Spatial Imagination Research Articles

Mutable mobiles? Making space for an access-based car sharing market

How is space made to matter in contemporary access-based markets? Drawing on the geographies of marketization and constructivist market studies, we examine how space is framed as a relevant quality to take into account in market exchange and how that qualification process itself is spatially situated. We trace a failed attempt to create an access-based car market in Stockholm, involving parallel but poorly synchronized site-specific effects of marketization across public and private realms. Our findings show how DriveNow sought to render its envisioned market spatially homogenous and the spatial interdependencies between this envisioned market and other (market and nonmarket) uses of space. We highlight the performation struggles between such alternative but overlapping spatial demarcations in specific microgeographies and show how seemingly similar spatial imaginaries can be materialized in different ways in one spatial realm.

Digging Holes and Building Walls: Spatial Imaginations of the Law in Stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor

Abstract Stories shape our thinking about legal relationships and the challenges of law. This paper is interested in the ways, in which spatial constellations are imagined in connection with the law. It analyzes selected stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor alongside each other. Legal themes permeate these stories. Their fictive dialogue brings forth contrasting imaginations of community, universalism, and human limitations. Starting with their variations on the Tower of Babel story, the paper then discusses Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, “Before the Law”, and “The Burrow”, as well as Shihor’s “The Bridge”, “The Bus”, “The Door”, and “Questions”. These stories illuminate Kafka’s and Shihor’s rich, narrative vocabulary of spatial imaginations of the law, and the fruitful contrast of their perspectives.

Participatory utopian sketching: A methodological framework for collaborative citizen (re)imagination of urban spatial futures

Explorations of emerging urban spatial futures increasingly depend on the empathetic interweaving of broad political ideals with grounded democratic involvement. The collaborative planning paradigm (CP) and participatory action research (PAR) have thus gained traction globally, since they centralise meaningful involvement of those with lived experiences of the local environment. Building upon this, we argue that ‘utopia’ can offer an alternative paradigm that enhances citizen engagement, by refocusing urban design and planning explorations away from a problem-based orientation to a values-based one. Through a four-stage collaborative framework: 1. Experiencing the Space, 2. Sketching of Utopias, 3. Sharing of Utopias, and 4. Collaborative Analysis, participatory utopian sketching offers the possibility for richer and wider citizen engagement in urban development processes. The novelty of the framework is its tenets of collaboration, citizen inclusivity, playful experimentation, and iterative reflective activity. Its flexibility also allows for multiple real-world applications in the making of urban spatial futures. We demonstrate the methodological framework of participatory utopian sketching using an empirical pilot study examining the spatial imagination of solar panel futures within a neighbourhood located in Luleå, the provincial capital of Northern Sweden. Thereafter, we provide elucidations on the framework’s opportunities and challenges in wider urban design and planning discourse.

Mobile educational space and imaginative travellers in-situ: A case study of a UK international branch campus in China

ABSTRACT This paper problematizes the neglect of spatiality and materiality of international branch campuses in extant studies and challenges the predominant representation of transnational education students merely in terms of their corporeal immobility. Based on a case study of a UK international branch campus in China, this paper incorporates interview narratives and ethnographic observations to reveal the students’ experiences and imaginations, and to delineate the unique texture of the spatiality of the campus. In examining the dynamic interrelations between imagination, materiality, and (im)mobility in transnational educational spaces, this paper highlights the students’ imaginative process, in which spatial imagination and imaginative space (re)produce each other and are complicated by the various sources of power at play. The international branch campus thus functions as an infrastructure of im/mobilities, which is both locally embedded and transnationally connected; it enables students’ imaginative mobilities, transforming them into ‘imaginative travellers’ who have never physically been abroad but whose being and belonging are constantly negotiated by their everyday experiences in a mobile educational space.

간호대학생의 VR 아바타-가상환자 제스처를 통한 상상력과 알고리즘 체화의 확장 경험

Objectives This study is the first study to explore the experience of expanding the imagination and algorithmicization of nursing students through VR avatar-virtual patient gestures from the perspective of nursing as a practical art. This is a qualitative and descriptive study to specifically investigate the learner s imagination and embodiment through the interaction gesture between VR avatars and virtual patients, and to deeply explore the clinical environment and experience extended to real patients.
 Methods According to the research purpose, from April 2021 to June 2021, 15 nursing college students who had both virtual and real patient nursing practice training experiences by using the VR practice training practice training program and completing clinical practice courses were intentionally sampled (purposive sampling) was selected. Data were collected through focus group interviews and in-depth personal interviews that elicit a rich understanding of participants experiences and beliefs, and analyzed using inductive analysis methods of qualitative research methods. Therefore, it was analyzed using a qualitative content analysis method to find and interpret the characteristic meaning, themes, and rules of the data.
 Results Analysis Results 1. The study participants were able to have metacognition through spatial imagination through the design of the embodied virtual environment, and through this, they were able to materialize and individualize the physical environment in clinical practice education. 2. Research participants imagined a virtual therapeutic relationship through the individual gestures of VR avatar-virtual patients, and extended it to the meaning of artistic actions given by their gestures to clinical patients. 3. The study participants embodied the nursing algorithm while experiencing the changing monitor of the virtual patient, audiovisually, and extended it to a cooperative relationship for clinical application. 4. Research participants found identity through individual and creative nursing needs in the interaction between avatar-virtual patient, and this expanded to genuine care that understood the individual as a unique person in the clinical process.
 Conclusions This study is the first study to explore the imagination and embodiment of learners through VR at the time when the VR virtual nursing online practice program is expanding due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the necessity of VR virtual nursing-related research was presented. If the development of a program that has an algorithm that can elicit the user s emotions and receive feedback and implements the avatar-virtual patient gesture in the VR environment in detail as it is in reality, it is believed that users rich imagination and interpretation will be further improved. In addition, the instructor will have to apply an educational method that can freely describe the user s imagination and subjective interpretation that exists in the moment through gestures. To that end, the evaluation criteria of VR virtual nursing education program should be removed from the rubric that separates grades and ranks, and the pass- fail method should be introduced to reduce the burden on learners and help them to draw their own gestures that reveal their unique colors in a free environment. something to do. It is expected that research on effective practice models to discover nursing gestures as art based on the embodied behavioral patterns between avatar-virtual patient-clinical patient is expected.

A térbeli alkotás oktatási jelentősége az általános iskolában

The educational significance of spatial creation in primaryschoolEva Lehot’áková – Attila TóthThe time for learning to think spatially is limited in time. There are certain time periods for the development of spatial capacity vision. When these periods are missed, one loses the opportunity to develop their abilities to the level provided by his genetic disposition. Art education at primary schools has an educational potential to develop the spatial imagination of 10-12 year old students.

The Han River Development: Planning the Riverfront as Seoul’s Natural Landmark

This paper analyzes the history of the development of the riverfront of the Han River, the river that runs east-to-west in Seoul. In many scholarly works, the development of a commercial leisure district on the one hand, and local uses such as low-cost housing on the other, have formed two opposing waterfront spatial imaginaries. However, it is questionable whether these two visions are applicable to many metropolitan riverfront developments. The historical absence of an industrial port and the focus on the traffic flow in the Han River have contributed to the linear development of the waterfront area. After analyzing archival data and ethnographical interviews, this paper argues that this idiosyncrasy of the Han River waterfront should not be regarded as either underutilization or underdevelopment. Rather, it should be considered as reflecting the unique urban conditions of Seoul, including the legacy of the Cold War, the wide breadth of the river, and the relatively late expansion of the city south of the river. By situating the Han River development in the context of increasing criticism against the copy-and-paste waterfront developments elsewhere, this paper argues the consideration of “place” needs to include a historical dimension as past spatial practices have the tendency to continue to the present even after new developments are established.

Platform placemaking and the digital urban culture of Airbnbification

This paper develops the notion of “platform placemaking”, describing how platforms mobilize user data to remake urban spatial imaginaries in their interests. Using Airbnb as a case, the paper studies the digital urban culture of “Airbnbification” – examining how Airbnb’s reviews and descriptions become part of reshaping urban place, while contributing to the place alienation of long-term residents. Airbnb feeds a surge in urban tourists on the hunt for “real urban experiences”: off-the-beaten-track, everyday and mundane urban life, seen as representing something “real” and “authentic”. This paper situates Airbnb in the literature on postmodern consumption, and examines the way hosts and guests on Airbnb stage, perform and construct cosmopolitanism and “authentic” urban place to cater to the values of new urban tourism. The paper introduces an approach to studying digital urban culture through platform data, using computational discourse analysis to examine Airbnb in New York City. By linking narratives in reviews and neighborhood descriptions to census data, we examine how authenticity and cosmopolitanism is staged and marketed. The paper argues that Airbnb serves to promote a value system that devalues the cultural and spatial capital of long-term residents, implying that the new tourists’ cosmopolitan longing to belong may thus come at the cost of the locals’ own sense of belonging. The platform placemaking of Airbnb thus emphasizes urban place as a consumption experience, while depressing other ways of experiencing the city.

Evaluation of the Online and Offline Mixed Teaching Effect of MOOC Based upon the Deep Neural Network Model

This article is dedicated to discussing the online and offline mixed teaching evaluation of MOOC based on deep neural networks. Deep neural networks are an important means to solve various problems in various fields. It can evaluate the teaching attitude of teachers, the teaching content in the classroom, the teacher’s narrative ability, the teaching methods used by the teachers, and whether the teaching methods are rigorous. And it can train on a large number of datasets evaluated by students on a certain course and get results. This article first explains the advantages of the neural network model and explains the reasons for the emergence of MOOCs and the mixing with traditional classrooms. It also explains some deep neural network (DNN) models and algorithms, such as BP neural network model and algorithms. This model uses backpropagation. When there is an error between the output sample of the neural network and the target sample, the error can be backpropagated to adjust the threshold and weight to make the error reach the minimum. The algorithm steps include forward propagation and backpropagation and are substituted into the gradient descent method to obtain the weight change of the output layer and the hidden layer. It also explains the Gaussian model in DNNs. The given training data vector in the Gaussian mixture model and the configuration of GMM are used for expectation maximization training using an iterative algorithm, and the unsupervised clustering accuracy ACC is applied to evaluate its performance. Use pictures to describe the mixed-mode teaching mode in the MOOC environment. It is necessary to consider teaching practice conditions, time, location, curriculum resources, teaching methods and means, etc. It can cultivate students’ spatial imagination, engineering consciousness, creative design ability, drawing hand-made ability, and logical thinking abilities. It enables teachers to accept the fair and just evaluation of students. Finally, this article discusses the parallelization and optimization of GPU-based DNN models, splits the DNN models, and combines different models to calculate weight parameters. This article combines model training and data training in parallel to increase the processing speed under the same amount of data, increase the batch, increase the accuracy, and reduce the training shock. It can be concluded that its DNN model has greatly improved the training effect performance of the MOOC online and offline mixed course effect dataset. The calculation time is shortened, the convergence speed is accelerated, the accuracy rate is improved, and the acceleration ratio is increased, which compares with the same period of the previous year increase of more than 37.37%. The accuracy has increased, comparing with the same period of the previous year, an increase of more than 12.34%.

The stalemate: Motivational interviewing at a carceral junction

This study explores the use of motivational interviews to make non-compliant rejected migrants (‘rejecteers’) return. The study is based on qualitative data from field visits in accommodation centres for rejecteers (‘departure centres’) and from interviews with rejecteers and with the police interviewers conducting the interviews. A thematic analysis showed that these interviews differ from similar dialogue techniques by confronting the interviewees with their situation as seen by the state, in turn eliciting negotiations of belonging and borderwork in the form of repeated rejections. The motivational interviews fail to convince rejecteers that return is viable, especially because they reduce the complicated social situation of rejecteers to a need for responsibilisation. Rather than changing the spatial imaginaries of rejecteers, these motivational interviews block dialogue and engender incomprehension, demotivation and frustration on both sides of the table. In lieu of solving the problem of return, the main function of the motivational interviews is to be spectacles of enforcement that serve to individualise responsibility and to absolve the state of the responsibility for the social problems of ‘rejecteers’.

Low-carbon cows: From microbial metabolism to the symbiotic planet.

This article focuses on two projects – one at a large chemical company and the other at a small start-up – to intervene in the relations between cows and ruminal microbes to reduce bovine methane emissions. It describes these interventions as ‘symbiotic engineering’: a biopolitical technique targeting holobionts and becoming effective by working on interlaced sets of living things. Based on the analysis of these cases, the article elucidates a planetary symbiopolitics (Helmreich) that connects ‘molecular biopolitics’ (Rose) and ‘microbiopolitics’ (Paxson) to ‘bovine biopolitics’ (Lorimer, Driessen) and the politics of climate change. We critically investigate the spatial imaginaries of symbiotic engineering practices that single out the microbial realm as an Archimedean point to address planetary problems. This technoscientific vision resonates with the notion of the ‘symbiotic planet’ advanced by Lynn Margulis that depicts the Earth System, or Gaia, as a vast set of relations among living things down to the tiniest microbes. Margulis’ concept, as well as the ‘symbiotic view of life’ (Gilbert, Scott, Sapp) has been embraced in recent debates in STS as a way to think of multispecies worldings. The article contributes critically to these debates by showing what happens when the topology of the symbiotic Earth becomes the operating space for symbiotic engineering practices.

Why is emotional data failing to produce more humane cities? Urban governance and the (interdisciplinary) problem of wellbeing

ABSTRACT The city is often highlighted as the key space in which our emotions and personal mental health can be shaped. Globally, place-based approaches to promoting urban health and happiness have become commonplace. Initiatives and policies improving urban and regional wellbeing operate at a range of scales, from global alliances of NGOs and supranational health bodies, to regional, local, and community action. This paper critically reviews the spatial imaginaries and limited discipline-specific definitions of the urban and wellbeing present in data-driven approaches to urban emotions and wellbeing, and the potential effectiveness of the policy solutions which are proposed as a result. Responding to the very specific forms of interdisciplinarity advanced to date, the paper outlines how a dialogue between humanities perspectives on emotional cultures, and political economies of place-based wellbeing interventions can be advanced to address these limitations.

Repoliticising national policy mobilities: Resisting the Americanization of universal healthcare

Policy mobilities scholarship has comprehensively challenged the methodological nationalism and rational orthodoxies of policy studies. Contributing to recent debates on policy mobilities and post-politics, this paper examines how struggles over the ‘national’ shape policy on the move. Focussing on attempts to embed accountable care models across the English National Health Service (NHS), I consider how ‘integration’ has been mobilised as a seemingly irresistible solution to the failures of market-orientated healthcare reforms in times of austerity. Yet, I foreground how campaigners slowed down the local contracting of accountable care through repoliticising circulating policy as the ‘Americanization’ of the NHS. The paper emphasises the ongoing, yet shifting and politically contested, role of the state and national spatial imaginaries in the making and translating of globally mobile policy. Rethinking the times and spaces of politics and policy in the current conjuncture, I conclude by warning of the limits of nostalgia for the post-war national welfare state when pushing for universal healthcare as a right for all.

ELEMENTS OF STUDENT SPACE IMAGINATION IN THE TEACHING OF GRAPHIC SCIENCES AND METHODS OF USING IT

The article describes the elements of the development of students' spatial imagination in teaching graphic sciences and methods of its use, in particular, the apparatus of spatial imagery for use in the science of descriptive geometry and methodological recommendations for its use.

Tangible symmetry elements and space-group models to guide from molecular to solid-state composition.

The ability to imagine symmetry and the spatial arrangement of atoms and molecules is crucial in chemistry in general. Teaching and understanding crystallography and the composition of the solid state therefore require understanding of symmetry elements and their relationships. To foster the student's spatial imagination, models representing a range of concepts from individual rotation axes to complete space groups have been designed and built. These models are robust and large enough to be presented and operated in a lecture hall, and they enable students to translate conventional 2D notations into 3D objects and vice versa. Tackling them hands-on means understanding them.

Robert T. Tally Jr., Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination

Robert T. Tally Jr., <i>Topophrenia: Place, Narrative and the Spatial Imagination</i>

Urbanization and the organization of territorial cohesion – results from a comparative Danish case-study on territorial inequality and social cohesion

PurposeThere is a growing importance for public facilitation of corporate social responsibility and involvement of civil organizations in securing territorial cohesion and development. In the present article, the authors focus on how we are to understand a locally sensitive organization of territorial cohesion in the Danish context. Traditional sociological concepts and standardized area-types used for administrative purposes have turned out not being very helpful in understanding the interrelation between inequality, urbanization and territorial cohesion. The authors argue for a processual and relational approach to urbanization.Design/methodology/approachThe present article is based on interview material and policy documents from three Danish case studies representing urban, suburban and rural forms of settlement. The case studies are part of a cross-European research project.FindingsThe authors show how territorial governance play a key role in the strategies of densification/de-densification facilitating shielding capacities of collective efficacy, and reversely that bottom-up innovations are crucial for the ability of territorial governance to mobilize territorial capital and mediate in effects of territorial inequality. Spatial imaginaries legitimize these efforts to organize cohesion. The spatial imaginaries work as common frame of references for the interplay between strategies of (de)densification and collective efficacy, and they activate particular balances between growth agendas and everyday life.Originality/valueThese findings represent an original perspective on how and why urbanization impact on places in a more specific and variated way than often portrayed as it highlight how social capacities tied to place might work with or against existing social, economic and cultural structures shaping territorial cohesion.

In the Shadow of the Green Revolution: Constrained Spatial Imaginaries and Smallholder Farming in Guatemala’s Pacific Lowlands

Much smallholder farming currently exists side by side with large-scale, industrial agriculture, as an outcome of the Green Revolution unfolding in uneven and dualistic terms. In Guatemala’s Pacific lowlands, state incentives fuel expansion of industrial export agriculture. Large-scale sugarcane production has come to surround rural farming communities, where small-scale farmers grow maize and sesame with little state support. Drawing on a survey of nearly 200 households, seventeen in-depth interviews, and four focus groups in five communities during 2014 and 2015 in the Department of Retalhuleu, our research explores the realities and imaginaries of smallholders as they negotiate their incorporation into the Green Revolution. In the face of minuscule agricultural plots resulting in limited production, cycles of agrarian debt, vulnerability to drought, and emigration to the United States, smallholders paradoxically work hard to replicate “modern” Green Revolution approaches in their own parcels. We argue that the proximal, uneven expansion of modern technocentric agriculture, fueled by the model of the Green Revolution, has helped cultivate “constrained spatial imaginaries” among smallholders, in which ideas and desires around improved agricultural practices remain bound to accessing hybrid seeds, chemical inputs, and technical extension, despite the way the Green Revolution has been implicated in their ongoing marginalization.

Spatial Imaginaries and Performance of the Villancico de Negro

Abstract: This essay is a reflection on the performance of the villancico de negro in an early modern Ibero-American context as well as on the musical subgenre's contested meaning in present-day concert programs. The first part examines the coro , a privileged space within a viceregal cathedral where ecclesiastical ritual devotion enacted a collective sensorial experience. This was a site where male choristers embodied the performance of villancicos through voice, taking on stock theatrical characters on the margins of empire. The second part explores the villancico de negro "Vengan, que lo plegona la negla," scored for two tiple singers and instrumental accompaniment, which is preserved in a manuscript dated 1704 from the archive of the Bogotá Cathedral. Here, I offer a close reading of the text's construction of Black women's voices and bodies as they participate in the narration and action of a Christmas play. The final section briefly looks at the discourses of silencing in the performance of villancicos de negro in the United States today. This reflection is informed by my experience as a scholar and performer of early modern Iberian and Ibero-American repertoires.

Потенциальность наступления стадии постгорода в процессе трансформации геокультурного пространства Перми (антропологический аспект)

The article investigates the potential of transformation of the Perm geocultural space into a post-urban construct of a non-classical type. The following research methods and principles have been used: the «synthetic deconstruction» method, the method of polyphonic dialogue of consciousnesses, the synergetism principle, the concept of «plurality of truth», criticism of global ideological narratives actualizing local anthropogenic archetypes of historical thinking. The study examines the historically determined correlation of pre-modern, modern, and postmodern geocultural patterns of the urban environment, focuses on the problem of «fragmentary eclecticism» of Perm. Within the framework of the concept of local history, the author analyzes the problem of the «polyphonic dialogue of geocultural consciousnesses» (M. M. Bakhtin), which helps to prevent the ideological «battle of the Gods» in a single space of urban locations. The article assesses the potential of turning the city into a «virtual post-urban construct», analyzes the possibilities of «revitalizing» the suburban and rural areas harmoniously integrated into virtual «network processes» (J. Baudrillard). The researcher analyzes the potential of the formation of a pattern of «mobile architecture» in the city of Perm with the widest possibilities of the most diverse variations of the construction of his «spatial imagination». In addition, this paper discusses methodological aspects of the emergence of biopolitics (M. Foucault) and the crisis of the managerial principle of the modern era «to supervise and punish». Alternative «soft» forms of control are considered within the network processes of «virtual Perm».