A Critique in Search of a Corpus: Re-visiting Governance and Re-interpreting Urban Politics

One of the most profound changes of the last two decades has been in the form and the function of local government. Its role as part of the local state has been challenged through the re-scaling and re-configuration of many of its aims. This paper examines the growth of business sector involvement and the ascendancy of the partnership model in urban development, as part of an analysis of the changes and the continuities that stretch across the local government – local governance conceptualization of political relations. I start the paper with a discussion of the main issues in the local governance literature as a precursor to a commentary onImrie and Raco's (1999) recent paper, 'How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom'. The wider literature is drawn upon to discuss some of the theoretical approaches used to analyse this much-vaunted transformation and three key themes are used to structure the remainder of the paper. I argue that Imrie and Raco caricature the work of other academics in order to make their claims over omissions from the literature. In doing so, they ignore or under-play how state restructuring and the logic of capital has often been the object of analysis, rather that the voluntarist incorporation of business élites into the local governing apparatus. Using empirical examples from three English cities I argue that while, on the one hand, their examples are revealing and serve to sensitize current debates around governance, the state and regulation, on the other hand, there is still a need to interpret these 'local' politics within a broader and more scale-sensitive framework and in more abstract terms. This demands a clear distinction between local governance as a concept, and its investigation in an empirical way.     

中国东北地区四中心城市功能关系优化

大连、沈阳、长春、哈尔滨是中国东北地区4个大区级中心城市,在新的历史时期其城市功能定位和发展关系协调至关重要。论文认为,未来15年,沈阳的政治、文化、信息中心作用不会改变,但是,面对其他城市的快速发展和竞争,其大区"龙头"作用特别是经济核心地位会相对下降。大连会渐显其大区核心地位和"龙头"作用。长春、哈尔滨市的次级中心地位依旧,分别承担起国家汽车、光电子、现代农业基地和重型装备制造业、冰雪旅游、对俄贸易中心的功能。     

吉林省区域核心城市可持续发展能力的定量化研究

本文选取吉林省9个地区的核心城市,进行可持续发展能力的定量化研究。提出了针对吉林省核心城市的可持续发展能力评估的5个方面49个指标,分别采用指数化方法与因子分析法对吉林省区域核心城市可持续发展能力进行测度。经对比分析,最后确定以指数化方法的研究结论作为吉林省区域核心城市可持续发展能力的测试结果,并对结论进行了定性分析。     

珠江三角洲中小城市的城市化研究

本文通过对中小城市在珠江三角洲城市化进程中的发展地位、发展特点、城市化形成机制以及珠江三角洲未来发展环境等方面进行分析,得出:①中小城市的发展完善了珠江三角洲的城镇体系;②中小城市对城市化水平的贡献率远远大于大城市;③未来城市发展的动力机制将更趋多样性,将会出现更加理想的城市化空间发展模式。另外,针对珠江三角洲未来中小城市的发展,本文提出了相应的对策。     

珠江三角洲城市群交通问题与对策--日本近畿圈的实践与启示

从城市结构、交通系统和管理体制等方面对珠江三角洲和近畿圈两个城市群交通进行比较分析。指出珠三角交通存在城市交通系统供需不平衡,致使城市交通运输效率低下,进而制约经济持续快速增长等问题。得出了要使珠江三角洲城市群交通的供求关系达到平衡,必须积极借鉴日本近畿圈的先进经验,合理调配交通系统中"人-车-路"三者之间相互关系的结论。     

From Spatial Keynesianism to Post‐Fordist Neoliberalism: Emerging Contradictions in the Spatiality of the Irish State

Abstract: The transition from Fordism to post‐Fordism has been accompanied by profound changes in the spatiality of west European states. The hierarchical, top‐down and redistributive structures that typified the Fordist welfare state have been replaced by more complex spatial configurations as elements of economic and political power have shifted both downwards to subnational territorial levels and upwards to the supranational level. A major debate has developed around the nature of these emerging forms of state spatiality and of the processes underpinning their formation. This paper examines how these processes have operated in the particular case of the Republic of Ireland. Here, the spatiality of the state was founded on a peculiar post‐colonial combination of a localised populist politics and a centralised state bureaucracy. While this arrangement was quite suited to the spatial dispersal of industrial branch plants which underpinned regional policy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly problematic with the more recent emergence of new trends in the nature and locational preferences of inward investment. This is reflected in the profound conflicts that have attended the formulation and implementation of the National Spatial Strategy, introduced in 2002. The result is a national space economy whose increasing dysfunctionality may now be compromising the very development model upon which Ireland's recent spectacular economic growth has been built.     

Urban shrinkage: an unspoken challenge of spatial planning in Russian small and medium-sized cities

Shrinkage since the collapse of state socialism has been evident in many Russian cities, especially in small and medium-sized (SMS) ones. The Russian state, de jure, has been promoting the idea of self-governance; thereby, urban municipalities ought to develop and adopt own planning decisions to cope with various challenges, including those related to depopulation. The current research focuses on planning responses to urban shrinkage. It aims at understanding how the phenomenon is conceptualized in the planning documents of Russian SMS cities and what solutions are proposed to cope with it in the conditions inherited from the Soviet times housing and infrastructural deficit. The empirical evidence for the analysis is drawn from over 70 SMS cities located in Central and Southern Russia. Results state that despite obvious and persisting urban shrinkage, most of the reviewed documents ignore or underestimate the phenomenon. Instead of suggesting flexible solutions, which would help overcome the shortage of urban infrastructure not aggravating shrinkages’ effects in the cityscape, long-term spatial plans are being developed with hope for future growth proposing measures that contribute to the intensification of urban sprawl and fragmentation.     

Patent portfolio analysis of cities: statistics and maps of technological inventiveness

ABSTRACT

Cities can be considered as engines of the knowledge-based economy, because they are the primary sites of knowledge production activities that subsequently shape the rate and direction of technological change and economic growth. Patents provide rich information to analyse the knowledge specialization of specific places, such as technological details and information on inventors and entities involved. The technology codes attributed at the level of individual patent documents can be used to indicate the diversity and scope of the knowledge claims underlying a specific invention. In this study we introduce tools for portfolio analysis in terms of patents that provide insights into the technological specialization of cities. The mapping and analysis of patent portfolios of cities exploits data derived from the Unites States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and dedicated tools (at https://leydesdorff.net/software/patents/). The results allow policy makers and other stakeholders to identify promising areas of further knowledge development, including smart specialization strategies.     

The Integration of VHR Satellite Imagery,GPR Survey and Boring for Archaeological Prospection at the Longcheng Site in Anhui Province,China

This paper is focused on the joint use of non‐invasive and minimal intervention techniques for supporting archaeological prospection. Very high resolution (VHR) satellite imagery analysis and ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) and boring surveys were integrated for the study of the Longcheng site, located near Hefei city in Anhui Province, China, to test their effectiveness and efficiency in prospecting archaeological remains and evaluating their degree of preservation. First, target locations of potential archaeological structures were identified on a WorldView‐2 (WV‐2) satellite image through spatial and radiometric enhancement, interpretation and object‐oriented classification. Second, archaeological features extracted from the WV‐2 imagery were further investigated by a GPR survey that provided detailed cross‐checking information about buried remains. Finally, a subsequent boring survey was conducted across those prospective archaeological structures in order to map the stratigraphic sequences on the basis of colour, compactness and the inclusions contained in the soil, and then to test their correspondence with the GPR data. The boring led to detailed confirmation of the results produced by the remote sensing analyses and GPR surveys, as well as the discovery of datable artefacts. On the basis of all the integrated data, the preliminary layout and structure of the Longcheng site was reconstructed in GIS. Furthermore, the widths, lengths, heights and burial depths of these buried archaeological structures were estimated in detail.