Proceedings of the General Meeting of the Association of Japanese Geographers

Like other Iranian cities, school boards have not created official attendance areas for schools at any education level of Rasht City to spatially allocate students to schools within their local areas. In the absence of guidance from education authorities, parents are the main decision makers in choosing schools for their children. This is also the case for the selection of public female junior high or PFJH schools in Rasht City. Although this might invoke images of freedom under the current system, many female students go to school outside their local areas. In the case of the Iranian city of Rasht, this parental choice based system of school selection has resulted in commutes that are longer than necessary for the PFJH students who journey on foot or on the public buses, city taxis, and shared rental taxies and mini-buses that comprise the city's public and private transport. Despite the relative ease of getting to school in developed countries, a daily journey to the city in Iran is a heavy burden on students and their families. Without the convenience of a free school bus or carpooling, most students have to travel longer distances than necessary on foot from their homes to catch a taxi or rented private vehicles along main routes. Not only are such means of conveyance adding to the considerable cost families of sending their children to the schools in Rasht, they are also less safe. Daily travel in taxis or rented buses also means higher exposure to the risk of injury or even death. Another consequence of lengthy journeys to city schools on foot and rented vehicles included decreased time and energy for homework or other activities at home. In order to reduce the problems that students face daily in their commutes to schools in Iran, replacement the parental choice of school selection with student enrolment within a certain school attendance area was the aim of this research. It proposed this can be accomplished by introduction of attendance areas that reduce both the time and distance of commutes to schools and allocate students to the nearest schools on foot as much as possible. Multiplicatively weighted Voronoi diagram (MWVD) was the method for the construction of attendance areas given its utility in demarcating spaces so that all journeys within them are closest to a chosen school. A GIS-based specialist packaged called WVD18 (Mu Lan, 2004) was applied for the construction of diagrams that would represent the attendance areas for each school. Each diagram was then constructed in relation to the number of students to represent the weighted factor. Following this approach, larger schools tended to have larger enrolment areas and vice versa for smaller schools. Once the attendance areas were completed, they were analyzed spatially using Arc/Info, software of the Geographical Information System (GIS). In order to examine if the delimited boundaries minimized travel times and distances for students at schools, five studied PFJH schools were analyzed for more detailed study. The research concluded that the projected school attendance areas can result in shorter and more convenient commutes on foot. This can also nearly eliminate the need to travel by vehicle for the overwhelming majority of students and make their journeys more convenient.

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ENSO related spatial and seasonal variation in rainfall regimes in Laos was investigated using the Factor Model (FM). A 3-Factor Model (FM) with statistically significant t-values identifies the three seasonal rainfall regimes, which can be characterised as wet, dry, and inter seasons rainfall. Influences of ENSO were significant during the wet season, and apparently a significantly lower rainfall during the wet seasons. The wet season rainfall found to be most important in restricting upland rice farming in Laos. Significant correlation coefficients are found between rainfall and upland rice production. Importantly the ENSO related rainfall largely controls the upland rice production in Laos.

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IntroductionThe issue of equity is increasingly recognized as an essential component of sustainable development and transportation. There is agreement worldwide that sprawling, low-density urban structure is unsustainable, where a critical issue is inequality in job access between those who use private vehicles and those who use public transit. Using GIS, in this article I examine the spatial and temporal changes in job accessibility inequality between car and public transit in greater Boston.Methods Methods comprise four parts. The first part calculates measures of job accessibility in 1990 and 2000 for car and public transit commuting using job accessibility formulae employed in previous studies (e.g., Kawabata and Shen, 2006; Shen 1998). The second part computes measures of inequality in job accessibility between car and public transit in 1990 and 2000. The third part calculates temporal changes in job accessibility from 1990 to 2000. And the fourth part visualizes the resulting measures. The spatial unit of the analysis is the traffic analysis zone. Data are mainly from the Census Transportation Planning Packages.ResultsFigure 1 shows maps visualizing inequality in job accessibility between car and public transit in 1990 and 2000. One notable finding is that job accessibility inequality decreased around the urban core areas where the public transit system is relatively well developed. Another notable finding is that job accessibility inequality increased in some suburban zones near major highways.ConclusionAn important objective of sustainable development is narrowing the considerable gap in accessibility between car and public transit commuting methods. Based on the results, one strategy to achieve this objective is, first, to identify areas where jobs are clustered and growing but where job accessibility inequality is growing. The next step would be to develop public transit systems in those areas. Although developing public transit systems in vast suburban areas without assigning priority would be difficult, targeting suburban areas pinpointed in such as way would be highly plausible and cost effective. Major ReferencesKawabata, M., and Shen, Q. 2006. Job accessibility as an indicator of auto-oriented urban structure: a comparison of Boston and Los Angeles with Tokyo. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 33: 115-130.Shen, Q. 1998 Location characteristics of inner-city neighborhoods and employment accessibility of low-wage workers. Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 25: 345-365.

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Regionalization movement with NUTS (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics) has brought a new structuring process for candidate countries to European Union. The main applications in this process can be simply based on the smaller region groups to collect more detailed and reliable data-information. In this regard, the aim of data-information collection should not be only the reason to start a new regionalization movement. This movement has to be considered together with developmental issues to solve regional inequalities among more and less developed regions and to apply the best regional development projects between specific region groups.
In the analysis of region groups in Turkey, the findings and results of our previous studies for geographic and especially for NUTS level-1 regions did not deeply confirm GDP per capita income convergence in terms of Neoclassic Growth Model. For this reason, we have also analyzed the regional convergence tendencies for NUTS level-2 regions in this study and compared it with the result of previous studies. Similarly, the analysis of NUTS level-2 regions was also observed as a divergence tendency. However, it will open us a three-dimensional perspective for regional development projects; first, analyzing the importance of sample size in terms of the growth model; second, significance of socio-economic interactions among regions; and third, testing the endurance power of smaller region groups against regional diversifications and differentiations.
In this point, if Convergence Model is taken as an aim, then it can be used for only academic studies in application. Countries or regions in these studies, where they reached regional convergence, can be considered as developed countries or successful in regional development issues, otherwise underdeveloped, developing or unsuccessful countries or regions.
However, Convergence Model can be applied for countries or regions as a tool in terms of mapping regional development projects. Hence, we firstly need to figure a convergence tendency among regions by recombining region groups. Thus, developed areas are taken as key regions and combined with underdeveloped regions according to their developmental levels, successively. After reaching a statistically significant convergence finding, new multiregional development projects should be applied among specific region groups with quality and quantity components. These implementations will be more functional than previous projects because single and local projects can not provide a convergence, it can provide only development for the region and its neighbors. It is also important to remember that developed regions will naturally continue to grow by itself at the same time.
This approach was applied for the case of Turkish regions by recombining of NUTS level-2 regions in terms of socio-economic developmental levels as "NUTS Project Level-1 Regions", and finally, reached a model convergence tendency. Physically, this is not an actual regionalization; this is a new direction for project implementation fields, which will provide an opportunity how to balance and solve regional differences in the future.
Consequently, EU type regionalization did not bring an additional input, but brought an idea to where we need to go. Thus, regionalization movements should not ever be an aim; it should be used as a tool to reduce regional inequalities. In this point, developmental issues will take a very important role such as well-organized state management, determined & reliable policies in region groups, by using the local forces more effectively, and new regional administrative organizations; to increase socio-economic investments encouraging the private sector investments particularly from developed region to underdeveloped.

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