Christine L. Jocoy

Feeling at risk matters: water managers and the decision to use forecasts.

Experts contend that weather and climate forecasts could have an important role in risk management strategies for community water systems. Yet, most water managers make minimal use of these forecasts. This research explores the determinants of the use of weather and climate forecasts by surveying managers of community water systems in two eastern American states (South Carolina and the Susquehanna River Basin of Pennsylvania). Assessments of the reliability of weather and climate forecasts are not driving their use as water managers who find forecasts reliable are no more likely to use them than are managers who find them unreliable. Although larger systems and those depending on surface water are more likely to use forecasts for some (but not all) purposes, the strongest determinant of forecast use is risk perceptions. Water managers who expect to face problems from weather events in the next decade are much more likely to use forecasts than are water managers who expect few problems. Their expectations of future problems are closely linked with past experience: water managers who have had problems with specific types of weather events (e.g., flood emergencies) in the last 5 years are likely to expect to experience problems in the next decade. Feeling at risk, regardless of the specific source of that weather-related risk, stimulates a decision to use weather and climate forecasts.

Experimenting with Active Learning in Geography: Dispelling the Myths That Perpetuate Resistance.

While some geographers have embraced active learning as a means to engage students in a course, many others stick to conventional teaching methods. They are often deterred by suggestions that it can be difficult to implement active learning where students have no prior knowledge of a subject, that active learning requires too much work of lecturers and students, and that there are significant institutional constraints to implementing active learning. In this article the authors draw on their experiences of utilizing active learning in five different countries before dispelling myths which continue to constrain the uptake of active learning methods. Finally, they provide simple guidelines for successful integration of active learning in geography courses.

Surviving the First Time Through: A New Instructor's Views on Designing and Teaching Economic Geography and how Mentoring Early-Career Faculty Can Help

This article presents the reflections of a new instructor of economic geography in the USA. The author offers practical advice for designing and delivering a course for the first time. Suggestions are given in support of the view that sharing knowledge of effective teaching practices is an important component of mentoring early-career faculty. By producing and publishing practical examples of teaching materials, experienced faculty may assist novice instructors in balancing time spent on teaching and research. The author encourages economic geographers to contribute to the health of the sub-discipline by supporting new faculty in this manner.

Homelessness, travel behavior, and the politics of transportation mobilities in Long Beach, California

The geography of homelessness is often characterized as containment in marginalized spaces of cities or as placelessness necessitating continuous travel. These characterizations, which reflect discourses about ‘the homeless’ as an imagined deviant homogeneous group, have had substantial effects on policy formation and critiques of punitive turns in urban governance. Suggested policy responses frequently assume straightforward relationships between power/powerlessness and mobility/immobility binaries that do not appropriately portray actual mobility patterns of homeless individuals. Through focus groups and structured interviews, this paper examines the daily mobility of homeless adults in Long Beach, California, to identify the ways in which the everyday travel of homeless individuals compares with these ‘imagined’ characterizations and with national US household travel patterns. Results show that homeless mobility is highly spatially constrained and structured by sociocultural relations of stigmatization, economic productivity, and personal responsibility that are reflected in the operational conventions and institutional practices of transportation and social welfare systems. Nonetheless, during the course of a day, homeless individuals move among spaces where they experience varying levels of inclusion and exclusion, thus complicating static, homogeneous characterizations. This analysis contributes to both the urban transport and social geography literatures by demonstrating the value of combining sociocultural approaches to the study of mobility with more typical transportation geography analyses of individual travel behavior.

Counting the homeless: the culture of quantification in American social policy:

This commentary reflects on the practice of counting the homeless within political jurisdictions (i.e., homeless counts) within the United States to satisfy a cultural practice of quantification within American social policy. It discusses the problems arising from the cultural preference for quantification as the means of identifying and addressing a social problem with specific examples from US homeless assistance programs and participant observation in Long Beach, California. The culture of quantification is apparent in explanations for why counts are done, the disproportionate attention paid to measurement methods over reflection on interpretation of and responses to the numbers, and the general failure to effectively link the practice of counting to the causes of and solutions to homelessness. This focus diverts attention from real data needs and effective interpretation of data, consumes resources better used elsewhere, and generates among well-meaning people, particularly count volunteers, a false sense that they are addressing a problem simply by quantifying it. The commentary concludes with suggestions for examining how counts are actually used in modifying existing programs to evaluate the effectiveness of these quantification practices.

Green growth machines? Competing discourses of urban development in Playa Vista, California

ABSTRACT Playa Vista is a massive mixed-use development built on coastal wetlands in west Los Angeles. Its land use story illustrates how strategically constructed discourses shape contested urban spaces. Through an analysis of newspaper reporting and government documents, this paper traces how pro-Playa Vista interests changed their growth discourses rationalizing the development between 1979 and 2015. Findings suggest that pro-growth coalitions are resilient when they modify their discourses to negotiate new regulatory and political contexts, specifically pursuing sustainability fixes. They are not dogmatic in their adherence to orthodoxies of private property rights and “highest and best use” of land but rather continually reconstruct growth discourses incorporating enough of the values of their opponents (i.e. “green” values such as growth management and smart growth) that some environmental and homeowner citizens’ groups join the growth coalition, forming a “green growth machine” that not only profitably builds on the land but finances ecological restoration.

Better must come: exiting homelessness in two global cities, by Matthew D. Marr

lifting filled with unfamiliar locations and populations; however, those chapters pay off in the original analysis of the spatial politics of the city. I would have enjoyed greater depth in the discussion of how Jerusalem’s urban growth machine differs from the model that Logan and Molotch described, particularly in its composition. The difference in goals for the Western and Israeli coalitions was discussed often, but how the composition of the two groups differs in their specifics would have been illuminating and would have strengthened their conclusions in that direction. In addition, Jerusalem is a rich case study that vividly displays the consequences of the contested city and neoliberalism, but there is no real discussion of the book’s findings for the field of urban studies. Jerusalem is a singular and unique city making it challenging to draw out broader lessons, but revisiting the analysis’ implications for the theories the authors use would have been a sufficient coda. Overall, Jerusalem is a well-written book, though highly specialized and intended for an academic audience; it is appropriate for both students and scholars, though undergrads may find it methodical and overly-nuanced. Those interested in international perspectives on urban development or in Jerusalem as a city will find valuable and original information.

A People's Guide to Los Angeles

Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2012. xi and 310 pp., maps, illustrations, bibliography, index.

City of Disorder: How the Quality of Life Campaign Transformed New York Politics. Alex S. Vitale

29.95 paper (ISBN 978-0-52027-081-7)...

Plagiarism by Adult Learners Online: A case study in detection and remediation

City of Disorder traces the emergence of the “quality-of-life” paradigm for social control in the 1990s and its displacement of urban liberalism as the dominant political philosophy guiding urban policy and programs. Focusing on New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, Vitale explains the rise of punitive policing and social policies as a result of neoliberal globalization. Through several neighborhood case studies, he argues that residents demanded punitive approaches from the police and city government as a result of their frustration with urban liberal government approaches to addressing the social disorder visible in their neighborhoods (e.g., homelessness, prostitution, and graffiti). This social disorder is the result of growing inequality created by neoliberal economic development strategies pursued by the City. A former practitioner and homeless advocate, Vitale successfully balances writing for both academic and general audiences by grounding his arguments within the academic literature and writing in language free of jargon with an expository tone. The book is appropriate for non-experts (specifically upper division undergraduate and graduate students), as Chapter 1 carefully reviews the theoretical context for understanding the rise of quality-of-life politics from criminology and urban studies perspectives, while Chapters 2–4 clearly define “quality of life,” urban liberalism, and social disorder in a manner accessible to the layperson. These chapters also identify the origins and proponents of each policy approach, their implementation under different New York mayoral administrations, and their success in addressing disorder. The work of geographers (e.g., Neil Smith, Gordon Macleod, David Harvey, Don Mitchell) is acknowledged primarily in discussions of the economic contexts for the backlash against the urban poor, the execution of neoliberal urban policy focused on place-based competition for global capital, and race as a social marker of urban decline. Vitale argues that “the failure of urban liberalism as a governing strategy is the result of the defection of both elites and the middle classes” (p. 26), as well as poor communities, all of whom turn to more repressive social policies. Leading neoconservative and leftist critiques are missing an explanation of the failings of urban liberalism and how they trigger these defections. This study incorporates analyses from both political perspectives to demonstrate the impact of three contradictions in urban liberal policies. First, the Koch and Dinkins administrations underfunded programs to reform and enhance housing and social services in favor of subsidies to financial service sector and commercial real estate interests. Second, social service delivery was implemented by bureaucrats with no meaningful input from communities. Third, despite calls for social tolerance and respect for individual rights, few opportunities were established for social integration of marginalized groups. Chapters 5–7 address these contradictions within specific government policies implemented in New York City. Chapter 5 describes how New York’s liberal mayors subsidized corporate economic development in the name of attracting global investment, which exacerbated the first contradiction of urban liberalism. Chapter 6 tracks the development of policing practices that emphasize aggressive response to problems of public disorder (e.g., visible street homelessness, panhandling, public drinking, etc.) consistent with the “broken windows” theory. The police and mayoral administrations began to take disorder seriously after civilian groups, frustrated by inaction, undermined their authority by providing private enforcement of public order, safety, and sanitation. In Chapter 7, Vitale examines three cases of neighborhood mobilization against public disorder to illustrate how neoconservative quality-of-life approaches to urban policy found favor among former supporters of Democratic administrations. The cases specifically highlight the second and third contradictions of urban liberalism.