GEOGRAPHY EDUCATION

This article could just as easily been titled, “The rise of the modern city-state.”  Parag Khanna (known for his TED talk, Mapping the Future of Countries) argues in this article that governance is happening increasingly at the city scale.  “In the face of rapid urbanization, every city, state or province wants to call its own shots. And they can, as nations depend on their largest cities more than the reverse.”

Questions to Ponder: Is this devolution?  How so?  How does this make us rethink political power and ‘the state?’  How might this shift reshape the world?  How might this concept relate to the the term primate cities?

Tags: political, urban politics, urban.

So few of my students have actual experience working on a farm and being part of the food producing process.  This gallery of 38 photos around the world is a great visual to reinforce how important the harvest is for sustaining life on this planet.  The picture above shows the a Hmong hill tribe woman harvesting a rice terrace field at Mu Cang Chai district, northern Vietnamese province of Yen Bai. The World Bank on Oct. 7 lowered its 2013 growth forecast for East Asian developing countries to 7.1 percent and warned that a prolonged US fiscal crisis could be damaging to the region.

Tags: agriculture, food production, landscape, images.

Historically, waves of immigrants came to the United States to work in textile mills.  Since 1990, 77% of manufacturing jobs have been outsourced to places with lower wages as the industry has become automated.  Today though, specialty items that still need to done by hand are coming back to the U.S. and wages in that sector are rising as American consumers want a “made in the USA” label.  

Tags: manufacturing, North America, labor, USA.

This video shows the place matters; a Washington D.C. educator shows how food deserts and other spatial problems of poverty impact his students on a daily basis. 

We usually look at life expectancy data at the national scale and that obscures some of the real issues of poverty in developed countries.  Above is a map that shows the Gini index which measures the degree of economic inequality (the Gini coefficient was recently added to the APHG course content for the Industrialization and Economic Development unit).  Here are some maps and data from the World Bank that utilizes the Gini Index as well as an interactive Gapminder graph.  

Tags: industry, location, place, migration, APHG, poverty, socioeconomic.

I imaged that the term ‘the boondocks’ was of Asian origin, but I was surprised to learn how this U.S. military lingo was able to become a mainstream term.  The Tagalog word bundok means mountain and given that the guerrilla warfare tactics, the enemies were hiding ‘in the boondocks.’ This term spread throughout the military to mean an isolated region, but today the term completely shifted from its military-based meaning to one that embraced the American heartland.  This is a fascinating article from NPR’s Code Switch team that focuses on issues of culture, identity and race. 

Tags: language, toponyms, historical, conflict, culture, diffusion.