The Girls' Home, Bangkok, Thailand: Developing Thoughts on Democracy

This paper describes an exercise with children in the implementation of housing rights. Based on the argued opinion that housing rights cannot be exercised without participation and that participation without knowledge is pretence, a Kids and Architecture programme was initiated with a group of 40 children — displaced from homes in the Klong Toey slum in Bangkok — at a girls' home run by the Human Development Foundation (HDF). The programme, developed in two phases and involving students from the King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT), School of Architecture, set about to teach these children some of the elements of architecture so that they could participate in the design of their own housing. From this experiment a number of conclusions are drawn about the implementation of housing rights and about the teaching of architecture, both to children and architecture students.     

基于农村宅基地使用权确权的数据库建设

针对农村宅基地使用权确权介绍了数据库建设的基本要求、技术路线、方法、数据库结构以及数据集成等。数据库建设基本分为属性数据库、图形数据库、档案数据库3个方面的创建,概述了在数据库建设中对数据的使用原则和检查处理过程,以及用数据库进行数据处理、数据汇总的基本流程,使宅基地使用权达到了数字化的管理和使用。     

Governing urban vacancy in post-crash dublin: contested property and alternative social projects

The scale and severity of property crashes following the global financial crisis has made vacancy a more visible and politically significant feature of cities. Although research has focused on urban experiments in vacant spaces, there has been less emphasis on how the contested property relations around vacancy remake urban governance. In this paper, we argue that debates about vacancy have been a central concern in post-crisis urban governance. In the first part of the paper we draw two conceptual approaches into a dialogue and apply them to an analysis of vacant space: that of Nicholas Blomley on property and Elizabeth Povinelli on “alternative social projects”. In the second part of the paper, we critically analyse how three groups discursively construct the need to “activate” and “re-use” vacant spaces in Dublin: grassroots groups, urban policy-makers, and financial actors. We argue that governing vacancy will be a key feature of post-crisis urbanisation.     

Pathways and Processes: Reviewing the Role of Young Adults in Urban Structure

Challenges arising from changing demographics, expensive housing, and precarious labor have prompted recent interest in the residential geographies of young adults. Yet, despite attention to young adults' diverse housing pathways, I argue that greater focus is needed on the place-based and spatial underpinnings and effects of particular housing pathways: Connections to urban processes of “youthification”—the concentration of young adults in dense neighborhoods—and “studentification”—whereby an area becomes dominated by university students—remain underdeveloped, as do linkages between these phenomena and gentrification. I explore these connections through a critical review of extant literature to show that the enactment of some pathways is associated with particular urban processes, which might foreclose certain pathways for other individuals. Finally, I identify three crucial areas of inquiry: (1) how youthification, studentification, and gentrification interact; (2) how these processes shape and are shaped by diverging individual housing pathways; and (3) how differences among young adults such as race, ethnicity, and gender intersect with age in the course of these processes.     

The populist eruption and the urban question

Generalizing the recent experience of the United States, the common wisdom associates today’s ‘populist explosion’ with a deepening urban-rural divide, in which small towns and rural regions are seen as reservoirs of populist anger while large cities in the most prosperous areas are portrayed as strongholds of multicultural coexistence and liberal democracy. In challenging this representation, this paper underlines the ‘urban roots’ of today’s populist phenomenon in Western societies, using Italy as illustrative evidence. It is argued that cities – far from being pacified enclaves of happiness and democracy – are central to the contradictions of contemporary societies and their degenerations, reflecting an ambivalent relationship with the nation-state: potential sites of post-national democracy, on the one hand, but also spaces contributing to the current populist-white-revanchist wave sweeping Western societies, on the other hand. In doing so, the paper shows how the intersected housing and refugee crises have fomented impulses of ethnic-majority revanchism within Italy’s cities and towns in a context of late neoliberalism.     

Gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty: changing urban geographies through boom and bust periods

Many postindustrial cities across Europe and other contexts are marked by growing social–spatial inequalities, housing liberalization, and gentrification, which limit the housing options of low-income households. We investigated changes in the residential moves of different low-income households (working poor, low-to-middle income, and unemployed) in the Amsterdam and Rotterdam urban regions for the time period 2004–2013. We found an overarching trend for the suburbanization of poverty toward the urban peripheries and surrounding regions. While this trend appears to be relatively crisis resistant in the tight Amsterdam housing context, it is more cyclical in Rotterdam and has slowed following the global financial crisis. Low-to-middle income and unemployed households are increasingly moving to the urban regions surrounding cities, particularly to higher density satellite towns. Nevertheless, a growing number of working poor households remain highly urbanized, employing various coping strategies to acquire housing. This paper reveals how the suburbanization of poverty is both a direct process of poor households moving from city to suburb, and a broader indirect process caused by exclusionary mechanisms such as the decreasing accessibility and affordability of inner-urban neighborhoods, which reflect broader changes in the geography and socioeconomic patterning of urban regions.     

中国居民住房内生活设施配置及区域差异

选取居民住房内管道自来水、厨房、厕所、洗澡设施配置率作为衡量指标,在分析单项生活设施配置及区域差异状况的基础上,运用序排列多边形面积法计算综合指数,阐释全国居民住房内生活设施配置及区域差异综合状况,并通过相关性研究解析其形成的原因,最后提出了相应的政策建议。结果表明：全国各县级单元四项设施配置的区域差异显著;大致以“胡焕庸线”为界分为东南、西北两个部分,东南部综合指数高,以高、较高、中等类型区为主;西北部综合指数低,以较低、低类型区为主;东、中、西、东北四大板块综合指数差异大小依次为：东部地区>西部地区>中部地区>东北地区;经济发展水平、居民收入、受教育程度、城镇化率是影响住房内生活设施配置区域差异的重要因素。     

中国县域住宅价格的空间差异特征与影响机制

以2014年中国2872个县级单元的住宅平均单价为基本数据,通过空间自相关和核密度函数分析中国住宅价格的差异格局、空间关联特征和分布形态,构建“住宅价格等级金字塔”;根据“需求+供给+市场”的三维理论视角建立包括5大住宅价格差异影响因素在内的价格模型,采用地理探测器分析全国及其区域子市场的影响因素强度差异,并探索其影响机制。结果表明：① 中国区域住宅价格呈现以行政等级性为主、空间集聚性为辅的双重差异格局,其空间关联与集聚性显著;② 中国住宅价格呈现出房价越高,区域越少,所居住城镇人口越少的“金字塔式”等级分布特征。③ 租房户比例、流动人口规模、住房支付能力、住房市场活跃度、土地成本是中国住宅价格差异的5个核心影响因素,不同行政等级子市场的影响因素作用强度各异。     

Contradictory socio-economic consequences of structural adjustment in Kingston, Jamaica

Since the early 1980s, the introduction of International Monetary Fund-directed structural adjustment packages to stabilize the Jamaican economy has reduced the scope of the government, cut back its capacity to intervene in the housing market, opened the economy to foreign goods (but limited capital), and re-produced the colonial version of a non-dynamic, labour-surplus urban economy in Kingston. This paper traces the impact of structural adjustment on unemployment and class formation in Kingston, and the relationship of these issues to housing problems. Rented, poor-quality housing, underpinned by low socio-economic status and historically high rates of unemployment, has created an overt spatial concentration of poverty, located in West and East Kingston. Nevertheless, overall unemployment is currently lower than at independence in 1962, and virtually all housing indicators have recorded improvements over the same time period. These improvements have been due to a deceleration in the growth of Kingston's population since the mid-1960s; government commitment, despite structural adjustment, to improve the quality of collective consumption; and the determination of Kingston's citizens to build better homes for themselves, often aided by loans from local building societies and remittances from family members resident overseas. However, at least a quarter of Kingston's population remains both unemployed and concentrated into areas of poor quality housing. These circumstances in Kingston are compared with those in adjacent Latin American cites under structural adjustment.     

地质雷达技术在和平饭店南楼基础检测中的应用

房屋质量检测中基础检测是最困难的部分，在上海和平饭店南楼基础木桩深度探测时首次应用地质雷达技术，取得了较为满意的结果，为将来房屋质量检测中基础探测开辟了新途径。