140 research outputs found

    Development of a Web-Based Geographical Information System for Interactive Visualization and Analysis of Container Itineraries

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    The paper describes an advanced prototype of a web-based geographical information system for user-friendly, interactive and efficient visualization of containers travelling over the world. The prototype uses ConTraffic Oracle Data Base (DB), where more than 300 000 container’s events are archived daily. The DB contains currently around one billion container movements. In addition, geographical data about the used locations/ports was collected and stored in the same DB on which the prototype is implemented. The prototype system provides users with container traffic information for specific date range, presented in interactive geographical and tabular mode. As a result, the prototype makes efficient visualization for easy visual analysis of container movements and status. The system used in this study gathers in quasi real-time online data from open sources, processes and stores it in DB. Using the proposed GIS application the user can access any time the DB and review on a map the itinerary of a specific container in specific date range, interact with the geographical presentation to receive specific details for the container for the used ports and review the itinerary details in interactive tabular presentation.JRC.G.4-Maritime affair

    Analysis of Logistics Infrastructure Characteristics in Amazonas

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    Logistics is an essential component of economic growth, the development of a country, as the element of production movement and regional trade, in which it directly affects competitiveness. Throughout the history of mankind wars have been won and defeated by the strengths and capabilities of logistics - or lack thereof. Transport infrastructure plays a significant role in the logistics process of a given region, as it impacts transport costs, causing barriers to economic and social development. It is often said that the problem of the Amazon region is not logistics, but lack of infrastructure to serve the region. Thus, this research sought to verify the scenario of distribution logistics in the interior of the Amazon, investments in transport infrastructure in the state of Amazonas. This article aimed to verify the importance of logistics in companies in the State of Amazonas and to analyze the challenges of small and large companies

    Roots in Stone and Slavery Permanence, Mobility, and Empire in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias

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    This dissertation examines the strategies that institutions and individuals employed in order to establish themselves in the slave-trading port city of Cartagena de Indias. In doing so, it uncovers social, religious, economic, geographic, and increasingly racialized transformations that made Cartagena a sustainable and stable component of the Spanish empire during the seventeenth century. In 1610, when church officials arrived in Cartagena with a mandate to establish a new tribunal of the Spanish Inquisition, a fragile political and economic balance already prevailed. The inquisitors needed to carve out space to integrate the new tribunal into the existing system without upsetting local power groups. For this, the inquisitors employed a tactic that they described as “building authority day by day.” To avoid direct confrontation with existing power-holders the inquisitors applied confiscation of property gradually and selectively against people convicted of religious deviance. The first target for confiscation was a prosperous but socially vulnerable community of women of African descent whom inquisitors had declared guilty of “witchcraft.” By offering for sale confiscated real estate, which was located in a zone that was increasingly attractive to prosperous buyers, the Inquisition became integrated into the economic life of Cartagena and laid the foundations for the tribunal’s survival. Selective confiscations allowed inquisitors to secure the ground for later prosecuting members of the elite, especially Portuguese traders in African captives, suspected of practicing Judaism. The local power that the Inquisition had gradually attained allowed inquisitors to achieve some convictions and confiscations. However, the economic dynamics of the city--in which Portuguese traders had exclusive rights to trade in African captives through the asiento contracts--imposed limits to the Inquisition’s tactic. The inquisitors eventually acquitted most of the Portuguese traders and allowed many of them to remain in Cartagena. When the Portuguese asientos ended, Spanish migrants who had opened up space for themselves in Cartagena took control of the economic nodes that the Portuguese had previously dominated. Some Inquisition officials themselves profited from agricultural and commercial activities indispensable to the trade in African captives. Constrained by the physical limitations of a port city surrounded by water, members of the new commercial elite expanded their economic activities into the neighboring island of Getsemaní. Getsemaní was home to free and enslaved people of African descent who lived and worked in artisanal workshops, including noxious industries. Many residents of Cartagena described Getsemaní as an arrabal, or slum. Spanish newcomers seeking to become permanent residents of Getsemaní employed legal strategies to have those industries removed. For local officials, however, the economic benefits of the arrabal prevailed over arguments about the impropriety of unsavory enterprises. The economic survival of Cartagena required that such industries remain at the edges of the city’s physical boundaries. Against the colonial authorities’ interests, this liminal location allowed the communities of African descent that remained in Getsemaní to maintain connections with runaways from enslavement who had settled in the hinterlands. Fugitives themselves were sometimes able to maintain fragile freedoms in Getsemaní, passing unnoticed by people who took them to be “blacks from the forest” rather than “fugitive slaves.” The dynamics that made Cartagena a stable and self-sustaining city shaped the meanings of permanence for individuals of different backgrounds, including merchants who avoided conviction, notaries who drew revenue from forging documents, and fugitives from slavery who settled the forests surrounding Cartagena.  PHDHistoryUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/146037/1/anasilva_1.pd

    Containing the Ship of State: Managing Mobility in an Age of Logistics

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    University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2018. Major: Political Science. Advisor: Raymond Duvall. 1 computer file (PDF); 400 pages.This dissertation argues that global logistical circulation, although often taken for granted as a banal economic process, is a political project central to the making of world order. To make this argument, it examines the social and political economic impacts of the concomitant rise of logistical management and shipping containerization as twin operations intensifying the global circulation of commercial capital. Since the 1960s, businesses have increasingly experimented with just-in-time logistical techniques to speed the realization of surplus value, leading to the rise of global transoceanic networks of distribution that reorganize commercial circulation across distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies. As logistical management systems have sought to regularize, standardize, and create flexible networks for circulating goods across vast distances around the world, they have become crucial to the expanded reproduction of capital. Accordingly, states have also adopted logistics-oriented growth strategies, investing in organizing and securing a socio-spatial order that produces a world safe for the movement of commercial capital, often in ways that inhibit the social and spatial mobility of vulnerable populations that live and work along global supply chains. The empirical focus of the dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study of the Trans-Pacific shipping passage between the US and China. Understanding logistics as both a material practice and calculative rationality, this dissertation employs an ethnographic approach to interrogate the effects of logistics’ global rise through four cuts: 1) A theoretical and historical analysis of the rise of logistics management and shipping containerization in the 1960s, 2) the securitization of goods movement in US maritime cargo policy, 3) the expansion of logistical infrastructure across the world’s oceans and in Los Angeles and Singapore, and 4) the seafaring labor process. My overarching claim is that logistical practices and rationalities exacerbate growing and often contradictory tensions between the mobility of capital and the containment of people and infrastructure that facilitate global circulation. Rather than understand containment as a static process of sequestration or enclosure that impedes the ability for capital and people to circulate, processes of containment have gained fundamentally productive functions that intensify and facilitate, rather than prevent or deter the long-distance expansion of capitalist networks. In this way, logistics produces a set of relations in which moving the world’s goods across space comes to be understood as normative and desirable, while containing the human lives that do this work is seen as necessary and productive

    From Colonial Cargo to Global Containers: An Episodic Historical Geography of Manila's Waterfront

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    From Colonial Cargo to Global Containers narrates an episodic historical geography of the Port of Manila. The dissertation examines a series of key moments that transformed the port’s social and built environments: the onset and early years of American colonialism (1898-1905), the first five years of Philippine independence (1946-1950), and politically significant moments of harbor-side history prior to the declaration of Martial Law in the Philippines (1954-1972). Ethnographic vignettes and interviews with Manila’s cargo truck drivers bookend the project’s historical chapters and archival work. The dissertation’s analysis of decades of Philippine political change remains bounded by its geographic focus on political, social, and labor histories as they unfold mostly on and around the city’s wharves and piers. Across these eras, the research examines events in which the port and its stevedores and longshoremen were thrust into the national and international political spotlight. Manila’s docks featured prominently in the scenes of early American empire, local and global anti-communism from 1946-1950, and national trade union and electoral politics in the decades that followed. In each of these episodes, the management and control of port space and labor aimed to secure far more than the smooth flow of imports and exports. Thus, the dissertation aims to understand the port as not simply a bustling node of trade but rather a political space where power is historically secured, reproduced, contested, and resisted. More broadly, the research attests to the importance of critical geographic studies of particular landscapes and socio-spatial change over time.Doctor of Philosoph

    Fluid Networks and Hegemonic Powers in the Western Indian Ocean

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    Develop a basin scale analysis/initial assessment strongly MSP oriented for the Western Mediterranean

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    This Report has been created thanks to the collaboration of all the Member States involved in the SIMWESTMED project (Figure 1) that have been invited to complete the Country Fiche (CF), a document that has leaded to the development of shared knowledge regarding the marine area considered in the project. Thus, the aim of this Report is to entail a collection of information across the European countries of the Western Mediterranean region and the Strait of Sicily, including Malta waters. The Initial Assessment (IA), in fact, provides an initial overview of the area’s characteristics and this report is the harmonized output of all available information including the description of marine environment, maritime activities, key sectoral and socio-economic trends and emerging pressures, legal and transboundary issues, and governance aspects. The assessment uses existing information by organizing them in a comparable way in order to carry out a previous analysis on the main driver and issues that need to be considered for future MSP processes. The IA is based mainly on desk-based reviews, in order to build a shared synthetic view on the Western Mediterranean region, identifying key issues (main activities and priority conservation issues) and data gaps that are synthesized in the following report.peer-reviewe
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