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.     

中国餐饮业食物浪费的资源环境问题综述

近年来食物浪费以及食物浪费的资源环境问题越来越成为全球关注的焦点,尤其是在发展中国家,食物浪费成为威胁食物安全的另一关键因素。尽管如此,在中国,人们仍然对食物浪费缺乏认识,尤其是餐饮业中消费者的食物浪费。因此,基于国内主流媒体报道的大量餐饮业食物浪费的案例数据资料,本研究针对餐饮业中的食物浪费做了系统的阐述。针对餐饮业食物浪费的初步估计,本研究揭示了我国餐饮业食物浪费的严重性。通过分析国际上大量食物浪费的相关文献资料,本研究具体阐述了食物浪费的资源环境代价。最后,本研究基于生命周期评价方法提出了针对餐饮业食物浪费及其资源环境效应研究的概念框架,以便更有效地减少食物浪费。     

Thrifty, green or frugal: Reflections on sustainable consumption in a changing economic climate

In the context of a string of economic crises that have affected major world economies between 2007 and 2009, there seems to be a certain amount of overlap between debates around these issues and debates around long term environmental problems such as climate change. One of the interesting points of overlap is a renewed interest in notions of austerity with optimistic commentators offering up hope that a (re)turn to frugality represents a unique opportunity for the pursuit of sustainable consumption. Against this backdrop the analysis sets out an approach to frugality as a social practice and drawing on a qualitative study of persons who identified themselves as attempting to reduce their environmental impacts, it considers the links between frugality and sustainable consumption. Crucially, a distinction is drawn between thrift and frugality in relation to: (1) the scale at which they exercise care and compassion; (2) their relationship to the normative expectations of consumer cultures, and; (3) their consequences in terms of environmental impacts. Taking these distinctions alongside historical analyses of changing consumption patterns, a note of caution is offered that the passage from the economic downturn to sustainable consumption may not be as clear as might be hoped.     

Dye Removal,Energy Consumption and Operating Cost of Electrocoagulation of Textile Wastewater as a Clean Process

In this research, the efficiency of electrocoagulation treatment process using aluminum electrodes to treat synthetic wastewater containing Reactive Red198 (RR198) was studied. The effects of parameters such as voltage, time of reaction, electrode connection mode, initial dye concentration, electrolyte concentration, and inter electrode distance on dye removal efficiency were investigated. In addition, electrical energy consumption, electrode consumption, and operating cost at optimum condition have been investigated. The results showed that dye and chemical oxygen demand removals were 98.6 and 84%, respectively. Electrode consumption, energy consumption and operating cost were 0.052 kg/m³, 1.303 kWh/m³ and 0.256 US$/m³, respectively. Dye removal kinetic followed first order kinetics. It can be concluded that electrocoagulation process by aluminum electrode is very efficient and clean process for reactive dye removal from colored wastewater.     

流域耗水平衡方法与应用

流域水量平衡分析是水资源现状评价与水资源合理调度研究工作中的-个核心.本文基于遥感技术估算的蒸散,结合监测统计数据,提出了流域耗水平衡方法,以海河流域为例进行了2002年-2007年流域及子流域的耗水平衡分析,流域多年平均蓄变量为-62.3亿m3,其中农业生产是流域水资源消耗的主要因素,占耗水总量的54.3%,年际变动范围较小(-5%-8%).通过流域蓄变量变化和流域蒸散结构的分析,揭示海河流域存在的水资源问题,为流域水资源管理和节水型社会建设耗水控制和节水方案提出建议.     

谈谈房屋用途的确认

根据现有的两种房屋用途分类文件,从两者对权属登记的适用性角度出发,探了房屋的确认。     

鄱阳湖流域岩石化学风化特征及CO2消耗量估算

岩石风化过程中所产生的碳汇是全球碳循环的重要组成部分,该领域受到研究全球变化科学家们的普遍关注。文中通过对鄱阳湖流域河水系统的样品采集和化学成分分析,研究了河水化学成分来源及流域岩石风化所产生的碳汇效应。以大气降水、蒸发岩、硅酸岩和碳酸盐岩为4个端员,计算出它们对河水中溶解质的贡献率分别为10．4％、21．9％、30．...