ABSTRACT Authoritarianism is often treated as a condition migrants leave behind. This commentary argues that it also travels with them, shaping how they interpret and mobilise possibility in the destination. Drawing on diaries and interviews with 13 Turkish‐speaking migrants in London, it shows how experiences of future uncertainty in Turkey have become a comparative lens through which adversity in London was understood and coped with. Authoritarianism thus produced a paradox: by enclosing the future and shrinking spaces of citizenship in Turkey, it made alternative futures in London feel more visible and achievable. The commentary concludes with a suggestion for future research to locate migrants' hope beyond individual resilience, with a focus on the specifically urban infrastructures that animate and sustain it.
ABSTRACT This article examines the spatial and demographic dimensions of daily school mobility in the Czech Republic, with particular attention to how commuting distance reflects broader inequalities in access to education. Drawing on detailed municipality‐level data on pupil and student flows, the study analyses school commuting as a form of routine population mobility that reveals underlying patterns of spatial equity. Building on the concepts of educational accessibility and education deserts, we identify significant regional disparities in the distribution of educational opportunities. Urban areas benefit from dense educational infrastructure, whereas peripheral and sparsely populated regions experience structurally longer school commutes. Suburban zones around major cities are characterised by a demographic–infrastructural mismatch where local demand exceeds school capacity. These findings demonstrate how demographic structures, settlement patterns and spatial organisation of educational services jointly shape unequal access to schooling. The study contributes to population geography debates on spatial inequality and provides an evidence‐based foundation for more regionally sensitive educational planning.
ABSTRACT Local government should inform citizens if they live in disaster‐prone areas. The local government should indicate that it has the resources available to help predict and recover from a potential disaster. Data in the public domain, such as Population Census and Household Survey data, can be used to assess the recoverability of at‐risk areas within a local government without incurring additional data‐collection costs. This will enable local authorities to implement risk‐mitigation programmes to respond to rapid‐onset disasters and provide timely assistance to those in need. In most instances, people in these vulnerable areas are not resilient to catastrophes such as floods, fires and droughts. To assess a community's recoverability, two indices were used: the Fortunate Index and the Food Insecurity Index. The Fortunate Index, loosely based on Bhutan's National Happiness Index, comprises 11 indicators drawn from the 2011 Census, selected by interviewees as indicators of their sense of being fortunate. The Food Insecurity Index in South Africa is based on the FAO's Food Insecurity Experience Scale. Areas of food insecurity and ill fortune are identified and analysed to derive indices of communities' ability to recover from a rapid‐onset disaster. Additional data, such as flood lines and fire risk categories, are used to plan for mitigative activities. This paper developed a set of indicators to assess a community's capacity to recover, ranging from very low recoverability to high recoverability, based on food security and fortunateness, and to inform local authorities in reacting to and reducing disaster risk and developing appropriate measures such as placing emergency services close to these identified areas, to provide better housing over the long term away from flood prone areas and stricter enforcement of not developing below the 1:100‐year flood line. These activities can contribute to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.
ABSTRACT Despite its strategic position at the crossroads of the Persian Gulf, the Caspian Sea, the Indian Ocean and Central Asia, Iran remains significantly excluded from major regional trade corridors, energy networks and port connectivity frameworks. This study argues the structural causes of Iran's geopolitical isolation and proposes a strategic transition towards geo‐economic connectivity. Drawing on comparative geo‐economic analysis, the research integrates macroeconomic trajectories, Liner Shipping Connectivity Index data, port performance metrics and critical discourse analysis. It also evaluates China's historical policy shift as a comparative framework. The findings reveal a stark divergence between Iran and its regional neighbours. Whereas the United Arab Emirates has leveraged a port‐centric geo‐economic model to achieve sustained maritime connectivity and economic growth, Iran's ideologically driven foreign policy has fostered structural isolation, declining global economic share and heightened vulnerability to sanctions. Quantitative indicators confirm that Iran's maritime connectivity lags significantly behind regional benchmarks, reflecting broader governance deficiencies rather than geographic limitations. Geopolitical fear discourses further legitimise international exclusion and deter foreign investment. The study demonstrates that physical infrastructure alone cannot overcome these barriers without coherent policy reforms. To transform geographic potential into tangible influence, Iran must prioritise maritime development along the Makran coast and Chabahar Port. By shifting from ideological confrontation to pragmatic geo‐economic statecraft, Iran can rebuild regional trust, integrate into transnational logistics networks and secure its position as a vital Eurasian transit hub. This strategic reorientation offers a viable pathway to sustainable national development and regional integration.
ABSTRACT In this article, I demonstrate the value of attending to scalar aesthetics. By scalar aesthetics, I mean the showing, making perceptible or making public of relations between big and small, specific and general, local and global, domestic and international. I suggest that the burgeoning field of ‘art geographies’ and research in cultural geography more generally should extend and sharpen its attention to scale. As an extension to geographical research on how scales are produced through social and political‐economic processes, scalar‐aesthetic analysis elucidates the cultural production of scale. Building on Neil Smith's work on ‘scale‐jumping’, I examine how aesthetic leaps constitute constellations of knowledge that instantiate political effects. I focus empirically on scalar‐aesthetic interventions into the politics of home within the Swedish art world, analysing especially the work of Meriç Algün. Algün uses what I call ‘coarse’ scalar aesthetics and finite lists to make perceptible the scale of migration bureaucracy and the expanded scale of borders. Her work highlights the coarseness of the interpenetration of private and public scales, revealing how borders are encountered at constellating scales. Through offering scalar‐aesthetic knowledge on the home and its scalar politics, her work intervenes in domopolitical debate. I argue that paying attention to scalar aesthetics can help geographers understand the kinds of relations, connections and leaps that reveal and contest the scalar politics of home. More broadly, scalar aesthetics are a potentially valuable source of geographical knowledge on the world's scales; they have a radical potential to model different routes to generalisability and to challenge dominant scalar paradigms. Scalar aesthetics analysis is therefore a key means through which cultural geographers can address ‘big’ questions of public importance.
