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The reality show "The Amazing Race" serves as a useful text for the cultural geography classroom. As competitors travel the world, they complete challenging tasks designed to be both educational and entertaining. Audiences see actual images from destinations around the world and learn about the unique cultures of these places. They also see contestants react, sometimes negatively, to these new and unfamiliar cultures. This article outlines the use of this show to teach issues of culture, identity, and difference. Alongside watching episodes, students discussed conceptual readings and designed challenges inspired by the show to educate participants from the university community.

The introductory level course Geography of the U.S. and Canada requires students to grasp large amounts of complex material, oftentimes using a lecture-based pedagogical approach. This article outlines two ways that popular music can be successfully used in the geography classroom. First, songs are used to review key concepts and characteristics of each subregion as a way to reinforce course material. Second, students critically analyze place representations in a selected song as a way to synthesize course themes. Excerpts from student work demonstrate that music does assist in helping students connect to and understand geographical concepts.

This article presents a lesson plan used to teach about African urbanization using Kenyan novels. Specifically, three urban novels written by Meja Mwangi are used. Based on a qualitative survey of student preference and learning, this lesson plan uses these novels alongside more traditional academic texts to achieve effective student learning. Understanding that students prefer to read novels but learn best from textbooks, this mixture of texts generates emotional discussions that are substantiated with factual research. (Contains 2 tables and 2 notes.)

Sustainable Development Goal 6 seeks universal access to safe water. This is ambitious, especially for developing countries, and meeting it will require reliance on informal water suppliers alongside traditional formal suppliers. We adopt a case study approach to explore water production in Ghana's Sunyani West District. We observe that privately managed mechanised boreholes have become a major source of water in the district, in terms of the number of people they serve and the fact that they are successful in serving them. However, water users and formal water providers have different perceptions of these boreholes. This tension between formal and informal providers needs to be resolved and one possible way is through formalisation of the informal services. We propose a hybrid model for water governance by the District Authority and argue that this governance arrangement will formalise the operations of the informal mechanised boreholes and reflect the intimate co-production of water between the formal suppliers and the emerging informal providers in the district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has brought global attention to the critical role of water in managing infectious outbreaks. Although Sub-Saharan Africa could become a COVID-19 hotspot, some are optimistic that given the right strategies and interventions the region can contain the pandemic. One such interventions is Ghana's directive to provide free water to domestic users for six months to ensure that water insecure households do not compromise appropriate hygiene and sanitation during COVID-19. We highlight in this commentary how the complex geographies of water provision in the region could undermine the overall benefits of such initiatives, especially to poor and water insecure households. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international development community spends billions of dollars annually on safe drinking water projects globally in low‐ and middle‐income settings. These projects are driven by the World Health Organization's Joint Monitoring Programme metrics that rely on indirect measurements of water insecurity via water source and fetching time, with tacit acknowledgment of price inelasticity. But the success of water interventions, as framed by these metrics, is often tempered by the reality that people do not always use the safest, nearest, or least expensive water source. Drinking water interventions are confounded by diverse social and environmental factors that shape household water seeking behaviors in unexpected or underappreciated ways. These caveats to human water‐related behaviors are littered throughout the drinking water literature—often as an anecdote to a given study's primary findings—and present significant barriers to providing universal safe water as outlined by Sustainable Development Goal 6. We review and categorize these socio‐environmental confounders into six themes at multiple scales: social relations, water properties, intermittency, affordability, fetching practices, and physical and mental health. We illustrate how efforts to mitigate drinking water insecurity are complicated by the interaction of these social and physical processes. We highlight emerging metrics that enable a richer assessment of household water insecurity, and emphasize the importance of transdisciplinary approaches to improve the effectiveness of clean water interventions. This article is categorized under:Engineering Water > Planning WaterEngineering Water > Sustainable Engineering of WaterHuman Water > Water as Imagined and RepresentedHuman Water > Value of Water [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The equitable and universal provision of safe and affordable water is one of the Sustainable Development Goals, but progress has been slow, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper presents a case study of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to highlight water access progress at the city scale. Using household surveys and interviews with officials, it explains improvements in hours of water availability and numbers of household water connections, but also discusses the remaining challenges with water cost and customer satisfaction. To achieve the goal of universal access, the city must further increase water production and address concerns with how water quality is monitored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article synthesizes the literature on historical and emerging institutional arrangements for urban water supply in Sub-Saharan Africa to highlight successes, drawbacks, and opportunities for improving future water access. It traces the influence of decades-long global water initiatives on urban water-policy reforms in the region and reviews evidence on emerging community self-help and partnership models. Finally, it discusses the merits, targets and potential of Sustainable Development Goal 6 to improve urban water access in the region. The findings suggest that improving urban water supply in Sub-Saharan Africa requires innovative governance and institutional arrangements that blend the strengths of public, private and community-based water supply models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Millennium Development Goal for water sought to halve the number of people without access to an improved source of water. The world officially achieved this goal in 2010, but a significant body of literature critiques the definition and measurement of access. This paper provides an overview of this criticism and uses data from Dar es Salaam to show that poor quality, fluid price structures, unreliable supplies, and burdensome collection all limit water access even though they are not considered in official measurements. This paper argues for a meaningful definition of access is required to generate real development and poverty reduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a low fertility rate and high life expectancy, Japan's population structure is unsustainable. The country's rapidly aging population has important cultural, political, social, and economic impacts. I traveled to Gifu and Mie Prefectures to study aging and eldercare in nursing homes, hospitals, and group homes. This article outlines my observations of these population effects, especially highlighting the impacts of national long term care insurance on where care is provided and various institutional efforts to maintain important cultural traditions and provide individualized care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]