Some Spatial Implications Of A Massive Industrial Accident: The Case Of Nuclear Power Plants 1

The application of geographic concepts and techniques to solving human problems is gaining new strength as a dimension of American geography. The nature of this trend is being shaped by a concern for relevance and educational change. Adoption of this approach has many implications for the individual geographer, as well as for the discipline. Some possible negative and positive aspects of the trend are suggested.     

The Assassination of New York. Bob Fitch; From Redlining to Reinvestment: Community Responses to Urban Disinvestment. Gregory D. Squires,editor; At Road’s End Transportation and Land Use Choices for Communihs. Daniel Carlson et al.

This study disentangles the relationship between income and real estate value development in Dutch urban neighborhoods. Within the literature on upgrading and downgrading, it is often assumed that neighborhood income and real estate value development are strongly linked. The results reported here—based on research in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Tilburg—indicate that income and real estate values develop simultaneously in only a relatively small number of neighborhoods, which are at the top and bottom of the housing market hierarchy. The majority reveal a more complex relationship: a number of neighborhoods show a time lag between the trends, whereas in other neighborhoods income and real estate values show partially diverging trends. Several tentative explanations are offered for the complex relationship, and stress the importance of place-specific knowledge. Three points of attention are suggested for further research: understanding the role of household dynamics, the position of neighborhoods within their urban system, and the role of the state and housing associations in neighborhood change.     

GEOGRAPHIC CATEGORIES OF SETTLEMENT AND THE 2000 CENSUS: A CHALLENGE FOR GEOGRAPHERS

Through a close examination of the case of Virginia v. Hicks—from Kevin Hicks's arrests for trespassing on streets near a Richmond, Virginia, public housing project in 1998 and 1999 to the unanimous Supreme Court decision upholding these arrests on the grounds that no harm was done to the First Amendment—this paper explores how the rights of private property are made, through the judicial process, to "trump" other kinds of rights and interests. It examines the implications of both dominant property practices and discourses and a more general judicial anti-urbanism for city life. The paper shows that one of the things at risk given the judiciary's love affair with private property rights is the right of some people simply to be present in public space. By implication, the paper argues that legal geographies need to examine more than just final court decisions (as is often the case), but also uncover the full legal history—the strange twists and turns—of the cases examined.     

DEMOGRAPHIC POLARIZATION OF HOUSING AFFORDABILITY IN SIX MAJOR UNITED STATES METROPOLITAN AREAS

This paper describes and analyses the geography and structure of the neighborhood residential preferences and residential satisfaction of the inhabitants of the medium-sized, post-Soviet city of Ust'-Kamenogorsk, Kazakhstan (population ca. 300,000). It is based on a questionnaire survey (N = 1516 + 320) conducted by the author in cooperation with the statistical authority of the Eastern Kazakhstan oblast'. At the aggregate level, the evidence that is presented suggests distinct preference patterns, and that the main focus of preference is on the city center. The geography of residential satisfaction is different. Differences in satisfaction have been found between residents of housing built by former high-priority enterprises and those occupying most of the remainder of the housing stock. These differences underscore the pervasive and continuing importance of the legacy of Soviet economic and territorial planning, and the still rather limited changes that the marketization of the economy has been able to produce.     

CBO Performance in the Shelter Sector: A Study of La Piña and Lebrón,Santo Domingo,Dominican Republic

The current global housing policy, the enabling approach, emphasizes the need for governments to encourage community participation in the shelter sector. This research examines the role of the government and community-based organizations (CBOs) in the housing sector and analyzes how they interact. To determine whether governments and CBOs are participating in the shelter sector as advocated under the approach, this study examines the role of two CBOs engaged in upgrading shelter for the poor in Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic. This research demonstrates that the enabling approach can be effective if the government is supportive and CBOs are engaged in the planning, decision-making, and implementation of the housing project. This study finds that cooperation between the implementing NGO, CBOs, and households is crucial for the success of the housing project. The study also demonstrates how the enabling policies employed in Santo Domingo, including low-cost labor and use of low-cost building materials, help overcome obstacles encountered under previous housing policies such as displacement and affordability issues.     

Work,Home, and Market: The Social Transformation of Housing Space in Guangzhou,China

Principal components analysis of small-area data provided by China's 2000 Population Census shows that major new economic and social forces largely shape the spatial composition of housing in Guangzhou. This is generally manifested in a series of concentric rings: the old urban core, the middle zone of reform housing, and the outer ring of new commodity housing. In addition, urban villages punctuate the metropolitan landscape. Corresponding analysis of sociodemographic attributes depict a metropolis in transition, with market elements and choice-based housing decisions beginning to impinge on the urban fabric. However, the deeply entrenched socialist institutions established during the early years of the People's Republic ensure the continuing dominance of the workplace and occupational attributes as factors structuring China's metropolitan space.     

Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of view-points are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default—superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.     

"The Same But Not the Same": The Discursive Constitution of Large Housing Estates in Germany,France, and Poland

Since the 1960s, large housing estates have shaped the geography of suburbia in many Western and Eastern European cities. This paper examines the constitution of the social and spatial meanings of large housing estates within three different national contexts: in Germany, Poland, and France. Employing discourse theory and an empirical analysis of the coverage of major national newspapers, we identify cross-national and specific national patterns of discourses that (re)produce particular social spaces and distinct social orders. Quantitative discourse analysis reveals differences, similarities, and ruptures in various constructions of the meaning of large housing estates. We find that large housing estates in France and Germany are constituted in print media as threatening places and as places of foreignness located "outside" the "proper society." In contrast, Polish large housing estates are framed discursively as threatened places located in the social "inside."     

Homelessness in Canada and New Zealand: A Comparative Perspective on Numbers and Policy Responses

This article provides a comparative perspective on homelessness in Canada and New Zealand, with a focus on three urban regions. It seeks to document homeless numbers in the chosen cities, to evaluate the utility of counting the homeless, and to identify common and divergent approaches in homelessness policy. Research involved document analysis, key informant interviews, and participant observation. Literal homelessness is found to be several orders of magnitude higher in the Canadian cities. In one of the Canadian centers, suburban homelessness is emerging as a significant phenomenon. Efforts to count the homeless allow such trends to be tentatively quantified, and inform policymaking. Policy differences between the countries are stark: Canadian cities are seeking to respond to an emergency, which may call for a radical change of approach in the form of "housing first." In New Zealand, a national program of social housing, combined with cultural factors, reduces pressure to act.     

Modelling spatial heterogeneity and anisotropy: child anaemia,sanitation and basic infrastructure in sub-Saharan Africa

Public interventions in support of public health and housing in developing countries could benefit from better understanding of spatial heterogeneity and anisotropy. Estimation of directional variation within geographically weighted regression (GWR) faces problems of local parameter instability, border effects and, if extended to non- spatial attributes, potential endogeneity. This study formulates a GWR model where anisotropy is filtered out based on information from directional variograms. Along with classical regressions, the approach is applied to investigate child anaemia and its associations with household characteristics, sanitation and basic infrastructure in 173 regions of sub-Saharan Africa. Based on ordinary least squares (OLS) results, anaemia prevalence rates are up to three times more responsive to child morbidity (related to malaria and other diseases) than to other covariates. GWR estimates provide similar indications, but also point to poor sanitation facilities as a cofactor of severe anaemia particularly in east and southern Africa. The anisotropy-adjusted GWR is spatially stationary in residuals, and its estimated local parameters are less collinear than GWR with no adjustment. However, similar explanatory power and lack of significant bias in parameters estimated by the latter suggest that directional variation is largely captured by modelled co-movements among the variables.