regions

Why Asia is the center of the world again

"Asians don’t think of themselves as Asian, but as the new Silk Roads re-emerge and propel Asia to the center of the world economy, Asians are rediscovering their greatness and forging a new Asian identity for the 21st century."

Source: www.youtube.com

When discussing global economic growth, it is impossible not to mention Asia. Parag Khanna is the author of the book, The Future is Asian, and in this TED talk he highlights how Asia is growing. More importantly, he looks at how discrete Asian cultures are becoming more intermixed as the economic infrastructure of Asia becomes increasingly interconnected (a summary article is titled, We are all Asians Now). His 2009 TED talk, Mapping the Future of Countries, about border conflicts, is an APHG classic.

GeoEd Tags: regions, political, globalization, culture, economic, TED, video.

Scoop.it Tags: regions, political, globalization, culture, economic, TED, video.

February 25, 2019 0

How an emerging African megacity cut commutes by two hours a day

The next 15 megacities #2: Could Dar es Salaam’s experiment with Africa’s first ‘gold standard’ bus rapid transit system offer an alternative to a future dependent on private cars?

Source: www.theguardian.com

This is a good article about the critical nature of transportation infrastructure to a growing city in the developing world. More important than this one article, I want to highlight the entire Guardian series entitled "The Next 15 Megacities."

In 1975 there were only 3 megacities (cities population over 10 million) in the world. Today there are 33 megacities and by 2035, there are expected to be 48. This acceleration is one of the more astounding and important facts about how the world is changing today. This series explores these emerging megacities that will have over 10 million by 2035; overwhelmingly these cities are in Asia.

GeoEd Tags: Tanzania, Africa, urban, transportation, planning, megacities, regions, APHG.

Scoop.it Tags: Tanzania, Africa, urban, transportation, planning, megacities, regions, APHG.

February 21, 2019 0

USGS’s Streamer Tool

Streamer is a new way to visualize and understand water flow across America. With Streamer you can explore our Nation’s major streams by tracing upstream to their source or downstream to where they empty.

Source: txpub.usgs.gov

Streamer is the online mapping application that lets anyone explore downstream and upstream along America’s rivers and streams (here is a YouTube tutorial). Streamer can be used to follow the paths of rivers up to their headwaters and down to the sea, to view location-related information such as weather radar and near real-time streamflow data, and to discover hydrologic connections between distant places.

Scoop.it Tags: water, mapping, physical, fluvial, regions.

WordPress TAGS: water, mapping, physical, fluvial, regions.

October 11, 2018 0

China is trying to turn itself into a country of 19 super-regions

"China’s urbanization is a marvel. The population of its cities has quintupled over the past 40 years, reaching 813m. By 2030 roughly one in five of the world’s city-dwellers will be Chinese. But this mushrooming is not without its flaws. Restraining pell-mell urbanization may sound like a good thing, but it worries the government’s economists, since bigger cities are associated with higher productivity and faster economic growth. Hence a new plan to remake the country’s map.

The idea is to foster the rise of mammoth urban clusters, anchored around giant hubs and containing dozens of smaller, but by no means small, nearby cities. The plan calls for 19 clusters in all, which would account for nine-tenths of economic activity (see map). China would, in effect, condense into a country of super-regions."

Source: www.economist.com

This type of plan would have been politically and economically unthinkable in years past, but the time-space compression (convergence) has made the distances between cities less of a barrier. High-speed transit in the form of bullet trains link cities to other cities within the cluster more tightly together and the threshold of the functional region expands. While some of these clusters are more aspirational, the top three (Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing) are already powerful global forces.

Scoop.it Tags: urban, regions, transportation, megacities, economic, planning, China, East Asia.

WordPress TAGS: urban, regions, transportation, megacities, economic, planning, China, East Asia.

August 27, 2018 0

Seterra Geography Games

Learn world geography the easy way! Seterra is a map quiz game, available online and as an app for iOS an Android. Using Seterra, you can quickly learn to locate countries, capitals, cities, rivers lakes and much more on a map.

Source: www.seterra.com

This is my newest favorite app to recommend for teachers. If you need students to learn where in the world things are without having to take up class time with map quizzes and the like, this app is great. It has basic "countries and capitals" quizzes for world regions, but it also has some more difficult quizzes for the those that need/want a challenge.

Tags: trivia, games, regions, toponyms.

August 13, 2018 0

Italy’s Geographic Challenge

“Stratfor explains that Italy’s main geographic challenge is to preserve its unity despite strong regional identities.” For more of these videos, visit http://arcg.is/1IeK3dT

Source: www.youtube.com

Italy’s a country that we may think of as monolithic, but (like so many other countries) it has some deep and persistent regional distinctions. These videos are older, but the the divisions discussed are still pertinent. Stratfor also added a video of Italy in their “Geographic Challenge” series. I’ve updated my map which spatially indexes 70+ of their videos that are especially relevant to geography teachers to include this one. These videos are great starting points for students that are researching a particular country.

Tags: video, geography education, Italy, Europe, regions.

June 18, 2018 0

The World’s Most Economically Powerful Cities

“The newest ranking of the world’s most economically powerful cities put together by Martin Prosperity Institute (MPI) research team finds New York to be the clear winner [over London]. Our Global City Economic Power Index is based on five core metrics: Overall Economic Clout, Financial Power, Global Competitiveness,

Equity and Quality of Life.”

Source: www.citylab.com

100 years ago, the biggest trends in urbanization showed that the biggest cities in the world were also the most economically powerful cities in the world in core areas. In the last 50 years, the most obvious change has been the remarkable growth in of the world’s largest cities in the developing world.

Questions to Ponder: Why has there been such spectacular growth of megacities, especially in the developing world? How is this map ranking global cities different from a list of the world’s largest cities? What regional patterns do exist in the 25 most economically powerful cities in the world? What are the implications of these patterns?

Tags: urban, megacities, regions.

May 14, 2018 0

Why South Asia’s majorities act like persecuted minorities

“Mukul Kesavan, a perceptive Indian historian, sees this region-wide propensity for majoritarian nationalism as a sad if natural outcome of the awkward struggle to build new nation-states. The most egregious recent example is Myanmar, whose 90% Buddhist majority felt so threatened by a Rohingya Muslim minority of barely 1% that it sanctioned burning, pillage, murder, rape and enforced exile. Bangladesh chased non-Muslim tribes into India, and its once large and prosperous Hindu minority has dwindled alarmingly in the face of constant pressure. In the name of orthodoxy, extremists in Pakistan have viciously hounded not only Christians and Hindus but also Shia Muslims, Ahmadis and allegedly unorthodox Sufis. Sinhalese have historically dominated the island [of Sri Lanka], a fact forcefully reasserted in 2009 when the Sri Lankan army brought to a bloody end a 26-year-long insurgency by mostly Hindu ethnic Tamils, the largest minority group.”

Tags: religion, ethnicity, South Asia, regions, political, conflict.

Source: www.economist.com

April 23, 2018 0