Does time heal all wounds? Restoring place attachment in Halifax's Point Pleasant Park after Hurricane Juan

On September 29, 2003, Hurricane Juan profoundly altered Halifax's Point Pleasant Park, resulting in feelings of solastalgia (the distress caused by perceived negative changes to a beloved place) as park users mourned the loss of a place that held great significance for the city. Starting in 2008, over 100,000 trees have been planted in order to restore the original Acadian mixed forest to this landscape. Drawing on scholarly literature focused on place attachment and disaster recovery, this paper utilizes interviews (n = 11) and online surveys (n = 79) to determine whether long‐term park users have re‐established positive place attachments in conjunction with the park's restoration. Our results indicate that participants have largely overcome their solastalgic outlook and restored meaningful place attachments to the park. Unexpectedly, our results also suggest that long‐term participants have current place attachments that appear stronger than the place attachments expressed by participating short‐term users, who never experienced the traumatic impact of Hurricane Juan on Point Pleasant Park.     

Subaltern Empowerment in the Geoweb: Tensions between Publicity and Privacy

Geographers have argued that the emergence of the geospatial web, or geoweb, represents a radical shift away from the state's monopolization of geospatial technologies. Like the public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) movement before it, the geoweb research agenda has emphasized a desire for empowerment and participatory democracy. However, this research agenda has also inherited a conceptualization of power that emphasizes the linkages between empowerment and public visibility, and this paper argues that this inheritance opens potentially sensitive geoweb data to exploitation. Geographers therefore have an important role to play in emphasizing the need to explore ways of harnessing the power of the geoweb for marginalized communities while nonetheless maintaining those communities' privacy. This paper uses work with the Maijuna indigenous people of Peru as a case study to begin a discussion about how the political goals of disempowered people may be best obtained through both public and private uses of the geoweb.     

A sequence of inland desert settlement in the Oman peninsula: 2008–2009 excavations at Saruq al‐Hadid,Dubai, UAE

The 2008–2009 excavations conducted by the Dubai Desert Survey at Saruq al‐Hadid, Dubai, have transformed our interpretation of the site from an Iron Age bronze production centre to a site with multiple occupations over the course of more than three millennia; they underline the importance of this site for understanding land use and settlement patterns in the deserts of the Oman peninsula. Saruq al‐Hadid probably began as an oasis site where nomadic pastoralists during the Umm an‐Nar and Wadi Suq periods camped and took advantage of a relatively well‐watered landscape. In contrast, Iron Age remains at the site do not bear any definite signs of settlement per se; instead, the material culture suggests that Saruq al‐Hadid may have been one of several sites in south‐east Arabia that were dedicated to a snake cult. The site is capped by waste from an intensive metalworking operation that appears to have taken place during the later first millennium BC. Iron age and later remains from the site tie Saruq al‐Hadid to a regional network of settlement and trade centres and suggest that, like the mountain piedmont and coasts, the sandy desert expanses of the Oman peninsula held economic and ritual importance in the overall landscape.     

Voters on the move: The political effectiveness of migration and its effects on state partisan composition

Recent population forecasts issued by the U.S. Census Bureau suggest that by 2030 Sunbelt migration could result in two-thirds of all Americans living in the South and West. What's more, 30% of all Americans could live in California, Texas, and Florida (U.S. Census Bureau, 2005). Regardless of whether such high levels of continued Sunbelt migration occur or other patterns emerge, population movement will have electoral implications as the composition of migration streams change the balance of party identifiers at both origins and destinations. To illustrate how migration streams can exhibit very different levels of ‘political effectiveness,’ this research substantively addresses three key issues under-examined in the current literature: 1) the ability of migration to both reinforce and dilute party strength, 2) the changes in partisanship at the origin and destination of migration streams effected through processes analogous to ‘packing’ and ‘cracking’ in electoral redistricting literature, and 3) the importance of migration selectivity. This research uses an innovative, albeit far-from-precision method to suggest how recent U.S. migration trends may portend changes in Republican and Democratic partisanship. Using 2000 Presidential election exit polls by state, along with 1995–2000 PUMS migration data, individual party identification is inferred from individual migrant characteristics. This research calls attention to and argues for research to address the highly complex relationships of migration with electoral geographies.