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Modem urban transportation systems continuously challenge, and are challenged by, the changing nature of 21st-century travel demand. Today, congestion is the norm in cities of the United States, and researchers and practitioners are seeking solutions to these problems. Urban commuting is identified as contributing to the suboptimal performance of transportation systems. This paper offers a review and critique of recent research on urban commuting, emphasizing geographical dimensions of this topic. Three broad areas of research related to urban commuting are discussed. These include (1) urban sustainability, (2) land use, and (3) geographic information systems (GIS). Major themes are examined in an effort to elicit thought on future geographic research. At the conclusion of the paper, summary remarks are provided and avenues for research are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents information on several conferences on geography, held in 1985. It is reported that the "National Speleological Society Annual Meeting" was held during June 23-29 in Frankfort, Kentucky. The Society is involved in the exploration and mapping of caves and furthering research in cave and karst science. This convention was attended by nearly 1,000 people who participated in five days of papers, nine mini-courses, sixteen workshops, and several field trips. The "Ninth World Forestry Congress," reportedly, was held during July 1-10 in Mexico City. The Congress was organized under the auspices of the Mexican Covernment through its Ministry of Agriculture and Hydraulic Resources and with collaboration of United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization. Delegates representing forestry and agricultural government agencies, private industry, research and teaching, and international organizations participated in paper sessions and field trips. The topic of this convention was "Forestry Resources in the Integral Development of Society." The article further reports that the "Twenty-first Annual American Water Resources Association Conference and Symposium" was held during August 11-16 in Tucson, Arizona. The conference theme was "Water Demand: Sharing a Limited Resource" and the symposium theme "Groundwater Contamination and Reclamation."

Geography is again becoming an integral part of the premier natural-science agency of the federal government. Geographic research emphasizes the surface of the earth, a portion of the earth system that the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) defines as the “critical zone.” Although geography was part of the USGS from the creation of the agency, in recent years geography in the agency has largely been limited to topographic mapping. Recently, the USGS and an advisory committee of the National Research Council (NRC) reviewed the role of geography at the Survey. The committee's report, along with ongoing decision-making in the federal government, is likely to reshape geography in the USGS. The newly defined USGS has a regional structure and four disciplines: geology, hydrology, biology, and geography. The NRC report emphasizes the need for the creation of a spatial database called the National Map to replace the existing series of paper topographic maps. The report also outlines the need for geographic research in geographic information science (GIScience), nature-society connections, and bridging of science to decision-making. The NRC report has been briefed throughout the USGS, in the federal executive branch, and in Congress. The changing role for geography in the USGS requires change in the agency culture, revised budgetary decisions, and the establishment of a long-term core agenda for research. Academic geographers will need to prepare a new generation of geographers for participation in the USGS and similar agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method to measure two types of tempos: 1) the tempo of elderly age concentration, the rate of change in the elderly proportion in a region; and 2) the tempo of elderly geographical concentration, the rate of change in a region's share of the national elderly population. The two measurements are applied to historical data for the United States. The results reveal that both tempos vary spatially and temporally. Relative tempos are also introduced to compare the indices between different age groups and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the spatial activity of elderly SRO hotel tenants in the service-dependent ghetto. Exploratory fieldwork was conducted in a neighborhood of Chicago during 1985 and 1986. At four of the identified hotels, 53 activity spaces were recorded by first-hand involvement in the geographical activity of the participants. The fear of both street crime and social-service agencies imposes isolation upon this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How useful are county soil surveys for estimating floodplain storage in fluvial sediment budgets? This paper compares data about accelerated sedimentation collected from field corings with information derived from three county soil surveys in southeastern Minnesota. Two soil surveys proved to be unsatisfactory data sources about historical alluvium, but another survey was a more accurate source for one drainage basin. Even tins third soil survey would require calibration for use in a geographic information system, because it was only the survey's maximum estimate that agreed with the field data.

Current inventories of hazardous waste sites seldom include older, unreported sites, thereby creating a serious shortcoming in attempts to assess risks posed by one type of technological hazard. Based upon a review of urban morphogenesis, hazardous material use in industry, and past waste management practices, this paper presents a model of historical hazards accumulations. Reviews of past industrial waste disposal practices in three Illinois urban settings illustrate the model's effectiveness.

This paper analyzes the changes that are transforming intermodal transportation in the United States and Canada. Traffic is being concentreated at a relatively small number of inland load centers that serve as regional truck distribution points, and are linked by high volume dedicated train services. Both theoretical and practical implications of the changes are examined, and a range of research questions are presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the surprisingly great variation in demographic character across the states, utilizing data on fertility, mortality, age, sex, mobility, household character, abortion, race and ethnicity. A fairly simple regional pattern is revealed that is less related to levels of economic development than to long-standing historical cultural differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study reveals some disturbing facts about the status of minorities in geography in the United Stales. The three underrepresented minority groups comprise only about 3% of the total geography population in the sample. This does not reflect well on geography, a discipline whose cultural and regional roots are as diverse as its subjects of study. It is important to increase minority participation in geography in order to diversity the discipline as well as allow minority students to enhance their spatial skills such as an understanding of the earth, cultural patterns, and political issues at the local, national, and global levels. If the discipline continues to neglect the need to provide a quality geographic education to minority students, it will forsake not only one of its major missions of spreading global knowledge to all, but will lose its market share of the growing minority student population. This paper describes the extent of minority underrepresentation in geography and provides a set of general recommendations, including a call for a national conference and formation of a high-level committee to deal with the issue of increased minority participation in geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of what lies ahead is of particular concern for Latin Americanists. The last decade has witnessed a serious erosion of both the popularity of their specialty, and an equally troublesome reduction in employment opportunities. This paper uses Association of American Geographers (AAG) data bases to document the age-gender structure of contemporary Latin Americanist geographers, and projects likely compositional changes through the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A region's elderly population has two sources of growth, net migration and the net aging-in-place of its resident population. This paper outlines a method for identifying the projected relative contribution of these two sources of elderly population growth over time, and illustrates it with data for the states of Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, and New York. The sources of elderly population growth differ between regions and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Area studies emerged as the leading tradition in American geography during the second decade of this century, supplanting the earth science tradition. The man-land tradition, reaching its peak during the second and third decades, never became as dominant as did the area studies tradition, based on a classification of the number of articles published, papers presented at annual AAG meetings, doctoral dissertations, and philosophical and methodological pronouncements by noted figures in American geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the eleventh Karst Research Conference that was held in Decorah, Iowa during April 5-7, 1990. The periodic meetings explore different karst regions through an intensive field trip led by local researchers, followed by paper presentations by geographers, geologists, chemists, environmentalists, engineers. The meeting showcased the karst area of southern Minnesota and northeastern Iowa where much recent work has been done on the impact of pesticides and agricultural practices on karst terranes.

The Fifth Annual Georgia-Florida Conference was held in Athens, Georgia, on February 16 and 17, 1990. The conference provided a forum for students to present their research in preparation for larger conferences and to receive critiques from their colleagues. The atmosphere was informal and noncompetitive. The first paper in one session focused on the plans to preserve the landscape of the second battle of Antietam in Washington County. The other session emphasized on physical geography. The conference concluded with a well-attended party and enthusiastic plans for next year.

Most approaches to neighborhood activism among homeowners explain it in terms of a single social variable, such as class or race or gender. This article argues that, by focusing on one social category, these approaches fail to examine the range of variables that influence homeowner activism. The paper argues that, instead of understanding homeowner activism as a politics of class or race or gender, it should be understood as a politics of space. Such an approach allows us to understand how social variables interrelate in homeowners' political project and provides a more effective explanation for why this agenda is translated into action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One aspect of a recent restructuring of urban economies, societies, and spaces has been a change in urban planning practice. Planning is increasingly privatized and decentralized in U.S. cities. Private planning consultants are often hired by public-private coalitions in order to shape the future of cities, while the planning processes they institute are frequently claimed to be consensus-based, collaborative, and inclusionary, rather than elite-centered and expert-driven. This paper discusses the use of "visioning"-an increasingly popular technique that develops goals for the future of a city through consensus-based meetings, open to all parties-as developed by New Century Lexington, a public-private planning initiative in Lexington, Kentucky. It argues that: (1) new public-private planning procedures, incorporating collaborative techniques, frequently become the institutional sites of political struggle over how future urban geographies are produced; (2) in order to understand the role of visioning in contemporary urban politics and in policy making outcomes, we must recognize the sociospatial context in which it is deployed; and (3) in the case of New Century, the way in which local elites controlled the mechanics of the visioning process made dissent difficult and, therefore, produced a vision of the future largely parallel to their standard economic development models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on access tends to focus on descriptive indicators characterizing need. Other attributes such as behavior and attitudes however may also play central roles. This paper explores the influence of descriptive (e.g., sociodemographic characteristics, residential location, and physical health) and behavioral (e.g., social network interaction and mobility) variables on service use using a recent survey of persons living with HIV or AIDS in Orange County, California. Services are divided into two types: medical care (providing medication and regular examinations associated with HIV and AIDS) and human services (providing mental health care and meeting basic needs such as food, clothing, and housing). The analysis indicates that not having medical coverage was strongly associated with greater use of public medical services, and that self-reported disability and being reliant on a friend for transportation were strongly associated with greater use of human and supportive services. Implications of these results are presented for policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reexamines the conventional wisdom concerning the Midwestern origins of American academic geography at the doctoral level. Prosopographic analysis of 34 Ph.D.s awarded in geography between 1893 and 1921 finds that these were largely earned in Eastern universities, and that both Eastern and Midwestern institutions awarding doctorates in the field drew students primarily from the home region. By contrast, prosopographic examination of a second and later group, the faculty and graduate students at Clark University between 1921 and 1946, discloses an interregional pattern of recruitment closely tied to Midwestern institutions. Paradoxically, though sited in an Eastern university, early Clark geography was substantially Midwestern in personnel and program. Further institutional and prosopographic study of the early sites of graduate study is needed to reveal the complexity of American academic geography in its formative period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on sustainable agriculture is underfunded in the United States. Therefore, the topical relevance and the dissemination of this research must be carefully targeted to reach farmers. This paper investigates the actual linkages between local alternative farmers and the information dissemination efforts of publicly funded researchers who obtained grants from a federal/regional program. This analysis is based on a mail survey of twenty sustainable farmers in the Illinois Sustainable Agriculture Society, fifty farmers in the Illinois Organic Crop Improvement Association, and forty-two researchers who received grant funding from the North Central Region of the USDA's (United States Department of Agriculture) Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (USDA-SARE) program between 1988 and 1996. Appropriate statistical techniques were employed to analyze the relatively small sample sizes. Findings suggest that the local needs of farmers are not being met by the national and regional efforts of USDA-SARE, although sustainable farmers are somewhat more likely than organic farmers to receive publicly funded research information. Based on this survey research, the USDA should reconsider the focus and goals of its commitment to sustainable agricultural research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]