Daniel Sui

With the explosive growth of Uber and other mobility service providers, their influences on urban mobility have attracted attention from both researchers and policy circles alike, yet few quantitative studies have been conducted on the topic. Using Uber pickup data in New York City in 2014, this article investigates the spatiotemporal relationship between Uber and public transit using buffer analysis and spatial cross-correlation analysis and assesses Uber’s impact on urban transportation equity with the Gini coefficient and correlation analysis. Our results confirm previous arguments that Uber both complements and competes with public transit, but competition is more prevalent in New York City. Specifically, Uber competes with public transit during most hours of the day and in areas with good public transit coverage, whereas it complements public transit at midnight and in places with insufficient public transit services. The distribution of Uber services is highly unequal, and Uber’s role in improving transport equity is insignificant. Correlation analysis shows that there tend to be fewer Uber pickups in low-income areas, which diverges from previous studies suggesting that Uber serves low-income areas well. In addition, a weak negative correlation is detected between the number of Uber pickups and the percentage of minorities.

This article coins a neologism, place spoofing, to describe the unique transformation of a place when it purposefully replicates another alien place, thereby enabling the residents to live in the vicarious environment of that imitated place. Place spoofing captures how a place disconnects from its indigenous culture and historical heritage during the transformation. This framing enables us to further reflect on the causes of this unique urban development. To deepen our understanding of place spoofing, we elaborate on its connotation, different spoofing strategies, and its goal of delivering an alien sense of place. We further analyze its market price and then discuss the perspective of place spoofing as a type of conspicuous commodity. To put the theoretical framework in context, the xenophilic copycat residential communities in Beijing are examined. Specifically, the copycat communities are sifted out from all available Beijing residential community transactions from an online real estate database. The distribution of copycat communities demonstrates the (re)production of place spoofing in the geographic layout of the city. The empirical results show that the copycat communities tend to have higher prices, implying that the residents pursue an alien sense of place and the symbolic meanings carried by its sentiment. This study also discusses how buyers, developers, and governments react to place spoofing. Overall, place spoofing provides a lens to frame this long-standing, but often neglected, urban development. This article lays the groundwork for geographers to explore the spoofing phenomenon by examining its underlying spatial characteristics, economic benefits, and social implications.

Cyberbullying is an emerging social issue along with the prevalence of social media. Previous studies have used extensive surveys or firsthand data primarily from conventional social networks ¹ 1 Social media whose users primarily use their real name and provide identifiable information, although some might use pseudonyms (e.g., Facebook and Twitter). View all notes (e.g., Twitter) to study cyberbullying, which often ignores the factor of anonymity and location. Considering the sensitive nature and contagious effect of cyberbullying, a better understanding of the spatiotemporal pattern in cyberbullying is sorely needed to develop effective policies to combat this toxic social behavior. Grounded in the dramaturgy theory and the emerging literature on technoself, this study aims to compare cyberbullying in the anonymous social media (Yik Yak) with the conventional social media (Twitter) and explore its spatiotemporal patterns. A support vector machine is used to help identify records with bullying content. Average nearest neighbor, kernel density, and Ripley's K-function are used to explore the spatiotemporal patterns of cyberbullying behavior. We have found that cyberbullying is more likely to occur in anonymous than conventional social media. We also detected a clustering pattern corresponding to the student population, which can be explained by the dramaturgy theory and recent studies on technoself. In addition to making suggestions to help reduce cyberbullying in the future, this article also sheds light on the need for future studies.

The past 20 years have witnessed the emergence of a plethora of research themes in GIS that are quite different from conventional GIS practices. This article develops a preliminary framework to loosely knit together the diverse intellectual threads for the emerging GIS themes. It is found that the framework for the six senses of the whole new mind (design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning) captures the six major emerging GIS themes remarkably well. Conventional GIS practices have been predominantly concentrating on automated cartography/map-making, spatial modelling, geocomputation and database development with the goal for efficiency, which tend to be closely associated with the left-side/slow thinking capabilities of the human brain. In contrast, the emerging GIS themes focus more on geonarratives, qualitative/mixed methods, storytelling and synthesis with the goal for achieving equity and social justice, which tend to be more closely associated with the right-side/fast thinking capabilities of the human brain. Evidently, these new GIS practices have the potential to enable GIS users to transcend what Heidegger called the enframing nature of technology and motivate them to explore new areas of enquiry with greater sensitivities to the social and political dimensions of GIS application. Increasingly, these emerging GIS practices are transforming GIS into a liberation technology that continues empowering GIS users in their quest for a better, more equitable and sustainable world. These emerging themes also pose new research and educational challenges for the GIS community in the years ahead.

Since the U.S. Embassy in Beijing placed an air quality sensor on its roof and began publishing the results on Twitter in 2008, air quality has gained widespread attention on Chinese microblogs. When the Chinese government introduced new air quality standards in 2012, some hailed this as a victory for Chinese microbloggers, signifying the emergence of social media as a democratizing force leading to greater citizen power. Using a representative sample of microblog posts collected from October 2012 to June 2013 on the topic of air pollution, as well as contextual information from a variety of sources, we examine how the government, companies, nongovernmental organizations, and individuals approach the Chinese social media landscape. We find that although microblogs are capable of empowering citizens to advance an environmental cause, social media have also been increasingly employed by the government as a tool for social monitoring and control and by companies as a platform for profiting from air pollution.

The field ofGIS(SforSystems,Sciences,Services, andStudies) is at a cross‐road in the early 2010s. Aiming to link the multiple visions for the next phase ofGISdevelopment, this article suggests that the emerging openGISshould serve as a guiding concept. Contextualized in the broader literature of open science, this article proposes openGISshould include eight dimensions related to data, software, hardware, standards, research, publication, funding, and education. For theGIScommunity, openGISoffers four exciting opportunities: (1) technology‐driven opportunities for addressing challenges posed by the (spatial) big data deluge; (2) application‐led opportunities for confronting the problems of a rapidly changing planet; (3) curiosity‐inspired, crowd‐powered opportunities for the development of an open and geographic citizen science; and (4) education‐focused opportunities for implementing the vision of a spatial university. Although there are academic, legal, social/political, and environmental impediments for the practice of openGIS, openGISwill become increasingly important in shaping our research and educational agendas in the future.

Geographic space demonstrates scaling or hierarchy, implying that there are far more small things than large ones. The scaling pattern of geographic space, if visualized properly (i.e., based on the head/tail breaks classification), can evoke a sense of beauty. This is our central argument. This beauty is a new type of aesthetic at a deeper structural level and differs in essence from an intuitive sense of harmony, perceived in terms of color, shape, texture, and ratio. This new kind of beauty was initially defined and discovered by Christopher Alexander, and promoted in his master work The Nature of Order. To paraphrase Mandelbrot, this is beauty for the sake of science rather than for art's sake or for the sake of commerce. Throughout the article, we attempt to argue and illustrate that the scaling of geographic space possesses this new kind of beauty, which has a positive impact on human well-being. The article further draws on the previous work of Nikos Salingaros and Richard Taylor on the beauty in architecture and arts to support our argument.