Gis and the Social Sciences ─ Theory and Applications

This book explores how human geography can engage with a variety of important policy issues through linking together GIS and spatial analysis. It considers how geography can ‘outreach’ to the wider community and demonstrates the importance of applied GIS and spatial analysis for solving real world problems in both the public and private sector.

The book is divided into two sections. The first section introduces basic theoretical material from a social science perspective. This section explores how spatial data is handled in a GIS, forms of geocoding, geoprocessing and visualisation, and ends with a discussion of basic GIS functionality – what are the standard spatial commands within GIS packages and what can they offer in terms of spatial analysis? Part B then explores the range of applications that GIS has been primarily used for in the social sciences, offering a global perspective of examples at a range of spatial scales. The book explores the use of GIS in crime, health, education, retail location, urban planning, transport, geodemographics, emergency planning and poverty/income inequalities. The text is supplemented with practical examples at the end of each chapter, and a companion website containing further examples and data sets. These will be written in both MAPINFO and ARC, to show how the user can access data and put the theory in the textbook to applied use.

This book is the first to offer a social science approach to GIS techniques and applications while showing the user how to do GIS. It provides a range of modern applications of GIS with associated practicals to work through, and demonstrates how researcher and policy makers alike can use GIS to plan services more effectively. It will be of great interest to geographers, as well as the broader social sciences, such as sociology, crime science, health, business and marketing.

Dimitris Ballas is Senior Lecturer in Geographical Information Systems at the University of Sheffield and Deputy Director of the University of Sheffield research Centre for Health and Well-being in Public Policy (CWiPP). He is an economist by training (1996, University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece) and also has a Master of Arts (with distinction) in Geographical Information Systems (1997, University of Leeds, UK) and a PhD in Geography (2001, University of Leeds, UK). He has extensive experience and expertise in the use of Geo-informatics and GIS in the Social Sciences. His current research interests include economic geography, social and spatial inequalities, social justice, exploring geographies of happiness and well-being and socio-economic applications of GIS. He has co-authored and co-edited four books and he has published widely on applications of GIS and spatial modelling on a wide range of subjects including local labour market policies, social policy, spatial planning, health, rural policy analysis and human cartography.

Graham Clarke is Professor of Business Geography at the University of Leeds. He has worked extensively in GIS and applied spatial modelling, focusing on many applications within urban/social geography. In particular he has published widely in retail and business geography, health geography and the impacts of changing rural and urban policy. In addition to a strong GIS focus these publications include many different types of spatial analysis, including spatial interaction modelling, microsimulation, geodemographics and spatial statistics. In addition, he has taught first year GIS and various masters GIS modules, including GIS for planning (including public and private sector examples). He was also involved with the design and implementation of a web-based GIS distance learning course which is jointly run with the Universities of Southampton and Penn-state in the US.

Rachel Franklin is Associate Director of the Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) initiative at Brown University, where one of her key responsibilities is teaching GIS to undergraduate and graduate students from across the social sciences. She also holds an appointment as an Assistant Professor (Research) in Population Studies. She holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Arizona (2004). As a population geographer and regional scientist with research interests in spatial variations in demographic processes at the national and sub-national scales, her current research focuses on student migration flows in the United States and the spatial and demographic aspects of population decline in the U.S. and Europe.

Andy Newing is currently a PhD student at the School of geography, university of Leeds. Andy is a skilled expert in GIS and has already put together a number of excellent teaching materials for GIS practcials used in various Leeds modules. He is an expert in both MAPINFO and ARC and will be primarily responsible for the exercises and data sources used throughout the text. Andy is working on retail location models for his PhD and already has three peer-reviewed papers accepted for publication. He is an experienced demonstrator across the full range of GIS courses and practical’s offered here at Leeds – using both Arc and MapInfo and has already helped to develop practicals for undergrad and masters level students across a range of human geography themes and applications – for both face to face and online delivery using Arc and MapInfo.