Geography Compass最新文献

While historical geographers contributed to colonial projects as surveyors, explorers and map-makers, since the 1990s they have contributed to the critical analysis of the imaginary and material geographies of empire. However, as the only example of Asian-led colonialism, the study of Japanese colonialism has not received anywhere near the same degree of scholarly attention as western colonialism, especially in the English-speaking literature. This study summarizes the historical geographies on both Japanese colonialism and colonial cities in Japanese Empire, arguing the vulnerable status of Japanese colonial cities in postcolonial urbanism, and concludes with a discussion of the particularities of Japanese colonialism. It argues that there is plenty of space for geographical research in the Japanese colonial context. Japan's colonial cities have special characteristics and should receive more attention in post-colonial urbanism as it in line with the urban scholar's call for ordinary cities in global south. It is hoped that this review can be a complete summary of relevant research and will provide useful references for future geographers to comparatively research Japanese colonialism.

As consumer cultures become increasingly digital and the digital/data has become more commodified, geographers have turned their attention to researching the ways in which consumption spaces, socialities and subjectivities are (re)produced by the digitalisation of everyday life. This article investigates the relationships between the digital and geographies of consumption based on a close reading of recent studies on the promises, possibilities, challenges, and flaws of the intersections of the digital and consumption in geography. It connects the digitalisation of consumption with the tradition of mapping and doing geographies of consumption that is concerned with the social life of thing, and opens a conversation on how subjectivities, spatialities, and socialities of consumption are reproduced by the changes in digital spaces and practices in the mundane. This article also points to the potential of a ‘follow the digital’ approach for establishing a dynamic and multi-sited understanding of geographies of consumption in the digital context.

This intervention develops arguments in our book Capitalism and the Sea on the complex temporalities attached to capitalism's intense and peculiar relationship to the global ocean. Technological innovations like the steamship or containerisation plainly transformed the pace and intensity of maritime commerce, and aspects of the global economy. We take this further to argue that the very origins and periodisation of capitalism are connected to the global ocean; as will be our futures, given the unpredictable implications of the oceans acting as the biosphere's ‘heat sink’. We consider several stylised expressions of time at sea: deep-time, logistical-time, life-time, and revolutionary time suggesting that the ocean world as a geographical space articulates these in distinctive and contradictory ways.

This paper reviews literature and identifies trends in the study of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India since the country's Independence. In doing so, it brings into conversation literature from various disciplines centered around slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies of Indian cities. The paper begins by laying out the history of slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies in India and then contextualizing the policies by examining how they came about and how they correspond to specific moments of the Indian political-economy, especially the “liberalization” of the market in the 1990s. In the second section, the paper highlights trends in contemporary research on slum redevelopment and rehabilitation policies with a focus on studies on dispossession. The final section identifies a critical omission of the socio-spatial realities of caste in contemporary studies of slum redevelopment and provides suggestions for future research.

This critical review lays down the fundamentals for rethinking just energy transition. It reviews the theoretical perspectives of energy justice, socio-technical transitions (STTs), and political ecology and presents a plausible and useful way to approach a just low-carbon transition using Political Ecology as a broad framework. This Political Ecology framework for Sustainable Energy Transition (PESET) addresses power issues associated with low-carbon transition, while also identifying the role of inclusivity and justice in low-carbon transition. As energy transition studies have primarily focused on the Global North and the extraction and production of large technologies, this framework provides a more radical means to achieve just transition objectives with particular relevance for application in the Global South—a region largely overlooked in transitions scholarship and where mundane/simple technologies (e.g. Solar Home Systems and clean cookstoves) typify transitions processes to date. The PESET framework presents a novel contribution, linking the concepts of energy justice, STTs, and political ecology to provide a more comprehensive means of framing and analysing just energy transitions. It thus provides a novel overarching framework linking energy studies, sustainability transitions, development studies and innovation studies especially in an era where the globe is moving toward a clean and affordable energy for all (Sustainable Development Goal 7).

Geographers and urban studies scholars tend to rely on policy mobilities approaches to explain processes of policy spread, whereas political scientists and public policy scholars usually draw on either policy diffusion or policy transfer. I challenge this widespread scholarly practice of selecting approaches based on the association with a certain discipline. Instead, first and foremost, the specific research aim(s) and question(s) should shape the choice of theoretical lens. Analytical or policy outcome-oriented studies should rely on policy diffusion and policy transfer, while a policy mobilities approach is best suited for more (policy) critical analysis. The approaches can also complement each other to a certain degree. Analytical and policy outcome-oriented approaches need a stronger critical perspective while policy mobilities scholars need to underpin their critique with constructive suggestions on how to improve established practices.

In this paper, we survey the expanding body of literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Chinese and Anglophone geography, and locate the main lines of development. The emerging scholarship approaches the BRI as a spatial discourse and examines the production of geographical reasoning in statecraft. It also links up with studies of the BRI as both a material project and an everyday experience. We argue that it is in this combined understanding of BRI's multiple registers, as discourse, project, and experience, that a trilectical approach for future geographical engagement can be identified as the BRI edges to its second decade.

As part of an argument about the value of a geographical approach to the connection between local weather and physical exercise, this paper begins with how that connection features in four areas of scholarship that have been at the forefront of exploring it so far. By comparing how each of them commonly imagines ‘the human’ and ‘the weather’ in their studies, we particularly highlight how different bodies of work illuminate different facets of the weather-exercise connection. This, we suggest, represents an opportunity for geographers to explore how these facets combine in context with a view to tackling the complex public health challenges associated with increasing human inactivity and a warming world. Building on that, we end with three promising cross-cutting themes that we think could usefully guide these endeavours: adaptation, decision-making and place.

European colonialism sought to inscribe order and meaning on non-European landscapes through the process of place naming. Naming or renaming was fundamental to the extension of imperial control over physical and human environments. This article offers a brief overview of the ways critical place name studies has addressed these colonial practices. In particular, the paper examines the power relationships inherent in place naming, asks questions about authority and authenticity in place naming, highlights the importance of sound in the performance of place names, and explores decolonial mapping practices as an opportunity to challenge neocolonial cartographies. I suggest that critical place name studies has been insufficiently attentive to orthography and that addressing the spelling of place names more directly offers important ways to understand how power and authority intersected with authenticity and reproducibility in colonial naming practices. I conclude by identifying the potential benefits to geographers of prioritising decolonial research by collaborating with indigenous peoples and incorporating indigenous practices within research.

For the past two decades, work across a range of fields, but particularly geography, has engaged ‘critical hydropolitics’ as a way to highlight not only the politics inherent in decisions about water, but also the foundational assumptions of more conventional hydropolitical analyses that tend to focus on conflicts and cooperation over water resources, with a heavy emphasis on ‘the state’ as the key actor and scale of analysis. In this article we review critical hydropolitical literature that focuses on transboundary rivers that descend from the eastern Tibetan Plateau, namely the Lancang-Mekong, Yarlung Tsangpo-Brahmaputra and Nu-Salween river basins. We highlight five key and interrelated themes that have emerged in the literature to date - the state, scale, infrastructure, knowledge and logics, and climate change - and discuss how these provide useful tools for more fine-grained analyses of power, control and contestation.