1. Title: Industrial Townships and the Policy Facilitation of Corporate Urbanisation in India
Urban Studies
Volume 52, Issue 8, June 2015
1. Title: Industrial Townships and the Policy Facilitation of Corporate Urbanisation in India
Authors: Ashima Sood.
Abstract: New policy and legislative initiatives in India over the last decade, from the Special Economic Zones Act 2005 to subnational state-level counterparts, have encouraged processes of corporate urbanisation, by facilitating the development of ‘industrial townships’ largely by private actors. This emerging policy architecture places a range of municipal functions, infrastructures and services in the domain of the (private) township, paralleling processes of urban gating and enclave growth worldwide. This paper analyses the relevant policies and laws to examine the role of the state in facilitating the growth of such urban clubs in India and fostering privatised provision of public goods. With few evaluations of the scope and impacts of such urban development in India, the case of Jamshedpur, an early prototype of corporate urbanisation, highlights how such sites may encourage patterns of unplanned and under-provisioned growth around the core.
2. Title: Nourishing the City: The Rise of the Urban Food Question in the Global North
Authors: Kevin Morgan.
Abstract: The urban food question is forcing itself up the political agenda in the Global North because of a new food equation that spells the end of the ‘cheap food’ era, fuelling nutritional poverty in the cities of Europe and North America. This article explores the rise of the urban food question in the Global North through the multiple prisms of theory, policy and political practice. First, it explores the theoretical ways in which the food system is being framed in urban planning, urban political ecology and community food security. Second, it charts the rise of new urban foodscapes associated with urban agriculture and public health. Finally, it identifies a new urban food politics and asks if this constitutes a new social movement.
3. Title: Rural Development Led by Autonomous Village Land Cooperatives: Its Impact on Sustainable China’s Urbanisation in High-Density Regions
Authors: Jieming Zhu; Yan Guo.
Abstract: As a main rural initiative, village land shareholding cooperatives spearhead non-agricultural development in the interest of rural communities, and thus participate in urbanisation. Nanhai, Guangdong, is a case in illustration. The institution of land shareholding cooperatives gives rise to unique compartmentalised industrialisation and fragmented urbanisation in the context of high population density and small-area autonomous villages. Village cooperatives are mutated from economic corporations to welfare organisations, prompted by the collapse of village enterprises. Being averse to investment for long-term productivity, village cooperatives indulge in extracting short-term land rents solely. Extracting land economic rents created by urbanisation, village cooperatives generate environmental and social equality problems. High-density low-income countries, especially in Asia, are facing a great challenge as fierce competition for limited urban land resources without effective governance often results in an unfavourable form of urbanisation. Sustainable compact urbanisation needs to strike a balance between local autonomy and urban integrity.
4. Title: The Real Estate Markets: Players, Institutions and Territories
Authors: Thierry Theurillat, Patrick Rérat, and Olivier Crevoisier.
Abstract: Revealing the parties, the processes and the institutions and, consequently, both the diversity and contingency of the real estate markets, the existing increasing literature emphasises the contemporary numerous links and interdependencies between real estate, land value, planning and town planning policy and even the financial system. This paper is an attempt to understand all the real estate markets, from the most peripheral ones, where the urban rent is the lowest, to the most dense city centres. To gain a better understanding of the real estate market, a process of firstly deconstruction and then reconstruction is used. The process of deconstruction involves identifying various market trends according to property type (principally residential buildings), players and institutions, territorial situations and temporalities based on research conducted in Switzerland. We then developed a meta-synthesis inspired by Fernand Braudel whose works put as much emphasis on day-to-day economic activity as on long-term activity, and on local as well as global issues.
5. Title: Location or Design? Associations between Neighbourhood Location, Built Environment and Walking
Authors: Gi-Hyoug Cho and Daniel Rodriguez.
Abstract: In examining the association between environmental exposures and walking, conducting research on a neighbourhood scale has been the dominant approach whereas the association of the regional-scale environment with behaviours has rarely been explored. Because regional location and neighbourhood built environment attributes are likely to be correlated, the findings in neighbourhood-scale studies may be biased. In contrast to existing literature, this study is based on the assumption that a neighbourhood’s location may be associated with walking or physical activity and that this association may be separately identifiable from the influence of the neighbourhood built environment on behaviours. The findings indicated that residing in a highly urban location had a consistently positive association with walking and transportation-purpose physical activity when the neighbourhood built environment and individuals’ socio-demographic factors were controlled. Meanwhile the inclusion of the neighbourhood location variable did not result in significant changes to the models for recreation-purpose activity.
6. Title: Understanding Continuity in Sustainable Transport Planning in Curitiba
Authors: Jean Mercier, Fabio Duarte, Julien Domingue, and Mario Carrier.
Abstract: The Brazilian city of Curitiba has long been recognised as an exemplary success in urban planning, particularly its sustainable urban transport, with modal splits strongly favouring public transit. Its success was achieved principally through rigorous and detailed planning, beginning in the 1970s, using policy tools that have been described, and sometimes criticised, as technocratic. After 40 years of a quite successful experience in transport planning and implementation, Curitiba, like many world cities, faces new challenges, particularly in the form of metropolitanisation and increased aspirations for citizen participation. In this paper we investigate which policy tools are being used to face these emerging challenges in Curitiba, whether they are the same as those used in the past and which led the city to be a recognised urban transport success case, or different, more flexible and participative tools presumed to be more in tune with the emerging context of metropolitanisation and increased demands for participation. The answer, coming from interviews within Curitiba transport representatives, current literature review and limited comparisons with other successful transport cities of the Americas, suggests a continuation of Curitiba’s proactive format, one which has led to its past successes, with some modest overtures to more interactive and participatory policy tools.
- Jean Mercier
- Université Laval, Canada
- Fabio Duarte
- Pontificia Universidade Catolica do Parana, Brazil
- Julien Domingue
- Université Laval, Canada
- Mario Carrier
- Université Laval, Canada
- Jean Mercier, Université Laval, Science politique, 1030, Avenue des Sciences-Humaines, Local 4447, Quebec City, Quebec G1V 0A6, Canada. Email: jean.mercier{at}pol.ulaval.ca
7. Title: Monetary Policy and Bubbles in the National and Regional UK Housing Markets
Authors: I-Chun Tsai.
Abstract: Numerous studies have explained the significant correlation between monetary policies and asset pricing bubbles. This study uses data on the overall UK housing market and the five UK regions with the highest house prices to evaluate the correlation between monetary policies and pricing bubbles in the UK housing markets. This study uses a theoretical model to verify whether monetary policies affect asset pricing bubbles. Fluctuations in house prices are classified into fluctuations related to fundamentals (the mean reversion behavior and responses to information in the current period) and fluctuations unrelated to fundamentals (self-related behavior). After estimating the fluctuation behavior of house prices through quintile regression, this study asserts that a monetary easing environment can significantly increase housing returns. The self-related phenomenon of asset returns has increased significantly and has thus continuously increased prices and formed a bubble.
8. Title: Change in The Social Life of Urban Public Spaces: The Rise of Mobile Phones and Women, and the Decline of Aloneness over 30 Years
Authors: Keith N Hampton, Lauren Sessions Goulet, and Garrett Albanesius.
Abstract: This study illustrates that over the past 30 years, Americans have become less socially isolated while using public spaces. Based on content analysis of films from four public spaces over a 30-year period, the behavior and characteristics of 143,593 people were coded. The most dramatic changes in the social life of urban public spaces have been an increase in the proportion of women and a corresponding increase in the tendency for men and women to spend time together in public. Despite the ubiquity of mobile phones, their rate of use in public is relatively small. Mobile phone users appear less often in spaces where there are more groups, and most often in spaces where people might otherwise be walking alone. This suggests that, when framed as a communication tool, mobile phone use is associated with reduced public isolation, although it is associated with an increased likelihood to linger and with time spent lingering in public. We argue that public spaces are an important component of the communication system that provides exposure to diverse messages, brings people into contact to discuss their needs and interests, and helps people recognise their commonalities and accept their differences. The increased tendency to spend time in groups while in public contrasts with evidence from other research that suggests a decline in American public life, and that mobile phones have increased social isolation in public spaces. The increase in group behavior, women and lingering in public may have positive implications for engagement within the public sphere.
9. Title: Working with Diversity: A Geographical Analysis of Ethno-Racial Discrimination in Toronto
Authors: Brian Ray and Valerie Preston.
Abstract: Work is an important location for examining the heterogeneity of contemporary urban societies that are being transformed by migration, aging, and economic restructuring. At work locations, people from different ethnic and racial groups often encounter one another, regardless of whether they live in close proximity. Work is also a frequent site of discrimination, particularly for racial minorities. This study evaluates ethno-racial heterogeneity by documenting the spatial patterns of workplace location for ethno-racial groups in Toronto. We also compare and contrast the degree to which racial minorities experience discrimination at work. Based on our findings that underline a strong association between discrimination, racial minority status, and ethno-cultural group identification, we argue that it is important to examine critically the ways in which discrimination persists in racially and ethnically diverse work locations
10. Title: Constructing Radicalized Masculinities In/through Affective Orientations to a Multicultural Town
Authors: Esther Rootham, Abby Hardgrove, and Linda McDowell.
Abstract: This paper examines how gendered and racialised discourses and practices intersect to shape, to an extent, the ways in which young men are affected by representations of Luton and how they experience urban space. Using Wetherell’s concept of affective intersectionality, Hage’s distinction between passive and governmental belonging and Brah’s interpretation of diasporic identities, we argue that the affective-discursive modalities through which participants make sense of belonging reflects wider political discourses positioning them as differently valued. Despite contradictions and ambivalences, racialised young men tended to express relatively more positive feelings of being ‘at home’ in their neighbourhood and in Luton than the white young men we interviewed. Yet, they were also less likely to express a sense of entitlement to the city. Furthermore, spectacular racist events reinforced more mundane experiences of everyday racism, particularly among Muslim young men.
以下是书评：
11. Title: Vrbes Extinctae: Archaeologies of Abandoned Classical Towns
Authors: John P McCarthy.
Abstract: The article reviews the book “Vrbes Extinctae: Archaeologies of Abandoned Classical Towns” by Neil Christie and Andrea Augenti.
12. Title: Architectural Design and Regulation
Authors: Nicholas Coetzer.
Abstract: The article reviews the book “Architectural Design and Regulation” by Rob Imrie and Emma Street.
13. Title: Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut
Authors: Christine Mady.
Abstract: The article reviews the book “Leisurely Islam: Negotiating Geography and Morality in Shi’ite South Beirut” by Lara Deeb and Mona Harb.
14. Title: Implosions/Explosions: Towards A Study of Planetary Urbanization
Authors: Leslie Sklair.
Abstract: The article reviews the book “Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization” by Neil J Brenner.