms leading to the changing socio‐spatial structure of Chinese cities. Divided cities foster social inequalities by unevenly distributing opportunities and resources for education, income, health, and social networks, and, in turn, affect individual well‐being. This review concludes by calling for more theoretical development and comparative research in studies of Chinese residential inequalities and offering some suggestions for the field's future direction.

Unity through separation: spatial divisions and intra-movement relations in Lebanon’s October Uprising

ABSTRACT Within the field of social movement studies, scholars have devoted increasing attention to how protesters reclaim and organize public spaces. Case studies reveal that protesters often split up larger reclaimed spaces by drawing internal, sometimes invisible, boundaries. So far, however, the subdivision of protest spaces remains an under-theorized phenomenon. Through a case study of Lebanon’s 2019 October Uprising, this article contributes to disentangling how spatial subdivisions emerge and shape relations between protesters. The study relies on fieldwork observations and interviews with 51 protesters from Lebanon’s second-largest city, Tripoli, where the protest space was divided into three main zones, reflecting social, ideological, and tactical fault lines in the city’s uprising. By employing Löw’s concepts of spacing and synthesis, it analyzes how Tripoli’s protesters came to associate these three zones with diverging identities, ideologies, and tactical orientations, while also connecting them together as functional parts of the larger movement. Although the separation of Tripoli’s protest space did not alleviate disagreements and conflicts, the article finds that subdivisions facilitated a thin form of order and helped protesters make sense of their internal differences.

Two-Dimensional Uniform and Non-Uniform Haar Wavelet Collocation Approach for a Class of Nonlinear PDEs

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach employing two-dimensional uniform and non-uniform Haar wavelet collocation methods to effectively solve the generalized Burgers–Huxley and Burgers–Fisher equations. The demonstrated method exhibits an impressive quartic convergence rate. Several test problems are presented to exemplify the accuracy and efficiency of this proposed approach. Our results exhibit exceptional accuracy even with a minimal number of spatial divisions. Additionally, we conduct a comparative analysis of our results with existing methods.

A city in the process of revitalisation in the opinion of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Results of a pilot qualitative study

The article presents the results of a qualitative pilot study conducted to reconstruct both the representation of the city from the perspective of young people from disadvantaged neighbourhoods (DN) in Łódź (Poland) and the configuration of its determinants. Exploration of the city, regulated by the principles of the qualitative content analysis method included exploratory walks (research participant + two students) and a discussion with a group of youth from DN – participants of a youth club established in one of the local educational institutions. The study results present a city full of spatial divisions in which the disadvantaged position of young people from DN becomes evident. The reconstructed picture of the relationship between space and places reveals discursive, cultural and economic mechanisms of extending the power of some groups of citizens over others, whose intersectionality in the era of intensification of revitalisation processes is reflected in the identity processes of these young people. The conclusions of the study encourage its continuation on a larger and more purposefully diverse research sample as well as a revitalised discussion around the role of social professions in revitalisation processes.

The meandering trajectories of financial innovations: commercial paper and its uses in sixteenth-century Lyon's trading networks

This article explores the complex dynamics of financial innovation in early modern times, challenging linear models of temporal and spatial divisions that tend to shape our understanding of the evolution of financial systems. It supports the idea that innovation should be viewed as a non-linear and contextual process, involving diverse stakeholders and characterised by interactions and unexpected occurrences. The study focuses on the dissemination and trajectories of financial innovations, specifically the bill of exchange and its variation, the ricorsa, as well as the transferability and negotiability of commercial paper. It does so by investigating the interactions and exchanges between merchants and bankers from diverse backgrounds during the sixteenth-century Lyon fairs, using the archival records of one of the first Italian banks in Lyon (Salviati). The study reveals the mutual influence and acculturation among these agents and challenges the compartmentalisation of financial expertise. Through an analysis of transactions recorded in the Salviati bank's ledgers, the article highlights previously unknown uses of commercial paper by Southern merchant communities and discusses the factors that may have hindered the full-scale development of endorsement and discount in the Lyon trading networks, despite their potential benefits. The results provide insights into the intricate nature of financial innovation and the influence of structural and cultural factors on its development.

BIBLIOMETRIC ANALYSIS OF LITERATURE ON REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE CENTER- PERIPHERY MODEL IN EUROPE

This paper investigates the effect of spatial divisions and their demarcations on the formation of networks and the inadequacies of specific policy implementations in mitigating marginalization processes. Despite the controversies surrounding numerous theoretical premises, the center-periphery model remains widely accepted. Implications of these ideas by synthesizing critical findings from a vast array of prior literature using a comprehensive bibliometric analysis have been clarified. Innovation and a readjustment of regional policy are required to address the disparities between the center and the periphery. Regional development policies of the European Union aim to reconcile the socioeconomic chasm between prosperous and peripheral regions. The localization theory of regional development provides insights into the spatial distribution of firms, the dispersion of economic prosperity, and the potential for future growth. These insights provide valuable perspectives on regional policies and the factors that influence the geographical distribution of economic activity.

Elite agency in the growth of offshore business services in Romania

Processes of outsourcing and offshoring have driven the changing spatial divisions of labour through foreign investment and development of peripheral regions into key offshore destinations for business services. This paper focuses on the role of elites, transnational and domestic, in the transformation of Romania into a major business services offshoring location in Central Eastern Europe (CEE) over the last two decades. The paper reveals the role of elite agency in connecting domestic resources to business services global production networks (GPNs) in order to drive domestic institutional transformation. A lot has been written about the agency of labour; yet there is a gap in our understanding of the agency of elites, specifically how transnational elites articulate with other elites at the national-, meso- and micro-level and produce institutional changes. Drawing on literature on enclave creation and dual economies, the paper illustrates how the alliance between domestic and transnational elites shaped transformation across the sector by implementing labour market flexibilisation and by crafting a ‘sound’ business environment in terms of infrastructure, investment incentives and bureaucratic framework to emulate institutional conditions of the home country. The development of the Romanian business services sector into an ‘enclave economy’ has become dependent on collaborative networks with domestic universities and intermediary organisations, which played a key role in facilitating foreign investment attraction and linking domestic resources to the needs of multinational firms.

A Window Into the European City: Exploring Socioeconomic Residential Segregation in Urban Poland

AbstractIn this paper, we build on a long research effort aimed at identifying the specific conditions, functional and structural characteristics of urban areas, that produce different levels of residential segregation across cities. We explore segregation levels in Poland's 87 largest cities, cities with more than 50,000 residents, by measuring indices of dissimilarity relating to socio‐professional status. We then proceed by examining core structural determinants of the revealed segregation levels, including city size, and housing market characteristics. The results suggests that the structural characteristics of urban regions are indeed significant predictors of the level of socio‐spatial disparities in urban Poland. As expected, larger cities are more segregated than the smaller ones; higher shares of public housing also appear to contribute to more pronounced socioeconomic spatial divisions. Intriguingly, the share of new housing stock alone is not related to strong residential segregation.

Trajectories of value capture, strategic coupling and labour regime reconfiguration: Coal mining, automotives and business services in post-socialist Romania

Drawing on global production network research and conceptual explanations of the changing spatial divisions of labour, this article investigates the transformative effects of the dynamic interplay between strategic coupling and multiscalar changes across labour regimes in Central and Eastern European post-socialist sectoral trajectories. It interrogates critically whether sectors across peripheral regions have been able to slot themselves into lead firms’ transnational production systems, resulting in processes of value creation, value capture or value destruction. The empirical analysis reveals that the capacity of domestic resources to purposively match and align themselves to global lead firms and their strategic objectives is influenced by local historical legacies, spatiality, elite agency and labour agency, which combined to shape distinct meso-level transformations. The methodology is based on analysing the post-socialist transformation of three sectors in Romania, which have different historical legacies, institutional configurations, and spatial and temporal vectors of development, allowing us to trace interactions between different modes of strategic coupling or decoupling and labour regime reconfiguration. The central thrust of the article highlights how different modes of strategic coupling into global production networks, or decoupling from global production networks, are causally linked to the reconfiguration of labour regimes, leading to long-term regional socio-economic transformations.

Dimensions of repair work

Reflecting on the necessary, though risky path of overcoming dualistic thinking about repair and care work, I develop analytical distinctions between different kinds of repair work, reflecting gendered, racial, and spatial divisions of labour, as well as distinct forms of ecological consciousness and agency.

Inequality Regimes in Grocery Stores: Intersections of Gender, Hierarchies, and Working Conditions

This article explores the extent to which spatial and hierarchical divisions of work in grocery stores intersect with gender, and resulting inequalities in employees’ working conditions. Our empirical basis is individual and group interviews conducted with managers and employees at two grocery stores in Sweden. The theoretical concept of inequality regimes serves as an analytical tool for understanding if and how multiple intersecting processes produce and maintain inequalities in working conditions. The findings show that hierarchical and gendered inequalities are (re)created in the stores, for both permanently and temporarily employed workers. The organizing processes include a functional and gendered division of the workforce together with a division based on terms of employment mainly based on the profit generated by the goods handled in each department. The study shows how spatial divisions related to hierarchy, status, and gender intersect in creating inequalities in employees’ working conditions, career opportunities, and the physical and psycho- social working environment.

Interior Design: The Doll's House and the Working-Class Child

This article explores the unexpected relationship that working-class children had with doll's houses in the late nineteenth century. Placing texts by children's author Frances Hodgson Burnett alongside historical material concerning the manufacture of doll's house furniture by students in London's Ragged Schools under the supervision of housing reformer Octavia Hill, I argue that both women understood the educational or formative value of the doll's house as deriving from the object's ability to teach lessons in temporality. I examine this object and its deployment in contemporary object lessons to show that the spatial divisions of these miniature homes operate in relation to both short- and long-term cycles of time. This article also demonstrates that apparently universal models of selfhood and development were in fact contingent on class structures (both authors, for instance, connect developmental abnormalities in poor children to the fact that they grow up in one-room homes).

Differentiated Rehabilitation and the Geographies of Unfreedom in Post-Colonial Bombay

Abstract The “refugee crisis” after the 1947 Partition of British India generated new contestations over urban resources, especially for securing accommodation. It resulted in a proliferation of encampment laws and policies with outcomes at multiple levels: city, neighborhood, and community. This article traces the uneven geographies produced by Bombay’s encampment laws and the (spatial) politics of refugee rehabilitation. It focuses on the state’s use of “camps” to segregate impoverished refugees and consolidate the urban periphery. The article explores the interplay between law, space, and property to illustrate how refugee entitlements created and sustained various forms of power and precarity in the metropolis. Refugee camps provided “conditional access” to shelter for indigent Sindhi refugees and became markers of social identification. Middle-class Sindhi refugees, on the other hand, secured their place in the city by establishing cooperative housing societies. This article highlights how caste and regional distinctions in pre-Partition Sindh translated into class-based spatial divisions among the displaced Sindhis in post-colonial Bombay.

Culture wars and the making of authoritarian populism: articulations of spatial division and popular consent

This article considers the relationship between culture wars and the politically divisive landscape being shaped by contemporary forms of right–wing populism. It argues that culture wars should be understood as a technique through which the current Conservative government is seeking to shape and secure forms of what Stuart Hall termed 'authoritarian populism'. This mode of political intervention is being generated through mobilising particular spatial divisions and imaginaries. To develop this argument the article considers two particular elements within the culture–war discourse in Conservative politics, each of which depends on and mobilises different spatial divisions. The first section deals with the role of 'Levelling Up' discourses, while the second part explores the Tories' increasing emphasis on 'impunity' for British soldiers.

A planning examination via class structure and residential differentiation theory: The case of Karabük

Based on the argument that urban construct can be formed through social classes in capitalist societies, this article investigates the class effects of spatial formation in Karabük, an industrial city in Turkey. The research discusses the reflection of class positions and stratification on space by referencing David Harvey’s theory of “class structure and residential differentiation”. In the context of the study in which archival research was also used in addition to the theoretical perspective, the spaces of the working class and upper-middle class in Karabük were examined. When the positions and architectural qualities of the structures in settlements where the upper-middle class and working class were located were examined, it was observed that the space was organized depending on the hierarchy of the social class. Accordingly, the spatial inequalities and divisions brought by the capital system also determined the hierarchy of the urban structure. Spatial segregation, which is not a product of the self-preferences of individuals, was formed as a result of production relations led to changes in urban space and different groups of classes experienced differentiation in the possibilities of access to resources.

EXAMINATION OF METRO STATIONS PEDESTRIAN ACCESSIBILITY FOR ALL USING OPEN DATA KIT: A CASE STUDY OF NOIDA CITY IN INDIA

Abstract. To make transit rail services more attractive, the preferred public travel mode and serve as the backbone of any metropolitan area, there arises a need to create a sustainable and inclusive urban environment with access to all. This study aims to map the pedestrian permeability and impermeability by categorizing roads and streets around identified transit nodes in Noida as public, private and non-accessible by all. By doing so, the study identifies very distinct and spatial divisions like gated communities and urban villages that have emerged as social ghettos in the planned city Noida and thereby, devoid it of being an inclusive city. Initial metro station smart android-based mobile surveys were done across 12 elevated metro stations falling on the blue transit corridor line connecting Delhi with its satellite town Noida using smart apps namely ODK and Kobo Toolbox with the analysis done in QGIS. It was found that trip distance and time had a strong association with walking while age, gender and purpose of the trip had no association with walking to the metro station. Most transit users living within one-kilometer walking distance prefer to walk to the nearest metro station in Noida. Finally, the study shows the area difference between the perceived and actual Isochrones prepared in QGIS as Ped-sheds after deducing areas such as gated communities, superblocks and unplanned settlements like urban villages where the existing road/street network is not accessible by all or safe to use.

On the convergence of NSFD schemes for a new class of advection–diffusion–reaction equations

This paper deals with the two classes of non-linear advection–diffusion–reaction (ADR) equations subject to certain initial and boundary conditions. We derive exact finite difference (FD) schemes with the help of solitary wave solutions of ADR equations. Furthermore, we construct non-standard FD schemes for both the equations. The positivity and boundedness properties of the equations are satisfied by the proposed non-standard FD schemes. We also prove that these schemes are stable under certain conditions. Moreover, they are shown to be first order consistent in both time and space. We compute solutions of the ADR equations by applying proposed non-standard FD schemes under given initial and boundary conditions. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed methods are simple and powerful tool in finding the numerical solutions of ADR equations. The schemes give good accuracy even for few spatial divisions.