Suchergebnisse

Theories on Social Space: Origins and Analysis -- Discovering Shanghainese People from the Spatial History of Shanghai -- The Spatial Characteristics during the Rise of Shanghai -- The Spatial Narration of Shanghai's Inner-City Regeneration -- Business Streets in Shanghai: Past and Present -- Struggles over Power and Urban Regeneration Mode in the Tianzifang Experiment -- The Three-stage Social Naming of Space in Tianzifang -- Spatial Justice and Equality of Right-of-way in The Automobile Society -- Morning Exercises in Parks and Social Space -- Digital Economy and Interactive Communities -- From Space Production to Community Empowerment.

This book explores small town geographical aspects by approaching them from a socio-spatial perspective. The contributions included in this book delve into a range of topics that have not been commonly studied before, such as white privilege, neglect of municipal infrastructure, collaborative governance, livelihoods in small-scale fisheries, housing provision, well-being in mining towns, studentification in rural contexts, election trends, and the historical development of small-town spas. The book adopts a socio-spatial point of view, providing a holistic understanding of the interplay between social and spatial factors within selected small town case studies. This approach sheds light on the socio-economic, political, and cultural dynamics that shape small towns. This localized perspective allows for a more targeted analysis of issues and potential solutions, taking into account the specific historical, cultural, and political contexts of small town South Africa. The edited volume serves as a valuable resource for academics, policymakers, practitioners, and anyone interested in understanding and improving small towns in South Africa.

This project is an analysis of the spatial inequality that exists between rural and urban areas in access to food assistance agencies. I gathered the population of all food pantries and soup kitchens in 24 sample counties in Indiana and mapped the location of these agencies using geographic information system analysis. Using the population center of the census block group, I measured the distance from the population center to the nearest food assistance agency. If the closest agency was more than a mile away, the census block group was considered a food assistance desert, a concept I created that draws on the food desert measurement. I found that rural high‐poverty counties in my sample are the most likely to contain census block groups that are food assistance deserts, and urban high‐poverty counties are the least likely to contain food assistance deserts. From these findings, I determine that access to assistance agencies needs to be increased in rural areas, especially rural areas with high‐poverty rates.

Most of the research on urban change in the formerly centrally planned countries has focused on the more prosperous capital cities of Warsaw, Prague, Berlin, Budapest and Tallinn. Thus, our understanding of on-going urban transformations in this part of the world is skewed towards a handful of urban areas. This paper takes a different approach by studying the post-socialist transformations of the socio-spatial structure of a second-tier city, based on data from Łódź, Poland. The results reveal the socio-spatial restructuring of Łódź at both the macro and micro levels. Most importantly, despite being organised at a wider scale by stable social areas, at the micro level there are dynamic processes of socio-spatial segregation throughout the city that contribute to the fine-grained fragmentation of social space. From an empirical perspective, this means that either a stable structure or growing fragmentation can be identified, depending on the scale of analysis.

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained largely underinvestigated. Another complementary question is whether socio-economic networks in space also show a similar hierarchical pattern. Against this background, the present paper investigates – from a methodological viewpoint – the relationship between network connectivity and the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in an urban-economic network constellation. After a review of the literature, we address in particular the following methodological issues: (i) the (aggregate) behavioural foundation underlying the rank-size rule/Zipf's law in the light of spatial-economic network theories (e.g. entropy maximization, spatial interaction theory, etc.); (ii) the nature of the analytical relationship between social-spatial network analysis and the rank-size rule/Zipf's law. We argue that the rank size rule is compatible with conventional economic foundations of spatial network models. Consequently, a spatial-economic interpretation – as well as a network connectivity interpretation – of the rank-size rule coefficient is provided. Our methodological contribution forms the foundation for the subsequent empirical analysis applied to spatial networks in a socio-economic context. The aim here is to test the sensitivity of empirical findings for changes in scale, functional forms, time periods, and network structures. Our application is concerned with an extensive spatio-temporal panel database related to the evolution of urban population in Germany. We test the relevance of the rank-size rule/Zipf's law, and its evolution over the years, and – in parallel – the related 'socio-economic' connectivity in these urban networks. In particular, we will show that Zipf's law (i.e., with the rank-size coefficient equal to 1) is only valid under particular conditions of the sample size. The paper concludes with some retrospective and prospective remarks.

The aim of the paper is to determine the socio-spatial structure of neighbourhoods and their changes in the urban region of Vilnius after 1990 and to identify further trends of potential development. On the one hand the post-Soviet city Vilnius is characterized by a stable mixed social structure with slow processes of social changes in formerly inhabited territories. On the other hand newly-built residential areas emerged with socially homogeneous, better income structures. Based on the general development trends in the urban region of Vilnius and results of the present survey, two prospective scenarios (persistence/social stability and growing social difference/polarisation) in the city region can be distinguished. The most important factors for social stability concern inherited structures (privatization, social mixed population, image, infrastructure) and factors of differentiation by current processes (construction, deterioration of housing quality).

In this paper the socio-spatial differentiation that has taken place in the metropolitan region of Budapest since the change of regime is analysed. It is intended to show how local underlying structures and new regulatory contexts (e.g. free market, local urban policies) as well as legacies of the past work together in setting a diverse path of development within the city. In line with the objective in the analytical part of the paper the overall pattern of socio-spatial change in the metropolitan region is analysed with the aid of census data. This is followed by the interpretation of empirical research data gathered in different neighbourhoods of the city as part of an international research project. It is demonstrated that with the post-socialist transition the locational preferences of relevant stakeholders (both residents and investors) changed significantly which caused a sharp turn in the trajectory of the individual urban zones. This included the rediscovery of the city-centre, a slow but steady upgrading and gentrification of the historical residential quarters, the gradual social erosion in the housing estates, decline and later re-investment in the industrial brown field zone, and a boom, and later stagnation in the suburban areas. However, due to local policies and global effects (e.g. global financial crisis) individual development tracks of neighbourhoods are gaining importance in Budapest, making the pattern of investment-disinvestment more mosaic like within the same urban zone. As a consequence it is almost impossible to assess one urban zone as a homogeneous area, and set in a universal model. Dynamics more and more depend on local efforts and mechanisms. The study demonstrates that local forces are increasingly powerful in urban development and the overall future of the cities seems to depend on the total sum of efforts, investments and quality of change in its neighbourhoods.

"The unmistakeable pattern that has long divided Santiago de Chile into the 'rich' northeastern municipalities and the 'poor' rest of the city has recently begun to change. Little is known about the mechanisms that drive these processes of socio-spatial differentiation and their associated opportunities and risks. This chapter explores three trends in socio-spatial change for 39 municipalities of the Greater Metropolitan Area of Santiago: demographic variables such as population trends and intra-metropolitan migration streams, housing and land market trends with respect to construction volume, building permits and land prices, and finally state housing policy with particular reference to social housing programmes. The analysis shows that in combination, these trends have supported the formation of two extreme types of socio-spatial conditions in various locations throughout the city. The chapter stresses the prominent role of state housing programmes. While the contemporary debate on these aspects focuses to a large extent on the agglomeration of low-income groups in social housing schemes on the periphery, the results suggest that the housing policy should give attention to some of the more central locations, where the move towards gentrification could cause the displacement of low-income groups in the future." (author's abstract)

Persons who were congenitally blind, late blind, and blindfold sighted learned an object-array by being guided within it in cardinal directions towards walls. Subjects then judged the near, far, left, and right locations of objects from different points of observation (PO). One-half of the subjects were guided to POs and at spot informed about their orientation (actual condition). The rest were first asked to imagine being at POs (imaginal condition). Group and task condition did not interact, but group and PO did: Visual experience speeded up judgments, especially in corners. The sequence imaginal-actual speeded up judgments in all groups.