Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

Reassessing the ROK-US alliance: Transformation challenges and the consequences of South Korea's choices

Changing political attitudes in South Korea, and the appearance of some divergence of view between Washington and Seoul on the nature of the threat posed by North Korea are impelling a re-examination of the US-South Korea alliance. At the same time, although still concerned with deterring an invasion from Pyongyang, the alliance must now also deal with the possible conse quences of a catastrophic collapse of the North Korean state. Changing threat perceptions, developments in military technology and doctrine associated with the 'revolution in military affairs', as well as the emergence of new issues such as terrorism, all require a redefinition of the alliance. While the changing geo-strategic environment and the wider regional role of the alliance will all be factors in the modifications made to the Washington-Seoul security relationship, the key to South Korea's future alliance choices will be the nature of the path taken to eventual Korean unification.     

Rethinking the value of unpaid care work: lessons from participatory visual research in central Tanzania

Abstract

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South. We draw on participatory and visual ethnographic fieldwork to show that rural women in Tanzania perceive UCW as an experience that entails not only physical toil and drudgery, but also positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment, which are integral to affirming their self-perceived identities and roles as farmers and mothers in their communities. These material, affective, and symbolic dimensions of UCW emerge from agrarian women’s situated knowledges and experiences of ensuring household social reproduction on and with the land, as well as the gender relations and seasonal dynamics that shape the organization of work tasks in agrarian landscapes. To achieve transnational gender justice, we suggest that a more fine-tuned and nuanced approach to understanding the variability and complexity of care work as practiced and perceived by heterogeneous groups of women (and men) in particular places and times is needed.     

九十年代我国人口地理学研究的瞻望

本文在分析我国人口形势的基础上,提出了九十年代结合我国人口实际情况开展人口地理研究的主要课题.同时对人口地理研究中理论与方法的提高也进行了讨论.