The border as an engine for mobility and spatial integration: A study of commuting in a Swedish–Norwegian context

The purpose of the study was to analyse how cross-border commuting differed from intranational commuting in Sweden, and how cross-border mobilities affected spatial integration. The authors analysed patterns and spatial flows of cross-border commuting by comparing them with characteristics of intranational commuting. In the article, they explore the assumption that the border constitutes an ‘engine’ for work-related mobility, which affects processes of spatial integration in cross-border areas. The empirical material comprised data from surveys of commuting from the Swedish county of Värmland to Norway and commuting within Värmland. The findings showed that cross-border commuting shared common features with intranational commuting, including how the frequency of commuting was dependent on distance. The motives for commuting differed, and the reasons for working in Norway were economic rather than professional. In terms of spatial integration, cross-border commuting was mainly one-directional, from Sweden to Norway, while leisure mobility and migration tended to be in the opposite direction. The authors conclude that the border region is characterised by integration through specialisation, which involves a permanent state of ‘transient’ mobility. Thus, a win-win situation can be distinguished, in which the border serves as a resource and an ‘engine’ for cross-border integration, mobility and economic activities.     

中国城市区域治理的尺度重构与尺度政治

系统回顾西方尺度理论,尤其是尺度生产（尺度重构与尺度政治）理论,借此阐释中国城市区域治理形成的尺度逻辑。研究发现,中国城市区域包括城市群与都市区2个地理尺度;治理尺度是以行政权力为核心,形成自上而下的行政权力金字塔;治理尺度的动态重配并与地理尺度相耦合的过程是中国城市区域治理的尺度建构的本质;改革开放后,中国宏观政治经济在“去中心化-再中心化”过程中持续动态调整;中国城市区域的产生是国家空间选择性的结果,来克服以城市为基础的资本积累模式的体制危机;城市群治理以柔性尺度重构为主,都市区治理以刚性尺度重构为主;城市区域内部产生复杂的多主体间的尺度博弈。     

Re‐enlivening the Indian Ocean through contemporary trade: East African traders searching for new markets in Jakarta

While much has been written about the history of mobility and trade in the Indian Ocean, recent trading connections between Eastern Africa and Asia have so far only gained very little attention. However, in Zanzibar alone, hundreds of traders regularly embark on journeys reviving old routes and further develop them, in order to take advantage of the way the global economy works today. By providing an ethnographic account of such a journey undertaken by four Zanzibari traders to Jakarta, this article gives an insight into the organization, calculations and imaginations involved in contemporary Indian Ocean trading networks. Although this trade journey clearly marks a new form of translocal mobility among Zanzibari traders, this mobile ethnography highlights how the journey is at the same time closely linked to, evokes and enlivens very old processes of mobility across the Indian Ocean, thus highlighting the dialectics between old and new mobilities, and between familiarity and strangeness.     

Mobility encounter: The narratives of Burmese refugees in Norway

The article examines the lived experiences of Burmese refugees in Norway in order to understand how they experience integration into local society and how they manage their transnational lives in new socio-economic, political, and cultural contexts. The examination is performed from the perspective of mobility as the entanglement of movement, representation, and practice. In teasing out the refugees' various experiences, the author emphasizes the diversity of migrant groups in terms of their ethnicity, religion, gender, and age, as well as multiple dimensions of mobilities. The complex politics of mobility – how different mobilities are produced, practised, and regulated in relation to issues such as transnational migration, diasporic cultures, and communication technologies – is seen as underlying the narratives of Burmese refugees in Norway. Their narratives equate mobilities with escape from poverty, highlighting the linkage that mobility has with poverty and development. The discussion reveals the potential for divisiveness within wider society in Norway, and it is argued that a nuanced understanding of how mobilities are differentially accessed within immigrant groups is essential for conceiving a multicultural society in Norway.     

论土地整治与乡村空间重构

目前,中国新型工业化、城镇化和农业现代化的推进仍缺乏重要抓手和空间支撑平台,严重影响了城乡一体化发展进程。亟需通过开展农村土地综合整治,重构乡村生产、生活和生态空间,为推进新农村建设和城乡一体化发展搭建新平台。本文在界定了乡村空间重构,即在快速工业化和城镇化进程中,伴随乡村内生发展需求和外源驱动力综合作用下导致的农村地区社会经济结构重新塑造,乡村地域上生产空间、生活空间和生态空间的优化调整乃至根本性变革的过程,及其产业发展集聚、农民居住集中和资源利用集约3 个方面内涵的基础上,分析了工业化和城镇化进程对乡村生产、生活和生态空间的影响;探讨了乡村空间重构的土地整治类型及助推机制;结合农用地整治、"空心村"整治和工矿用地整治提出了乡村生产、生活和生态空间重构的模式与途径,以及依托土地整治的以"自下而上"为主、"自上而下"为辅的乡村空间重构战略。作为城乡一体化发展根基的乡村空间其重要性和基础平台作用应受到足够重视,乡村集约高效的生产空间、宜居适度的生活空间和山清水秀的生态空间的优化重构,有赖于区域农村土地整治工程技术、政策机制与模式的创新。     

转型时期广州居民职住流动及其空间结构变化——基于3个年份的调查分析

中国城市处于由国家/集体分配体制为基础的计划经济向以市场调控为基础的市场经济转型的特殊时期,城市居民职住空间大规模重构。本文基于2001年、2005年和2010年家庭调查问卷,分析城市居民职住流动及其空间变化,总结城市居民职住流动对广州市社会空间重构的影响。改革开放以来广州市城市居民职住流动率大规模增加,且圈层差异明显,越往外围,职住流动率越高。城市居民的职住就近流动的特征明显,偏好于工作地附近就近选择居住地或在居住地附近就近选择工作地。地方政府应通过城市规划、就业制度改革和住房制度改革等手段来加强宏观调控,合理引导不同社会群体的职住区位选择,以减少居住空间分异和职住空间的过度分离。     

全球重构中尺度重组及其地域性管制实践研究

为解释20世纪70年代以来的全球重构现象,西方人文地理学经历了尺度转向并开展了尺度重组的理论和实证研究。“尺度重组”的常见含义有三类:抽象层面的社会建构基础上尺度的历史演变、具体层面的国家或城市尺度重组以及政治斗争视角的行动者对尺度的运用。这一概念具备4个基本要素或特征,即尺度的社会建构和动态演进、尺度重组同政治斗争的关联性、尺度重组的路径依赖性以及尺度重组同其他空间维度的关联性。基于当前理论和实证研究,尺度重组的典型地域性管制实践可归纳为行政权限调整、行政区划调整、地方增长极的培育和跨边界区域合作。     

Spatial and social transformations in a secondary city: the role of mobility in Sekondi-Takoradi,Ghana

Abstract

Existing research on urban Ghana mainly focuses on processes occurring within the country’s major cities, thereby reproducing a trend within the social sciences to overlook the role of intermediate and secondary cities. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by exploring spatial and social transformations in Sekondi–Takoradi, one of Ghana’s secondary cities and the metropolitan area serving the region’s emerging rubber industries as well as the country’s oil and gas economy. Using qualitative interviews conducted with residents in five of the city’s neighbourhoods, and a modified version of Kaufmann’s typology of mobility, we examine migration into Sekondi–Takoradi, residential mobility within the city and the daily mobility of the city’s residents. The paper highlights how these diverse forms of mobility interact with processes taking place both within and outside Sekondi–Takoradi, most notably influencing and being influenced by livelihood strategies. It is argued that the city and its hinterlands can best be envisaged as a mobile networked whole, rather than consisting of disconnected and compartmentalized locales. The paper thus contributes to broader debates on how mobility shapes urbanization by providing new empirical data on events unfolding in Africa’s secondary cities, and extends existing research by providing a counter-narrative to literature that examines the city and its surrounding rural areas separately.     

尺度重组视角下粤港澳大湾区同城化地区跨界治理机制研究

在经济全球化竞争下,尺度重组已成为中国调控空间发展的重要跨界治理手段,以实现吸引资本流动、培育区域经济发展动能的目的。同城化地区作为一种城市区域尺度,其跨界治理机制逐渐成为区域一体化的重要议题。文章以国内同城化进程相对成熟的广佛同城为例,从尺度重组的视角探讨其跨界治理演变,研究发现广佛同城化进程经历了两个阶段的尺度重组：从“行政区”尺度到以广佛高质量发展融合试验区为代表的“功能区”尺度。新阶段治理机制在治理主体上增加了功能平台管委会和市场主体,强化以功能区为引导、以全周期为理念的规划建设运营机制,在激励机制上转向政策争取与制度红利共享,可视为广佛原有治理机制的经验保留和渐进式改革。广佛为适应不同阶段发展运用尺度重组策略推进治理创新的探索,能为粤港澳大湾区乃至全国其他都市圈同城化地区跨界治理提供参考。     

辽宁沿海城市带空间结构

辽宁沿海城市带是中国环渤海地区的重要组成部分。在辽宁沿海经济带开发上升为国家战略的背景下,该区域城市群空间结构必然面临着转化与重组。本文以辽宁沿海城市带24个大、中、小城市为空间单元,分别从城市规模、经济发展水平、交通网络通达性3方面讨论城市群集聚程度,并对其空间分布特征进行分析,结果表明:①城市规模等级差异明显,首位城市垄断性强。通过构建规模指数模型,将该区域24个规模不等的城市分为4级,同级城市规模指数幅度变化不大,但是不同级别城市之间规模差异很明显。进一步运用首位度、分形理论等方法分析城市规模分布的空间特征,发现该区域城市首位分布明显,城镇规模分布较为松散,人口空间分布差异程度较大。②经济发展格局具有明显的层序性,空间集聚现象显著。经济空间结构呈现非均衡分布状态,而且各城市的经济发展水平之间存在较强的空间正相关关系,具有相似发展水平的城市在空间上具有显著的集聚及两极分化现象,发展水平较高的城市集中布局于辽东半岛,而辽宁省西部以及东南部的经济极化现象较弱。③通达性空间分异明显,交通网络仍有很大发展潜力。通达性最优区域集中分布在该区域的几何中心以及辽东半岛地区,辽西、辽东南的通达性值普遍较高。④综合以上分析,发现辽宁沿海城市带空间结构为典型的条形核心—外围—边缘结构,具有大连、锦州、营口3个强中心,其中大连的极化作用最强。     

国家级新区的治理尺度建构及其经济效应评价

国家级新区作为中国战略空间的核心内容,其设立与发展过程中的治理尺度建构至关重要。论文从尺度重构视角建立了分析框架,以此来考察国家级新区治理尺度建构的实践,并采用回归模型实证检验了不同治理类型的经济效应。研究认为,国家级新区治理尺度建构是各级行政主体通过刚性或柔性的手段在新区的定位、区划和权力配置等方面进行变革的作用过程。在具体实践中,不同国家级新区所建构的治理尺度在地域空间组织、行政主体构成和权力分配等方面具有显著差异,形成了多样化的治理类型。其中,“市辖区+合署办公”和“市辖区+管委会”等治理类型具有较高的经济效应,有助于解决权力边界模糊和治理主体多元等问题,而“市辖县+管委会”和“跨地市+管委会”等治理类型则表现出较低的经济效应。对于跨地级市或包含市辖县的国家级新区,需要适时推进“撤县设区”来简化治理主体或通过上级政府的“强势权力介入”来统一地域发展逻辑。     

The Permeable City: Toronto's Spatial Shift at the Turn of the Millennium

This article presents an analysis of the relationship between urban governance restructuring, and global, national, and local action through a case study of the Toronto city‐region. The Toronto city‐region recently underwent a massive reorganization of its governance structures, functions, and jurisdictional boundaries. This restructuring raises questions about why these changes occurred at this particular juncture in the region's history. Why did the city that had always been known in the academic and political discourse as the “city that works” stop “working”? What global and national forces might have accounted for such a radical restructuring? And what did local action contribute? These questions are explored in both historical and contemporary contexts by drawing on insights from regulation theory, urban regime theory, and an analysis of Canada's changing fiscal federalism. This approach informs the role that institutions — regardless of their origin or territorial scope — play in sustaining a local accumulation system, and how this “local” accumulation grounds a national regulatory mode and regime of accumulation. The approach also explores the relationship between regime and regulation theories in the context of policy formation and institution building. The study concludes that the current policy set is incapable of resolving the region's crisis tendencies. Notwithstanding external forces, the current policy set is not inevitable. Globalization does not predetermine all spatial‐economic outcomes.     

Mobile livelihoods among ethnic minorities in China: Insights from Yunnan

Ethnic minority populations in Yunnan have had diverse mobility patterns since the advent of globalized production and developmental programmes. The article presents insights into the various mobility patterns and their effects in Yunnan and contributes to an understanding of the present economic and social processes of mobilities and changes in China as a whole. The analysis is based on an empirical study conducted in the years 2010–2011 by the authors together with local researchers in Yunnan. The results revealed that the mobilities practised among members of the ethnic minority groups in Yunnan included not only outmigration but also cross-border cultivation of plantations, daily and circular mobility, inflows of labour and investors, and involuntary relocation. Although some mobilities may have been conducive to livelihoods and capabilities due to the income-earning and profit-making opportunities arising from the acquisition and appropriation of land and capital, they have also resulted in differentiation processes that confirm the counter-geographies of production, survival, and profit-making. The authors conclude that mobilities do not just concern physical location, but as a social process, mobilities have reconstituted relational references and networks in terms of ethnic and cultural identity, gender relations, labour division, and locality and community integration.     

Urban investment and development corporations,new town development and China’s local state restructuring – the case of Songjiang new town,Shanghai

This article seeks to understand China’s new urban space production and associated state space rescaling through a microscopic investigation of urban investment and development corporations (UIDCs), based on a case study of Shanghai’s Songjiang New Town Development Corporation (SNTDC). It argues that the introduction of UIDCs as both developers and managers of designated urban regions is a creation of institutional reformation to accomplish customized place- and scale-specific spatial projects under the state strategy of new urban spatial development, playing an essential part in the rescaling of state space. UIDCs are economically independent of other social groups, politically bonded with the local government, and assume entrepreneurial and administrative functions within designated areas, acting as intermediary agents to enable local states greater capacity in governing new urban space production, engineering social change, and propelling economic development.     

‘We are at the mercy of the floods!’ : Extreme weather events,disrupted mobilities,and everyday navigation in urban Ghana

This paper examines how extreme weather events affect the mobility of low-income urban residents in Ghana. Bringing together scholarship on extreme weather and mobilities, it explores the differential impact of flooding on their everyday lives as they navigate the cities of Accra and Tamale. A range of qualitative methods were drawn on, including semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, and follow-along-participant observations in selected communities of both cities. Three key themes emerged: disrupted road and transport infrastructure, everyday mobility challenges, and coping/adaptive strategies. In flooding conditions, residents experienced difficulties leaving/returning home, engaging in income-generating activities, and accessing transport services and other key urban infrastructure. Conceptually, the paper reveals how disruption to urban residents’ daily movements and activities (re)produces new forms of mobilities and immobilities, which have three relational elements: postponed, improvised and assisted. Throughout the analysis, we show how these mobilities/immobilities vary by age and gender: all urban residents, (though women in particular), experience postponed mobility; young people especially engage in improvised mobility; and children and the elderly are in greatest need of assisted mobility. The paper thus contributes to scholarship on extreme weather events and mobility by providing a more spatially nuanced understanding of the multi-faceted domains in which flooding, socio-economic conditions and adaptive strategies intersect to influence urban mobility in resource poor settings.     

流动视角下跨国教育空间的构建：国际学校案例

流动视角下对多元教育空间的理解需要反思教育与不同地理空间和过程间的相互塑造,以及教育流动过程的关系化本质。以广州某典型国际学校为例,通过参与式观察和半结构化访谈等质性研究方法,分析了跨国教育空间构建过程中全球与本土、流动与驻留（stillness）间的张力。研究表明：知识、人、空间等要素以相互依托和嵌套的方式进行跨国流动,将国际学校打造为全方位、多层次的跨国“教育飞地”;同时,流动的过程并不意味着是对驻留的否定,两者同时塑造着学校空间。一定程度本土要素的加入并没有动摇学校作为国际教育机构的根基。总体来看,教育资源的整体性跨境流动在物理空间、社会服务和阶层意义上形成了与本土间的隔离。构建于本土的跨国教育未能实现真正的跨文化互动和联系,反而进一步强化了文化的差异和边界的形成。研究对教育地理学的丰富和国际化背景下城市特殊空间的研究具有积极推动意义。     

Manoeuvring the middle ground: Social mobility and the renegotiation of gender and family obligations among Chinese Singaporeans

The article examines Singaporeans' experiences of upward social mobility and how traditional gender roles within the family are renegotiated and reinterpreted in Singapore. When the former British colony gained independence in 1965 its post-colonial government embarked on an ambitious modernization programme, under which villages were demolished and residents relocated to new high-rise estates, farmland gave way to factories, the education system was reformed, and women entered the workforce. The transformation has been accompanied by a rapid upward social mobility, whereby Singaporeans born in the midst of the transformation, in the period 1960s – 1980s, lived remarkably different lives compared with preceding generations. The article is an ethnographic analysis of how Singaporean middle-class women and men, who have experienced rapid upward social mobility, handle and negotiate changing expectations regarding gender and intergenerational support. The analytical framework is constructed around the concepts of social mobility, modernity, and spaces of contestation and negotiation. The ethnographic data illuminate how traditional family values, such as filial piety, are contested and renegotiated. The data also show how social mobility intersects with other forms of mobility, such as the spatial movement involved in urbanization. Women entering the labour force have to spend their days away from home and can no longer fully attend to their elderly family members and/or young children. However, spatial movement in the sense of increased access to transportation and communication has also enabled members of extended families to maintain their ‘urban kinship network’ without having to live together.     

Enhancing spatial accuracy of mobile phone data using multi-temporal dasymetric interpolation

Novel digital data sources allow us to attain enhanced knowledge about locations and mobilities of people in space and time. Already a fast-growing body of literature demonstrates the applicability and feasibility of mobile phone-based data in social sciences for considering mobile devices as proxies for people. However, the implementation of such data imposes many theoretical and methodological challenges. One major issue is the uneven spatial resolution of mobile phone data due to the spatial configuration of mobile network base stations and its spatial interpolation. To date, different interpolation techniques are applied to transform mobile phone data into other spatial divisions. However, these do not consider the temporality and societal context that shapes the human presence and mobility in space and time. The paper aims, first, to contribute to mobile phone-based research by addressing the need to give more attention to the spatial interpolation of given data, and further by proposing a dasymetric interpolation approach to enhance the spatial accuracy of mobile phone data. Second, it contributes to population modelling research by combining spatial, temporal and volumetric dasymetric mapping and integrating it with mobile phone data. In doing so, the paper presents a generic conceptual framework of a multi-temporal function-based dasymetric (MFD) interpolation method for mobile phone data. Empirical results demonstrate how the proposed interpolation method can improve the spatial accuracy of both night-time and daytime population distributions derived from different mobile phone data sets by taking advantage of ancillary data sources. The proposed interpolation method can be applied for both location- and person-based research, and is a fruitful starting point for improving the spatial interpolation methods for mobile phone data. We share the implementation of our method in GitHub as open access Python code.     

DEVELOPING THE SPATIAL MISMATCH HYPOTHESIS: PROBLEMS OF ACCESSIBILITY TO EMPLOYMENT FOR LOW-WAGE CENTRAL CITY LABOR

This research focuses on the spatial mismatch hypothesis as an explanation for the concentration of unemployment in the central cities of the industrial Midwest. It is argued that the immobility of low-wage labor relative to the mobility of employment results in either the exploitation or isolation of low-wage labor. In the contemporary period, the suburbanization of low-wage employment economically isolates the immobile low-wage population of the central cities. This alternative view of the spatial mismatch de-emphasizes race and emphasizes the segmentation of women and minorities into low-wage occupations. To test the spatial mismatch hypothesis, a model of the probability distribution of travel times to work is estimated for three cities in the industrial Midwest: Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The results support the hypothesis that the decentralization of employment reduces access to employment for central city residents as evidenced by the lower frequency of short trips to work for low-wage central city labor.     

珠三角城市区域治理的尺度重构机制研究——基于产业合作项目与交通基础设施项目的比较

珠三角作为中国东南沿海的巨型城市区域,旨在构建跨越经济社会系统的多元协同的综合一体化地区。本文以深汕特别合作区与穗莞深城际铁路两个区域合作项目为例,借鉴“新国家空间”理论,基于区域治理所面临的经济发展困境与行政治理困境,分析区域治理过程中的权力上移和下移,即省市关系调整的弹性应对策略。研究发现：区域产业合作项目中,为克服城市间合作的制度化不足的行政治理困境,省政府进行了包括资源注入、事权下放、去管制和扩大地方自主权的区域治理权力的尺度下移;区域基础设施项目中,为了解决省政府财权不足的行政治理困境,省政府进行了水平权力重组以构建综合博弈体、强制性地方事权上收和以收权导向的行政奖励的区域治理权力的尺度上移。由此,本文认为珠三角区域治理并非单向、机械的尺度建构过程,而是区域项目建设导向下,以修复行政治理困境为目标,灵活多向的尺度重配过程。