GIS Day at UGI2011 was marked with a delayed start on my part because of an alarm clock mishap (mobile phone battery died overnight), but I did manage to catch the last 10 minutes of the first lecture I had planned to attend. The second lecture on my agenda was cancelled because it was another no-show, which was quite disappointing because according to the abstract, the lecture, entitled “Modelling Of Future Land Use In Disturbed Landscape: Integration Of Land Cover Data With Spatial Attributes“, aimed at analyzing the dynamics, development and processes in disturbed landscape (changes of landscape character, land-cover, land-use) from the past to present and predicting future land-use development.
I use Google Earth on a regular basis for a variety of tasks including verification and visualization of geographic data. So I’ve put on my calendar a talk by Dr. Peng Gong of the Center for Earth System Science at Tsinghua University in Beijing entitled ”Beyond Google Earth: Mapping With Global Mapper And Global Analyst“, where he introduced an integrated software platform for remote sensing and geographic information system based on Google Earth: Global Mapper (GMap) and Global Analyst (GA). What I found particularly fascinating about this new web-based platform was that the functions of image processing, information extraction and basic editing, processing, analysis and map display functions are all integrated with Google Earth. Hence, Google Earth has been extended by Dr. Gong and his colleagues to handle geo- and image-processing operations. A demo of the platform can be tested here: http://www.globalanalyst.cn/ga2/index.html.
Next, I attended a series of talks from the IGU Commission on Political Geography, begining with ”The Future Borders Between Israel And Palestine” by Dr. Shlomo Hasson of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The lecture examined a series of scenarios of future border patterns between Palestine and Israel and the types of cross-border relationships that may develop as a result. At the Q/A session I asked Dr. Hasson what his thoughts are about the status of Jerusalem as part of any two-state solution? He responded by advocating an EU-style open-border policy in Jerusalem because of its importance to all three Abrahamic faiths.
Dr. Hasson’s talk was followed by Juliana Silva of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile who spoke of the ”Humanitarian Fence: Keeping Refugees Under Care And Control At A Distance“. A self-proclaimed non-geographer, she stressed the centrality of refugees within the fields of International Relations and Human Geography. She used Michel Foucault’s methodology of interpretive analytics – where knowledge, power, and self are axes of experience, is presented as a comprehensive model of the critical task of the History of Thought – to identify and comprehend the modes of operation of strategies, technologies and techniques that articulate the humanitarian space and construct the refugees as objects of action of humanitarian agencies.
The last talk of the session was Dr. Johannes Tsheola of the University of Limpopo in South Africa, who spoke of ”Transformation Of Africa’s Colonial Borders And Trade Regionalism Of The New Partnership For Africa’s Development“. I must admit that Dr. Tsheola’s slides were a little too heavy on text which rendered following the talk and reading the slides a little difficult. Dr. Tsheola argued that the African Union’s economic model, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), has in practice undermined the consolidation of horizontal trade relations among Africa’s regional economic communities (RECs), whilst simultaneously exploiting the paradoxes embedded with the colonial boundaries to perpetuate the prevailing vertical trade relations of individual states and engendering new ones at the continental scale.
Abdulhakim Abdi
