The Mobile Street Food Service Practice in the Urban Economy of Kumba, Cameroon

The mobile food service practice is one of multiple survival strategies adopted by poor urban households in Cameroon to maintain and expand the base of subsistence incomes, especially in the current surge of economic crisis. Though a fast-growing informal sector enterprise, it is still at an artisanal stage in urban Cameroon, creating an urgent need for a supportive policy environment that could have measurable positive impacts on improving the productivity, welfare and income levels of the micro-entrepreneurs. This study looks at the mobile food service practice in Kumba, Cameroon, in terms of its basic characteristics, the locational factors influencing its socio-spatial distribution, the critical success factors (CSFs) determining customer choices, and its impacts on the local environmental resources and quality of urban life. The mobile food service practice creates employment, generates income, and acts as a food energy-support instrument to the urban poor and local economic activities operating in Kumba. The vendors, who are mostly women, can make incomes that are 405 per cent of the national minimum wage and, thus, contribute financially towards the education, health and survival of their families. The paper provides some recommendations on ways to improve the efficiency of this sector so as to achieve sustainable economic and social development and to enhance empowerment thereof.     

Environmental change and the informal plastic recycling networks of Kolkata

This article introduces plastic recycling networks in Kolkata, India, as a case to illustrate the contradictory entanglement of economic and environmental change in urban informal contexts of the Global South. In light of the prevailing environmental critique of informal plastic recycling in India, this article discusses plastic recyclers’ environmental impact and contribution as well as the potential to enhance the environmental and economic performance of their business. Network and chain approaches in the emerging field of Environmental Economic Geography are combined with the notion of social metabolism to conceptualize the entanglement of environmental and economic processes as well as socio-environmental inequalities entailed in recycling networks. The analysis reveals the impact that the heterogeneity and fluctuation of plastic waste supply has on the economic organization of recycling networks, giving rise to distinct forms of governance in its intermediate and down-stream segments. Such an integrated perspective also serves to explain why environmental upgrading is hard to achieve under prevailing circumstances by plastic recyclers in Kolkata. Based on an assessment of the social and political conditions of informality under which plastic recyclers operate, the adoption of common assumptions about ecological modernization imbuing parts of Environmental Economic Geography is called into question.     

大马士革非正式聚落的讨论(英文)

Toadies cities are accumulating the global population in their territories,occurring formally and informally.The in-crease of urban informality is the most significant trend shaping the 21st century world.Furthermore,the urban informality theory should be considered in urbanization courses and development studies.With the rapid economic market development,changes mapped the major Syrian cities.Damascus is in the midst of a profound transformation of architectural and planning changes.Damascus urbanization i...     

钢筋混凝土建筑抗倒塌设计

建筑抗倒塌问题近年来在欧美国家得到广泛关注，并颁布了相关的设计规范和标准。我国还没有制定有关建筑抗倒塌方面的规范和标准。本文提出一种基于建筑危险性的钢筋混凝土建筑抗倒塌设计方法。该方法将钢筋混凝土建筑分为四类，通过设置拉杆连接系统和Alternate Path设计提高建筑抗倒塌能力。     

Image Sources for Informal Settlement Management

Informal settlements are a common feature of developing countries. In South Africa the improvement of living conditions in these settlements and the upgrading to formal housing types are regarded as being of central importance to the nation's development. Effective settlement improvement and upgrading activities, which we here term "management", require adequate spatial data. To date, the acquisition of spatial models of informal settlements has been based on conventional mapping techniques, and mostly on photogrammetry. Data are compiled using analogue or analytical methods. These are manual and hence require both considerable expertise and expensive equipment. Moreover, these methods are uneconomical over the often relatively small, densely populated areas covered by informal settlements and are also too expensive to employ with a regularity required to support such tasks as change detection. Alternative imaging sources and mapping techniques are therefore needed.
In this article we examine the problem of spatial information acquisition for informal settlement management from three perspectives: spatial information requirements, the role which imagery can play in satisfying these spatial information requirements, and effective imaging options. We focus on the potential of high resolution satellite imaging, small format digital aerial imagery and digital multispectral video systems for rapid mapping. We also discuss the example of automated shack extraction from aerial imagery.     

Surveying co-located space-geodetic instruments for ITRF computation

A new and comprehensive method is presented that can be used for estimating eccentricity vectors between global positioning system (GPS) antennas, doppler orbitography and radiopositioning integrated by satellites (DORIS) antennas, azimuth-elevation (AZ-EL) very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) telescopes, and satellite laser ranging (SLR) and lunar laser ranging (LLR) telescopes. The problem of reference point (RP) definition for these space-geodetic instruments is addressed and computed using terrestrial triangulation and electronic distance measurement (EDM) trilateration. The practical ground operations, the surveying approach and the terrestrial data processing are briefly illustrated, and the post-processing procedure is discussed. It is a geometrically based analytical approach that allows computation of RPs along with a rigorous statistical treatment of measurements. The tight connection between the geometrical model and the surveying procedure is emphasized. The computation of the eccentricity vector and the associated variance–covariance matrix between an AZ-EL VLBI telescope (with or without intersecting axes) and a GPS choke ring antenna is concentrated upon, since these are fundamental for computing the International Terrestrial Reference Frame (ITRF). An extension to RP computation and eccentricity vectors involving DORIS, SLR and LLR techniques is also presented. Numerical examples of the quality that can be reached using the authors approach are given. Working data sets were acquired in the years 2001 and 2002 at the radioastronomical observatory of Medicina (Italy), and have been used to estimate two VLBI-GPS eccentricity vectors and the corresponding SINEX files.     

CALCUTTA'S HAND–PULLED RICKSHAWS: CULTURAL POLITICS AND PLACE MAKING IN A GLOBALIZING CITY*

For more than a century, hand‐pulled rickshaws have been a prominent part of Calcutta's cityscape. Under the veil of modernization, progress, and globalization, however, the government of West Bengal State declared that rickshaws cause traffic congestion and constitute an exploitative use of human labor. Yet, despite the government‐imposed ban, rickshaws continue to ply the streets of central Calcutta. Based on interviews with rickshaw owners, operators, public officials, and local residents, we examine the cultural politics surrounding rickshaw pulling in Calcutta. This article shows that the rickshaw wallahs (pullers), who operate as part of the informal economy, provide an expansive range of services not limited to transportation. Indeed, the rickshaw wallahs form an integral part of Calcutta's social fabric, having made a place for themselves by facilitating social interaction and challenging hegemonic ideas and practices about who belongs where.     

After the 1997 financial crisis in Bangkok: The behaviour and implications of a new cohort of street vendors

After the 1997 financial crisis, many retrenched workers preferred not to return to provincial homes but remained in Bangkok to establish informal retail businesses in branded and other consumer products. In contrast to traditional street vendors, who specialized in food items primarily catering for low‐income customers, and focused on high volume, these ‘new generation’ street vendors also adopted more formal business practices. Given their greater sophistication and better education, we hypothesized that they would be more organized advocates of vendors' rights and thus more prone to conflicts with municipal authorities. Based on interviews, however, we found that new generation vendors are adaptive to location and business strategy, and prefer a low profile in dealing with officialdom. By contrast, traditional vendors remained more tied to particular spaces, are more likely to stand up for their rights to use public space and, because they expect more from government, are more prone to conflicts with municipal authorities. Our findings relate to ongoing discussion on the rights and needs of street vendors to access urban public space and the responsibilities of authorities to meet and provide for these informal sector livelihoods that make up a significant share of the national economy in Thailand, as elsewhere in the global South.     

流动商贩的空间分布特征及与正规商业的分布关系——基于距离测度方法的数量研究

有关非正规经济的空间分布特征始终缺乏宏观维度的定量研究。本文利用数字化城市管理系统中的流动商贩数据和工商局登记的正规商业数据,通过DO指数和M函数,分别探究流动商贩的空间特征及其与正规商业的分布关系。研究发现：① 绝大多数类型的流动商贩及其占地面积具有显著集聚的空间格局;其中,与居民需求较为密切的商贩类型,集聚程度相对较低。② 相较于正规商业,流动商贩在极小的空间尺度上更为强烈地集聚分布;但随着尺度扩大,集聚程度呈快速衰减态势。③ 经营内容相近的流动商贩与正规商业之间表现出显著的互斥关系,而非共栖关系;且两者的互斥程度在较小的空间尺度上尤为强烈。由此,本研究证明设立摊贩疏导区具有可行性和必要性,并就设置的类型及原则提出了初步建议。     

改革开放以来珠江三角洲基层非正规土地利用实践与制度创新——以东莞市长安镇为例

21世纪初,在对非正规经济研究的二元主义、新马克思主义和新自由主义理论解释基础上,出现了批判管治主义理论,重点关注国家权力与制度对非正规性产生的影响。基于该视角,以东莞市长安镇为例,运用质性研究方法,分析了改革开放先行区的珠江三角洲,其基层非正规土地利用实践的产生、表现及其与制度创新之间的关系。研究发现：改革开放以来,在国家土地制度缺失、正规土地管理制度颁布和实施阶段,以及省级政府主导的土地制度创新阶段,非正规土地利用实践经历了被政府鼓励、包容和默许及正规化的过程。部分非正规土地利用实践成为制度创新的根源。土地制度的演变经历了由乡村基层“自下而上”式向地方政府“自上而下”式推动的转变,在演变过程中具有非正规性特征,并服务于各个时期的城市与经济发展需求。未来的研究中,应更多的关注“自下而上”的制度创新和地方实践。