The role of nature-based solutions and senses of place in enabling just city transitions

Discussions about just transitions and nature-based solutions (NBS) often articulate an essentialist sense of place perspective that emphasises stasis through combinations of belonging, rootedness, continuity, attachment and connections among sites, scales and subjectivities. In response, we demonstrate how a progressive understanding of "senses" of place that embraces fluid place meanings accessible at different temporal and spatial scales enables a new understanding of the interface between structural and emotional transformation of place, as well as rethinking of just urban transitions. We present four transformation modalities that reconsider people-place, people-nature, and people-institutional relations pertinent to environmental justice and use case examples to demonstrate their relevance to NBS planning. We conclude by offering two overarching principles for urban policy, planning, and governance for fostering just transitions through NBS. First, NBS planning needs to pur-posively activate structural and emotional transformations through experimentation to enhance procedural justice. Second, NBS co-design and implementation should consider the dynamic interplay between recognition and distribution justice to engage multiple senses of place

The role of nature-based solutions and senses of place in enabling just city transitions

Discussions about just transitions and nature-based solutions (NBS) often articulate an essentialist sense of place perspective that emphasises stasis through combinations of belonging, rootedness, continuity, attachment and connections among sites, scales and subjectivities. In response, we demonstrate how a progressive understanding of "senses" of place that embraces fluid place meanings accessible at different temporal and spatial scales enables a new understanding of the interface between structural and emotional transformation of place, as well as rethinking of just urban transitions. We present four transformation modalities that reconsider people-place, people-nature, and people-institutional relations pertinent to environmental justice and use case examples to demonstrate their relevance to NBS planning. We conclude by offering two overarching principles for urban policy, planning, and governance for fostering just transitions through NBS. First, NBS planning needs to pur-posively activate structural and emotional transformations through experimentation to enhance procedural justice. Second, NBS co-design and implementation should consider the dynamic interplay between recognition and distribution justice to engage multiple senses of place.Peer reviewe

Shifting Spatialities of Power: The Case of Australasian Aviation

This paper explores how different modalities, spatialities and scales of power operate in a geopolitical context. By tracing the dynamic and shifting economic geographies of state and firm power in the events leading up to the collapse of a major Australian firm, Ansett Airlines, it reveals the difference that place and position make to the creation and use of power. The paper stresses agents’ relational positioning, their ‘places’ in multiple networks of association and the ways in which their past actions and visions of the future condition their strategic options. The paper contextualises the workings of power and explores how power relationships are re-configured in specific contested events. It concludes that power cannot be separated from the spatial and temporal dimensions of actual contexts, from actor’s positions in contexts, or from their strategic objective

Enactivism and ethnomethodological conversation analysis as tools for expanding Universal Design for Learning: the case of visually impaired mathematics students

Blind and visually impaired mathematics students must rely on accessible materials such as tactile diagrams to learn mathematics. However, these compensatory materials are frequently found to offer students inferior opportunities for engaging in mathematical practice and do not allow sensorily heterogenous students to collaborate. Such prevailing problems of access and interaction are central concerns of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an engineering paradigm for inclusive participation in cultural praxis like mathematics. Rather than directly adapt existing artifacts for broader usage, UDL process begins by interrogating the praxis these artifacts serve and then radically re-imagining tools and ecologies to optimize usability for all learners. We argue for the utility of two additional frameworks to enhance UDL efforts: (a) enactivism, a cognitive-sciences view of learning, knowing, and reasoning as modal activity; and (b) ethnomethodological conversation analysis (EMCA), which investigates participants’ multimodal methods for coordinating action and meaning. Combined, these approaches help frame the design and evaluation of opportunities for heterogeneous students to learn mathematics collaboratively in inclusive classrooms by coordinating perceptuo-motor solutions to joint manipulation problems. We contextualize the thesis with a proposal for a pluralist design for proportions, in which a pair of students jointly operate an interactive technological device

An information assistant system for the prevention of tunnel vision in crisis management

In the crisis management environment, tunnel vision is a set of bias in decision makers’ cognitive process which often leads to incorrect understanding of the real crisis situation, biased perception of information, and improper decisions. The tunnel vision phenomenon is a consequence of both the challenges in the task and the natural limitation in a human being’s cognitive process. An information assistant system is proposed with the purpose of preventing tunnel vision. The system serves as a platform for monitoring the on-going crisis event. All information goes through the system before arrives at the user. The system enhances the data quality, reduces the data quantity and presents the crisis information in a manner that prevents or repairs the user’s cognitive overload. While working with such a system, the users (crisis managers) are expected to be more likely to stay aware of the actual situation, stay open minded to possibilities, and make proper decisions

The Mechanics of Embodiment: A Dialogue on Embodiment and Computational Modeling

Embodied theories are increasingly challenging traditional views of cognition by arguing that conceptual representations that constitute our knowledge are grounded in sensory and motor experiences, and processed at this sensorimotor level, rather than being represented and processed abstractly in an amodal conceptual system. Given the established empirical foundation, and the relatively underspecified theories to date, many researchers are extremely interested in embodied cognition but are clamouring for more mechanistic implementations. What is needed at this stage is a push toward explicit computational models that implement sensory-motor grounding as intrinsic to cognitive processes. In this article, six authors from varying backgrounds and approaches address issues concerning the construction of embodied computational models, and illustrate what they view as the critical current and next steps toward mechanistic theories of embodiment. The first part has the form of a dialogue between two fictional characters: Ernest, the �experimenter�, and Mary, the �computational modeller�. The dialogue consists of an interactive sequence of questions, requests for clarification, challenges, and (tentative) answers, and touches the most important aspects of grounded theories that should inform computational modeling and, conversely, the impact that computational modeling could have on embodied theories. The second part of the article discusses the most important open challenges for embodied computational modelling