Early View | Geography Directions

Academic (corporate) Futures: teaching and research

May 14, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

A billboard outside Beacon College, Hong Kong: the type that promotes celebrity tutors

Fulfilling roles as facilitators of learning, impassioned ambassadors and professionals of their subject areas, those who teach, tutor or lecturer will hopefully gain the respect and attention of their students, but few will rise to celebrity status through this calling. Unless, that is, they are part of the ‘celebrity tutors’ (Straits Times) that are hailed as Hong Kong’s ‘tutor kings and queens’ (BBC News). A Channel 4 documentary on this phenomenon revealed how exam pressure in Hong Kong has led to parents seeking additional tutoring for their children and how one ‘super tutor’ has transformed this demand into a successful commercial enterprise. He is one example of a celebrity tutor that you may catch smiling glamorously from giant posters in Hong Kong shopping malls or on the sides of buses – the typical advertising ground for commercialised faces such as film stars and sports stars.

These ‘Tiger Tutors’ are interesting in terms of their insight to the commercialisation and staging of education, but I also want to draw attention to another part of the professional academic’s life: the staging of research. Tim Hall explores, in an early view paper for The Geographical Journal, human geographers’ contemporary research activities with a focus on the changeability and diversity of individuals’ research practices (in British universities). The paper draws upon survey results to discuss why change happens and highlights the porosity of geographical research boundaries, applied research and contention between autonomous research and the staging of Geography within departments, funding bodies and the structures of the RAE. Hall’s paper complements earlier sociologies of geography such as those by Sidaway (1997) and Castree (2011).

The two academic activities, presented here, demonstrate general processes of academic knowledge production and, particularly, “the corporatisation of higher education” (Hall 2013:11). As an early career academic, both offer optimism for the future, in their different ways.

Hall, T. 2013 Making their own futures? Research change and diversity amongst contemporary British human geographers. The Geographical Journal. DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12002

Castree, N. 2011 The future of geography in English universities. The Geographical Journal 177,4. 294-9

Sidaway, J. 1997 The production of British geography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 22,4. 488–504

HK celebrity tutors. The Straits Times: Asia Report

Meet the ‘tutor kings and queens’. BBC News online.

The making of… Hong Kong’s Tiger Tutors. Channel 4

Leave a Comment » | Early View, Social Geography, The Geographical Journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: British geography, Celebrity tutors, corporate higher education, institutional contexts, researcg, sociologies of geography | Permalink
Posted by fionaferbrache

Minding the Gap in Cartography: from maps to mapping practices

April 9, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

World Map from 1664

If the biologist’s iconic tool of the trade is a microscope, then the geographer’s might well be a map. Both tools offer an alternative perspective of the world, but unlike the microscope, which enlarges for the biologist, the map serves the geographer through reduction. Maps and processes of mapping are the topics of enquiry in a TIBG paper by Kitchin, Gleeson and Dodge (2012) – one of the latest pieces of work on cartography by these authors.

For those unfamiliar with the scholarly literature, it is perhaps assumed that “a map is unquestionably a map” (Kitchin et al. 2012:2) – something that exists to measure and represent the world, even through its different forms. For example, the London Tube map, celebrated this year as part of the 150-year anniversary of London Underground, is a topographical map showing connections between stations, rail lines and fare zones. This is different to geographically scaled maps such as the Michelin Road Atlas or Ordnance Survey maps.

Different again is the set of maps (cartograms) comprising the Worldmapper collection, available online (see below). These are based on a flat map of the world and territories are re-sized according to particular variables e.g. total population, fruit exports, disease, internet uses and migration.

Kitchin et al. challenge the idea of a map as something complete, fixed and stable – that which they refer to as being “ontologically secure”. Instead, they rethink mappings as processual (thus the importance of using the verb ‘mapping’ rather than the noun ‘map’): practices that are never complete but unfold out of and into specific relational contexts. Their paper is written from a more-than-representational standpoint to challenge the assumed ontology of maps and then consider what this means epistemologically for cartography.

The theory behind this article can be applied to other visual materials – photography, for example. However, Kitchin et al. will hopefully inspire you to look again and rethink how you understand those maps blue-tacked to the wall in your teacher’s room.

Mind the map: London Underground turns 150. BBC News

Kitchin, R., Gleeson, J. and Dodge, M. 2012. Unfolding mapping practices: a new epistemology for cartography. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. doi/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00540

Worldmapper collection

4 Comments | Cultural Geography, Early View, General, Scale, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: Cartography, epistemology, London Underground map, mapping practice, maps, ontological security, World Bank | Permalink
Posted by fionaferbrache

Genetically Modified Boundaries

March 22, 2013

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Martin Mahony

When prominent environmentalist Mark Lynas recently announced that he no longer opposes the genetic modification of agricultural crops, a decades-long debate about the risks, benefits, uncertainties and politics of biotechnology returned to our news stands. Lynas’ speech at the Oxford Farming Conference in January made the news worldwide, as the former guerilla activist of the anti-GM movement announced his regret at the harm done to technological progress by the protests of his one-time colleagues.

Researchers in geography and science and technology studies (STS) are united by, amongst other things, their interest in boundaries. In a recently-published commentary in Area, Helen Pallett and I seek to explore this disciplinary confluence to try and make sense of the recent evolution of the GM debate. We were inspired to the task by last year’s protests around a field of experimental wheat at Rothamsted Research in Hertfordshire. We drew attention to what we see as four interesting (and overlapping) boundary issues in the GM debate:

The distinctions made between reason or rationality and unreason or irrationality;
the inclusion or exclusion of certain voices from a debate often cast as being solely about science;
the boundaries between different spaces of public engagement which may have different norms and styles of debate; and
the material territories of the laboratories and fields of experimental crops, which were threatened with transgression last year by the Rothamsted protests.

We thought it was important to shift academic analysis of such controversies away from discussion of an abstract public debate at the national level to consider more deeply the material elements and multiple spaces of debate and contestation. What was also interesting to us is how these very different sorts of boundaries and spaces interact with and map onto each other; so the territory of Rothamsted’s wheat field came to symbolise, for a short time, the protected space some actors saw as necessary for science to function, out of reach of society’s interference.

We could equally have written a piece like this in response to the Lynas story – reflecting for example on the ways rhetorical boundaries were drawn between cool-headed scientific rationality and emotive, irrational protest. Lynas’ interview in the Guardian could itself be read as an insight into the constellation of powers which constitute contemporary modes of environmental governance. Science, the state, private corporations, social movements, high-profile media figures – all of these actors make an appearance in Lynas’ story, as we hear how one individual has navigated the contested boundaries which separate them from one another. All four elements of our sketchy typology of boundary issues likewise make an appearance in the media coverage of Lynas’ conversion. Real-world events like these provide occasions for geographers to engage with other disciplines and academic traditions like STS and environmental sociology, which have their own analytic tools for making sense of boundaries, whether material, rhetorical, or both. In research on complex issues like GM, disciplinary boundaries too can be subject to some rethinking.

Martin Mahony and Helen Pallett, 2013, Boundaries, Territory and Public Controversy: The GM debate Re-materialised, Area, DOI: 10.1111/area.12014

Martin Lynas: Truth, treachery and GM food, The Guardian

Anti-GM activists urged not to trash wheat field, The Guardian

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Posted by mwfmahony

The Rise of the South: Beyond Expectations or a Warning about Our Future?

March 21, 2013

Jen Dickie

On the 14^th March, the United Nations Development Programme published the 2013 Human Development Report, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, which describes how the “rise of the South is radically reshaping the world of the 21^st century, with developing nations driving economic growth, lifting hundreds of millions of people from poverty, and propelling billions more into a new global middle class”. Crediting sustained investment in education, health care and social programmes as well as increasing international engagement, the report states that the “world is witnessing an epochal global rebalancing”. Whilst the UN’s press release focuses on the “massive poverty reduction” and that more than 40 developing countries have demonstrated growth beyond expectations, Claire Provost highlights some of the more negative findings from the report in her article for The Guardian. Her article focuses on the warning from the UN that unless action is taken to tackle environmental threats such as climate change, deforestation and air and water pollution, the number of people living in extreme poverty could increase by up to 3 billion by 2050. The report highlights that climate change is already exacerbating “chronic” environmental threats, and stresses that although everyone is affected, “they hurt poor countries and poor communities the most”.

In an article for The Geographical Journal, Nigel Clark, Vasudha Chhotray and Roger Few discuss the relationship between natural hazards and disasters and how best to address the “uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups”. They argue that human-induced climate change and its associated impacts have further added to the already complex nature of natural disasters. Questioning the concept of global environmental justice, they discuss issues such as the tendency of powerful political and economic actors to take advantage of disasters and how traditional coping mechanisms have been eroded by ‘global modernising forces’; however, they state that whilst aid responses can be distributional and/or rights-based, the idea of justice is likely to stem from “ordinary human virtues of care and compassion”. Following this argument, Clark et al., offer the notion that current generations of humans may be more likely care about the environment and the challenges it, and our future generations, face if we consider ourselves as owing an incalculable debt to past generations who survived a magnitude of natural disasters and therefore made our existence possible.

As growth in developing nations continues, the challenges facing them will change. The UN highlights that sustainable economies and societies will rely on new policies and structural changes, and that these are needed if human development and climate change goals are to be aligned. However, it is clear that policies alone will not be enough. If we can show the same resilience and respect for our environment as our ancestors did, and view our actions as something we ‘owe’ our future generations, perhaps attitudes will change.

Nigel Clark, Vasudha Chhotray, Roger Few, 2013, Global justice and disasters, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12005

Environmental threats could push billions into extreme poverty, warns UN, The Guardian, 14^th March 2013

Press release: “Rise of South” transforming global power balance, says 2013 Human Development Report, accessed 18^th March 2013

Human Development Report 2013, The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World, accessed 18^th March 2013

Leave a Comment » | Atmosphere & Biosphere, Biogeography, Climatology, Cultural Geography, Development, Early View, Economic Geography, Environment and Society, Global Issues, Hydrology and Water Resources, Social Geography, The Geographical Journal | Tagged: Climate change, disasters, Global environmental justice, hazards, Human Development Report 2013, UN | Permalink
Posted by Jen Dickie

Avenues (The World School): the road to a global geography of education?

March 12, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

As I walk by my former primary school on a Tuesday early morning, the current pupils must be gathered in assembly for I can hear the School hymn. Schooled in Guernsey, I studied the Bailiwick of Guernsey’s Curriculum and my education was embedded, to a large extent, in local Island (one might say national) context.

‘National’ or ‘state’ level schools tend to be considered as mainstream organisations for learning (Kraftl 2012). They teach about the world beyond their state borders, but rarely embed themselves internationally. This point is made by the team behind Avenues: an alternative educational establishment based in New York.

Avenues, subtitled ‘The World School’, opened its first campus in September 2012. It is envisaged that this international school will expand to include more than 20 campuses around the globe, in places such as Singapore, London, Paris, Mumbai and São Paulo. When this integrated global learning community is established, students will be able to take advantage of a singular leaning system to spend short periods at different campuses around the world. This physical mobility is part of the essential criteria through which Avenues aims to “prepare students for global life”.

With its global philosophy, perhaps Avenues could be conceived as a form of education beyond the mainstream (this is not an unusual perspective in current media articles on the school). If so, then it contributes to what Kraftl (2012:1) calls “geographies of ‘alternative’ education”. While Kraftl’s focus remains on UK-based homeschooling, and draws upon themes of emotion and affect, and family and home, his article clearly demonstrates some of the political, social and academic values associated with alternative sites for learning.

Could we see Avenues and its potential global networks analysed in geographies of education at some point in the future?

Avenues: The World School

Education: Move Over Dalton. The Economist (online). 01 September 2012

Collins D and Coleman T (2008) Social geographies of education: looking within, and beyond, school boundaries Geography Compass 2 281–99

Kraftl, P. (2012) Towards geographies of ‘alternative’ education: a case study of UK home schooling families. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00536.x

World class: a superschool for the global age. The Telegraph (online). 04 February 2013

Leave a Comment » | Early View, Geography Compass, Scale, Social Geography, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: Alternative education, Avenues, Children's geographies, emotion and affect, Geographies of Education, Homeschooling, learning, schools | Permalink
Posted by fionaferbrache

Stop Horsing Around – Governance of the Meat Industry, Consumer Confidence and the Blame Game

February 20, 2013

Jen Dickie

On the 15^th January the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) published a report stating that horse and pig DNA had been detected in beefburger products available from retail outlets in Ireland. The FSAI reported that whilst the presence of pig DNA had a plausible, although clearly still unacceptable, explanation –cross contamination in meat processing plants, there was no reasonable explanation for the presence of horsemeat.

Since then, the ‘horsemeat scandal’ has dominated our headlines with a steady stream of shocking revelations about the meat industry and its regulations, supply chains and possible links to the criminal underworld. The timeline of findings and events published by the UK Food Standards Agency demonstrates not only the extent and seriousness of the investigation, but the unfolding complexity and (to some) the surprising lack of transparency of the meat industry. What is clear, however, is that as the number of products testing positive for horse DNA rise, consumer confidence is plummeting and accusations of blame are flying.

Whilst Felicity Lawrence provides an ‘essential guide to the horsemeat scandal’ in The Guardian, explaining the involvement of Europe in our meat supply chains in particular, Reuters report on the “accusations, denials and threats to sue (that) reverberated round Europe on Friday as meat traders, food processors, retailers and governments all rejected blame”. However, as the pressure on Governments to act grows and claims of mis-labelling, negligence and fraud ricochet across Europe, Reuters describe how the accused believe they are being used as scapegoats for the politicians who are struggling to explain these breaches in food safety controls.

As the saga continues, and questions are raised about how this substantial quality control failure has been allowed to happen, the meat industry will find itself under increasing scrutiny. In a timely article for The Geographical Journal, Laura Devaney provides interesting insight to the operating logics, performance and impact of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (the institution that first reported the presence of horsemeat in beef products) since its formation 10 years ago. Using interviews with food industry stakeholders, Devaney highlights the “dynamic coexistence of both neoliberal and biosecurity agendas” in the work of the FSAI, which reflect the “new ways of securitising food… (that attempt to) protect society and allow it to prosper, but enable the deregulated free trade of safe food”. However, Devaney also discusses the conflict between the neoliberal agendas that promote self-regulation in the food industry and the biosecurity measures related to ensuring public health and food safety. It is this conflict that appears to be the key component in the current horsemeat scandal.

In these times of economic austerity the demand for cheap, mass-produced processed food has grown, it is therefore not a surprise that the complex nature of supply chains and the de-regulation of the food industry have been taken advantage of. As always, ‘lessons will be learned’ from this latest food scare but in the meantime, instead of pointing the finger of blame, regulations need to be tightened and consumer confidence regained.

Laura Devaney, 2013, Spaces of security, surveillance and food safety: interrogating perceptions of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland’s governing technologies, power and performance, The Geographical Journal, DOI: 10.1111/geoj.12001

Horsemeat scandal: the essential guide, The Guardian, 15th February 2013

Horsemeat blame game ricochets across Europe, Reuters, 15th February 2013

Timeline on horse meat issue, The Food Standards Agency, accessed on 19th February 2013

FSAI Survey Finds Horse DNA in Some Beef Burger Products, Food Safety Authority of Ireland, accessed on 19th February 2013

Leave a Comment » | Biogeography, Early View, Economic Geography, Environment and Society, General, Global Issues, Political Geography, The Geographical Journal | Tagged: beef, Biosecurity, consumer confidence, Food Safety Authority of Ireland, Food Standards Agency, horsemeat, neoliberalism, scandal | Permalink
Posted by Jen Dickie

Directions for Geography: towards better public engagement

February 12, 2013

by Fiona Ferbrache

As a geography lecturer, I often hear students enthuse about the diverse opportunities the discipline presents to them in terms of future careers. Geography embraces so much between the polarised categories of the natural and the social; the human and non-human; local and global; and life and death, as illustrated on this website. Recognising the centrality of geography in the world around us makes it somewhat surprising that our disciplinary issues are rarely acknowledged as explicitly geographical when they appear in the public realm. This point is made by Smith (2013):

academic geography generally has little or no disciplinary presence in episodic media enthusiasms for geographic topics ranging from glacier behaviour, food labelling, or flows of people, goods or waste

He continues by stressing that geographers with popular public profiles, Mark Maslin and Iain Stewart, have been labelled exclusively as ‘earth scientist’ and ‘geologist’ respectively, despite their crossovers with geography (which, in the latter case, is reflected upon by Donovan, Sidaway and Stewart, 2011).

So what can be done to bridge the gap between scholarly knowledge of geography and public knowledge of geography? Among other things, Smith suggests the development of interactive exchanges between academics and publics (see, for example Lane et al. 2011), and adaptation of research outputs for presentation to different audiences (Smith cites Murphy (2011) as a good example). These activities might well be enriched through the use of internet technologies and digital media.

The lack of geography, explicit in the public arena, makes websites such as Geography Directions and Geography in the News, key resources for students and teachers. Arguably though, these sites remain focused on a more disciplinary community, thus raising the question who (or which groups of people) comprise the ‘publics’ that we are seeking to make geographies with and for? Also, in seeking to include, who are we excluding?

Donovan, K., Sidaway, J.D. & Steward, I. 2011 Bridging the geo-divide: reflections on an interdisciplinary (ESRC/NERC) studentship. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 36 9-14

Lane, S.N., Odoni, N.. Landström, C., Whatmore, S.J., Ward, N. & Bradley, S. 2011 Doing flood risk science differently: an experiment in radical scientific method. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 36 15-36.

Murphy, J. 2011 Walking a public geography through Ireland and Scotland. The Geographical Journal. 177 367-379

Smith, J. 2013 Geography in public and public geography: past, present and future. The Geographical Journal. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00491.x

Geography in the News. RGS-IBG.

Leave a Comment » | Early View, Social Geography, The Geographical Journal, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers | Tagged: civic science, digital scholarship, geography and the media, Public geography | Permalink
Posted by fionaferbrache

Avalanche! How Trees Hold the Secrets of the Past…

February 6, 2013

Jen Dickie

Last month, tragedy struck in the Scottish Highlands when an avalanche swept four climbers to their deaths. The experienced mountaineers were descending the Bidean Nam Bian peak on the southern side of Glencoe when the avalanche hit, causing them to fall 1000ft (c. 300m) before being buried under dense snow. In a report for The Independent, Richard Osley describes how the tragedy occurred shortly after the Scottish Avalanche Information Service (SAIS) issued a warning that human-triggered avalanches were likely in the Glencoe area and the risk was rated as ‘considerable’. The SAIS reported that on the day of the avalanche, there did not appear to be much depth of snow on the hills of Glencoe, however, there were areas of “mainly hard, unstable windslab” that overlay “a persistent softer weaker layer”; in these conditions more compact blocks of snow can separate from the surrounding snow resulting in a ‘Slab Avalanche’, this type of avalanche is responsible for the majority of avalanche-related fatalities.

As the popularity of the winter sports industry grows, there is increasing pressure on scientists to predict where and when avalanche events will occur. Dedicated research centres such as the Swiss Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research are continually improving our understanding of avalanche formation and dynamics and therefore providing increasingly reliable warning services, however, they highlight that we are still unable to accurately predict “why, when and where an avalanche will be released”.

In an article for Area, Mircea Voiculescu and Alexandru Onaca describe how they have applied dendrogeomorphological methods to assess snow avalanches in the Sinaia ski region in the Romanian Carpathian Mountains. By combining climatological and nivological (physical properties of the snow) analyses with information on disturbances recorded in tree growth, they argue that historical avalanche activity can be reconstructed, including the frequency, magnitude and return-period characteristics of the events. This knowledge, they argue, can be used to make assessments of risk in areas such as the Carpathian Mountains, where the geomorphological understanding of local avalanches is limited.

As winter sports become more popular with non-expert communities, there is growing pressure to identify high risk areas and to provide appropriate warning systems that non-experts can understand. It is clear that real-time observations and local knowledge are key to identifying avalanche risk, however, this research shows that by combining different techniques and approaches, we can increase our knowledge and understanding of hazards such as avalanches, and provide essential risk information to previously unmonitored regions such as newly established winter sports resorts.

Mircea Voiculescu and Alexandru Onaca, 2013, Snow avalanche assessment in the Sinaia ski area (Bucegi Mountains, Southern Carpathians) using the dendrogeomorphology method, Area 45 109–122 doi: 10.1111/area.12003

Four climbers die in Glencoe avalanche, The Independent, 20th January 2013

SportScotland Avalanche Information Service, accessed on 18th January 2013

The WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, accessed on the 18th January 2013

Leave a Comment » | Area, Climatology, Early View, Environment and Society, General, Geomorphology, Global Issues, Hydrology and Water Resources | Tagged: avalanche, dendrogeomorphology, mixed techniques, risk, Romania, Scotland, Snow, winter sports industry | Permalink
Posted by Jen Dickie

The Low Carbon Dichotomy: Efficiency Versus Demand Reduction

February 1, 2013

by Briony Turner

800px-London_-_The_Gherkin_&_Canary_Wharf

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

One could say that effective low carbon solutions will be those that respond to the requirements of energy infrastructures and to the ways in which people actually integrate the social and technical aspects of energy systems to achieve comfort, cleanliness, and other ordinary ways of life. This requires developing a better understanding not only of householders’ daily practices within their homes and how adaptable these practices are but also the practical application of this understanding into standard industry working practices.

An international climate change audit found that the UK lags behind others in Europe on programmes to move consumer choice to more energy-efficient appliances, recommending that the government “undertake evaluations of effectiveness based on real practice in homes so that programmes can be responsive and kept on track”. We increasingly have the research findings to enable this. Take for instance Harriet Bulkely and Sara Fuller’s article in Area which explores how British people who have recently migrated to Spain actually adapt to new regimes of heat. Intriguingly, one of their findings is that adapting to the heat may potentially result in “increasing vulnerability to the cold, demonstrating how responses to stresses on thermal comfort are culturally and materially conditioned”.

So, bearing in mind the challenges posed by cultural and material norms, people’s expectations of comfort and the potential for adaptability, all-be-it with repercussions, there is an additional challenge in the form of a divergence in industry strategies within the UK, at the heart of which is the interlinking black box of domestic practices. The built environment industry is focused on low carbon in the form of reducing emissions of buildings through improving their energy performance, reducing their overall energy usage, i.e. focusing on how much electricity the buildings (including the human activity within them) use. Yet, the energy supply industry sees the issue, within a future grid system based on inflexible nuclear generation and intermittent renewable generation, as one of balancing supply and demand. This requires demand management which is not just focused on how much electricity people use, but, is actually more concerned with when they use it –for more on this, see Sarah Higginson and colleague’s 2011 conference paper.

Both industries diverge on the strategy for tackling people. Whilst both confine people to the term “end user”, the supply industry regards the end user as an object necessitating “demand management” whereas, the built environment industry sees the building (which contains the end user) necessitating “demand reduction”. The householder has in many ways been divorced from the home, with the focus of behaviour change activity resting predominantly on utility supply and demand chains.

Both industries concede some acknowledgement of the impact of individual behaviour on energy demand with most interventions in both industries aimed at encouraging activities based on small lifestyle adaptations that enable continuation and/or enhancement of existing standards and conventions. Yet the dichotomy of managing energy demand to uphold/lock in/enhance existing ways of life when everyday practices are constantly changing is widely criticised –for those interested in this have a look at Yolande Strengers’ paper on ‘Peak electricity demand and social practice theories’.

To achieve the ambitious energy consumption and carbon emissions reductions set out in statute, low energy/low carbon design and retrofitting needs to shift from focusing on building energy performance, to domestic energy performance, with the building fabric, services and interior design being better understood as contributory factors to locking in, but also with the potential to change domestic energy practice. This perspective leads beyond the supply and demand rhetoric to analyse how energy systems lock in or challenge existing unsustainable needs and what opportunities there are across the material infrastructures to change domestic practice.

Sara Fuller and Harriet Bulkeley, 2012, Changing countries, changing climates: achieving thermal comfort through adaptation in everyday activities, Area, DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01105.x

Sarah Higginson, Ian Richardson and Murray Thomson, 2011, Energy use in the context of behaviour and practice: the interdisciplinary challenge in modelling flexible electricity demand presented at Energy and People: Futures, Complexity and Challenges Oxford University 20-21 September 2011

INTOSAI, 2010, Report by the INTOSAI Working Group on Environmental Auditing: The Climate is Changing – Key Implications for Governments and their Auditors

Yolande Strengers, 2012, Peak electricity demand and social practice theories: Reframing the role of change agents in the energy sector, Energy Policy 44 226-234

Leave a Comment » | Area, Early View, Scale, Social Geography, Urban Geography | Tagged: behaviour change, built environment, Climate change, domestic practice, energy, energy industry, energy policy, energy transition, Low Carbon Futures, practices, reterofit, sustainable design, transitions | Permalink
Posted by Briony

Bricks, Mortar and Bricolage: an Economic Geographer’s Take on the Stumbling Blocks of Knowledge Transfer in the Built Environment Industry

January 17, 2013

by Briony Turner

Lucas Cranach the Elder [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Tree of Knowledge

If you can get past the academic jargon, there’s an interesting article on knowledge transfer of green building design by James Faulconbridge in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Perhaps the reason it’s interesting in a practitioner sense, is that it is based on actual professional practice –it draws not only upon other academic reflections, but also on those of 25 current British/Australian industry professionals.

The paper says it aims to suggest a framework for geographical analysis of attempts at mobilising green design knowledge. However, it misses a trick, in that it raises some salient and relevant points for industry with regard to the stumbling blocks of transferring innovative design and best practice into action. For those in the built environment industry it will come as no surprise that application of this framework, i.e.. the paper’s conclusion, reveals that knowledge is situated and place-specific and that solutions need to incorporate bricolage within knowledge assembly and transfer.

The author makes reference to blockage of attempts to reduce environmental impact being in part due to the lack of recognition of the “benefits of collective learning and the sharing of green design knowledges” -whilst this paper is not country specific, for the UK this is not necessarily the case. The stumbling block quite often, as pointed out later in the paper, is the institutional context, particularly time, importance and resource allocated to the processes of knowledge mobility. Much new knowledge, often termed within industry ‘best practice’ (even when its more-often-than-not actually innovative practice), is freely available, but hearing about it, knowing where to find it and having time to digest it and work out how to adapt current practice to incorporate it, are part of the daily struggle of most bought-in, already interested practitioners. For those that aren’t (the greater challenge when it comes to step-change within professional practice) other/additional knowledge mobility tactics may well be required.

Many professionals use conferences as a means of staying up to date, the odd lucky few get to go on study tours as mentioned in the paper. However, in these austere times, ability, both in terms of time away from the desk and cost, for the majority, is hampered. Cracking how to enable effective knowledge transfer within current regime constraints is certainly a challenge worthy of uptake here in the UK.

The paper also suggests that economic geographers can contribute to debates about transitions to sustainability and building design via institutional analyses of knowledge mobility. Hopefully they will, but perhaps in more accessible language, to ensure their own knowledge contributions aren’t rendered ‘situated’ within academia. It would be wonderful to see the recommendations within this paper in plain English, in trade press such as the RIBA Journal, Inside Housing, Building, Eco Building, Green Building etc.

Now, a brief, but I hope the reader will agree, salient semantic foray into a few of the terms being used. Focus of academic and industry efforts must not get tied to purely a focus on ‘green design’ as commonly perceived and, in fact, as reflected in this paper’s definition, as “negative environmental impact mitigating” design, but instead should ensure that focus includes the social aspect, i.e. not simply the wider community/society, but the people, the inhabitant(s), aspect of homes. Homes should be fit for habitation now and in the future, i.e. resilient/enable their inhabitants to be resilient to current and future climatic projections.

Along these same lines, industry needs to assign more importance on the incorporation of domestic function as well as to form and fabric into thinking on green/sustainable design. Whilst at present there is increasing focus on energy efficiency behaviour of inhabitants (pause here for a wry smile on reading the title of the National Housing Federation’s recent launch event of their “Count us in” report on this, aptly named “Don’t forget the people”), the internal environment of homes and health of inhabitants receive less attention, yet are, as, if not more, important – certainly important for those landlords aware of the housing health and safety rating system…

Furthermore, sustainable design/green design that tackles both mitigation of carbon emissions from residential stock and adaptation of stock to projected changes in climate is not confined to new build. These are design issues as relevant to new build as to existing housing stock. For more information on this, take a look at the useful, clearly set out, easy to read “Design for Future Climate” report produced by the Technology Strategy Board, and for those wanting facts and figures on overheating in particular, take a look at the Department for Communities and Local Government’s recent gap analysis and literature review, which formed part of their investigation into the overheating of homes – their recommendations are also worth a read.

If you’re struggling to connect why excessively cold and overheating homes are design problems, take a look at the Heatwave Plan and the Cold Weather Plan for England 2012, short documents both published by the NHS whose recommendations include factors relating to the built environment. The NHS picks up the pieces of this current neglect of thinking about the internal environment and domestic life within homes. Its staff know all too well the contribution of poor housing stock to the medical and death toll during periods of climatic extremes, projected to become increasingly more frequent over the coming years. Speaking of the NHS, there is an intriguing piece of research underway called SHOCK (not) HORROR which is capturing the highly refined and evolved efficient knowledge transfer processes within A&E wards for help in improving infrastructure resilience. Watch this space…

James Faulconbridge, 2012, Mobile ‘green’ design knowledge: institutions, bricolage and the relational production of embedded sustainable building designs, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00523.x

“Count us in”, National Housing Federation

Cold Weather Plan for England 2012, National Health Service

Design for Future Climate, Technology Strategy Board

Heatwave Plan for England 2012, National Health Service

Investigation into overheating in homes: analysis of gaps and recommendations, Department for Communities and Local Government

Investigation into overheating in homes: literature review, Department for Communities and Local Government