Environments of disadvantage: Geographies of persistent poverty in Glasgow

Persistence of poverty amidst plenty is a characteristic of advanced capitalist societies. In the UK most of the disadvantaged live in towns and cities, where despite half a century of the welfare state, poverty and deprivation remain serious problems for people and places marginal to the capitalist development process. This research employs data from successive national Censuses of Population to map the changing geography of disadvantage in the post‐industrial city of Glasgow. The findings provide insight into the effectiveness of past anti‐deprivation strategies and signpost areas for future action.     

社会阶层化与城市社会空间的发展及其与城市娱乐业的(空间)关系

基于学术界共识的后工业化大城市社会空间中产阶层化的理念,本文首次提出社会阶层化的概念并指出社会阶层化主要研究在社会阶层的生活行为扩散和变化规律下,所构建的城市日常居住社区体系和日常生活行为场所体系的时空模式,以此探讨城市社会空间结构的变化。研究认为不同城市发展阶段其对应有不同主导阶层的社会阶层化空间结构。进一步从解构城市社会空间结构的演化动态角度,研究不同社会发展阶段下,社会阶层化与城市娱乐产业的对偶空间结构关系。     

Adjusting to change: privilege and place in post-Soviet central Moscow

In the new Russia where one lives plays an important part in influencing life chances, and consequently in shaping opinions regarding the changes since the collapse of the Soviet system in 1991. This study of the social geography of central Moscow is based on surveys of sample populations undertaken in 1993 and 1997. Post-Soviet central Moscow has undergone substantial change in population, social class structure and economic function during the transition from socialism to a market economy. Tens of thousands of central city residents have been relocated in the wake of re-development in the central city and there is evidence of growing social stratification as the inherent high value of central city space is reflected in the post-Soviet market place. Quality of life indicators suggest that there remains a wide gap between expectations raised by the advent of democracy and the market economy and the reality of daily life and labour for central city residents.     

CULTURE‐LED DEVELOPMENT AND CONFLICT OVER URBAN SPACE: REIMAG(IN)ING ST PETERSBURG,RUSSIA

Culture‐led projects have long been part of strategies to regenerate cities in advanced capitalist economies. In recent decades those projects also have become a focal point of urban development in post‐socialist cities. This study argues that an attempt to reimage(in)e the city of St Petersburg through its culture‐led flagship project, Mariinsky Theatre–2, has generated significant changes not only to its built fabric, but also to its social fabric. In the context of a post‐socialist city, this study examines how the urban space of the historical centre is being contested by its urban users, often on the basis of differences in perception, including the impacts of the culture‐led project on those perceptions. Civic awareness about social exclusion and inclusion in urban space is on the rise in this post‐socialist city.     

中国城市社会阶层空间化评价的思路与方法

探索了一种专门适用于中国城市内部社会阶层空间化评价的思路与方法,提出“五等级+八阶层+三视角”的分析框架。主要过程为：①以职业身份为基础划分为八大社会阶层;②基于组织资源、经济资源、文化资源占有情况归入到五大社会经济等级并赋分值;③选取适宜的空间尺度构建城市社会阶层评价区;④提出一种平均社会阶层水平（ASC）、社会阶层区位熵（LQSC）、阶层差异指数（ISC）的计算方法,并综合评价各社会阶层区的平均社会阶层、主导社会阶层、内部阶层差异特征。将该方法应用到广州市的案例研究,结果表明：广州市社会阶层呈现明显的空间集聚与空间分异;不同社会经济等级人士具有各自不同的区位指向;不同评价单元内部的社会阶层差异程度各异,且与平均社会阶层水平趋势相反。该思路可为中国城市内部社会阶层的空间化研究提供一个可供选择的视角。     

The dynamic nature of social disadvantage: implications for hazard exposure and vulnerability in Greater Vancouver

Urbanization and re-urbanization continually alter spatial patterns of social disadvantage and hazard exposure, which in turn affect social vulnerability. The current study explores vulnerability to hazards in Greater Vancouver over a 15-year period (1986 to 2001). Results illustrate how social disadvantage is multi-dimensional and emerges from the social geography of a city. The study illustrates the speed with which both the structure and spatial patterns of social disadvantage can change in cities experiencing rapid growth or redevelopment. The study also suggests that Greater Vancouver does not display consistent patterns of minority- or income-based environmental inequity in hazard exposure, which raises questions about the role of various policies in ameliorating vulnerability to natural and technological hazards .     

Exemplary Cities in China: The Capitalist Aesthetic and the Loss of Space

ABSTRACT

Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial transformation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital-centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.     

A Picture of the Floating World: Grounding the Secessionary Affluence of the Residential Cruise Liner

Abstract:  A quarter century of financial deregulation, robber-baron corporatism and growing income polarisation has enabled the spatial partitioning of urban space into new and complex arrangements of micro-neighbourhood governance and privatism. These archipelagos of fortress homes and neighbourhoods increasingly lie outside the spaces of conventional state and city government. Yet while residential spaces of urban affluence have been unable to fully remove contact with the social diversity of the public realm, nomadic forms of super-affluence, flowing around a global–national urban system, have generated a form of networked extra-territoriality—a social space decoupled from the perceived risks and general dowdiness of the social world beneath it. This paper examines this space via the curious case of The World , a large residential cruise ship which, as its name suggests, roams the oceans and ports of the globe. Our title is taken from the name given to Japanese paintings of the new affluence and fantasy of life lived by the affluent and artists in late nineteenth century Japanese cities ( O Ukiyo E , or pictures of the floating world). We suggest that The World forms a similarly disconnected realm, not only literally afloat, also detached from the reality of a world that has been strategically left behind.     

The Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

城市重建及其防护体系的构成——十六世纪倭乱在江南的影响

江南是从唐宋以来中国最为繁荣的经济区 ,一直保持着持续发展的良好态势。除偶或受王朝更迭以及内部萌生的变乱 (如盗匪、民变等 )的影响外 ,最大的破坏性影响在于外患。倭寇之乱就是其中影响程度较深的一种 ,也是有明一代对中国沿海地区扰乱较深的事件。由于倭寇事件本身涉及到许多方面的问题 ,因此本文在廓清明代倭乱的程度及其历史地理背景的基础上 ,将讨论重点置于已往很少注意的嘉靖倭乱给江南地区城防建设带来的影响。这是明代中后期江南地区社会发展过程中的一个重要方面 ,因为这一时期的城防建设不但与过去有很大的不同 ,出现了一次大规模的修建活动 ,而且在以后 ,更奠定了江南城市社会发展的重要基础。从这一角度出发 ,说明战争动乱期间的控制行为在城防这种特定形式下是如何展开的 ,并揭示社会力量在江南地区所体现的地位和作用。     

城市公共空间与移民跨群体融合研究——时空间行为视角的研究综述

大规模人口流动背景下的社会极化和社会排斥是全球城市普遍面临的挑战,移民的跨群体社会融合已成为中国城市研究关注的新议题。城市规划和地理学者长期重视公共空间的社会融合效应,强调通过公共空间的营造改善群体间的包容态度、促进群体间融合。然而,持续增强的移动性使得本就存在争议的公共空间跨群体融合效应更加复杂。本文从时空间行为的视角出发,从时间、空间、行为三个维度,构建围绕公共空间的移民—本地居民跨群体融合效应综合分析框架。此框架整合空间、行为和时间三个维度,考虑个体活动与移动的连续性,构建多重空间情境下的活动—移动链,揭示公共空间在不同时间尺度上的跨群体融合效应。在移动性增强的背景下,时空间行为视角的研究框架有助于理解人—地交互的社会融合效应,为包容性城市建设提供参考。     

Social areas in Beijing

Cities in the Western world have been subjected to a spatial process that essentially reflects rules of the market economy. People with ‘might’, defined in terms of money, have priority access to better residential locations. This allows a larger measure of personal preference to sway on residential location, and has ushered in the secondary factors of family or life–cycle effects as well as individual perception and choice regarding what is an acceptable neighbourhood and acceptable distance for commuting. Some parallel work has been done in socialist and Third World cities in the 1970s and 1980s which provides evidence of divergence from the original construct. Yet due to lack of good quality and sufficient data and general lack of interest in the social geography of cities there was little work done in China. Up to 1990, Chinese cities had combined the characteristics of socialist central planning, and characteristics of Third World cities of low level of economic development and limited ability of city governments in improving urban housing. Based on the latest 1990 Census, we study the social areas of Beijing of 1990 and the dynamics behind their formation. In particular, we shall highlight the impacts of the housing supply situation and allocation under central planning and the interrelationship between these and the conventional social areas dynamics. The Opening and Reform after 1978 has introduced new dynamics in China's urban social space. The 1990 census netted out some evidence of these new factors. However, their real impact may only be more adequately measured by the coming census in 2000. Limited by the census data, our examination has excluded the latest situation (after 1990). In spite of the use of the Shevky and Bell construct the purpose of the present study focuses on understanding the social geography of contemporary Chinese cities, and provides a useful historic and ideological dimension for comparative studies for related key concepts in urban and social geography.     

The urban in fragile,uncertain, neoliberal times: towards new geographies of social justice?

Canadian cities are at a crossroads. The neoliberalization of governance at multiple scales, inadequate re-investment in urban infrastructure, increasing reliance on continental and international trade, and the restructuring of the space economy have combined to weaken Canada's cities just as the global economic system is undergoing transformation. Canadian urban geographic scholarship has much to offer under current conditions, and is already making significant contributions in key areas. In particular, research on what might be called the contours and impacts of urban restructuring and the neoliberal city, immigration and cities of difference, and urban environmental justice show much promise and are likely to define the core of Canadian urban geography into the future.     

Epistemological Ignorances and Fighting for the Disappeared: Lessons from Mexico

Social justice struggles across the Americas have, over the last half century, transformed the urban areas of this region into international staging grounds for protesting the global devastation wrought by capitalist exploitation, state terror and social hatred. This paper maintains that there is much to learn for struggles against this triangulation in other parts of the world. In particular, through a discussion of how contemporary activism in Mexico against feminicidio, drug wars and brutal repression draws from a long legacy of protest across the Americas, I seek to illustrate the relevance for other places as people fight a cruel modernity that evolves through terror, profit and hatred. Critical geography has long contributed to exposing these connections and can still deepen its commitments to mapping the landscapes of the growing populations of disappeared and marginalized peoples in Mexico and elsewhere.     

社会地理学社会-文化转型的内涵与研究前沿方向

根据国外名学的观点与权威献,论述社会地理学社会—化转型的学科内涵,重点探讨了“新”社会地理学的理念、研究的主体内容与前沿方向。全从社会—化转型的角度认定“新”人地理学是一门探索性的社会科学,它的社会—化空间性为其他社会科学挖掘其学科内涵拓展了思路,并为它们指引空间延伸的方向与内容。第二,探索性地总结了“新”社会地理学主体研究内容、结构及其目标。即“社会空闻结构”的综合理念及其进展。第三,探讨了新社会地理学与其他“新”人地理学分支学科交叉研究的前沿方向,及其相关的较为成熟的学科内容及其研究框架。全揭示学科边沿性越来越模糊的新社会地理学的基础原理是人地理学其它分支学科分析与探讨问题的理念基础。     

Picturing the city: young people's representations of urban environments

Urban environments form the setting of everyday life for most Western young people. This article explores visual representations of cities made by young people in a range of environments within four countries. The findings inform a larger study on urban geographies within geography education. We analyse students' drawings of cities regarding physical characteristics, activities and issues. There are many commonalities between drawings from the four countries, the majority showing a ‘big, busy city’ representation with skylines, traffic and shopping areas. There are also distinctive characteristics for each set, for example Finnish students tended to emphasise environmental and social issues more than in the other countries. In relation to methodology, we conclude that drawings, supported by contextual information, are a useful source to understand young people's representations of cities. Further, this research supports thinking about how to merge young people's experiences and imaginaries with the teaching of urban geography.     

A Tale of One City: Creative Destruction,Spatial Fixes,and Ideology in Binghamton,New York

Revitalization of the City of Binghamton has been seen as a key element for economic recovery of the central New York region. Recently, civic leaders have favored neoliberal strategies. Supporters justify these strategies based on notions of community well being. They also assume that government sponsored creative destruction will counter-act the inherent tendency within capitalism to seek spatial fixes. Archaeological research on the history of landscape transformations in Binghamton demonstrates the depth of capitalist spatial fixes that have contributed to Binghamton’s current economic crisis. The resulting exploitation of labor and the working class was often obscured by ideologies associated with individual achievement or social reform. Thus, the history of capitalist social relations as it was written in the city scape of Binghamton echoes contemporary conditions and has the potential to inform critiques of these conditions.     

边缘化新白领的中产阶层化研究:内容、理论构架与未来

随着国际金融海啸后社会经济矛盾的地理大转移,广大新兴市场化国家内城市新白领阶层的社会经济生境边缘化趋势不可避免。边缘化的新白领必然导致其中产阶层化历程的异化,与常规的中产阶层化特征、机制与社会空间后果相异。本文将新白领及其边缘化中产阶层化机理纳入中产阶层化一般化研究之内,继而构建新白领中产阶层化研究理论构架,以便进一步补充、完善一般中产阶层化理论体系。最终,希望为"十二五"以来面临新转型的中国大城市内城再城市化、更新和转型提供一些发展引导思路。     

1800—1945年长春市街道命名的文化政治阐释——基于葛兰西霸权理论的视角

20世纪80年代，西方文化地理学界对传统地名学进行了批判转向，地方命名中的文化政治过程成为研究核心。本文以2017年被国务院列为国家历史文化名城的长春市为例，在批判地名学的背景下，借鉴葛兰西的霸权理论，对1800—1945年间长春街道命名过程进行文化政治分析。研究发现：1931年九一八事变前，长春街道命名成为不同政权控制下各种力量争夺的战场，形成清政府控制的长春地方力量、俄国殖民者力量和日本殖民者力量分区控制下的街道名称，争夺加深了城市内部分异。1931年九一八事变后，长春沦为日本的殖民地，日本殖民者为隐藏其妄图永久占领东北并实现霸权统治的野心，在其划定规划的“实在国都事业区域”进行中式命名，却隐喻了明显的归顺色彩。     

Postcolonial polar cities? New indigenous and cosmopolitan urbanness in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

The arrival into geography, and especially urban geography, of a frame of questioning coming from postcolonial studies has contributed to a fascinating debate about what a “postcolonial” city is and how the urban duality between ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated “European” towns and “native” settlements is being reformulated and transformed. Obviously, Arctic cities are not postcolonial in the political sense of being independent from the former colonial centre – although this process may be under way in Greenland – but they have seen a progressive move from a Eurocentric culture toward greater hybridization. This article looks into two new trends that contribute to making Arctic cities postcolonial: first, the arrival of indigenous peoples in cities and the concomitant diminution of the division between Europeans/urbanites and natives/rurals; and second, the arrival of labour migrants from abroad, which has given birth to a more plural and cosmopolitan citizenry. It advances the idea that Arctic cities are now in a position to play a “decolonizing” role, in the sense of progressively erasing the purely European aspect of the city and making it both more local and rooted (through indigenous communities) and more global and multicultural (through foreign labour migrants).