Informal housing,spatial structure,and city compactness

This paper develops a monocentric city model with a formal and an informal sector in the housing industry. While formal developers build houses renting land from landowners, informal developers use land for free. However, informal developers must incur defensive expenditures to avoid government intervention. In equilibrium, at any distance of the central business district (CBD), informal developers use land until the value of the marginal productivity of land equals the defensive expenditures per unit of land. The model shows the land allocated to produce short informal (tall formal) buildings increases (decreases) with distance to the CBD. Thus, the model introduces a new source of spatial variation of building height. The model also shows that a higher level of informal housing increases the spatial size of a city and reduces the height of its buildings.     

Grabbing Land for Equitable Development? Reengineering Land Dispossession through Securitising Land Development Rights in Chongqing

This article examines the securitisation of land development rights under the dipiao scheme in Chongqing, China. It argues that this instrument is based on the dispossession and exploitation of rural households but these unequal relations have been concealed and naturalised through the complex geographies and temporalities of dispossessory arrangements, financing mechanisms and discursive tactics. By overcoming political barriers to land commodification and dispossession in this way, the Chongqing government has expanded the frontier of commodifiable land and sustained a land‐based, urban‐centric and debt‐financed accumulation. Instead of narrowing the urban–rural divide, this instrument reproduces and solidifies it. On this basis, the article argues that conceptual and political innovations for inclusive and equitable development needs to shift the attention from land to people.     

Finding Mid-19th Century Native Settlements: Cartographic and Archaeological Evidence from Central California

Historical maps have the potential to aid archaeological investigations into the persistence of Native American settlements during the mid-19th century, a time when many Native communities disappear from archaeological view. Focusing on Tomales Bay in central California, we evaluate the usefulness of historical maps as a way to discover and interpret archaeological deposits dating to the period, with the aim of better understanding indigenous patterns of residence at the transition from missionary to settler colonialism. In particular, we focus on diseños and plats created to document Mexican-era land grants as well as early maps produced by the General Land Office and United States Coast Survey. Although we note inconsistencies regarding the inclusion of indigenous settlements on historical maps, our case study offers an example of how archaeologists can employ historical maps and targeted archaeological ground-truthing to discover sites that are poorly represented in the historical and archaeological records.     

John Locke on Native Right,Colonial Possession,and the Concept of Vacuum domicilium

The early paragraphs of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1690) describe a poetic idyll of property acquisition widely supposed by contemporary theorists and historians to have cast the template for imperial possessions in the New World. This reading ignores the surprises lurking in Locke’s later chapters on conquest, usurpation, and tyranny, where he affirms that native rights to lands and possessions survive to succeeding generations. Locke warned his readers that this “will seem a strange doctrine, it being quite contrary to the practice of the world.” His doctrine of native right is equally strange to recent scholars who see in Lockean theory the ideological prototype for England’s colonial expropriation in the “vacant lands” of North America. This interpretation, dignified by the elusive principle of vacuum domicilium, is considerably weakened when Locke’s arguments are placed in the historical context of the sixteenth and early seventeenth-century English colonial experience. Locke’s Second Treatise, with its literary flourish of a vast and idyllic state of nature, was written in the full appreciation of Amerindian agriculture, its established populations, the acknowledgement of native property rights, and the policy and practice of purchasing land from the native inhabitants.     

Grazing was not mining: managing Victoria's goldfields commons

The great land rush of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw vast swathes of temperate grazing land around the world pass into private hands. Commons and common lands, however, provided a vital interim mechanism in this shift from state control to private property ownership. Commons ensured continued and widespread access to natural resources, including water, minerals, soil, grass, and timber, that was integral to the colonial settler project. The gold rush in nineteenth‐century Victoria sheds important light on this process, where almost 250,000 ha of Crown land were set aside as goldfields commons. These reserves maintained auriferous or gold‐bearing land in public hands and provided access to extensive tracts of grazing for the sheep and cattle of gold miners. In this paper, we examine how the traditional English notion of common lands was transferred to a New World environment and draw on the work of economist Elinor Ostrom to evaluate the use and function of Victoria's goldfields commons in terms of management, regulation, and sustainability.     

TENURE SECURITY INTERVENTIONS IN CAMBODIA: TESTING BEBBINGTON'S APPROACH TO DEVELOPMENT GEOGRAPHY

The relationship between the development industry and the problems it claims to address is problematic. Development studies have often found development practice systematically misrepresenting its context with the result that interventions are out of kilter with reality and fail. In a series of articles in the early 2000s Antony Bebbington suggested development geographers attend to the spatial distribution of development interventions by mapping and explaining immanent development, mapping and explaining intentional development and studying the relationships between them. This article uses the case of property rights interventions in Cambodia to examine the extent that Bebbington's approach might explain development interventions and their relationship to the contexts into which they are inserted. Primary data consist of interviews with key actors involved in decisions over the locations of these interventions. Secondary data consist of reports and databases showing their geographical spread, and political and social science literature explaining the main transitions in recent Cambodian history. The main empirical finding is that the interventions, land titling and community forestry, have not been implemented in the places where the problems they are claimed to address are located. The methodological reflection is that Bebbington's approach valuably challenges policy narratives that tend to smooth space and conceal unevenness. However, it provides only a broad theoretical framework rather than any theoretical content. The approach may only realize its potential when Bebbington and others begin to apply it to generate hypotheses and theory. A new hypothesis emerging from the Cambodian case is briefly introduced in this regard.     

略论土地综合承载力评价指标体系的设计思路——我国沿海地区案例分析

长期以来,作为我国社会经济迅速发展的东部沿海地区,其人地关系日趋紧张,人口、资源、环境等各类问题也日趋激化,谋求区域发展的可持续性已成为该地区的必然选择。而土地综合承载力又恰恰为可持续发展的实施提供了切入点。本文在对土地承载力重新审视的基础上,以全新的视角重构土地承载力的理论框架,并以我国东部沿海地区为例,对区域土地承载力的评判指标体系进行了全新设计,为进一步的区域土地承载力综合评价奠定基础。     

贵州省的城市生态环境问题

本文以贵阳等九座城市为例,从城市的自然环境和人类活动影响两方面,探讨贵州城市的生态,环境问题,以及协调人地矛盾的主要对策。全文分为以下三大部分:首先探讨城市的自然环境特征,说明贵州城市的形态结构,水土资源及城市扩展均受"喀斯特"环境的制约,其生态环境极为脆弱。表现在水土资源贫乏,平地少又很分散,地形封闭,旱涝和地貌灾害频繁等。第二论述城市的生态环境问题:以煤烟性空气污染,水体有机污染和交通噪声污染为主。SO₂的污染极为严重,酸雨污染,城市河段及湖(库)污染普遍存在;4/5的城市交通噪声超过国家标准;1/2城市区域环境噪声污染严重。最后提出重建城市生态环境的主要对策。     

山西省农业土地资源可持续利用研究

农业土地资源的可持续利用是实现农业可持续发展的基础和保证。本文通过分析山西农业土地资源的特点,开发利用现状及存在的主要问题,提出了山西农业土地资源可持续利用的主要措施:加快退耕还林步伐,调整农业用地结构,优化农业生态环境;加强生态农业建设,合理利用土地资源,提高土地生产率;加大农业生态环境整治力度,防止土地退化,减轻自然灾害;强化土地管理,规范土地市场,保护农业土地资源。