Spatial Interconnectedness Research Articles

Spatial network analysis and driving forces of urban carbon emission performance: Insights from Guangdong Province

As the primary contributor to carbon emissions, how cities enhance their carbon emission performance and mitigate emissions is crucial for achieving low-carbon urban environments in China. However, existing research often overlooks the spatial interconnectedness of carbon emission performance, neglecting reciprocal influences among cities. This study examines the network structure of carbon emission performance among Guangdong's cities from 1997 to 2019, using a super-efficient SBM model and social network analysis, and measures spatial impacts of network factors with the spatial Durbin model. Findings reveal that: (1) The overall network of carbon emission performance is relatively loose with minimal changes in connectivity and efficiency but shows significant local clustering. (2) Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Zhuhai have high centrality, dominating carbon emission performance resources and acting as key transmission nodes, while most other regions have low centrality, indicating network polarization and potential vulnerabilities. (3) Enhancing a region's centrality, economic development, industrial structure, openness, and attraction of talent and technology can boost local carbon emission performance, but may also lead to the displacement of emissions to neighboring areas and outflow of low-carbon and innovative elements, negatively affecting surrounding regions through spatial spillover effects. This research advances regional carbon emission reduction strategies by highlighting the interplay between spatial networks and carbon emission performance, fostering synergies in reduction efforts.

Tweeting during the Pandemic in New York City: Unveiling the Evolving Sentiment Landscape of NYC through a Spatiotemporal Analysis of Geolocated Tweets

ABSTRACT This article explores the relationship between spatial factors, socioeconomic conditions, and Twitter (now called X) sentiment in New York City (NYC) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Twitter data, the study investigates how sentiment varied across different geographies. It examines whether sentiment scores, unemployment rates, and COVID-19 hospitalization rates in NYC zip codes revealed spatial associations. The research employs sentiment analysis, a natural language processing technique used to algorithmically determine the emotional tone of a text, on a database of geo-located tweets spanning January to December 2020. The findings reveal a shift towards more negative sentiment during the initial year of the pandemic. Moreover, the study uncovers variations in sentiment trends across boroughs and zip codes. Additionally, a zip code-level fixed-effects model demonstrates a statistically significant relationship between sentiment scores and unemployment rates. In summary, this article makes a two-fold contribution: firstly, it adds a spatial lens to the scholarly debate regarding the use of Twitter data as an indicator of publicly expressed sentiment; secondly, it provides empirical evidence on the spatial interconnectedness of sentiment, health (hospitalization), and socioeconomic factors (unemployment). Overall, this research sheds light on the nuanced relationship between sentiment and space during the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC.

Digital inclusive finance, consumption structure upgrading and carbon emissions

The “14th Five-Year Plan” represents a crucial phase in enhancing financial inclusivity in China and addressing the challenge of “peak carbon emissions.” Given the digital economy’s rapid growth, China must urgently devise a model for high-quality development that combines digital finance with eco-friendly and low-carbon strategies. Uniquely focusing on the intersection of digital finance and sustainable growth, this paper fills a critical gap in the existing literature. To examine the impact of digital inclusive financing on carbon emissions from the vantage point of enhancing consumption structures, this study uses panel data covering the years 2014–2020 from 30 Chinese provinces. This research underscores the novel finding that digital inclusive finance can play a significant role in lowering carbon emissions by encouraging individuals to alter their consumption patterns. Variations across regions are evident in the impact, with the central and western areas experiencing a more pronounced decline in carbon emissions in comparison to the eastern region. Moreover, the influence of consumption structure upgrading varies across regions. Additionally, the study identifies a positive spatial spillover relationship between digital inclusive finance and carbon emissions. Through its pioneering exploration, this study offers fresh insights for boosting digital finance’s carbon-reduction impacts through consumption structure upgrades, strengthening the spatial interconnectedness of digital finance and consumption trends, and eventually supporting a path toward low-carbon, high-quality development.

A new coat of paint: The bluewashing of justice reinvestment and realignment to community reinvestment

AbstractJustice reinvestment has been hailed as a solution to mass incarceration across the United States for nearly 20 years. It suggests that inefficiencies in the criminal justice system can be eliminated to reinvest money in high‐incarceration communities to reduce the correlates of crime. However, the implementations have focused on reinvesting criminal justice funds back into public safety, which has led to the “bluewashing” of justice reinvestment. Introduced here, bluewashing occurs when a justice agency that has historically poor social justice performance communicates positive justice performance after implementing a theoretically supported reform in name only. In actuality, the reform has been modified to suit their own continuance. A realignment of the logic and theoretical support of justice reinvestment is critical to produce reforms that can provide relief for states, agencies, and citizens that are promised by justice reinvestment. This work directly connects the justice reinvestment thesis with the spatial interconnectedness of poverty, education, employment, and housing with crime and recidivism. It argues that justice reinvestment is a crime prevention policy that can simultaneously reduce mass incarceration and empower millions of American citizens living in the United States' most brutal conditions.

Effects of Spatial Interconnectedness on Unit-Level Human Capital Performance

Existing strategic human capital literature indicates that unit-level human capital performance depends on task complexity and the relational dynamics of a unit’s social environment. However, physical work environments, where task execution and relational dynamics happen, may also matter to unit performance because they shape interactions. Therefore, we examine the effect of spatial interconnectedness, a spatial attribute which accounts for interaction and movement, on unit performance. Using interrupted time series quasi-experiment, multi-level mixed methods and a novel space syntax methodology, we find that spatial interconnectedness correlates positively with unit performance, but such gains diminish with increased coordinative task complexity. These findings contribute to the theory of human capital resource emergence which currently omits spatial factors. It also provides practical insights on human capital deployment in firms.

(Non)Places of Bangalore: Where the East Meets the West in Bharati Mukherjee’s Miss New India

This essay constitutes an attempt at reading Bharati Mukherjee’s 2011 novel, Miss New India, through the prism of spatial locations depicted in it. Unlike many of the texts in the late South Asian American author’s oeuvre, which depict migration from the East to the West, Miss New India is located exclusively within South Asia. This notwithstanding, the novel focuses on the impact the West used to and continues to exert on the East. I would like to argue that through her depictions of places and non-places of Bangalore-the novel’s primary location-Mukherjee points to the spatial interconnectedness of the East and the West as well as to the temporal interconnectedness of the colonial past and postcolonial, late-capitalist present.

Cyberbullying in a boundary blurred working life

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore what characterizes cyberbullying when it is performed in digital space and in an increasingly boundary blurred working life context.Design/methodology/approachCyberbullying is explored through the lens of Erving Goffman’s theories on everyday life interaction and social media scholars understanding of social life on the internet today. The empirical material for the study is grounded in eight in-depth interviews with individuals who have been subjected to cyberbullying behavior in their professional life. The interview data were analyzed by means of thematic analysis.FindingsThree key themes were identified: spatial interconnectedness, colliding identities and the role of the audience. The empirical data indicate that in order to understand cyberbullying in working life, it is necessary to consider the specific context that emerges with social network sites and blogs. Moreover, this study shows how social network sites tend to blur boundaries between the private and the professional for the targeted individual.Originality/valueCyberbullying in working life is a relatively under-researched area. Most existing research on cyberbullying follows the tradition of face-to-face bullying by addressing the phenomenon with quantitative methods. Given the limited potential of this approach to uncover new and unique features, this study makes an important contribution by exploring cyberbullying with a qualitative approach that provides in-depth understanding of the new situations that emerge when bullying is performed online.

Unthinking ethnocentrism: Ecocritical approaches to ethnic diversity in Nordic screen media

Abstract This article develops an ecocritical perspective on the ways Nordic film and television has addressed ethnic and racial diversity. Here we develop the term ‘ecotone’, a concept originating in environmental studies that characterizes the transitional space linking separate ecological communities. Focusing on the popular noir series Bron/Broen (The Bridge) (2011–18), Hannes Holm’s Swedish comedy En man som heter Ove (A Man Called Ove) (2015), the Norwegian teen drama Skam (Shame) (2015–17) and Ruben Östlund’s controversial film Play (2011), we claim that the ecotone, when adopted as a form of mediated intervention, allows us to interrogate the taken-for-granted ideological foundations of Nordic societies. This involves unpacking the representations of material culture and spatial interconnectedness that define immigrant Others in relation to their environment.

The geography of smallpox in England before vaccination: A conundrum resolved

Smallpox is regarded as an ancient and lethal disease of humans, however very little is known about the prevalence and impact of smallpox before the advent of vaccination (c.1800). Here we use evidence from English burial records covering the period 1650–1799 to confirm a striking geography to smallpox patterns. Smallpox apparently circulated as a childhood disease in northern England and Sweden, even where population densities were low and settlement patterns dispersed. However, smallpox was a relatively rare epidemic disease in southern England outside the largest cities, despite its commercialised economy and the growing spatial interconnectedness of its settlements. We investigated a number of factors hypothesised to influence the regional circulation of smallpox, including exposure to naturally occurring orthopox viruses, settlement patterns, and deliberate preventative measures. We concluded that transmission was controlled in southern England by local practices of avoidance and mass inoculation that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Avoidance measures included isolation of victims in pest houses and private homes, as well as cancellation of markets and other public gatherings, and pre-dated the widespread use of inoculation. The historical pattern of smallpox in England supports phylogenetic evidence for a relatively recent origin of the variola strains that circulated in the twentieth century, and provides evidence for the efficacy of preventative strategies complementary to immunisation.

THE EFFECTS OF BUILT ENVIRONMENT DESIGN ON OPPORTUNITIES FOR WELLBEING IN CARE HOMES

The built environment influences the wellbeing of older people in care homes. In order to design for enablement, physical activity, and social connectivity there are lessons to be learnt from current care home buildings. Uncovering this design information is key for the future improvement of environments for older people. To the field of architecture, this paper presents an analysis of ethnographic observations (utilising an adapted form of the AEIOU heuristic) from five urban care homes in the UK. Findings provide insight into the qualities of the built environment that have impact on the activity and potential wellbeing of older residents. Five significant qualities of the built environment are identified: Spatial Legibility, Spatial Interconnectedness, Spatial Traversability, Spatial Diversity, and Spatial Aesthetics.

It's all relative: Spatial positioning of parties and ideological shifts

AbstractThe usefulness of the general class of spatial econometric models, which relaxes the assumption that the observations are independent, has only recently been realised. One particularly fruitful application includes models of parties' ideological change as well as the electoral consequences of party competition. In these studies, scholars can explicitly model the spatial interconnectedness of political parties in theoretically pleasing ways, producing inferences that are consistent with formal models of party competition, but are beyond the grasp of traditional ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models. To illustrate these benefits, this article replicates Adams and Somer‐Topcu's 2009 study of parties' responses to ideological shifts by rival parties to show that appropriately modeling patterns of interconnectivity between parties via weights matrices provides more realistic inferences that are more consistent with formal models of party competition.

The Impacts of Visibility and privacy in the workplace on Organizational productivity as conducted through Informal Interactions

The aim of this paper is to investigate two important factors of workplace layout, visibility and accessibility, and their impacts on “face to face” interaction in the workplace. It is believed that a certain space layout will provide the opportunity for employees to interact with each other thus increases the possibility of team working. The greater level of team working in any organization will lead to higher productivity. The methods to improve the possibility of unplanned communication and ease of interaction within a work area are classified under spatial interconnectedness. This spatial interconnectedness contains workers’ visibility, worker`s movements and accessibility within the work space. In this study, employees in an office were asked to complete a survey that calculated variables of the research. They received a questionnaire including measures for each of the key variables. Some of these procedures were taken from a research made for a large corporation, and others were certified measures from the physical workplace contemporary literature. SPSS statistic software was used as software to analyze the data and layout plans was analyzed by Depth map. The results indicate that the visibility of the worker`s and the accessibility in a work area is significantly correlated to interaction. The study highlights the importance of workplace productivity and manipulating informal interaction as a measurement of productivity in the office space.

Positive interactions and the emergence of community structure in metacommunities

The significant role of space in maintaining species coexistence and determining community structure and function is well established. However, community ecology studies have mainly focused on simple competition and predation systems, and the relative impact of positive interspecific interactions in shaping communities in a spatial context is not well understood. Here we employ a spatially explicit metacommunity model to investigate the effect of local dispersal on the structure and function of communities in which species are linked through an interaction web comprising mutualism, competition and exploitation. Our results show that function, diversity and interspecific interactions of locally linked communities undergo a phase transition with changes in the rate of species dispersal. We find that low spatial interconnectedness favors the spontaneous emergence of strongly mutualistic communities which are more stable but less productive and diverse. On the other hand, high spatial interconnectedness promotes local biodiversity at the expense of local stability and supports communities with a wide range of interspecific interactions. We argue that investigations of the relationship between spatial processes and the self-organization of complex interaction webs are critical to understanding the geographic structure of interactions in real landscapes.

Geo time information visualization

Analyzing observations over time and geography is a common task, but typically requires multiple, separate tools. The objective of our research has been to develop a method to visualize, and work with, the spatial inter-connectedness of information over time and geography within a single, highly interactive three-dimensional (3-D) view. A novel visualization technique for displaying and tracking events, objects and activities within a combined temporal and geospatial display has been developed. This technique has been implemented as a demonstrable prototype called GeoTime in order to determine potential utility. Capabilities include descriptive events and relationships, association analysis, event aggregation methods and geo-located linked charting. Initial evaluations have been with military users. However, we believe the concept is applicable to a variety of government and business analysis tasks.

GeoTime Information Visualization

Analyzing observations over time and geography is a common task, but typically requires multiple, separate tools. The objective of our research has been to develop a method to visualize, and work with, the spatial inter-connectedness of information over time and geography within a single, highly interactive three-dimensional (3-D) view. A novel visualization technique for displaying and tracking events, objects and activities within a combined temporal and geospatial display has been developed. This technique has been implemented as a demonstrable prototype called GeoTime in order to determine potential utility. Capabilities include descriptive events and relationships, association analysis, event aggregation methods and geo-located linked charting. Initial evaluations have been with military users. However, we believe the concept is applicable to a variety of government and business analysis tasks.

Spatial Aggregation in Multiregional Input-Output Models

This study continues the investigations into effects of spatial aggregation in connected, several-region input-output models that were initially reported upon in Miller and Blair (1980; 1981) for an interregional input-output model. In the present paper our interest is in the error that is introduced into a multiregional input-output model through aggregation of regions. As in the earlier paper, we investigate the question by means of both hypothetical and real data. In the present study, these are (1) randomly generated multiregional data incorporating varying degrees of regional linkage and (2) actual 1963 US multiregional data. To allow some comparison with the interregional experiments, the data for the random experiments in the present paper are derived from our original randomly generated interregional data. The same levels of spatial interconnectedness as in the interregional experiments are also used here, and the same measures of aggregation error are employed. As in the interregional case, we conclude that spatial aggregation in multiregional input-output models does not necessarily lead to unacceptable error.

Actinomycosis

Smallpox is regarded as an ancient and lethal disease of humans, however very little is known about the prevalence and impact of smallpox before the advent of vaccination (c.1800). Here we use evidence from English burial records covering the period 1650–1799 to confirm a striking geography to smallpox patterns. Smallpox apparently circulated as a childhood disease in northern England and Sweden, even where population densities were low and settlement patterns dispersed. However, smallpox was a relatively rare epidemic disease in southern England outside the largest cities, despite its commercialised economy and the growing spatial interconnectedness of its settlements. We investigated a number of factors hypothesised to influence the regional circulation of smallpox, including exposure to naturally occurring orthopox viruses, settlement patterns, and deliberate preventative measures. We concluded that transmission was controlled in southern England by local practices of avoidance and mass inoculation that arose in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Avoidance measures included isolation of victims in pest houses and private homes, as well as cancellation of markets and other public gatherings, and pre-dated the widespread use of inoculation. The historical pattern of smallpox in England supports phylogenetic evidence for a relatively recent origin of the variola strains that circulated in the twentieth century, and provides evidence for the efficacy of preventative strategies complementary to immunisation.