Gated communities and urban fragmentation in Latin America: the Brazilian experience

Since the mid-1970s, gated housing areas of the privileged have been spreading in Latin American cities. They have to be seen as a visible consequence of the deepening social disparities within Latin American societies and the resulting fragmentation of urban space. Condomínios fechados (Brazil) or barrios cerrados (Argentina) can be typified following different criteria, such as formation, location, size, fittings, construction typology, as well as social structure. Three groups of actors influence the process of their expansion: the real estate companies, for which the new form of living offers an attractive market segment, the target groups, whose increasing expectations regarding security and living comfort need to be met, and the public authorities, who have to find adequate responses concerning the further orientation of urban development. Based on case studies from Brazil, the paper will discuss the different phases of gated community expansion and the reasons why this is happening. Their internal structure and differentiation, as well as consequences for socio-spatial development and urban planning will also be dealt with.     

International students as urban agents: International education and urban transformation in Auckland,New Zealand

This paper discusses connections between the internationalisation of education, and in particular the growth in international students, and processes of urban transformation. The research is centred in Auckland, New Zealand, a city where the number of international students has grown rapidly over the last decade leading to significant impacts on the urban form and experience of the city’s CBD. This includes growth in educational services such as language schools and other private training establishments, new residential geographies characterised by low-cost and low-quality high-rise developments, and new ethnic economies of food, service and entertainment businesses that explicitly target international students. The paper draws on research with South Korean international students and a range of secondary materials to interrogate the connections between student mobilities and changing urban form. In doing so the paper contributes to emerging scholarship on student geographies and the role of students as urban agents through the inclusion of an international dimension that has largely been absent in the extant literature. The findings illustrate that while international students themselves clearly play a significant role in the transformation of urban spaces their influence cannot easily be separated from the contribution of a range of other actors including educational businesses, property developers, transnational migrants and local and national state actors.     

对地质勘查设计进行审查的必要性——以监理某煤矿水文补勘工程为例

煤田勘探工程中监理工程师对设计的审查工作往往被忽视,与公路、建筑行业是有一定的差距。以监理某煤矿水文补勘工程为例,指出了设计中存在的补勘目的不明确,含水层的划分不准确,忽略了水文测井项目等诸多问题,同时强调了这些问题如不彻底解决所造成的严重后果。说明了针对存在问题所采取的程序措施和技术措施,突出了监理工程师在设计审查中的作用,明确了对地质勘查设计审查的必要性,对今后开展监理工作有一定的借鉴意义。     

Using economic geography to reinvigorate land-change science

In this paper we review the implications of neoclassical economic framings within the interdisciplinary field of land-change science. We argue that current pressing global environmental problems, such as land grabs, loss of critical carbon sinks and the increasing importance of corporate actors in land-use decision-making, necessitate a reconsideration of neoclassical conceptualizations of what the economy is, who economic actors are and how they make decisions, and how environment–economy linkages operate in a globalized world. We argue that concepts from economic geography can help land change science move beyond neoclassical framings. The first concept is that the economic (including markets, commodities, and rational decision-makers) is neither separate nor universal, but is historical and socially embedded. The second is to use these notions to understand the spatial organization of economic activity. The framework of global production networks, in particular, will help land change scientists conceptualize and represent teleconnections. Using economic geography to move beyond neoclassical economic framings will bring a fresh approach to economic change that holds much promise for invigorating land change science.     

The influence of the early formation of human and social capital on inventiveness: perspectives from a Swedish case study

Analysing life-history narratives of Swedish inventors, this paper explores how family background influences upon the formation of social and human capital and demonstrates how these capital resources affect the creative abilities of inventors. The main findings of the paper are that the socio-economic position one is born into has important implications for the development of human and social capital, and that the nature and extent of an inventor’s capital assets strongly influences the nature of his or her inventiveness. Inventors who come from higher socio-economic backgrounds have greater endowments of formal human capital than those from more modest backgrounds, and the social networks they use in their inventive work link them to other actors with human capital endowments similar to their own. Therefore, inventors with high human capital endowments will benefit from their social networks, as they constitute important means of gaining access to innovative knowledge and business advice. In contrast, inventors from lower socio-economic backgrounds with limited formal human capital resources are more likely to have actors in their social networks who themselves possess limited formal human capital. However, these inventors may become prosperous inventors if they are endowed with great social capital resources from their formative backgrounds because, for inventors, high endowments of social capital can compensate for a lack of formal human capital.     

Producing interventions for AIDS-affected young people in Lesotho’s schools: Scalar relations and power differentials

Children and youth are a key target group for interventions to address southern Africa’s AIDS pandemic. Such interventions are frequently implemented through schools, and are often complex products of negotiation between a range of institutional actors including international agencies, NGOs, government departments and individual schools. These institutions not only stand in different (horizontally scaled) spatial relationships to students in schools; they also appear to operate at different hierarchical levels. Empirical research with policy makers and practitioners in Lesotho, however, reveals how interventions are produced through flows of knowledge, funding and personnel within and between institutions that make it difficult to assert that any intervention is manifestly more international or more local than any other. Scale theory offers the metaphor of a network or web which usefully serves to move attention away from discrete organisations, sectors and scalar positionings and onto the relationships and flows between them. Nevertheless, organisations and development interventions are often partly structured in scalar hierarchical ways that express substantive power differentials and shape the forms of interaction that take place, albeit not binding them to strict binaries or nested hierarchies. A modified network metaphor is useful in aiding understanding of how particular interventions are produced through intermeshing scales and diverse fluid interactions, and why they take the form they do.     

Till geochemical and indicator mineral methods in mineral exploration

This paper summarizes advances since 1987 in the application of glacial sediment sampling to mineral exploration (drift prospecting) in areas affected by continental or alpine glaciation. In these exploration programs, clastic glacial sediments are tested by geochemical or mineralogical methods to detect dispersal trains of mineral deposit indicators that have been glacially transported from source by mechanical processes. In glaciated terrain the key sampling medium, till, is produced by abrasion, crushing and blending of rock debris and recycled sediment followed by down-ice dispersal ranging from a few metres to many kilometres. As a consequence of the mid-1980s boom in gold exploration, the majority of case studies and regional till geochemical surveys published in the past decade deal with this commodity. Approximately 30% of Canada and virtually all of Fennoscandia have been covered by regional till geochemical surveys that aid mineral exploration and provide baseline data for environmental, agricultural, and landuse planning. The most profound event in drift prospecting in the last decade, however, has been the early-1990s explosion in diamond exploration which has dramatically increased the profile of glacial geology and glacial sediment sampling and stimulated changes in sampling and analytical methods.     

Prediction of slope stability using artificial neural network (case study: Noabad, Mazandaran, Iran)

Investigations of failures of soil masses are subjects touching both geology and engineering. These investigations call the joint efforts of engineering geologists and geotechnical engineers. Geotechnical engineers have to pay particular attention to geology, ground water, and shear strength of soils in assessing slope stability. Artificial neural networks (ANNs) are very sophisticated modeling techniques, capable of modeling extremely complex functions. In particular, neural networks are nonlinear. In this research, with respect to the above advantages, ANN systems consisting of multilayer perceptron networks are developed to predict slope stability in a specified location, based on the available site investigation data from Noabad, Mazandaran, Iran. Several important parameters, including total stress, effective stress, angle of slope, coefficient of cohesion, internal friction angle, and horizontal coefficient of earthquake, were used as the input parameters, while the slope stability was the output parameter. The results are compared with the classical methods of limit equilibrium to check the ANN model’s validity.     

After the consent: Re-imagining participatory land governance in Massingir,Mozambique

Massingir district is located in southern Mozambique, bordering South Africa. From the mid-2000s onwards, foreign private and domestic investments in the district have been on the rise in the agribusiness, tourism, and conservation sectors. This has resulted in events that scholars and activists have come to describe as land, water, and green grabs. The on-going discussions have urged the government to fully implement the policy and legal frameworks that oblige investors to undertake community consultations based on the principle of Free and Prior Informed Consent (FPIC) and to safeguard the communities’ land right acquisition. However, little has been clarified about how the consulted communities actually have experienced the consequences of their consent after they agreed to resettle or to concede parts of their communally managed land to investors. This article elaborates on a case study of a community resettled from the Limpopo National Park in Massingir and the neighboring community, which, after struggling to secure land and to improve their livelihood, began to reflect on their initial consent, interact with various actors, and craft strategies for expressing dissent and re-negotiating the deal they had struck. The article argues that the current emphasis on consultation for the purposes of building consent overlooks the importance of paying systemic attention to these strategies that are emerging from the community’s everyday experiences with the consequences of their act of giving consent. Inclusive land governance entails an institutional mechanism that closely responds to people’s experiences with policy practices.     

Repressive tolerance: The gay movement and the Vatican in Rome

The World Gay Pride week convened in Rome in July 2000 at the same time the Catholic Church planned on celebrating its Holy Year Jubilee. Thousands of gays came together, and by the end of the week more than 200,000 marched through the streets of Rome's historical centre. This unique event provides an opportunity to examine the causal relationship of the gay movement acquiring a political identity of its own while the city of Rome was trying to assert a `proper' identity for its public spaces. Acting in solidarity for the first time since its formation, the gay movement drew attention to the difficulties in securing unrestricted access to Rome's public spaces. Conservative sectors of society challenged the right to demonstrate, as guaranteed in Italy's Constitution, which resulted in the delay of obtaining the necessary permit. On the one hand, this revealed the existence of sectors of society not yet willing to acknowledge gay rights or even discuss gay issues in public; on the other, it helped make clear that the process for building Rome's identity is governed by a specific political design. In particular, policies for the privatisation of urban space in conjunction with discriminatory planning processes in the city's historical centre, point to tourism as a powerful tool to control urban space. Resisting this spatial marginalization the gay movement has significantly widened the scope of its social and political action in order to contest prevailing practices and trends which are shaping the city.     

The limits of armed contestation: Power and domination in armed groups

Non-state war actors have only recently become a subject of study in political geography while other social sciences such as political anthropology, sociology and political science have addressed this subject in their respective conceptual language. This article, drawing on empirical research on war actors in 14 countries and using data on a sample of 80 such groups, advocates using the language of political sociology, and in particular that of Max Weber and Norbert Elias, to study this form of contestation. It presents some major findings of an empirical analysis built on these conceptualizations. Written from a political science perspective it tries to link up to the discourse in other social sciences, especially in political geography.     

Zoning in: The contributions of buyam–sellams to constructing Cameroon’s wild food zone

Studies of forests in Africa employ the term zone to denote a particular type of forested area. This limited usage speaks to a need for human geographers to pay more attention to elaborating and engaging with the concept of the zone. This article shows why human geography should pay the ‘zone’ more attention. Using Cameroon’s humid forest zone (HFZ) as a case study, the article focuses on how conceptual elaboration of the ‘zone’ can inform analyses of the food product trade in Cameroon. This trade is organized around various types of buyers and sellers (or buyam–sellam in pidgin), and offers a wide variety of wild products to Cameroon’s urban food consumers, including fruits and vegetables, game meat, condiments, medicinal plants, and fibers. Drawing on fieldwork surveys, interviews and focus groups in twenty-four markets of 203 buyam–sellams and 197 of their customers during the wet and dry seasons, this article analyzes narratives about Cameroon’s wild food zone. It ultimately shows what scholarly attention to the ‘zone’ offers in this case that other spatial concepts do not.     

Beyond flexible citizenship: Towards a study of many Chinese transnationalisms

Over the last decade, flexible citizenship has contributed much to our understandings of how contemporary Chinese migrate across the world in late capitalism. This corpus has not only called attention to the manifold strategies that these migrants adopt to inhabit multiple spaces, but has also elucidated how transnational migration can be deployed for the purposes of capital accumulation and enhancement of one’s lifestyle. This paper argues that the current fixation on the flexible strategies of the Chinese ‘shuttling’ between the East and West inevitably occludes other logics of mobilities that may be more germane for other (neglected) segments of the ‘new Chinese diaspora’. Through its consistent rehearsal, the present preoccupation may have led to an inadvertent reification of flexible citizenship, as the paradigmatic model of modern-day Chinese mobilities. In an effort to move the discussion forward, this paper weaves a deliberately dissonant story with the narratives of 50 Singaporean Chinese migrants who are living in, or who have returned to Singapore from, New York or the Californian-Bay Area. The viewpoints offered by these less ‘conventional’ Chinese subjects not only diverge from the usual ‘strategic’ or ‘calculative’ storylines among the Hong Kongers and Taiwanese, but also uncover distinctive assemblages that span across multi-sited and transcultural contexts. Although this paper has no intentions to discredit flexible citizenship, it hopes to have begun the process of decentring the locus of our knowledge pertaining to the subject, drawing attention to the possibility of alternative realities within many Chinese transnationalisms.     

Twenty-five years of spectral UV-B measurements over Canada,Europe and Japan: Trends and effects from changes in ozone,aerosols, clouds,and surface reflectivity

Spectral UV records of solar irradiance at stations over Europe, Canada, and Japan were used to study long-term trends at 307.5 nm for a 25-year period, from 1992 to 2016. Ground-based measurements of total ozone, as well as satellite measurements of the Aerosol Index, the Total Cloud Cover and the surface reflectivity were also used in order to attribute the estimated changes of the UV to the corresponding changes of these factors. The present study shows that over the Northern Hemisphere, the long-term changes in UV-B radiation reaching the Earth's surface vary significantly over different locations, and that the main drivers of these variations are changes in aerosols and total ozone. At high latitudes, part of the observed changes may also be attributed to changes in the surface reflectivity. Over Japan, the UV-B irradiance at 307.5 nm has increased significantly by ∼3%/decade during the past 25 years, possibly due to the corresponding significant decrease of its absorption by aerosols. It was found that the greatest part of this increase took place before the mid-2000s. The only European station, over which UV radiation increases significantly, is that of Thessaloniki, Greece. Analysis of the clear-sky irradiance for the particular station shows increasing irradiance at 307.5 nm by ∼3.5%/decade during the entire period of study, with an increasing rate of change during the last decade, possibly again due to the decreasing absorption by aerosols.     

Some things old, some things new: The spatial representations and politics of change of the peak oil relocalisation movement

Despite continued uncertainty about the physical realities and political, economic and social implications of peak oil, combined concerns about oil scarcity, climate change and globalisation has spawned an energetic relocalisation movement dedicated to achieving a comprehensive reduction in oil dependency through community-scale initiatives. This paper uses a discourse approach to examine the emergence, geographical spread and practices of the Transition Network, a UK-originated relocalisation movement now involving 186 local initiatives in the UK and other countries. We trace the movement’s drawing upon, and innovation from, discourses and techniques used by other grassroots environmental movements to promote a spatial representation of peak oil as an inevitable and geographically undiscriminating problem, and its use of addiction metaphors and participatory techniques to promote personal and community-scale energy descent initiatives as a viable and necessary alternative to globalisation. We also analyse the spatial representations and techniques used in the Network’s “rhizomic” spread across multiple localities around the world and embedding in communities where relocalisation initiatives are established. We conclude by examining the future challenges these spatial constructions of peak oil pose for the relocalisation movement.     

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.     

Global forest conservation initiatives as spaces for participation in Colombia and Costa Rica

This paper investigates the spaces for participation that have been created by readiness preparations launched in connection with the international initiative “Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation” (REDD+) in Colombia and Costa Rica. I analyse the emergence of these spaces and who is leading the process in each country. My findings indicate that in Costa Rica, the public sector is leading preparation activities and creating the public spaces for participation in REDD to which private actors are invited. In Colombia on the other hand, NGOs, development assistance agencies and other private actors are leading the process and the state is the invited actor. I identify four factors that determine the scope of different actors’ possibilities to participate in the REDD+ spaces. These are (a) control of key resources, (b) ideological affinity, (c) the creation and dissemination of information and knowledge, and (d) the creation of norms to validate REDD+ pilot initiatives. The separation between these factors is not clear-cut and consequently they reinforce each other at different levels. The research presented here contributes to a better understanding of the implications that national REDD+ politics may have in the future functioning of the programme.     

Neoliberalism and privatisation in South Africa

Perhaps the defining characteristic of development as a global discourse is its neoliberal character. Even recently liberated nations such as South Africa have not escaped its reach. In South Africa, there has been a movement from a development policy with a socialist resonance – the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) – to one decidedly neoliberal in form and substance – the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy. The articulation of neoliberalism through development policy is being facilitated through a series of measures among which are fiscal austerity, export oriented production and the privatisation of public sector services. While the GEAR policy, as a macroeconomic framework, is being contested by labour unions it is privatisation which is facing widespread opposition among communities. My intention is twofold, firstly, to investigate how neoliberalism as a global hegemonic discourse has succeeded in capturing, colonising and repackaging the development imaginary of the African National Congress (ANC). Secondly, I wish to examine how privatisation as a sub-discourse of neoliberalism is being articulated in the historically black township of Chatsworth, in Durban. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.