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Because of the often remote and fledgling character of Canada's aboriginal tourism attractions, developing alliances with knowledgeable and culturally sensitive distribution channel operators are especially important. The distribution channels developed can affect the patterns of destination use, target markets attracted, and economic impact created for aboriginal communities. This research describes the structure and perspectives of the European tour operator industry as it relates to the distribution of North American aboriginal tourism experiences to European travelers. The findings suggest strategies for working with tour operators in configuring, positioning, promoting, and delivering aboriginal tourism.

While plans to develop “smart cities” are gathering pace across the world, we know little about the ways in which the discourses of datafication, smartness, and big data play out in material contexts of urban development, including utility and resource management. In this paper, we explore this intersection in the case of Bangalore’s water supply, where IBM in alliance with the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is implementing a water-flow sensor network and geographic database system under the label of “big data for water supply.” We illustrate how the BWSSB-IBM approach narrows down the complex field of water provision to a question of water in- and out-flow measurements and the monitoring of BWSSB ground personnel. In theoretical terms, we discuss the ways in which these processes constitute both particular claims to knowledge, and the redefinition of citizenship as consumption.

This research examines gated communities in the Denver-Boulder area to better understand the phenomenon at the metropolitan scale. To gain some insight into why they have proliferated, we examine the characteristics of gated communities and the areas in which they are located, as well as residents' motivations for moving into one.The Denver area has most of the types of ownership-based gated communities prevalent across the United States. We also studied rental gated communities. Ownership-based communities are located in the suburban, exurban, and prestigious inner urban areas of Denver. Prestige, privacy, and maintenance are among the most important reasons for moving to a gated community, but the gates per se were among the most important considerations only for those residents who had previously lived in such a community. Spatial distribution within the area leads to the conclusion that competition among developers may help explain the clustering of these communities.

This chapter examines the ways in which big data is involved in the rise of smart cities. Mobile phones, sensors and online applications produce streams of data which are used to regulate and plan the city, often in real time, but which presents challenges as to how the city's functions are seen and interpreted. Using a socio-technical approach, we offer a critical evaluation of the types of data being used in urban governance and their advantages and drawbacks in comparison to previous information systems. Using examples from New York and Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire, we demonstrate how big data can both illuminate and obscure our understanding of urban development. We outline methodological considerations for the use of such data, offering conclusions towards the development of a critical urban data science.

Sustaining up-to-date land registers in the global south is an increasing concern for the protection of tenure, development of land markets and long-term sustainable planning practices and policy. It requires both the prompt reporting of land transfers and also an alignment between prevailing land rights and official recording systems. The literature on land registration highlights some effects of inheritance practices on the land register and land development. Taking these studies a step further, our research investigates how such effects evolve from the rules that guide inheritance practices using a qualitative research approach. We found that normative practices of inheritance mostly lead to communal property through numerous processes which have implications on the timing and likelihood of possible registration. Also, we found that the significance of land and buildings in the social context transcends the physical property per se and includes dimensions of spirituality and social identity. Our findings explain the misalignment between the official and social logics of property and suggest likelihood of non-reporting. We conclude that flexibility is required in recording communal rights in rural areas and that the transition to individual property is more likely in peri-urban and urban areas where the social logics of property have broken.

SummaryLocation plays a fundamental role in human cognition and communication, certainly in this era of social media in which people have freedom to communicate anytime and from anywhere with current communication technology. This opportunity to communicate with text messages or through online social media such as twitter, blogs or facebook allows, for instance, sharing travel experiences.Geographic Information Systems are well equipped to handle locational information expressed in longitude and latitude, however, they cannot convert the geographic information present in the text to useful map information. Such textual information is known to have existed for over 250 years with over a billion biological specimens collected, all providing information about the collection locality of the specimen, but not always providing coordinates. This is one of the barriers in using these descriptions for spatial analysis. With some effort of interpretation, one might be able to understand and geocode these locations. Geocoding from textual descriptions is important because it allows to address textual ambiguity and, once the geocoding is done, no other geographic identifier is required.In a broader perspective the research project reported here aims to understand how humans communicate about location information using semi-structured text and how technology can aid in understanding and spatially representing it. For this purpose, real-world data from the published Ornithological Gazetteer of Brazil was used. In this gazetteer, localities are described using a number of statements that can be interpreted as spatial hints as to position. We identify those hints and their components, which need to be extracted and stored in a structured format. To do so, techniques of natural language processing and information extraction are used to understand the syntactic structure of the descriptions, based on which extraction patterns are developed per hint type. Upon extraction, these hints are translated to spatial representations.Some hints allow us to represent crisp boundaries as vector representation, whereas others are represented using a probability raster approach. Using these two representation types, hints were converted into their relevant spatial representations and for an entry description, these were combined to derive the common area where the locality at i Summary hand is expected to fall. By carrying out this methodology for those entries with available geocodes, we are able to evaluate the accuracy of our results for this gazetteer. The approach presented in the thesis is generic and can be applied to other similar text sources.ii SamenvattingLocatie heeft een belangrijke rol in menselijke cognitie en communicatie, vooral ook in het huidige tijdsgewricht waarin sociale media de mens de vrijheid verleent op ieder moment en iedere locatie te communiceren. Deze verworvenheid van communiceren met korte tekstberichten of via sociale media zoals twitter, blogs of facebook, stelt de mens bijvoorbeeld in staat reiservaringen ui...