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

Original Articles

The latest issue of The Geographical Journal is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break to view the full table of contents.

Contributions

Editorial (page 2)
Klaus Dodds
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00456.x

Commentaries

Polar Partners or Poles Apart? On the discourses of two US think tanks on Russia’s presence in the ‘High North’ (pages 3–8)
Leonhardt A S Van Efferink
Article first published online: 30 AUG 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00433.x

The logical status of applied geographical reasoning (pages 9–12)
Dragos Simandan
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00430.x

Geography and global health (pages 13–17)
Tim Brown and Graham Moon
Article first published online: 1 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00425.x

Articles

Using GIS and perceived distance to understand the unequal geographies of healthcare in lower-income urban neighbourhoods (pages 18–30)
Timothy L. Hawthorne and Mei-Po Kwan
Article first published online: 5 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00411.x

One world, big society: a discursive analysis of the Conservative green paper for international development (pages 31–41)
Patricia Noxolo
Article first published online: 31 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00421.x

Balancing urban and peri-urban exchange: water geography of rural livelihoods in Mexico (pages 42–53)
Rolando E Díaz-Caravantes
Article first published online: 30 AUG 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00435.x

Water demand management in Yemen and Jordan: addressing power and interests (pages 54–66)
Mark Zeitoun, Tony Allan, Nasser Al Aulaqi, Amer Jabarin and Hammou Laamrani
Article first published online: 3 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00420.x

Lost in translation: conflicting views of deforestation, land use and identity in western Madagascar (pages 67–79)
Ivan R Scales
Article first published online: 5 AUG 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00432.x

Networks of power and corruption: the trade of Japanese used cars to Mozambique (pages 80–92)
Andrew Brooks
Article first published online: 21 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00410.x

Review essay

Reinventing the map collection: new journeys through (un)known worlds of London and America (pages 93–95)
Benjamin D Hennig
Article first published online: 4 AUG 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00407.x

Regulars

The Geographical Journal referees 2011 (page 96)
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00459.x

The latest issue of Area is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break to view the full table of contents.

Special section: Exploring the outdoors

Confluences of human and physical geography research on the outdoors: an introduction to the special section on ‘Exploring the outdoors’ (pages 2–6)
Pauline Couper and Richard Yarwood
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01053.x

Taking students outdoors to learn in high places (pages 7–13)
Ian C Fuller
Article first published online: 11 JAN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2010.00990.x

Researching the outdoors: exploring the unsettled frontier between science and adventure (pages 14–21)
Pauline Couper and Louise Ansell
Article first published online: 24 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01016.x

One moor night: emergencies, training and rural space (pages 22–28)
Richard Yarwood
Article first published online: 31 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01015.x

Climbers’ narratives of mountain spaces above 8000 metres: a social constructivist perspective (pages 29–36)
Geoff A Wilson
Article first published online: 24 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01021.x

Ways of knowing for ‘response-ability’ in more-than-human encounters: the role of anticipatory knowledges in outdoor access with dogs (pages 37–45)
Katrina Brown and Rachel Dilley
Article first published online: 7 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01059.x

‘My magic cam’: a more-than-representational account of the climbing assemblage (pages 46–53)
Paul Barratt
Article first published online: 13 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01069.x

Articles

Future visioning for sustainable household practices: spaces for sustainability learning? (pages 54–60)
Anna R Davies, Ruth Doyle and Jessica Pape
Article first published online: 19 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01054.x

People can talk about their practices (pages 61–67)
Russell Hitchings
Article first published online: 19 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01060.x

Solicited diaries and the everyday geographies of heterosexual love and home: reflections on methodological process and practice (pages 68–75)
Carey-Ann Morrison
Article first published online: 19 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01044.x

Transnational masculinities in situ: Singaporean husbands and their international marriage experiences (pages 76–82)
Yi’En Cheng
Article first published online: 11 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01045.x

The enigmatic regional geography of social enterprise in the UK: a conceptual framework and synthesis of the evidence (pages 83–91)
Heather Buckingham, Steven Pinch and Peter Sunley
Article first published online: 23 SEP 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01043.x

The spatial transcript: analysing mobilities through qualitative GIS (pages 92–99)
Phil Jones and James Evans
Article first published online: 7 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01058.x

Integrating knowledge and actions in disaster risk reduction: the contribution of participatory mapping (pages 100–109)
Jake Rom D Cadag and JC Gaillard
Article first published online: 15 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01065.x

The challenges and opportunities of participatory video in geographical research: exploring collaboration with indigenous communities in the North Rupununi, Guyana (pages 110–116)
Jayalaxshmi Mistry and Andrea Berardi
Article first published online: 8 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01064.x

Commentaries

Impacted geographers: a response to Pain, Kesby and Askins (pages 117–119)
Tom Slater
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01067.x

The politics of social justice in neoliberal times: a reply to Slater (pages 120–123)
Rachel Pain, Mike Kesby and Kye Askins
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01073.x

Reviews

Deathscapes: spaces for death, dying, mourning and remembrance – Edited by Avril Maddrell and James D Sidaway (pages 124–125)
Lakhbir Jassal
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01014.x

New spaces of exploration: geographies of discovery in the twentieth century – Edited by Simon Naylor and James Ryan (pages 125–126)
Oliver Dunnett
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01017.x

Food security and global environmental change – Edited by John Ingram, Polly Ericksen and Diana Liverman (pages 126–127)
Beth Bee
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01022.x

Domesticating neo-liberalism: spaces of economic practice and social reproduction in post-socialist cities – By Alison Stenning, Adrian Smith, Alena Rochovska and Dariusz Świątek (pages 127–128)
Stefan Bouzarovski
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01023.x

Geographies of mobilities: practices, spaces, subjects – Edited by Tim Cresswell and Peter Merriman (pages 128–129)
Jon Shaw
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01046.x

Magical Marxism: subversive politics and the imagination – By Andy Merrifield (pages 129–130)
Kelvin Mason
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01047.x

Area referees 2011

Area referees 2011 (pages 131–132)
Article first published online: 23 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01079.x

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.

'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

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

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:

Why publish in Geography Compass?

• Fast publication, typically 8 weeks from acceptance of final version
• A citable, peer-reviewed article, with a permanent URL
• A wide, international audience through a global medium
• A free PDF off-print of your article
• Free individual access to the site for a year
• Usage statistics for your article
• A discount for your institution if they buy a subscription

Geography Compass does not publish research articles. Its aim is to provide authoritative, peer-reviewed surveys of recent scholarship for non-specialists.  Manuscripts will be evaluated on whether the manuscript:

• meets the objectives of the Geography Compass aims and scope
• makes a contribution to the field
• is accessible to a new scholar in the field
• has any major omissions or errors

If you have an idea for a potential article on any of the above themes or any additional questions, please contact Scott Curtis (curtisw@ecu.edu). We hope that you are excited by this opportunity to publish your work in Geography Compass.

For further information please visit here.

]]> http://blog.geographydirections.com/2012/01/20/geography-compass-atmosphere-biosphere-section-invitation-to-contribute/feed/ 0 wstobbar compass http://blog.geographydirections.com/2012/01/19/goldman-sachs-rules-the-world-islam-style/ http://blog.geographydirections.com/2012/01/19/goldman-sachs-rules-the-world-islam-style/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:36:43 +0000 rgsibgjournals http://blog.geographydirections.com/?p=5659 ]]> 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

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.

Original Articles

Anthropogenic controls on large wood input, removal and mobility: examples from rivers in the Czech Republic
Lukáš Krejčí and Zdeněk Máčka
Article first published online: 23 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01071.x

Special Section: Exploring the Great Outdoors

‘My magic cam’: a more-than-representational account of the climbing assemblage
Paul Barratt
Article first published online: 13 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01069.

Special Section: Emerging Subjects, Registers and Spatialities of Migration Methodologies in Asia

Methodological dilemmas in migration research in Asia: research design, omissions and strategic erasures
Rebecca Elmhirst
Article first published online: 13 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01070.x

Commentary

The latest issue of Geography Compass is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break to view the full table of contents.

Development

Leveraging Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD) in the Caribbean (pages 1–18)
Dhanaraj Thakur
Article first published online: 5 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00467.x

Informal and Cooperative Recycling as a Poverty Eradication Strategy (pages 19–34)
Jutta Gutberlet
Article first published online: 5 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00468.x

Economic Geography

The Changing Role of Place-Image in the Profit Making Strategies of the Designer Fashion Industry (pages 35–43)
Nebahat Tokatli
Article first published online: 5 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00466.x

Political

The Commonplace Geopolitics of Conspiracy (pages 44–59)
Laura Jones
Article first published online: 5 JAN 2012 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00465.x

WaterWise Exhibit, Science Gallery 'Surface Tension' Exhibition (Dublin). Photograph used with permission of Des Moriarty.

In 2009 the UK Chief Scientific Advisor Sir John Beddington warned that global society is facing a ‘perfect storm’ of challenges in the context of a changing climate with 50% more energy and food and 30% more water required by 2030. In our Area paper we argue that despite such widely articulated concerns, routinised production and consumption behaviour, particularly within households of western, industrialized societies remains unsustainable. Experimental tools for trying to initiate a significant shift towards more sustainable futures are clearly required. Collaborative visioning exercises are emerging as one way to engage a wide range of stakeholders and members of the public in the design of innovations for more radical advances towards sustainable living. Situated within a wider research project on sustainable consumption (CONSENSUS) our Area paper reflects on the learning potential of multistakeholder visioning exercises held with the aim of generating ideas for more sustainable household heating and washing practices. Concepts developed through this visioning process were clustered and prioritized and three distinct future scenarios were constructed. In addition to formal workshops with stakeholders and the general public we also engaged in a more novel public outreach experiment with the Science Gallery in Dublin. As part of their water-themed exhibition – ‘Surface Tension’, we developed an exhibit ‘WaterWise: Washing Futures’ with illustrator Chris Judge who depicted our scenarios for future washing practices in a fun, provocative format.

Visitors are invited to step into the year 2050 and imagine more sustainable washing routines through the use of advanced technologies and water systems supported by alternative cultural norms and water regulations. Drawing on emerging and envisioned societal and technological trends, the exhibit encourages critical reflection on our washing routines and how we approach sustainability problems. Visitors are asked to provide feedback on the scenarios and in this way they contribute to the iterative nature of the scenario design process, helping to shape policy recommendations for sustainable water consumption. Our Area paper reflects on the benefits and limitations of adopting such collaborative visioning processes and marks the first step in examining what impact they can make to changing how we live now and in the future.

The authors: Anna Davies is Associate Professor and Ruth Doyle is a PhD student, both in the Department of Geography, Trinity College Dublin.

Davies A R, Doyle R and Pape J 2011 Future visioning for sustainable household practices: spaces for sustainability learning? Area doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01054.x

CONSENSUS: A cross-border household analysis of CONSumption, ENvironment and SUStainability in Ireland. Project website 2011.

Surface Tension exhibition, Science Gallery, Dublin (open 21 Oct 2011 – 20 Jan 2012).

WaterWise: Washing Futures YouTube video. 7 Nov 2011.

Independent State of Samoa in the South Pacific Ocean

Happy New Year!

Here is a brain teaser to mark the occasion:

Q: In the South Pacific Ocean, the Independent State of Samoa and the New Zealand territory of Tokelau, were the first to begin the New Year of 2012. A year ago, they were two of the last states to move into 2011. How can this be?

A: At midnight 29 December 2011, Samoa and Tokelau reset their calendars to 31 December, thus skipping 24 hours and 30 December entirely. Since 1892, Samoa has observed its position, roughly 20km east of the International Date Line (IDL).  An imaginary borderline on the surface of the Earth, at roughly 180º longitude, marks the start of each calendar day. A few days ago, Samoa realigned itself with the western side of the IDL, and moved 24 hours into the future. The main reason for this transition is linked to trade, in order to bring Samoa and Tokelau closer in time to their largest trading partners – Australia and New Zealand (BBC News, 2011; Lane, 2011).

This time-space geography provides an example of the way in which temporality and spatiality are significant for contextualising, organising and positioning ourselves in the world.  This is noted by Merriman (2012) in the current TIBG.  However, here is another brain teaser for the ontologically minded: Merriman asks readers to reconsider normative (“delimited, constrained, located and partitioned” (p.24)) time-space geographies, in order to apprehend the world in more enlivened ways – through movement, energy and affect, for example.

Merriman’s paper is grounded in non-representational philosophies, not to convince us that human geography should dispense with time and space, rather to focus on the ways in which theories of mobile practices may help to decentralise the privileged position of time and space in Western geographical research. As Samoa’s realignment with the IDL illustrates, even states mapped onto the earth’s surface can be apprehended as moving forms.  This dynamic imagining, Merriam argues, may demonstrate openness to ‘movement-space’ rather than ‘space-time’.

  BBC News (2011) Samoa and Tokelau skip a day for dateline change. BBC News 30 December 2011

  Lane, M. (2011) How does a country change its time zone? BBC News. 10 May 2011

Merriman, P. (2011) Human Geography without time-space. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol.37,1. pp.13-27

My Great Aunt was a ‘Jenny’ – a member of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS) – and, as a First Officer, she worked in Admiralty Arch, the Grade I listed building that straddles the road between the Mall and Trafalgar Square.

Admiralty Arch was completed around 1911 and initially provided offices and residences to the Royal Navy.  Over the years, it has provided hostel accommodation for homeless people and, most recently, offices for the Cabinet.  Today, Admiralty Arch is for sale at approximately 75 million pounds, and speculation suggests a transformation into a lavish hotel (Ruddick, 2011).

An iconic landmark of London, Admiralty Arch evokes a sense of place, but it is also provides an example of the “building biography”, a concept explored by McNeill and McNamara (2012) in relation to the life of a Sydney hotel.  A building’s biography draws attention to different persepctives throughout its history, and how these may have been constituted by human agents, materialities and political and economical conditions at the time.

Applying this concept to Admiralty Arch, one must consider the people who have worked there, as well as those who have been involved with its maintenance, as significant characters in the biography. In addition, this idea positions the building within urban frameworks and geopolitical and economic contexts. For example, the sale of Admiralty Arch can be seen as part of the Government’s strategy to improve efficiency of government property in a time of austerity (see report, 2011).  At the heart of their paper, McNeill and McNamara invite geographers to challenge preconceived visions of what a building actually is (how it differs through time); that is, to reconceptualise the ontology of the built world.

  Report

  Ruddick, G. (2011) London’s Admiralty Arch could become a hotel under Government plans. The Telegraph. 03 November, 2011.

  McNeill, D. & McNamara, K. (2012) The life and death of great hotels: a building biography of Sydney’s ‘The Australia’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 37,1. pp.149-163

Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. (c) 2011 Wikimedia.

Benjamin Sacks

Geography is one of academia’s oldest and most respected subjects. Yet, perhaps precisely because of its age and shifting priorities, the discipline has often been threatened with extinction or, at the very least, streamlined into a smaller field, open to the machinations of the sciences, anthropology, and sociology. Certainly, the field long ago lost its way in American higher education, relegated to a few institutions requiring geographic study for its broader mission of scientific research (e.g., the University of California at Berkeley, Dartmouth College).

Dr Chris Philo (University of Glasgow), the chair of next year’s RGS-IBG Annual Conference, has chosen the theme of ‘security of geography/geography of security’. Introduced in the January 2012 edition of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Dr Philo described ‘this double-barrelled construction’ as necessary for understanding (and responding to) geography’s requirements for survival, as well as the international arena’s need for geography for its own survival (1).

This so-called “flipped” approach responds to the ever-fluid nature of geographic discourse. The study of the constantly-changing Earth, its lands and peoples, requires a degree flexibility that few other disciplines need. This, naturally, creates a series of problems unique to geography. For instance, as Dr Philo argues, should geography narrow its security scope to national defence interests, at the expense of broader concerns about the planet (2)? Too, will geography that focuses on international affairs ‘crowd out’ human geographers, who traditionally share more with their anthropological counterparts than diplomats (2-3)?

Geography’s strength – a web connecting sciences with social sciences and the humanities – is also its weakness. Dr Philo highlighted Dr Trevor Barnes’ (University of British Columbia) concerns that the field was being gradually jammed into ‘a single big “S” Science approach’, albeit to detriment of human, historical, and political geography (3-4). His general solution is to maintain geography’s inclusiveness as much as possible, a spirit that will hopefully find a variety of answers at the 2012 RGS-IBG Annual Conference.

Philo, Chris, ‘Security of Geography/Geography of Security‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 37.1 (January 2012): 1-7.

 ’Trevor J Barnes‘, Department of Geography, the University of British Columbia, accessed 19 December 2011.

Logo of the RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2011. © Royal Geographical Society (with IBG)

by Madeleine Hatfield

As the first term of the UK’s current academic year draws to an end, the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual Conference of August and September already seems a long time ago – in fact, planning for next year’s conference in July is well underway. Those who attended will remember a wide range of papers and presenters sharing their research under the theme of ‘Geographical Imagination’. Several of the research projects behind these presentations also made the news, showing how geographical research informs wider debates, including Tom Hargreave’s work on smart energy meters, Jon Anderson’s research on surfing and coastal conservation and Jenny Pickerill on the short-comings of ‘eco-bling’.

The Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers journal offers another window onto the geographical imagination with its Virtual Issue guest edited by the conference chair, Stephen Daniels (University of Nottingham). This brings together papers – still free to access online at the time of writing – published across the history of the journal and shows how the concept of a geographical imagination can provide a new way of understanding places, how we think about them and how we represent them through our writing and maps. Our understanding of the world around us is always influenced by our imagination, not just when we dream or write stories, and our imagination is equally fed by everything we see and do – reading the news, attending lectures or going on holiday.

Daniels, S. ed. 2011. Virtual Issue on The Geographical Imagination. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers.

Dr. Jon Anderson’s Spatial Manifesto website with audio and visual media coverage from the BBC.

Bawden, T. 2011. The Smart answer to the energy crisis? The Independent, 1 October 2011. [Report on Tom Hargreave’s research as presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference]

In Loughborough. 2011. When eco-friendly means eco-bling. 15 September 2011. [Report on Jenny Pickerill’s research as presented at the RGS-IBG Annual Conference]

Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Annual International Conference.

Original Articles

Aesthetics of loss: biodiversity, banal violence and biotic subjects
Kathryn Yusoff
Article first published online: 6 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00486.x

The cultural economy of cleantech: environmental discourse and the emergence of a new technology sector
Federico Caprotti
Article first published online: 6 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00485.x

The latest issue of Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break to view the full table of contents.

Boundary Crossings

Security of geography/geography of security (pages 1–7)
Chris Philo
Article first published online: 15 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00488.x

Mixed methods in land change research: towards integration (pages 8–12)
So-Min Cheong, Daniel G Brown, Kasper Kok and David Lopez-Carr
Article first published online: 17 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00482.x

Papers

Human geography without time-space (pages 13–27)
Peter Merriman
Article first published online: 7 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00455.x

Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life (pages 28–43)
Ben Anderson
Article first published online: 12 APR 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x

Distant feelings: telepathy and the problem of affect transfer over distance (pages 44–59)
Steve Pile
Article first published online: 12 JUL 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00458.x

Spiders, Sartre and ‘magical geographies’: the emotional transformation of space (pages 60–74)
Mick Smith, Joyce Davidson and Victoria L. Henderson
Article first published online: 15 SEP 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00459.x

The local universality of veterinary expertise and the geography of animal disease (pages 75–88)
Gareth Enticott
Article first published online: 7 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00452.x

Post-political spatial planning in England: a crisis of consensus? (pages 89–103)
Phil Allmendinger and Graham Haughton
Article first published online: 12 OCT 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00468.x

Rethinking the sovereign in sovereign wealth funds (pages 104–117)
Adam D Dixon and Ashby H B Monk
Article first published online: 27 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00447.x

World class? An investigation of globalisation, difference and international student mobility (pages 118–131)
Allan M Findlay, Russell King, Fiona M Smith, Alistair Geddes and Ronald Skeldon
Article first published online: 28 JUL 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00454.x

Humanism, race and the colonial frontier (pages 132–148)
Alan Lester
Article first published online: 1 JUN 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00450.x

The life and death of great hotels: a building biography of Sydney’s ‘The Australia’ (pages 149–163)
Donald McNeill and Kim McNamara
Article first published online: 26 APR 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00445.x

Value, gleaning and the archive at Maxwell Street, Chicago (pages 164–176)
Tim Cresswell
Article first published online: 20 MAY 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00453.x

The latest issue of Geography Compass is available on Wiley Online Library.

Click past the break to view the full table of contents.

Cultural

Geography, Memory and Non-Representational Geographies (pages 875–885)
Owain Jones
Article first published online: 5 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00459.x

Development

Sport-for-Development and the 2010 Football World Cup (pages 886–897)
Roger Levermore
Article first published online: 5 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00460.x

GIS & Earth Observation

Coastal Benthic Habitat Mapping to Support Marine Resource Planning and Management in St. Kitts and Nevis (pages 898–917)
Steven R. Schill, John English Knowles, Gwilym Rowlands, Shawn Margles, Vera Agostini and Ruth Blyther
Article first published online: 5 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00462.x

Social

Smoking’s Shrinking Geographies (pages 918–931)
Damian Collins and Amy Procter
Article first published online: 5 DEC 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2011.00463.x

This morning, as I walked to University, I was passed by runners, cyclists, buses, taxis and cars. What a choice we have available for reaching our work places or making the school run.  A report by the BBC (Crompton, 2011) last month, drew attention to the school run in Kamuneru, Kenya (a highland area in the north-west of the country) as literally that: a walk or jog to reach class each day.

Travel by foot is the only means of transport for many families in this Kenyan area, and long distances (the report commented on one child travelling 20km from their home to school each day) are undertaken in bare feet and on poor unsurfaced roads.  Geography matters! For one child, these distances offers the opportunity to train athletically everyday, by running to school, but for another pupil, the journey held little for her to be positive about.

Hamnett and Butler (2011) tell us that “Geography matters” for children and education in the UK too.  Here, the distance that one lives from school has become an important criterion for allocating places to pupils.  Through a critical analysis of distance-based policies in East London, Hamnett and Butler argue that this system reproduces unequal access to educational resources, and can be amplified inter-generationally.  They also indicate that hierarchies of school popularity/unpopularity have developed, partially as a result of the value placed on distance.

These two examples reveal how geography matters in London and Kamuneru, in terms of distance to schools, but in very different ways.

  Crompton, V. (2011) The school run in Kenya’s highlands. BBC News: Education and Family. 10 October, 2011.

  Hamnett, C. & Butler, T. (2011) ‘Geography matters’: the role distance plays in reproducing educational inequality in East London. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Vol.36,4.  pp.479-500

Original Articles

Experimental geopolitics: Wafaa Bilal’s Domestic tension
Alan Ingram
Article first published online: 30 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00455.x

Commentary

Earthquake disasters and resilience in the global North: lessons from New Zealand and Japan
K Crowley (Nee Donovan) and J R Elliott
Article first published online: 28 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00453.x

A royal encounter: space, spectacle and the Queen’s visit to Ireland 2011
Nuala C Johnson
Article first published online: 28 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4959.2011.00454.x

Original Articles

Disciplined mobility and carceral geography: prisoner transport in Russia
Dominique Moran, Laura Piacentini and Judith Pallot
Article first published online: 28 NOV 2011 | DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00483.x

‘The ‘Tent City University’ looms over the Occupy London tents’ Source: Sam B, Flickr: DSC_2030. License: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers in July 2011, Colin McFarlane’s paper on ‘The city as a machine for learning’ demonstrates how we can benefit not just from learning about cities but by making learning more central within cities. This includes recognising – to use Colin’s own words – ‘the resources marginal groups use to cope with, negotiate and resist in the city’, particularly how they do this through learning and how this in turn can be furthered by measures such as urban forums.

Learning and cities have hit the headlines recently for a number of reasons, showing the importance of Colin’s research to cities in a wide variety of contexts. For example, the ‘Tent City University’ of the Occupy the London Stock Exchange movement places learning at the heart of this particular struggle. Cities worldwide are central to the Occupy movement, producing networks of learning between cities, and urban areas have also been the sites of recent protests against cuts in the UK, including to education and public sector pensions.

As more and more people become urban dwellers, such issues become only more significant and this mass urbanisation is also the subject of a 21^st Century Challenges event at the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) on 6^th December 2011.

McFarlane C 2011 The city as a machine for learning Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 36 360–376 doi: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00430.x

21^st Century Challenges, Adapting to an Urban Future, RGS-IBG 6 December 2011

BBC News, Public sector strike rallies held across UK, 1 December 2011

Tent City University @OccupyLondon 2011

Freetown, Sierra Leone. In 2000, British forces successfully intervened in their former colony to end a bloody civil war. (c) 2011 Wikimedia Commons.

Benjamin Sacks

Long before decolonisation wound down in the late 1980s (the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia excepted), scholars had established ‘postcolonialism’ as an important academic field. Postcolonialism was guided by important questions in a rapidly changing global environment: should postcolonial states align themselves with their former colonisers, e.g., through formal networks as the Commonwealth of Nations and informal, commercial and social relationships. Postcolonialism’s supporters argued that it was vital to monitor newly-independent states and to identify deficiencies and abuses wrought by the colonial power. Detractors, on the other hand, stressed the limitations in colonial responsibility and multi-way cultural exchange, often citing such relatively successful post-independence relationships as the United Kingdom and India. Over fifty years since the first great decolonisation wave, the issue of responsibility and postcolonial relationships remains controversial.

In Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Pat Noxolo (University of Sheffield), Parvati Raghuram (The Open University), and Clare Madge (University of Leicester) added an important new addition to this extant debate. In ‘Unsettling Responsibility: Postcolonial Interventions’, the authors tackled the complex web of ethics, responsibility, agency, and strategy that haunt postcolonial relationships. Noxolo, Raghuram, and Madge highlighted responsibility’s limitations, particularly after so many years of independence. Most importantly, however, they sought a paradigm shift: to remove vertical, bilateral responsibility and postcolonial relationships in favour of complicated, group-by-group constructions and analyses. ‘In practice’, they noted, ‘responsibility is messy’ (p. 2).

In seeking this paradigm shift, the authors ground their work in theoretical geography. Ascription-the quality that responsibility is put into practice, and agency-the ‘locomotion’ or motivation behind behaviour, action, and reaction. Traditionally, scholars used these functions to support their postcolonial perspectives (pp. 5-7). While acknowledging the benefits of analysing ascription and agency, Noxolo, Raghuram, and Madge stressed their limitations. Instead, they stressed the need to approach each analysis uniquely, to learn and apply narratives and practices from multiple colonial and postcolonial actors so as to avoid the all-too-easy victim/victimiser syndrome. “Giving an answer can lead to vulnerability, to violation or to political manipulation” of some subjects, whereas asking others (in differing situations) may be fine. Thus, postcolonial studies is inherently risky, tainted with emotional discourse and defensiveness on both sides, and should be approached with due caution and awareness for actors outside the traditional ‘top-down’ model. Colonialism and its effects were webs of collusion, power, need, victors and victims, not merely directives from the top.

Pat Noxolo, Parvati Raghuram, and Clare Madge, ‘Unsettling Responsibility: Postcolonial Interventions‘, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series (October, 2011) [Early Online View].

Children in Need, the annual charity appeal and high-profile telethon, was broadcast by the BBC on Friday evening.  Around the British Isles, people danced, sang and entertained to raise money towards the appeal. By the end of the televised coverage, £26,332,334 had been contributed, although the final total is likely to be much higher (last year’s event raised around £40,000,000).  This financial aid is then distributed among many organisations in support of disadvantaged children in the UK.

It is timely, then, to consider Mawdsley’s article on aid at a more global scale.  In TIBG, Mawdsley argues that Southern development actors (China and India, for example), sending foreign aid to places such as Africa and other parts of Asia, are bringing about changes to geographical understandings of development.  Mawdsley urges readers to consider how Southern countries construct aid rhetoric, in comparison with the language used by more traditional (Western) actors.  For example, the term ‘donor’ is resisted by many Southern development actors that, Mawdsley argues, are keen to avoid replicating the hierarchical donor/recipient relations associated with Western foreign aid.  The author’s analysis is developed through the lens of ‘gift theory’ with its cultural notions of giving, receiving and reciprocity.

What we call things matters, argues Mawdsley, and the way in which Southern development partners construct themselves is ultimately challenging conventional understandings of critical development geography.

  Deacon, M. (2011) Children in Need, BBC One & BBC Two, Review. The Telegraph

  Mawdsley, E. (2011) The changing geographies of foreign aid and development cooperation: contributions from gift theory. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00467