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Handbook of research methods and applications in economic geography
\"This Handbook provides an overview and assessment of the state-of-the-art regarding research methods, approaches and applications central to economic geography. The chapters are written by distinguished researchers from a variety of scholarly traditions and with a background in different academic disciplines including economics, economic, human and cultural geography, and economic history. The resulting Handbook covers a broad spectrum of methodologies and approaches applicable in analyses pertaining to the geography of economic activities and economic outcomes.\" From publisher's website.
Book
Theorizing practice in economic geography: Foundations, challenges, and possibilities
Over the last decade or so there has been an identifiable shift in the interests of many economic geographers towards a concern with practices: stabilized, routinized, or improvised social actions that constitute and reproduce economic space, and through and within which socioeconomic actors and communities embed knowledge, organize production activities, and interpret and derive meaning from the world. Although this shift has gained significant momentum its general theoretical significance remains somewhat unclear and the concept is vulnerable to criticisms that it is incoherent, too ‘micro-scale’ in emphasis, unable to provide valid links between everyday practices and higher-order phenomena (eg, institutions, class structures), and that, in some cases, it lacks a sound political economy. This paper argues that while it undoubtedly has limitations, the practice-oriented shift represents an ongoing development of a longstanding and heterodox field of social scientific interest from both within and beyond the subdiscipline. We first highlight the diverse strands of economic geography scholarship that have an explicit interest in practices and then propose an epistemological and methodological framework for a practice-oriented economic geography. The framework is based on the polemical argument that insight from both critical realist and actor-network perspectives can provide the basis to better demarcate practices in relation to their social and spatiotemporal dimensions. It goes on to outline a reformulated retroductive methodology to assess the impacts and theoretical significance of particular economic-geographical practices. The paper concludes that practice offers a potentially powerful, yet complementary, epistemological tool that can create conceptual space for the study of a wide range of socioeconomic and geographical phenomena.
Journal Article
Seeing the City
The city is a complex object. Some researchers look at its shape, others at its people, animals, ecology, policy, infrastructures, buildings, history, art, or technical networks. Some researchers analyse processes of in- or exclusion, gentrification, or social mobility; others biological evolution, traffic flows, or spatial development. Many combine these topics or add still more topics beyond this list. Some projects cross the boundaries of research and practice and engage in action research, while others pursue knowledge for the sake of curiosity. This volume embraces this variety of perspectives and provides an essential collection of methodologies for studying the city from multiple, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives. We start by recognizing that the complexity of the urban environment cannot be understood from a single vantage point. We therefore offer multiple methodologies in order to gather and analyse data about the city, and provide ways to connect and integrate these approaches.
The contributors form a talented network of urban scholars and practitioners at the forefront of their fields. They offer hands-on methodological techniques and skills for data collection and analysis. Furthermore, they reveal honest and insightful reflections from behind the scenes. All methodologies are illustrated with examples drawn from the authors own research applying them in the city of Amsterdam. In this way, the volume also offers a rich collection of Amsterdam-based research and outcomes that may inform local urban practitioners and policy makers.
Altogether, the volume offers indispensable tools for and aims to educate a new generation of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary-minded urban scholars and practitioners.
eBook
The Concept, Dimensions and Methods of Assessment of Human Well-Being within a Socioecological Context: A Literature Review
The concept of well-being has evolved over the past several decades as research has continued to reveal its multidimensional, dynamic, person-specific and culture-specific nature. Most recently, the ecological embeddedness of well-being has also gained recognition, and this development of the concept demands that we explore and identify new conceptual frameworks and appropriate methodological approaches towards the assessment of quality of life within a socioecological context. This paper offers a review of seminal and current research in the fields of social indicators, human development, ecological economics, and natural resources management, with the aim of examining the concept and the various methodologies designed to assess both the objective and subjective components and the multiple dimensions that comprise well-being. We also present some methodological approaches that have the capacity to account for the role of ecosystem services, considering several studies of rural populations whose well-being depends on the flow of ecosystem services, highlighting the participatory methods these studies employed to identify and assess locally relevant well-being indicators, and addressing some of the challenges inherent in such methods. We conclude with an appraisal of what we regard as the most appropriate methodological approach for measuring human well-being in the socioecological context.
Journal Article
Eudaimonic and Hedonic Components of Happiness: Qualitative and Quantitative Findings
This paper illustrates a new project developed by a cross-country team of researchers, with the aim of studying the hedonic and eudaimonic components of happiness through a mixed method approach combining both qualitative and quantitative analyses. Data were collected from 666 participants in Australia, Croatia, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and South Africa. A major aim of the study was to examine definitions and experiences of happiness using open-ended questions. Among the components of well-being traditionally associated with the eudaimonic approach, meaning in particular was explored in terms of constituents, relevance, and subjective experience. The Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS) was also administered to quantitatively assess the hedonic dimension of happiness. Results showed that happiness was primarily defined as a condition of psychological balance and harmony. Among the different life domains, family and social relations were prominently associated with happiness and meaningfulness. The quantitative analyses highlighted the relationship between happiness, meaningfulness, and satisfaction with life, as well as the different and complementary contributions of each component to well-being. At the theoretical and methodological levels, findings suggest the importance of jointly investigating happiness and its relationship with other dimensions of well-being, in order to detect differences and synergies among them.
Journal Article
Measuring Capacities for Community Resilience
The purpose of this study was to measure the sets of adaptive capacities for Economic Development and Social Capital in the Norris et al. (2008) community resilience model with publicly accessible population indicators. Our approach involved five steps. First, we conducted a literature review on measurements of the capacities. Second, we created an exhaustive “wish list” of relevant measures that operationalized the concepts presented in the literature. Third, we identified data sources and searched for archival, population-level data that matched our indicators. Fourth, we systematically tested correlations of indicators within and across the theoretical elements and used this information to select a parsimonious group of indicators. Fifth, we combined the indicators into composites of Economic Development and Social Capital and an additive index of Community Resilience using Mississippi county data, and validated these against a well-established index of social vulnerability and aggregated survey data on collective efficacy. We found that our measure of community resilience capacities correlated favorably and as expected when validated with the archival and survey data. This study provides the first step in identifying existing capacities that may predict a community's ability to “bounce back” from disasters, thereby reducing post-trauma health and mental health problems.
Journal Article
On the Methodological Framework of Composite Indices
In recent times, composite indicators have gained astounding popularity in a wide variety of research areas. Their adoption by global institutions has further captured the attention of the media and policymakers around the globe, and their number of applications has surged ever since. This increase in their popularity has solicited a plethora of methodological contributions in response to the substantial criticism surrounding their underlying framework. In this paper, we put composite indicators under the spotlight, examining the wide variety of methodological approaches in existence. In this way, we offer a more recent outlook on the advances made in this field over the past years. Despite the large sequence of steps required in the construction of composite indicators, we focus particularly on two of them, namely weighting and aggregation. We find that these are where the paramount criticism appears and where a promising future lies. Finally, we review the last step of the robustness analysis that follows their construction, to which less attention has been paid despite its importance. Overall, this study aims to provide both academics and practitioners in the field of composite indices with a synopsis of the choices available alongside their recent advances.
Journal Article
Urban expansion patterns and their driving forces based on the center of gravity-GTWR model: A case study of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei urban agglomeration
Research into urban expansion patterns and their driving forces is of great significance for urban agglomeration development planning and decision-making. In this paper, we reveal the multi-dimensional characteristics of urban expansion patterns, based on the intensity index of the urban expansion, the differentiation index of the urban expansion, the fractal dimension index, the land urbanization rate, and the center of gravity model, by taking the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (Jing-Jin-Ji) urban agglomeration as an example. We then build the center of gravity-geographically and temporally weighted regression (GTWR) model by coupling the center of gravity model with the GTWR model. Through the analysis of the temporal and spatial patterns and by using the center of gravity-GTWR model, we analyze the driving forces of the urban land expansion and summarize the dominant development modes and core driving forces of the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration. The results show that: 1) Between 1990 and 2015, the expansion intensity of the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration showed a down-up-down trend, and the peak period was in 2005–2010. Before 2005, high-speed development took place in Beijing, Tianjin, Baoding, and Langfang; after 2005, rapid development was seen in Xingtai and Handan. 2) Although the barycenter of cities in the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration has shown a divergent trend, the local interaction between cities has been enhanced, and the driving forces of urban land expansion have shown a characteristic of spatial spillover. 3) The spatial development mode of the Jing-Jin-Ji urban agglomeration has changed from a dual-core development mode to a multi-core development mode, which is made up of three functional cores: the transportation core in the northern part, the economic development core in the central part, and the investment core in the southern part. The synergistic development between each functional core has led to the multi-core development mode. 4) The center of gravity-GTWR model combines the analysis of spatial and temporal nonstationarity with urban spatial interaction, and analyzes the urban land expansion as a space-time dynamic system. The results of this study show that the model is a feasible approach in the analysis of the driving forces of urban land expansion.
Journal Article
Some Notes on Institutions in Evolutionary Economic Geography
Within the evolutionary economic geography framework, the role of institutions deserves more explicit attention. We argue that territorial institutions are to be viewed as orthogonal to organizational routines since each territory is characterized by a variety of routines and a single firm can apply its routines in different territorial contexts. It is therefore meaningful to distinguish between institutional economic geography and evolutionary economic geography as their explanans is different. Yet the two approaches can be combined in a dynamic framework in which institutions coevolve with organizational routines, particularly in emerging industries. Furthermore, integrating the evolutionary and institutional approach allows one to analyze the spatial diffusion of organizational routines that mediate conflicts among social groups, in particular, those between employers and employees. An evolutionary economic geography advocates an empirical research program, both qualitative and quantitative, that can address the relative importance of organizational routines and territorial institutions for regional development.
Journal Article
Sustainable Development Goals Indicators at Territorial Level: Conceptual and Methodological Issues—The Italian Perspective
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (2015) can be considered the synthesis of a debate, which sets the sustainable development as a priority for the International Community. The achievement of the sustainable development goals has made necessary to develop a system of indicators. Indicators and data should be collected and reported sub-nationally, giving attention to the territory. This is a necessity even more for Italy, a country historically characterized by strong regional specificities and differences, which find their radicalization in the so-called North–South gap. In this paper, we want to examine and monitor the Italian situation as to the achievement of the SDGs, based on the analysis of the Regions, to highlight potential differences or territorial homogeneity. In particular, we want to emphasize not only how there is actually a gap between the North and the South of the country, but also how the synthesis tends often to be representative of situations profoundly different from each other, as a result of different values in the basic indicators, or similar situations between them. Due to the difficulty of reporting on a paper a detailed analysis of all 17 sustainable development goals, we focus only on the first three goals one. In particular, for each goal we select indicators all useful for the analysis of regional realities and appropriate some for monitoring the present condition, others for providing information on the future one (risk). The research methodology is to use the Adjusted Mazziotta–Pareto Index for creating a composite index for each goal considered. This analysis is preceded by an exploratory analysis of the basic indicators over time through the use of within and between correlations and the average PCA.
Journal Article