Best practices for measuring community resources across Canada: A comparison of coding classifications

Social scientists, geographers, criminologists, and health scientists are often tasked with finding data to best capture the impact of “community context” on individual outcomes, including residential services, physical resources, and social institutions. One outlet for such data in Canada is Digital Map Technologies Inc. (DMTI) Spatial, which offers a national repository of over one million businesses and recreational points of interest. The database is generated through CanMap Streetfiles, which includes geocodes of each point's precise location. These data are available to researchers from their university data library and Esri Canada, but primarily available to private sector and government markets. That said, the goal of the current paper is to encourage researchers to access this rich yet under-utilized data source. Each service, business, or resource in the DMTI Spatial database is assigned to a respective category using Standard Industrial Classification codes and North American Industrial Classification System codes. It is not clear, however, which is the more reliable coding criteria. We provide an overview of our review of DMTI Spatial data and take-away suggestions for using this valuable resource for future research on meso-level residential markers.     

Polycentricity and the Multiplexity of Urban Networks

Abstract

Empirical studies on polycentric urban regions (PURs) tend to analyse their spatial organization by examining only one type of functional linkage between cities. However, it has generally been accepted that urban networks are multiplex phenomena and that spatial interactions between cities can take many different forms, for example, commuting, shopping trips, and inter-firm trade. The spatial organization of each of these functional linkages is not necessarily identical, and, therefore, a region can appear to be polycentric and spatially integrated based on the analysis of one type of functional linkage but monocentric and loosely connected based on the analysis of another type of functional linkage. The aim of this paper is to stimulate further discussion on the multiplexity of urban networks with regard to the relational complexity of urban regions. Focusing on one PUR (Randstad Holland), we compare the geographical scope and spatial structure of different functional networks within it. Our results indicate that the spatial organization of the urban network depends on the lens through which it is assessed.     

Emancipation or Enclosement? The Spatialization of Difference and Urban Ethnic Contestation in Colombia

Abstract: The focus of this article is a paradox inherent in the political effects of spatial claims undertaken by multicultural policies in many nation states: though territory is considered as one of the primary means of achieving autonomy and self‐determination, it is at the same time a mechanism that encloses difference. Through a combination of archival and ethnographic research I study the political effects of binding indigenous people's minority rights with indigenous reservations in Colombia. I focus on analyzing the legal ways in which an “ethnic indigenous type” has been attached to an “ethnic indigenous rural topos” in the jurisprudence of the Colombian Constitutional Court. I also examine how ethnic groups in the capital city of Bogotá have questioned the multicultural ideals of indigeneity and the romantic desires of what an indigenous place should look like. Ultimately, my intention is to draw attention both analytically and politically, to the necessity of more thorough analyses of the consequences of strict forms of spatializing ethnicity.     

A New Diplomatic History and the Networks of Spanish Diplomacy in the Baroque Era

Diplomatic history has undergone profound alterations during the last century. According to the old model built by Mattingly in 1955, diplomatic history was the analysis of international and political relations within a national context. Subsequent studies analysed how diplomacy evolved towards a more institutionalised and professional scheme (established in eighteenth-century European diplomacy). However, was this conclusion an inevitable one for Early Modern and Baroque diplomacy? This essay intends to retrace the steps that have been taken towards a new history of diplomacy, by early-modern historians in general, and by Spanish historiography in particular, as well as to assess the idea that what made a difference for Spanish Baroque diplomacy was the extent of networks that allowed cultural transference, the capacity to influence others, rather than the institutional extent of connections and practices. Which people or processes promoted the circulation of ideas, information, and culture, within and outside the Spanish monarchy, during the seventeenth century? This question will form the focus of the second part of this essay, in which the author analyses several specific cases of Spanish ambassadors in Europe: their networks of communication, their building of stereotypes, their informal diplomatic practices, and their use of ceremonial practices.     

‘Let’s find out’: the historian laureate and participatory heritage discovery

ABSTRACT

Developing modes of engagement in the construction of public heritage knowledge emphasize participatory media and active collaboration with citizens. The City of Edmonton created the first historian laureate position in Canada in 2010, and related programs are still rare. This article considers the interaction of narrative content with social and technological contexts of production, viewing the role of the historian laureate as amateur historian and professional storyteller. The historian laureate operates primarily in accessible contexts of leisure, mediated in part through digital technologies, and can respond relatively directly to community interests as a heritage coordinator rather than expert. Rather than representing oppositional or disruptive power to official heritage discourses, the project enables the production of ‘small heritages’ through a series of story episodes. These stories focus on events, people, places and artifacts that typically fall outside the meta-narratives and monuments of a city’s heritage landscape. The historian laureate, embodying or articulating local experience in ways amenable to leisure activity, demonstrates capacities to produce largely indeterminate, diverse and porous ideas of place and histories as part of a bottom-up social generation of knowledge.     

THE MISSISSAUGA TRAIN DERAILMENT AND EVACUATION, 10–16 NOVEMBER 1979

The evacuation of a quarter of a million residents of the city of Mississauga, Ontario, in the aftermath of the derailment of a freight train carrying hazardous materials on 10 November 1979, was, at that time, the largest peacetime evacuation ever conducted in North America. It took place with little panic or injury, no deaths, and no apparent resistance to evacuation advice. Not surprisingly, then, the success of the Mississauga evacuation has attracted the interest, and raised the hopes, of emergency planners, governments, and industry officials in North America and many other countries. These groups want to understand the reasons for the success of the evacuation, and, if possible, to transfer the effective elements of the Mississauga emergency plans and response procedures to their own jurisdictions. Their concerns reflect the wider search for a model of public decision-making under threat which would identify and link cirtical factors, decisions, and behaviour, and which would provide a framework for emergency planning and research.