Spatial optimisation of fire service coverage: a case study of Brisbane,Australia

In the context of changing demand for fire services, spatial optimisation of fire coverage has attracted little scholarly attention despite its potential to improve emergency response and to inform future service planning for fire stations. Drawing on small area population forecasts, this paper extends the application of the Maximum Coverage Location Model to compute and delineate the spatial coverage of current and proposed new fire stations to align with population growth estimates for Brisbane, Australia. Our results reveal important gaps in fire cover that are likely to emerge as a result of predicted population growth, the spatial patterns of which varies across the Brisbane metropolitan area. We draw on these results to delineate a series of new potential sites for fire stations to ameliorate the reduction in spatial coverage as a consequence of predicted population growth demonstrating the utility of our analytic approach for decision‐making and operational planning in the fire services.     

Ecological livelihoods of farmers and pollinators in the Himalayas: Doing critical physical geography using citizen science

In farming communities dependent on the cultivation of pollinator-dependent crops, the livelihoods of farmers are inextricably linked with pollinator health. A global pollination crisis interlinked with a crisis of food production and farmer livelihoods, exacerbated by processes of socio-environmental change, is emblematic of the Anthropocene and of the kinds of ecosocial problems with which critical physical geography (CPG) engages. We propose examining the farmer-pollinator system in the Indian Himalayas through an ecological livelihoods approach using a range of collaborative citizen science methods including bloom observations to document pollinator visits, plant phenological observations to document year-round floral resource availability, and farm diaries to document orchard management practices. An ecological livelihoods approach draws on posthumanist theory, which has remained largely disengaged with methodological questions that are of concern to CPG. Citizen science, although widely used across a range of disciplines, has seen limited engagement in CPG. After elaborating some of the opportunities and challenges that an engagement between CPG, posthumanist theory, and citizen science opens up, we propose a methodology that would be simultaneously epistemological (understanding interdependence between livelihoods of farmers and pollinators) and ontological (imagining and building worlds where farmer and pollinator habitats are recomposed).     

Book reviews

Selwyn Ilan Troen and Benjamin Pinkus, eds., Organizing Rescue: National Jewish Solidarity in the Modern Period, London, Frank Cass, 1992, pp. xi, 424.

Idith Zertal, From Catastrophe to Power: Jewish Illegal Immigration to Palestine 1945–1948 (Hebrew). Tel Aviv: Am Oved Publishers, 1996. 674 pp.; notes; bibliography; index.

Yoav Gelber, Jewish‐Transjordanian Relations, 1921–48, London: Frank Cass, 1997. 320 pp., glossary, sources and bibliography, index.

Moshe Shemesh, The Palestinian Entity, 1959–1974; Arab Politics and the PLO, Second (Revised) Edition, London: Frank Cass, 1996. xxiii, 433pp., bibliography, index.

Yeshayahu A. Jelinek, ed., Zwischen Moral und Realpolitik: Deutsch‐israelisch Bezeihungen 1945–1965: Eine Doku‐mentensammlung. Gelingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1997. 687 pp.

Angelika Timm, Jewish Claims Against East Germany: Moral Obligations and Pragmatic Policy. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1997, xi + 291pp.     

Italian immigration: the origins,nature and evolution of Italy’s migratory systems

This article reconstructs the historical development of foreign settlement in Italy. It shows how Italy is part of a number of different migratory patterns, some of which are interconnected, while others are quite strongly differentiated. This diversity means that the standard images that link Italian immigration with a high degree of social marginalization do not correspond to the more complex realities, and by focusing on short-term aspects simply conflate highly differentiated patterns of migration into one single type. The article begins by reconstructing the patterns of foreign settlement in Italy since the time of Unification and then goes on to analyze the mechanisms of contemporary migrant flows to demonstrate how these derive from very different sets of motives and expectations. The motivations also explain why different immigrant groups respond to the different forms of regulation adopted by the Italian state. The article concludes by reviewing the data presently available on the numbers of foreigners currently in Italy, which indicate that over the last twenty years those numbers have decreased.     

Fragmented Forests,Fractured Lives: Ethno-territorial Struggles and Development in the Pacific Lowlands of Colombia

The culturally and ecologically diverse Pacific lowlands of Colombia are both the locus and product of key political economic and cultural political conjunctures. Twenty-five years after they emerged in their current form, Afro-Colombian ethnic and territorial struggles have become important icons of resistance to development and struggles for social change. But in Colombia as in other parts of the world, the rapid and violent expansion of capitalist accumulation and state power have had devastating consequences for the region's forests and communities—literally and epistemically fragmenting both. Based on long-term fieldwork, this paper examines the ongoing and contentious co-production of the Colombian Pacific region amidst the increasingly violent forces of neoliberal governmentality in the 21^st century. It shows that the Pacific lowlands are an example of “political forests” in the sense that they are a contested site and product of Afro-Colombian cultural politics and state territorialisation.