Regional innovation systems and the labour market: A comparison of five regions

This paper reviews the concept of Regional Innovation Systems with particular attention on the labour market dimension. It argues that the labour force as a repository of skills and knowledge plays a key role in generating knowledge flows within Regional Innovation Systems. Then, by reference to a number of important dimensions characterizing innovation, five regions from northern Europe are contrasted. In light of research undertaken by the authors the paper highlights the problems associated with a regional system that may hamper innovation and it shows that Regional Innovation Systems can be underdeveloped by being too dependent on public support. Accordingly a combination of public and private governance at the regional level to promote systemic innovation is advocated. The paper also shows how the Regional Innovation Systems can evolve and how regions can become increasingly developmental knowledge laboratories influencing labour market conditions.     

The Use of Expert Judgments in Predicting Interregional Migration Patterns: An Analytic Hierarchy Approach

This paper presents an application of Saaty's analytic hierarchy process to the prediction of interregional migration patterns. This application is an example of how Saaty's method can be used in analyzing geographic problems to synthesize the results of theoretical models with the judgments of experts and policymakers. After discussing the basic theory behind Saaty's method and how expert judgments can be inserted into the Tobler-Dorigo migration model, the results of an application of this model to predict migrations between the nine U.S. census regions for the 1965–70 period are used to illustrate the basic steps in this approach.     

Walking the Dog in Madrid During the Pandemic

The relationships we humans form with our pets condition the spaces we inhabit and how we move around in them. This article discusses relations between humans and their dogs in the city of Madrid during the Covid-19 lockdown. As an emergency ethnography, this article shows how, in this context, dogs can become the centre of relations between neighbours, facilitating or worsening them, creating new problems and simplifying others.     

Location-Allocation Models of Some Traffic Facilities

The objective of this paper is to formulate location-allocation models of linear facilities, such as bridges, railroad crossings, and staircases. The location-allocation models in this paper differ from existing location-allocation models in that the service provided by the facilities is consumed by trips, with associated origins and destinations. The first part of the paper shows the formulation of these location-allocation problems in one-dimensional space. It is demonstrated that these problems can also be formulated by the use of a rectilinear Voronoi diagram in two-dimensional space. The second part of the paper demonstrates fundamental relationships between the number of facilities and the total length of indirect trips and between the number of facilities and the total number of indirect trips for uniformly and independently distributed origins and destinations.     

Computer Use in Pottery Studies at Aphrodisias

Abstract

This article is intended primarily for archaeologists who may know little about computers, but suspect that the computer might be useful to them in their research. The emphasis is on the application of the computer to ceramics at the site of Aphrodisias, Turkey, where this system of field recording has evolved. The excavations at Aphrodisias have unearthed a relatively continuous stratigraphic sample of pottery from the Chalcolithic through to the Roman and Byzantine periods. This rich and varied corpus of material culture is now being analyzed with the aid of the computer. This article familiarizes the reader with the problems, methodology, and computer mechanics used to retrieve these data and shows how such a system can be used when a direct tie-up with a computer is impossible.     

Partitioned Nature,Privileged Knowledge: Community‐based Conservation in Tanzania

Community Based Conservation (CBC) has become the catch–all solution to the social and ecological problems plaguing traditional top–down, protectionist conservation approaches. CBC has been particularly popular throughout Africa as a way to gain local support for wildlife conservation measures that have previously excluded local people and their development needs. This article shows that, despite the rhetoric of devolution and participation associated with new CBC models, conservation planning in Tanzania remains a top–down endeavour, with communities and their specialized socio–ecological knowledge delegated to the margins. In addition to the difficulties associated with the transfer of power from state to community hands, CBC also poses complex challenges to the culture or institution of conservation. Using the example of the Tarangire–Manyara ecosystem, the author shows how local knowledge and the complexities of ecological processes challenge the conventional zone–based conservation models, and argues that the insights of local Maasai knowledge claims could better reflect the ecological and social goals of the new CBC rhetoric.     

IMAGINING SAFE URBAN SPACE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF DETECTIVE FICTION TO RADICAL GEOGRAPHY

Radical geographers often discuss how contemporary urban space is becoming increasingly violent and dangerous. They pay much less attention to the question of how to make this space safe. In contrast, detective fiction focuses precisely on how to take danger out of the city. It therefore provides radical geographers with imaginative models of how different levels of space are linked through forms of violence. Detective fiction challenges accounts of the urban spatialization of power that over-simplify relations between city inhabitants as a clash between “oppressor” and “oppressed.” By suggesting how a subject can simultaneously oppress through and be oppressed by volence, detective fiction shows the contradictory multiplicity of people's spatial identifications.     

Mining Formalization at the Margins of the State: Small‐scale Miners and State Governance in the Peruvian Amazon

This article analyses the Peruvian government's quest to formalize small‐scale mining in the Amazon as a political process which shows how state governance problems are reproduced in the margins of the state. It asks why the central state is unable to govern mining activities in the Madre de Dios region, and examines how small‐scale miners have reacted to state attempts to formalize their activities. The author argues that, through political agency and the reproduction of ‘hybrid’ formal and informal institutions, small‐scale miners have learned to contest, reinterpret and build alternatives to central state governance. The article contributes to the literature on development policies by showing how difficulties in implementing regulatory policies may be analysed as governance problems, particularly in regions like the Amazon, where the state apparatus is not well established.     

What is worth teaching in geography?

Abstract

To be efficient, geographers must teach not facts, but how to learn. This means teaching theories, methods and models, and also the languages of investigation, which include mathematical languages. These are important because some human knowledge and discourse, including growing conceptual areas in geography, cannot be translated from mathematics. Mathematical languages are tools of inquiry, the teaching of which can quickly open up new lines of thinking. Mathematical geographers can make a unique contribution to applied areas through their ability to model and clarify complex problems. An example of teaching mathematical languages is given using a simple directed connectivity matrix, which in turn can be manipulated to introduce advanced ideas. During this process, students are learning naturally about mathematical languages.     

Declining foraging efficiency and moa carcass exploitation in southern New Zealand

The application of foraging theory to understanding carcass exploitation is a relatively recent development. The methodology developed by archaeological and ethnoarchaeological research on butchery/transport studies has been integrated into a behavioral ecological framework to create models that can be used to understand archaeological carcass exploitation. In this paper, I use such a model to examine how New Zealand foragers altered their use of moa carcasses as the availability of these large birds declined. Moa data from the Shag River Mouth site in southern New Zealand are analyzed to test changes in butchery/transport and skeletal element breakage patterns expected with resource depression and declining foraging efficiency. This research shows that at Shag Mouth, field processing of moas increased and marrow, and possibly grease extraction intensified over time.     

Stable Isotopes,Chronology, and Bayesian Models for the Viking Archaeology of North-East Iceland

This paper reviews the results of a long-term research project that used stable isotope analyses (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N, δ³⁴S) and Bayesian mixing models to better model the chronology for a presumed Viking Age cemetery at Hofstaðir, near Lake Mývatn in north-east Iceland. δ¹³C and radiocarbon dating indicated that many of the individuals consumed a large amount of marine protein, which results in a marine reservoir effect (MRE), making ages older than expected. In addition to the MRE, geological activity in the region has the potential to introduce massive quantities of radioactive ‘dead’ carbon into the freshwater system, resulting in a very large freshwater reservoir effect (FRE) that can offset radiocarbon ages on the order of a few thousand years. The radiocarbon dates of organisms that derive an unknown proportion of their carbon from both marine and freshwater reservoirs are extremely difficult to ‘correct’, or, more appropriately, model. The research not only highlights the complexities of dealing with multiple reservoirs, but also how important it is to develop models that are temporally and geographically relevant to the site under study. Finally, it shows how this data can be used to inform the development of chronological models for refining the dating for archaeological activity.     

Assessing place-based identities in the early Middle Ages: a proposal for post-Roman Iberia

Sociological models of place-based identity can be used to better understand the social dynamics of local communities and how they interact with their surroundings. This paper explores how these theoretical models of belonging to a place, in tandem with communal cognitive maps, can be applied to post-Roman contexts, taking the Iberian Peninsula in the Visigothic period (sixth–eighth centuries) as a preliminary case study. We argue that this approach can give us not only a more complex understanding of community agencies but also allows us to reconsider the social context for past social interactions. Furthermore, it will open a new archaeological perspective for future work on the relations between groups and individuals with their built, social, and natural environments.     

Design in government: City planning,space-making,and urban politics

In recent years, design has appeared in an ever-broadening range of government processes and projects, particularly in cities. What has design become, such that its methods and practices could be applied to urban planning and public administration? And what are the governmental problems that design methods and designers are being mobilized to address? This article answers these questions by tracing the tangled intersections of design, city planning, and urban administration in the last century. Through a genealogical analysis, it shows how a number of designers came to redefine design as a set of procedures for formulating and proposing solutions to “wicked problems.” This understanding of design—which developed in fields such as industrial and product design that were remote from government—has recently gained salience in public administration and city planning. In contrast to an influential geographical analysis of design as spectacular architecture that is divorced from any broad social objective, the article argues that design in government can be analyzed as the design of politics. Its concern is not with the aesthetic or functional qualities of material objects—whether a manufactured product, building, or article of clothing—but with the ongoing work of organizing argumentation and decision making about complex, large-scale problems.     

Dimensions of State Environmental Policies

States have developed an array of environmental programs in response to a variety of political and environmental factors. This article examines three state clean air programs—setting ambient standards, ambient monitoring, and enforcement—and shows how each program has a distinct set of empirical determinants, reflecting the programs' diverse purposes. States' ambient standards policies allocate resources among competing claimants, and consequently they reflect the balance of environmental politics in each state. Ambient monitoring programs reflect the degree to which states need and can process information about air pollution problems. The level of states' enforcement programs reflects the scope of the environmental problem in each state.     

Linked population and economic models: some methodological issues in forecasting,analysis, and policy optimization

Some problems associated with demographic-economic forecasting include finding models appropriate for a declining economy with unemployment, using a multiregional approach in an interregional model, finding a way to show differential consumption while endogenizing unemployment, and avoiding unemployment inconsistencies. The solution to these problems involves the construction of an activity-commodity framework, locating it within a group of forecasting models, and indicating possible ratios towards dynamization of the framework. The authors demonstrate the range of impact multipliers that can be derived from the framework and show how these multipliers relate to Leontief input-output multipliers. It is shown that desired population distribution may be obtained by selecting instruments from the economic sphere to produce, through the constraints vector of an activity-commodity framework, targets selected from demographic activities. The next step in this process, empirical exploitation, was carried out by the authors in the United Kingdom, linking an input-output model with a wide selection of demographic and demographic-economic variables. The generally tenuous control which government has over any variables in systems of this type, especially in market economies, makes application in the policy field of the optimization approach a partly conjectural exercise, although the analytic capacity of the approach can provide clear indications of policy directions.     

Markovian Models of Movement Within Urban Spatial Structures

Much work has assumed that movement within urban spatial structures is an “adaptive” process. Nonetheless, mathematical models have not yet been specified and tested which formulate both how different individuals “adapt” over time in destination or route selection, and how predictions about aggregate movement can be derived from postulates about different persons. Two adaptive first-order Markov models for heterogeneous individuals are suggested by the literature. When formulated and tested, however, these models are inadequate to describe travel within urban spatial structures. This implies that the use of Markovian processes to model movement may be overrated. More confidence may be placed in other formulations such as linear learning models of route and destination choice.     

A Family of Location Models for Multiple-Type Discrete Dispersion

One of the defining objectives in location science is to maximize dispersion. Facilities can be dispersed for a wide variety of purposes, including attempts to optimize competitive market advantage, disperse negative impacts, and optimize security. With one exception, all of the extant dispersion models consider only one type of facility, and ignore problems where multiple types of facilities must be located. We provide examples where multiple-type dispersion is appropriate and based on this develop a general class of facility location problems that optimize multiple-type dispersion. This family of models expands on the previously formulated definitions of dispersion for single types of facilities, by allowing the interactions among different types of facilities to determine the extent to which they will be spatially dispersed. We provide a set of integer-linear programming formulations for the principal models of this class and suggest a methodology for intelligent constraint elimination. We also present results of solving a range of multiple-type dispersion problems optimally and demonstrate that only the smallest versions of such problems can be solved in a reasonable amount of computer time using general-purpose optimization software. We conclude that the family of multiple-type dispersion models provides a more comprehensive, flexible, and realistic framework for locating facilities where weighted distances should be maximized, when compared with the special case of locating only a single type of facility.     

Urban Regeneration in the Brazilian urban policy agenda

This article aims to highlight the main arguments that sought to justify the incorporation and legitimization of Urban Regeneration in the urban policy agenda in Brazil. It shows how the convergence between different and even conflicting propositions related to urban development provided ideological support to the construction of discourses in which urban regeneration is portrayed as beneficial to society as a whole, and how recent international ideas on urban development were incorporated in urban policies of contemporary Brazil, considering our local socio-economic and political environment, planning tradition and regulatory frameworks. The focus will be on Rio de Janeiro and particularly São Paulo given the key role these two cities play in defining urban policy paradigms, guiding government agendas and exporting regulatory models to other parts of Brazil.