Social sustainability of urban regeneration led by industrial land redevelopment in Taiwan

Abandoned industrial sites, usually contaminated by hazardous substances, create social injustice in the surrounding communities. Redevelopment of industrial land has brought prospects of sustainable development to the communities that live in and around them. This research is to identify the critical factors facilitating urban regeneration and particularly social sustainability in Kaohsiung, an industrial city of Taiwan which experienced deindustrialization in recent decades, resulting in several abandoned industrial sites and decay of the adjacent urban communities. Two different industrial land redevelopment projects were examined; (1) Jhongdou Wetland Park, which focuses on environmental sustainability, and (2) Pier-2 Art Centre, which focuses on economic sustainability. Measured by the social sustainability indicators developed by the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development and through findings from a questionnaire survey of community members, this study found that the redevelopment project of the Pier-2 Art Centre has a higher level of social sustainability than the Jhongdou Wetland Park, performing better in six out of nine themes. Critical dimensions resulting in the better performance in social sustainability of the Pier-2 Art Centre included rental affordability, heritage conservation, community image, cultural activity, community association, public space, local organization and higher accessibility to facility.     

Sustainable Development Frontiers: Is ‘Sustainable’ Cocoa Delivering Development and Reducing Deforestation?

Forest frontiers are important areas for sustainable development as they combine the need to halt deforestation with the challenges of rural poverty. In the region of San Martín, Peru, the ‘Production, Protection and Inclusion’ model combines narratives of conservation, economic development and social inclusion in what can be defined as a ‘sustainable development frontier’. This article asks how such sustainable development frontiers change social, economic and ecological outcomes in the localities where they are found. The authors examine the reality of sustainable cocoa production linked to conservation and development goals, as promoted by government bodies, international agencies, cooperatives and chocolate brands in Peru, and show how, paradoxically, sustainability goals intensify production and attract smallholders into forest frontier areas. In doing so, the boom in demand for sustainable commodities has inadvertently created conditions encouraging further colonization of forested areas leading to a continuing rise in deforestation, ecological degradation and economic instability. Narratives of sustainable development can thus reinforce commodity intensification, as they obscure alternative approaches and reproduce traditional frontier dynamics.     

Contribution of Local Agenda 21 to Practical Implementation of Sustainable Development: The Case of the Czech Republic

Local Agenda 21 (LA21), a voluntary tool for implementing sustainable development (SD) in local level, is one way of implementing sustainability principles in practice. Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Conference in Rio de Janeiro, which made the first reference of LA21 (intended as a framework for the twenty-first century respecting SD principles), this article deals with evaluating the real contribution of this initiative to the implementation of SD in practice on the example of selected municipalities in the Czech Republic. This contribution is examined by a comparative analysis of the indices of change in selected indicators (three to four indicators for each pillar of SD) for municipalities involved in the LA21 initiative in comparison with reference municipalities, which have not been involved in LA21 so far. The analysis results indicate that different trends in some of the indicators can be observed in municipalities implementing LA21 and in the others. This applies, in particular, to the environmental indicators (such as the degree of waste separation, indicating in part the degree of environmental awareness), but also to some of the economic ones (municipal capital expenditures indicating investment activity).     

Radical Environmentalism and “Commoning”: Synergies Between Ecosystem Regeneration and Social Governance at Tamera Ecovillage,Portugal

This article explores the scope and limitations of Radical Environmentalism as a source of practices of “commoning”. The application of the radical environmental “Healing Biotope” model in Tamera, an ecovillage located in southern Portugal, further expands the understanding of “commoning” as a social process, as well as of Radical Environmentalism as a cognitive framework. This article distinguishes between the technical and political dimensions of “commoning”. It also identifies two structuring dimensions of Radical Environmentalism, hereby called integrative rationality and the experiential action research and learning methodology. These dimensions support the technical aspect of “commoning” in Tamera by promoting epistemic and methodological coherence between social and environmental technologies. Despite their contested scientific validity, they contribute to the sustainability of the project by promoting synergies between ecological regeneration and social governance. However, they have limited capacity to address the political dimension of “commoning”, related with rank and socio‐economic inequalities among members.     

Urban smartness and sustainability in Europe. An ex ante assessment of environmental,social and cultural domains

The aim of the paper is to define a set of smartness and sustainability indicators applicable to European cities and to assess their outcome in an ex ante perspective with regard to the implementation of Europe 2020 strategy. Following the DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressures, State, Impact, Response) model, we select a bundle of indicators for three relevant sustainability domains (environmental, social and cultural), which are proper to the smart city definition. Then we define groups of homogeneous cities for each domain by using a two-step cluster analysis. Results show the existence of heterogeneous groups of cities that are likely to become smart in the cultural domain, side by side with groups of more developed urban areas that have acquired a substantial advantage in the environmental and social dimensions.     

Measuring Relative Sustainability of Regions Using Regional Sustainability Assessment Methodology

Scientists analyze sustainability at the regional level with a combination of multiple indicators which reflect different characteristics of regions without combining the results in a single comparative unit. Moreover, the assessment of interdependencies between different characteristics requires experts' analyses, which makes sustainability analysis subjective, time consuming, and limited in use. This article analyzes the relative sustainability of subnational level regions through the application of regional sustainability assessment methodology (RSAM) based on accounting of resources capital and its internal and external transfers. This approach allows for assessment of regional sustainability as a function of resource quantity, quality, and interchangeability. The comparison of the two case study regions presented in the paper indicates the difference between a more sustainable region and a region of “weak sustainability.” First, the article indicates the discussion of the relevant geographic, economic, and social literature for both sustainability assessment and regional comparison. This discussion is followed by a conceptual representation of proposed RSAM and its application to various regions. Next, the article covers the data used and applied methods to test the proposed methodology and compare the two case study regions. The article concludes with a discussion of findings and recommendations for further application and testing.     

Whose Minerals,Whose Development? Rhetoric and Reality in Post‐Conflict Sierra Leone

Despite boosts in mineral exports, popular post‐conflict minerals‐for‐development reforms in Sierra Leone have failed to significantly reduce poverty. This article uses power as an analytical lens to explore the reasons for this failure, with empirical material from the diamond sector's mining cooperatives scheme (2005), the Diamond Areas Community Development Fund (DACDF), and Kono District. The study shows that there was no significant improvement along four dimensions: material deprivation, education and health, vulnerability, and powerlessness. The authors argue that understanding the impact of these reforms requires a nuanced multi‐scalar examination of power relations, actors, and the social, political, economic and historical context within which mining is embedded. Their findings point to: 1) limits to mineral‐led poverty reduction and the need for realistic expectations and diversification of livelihood opportunities; and 2) the need for interventions that balance power asymmetries and the way that power is exercised among diverse actors, wherein decentralization offers early hope.     

Archaeological excavations at Bosutswe,Botswana: cultural chronology,paleo-ecology and economy

Excavations at the site of Bosutswe on the eastern edge of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana have uncovered over 4 m of deposit ranging in age from CE 700 to 1700. Our research has produced quantitative and qualitative measures of the material and ecological dimensions that structured the everyday actions and behaviors through which social identities were constituted, maintained, and transformed during the period when the polities of Toutswe, Mapungubwe, Great Zimbabwe and Khami rose to power. By examining the material dimensions that underlay shifting relations of production, exchange, and social stratification we are able to contextualize the social judgments that ascribed value to material goods and food ways, while specifying the ways these were used to create and naturalize social relationships and power differentials. Stable isotope analyses, combined with evidence of vitrified dung, further enable us to suggest changes in herd management strategies used by the inhabitants of the site to compensate for ecological changes brought about by long-term occupation, while at the same time enabling them to economically tie subordinates to them as social divisions became more rigidly defined after CE 1300. The cultural and economic changes that took place at Bosutswe thus directly impact our understanding of the social transformations that immediately preceded contemporary configurations of ethnicity in Botswana.     

Social enterprises in regional innovation systems: a review of Finnish regional strategies

The aim of modern innovation policies is to enhance the innovation capability of regions, their organizations and people. Regional innovation system (RIS) theory has been one of the most popular frameworks for realizing innovation policies. Yet, adopting the perspective of sustainable innovation policy where innovation is also seen as a solution to various societal and environmental problems has been slow. Social enterprises (SEs) are discussed here as a means to address those problems, particularly through collaboration between sectors and focusing on social sustainability. The aim of this paper is to identify whether and in what way SEs are communicated as an innovative solution and as a source of innovations for economic and development activities through regional strategies. The data consist of regional innovation and business strategies from all Finnish regions, analysed using qualitative content analysis. We argue that there is a need to go deeper and include effective support mechanisms for SEs in these documents. Better inclusion of SEs as part of innovation systems and communicating this through regional strategies would help to develop SEs and to have them perceived as potential innovators and active entrepreneurial actors in innovation systems contributing to economically, environmentally and socially sustainable development.     

怒江大峡谷旅游扶贫研究

旅游扶贫是解决旅游资源丰富型地区贫困问题的有效途径。怒江峡谷区是个区域性的特困少数民族地区,山高坡陡、生态环境脆弱的地理环境决定传统的农业难以改变其贫困面貌。而其丰富的民族文化资源、生物多样性资源和独特的峡谷自然景观等旅游资源,使怒江旅游扶贫成为可能。文章分析了怒江峡谷旅游扶贫的优势、劣势资源和机遇,提出怒江旅游发展应以乡村生态旅游为目标,开发特色旅游扶贫产品,发挥政府引导和扶持作用。     

Awareness and Action: The ethno-gender dynamics of Sri Lankan NGOs

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are the modus operandi in the development arena at this juncture. Many, including feminists, place much faith in these actors for creating a progressive space for social, political, and economic activities to be undertaken. This article employs fieldwork evidence from eastern Sri Lanka, carried out in 1998–1999 and early 2004, to challenge this simplistic reading. The primary social group that was studied during the fieldwork period was female-headed households. This article argues that there are different types of NGO working in multiple ways in the region, and it is important to distinguish between these differences. NGOs that primarily execute development-oriented projects without considering the ethno-nationalist and gender politics are culpable of the violence of development. It is only when NGOs are in local communities for the long haul that they are able to develop a commitment to reassess and evaluate the social transformative potential of their activities. Using a feminist political economy perspective this article argues that it is important and necessary that NGOs confront social, political, and economic structures, including ethnic identity politics, if their activities are to lead to transformative feminist politics. In other words, NGOs would have to do more than pay lip service to gender mainstreaming, as is more often the case. These actors need to recognize and understand the potency of ethno-nationalist politics, social structures, social exclusion, and social injustice in order to create social spaces that are enabling of women's agency in the local communities within which they work and operate.     

Economic challenges for the EU Water Framework Directive reform and implementation

The European Water Framework Directive (WFD) is a unique and historic piece of environmental legislation, combining ecological and economic dimensions. The aim of the WFD is to ensure sustainable socio-economic management of the resource, protecting the quantity and quality of water. The complexity of this political, ecological and economic framework has led to misinterpretation and implementation problems among Member States, and thus to unsatisfactory outcomes. This paper analyses the economic science challenges for the upcoming WFD reform and its subsequent implementation, and gives some recommendations about how to handle these challenges. Consensus is required on the definitions of the existing economic concepts and tools currently included in European Union (EU) water policy (through the original WFD) and the methods for operationalizing them. Additionally, this will help fill key gaps, such as the lack of suitably skilled practitioners and the need for homogeneous economic knowledge among Member States. Furthermore, it seems necessary to integrate additional emerging concepts into the water policy debate and its praxis in the EU context.     

Gender and living arrangements of the elderly in Iran

In 2006, the aging population in Iran had increased to about four million, representing about 7 per cent of the total population. We examined marital status and the living arrangements of this growing population based on a public use sample of the 2006 census and published data from the 1976 census. We observed a gender-based transition in living arrangements of the elderly; men continued to live with a spouse, perhaps through remarriage, continuing to be the head of household. The living pattern for women was noticeably different: about 20 per cent were unmarried and living alone but otherwise living with married children, predominantly sons. This analysis revealed a decline from the traditional pattern of co-residence with married children between 1976 and 2006 and an increase in solitary living among women. However, it raised several questions that need extensive research concerning the social, economic, and health status of the elderly in relation to their living arrangement.     

Global / globalizing cities

Along with the rise in research on globalization, the concept of globalization has become a subject to a more critical scrutiny. While majority agree that it represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science, doubts about its newness, inevitability and epoch-making qualities are also being raised. Others argue that the globalization literature neglects issues of social regulation by the nation-state, while some critics view it as a discourse drawn upon to legitimize particular political and economic agendas. Debates focus on metropolitan manifestations and impacts. Moving from this background, the paper presents three sociospatial urban configurations that have emerged in the literature. Alongside attempts at identifying globalizing cities and transnational urban networks as new theoretical subjects, another significant vein in the literature focuses on the complex forces of globalization and the production of new urban spaces in these cities. In addition, economic conceptions of globalization is now being pushed beyond adding sociocultural or sociopolitical dimensions and argue instead for the need to theorize globalization as a discursive formation. The global city as a discursive category conjures up imaginary concepts of high modernity, megadevelopment, 21st century urbanity. However, it is noted that the way forward is to focus on the distinctive ways in which urban actors engage in specific processes of economic and social reflexivity. There exists an urgent task for theorizations of the global city, which weave together historical, economic, cultural, sociopolitical and discursive dimensions.     

Museums and cultural sustainability: stakeholders,forces, and cultural policies

This paper explores the relationship between museums, cultural sustainability, and cultural policies. Specifically, it offers a theoretical model for the sustainable development of museums and a process for designing appropriate cultural policies for museums with cultural sustainability in mind. The case of Cyprus is used to demonstrate how strengths and gaps in cultural sustainability can be identified within a broader museum environment. The study examines the main stakeholders (the state, municipalities/ communities, and individuals), types of museums (archaeological, art, ethnographic, etc.) they establish and the forces influencing their decisions (such as politics, a sense of national identity, cultural tourism, economic revitalization, and personal agendas) in order to map the Cypriot museum environment and identify the emphasis placed on different parameters of cultural sustainability. By identifying cultural sustainability strengths and gaps on a national level, it becomes easier for cultural policy-makers to design appropriate cultural policies for museums.     

Water,Geopolitics, and Economic Development in the Conceptualization of a Region

Two U.S.-based geographers outline three dimensions (geopolitical, economical, and biophysical) used to define the basin of the Mekong River as a region, which reveal multi-scalar water governance policies and discourses that lie at the core of current challenges and tensions within the basin. Drawing on their extensive knowledge and fieldwork, the authors demonstrate that processes integral to the framing of the Mekong as a region of economic integration and international cooperation (water resource development through construction of large dams) conflict sharply with the functioning of the Mekong as a region of highly connected biophysical processes. The approach utilized in the paper can be applied to the study of other transboundary river-basin regions in Eurasia and elsewhere facing similar contradictions among the geopolitical, economic, and biophysical dimensions used to define them. By focusing on a region as constructed simultaneously through multiple social and biophysical processes, the authors contribute to current debates within geography and related fields on the nature of regions.     

Urban Regeneration and Socio-economic Sustainability: A Role for Established Small Food Outlets

In recent years, the challenges of urban regeneration and sustainability have been brought together in discourses concerning the re-shaping of inner-city districts of large cities. Currently, sustainable development in regeneration policies is mostly dominated by the environmental dimension and qualities of the built environment, with some focus on the more easily quantifiable aspects of social and economic dimensions. There is, however, limited discussion about integrating socio-economic aspects of sustainable regeneration in the literature. This paper presents a critical exploration of the role of the existing small business base in facilitating more sustainable urban re-development from a socio-economic standpoint. Indigenous food outlets in Birmingham's Eastside district—a re-development initiative branded as exemplar of sustainable urban development—are used to illustrate the role of small businesses in the day-to-day life of districts undergoing regeneration. The paper reflects on challenges and benefits from retaining and supporting established businesses throughout the re-development process and concludes with some reflections on lessons learnt from the case study. It argues that planners, policy-makers and developers should accord greater attention to the role of established businesses to foster urban districts that strive towards integrating aspects of socio-economic sustainability.     

宁夏南部回族社区人地关系及可持续发展研究

本文运用区域可持续发展基本理论,全面分析了宁夏南部回族社区人地关系由掠夺式向互为报复式演进的过程、原由及危害,剖析了回族社区可持续发展的四大制约因子,即:生活贫困及生产方式的落后性,人类自身生产及人口素质的低层次性,区域文化的封闭性,生态环境的逆展性。并针对上述因子,提出了改善人地关系,实现可持续发展的举措是:加快区域经济建设,深化生态环境建设,加强地域文化建设,积极进行社区建设。     

包头市城市生态支持系统可持续发展的限制因子探讨

本文在了解包头市自然环境与社会经济状况的基础上,采用了静态与动态相结合的方法,运用层次分析法从支持水平、协调性、发展能力三个方面构建指标体系,建立研究模型,定性与定量相结合,对包头市的城市生态支持系统自1992年-2001年十年以来的发展轨迹进行了全面深入的研究分析与评价,得出包头市"城市生态支持系统支持水平较低"的结论,在此基础上提出了包头市城市生态支持系统的主要限制因子。目的在于通过对包头市城市生态支持系统的综合水平的分析与评价,正确认识城市发展中存在的问题,提高城市生态支持系统的结构、功能,提高限制因子容量,推动包头市城市生态支持系统的建设,促进城市健康发展。     

A road,a disappearing river and fragile connectivity in Sino-Inner Asian borderlands

In 2013, President Xi Jinping formulated China's vision of Eurasian connectivity: The Silk Road Economic Belt. The strategy envisages the construction of infrastructure networks that will enmesh the Eurasian continent and form an interconnected space of exchange. Since the plan was announced, the Economic Belt has attracted much academic and media attention in terms of the infrastructure being built and its future potentialities. At the same time, questions about the sustainability of this infrastructure in a dynamic Sino–Inner Asian borderland, with its highly fluid terrain and socio-political geography, have been virtually absent from the debate.The inevitable decay, maintenance and social ambiguity surrounding transport infrastructure lack the appeal associated with new construction projects; yet, discussing them is crucial in the context of mega initiatives such as the Economic Belt. It is important to bring it back ‘down to the ground’ and into more mundane terms. By zooming in on a single desert road in northwest China that has been designated as a crucial conduit in the westward arc of the Economic Belt, this article draws attention to the social complexity and ecological vulnerability of transport infrastructure in the Sino–Inner Asian borderlands. At one scale, this infrastructure is part of China's vision of globalization; at another scale, however, it is firmly embedded in local contexts. By pushing the political, ecological and material complexity of road maintenance to the centre of our inquiry, the article offers a new perspective on the current construction boom and its sustainability.