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Geoparks are territorial landscape protection and promotion organisations with aims of geoheritage conservation, geo‐education, and sustainable regional development using geotourism products. Building on an analytical literature review, using the Scopus database, this paper shows that geopark studies remain solidly positioned in the domain of the geosciences and have objectified, expert‐based interpretations...
The present paper proposes a three‐axis method for identifying metropolitan regions in a European context that was developed from a public policy perspective within the field of regional geography. Drawing on a harmonised definition of functional urban area and a case‐specific literature review, the proposed method can be applied to urban regions characterised by multiple territorial development patterns...
This special section seeks to identify what it is that makes islands special as well as to critique the limitations of generalised conceptions of islandness. In recent years, the field of island studies has drawn on critical trends in geography, being particularly influenced by the “relational turn,” the “decolonial turn,” and theories of the Anthropocene. The papers in this special section focus...
Through a study of the publication data about translations in the field of geography in China from 1900 to 2017, this paper discusses translation as an inherent factor implying foreign geography's impact on modernising and promoting geography in China. The progress of geographical translation in China has been circuitous and arduous, and can be classified into four distinct yet interconnected phases...
After years of public debate about same‐sex marriage, the Australian Government put the issue to the electorate in the “Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey” in late 2017. The survey asked voters whether the law should be changed to allow same‐sex couples to marry. Nationally, 61.6% of voters responded “Yes.” But there were marked variations by electoral division, with the proportion of “Yes” votes...
After decades of going beyond the linguistic and textual concerns of early critical geopolitical scholarship, literatures in political geography are today offering rich engagements with the affective, material, embodied, and technological world. However, this paper argues that despite pressures to continually break new intellectual ground, political geography needs not and should not move wholly past...
Despite human geographers’ growing recognition of the need to explore how digital technologies are increasingly co‐producing geographies, the methodological implications of such forms of data production are rarely discussed. This paper explores how smartphones co‐constitute fieldwork when they are used as research instruments. Drawing from a research project on young people's nightlife in Switzerland,...
The ratio between the rental and sales values of residential properties are a much studied statistic in the field of real estate economics. When these values do not keep pace with each other, and in particular when the ratio is low, some commentators take this as an indication that there may be a housing bubble building. The ratios are also of interest to potential property investors. These ratios...
Vannini and Vannini (AREA 2019, 1–10) criticise UNESCO for identifying Gros Morne National Park as a Natural World Heritage site because that label implies an absence of human relations and social life: it is a “storyless space.” Far from being without stories, both human and geological, the area full of the tales of past visitors, including indigenous peoples who left their artefacts to tell their...
This paper explores the co‐construction of a temporary yet intimate relationship between researcher and participant when discussing participants’ personal lives in fieldwork interviews. Through the case study of a project exploring how men who have sex with men use geolocative mobile phone apps for social and sexual encounter, I explore how the researcher and participant can experience moments of...
Few studies have approached children's behaviour during flood disasters, and none of them were in Italy. In this study we performed an analysis of flood‐risk perception in children aged between six and 14 years in three Italian regions characterised by diverse typologies of flood phenomena. To perform such an analysis, we collected data using a fictional story which, through identification with the...
This paper reports on ethnographic research conducted at one of Canada's Natural World Heritage sites: Gros Morne National Park. UNESCO's criteria for the identification of natural heritage sites and its descriptions of the specific qualities of listed sites are informed by a dualist ontology that sharply separates nature and culture. The result of this separation between nature and culture is the...
This paper interrogates the aspects of islandness labelled “vulnerability” and “resilience” through analysing the concepts’ definitions from a development perspective. The investigation is conducted through the lens of four assumed islandness aspects: boundedness, smallness, isolation and littorality. Discussion examines how and why core concepts of vulnerability and resilience have emerged from island...
Eco‐cultural island tourism is a global phenomenon. Accordingly, island studies has engaged with it through a variety of approaches, including relational geography perspectives. However, prevalent relational island studies theories tend to be based on remote, peripheralised archipelagos or urban island power centres and may thus be inappropriate for certain kinds of small, near‐shore islands. This...
The accelerating and intensifying dynamics of the Anthropocene are highly topical for island studies. Manifold effects of urbanisation, offshoring, migration and climate change become heightened in the context of island spatiality as global connections, fascination and conservation ideals produce tax havens, mass tourism, ecological enclaves and novel island ecosystems. The Anthropocene calls for...
This paper takes a critical comparative approach to the reshaping of land, sea and space that often transform islands. I show how island physicality is part of a fluid process of reshaping the environment by discussing four dynamic spheres of change: upward, downward, outward and inward. Islands are sometimes joined to a mainland or to each other as a way of enlarging terrain or increasing mobility...
In recent decades, island studies scholars have done much to disrupt static notions of the island form, increasingly foregrounding how islands form part of complex networks of relations, assemblages and flows. In this paper, we shift the terms of debate more explicitly to relationality in the Anthropocene. We consider the implications and challenges that a wider set of debates, particularly surrounding...
From a comparative political perspective, island jurisdictions stand out as having exceptionally democratic regimes in comparison with mainland or continental polities. Irrespective of their geographical location, levels of economic development or constitutional status (sovereign or nonsovereign), with only a few exceptions, island jurisdictions around the world have democratic political institutions...
Researchers are increasingly turning to relational approaches to island geography, with special emphasis being placed on archipelagos and land–sea interactions. Islands nevertheless continue to be associated with isolation, peripherality and/or disconnectedness, and fixed links such as bridges and causeways continue to be regarded as factors that decrease the quality of islandness. This does not,...
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