Geography Compass最新文献

Neighbourhood environments are increasingly being recognised as settings within which people experience well- or ill-being. However, Autistic people are seldom considered in wellbeing research, which often centres on neurotypical experiences of places. Autistic people's encounters within places, and the effects of these encounters on their wellbeing, are therefore under-researched and under-theorised. This paper considers how a relational conceptualisation of wellbeing, in conjunction with an intersectional understanding of Autistic identities, might bring together insights from critical autism studies and geographies of wellbeing to map out the relationship between autism, place, and wellbeing. Recognising that neuro-normative social landscapes often disable Autistic individuals, we argue for a relational and intersectional approach to understanding and enhancing Autistic wellbeing. We advocate for designing inclusive spaces that actively support the wellbeing of Autistic people, highlighting the vital role we, as geographers, can play in transforming socio-spatial structures to address diverse needs and foster a more equitable environment for everyone.

This paper develops a multidimensional framework for sustaining care-full public spaces. We open by engaging with key understandings of the affective and relational dimensions of both public spaces and urban care scholarship. We then set out the elements of a framework for conceptualising the possibility of care-full public spaces. Writing from feminist and decolonial standpoints, we review emerging and foundational research to delineate three key components of such an approach: (1) governance, (2) materialities and design, and (3) performing public spaces. We then apply the framework, grounding our analysis of care in public spaces in a case study of caring for and as Country in Sydney, Australia. Throughout the paper we emphasise the generative possibility of care as an evaluative frame and central practice that sustains public spaces.

In his Oceans Rise, Empires Fall, Gerard Toal reformulates Critical Geopolitics in order to better address our planetary ecological crisis. A renewed attention to some of the classic texts of geopolitics, particularly those of Halford Mackinder, recuperates themes somewhat neglected in readings that focus upon the racist and imperialist framings of those works. This comment suggests that Marx rather than Mackinder might be the better point of departure for considering the themes of culture, geo-ecology and geopolitical strategy that Toal excavates from Mackinder.

Financial and monetary technologies, understood both through their digital platforms and the materiality of mobile devices, are increasingly pervasive, and now shape the economic practices of individuals, households, and communities. In this critical synthesis we bring together research in economic geography on everyday life and financial and monetary technologies (fintech) to show the centrality of these technologies to daily life, and to suggest ways that research on the geographies of fintech could be deepened through attention to everyday life. We show how a focus on everyday life highlights the impact on fintech end-users, such as consumers and debtors, and their relationship to the (re)privatization of social reproduction, across a range of practices, spaces, and actors. We also show how financial technologies and digital platforms contribute to the construction and production of the mundane and habitual routines of daily life and connect up often-thought distinct sites and scales of activity. To demonstrate the value of our critical synthesis, we then analyze two examples, “Buy Now, Pay Later” (BNPL) and “Earned Wage Access” (EWA). These examples show how fintech products reconfigure the everyday life of payments, wages, and debt management, especially for cash-constrained consumers from whom these products are specifically designed to profit. Critically, we build the literature on everyday life and fintech in economic geography to argue that a synthesis of these literatures—the everyday life of fintech—provides a fruitful avenue to pursue new research at the intersection of the geographies of money and finance, platforms, and the digital economy.

The global greenhouse boom is central to the accelerating intensification of agri-food systems. Perspectives and principles of critical agrarian studies, the Plantationocene, and environment-society geography are used to offer a novel approach to the global greenhouse boom. Case studies of leading greenhouse countries (Spain, China, Morocco, Mexico) illustrate distinctive dynamics that have developed during recent decades. The perspectives and case studies are used to suggest insights and themes for future research. These center on the volumetric enclosures of the greenhouse boom, sociotechnical assemblages linked to long-distance market chains through transportation networks and new infrastructure, agrarian transformations of rural depopulation and national-international labor migration, spatial clustering fueled by land and water rushes that concentrate on the periurban territory of extended urbanization, and the marginalized food systems and precarity of greenhouse workers. Insights from the global greenhouse boom suggest the disruption of prevailing ideas of the geographic trajectories of global land-use intensification. The emergent new geographies of the global greenhouse boom abound with timely opportunities and well-suited challenges for future geographic research that is engaged with sustainability and justice.

Agency plays a crucial role in social and economic change, especially in regional transition processes. Interpreting the influence of context on agency reflects the spatial ontology of economic geography. However, culture, as one dimension of context, is still profoundly limitedly understood within economic geography. For instance, it is often constrained to tangible cultural heritage or formal institutions. Moreover, individual-level agency has remained understudied, especially how individuals develop their capacity to act, since it is challenging to distinguish individual and their position within in/formal organizations. Here, we suggest addressing these limitations by integrating Bourdieu's notion of habitus, which contributes to transcending the dichotomies between materials and culture and between structuralism and individualism. Hence, the primary objectives of this paper are as follows: (1) to undertake a comprehensive review of habitus from broader social sciences, in particular to explain the mediated dualism of habitus; (2) to respond to the criticism that habitus is a static concept, and to explain the potential to investigate change; (3) to explicate how agency interacts with habitus. Finally, we recommend economic geographers to integrate fragmented habitus with agency to study social structural change, thereby enriching the discipline's comprehension of context.

This second of three review articles on the uneven geographies of COVID-19 examines geographical research on (1) spatial patterns of the pandemic's unfolding and (2) its uneven economic geographies, considering both its direct and indirect impacts—for example, those resulting from related preventive measures. In line with this article series, it (3) concludes by discussing the relevance of the reviewed research for the syndemics approach and vice versa. Research on economic effects analyzes disruptions to global value chains, industries, labor systems, and workspaces, particularly remote work. Some studies explore how the pandemic coincided with ongoing economic transitions such as economic restructuring and shrinkage, austerity politics, digitization, and automation. Studies highlight the need to contextualize spatial inequalities within historical political-economic interdependencies, power asymmetries, and structural disparities. In doing so, geographical studies add depth to syndemic analyses of structural vulnerabilities and crisis cascades, highlighting the need for spatially sensitive assessments. Still, diverging findings at national, regional, and local levels call for comparative ex-post analyses and relational methodologies able to unpack syndemic complexities. In turn, geographers can benefit from syndemic scholars' insights into disease burdens and pre-existing structural health impacts.

With the rise of urban pet culture, new animal geographers have started to explore the subjectivity of animals in urban spaces, focussing on their lives and agencies as active participants. However, little attention has been given to how pets make their presence and needs visible in urban spaces and their rights within the city. This paper examines pets' entanglements with humans in public spaces, drawing on the concepts of public address and the right to the city. By extending these ideas beyond anthropocentric urban geographies to encompass pet agency and animal geographies in the city, this paper discusses the forms of pets' public address. It explores how the public address ‘animals’ public spaces, emphasizing the dynamic and fluid relationships between pets and humans. Additionally, it investigates what rights pets hold in different cities and how these rights are exercised. As pet populations grow and conflicts between humans and pets intensify, this paper proposes future directions for researching the public address and the right to the city of animals.