Spatial Setting Research Articles

Wandering maidens in the Acropolis Propylaia: some considerations on the spatial setting of the cults of the Charites, Artemis and Hermes, their administration and related cult images

AbstractThis paper aims to develop a holistic view on the cults of the Charites, Artemis and Hermes which can plausibly be located in the Acropolis Propylaia. Based on the combined analysis of the spatial and architectural setting, which changed in the course of the erection of the Mnesiklean Propylaia in 437–432 BC, along with the imagery and textual evidence for these cults, I propose that due to the altered spatial distribution and the rotated building axes, initially separate cults were fused together. Consequently, iconographical shifts occur in the modes of depiction of these three divinities. The Charites, who were attached in Archaic imagery to Hermes, in the Classical period become iconographically intertwined with Artemis. The iconographic shift is detectable especially in the new cult images1 for Hermes Propylaios and Artemis Epipyrgidia with the Charites, which had been created by the sculptor Alkamenes, presumably by order of the Athenian state. This article should not be seen as a contribution to the analysis of copies (Kopienkritik) for known statue types or an architectural study; instead, its focus lies in the concepts of visualization of divine images, which were developed for a highly specific spatial setting in the cultic landscape of the Athenian Acropolis.

Speech comprehension in noise-considerations for ecologically valid assessment of communication skills ability with cochlear implants. German version

Nowadays, cochlear implant (CI) patients mostly show good to very good speech comprehension in quiet, but there are known problems with communication in everyday noisy situations. There is thus aneed for ecologically valid measurements of speech comprehension in real-life listening situations for hearing-impaired patients. The additional methodological effort must be balanced with clinical human and spatial resources. This study investigates possible simplifications of acomplex measurement setup. The study included 20adults from long-term follow-up after CI fitting with postlingual onset of hearing impairment. The complexity of the investigated listening situations was influenced by changing the spatiality of the noise sources and the temporal characteristics of the noise. To compare different measurement setups, speech reception thresholds (SRT) were measured unilaterally with different CI processors and settings. Ten normal-hearing subjects served as reference. In acomplex listening situation with four loudspeakers, differences in SRT from CI subjects to the control group of up to 8 dB were found. For CI subjects, this SRT correlated with the situation with frontal speech signal and fluctuating interference signal from the side with R2 = 0.69. For conditions with stationary interfering signals, R2 values <0.2 were found. There is no universal solution for all audiometric questions with respect to the spatiality and temporal characteristics of noise sources. In the investigated context, simplification of the complex spatial audiometric setting while using fluctuating competing signals was possible.

Rootlessness: How the Irish private rental sector prevents tenants feeling secure in their homes and tenant’s resistance against this

Ireland’s housing situation in the 2020s is similar to many other Anglophone countries, including Australia and the UK: A deepening housing crisis, an increased reliance on the private rental sector, and a residual ideological preference for homeownership, despite this increasingly being a less viable option for ‘Generation Rent’. Using Fullilove’s concept of rootshock, we argue that tenant perceptions of landlords’ actions and beliefs can contribute to a sense of rootlessness: no or few ties to the spatial setting of the dwelling. Using work done by resistance scholars, we also demonstrate that the inability to feel fully ontologically secure in one’s residence often leads to attempts by the tenant to make roots in their dwellings or resist rootlessness to create the sense of being at home. Based on qualitative research undertaken in 2019 with renters in three Irish cities, Dublin, Cork and Galway, we examine everyday forms of resistance, to explore the possibilities tenants carve out for themselves in order to survive and exist in the private rental sector and conclude by asking how we can learn from these practices to think about how to improve living standards for tenants.

A double fixed rank kriging approach to spatial regression models with covariate measurement error

AbstractIn many applications of spatial regression modeling, the spatially indexed covariates are measured with error, and it is known that ignoring this measurement error can lead to attenuation of the estimated regression coefficients. Classical measurement error techniques may not be appropriate in the spatial setting, due to the lack of validation data and the presence of (residual) spatial correlation among the responses. In this article, we propose a double fixed rank kriging (FRK) approach to obtain bias‐corrected estimates of and inference on coefficients in spatial regression models, where the covariates are spatially indexed and subject to measurement error. Assuming they vary smoothly in space, the proposed method first fits an FRK model regressing the covariates against spatial basis functions to obtain predictions of the error‐free covariates. These are then passed into a second FRK model, where the response is regressed against the predicted covariates plus another set of spatial basis functions to account for spatial correlation. A simulation study and an application to presence–absence records of Carolina wren from the North American Breeding Bird Survey demonstrate that the proposed double FRK approach can be effective in adjusting for measurement error in spatially correlated data.

Depiction of Bodrum Halicarnassus in the historical cartographic materials between 15th and 19th Centuries

Historical cartographic materials provide us with significant evidence not only about the evolution of spatial setting in a city and region, but also conception of it from different worldviews. In this context, Bodrum, the site of ancient Halicarnassus in the Eastern Mediterranean, can be considered as a perfect laboratory for the observation of this evolution and conceptions owing to the availability of a number of historical maps belonging to the different eras and traditions. By revealing four mapping traditions for elaboration of the historical cartographic materials available for Bodrum, the study re-read the history of Bodrum city with reference to, on the one hand, the evolution of spatial configuration of the old and remarkable buildings in the city, and on the other hand, the manifestation of the different world views and conceptions, which is realized by employing a two-folded lens that reformulates history as cartography while contextualizing cartography as history. Georeferencing is also used as an auxiliary method of analysis for the fixation of spatial elements.

FINE-GRAINED PARALLELISM FOR POST-PANDEMIC CITIES: 12 DESIGN STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT URBAN PLANNING

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way we live in the city. Social distancing will remain as a provisional code of conduct for unforeseeable outbreaks of pandemic diseases in the future. Social distancing is predicated upon reduced density of people in any given space and time. Since urban sprawl has been proved to be unsustainable, spreading out the urban density to suburbs cannot be the right direction to achieve this. Fine-grained parallelism is proposed as a single theoretical framework for an alternative post-pandemic urbanism. It is a way of maintaining simultaneous movement and co-presence, two essential properties of urban living, without the risk of crowding, by reconceptualising the existing spatial setting in a finer resolution. Existing urban spaces that have been underused, ill-used or unused can be reconfigured to achieve fine-grained urbanism for the resilient post-pandemic city.

Regulating Nimbus and Focus: Organizing Copresence for Creative Collaboration

Creative collaboration often takes place in collaborative spaces that increasingly use virtual modes of interaction. To better understand the organizational conditions and organizing practices that facilitate collaboration in such spaces, we compare ethnographies of an online platform for collaborative songwriting and a physical songwriting camp, with each of these spatial settings coming with distinct advantages and disadvantages for creative collaboration. We identify the emergence of copresence – an active mutual orientation toward one another – as a common organizational condition for collaboration. Copresence was fostered by practices of regulating nimbus (i.e. making people more or less visible) and focus (i.e. directing attention to others) that not only stimulated moments of converging copresence marked by collaborative problem-solving, but also enabled diverging copresence marked by undirected attention and more serendipitous interactions. Our comparison reveals the challenges of negotiating between converging and diverging copresence to counteract tendencies towards excessive, or conversely, insufficient nimbus and focus of the participants, both of which are barriers to copresence. These insights contribute to ongoing debates about the organization of online and offline collaborative spaces by shifting the focus away from co-location towards copresence, highlighting the oscillation between converging and diverging copresence as important for a collaborative atmosphere and identifying practices by which copresence can be organized in different spatial settings.

Space for seduction: the redefining of auction houses’ role in the art market

ABSTRACT Technological and socio-economic changes have forced organizations in the art sector to redefine their function in the market, to strengthen their relationships with consumers and to appeal to a more heterogeneous consumer audience. The physical space of art organizations constitutes a major tool for them to attract and communicate with customers. Based on a multiple case studies approach, this article explores how art auction houses have rearranged their physical space in order to create an intended customer experience based on seduction. Our study contributes to Consumer Culture Theory research by illustrating how both the tangible and intangible features of the spatial setting are orchestrated by managers to facilitate an intended consumer experience. Space is organized in such a way that a heterogeneous customer base can co-participate in the game of seduction, and the artwork maintains its role as a catalyst of the experience.

Moving across the Zoo–Field Border: Heini Hediger in Congo

The twentieth century witnessed the rise of zoo biology. Such a discipline might seem anchored in a specific spatial setting (that of the zoological garden), but if historians want to understand its development they should not limit their view to the confines of the zoo grounds. After all, understanding animals and their behavior at the zoo often involved thinking about them in other spaces as well. Notably, the “artificial” state of animals in captivity invited reflection on their “natural” condition in the wild. In order to study the changing relation between science performed at the zoo and in the field, this essay conceptualizes a “zoo–field border”—arguing that movements across this border are crucial to understanding practices on both sides. In particular, the essay analyzes a field expedition to the national parks of the Belgian Congo set up in 1948 by Heini Hediger, the Swiss zoologist who is often credited as the pioneer of zoo biology. Hediger’s expedition, it argues, involved conceptual, methodological, and logistical border-crossing. The combination of these forms, then, ultimately enabled a rethinking of animals and their behaviors on both sides of the border.

Structure-aware bottle cap art

We propose a new image processing problem that consists in approximating an input image with a set of plastic bottle caps. This problem is motivated by the appreciation caused by low resolution imaging, combined with the goal of finding a new destination for plastic caps that would be discarded and possibly damage the environment. Our solution consists in formulating an energy that measures how well a bottle cap art reproduces structures and features from the reference image and maximizing it with a simulated annealing strategy. Examples in the paper show that our method produces high quality results in this very low spatial and color resolution setting.

Individual differences in working memory and semantic fluency predict younger and older adults' multimodal recipient design in an interactive spatial task

Aging appears to impair the ability to adapt speech and gestures based on knowledge shared with an addressee (common ground-based recipient design) in narrative settings. Here, we test whether this extends to spatial settings and is modulated by cognitive abilities. Younger and older adults gave instructions on how to assemble 3D-models from building blocks on six consecutive trials. We induced mutually shared knowledge by either showing speaker and addressee the model beforehand, or not. Additionally, shared knowledge accumulated across the trials. Younger and crucially also older adults provided recipient-designed utterances, indicated by a significant reduction in the number of words and of gestures when common ground was present. Additionally, we observed a reduction in semantic content and a shift in cross-modal distribution of information across trials. Rather than age, individual differences in verbal and visual working memory and semantic fluency predicted the extent of addressee-based adaptations. Thus, in spatial tasks, individual cognitive abilities modulate the interactive language use of both younger and older adults.

Public support to socia innovation. The need of a planning perspective

In urban studies social innovation mainly means voluntary, non-statutory, citizen-led or community-led initiatives implemented to respond to unmet or new social needs. Until now the most influential research has overestimated the potential of social innovation to come up with progressive solutions alone without the support of public action. The paper considers public support to social innovation key to encourage local activation in fragile urban areas as well as to insert community-based activation in a strategic planning perspective. In discussing the cases of Barcelona and Bologna, the concluding remarks suggest a reframing of social innovation as a social and territorial construct that might need to be mobilised ad hoc within particular spatial settings.

Polycentricity of daily urban systems: A misconceived concept and buzzword in ‘metropolitan’ planning practice

Spatial planning practice is increasingly facing the challenge of managing the complexity of daily urban systems. As a normatively defined spatial imaginary, the concept of polycentricity has become widely used in planning practice in order to mitigate territorial disparities and to enhance urban competitiveness. Although polycentricity has been thoroughly studied as an analytical concept for understanding the dynamics of urban networks, the operationalization of the concept in planning practice has not yet been subjected to critical evaluation, despite recent metropolitan planning practices signalling a misunderstanding of the basic principles of polycentricity. Based on a case study of Czech metropolitan areas, this article addresses the question: Are there any shortcomings related to the operationalization of a normatively defined polycentric vision of spatial development at the level of metropolitan planning agendas? Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, the study compares different spatial settings of metropolitan areas with spatial visions defined by planning and policy documents. The findings point to several limitations related to a missing link between spatial reality and planning agendas, the weak operationalization of polycentricity, and scale-related miscomprehension. In order to translate the polycentric narrative into planning practice more efficiently, we will argue for a strengthening and formalization of metropolitan planning agendas and a more intensive interconnection of theoretical knowledge with territorial management.

Let’s eat together! The production of commensality in the spatial setting of the flexible office

This paper draws attention to commensality -eating and drinking in the presence of others- and the spatial production of sharing food at work. We propose to add a socio-spatial perspective to the research agenda on the triad of food, work, and organization. In particular, we conceptually and empirically discuss the potential for understanding commensality space in a way that addresses its productive force, and its inherent dialectics and tensions. Applying insights from Lefebvre’s work on dialectics and space, we analyze the case of a French Banking organization's new flexible office, and we argue that and how commensality is meaningful to everyday working life. The contribution of this paper is three-fold: it argues that organizational space is a set of multiplicities that enact particular practices and organizational dialectics; it extends the concept of commensality; it adds to typical forms of commensality in sociology.

Kirchliche Räume zwischen Religion und Populärkultur

This article discusses the role of popular culture in religious events, focusing on built space and atmosphere using the example of a young Catholic initiative in Germany. While the topic “religion and popular culture” has received much scholarly attention, a focus on popular cultural atmospheres and their adaption in religious contexts remains a research gap. In order to analytically outline the relationship between religion and popular culture, the author proposes a differentiation and systems-theoretical approach while referring to the concept of “popular religion” (Hubert Knoblauch). The article first introduces the concepts of “popular culture,” “popular religion” as well as “atmosphere” and then discusses, on the basis of a case study and empirical surveys, the relationship between popular cultural and religious elements in the spatial and atmospheric setting of the initiative under investigation. Eventually, the author suggests that talk of a “dissolution of boundaries” (Entgrenzung) between religion and popular culture is only partially accurate because distinctions between religious and non-religious domains continue to be made both in the field and in analytical reconstruction.

Slow and steady wins the race: Spatial and stochastic processes and the failure of suppression gene drives.

Gene drives that skew sex ratios offer a new management tool to suppress or eradicate pest populations. Early models and empirical work suggest that these suppression drives can completely eradicate well‐mixed populations, but models that incorporate stochasticity and space (i.e. drift and recolonization events) often result in loss or failure of the drive. We developed a stochastic model to examine these processes in a simple one‐dimensional space. This simple space allows us to map the events and outcomes that emerged and examine how properties of the drive's wave of invasion affect outcomes. Our simulations, across a biologically realistic section of parameter space, suggest that drive failure might be a common outcome in spatially explicit, stochastic systems, and that properties of the drive wave appear to mediate outcomes. Surprisingly, the drives that would be considered fittest in an aspatial model were strongly associated with failure in the spatial setting. The fittest drives cause relatively fast moving, and narrow waves that have a high chance of being penetrated by wild‐types (WTs) leading to WT recolonization, leading to failure. Our results also show that high rates of dispersal reduce the chance of failure because drive waves get disproportionately wider than WT waves as dispersal rates increase. Overall, wide, slow‐moving drive waves were much less prone to failure. Our results point to the complexity inherent in using a genetic system to effect demographic outcomes and speak to a clear need for ecological and evolutionary modelling to inform the drive design process.

Variograms for kriging and clustering of spatial functional data with phase variation

Spatial, amplitude and phase variations in spatial functional data are confounded. Conclusions from the popular functional trace-variogram, which quantifies spatial variation, can be misleading when analyzing misaligned functional data with phase variation. To remedy this, we describe a framework that extends amplitude-phase separation methods in functional data to the spatial setting, with a view towards performing clustering and spatial prediction. We propose a decomposition of the trace-variogram into amplitude and phase components, and quantify how spatial correlations between functional observations manifest in their respective amplitude and phase. This enables us to generate separate amplitude and phase clustering methods for spatial functional data, and develop a novel spatial functional interpolant at unobserved locations based on combining separate amplitude and phase predictions. Through simulations and real data analyses, we demonstrate advantages of our approach when compared to standard ones that ignore phase variation, through more accurate predictions and more interpretable clustering results.

Signals of Potential Species Associations Offer Clues about Community Organisation of Stream Fish across Seasons

Simple SummarySpecies interactions are one of the main factors affecting community assembly, yet the role of such interactions remains mostly unknown. Here, we investigated roles of potential species associations in fish community assembly in the Qiupu River, China. Our results suggested that potential species associations might have been underestimated in stream fish community assembly. The contribution of potential species associations to fish community assembly can be reflected by interaction network structures. Omnivorous species play an important role in maintaining network structure as they may have more associations with other species. This study highlights the importance of capturing species associations in river ecosystems across different geographical and environmental settings.Environmental filtering, spatial factors and species interactions are fundamental ecological mechanisms for community organisation, yet the role of such interactions across different environmental and spatial settings remains mostly unknown. In this study, we investigated fish community organisation scenarios and seasonal species-to-species associations potentially reflecting biotic associations along the Qiupu River (China). Based on a latent variable approach and a tree-based method, we compared the relative contribution of the abiotic environment, spatial covariates and potential species associations for variation in the community structure, and assessed whether different assembly scenarios were modulated by concomitant changes in the interaction network structure of fish communities across seasons. We found that potential species associations might have been underestimated in community-based assessments of stream fish. Omnivore species, since they have more associations with other species, were found to be key components sustaining fish interaction networks across different stream orders. Hence, we suggest that species interactions, such as predation and competition, likely played a key role in community structure. For instance, indices accounting for network structure, such as connectance and nestedness, were strongly correlated with the unexplained residuals from our latent variable approach, thereby re-emphasising that biotic signals, potentially reflecting species interactions, may be of primary importance in determining stream fish communities across seasons. Overall, our findings indicate that interaction network structures are a powerful tool to reflect the contribution of potential species associations to community assembly. From an applied perspective, this study should encourage freshwater ecologists to empirically capture and manage biotic constraints in stream ecosystems across different geographical and environmental settings, especially in the context of the ever-increasing impacts of human-induced local extinction debts and species invasions.

Hörsaal-Leben

Lecture Hall Life. The Practice of the Lecture in 18th Century Universities Comparing the practices of lecturing in Halle and Göttingen during the 18th century through the eyes and ears of their listeners opens up access to the history of the lecture as a cultural performance. As a knowledge technology, the lecture was on the one hand a complex text machine, and on the other hand a communicative practice with its own spatial, social, material and performative settings. Academic teaching was further characterised by an economisation that created strong competition among scholars and fostered a moral economy of lecture fees. As social spaces lecture halls showed little separation between public and private spheres, since they were very often located in the professors’ private houses. The offer, attendance and economy of lectures gave rise to various forms of deviance, while teaching on the object and the production of textbooks contributed to the formation of subject-disciplinary identities and demarcations. Thus, the everyday life of lectures is a key to understanding academic knowledge cultures in economic, epistemic and social terms.

Effects of spatialized water-sound sequences for traffic noise masking on brain activities.

Informational masking of water sounds has been proven effective in mitigating traffic noise perception with different sound levels and signal-to-noise ratios, but less is known about the effects of the spatial distribution of water sounds on the perception of the surrounding environment and corresponding psychophysical responses. Three different spatial settings of water-sound sequences with a traffic noise condition were used to investigate the role of spatialization of water-sound sequences on traffic noise perception. The neural responses of 20 participants were recorded by a portable electroencephalogram (EEG) device during the spatial sound playback time. The mental effects and attention process related to informational masking were assessed by the analysis of the EEG spectral power distribution and sensor-level functional connectivity along with subjective assessments. The results showed higher relative power of the alpha band and greater alpha-beta ratio among water-sound sequence conditions compared to traffic noise conditions, which confirmed the increased relaxation on the mental state induced by the introduction of water sounds. Moreover, different spatial settings of water-sound sequences evoked different cognitive network responses. The setting of two-position switching water brought more attentional network activations than other water sequences related to the information masking process along with more positive subjective feelings.