Locating creative city policy in East Asia: neoliberalism,developmental state and assemblage of East Asian cities

This paper attempts to map how creative city policy emerged as a new form of urban politics in East Asia. It locates the emergence of creative city policy within the East Asian context, where the current political economic movement of neoliberalism intersects with the developmental state’s historical legacy. By investigating institutional and economic practices and consequences of creative city policy in Seoul and Yokohama, this study focuses on how the urban place become carefully rearranged settings through certain procedural, institutional, and technical mechanisms implemented by various discursive and material practices of policy actors. Through this analysis, this research critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy driven-development and considers the social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within the new creative city policy discourse.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

Empirical Analysis of a Travel-Time Forecasting Model

The purpose of this article is to analyze empirically a travel-time forecasting model that estimates link travel times on congested road networks. In separate studies by You and Kim, a nonparametric regression model has been developed as a core forecasting algorithm to reduce computation time and increase forecasting accuracy. In this article, the sensitivity of model parameters is evaluated so that the proposed travel-time forecasting model could be utilized in transportation information and management systems such as location-based services and intelligent transportation systems applications.     

Nurses across borders: global migration of registered nurses to the US

Like many other global north countries, the US is facing a nursing shortage. In the last few years, such nursing shortages have been identified as part of a broader ‘global crisis’ in nursing. Resorting to importing internationally educated nurses is a popular strategy to address the shortfall. Importing nurses into the US is not new. However, the current shortage is different because of greatly intensified efforts to recruit nurses from overseas, and because of the unprecedented scale of global nurse migration. This article uses an analysis of Census data to track the trends and geographies associated with internationally educated registered nurses (IERNs) in the US since 1980. I show that there are important subnational differences in the distribution of IERNs; most are concentrated in a few states. By paying particular attention to subnational geographies within the US, I draw attention to the variations in and implications of the distribution of IERNs and how this impacts public policy discourses associated with the transnational migration of IERNs into and within the US.     

Land Markets in the Harris-Todaro Model: A New Factor Equilibrating Rural-Urban Migration

Recent research in the Harris-Todaro (HT) tradition has added an important new element to the model by incorporating an urban land market. Brueckner and Zenou (1999) (hereafter BZ) argue that a model where migration equalizes expected wages between city and countryside may overlook another important force that equilibrates the process of rural-urban migration. This force is the migration-induced rise in the urban cost of living, which occurs principally through escalation of urban land rents as the city population expands. Land-rent escalation, which tends to limit rural-urban migration, provides an important additional force that may help determine city sizes in developing countries. The present paper provides a simpler alternative to BZ's analysis by assuming that urban residents smooth their income as they cycle between formal and informal employment. This allows migration decisions to be based on the expected wage, as in the usual HT framework, in a model that includes a land market. The analysis shows that this modified framework generates results slightly different from those of BZ.     

Modeling Air Quality in Urban Areas: A Cell‐Based Statistical Approach

Statistical regression models are presented that explain the observed variations, across urban areas, in the concentrations of two major pollutants, ozone and carbon monoxide. Model specification and estimation are based on an explicit and new spatial framework derived from the theoretical concept of well‐mixed cells, whereby the basic Fickian system of diffusion equations is integrated over the regional space partitioned into a grid of large cells. The concentration in each cell results from the balance of pollutant flows into and out of this cell and of pollutant emissions and removal within that cell, and is expressed as the sum of two concentration contributions: (1) the local effect, dependent upon pollution‐related factors around the measuring station, and (2) the regional effect, dependent upon pollutant flows originating outside the local area. A large database is developed, making extensive use of GIS technology, to spatially relate such data as pollution measurements, meteorological factors, land‐use characteristics, census socioeconomic data, and major highway network characteristics. The results confirm the appropriateness of the well‐mixed cell framework, are in line with general knowledge regarding the determinants of ozone and carbon monoxide concentrations, and clarify the role of transportation, residential fuel use, economic activities, natural environments, and meteorological factors such as temperature and solar radiation. About SO percent of the variations in concentrations are explained by these models. Several areas of further research are outlined.     

Operationalizing social equity in public policy design: A comparative analysis of solar equity policies in the United States

While it is widely recognized that energy injustices are prevalent in the clean energy transition process, there has been limited research attention on policy efforts aiming to mitigate these inequities. In this paper, we use solar equity policies as an empirical case study to understand how social equity considerations are conceptualized and operationalized in energy policy content. We build upon the policy design literature and code institutional statements of 54 solar equity policies adopted between 2001 and 2021 in the United States. In our comparative analysis, we focus on three levels of policy design elements that can be directly observed in written policy language: macro-policy goal construction, meso-policy instrument choices, and micro-level policy settings and calibrations. We find that the policy goal of energy justice is multifaceted, with a great emphasis on solar energy accessibility and provision of economic benefits and security for disadvantaged communities. There is a dominant preference by policymakers to use redistributive policies and community solar programs to advance energy justice-related goals. Solar equity policy instruments on-the-ground measures have also been calibrated to target specific disadvantaged populations in the energy system, which focus mostly on income-based vulnerability.