Operating anew: Queering GIS with good enough software

In the last decade, conversations around queering of GIScience emerged. Drawing on literature from feminist and queer critical GIS, with special attention to the under‐examined political economy of GIS, I suggest that the critical project of queering all of GIS, both GIScience and GISystems, requires not just recognition of the labour and lives of queers and research in geographies of sexualities. Based upon a queer feminist political economic critique and evidenced in my teaching critical GIS at two elite liberal arts colleges, I argue that the “status quo” between ESRI and geography as a field must be interrupted. Extending a critical GIS focus beyond data structures and data ethics, I argue that geographic researchers and instructors have a responsibility in queering our choice and production of software, algorithms, and code alike. I call this production and choice of democratic, accessible, and useful software by, for, and about the needs of its users, good enough software.     

L'identification des zones calmes et un diagnostic d’équité environnementale à Montréal

Quiet urban areas are places with low noise levels that can help people to support physical and mental wellness. This paper has two objectives: to identify quiet urban areas in Montreal and to check for the presence of environmental inequities in access to such areas for vulnerable groups (children, older people, low‐income individuals, and visible minorities). Using a GIS‐based methodology, 2,282 quiet urban areas were identified in Montreal. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model analysis showed that there are no major inequities in access to quiet urban areas for the population groups studied. The analysis did, however, revealed substantial spatial disparities in terms of the distribution of quiet urban areas across the boroughs and municipalities examined.     

Our GIS is too small

GIScience and GISystems have been successful in tackling many geographical problems over the last 30 years. But technologies and associated theory can become limiting if they end up defining how we see the world and what we believe are worthy and tractable research problems. This paper explores some of the limitations currently impacting GISystems and GIScience from the perspective of technology and community, contrasting GIScience with other informatics communities and their practices. It explores several themes: (i) GIScience and the informatics revolution; (ii) the lack of a community‐owned innovation platform for GIScience research; (iii) the computational limitations imposed by desktop computing and the inability to scale up analysis; (iv) the continued failure to support the temporal dimension, and especially dynamic processes and models with feedbacks; (v) the challenge of embracing a wider and more heterogeneous view of geographical representation and analysis; and (vi) the urgent need to foster an active software development community to redress some of these shortcomings. A brief discussion then summarizes the issues and suggests that GIScience needs to work harder as a community to become more relevant to the broader geographic field and meet a bigger set of representation, analysis, and modelling needs.     

A hard binary to shake: The limitations and possibilities of teaching GIS critically

This paper builds upon studies employing a syllabi-based methodology that suggest a tendency for critical geographic information science (GIS) courses to emphasize reading/discussion about GIS without actually doing GIS, and for traditional GIS instruction courses to emphasize the technical capacities of GIS software without incorporating critical theory in substantive ways. However, through ethnographic evidence we reveal that there is likely more innovative theory-practice transcending pedagogies being utilized than would necessarily show up in such a syllabi-based methodology. There are also very real and differentially manifest pragmatic, departmental, and institutional barriers in place to effectively incorporating critical social theory into courses that actually do GIS. We first catalogue these barriers as a means of ascertaining what can (and cannot) be done to overcome them through GIS pedagogic innovation. We then outline the (often-veiled) pedagogic strategies deployed by critical GIS scholars today to navigate and circumvent these barriers.     

Teaching critical open GIS

Higher-education geographic information system (GIS) curricula largely marginalize and separate instruction of critical GIS and open GIS, paralleling a divide between GIS and non-GIS in geography. GIS is typically represented as a singular, infallibly objective, and universally applicable technology. GIS generally dismisses the critiques from human geography, while critical human geography dismisses GIS for its association with positivism and unethical applications. Teaching critical open GIS may bridge this divide, creating a transformative pedagogical space for human geography to affectively and effectively engage with open GIS technology at the level of code. Critical open GIS students practice and critique GIS as conflicted insiders, bridging the divide between GIS and non-GIS in their geography education. Reviews of GIS curricula find support for teaching critical and open GIS, but reviews of texts and syllabi confirm their marginalization and separation. A new critical open GIS course is introduced, using GIS in development and political ecology as integrative frameworks.     

Bruit aérien et équité environnementale dans les quatre plus grandes métropoles canadiennes

Previous environmental equity studies have examined the spatial distribution of aircraft noise across cities. Their findings show that, in several cities, visible minorities and low-income populations are most affected by aircraft noise. In contrast, one study concludes that well-off populations are the most affected. These contradictory findings support the use of a comparative approach for several cities. The aim of this study is twofold. First, we want to identify if there are groups in the population that are in a situation of inequity to aircraft noise exposure in Toronto, Montréal, Vancouver, and Calgary. Then, we want to check if the exposure to the aircraft noise of the different groups varies significantly from one metropolis to another. We use the recommended noise exposure contour maps in Canada: the Noise Exposure Forecasts. Next, four variables are extracted from the 2016 Statistics Canada census at a fine-scale level (dissemination areas): that is, the percentages of low-income, visible minorities, 0- to 15-year-old, and 65-year-old and over populations. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model show that environmental inequities in terms of exposure to aircraft noise for the four population groups are not consistent from city to city.     

Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical human geography has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how particular key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. Although keystone ideas in GIScience such as Tobler's “First Law” and the modifiable areal unit problem speak to enduring concerns of human geography, they have drawn little interest from that field. Here, we suggest one way to reformulate the computational approach to the region for relational space, so that regions emerge not through proximity in an absolute space or similarities in intensive properties, but according to their similarities in relations. We show how this might operate theoretically and empirically, working through three illustrative examples. Our approach gestures toward reformulating key terms in GIScience like distance, proximity, networks, and spatial building blocks such as the polygon. Re‐engaging the challenges of representing geographical concepts computationally can yield new kinds of GIS and GIScience resonant with theoretical ideas in human geography, and also lead to critical human geographic practices less antagonistic to computation.