HarassMap

Among the 79 million people in Egypt, 55 million have cell phones, and nearly half of these are women.  A group of researchers is using cell-phone technology and geography to address an all-too-common problem in Egypt, where most women report sexual harassment. In fact, nearly half of all Egyptian women experience some form of sexual harassment every day, a pattern that the HarassMap project intends to reverse.

The map uses SMS texting technology to gather reports of various kinds of unwanted encounters, from ogling and catcalling to comments or touching. Each woman also reports the location of the incident, which is corroborated with cell-phone tower triangulation. Trends in such incident reports are tabulated over time, and they are mapped on the project web site. The project has been developed by academics based in both Egypt and the United States, and is supported by several Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs).

The map has been developed by NiJeL, which uses “high performance mapping” to address social problems worldwide. The map can be adjusted in various ways by users wishing to focus on a particular neighborhood or a particular kind of incident. The default map is at an intermediate scale that shows greater Cairo on a  single image, so that all of the incidents in the central business district, for example, are likely to be agglomerated in a single number. Zooming in to a larger scale map, however, it become possible to identify particular streets or neighborhoods that warrant concern. Zooming out to a smaller scale map, users can find that women in cities and towns outside the capital are also experiencing harassment.

This project is but one example of the spatial dimensions of sexuality; some geographers who study this area of human geography have been organized into the Sexuality and Space Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers (AAG)  since 1996. The project is perhaps even more closely aligned with the work of the Geographic Perspectives on Women (GPOW) Specialty Group, as it draws attention to the spatial dimensions of gender and the liberties that men presume appropriate to take with women in particular contexts.

Finally, the project relates to the increasingly prevalent work on the geography of crime, which is a growing area of cooperation between academic geographers and criminal justice programs. The detailed mapping of crimes can be used in law enforcement, crime prevention, and public education efforts. In the case of the HarassMap, both crimes (such as indecent exposure) and related transgressive behaviors  are mapped, both to let individual women know where to be most vigilant and to direct law-enforcement efforts. Moreover, these maps can be used to justify the dedication of an increased level of police effort to the problem of sexual harassment, by showing how common it actually is.

Classroom activities:

1. Using Google Chrome or another browser that facilitates language translation on web pages, students who do not read Arabic can examine the web site in greater detail than is otherwise possible. How much does automated translation increase the ability to understand web sites written in languages other than one’s own? What are the limitations of online translators?

2. Distribute base maps of the campus and of the surrounding area, perhaps at several scales, up to an entire metropolitan area. Ask students, working individually, to prepare their own maps of “hot spots” for sexual harassment. Then ask students to compare maps, identifying patterns within maps and patterns of agreement or disagreement among the maps prepared by the students. What factors might account for differences in the level of harassment that women experience in different places? What factors might account for differences in perceptions of the prevalence of harassment?

A Pond-to-Pond Journey

Some geographers love to learn about places by following transects. When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC), I would sometimes go start at the Inner Harbor and follow any major street,  a couple dozen of which radiate from that central location, through the city, to the suburbs, and beyond. It was the start of a habit that I have continued, most recently by eschewing the high speed of the New York State Thruway in favor of the U.S. 20 on a drive from Bridgewater to Albany, a brief transect that I would love to extend in both directions. When we followed this short transect in July, Newport, Oregon was a couple thousand miles to our backs. When we got off Route 20 in Albany in favor of a faster route home, Boston was still a couple hundred miles ahead.

Author William Least Heat-Moon describes an unusual transect from New York City to Astoria, Washington in his book River Horse: The Logbook of a Boat Across America. In it, he describes what seems at first an impossible transect — crossing the United States on fresh water in a 22-foot boat. Better known for his book Blue Highways, in River Horse he finds a way of crossing the country that avoids not only the major highways, but the minor ones as well. Most houses and businesses face a road, with a “front” maintained for visitors and passersby to see. By crossing the country on rivers and canals, Heat-Moon experiences the cultural landscape from behind the usual lines.

It is, of course, not physically possible to cross the United States entirely on fresh water, as several drainage divides must be crossed. Heat-Moon minimized the inevitable portages  by carefully mapping his route, by having friends occasionally swap a canoe for the main expedition craft, and by pushing each boat to the limits of its hull draft.

My wife Pamela (librarian, blogger, and honorary geographer) and I are planning a major transect of our own, assuming that the passenger automobile is still in use when we near retirement. To celebrate our 66th year, we are going to make a transect “from Chicago to L.A., more than two thousand miles all the way. ” That is, we are planning a transect along the old Route 66, which predates the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System by a generation. In many places, the original roadbed has been obliterated by the new system, but in others, it runs parallel — or it runs into the trees and fields. In many cases, travel facilities or entire small towns that served the original highway passengers have been abandoned.

I was put in mind of these various transects when I heard recently about a most unusual transect that geologist Robert Thorson and his wife Kristine followed in the summer of 2009. The transect is unusual in that they proceeded in an orderly fashion from east to west, but rather than following lines or curves, they followed a discontinuous collection of points on the landscape: the kettle ponds left by the receding ice of the Pleistocene glaciations. Their journey is documented in his book Beyond Walden: The Hidden History of America’s Kettle Lakes and Ponds and on his blog, Walden to Wobegon. The blog title refers to two kettle ponds made famous by literature: Thoreua’s very real Walden Pond and Garrison Keilor’s fictional Lake Wobegon. I learned about both the book and the blog from Robin Young’s delightful interview with Professor Thorson on WBUR’s Here and Now radio program.

Thorson provides insights regarding limnology, the ponds and lakes themselves, and the history of recreation on fresh water. In moving across the inverted archipelago at  the southern fringes of continental glaciation, however, he also tells tales of the land and the people in the vast spaces between those most intriguing bodies of water.

A final example of a transect comes from WBUR, one of  several public radio stations in Boston, Massachusetts. Traveling west from Boston along Route 9, WBUR produced programs in each of five cities and towns over the course of a week. On topics ranging from immigration to higher-education funding and arts-centered economic development, the series — aired as Finding a Way Along Route 9 — provides an excellent sampling of the current state of the economy and society in Massachusetts. Although the series does not cover the entire state, it makes a conscious effort to overcome a pervasive tendency to associate Boston — the primate city of Massachusetts — with the state as a whole.

Discussion / Activity

1. What are some examples of transects you have read about or encountered in radio, film, or other media? What did the traveler or travelers involved learn from their experience?

2. What is a transect that you could take in a single day, close to home, in order to learn something about your region? What mode of transportation would you choose, and what are its advantages and limitations? How would you record your learning along this transect? (This question can be treated either as a thought experiment or as an actual class assignment, in which each student plans a transect, follows it, and reports back. A group of students could be sent on transects that cover different “slices” of the same region.)

3. What is a transect that you would like to follow elsewhere in the world, if time and money were unlimited? What would you expect to learn?

Garden Tales

This year, my family has been recognizing the anniversary of each state’s admission to the United States in a project known as Celebrating the States.  For each state, our celebration includes watching one film that relates to the state. Of course, thousands of films have been produced in California, so we chose a title that tells a particular story about California. Given our great interest in the geography of food, we selected an independent, documentary film called The Garden.

The film describes a community garden that was located on 14 acres occupying two city blocks to the north of 41st Street, between Long Beach Avenue and Alameda Street, in an area of South Los Angeles known as South Central LA. The farm was funded by the city of Los Angeles as part of  a multi-faceted approach to healing the city after the deadly 1992 Los Angeles Riots. The garden became the largest community garden in the United States — part of a continent-wide movement that encourages members of a community to grow some of their food on shared land. Connecting people to the land helped connect them to each other.

The film describes how the garden came to be destroyed, despite its many benefits to to the South Central community. The land on which the garden was created had been purchased by the city using imminent domain, which is a legal method of forcing the sale of property at a current fair-market price to a government for a public purpose. In this case, the man who originally sold the land to the City of Los Angeles was able to purchase it back, years later, for the same price. Once he did that, he exerted his private property rights over the land, including the right to evict the gardeners.

In the end, the garden was defeated, but not the gardeners. The landowner demanded millions of dollars to avoid the eviction, but demolished the garden even after they raised the full amount from foundations and other donors. The South Central Farmers continue to farm, on a more extensive piece of land in California’s Central Valley, and to truck the produce into the city. The new location is a better fit with the neoclassic  von Thünen model, which posits that vegetable crops will be found at a modest distance from an urban place, rather than in the city itself.

This film relates in several ways to No Impact Man, a film about which I blogged in connection with our New York commemoration. As Colin Beavin and his family showed in that film, growing food close to urban populations can greatly reduce the human impact on  environmental systems, as the distance food has to travel can be greatly reduced.

Another story of a garden in peril is that of the historic research garden of the Valivov Institute of Plant Industry, however, where the ultimate fate of the garden is not yet known. As with the South Central Farmers garden, this very special garden is threatened by real estate development, in this case residential development associated with suburban sprawl in its suburban location south of St. Petersburg.

As with South Central, the Valivov garden has became a cause célèbre, drawing supporters from throughout the  world. The garden is considered a critical reserve of the internal biodiversity of several crop and botanical plants.  The site itself is of interest for historic reasons as well, because of the extremes to which scientists at the time went to protect rare food strains during the siege of Leningrad (as St. Petersburg was then known) during World War II. Then as now, scientists protecting this garden understood the importance of genetic diversity within food crops as a necessary component of food security. Modern agriculture has dramatically reduced genetic variability within crops; ironically, perhaps, modern crop science requires access to genetic stocks that offer a great deal of variety. The scientists in St. Petersburg also understand that subtle differences in soil chemistry and soil organisms are important, so that transplanting the cultivars to another location would not fully preserve the biodiversity that has been developed at the site.

In both the Los Angeles and St. Petersburg cases, the gardens were under threat because proximity to urban places resulted in land values  that are quite high, relative to the value ascribed to their use as gardens. The tendency of land values to increase with greater proximity to urban areas is known as a rent cone. The conversion of farmland to commercial, industrial, or residential use is — to a great degree — influenced by the expansion of rent cones, which set price expectations (otherwise known as land rent) that are difficult to meet with agricultural land uses. And as von Thünen would have predicted, even with government or charitable subsidies, only the highest-value, intensive agricultural activities are likely to persist close to cities. Extensive uses such as grain or grazing would simply be out of the question, as they yield very low land rents per unit of land.

Discussion questions for viewers of The Garden:

Aside from the provision of food, what benefits were provided by the South Central community garden?

How do the relationships between public and private spaces change over the course of this film?

Are you aware of any community gardens in your city or region? If so, how do they compare with the community garden in the film?

No Impact Man

For the first several years after  my family moved to Massachusetts in 1997,  New York became a place we passed through as we drove between our new home in Bridgewater and our relatives in Maryland. Sometimes these trips would include a stay near the scenic Hudson with our geographer friend Jeff, who is a planner for, well, Scenic Hudson. In more recent years, we have spent a lot more time exploring the center of the state, as we take our daughter to and from a camp in the Adirondacks. One of those outings, in fact, led me to post a Concept Cache about a coffee shop in rural central New York.

During all of this time, our visits to New York City have been relatively few, though we have enjoyed the visits when we have enjoyed The City (as it is often known) immensely when we have made the effort. The “effort” has to do with two main factors: expense and transportation. Both of these barriers can be lowered with a bit of ingenuity and experience, of course, but so far our visits have been very special treats. Recently, I watched the film No Impact Man as part of my wife Pamela’s Celebrating the States blogging project, and it led me to think critically about the role of New York City — and cities in general — in human-environment interactions.

In my course on the geography of environmental problems, I use Andrew Goudie’s Human Impact Reader anthology to help my students examine the spatial aspects of a variety of impacts humans have on the environment. In simple terms, the impact of humans on the environment can be summarized as I=PCT, which is to say that the human impact is a function of population, per-capita consumption, and the technology used for that consumption. As we read the anthology’s seminal scientific articles on a wide variety of human impacts — from coastal erosion and soil degradation to flash floods and climate change — I emphasize the spatial dimensions of each of these impacts.

No Impact Man — which should really be called No Impact Family — is the story of one year in the life of Colin Beavan, his wife, and their young daughter. As the title implies, the goal of the family’s year-long approach was to reduce their net impact on the environment to zero, by a combination of reducing negative impacts and increasing positive impacts, with an emphasis on pursuit of the former. Their effort leads to some important findings about the spatial dimensions one the other side of the equation. Specifically, how might high density mitigate or enhance the relative contributions of population, consumption, and technology?

In my earliest thinking about the environment, I viewed cities mainly as sources of environmental problems, given the high density of some sources of air and water pollution.  I have since learned that low density can also be problematic, as  suburban sprawl tends to increase the use of private vehicles, among other effects. From an environmental-impact perspective, the clearest advantage of urban density is the ability to reduce or eliminate automobile dependency and thereby eliminate a major source of climate-changing greenhouse gases. The Beavan family gave up airplanes and automobiles for the entire year, used trains only for long distances, and used walking and biking for almost all of their transportation needs. To do this while still enjoying access to many cultural, educational, and employment opportunities, it is almost essential to live in an urban place, where a great number of such opportunities can be found within a short travel distance.

In reducing their impact, the Beavins also focused a lot of their effort on food — growing some of their own and buying from nearby sources. The spatial dimensions of this are a bit more complicated. Food that is grown locally does not have to be transported very far, reducing the use of fossil fuels for transportation. Food that is grown organically does not require chemical inputs (and therefore eliminates chemical waste streams). Eating low on the food chain — that is, vegetarian or vegan — further reduces the use of both energy and chemicals. An advantage of pursuing these goals in an urban setting is that a critical mass of like-minded consumers can be found, creating enough demand for farmers from the region to supply urban farmers’ markets. Whether such efforts could ever be scaled up to supply the entire food needs of major metropolitan areas, however, remains to be seen.

Colin Beavan hopes to have an impact beyond the one-year experiment. His No Impact Man blog is an effort to build on the experience.

Mato Grosso: The Future of Food

Paul Ehrlich’s publication of The Population Bomb in 1968 explained why human population growth was accelerating, and touched off serious debate about whether enough food could be produced to feed ever-more billions of people. Even as many have faced malnutrition and even starvation, however, total food production has tended to keep pace.

For the foreseeable future, population will continue to grow, albeit it at a decreasing rate. Over the next half-century, the question seems not to be whether humans will produce enough food, but rather how that food will be produced. The human population is passing through what E.O. Wilson has called the bottleneck, and by the middle of the twenty-first century, it is likely to level off at somewhere between 8 and 9 billion people.

Overall food production can be achieved in just a few ways:

• Distribute food more equitably by curtailing over-consumption and reducing the production of meat
• Increase crop yields
• Increase the land area under cultivation

Each of these broad strategies involves a lot of possible specific cases and a number of complicated trade-offs. The story of soybeans in Brazil — particularly in the huge, interior state of Mato Grosso — illustrates several of the complications associated with the second and third options.

I took these photographs of Cargill’s riverfront terminal just downstream from Porto Velho, Rondônia in 2003. Much of the soy grown in the center-west portion of the country is brought by road to this break-in-bulk point, where it is transfered to barges that can take it all the way to Belem, at the mouth of the Amazon River, for export.

For many years, agricultural production in Brazil increased slowly, if at all, and sometimes not fast enough to keep up with domestic population growth. What little increase did occur was strictly the result of increases in the amount of land being cultivated. Even though considerable efforts were made to increase yields, improvements in technology did little more than offset the poor quality of the new lands being cultivated.

The twentieth-century experience of Brazil is hardly surprising; humans farm about 1/8 of the earth’s land surface and almost by definition this is the most productive 1/8. Any new areas brought into production are likely to be marginal lands in both senses of the word: in peripheral locations relative to existing human settlement and of lower quality relative to already-settled lands.

By the close of the twentieth century, however, something clearly had changed, as Brazil’s agricultural output — particularly of soybeans — began to challenge the role of the United States as the dominant producer in the Western hemisphere. Reporting for the radio program Living on Earth, Bruce Gellerman has described this transition beautifully in Magic Seeds and the Miracle Crop. (His report is available as an mp3 and as text with some excellent photographs.)

The report describes how Mato Grosso has become such a large and still-growing producer of soybeans, despite the unsuitable soil conditions. It then goes on to describe the consequences associated with such success: increased reliance on pesticides, the tendency of crop pests to develop pesticide resistance, and the great loss of habitat in the savanna, known in Brazil as cerrado, or “closed” for its traditional inaccessibility.

Brazil is advancing on its frontier just as the United States did more than a century ago. A decade ago, I wrote  comparison of the two frontier experiences: that of the United States in the 19th-century West and that of Brazil in the 20th-century Amazon. According to Gellerman’s report, the process continues in the 21st-century cerrado, but with more than one biome at stake and with the potential for much more substantial clearing. With the techniques currently being employed, the area remaining to be cultivated in Brazil might be greater than the area currently cultivated in the entire United States.

« Previous Page