Light pollution refers to the degradation of darkness through the use of artificial light at night in and around human infrastructures. This pollution is intrinsically related to urbanization and spills out from urban areas to affect both rural and protected areas. Several countries are organizing the fight against light pollution. There, local communities are experimenting with environmental policies

In Jordan, many women’s small food businesses and nonprofit projects have been supported as a sustainable rural development strategy. The prevalence of these projects in bazaars and festivals in Jordan indicates their prominence. Most studies of these projects have framed them in terms of microfinance or development goals such as women’s empowerment. The framework of empowerment has been widely critiqued

Understanding how inequalities are transmitted through generations and restrict upward spatial mobility has long been a concern of geographic research. Previous research has identified that the neighborhood in which someone grows up is highly predictive of the type of neighborhood he or she will live in as an independent adult. What remains largely unknown is the relative contribution of geography

Within climate–energy–transport scholarship and professions there is a growing consensus that electric vehicles (EVs), which include personal cars, sport utility vehicles (SUVs), vans, and pickup trucks, are essential for decarbonizing mobility. This article urges caution and pause before an EV lock-in and calls on geographers and other scholars, professionals, and sustainability advocates to consider

For industry proponents, the Xinavane Sugar Mill, Mozambique’s largest sugar estate, has been rehabilitated from postconflict subsistence farming to agroindustrial productivity. Such investment-oriented narratives seek to erase earlier land dispossessions and uneven accumulation. Drawing ethnographic research together with Mozambican Land Cadaster and archival documents, this article rethinks land

Supported by a large body of scholarship, it is increasingly orthodox practice for cities to deploy urban greening interventions to address diverse socioenvironmental challenges, from protecting urban ecosystems to enhancing built environments and climate resilience or improving health outcomes. In this article, we expand the theoretical boundaries used to challenge this growing orthodoxy by laying

Payments for ecosystem services (PES) arrangements aim to influence human activities in critical ecosystems that produce, among other services, water, biodiversity, and carbon sinks. In practice, PES arrangements ultimately seek to redefine and territorialize space for conservation. Establishing control over activities within a targeted area is challenging, however, particularly when these areas are

Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions draw on racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” culpability in oil as development. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within

This article asks this question: What if, rather than starting from the United States or the United Kingdom in histories of geography, we start from Nigeria? Focusing on Nigerian geographers working in Nigeria’s first university from 1948 to 1990 and drawing on archival evidence and new oral history interviews, this article argues that the view from Nigeria offers significant new perspectives on the

This article aims to advance understandings of contemporary state-making in rural Mongolia, contingent on historical processes rather than a taken-for-granted natural category. Writing on postsocialist Mongolia often emphasizes the “retreat of the state” in rural areas; this article offers a counterpoint to this discourse by illustrating the ways in which herder livelihoods and the idealization of

In an effort to contribute to the contemporary debates on accumulation by dispossession (ABD), we argue for a closer attention to the link between the state and ABD. We propose contextualizing ABD within the institutionalization of the process of replacing communal property rights with private property rights. In such institutionalization, the state plays a critical role as the final guarantor of property

Enforcement of border control has become a global trend as nation-states endeavor to regulate cross-border flows and handle security risks posed by migrants. This article analyzes the China–Myanmar border, which is hitherto neglected in the literature but undergoes innovative experimentation in border control, to complement the well-established literature on border enforcement. We draw on a theoretical

Emerging new materialism scholarship provides an exciting theoretical space not only for challenging traditional conceptions of human agency but also for rethinking the role of the material world in shaping political outcomes. Although a wildly diverse intellectual movement, this scholarship shares the common goal of widening traditional understandings of agency to include nonhuman objects. This article

Evacuation is a fairly empty and technical concept often used to describe moments of emergency governance when peoples are moved away from harm. It was also a key code word, though, within the Nazi deportation and killing of Europe’s Jews. How could evacuation be deployed in these contexts and for these purposes? What is so crucial here is not simply that the practices of the Holocaust were termed

Since the 2008 global financial crisis, a green economy has been promoted as a way to foster sustainable development and eradicate poverty at the same time. Many states have become more active in investing in renewable technologies and allocating capital to renewable energy development. With the rapid growth of the green economy in East Asian countries (e.g., China, South Korea, and Taiwan), however

Between 1930 and 1932 the three sessions of the Round Table Conference in London drew more than seventy Indian delegates to the city, for up to three months, to debate India’s constitutional future within the British Empire. This article argues that the atmosphere of the conference was central to its successes and failures and that studying atmospheres can help us think about the co-constitution of

This article examines how recent increases in commercial poaching of wildlife intensify the dictates that underpin conservation law and its enforcement; namely, the securing of space, punishing of transgressors, and protecting of nonhuman life. Drawing on ethnographic research with antipoaching personnel in Mozambique, I examine how rangers translate these legal and normative manifestations of conservation

Geographical variable distributions often exhibit both macroscale geographic smoothness and microscale discontinuities or local step changes. Nonetheless, accounting for both effects in a unified statistical model is challenging, especially when the data under study involve a multiscale structure and non-Gaussian response variables. This study develops a locally adaptive spatial multilevel logistic

Previous research has identified a number of physical, socioeconomic, and demographic factors related to tornado casualty rates. There remain gaps in our understanding of community-level vulnerabilities to tornadoes. Here a framework is provided for systematically identifying the most unusually devastating tornadoes, defined as those where the observed number of casualties far exceeds the predicted

This article advances three interrelated arguments. First, by focusing on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Research Department, an undertheorized chapter in the civil rights movement, we advance an expressly spatialized understanding of the African American freedom struggle. Second, by focusing on an SNCC-produced pamphlet titled The Care and Feeding of Power Structures, we advance

Systems of food production and provision face a set of complex and interdependent challenges to sustainably meet current and future nutrition needs and minimize the negative social and ecological consequences of modern agriculture. Food system localization, often in the context of specific initiatives like farmers’ markets, are frequently put forth as a promising strategy for establishing more just

We report on a multicriteria decision-making study where participants were asked to purchase a house shown on maps that include hazard prediction information. We find that participants decided to buy different houses, depending on whether uncertainty is shown on the map display and on the type of uncertainty visualization (i.e., varying color value, focus, or texture). We also find that participants’

We compared two biogeomorphic models that postulate how vegetation is intertwined in the response and recovery of barrier island dunes. Each model was developed in a separate coastal region using different methods. Both relied on simple elevational representations of topography. By comparing topographies among more islands of these two regions and by linking multiple representations of topographic

This article deploys a discursive–material analytical framework to trace how perceptions of data power are constructed in urban activist circles against data’s capacity to advance grassroots political goals. By framing South African data activism practices as a form of technopolitics—a concept that foregrounds the coconstitution of politics and technology through their anchoring to normative discourses—this

Although the notion of the Anthropocene has generated a great deal of literature across disciplines, the geographic critique of this concept is still developing. This article contributes to justice-oriented engagements with the Anthropocene by highlighting the relationships through which planetary knowledge is constructed as sites of critique. I develop an analytic of synoptic geographies, which addresses

Location masking, or geomasking, is a practice typically undertaken by data stewards who wish to release a georeferenced data set without infringing on the privacy of those whose data are involved. With numerous opportunities to transmit our personal locations through electronic devices, individuals have the agency through masking to stem the flow of their location data or otherwise engage in obscuring

Our attempts to gain knowledge from studying the effects of a single windstorm might be complicated by one or more other events that pass through the same system before it recovers from prior damage. In this article, we had the opportunity to examine permanent plots affected by two consecutive catastrophic storms of comparable intensity within a short time frame (less than a decade). We compared tree

This article examines the role of recent reforms to Japan’s energy governance regime in stimulating fixed capital investments in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and analyzes the investment trends and land use changes that are emerging as a result. Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese government passed a feed-in tariff (FIT) to incentivize renewable energy production, followed

Adaptation to climate change is a policy objective of rapidly growing importance for development programming across the Global South. This article offers an interrogation of the discursive politics surrounding the term based on insights from postcolonial theory. By employing a theoretical framework rooted in the concepts of imaginative geographies and discursive violence, this contribution seeks to

Urbanicity has long been associated with stress, anxiety, and mental disorders. A new field of neurourbanism addresses these issues, applying neuroscience laboratory methods to tackle global urban problems and promote happier and healthier cities. Exploratory studies have trialed psychophysiological measurement beyond laboratories, capitalizing on the availability of biosensing technologies to capture

Losing touch is a pervasive bodily experience that has received surprisingly little geographical attention. Developing geographical thought on mobility and touch, our article aims to provide a more comprehensive account of the geographies of losing touch. Conceptually, we propose that enclosure and exposure are two spatial metaphors that can help to understand processes of losing touch in terms of

U.S. federal government agencies play an important role in mitigating some risks posed to communities by natural hazard events, especially communities with high proportions of low-income or minority residents. Ongoing efforts of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) to reduce the buildup of forest fuels on national forests, particularly in dry mixed-conifer forests of the U.S. West, are an example. Federal

Smart technologies have advanced rapidly throughout our society and across geographic spaces and places. The “smart” developments have presented unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the discipline of geography. This special issue of the Annals of the American Association of Geographers focuses on the theme of smart spaces and places from a wide range of perspectives. The collection of twenty-one

The smart technologies led by advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the emerging data science in recent years are transforming many facets of society in profound ways. One of these affected areas is the experience of human dynamics in general and human mobility in particular with the growing maturity of smart technologies. The goal of this article is to critically examine the concepts

Smart technology—in its many facets—is often critiqued within geography in ways that parallel the critiques of quantitative geography in the 1960s and GIScience in the 1990s. In this way, both the development of “smart” technology itself and its criticisms are the latest chapter in a long-standing disciplinary debate around quantification and technology. We reevaluate this history and argue that quantitative

In this article we use the natural lab of music festivals to examine behavioral change in response to the rapid introduction of smart surveillance technology into formerly unpoliced spaces. Festivals are liminal spaces, free from the governance of everyday social norms and regulations, permitting participants to assert a desired self. Due to a number of recent festival deaths, drug confiscations, pickpockets

In this article we argue that “smart” work spaces are created through access to wireless networks and mobile cloud computing collaboration software. Yet the power relations embedded in these overlapping physical and cyberspaces function to control the spatial and temporal fragmentation of related work activities. Through a review of the literature, we first describe how scholars have considered the

As spaces increasingly come to be described as “smart,” “sentient,” or “thinking,” scholars remain in disagreement as to the nature of intelligence, knowledge, or the “human mind.” This article opens the notion of intelligence to contestation, examining differing conceptions of intelligence and what they might mean for how geographers approach the theorization of “smart” spaces. Engaging debates on

This article examines 1990s Internet firm Zip2 as an early case study in the political economy of location-based services (LBS) and “smart” cities in the United States. Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s first startup, Zip2, combined digital maps built using public spatial data with computerized Yellow Pages listings to create city directory Web portals for daily newspapers. Examining the technical affordances

Smart cities frequently rely on vast sensor networks, such as traffic cameras and ventilation controllers. This requires that we rethink methods of spatial tessellation. As tessellation is becoming more dynamic, we often combine multiple tessellation methods and switch tessellation shapes frequently for different data collection and analytics. In this article, we review how tessellation works with

Inferring the unknown properties of a place relies on both its observed attributes and the characteristics of the places to which it is connected. Because place characteristics are unstructured and the metrics for place connections can be diverse, it is challenging to incorporate them in a spatial prediction task where the results could be affected by how the neighborhoods are delineated and where

Smartphones have become a significant platform in everyone’s daily lives. For example, maps and map-based services on smartphones bring great convenience for wayfinding. They affect users’ spatial awareness, however, due to their small sizes. That impacted spatial awareness can lead to degraded spatial knowledge and disorientation. This study intends to address these issues associated with spatial

Using real-time data from portable air pollutant sensors and smartphone Global Positioning System trajectories collected in Beijing, China, this study demonstrates how smart technologies and individual activity-travel microenvironments affect the assessment of individual-level pollution exposure in space and time at a very fine resolution. It compares three different types of individual-level exposure

The formation and demolition of vacant houses are the most visible sign of city shrinking and revitalization. Timely detection of vacant houses has become an inevitable task to aid the “Smart City” initiative. Two pressing problems exist for vacant houses, however: (1) No publicly accessible information is available at the individual house level and (2) the decennial census survey does not catch up

Social networking sites (SNS), such as Facebook and Twitter, have attracted users worldwide by providing a means to communicate and share opinions and experiences of daily lives. When empowered by pervasive location acquisition technologies, location-based social media (LBSM) has become a potential resource for smart city applications to characterize social perceptions of place and model human activities

This article employs a social justice framing to examine youth perspectives of the smart city. We examine how youth understand the impact of digital technologies on urban transformations and whether their technology skills and digital literacy give them a sense of ownership over the future of their city. Research was conducted within the context of a six-week summer educational program involving seventy-nine

As “smart” urbanism becomes more influential, spaces and places are increasingly represented through numeric and categorical data that have been gathered by sensors, devices, and people. Such systems purportedly provide access to always visible, measurable, and knowable spaces, facilitating ever more rational management and planning. Smart city spaces are thus governed through the algorithmic administration

This article argues that the turn toward smart cities, emphasizing solutions, services, and infrastructures driven by digital technologies, has reinforced a dominant ideology shaping urban decision making, frameworks, and outcomes. Two core dimensions of this ideology of technology in urban governance interact to consequentially reshape urban processes: (1) the priority of attracting high-technology

Concerns have been raised regarding smart city innovations leading to, or consolidating, technocratic urban governance and the tokenization of citizens. Less research, however, has explored how we make sense of ongoing appropriation of the resources, skills, and expertise of corporate smart cities and what this means for future cities. In this article, we examine the summoning of political subjectivity

In this article we ask why smart cities have emerged within the international development community as the normative urban logic for confronting systemic global crises. This phenomenon is exemplified by the embrace of smart cities as an implementation tool for UN Habitat’s aspirational New Urban Agenda. Our analysis deploys two theoretical approaches in novel combination. First, we reinterpret Foucault’s

Visions of smart energy systems are increasingly influencing energy systems around the world. Many visions entail ideas of more efficient versions of existing large-scale energy systems, where smart grids serve to balance energy consumption and demand over large areas. At the other end of the spectrum are visions of smart energy places that represent a challenge to dominant, large-scale energy systems

A foodshed is a concept analogous to a watershed, describing the catchment of the sources of food for a region. As such, it portrays linkages ranging from local communities out to the global food system. Inefficiencies exist at all stages of the food supply chain, resulting in the challenges of inequitable access to healthy and safe food. Many of these inefficiencies are informational; for instance

Greater integration of advanced vehicle technologies is commonly discussed as a component of developing smart cities, potentially leading to a host of benefits. Final impacts of such benefits are uncertain, though, given research that illustrates induced travel by initial adopters of emerging vehicle technologies and services and mixed effects in transit use and active transportation. The locations

Recent success in the many applications of information and communications technologies (ICTs) in urban settings largely defines our understanding of sustainable development in the context of smart societies and communities. The footprints of such smart transformation barely imprint in the countryside, however, where rural communities face tremendous barriers, such as the absence of ICT infrastructure

This article addresses recent valorizations of infrastructure as a vital lens for understanding and explaining the constitution of modern life. It argues that greater care needs to be shown toward the evental (or events-led) underpinnings of infrastructure to accurately grasp the latter’s space-ordering powers. Indeed, existing work on infrastructure has tended to stress the postformative political

In this article we attempt to understand the new world geography through its cities by treating corporate globalization from the perspective of cities insofar as they are central to the global networks that make large-scale economic processes possible. To this end, we draw on a conceptual and empirical extension of world city network research to describe the major globalization phases that have been

Although agent-based models (ABMs) provide an effective means for investigating complex interactions between heterogeneous agents and their environment, they might hinder an improved understanding of phenomena being modeled due to inherent challenges associated with uncertainty in model parameters. This study uses uncertainty analysis and global sensitivity analysis (UA-GSA) to examine the effects

Concerns over deforestation are growing along with the climate crisis. This is particularly unsettling in relation to the rise of populist authoritarian regimes. In this article I reveal the connections between forests, neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and cronyism, through an in-depth ethnographic study of the Romanian Carpathian forests after the fall of socialism in 1989. The study examines the

Across eastern and southern Africa, conservation landscapes increasingly extend far beyond the boundaries of government-owned protected areas. Several countries have now granted full legal recognition to various types of private or otherwise nonstate conservation arrangements, thereby often seeking to create novel opportunities for ostensibly “green” capital investments in various for-profit conservation

The prevailing labor migration regime in Asia is underpinned by rotating-door principles of enforced transience, where low-wage migrant labor gains admission into host nation-states based on short-term, time-limited contracts and where family reunification and permanent settlement at destination are explicitly prohibited. In this context, we ask how migrant-sending families in Southeast Asian “source”