Geographical Journal最新文献

The aim of this study was to examine the effects of a disaster education intervention on children's risk perception and preparedness. It also sought to advance longitudinal studies, during an 18-month time period, of risk perception and preparedness by using a quasi-experimental methodology in child-centred disaster research. This study used a quasi-experimental longitudinal research design to measure the effects of disaster education on children. These effects were examined on children's risk perception and preparedness in the Van and Kocaeli provinces of Türkiye during the 18-month period, with a sample of 720 school children. Experimental and control groups were randomly allocated, controlling for age, school grade and school enrolment. The disaster education intervention was designed to improve the children's awareness of natural hazards and their knowledge of disaster risk reduction using discussion, visual materials and interactive teaching of emergency management. The results indicate that the disaster education intervention had a positive effect on children's risk perception and perceived importance of preparedness in both study locations. It also helped children to understand the risks and hazards in their living environments. More importantly, this study showed that disaster education enhanced the protective measures taken by children for disasters. This is the first study using the quasi-experimental longitudinal research design to measure the effects of disaster education on children's risk perception and the importance of preparedness. The findings are of relevance for organisations such as government departments and non-government organisations when designing or improving disaster education programmes.

Nation-wide cuts to bus subsidies have led to reduced service in rural communities in the UK, leaving those who do not have access to a car – most of whom are older, have a disability, or have a low income – with few other options to meet their travel needs. This has resulted in greater demand on community transport, small-scale, local, and community-based transport schemes that are run by the not-for-profit sector and are primarily volunteer-run. Drawing on 28 interviews conducted with volunteers and staff from community transport schemes across Oxfordshire, this paper describes the provision of community transport schemes at the intersection of informal transport and an ethics of care. This sector is posited as informal, however; unlike many informal transport schemes, community transport is non-entrepreneurial. Instead, these schemes emerge from the community and are care-driven. Volunteers who run these schemes all provide skilled labour that is a practice of caring about, caring for, or care giving. This framing highlights the undervaluing of community transport. Indeed, the labour and schemes are underfunded and lack recognition. This study therefore emphasises the socio-political nature of community transport and shows the importance of supporting caring transport services. It concludes by discussing how this undervalued sector might be re-valorised so that it can continue to support those with few other transport options.

This paper provides an analysis of working from home patterns in England using data from the 2021 Census to understand (1) how patterns of working from home (WFH) in England have shifted since the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) whether human mobility indicators, specifically Google Community Mobility Reports, provide a reliable proxy for WFH patterns recorded by the 2021 Census, providing a formal evaluation of the reliability of such datasets, whose applications have grown exponentially over the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that WFH patterns recorded by the 2021 Census were unique compared with previous UK censuses, reflecting an unprecedented increase likely caused by persistent changes to employment during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a clear social gradient emerging across the country. We also find that Google mobility in ‘Residential’ and ‘Workplace’ settings provides a reliable measurement of the distribution of WFH populations across Local Authorities, with varying uncertainties for mobility indicators collected in different settings. These findings provide insights into the utility of such datasets to support population research in intercensal periods, where shifts may be occurring, but can be difficult to quantify empirically.

Contemporary literature on urban agriculture often analyses urban community gardens as ‘existing’ commons with the capacity to counter neoliberal urban development and resource management practices. However, the existing literature on ‘political gardening’ generally focuses on cities in North America and Europe, despite the prevalence of urban community gardens and neoliberal planning across other regions, including Southern cities. This paper examines urban community gardens in Cape Town, South Africa to assess their capacity to function as urban commons in six areas: infrastructure, inputs, land, produce, labour and immaterial components. This mixed-methods study employed questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations across 34 urban community gardens in the city. The findings and analysis demonstrate how the urban community gardens counter neoliberal privatisation and individualisation processes. However, their capacity to function as urban commons is significantly curtailed by an entrenchment within the neoliberal context. Thus, the urban community gardens are framed as ‘experimental’ commons, a valuable re-conceptualisation of alternative resource utilisation in neoliberal Southern cities.

The presentation of soil erosion on agricultural land, both to the expert and the public, frequently takes the form of pictures and descriptions of extreme events. These attention-grabbing images are case studies of worst-case scenarios and serve an important purpose of warning what may happen under certain circumstances; they also have a potential to mislead. On the other hand, long-term studies of erosion are able to present extreme events in a more acceptable scientific context. Monitoring studies emphasise the importance of frequent, low-magnitude runoff events and their ability to transport nutrients and pesticides to freshwater systems. Thus, the need for a balanced presentation of erosion which places extreme events in a broad context in space and time. Communicating with practitioners such as farmers requires the use of non-conventional channels rather than the reliance on academic journals.

Existing literature has explored how different firm behaviours and strategies in different institutional contexts result in variegation in network structures. Based on those studies, this paper first examines how networks have been shaped by China's institutional transition in general and the process of marketisation in particular. Furthermore, we stress that the rise of networks in China's film industry has in return boosted the development of private firms and subsequently pushed forward the process of marketisation in this industry. Empirical results show that private firms have benefitted more from the complementarity between direct knowledge spillovers via inter-firm networks and indirect knowledge spillovers via inter-city networks, while state-owned enterprises are incapable of coping with the competition effects stemming from inter-city networks and fail to benefit from trans-local knowledge spillovers in networks. Our main contribution is thus to direct attention to the interaction between network dynamics and institutional transition, which remains underexplored in the current literature.

UK-wide multivariate neighbourhood classifications have been built using small area population data following every census since 1971, and have been built using Output Area geographies since 2001. Policy makers in both the public and private sectors find such taxonomies, typically arranged into hierarchies of Supergroups, Groups and Subgroups, useful across a wide range of applications in business and service planning. Recent and forthcoming releases of small area census statistics pose new methodological challenges. For example, the 2022 Scottish Census was carried out a year after those in other UK nations, and some of the variables now collected across different jurisdictions do not bear direct comparison with one another. Here we develop a methodology to accommodate these issues alongside the more established procedures of variable selection, standardisation, transformation, class definition and labelling.