Gary L. Gaile

The Next Wave: Postfederal Local Economic Development Strategies

In the absence of significant federal economic development resources, local officials face complex choices about both the level and the orientations of their policy efforts. A national study of local economic development officials indicates that cities in this post federal period are characterized by increased local economic development activities even when relying on own-source revenues, by risk-taking rather than risk-aversive approaches, and by more diverse policy orientations emphasizing indigenous growth and job creation strategies. Cities using more entrepreneurial tools that demand active city roles appear to be more likely to have higher average job and firm growth rates than cities never using these tools.

Local politics in a global era: thinking locally, acting globally

Given the contested meanings of the local global context, it is important to see local political processes as more than a matter of new interests or claims prompted by globalization or even new institutions such as public-private partnerships. We argue that local politics in a global era are best understood in terms of the ideas, institutions, and interests shaping local policy processes. They are shaped by the causal stories that different groups and organizations use to politicize issues linking the local and the global, to seek new institutional venues, and to promote some solutions over others. We draw on our national surveys in 1989 and 1996 of large and mediumsized American cities to examine these causal stories about globalization and localism and the policy choices they privilege. Five local strategies are especially salient: classic locational approaches, the world-class community orientation, the entrepreneurial mercantilism strategy, asset-based human capital strategies, and the sustainable development orientation.

Exploring Sustainable Development

elaboration here serves as a model for geographic investigations of human-environment relations. Likewise, Kull avoids painting himself into the purely black and white box of state control versus peasant mode of resource use. Through the wide-angle lens of the historically informed political ecologist, he is able to view other aspects of the problem and to figure other variables into the equation. For instance, we learn here that one of the often-overlooked factors in many resource management studies is the careful appraisal of quality, or ‘‘resource character,’’ that users must take into account when making decisions. In recognition of his innovative scholarship in cultural and political ecology as demonstrated by the publication of Isle of Fire, Christian Kull received the James M. Blaut Award presented by the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group at the 2005 AAG Annual Meeting. In appearance, the paperback cover is most dramatic, enhanced with a striking nighttime color photograph taken by the author of a fire racing along a distant irrigation canal. The book is attractively produced and impeccably edited by the University of Chicago Press, and represents the latest (No. 246) in a long line of notable publications in the Geography Research Papers series. Many of these, sadly, are now out of print. Yet who among us has not, on at least one occasion, spent a few hours perusing the stacks of a good university library, facing the shelf that might hold all the numbers in this series (which date back to 1948), reading the titles printed along the spines, pulling down volume after volume, one after another, chasing our own interests and curiosity, and feeling simultaneously somewhat amused and awestruck that our chosen academic discipline could be so rich and rewarding? Most emphatically, Isle of Fire has now joined the ranks and is certain to become one of those volumes that will fly off the shelves and into our hands for a long time to come.

Characteristic mean and dispersion in surface orientations for a zone

Abstract Descriptive statistics for mean and dispersion measures of surface orientations are important in characterizing a zone of such diversity that more than one observation is required to represent it adequately. The derivation of such statistics related to aspect is problematic because of the circular scale used to measure aspect and the hemispherical scale for both slope and aspect. Two techniques are presented for computing the mean and dispersion measures of aspect and a bi-directional surface orientation. The relevant directional statistics are briefly presented with appropriate examples.