Spatial Imagination Research Articles

Social, cultural and spatial imaginaries in rural tourism transitions

In the social sciences, the topic of imaginaries refers to socially constructed, taken-for-granted meanings about events, places, and people. Imaginaries are created symbolically and rhetorically, through claims about self, others, and places; they help people make sense of individual and shared experiences. This study explores how residents of a rural community discursively construct imaginaries to address tourism-related transitions. Telephone interviews were conducted with three types of residents (leaders, permanent residents, and second homeowners) in Burke, Vermont (USA). Results show that interviewees conceptualized imaginaries in quite different ways. Community leaders discussed imaginaries within discourses of growth, permanent residents discussed imaginaries within discourses of history, and second homeowners discussed imaginaries within discourses of utopia. These results are contextualized within two institutional discourses of local community tourism planning. Three theoretical propositions about imaginaries and tourism-based rural community development are suggested. This research expands traditional empirical approaches to evaluating rural tourism development processes by suggesting that imaginaries are implicit but important aspects of decisions about social change.

Nie od razu Paryż zbudowano… Trójwymiarowe puzzle i klocki architektoniczne jako uniwersalne narzędzie wspierające proces wychowania estetycznego

This article proposes the use of knowledge of space studies in the school educational practice. It allows for implementation of obligatory content and skills indicated in the core curriculum for general education. Shaping the spatial imagination and aesthetic sensitivity is accompanied by the development of both social and manual skills, while the construction of miniature buildings by students is a convenient starting point for a discussion on social and cultural changes.

A 3D Hologram With Mixed Reality Techniques to Improve Understanding of Pulmonary Lesions Caused by COVID-19: Randomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundThe COVID-19 outbreak has now become a pandemic and has had a serious adverse impact on global public health. The effect of COVID-19 on the lungs can be determined through 2D computed tomography (CT) imaging, which requires a high level of spatial imagination on the part of the medical provider.ObjectiveThe purpose of this study is to determine whether viewing a 3D hologram with mixed reality techniques can improve medical professionals’ understanding of the pulmonary lesions caused by COVID-19.MethodsThe study involved 60 participants, including 20 radiologists, 20 surgeons, and 20 medical students. Each of the three groups was randomly divided into two groups, either the 2D CT group (n=30; mean age 29 years [range 19-38 years]; males=20) or the 3D holographic group (n=30; mean age 30 years [range 20=38 years]; males=20). The two groups completed the same task, which involved identifying lung lesions caused by COVID-19 for 6 cases using a 2D CT or 3D hologram. Finally, an independent radiology professor rated the participants' performance (out of 100). All participants in two groups completed a Likert scale questionnaire regarding the educational utility and efficiency of 3D holograms. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) was completed by all participants.ResultsThe mean task score of the 3D hologram group (mean 91.98, SD 2.45) was significantly higher than that of the 2D CT group (mean 74.09, SD 7.59; P<.001). With the help of 3D holograms, surgeons and medical students achieved the same score as radiologists and made obvious progress in identifying pulmonary lesions caused by COVID-19. The Likert scale questionnaire results showed that the 3D hologram group had superior results compared to the 2D CT group (teaching: 2D CT group median 2, IQR 1-2 versus 3D group median 5, IQR 5-5; P<.001; understanding and communicating: 2D CT group median 1, IQR 1-1 versus 3D group median 5, IQR 5-5; P<.001; increasing interest: 2D CT group median 2, IQR 2-2 versus 3D group median 5, IQR 5-5; P<.001; lowering the learning curve: 2D CT group median 2, IQR 1-2 versus 3D group median 4, IQR 4-5; P<.001; spatial awareness: 2D CT group median 2, IQR 1-2 versus 3D group median 5, IQR 5-5; P<.001; learning: 2D CT group median 3, IQR 2-3 versus 3D group median 5, IQR 5-5; P<.001). The 3D group scored significantly lower than the 2D CT group for the “mental,” “temporal,” “performance,” and “frustration” subscales on the NASA-TLX.ConclusionsA 3D hologram with mixed reality techniques can be used to help medical professionals, especially medical students and newly hired doctors, better identify pulmonary lesions caused by COVID-19. It can be used in medical education to improve spatial awareness, increase interest, improve understandability, and lower the learning curve.Trial RegistrationChinese Clinical Trial Registry ChiCTR2100045845; http://www.chictr.org.cn/showprojen.aspx?proj=125761

Soft planning in macro-regions and megaregions: creating toothless spatial imaginaries or new forces for change?

ABSTRACT Both planning practice and research increasingly acknowledge the existence of new scales and governance arrangements alongside and between statutory planning systems. Examples of new scales of non-statutory planning are large-scale megaregions and macro-regions. Drawing on examples from North America and Europe (Southern California and the Danube Region respectively), this article examines how new processes of cooperation at this scale can influence other statutory levels of decision-making on spatial development. The analysis of spatial delineations, discourses, actors, rules and resources associated with megaregions and macro-regions suggests that this type of ‘soft planning’ can foster territorial integration when a perception exists that there are joint gains to be made, when informal rules are negotiated in context-specific and bottom-up processes, when soft spaces are used as arenas of deliberation to renegotiate shared agendas, and when actors succeed in ensuring the anchorage of informal cooperation in other arenas.

On Stalling and Turning

Abstract This series of elliptically interrelated autotheoretical vignettes offers a “wayward genealogy” of how the author came to be involved in the Stalled! public toilet redesign project and what that project entails. The article revolves around observations of the actions of stalling and turning and of the spatial imaginaries that make these actions both necessary and legible in a variety of contexts—of watching pelicans dive into the Pacific Ocean, living on the grounds of the Dachau concentration camp, encountering transphobic feminism, researching San Francisco's urban history, and reading psychoanalytic theory, among others. After describing the origins of the Stalled! project in recent public discourse on “transgender toilets,” and its practical designs for abolishing the gender binary in space, the article suggests that concepts of transness make sense only in relation to a spatial configuration on which the logic of the term depends: it requires difference and separation as a precondition of its transversal operations, even as it demonstrates how other arrangements—other floor plans, not just of sex and gender but of space and time and sociality—are possible.

Integrating sociotechnical and spatial imaginaries in researching energy futures

In this Perspective we argue that how we imagine energy futures is inevitably entwined with how we envision our collective social and geographical futures. Spatiality is both constituted by and constitutive of sociotechnical imaginaries (STIs), as they encode specific imaginations of socio-spatial order. Going beyond recognising spatial differences, we formalise an assertively spatial perspective on STIs by drawing on the concept of spatial imaginaries. We show how holding that STIs and spatial imaginaries are co-produced is a productive way of conceptualising the spatial dimensions of STIs. Drawing on three types of spatial imaginary (place imaginaries, idealised spaces and spatial transformations imaginaries), we delineate two main lines of inquiry. First, we elaborate the spatialities underpinning energy transition imaginaries, identifying ways that each particular type of spatial imaginary, both separately and interconnectedly, shape energy transitions. Second, we address the politics of space and scale involved in the circulation and uptake of energy transition imaginaries, which is shaped by existing power relations, socio-spatial inequalities and the differentiated material and symbolic resources available to actors. We argue that this agenda contributes to richer understandings of how energy transitions unfold and offers further insights into how spatial concepts are actively mobilised within processes of social change.

Tracks to gay elsewheres: cultural attachment and spatial imaginaries

This article considers how cultural narratives of queer migration to urban centres are understood through media and cultural references that mark specific non-urban places and times. Through an analysis of queer migration narratives in Smalltown Boy (1984), a song and music video by UK band Bronski Beat, and Boytown (2012), its suburban Sydney reimagining by artist Daniel Mudie Cunningham and DJ Stephen Allkins, I argue that the interconnections between visual, media and cultural artefacts are not merely an additive way to understand queer cultural geographies but rather signal intertwined geographic and aesthetic registers. In Boytown, the explicitly gay lyrics and imagery of Smalltown Boy are paired with other songs and music videos that connote queerness but also directly relate to suburban images of youthful alienation. The attachment to urban narratives and images is supplemented by this distinctly suburban attachment. In this article, I argue that conventional statistical figurations of changes to gay ghettoisation and now well-established critiques of queer urbanity are usefully combined and expanded by considering cultural attachment. This article demonstrates the generative intersection of creative geographies and geographies of sexualities attuned to the queer suburban.

The Democratization of Educational Care: Spatial Imaginaries, Demographic Change, and Black Families Continued Educational Advocacy

ABSTRACT Too often, Black families’ educational agency has been marginalized in discourse on racial and spatial divides in US education. Indeed, Black families have persistently employed a range of tactics to access and create the educational resources their children deserve. Drawing from scholarship on spatial imaginaries, in this article, I track how Black families have developed democratic and communal outlooks on place-based resources such as public schools. I identify what I term democratization of educational care, or how some Black families’ educational advocacy for their own children broadly benefit all students. To demonstrate these dynamics, I share how Black families’ educational advocacy in a demographically changing suburb of Detroit, Michigan, uplifted the needs of their children, while also seeking to address larger systemic inequities. Implications suggest how school leaders can learn from the positioned knowledge and advocacy of Black families to foster educational equity and care in demographically changing school systems.

The influence of 3D printing on the education of primary and secondary school students

As a product of high and new technology, 3D printing is applied to the education industry, and its impact on the education of primary and secondary school students is also of great significance. In creation, students can improve their practical ability and comprehensive quality. Observing objects before modelling helps to improve their observation and concentration. In the use of software modelling, we can give full play to their imagination to build models, improve their creativity and spatial imagination, stimulate students’ enthusiasm for learning, and cultivate the habit of autonomous learning. After the completion of modelling printing, students can reflect on the problems found in time and improve them to improve their ability to think hard and solve problems. At the same time, both the modelling process and the analysis and thinking are inseparable from the mutual help of teachers and students, which also promotes the interactive learning and enhances the collective sense of honour. In the process of communication, which can promote students’ communication and learning, so that teachers and students can make progress together.

APPLICATION OF VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE DESIGN OF PRODUCTION SYSTEMS AND TEACHING

The content of the contribution is a description of the virtual reality use in the design of production processes and in the teaching process. The aim of the article is to describe the methodology for 3D virtual design of production systems as well as a description of the creation of interconnectors for simulation tools Siemens Tecnomatix, Simio, AutoCAD and Dassalut systems by using the moreViz tool. The use in the design of production systems lies precisely in the ability to realize the projected space on a scale of 1:1, which will allow maximum use of space and its orientation. The effect in teaching lies in a better understanding of the elements that can be displayed in fully immersive virtual reality, which helps to teach faster and engage spatial imagination.

Governing the Contested City: Geographies of Displacement in Diyarbakır, Turkey

AbstractThis article develops a spatial analysis of the authoritarian governmentality of the Kurdish issue in Turkey through a case study of Diyarbakır in which geographies of war and peace have coalesced. Drawing on recent theorisations of military urbanism, it examines encounters—including both conflict and cooperation—between the state bureaucracy, local pro‐government elite and pro‐Kurdish municipal authorities within the context of the initiatives to rehabilitate the city’s historic centre, Suriçi, during the period 2002–2015. The article suggests considering Suriçi’s rehabilitation as part of a post‐conflict urban regime to thwart social and political vibrancy of the Kurdish urban poor in tandem with the idea of securitisation through marketisation. In doing so, it demonstrates that unpacking spatial imaginaries and rationalities that have rendered Suriçi dwellers displaceable by devaluing their collective urban experience is critical for our understanding of the utter violence erupted during and after the urban warfare of 2015.

The Allegorical Architectural Project: Provocateurs, Propositions and Confrontations

AbstractDaniel K Brown, Professor of Design Studio (Architecture) at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, knows how to nurture his students into producing extraordinary work. He uses a narrative point of departure for each project, instilling spatial imagination provoked by literary presences. He is a great believer in the power of architectural drawing and modelling as well as the ‘word’ – whether poetry or prose. The combination of these notions creates a heady mix of ambiances in the studio's output.

Analysis of the Teaching Reform Strategy of Mechanical Principles

With the rapid development of the manufacturing industry, in order to adapt to the development of the current era, the demand for mechanical professionals has doubled. The mechanical principle course is a professional basic compulsory course for cultivating mechanical students’ spatial imagination, logical thinking ability and innovative design ability. High-quality course teaching has a very important position in professional teaching. Teaching reform is imperative. Various teaching methods, rich teaching content, active participation in science and technology competitions and other aspects are optimized to mobilize students' learning motivation and optimize courses. The content improves students' practical ability, deepens the understanding of theoretical knowledge, backs their creativity, and takes a multi-pronged approach to improve the quality of teaching.

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

Measuring the Harlem Renaissance: The U.S. Census, African American Identity, and Literary FormOn Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AS SUPPORT OF COGNITIVE PROCESSES OF PEOPLE WITH VISUAL IMPAIRMENTS

At present, we increasingly encounter the concept of so-called digital literacy. Digital technologies are constantly evolving in this field and play an important role in human life. They are important not only in the labor market but also in education and human skills development. Digital technologies are thus one of the means by which we can develop the cognitive processes of visually impaired people. We can thus help them to improve a number of areas that are limited due to loss or reduction of visual perception. Especially, thinking, memory, and creating ideas are very important. This contribution was created within the solution of the project TAČR – Reduction of information deficit and development of the imagination of visually impaired people through 3D models with auditory elements in cooperation with the project PIGŽU – Support of information literacy of pupils and teachers. The first of the projects aims to reduce the information deficit caused by the loss or reduction of visual perception in visually impaired people using multisensory action. At the same time, it aims to develop their spatial imagination. The second project then focus on the creation of digital aids, which aims primarily at the development and support of computational thinking. In addition to mainstream primary school pupils, the project also focuses on pupils with special educational needs, including visually impaired individuals. The main output of the project is the creation of aids, including methodologies, using digital technologies. These are technologies such as Ozobot, Blue-Bot, or Bee-bot. The aim of the paper is to acquaint with the project, to provide at least basic information about digital technologies, and especially to describe the possibilities of personality development, skills, and abilities using these technologies in visually impaired students.

Emptying the Future, Claiming Space: The Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania as a Spatial Imaginary for Strategic Coupling Processes

This article contributes an economic geography perspective on the envisioning and implementing of mega-infrastructure projects in Africa. Focusing on development corridors and their implicit spatio-temporality of “global integration,” we conceptualize corridors as spatial imaginaries for strategic coupling processes. We distinguish between emptying the future and claiming space as two fundamental mechanisms of spatial imaginaries. Together, these mechanisms can render crucial territorial and relational “insides” and “outsides” available for coupling processes. Spatial imaginaries are then sources of power in the coupling between corridor regions and global production networks.Empirically, we focus on the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania (SAGCOT) in relation to the coupling process between global fertilizer manufacturer YARA International and the Tanzanian agricultural market. Facing unfavourable coupling conditions with Tanzania’s fertilizer sector, the early mobilization of SAGCOT served to promote a narrow imaginary of Tanzania’s agrarian future, thereby making a soft claim to territorial (through the corridor) and networked space (through a network of corridor stakeholders). Although YARA and Tanzanian counterparts initially capitalized on SAGCOT’s mobilization due to its promise to transform Tanzanian agriculture, a gradual disenchantment with SAGCOT’s vision and its subsequent disintegration jeopardizes these coupling process today.Approaching corridors as spatial imaginaries reveals therefore their instrumental but fragile power in coupling processes. Such power is not about blunt domination or coercion, but rather builds on persuasion and consent. Only when spatial imaginaries succeed in maintaining persuasive arguments about the future, is their function of initiating and stabilizing otherwise unfavourable coupling processes available.

The spatial hierarchies of a networked state: historical context and present-day imaginaries in Finland

ABSTRACT This article offers a new approach to the analysis of spatial hierarchies and selectivity within national politics. These hierarchies and related state spatial restructurings are approached by analysing spatial imaginaries of the political elites in Finland. This study places these present-day imaginaries and hierarchies in their historical context and analyses the qualitative shifts in Finnish spatial hierarchization. The paper illustrates how the institutionalized hierarchies of the 1960s and 1970s were used as a tool in the emerging Fordist welfare state, and how the hierarchies of today are built on a more competitively oriented basis. The current spatial imaginaries and hierarchies are approached through an extensive suite of elite interviews. These spatial hierarchies are revealing of the existing ways of reasoning and follow the more general spatial and economic rationalities. This paper argues that as the institutional status of the earlier spatial hierarchy has waned and been replaced with network-based spatial systems, hierarchies also exist, however, within the network-based spatial imaginaries and their associated policy practices. The new spatial hierarchies do not have institutional status, but their role in processes of state spatial restructuring is nevertheless important.

Theorizing communal trauma: Examining the relationship between race, spatial imaginaries, and planning in the U.S. South

While planning theory has long acknowledged the profession’s role in producing racialized spatial realities, few have explored how place-based trauma shapes places and affects spatial processes and lived experiences. To fill this gap, I employ my experience as a practicing planner working primarily in Black communities in Jackson, Mississippi, to conceptualize communal trauma as a place-based theory that can help planners understand how racialized communities hurt and address it. In this paper, I, first, analyze autoethnographic data as trauma imaginaries, the intersection of spatial imaginaries and trauma. From this analysis, I then construct communal trauma as harm and wrong committed against targeted racialized groups so horrendous that it induces a traumatic condition. Finally, I discuss the implications for the field of planning. I propose that identifying trauma imaginaries as an indicator of communal trauma can help planners develop trauma remediation approaches that advance ethics and justice in the field.

The spatial imaginaries of Mujaddidī Sufis and political integration in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India

ABSTRACT This article identifies two comparable teaching and learning lines of the reformist Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidīyya Sufi order in the Indo-Afghan borderlands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It describes the strategies of social engagement of the mobile mullās of the Akhund Ghaffūr-Haddā Mullā line and those of the pīrs of the khānqah (Sufi lodge)-centered line of Khwājāh Usmān Dāmanī. The concurrent establishment of these two Sufi lines in the northwestern borderlands of colonial India was an important historical phenomenon inspired by a ‘reformed’ Mujaddidī practice and the two Sufi lines were comparable because of their roots in Mujaddidī reformism. I argue, however, that the two Sufi lines must also be differentiated because of the loci of their participation in and mediation of the day-to-day affairs of practising communities. Members of the Haddā Mullā’s line dispersed among the Pashtun borderland communities to enforce religious priorities from day to day, while members of Usmān Dāmanī’s line consciously confined their activities to the khānqah. The patterns of activity of the members of the two Mujaddidī lines suggest a new framework for understanding the relationship between Islam and politics in the Indo-Afghan borderlands: it was not the ideological approach to Islam, but the spatial imaginaries employed by the frontier Sufis which produced their respective political agendas and impact.

Урок за отраслова професионална подготовка по сградостроителство. Покривни линии

In modern building construction challenges are posed by new technologies, new building materials and technique. This is why it is important for new students to be trained to not only have proper skills, habits and competences but also to know how to apply these skills when facing new production conditions. The author shares in the article her extensive experience as a professional education teacher in building construction. When developing a lesson the main goal is to exercise the students’ creative abilities as well as their problem solving skills. When planning and organising a lesson the main focus is on those goals and tasks which would help develop logical, abstract and technological thinking in addition to spatial imagination and abilities to solve problems of different nature. Learning new skills for drawing roof lines and also skills for designing pitched roofs is achieved through posing and solving diverse problems which stimulate cognitive activity. For the students to solidify the acquired knowledge and skills they have to answer certain questions and also to solve different problems on their own. Homework includes carrying out an artistic task, for example designing a pitched roof for a building with a complicated plan, the goal of which is to reinforce the students’ knowledge on the subject of roof lines and designing pitched roofs.