January 27, 2012
by Ilan Kelman

Buildings in Moss' city centre in the floodplain (photograph by Ilan Kelman)
Looking back over past centuries, Norway, as with many other countries, has long experienced major river flood catastrophes. Several hundred died along the Gaula River in 1345. In eastern Norway in 1789, flooding killed over 70 people.
Fortunately, river flood deaths have been rarer in contemporary times though threats are still frequent. Most problems are property disruption and damage. Part of the reason is that we own more to be damaged.
Part of the reason is Norway’s tradition of managing rivers by relying on walls–dams, levees, and dikes. When (not if) a wall’s flood design limit is exceeded, the land behind it floods. People are unprepared because they thought that they would be protected.
Instead of forcibly separating people and water, why not let floodplains–called that for a reason–do their job? Let rivers behave as rivers, spreading out when it rains or when the snow melts. Use walls occasionally or as a part of flood risk reduction, but don’t rely on them for everything.
River floods are part of Norway’s environment. They are a natural process. When humans get in the way of floods, then disasters happen. We can stop disasters by permitting floods.
The author: Dr. Ilan Kelman is Senior Research Fellow, Center for International Climate and Environmental Research – Oslo (CICERO).
Kelman I and Rauken T 2012 The paradigm of structural engineering approaches for river flood risk reduction in Norway Area doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01074.x
Sandelson M 2011
Norway storms isolate thousands The Foreigner 27 December
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Area, Climatology, Cultural Geography, Environment and Society, Global Issues, Hydrology and Water Resources, Social Geography, Urban Geography | Tagged: Engineering, floodplains, floods, housing, natural disasters, risk, Urban planning |
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Posted by rgsibgjournals
January 25, 2012

The latest issue of The Geographical Journal is available on Wiley Online Library.
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Content Alert, The Geographical Journal | Tagged: Amer Jabarin, Andrew Brooks, Benjamin D Hennig, Big Society, Conservative green paper on international development, corruption, discursive analysis, Dragos Simandan, Empire, environmental discourse, ethnic identity, forest, GIS, global production networks, globalisation, Graham Moon, Hammou Laamrani, Health, healthcare accessibility, hydropolitics, inequality, Ivan R Scales, Japan, Jordan, Klaus Dodds, Leonhardt A S van Efferink, livelihoods, Madagascar, Mark Zeitoun, Mei-Po Kwan, Mexico, mixed-method, Mozambique, Nasser Al Aulaqi, Ohio, Patricia Noxolo, peri-urban, political ecology, post-bureaucratic, power, quality care, Rolando E Díaz-Caravantes, rural, Russia, satisfaction, security, the Arctic, Tim Brown, Timothy L. Hawthorne, Tony Allan, trade, UK, US think tanks, used cars, water demand management, water policy, water supply, Yemen |
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Posted by Wil Stobbart
January 24, 2012

The latest issue of Area is available on Wiley Online Library.
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Content Alert, Area | Tagged: Representation, Exploration, communication, United Kingdom, governance, practice, teaching, cycling, bodies, love, Home, Himalayas, UK, social enterprise, Dartmoor, Fieldwork, learning, Climbing, Ireland, materiality, Mobilities, embodiment, knowledge, New Zealand, consumption, participatory video, Participant observation, Physical Geography, Time-space, Stefan Bouzarovski, Anna R Davies, Heather Buckingham, Steven Pinch, Peter Sunley, regional geography, Katrina Brown, Rachel Dilley, Phil Jones, James Evans, Russell Hitchings, Ruth Doyle, Jessica Pape, Carey-Ann Morrison, walking, disaster risk reduction, Jayalaxshmi Mistry, Andrea Berardi, Guyana, geographic research, participation, indigenous geographies, Singapore, transnational masculinities, interviews, non-migrant, international marriage, participatory 3-dimensional mapping, action, Philippines, Jake Rom D Cadag, JC Gaillard, Yi’En Cheng, emotional geographies, more-than-representational, assemblages, rock climbing, Paul Barratt, Tom Slater, human geography, outdoors, affective, Pauline Couper, Richard Yarwood, reflection, Ian C Fuller, outdoor education, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, Louise Ansell, Mountain Rescue, rurality, emergency, training space, mountain spaces above 8000 metres, social constructivism, Geoff A Wilson, anticipation, knowledges, video ethnography, outdoor access, human–animal relations, sustainable production, visioning, sustainability transition, geographical imagination, routine, heterosexuality, embodied, solicited diaries, qualitative methodologies, location, survey evidence, qualitative GIS, GPS, Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby, Kye Askins, Lakhbir Jassal, Oliver Dunnett, Beth Bee, Jon Shaw, Kelvin Mason |
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Posted by Wil Stobbart
January 23, 2012

The Soviet Nuclear Icebreaker 'Arktika' was the first surface vessel to reach the North Pole (1977). © Wikimedia Commons.
Benjamin Sacks
The open sea may be international waters under maritime law, but large swaths of the world’s oceans fall under the influence of major powers. The United States and Japan dominate Pacific affairs, thanks to their control over various island groups and the importance they attach to the Pacific economy. similar situations exist for the United Kingdom in the South Atlantic and France in the western Indian Ocean. Several states contest the strategically important South China Sea. The Arctic Ocean has long been Russia’s backyard, home to historically prominent naval and merchant shipping lanes, vital fishing grounds, and home to some of its surviving indigenous peoples.
In 2007, however, Russia’s influence in the Arctic became a controversial issue when two submarines, Mir-1 and Mir-2 planted a Russian flag on the seabed below the North Pole. The Guardian reported that Moscow’s act ‘prompted ridicule and skepticism among other contenders…with Canada comparing it to a 15th century land grab’. The flag-planting was largely ceremonial, but it did indicate Russia’s ambitions to tap into the region’s vast suspected oil and rare earth minerals reserves.
Fortunately, Arctic tensions between local states have not escalated since the 2007 episode. But Russia’s behavior did pique the interests of a number of think-tanks and policy institutes, both intrigued and concerned about what Russian actions could mean for the future of international maritime law, as well as US-Russian and European-Russian relations. In ‘Polar Partners or Poles Apart?’, Leonhardt A S van Efferink (Royal Holloway, University of London) discussed the position of two important American institutes: the Brookings Institution and the Heritage Foundation. The article, published in the March 2012 issue of The Geographical Journal, compared the two institutes’ visions. While not choosing one side or the other, van Efferink suggested that the divergent futures could lead to either an ‘inclusionary’ or ‘exclusionary’ region (7).
The Brookings Institution, he argued, sought to remove the Cold War ethos from the Arctic control issue. While acknowledging the US Geological Survey’s 2008 estimate that the Arctic held roughly thirteen per cent of the planet’s undiscovered oil and thirty per cent of undiscovered natural gas (tremendously high figures, if true), the report stressed that collaboration, neutrality, and mutual good faith should be paramount for all parties involved (5-6).
The Heritage Foundation’s standpoint follows a so-called ‘neo-Realist’ perspective, unsurprising given its conservative roots. Their report holds that the United States should take action in the Arctic to limit Russia’s growing influence in the region and quell any designs for Russian Arctic oil production (7-8). Whichever course the Arctic issue eventually follows, it will be vital to international interests, not just the Arctic’s neighbours, that it be dealt with in a cautious, responsible, and ultimately beneficial manner.
Tom Parfitt, ‘Russia Plants Flag on North Pole Seabed‘, The Guardian, 2 August 2007.
Leonhardt A S van Efferink, ‘Commentary: Polar Partners or Poles Apart? On the Discourses of Two US Think Tanks on Russia’s Presences in the “High North“, The Geographical Journal 178.1 (Mar., 2012): 3-8.
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Political Geography, Biogeography, Development, Environment and Society, Global Issues, General, The Geographical Journal | Tagged: Japan, United States, Russia, cold war, Benjamin Sacks, Leonhardt A S van Efferink, Arctic Ocean, North Pole, Mir-1, Mir-2, US-Russian Relations, European-Russian Relations, The Brookings Institution, The Heritage Foundation, Arktika |
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Posted by Benjamin Sacks
January 23, 2012
by Cian O’ Callaghan

'Balloon', Sorcha O'Brien and Eli Caamano, commissioned by the National Sculpture Factory, Cork. Photo by Cian O'Callaghan.
One of the impacts of the financial crisis that began in late 2008 is that the strategies, plans, and visions underpinning the development of cities do not speak to current realities. Many of these strategies project twenty or thirty years into the future, a future they seek to build from a present that no longer exists.
The art installation depicted in the photograph above, which was produced in Cork city, Ireland during September 2008, captures the mood of this period very well. It caught the city at a pivotal moment when the aspirations of the Cork Docklands Development Strategy – a plan initiated around the start of the millennium, which came to fruition in unison with the collapse of the property market – were about to be swallowed up the recession. At the time these industrial buildings were slated for demolition to make way for three million sq ft of offices and over 1,200 apartments. The installation was, in a way, like an elegy for these buildings and the version of industrial Cork they represented. Due to the property crash, the intended development never happened, and these industrial buildings are still sitting on the quays.
The Celtic Tiger period in Ireland was characterised by optimism and growth. But Ireland is now characterised by a very different narrative; that of banking collapse, sovereign debt, failed speculation, and ghost estates. This confrontation between the exuberance of the Celtic Tiger and the miasma of the current period is expressed in those strategies that bridge the rupture between these two very different eras. Now, rather than the population growth that was anticipated as a result of the Docklands project, Cork has to contend with halted developments and vacant properties, the loans of which are owned by Ireland’s ‘toxic’ bank, the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA). One of the city’s landmark buildings, the Elysian, for example, is now also one of Ireland’s most iconic ghost estates with reputably only twenty five units in the complex sold. Meanwhile, the local Occupy Cork movement recently moved their camp off the streets and into another NAMA owned building in the city centre.
The dilemma currently faced by Cork is not unique to that city. This conundrum raises a number of important questions for urban geographers. One, which I address in my paper, is what happens to all those powerful urban visions underpinning aborted growth plans? As we enter into a new era of capitalism, a key research question for urban geographers will not only be to address how to move the development of cities forward, but also to understand the latent affects of the plans and visions now lost but not forgotten.
The author: Dr Cian O’ Callaghan is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Geography and NIRSA (National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis), National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
O’Callaghan C 2012 Lightness and weight: (re)reading urban potentialities through photographs Area doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01078.x
O’Connell B 2011 The high-rise and the downturn The Irish Times 25 June
A Christmas gift to Cork YouTube video 2 Jan 2012
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Area, Cultural Geography, Economic Geography, Global Issues, Political Geography, Social Geography, Urban Geography | Tagged: Art, financial crisis, gentrification, Ireland, property market, red balloons, regeneration, Urban planning |
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Posted by rgsibgjournals
January 20, 2012
These Early View articles are now available on Wiley Online Library.

Original Articles
Critical distance: doing development education through international volunteering
Kristina Diprose
Article first published online: 16 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01076.x
Lightness and weight: (re)reading urban potentialities through photographs
Cian O’Callaghan
Article first published online: 18 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01078.x

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Area, Content Alert, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: Area, Chris Philo, Cian O'Callaghan, consumption, Content Alert, Cork city, development education, disciplinary boundaries, Early View, Foucault, G S Bilotta, global citizenship, international organisations, International volunteering, Ireland, Kristina Diprose, M Grove, methodology, pedagogy, Rebecca Collins, Russell Hitchings, S M Mudd, soil erosion, sustainability, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, UK, urban geography, visual methods, waterfront redevelopment, Youth |
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Posted by Wil Stobbart
January 20, 2012
Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass has established itself as a key reference for up-to-date peer-reviewed research reviews in all facets of geography. We hope to strengthen the Atmosphere & Biosphere section with a new round of articles that continue the excellence in publication from scholars including Marshall Shepherd, Thomas Knutson, Andrew Comrie, Kristin Dow, Steven Quiring, Julie Winkler and others.
We are currently looking for material on the following themes:
- Synoptic meteorology
- Tropical meteorology
- Polar meteorology
- Agricultural and forest meteorology
- Forecasting and modeling
- Mesoscale processes
- Weather hazards
- Climate systems and dynamics
- Climate change
- Climate variability
- Air-sea-land interactions
- Applied meteorology and climatology
- Weather, climate, and society
- Hydrometeorology and hydroclimatology
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Announcements, Atmosphere & Biosphere, Geography Compass | Tagged: Agricultural and forest meteorology, Air-sea-land interactions, and society, Andrew Comrie, Applied meteorology and climatology, Atmosphere & Biosphere, climate, Climate change, Climate systems and dynamics, Climate variability, Forecasting and modeling, Geography Compass, Hydrometeorology and hydroclimatology, Julie Winkler, Kristin Dow, Marshall Shepherd, Mesoscale processes, Polar meteorology, Scott Curtis, Steven Quiring, Synoptic meteorology, Thomas Knutson, Tropical meteorology, Weather, Weather hazards |
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Posted by Wil Stobbart
January 19, 2012
by David Bassens

Goldman Sachs New World Headquarters (photo by Z4dude via Wikimedia Commons)
Last October, Goldman Sachs registered Islamic bonds – sukuk as these are called – for a total value of US$2 billion on the Irish Stock Exchange. Remembering the sobering BBC-statement late September by independent trader Alessio Rastani that “Goldman Sachs rules the world”, this paradoxical feat inevitably triggers the question of how it can be that a global investment bank renowned for its speculative behavior tries to attract ‘Shari’a-compliant’ capital that shuns interest, uncertainty, and speculation to finance its day-to-day business.
Our recent study, published in Area, which focused on office networks of transnational Islamic Finance (IF) firms and which produced empirical insights with regard to the heavy entanglement of IF and conventional financial circuits, makes the above far less counterintuitive. IF firms have indeed emerged as an answer to faith-based demands for Shari’a-compliant finance, when during the oil-boom of the 1970s Gulf bankers laid the basis for a domestic sector. However, next to full-fledged Islamic banks, ‘conventional’ banks with a strong historical presence in the Muslim World have developed ‘Islamic windows’ to cater to the growing demand for Shari’a-compliant products. This globalization of IF has produced a geography that is marked by the emergence of a number of financial centers in the Gulf (e.g., Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and Manama), where IF is gradually becoming a dominant finance form, but which are in turn heavily interconnected with ‘conventional’ financial centers that are striving to attract business in growing sukuk markets.
The recent engagement between IF and Wall Street investment bankers, then, allows us to conclude that these geographical entanglements imply that IF’s acclaimed ‘alterity’ is largely inflated. While the increased involvement of IF actors in ‘mainstream’ global financial circuits could potentially import a ‘new world’ of customs, values, demands, and ideologies into the realm of global finance, even in times of financial turmoil global finance is being persistently reproduced from Wall Street and The City through a formal, but not substantial adaptation of financial techniques to demands from ‘new’ places. Indeed, although much is done to present the bonds as Shari’a-compliant, a thorough investigation of the prospectus by Khnifer shows that Goldman Sachs has, put simply, issued conventional debt.
The motives for such formal adaptations are grounded in the current phase of capitalist crisis since it is mainly aimed at channeling surplus oil-liquidity through conventional financial centers, while still not actually adapting the ‘nature’ of global finance itself. This means that IF can also be understood as a manifestation of global finance as it reaches out and integrates ‘new and exciting’ emerging markets. In times when liquidity has become a scarce good, such engagements are likely to proliferate, but whether it will mean that Wall Street’s – or The City’s for that matter – investment banking community will start to limit its speculative behavior to conform to the Shari’a remains largely a rhetorical question.
The author: David Bassens is postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders at Ghent University’s Geography Department. He was the winner of the 2010 Area prize for new researchers.
Bassens D, Derudder B and Witlox F 2010 Searching for the Mecca of finance: Islamic financial services and the world city network Area 42 35-46
BBC 2011 ‘Anyone can make money from a crash,’ says market trader 26 September
Khnifer M 2011 Disclosure of three likely flaws in Goldman Sachs’ milestone sukuk 9 December
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Area, Cultural Geography, Economic Geography, Global Issues, Political Geography, Social Geography | Tagged: economics, faith, finance, financial crisis, Goldman Sachs, islam, religion, Shari'a law, wall street |
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Posted by rgsibgjournals
January 17, 2012
by Fiona Ferbrache
Sunday evening, Radio 4 broadcast Dying Inside, a documentary exploring the increase in number of older prisoners (over the age of 50) in UK prisons. Old prisoners comprise around 9% of approximately 88,000 inmates. The broadcast exposed some of the realities that older prisoners may face: premature ill health, in particular diabetes and coronary heart disease; and the likelihood of dying behind bars. One of the key features of this programme was the producer’s (Rex Bloomstein) interviews with older prisoners. He brought their stories to life by replaying some of these conversations and the rasping voices of elderly men. The broadcast illustrates a qualitative carceral geography where prisoners are embodied bearers of gender, age and culture.
Carceral geography is also the focus of Moran, Piacentini and Pallot’s (2011) paper in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Their work draws from empirical research on the Russian Penal system, and mobility theories. The authors argue that much mobility has been conceptualised in a way that emphasises association with freedom and autonomy. The downside is that mobility is seldom considered as an instrument of power that disciplines and limits a subject’s agency. As the authors indicate, the academic question ‘why travel?’ is seldom answered: ‘because I had no choice’.
Addressing this under-theorised area of mobility, Moran at el. explain how carceral geographies can help scholars to acknowledge more disciplined forms of mobility. In their example, power is fundamentally expressed through the (poor) conditions of transporting prisoners between a remand centre and the prison in which sentences will be served (often hundreds or thousands of kilometers apart). An association between prison, enclosure and static space that comes (perhaps too easily) to mind, is satisfyingly challenged in this paper through the concept of carceral mobilities.
Dying Inside, 2012 [Radio broadcast] Radio4, 15 January 2012 1700
Moran, D., Piacentini, L. & Pallot, J. (2011) Disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in Russia. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00483.x
J. Pallot took part in a discussion on On womens’ prison in Russia – From our Own Correspondent, BBC World Service, Wednesday 11th May 2011.
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Cultural Geography, Early View, Social Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: Ageing prisoners, carceral geography, coercion, Disciplained mobilities, discipline, Dying Inside, Prison, prison forced migration, Prisoners, Russia |
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Posted by fionaferbrache