Canadian Geographer-Geographe Canadien最新文献

Walking is a healthy, sustainable, and economical form of transportation or recreation. Yet in North America walking is not always accessible, safe, or comfortable. A challenge to creating quality pedestrian environments is lack of data on what barriers exist and how barriers vary across communities. Our goal is to characterize pedestrian barriers and concerns at the microscale level. We analyzed 2,588 reports of hazards, missing amenities, or incidents from WalkRollMap.org, a crowdsourced webmap of barriers to walking or rolling. We assigned themes related to actionable infrastructure interventions and summarized data by location, walkability, street type, and characteristics of who reported it (age, gender, and self-reported disability). Most reports were related to crossings (45%), sidewalk quality (29%), and the volume and speed of cars (13%). Reports were more common in more walkable places (likely related to exposure) and on major roads. People living with a disability reported sidewalk concerns at a higher rate than others, while people over 75 years of age were more likely to identify issues related to the volume and speed of cars. Cities should prioritize risk reduction interventions for pedestrian road crossings and sidewalk improvements, especially on major roads in amenity dense walkable places.

Development of high-resolution temperature models in mountain environments must include consideration of the influence of complex topography and seasonality on thermal distribution across horizontal and vertical scales. Small-bodied organisms, including arthropods, in montane and alpine ecosystems inhabit environments for which local microclimate and heat transfer is especially important. We developed and applied high-resolution air and surface temperature models for a remote mountain environment using in-situ data for interpolation procedures in ArcGIS Pro. This approach requires recording directional and time-period specific lapse rates to aid in the development of air temperature models. Also examined is the offset between air temperature and surface temperature and to what extent air temperature alone is a reliable indicator of ground-level thermal conditions. We describe an environmentally inclusive surface temperature modelling method that allows for the addition of explanatory layers (landcover, elevation, aspect, slope, and topographic position index) aiding in the interpolation process. These models are used to delineate thermally defined ecological zones and model unique thermal properties of relevance to arthropods across the southern Alberta study area.

In government guidelines the strengthening of rural infrastructure is often seen as a central building block to create economically prosperous, well-developed rural regions and to support the well-being of local communities. We challenge this assumption by analyzing the subjective handling of infrastructures in a remote rural area in British Columbia, Canada. Based on the analysis of empirical material from photography-supported interviews, we argue that fully capturing the influence of infrastructures on local communities requires a relational approach to infrastructures understood as infrastructuring. Derived from the conceptualization of infrastructuring in science and technology studies, we developed the notion of infrastructural autonomy. With the notion of infrastructural autonomy, we are able to outline our findings that subjective and place-sensitive handlings of infrastructures promote gains in personal ontological security. Based on our qualitative study, we argue that a closer examination of the subjective relation between a place, its infrastructure, and its inhabitants is crucial to understand the infrastructural needs of a place as well as the well-being of its users.

Development is not a set of performative actions. Rather, it is produced and reproduced over the years as a discourse (in the Foucauldian sense) that operates through a variety of categories of knowledge. In this way, development is a set of socio-political and economic beliefs—an undeniable truth—that is exported to Pakistan through international institutions and technocrats. This paper attempts to understand the dissemination of development in Pakistan by focusing on the constructivist tendencies of development that employ various discursive strategies and language techniques to naturalize the socio-economic and political hierarchies both socially and spatially. Taking the planning and development of Islamabad—a model urban settlement and a crown jewel of development in the country's history—as the case study, this research finds that various labels, linguistics contrasts, othering, and socio-economic hierarchies were constructed and employed to construct the socio-materiality of development as a natural order of things. This developmentality (drawing on Foucault's governmentality) is found in more than 150 planning and policy-related documents from 1957 to 2018, showing the patronization and reproduction of power hierarchies, inequalities, exclusion, discrimination, and control.

The workplace is a key space where LGBTQ+ people face discrimination leading to mental health distress. This paper shows how spatial attributes of work shape experiences and perceptions of discrimination and mental health distress. Building on minority stress theory, we demonstrate how spatial attributes of work can cause, amplify, or mitigate mental health distress among LGBTQ+ people through direct and indirect mechanisms, such as anticipated discrimination, perceived discrimination, and the availability of coping devices. Our findings suggest that understanding the connection between workplace discrimination and poor mental health requires a more nuanced understanding of the workplace, highlighting how workplace stressors are simultaneously emplaced in and exceed the spatiotemporal bounds of the workplace.

Personal protective equipment (PPE) is critical among healthcare professionals, considering that it serves as the first line of defense against infectious diseases and hazards in the healthcare environment. Therefore, the shortage of PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic exposed a unique vulnerability within the healthcare system, heightening the risk of infection among healthcare professionals. Despite this evidence, few studies have explored whether this negative impact of PPE scarcity extends to mental health among healthcare professionals in Canada. Using the Survey on Healthcare Workers' Experiences During the Pandemic conducted by Statistics Canada (n = 12,246), the current study aims to address this void by exploring the association between PPE shortages and two indicators of mental health—depression and general anxiety disorder. We found that 18% and 26% of healthcare professionals reported depression and general anxiety disorder, respectively. Results from logistic regression analyses indicate that healthcare professionals who faced at least one PPE restriction were more likely to report general anxiety disorder. Additionally, professionals who experienced four or more restrictions were more likely to report depression (OR = 1.28, p<0.01), compared to those who did not experience any restriction. Based on these findings, we discuss whether the stress and anxiety resulting from inadequate protection during the pandemic may point to the importance of understanding the broader implications of PPE shortages on the mental well-being of healthcare professionals. The current study highlighted that it is essential to craft evidence-based policies that not only prioritize the physical safety of healthcare professionals but also their mental well-being, ultimately strengthening the healthcare system's response to crises.