scholarly journals ‘Mbare Musika is ours’: An analysis of a fresh produce market in Zimbabwe

2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (476) ◽  
pp. 311-337 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shiela Chikulo ◽  
Paul Hebinck ◽  
Bill Kinsey

Abstract The functioning of markets is premised on the creation of collaborative relationships and networks. Food markets in Zimbabwe are evolving in response to state interventions that aim to restructure the marketplace and the flow of produce. This article explores Mbare Musika, the oldest and largest marketplace in Harare supplying the city with fresh fruit and vegetables. We analyse Mbare Musika from the perspective of the interactions among farmers and retailers, vendors, transporters, intermediaries, officials, and customers, in creating and sustaining a specific enduring market. We use actor narratives to understand the ordering and (re)ordering of people and produce in the context of informalization, shifting polycentric relationships, and market infrastructure to sustain livelihoods anchored on the circulation of large volumes of diverse fresh produce. The market is overtly economic in outlook but, intrinsically, it is a social arena where discourses are continuously reconstructed, reproduced, and expressed through daily interactions. We situate Mbare Musika in past and present sociopolitical processes of transformation in Zimbabwe.

Author(s):  
Timofei Bogomolov ◽  
Malgorzata W. Korolkiewicz ◽  
Svetlana Bogomolova

In this chapter, machine learning techniques are applied to examine consumer food choices, specifically purchasing patterns in relation to fresh fruit and vegetables. This product category contributes some of the highest profit margins for supermarkets, making understanding consumer choices in that category important not just for health but also economic reasons. Several unsupervised and supervised machine learning techniques, including hierarchical clustering, latent class analysis, linear regression, artificial neural networks, and deep learning neural networks, are illustrated using Nielsen Consumer Panel Dataset, a large and high-quality source of information on consumer purchases in the United States. The main finding from the clustering analysis is that households who buy less fresh produce are those with children – an important insight with significant public health implications. The main outcome from predictive modelling of spending on fresh fruit and vegetables is that contrary to expectations, neural networks failed to outperform a linear regression model.


2009 ◽  
Vol 12 (11) ◽  
pp. 2044-2050 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Cummins ◽  
Dianna M Smith ◽  
Mathew Taylor ◽  
John Dawson ◽  
David Marshall ◽  
...  

AbstractObjectiveNeighbourhood differences in access to fresh fruit and vegetables may explain social inequalities in diet. Investigations have focused on variations in cost and availability as barriers to the purchase and consumption of fresh produce; investigations of quality have been neglected. Here we investigate whether produce quality systematically varies by food store type, rural–urban location and neighbourhood deprivation in a selection of communities across Scotland.DesignCross-sectional survey of twelve fresh fruit and vegetable items in 288 food stores in ten communities across Scotland. Communities were selected to reflect a range of urban–rural settings and a food retail census was conducted in each location. The quality of twelve fruit and vegetable items within each food store was evaluated. Data from the Scottish Executive were used to characterise each small area by deprivation and urban–rural classification.SettingScotland.ResultsQuality of fruit and vegetables within the surveyed stores was high. Medium-sized stores, stores in small town and rural areas, and stores in more affluent areas tended to have the highest-quality fresh fruit and vegetables. Stores where food is secondary, stores in urban settings and stores in more deprived areas tended have the lowest-quality fresh produce. Although differences in quality were not always statistically significant, patterns were consistent for the majority of fruit and vegetable items.ConclusionsThe study provides evidence that variations in food quality may plausibly be a micro-environmental mediating variable in food purchase and consumption and help partially explain neighbourhood differences in food consumption patterns.


Author(s):  
Azhari Amri

Film Unyil puppet comes not just part of the entertainment world that can be enjoyed by people from the side of the story, music, and dialogue. However, there is more value in it which is a manifestation of the creator that can be absorbed into the charge for the benefit of educating the children of Indonesia to the public at large. The Unyil puppet created by the father of Drs. Suyadi is one of the works that are now widely known by the whole people of Indonesia. The process of creating a puppet Unyil done with simple materials and formation of character especially adapted to the realities of the existing rural region. Through this process, this research leads to the design process is fundamentally educational puppet inspired by the creation of Si Unyil puppet. The difference is the inspiring character created in this study is on the characters that exist in urban life, especially the city of Jakarta. Thus the results of this study are the pattern of how to shape the design of products through the creation of the puppet with the approach of urban culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-44
Author(s):  
Diana Mihnea

During the 1920s, the city of Sibiu expanded by approximately 250 hectares, with an area that was three times larger than its historical core. This great expansion was the result of the application of the agrarian reform, whose laws allowed and encouraged the creation of new building plots in the cities of Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș. Although this was the largest territorial growth of the city up until that time, it was not controlled by the municipality and its Technical Office. In fact, the city authorities were excluded from most stages of the decision-making process. All the decisions were taken by the central and local institutions of the Ministry of Agriculture and Domains that were in charge with the application of the agrarian reform. The territorial expansion was not based on any large-scale studies regarding the needs of the city or the impact on its future development. In fact, the proportions and the directions of the city’s expansion were dictated mostly by the number of accepted requests for building plots and by the position of the areas that could be expropriated and that were suitable to be parcelled. The creation of the large new allotments was simultaneous with the efforts of the municipality to draft a systematisation plan that was now urgently necessary, given the rapidly changing situation of the city, and it was imposed by the new administrative legislation of Romania. So, shortly after the parceling plans were issued and the new building plots were distributed to those entitled, a preliminary systematization plan – drafted between 1926 and 1928 – proposed the revision of the new allotments and the modification of the procedure for assigning the building plots according to a system that would allow a gradual territorial growth of the city. Hence, during the second half of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s there were ample negotiations over the new urban territory, involving not only the Ministry of Agriculture and Domains, but also the Ministry of Interior and the Superior Technical Council. In the end, after almost a decade of negotiations, only minor adjustments were made to the allotments and the provisions of the systematisation plan were only partly applied.


1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-157 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Forest

The 1984 municipal incorporation of West Hollywood, California offers an opportunity to explore two related themes: (1) the role of place in the creation of identity generally, and (2) the role of place in the creation of sexual identity in particular. Work on the second subject has largely concentrated on the political economy of gay territories, although there has been an ongoing concern with the symbolic importance of these places. Although these studies have provided valuable insights on these themes, they do not reflect the renewed concern in humanistic geography with the normative importance of place, and the study of morally valued ways of life. These latter topics provide alternative avenues into questions of identity. In the coverage of the incorporation campaign, the gay press presented an idealized image of the city. In defining a new gay identity, the gay press utilized the holistic quality of place to weave together the ‘natural’ and cultural elements of West Hollywood. This idealized ‘gay city’ united the place's real and imagined physical attributes with social and personal characteristics of gay men. More simply, the qualities of the city itself expressed intellectual and moral virtues, such that characterizations of the city became part of a narrative defining the meaning of ‘gay’. This new gay male identity included seven elements: creativity, aesthetic sensibility, an orientation toward entertainment or consumption, progressiveness, responsibility, maturity, and centrality. The effort to create an identity centered on West Hollywood was relatively conservative in the sense that it was not a fundamental challenge to existing social and political systems. Rather, it reflected a strategy based on an ethnicity model, seeking to ‘demarginalize’ gays and to bring them closer to the symbolic ‘center’ of US society.


Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 586-603 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH REES JONES

ABSTRACT:The York House Books provide much-cited evidence of Richard III's relationship with the City of York in 1485, yet the nature and purpose of the House Books has never been satisfactorily explored. Through a focus on the records of a single year (1476–77), this article places their development within the context of new forms of civic bureaucracy in England and France in which the recording of emotions and speech had particular rhetorical and political significance in the reign of Edward IV. This expanding culture of civic literacy led not only to the creation of fuller records of civic politics and events (including the surviving texts of the Corpus Christi drama), but also enabled new forms of political activity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Hermelin Saras Putri ◽  
Ririn Gusti

This study aims to systematically obtain information related to community empowerment through kalamansi citrus farmer groups. The method used is the focus group discussion by getting the results that community empowerment through the kalamansi citrus farmer group was established in 2008, has 27 members, the natural lemongrass farmer group gets certificate of appreciation from the Governor of Bengkulu as an Independent Kalamansi Citrus Farm Farmer / Success in the Context of the 50th Anniversary of Bengkulu Province, on 18 November 2018. As time goes by, Kalamansi oranges have produced many fruits, the empowerment of sustainable natural lemongrass farmer groups in Padang lemongrass village is one of a form of community empowerment. The community usually sells it in the form of fresh fruit to market traders in the city of Bengkulu. With the empowerment of this sustainable natural fresh farmer group, the community can use their land as a kalamansi orange plantation where the products they plant will be traded in the market or to Mr. Amti who needing the raw material for kalamansi syrup, the community can increase their family's economic income by planting kalamansi and oranges the community also conserves kalamsi citrus fruit in the city of Bengkulu. Keywords: Empowerment, farmer groups, kalamansi oranges. 


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