{"title":"Mobile Internet and regional development in China","authors":"Lei Dong, Haishan Wu","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16676091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16676091","url":null,"abstract":"Does the spread of mobile Internet promote regional development and reduce poverty? This important question is closely related to the topic of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and economic development, which has been discussed for a long time (Heeks, 2010; World Bank, 2016). Researchers have shown evidence that Internet connectivity and the use of mobile phones can reduce transaction cost, increase market efficiency, expand educational opportunities, and promote innovation (Aker and Mbiti, 2010; Guerrero, 2015; Litan and Rivlin, 2001). Yet little empirical works have been done to analyze the economical impacts of mobile Internet due to the scarcity of micro-level data, despite that smart-phone and mobile Internet are becoming an inseparable part of people’s daily lives. Here, we propose using a novel data source to map county-level mobile Internet coverage in China and analyze its relationship with socio-economical indicators. First, we extracted the most visited county as a user’s ‘‘home county’’ via Baidu’s geo-positioning data, which covers nearly 80% of the total mobile Internet users in China. We summed up the number of users within the whole country and scaled the total number up to 500 million—the total number of mobile Internet subscribers in China at the end of 2013 (CNNIC, 2016). We then divided the mobile Internet users of each county by its corresponding population derived from statistic yearbooks, constructing the mobile Internet coverage indicator at county-level. Second, we collected socio-economical data (e.g. gross regional product (GRP), national poverty counties, urbanization rate, and education year) from sixth population census and local governments’ reports, and combined them at county-level for comparison. Figure 1 maps the mobile Internet coverage and national poverty counties (released by the Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development in 2012). We find that the area of higher mobile Internet coverage (brighter) is also the area where the economy is more developed, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangdong, and Zhejiang; and most of the national poverty counties (in orange) are of lower mobile Internet coverage (darker), which looks like ‘‘digital black holes.’’ For example, there are 73 national poverty counties in Yunnan province (Figure 1(d)), ranking the lowest among all provinces. Meanwhile, the mobile Internet coverage of Yunnan is 22.9%, ranking the second lowest.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"24 1","pages":"725 - 727"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81235982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Financialization and the third sector: Innovation in social housing bond markets","authors":"T. Wainwright, G. Manville","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16684140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16684140","url":null,"abstract":"The recent global financial crisis has seen investors turn away from real-estate bonds, given their role in distributing risk during the crisis. However, since 2009, a new type of real-estate bond market has grown in London, enabling social housing groups to issue bonds. This could be viewed as further evidence of the extension of financialization practices into new spaces, beyond those of traditional capital markets and associated intermediaries. In this paper, we examine how financialization has begun to permeate the third sector, reordering the priority of housing associations' values, displacing social value creation with the economic. We highlight how reduced state funding has led social housing providers to become more reliant on capital market intermediaries, and explore how locally orientated social housing associations have become embedded within wider financial networks. While policy makers have viewed financial markets as a panacea to fund social housing developments in an age of austerity, tensions have emerged, requiring localized social housing organizations to become more commercial in their activities, jeopardizing their ability to protect vulnerable communities through social value creation.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"139 1","pages":"819 - 838"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91350619","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Infrastructuring the social: Local community work, urban policy and marginalized residential areas in Denmark","authors":"R. Birk","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16683187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16683187","url":null,"abstract":"This article develops the concept of infrastructuring the social by analyzing the uses of local community work in Danish marginalized residential areas. Infrastructuring the social is a concept to describe how spaces are designated as problematic and marginalized and then remade through the creation and materialization of normative and instrumental relations. The article empirically demonstrates how infrastructuring the social works through enacting relations between residents, local community workers and professionals from municipalities, relations which are used to move people along normative trajectories. These trajectories are meant to transport people out of problematic areas, and into closer contact with “regular society,” such as Danish institutions, education, and the labor market. Infrastructuring the social is thus enacted from the outside in, imbued with the normative imperatives of the welfare state, seeking to rework the agency of residents and improve the marginalized residential area. The concept of infrastructuring the social nuances the trope of the “network” by highlighting the normative imperatives embedded in making relations, and goes beyond frameworks of governmentality by highlighting the practical messiness and on-going work of everyday governance.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"34 1","pages":"767 - 783"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84511085","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Planning, uncertainty and risk: The neoliberal logics of Amsterdam urbanism","authors":"F. Savini","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16684520","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16684520","url":null,"abstract":"Since the last decade, rising concern related to uncertainty in urban dynamics has encouraged alternative approaches to land development in order to reduce financial risks of public spending while stimulating new investments. In particular, municipalities are experimenting with more open-ended, incremental and co-produced forms of urbanism that aim to reform existent supply-led urban development models. This paper shows that these practices underlie a neoliberal reform of public spending and that they have important socio-political implications for urban welfare. By discussing the relation between uncertainty and risk, it shows that recent reforms of urban development policies do not reduce risk but rather reorganize it in two ways. First, by resizing the time horizon of action and prioritizing short-term delivery, and second, by simultaneously privatizing and collectivizing risk to individuals and public budgets. An in-depth analysis of recent reforms in Amsterdam public financing model is provided. This paper concludes that a risk-sensitive view of planning innovation is today necessary in order to address future socio-economic challenges of urban change.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"59 1","pages":"857 - 875"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80617076","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Living space and psychological well-being in urban China: Differentiated relationships across socio-economic gradients","authors":"Yang Hu, R. Coulter","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16680213","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16680213","url":null,"abstract":"Western research has shown that a shortage of living space is associated with poor psychological well-being. By contrast, norms and practices of extended family co-residence, collectivist social organization, and a bureaucratic quota-based housing allocation system were thought to limit the adverse psychological effects of cramped dwelling conditions in pre-reform China. As these buffers may be weakening with the dramatic housing reforms, socio-economic, and cultural changes taking place in post-reform urban China, we use data from the 2010 China Family Panel Studies (N = 13,367) to re-examine the relationship between living space and psychological well-being in contemporary Chinese cities. In particular, we examine the ways in which this relationship is moderated by family wealth and community poverty in order to explore how subjective experiences of dwelling space are shaped by one’s relative socio-economic position. The results show that cramped living conditions are significantly associated with poor psychological well-being in post-reform urban China. Importantly, the psychological implications of cramped dwellings may vary with family and particularly community socio-economic status as this association tends to be stronger among more affluent families and communities than among those that are more impoverished. Taken together the findings indicate that uneven socio-economic development, segmented cultural change, and drastic housing reforms within China’s cities may be interacting to configure people’s housing experiences and health outcomes.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"16 1","pages":"911 - 929"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82747436","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“I never felt targeted as an Asian … until I went to a gay pub”: Sexual racism and the aesthetic geographies of the bad encounter","authors":"Derek Ruez","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16680817","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16680817","url":null,"abstract":"Encounters across difference—in city spaces marked by diverse migration trajectories, cultural differences, and racialized hierarchies—have captured the attention of urban scholars concerned with both the challenge of “living with difference” and the promise of multicultural conviviality that inhere in the super-diversity of many cities. Expanding on approaches that focus on analyzing the conditions of a good or “meaningful” encounter that can reduce prejudice or promote intercultural understanding, this paper brings interviews with queer Asian men in Sydney, Australia into dialogue with Sara Ahmed's revaluation of the “bad encounter.” It shows how research on encounters can more productively engage with how negative encounters can become meaningful political occasions in their own right. Focusing on the problem of sexual racism as it emerges in accounts shared by participants, the paper highlights dating and sex as important moments through which the aesthetic orderings of race, gender, and sexuality shape the unevenly shared spaces of citizenship and urban life.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"16 1","pages":"893 - 910"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80057008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Buy-to-let gentrification: Extending social change through tenure shifts","authors":"Antoine Paccoud","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16679406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16679406","url":null,"abstract":"Recent discussions of gentrification in the UK have centred on new builds and on the influence of particular public programmes. This paper focuses on a form of gentrification that has cut across both of these: buy-to-let, broadly defined as the purchase and transfer of a dwelling to the private rental market. Initiated in response to a favourable legislative and financial context, this form of property investment has not usually been considered as gentrification, likely because it is at odds with the historical link between gentrification and ownership in the UK, poses problems with consumption side explanations and is not seen as displacing low-income residents. The paper uses a detailed comparison of small-area social and tenure data from the 2001 and 2011 UK censuses to show that buy-to-let has become a prominent tenure trajectory in gentrifying neighbourhoods. This prominence emerges from the opportunity it affords to use the general value gap created by the deregulation of the private rental sector to close rent gaps in the most urban, central and disadvantaged areas of England. This tenure shift, shown to be intrinsically linked to gentrification, creates vast opportunities for asset appreciation but also initiates long term trajectories of displacement in surrounding areas.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"6 1","pages":"839 - 856"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84512511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Nazism, neoliberalism, and the Trumpist challenge to democracy","authors":"Daniel Bessner, M. Sparke","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17701429","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17701429","url":null,"abstract":"Trumpism demands that scholars rethink the categories commonly used to critique authoritarian and pro-market regimes. We seek here to contribute to this rethinking with a series of reflections on how the terms “Nazi” and “neoliberal” cannot be used without careful consideration of the ways in which they complicate one another. In particular, we suggest that scholars must be careful about comparing Trumpism to Nazism, because, in the past, the “Weimar analogy” was used to justify anti-democratic structures of governance. The latter is an important trap to avoid, because we ultimately conclude that Trump’s monstrous merging of neoliberal and Nazi tendencies can only be overcome with democratic struggle.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"43 1","pages":"1214 - 1223"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85775628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beyond studentification in United States College Towns: Neighborhood change in the knowledge nodes, 1980–2010","authors":"Nathaniel Foote","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17698962","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17698962","url":null,"abstract":"With the rise of the cognitive-cultural (or knowledge) economy, urban areas around the world have experienced significant changes in their social geographies. Studentification is one such change that has occurred in cities hosting major universities around the world. This study extends the analysis of social change to vital knowledge nodes in the networked global economy: United States college towns. K-means cluster analysis is used to identify neighborhood types in ten cities with major research universities across four Census years: 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Temporal and spatial analyses are then conducted to determine how these knowledge nodes have changed with the decline of the industrial economy and the rise of the knowledge economy. The analysis indicates the presence of six neighborhood types in these college towns: Middle Class, Minority-Concentrated, Stability, Elite, Mix/Renter, and Student. Over the course of the study period, the number of Elite neighborhoods increased considerably, while the number of Middle Class neighborhoods plummeted. The number of Mix/Renter neighborhoods also increased. Spatially, Student and Minority-Concentrated neighborhoods generally remained fairly clustered in the same areas across the study period. Elite neighborhoods spread across wider geographical areas over the course of the study period. These results are compared to previous studies on neighborhood change. The comparisons reveal that the knowledge nodes show some similar patterns to studentifying cities and to rapidly growing nodes in areas with ties to the global knowledge economy.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"51 1","pages":"1341 - 1360"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78941301","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Freedom, part-time pirates, and poo police: Regulating the heterotopic space of the recreational boat","authors":"Deanna Grant-Smith, Robyn Mayes","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17697976","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17697976","url":null,"abstract":"At all levels of governance from international convention to local policy, the regulation of pollution from boats and ships has been steeped in conflict and subject to resistance. Recreational boaters, in particular, are often highly resistant to attempts to regulate their boating activity, particularly on environmental grounds. Such ongoing resistance poses a significant policy compliance challenge. This paper seeks to shed light on this complex, ongoing and broader field of opposition to environmental management by way of a case study analysis of resistance to on-board sewage regulations on the part of recreational boaters in Queensland, Australia. This resistance on the part of ‘everyday’ citizens is examined through the lens of heterotopia. In consequence, the paper can contribute to understandings more broadly of problems beleaguering environmental policy while also attending to the deeply implicated social roles of recreational boating spaces; namely as heterotopias of compensation and/or illusion. It also highlights how these heterotopic positionings are intensified by the scatological orientation of the policy under study.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"25 7 1","pages":"1379 - 1395"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76629633","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}