RESIDENTIAL SORTING AND ENVIRONMENTAL EXTERNALITIES: THE CASE OF NONLINEARITIES AND STIGMA IN AVIATION NOISE VALUES

This paper explores the sorting process in response to differing levels of aviation noise exposure in a housing market. Spatiotemporal hedonic pricing (HP) and stated choice (SC) results reflect nonlinearities and stigma. The HP models reveal nonlinear noise depreciation increasing from 0.40 to 2.38 percent per decibel as noise increases, while the SC noise values are lower in an area with high long‐term noise exposure. These nonlinearities are attributed to the spatial sorting of noise tolerant individuals. HP results from the same “noisy” area show a “stigma” from noise during the first year after the complete removal of aviation noise.     

The Making of an Australian ‘Airport City’

Globally, the changing nature of airports, and particularly the juxtaposition of general commercial land uses alongside aviation functions, is captured in the concept of the ‘airport city’. In Australia, commercialisation has impacted nearly all privatised capital city and general aviation airports. Essendon Airport's contested transformation from a run‐down general aviation facility into an emergent business and retail hub in Melbourne's north‐western suburbs serves as an instructive case study of the evolution of the airport city as a new suburban typology. Drawing in part on in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders involved in the redevelopment process, this paper examines the conflicting forces that have driven commercialisation since the late 1990s, the spatial outcomes and the wider planning issues arising.     

Living with toxic development: Shipbreaking in the industrializing zone of Sitakunda,Bangladesh

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among local communities and shipbreaking workers, this essay focuses on the lived experiences of toxicity in the rapidly industrializing zone of Sitakunda, Bangladesh. Shipbreaking is receiving attention as a zone of toxic exposure. There is pressure for increased regulation and protection for workers. In contrast, other forms of pollution in the industrial zone of Sitakunda, such as water, air and noise pollution, are neglected or ignored. Worries about pollution and health highlight the unevenness of promises of development to come, also expressed by marginalized fishing communities structurally excluded from industrialization. My interlocutors describe unnayan (economic development) as bishakto (poisonous, toxic). I conceptualize this as ‘toxic development’ to draw attention to how ‘ordinary people’ (migrant workers, fishing and agricultural communities, shipbreaking workers and manual labourers) without capital, land or social networks of influence endure poisonous industrial activities that both create livelihoods and destroy them.     

THE HAPPINESS‐REDUCING COSTS OF NOISE POLLUTION*

ABSTRACT This analysis examines the costs of everyday residential noise pollution using a series of “happiness regressions.” We control for both the possibility that an unobservable characteristic may cause omitted variable bias, as well as for the possibility of endogeneity bias if “effort” is not adequately taken into account. We find perceived noise pollution to exert a negative and highly significant effect on happiness. We then calculate the required income transfer to compensate for the noise and find the costs of noise pollution to be on the order of €172 per month per household.     

L'identification des zones calmes et un diagnostic d’équité environnementale à Montréal

Quiet urban areas are places with low noise levels that can help people to support physical and mental wellness. This paper has two objectives: to identify quiet urban areas in Montreal and to check for the presence of environmental inequities in access to such areas for vulnerable groups (children, older people, low‐income individuals, and visible minorities). Using a GIS‐based methodology, 2,282 quiet urban areas were identified in Montreal. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model analysis showed that there are no major inequities in access to quiet urban areas for the population groups studied. The analysis did, however, revealed substantial spatial disparities in terms of the distribution of quiet urban areas across the boroughs and municipalities examined.     

我国区域中心城市航空物流与宏观经济的匹配性及空间分布研究

通过建立计量分析模型研究区域中心城市航空物流与宏观经济的内在关系,提出匹配度参考系数和匹配性分析象限图,将我国航空物流与经济的匹配程度划分为六类:以航空物流为推动的高度匹配型、以经济为拉动的高度匹配型、航空物流为支撑的良性匹配型、经济为支撑的良性匹配型、航空物流为瓶颈的低度匹配型、经济为瓶颈的低度匹配型。以我国30座区域中心城市2000年至2013年的统计数据为样本,实证研究了航空物流与宏观经济的匹配程度和相互作用特点,并对各匹配类型提出了针对性的发展建议。研究结果表明,中国东部地区与西部地区的中心城市在匹配性上存在巨大差异,高度匹配型城市在地理空间上呈现出明显的"T"形分布特点。     

Site Fight! Toward the Abolition of Immigrant Detention on Tacoma’s Tar Pits (and Everywhere Else)

This paper theorises the spatialisation of White supremacy through the siting and expansion of a US immigrant detention centre, the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC). This case reveals the spatial relationship between the detention centre’s displacement with the Seattle‐Tacoma region’s increasing wealth, highlighting the role of detention and incarceration in the spatialisation of White supremacy. If White advantage maps onto whiteness as property, then White supremacy maps onto interlocking systems of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that dispossess people of colour of land and turns their bodies into devalued pollution sinks, where the less‐than‐citizen is forced to live on Tar Pits that they cannot even call “home”. Since 2014, detained immigrants’ activism has fuelled conversations about the punitive nature of administrative immigrant detention, racial profiling, and the city’s responsibility to enforce health, safety and environmental regulations for all residents. Through the stories of detainees, deportees and their co‐conspirators, this site fight illustrates how abolition ecologies call for tearing down toxic detention centres. Beyond rejecting White supremacist logics in immigration enforcement, abolitionists make freedom as a place together.     

工业革命以来西方主要国家环境污染与治理的历史考察

环境污染由来已久。早在14世纪初,英国就注意到了煤烟污染;17世纪伦敦煤烟污染加重时,有人著文提出过改善大气品质的方案。不过直到这时,污染只在少数地方存在,污染物也较少,依靠大自然的自净能力,尚不至于造成重大危害。环境污染发生质的变化并演变成一种威胁人类生存与发展的全球性危机,则始于18世纪末叶兴起的工业革命。     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 32, Number 3. June 2016

Front and back cover caption, volume 32 issue 3 Front cover STANDSTILL Behzad Sarmadi tells the story of Dubai's descent into an economic crisis in 2009 by seizing on the financial concept of ‘standstill’. The government of Dubai publicly (and unilaterally) invoked this concept in late 2009 so as to pause the debt obligations of a ‘government‐related’ corporation in the face of immanent bankruptcy. This figurative use of standstill by the city‐state, however, soon manifested itself in the city. Cars once owned by over‐indebted foreign residents began to accumulate dust on the sides of roads and parking lots as they were abandoned to literally stand still. Sarmadi examines this process by repurposing the notion of standstill as a tool with which to ethnographically link the structural dimensions of a financial crisis and its lived experience. Back cover DISEASES OF THE SOUTH At night the chimneys of the Ilva steelworks loom behind a residential building in Taranto, southern Italy. The largest steelworks in Europe, and one of the few former state factories still standing in southern Italy, Ilva provides much needed employment in an impoverished region. However, it is also one of the worst polluters in Italy. Epidemiological studies have shown a high incidence of pulmonary cancers in the area, prompting Italian legal authorities to put the owners on trial for illegal polluting emissions. In spite of the unhealthy environment both in Taranto and in toxic waste‐ridden Terra dei fuochi, near Naples, the state's dominant message is for its residents to adopt ‘healthier lifestyles’. Biomedicine emphasizes individual, lifestyle‐linked factors of disease. Yet such an emphasis diminishes some of the most obvious underlying factors, such as pollution, over which individuals have little or no control, and which affects entire territories and populations. When a population is stigmatized or racialized as ‘backwards’, as southern Italians are, even the most obvious environmental injustices can be obfuscated in this way. In southern Italy, as in other areas hit by environmental injustice, marginality is compounded by a stigma that demonizes as irrational local environmental movements fighting pollution on their own doorstep. Effectively, people are blamed for aiding and abetting their own diseases. While the health‐or‐jobs dilemma is a classic issue of industrialization, companies have even more power to pollute once they are the only source of jobs left.     

Violence,Past and Present: “Mati” and “Non‐mati” People

The article explores violence as an entanglement of race, politics and belonging in Guyana. The author argues that where race as an object of violence has to be actively orchestrated against people who wish to live in peace, other factors can intersect to dangerously alter the balance of “co‐existence”. By co‐existence, the author refers to people’s management of complementary settings: a politically orchestrated race problem is seen as separate by people who have their own agendas to do with amicable relations and their living conditions. The race problem is located in the notion of a city‐space as divided from what people do. However, the article considers the shifting of this city‐space in ethnic composition and its extension into everyday relations. The shift in a post‐repression era further demonstrates violent citizenship through transformations in relation to an outside imaginary.     

An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines,modernization, and the global Cold War

In 1957, the United States government provided funding for Pan American World Airways to purchase a 49% share in Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana Afghan Airlines. While unusual in its scope, the arrangement was part of a broader program of US technical assistance, administered jointly by government agencies and private corporations, to newly formed airlines in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1955 and 1965, technical assistance for commercial aviation was critical to the USA’s Cold War strategy to win ‘hearts and minds,’ and to contain Soviet influence, in the developing world. Using Ariana as a case study, this article examines what was at stake for the USA – politically, economically, and culturally – in aviation technical assistance projects. However, the article also argues that such projects should be seen as instances of ‘co‐production,’ in which recipients of technical assistance exploited superpower rivalries and actively shaped the airplane’s uses and meanings.     

Du temple and Mozhaiskii: Was either of them the first to flight test an aeroplane?

The article investigates works of the first European aeroplane designers F. du Temple and A. F. Mozhaiskii. They followed all the aeroplane creation stages: bird flight observations, model tests, technical calculations and design of the full‐sized apparatus. The author proves that, despite of common opinion of aviation historians, the aeroplanes could not perform even a short flight because of insufficient durability and shortage of power. Nevertheless the names of du Temple and Mozhsaiskii deserve a place in the history of aviation. They were the first who made a difficult step from speculation on problems of flying and experiments with small models to creation of real aircraft.     

‘Lend me your ears’: social policy and the hearing body

Recent developments in music regulation policy in some European countries show a recognition of changes in the built environment, contemporary demographics and the sonic profile of popular music. These initiatives have not been echoed in Australian music policy, where the primary focus is on the cultural and economic conditions of production and consumption, with little interest in the mechanics and biology of sound production and circulation, and their social welfare implications. Within the general category of noise pollution, it appears that the proliferation of low-frequency noise (LFN) is the fastest growing problem, in which contemporary popular music is increasingly implicated. This paper explores why LFN should suddenly become so pervasive that it has begun to attract specific social policy and legislative measures, its own scientific journals, and attempts to establish standards of its measurement specific to a profile that evades traditional sound pollution analysis.     

Mapping international flows of electronic waste

In this paper, we map the international trade in electronic waste (e‐waste). We quantify the directions and magnitude of this trade at the global scale and examine the utility of the pollution haven hypothesis for explaining the observed trade patterns. Our results demonstrate four key findings: the international trade in e‐waste is a more complex story than being one about ‘rich’ countries dumping waste in ‘poor’ countries; the trade in e‐waste is highly regionalized, with intra‐regional trade accounting for most of the total trade flows; the pollution haven hypothesis is an important, but partial, explanation of observed trade patterns; and there is a need to conceptualize the trade and traffic of e‐waste as open ended and contingent processes facilitated by situated practices of wasting and valuing that rely on geographic difference and mobility for the exchanges between the domains of waste and value to occur.     

Technology and geographical imaginations: representing aviation in 1930s Italy

This paper examines the geographical imaginations associated with aviation in fascist Italy, focusing on the representation of flight on the one hand, and on the other hand the role of propaganda flights organized by the regime in the 1930s. The representation and use of aviation in interwar Italy is explored in light of the concept of technological legitimation, based on an understanding of technological practice as a political and ideological instrument. Aviation, as one of the new subjects of artistic representations of the modern era, was grasped by avant-garde and modern movements in the early twentieth century. In turn, representations of aviation were used by Mussolini's regime, which considered it a key to national development and modernization, materially as well as in the representational sphere. Propaganda flights in 1930s Italy were organized by the Ministry of Aeronautics and local aero clubs, and were an expression of the politicized use of aviation, both in terms of representations of technology and the aviator, and the exploitation of flight's public potential for the construction of fascist spectacle.     

How best to drain the alchemist's cauldron: A study of the problem of marine pollution in Australia

There exists a significant problem of marine pollution in the Commonwealth of Australia. The present paper attempts to explore three aspects of this problem: the scientific, legislative, and probative. With respect to the scientific, the kinds (eg hydrocarbons, toxic metals, and viruses and bacteria) and sources (eg ship‐source and dumping) of marine pollution are examined. With respect to the legislative, the Offshore Constitutional Settlement 1979, as well as relevant‐ Commonwealth and state (Victoria and New South Wales) legislation are studied. Finally with respect to the probative, three solutions including cooperative, bottom‐up and top‐down ones are proposed and, at least in the case of the first of these, evaluated. The paper finds that the problem of marine pollution is rooted more in the federal nature of the Australian constitution than in the concurrent (as distinguished from coordinate) nature of the powers of the Commonwealth and states under this same constitution.     

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS IN THE YEREVAN REGION

The articles describes the extent of environmental pollution in Greater Yerevan (pollution of air, water, and soil, noise pollution). Conflicts of nature management are revealed, the state of the environment is analyzed, and measures for resolving environmental protection are outlined. Among the interesting revelations are the fact that pollution from chloroprene rubber production in the city remains a major problem, in spite of the fact that production has switched from a calcium carbide-based to a butadiene-based technology and that nearly half of the basin's rayons (5 of 11) are reported to lack wastewater treatment facilities. Translated by Jay K. Mitchell, PlanEcon, Inc., Washington, DC 20005 from Izvestiya Akademii Nauk SSSR, seriya geograficheskaya, 1990, No. 1, pp. 55-65.     

The Symbolic Politics of Belonging and Community in Peri‐urban Environmental Disputes: the Traveston Crossing Dam in Queensland,Australia

This paper examines a recent dispute generated by the Queensland State Government proposal to build the Traveston Crossing Dam on the Mary River in southeast Queensland, Australia. It is particularly concerned with the ways in which interrelated issues of belonging, community identity, and social diversity were negotiated during the anti‐dam campaign. As an unusual alliance of farmers, environmentalists, urban retirees, some Aboriginal people and others, it takes a view of the anti‐Traveston Crossing Dam campaign as a fluid network of people and approaches the notion of community identity as the symbolic construction of similarity. Locally specific, the paper describes pertinent aspects of community politics in the context of rural socioeconomic change, and the mobilisation of heritage. With regard to local senses of belonging, it also discusses the involvement of Aboriginal people during the campaign. More broadly then, this paper attempts to make an ethnographic contribution to the study of environmental disputes and the politics of alliance in peri‐urban areas of settler‐descendant societies such as Australia.     

Environmental influences on skilled worker migration from Bangladesh to Canada

We conducted focus groups in Toronto with 44 recent skilled worker immigrants from Bangladesh to explore whether their decisions to migrate to Canada may have been influenced by environmental problems. Previous research has documented how floods, cyclones, droughts, and seasonal precipitation variations affect rural‐urban migration patterns within Bangladesh, and to its neighbours. Most participants had not experienced such environmental hazards, having lived in Dhaka prior to migrating. However, Dhaka's ongoing problems with air and water pollution, sanitation, lack of green space, and food adulteration were cited by 70% as being relevant considerations for the decision to migrate. The degree of influence varied considerably among participants. Roughly 16% said pollution was their primary motivation for leaving, household members having suffered from illnesses traceable to air pollution or poor sanitation. Another 54% stated that Dhaka's environmental problems were part of a wider range of quality‐of‐life concerns that had some influence on their decision. The findings suggest that current migration to Canada is not connected with environmental migration that takes place within Bangladesh, but that urban environmental problems combined with other social, economic, and political factors can help drive migration.     

Youthful Creativity in Regional Australia: Panacea for Unemployment and Out‐Migration?

This paper addresses the theme of youth out‐migration from rural Australia, in the context of recent policy discussions about creativity and its role in regional development. Ethnographic fieldwork in one rural location – the New South Wales Far North Coast – is drawn upon to highlight how creative industries are being cast as a potential way of promoting cultural activities and jobs for young people, and in turn, how they might be imagined as a means to mitigate youth out‐migration. Yet, creative industries have contradictory employment and social outcomes. Creative industries are likely to generate higher rates of youth participation in economic activities than public data reveal. However, strategies for future job growth should also consider the limitations and instabilities of creative industry employment. Second, and more broadly, the paper discusses those socio‐cultural dimensions of nascent creative industries that may have a more substantial impact when conceived as part of strategies to stem youth exodus from rural areas. Creative activities may contribute to rural development in indirect ways, especially if linked to policy goals of increased tolerance of youth activities, better provision of cultural services, and improved well‐being for young people. While formal job‐creation may be limited, creative industries could mitigate some of the impacts of youth migration to cities by enriching regional social life and mediating perceptions of the advantages and drawbacks of rural versus urban life. This kind of policy imagination requires a shift in attitudes towards young people and a more genuine commitment to encourage young people to feel that they belong in non‐metropolitan areas.