Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
4.
A
SSESSING
C
OMMUNITY
S
USTAINABILITY
S
PATIALLY WITH
GIS
GIS is particularly useful for sustainability assessment since it can
integrate data in various domains across natural systems (water, air, land) and
human systems (political, social, economic characteristics). GIS can be used to
capture aspects of sustainability that have been elusive to measure—such as
natural capita and social capital—through hyperspectral remote sensing,
ubiquitous GPS tracking, and social media. In addition, visualization of
multidimensional data in GIS can compress large amounts of information and
convey information effectively. With GIS, one can monitor change and
analyze spatial distribution and the relationships of entities. This (integration,
visualization, and analysis of appropriate data) can facilitate the collaborative
learning process of identifying issues related to sustainability, particularly
through open platforms like GeoWeb 2.0. GIS can help address the limitations
of the capital framework discussed earlier (i.e., integration of large data, lack
of understanding of the society-nature relation, lack of attention to
distributional aspects of sustainability). Despite the potential of GIS discussed
above, GI has been underutilized due to an inadequate understanding of spatial
concepts (Marsh et al., 2007).
Here I present a typology of geospatial inquiries applicable to
sustainability-related issues. This is intended to address an inadequate
appreciation of spatial concepts and to guide GIS users to think more spatially
about sustainability. GIS can address the following five questions (Hwang,
2013). Working definitions of those geospatial inquiries are provided below:
Spatial Distribution (SD): where things are in a place/region
Spatial Interactions (SI): how things interact between places/regions
Spatial Relationships (SR): where things are related across domains in
a place/region
Spatial Comparisons (SC): where things differ among places/regions
Temporal Relationships (TR): how things change in places/regions
Here
thing
is used as an umbrella term to refer to objects (spatially
discrete phenomena such as land parcels and roads), fields (spatially
continuous phenomena such as temperature and elevation), and events
(dynamic geographic phenomena such as earthquakes and crime incidents)
(Goodchild et al., 2007). The term
place/region
is a domain-specific multi-
