Geographical Research最新文献

In multifunctional rural regions, strong commercial incentives exist for agricultural landholders to convert their land from farming to residential, lifestyle, and tourist land uses. In Australia, those regions mainly comprise coastal, peri-urban, and high-amenity rural areas. The pace and pattern of land-use conversion in these regions is shaped by the interaction of landholders with land-use planning regulations, notably minimum lot size (MLS) controls. This paper examines that interface in a deep dive into the role of land-use planning controls in shaping the future of farming in an area of rapid rural change, the Ballina-Lismore region in northern New South Wales. We argue that although planning controls in the region are designed to protect land for agriculture by curbing pressures for suburbanisation, they have also inadvertently contributed to the proliferation of unplanned rural living. This proliferation has occurred because MLS controls have incentivised agricultural landholders to sidestep restrictions on subdivision by exploiting concessions and flexibility in some of the controls and have forced some nonagricultural buyers of rural land to acquire bigger holdings than they may have otherwise desired, hence “sterilising” these agricultural-zoned landholdings from farming. We conclude that to better protect agriculture in multifunctional rural regions, land-use planning needs to look beyond deterrence mechanisms, such as MLS restrictions, and towards planning incentives to promote farming on agricultural-zoned land.

We verified a method of acquiring digital surface models of steep, forested, small watershed topography, where real-time kinematic processing is difficult because of the presence of interfering objects. Our approach involved using an uncrewed aerial vehicle with a built-in global navigation satellite system, which reduces time and labour costs. We tested the applicability of structure-from-motion multi-view stereo processing, and post-processing motion corrections of positional coordinate data were also tested. Nine verification points were established in a small 0.5 km² watershed, with check dams established in the headwaters of the forested area. The position accuracy and overall working time of verification points extracted by the method were compared with the position accuracy and work time obtained by a field survey using a conventional total station. The results show that the vertical error between the total station and each verification point at an altitude of 150 m ranged from 0.006 to 0.181 m. The working time of the survey was 13% of that of the total station survey. The proposed workflow shows that safe and non-destructive topographic surveying, including fluvial geomorphological mapping, is possible with a vertical error of ±0.103 m in small watersheds. This method will be useful for rapid topographic surveying in inaccessible areas during disasters, namely, debris flow monitoring at check dam sites and efficient topographic mapping of steep valleys in forested areas where positioning ground control points is laborious. It should also be of widespread interest to geographers working with spatial challenges related to land management.

In response to the acute public health crisis of COVID-19 in 2020 and 2021, governments in Australia and around the world rushed to institute technologies to track human bodies with “live” surveillance. In Australia, “lockdowns” halted human mobilities in all states for different periods, and technologies for tracking bodies and collecting data were introduced after and between physical lockdowns. In this article, we analyse both the monitoring technologies developed to contend with COVID-19 and the complex array of regulations and public health orders governing space and mobility in New South Wales and Sydney. Our focus on monitoring technologies is based on the COVIDSafe App (National) and the New South Wales COVIDSafe Check-in App. These apps enabled the surveillance of individual mobilities before their sudden demise apparently unrelated to the public health scenario at the time. We argue that these technologies are examples of sensory power which rapidly enrolled human bodies in systems of surveillance that were difficult to unravel through 2022 and beyond. Our focus on regulations and public health orders outlines the shifting legal geographies during public health crisis and the ways these were enacted as mobility restrictions, surveillance, and punishment in western Sydney. We argue that the scars of the peak pandemic will endure in particular locations and communities, signalling the persistence of sensory power beyond the life of specific COVID-19 tools.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted modern urban ecosystems on an unprecedented scale. Many urban scholars have undertaken the challenge of documenting and analysing how this global health crisis has been experienced and coped with, resulting in a surge of studies on its impact on various cityscapes and domains of urban life. In this paper, we present findings from a scoping review of 138 articles on this subject published between the outbreak of the pandemic and the end of June 2022. Our review showcases scholarly accounts of cascading shifts that have occurred within urban ecosystems and provides a better understanding of conceptual and methodological alterations in research approaches. Because both the investigated impacts and the research strategies deal primarily with the consequences of losing the pre-pandemic spatial, temporal, social, cultural, and political frames of reference, we adopt transdisciplinary disorientation theories as the review’s interpretive framework. This step proves to be fruitful in mapping and interpreting crises and breakdowns and also in revealing how an unexpected planetary ordeal has reoriented pre-pandemic trends in urban development and transformed cities and urban life alike. We suggest that the disorienting pandemic experience can serve as a potent legacy for urban futures. However, the scale and distribution of post-pandemic reorientations across European cities and their residents cannot yet be fully comprehended.

Humanitarian migration to Australia has reached new levels, accompanied by unprecedented complexity and diversity. Little is known about labour market integration for these newcomers, nor about how well their skills match those required for or relevant to their employment. Here we analyse how labour force engagement and skill alignment are influenced by migration status, including migration scheme, region of birthplace, applicant status, year of arrival, citizenship, and internal migration after settlement, and metropolitan versus regional geographic location of settlement. In particular, we focus on employed humanitarian visa holders who arrived between 2000 and 2016. Using the 2016 Australian Census and Migrants Integrated Dataset (ACMID) for quantitative analysis, our modelling established that they were not as likely to be in the labour force as skilled visa holders. Similarly, humanitarian visa holders who were employed were less likely to be in jobs that matched their skills and more likely to have lower income levels. Moreover, there were significant differences in skill alignment between those settling in metropolitan and in regional areas. The relative probability of being over-skilled was correlated with migration scheme, origin, duration since arrival, internal movement in the year preceding the census, proficiency in spoken English, family status, and gender. Labour market outcomes varied by visa subtype and by metropolitan versus regional settlement. We conclude that the design of migration policy requires further important consideration, both to improve the outlook for this vulnerable population and to address chronic skill shortages in Australia.

Sexual harassment and gang rape in Egypt have garnered attention from both traditional and digital media. This study employed a volunteer HarassMap to analyse sexual harassment crimes (SHCs) across Egypt from a spatial perspective. The specific aims were to apply the Hierarchical Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (HDBSCAN) algorithm to locate clusters of reported SHCs, and to assess their spatial dependence on land use types. To accomplish this task, ring buffers of 100, 200, 300, 400, and 500 metres were established around each crime scene to determine which land use was mostly associated with the incidence of these SHCs. Local bivariate relationships were used to explore the associations between SHC and each land-use category. Results from the HDBSCAN algorithm revealed four crime clusters within the study domain, mainly located in Greater Cairo, Alexandria, and Behaira. Notably, commercial establishments and transit stations showed a significantly positive correlation with SHC. The study shows how land uses shape SHC and showed that it is possible to identify environmental risk factors for harassment. These risk factors can help policymakers, urban planners, and community stakeholders prevent and reduce sexual harassment and gender inequality, and promote just and inclusive societies.

This paper contributes to debates about the globalisation of higher education by providing a pioneering geographical exploration of Chinese–foreign cooperation in running transnational higher education, or TNHE, programs. Departing from widespread neoliberal and postcolonial critiques of TNHE, which tend to emphasise liberal market forces and Anglo-American hegemony in the circulation of academic knowledge, our study examines how the Chinese state’s developmental targets, strategic policies, and political–ideological considerations have shaped the evolutionary trajectory, geographical distribution, and cross-border connections of China’s TNHE programs. We demonstrate that the place-based development of TNHE is mediated by governments’ interventionist policies and embedded in existing higher education regimes, especially in the context of East Asian developmental states. By maintaining a higher education system dominated by public universities and by being the ultimate examination and approval authority, the Chinese government both determines the status of TNHE in the national higher education system, constrains the typologies and sources of knowledge flows, and shapes the national landscape of TNHE development. The territorial geographies of TNHE thus reflect complicated interactions between the state and the market, the global and the local, and economic and political/cultural forces.