No abstract

The investigation of historical maps is fundamental to understanding the dynamics of landscape changes. In this study, we propose Web GIS tools as a way to compare historical maps efficiently for knowledge production. A key impetus of this article is to contribute to the ongoing efforts to broaden the appeal of ‘mixed‐methods research’ by bridging the epistemological and methodological gaps between GIS and qualitative methodologies in knowledge production. This article proposes a new visualization method for historical landscape change analysis by comparing multiple maps simultaneously with the mash‐up of Web GIS. Based on the analysis of exterior facts represented on the maps, four developmental footprints were investigated, namely, surviving place identity, disappeared place identity replaced by new identity, waning place identity overlapped with new identity, and waning identity by disconnected spatial relationships. To this end, the study argues that Web GIS applications have more potential in spatial knowledge production than traditional desktop GIS.

This paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural‐urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post‐reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non‐lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de‐territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially‐sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de‐territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re‐asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans‐local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage‐based rural networking that transcends space‐time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly‐divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more ‘inclusive’ rural studies.