Suchergebnisse

GIS (Geographic Information Systems) has captured planning practice to an unprecedented degree, and this article on how it reconfigures and is configured by institutional context. The author inquires into GIS as a technology for incorporating knowledge into institutional use and includes five propositions: (1) GIS's efficiencies in data processing allows it unprecedented facility and scope of analysis, (2) its use increases alienation, (3) its mimetic language furthers its role in planning, (4) its logic appears rational—purposive, but it conceals an underlying normative logic, and (5) its most profound effect is on the mapper, and the alienating and normative character of GIS necessitate new modes of "social ground-truthing." The author studies the southeast Los Angeles (SELA) initiatives to demonstrate these propositions. This article compares two studies: one GIS-based, and the other based on participatory action research and discusses how GIS might be recontextualized into a technology for liberating democratizing processes.

Since Hardin first formulated the tragedy of the commons, researchers have described various ways that commons problems are solved, all based on the model of individual rationality. Invariably, these institutional solutions involve creating some system of property rights. We formulate an alternative model, one not founded on property rights but on decision-making around so-called vector payoffs. The model is formalized and an existence proof provided. The new model is shown to be effective in explaining some anomalous results (e.g., unanticipated cooperation) in the experimental games literature that run counter to the rational model. We then use the case of the buffalo commons to illustrate how the new model affords alternative explanations for examples like the rise and fall of the buffalo herds in the Great Plains. We find the vector payoff model to complement, though not displace, that of individual rationality.