Mapping a path towards equity: reflections on a co-creative community praxis

‘Community geography’ is a growing sub-field that leverages academic resources to facilitate spatial research in partnership with local communities. The Mapping Prejudice Project and the CREATE Initiative, two interdisciplinary projects at the University of Minnesota, demonstrate some of the opportunities and challenges associated with practicing community geography. Mapping Prejudice is leveraging community crowdsourcing to build the first comprehensive spatial database of racially restrictive housing covenants in the United States. CREATE is co-developing research on critical problems at the intersection of environment and equity through collaboration with community partners. These two projects incorporate a methodological commitment to place-based and historically grounded research that seeks to make knowledge in—and in relation to—a specific place. Incorporating earlier feminist and critical GIS theory, these projects have adopted an iterative research model that places under-resourced communities at the forefront of the research process. Their work produces a fluid, responsive, and co-creative approach that has the capacity to legitimate its knowledge claims through responsiveness to community needs and collective experience.

     

The social housing sector in Prague and Warsaw: trends and future prospects

The paper provides an overview of trends and processes of change affecting new social housing provision in Prague and Warsaw. The local responses are reviewed within the context of changes to the national housing system defining the performance of municipal and non-profit housing sectors. The research analyses the mix of policy instruments implemented in three major policy domains—regulatory, fiscal and financial—to promote the production of new social housing in the two cities. The system of new social housing provision is examined as a dynamic process of interaction between public and private institutions defining housing policy outcomes. The outcomes are evaluated through a series of indicators related to housing output, stability of investment, differentiation of rents, affordability and choice. The overview demonstrates how significant shifts in regulatory and fiscal policy, coupled with decentralization of responsibilities for social housing, limit the opportunities for more efficient performance in the sector and its growth. This is particularly evident in Warsaw, where the sector operates as a social safety net. New social housing in both cities has better quality and remains affordable, but access is constrained and waiting times have increased. The research highlights the problem of declining output, dwindling financial resources, and lack of cost recovery due to universal rent control. This is eroding the sustainability of social housing, potentially leading to lower investment and subsequent privatisation. In Warsaw, housing allowances are a municipal responsibility making the liberalization of rents difficult, while Prague has moved in the direction of rent deregulation with a more robust system of means-tested housing support provided by the central government. Such policy choices map a different trajectory for the future of social housing.     

Housing the Urban Poor in Twenty-First Century Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Mismatch and a Way Forward for Ghana

The debate on housing the urban poor has become more sophisticated since Turner’s original ideas of self-help and self-building by the poor were introduced in the 1970s. Today, the emphasis in housing the poor is on a pluralistic approach that stresses enabling housing provision for the poor by expanding the range of providers to include government, the private sector, the poor themselves, non-governmental agencies, and cooperatives. Official housing policy in Ghana does not reflect the pluralistic approach that prevails in practitioner and academic circles. Using ethnography, this paper presents the housing experience of a typical poor family in Ghana to determine what the poor build. It highlights the obstacles the poor have to overcome to acquire the housing they want. The ethnography provides a basis upon which the mismatch between the pluralistic approach and Ghana’s housing policy can be bridged thus providing a way forward. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of the housing industry in poverty alleviation in Ghana.     

Housing the Urban Poor in Twenty-First Century Sub-Saharan Africa: Policy Mismatch and a Way Forward for Ghana

The debate on housing the urban poor has become more sophisticated since Turner’s original ideas of self-help and self-building by the poor were introduced in the 1970s. Today, the emphasis in housing the poor is on a pluralistic approach that stresses enabling housing provision for the poor by expanding the range of providers to include government, the private sector, the poor themselves, non-governmental agencies, and cooperatives. Official housing policy in Ghana does not reflect the pluralistic approach that prevails in practitioner and academic circles. Using ethnography, this paper presents the housing experience of a typical poor family in Ghana to determine what the poor build. It highlights the obstacles the poor have to overcome to acquire the housing they want. The ethnography provides a basis upon which the mismatch between the pluralistic approach and Ghana’s housing policy can be bridged thus providing a way forward. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of the housing industry in poverty alleviation in Ghana.     

Housing Policy Regime in Lithuania: towards liberalization and marketization

This paper reviews housing policy development in Lithuania in the light of previous literature which reinterprets Esping-Andersen’s work on welfare regimes and adopts it to study housing policy. It seeks to highlight the major features of the Lithuanian housing policy. The findings of this paper reveal that the Lithuanian housing regime exhibits many features which are common under the liberal one. Most significant of these are low de-commodification for those who have to buy or rent a home for the market price, increasing stratification based on income and the dominant position of the market in housing production, allocation and price determination. However, a detailed examination of the Lithuanian housing policy reveals that the housing policy system, despite having many features similar to the liberal one, has been operating in different social and economic settings as a result of unique historical experience of the communist housing policy (massive production of low quality apartment blocks during the communist era, which currently need substantial renovation) and consequently drastic changes in the housing field since 1990s (massive privatization of the housing stock and decentralization of the housing management system). The Lithuanian housing policy regime could be characterized as a regime with the higher owner-occupation compared to other welfare state regimes, but the lower economic power of the owners to take care of their property maintenance, repair and renovation.     

Emerging grassroots resilience and flood responses in informal settlements in Accra,Ghana

In the last five decades, many informal communities in Accra, Ghana have suffered from annual flood hazards. Residents of these communities appear to have successfully resisted evictions by city authorities; survived flood hazards and poor environmental health conditions. These flood affected households continue to survive with increasing housing and population densities in the face of these annual floods. Are they becoming resilient? Have residents built adaptive capacities through learning experiences from previous flood occurrences and evictions attempts? What has produced and continued to shape their responses to flooding? What can be learned from this supposed grassroots resilience to inform flood management in urban Africa? Using case studies of three informal communities of Glefe, Agbogbloshie and Old Fadama, this paper explores the gradual and evolving adaptive capacities and social resilience to flood hazards among poor urban dwellers. The paper reveals the depth of understanding and embodied nature of flood experiences among affected slum dwellers and how these are gradually being transformed into adaptive capacities and shaping their responses. In the absence of efficient state flood interventions, there are emerging and enduring flood responses and adaptation practices shaped by residents’ social networks, political alliances and sense of place. These responses translates into continuous re-structuring of housing units, construction of communal drains, creation of local evacuation teams and safe havens. Urban policy contributions that can be learned from these emerging grassroots capacities for flood vulnerability management have been proposed.     

Strategic planning and the Paris agglomeration in the 1960s and 1970s: The quest for balance and structure

Strategic planning in the Paris agglomeration in the 1960s and 1970s sought to correct centre—periphery and west—east imbalances in the provision of employment and services, and to promote a nodal structure within the essentially amorphous suburbs. The suburbanization of manufacturing employment and certain higher-order services, the workings of the housing market and the centrifugal dispersal of manual workers, the construction of suburban ‘poles’ and new towns, and the programme of road and rail investment are each reviewed in the context of these objectives. Success was only partial: failure to control adequately office development in central Paris and Hauts-de-Seine, to provide the suburbs with orbital as well as tangential transport connections, and to resist the embourgeoisement of the Paris housing stock left much of the imbalance in force.     

Navigating the future of tsunami risk communication: using dimensionality,interactivity and situatedness to interface with society

Two-dimensional paper maps are well-established tsunami risk communication tools in coastal communities. Advances in GIS, geovisualization and spatial interface technologies suggest new opportunities to deliver tsunami risk communication using 3D, interactive and situated risk visualization. This paper introduces a set of geovisual interface constructs—dimensionality–interactivity–situatedness (DIS)—and evaluates their presence, absence and distribution in 129 examples of existing academic and public visual tsunami risk communication. The resulting analyses reveal structural differences in the distributions of DIS found in each of academic and public risk communication literatures, and opportunities for interactive location-aware risk communication. The second half of this paper reports on three new tsunami risk visualization interfaces informed by and developed to demonstrate how we might explore new undeveloped risk communication territory revealed by the DIS cube analysis. We discuss the design, rationale and implications of: EvacMap; ARRO3D; and Tsunamulator. These risk visualization interfaces deliver location-aware, user-centred risk maps, as well as virtual risk maps and tsunami simulations that can be viewed while standing in situ in coastal environments. This work is a first step intended to help the risk communication community systematically engage an emerging territory of interactive and location-aware 3D visualizations. This work aims to facilitate and encourage progress towards developing a new strand of interactive, situated geovisual risk communication research, by establishing these guiding constructs, their relationship to existing works and how they may inform the design of future systems and usability research.     

Investigation as legitimacy: the maturing of the big public inquiry

All major resource development schemes lie embedded in political prejudices and commitments, in interest group expectations which themselves are influenced by past events, and in the changing atmosphere of public priorities. A proposal to develop a new technology, which, especially if successful, would lead to further investments of a similar nature but which would by necessity restrict the scope for other opportunities in other policy areas, is bound to be controversial. The inevitable demand is for full justification through some kind of reputable open examination whose conduct and outcome are deemed to be fair and legitimate. While the form of that examination will vary from country to country its function remains the same — namely, to mobilise public support for a decision and the policies that envelop it. In the U.K. the public inquiry seeks to serve such a function. Its constitutional role, history, contemporary style and emerging problems of legitimacy are all examined with reference to the Sizewell B Inquiry into Britain's first pressurised water reactor.     

Cost-benefit analysis of vetiver system-based rehabilitation measures for landslide-damaged mountainous agricultural lands in the lower Northern Thailand

On May 23, 2006, the landslide-debris flow occurred in several places of the lower Northern Thailand. These destroyed about 4,000 houses resulting in about 10,000 people having to be permanently evacuated. They also damaged large areas of high potential agricultural growth in the highland and mountains in the region. The impact of the landslide was both in terms of disruption of agricultural production and lowering of land productivity. A cost-benefit analysis (CBA) was used to compare the net welfare gained from different land rehabilitation measures applied in landslide-damaged agricultural areas in the lower Northern Thailand. In this paper, ex ante CBA was conducted based on the interviews with knowledgeable stakeholders prior to land rehabilitation project and policy implementations. The alternative measures were as follows: Measure 1—planting of vetiver grass (Chrysopogon zizanioides (L.) Roberty) with waterway construction; Measure 2—planting vetiver grass with intercropping of durian seedling and sunn hemp (Crotalaria juncea L.) including waterway construction; Measure 3—planting vetiver grass with intercropping of durian seedling and banana (Musa sapientum L.) including waterway construction; and Measure 4—status quo (under natural ecological succession process). For a 20-year project period, the highest net present value (NPV) was obtained from Measure 2 followed by Measure 3. The NPV of Status Quo option was higher than Measure 1. This is because if the land were to be left to naturally regenerate as is the case under Status quo, farmers would benefit from the natural rehabilitation process by native pioneer plants. The appropriate measures as studied in this research can be competent representative model for rehabilitating the landslide-damaged areas in the lower Northern Thailand where rehabilitation systems have not yet been introduced.     

Restructuring socialist housing estates and its impact on residents’ perceptions: “Renovatsiia” of khrushchevki in St. Petersburg,Russia

This paper explores the issue of restructuring socialist housing estates in St. Petersburg, Russia, with an emphasis on residents’ perceptions of the wide range of economic, social, and environmental impacts of that restructuring. A new housing renewal program, “renovatsiia” (renovation) of khrushchevki, has been controversial from the very beginning and involves the demolition of existing khrushchevki and the construction of new housing on the same sites. By examining the issue within the framework of housing regeneration in the post-socialist context, the paper aims to provide insights into some of the challenges of urban renewal in the housing sector in the second largest Russian city. The paper at the same time investigates the viability of the collaborative planning model in the context of the post-socialist city.     

Expert engagement in participatory processes: translating stakeholder discourses into policy options

This paper demonstrates an innovative role for experts in supporting participatory policy processes with an application to landslide risk management in the Italian town of Nocera Inferiore. Experts co-produce risk mitigation options based on their specialized knowledge taking account of local knowledge and values by directly coupling stakeholder discourses with option design. Drawing on the theory of plural rationality and based on a literature review, interviews and a public questionnaire, stakeholder discourses are elicited on the landslide risk problem and its solution. Armed with the discourses and in close interaction with stakeholders, experts provide a range of technical mitigation options, each within a given budget constraint. These options are subsequently deliberated in the participatory process with the intent of reaching compromise recommendations for landslide risk mitigation. As we show in an accompanying paper, “Compromise not consensus. Designing a participatory process for landslide risk mitigation” (this issue), the provision of multiple co-produced policy options enhances stakeholder deliberation by respecting legitimate differences in values and worldviews.

     

Probing the (in)compatibilities of social theory and policy relevance in Piers Blaikie’s political ecology

One of Piers Blaikie’s most important contributions to the development of political ecology is his critique of land and resource conservation policy in the global South. In this paper I trace the development of Blaikie’s ideas about the policy relevance of political ecology, focusing particularly on the challenges posed by the introduction of poststructural social theory into the field. I begin by revisiting Blaikie’s earlier critiques of environment and development policy. This will provide the departure point to explore how his thinking on the relationship of theory and policy and of academic and development practices has evolved in subsequent writings. I have invented two personas, “early Blaikie” and “late Blaikie”, to facilitate this task. Second, I want to probe some of the challenges that late Blaikie presents for doing political ecology research, to some extent by pitting early Blaikie against late Blaikie and letting them hash it out. Third, I turn to my own and others’ research and consultation experiences as a way to examine the possibilities for reconciling theoretically driven critiques with policy relevant research.     

Vacancy and defect structures in metal oxides

The self-consistent local density (LD) theory is used to model vacancy and defect structures in metal oxides by use of the embedded cluster scheme. LCAO-MO expansions of cluster orbitals are obtained by the DV-Xα discrete variational method, and used to characterize energy levels, charge distributions, X-ray absorption and cohesive energies. Examples are drawn from recent work on transition metal monoxides such as Fe_1?x O, ceramic materials such as yttrium-stabilized zirconia, and the alumina/ruby system. It is shown that in addition to predicting spectroscopic properties, LD theory has now reached a stage of implementation where lattice stability and local site geometry can be usefully explored.     

Compromise not consensus: designing a participatory process for landslide risk mitigation

With the escalating costs of landslides, the challenge for local authorities is to develop institutional arrangements for landslide risk management that are viewed as efficient, feasible and fair by those affected. For this purpose, the participation of stakeholders in the decision-making process is mandated by the European Union as a way of improving its perceived legitimacy and transparency. This paper reports on an analytical-deliberative process for selecting landslide risk mitigation measures in the town of Nocera Inferiore in southern Italy. The process was structured as a series of meetings with a group of selected residents and several parallel activities open to the public. The preparatory work included a literature/media review, semi-structured interviews carried out with key local stakeholders and a survey eliciting residents’ views on landslide risk management. The main point of departure in the design of this process was the explicit elicitation and structuring of multiple worldviews (or perspectives) among the participants with respect to the nature of the problem and its solution. Rather than eliciting preferences using decision analytical methods (e.g. utility theory or multi-criteria evaluation), this process built on a body of research—based on the theory of plural rationality—that has teased out the limited number of contending and socially constructed definitions of problem-and-solution that are able to achieve viability. This framing proved effective in structuring participants’ views and arriving at a compromise recommendation (not, as is often aimed for, a consensus) on measures for reducing landslide risk. Experts played a unique role in this process by providing a range of policy options that corresponded to the different perspectives held by the participants.     

Development through football in Africa: Neoliberal and postcolonial models of community development

Informed by academic writings on non-governmental organisations (NGOs), critiques of neoliberal development, and postcolonial development theory, this paper explores the relationship between football and development through critical analysis of two contrasting initiatives. One is the Football for Hope Movement (FHM), which was the principal backer of the official campaign of the 2010 FIFA World Cup (FWC), called “20 Centres for 2010”. The second is the Katina 2009 football tournament held under the auspices of a community development project in Uganda sponsored by the Guardian newspaper and Barclays bank in the UK.The initial aim was to identify the particular development models at work within ‘development through football’ initiatives. While an established model of NGO-led community development is certainly apparent, different initiatives suggest a basic distinction between neoliberal and postcolonial variants. The paper identifies and explains the differences while showing how contrasting models become sites of struggle and overlap, to some extent, when translated into development practice. Ultimately, the investigation reveals how football is used as a magnet to draw young people deeper into the operational orbit of NGOs and their donors. The paper also draws attention to new actors and partnerships in international development – most notably the Guardian, whose transformation into a development actor suggests a novel ‘NGO-isation’ of the media itself.     

Herders and hazards: covariate <Emphasis Type="Italic">dzud</Emphasis> risk and the cost of risk management strategies in a Mongolian subdistrict

Studies of mobile pastoralist livelihoods have shown that a variety of socio-technical practices have been developed to achieve reliable outputs from livestock in variable arid and semi-arid environments. This paper builds upon the concept of pastoralists as high-reliability seekers rather than risk-averse and makes a case for understanding Mongolian herders as well adapted to livestock production in highly variable climatic conditions within a certain threshold of risk and uncertainty. This system fails, however, during instances of high uncertainty and covariate risk such as in cases of the natural hazard dzud, which requires individual households to make significant cash investments in risk management. It forwards the idea that investing in local government—soum and bag level—administrative capacity and infrastructure is needed to build system resilience to covariate risk. Based on ethnographic research in rural Bayankhongor, this paper interrogates how dzud interfaces with socio-economic factors amongst pastoralists in central west Mongolia.     

From comparative statics to dynamics in urban-systems theory

An outline is presented of the main methods of systems analysis relevant to urban and regional modelling. The argument is set in the context of a brief discussion of system types and the identification of these for cities and regions. The methods are illustrated by reference to the Huff— Lakshmanan— Hansen shopping model with particular emphasis on developing techniques in dynamical systems theory.     

A Portfolio Approach to Evaluating Natural Hazard Mitigation Policies: An Application to Lateral-Spread Ground Failure in Coastal California

In the past, efforts to prevent catastrophic losses from natural hazards have largely been undertaken by individual property owners based on site—specific evaluations of risks to particular buildings. Public efforts to assess community vulnerability and encourage mitigation have focused on either aggregating site—specific estimates or adopting standards based upon broad assumptions about regional risks. This paper develops an alternative, intermediate—scale approach to regional risk assessment and the evaluation of community mitigation policies. Properties are grouped into types with similar land uses and levels of hazard, and hypothetical community mitigation strategies for protecting these properties are modeled like investment portfolios. The portfolios consist of investments in mitigation against the risk to a community posed by a specific natural hazard. and are defined by a community's mitigation budget and the proportion of the budget invested in locations of each type.

The usefulness of this approach is demonstrated through an integrated assessment of earthquake—induced lateral—spread ground failure risk in the Watsonville, California area. Data from the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 are used to model lateral—spread ground failure susceptibility. Earth science and economic data are combined and analyzed in a Geographic Information System (CIS). The portfolio model is then used to evaluate the benefits of mitigating the risk in different locations. Two mitigation policies, one that prioritizes mitigation by land use type and the other by hazard zone, are compared with a status quo policy of doing no further mitigation beyond that which already exists. The portfolio representing the hazard zone rule yields a higher expected return than the land use portfolio does; however, the hazard zone portfolio experiences a higher standard deviation. Therefore, neither portfolio is clearly preferred. The two mitigation policies both reduce expected losses and increase overall expected community wealth compared to the status quo policy.