Suchergebnisse

This essay provides an economic geography perspective on the causes and consequences of the war in eastern Ukraine. It focuses on the controversial proposition that the armed conflict in 2014 was triggered by domestic, economically determined factors. The essay argues that economic and material circumstances in the region had generated neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a locally rooted, internally driven armed conflict. The role of the Kremlin's military intervention was paramount for the commencement of hostilities. As the human and economic costs of the war continue to mount, Ukraine's war-ravaged eastern regions face further depopulation, economic decline and erosion of development.

This study exposes and maps a hitherto little‐known dimension of China's urban geography – that of shrinkage, directly affecting one in 10 of its cities. Urban shrinkage is revealed to be a growing concern for the most populous country on earth, with the absolute number of shrinking cities rising by 71% from 164 in the 1990s to 281 in the 2000s. By developing its own definition of the city as an urban area (UA) in the Chinese political‐administrative context, this paper builds a morphologic taxonomy of China's shrinking cities. This reveals the overall net population loss across Chinese shrinking cities more than doubling since 1990, reaching 7.3 million inhabitants in 2010. Sixty‐eight Chinese UAs, mostly in north‐eastern China, are found to have been shrinking continuously since 1990. Despite the multifaceted and entangled make‐up of urban shrinkage, the paper identifies four distinct causes of this geographical phenomenon in China: (1) state‐incubated reindustrialisation and economic restructuring, impacting upon 63% of all shrinking UAs; (2) the country's new economic geography, with the underlying centripetal forces of agglomeration pushing around 34% of all shrinking cities towards marginalisation; (3) state‐propelled demographic change, leading to natural population decline in 26% of Chinese shrinking cities; and (4) state‐sponsored mega‐shrinkage, responsible for urban population loss in almost 20% of all the cases. This study further provides a theoretically informed reflection on the peculiarity of shrinkage in China and its public policy implications.

This paper critically engages with State/Space theory by interrogating the soundness of its fundamental assumptions regarding the rescaling of capitalism and by questioning the validity of its proposition about ever-rising spatial imbalances and economic divergence in post-1970s' Europe. The paper employs descriptive, cartographic and econometric analysis of the regional and urban growth data covering 28 European Union countries and 11 major OECD and BRICS economies. The vast volume of multi-scalar evidence presented here cannot substantiate the central rescaling hypothesis about Europe's increasing spatial disparities. A set of alternative explanations is proposed to account for the reported European economic convergence trends.

Soon after de facto annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by the Russian Federation in February-March 2018, the Donbas was plunged into a brutal – albeit undeclared or 'hybrid' – war that pitted Russia and its proxy military forces against Ukraine. In total, between 14 April 2014 and 15 November 2017, the UN recorded 35,081 war-related casualties, including 10,303 people killed and 24,778 injured. Today, there are 1 491 528 internally displaced people or 1 217 071 families, most of them from war-torn territories (Ministry for Social Policy 23 March 2018). Over 80% of the IDPs have found temporary residence in just ve Ukrainian regions: the government-controlled districts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts (42% and 13% respectively), the neighbouring Kharkiv and Zaporizhia oblasts (10.9% and 7.4% respectively), and Kyiv (8%). Of the remaining Donbas inhabitants, two to three million currently reside in non-government controlled areas, with another 600,000 being caught in the so-called 'grey zone', living within 5km either side of the 457km frontline.