Insecurity and Pastoral Development in the Sahel

In this article it is argued that conventional agro-ecological and organizational concepts used in pastoral development are strongly biased towards the formulation and enforcement of norms. This leads development experts to attempts to control pastoralists and their herds. The policies and development interventions based on these assumptions have been largely unsuccessful. As a consequence attention for dryland areas and pastoral development has declined among researchers and development agencies. An important reason for this failure is the fundamental misfit between these normative concepts and the reality of dryland ecosystems and pastoral society. In order to show this, an alternative view on rangeland ecology and pastoral society is presented, supported by a case study of Fulbe pastoral society in dryland Central Mali. The authors argue that approaches to pastoral development must be revised in the direction of the dynamics inherent in the pastoral way of life.     

The Strategic Choice of Location and Transport Mode in a Successive Monopoly Model

This work emphasizes the incentives for vertical integration in a spatial model. A downstream monopoly will both strategically increase its transport costs and locate inefficiently relative to its customers. This forces the upstream monopolist to lower its input price rather than permit sales to decline. The excess costs and the inefficient location lower total profit in the vertical stream generating an incentive for vertical integration.     

Social areas in Beijing

Cities in the Western world have been subjected to a spatial process that essentially reflects rules of the market economy. People with ‘might’, defined in terms of money, have priority access to better residential locations. This allows a larger measure of personal preference to sway on residential location, and has ushered in the secondary factors of family or life–cycle effects as well as individual perception and choice regarding what is an acceptable neighbourhood and acceptable distance for commuting. Some parallel work has been done in socialist and Third World cities in the 1970s and 1980s which provides evidence of divergence from the original construct. Yet due to lack of good quality and sufficient data and general lack of interest in the social geography of cities there was little work done in China. Up to 1990, Chinese cities had combined the characteristics of socialist central planning, and characteristics of Third World cities of low level of economic development and limited ability of city governments in improving urban housing. Based on the latest 1990 Census, we study the social areas of Beijing of 1990 and the dynamics behind their formation. In particular, we shall highlight the impacts of the housing supply situation and allocation under central planning and the interrelationship between these and the conventional social areas dynamics. The Opening and Reform after 1978 has introduced new dynamics in China's urban social space. The 1990 census netted out some evidence of these new factors. However, their real impact may only be more adequately measured by the coming census in 2000. Limited by the census data, our examination has excluded the latest situation (after 1990). In spite of the use of the Shevky and Bell construct the purpose of the present study focuses on understanding the social geography of contemporary Chinese cities, and provides a useful historic and ideological dimension for comparative studies for related key concepts in urban and social geography.