Herculano Cachinho

The future role of GIS education in creating critical spatial thinkers

Abstract Teaching of critical spatial thinking in higher education empowers graduates to effectively engage with spatial data. Geographic information systems (GIS) and science are taught to undergraduates across many disciplines; we evaluate how this contributes to critical spatial thinking. The discipline of GIS covers the whole process of spatial decision-making, but GIS modules often ignore the context setting of spatial problems, and just cover the technical aspects of how to use GIS software. We outline how some existing GIS practicals could be improved to focus on the development of critical spatial thinking skills, competences and abilities that are valuable to graduates.

The pace of life and temporal resources in a neighborhood of an edge city

Recently, the phenomenon of social acceleration, which has profound impacts on everyday life, has attracted some attention from social scientists. At the same time, an increased engagement with social practices that are related to slowing down has also been highlighted, thereby unveiling an inherent tension between fast and slow times in contemporary societies. However, little attention has been paid to how fast and slow times are spatially dispersed and rooted. This study contributes to current discussions on the pace of life by considering the dynamics of speeding up and slowing down in the everyday life of residents in a neighborhood of an edge city and the role played by local resources in the performance of everyday life practices. We undertook our study in the Colinas do Cruzeiro neighborhood, in the municipality of Odivelas in the North of Lisbon’s metropolitan area, where we conducted 21 in-depth narrative interviews with residents with the purpose of understanding the spatiotemporal organization of their daily lives and the role of the neighborhood’s resources. Our results identify four different timestyles among the interviewees, all of them fluctuating between fast and slow temporalities in different ways. Thereafter, we identify and describe the main practices of speeding up and slowing down in the interviewees’ everyday life and the local resources, which are mobilized in Colinas do Cruzeiro in order to perform these practices. We give some conclusions after a brief discussion of the results. Our main argument is that local resources play a vital role in an individual’s ability to speed up or slow down and therefore more attention must be paid as to how local resources can become temporal advantages.

The first impression in the urban sonic experience: transitions, attention, and attunement

ABSTRACT The objective of this study is to understand the phenomenology of moments of transition between sonic environments in the urban context and conceptualize the role they play in the attunement of the body to urban spaces. It has been argued that transitions between different environments tend to be moments when sonic perception and feedback are enhanced and, as moments of interruption, they play a significant role in how we attune to urban places. Our study contributes to a greater understanding of these moments. We present the concept of sonic first impression to address the affective nuances of these moments, and the concept of sonic attunement to address how individuals tune in to urban places through sound. In order to explore how these concepts apply in practice, we have undertaken a participatory methodology with 12 volunteers, which included sound diaries and go-alongs. These methods allowed us to gather in-depth data about spatial and temporal transitions and issues related to the angle of arrival of the body. Our results unveil the role that sound plays in attunement to place, a role that encompasses both meaning and affect, active and passive hearing, consciousness and unconsciousness, mind and body, psychology and physiology.