New Books for Geographers

New Books: October 2014

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803). Authors interested in reviewing books should also contact the Editor-in-Chief (kentm@lsu.edu).

October, 2014
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Arnold J. Kreisman

Born in Brooklyn, New York on September 29, 1925 to parents Isidore and Minnie, Arnie Kreisman passed away at the age of 89 on October 13, 2014. A US Army veteran who served in the Occupation Forces in Frankfurt, Germany, Kreisman later became a professional cartographer and geographer.

Attaining his bachelor’s degree from the City College of New York, his master’s degree from Syracuse University, and finally his doctorate degree from the University of Pittsburgh, he was heavily involved in resource and development planning. During his career he produced relief maps for the Aero-Service Corporation in both Philadelphia and Santiago, Chile. He also worked in Paraguay, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Peru for the Organization of American States (OAS). With OAS, Arnie mapped the resources of countries, displaying the location of people in regard to ages, education, and skills, the location of natural resources, and the location of weather, water, and other geographic conditions to determine the best location for activities such as farming and manufacturing. Kreisman also had a political career, serving as a democratic committeeman in Montgomery County for John F. Kennedy in 1960.

After retiring he moved to Columbia, Maryland. Kreisman has two daughters, Erika and Julie, with his first wife, Janet Friedman, and a third daughter, Florence, with his second wife, Elena Pino, whom he had met in El Salvador. The father of successful professionals, his first two of his daughters both have careers as attorneys and his third daughter is a manager for the Early Childhood Instruction Team for D.C. public schools.

He is survived by his widow, his sister, Evelyn Prybutok, his daughters and son-in-laws, nieces and nephews, as well as four grandchildren, Alex, Katie, Najá, and Iris. He also has an unofficial “adopted son” named Juan Neffa, whom he brought to Pittsburgh from Paraguay as a teenager. Kreisman was a lifelong member of the AAG and will be missed dearly by his family, friends, and the geography community.

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GIS in Chicagoland

The prevalence of GIS and digital mapping in the Chicago region is nothing new. The footprints of GIS are everywhere. Local government offices were early adopters of mapping technology, using GIS and spatial analysis to maintain or improve their interests. Currently, it is difficult to find a local government office in the region that does not have its own GIS department. If none is present, the offices often use an outside consultant, like MGP Inc., which performs geospatial tasks for them. Regional GIS associations like the Illinois Municipal Arc Users Group exist almost entirely to serve government GIS users in the region and have heavy participation.

While most academic institutions in Chicagoland have modest GIS or Geography programs in terms of relative size, their faculty, students, and research definitely have noteworthy quality and content. Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL), University of Illinois at Chicago (Chicago, IL), DePaul University (Chicago, IL), and Elmhurst College (Elmhurst, IL) are just some of many in the region that offer graduate and/or undergraduate degrees with concentrations in GIS along with GIS certificate programs. Other institutions still recognize the importance of GIS and carry it as a primary subject in a variety of classes, such as the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL).

Other Local non-profit organizations use GIS for various purposes that you can likely guess just given their names. The Alliance for the Great Lakes, Archdiocese of Chicago, Chicago Teachers’ Union, Illinois Natural History Survey, Metra, and The Chicago Community Trust, are just a few out of hundreds. Other organizations in Chicagoland promote GIS usage and collaboration among its members like the Illinois GIS Association, Geographic Society of Chicago, and the Chicago GIS Network .

Finally, many recognizable corporations and businesses based in Chicagoland use GIS and spatial analysis to accomplish all sorts of tasks from market research to site placement and from human resources to transportation logistics. McDonald’s, Walgreens, Potbelly’s, and Aon along with scores of others, employ GIS on a daily basis. Chicago is also home to other entities like HERE which is a global leader in providing mapping and location intelligence data.

However, with all this GIS use going on, the Chicago region is not really a stand out. It is more of an example of what has been happening in other metropolitan areas around the United States and around the world. People recognize the power of spatial analysis and GIS. One by-product of this recognition is the hunger for more location-based data. Even though Chicago area GIS users are equal to others in terms of who is using GIS and spatial analysis, Chicago is far ahead of its peers in terms of answering the call for more spatial data.

Approximately three years ago, the city of Chicago committed to an open data initiative that would theoretically inform policy and improve services by putting municipal data in the hands of anyone who wanted it. Today the city of Chicago’s data portal provides a huge number of records to the general public. A large percentage of the data is location-based. The site has been a major success and influenced Cook County, which includes the City of Chicago, to release their data in the same manner.

This open data allowed researchers, concerned citizens, application developers, and any general map lover to download any or all location-based data from these portals and begin to analyze and display phenomena happening in the metropolitan area. Open City is just one group in the region that creates applications with open data to improve transparency in operations. Many of these applications involve spatial data and mapping applications.

Clear Streets is a good example of these applications and a favorite among Chicago residents. During or after a snow event, Clear Streets displays on a map which streets have been cleared of snow along with a time stamp of when it occurred. The City of Chicago’s snow plow tracker website conveys real time information on where snow plows are in the city. However, users do not know whether their street has been plowed or not. That is where Clear Streets steps in and gives an accurate depiction of what parts of the city have been plowed (at least once) using the data feed from the city’s plow tracker site.

Another mapping application, Is There Sewage in the Chicago River?, tracks sewage dumps into the Chicago River and plots them on a map. Chicago Bike Crash Reports pinpoints every location in Chicago where a bike accident occurred and had a police report filed along with it. One of the more attractive applications built with this publicly available data is Edifice which tracks the city’s built environment.

The list of datasets available is staggering. This initiative in the Chicago area has led to similar data distribution efforts in the region and in other cities like New York, Boston, and Los Angeles. Using this location based data just from a visualization standpoint gives a greater understanding to the geography of the region and how different processes may work together to form the landscape.

GIS use is at the forefront of this initiative because it is the perfect marriage between maps and data. From here, spatial analytics and statistical methods can provide evidence to whether urban planning initiatives are working, crime is being reduced, or potholes are getting filled. These questions may seem simple to answer but become far too complex to handle in any other fashion when the scale is increased to encompass such a large area.

Other sites to note:

 

—Todd J. Schuble
Manager of GIS Research/Senior Lecturer
University of Chicago

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0017

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President's Column

Recognizing the Work of Graduate Students

Mona Domosh

It was a pleasure to open our Spring 2014 AAG council meeting by welcoming our new and first graduate student representative to the table. The council had agreed last year to support the idea of a graduate student representative to council; after all, graduate students comprise around 40% of the AAG membership and so having someone on our governing council that represents their interests seemed a no-brainer. And indeed even in the first few hours (yes, to those uninitiated, council meetings go on, literally, for days!) we began to realize the importance of having the voice of graduate students heard within the not-so-hallow halls of the AAG. The representative raised the important issue of AAG funding for dissertation research, querying our policy of limiting awards to $500; by the end of the meeting, we had agreed to raise that amount to $1000 for a three-year trial period, good news all around. In this column I want to highlight the crucial role that graduate students play in our association, discuss the important academic labor they perform in our departments, universities and discipline, and raise the question of how best to recognize and support that work.

I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I snuck into my first AAG conference. I was a first-year graduate student, and, like many of my fellow grad students (I suspect!) I was not yet a member of the association and wasn’t presenting a paper (see Julie Winkler’s column about the importance of AAG membership, “Why We Join the AAG”). So I simply walked into the conference site and promiscuously wandered through a series of sessions for two days. At the time it wasn’t considered necessary for graduate students to be presenting at our annual conference each year. Flash forward, 30 years later, and the situation for graduate students is decidedly different; most are expected to not only present their research, but publish it, and therefore the importance of giving talks at annual meetings and participating in our association well before their first job letter of application is written is much clearer: networking, professional development, research collaborations, etc. Graduate students are vital to our conference and discipline, totaling approximately 40% of our registrants. They also do an inordinate amount of work in terms of organizing sessions, chairing panels, and helping to run specialty groups. We rely on graduate students’ energy and curiosity, their novel approaches to theory, methods and empirics, and their challenges to the status quo; in turn the conference and the association hopefully provides them an academic home for intellectual and professional development. But I wonder given the multitude of demands on their daily lives and their many contributions to our discipline whether we are doing enough.

The increasing pressures on academic work and workplaces that have accompanied the neoliberalization of the academy are nowhere more apparent than in the lives of graduate students (see Eric Sheppard’s column on the issue of the neoliberal academy, “Geography and the Neoliberalizing Academy”). They must complete rigorous coursework, theses and dissertations; they work as teachers, teaching assistants, research assistants and staff assistants; they must learn how to professionally present their research and publish it; and they have to figure out how to network and organize their professional lives. They also occupy an in-between, or perhaps better stated, a double status: they are students and teachers, apprentices and workers, mentors and advisees. This is a heavy burden, compounded by the fact that most graduate students work under less than ideal conditions: their wages are often barely livable, many have no or limited health coverage and few if any other benefits, and they rarely have a say in the running of their workplace. It is these pressures and conditions that have led many graduate students to unionize; there are now more than 25 universities in the U.S. with unions representing graduate students, including universities with some of the top geography programs.

It was within this context of students struggling to attain more of a voice in the running of academic institutions, particularly around issues of academic labor, that the Graduate Student Affinity Group (GSAG) of the AAG was formed in the late 1990s. According to the co-founders, geography graduate students working to unionize at their own institutions began to realize that having a platform for voicing their concerns within the AAG was an important step in recognizing and confronting graduate student issues; forming an affinity group seemed the logical move. Two graduate students from the University of Washington filed the papers to form GSAG in 2001, and today the group has over 1,000 members. GSAG organizes plenaries and panels related to student issues, provides travel and research grants, and co-hosts the “Welcome to the AAG” panel, a wonderful gateway for those attending their first national geography conference. Members of the group have also worked closely with AAG staff on projects to support graduate education and training programs like EDGE and GFDA, and they are currently compiling an international directory of all geography graduate student groups. Even with some unique challenges (e.g. their membership pretty much turns over every four years), the affinity group does important work for the discipline, but it is also of course another “job” for graduate students.

It was GSAG members (spurred on by an AAG councilor’s mention that some regional divisions had student members on their board) who asked for representation on the AAG council, and at the Spring 2013 meeting the council voted to approve a non-voting graduate student representative to the council. We might want to consider involving the representative more fully and making them a full-fledged councilor: this would require a vote of the members, but is certainly do-able and perhaps advisable. For now, I’m very happy that we have a graduate student sitting at that big table for those three days, voicing her concerns, providing what are often novel perspectives on the issues in front of us, and raising new issues all together.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the importance of graduate student representation on the council, on whether we can do more as an association to recognize and support the work they do for us in our departments and universities, and on other matters pertaining to the importance of graduate students to our association, our discipline, and our intellectual and professional lives.

— Mona Domosh

DOI: 10.14433/2014.0016

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David Huff

David Huff, Professor Emeritus of Marketing and Geography at the University of Texas at Austin, and giant in the field of applied geography, passed away on August 15, 2014, aged 83.

David L. Huff was born in 1931 in McMinnville, TN, then spent an idyllic boyhood on Lake Oswego, OR. At first he struggled to find a college or career that held his interest, trying many jobs and five undergraduate universities, plus a stint in the Army.

His academic motivation and interest was finally sparked at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA, at a time when quantitative geography was just emerging. Throughout the time of his MBA and PhD, he was strongly influenced by early analytical economic geographers and early quantitative sociologists, game theorists and rational choice theorists. He emerged from this exciting time in graduate school as a holistic quantitative social scientist. His doctoral thesis work from 1959 to 1962 in modeling trips to shopping centers and stores was published in 1963.

Huff’s first teaching position was at UCLA where he was very quickly promoted to tenure as a business and marketing professor because of his early accomplishments. It was here in 1964 that he developed the Huff Model to forecast market share and retail attractiveness. It is based on the premise that when a person is confronted with a set of alternatives, the probability that any particular item will be selected is directly proportional to the perceived utility of each alternative.

The model is an excellent example of a bridge between geography and business. It soon entered the textbooks and was used by academicians and practitioners throughout the world. Its popularity and longevity can be attributed to its conceptual appeal, relative ease of use, and applicability to a wide range of problems, of which predicting consumer spatial behavior is the most commonly known.

For the last 50 years the Huff Model has been taught in courses across marketing, economic geography, economics, retail research, urban planning and decision theory. It has been widely used by market analysts and planners to locate convenience stores, shopping malls, and other types retail establishments. It continues to be the standard model for the industry and is now incorporated into GIS systems.

Among Huff’s other academic contributions were the application of multivariate graphic displays to market analysis, the formulation of objective measures for delineating market areas, the development of computerized systems to monitor economic activities geographically, and the derivation of planning regions for the geographic delivery of health care and economic services.

After UCLA Huff took a Fulbright Lectureship at the Université d’Aix-Marseille in France which started a life-long love of French culture. He then moved to the University of Kansas as Director of the Center for Regional Studies but this position did not allow him the time he needed to do basic research so he readily accepted an offer from the University of Texas to become Century Club Centennial Professor of Business Administration where he remained until retirement.

In addition to his work in academia, Huff consulted for dozens of agencies including the U.S. Department of Transportation, Resources for the Future, National Institutes of Health, U.S. Bureau of the Census, and National Endowment for the Arts, as well as for numerous state and regional offices. He has advised hundreds of business firms on various aspects of market area analysis. In 2003 he was invited by Esri to become a technical advisor, using his expertise to develop advanced predictive models and review existing analysis capability in Esri’s business analysis products and services.

During his academic career, Huff received numerous teaching awards and much prestigious professional recognition. For example, the AAG awarded him the James R. Anderson Medal in Applied Geography in 1988, and he was the recipient of the Distinguished Mentor Award from the National Council for Geographic Education in 1998 in recognition of his long history of successful mentoring of master’s and doctoral students.

David had remarkable standing in the profession. He was a man who loved his work, was always full of enthusiasm, and generous with his time and talent. He will be missed by many, not only colleagues and friends, but also business professionals and the whole applied geography industry.

He leaves behind his wife of 61 years, Suzanne, his children Nancy, Karen and David, as well as 10 grandchildren and a growing brood of great-grandchildren.

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MyCOE / SERVIR Capstone Fellows Describe Their Experiences

[/media-credit] Joel Kowsky, NASA
In the spring, 14 students traveled from all over the world to Washington, D.C., to discuss their efforts using satellite data and mapping technologies to address climate change issues in their regions. The efforts are part of the My Community, Our Earth (MyCOE) / SERVIR Fellowship Program. The student-led projects address a range of issues including agricultural productivity, water resources, sea level change, food safety, forest conservation, and natural disaster planning.

The event was a culmination of a global program carried out over the past two years, with representative student-led projects highlighting how youth around the world are using remote sensing, GIS, GPS, and geospatial data to address climate change issues in their regions. The 14 students were selected from the 120 participants who were nominated by instructors and staff of the MyCOE Program and SERVIR hubs and chosen by U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA.

View the inspiring testimonials from these fellows:

Khin Seint Seint Aye, Impact of famous floating gardens on the environment and livelihoods of a unique Inle lake in Central Myanmar

Susan Malaso, Application of GIS and RS Techniques in Frost Risk Mapping for Mitigating Agricultural Losses in Kenya

Lhakpa, Linking Traditional Beliefs on Climate Change to Scientific Understanding: A Case Study in Eastern Bhutan

Tsedenya Abebe Mengiste, Assessment of Flood Frequency and Local Adaptation Practices in Dilu-Meda, Upper Awash, Ethiopia

Prasamsa Thapa, Surface Area Variation and Climatology of Tsho Rolpa Glacial Lake using Remote Sensing and GIS, Dolakha District, Nepal

Jirawat Panpeng, Vulnerability of Rural Coastal to Potential Sea Level Change: Case of Laemsing District, Chanthaburi Province, Thailand

Roseline Nijh Egra Batcha, Participatory Learning and Gender Partnerships in Climate Change and Food Security: Mfoundi-Yaounde Cameroon

Joyeeta Poddar, Assessment of Glacier Health as a Response to Climate Change in Western Himalayas, India

Khoa Nguyen, Changes of paddy rice extent and its possible effect on the environment in Mekong Delta, Vietnam

Seble Dejene, Carbon Stock Estimation in Wof-Washa Natural Forest: Carbon Finance Options & Climate Change Mitigation, Ethiopia

Pramila Paudyal, Climate Change Vulnerability in Mountain Agriculture: A Case Study Of Susma Chhemawati VDC, Dolakha District, Nepal

Wasiu Alimi, Assessment of the Climatic and Socio-Economic Impacts of Illegal Logging in a Rainforest: The Role of Women, Nigeria

Lateefah Oyinlola, Assessment of vulnerabilities of fresh cut produce to climate change in South Western Nigeria

Tran Thi Mai Anh, Application of GIS and Remote Sensing in Administering Payment For Forest Environmental Services at Huong Son Hydroelectric Power Plant’s Watershed, Vietnam

The MyCOE / SERVIR program supports long-term training of young, emerging scholars in the use of Earth observations, geography, and geospatial technologies to address climate change issues in developing regions. The public-private partnered program provides the mentorship, networking, and professional development necessary to transform innovators into scholars, with the skills to connect their research results to the public and decision makers. It is sponsored by NASA, USAID, and AAG, with the AAG also administering the program. SERVIR, an acronym meaning “to serve” in Spanish, is a joint venture between NASA and USAID. SERVIR works in partnership with leading regional organizations around the globe to help developing countries use information provided by Earth-observing satellites and geospatial technologies to better manage climate risks and sustainability of natural resources.

To learn more about the full My Community, Our Earth / SERVIR program, contact Project Director Dr. Patricia Solís at psolis [at] aag [dot] org. Or, visit https://www.aag.org/mycoe.servir. Read more detailed information on the NASA event.

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Two Geographers Awarded 2014 Guggenheim Fellowships

Anthony Bebbington, professor and director of Clark University’s Graduate School of Geography, and Diana Liverman, professor at the University of Arizona, were recently awarded a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. They were among the 178 scientists, artists and scholars from the almost 3,000 applicants from the United States and Canada to receive an award this year.

Bebbington’s award was in support of his forthcoming book, “Natural resource extraction in Latin America: transforming the human-environment, challenging social science.” His research addresses the political ecology of rural change, with a particular focus on extractive industries and socio-environmental conflicts, social movements, and indigenous organizations and livelihoods.

Starting in late summer, Liverman will use her one-year fellowship to write a book on poverty and climate change in the Americas. She plans to outline policies that work with communities to reduce climate risks through a variety of programs, such as small-scale irrigation and water conservation, shade, mobility and warning systems. Her goal is to identify solutions that eliminate poverty, reduce emissions and help people adapt to climate change.

Established in 1925 by former U.S. Senator and Mrs. Simon Guggenheim, the foundation has sought from its inception to “add to the educational, literary, artistic, and scientific power of this country, and also to provide for the cause of better international understanding. The foundation has granted more than $315 million in Fellowships to almost 17,700 individuals, including scores of Nobel laureates and poets laureate, as well as winners of Pulitzer Prizes, Fields Medals, and other important, internationally recognized honors.

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New Books for Geographers

New Books: June 2014

Every month the AAG compiles a list of newly-published books in geography and related areas. Some are selected for review in the AAG Review of Books.

Publishers are welcome to send new volumes to the Editor-in-Chief (Kent Mathewson, Editor-in-Chief, AAG Review of Books, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803).

Anyone interested in reviewing these or other titles should also contact the Editor-in-Chief.

June, 2014

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A Decade of Change: AAG Returns to Chicago

The AAG is pleased to be holding its next annual meeting April 21-25, 2015, in the world-class city of Chicago.  The AAG last met in Chicago in 2006, and in the newsletter issues leading up to the 2015 meeting, the Local Arrangements Committee (LAC — chaired by Professor Euan Hague, Chair of the Geography Department at DePaul University) will provide articles that highlight some of the more dramatic changes in Chicago since then. This first article provides an overview of some of the themes of change discussed by the LAC at its first Chicago meeting on May 24, 2015 — these themes will be presented in greater detail in coming issues.

 

The AAG 2015 conference hotel, Hyatt Regency, 151 East Wacker Drive, Chicago

 

Population Redistribution

The 2010 Census reported that the 16 county multi-state Chicago–Naperville–Michigan City, IL–IN–WI Combined Statistical Area (2004 definition) had a population of 9.68 million.  That means that the Chicago region grew by 4 percent between 2000 and 2010, which was considerably slower growth than the previous decade (1990 to 2000) when the same 16 county metropolitan area grew by 11.1 percent.  The population loss in Chicago proper (with the exception of its Downtown) and the inner suburbs was largely responsible for the growth slowdown, for instance between 2000 and 2010 Chicago lost over 200,000 residents.  Meanwhile, the outer suburbs helped offset these latter declines, for instance the 3 largest outer suburbs of Chicago (Aurora, Joliet, and Naperville) together added 109,616, a little over half the amount that the City of Chicago lost. This reflects a continued long term trend in the Chicago region of population decentralization from Chicago’s core to the edge, despite a slight pause in that trend in the 1990s when the City of Chicago actually gained population for the first time since the 1950 Census.  Meanwhile Downtown Chicago deserves special attention as its population saw a 114 percent increase from 1990 to 2010.  This population increase was paralleled by a residential housing boom that has included the conversion of former Downtown office spaces to residential units and new high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums have sprouted up in and around Downtown – a theme that was highlighted in a special map provided to AAG attendees at the 2006 AAG meeting.

The LAC is working on field trips that will showcase various aspects of Chicago’s recent population redistribution trends and an upcoming newsletter will go into greater detail on these population shifts.

A Greener Chicago

The 2006 AAG meeting publications highlighted Chicago’s efforts to expand upon its rich heritage of city parks and greenways and those efforts have continued.  The Openlands Project was founded in 1963 and since then it has helped secure, protect, and provide public access to more than 55,000 acres of land for parks, forest preserves, land and water greenway corridors, and urban gardens.  Participants of the AAG meeting will be able to link up with this vast network of greenways within walking distance of the conference hotel.  Just blocks away is Millennium Park which is currently celebrating its 10th anniversary and special events continuing into 2015 will celebrate this magnificent park space by showing off its world-class art, music, architecture, and landscape design.  Another “green” milestone reached by Chicago’s is its commitment to bicycling as it has built over 200 miles of on-street bike lanes including one that weaves 1.2 miles through downtown within a buffer that separates it from cars.  Chicago also has a Divvy (divvybikes.com) bike sharing program with the largest number of stations of any city in the United States.

 

Corner of Monroe and Canal Street, Chicago, by author 24 May 2015.

 

The LAC is already working on field trips that will visit components of the greenway system of Chicago and an upcoming newsletter will go into greater detail on many other aspects of the greening of Chicago.

Chicago’s Food Systems

The Chicago region is the command and control center for U.S. industrial agriculture (center of the Corn Belt) yet it is also a leader in alternative agricultural systems including a very active local food movement that emphasizes organic and natural choices.  The Chicago food theme is one that the LAC is particularly interested in as several members are actively researching the issues, so upcoming newsletter stories will review the status of the region’s ties to traditional industrial agriculture as well as the growth in alternative systems.  As coincidence would have it when the LAC met on Memorial Day 2014 weekend a massive crowd of protestors assembled in the Loop to demonstrate against the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and to promote a call for locally grown organic alternatives.

 

GMO protest at Federal Plaza on Jackson Blvd and Clark Street, Chicago, by author 24 May 2015.

 

The LAC is working on field trips that will visit parts of the corn-belt within range of Chicago and it will also show case locally grown components of the new Chicago food system including retail configurations that attempt to turn food deserts into food oases.

Lake Michigan and other Regional Water Resources

Chicago sits adjacent to Lake Michigan and the growth of the metropolitan region’s population and spatial extent have caused concern among regional planners over the potential for future water supply shortages.  The Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC) is promoting a regional approach to sustainable water supply planning and management.  Chicago and many of its inner suburbs are already withdrawing Lake Michigan water to meet their needs and as the outer suburbs speculate about their own future shortages from dwindling local ground water supplies they are being warned that Lake Michigan water may not be available.  All of this may seem odd given the vast size of Lake Michigan, but international laws with Canada limit withdrawals.

The LAC is working on the development of a field trip to showcase these and other regional examples of innovations in water resources management.  Views of the Chicago River and Lake Michigan are a close walking distance from the conference hotel and just a little further, just a mile, is Navy Pier which puts you slightly above and out onto the Lake.

Transportation 

Chicago is a large centralized gateway to international trade and traffic for the United States.  Chicago continues to grapple with the growth in freight flows that often test the capacity of the region’s transportation infrastructure.

 

Photo taken from a freight yard in Southwest Chicago on 28 May 2005.

 

As in 2006, almost all of the container freight on these railcars is transferred to and from trucks which take up twice the road space of cars on the region’s highways.

On top of the container-freight issue, the Chicago region is grappling with a host of other transportation issues including the goal of expanding public transportation services.  The edge cities toured during the last AAG meeting have matured and exhibit both traditional and reverse commuting patterns.  The Loop is still the dominant job center of the region and the peak commuting flows reflect this, however, there is a growing gentrifying population that works in the suburbs but lives and consumes in the city, which only adds more complexity to the pattern.  New retail configurations in the suburbs like Lifestyle Centers are adding to non-work related trips and suburban gridlock is common place on the weekends.  The Local Arrangements committee is working on field trips that will show-case some of the problems identified here as well as some of the existing plans that are in place to alleviate the problems.  The conference hotel is also directly accessible to public transportation, particularly the “L”, and extensive bicycle paths are within walking distance toward the Lake.

Race, Immigration, and Ethnicity

The LAC will write a newsletter piece prior to the meeting that articulates some of the changing dynamics and patterns of Chicago’s racial and ethnic diversity since the last meeting in 2006.  Topics to be covered will include the degree to which multiethnic neighborhoods have expanded or contracted or whether classic patterns of segregation have reemerged.  The piece will examine the tension that gentrification has posed to the stability of some of the city’s more stable ethnic enclaves.  The geographic dimensions of the growth in Chicago’s China Town will be described.

The Local Arrangements Committee already has plans to visit the Pilson neighborhood, a Latino neighborhood that has seen continued pressure from gentrification since the last meeting in 2006.

So as you plan your trip to Chicago, save time to explore these and many other aspects of change that Chicago has experienced since 2006.  Bring your walking shoes and depending on the weather you may even consider renting a bicycle to tour on the greenways of Chicago accessed in front of the conference hotel.  Venture into some of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods for unique dining experiences.  Or possibly even plan a journey from Downtown to the Edgeless exurbs of Chicago.

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FIRST Act Threatens Social Science Funding

As we reported to you in February, the Omnibus Appropriations Bill under which the Federal government is currently operating does not contain the so-called “Coburn Amendment,” which passed in March 2013 and prevented the National Science Foundation (NSF) from funding political science studies other than research “certified as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”

While we were pleased by the exclusion of the Coburn Amendment from this year’s Omnibus, recent activity in the House of Representatives again threatens funding for the social and behavioral sciences. The FIRST (Frontiers in Innovation, Research, Science, and Technology) Act (H.R. 4186) was introduced in March by Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-IN), Chair of the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Technology, and would dramatically reduce funding for NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate. As many of you are aware, the NSF’s Geography and Spatial Science program is part of the SBE Directorate.

If enacted, the legislation would – for the first time – specify caps on the authorized funding levels for each of the Foundation’s research directorates. The NSF leadership has historically had the ability to prioritize research expenditures by allocating funding from their overall research appropriation to the various directorates as deemed necessary. Currently, SBE is receiving $257 million in Fiscal Year 2014, but this amount would be capped at $150 million in the FIRST Act – a cut of 42 percent.

The AAG continues to work closely with our colleagues at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF), the Consortium of Social Science Associations (COSSA), and other key groups to express our concerns about the legislation. As part of those efforts, we signed onto a community-wide letter to the House Science Committee leadership two days after the FIRST Act was introduced (https://www.cnsfweb.org/CNSFLetterFIRSTActFINAL.pdf).

Separately, the National Science Board (NSB) took the rare step of issuing a statement signed by all 23 current NSB members that expresses concerns about the caps imposed in the FIRST Act (https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=131218&org=NSB&from=news). The statement also highlights a separate and important concern with the legislation – that it would undermine the peer review process for grant awards by requiring NSF program officers to certify that each grant is “worthy of federal funding” and “is in the national interest” (“national interest” is spelled out in six categories).

The FIRST Act was reported out of the House Science Committee on May 28 in a party-line vote. It could be acted upon by the full House at any time and the current thinking is that House leaders may bring the bill up for consideration later this month. If the bill is adopted, it would move on to the Senate. We will continue to monitor the debate on the legislation and will work with fellow science and higher-education organizations to make sure the importance of SBE funding is fully explained.

We always encourage AAG members to contact your Representative and Senators to express your views on issues of importance. The links below provide information about contacting members of Congress through the phone or internet. AAG members may also wish to use social media, such as Twitter or Facebook, to share their perspectives with elected officials, friends, colleagues, and the wider community.

You can locate your member of the House of Representatives by going to: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find/   

Contact information for all U.S. Senators can be found at: https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

If you have any questions, please contact John Wertman, the AAG’s Senior Program Manager for Government Relations, at jwertman [at] aag [dot] org, or Doug Richardson, AAG Executive Director, at drichardson [at] aag [dot] org.

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AAG Staff
AAG Staff