Back and forth with hopes and fears: Sri Lankan men's narratives on gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods

Although in the past Sri Lanka has had a higher number of women migrant workers, recent statistics show that the gap between the percentages of female and male migrants is decreasing. Since 2007, male migrants have outnumbered female migrants. The article explores how Sri Lankan men have responded to the increased economic needs of their families and lack of proper income-generating activities within the country by engaging in transnational livelihoods, as well as how their roles and identities are contested and negotiated through labour migration. The study is based on men's narratives on their reasons for migration and their experiences of transnational labour migration. The concepts of hope and life course are used to analyse the intertwined relationships of gender and mobility in transnational livelihoods. The author identifies that men's mobility is motivated by their hopes of fulfilling traditional gender norms as providers and protectors of their families in combination with their new identity as successful men. Further, the study provides evidence that men's mobility is not only gendered but also a repeated act during their life course. The study contributes to strengthen research on mobility and gender by adding men's perspectives on transnational labour migration.     

Regional Variation in Mobility Levels and Timing in the United States

The age patterns of U.S. internal migration, while examined extensively at the national level, have not been fully explored at the regional scale. This study examines, using 1985 - 1990 census data, the state-level variations in two aspects of lifecycle mobility: the mobility level, or the average number of moves made over the lifecycle, and the mobility timing, or the age at which half the lifetime moves are completed. It further delineates typologies of states based upon their age structure of mobility. The study found that regional patterns in the mobility level showed some evidence of the Snowbelt-Sunbelt patterns that characterized economic restructuring in the 1980s. Geographic patterns of mobility timing were less clear; however states in the West and the South showed somewhat more young distributions than the other regions. Further, there was a statistically significant relationship between mobility levels and timing: states with higher mobility levels also exhibited older mobility profiles, as a consequence of disproportionately high elderly mobility rates. The study highlights the regional differences in mobility behavior, and the interplay between the “how much” and the “when” of mobility.     

Loose threads: The translocal making of public space policy in Hanoi

This paper analyses the recent developments in public space policy in the city of Hanoi, Vietnam. It has three aims. The first is to look at a potentially progressive urban policy in contrast to most work on ‘policies in motion’ that has primarily been concerned with neoliberal policies. The second is to put the process of public space policymaking in Hanoi in historical and cultural perspective. We therefore describe public space in Hanoi as historically constituted by different layers of meaning and physical urban patterns. The paper's third aim is to analyse the translocal connections involved in a policy that is still in the making, and therefore characterized by a series of ‘loose threads’. We show how different types of connections – policy mobility, topological relations and inter‐referencing – relate Hanoi to multiple locales elsewhere. The conclusion reflects on the ‘politics of reception’ showing how analysing a policy in the making develops a critical analysis of policies in motion.     

Residential mobility and neighborhood inequality during the transition to adulthood

There is ongoing interest on the outcomes of residential mobility during the young adulthood. In this paper, we examine movement in and out of disadvantaged and advantaged neighborhoods as individuals move out of the family home and experience significant life course events. Using longitudinal data on young adults in the United States from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we find that while the point-in-time measure of the neighborhood poverty gap (the difference between the most and least advantaged neighborhoods) remained nearly identical from adolescence to young adulthood. But the neighborhood poverty gap between individuals starting out in the least and most disadvantaged residential settings decreased by 18.2 percentage points. In other words, cross sectional estimates of the poverty gap do not capture the dynamism of changes in poverty with young adult transitions. Partner formation, home ownership, and educational attainment are important life course transitions associated with significant moves up and down the neighborhood poverty distribution.     

Criteria of geographic relevance: an experimental study

The relevance of geographic information has become an emerging problem in geographic information science due to an enormous increase in volumes of data at high spatial, temporal, and semantic resolution, because of ever faster rates of new data capturing. At the same time, it is not clear whether the concept of relevance developed in information science and implemented for document-based information retrieval can be directly applied to this new, highly dynamic setting. In this study, we analyze the criteria users apply when judging the relevance of geographic entities in a given mobile usage context. Two different experiments have been set up in order to gather users' opinions on a set of possible criteria, and their relevance judgements in a given scenario. The importance ascribed to the criteria in both experiments clearly implies that a new concept of relevance is required when dealing with geographic entities instead of digital documents. This new concept of ‘Geographic Relevance’ is highly dependent on personal mobility and user's activity, whose understanding may in turn be refined by the assimilation of ‘Geographic Relevance’ itself.     

Predicting human mobility with activity changes

Human mobility patterns can provide valuable information in understanding the impact of human behavioral regularities in urban systems, usually with a specific focus on traffic prediction, public health or urban planning. While existing studies on human movement have placed huge emphasis on spatial location to predict where people go next, the time dimension component is usually being treated with oversimplification or even being neglected. Time dimension is crucial to understanding and detecting human activity changes, which play a negative role in prediction and thus may affect the predictive accuracy. This study aims to predict human movement from a spatio-temporal perspective by taking into account the impact of activity changes. We analyze and define changes of human activity and propose an algorithm to detect such changes, based on which a Markov chain model is used to predict human movement. The Microsoft GeoLife dataset is used to test our methodology, and the data of two selected users is used to evaluate the performance of the prediction. We compare the predictive accuracy (R²) derived from the data with and without implementing the activity change detection. The results show that the R² is improved from 0.295 to 0.762 for the user with obvious activity changes and from 0.965 to 0.971 for the user without obvious activity changes. The method proposed by this study improves the accuracy in analyzing and predicting human movement and lays the foundation for related urban studies.     

GEOSTATISTICS AS MEASURES OF SPATIAL SEGREGATION

Traditional measures of segregation, such as the index of dissimilarity, have been criticized as aspatial in nature. Spatial measures of segregation have been proposed, but they are difficult to use. Based on the idea that segregation implies a spatial separation of ethnic groups, the degree of spatial correlation among groups can reflect the level of segregation. This paper suggests that several geostatistical measures, especially the standard deviational ellipse, are effective tools for capturing the spatial characteristics of a population group. By comparing the ellipses of different groups, measures of segregation can be derived. The paper demonstrates this approach to measuring segregation by way of both a simulation and a case study. [Key words: spatial segregation, geostatistics, deviational ellipses, spatial correspondence/correlation.]     

THE REGIONAL GOVERNANCE CONTEXT IN RUSSIA: A GENERAL FRAMEWORK

Many European urban regions have experienced a transformation from a compact monocentric toward a less compact polycentric urban region since the 1960s. The debate on emerging polycentricity in Europe so far tends to be more theoretical than analytical. The trend toward increasingly polycentric urban regions is meanwhile beyond dispute, but the effects of this transformation on urban regions and their components have only been explored to a limited extent. Are the "old" central cities only losing people, functions, and status to the new urban centers, or do these centers complement each other and specialize in terms of economic activities and population composition? This article presents evidence for the Amsterdam urban region regarding population distribution, selective migration, job growth, and economic specializations of the region's subcenters. It will become clear from our data that the Amsterdam urban region has indeed become more polycentric, but also that Amsterdam has managed to remain a vital center. The newer and older urban subcenters have become increasingly important, but rather than competing with Amsterdam, they develop in a complementary way.     

Nature,Affordability, and Privacy as Motivations for Exurban Living

Current demographic trends indicate that the 21st century will be one of exurban growth as more Americans seek out countryside home sites and their accompanying lifestyles. Two of the literature's conventional wisdoms regarding exurban migration motivations are critically examined in this study: (1) exurbanites are seeking home sites in close proximity to natural places, and (2) exurbanites are drawn to countryside areas because of the affordability of such locations. This study uses 34 snowball-sampled, semistructured interviews from Indiana and Illinois exurbanites to examine these two commonly held beliefs. Subjects reported that the natural environment did not primarily motivate their moves. Current home sites were, however, attractive due to their perceived affordability. The main, and remarkable, finding of this study is the strong desire for privacy that drew people to exurbia. The desire for privacy was cited as a main motivator by a large majority of the subjects interviewed.     

Elemental mobility in subduction metamorphism: insight from metamorphic rocks of the Franciscan Complex and the Feather River ultramafic belt,California

The degree of element mobility in subduction metamorphism has generated much debate; some workers advocate considerable mobility during metamorphism, whereas others postulate minimal mobility. We assess this issue by examination of major and trace element concentrations and Pb-, Nd-isotopic data for 39 mafic metavolcanic rocks from the Franciscan subduction complex, related units of coastal California, and the Feather River ultramafic belt of the northern Sierra Nevada, California; these samples span a wide range of metamorphic grade. We conclude that these rocks, despite their metamorphism up to eclogite facies, preserve protolith major and trace elemental compositions and isotopic ratios, with the exception of some mobile large ion lithophile elements such as Ba, Pb, and to a smaller extent La, U, and Sr. Thus subduction metamorphism of these metabasalts occurred in a largely closed system. Lack of light rare earth element enrichment in the rocks demonstrates lack of chemical exchange with subducted metasediments. Relatively low SiO₂ content (<48 wt.%) of many of the metamorphic rocks and the lack of correspondence between silica depletion and metamorphic grade suggests that the silica depletion resulted from seafloor hydrothermal alteration before subduction. In spite of demonstrated mobility of Pb, and possible mobility of Nd, isotopic ratios of Pb and Nd were not modified during subduction metamorphism. In contrast to our results from metabasaltic rocks, our analysis of actinolite-rich rinds from high-grade Franciscan mélange blocks suggests some chemical exchange between metachert and the overlying mantle. The increasing enrichment in Ba and Pb with increasing metamorphic grade suggests that Ba- and Pb-rich fluids interacted more intensely with metabasalt at the higher grades of metamorphism. Comparison of these results with studies of the active Mariana forearc suggests that fluids interacting with the mantle wedge up-dip of the region of magma genesis are derived from subducting sediments overlying the down-going plate.