GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

Earlier in the semester we discussed how difficult it is to establish a new country in a region with political and economic instabilty.  This is only further complicated by the presence of factional rivalries.  It’s a tragedy that these problems are being played out.  

Tags: South Sudan, political, Africa, states.

This podcast highlights the political governance issues surrounding urban agriculture. 

This is a fun tool to make geographic analysis very personal.  You can also weight the importance of the locations based on the number of years stayed at a location.   For example, the map above is unweighted, but the map below reflects that most of my life was in the Western part of the United States.

In this map, all Zip codes with more than 500 people are ranked from 0 to 99 based on household income and education.  The ‘Super Zips’ rank 95 or higher. The map at the top shows the highest concentration of the nation’s 650 Super Zips. The typical household income in a Super Zip is $120,272, and 68 percent of adults hold college degrees. That compares with $53,962 and 27 percent in the other zips mapped.  Washington D.C. shows a powerful bifurcation: One-third of Zip codes in the D.C. area are considered ‘Super Zips’ for wealth and education and large swaths of the metropolitan area are considered food deserts.

This weekend I had the privilege essentially flying from Boston to Washington DC at night and was mesmerized by the vast urban expanse beneath me.  It was the greatest concentration of wealth in the United States as well as the some of the most blighted regions of the country.  What explains the spatial patterns of highly concentrated wealth and poverty in the biggest cities?  Are cities a causal factor in wealth and poverty creation?  What does this zip code data tell us? What accounts for the spatial patterns in your region?    

Tags: Washington DC, urban, unit 7 cities.housing, economic, poverty, place, socioeconomic, neighborhood.

NPR’s Planet Money has produced an 8-part series following the commodity chain of the T-Shirt.  This series explores cotton production, textile mills, sweatshops, outsourcing and in this podcast, the transportation infrastructure that moves goods globally.  This podcast touches on the same topic as one of my favorite TED talks, how containerization enabled globalization.

The country of Ukraine is both ethnically and linguistically divided and since the fall of the Soviet Union, the partisan politics have mirrored these divisions.  The northwestern portion of the country is primarily ethnic Ukrainian and with the majority speaking Ukrainian.  This section of the country that is hoping to strengthen economic and political ties with the EU and face Europe; those that aren’t as bullish on the EU here at least want to explore other options so they aren’t overpowered by Moscow’s shadow.  The southeastern portion of Ukraine primarily speaks Russian with sizeable ethnic Russian populations (although many ethnic Ukrainians speak Russian here); not surprisingly, this is the part of the country that  would rather join in a economic union with Russia and other former Soviet Republics, or at least not turn their backs on Moscow. 

Questions to Ponder: Why are language and ethnicity often tied to political orientation?  Why might trading with all economic partners not be as viable an option?