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.     

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。     

Interdisciplinary,Cross-Cultural Research: Double Trouble∗

U.S. housing policy strengthens the local specificity of capital through support for homeownership and the mortgage lending industry. As access to capital and homeownership rates have grown, predatory lending has emerged as a significant danger to homeowners and their surrounding communities. The geographic distribution is not well understood, likely due to the unavailability of mortgage data to identify instances of predatory lending. This article examines the spatial distribution of predatory lending in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, using public mortgage and property data. Predatory lending is spatially clustered within the city, suggesting a spatial component of abusive lending patterns not previously addressed. U.S. housing policy and intervention strategies designed to prevent and reduce the incidence of predatory lending should address the spatial aspects of predatory lending to target efforts and prevent weakening local connections between capital and communities.     

An Analysis of the Relationship Between Housing Foreclosures,Lending Practices,and Neighborhood Ecology: Evidence from a Distressed County

Residential foreclosures increased sharply during the 1990s and in the first years of the twenty-first century. These foreclosures have profound impacts on the households and neighborhoods involved. Although foreclosures occur everywhere, the geography of foreclosures displays a pattern tied to a metropolitan area's social, fiscal, and economic geography. We examine these correspondences as they exist within Summit County (Akron), Ohio, between 2001 and 2003. Foreclosures themselves often result from unfortunate financial events that can affect any household, but we found that the geography of foreclosures corresponds primarily to Summit County's racial distribution, above and beyond any correspondence with income levels and housing fiscal stress. There also exists a clear coincidence of foreclosures with subprime lending, itself associated with Summit County's racial patterns. Concentrations of foreclosures in particular neighborhoods can be tremendously harmful to the social and economic health of the neighborhood. These comparisons help us to better understand the neighborhood ecology of foreclosure rates and subprime lending.     

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.