Geography Publications and Research

MCDA4ArcMap – An Open-Source Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis and Geovisualization Tool for ArcGIS 10

Claus Rinner et al. — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:56:19 PDT

Modelling Innovation Support Systems for Development

Eric Vaz et al. — Thu, 02 May 2013 08:36:11 PDT

The present article offers a concise theoretical conceptualization on the contribution of innovation to regional development. These concepts are closely related to geographical proximity, knowledge diffusion and filters, and clustering. Institutional innovation profiles and regional patterns of innovation are two mutually linked, novel conceptual elements in this article. Next to a theoretical framing, the paper offers also a new methodology to analyse institutional innovation profiles. Our case study addresses three Portuguese regions and their institutions, included in a web-based inventory of innovation agencies which offered the foundation for an extensive data base. This data set was analyzed by means of a recently developed Principal Coordinates Analysis followed by a Logistic Biplot approach (leading to a Voronoi mapping) to design a systemic typology of innovation structures where each institution is individually represented. There appears to be a significant difference in the regional innovation patterns resulting from the diverse institutional innovation profiles concerned. These profiles appear to be region-specific. Our conclusion highlights the main advantages in the use of the method used for policy-makers and business companies.

Is it the “outstanding universal value" of heritage really global?

Vasco Monteiro et al. — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 05:00:47 PDT

Web 2.0 and social media play an important role nowadays in our society, not only from a user perspective, but also on an academic perspective. The data and information production based on the user-generated content is an important source to conduct scientific studies, specially the new geospatial information that exists due to the widespread of technological devices that capture the geospatial data. The main objective of this research is to assess if we can measure the brand awareness, with a focus in the reputation component, using geospatial usergenerated content with an approach as a geographic problem. In this paper is identified the main research question and objectives, the methodological approach and the expected results regarding this Doctorate Thesis in Information Management.

Exploratory Landscape Metrics for Agricultural Sustainability

Eric Vaz et al. — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:55:33 PDT

Socio-economic growth and urban change have been an increasing concern for decision makers in recent decades. The monitoring, mapping and analysis of agricultural land-use change, especially in areas where urban change has been high, is crucial. The collision between traditional economic activities related to agriculture in tourist areas such as the Algarve and current demand for tourism infrastructures in urban regions is also leading to loss of economic activity. This paper uses a combined Geographical Information System approach with CORINE land cover datasets to perform a Shannon’s diversity index quantifying changes in agricultural areas. The paper then expands on the nature of the agricultural changes observed, and offers a multi-temporal assessment by means of landscape metrics in order to understand the shifting land-use patterns for the Algarve in land use planning and regional economic equilibrium: (1) forest regions become transformed into agricultural areas and agricultural areas become urban; (2) areas which are initially agricultural become scattered residential regions created by economic investors; and (3) agricultural land-use changes have a cyclical nature in which – in the course of the economic recession – such dynamic effects brought about a decrease in tourism and focus on traditional sectors.

A Graph theory approach for geovisualization of land use change: An application to Lisbon

Eric Vaz et al. — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 06:55:41 PDT

Urban sprawl and growth has experienced increased concern in geographic and environmental literature. Preceding the existence of robust frameworks found in regional and urban planning, as well as urban geography and economics, the spatial properties of allocation of urban land use are still far from being completely understood. This is largely due to the underlying complexity of the change found at spatial level of urban land use, merging social, economic and natural drivers. The spatial patterns formed, and the connectivity established among the different subsets of land-use types, becomes a complex network of interactions over time, helping to shape the structure of the city. The possibility to merge the configuration of land-use with complex networks may be assessed elegantly through graph theory. Nodes and edges can become abstract representations of typologies of space and are represented into a topological space of different land use types which traditionally share common spatial boundaries. Within a regional framework, the links between adjacent and neighboring urban land use types become better understood, by means of a Kamada-Kawai algorithm. This study uses land use in Lisbon over three years, 1990, 2000 and 2006, to develop a Kamada-Kawai graph interpretation of land-use as a result of neighboring power. The rapid change witnessed in Lisbon since the nineties, as well as the availability of CORINE Land Cover data in these three time stamps, permits a reflection on anthropogenic land-use change in urban and semi-urban areas in Portugal’s capital. This paper responds to (1) the structure and connectivity of urban land use over time, demonstrating that most of the agricultural land is stressed to transform to urban, gaining a central role in future. (2) Offer a systemic approach to land-use transitions generating what we call spatial memory, where land use change is often unpredictable over space, but becomes evident in a graph theory framework, and (3) advance in the geovisual understanding of spatial phenomena in land use transitions by means of graph theory. Thus, the structure of this combined method enables urban and landscape to have a better understanding of the spatial interaction of land-use types within the city, promoting an elegant solution to rapid geovisualization for land-use management in general.

A Systems Perspective on Volunteered Geographic Information

Claus Rinner et al. — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 10:31:18 PDT

A novel and diverse type of geographic information, volunteered geographic information (VGI) is proving to be more than just a new type of data. In an effort to contribute to the conceptualization of the burgeoning field of VGI research, we propose to review selected definitions and debates around Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Traditional geographic information emerges from the interplay of the components of GIS: hardware, software, data, and people. It is shaped by the processing of geographic data through a series of functions for input, management, analysis, and presentation. Consequently, we suggest framing VGI as the information product originating from a "VGI system". The systems perspective takes into account the hardware and software used to set up a VGI initiative; the characteristics of the data volunteered by users; and the application context including the people involved in purposefully creating VGI as the system output. For example, VGI in citizen science emerges from numerical measurements (e.g., private weather stations) or categorical user input (e.g., invasive species observations), while VGI in map-based discussion forums comes from text input or multimedia submissions. In fact, VGI is only "voluntary" in that it is the result of sourcing and processing volunteered geographic data. Taking this broader perspective of VGI as the output of a system will allow us to better understand different types of VGI and the functionality needed to create them. It offers a comprehensive methodology for research into VGI. Ultimately, we may be able to design more effective systems for successful VGI initiatives.

A regional spatial-retrofitting approach to geovisualise regional urban growth: An application to the Golden Horseshoe in Canada

Eric Vaz et al. — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:55:31 PDT

Understanding urban change in particular for larger regions has been a great demur in both regional planning and geography. One of the main challenges has been linked to the potential of modelling urban change. The absence of spatial data and size of areas of study limit the traditional urban monitoring approaches, which also do not take into account visualization techniques that share information with the community. This is the case of the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario in Canada, one of the fastest growing regions in North America. An unprecedented change on the urban environment has been witnessed, leading to an increased importance of awareness for future planning in the region. With a population greater than 8 million, the Golden Horseshoe is steadily showing symptoms of becoming a mega-urban region, joining surrounding cities into a single and diversified urban landscape. However, little effort has been done to understand these changes, nor to share information with policy makers, stakeholders and investors. These players are in need of the most diverse information on urban land use, which is seldom available from a single source. The spatio-temporal effect of the growth of this urban region could very well be the birth of yet another North American megacity. Therefore, from a spatial perspective there is demand for joint collaboration and adoption of a regional science perspective including land use and spatio-temporal configurations. This calls forth a novel technique that allows for assessment of urban and regional change, and supports decision-making without having the usual concerns of locational data availability. It is this sense, that we present a spatial-retrofitting model, with the objective of (i) retrofitting spatial land use based on current land use and land cover, and assessing proportional change in the past, leading to four spatial timestamps of the Golden Horseshoe’s land use, while (ii) integrating this in a multi-user open source web environment to facilitate synergies for decision-making. This combined approach is referred to as a regional-spatial-retrofitting approach (RSRA), where the conclusions permit accurate assessment of land use in past time frames based on Landsat imagery. The RSRA also allows for a collective vision of regional urban growth supporting local governance through a decision-making process adhering to Volunteered Geographic Information Systems. Urban land use change can be refined by means of contribution from end-users through a web environment, leading to a constant understanding and monitoring of urban land use and urban land use change.

Business Topographies: A Spatiotemporal Analysis of 150 years of Indian Business

Eric Vaz — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 05:55:29 PDT

One of the most growing entrepreneurial landscapes has been without a doubt in the last decade India. India, with a total population of almost 1.2 billion inhabitants, is a land of immense business opportunity within a highly competitive market. Before the eighties however, India was mainly a rural country, with a large contrast of the nexus between city and periphery. With the emergence of young generation of entrepreneurs, the economy has been growing at a rate of 8-10% for the last 20 years. The share of the service sector has increased to 60 per cent in the total GDP. The growth rate of India has increased significantly and has been consistent mainly because of the emergence of private sector in general and small business entrepreneurs in particular. The private sector has not only played a significant role in savings but also played pivotal role in investment in the country which has been creating vast job opportunities and gigantic wealth for the country. Thus, the growth of the Indian economy is mainly driven by the private sector. Worldwide the landscape of business has undertaken a paradigm shift. The developing countries have become key drivers of the trajectory of global growth. World has started looking at the growth of India and China from a business perspective, but also in a context of environmental futures. These two economies will be the biggest economies by 2035. However, the change in the industrial and entrepreneurial landscape of India raises up some importance issues related with how is Indian business developing spatially, how its concentrated its growth is and how it is related to Indian transportation systems. Using different stages of Geographic Information Systems, we will answer these three questions by methodologies found in geostatistics, neogeography and spatial analysis. By means of a database of over 3000 businesses in India, we will (i) transform this database to spatially-explicit content through geocoding techniques which shall allow (ii) a geostatistical analysis through the creation of a Getis Ord (Local G) autocorrelation of identifying hot and cold space for entire India over time. This information will be assessed in a combination of volunteered-geographic information (VGI) where the availability of the entire road network of India shall be (iii) compiled on a spatial integrative analysis, allowing to understand the spatial relation of the Local G business hot and cold spots in relation to infrastructures and commutes. These results bring forth a novel approach of combined spatially-explicit methodologies and GIS, which for business analysis seems greatly to be missing and set out to create a new definition missing in literature: Business Topographies. A combined methodology taking forth available datasets brought from VGI related to autoregressive spatial modelling approaches shall allow a better understanding of the underlying patterns of the spatial transformation of the business landscape over time (in our case since 1850 for India) and the predictable consequences of future changes in spatiotemporal scenarios for business performance, taking into account commutes and Euclidean spatial proximity.

Collapsing landscapes? The regional science contribution to spatial understanding

Eric Vaz — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 12:40:42 PDT

Recent decades have witnessed unprecedented landscape change. Most of these changes have been brought by human impact on the environment, and excessive exploitation of resources. While economic growth has brought prosperity and better living conditions, much of the human impact has had irreversible consequences on environmental systems and destroyed fragile ecosystems and biodiversity. As much as our impact on earth has brought irreversible environmental change, our landscapes have in detriment of these choices witnessed a substantial change, most of it affecting our natural and historical heritage (Vaz and Nijkamp, 2009). In the context of regional development, economic geography and complex space-time dynamics are factors of continuous change (Nijkamp and Abreu, 2009). Monitoring of the transitions of land at regional level, is thus of utmost importance for founder regions in future. It is of utmost importance to preserve landscapes by enabling efficient economic growth, without jeopardizing the natural ecosystems and mitigating the impacts on the anthropogenic heritage and archaeological landscapes alike. This paper advances on the possible spatial interpretations of landscape change by means of defining the role at present of Geographic Information Systems as tools to allow sounder urban and regional interactions. Thus, I propose three pathways integrating regional development within a spatial landscape preservation framework. It draws inspiration from much of the work realized by Peter Nijkamp, concerning lessons learned from complex spatiotemporal interactions of regions. I arrive to the conclusion that we are facing what I designate as a general collapsing landscape, a result of rapid economic changes followed by landscape functionality. From a spatial perspective, regions can only become sustainable, when spatial memory – that is, the identity of place and time and economic traditions – are coherent and long lasting. From a regional science perspective, three types of landscape paradigms within the collapsing landscape are defined, posing as solutions for sustainable development in future: (i) the coherent landscape, (ii) the dominant landscape and (iii) the vertical landscape. All of these types of landscapes largely depend on our options taken in the next decades. The usage of Geographic Information Systems, in particular the recent advances in location based services, crowd sourcing and ambient information, play a leading role in the development of regions and may act as a visual tool for evaluation landscape change.

Interactions of Population, Health, and Place in a Spatially Explicit Heat Vulnerability Assessment

Claus Rinner — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:35:33 PST

This two-page paper was submitted on 04 December 2012 as a position paper for the Vespucci Institute in April 2013 but later withdrawn, because for personal reasons I cannot participate in the Institute. In the paper, I outline my view of the potential and risks of using geospatial data and models in health research. With reference to published work with students and collaborators, I present the Toronto heat vulnerability assessment as an example of "Synthesizing Population, Health, and Place", the theme of the Vespucci Institute. For the application to participate, I also outline the role that the Institute would have played as part of my sabbatical leave.

Bibliography on Immigration and Settlement in the Toronto Area, Third Edition

Michael Doucet et al. — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:44:42 PDT

Newcomer Services in the Greater Toronto Area: an Exploration of the Range and Funding Sources of Settlement Services

April Lim et al. — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 11:44:41 PDT

This paper provides a profile of newcomer services and the agencies which provide them to recent immigrants in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA). It is intended as a resource for researchers, immigrants, agency, community and government organizations. The paper begins by reviewing: the range of newcomer services available, trends in recent immigrant settlement in the Toronto area, and a description of funding sources for newcomer services in the GTA. Next we discuss our research methodology and identify some limitations to the material we present. The bulk of the paper consists of an identification of agencies providing newcomer services in the City of Toronto and Regional Municipalities of Durham, Halton, Peel and York. We cite location, funding source(s), and program offering(s) for each agency. The paper concludes with tabulated summaries of the agencies described.

The Effect of Standardization in Multicriteria Decision Analysis on Health Policy Outcomes

Jacqueline Young et al. — Wed, 30 May 2012 09:05:07 PDT

Health planners and epidemiologists have begun to use spatial analysis and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to explore socioeconomic inequalities that can affect population health. In particular, the use of area-based composite indices, also known as deprivation indices, has been effective at incorporating multiple indicators into an analysis. We used GIS-based Multicriteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to create a weighted index of health service need, and explored the standardization step in MCDA within a geovisualization environment. In a neighbourhood prioritization scenario for the City of Toronto, we implemented an MCDA using two common standardization techniques and three methods for standardizing cost criteria. We compared the resulting scores and rankings of neighbourhoods, and show that standardization is an important consideration in the data analysis process. We conclude with an assessment of the appropriateness of using one technique over the other as well as the potential effect on decision-making related to health policy.

The Spatial Dimensions of Multi-Criteria Evaluation – Case Study of a Home Buyer’s Spatial Decision Support System

Claus Rinner et al. — Tue, 29 May 2012 12:54:22 PDT

This paper explores the spatial aspects of GIS-based multi-criteria evaluation. We provide a systematic account of geographically defined decision criteria based on three classes of spatial relations: location, proximity, and direction. We also discuss whether the evaluation score of a decision alternative should be directly influenced by neighbouring scores and outline a methodology for distance-based adjustment of evaluation scores. A home buyer case study is employed to demonstrate how spatial criteria can be included in a spatial decision support system and to investigate the effect of geographically adjusting the evaluation scores of decision alternatives. The case study demonstrates how spatial criteria can be presented to decision-makers and their effects be observed in the decision outcome. Further, the spatial adjustment of evaluation scores using the performance of neighbouring properties smoothes the distribution of scores across the study area and allows decision-makers to consider a location’s environment.

Spatio-Temporal Multi-Criteria Analysis - Conceptual Challenges and Application to Health Service Planning

Jacqueline Young et al. — Thu, 10 May 2012 05:17:26 PDT

Population health is influenced by many socioeconomic and demographic factors that may include levels of employment, income, education, ethnicity and age. For health planning and service delivery, it is important to take into account demographic trends over time. This temporal component is usually incorporated into analyses by comparing multiple maps of variables at different points in time. In this study demographic variables with spatial and temporal components are used in a multi-criteria analysis within an interactive spatial decision support tool. We illustrate how the exploration of an area-based composite index over time can help analysts with identifying trends of increasing social deprivation and health-care needs. The paper focuses on the conceptual challenges of spatio-temporal multi-criteria analysis due to changing geographic boundaries, the standardization of variables across time, comparability of variables, and comparability of index scores.

User Task Scenarios for Map-Based Decision Support in Community Health Planning

Brian Kelsey et al. — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:27:19 PDT

Health outcomes are affected by the socio-demographic and physical-environmental characteristics of the places where people live. Therefore, epidemiologists have been interested in the use of maps to explore spatial patterns of disease for a long time. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are not only useful when visualizing complex spatial datasets but also when mapping the results of analytical processes. One such process is multi-criteria evaluation (MCE), which can be used to generate composite measures of public health based on individual, medical and non-medical factors.

The objective of this study was to determine if geovisual MCE can be an effective tool in community health planning. We provided highly interactive thematic maps coupled with MCE tools to planners at a community health centre and evaluated their use for community health planning and decision-making. User task scenarios were designed in a way to compare the usefulness of different representation methods for a number of tasks.

The pilot user test with two expert participants included interviews, questionnaires, and user task scenarios with think-aloud audio and screen video recording. We assessed the easiness of completing the tasks using completion rates and times and could identify a number of specific usability issues with the tool at hand.

A Scalable GeoWeb Tool for Argumentation Mapping

Aaron P. Sani et al. — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 04:58:22 PDT

Public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) support collaborative decision-making in the public realm. PPGIS provide advanced communication, deliberation, and conflict resolution mecha nisms to engage diverse stakeholder groups. Many of the functional characteristics of Web 2.0 echo basic PPGIS functions including the authoring, linking, and sharing of volunteered geographic information. However, with the increasing popularity of geospatial applications on the Web comes a need to develop concepts for scalable, reliable, and easy-to-maintain tools. In this paper, we propose a cloud computing implementation of a scalable argumentation mapping tool. The tool also illustrates the opportunities of applying a Web 2.0 model to PPGIS. The searching, linking, authoring, tagging, extension, and signalling (SLATES) functions are associated with PPGIS functionality to produce a participatory GeoWeb tool for deliberative democracy.

Toronto’s Little India in Residential Context: A Geographical Analysis of Census Data

Isabel Ritchie et al. — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:02:37 PDT

Ethnic economies are an important part of the today’s global city. We examine Toronto’s Little India and map the corresponding ethnic and Visible Minority population and their residential locations across the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). Although past research suggests that ethnic economies are typically accompanied by a local co-ethnic residential population, our study shows that this is not the case for Little India. While the South Asian population around Little India is increasing, it is growing at a slower pace than in some other parts of the Toronto CMA. We identify and examine four major South Asian residential clusters across the Toronto CMA that represent a potential customer base for the businesses of Little India.

A Geospatial Web Application to Map Observations and Opinions in Environmental Planning

Claus Rinner et al. — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 05:13:51 PDT

The geospatial Web enables virtually everyone to contribute to the growing col-lection of geographically referenced information on the World-Wide Web. In this chapter, we present a Google Maps-based tool that enables Web users to contribute two types of informa-tion: annotations and their reference locations. We further differentiate annotations into obser-vations and opinions regarding specific places. The potential of this approach for integrating lo-cal knowledge into environmental planning was assessed by conducting an online map-based discussion of organic farming among expert stakeholders in the Kawarthas area in Central On-tario, Canada. The discussion contents shed light on the participants’ perceptions of the organic food market. Moreover, the experiment demonstrated how a map-based discussion forum can be useful for obtaining public input on planning and policy issues.

Toronto’s Urban Heat Island - Exploring the Relationship between Land Use and Surface Temperature

Claus Rinner et al. — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:12:50 PDT

The urban heat island effect is linked to the built environment and threatens human health during extreme heat events. In this study, we analyzed whether characteristic land uses within an urban area are associated with higher or lower surface temperatures, and whether concentrations of "hot" land uses exacerbate this relationship. Zonal statistics on a thermal remote sensing image for the City of Toronto revealed statistically significant differences between high average temperatures for commercial and resource/industrial land use (29.1 °C), and low average temperatures for parks and recreational land (25.1 °C) and water bodies (23.1 °C). Furthermore, higher concentrations of either of these land uses were associated with more extreme surface temperatures. We also present selected neighborhoods to illustrate these results. The paper concludes by recommending that municipal planners and decision-makers formulate policies and regulations that are specific to the problematic land uses, in order to mitigate extreme heat.