Choices and responsibilities: finding the balance

Rapid population growth means the addition of a billion more people in 11 years. The International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), scheduled for September 5-13, 1994, will address the issue of population growth and design strategies for slower growth with economic development and environmental protection. This article summarizes Dr. Nafis Sadik's special preparatory message about the conference. The ICPD will address the issues of reproductive health, affordable family planning (FP), and informed choice. There will be an emphasis on better health care, housing, education, and other poverty alleviation measures. Empowerment of women through educational and economic opportunity and increased foreign aid are also themes. Improvements in the quality of life as well as demographic and social change are required. The key to slowing population growth is to meet the need for FP services to reduce fertility. Reexamination of the life-styles of the more affluent is also required. Needs and resources must be balanced. Sustainable development and resource use will depend upon slower population growth, more rational population distribution, alleviation of poverty, environmentally safer consumption patterns, and other measures. The 1994 draft plan of action has a broad mandate which recognizes the linkages between population and development. Target dates and reproductive rights language are bracketed and will be discussed during the conference. Quantitative goals are set for education, child and maternal mortality reduction, and universal access to FP and reproductive health services. The public should be made aware of the development and population links. Developing countries are asked to devote 20% of their government budget to social development. Countries by their action or inaction will choose a world population size in 2015 ranging from 7.27 to 7.92 billion. The difference of 660 million in 20 years is equal to the current population in Africa. The high projection for 2050 is 12.5 billion people. The ICPD will be the last global opportunity before the turn of the century to address the challenges of shared responsibility for the future of life on earth.     

Conflict on the urban fringe: Urbanization,environmental stress,and urban unrest in Africa

Most research on the security implications of environmental and demographic change does not explicitly distinguish between urban and rural areas. While statistical conflict analyses are increasingly sophisticated with respect to spatial and substantive disaggregation they largely ignore the possibility that urban and rural areas may be affected differently. In Africa, a continent assumed to be particularly vulnerable to the social and economic externalities of environmental and demographic change, less than one percent of the land mass is defined as ‘urban’. Yet, the population that lives in African cities is expected to increase by more than 150% between 2020 and 2050 according to UN population forecasts, massively outpacing rural population growth estimated at 35%. Given the vast social transformation associated with this process of rapid urbanization, understanding the dynamics and consequences of urban population growth in Sub-Saharan Africa, and its possible relationship with environmental factors is key to reducing vulnerabilities and facilitating sustainable urban growth on the continent. In this article we argue that high urban population growth may strain the provision of public services in urban areas, heighten competition over scarce urban land, and increase the chances of urban social unrest. We expect population pressure to have the most profound effects on social unrest in peri-urban areas, meaning the urban outskirts. We further investigate whether environmental push factors, operationalized as droughts happening in rural areas proximate to the urban centers, could be driving any effect of urban population growth on social disorder, possibly supporting concerns over climate change-induced social unrest. We test our expectations on a sample of similarly sized urban and peri-urban ‘grid cells’ covering the whole of the African continent for the 1997–2010 period, using geo-coded social unrest data. Our analysis shows that urban population growth is associated with increased unrest in the peri-urban areas only. We find no evidence, however, that this relationship is driven by environmental push factors in the form of nearby droughts. The study contributes insights relevant to the broader debates about possible security implications of hyper-urbanization and climate change.     

Reproductive rights,family planning: a cornerstone of control

The main objective of the action plan for the International Conference on Population and Development is to assure access to high quality information and reproductive health care services in a manner that is affordable, acceptable, and convenient. Informed choice should be voluntary for childbearing and fertility control decisions. Services must be sensitive to the cultural, economic, and demographic diversity of local communities. The target date for countries to implement family planning (FP) and reproductive health programs that are available to all is 2015. Programs must involve women in all phases of planning, management, and delivery of services; outreach programs must be developed to involve men. Public and private FP programs should be directed to removing all obstacles to method use by the year 2005 by redesigning and expanding information and services. IEC (information, education, and communication) should also focus on sexually transmitted diseases, including AIDS. Programs should provide high quality condoms from stock on hand. About 55% of couples in developing countries use some form of contraception. The increase in contraceptive use has contributed to the decline in total fertility from 6.1 children per woman in the 1950s to 3.7 in the 1990s. At least 350 million couples still lack access to modern FP methods. The draft plan emphasizes that couples must be given the freedom and responsibility to decide on the number and spacing of their children.     

Rising Second Home Numbers in Rural Ireland: Distribution,Drivers and Implications

This article highlights a marked growth in the number of second homes in Ireland since the mid-1990s, which is concentrated in the rural and coastal parts of the peripheral Border, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest and West regions, together with parallel growth in the number of long-term vacant dwellings in these regions. These phenomena are linked to economic and population growth, the “laissez faire” nature of land use planning in rural Ireland, the generous fiscal treatment of housing, as well as tax incentives to encourage house building in economically marginal areas. The social and economic impacts of these dwelling on individual localities vary, depending on their number, usage patterns and the nature of the local economy and housing market. However, their environmental consequences are largely negative as is their impact on the national economy and on the economies of those regions where vacant dwellings are concentrated. Thus, our research questions the value of housing-led rural development, as they can result in excessive output of vacant and second homes and highlights the importance of adequately resourcing planning authorities if the worst excesses of rural housing overdevelopment are to be avoided.     

老年人口迁移研究述评

老年人口迁移是老龄化社会的重要现象,它以提高生活质量为动机,具有重要的经济社会功能和独特的发展规律。本文系统梳理了发达国家成熟的老年人口迁移理论和实证研究进展,研究了老年人口迁移的宏观背景、迁移理论、迁移决策模型、迁移时空特征和迁移综合效应,构建了老年人口的研究框架。最后,针对我国老年人口迁移的研究现状进行了述评,并提出了未来的研究展望。     

西安市人地关系协调状态评价及动态预测

认识人地关系要素因果反馈联系和构建定量模型是进行城市协调状态评价的关键,以"关中-天水经济区"规划为背景,探讨大西安人地关系协调演进趋势具有现实意义。本文在突出表征城市环境因素对人地关系地域系统运行作用的基础上,优化指标体系,运用资源环境与经济社会发展函数构建复合人地关系协调发展度模型,对西部大开发以来研究区人地关系协调状态的等级与类型进行定量评价。在此基础上,通过灰色模型GM(1,1),预测2011-2020年研究区总人口与耕地面积的模拟值。分析发现:未来10年研究区的总人口年均增长13.99‰,耕地面积年均递减14.30‰,人多地狭的矛盾使生态安全将会受到严重挑战。     

人口城镇化不是农村工业化、乡村城镇化

人口城镇化和农村工业化、乡村城镇化哪种提法更符合社会发展的趋势?它们之间的最大区别,是人口城镇化必然要求较大规模的人口乡→城异地迁移,农村工业化和乡村城镇化更强调人口的就地转化。人口城镇化是现代社会的发展趋势,而农村工业化和乡村城镇化只适用于部分条件较为优越的地区,大部分现有的农村是不可能工业化、也不可能城镇化的。所以,作为未来的发展方针,必须提人口城镇化,而不是农村工业化或乡村城镇化。并且,人口城镇化还肩负着转移农村剩余劳动力、提高农业经营规模和节约利用土地资源等多重使命,需要作出系统的政策安排。     

The Problems of Adjusting to Slow Growth in the Niagara Region of Ontario

During the 1970s it became clear that earlier forecasts of population increase and urban expansion in the Niagara region were too great. There has been a steady decline in the national birth rate since the 1950s and a decline locally in the rate of net in-migration. Moreover, a worsening economic climate, increasing development costs, and greater planning restrictions have led to a decline in the rate of land conversion from rural to urban uses. These changing circumstances afford an opportunity to plan for more compact urban areas and thus protect the area's valuable agricultural land. However, attempts to achieve these ends have been constantly frustrated by a regional and local planning process which has been loath to recognize such a conservationist cause or the need to plan for slower growth. In this report I will review three issues: the changing trends in future urban growth in the Niagara region; the regional plan and the designation of future urban areas; and the problems that have contributed to conflict and delay in approving that plan.     

Prospects for the Rural‐Urban Fringe in Australia: Observations from a Brief History of the Landscapes around Sydney and Adelaide

Despite being a major site of recent population growth and, arguably, a key arena for sustainability concerns, the rural‐urban fringe has received relatively little attention in the literature concerning Australian cities and urban policy. To address this shortcoming the authors review post‐World War II efforts to plan the rural‐urban fringes of Sydney and Adelaide and find a number of issues for contemporary policy‐makers. First, the fringe is becoming increasingly complex due to multi‐faceted demographic change, a broadening economic base and demands for better environmental management, all within the context of an evolving understanding of sustainability. Second, water resource management, partly under the auspices of integrated natural resource management, is assuming a much higher priority than in early fringe planning endeavours, which emphasised urban containment, agricultural land protection and landscape conservation. Third, and partly as a consequence of this shift of priorities, there is also evidence of changes to the nature and focus of policy tools used in the fringe, with land management concerns now cutting across traditional land use planning. Finally, and fundamentally, these observations raise questions about how future governance of the fringe should be organised. Together these four themes pose an enthralling series of challenges for policy‐makers for which much more research and discussion are needed.     

Reforming Land and Water Rights in South Africa

Redress of historical injustice in access to land provided a mobilizing force for the overthrow of the apartheid government in South Africa. Inequality of access to water resources marks South Africa's history even more profoundly than inequality of access to land. Yet in South Africa, post‐apartheid legislative reform relating to land and water has followed largely separate, if parallel, paths. This article traces the development and current status of water reforms in the Inkomati Water Management Area, where water use is dominated by established commercial agriculture and forestry, by important environmental interests, including the Kruger National Park, and by demands for improved access to water from a black population of around 1.5 million living in former Bantustan areas. It indicates that in practice water and land reform are interdependent, but, although both have become more closely linked within local political and economic arenas, they remain largely disconnected and disabled by unresolved tensions within their separate policy processes. The article argues that the commoditized nature of land and water use within the established patterns of commercial agriculture sets constraints on what redistributive land and water reform can deliver to those historically dispossessed. In particular, increasing recourse to ‘strategic partnerships’ between African community landowners and commercial agribusiness as a means of maintaining the productivity of commercial farmland poses questions about the control and beneficial use of new forms of communal property.     

农村居民点空间格局演变及效应研究评述

农村居民点空间分布及其格局演变受到区域自然、社会、经济及历史发展等多重因素的综合影响,是反映人地关系的"真实写照";通过梳理农村居民点用地规模、空间分布、结构体系、景观格局及其驱动机制,进一步归纳总结农村居民点空间格局演变反馈效应及其研究内容框架。本文通过文献综述法和归纳总结法,从农户生计转型、乡村社会关系重构、资源环境问题以及景观生态等方面梳理出农村居民点空间格局演变及效应研究的5个核心问题。从资源效应、环境效应、经济效应、社会效应和生态效应5个方面构建其互馈效应体系和研究内容框架。     

可持续发展——中国理智的选择

本文对可持续发展战略的由来及含义做了详尽的说明,并结合中国的实际,探讨了在中国实行可持续发展战略的必要性及实现途径。提出在中国实现可持续发展是一项长期的、艰苦的任务,首先应转变经济发展模式,确立以保护环境和合理利用资源为核心的经济发展战略;利用市场机制和经济手段,促进市场经济与环境保护的协调配合;同时要采取有效的人口政策,控制人口增长;并通过建设生态农业和完善城市建设,加强农村与城市的环境综合整治。     

The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia

There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the ‘amenity’ of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises ‘amenity’ in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio‐economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south‐east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in‐migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro‐scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in‐migration rates has increased substantially between 1976–1981 and 1996–2001.     

空心村整治意愿及其影响因素——基于宁夏西吉县的调查

基于宁夏西吉县空心村问卷调查数据,研究村民对空心村整治规划的意愿及其影响因素。研究发现,目前多数公共设施在空心村中处于缺失状态;村民希望空心村整治能解决村庄的道路交通、自来水供应、垃圾处理等问题,能满足文化教育、就医和垃圾回收等方面的基础设施需求;希望村庄整治能考虑农业生产的便利性,能提高经济和社会保障水平。模型回归结果表明,家庭常住人口数量、家庭接受9年义务教育的人数、对当前住房的满意度、对本村小学满意度和对村庄生态环境满意度等因素对村民是否支持空心村整治具有重要影响。     

陕甘宁接壤区反贫困策略

陕甘宁接壤区是西部最为贫困的地区之一,2000年末仍有50余万人口未能脱贫。文章在分析本区贫困问题现状基础上,提出未来反贫困的主要途经是:转移贫困人口,减少贫困区人口数量;加快交通建设,提高贫困区与外界的空间可达性;加强生态环境建设;控制人口增长,提高人口素质;发展特色经济;加速乡镇企业及非公有制经济发展;大力发展旅游业。并相应提出新世纪反贫困的制度创新对策:加大对贫困地区的扶持力度;建立生态保护补偿机制;放弃粮食自给;赋予地方政府对大型矿藏资源的较大支配权。     

中德经济发达地区城乡一体化模式比较——以长江三角洲与莱茵河下游地区为例

城乡一体化是伴随着工业社会、城市化时代的一种特有的社会经济现象,是人类社会生产力高度发达的一个重要标志,尤其在经济发达地区这种现象更加明显。中德两国有着不同的城市化发展过程和不同的时代背景,在工业化与经济发达区域内,城市化道路及其带来的城乡一体化类型、特征、模式与前景是有一定差异的。本文着重探索中国的长江三角洲与德国的莱茵-鲁尔地区的城乡一体化模式,从不同的视角、层面进行比较研究,试图从两国不同的地区比较得到有益的启示。     

我国中西部地区乡村城市化问题与对策探讨——以中西部地区第一个乡村城市化试点县市巩义为例

文章以我国中西部地区第一个国家级乡村城市化试点县市巩义为例,剖析了中西部地区乡村城市化的理论背景、制约因素以及面临的主要问题,并提出了促进乡村城市化的若干对策。     

An alternative policy approach to rural development in regions facing population decline

ABSTRACT

Many rural regions in Europe used to be characterized by weak economic performance and negative population development. While in a long-term perspective this is not any more valid for large parts of Western Europe, a number of rural regions face persistent population decline. By analysing the case of Austria, where approximately one-third of rural areas have experienced such negative population change over the past decades, this paper will examine the impact on economic performance, income levels and well-being patterns. Addressing the crucial and persistent obstacles to positive population trends, new theoretical approaches and perspectives are discussed for overcoming limitations in development. Future approaches for regional development have to go beyond strategies for targeting economic growth, but have to address issues of local participation, social innovation and establishing trust as preconditions to effectively impact well-being dimensions. Such a mobilization effort would be the result of a comprehensive social transition process which would foster an altered narrative for these rural regions compared to the current and predominant focus on compensation and growth policies. Despite strong interlinkages with other regions and actors, the needs of local people would be central and both would be a cornerstone for social innovation.     

The Place of Population Geography in the System of Population Sciences

The area of research that is considered the proper domain of population geography is defined. In addition to an areal approach to the analysis of various aspects of population, such as growth, structure, migration and settlement patterns, there is great need for synthetic regional population studies, integrating all aspects of population within a particular territory. Causal relationships must be explained and the study of population must be related to the study of economic location.     

农村城市化影响下的土地资源持续利用初探——以长江三角洲地区为例

土地资源是作为中国二元城市化道路之一的农村城市化最基础性和最受关注的生产力要素,其协同效应驱动农村土地利用模式的全方位变革与重构,并由此引发农村和城市持续、协调发展以及区域土地资源合理利用的系列问题。本文以长江三角洲地区为例,阐述农村城市化运行机制及农村城市化驱动下的区域土地利用方式、结构、模式变革,进而探讨农村城市化进程中土地资源持续利用障碍,并寻求合理的解决途径。它对区域土地资源持续利用和城乡一体化发展具有理论价值和现实意义