Latitude by the Glass

In his recent article Chardonnay with Latitude, Boston Globe wine and food writer Stephen Meuse draws attention to the geography of wine. As with anything that varies spatially (such as coffee), geography can be used to learn about wine, just as wine can be used to learn about geography. The clever title of Meuse’s article reflects his decision to write about several wines whose common characteristic is particularly geographic: they are all made from grapes of the Chardonnay variety, but from the northernmost extremity of that grape’s geographic range.

Meuse describes the influence of both soil mineralogy and climate on grapes, and then provides tasting notes and retail information for a number of wines from close to 50 degrees North latitude. All of these wines are found in Europe, five degrees or more north of the northernmost wines in the Americas, though Meuse does not explain this difference, which has to do with the directions of currents in the north Atlantic Ocean. Northwestern Europe is warmed by the Gulf Stream, just as northeastern North America is cooled by the Labrador Current.

In his book The Geography of Wine, geographer Brian Sommers explains not only the geographic factors underlying terroir; he also examines the economic and social geographies of wine consumption and distribution. Wine, in fact, is of such interest to geographers that an entire specialty group of the Association of American Geographers is dedicated to wine scholarship.

Suggested activity:

Working as individuals or small groups in a class, identify common food or beverage items. What ingredients are required to produce each item? What factors determine where those ingredients can be produced? To what extent has human geography — such as patterns of trade or migration — influenced the location of these ingredients? What patterns of transportation are involved in producing the ingredients, processing the food or beverage, and delivering the product to consumers?

One Country – Two Princes

Among this week’s interesting posts by geographer Amanda Briney is an article about the geography of Andorra, a small principality nestled in the Pyrenees Mountains between Spain and France.  Most of us know this simply as a very small country, so it is good to learn some context and details about it. Most interesting to me is that it has a very unusual form of sovereignty, shared by two sovereigns who do not reside in the country. Moreover, one is secular and one religious!

Andorra shares several characteristics with other places that are dependent on tourism for economic development. Splendid scenery, an interesting history, and a situation that is at once isolated and convenient help to draw tourists. Meanwhile, its small area does not include abundant natural resources, and its high elevation and steep slopes limit the productivity of agriculture.

What is unusual about tourism in Andorra, however, is its incredible volume — with more than one hundred visitors per resident in a given year!

Suggested activities:

1. Use the Very Small Country quiz on JetPunk.com to learn the names of the world’s smallest countries — by area and population.

2. Divide the list among students, each of whom can learn about one country and report details about population, site, situation, and historical geography to the class as a whole. Research can begin with the Human Development Index, the CIA World FactBook, and the Census Bureau’s International Database.

Geography Directions: East Side Gallery and the Contested Geographies of Graffiti

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Following on from Fiona’s entry today (below) about a flâneur’s encounter with graffiti in Toulouse, I was struck by one of this week’s news stories [Guardian May 3, 2011 and May 4, 2011].  Tensions over the East Side Gallery – a series of graffiti based images on a particular stretch of the Berlin Wall – have triggered long-standing debates about the role of graffiti/public art in cities.  The Gallery was originally created after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to bring together (unpaid) artists from East and West Germany in a creative project.  Controversially, a number of pieces have been whitewashed and overlaid with copied images in a recent renovation, described by one commentator as a “faked-up’ pastiche of itself…a Disneyesque, postmodern reconstruction of the art of the Wall designed to please tourists”.  A number of the original artists are now suing the city council over issues of copyright and the reproduction of images without the artists’ permission.

These ethical and legal issues over the display and ownership of graffiti, in this case embroiled with political symbolism and significance, highlights a broader set of complex geographies that interweave ideas of creativity, art, public space, urbanism and place-making.  In the context of this news story, McAuliffe and Iveson’s article in Geography Compass (see Fiona’s entry) also offers valuable insight into the tensions surrounding graffiti, which they describe as “a modern touchstone of urban discontent, a global popular culture phenomena that drives urban managers to distraction” (2011: 128).  In providing a critical review of the literature, they aim to uncover the complexity of graffiti’s dynamic and contested geographies and explore the tensions surrounding public graffiti, which are so clearly demonstrated in the ongoing debates surrounding the East Side Gallery.

By Sarah Mills

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

 

Geography Directions: Urban Geography: a flâneur’s encounter with Graffiti in Toulouse

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

Strolling through Toulouse at the weekend, I was seeking to observe and understand the city through the eyes of a flâneur.  Baudelaire describes a flâneur as “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”; a concept not dissimilar from the methodological practice of participant observation.  Flâneur comes from the French verb flâner meaning “to stroll”, so it seemed an appropriate means of engaging with Toulouse on a Sunday afternoon.

During my exploration, I stopped to observe displays of graffiti across the city’s fabric, some of which are testimony to Toulouse’s thriving contemporary art scene.  The walls, ceilings and transport thoroughfares of the city have provided the canvas for famous graffiti artists, such as Miss Van who also exhibits her work internationally in galleries (see, Miss Van).  Her career has influenced many other Toulousians and the city hosts a range of galleries to showcase the latest work (Fatcap, 2011).

Urban graffiti is the subject of McAuliffe and Iveson’s (2011) article in Geography Compass.  They acknowledge diverse perspectives on graffiti, between expressions of art and forms of crime, and argue that this complex terrain provides a lens through which to understand contested urban geographies.  Their paper argues that the presence (and absence) of graffiti might be understood through multiple analytical frameworks, partly seeking to capture multiple subjectivities inherent in these displays.

Subsequently, in attempting to conceptualise myself as a flâneur, McAuliffe and Iveson persuade me that I may learn a lot about Toulouse and some of its inhabitants just through looking more closely at its rich geography of graffiti.

By Fiona Ferbrache

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

 

Concept Caching: Hydrothermal features in Iceland

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The Icelandic landscape is one of the most unique and interesting on Earth.  One of the few land-based rift zones, it is a standard discussion in any Physical Geography or Geology course.  Geothermal features are not only observed and studied, but they are harnessed for energy.  These geothermal features have also proved a “harsh reminder” for the power of the Earth, as discussed in the post, Geography Directions: Eyjafjallajökull: Geography’s Harsh Reminder. The March 2010 eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano had upset the operation of transportation and economic networks that bridged the Atlantic.  The costs, in time and money, were staggering.  Even more unnerving is the nature of such a geologic event, as it was virtually impossible to predict and to mitigate.

Geography Directions: Eyjafjallajökull: Geography’s Harsh Reminder

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

The eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull on 20 March 2010 caught Europe dangerously off-guard. For two months, waves of ash closed some of the world’s busiest airspace. An estimated ten million passengers were left stranded, international train services collapsed under the heightened strain of people seeking alternate transportation, and governments were left to deal with angered airlines seeking to regain some portion of lost revenue. In total, over one hundred thousand flights were cancelled. The legal and political fallout of Eyjafjallajökull’s eruption continues today. A fundamental questions lies at the heart of this debate: why wasn’t Europe better warned or prepared? Amy R Donovan and Clive Oppenheimer (University of Cambridge) highlighted this problem in their March 2011 Geographical Journal commentary. The danger such natural events as Eyjafjallajökull pose, as Donovan and Oppenheimer argue, is that they lie outside the traditional realm of managerial governance.

Many natural events, however dangerous, lend governments two favours: first, relatively ample warning; second, comparatively localised impact. Hurricanes are an excellent case-in-point. Every summer NOAA, the United States’s oceanographic and atmospheric monitoring agency, continuously tracks existing storms and recalculates their future projectories. Excepting such hurricanes as Andrew and Katrina–most hurricanes cause damage across a limited geographic expanse before weakening significantly in strength. The snowstorms that rack the American northeast are similarly tracked in advance so that appropriate precautions can be taken (even if, in the event, those precautions prove inadequate).

The Eyjafjallajökull eruption, much like the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, presents a very different scenario. Such events are difficult to forecast, even more difficult to contain, and–like other natural events–impossible to prevent. But, as The Geographical Journal commentary noted, preventative steps could have been taken. Although the Met Office’sVolcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), clearly noted the airspace risks posed by Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull and Mýrdalsjökull volcanoes, this information was not included in the annual National Risk Register, nor did it predicate the implementation of ‘sophisticated, integrated UK or EU policy in advance of the recent volcanic activity’ (p. 2). One hopes that the Eyjafjallajökull airspace fiasco will serve as a reminder of our inability to tame the extremes of physical geography.

By Benjamin Sacks

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

Concept Caching: Malta and the European Union

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

Malta is one of the earliest members of the European Union and it is also at “Fortress Europe’s” frontier.  As discussed in the post, Geography Directions: At the borders of ‘Fortress Europe’, the pressures of illegal immigrants arriving at the EU’s borders has hit Greece especially hard in the last months of 2010, but has also impacted Malta as well.  As these bastions of the EU, Greece and Malta are impacted by their geography as entry points to one of the world’s most prosperous and peaceful realms.  Both places are marked by immigrant detention centers.  As a small, culturally diverse island, Malta has long been dealing with illegal migrants mostly from Northern Africa. These detention centers become homes for illegal migrants for the several months as their status is determined.

Geography Directions: At the borders of ‘Fortress Europe’

From our Geography Directions site reviewing Wiley-Blackwell’s Geography Compass review journal covering the entire discipline.  Keep up with cutting edge academic geography.  These articles may be useful for introducing students to the discipline or may be appropriate for upper division Geography classes.

The outer borders of the European Union and their ‘barrier’ structures are back in the news. Since FRONTEX, the EU’s agency for border security, started to reinforce the policing of unofficial migration routes through the Canary Islands in 2007, the course of these routes has turned towards the Eastern side of ‘Fortress Europe’. In these new trajectories, Malta, Greece and the Italian islands have become the major border spaces that undocumented immigrants attempt to negotiate. In recent reports, the BBC and The Telegraph have brought to the fore the situation on the border between Greece and Turkey, where an increasing number of undocumented immigrants are being stopped and held in detention centres. FRONTEX has also become active at this border, allegedly cutting the crossings from 350 to 60 people a day. Consequently, those would-be immigrants arrested (men, women and children) are held in detention centres, which human rights organizations have denounced as overcrowded and unhygienic. The image of crowds of people calling to journalists from behind the bars of these detention centres causes many to question the politics behind ‘Fortress Europe’.

Human geographers have long battled with trying to understand the decision-making processes of people who decide to leave their countries of origin for what, on many occasions, is an unknown future in an unknown land. A complex combination of macro and micro factors play a role in migrants’ decision-making processes; insecurity, natural disasters, poverty, family obligations, the wish for safety and a better future are all powerful factors that many contemporary migrants face. In a forthcoming article for Area, Van der Velde and Van Naerssen (2010) propose a geographical approach for analyzing cross-border mobility by using the case of the European Union. The EU’s policy is based on the premise that migration can be controlled by its outer border system so the authors consider whether these borders act as barriers to the potential mobility of people (from outside of the EU but also across European countries). Overall, they try to develop a model which can take into account all the factors influencing spatial behaviours in international migration, analyzing them through the basic components involved in human (im)mobility: people, borders and trajectories. Their approach brings to the fore, once more, not only the diversity of factors that play a role in people’s movement (or not) across borders but also the difficulty in developing models which can accommodate complex understandings of human agency, borders and trajectories.

By Rosa Mas Giralt

To view the original article please visit the Geography Directions Blog.

A Russian re-turn?

Russia has been a significant global and Eurasian presence for much longer than many contemporary Western perspectives give credit to.  This may be because the Russian Realm has existed, and at times prospered, as ideologically distinct from the rest of the world system.  Some historical similarities aside (like, colonialism, imperialism, and empire), autocracy and communism separate this ideological set from the democratic and capitalist nearly everywhere else.  The subtle power of memory and history has begun to reassert themselves as some of the former Soviet territories and Republics reverse their primary political associations from west to east.  Yet, what is seen as a contemporary “turn to Russia” today would not be so much a “turn”, but perhaps a “re”-turn for some Eastern European states.

A brief look at Russian historical and territorial geography provides an insight into the recurring, although contentious, allegiance and memory across, now “independent,” territorial borders.  The ties that unite places like Ukraine, Belarus and the Russian core, are quite deep-rooted as they define significant parts of the shared “historical heartland” between these Slavic peoples.  Such memories are often revisited earnestly, despite their temporal distance of thousands of years back.  In more recent memory, the legacy of the Soviet system and its tenuous, federal “union” of diverse nationalities have also left an imprint.  The cultural organization of the Soviet system represented a fine line between political subordinance and cultural independence.   In the early 1990s, the appeal of cultural and political independence certainly won out.  However, the Soviet political and economic system, although globally judged as a failure, was somewhat a success on the ground as it provided a tangible safety net for people.  Communist-style support is now missed as capitalist alternatives have proven uneven and ultimately dissatisfactory.  In terms of global alliances, even former Republics that made the quickest turn to the West, are now rethinking such strategies as they find themselves increasingly peripheralized in complicated Western supra-national systems.  This geopolitical disillusionment has found a new opportunity as the Russian state has recently been making its own global resurgence, riding the wave of favorable global energy prices, reasserting its “need” for autocratic-style democracy, and reemerging as a global power in this multipolar world.

The strongest return has been that of Ukraine.  In 2004, the Orange Revolution was hoped to bring democracy and stronger ties to Europe.  However, since then, disenchantment has reigned and in February 2010 a pro-Moscow president was elected.  President Viktor Yanukovich ingratiated Ukraine with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, negotiating and signing some significant treaties and agreements that will have lasting effects.  This “re-turn” was not unilaterally endorsed, and some of the most comical political machinations resulted during the Ukrainian Parliament’s debate over these treaties.  Going even a step further, the new pro-Russian government is also rewriting its history books and erasing references to the pro-democracy interlude of the Orange Revolution.

In Latvia, economic troubles have contributed to the near return to Russian influence.  Historically, Latvia was one of the three Baltic States that declared their independence from the Soviet Union and made the quickest about face turn to the West.  However, following a recent economic collapse which associated blame with the West, the country nearly turned power over to a political party that is backed by the significant ethnic Russian population, itself a legacy of Soviet Russification.   Interestingly, there is an increasingly Latvian contingent that seems to view Russia as a lesser evil than Western Europe.

As Russia reemerges on the world political stage, there may be more former satellites that choose to return to its influence.  Especially as economic and governing politics in the European Union become increasingly uneven and contentious, perhaps even the most unexpected reversals may take place.

Concept Caching: The Flag of the European Union

From our Concept Caching image cache that hopes to promote student spatial awareness by relating specific features on the Earth’s surface with their visual character and GPS coordinates. Through the site photographs and GPS coordinates demonstrate core concepts in geography.  Images are “cached” for viewing by core concept and by region.  Images are certainly useful for introducing visual content to students in all Geography classes.

The European Union is truly a grand political, economic, social and cultural experiment.  Quite revolutionary for even a region of revolutions, the EU marks a fine line between inter-governmental and supra-national.  Complexity and compromise are what define the diplomatic-style interactions and the creation of cross-national policy.  Member states in the EU are entangled with one another across diverse policy areas and across scales.  Never has this been more apparent than with the 2010 Debt Crisis in Europe as discussed in the post Political Economy and Global Europe: A two-part spatial saga.  This image shows the nested and connected nature of various scales in the EU, and how certain cities and localities are directly connected to the European scale.

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