Geographical Research最新文献

International and national policies are being used to prioritise increases in urban forest coverage and diversity, support equitable access to urban greenspaces, and advance sound environmental governance outcomes. Yet, the relationship between people’s feelings about urban trees and public policy remains under-examined. Drawing on a unique dataset from an email-a-tree initiative, the objectives of this study were to identify how concern and connection for urban trees is expressed and determine how insights from the initiative might inform urban forest governance. We examined emails sent to trees using a mixed-methods approach that included qualitative coding, VADER sentiment analysis, and statistical and spatial analyses. We identified and considered three themes based on emails sent by members of the public and municipal tree inventory data. Those themes were location, age and loss, and type. In accord with other studies, overall sentiment for urban trees was positive and underscored people’s strong connections with trees, often based on routine and repeated engagements. However, people noticed and were concerned about a limited range of trees and tree types in urban settings. Based in Melbourne, Australia, our case study shows how examining feelings for trees helps residents and researchers understand urban tree relationships and gauge how those designing public engagement programs might learn from such an initiative to create meaningful opportunities for active participation in governance.

This paper starts from the point that our current political-economic-climate conjuncture demands new engagements at the dynamic interface of climate capitalism. Using two cases of climate capitalist responses to climate challenges, I demonstrate the reparative potentials that emerge from the tensions and ambiguities that typify that conjuncture. In the first case, I examine financialised climate infrastructure in Jakarta, Indonesia, that promises to protect the city from flooding while enriching city elites, but against which diverse social movements and collectives have organised. The second case is about a cooperative energy provider in Australia, operating on the terrain of a neoliberalised electricity market and climate change, and working towards multifaceted repair by collectivising and redistributing surplus and modelling democratic engagement. Those involved in these vastly different cases both pursue repair and reparations through climate capitalist projects by reckoning with historical and present climate debts while constructing forward-looking programs. As such, they chart the first steps towards reparative climate futures.

Planning policy for parks is typically guided by a standard approach that fails to account for how communities actually use parks. Moreover, few researchers know the exact parks people use, even though “use” is often hypothesised in the relationships being tested. Public participatory geographic information systems (PPGISs) present an opportunity to collect specific, spatially referenced information on park use and park-based activities. However, the reliability of these instruments has not been studied. The Park Life PPGIS captured residential location, park location, and park-based behavioural data from a sample of adults and was tested for reliability. Kappa scores and intra-class correlations assessed the reliability of the items. Recall of individual items all showed acceptable reliability and mostly achieved “substantial” agreement or “near-perfect” agreement. The Park Life PPGIS is a reliable instrument to capture park use and activities. Such information is essential for public health and physical activity researchers, urban planners, and park managers to develop informed planning and public health policies and programs that promote park use.

Hong Kong citizens’ sense of belonging has gone through a period of fluctuation during the period of rapid socio-political and legal change since the outbreak of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement in 2019. This study explored how multiple dimensions of the place attachment of Hong Kong citizens have been shaped by factors associated with these changes. Six socio-political variables were incorporated into the three dimensions of the person–process–place (PPP) framework. Based on a representative survey of the local population (n = 768), we found that political inclination and identity were significantly associated with the sense of place, with citizens identifying as Chinese and aligning with the pro-establishment camp showing higher levels of place attachment. Mobility was negatively associated with place attachment, whereas the correlation between attachment and perceptions of the law and legal system was positive. The study has implications for Hong Kong’s current socio-political and institutional environment and for emigration. It also demonstrates the wider applicability of the PPP framework for identifying and clarifying the various predictors of different dimensions of place attachment.

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.