Regional Futures sessions at the AAG, Denver 2023

The project team will have a strong presence in the upcoming American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Denver, CO. We are organising a paper and a panel session on Regional Futures. Click here to browse AAG Program.

Team presentations are listed below. The sessions will be recorded and archived on the site until June 25th, 2023

Follow link here to see dates and timings of presentations.

regional futures 1

Date: 3/25/2023
Time: 2:40 PM - 4:00 PM Mountain Time
Room: Virtual 5

Transitional peripheries: Digitalization-as-urbanization of metropolitan Guadalajara, Mexico 

Juan Demerutis, University of Guadalajara - CUAAD 

The making of urban development plans in the state of Jalisco dates to the first half of the twentieth century when a regulatory plan for Guadalajara was developed. The technologies implemented in plan-making have been changing over time. The state has attempted to digitalize and automate urbanization, from paper and manual processes to graphic outputs using computer-aided drawing software (AutoCAD) and, more recently, Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Yet, it is arguable that this process is a mere reproduction of the paper-based information infrastructures. This article aims to produce empirically original evidence of digitalization-as-urbanization by describing the historical process and the main features used to make urban development plans, emphasizing digitalization's pros and cons, and focusing on the metropolitan peripheries. Digitalization has evolved in line with technological development; however, these technological changes have not necessarily changed the plans' quality, the information structures, or how information is stored, circulated, and retrieved. Data has been traditionally kept in municipal offices under the supervision of gatekeepers, which usually preclude public access. The paper concludes with a critical discussion on the digitalization of urban development in metropolitan Guadalajara, where the periphery remains the transitional space that does not offer the complete infrastructure and facilities assumed to be present in a city, leaving its inhabitants at a disadvantage compared to those settled in the central city. 

The Digitalising Periphery: E-commerce and global warehousing in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region   

Abdul Shaban, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai 

Ayona Datta, Department of Geography, UCL, London 

Sheema Fatima, School of Development Studies, TISS, Mumbai 

The coming of a digital revolution in the global south has transformed metropolitan peripheries into strategic sites of global economic activities and rapid urban growth. Bhiwandi, a long neglected peripheral municipality of Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), has transformed recently through the simultaneous spatial reach of digital infrastructures and significant growth of industrial and commercial activity. The easing of land use regulations and its strategic locations across national and international transport corridors has seen the rise of Bhiwandi as the key global and regional warehousing destination. From Amazon to Flipkart to Nyka cosmetics – all major global e-commerce companies now compete for warehousing space in Bhiwandi. The present paper, in this regard, attempts to understand, (a) the changes in the national economic, local and municipal land use policies which enabled Bhiwandi to emerge as strategic warehousing site in India, (b) the transformations in digital infrastructure and connectivity that enabled the location of e-commerce warehouses far from their customer and client base, and (c) the local and global networks of warehousing enterprises and landowners in the periphery who further reinforced the localization of warehouses by triggering policy changes in their favour. Using policy analysis at national, regional, municipal, and local levels; and interviews with key stakeholders, we argue that Bhiwandi presents us with the evidence of a digitalising periphery that rides the wave of land use transformations and resultant socio-economic change in the region. 

Dynamics of Spatial Information Infrastructures: Ardhisasa platform for automated planning in Nairobi 

Catherine Gateri, British Institute in East Africa (BIEA)

Increasing digitalisation of urban governance across the world coupled with increased uptake of digital technologies by the populations indicates that digitalisation is fundamental to the transformation of the state in an information age. There has been widespread adoption of smart technologies in local governance in the Global South with the claim that opportunities presented by digitalisation will resolve the challenges of urbanisation literally automating regional futures. The Kenya government has enthusiastically adopted digitalization promising that all 5000 government services will be available on a digital platform by the year 2025. One of the major government services that has been going through the digitization process is land administration. The current land registration system in Kenya was established in 1897 to support land registration for colonizers who had come into the country during the 19th Century. The land registry records are in paper format and most operations are carried out on a manual basis. There has been an argument that lack of a modern registration system has contributed to inefficient land administration system in the country with the push for digitalization of the land records to increase efficiency. Consequently, the Kenya government has embarked on an ambitious national digitization program of all land records to replace the manual paper-based system establishing the National Land Information Management System referred to as Ardhi Sasa Platform. Using interviews, this paper describes the experiences of the users of the Ardhi Sasa platform and seeks to understand the dynamics of platformatilizing the manual/paper land records. 

Sorting Paper: Land Digitalisation experiences in Nairobi’s peripheral Counties 

Dennis Mbugua Muthama, British Institute of Eastern Africa (BIEA) 

Based on a scoping survey done in Kajiado and Murang’a Counties in Kenya, this paper describes the experiences of land administration officials with the digitalisation of land records. Specifically, it applies a digitalisation as urbanisation approach to analyse and examine the conditions that the digitalisation process operates under and discusses how the officials participate in these processes in the two counties. The two counties are in the process of initiating their land digitalisation programmes. Interviews with national and county government officials, community leaders, and land professionals indicate that in the two counties officials participated in the sorting paper phase of the digitalisation process. However, this participation was constrained by their limited resources and their non-involvement in the project design. These conditions are further complicated by local politics, a perception of corruption by the public, devolution, and maladministration. The survey suggests that in the two counties a number of key success factors are necessary to achieve successful digitalisation of land records. It is these success factors that the paper identifies. 

Discussant: Dr. Asher Ghertner
Rutgers University.

Regional Futures 2

Date: 3/25/2023
Time: 4:30 PM - 5:50 PM MT
Room: Virtual 6

Panel discussion with:

Clancy Wilmott
University of California, Berkeley

Calvin Chung
City University of Hong Kong

Ryan Burns
University of Calgary

Julien Migozzi
University of Oxford

Julie-Anne Boudreau
UNAM, Mexico

Fenna Hoefsloot
University College London

Diganta Das
NIE, Singapore

Discussant: Mathew Zook
University of Kentucky