bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Environment and Urbanization
Authors: Dodman David
Published: March 2017

Urban areas are often associated with environmental “problems.” Yet, while the dense concentration of people and economic activities in towns and cities can indeed generate very visible challenges related to pollution and solid waste, this simultaneously creates the opportunity for addressing these issues efficiently. This entry describes some of the main theoretical and policy approaches to engaging with the environment and urbanization which have evolved over time and have shown some notable successes. At the same time, it highlights how ongoing urbanization (particularly in the Global South) and evolving environmental challenges (such as those around climate change) mean that more radical approaches, which involve urban residents in more meaningful ways, will be required to face the local and global environmental challenges associated with urbanization.
Industrial Upgrading
Authors: Zhu Shengjun
Published: March 2017

The concept of industrial upgrading – making better products, making them more efficiently, or moving into more skilled activities – has often been used in the literature on competitiveness. Four types of upgrading have been identified: process, product, functional, and chain upgrading. Both the cluster approach and the value chain approach highlight the importance of industrial upgrading in order to face increasing competition in the global economy. Similarly, both stress the role played by governance in industrial upgrading. However, these two lines of work see governance operating at different geographical scales, and therefore with different implications for upgrading opportunities, mechanisms, and prospects for firms in developing economies.
Hillslopes
Authors: Harden Carol P.
Published: March 2017

Hillslopes are segments of the physical landscape at a spatial scale familiar to human experience – a person on foot can ascend a small hillslope within minutes. Hillslopes adjust, gradually or catastrophically, to the balance of forces acting on them, and their properties control the redistribution of water and sediment on terrestrial surfaces. To researchers, hillslopes are important as units of analysis of interactive processes involving hydrology, soils, biota, and human activity. To society, they are important for the opportunities, challenges, and hazards they present.
Community‐Based Natural Resource Management
Authors: Twyman Chasca
Published: March 2017

Community‐based natural resource management (CBNRM) encompasses both a broad approach to the community management of natural resources as well as a defined project format or program that is implemented through specific policies and practices. Emerging in the 1980s, it was seen as the panacea to conservation and poverty alleviation. However, CBNRM has come under fire recently for departing from its central ethos and even contradicting some of its core principles of social justice and socioecological sustainability.
Spatiotemporal Analysis
Authors: An Li , Crook Stephen
Published: March 2017

This entry discusses the concepts and methods related to spatiotemporal analysis. From early civilizations to modern times, space and time have been the two fundamental domains under which humans have characterized events and phenomena of interest. The conceptualization of absolute versus relative space–time has exerted a major impact on so‐called spatiotemporal analysis, which seeks to understand “when” and “where” (and to some extent “why”) things occur. This entry covers significant concepts and methods in relation to modern spatiotemporal analysis, such as time geography, analysis of time‐series spatial data, and exploratory space–time analysis. A set of statistical (e.g., Bayesian space–time models, survival analysis, multilevel models, latent trajectory models) and simulation approaches (e.g., cellular automaton, agent‐based models) have been presented in regard to their strengths and weaknesses for spatiotemporal analysis. The future directions of spatiotemporal analysis are pointed out to conclude the entry.
Representation: Geographic Systems
Authors: Zeiler Michael
Published: March 2017

Geographic information systems (GIS) apply
geographic data models
to describe how natural and constructed systems such as rivers, parcel cadastres, and transportation networks are located in space and interact with each other. Geographic data models are built by applying elements of a
geographic information model
to describe the spatial extents, attributes, interrelationships, and behaviors of the system under study. There are several generic geographic information models; cell‐based rasters are used for imagery and continuous phenomena, sets of features describe a collection of discrete geographic entities, graph elements are linked into networks, and finite‐element meshes in three‐dimensional space model topographical and other types of surfaces. Geographic data can also be structured to model temporal changes within geographic systems.
Globalization
Authors: Sparke Matthew
Published: March 2017

Globalization is both a
descriptive
term used to name processes of increasing global integration and a
prescriptive
term that is instrumentalized politically to persuade people about the way the world should be integrated. Most commonly, it is thereby used to prescribe pro‐market policies such as trade liberalization, privatization, and business deregulation by arguing that they are required for successful global integration. Descriptive accounts of globalization by scholars tend to complicate such simplified suggestions about successful integration by underlining the historically and geographically uneven development dynamics of market integration. These are dynamics that are simultaneously increasing global interdependencies and intensifying inequality, asymmetry, and volatility. In turn, the injustices and suffering associated with market‐led integration are widely contested and critiqued. Far from being anti‐globalization, though, most such critiques take an “alter‐globalization” approach that favors the globalization of global justice, global communication, global health, global environmental protection, and collaborative global protection from precarity more generally.
Governance and Development
Authors: Ballard Richard
Published: March 2017

Governance is a broad concept which refers to the many ways in which aspects of society are regulated or guided by institutions, rules, and conventions. Governance can take the form of a conscious attempt to fix a problem or achieve a goal, by managing, regulating, or steering processes or behavior through a combination of coercion and consent. It can, alternatively, be an unplanned process through which informal rules shape behavior. Bureaucracy has occupied an ambivalent position within development thinking, ranging from modernist optimism to skepticism from across the ideological spectrum. From the 1990s, the drive toward
good governance
meant that governance itself became a central focus of development programs. The intersection between governance and development in a more general sense is evident in the various attempts to manage the interaction between expanding economic production and the ability of people to meet their needs.
Tropical Rainforest Ecosystems
Authors: Armstrong A.H.
Published: March 2017

Rainforests are widely known to be the most biodiverse (in species per square ha) of terrestrial ecosystem types on Earth. Home to an estimated half of the Earth's plant and animal species, rainforests cover approximately 7% of total land area (Whitmore 1998). Yet many rainforests worldwide are still in descriptive stages and have not yet been fully catalogued taxonomically or explored. In fact, hundreds of new floral and faunal species are identified annually. Generations of ecologists and biologists have attempted to unravel what has led to such high species richness and what factors drive their distribution among the forest strata. But to date, comparatively little is known about the complex interrelationships of the species that comprise tropical rainforest ecosystems, what gave rise to such immense biodiversity, and how these ecosystems recover from and respond to the dynamics of change across numerous periodic and spatial scales. This entry describes the range of physical attributes that comprise the classification of a forest ecosystem as a tropical rainforest. In addition to a detailed description, this entry will also give an overview of the status of tropical rainforests as among the world's most threatened ecosystem types, relate direct anthropogenic threats (e.g., logging, pasture conversion) to indirect anthropogenic threat (e.g., climate change), and finally give an overview of some of the tools utilized and concepts investigated by the scientific and conservation communities alike toward understanding how to address some of the most pressing conservation issues of our time with respect to tropical rainforests. These include: how to accurately assess and characterize the immense biodiversity found in tropical rainforests; the development of the UN‐REDD, REDD+, and similar economically based incentive programs as long‐term conservation measures; and how remote sensing and ecological modeling are used to understand the past, present, and future responses to change in tropical rainforest ecosystems.
Corporate Retailing
Authors: Wang Shuguang
Published: March 2017

The retail sector in a typical capitalist market economy consists of diverse types of retailers. Some of them are corporate retailers, which operate multiple stores in the form of a chain. Others are independent retailers with a single store location. Corporate retailers can be further differentiated as publicly traded companies and privately owned chains. Relative to independent retailers, corporate retailers are small in number, but they command the largest share of the consumer market. In recent decades, a series of revolutionary changes have taken place in the retail industry worldwide amid the process of globalization of the world economy. The new trends and characteristics are embodied mainly by the corporate retailers, and have led to the retheorization of the orthodox retail geography and the emergence of a new retail geography with a major paradigm shift. As the retail planning process becomes more complex, so too does the role of retail geographers.
Environmental Management
Authors: Francis Robert A.
Published: March 2017

Environmental management is the management of our impact on the environment, and the environment's impact on us. It is usually performed to address environmental legislation or policies, and mainly refers to the methods and processes used to predict, measure and mitigate impacts. Environmental management has emerged in recent decades in response to increasing environmental awareness and usually involves stages of assessment, planning, action, and monitoring. These stages are often informed by international standards. Historically, management efforts have been limited by reductionist approaches to environmental systems that focus on components or processes in isolation and fail to recognize system complexity. More recently, systems thinking that acknowledges the dynamism and complexity of environmental systems has fed into management efforts, including consideration of adaptive cycles, resilience, interdisciplinarity, postnormal science, adaptive management, and sustainability. These are important for the management of many modern and complex environmental issues.
Global Environmental Change: Human Dimensions
Authors: Leichenko Robin , Eisenhauer David C.
Published: March 2017

Research on the human dimensions of global environmental change (HDGEC) encompasses a broad array of social science research on processes and outcomes of human‐induced environmental changes. HDGEC includes research on: (i) social, economic, political, and cultural drivers of global environmental change; (ii) impacts of and vulnerability to these changes among different sectors, regions, communities, and social groups; and (iii) societal responses, including adaptation, mitigation, and social transformation. Key cross‐cutting themes within recent HDGEC work include governance, equity and justice, and the social production and communication of scientific information.
State, The
Authors: Moisio Sami , Belina Bernd
Published: March 2017

Theories of the state and how these have been utilized and developed in human geography and related fields are discussed. It is suggested that historical materialist and poststructuralist approaches to the state need to be taken seriously and combined. Both approaches are briefly sketched before focusing on selected aspects of the state which are of particular importance within geography. Some ideas as to how these two strands of state theory could be put to good use in the study of territorial and relational state spaces are discussed as well.
Ethics in
GIScience
Authors: Harvey Francis
Published: March 2017

As geographic information systems and GIScience develop and take on more diverse roles in science, government, business, and industry, issues with ethical dimensions broaden but retain the depth they have always held. The intellectual and cultural diversity of these fields leads to a growing importance of including ethical components in education and practice. However, from a pragmatic viewpoint, considering ethical aspects of scientific and technological work touches on commonalities and human values. Instead of a philosophical approach, this entry offers an applied ethics approach to essential questions starting with the question of what we should do with our skills, knowledge, and technology.
Technology Spillover
Authors: Sun Yifei , Fan Peilei
Published: March 2017

Technology spillover refers to the unintentional technological benefits to firms that come from the research and development efforts of other firms without the costs being shared. Technology spillover is expected to be particularly strong from leading firms coming from advanced economies to firms in emerging economies. Successful technology spillovers depend on the absorptive capability of the receiving firms as well as the technological gap between sending firms and receiving firms. Technology spillover is also a social process which is modulated by the geographical as well as cultural context when it takes place. Both geographical and cultural proximity play significant roles in such a process. Future research should expand the focus on technology spillovers from leading firms coming from advanced economies to following firms in emerging economies to research that examines the two‐way knowledge flow and interactions between sending firms and receiving firms. Technology spillover is ultimately a learning experience for both sides.
Financial Geography
Authors: Lai Karen P.Y.
Published: March 2017

Financial geography is concerned with the roles of finance, money, and markets in the restructuring of contemporary capitalism, and how these changes have uneven impacts across space. Studies focus on the ways in which space and place are mobilized in shaping financial decisions, allocation of capital, regulatory frameworks of global financial markets, and development of onshore and offshore financial centers. An early political economy approach to regulation of international financial markets is later complemented by more social and cultural explanations and network approaches for analyzing the persistence and increasing importance of international financial centers (IFCs) as strategic basing points for global capital. Scales of analyses range from global frameworks and national financial markets to industry processes and household behavior. While much of the financial geography literature has concentrated on Anglo‐American economies, recent research highlights the increasing significance of emerging economies and alternative financial networks such as sovereign wealth funds and Islamic finance.
Gender and Development
Authors: Oberhauser Ann M.
Published: March 2017

The field of gender and development grew out of a movement to highlight women's roles and gendered power relations in many aspects of the development process. Since the mid‐twentieth century, this field has expanded to critically examine development through a feminist lens that focuses on socioeconomic and political inequalities and uneven spatial processes. Specifically, development theory and practice have shifted from structural approaches to the status of women in developing regions to poststructural frameworks that analyze the intersection of gender with other social categories. Furthermore, postcolonial and trans national feminist critiques of patriarchal and Western biases in development focus on women's voices and gendered experiences from the Global South as a means of promoting inclusive and sustainable development. This discussion outlines the development of theories and approaches to key topics in this field that include economic globalization, community‐based initiatives, health and the environment, and future directions in gender and development.
Anthropogeomorphology
Authors: Hupy Joseph P.
Published: March 2017

Anthropogeomorphology refers to the study of humans as an agent of landscape change. Humans act as a geomorphic agent upon the landscape in both a direct and indirect manner. Direct actions of humans, through activities such as agriculture, mining, construction, and war, have left lasting imprints on the landscape. Indirectly, the consequences of human activities heavily influence the natural geomorphic agents of wind, water, gravity, ice, plants, and animals. An increasing body of research is demonstrating just how profound an agent anthropogeomorphic forces are in the study of geomorphology.
Glacier Lake Outburst Floods
Authors: Frey Holger
Published: March 2017

The globally observed retreat of mountain glaciers is often accompanied by the formation of new glacier lakes. Such lakes are attractive new landscape elements, but they also have the potential for catastrophic drainage, so‐called glacier lake outburst floods. In order to assess the hazard potential of glacier lakes, interacting processes in complex and dynamic environments need to be considered and understood. Today, most situations are beyond historical precedence, but experiences from past events and new model approaches offer valuable tools for assessing the hazard potential of glacier lakes. Different possibilities for mitigation and adaptation exist to lower the risk of glacier lake outburst floods.
Oceans and Climate
Authors: Han Weiqing
Published: March 2017

The World Ocean covers approximately 71% of the Earth's surface, and its saline water comprises 97.5% of the Earth's hydrosphere. Ocean circulation and seawater properties are changing, due to forcing by the varying surface wind and buoyancy flux associated with climate variability and change. The recently detected ocean surface freshening in the tropics and salting in the subtropics indicate an intensified hydrological cycle. The global upper‐ocean warming and sea level rise in the past century, particularly since the 1950s, result partly from increased anthropogenic greenhouse gases. The increased uptake of carbon dioxide (CO
2
) from the atmosphere makes the ocean more acidic; this is known as acidification. On the other hand, the ocean has an enormous heat capacity and thus plays a crucial role in regulating global climate. Interactions between the ocean and atmosphere are responsible for important global climate phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).
Spatial Database
Authors: Schneider Markus
Published: March 2017

A
spatial database system
is a full‐fledged database system with additional capabilities to represent, store, manage, and query
spatial objects
, that is, geometric entities embedded in space. Spatial objects represent two‐dimensional points, lines, and regions. But increasingly, also more complex geometric structures, such as three‐dimensional objects, spatial networks, and spatial subdivisions, can be handled. A spatial database system provides the complete data management infrastructure for processing large volumes of spatial data and is the spatial data provider for many geospatial applications such as geographical information systems and spatial analysis packages. Its main features are the definition of
spatial data types
to represent different kinds of spatial objects, the introduction of
spatial operations
and
spatial predicates
to process and check the properties of spatial objects, the embedding of these concepts into
spatial query languages
, and
spatial index structures
enabling fast access to spatial objects. The discussion here focuses on user aspects and does not consider implementation aspects.
Geography Education: Digital and Online Trends
Authors: DeMers Michael N.
Published: March 2017

The landscape of learning is changing to include both blended and fully online course delivery as a result of the changing needs of the learner and the increasing availability of knowledge via the World Wide Web. This change requires rethinking the methods of delivery from passive content delivery to active learning methods necessitating a threefold interaction between learner and content, learner and learner, and learner and educator. Fortunately, with rapid advances in learning management technology and associated social and multimedia software, there are even more opportunities for such interactions than in face‐to‐face settings. While some teaching circumstances are unique to geography and other laboratory and field‐related courses, many of these can be accommodated in creative approaches and blended learning. Beyond that, the digital tools available both for online learning and for geography itself provide many opportunities for extraordinary learning experiences not otherwise available. Future technical advances will support the ready incorporation of immersive virtual worlds, game‐based learning, and possibly even the development of a new generation of learning management systems that support these technologies directly.
Machine Learning
Authors: Xiao Ningchuan
Published: March 2017

Machine learning is a research field in artificial intelligence and statistics that an aims to develop computational methods that can be used to learn from data and to predict with new data. Many machine learning methods, such as decision trees and support vector machine, have been developed. In geography, machine learning methods are used in areas such as remote sensing, cartography, spatial analysis and modeling, spatial decision‐making, and geographic information systems.
Atmospheric/General Circulation
Authors: Knox John A. , Knox Pamela N.
Published: March 2017

The general circulation of the Earth's atmosphere is the large‐scale flow of winds across the planet, including both time and space variations. The traditional view of the general circulation has been a three‐cell structure with Hadley, Ferrel, and polar cells. Modern research has revised this view. Spatial asymmetries at the Earth's surface, such as mountain regions, give rise to monsoon circulations. Interannual variations also occur, the most notable being the El Niño Southern Oscillation across the equatorial Pacific, which affects weather and climate globally. Other oscillations related to atmosphere–ocean interactions and/or tropical convection exist at a range of timescales, from intra‐annual to multidecadal. General circulation oscillations on the timescales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years are tied to changes in the Earth's orbital characteristics, such as the tilt of the Earth and the shape of its orbit.
Groundwater
Authors: Brands Edwin , Rajagopal Raj , Eleswarapu Usha , Li Peter
Published: March 2017

Water below the land surface, both from unsaturated and saturated zones, is referred to as groundwater. This source is estimated to contain more than 100 times that available from streams and freshwater lakes. Since groundwater is difficult to observe and track directly, monitoring, modeling, and mapping are crucial to its shared and sustainable use. Uneven distribution of human populations, and industrial and agricultural development, combined with variations in availability and accessibility to groundwater have resulted in overexploitation and contamination of several major aquifers leading to numerous local, regional, and international conflicts. Unconventional fossil fuel exploration and extraction, contamination from underground storage tanks and industrial activities, uneven agricultural withdrawals, natural pollution from arsenic, and global climate change have led to numerous social and political conflicts at various spatial and temporal scales. Development of institutional capacity to deal with such conflicts is urgently needed.
Corporations and Local States
Authors: Featherstone David , MacKinnon Danny
Published: March 2017

This entry engages with some of the key ways in which the relations between corporations and local states have been understood by economic and political geographers. We trace the emergence of research on the corporations–local states nexus in relation to debates on local economic development. We explore how these concerns have developed to cover a broader range of state practices, corporate strategies, and forms of social and political mobilization and struggles. The entry focuses in turn on the relations between corporations, local state strategies, and subnational economic development in the Global North; work on the intersections between labor, corporations, and local state practices in the Global South; and debates on social movements, resistance, and corporations which can link contexts in the Global North and South.
Geography Education: Primary and Secondary
Authors: Stoltman Joseph P.
Published: March 2017

Geography was one of the first subjects taught in primary and secondary education, along with reading and mathematics. From those curricular roots, the role of geography in primary and secondary schools globally has largely been influenced by European education, especially during the expansive colonial periods of European countries. At times geography has experienced periods of immense popularity and at other times it has taken a backseat within primary and secondary education. This entry reviews trends and discusses the current state of the discipline's role in primary and secondary education. Geography's inclusion in the social studies curriculum in the United States was a major change during the twentieth century, and similar changes are occurring in the curricula of other countries in the twenty‐first century. Geo‐educators are working to maintain an equitable presence with other core subjects of the social studies curriculum. National examinations that include geography provide the discipline with a necessary presence. Geospatial technology provides an entry to the use of geography by students both in and outside school. Rigorous content courses such as Advanced Placement Human Geography (APHG) and the International Baccalaureate (IB) have also helped to raise the academic profile of geography in primary and secondary education.
Indigenous People and Regional Development
Authors: Winchell Dick G.
Published: March 2017

Indigenous peoples around the world face tremendous challenges from globalization as they struggle to maintain the unique cultures, structures of governance, and identities within their specific tribal contexts of meaning. For the Indigenous peoples of the United States, sovereign tribal governments have been the mechanism for new directions for American Indian reservations. Access to their own revenues from tribal casinos has led to successful businesses, governments, and a resurgence through investment in Indigenous knowledge and language, wellness, and sustainable reservation economies. American Indian tribes remain, and now seek to escape dependence on the federal government to achieve seven‐generation (150‐year) plans and strategies for their own people for successful regional development. This entry focuses on regional development in terms of American Indian success in tribal governance, economic and regional development, and reinvestment in land, resources, cultural knowledge, and wellness.
Environment and Consumption
Authors: Pottinger Laura
Published: March 2017

Patterns of human consumption have numerous well‐documented negative consequences for the environment. Consumption practices aiming (or claiming) to be more environmentally or socially responsible are variously referred to as “ethical,” “green,” “sustainable,” or “political” and also as “alternative.” “Green consumption” is one popular solution to the environmentally harmful impacts of contemporary lifestyles. In theory, it works by connecting together the disparate purchases and everyday actions of individual consumers to form a political voice capable of persuading irresponsible corporations or governments to clean up. Other forms of “alternative” consumption try to address the dislocation of today's consumers from production and disposal by providing information or promoting locally made products. However, critics suggest that consumer capitalism and environmentalism are fundamentally irreconcilable and that polluting corporations exploit the ideals of ethical consumerism to “greenwash” brand images and to create new niche markets.
Geography of Education and Educational Systems
Authors: Meusburger Peter
Published: March 2017

The geography of education and educational systems deals with the causes and consequences of spatial variations in the provision and consumption of education; the impact of local milieus and of social and cultural environments on educational attainment; spatial variations in the sociodemographic structure of the teaching profession; the influence that political systems, educational policies, and demographic change have on location patterns of schools and universities; the spatial mobility of scholars, students, and ideas; and other issues where places, spatial relations, and social environments have an impact on educational processes. In a knowledge society, the educational system is an important sounding board of societal and economic structures and processes. Various indicators of educational attainment and achievement are used to uncover social and economic inequalities, and to display unequal power relations.
Neoliberalism
Authors: Peck Jamie
Published: March 2017

As a synonym for free‐market governance, neoliberalism refers to a programmatic set of pro‐market policy measures; to a rationality of small‐government transformation; to a political‐economic philosophy of “market fundamentalism”; and to a historically ascendant ideology (and pattern) of capitalist development. Even as the reach of neoliberalism is extensive, the process of neoliberalization does not foretell equilibrium or convergence, since it is (only) found in states of contradictory, incomplete, and uneven development. A stylized historical geography of the moving landscapes of neoliberalization is outlined, understood as both a challenge and a spur to evolving theoretical conceptions. Although it is widely used in critical circles, the analytical purpose and status of neoliberalism nevertheless remains contested.
Wetland Biogeography
Authors: Melton Joe R.
Published: March 2017

Wetlands are a unique ecosystem adapted to conditions of saturated soils that connect upland and deep‐water ecosystems. Wetlands cover about 5–8% of the Earth's surface, but are disproportionately important in providing unique habitats for large numbers of plant and animal species, storing immense amounts of carbon, and providing ecosystem services such as flood mitigation, water quality improvement, and coastal protection. Despite the great benefits of wetlands, they have been heavily impacted by human land use with approximately 50% of wetlands in populated regions drained, degraded, or filled in for purposes such as agriculture, mosquito control, forestry, or settlement. Wetlands can be difficult to categorize with some ambiguity in terms used, however, they are generally divided into three groups: coastal wetlands (including saltwater marshes, tidal freshwater marshes, and mangrove swamps), freshwater marshes and swamps, and peatlands (including bogs and fens).
Social‐Ecological Transformation
Authors: Brand Ulrich , Wissen Markus
Published: March 2017

“Social‐ecological transformation” is an umbrella term which describes recent political, socioeconomic, and cultural shifts resulting from attempts to address the social‐ecological crisis. On the one hand, think tanks and international organizations have issued reports which provide for an interpretation of the crisis and propose ways out of it. Their common denominator is that economic growth can be reconciled with social and environmental objectives. On the other hand, there is an academic debate in progress which at least in part addresses the crisis in more fundamental ways, challenging not only existing technologies and market structures, but also the underlying patterns of production and consumption. It is informed by social ecology, practice theory and political ecology. This entry presents these two strands of the debate and suggests a combination of political ecology and critical political economy as a means for better understanding the crisis and for informing the emancipatory strategies designed to address it.
Environment and Development
Authors: Himley Matthew
Published: March 2017

The environment–development nexus has long been of interest to geographers, especially political ecologists. This entry addresses a series of themes at the core of geographical scholarship on environment and development, including the role of natural resource mobilization in development; the social and ecological contradictions of traditional, resource‐intensive development; the rise of the sustainable development paradigm; the turn to “bottom‐up” development policies; “livelihoods” as a central analytical category in research; and the relevance of social and environmental difference in environment and development dynamics. The entry concludes by discussing two topics that are likely to attract greater scholarly attention in upcoming years: corporate‐led development and degrowth.
Urban Climatology
Authors: Voogt James A.
Published: March 2017

Human settlement, through the development of towns and cities, affects both the properties of the surface and that of the atmosphere above them. Urban regions therefore develop distinct urban climates in which the mean characteristics of the atmosphere within, above, and downwind of cities are modified by the city and constitute an unintentional modification of the climate. Urban climates are a local‐scale phenomenon that must consider the regional‐scale climate imposed by the topographic location of the city and the macroscale climate setting. Understanding urban climates is important because they provide a basis for minimizing negative effects of cities on their local climate and maximizing positive aspects that can improve the environmental quality and sustainability of the city.
Transportation History
Authors: Tam Ka‐chai
Published: March 2017

Transportation history focuses on technological innovations and their impacts on mobility, the economy, and society. Three key transport innovations took place before the Industrial Revolution: the mastery of wind power in river and maritime transport; the employment of animal power for land transport; and the invention of the wheel. The increase of speed and capacity of passenger and freight transport not only influenced trade and production patterns, but was also crucial to immigration and empire building. The Industrial Revolution brought steam power, the internal combustion engine, and electric power as technologies supporting the development of transportation systems such as maritime shipping, railways, highways, and then air transportation.
Spatial Crowdsourcing
Authors: Shahabi Cyrus
Published: March 2017

Spatial crowdsourcing engages individuals, groups, and communities in the act of collecting, analyzing, and disseminating urban, social, and other spatiotemporal information. This new paradigm of data collection has been shown to be useful when traditional means fail (e.g., due to disaster), are censored, or do not scale in time and space. The wide applicability of spatial crowdsourcing primarily became possible due to the broad availability of mobile devices. With spatial crowdsourcing, the goal is to efficiently outsource a set of spatiotemporal tasks (i.e., tasks related to time and location) to a set of workers, which requires the workers to perform the tasks by physically traveling to those locations. Hence, spatial crowdsourcing strategies must be designed to take advantage of large populations of human workers for ad hoc spatiotemporal tasks – they must consider the environment's dynamism (i.e., tasks and workers come and go) and scale as well as user considerations such as trust (i.e., not all workers are trustworthy) and privacy (i.e., not all workers want to share their location information). Here efficient spatial crowdsourcing task assignment strategies considering both trust and privacy are discussed.
Fuzzy Classification and Reasoning
Authors: Dragicevic Suzana
Published: March 2017

The issues of error, uncertainty, and representations in geospatial data have also increased the demand to use fuzzy set theory so as to better characterize the real nature of geographical boundaries and phenomena. This entry provides a summary of fuzzy sets and their application in a geospatial data context. Fuzzy classification and reasoning are elaborated and supported with relevant studies from the published literature.
Spatial Context
Authors: McLafferty Sara
Published: March 2017

A rapidly expanding body of research investigates how social and environmental processes are shaped by the local settings in which they occur. These local settings – spatial contexts – are increasingly studied and modeled using geospatial data and methods. This entry summarizes opportunities and challenges for spatial contextual research. It reviews how spatial contexts are modeled, highlighting advances such as modeling of contexts in space and time, and real‐time monitoring of contexts using GPS‐enabled devices. Innovative efforts to model spatial contextual effects through local spatial analysis methods, and multilevel and context‐aware modeling are also discussed.
Critical Spatial Thinking
Authors: Sinton Diana S.
Published: March 2017

Critical spatial thinking incorporates spatial concepts and geographic principles to guide and inform reasoning. The regular practices of critical thinking are applied within a context or situation involving geographic information, whether the thinker is the producer or consumer of such information. By applying knowledge of scale, location, distance, and other spatial concepts and notions, a critical spatial thinker understands problems, derives solutions, and communicates effectively about geographic processes, patterns, and outcomes. Different approaches to reasoning are strengthened and informed by following principles of critical spatial thinking. Decision‐makers who rely on critical spatial thinking acknowledge and mitigate uncertainty associated with their situation or problem, practice the tenets of visual and media literacy most often associated with map‐reading and interpretation, and use location‐based information in a reflexive and deliberate manner.
Political Ecology and Scale
Authors: Turner Matthew D.
Published: March 2017

“Scale” can be seen as size, level, or relation. The scales of observation and socioecological process play important roles in shaping human–environment relations and research. Political ecology, through its embrace of analyses of human–environment relations at multiple scales, has, despite its early dependence on scalar hierarchies, contributed much to our understandings of the malleability of scale. Political ecology's treatment of scale in analyses of environmental governance is examined with a particular focus on observational scale as size and knowledge politics; scale as level and the politics of scale; and scale as relation and the production of scale.
Freshwater Resources: Past, Present, Future
Authors: Petersen Lene , Heynen Martin , Pellicciotti Francesca
Published: March 2017

Freshwater is a crucial resource for human life and natural systems. It is defined as water containing less than 500 ppm of dissolved salts and constitutes only 2.5% of the total water on earth. Most is stored in ice caps, soil moisture, and groundwater reservoirs, and only a small percentage is accessible for sustainable uses (in lakes, rivers, shallow reservoirs). Freshwater availability changed during human history as a result of increasing drainage and diversions for agriculture as well as impounds and other constructions for hydropower use and flood control. Despite its apparent scarcity, it is of fundamental importance for every form of life and its availability is threatened by climate change and other human pressures. It is now recognized that measures to globally protect freshwater ecosystems and the services they provide are needed. However, competition exists between human and environmental needs, which form part of an ongoing debate.
Privacy, Personal Privacy
Authors: Dowling Robyn
Published: March 2017

Personal privacy is a historically recent phenomenon that is dynamic and context‐specific. Geographical understandings of personal privacy highlight its strong relations to home and the domestic sphere, as well as technologies and personal experiences. Modern communication technologies like social networking and wireless connectivity are changing the places and character of personal privacy.
Fragmentation of Production
Authors: Xin Tong
Published: March 2017

The term “fragmentation of production” describes the distribution of the production process across different countries. As a result of the fragmentation of production, traded products increasingly contain parts and components from more than one country, as does the associated value added. This leads to the fast growth of intermediate inputs in international trade, in terms of both goods and services. Fragmentation has grown rapidly in industries such as electronics, machinery, and textiles and apparel, in which multinational companies play a key role in the formation and organization of the global production network. Various disciplines have tried to explain this phenomenon from different perspectives, such as the feasibility of coordinating disintegrated production across distance provided by technological advances, as well as organizational and institutional settings that enable such arrangements. Empirical studies on fragmentation contribute to the development of trade theories.
Infrastructure and Regional Development
Authors: Haynes Kingsley E. , Chen Zhenhua
Published: March 2017

The relationship between infrastructure and regional development is an important public policy issue. It is central to decision‐making in relation to public investment in infrastructure improvements. Understanding the linkage between infrastructure and regional development requires not only knowledge of the impact mechanisms and appropriate economic theories, but also appreciation of geographic and spatial analysis. This survey of work on the relationship between infrastructure and regional development deals successively with some definitions, the mechanisms linking infrastructure and regional development, the methods of impact assessment, and some of the major issues confronting the analysis of causality, scale, and spillover effects.
Health Systems
Authors: Rosenberg Mark W.
Published: March 2017

Health systems are generally among the most complex public, private, or not‐for‐profit systems in a country. Their complexity stems from competing theoretical perspectives, the goals of the health system, the legislative and regulatory frameworks in which they are constituted, the people who provide the services within them, where those services are provided, and the totality of the services. An alternative way of conceptualizing health systems is to think about them in terms of the underlying values on which they are based. From the definition of legislative frameworks to how and where services are provided, to the values that underlie them, health systems are manifestly geographically expressed and infused with geographic issues.
Uneven Regional Development
Authors: Peck Jamie
Published: March 2017

A foundational concept in political‐economic geography, as well as a stubborn fact of life, uneven regional development refers not just to geographical inequality but to the mutual interdependence of localized growth and decline, to exploitative relations between regions of the core and the periphery, to conjuncturally specific positions within spatial divisions of labor, and to qualitatively differentiated modes of dis/connection to global value chains. The origins of the concept of uneven development can be traced to the political theory of Leon Trotsky. After some decades in the wilderness, the concept was rediscovered and repurposed by Marxian geographers, who called attention to its necessary (but far from predictable or singular) role in capitalist development. Recognition of uneven regional development, both theoretically and empirically, has in different ways acquired almost canonical status across the pluralist field of economic geography, having even earned a more circumscribed place in orthodox geographical economics.
Rent Gap
Authors: Addie Jean‐Paul D.
Published: March 2017

The rent gap refers to the difference between the capitalized rent realized from a plot of land and the potential rent possible if it were developed to its “highest and best” use. Introduced by Neil Smith in 1979, the rent gap provides a systematic production‐side theory of urban rent and inner‐city transformation. The concept has been critiqued, however, for dismissing the role of individual agents and consumption preferences in explanatory accounts of gentrification.
Scarcity
Authors: Sayre Nathan F.
Published: March 2017

Scarcity is commonly associated today with shortages of food and natural resources, but its importance in the social sciences is both broader and more profound than this suggests. It emerged as a concept in the late eighteenth century, intimately connected to anxieties about the causes and consequences of high food prices amid growing poverty. Some viewed food scarcity as the result of natural events that damaged crops, while others blamed social factors related to commerce and interstate conflict. How to understand and govern the market provided the backdrop for all these debates, and, as capitalist markets expanded and deepened their reach over the ensuing centuries, scarcity – both as idea and as reality – became a defining characteristic of modernity, even as economic production outpaced human population growth. Several important areas of contemporary social scientific inquiry share common origins in this history, including modern economics, which takes scarcity as its fundamental theoretical premise; Malthusian and neo‐Malthusian ideas about population growth, natural resources, and the environment; and Foucauldian theories of modern power and governmentality. Marxian approaches represent a response or counterpoint to these literatures insofar as surplus replaces scarcity as a key category for social theory.