‘White cranes fly over black cranes’: The longue durée of rural–urban migration in Vietnam

The changing nature of rural–urban migration, in the context of transition economies of East and Southeast Asia, is usually interpreted as an outcome of structural transformation, while the longue durée of these migration flows tends to be neglected. Adopting a historical perspective, supported by the ’migration as resistance’ approach, this paper examines the changes in rural–urban migration dynamics in Vietnam from the 1950s to 2010 in relation to the country’s political and economic reforms (Ð?i M?i). Drawing on a case study of female migration between Phu Khe and Hanoi, it analyses how migrants resist and undermine state control over population mobility in order to pursue their movement and migration, and how they develop their migration networks over time. By doing so, the paper highlights a gradual process of the changing nature of rural–urban migration in which migrants themselves, through their resistance to governance of mobility and their establishment of migration networks prior to Ð?i M?i, play an important role.     

Pareto’s law and sample size: a case study of China’s urban system 1984–2008

While Pareto’s law has been widely supported by empirical evidence in urban studies, past studies have focused on finding best fits for city rank-size distribution. A main concern with Pareto’s law is the truncation of sample selection, for which few studies have examined it directly. This study tests three existing threshold methods (number threshold, size threshold, and urban population percentage threshold) using China’s city system as a case study. In addition, this study proposes a new method based upon the percentage threshold of the total number of cities. A systematic analysis is applied to examine the relationship between Pareto exponent and sample size using different threshold methods. The results show that Pareto exponent is sensitive to sample size and the truncation point. Including only large cities is problematic because a slight change in the truncation point will yield quite different results of Pareto exponent. In addition, the new method, the percentage threshold of the total number of cities method, presents an advantage over previous methods, in that this method yields a consistent set of results over a wide range of thresholds. Finally, when using this new method with China’s city system, the Pareto exponent presents a turning point in 1996, representing China’s transition from a planned economy to a more market oriented economy during that period.     

The significance of quality of life and sustainability at the urban–rural fringe in the making of place-based community

Understandings of community in urban–rural fringe locations in Ireland are explored in this paper. As a specific space at the interface between the urban and the rural the fringe incorporates processes of rapid physical, social, and demographic change. These give rise to a range of complex and often competing dynamics, that impact on people and place in a variety of ways. Among the main preoccupations and concerns in these rapidly evolving fringe locations are those relating to what can broadly be described as ‘quality of life’. How this concept is understood across different groups situated within the spatial setting of the fringe, and how it influences the development of a sustainable community there, are central to this discussion. Drawing on household interviews from four case-study locations surrounding Galway City, Ireland, this paper examines how quality of life is experienced across a range of social and spatial dimensions that relate to these locations, and the extent to which they provide a common set of interests around which community may be built. From a wider knowledge perspective, it contributes to debates about how the concept of community provides explanatory power regarding the way in which individuals are associated with one another on the basis of a set of shared interests or concerns within a particular spatial setting.     

The ‘urban–rural divide’ at question: exploring the long-term shift of marital age in Greece

GeoJournal - While marital age is the highest worldwide, spatial disparities still exist among European regions. Although Mediterranean societies were traditionally characterized by high propensity...     

(Re)constructing rural–urban spaces: gendered livelihoods,migration, and natural resources in South Africa

Critical approaches to development theory and practice provide alternative perspectives that focus on counterhegemonic and discursive dimensions of the development process. Feminist development is one such approach that opens up new spaces and opportunities to promote socially progressive and sustainable economic strategies. This paper uses feminist development geography as a framework to highlight the intersection of diverse spaces and economic strategies at the household and community levels. The analysis focuses on gendered livelihoods that are linked to circular migration and use of natural resources as a way to understand the integration of rural and urban spaces of development. The empirical section of this paper examines demographic patterns and socio-economic trends in Limpopo Province, South Africa as a context for the case study of two community-based women’s producer groups. These examples illustrate how economic strategies and social identities are embedded in and integrate both rural and urban spaces. This analysis contributes to feminist and post-structural development theory and practice by highlighting the potential for progressive forms of economic and social empowerment.     

The stress state of the Earth’s lithosphere: Results of statistical processing of the world stress-map data

A method for the statistical processing of the input data on the stress state of the Earth’s lithosphere that takes the initial 3-D position of the principle stress axes into account is elaborated. This approach is based on the calculation of the arithmetic mean value for every six independent tensor components during determination of the average stress in any sampling. When determining the sampling for calculation of the average stress for the current cell of the calculated grid, it is proposed to insert the measurements into the sampling that are spatially located in such a manner where the distance from the measurement point to the cell center is less than some value that is named as a search radius. The latter either was specified as a constant for all cells of the calculated grid or was determined assuming that the dispersion of the average tensor was less than some preset value. The results of the application of this approach are presented based on the example of the processing of the measurements from the World Stress Map (Heidbach et al., 2008). The resultant set of the mean stress-field maps reflects the generalized pattern of the stress distribution in the Earth’s lithosphere.     

‘There’s no future here’: The time and place of children’s migration aspirations in Peru

This article examines young Peruvians’ aspirations and the role of migration in their imagined futures, from a generational perspective. The data come from Young Lives, a long-term study of childhood poverty combining survey and qualitative approaches with children and their parents. The paper uses a biographical approach that sees migration as part of individual biographies as well as social structures and life course processes. The aim is to deepen understanding of the social contexts in which aspirations for and by children are generated, paying close attention to family migration histories, dynamic household contexts, and children’s migration networks. The analysis focuses on the time-spaces of migration aspirations, showing the way past, present and future are interconnected. It also emplaces aspirations by focusing on the way aspirations by and for children are constituted in and through particular places. The conclusion reflects on the role of poverty and argues that ‘aspirations’ are about much more than abstract ‘futures’; they orient actions in the present and say a great deal about young people’s current realities and relationships.     

Inter-metropolitan migration of the newly landed immigrants in Canada: 1991–1996 and 1996–2001

Based on the tabulations of the Longitudinal Immigration Data Base, I characterized, explained and compared the 1991–1996 and 1996–2001 inter-metropolitan migration of the newly landed immigrants in Canada. The spatial and temporal patterns were consistent with the neoclassical economic theory and the ethnic enclave theory. In making their decisions on departure and destination choices, the immigrants were responsive to income and employment incentives, as well as the retaining and attracting powers of ethnic communities among Census Metropolitan Areas (CMAs). The research also discovered an interesting temporal pattern—while the inter-CMA migration of immigrants accentuated the over representation of the immigrants in Toronto and Vancouver in the 1991–1996 period, the rise of the “secondary” CMAs led to a spatial dispersal of the immigrants in the 1996–2001 period. This finding supplements the existing literature on internal migration of Canadian immigrants, which discovered little evidence of an increased dispersion of immigrants over time.     

Origin of the Early Sial Crust and U–Pb Isotope–Geochemical Heterogeneity of the Earth’s Mantle

It is shown that presence of the Early Precambrian sial crust in the Indo–Atlantic segment of the Earth and its absence in the Pacific has been caused by geochemical differences in the mantle underlying these segments. These differences were examined on the basis of Nd–Hf and U–Pb isotopes in modern basalts. The U–Pb isotope system is of particular interest, since uranium is a member of a group of heat-generating radioactive elements providing heat for plumes. It is shown that in the Indo–Atlantic segment, a distribution of areas of the modern HIMU type mantle is typical, while it is almost completely absent in the Pacific segment. In the Archean, in the upper HIMU type paleo-mantle areas, plume generation and formation of the primordial basic crust occurred; this was followed by its remelting resulting in the appearance of an early sial crust forming cratons of the Indo–Atlantic segment.     

Splendid isolation: ‘Philosopher’s islands’ and the reimagination of space

This paper argues that the metaphorical figure of the island plays an important but profoundly ambiguous role in the imagination of social space. The paper argues that ‘utopic’ islands have historically provided a fictional domain of experimentation that has informed the constitution of ‘real’ state spaces. From the 16th to 20th centuries this took the form of an increasingly consolidated and ‘global’ endotopia: a world, exemplified by the ‘political’ map, full of state spaces constituted as interiors. More recently, islands have served a very different metaphoric function, being used to create and legitimise spaces of exteriority – ‘xenospaces’ such as the online worlds of the ‘metaverse’ and the arcane legal/financial spaces of offshore – which in combination constitute an emergent xenotopia. The ‘philosopher’s island’ (Mackay, 2010), therefore, represents a complex and polyvalent spatial form that serves to continuously and expediently redefine the nature of social space.     

Gender myth and the mind-city composite: from Plato’s Atlantis to Walter Benjamin’s philosophical urbanism

In the early twentieth century Walter Benjamin introduced the idea of epochal and ongoing progression in interaction between mind and the built environment. Since early antiquity, the present study suggests, Benjamin’s notion has been manifest in metaphors of gender in city-form, whereby edifices and urban voids have represented masculinity and femininity, respectively. At the onset of interaction between mind and the built environment are prehistoric myths related to the human body and to the sky. During antiquity gender projection can be detected in western perceptions linking natural and built environments, commencing with Plato’s Atlantis and his Myth of Er, and later as a likely import of the Chinese yin-yang mythology. Culminating with the Age of Discovery, alongside advances in experiential awareness of the Earth’s sphericity, respective feminine and masculine earmarks can be detected in early modern perspicacity of the Earth’s southern and northern hemispheres. Our conceptions of natural and built environments inherently continue to contain gender traits. Yet urban voids, as the feminine face of city-form, have been severely understated in the built environment. Through design and configuration of urban voids, allegories of femininity in city-form ought to be celebrated, not discarded.     

Determination of the Parameters of the Earth’s Gravitational Field from Gradiometric Measurements

Astronomy Reports - The paper discusses the goals and objectives of the GOCE project, the measurement information and the data processing strategy used in determining the parameters of the...     

Toward vegetal political ecology: Kyrgyzstan’s walnut–fruit forest and the politics of graftability

As part of their long-running project to get beyond the nature–culture dualism, political ecologists have increasingly explored the active contributions of nonhumans to environmental politics. Upon decentering humans, however, too often posthumanist political ecologies have recentered humans and animals, indexing the enlarged category of “political actor” to narrowly shared traits like mobility or intentionality. Among other consequences, this tendency in political ecology’s posthumanism leaves the political agency of plants largely neglected. Political ecology suffers from this neglect, but the field can benefit from an integration of the insights of vegetal politics, a literature that traces the consequences of plant capabilities in more-than-human geographies. In this article, I model this integration—a vegetal political ecology—by examining human–plant partnerships in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan's walnut–fruit forest, an ecosystem distinguished by the number of its trees that can be modified by horticultural techniques like grafting. I argue that the forest’s “graftability” incrementally undermines two different hierarchies, one typifying people–plant relationships and another that characterizes state-centered regimes of post-Soviet forest governance. Graftability thus allows Kyrgyzstani villagers and trees to act with more autonomy than they otherwise would. This antihierarchical effect is a small biological determinism conferred by the capacities of the graftable tree, and it has political consequences. Vegetal political ecology aims to similarly connect plant performances to their broader political effects; by doing so, it can help political ecologists escape the residual humanism that still characterizes their efforts at posthumanism and better illuminate the political possibilities of partnering with plants.     

Structure and evolution of the Earth’s crust in the region of junction of the Central Asian Fold Belt and the Siberian Platform: Skovorodino–Tommot profile

An integrated geological and geophysical study was performed to investigate the region of junction of the eastern part of the Central Asian Fold Belt and the Siberian Platform in the Skovorodino–Tommot 3-DV reference profile line (52°–60° N, 122°–129° E), where the belt is separated from the Aldan–Stanovoi Shield of the Platform by a series of deep faults. The main results are as follows: Seismic, density, and geoelectric characteristics of rocks were obtained and used to determine (refine) the intracrustal boundaries of tectonic structures; large-block structure of the Earth’s crust, caused by mantle faults, and the difference between the layered structure of the crust for the shield and fold regions were established; and available paleomagnetic data were used to perform palinspastic reconstructions for 180 and 140 million years, the most productive metallogenic epoch in the region, coeval with collision processes at the closure of the Mongol-Okhotsk paleobasin.     

Assessment of microscale economic flood losses in urban and agricultural areas: case study of the Santa Bárbara River,Ecuador

Natural Hazards - To reduce and prevent significant economic flood losses, reliable tools are required to estimate potential river inundation effects. This paper focuses on the estimation of direct...     

Mineralogy and petrogenesis of a Ba–Ti–Zr-rich peralkaline dyke from Šebkovice (Czech Republic): Recognition of the most lamproitic Variscan intrusion

A peralkaline, ultrapotassic dyke found at ?ebkovice (T?ebí? district, western Moravia) is a mineralogically extreme member of a dyke swarm occurring along the south-eastern border of the Moldanubian Region of the Bohemian Massif. The dyke shows a simple zoning, with a very fine-grained marginal zone grading into a medium-grained central zone. It has a primary mineral assemblage of microcline and potassic amphiboles, with accessory apatite and altered phlogopite. The microcline exhibits an unusual red luminescence colour and pronounced substitution of Fe³⁺ for Al, with measured contents of Fe₂O₃ up to 8.5 wt.% (0.31 apfu Fe³⁺). Amphiboles have very high K (up to 0.99 apfu) and Si contents; their compositions follow an alkaline fractionation trend from potassic-richterite to potassic-magnesio-arfvedsonite, characterized by an increase of Na/K and a decrease of Ca, Mg, Fe²⁺ and Ti via heterovalent substitutions ^[B]Ca + ^[C](Mg,Fe²⁺) → ^[B]Na + ^[C]Fe³⁺ and Ti + Mg → 2Fe³⁺. The most evolved apatite is significantly enriched in SrO (up to 9.7 wt.%; 0.49 apfu Sr). The core of the dyke and late veinlets contain unique late- to post-magmatic Ba–Ti–Zr-bearing mineral assemblages of baotite, henrymeyerite, titanite, rutile, benitoite and bazirite. Anhedral baotite fills interstices distributed inhomogeneously in the dyke centre; it is locally replaced by a Ba-bearing titanite + henrymeyerite + rutile + quartz assemblage. Henrymeyerite (the second record in a lamproite) shows variable Fe/Ti ratios and represents a solid solution of the hepta- and hexatitanate components. Euhedral crystals of benitoite and bazirite are enclosed in the late-stage quartz–titanite–apatite veinlets in the fine-grained margin of the intrusion. In terms of a mineralogical–genetic classification, the ?ebkovice dyke can be considered as a new high-silica (~ 57 wt.% SiO₂) variety of lamproite (variety ?ebkovice), and represents a unique expression of post-collisional potassic magmatism on the south-eastern border of the Bohemian Massif. The peralkaline dykes from this area show mineralogical and geochemical features similar to those of silica-rich orogenic lamproites emplaced at destructive plate margins. In terms of the modern classification of lamproites, the ?ebkovice dyke is the first lamproite recognised in the Variscan orogenic belt.