scholarly journals Cities in a post-COVID world

Urban Studies ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 004209802110180
Author(s):  
Richard Florida ◽  
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose ◽  
Michael Storper

This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic; the lockdown as a forced experiment; the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks; and changes in the urban form and system. At the macrogeographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system. At the microgeographic scale, however, we suggest that it may bring about a series of short-term and some longer-running social changes in the structure and morphology of cities, suburbs and metropolitan regions. The durability and extent of these changes will depend on the timeline and length of the pandemic.

2021 ◽  
pp. 056943452110542
Author(s):  
Christopher Roby

This is an exploratory study that examines the effect of social information on gender differences in selection into a winner-take-all tournament, using a simple addition task. Participants perform this task in multiple rounds and then select into a competitive or non-competitive pay scheme. Prior to choosing payment schemes, participants are shown selected results about average performance and choices in a similar experiment. I find that the inclusion of social information eliminates any extant gender gap in competitive choices in every treatment. The reduction in the gender gap is not due to greater efficiency of choices by men or women, even though inefficient choices by low-performing individuals are mostly eliminated. Rather, the inclusion of feedback causes men and women to select into a competitive pay scheme in a similar manner, thereby removing the gender gap. Despite these results, the complexity of the social information intervention used leaves some results unexplained. JEL Codes: C9, J2, J16.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 137-140
Author(s):  
Pierre Filion

This commentary addresses the evolution of the North American suburb over the last 70 years, a period over which it adopted a development pattern marking a radical break from prior forms of urban settlement. Early in this period, the emerging suburban form constituted perhaps the sharpest transition in the history of urbanism in terms of urban form and transportation. This suburban form rapidly came to dominate North American metropolitan regions and spread to other parts of the world. In this commentary, I propose a brief history of the North American suburb since the late 1940s seen through the lens of the contributions it made to the evolution of urbanism across the continent. I contend that while suburbs are often associated with urban stasis, because perceived as an impediment to the emergence of new environmentally sensitive and socially and functionally integrated urban formulas relying on public transit and walking, they have played a major transformative role in the past and may be the source of further urban transitions in the future. North American suburbs have also undergone deep social changes over the last decades. However, I question the claim, made by some researchers, that we are entering a post-suburban era; but at the same time, I acknowledge the possibility of major future innovations within present suburban configurations.


2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 611-621
Author(s):  
Sára Horváthy

SummaryEgeria, a 4th century pious woman from the south of present-day Spain, retold, after visiting Palestine with the Bible in hand, her observations to her sisters. If the linguistic aspects of her letters are quite well-known, much less is known about its stylistic value, inappropriately called “simple”.What seems to be boringly the same again and again, is in fact a constantly renewed and perfectly mastered “variation on a theme”, just as in a well-composed piece of music. Her apparent objectivity is indeed a wish to focus on what she considers the most important, namely to tell her community, as closely to reality as possible, what she observed during her pilgrimage. However, Egeria’s latin is also a testimony of the christian lexicon in construction and of the social changes that were in progress by that time.Linguistics and stylistics work together here, the choice of a word or a grammatical formula reveals hidden information about the proper style of an author who, despite her supposed objectivity, had real personal purposes.


Imbizo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-42
Author(s):  
Niyi Akingbe

Every literary work emerges from the particular alternatives of its time. This is ostensibly reflected in the attempted innovative renderings of these alternatives in the poetry of contemporary Nigerian poets of Yoruba extraction. Discernible in the poetry of Niyi Osundare and Remi Raji is the shaping and ordering of the linguistic appurtenances of the Yoruba orature, which themselves are sublimely rooted in the proverbial, chants, anecdotes, songs and praises derived from the Yoruba oral poetry of Ijala, Orin Agbe, Ese Ifa, Rara, folklore as well as from other elements of oral performance. This engagement with the Yoruba oral tradition significantly permeates the poetics of Niyi Osundare’s Waiting laughters and Remi Raji’s A Harvest of Laughters. In these anthologies, both Osundare and Raji traverse the cliffs and valleys of the contemporary Nigerian milieu to distil the social changes rendered in the Yoruba proverbial, as well as its chants and verbal formulae, all of which mutate from momentary happiness into an enduring anomie grounded in seasonal variations in agricultural production, ruinous political turmoil, suspense and a harvest of unresolved, mysterious deaths. The article is primarily concerned with how the African oral tradition has been harnessed by Osundare and Raji to construct an avalanche of damning, peculiarly Nigerian, socio-political upheavals (which are essentially delineated by the signification of laughter/s) and display these in relation to the country’s variegated ecology.


2021 ◽  
pp. 089033442199477
Author(s):  
Virginia Thorley

Wet-nurses themselves rarely left written accounts. In this article, I have reconstructed their experiences and work situations breastfeeding other women’s infants in colonial Australia through examining available sources concerning their employment situations and the fate of their infants when they were boarded out, as they commonly were. The employment of wet-nurses by royal households or prominent families has long been the topic of historical accounts, whereas the situation of the more numerous wet-nurses further down the social spectrum has received disproportionately little examination. In this article, I do not discuss informal, altruistic wet nursing by family or neighbors but, rather, the situation of those women for whom it was an occupation, by its very nature short term. Primary material sighted for this study included a considerable number of advertisements for positions placed by employers, their intermediaries (e.g., family physicians) and wet-nurses themselves, and newspaper reports when the wet-nurse’s children came to the attention of the courts. Death for boarded-out infants who succumbed to inappropriate feeding and substandard care was typically ascribed to “natural causes.”


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