Geographical Research最新文献

Late last year, it was gently suggested to me that I take some leave. In fact, it was suggested that my leave liability might be worth reducing significantly and, generously, I was given until December 2025 to get there. I love my work, but I appreciate that the advice given was important. So I took a full month from mid-December 2023 to mid-January 2024 and gardened, went on a small beach holiday with family and friends, and immersed myself in long walks—some of which were peppered with music and some of which were silent. More leave is planned.

As it happens, returning to a practice I have not observed for some years, on most of my walks I listened to various podcasts focused on one of my key and longstanding personal passions and hobbies—the relationship of food, nutrition, and health to our ways of being and flourishing in the world over the life-course. Those who know me know that this orientation might border on … well … working!

Either way, still “hooked” on three particular podcasts by mid-January, I then returned, first, to the computer in my home office and thereafter to my two hot-desks at the University of Tasmania’s Sandy Bay and Hobart CBD campuses. But by then, as a result of the insights gained from listening to about 200 h of material, I had comprehensively rethought my relationship with food and reshaped the geographies both of home—planting, harvesting, cooking, and processing—and of shopping and procurement. My impulse has nothing to do with any article that follows this editorial in our first issue for 2024, but it is informed by a strong desire to see work in this journal focused on food geographies and food futures. (Given the press of time—being on leave, I left my editorial until the eleventh hour, and the production team needed it last week—I will be brief at this juncture and my comments imply no judgement of others’ health and wellbeing practices.).

So what is my point? Simply this: Because of that aforesaid longstanding interest in nutrition and health over the life-course, for years I have approached food and eating as experiments in self-care; I am my own highly adherent guinea-pig, if you like. Of course, I do consult my GP, a functional and integrative medical expert with additional formal qualifications in biochemistry. I keep records. In my leisure time, I read scholarly papers from medical and nutrition journals and—in all likelihood—am a nerdy about it all, and I guess I thought I had nailed “it.”

But new findings, including from large, randomised control trials such as that by Lee et al. (2022), include insights about the deleterious effects of ultra-processed foods. Reading such studies has prompted four significant responses in me: (1) With my partner’s blessing and collaboration, I audited what we purchase and eat and then reshaped our food choices. (2) I have rediscovered fermenting and preserving and sought to do so on a budget to test, at least in my context, the

The inevitable mine lifecycle sequences of the mining industry and the eventual closure of mines has dramatic impacts on mining communities. The complexities of mine closure and planning for a different future beyond mining demand prescient preparation, preferably long before mines close, to optimise community participation in planning and enhance change management opportunities. Convincing others of the usefulness of imagining a future that is so different from the status quo is challenging, and it is especially difficult bringing an entire community on a long-term planning journey. The Shire of Coolgardie, a small Western Australian local government authority, has embarked on a long-term mission to build economic and social resilience, shoring up funds that will assist the Shire to ride out the inevitable mine lifecycle sequences of and diversify its income bases. This article builds an evidence-based approximation of the economic and social benefits of the initiatives accrued across the Shire, outlining the calculated risks taken by the Shire in its quest to ultimately reorient the local economy to one less dependent on mining income and employment. The article concludes with lessons learned and a discussion regarding the replicability of the successful initiatives for other local government authorities elsewhere, particularly in Australia where the legislative restrictions to generate own-source revenues are so severely limiting.

This study offers a discussion of the role of street music (busking) in urban public spaces using the lenses of performance theory and the theory of atmospheres in order to consider how street music and buskers shape the public space of a city. The study examines urban characters, soundscapes, emotions and affects, and atmospheres in relation to street musical performance. Explored in particular are the roles and processes of two levels of atmosphere—the atmospheric performance space and the atmosphere of a city. We take Guangzhou, China, as the case study and use questionnaires, in-depth interviews, and participant observation as research methods to reach three main findings. First, street music has growing influence and affects how urban public spaces are appropriated and managed. Second, street music performance shapes the atmospheric qualities of urban public space and in doing so sensorially invigorates and animates urban space. Third, street music contributes to the broader atmosphere of the city. Such an atmosphere, created by Guangzhou’s street music performances, that echoes Guangzhou’s characters as a free, down-to-earth, tolerant, and vibrant city can be felt and warms those who encounter it.

Australia has a hidden but growing problem with household food insecurity, revealing the failure of conventional food infrastructures to support human flourishing. Disruptions to employment and livelihoods due to pandemic lockdowns have exacerbated household food insecurity, evincing the uneven geography of food access in countries globally, including Australia. Increasing demand for food relief had been observed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and has been met by food relief providers, which we consider as infrastructures of care addressing growing levels of hunger. This paper reveals COVID-19’s many impacts on the food relief sector across Metropolitan Sydney, New South Wales. It analyses both a questionnaire of food relief providers in 2022 and media articles, social media posts, reports, and websites. It provides much-needed insights into the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on the demand for food, interruptions to food provisioning, changes to food supply, and alterations made to suppliers’ ways of operating. Those insights show how infrastructures of care are place-based, responsive, dynamic, and constrained by caring capacities. Such insights are increasingly important for understanding infrastructural failures, documenting the real extent of household food insecurity, and challenging dominant discourses of Australia as a food-secure nation.

An increasing number of urban residents in the Global South are turning to rooftop gardening, whether through soil or hydroponics, to cultivate their own vegetables, fruit, and herbs. In Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital, rooftop gardening serves as an important alternative to traditional wet markets and more recently established supermarkets. In this paper, we examine the motivations, practices, and constraints of Hanoi’s rooftop gardeners, along with the level of government support or disapproval for rooftop gardening. Our study is grounded in critical urban geography and urban political ecology and specific debates regarding informal life politics. Our findings reveal that Hanoi’s rooftop gardeners feel confronted by a critical food safety crisis, emphasising their need to access safe, fresh, and affordable produce through rooftop gardening. Simultaneously, they express scepticism about the capacity and willingness of formal political institutions at both the municipal and national levels to address and resolve these concerns. We explore whether Hanoi’s urban rooftop gardeners can be considered to be engaging in a form of everyday life politics and examine the dynamics emerging in this regard. We conclude by offering potential policy recommendations for Global South cities to support urban gardening communities.

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.