Geography

Question

This piglix contains articles or sub-piglix about Geography

Answer 1

Spatial analysis

Spatial analysis or spatial statistics includes any of the formal techniques which study entities using their topological, geometric, or geographic properties. Spatial analysis includes a variety of techniques, many still in their early development, using different analytic approaches and applied in fields as diverse as astronomy, with its studies of the placement of galaxies in the cosmos, to chip fabrication engineering, with its use of "place and route" algorithms to build complex wiring structures. In a more restricted sense, spatial analysis is the technique applied to structures at the human scale, most notably in the analysis of geographic data.

Complex issues arise in spatial analysis, many of which are neither clearly defined nor completely resolved, but form the basis for current research. The most fundamental of these is the problem of defining the spatial location of the entities being studied.

Classification of the techniques of spatial analysis is difficult because of the large number of different fields of research involved, the different fundamental approaches which can be chosen, and the many forms the data can take.

Spatial analysis can perhaps be considered to have arisen with early attempts at cartography and surveying but many fields have contributed to its rise in modern form. Biology contributed through botanical studies of global plant distributions and local plant locations, ethological studies of animal movement, landscape ecological studies of vegetation blocks, ecological studies of spatial population dynamics, and the study of biogeography. Epidemiology contributed with early work on disease mapping, notably John Snow's work of mapping an outbreak of cholera, with research on mapping the spread of disease and with location studies for health care delivery. Statistics has contributed greatly through work in spatial statistics. Economics has contributed notably through spatial econometrics. Geographic information system is currently a major contributor due to the importance of geographic software in the modern analytic toolbox. Remote sensing has contributed extensively in morphometric and clustering analysis. Computer science has contributed extensively through the study of algorithms, notably in computational geometry. Mathematics continues to provide the fundamental tools for analysis and to reveal the complexity of the spatial realm, for example, with recent work on fractals and scale invariance. Scientific modelling provides a useful framework for new approaches.

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Answer 2

Spatial mismatch

Spatial mismatch is the mismatch between where low-income households reside and suitable job opportunities. In its original formulation (see below) and in subsequent research, it has mostly been understood as a phenomenon affecting African-Americans, as a result of residential segregation, economic restructuring, and the suburbanization of employment.

Spatial mismatch was first proposed by John F. Kain in a seminal 1968 article, "Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization". That article did not specifically use the term "spatial mismatch", and Kain disclaimed credit.

In 1987, William Julius Wilson was an important exponent, elaborating the role of economic restructuring, as well as the departure of the black middle-class, in the development of a ghetto underclass in the United States.

After World War I, many wealthy Americans started decentralizing out of the cities and into the suburbs. During the second half of the 20th century, department stores followed the trend of moving into the suburbs. In 1968, Kain formulated the “Spatial Mismatch Hypothesis”, but he did not refer to it by this term. His hypothesis was that black workers reside in segregated zones that are distant and poorly connected to major centers of growth. The phenomenon has many implications for inner-city residents dependent on low-level entry jobs. For example, distance from work centers can lead to increasing unemployment rates and further dampen poverty outcomes for the region at large.

In 2007, Laurent Gobillon, Harris Selod, and Yves Zenou suggested that there are seven different factors that support the spatial mismatch phenomenon. Three factors are attributed to potential workers accessibility and initiatives. The remaining two factors stress employers’ reluctance to divert away from the negative stigma of city people and in particular minorities when hiring.

Growth of ghost cities in China, mostly from not yet agglomerated areas between or adjacent metropolitan areas or coal mining towns, as in the case of the most famous example, Kangbashi New Area of Ordos, are an example of spatial mismatch. In the case of places near metropolitan areas, it represents less of a risk going forward than in mining areas.

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Answer 3

Spatial justice

Spatial justice links together social justice and space, most notably in the works of geographers David Harvey and Edward W. Soja. The organization of space is a crucial dimension of human societies and reflects social facts and influences social relations (Henri Lefebvre, 1968, 1972). Consequently, both justice and injustice become visible in space. Therefore, the analysis of the interactions between space and society is necessary to understand social injustices and to formulate territorial policies aiming at tackling them. It is at this junction that the concept of spatial justice has been developed.

Space being a fundamental dimension of human societies, social justice is embedded in it. So the understanding of interactions between space and societies is essential to the understanding of social injustices and to a reflection on planning policies that aims at reducing them. This reflection can be guided by the concept of spatial justice, which ties Social Justice with space. Spatial justice is a crucial challenge because it is the ultimate goal of many planning policies. However, the diversity of definitions of “Justice” (and of the possible “social contracts” that legitimate them), is high and the political objectives of regional planning or urban planning can be quite different and even contradictory.

Therefore, it is important to analyze the concept of spatial justice, which is still rarely questioned (particularly since the work of Anglo-American radical geographers in the 1970s–1980s ) to the extent that it has been taken for granted. These past few years, several events and publications have demonstrated the rising interest of human and social sciences for the concept of spatial justice.

The concept of Spatial Justice opens up several perspectives for social sciences. Building on the work of several famous Justice philosophers (John Rawls, 1971; Iris Marion Young, 1990, 2000), two contrasting approaches of justice have polarized the debate: one focuses on redistribution issues, the other concentrates on decision-making processes. A first set of approaches consists in asking questions about spatial or socio-spatial distributions and working to achieve an equal geographical distribution of society's wants and needs, such as job opportunities, access to health care, good air quality, et cetera. This is of particular concern in regions where the population has difficulty moving to a more spatially just location due to poverty, discrimination, or political restrictions (such as apartheid pass laws). Even in free, developed nations, access to many places are limited. Geographer Don Mitchell points to the mass privatization of once-public land as a common example of spatial injustice. In this distributive justice perspective, the access to material and immaterial goods, or to social positions indicates whether the situation is fair or not. At the scale of urban space, questions of accessibility, walkability and transport equity can also be seen as matters of distribution of spatial resources.

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Answer 4

Spatial association

Spatial association is the degree to which things are similarly arranged in space. Analysis of the distribution patterns of two phenomena is done by map overlay. If the distributions are similar, then the spatial association is strong, and vice versa. In a Geographic Information System, the analysis can be done quantitatively. For example, a set of observations (as points or extracted from raster cells) at matching locations can be intersected and examined by regression analysis.

Like , this can be a useful tool for spatial prediction. In spatial modeling, the concept of spatial association allows the use of covariates in a regression equation to predict the geographic field and thus produce a map.

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Answer 5

Synekism

Synekism is a concept in urban studies coined by Edward Soja. It refers to the dynamic formation of the polis state — the union of several small urban settlements under the rule of a "capital" city (or so-called city-state or urban system). Soja's definition of synekism, mentioned in Writing the city spatially, is "the stimulus of urban agglomeration."

From the social sciences' view, it is also a "nucleated and hierarchically nested process of political governance, economic development, social order, and cultural identity" Soja (2000:13-14).

In densely settled urban places, a critical-mass provides potential for innovation that is not typically available in rural environments, therefore synekism can be thought of as the geographical relationships that create and give importance to cities.

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Answer 6

Territorial entity

A territorial entity is an entity that covers a part of the surface of the Earth with specified borders.

They can be grouped as follows:

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Answer 7

Time geography

Time geography or time-space geography is an evolving transdisciplinary perspective on spatial and temporal processes and events such as social interaction, ecological interaction, social and environmental change, and biographies of individuals. Time geography "is not a subject area per se," but rather an integrative ontological framework and visual language in which space and time are basic dimensions of analysis of dynamic processes. Time geography was originally developed by human geographers, but today it is applied in multiple fields related to transportation, regional planning, geography, anthropology, time-use research, ecology, environmental science, and public health. "It is a basic approach, and every researcher can connect it to theoretical considerations in her or his own way."

The Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand created time geography in the mid-1960s based on ideas he had developed during his earlier empirical research on human migration patterns in Sweden. He sought "some way of finding out the workings of large socio-environmental mechanisms" using "a physical approach involving the study of how events occur in a time-space framework." Hägerstrand was inspired in part by conceptual advances in spacetime physics and by the philosophy of physicalism.

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Answer 8

Tobler's first law of geography

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Answer 9

Triangulated irregular network

A triangulated irregular network (TIN) is a digital data structure used in a geographic information system (GIS) for the representation of a surface. A TIN is a vector-based representation of the physical land surface or sea bottom, made up of irregularly distributed nodes and lines with three-dimensional coordinates (x, y, and z) that are arranged in a network of nonoverlapping triangles.

A TIN comprises a triangular network of vertices, known as mass points, with associated coordinates in three dimensions connected by edges to form a triangular tessellation. Three-dimensional visualizations are readily created by rendering of the triangular facets. In regions where there is little variation in surface height, the points may be widely spaced whereas in areas of more intense variation in height the point density is increased.

A TIN used to represent terrain is often called a Digital Terrain Model (DTM). An advantage of using a TIN over a rasterized digital elevation model (DEM) in mapping and analysis is that the points of a TIN are distributed variably based on an algorithm that determines which points are most necessary to an accurate representation of the terrain. Data input is therefore flexible and fewer points need to be stored than in a raster DEM, with regularly distributed points. A TIN may be less suited than a raster DEM for certain kinds of GIS applications, such as analysis of a surface's slope and aspect. A DTM can be formed from a DEM. A DEM can be interpolated from a TIN.

A TIN is typically based on a Delaunay triangulation, but its utility will be limited by the selection of input data points: well-chosen points will be located so as to capture significant changes in surface form, such as topographical summits, breaks of slope, ridges, valley floors, pits, and cols.

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Answer 10

Two-step floating catchment area method

The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is a method for combining a number of related types of information into a single, immediately meaningful, index that allows comparisons to be made across different locations. Its importance lies in the improvement over considering the individual sources of information separately, where none on its own provides an adequate summary.

The two-step floating catchment area (2SFCA) method is a special case of a gravity model of spatial interaction that was developed to measure spatial accessibility to primary care physicians. 2SFCA can also be used to measure other accessibility such as accessibility to jobs, to cancer care facilities, etc. It was inspired by the spatial decomposition idea first proposed by Radke and Mu (2000).

The 2SFCA method not only has most of the advantages of a gravity model, but is also intuitive to interpret, as it uses essentially a special form of physician-to-population ratio. It is easy to implement in a GIS environment. In essence, the 2SFCA method measures spatial accessibility as a ratio of primary-care physicians to population, combining two steps:

It has been recently enhanced by considering distance decay within catchments and called the enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method.

Furthermore, the use of capping certain services according to nearby population size,can improve the accuracy when analyzing across areas of different environments (i.e. rural and urban).

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