A simple mathematical model for soil nail and soil interaction analysis

Soil nails have been widely used to stabilize slopes and earth retaining structures in many countries and regions, especially, in Hong Kong. The analysis of the interaction between a soil nail and the surrounding soil is of great interests to both design engineers and researchers. In this paper, authors present a simple mathematical model for the interaction analysis of a soil nail and the surrounding soil considering a few key factors which are soil dilation, bending of the soil nail, vertical pressure, and non-linear subgrade reaction stiffness. The lateral subgrade reaction between the soil and the soil nail is assumed to obey a hyperbolic relation. Reported test data in the literature are used to verify the present model. The contributions of the soil-nail bending on the pull-out resistance are evaluated in two case studies.     

扬子及周缘地区上奥陶统-下志留统烃源岩发育环境及其控制因素

扬子地区下古生界发育了上奥陶统五峰组和下志留统龙马溪组两套有效烃源岩,查清其发育环境及其控制因素具有重要的科学理论和油气勘探意义.晚奥陶世开始,扬子地区进入碎屑岩陆棚演化阶段;五峰期-龙马溪期,扬子地区主体为局限的深水陆棚环境,总体呈现出浅水陆棚、深水陆棚、次深海共存的古地理格局.沉积体系展布和沉积演化主要受扬子陆块与华夏陆块的汇聚作用控制.扬子地区上奥陶统-下志留统烃源岩的形成与生烃母质生物的高生产力和高埋藏率、冰期-冰后期之交的气温快速转暖、海平面快速上升以及粘土矿物在有机质富集保存过程中的赋存驻留作用等密切相关.     

Participation in payments for ecosystem services: Case studies from the Lacandon rainforest, Mexico

Understanding people’s willingness to participate in projects and programmes of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has not been a key analytical concern of the scholarly literature around this new field of environmental policy and practice. This paper analyses participation in four communities benefiting from payments for biodiversity and carbon fixation in Mexico, and contrasts the results for each case with neighbouring communities that do not receive payments. We take a holistic approach that accounts for procedural rules, actors’ interactions, institutions and values, and individuals’ characteristics. We show that the nature of PES rules and the effectiveness of communication with government officers and NGOs influence resource managers’ ability and willingness to participate. We highlight community size, resource managers’ ability to diversify livelihood activities and local perspectives on the conservation of common forests, particularly sacred values and intergenerational concerns on forest conservation, as critical participation drivers. This analysis provides insights on why and how these new institutions may be attractive for some resource managers and permits to draw some recommendations for the future design of PES projects and programmes.     

Water and power in Santiago de Chile: Socio-spatial segregation through network integration

The analysis of the history of the management and distribution of electricity, water and sanitation networks in Santiago de Chile throws light on a problem which is central to thinking on the relationship between urban services management and territorial splintering: what is the impact of urban policy, in particular housing policy and urban planning, on access to services and on the potential levels of social segregation and institutional splintering of metropolises?The Chilean example is eminently anchored in its political and institutional history. We shall see, for example, that the authoritarian urban policy of the military government, associated with early liberal reform, enabled the improvement of access to networks in every municipality of the Greater Santiago area. However, this success, leading to the integration by urban services of a large territory, does not signify that networks remained neutral as regards the process of spatial segregation. Inversely, we can defend the theory that the presence of an integrated service was a necessary condition and a reinforcing factor of the process of urban spread and residential segregation. This paradoxical argument is a result of the ambivalent liberal network and urban policies of the military government. Urban expansion was largely sustained by the development of integrated infrastructures and universal services. The processes of liberalising land and urban services were mutually sustaining and provided the necessary conditions for the birth of an extremely intense movement of urban sprawl and segregation between 1985 and 2000.     

Greening as strategic development in industrial change - Why companies participate in eco-networks

Networking between companies and other regional key actors has grown into a widespread instrument for economic development since the 1990s. Participatory networks have formed the concept for many activities of Local Agenda 21. Simultaneously, economic geography has focused on network theories to explain innovation in and the economic success of regions.This article focuses on the reasons why individual actors participate in environmentally oriented information networks. The questions approached are: Does the concept of learning within networks influence a firm’s development? How do the participants interact with each other? What effects do the networks have on their environment (arenas)?The changing arenas of a firm are analysed with regard to environmental concerns. These changes need to be anticipated for reliable strategies. To gain information and knowledge about current behaviour and activities, the functions of networks as learning platforms are discussed. Drawing upon arguments from different network theories, the motivations of participating in a network are threefold: actor and firm oriented, network internal (inter-firm), and network external. From these, a generic target cube of network motivations and actions is set up.The concept is reviewed by examining 12 ‘regional environmental information-oriented corporation networks’ (RUN) in the Greater Munich Area. The empirical material reveals that this type of network does not provide a guarantee for significant improvements in a firm’s environmental behaviour. However, participants learn about best practices while pursuing explicit or implicit aims as to influence their arenas.     

City senses: On the radical possibilities of pragmatism in geography

This paper explores the radical possibilities of pragmatism for geography using the illustration of arguments concerning a renewed (urban) public realm through the exchange of validity claims in communication. Pressing further the pragmatist possibilities of Habermas’s idea of communicative action it draws on John Dewey’s work, and a range of contemporary pragmatist philosophers, to consider human communicability in its widest sense. This is then explored using an example of the spatiality and performativity of body-minds in a range of communicative spaces of the city. Then the paper moves on to consider the radical implications of pragmatism for geography in general in terms of body-mind/environment relations; a transactional view of space; experience, rationality and radical democracy.     

Modeling households’ decisions on reconstruction of houses damaged by earthquakes––Japanese case study

In this study, households’ decisions on reconstruction of damaged houses were modeled, using questionnaire data in Japan. Characteristics of households’ decisions were investigated using parameter estimation results. The effects of subsidizing policy were evaluated as follows. First, subsidy for rebuilding may be effective for the households whose houses were heavily damaged. Second, there is a possibility that subsidy accelerated rebuilding of houses by the households having children. Third, subsidy for rebuilding may not be effective for elderly people’s households and households in depopulated areas.     

Identifying China’s leading world city: a network approach

This paper reports our research on China’s world cities. Formal network analysis of air passenger linkages for recent years among China’s most populous cities and among many of the world’s largest cities allows us to identify the country’s leading world city from among the leading Mainland candidates, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. We theorize our findings about China’s world cities in relation to both global forces (and China’s increasing entanglement with them) and the policies and actions of the national state. We examine the national and global urban network through a longitudinal, two-level analysis of airline passenger travel for four time points between about 1990 and 2005. We show that Beijing was China’s leading world city at the beginning of the time period, a status it lost nationally in as early as 1995, and then globally 10 years later. On the other hand Shanghai became China’s leading world city, and it acquired this status first nationally in 2000, and then globally in 2005. The changing status of the Chinese capital corresponds to the country’s increasing involvement with the capitalist world economy. Shanghai’s ascendance as the leading world city in China may indicate that global forces have come to play an increasingly important role relative to that of the developmental state.