scholarly journals In-Between Sprawl and Neo-Rurality: Sparse Settlements and the Evolution of Socio-Demographic Local Context in a Mediterranean Region

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 3670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosanna Salvia ◽  
Pere Serra ◽  
Ilaria Zambon ◽  
Massimo Cecchini ◽  
Luca Salvati

Dispersed urbanization during the last half century has transformed metropolitan regions into well-connected, low-density residential areas. However, this kind of urbanization has changed irreversibly the traditional rural landscape around cities, leading to a new definition of ‘rurality’. The present work discusses the intimate relationship between urban sprawl and new forms of rurality. Considering economic downturns and the possible impact on landscape transformations, our study focuses on a representative Mediterranean case of urban sprawl (the metropolitan region of Athens, Greece). In this area, urban settlements expanded rapidly into fringe land, producing relevant socio-demographic transformations that have determined uneven changes in rural landscapes. A spatially-explicit investigation of local-scale dynamics that characterize population residing in sparse settlements over a long time period (1961–2011)—encompassing distinct phases of urban growth and rural development—is relevant for analysis of local changes in the relationship between sprawl and new forms of rurality. A new concept of ‘rurality’—adapting to rapidly-evolving, mixed rural/peri-urban contexts—require reframing the relationship between rural landscapes, scattered settlements, economic cycles and socio-demographic aspects, in the light of a truly sustainable development of local territories.

Land ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianluca Egidi ◽  
Rares Halbac-Cotoara-Zamfir ◽  
Sirio Cividino ◽  
Giovanni Quaranta ◽  
Luca Salvati ◽  
...  

Mediterranean regions have experienced a shift from accelerated urban growth typical of a post-industrial phase to a more recent spatial delocalization of population and economic activities reflecting discontinuous settlement expansion, land take, and the abandonment of cultivated areas around central cities. On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of land-use, settlement, and demographic indicators, the present study explores urban growth and population density over a sufficiently long time period in a metropolitan region of Southern Europe (Rome, Italy). Local-scale population trends were compared with the evolution of the primary sector (workers in agriculture, number of farms, cultivated land) between 1951 and 2011. Our results indicate non-linear growth waves alternating compact and discontinuous expansion shaping fringe land. The future development of metropolitan regions is increasingly dependent on the relationship between urban diffusion and economic viability of peri-urban agriculture. Crop abandonment and land take rates increase in local contexts where peri-urban agriculture rapidly declines. Policies managing ex-urban development and promoting the recovery of fringe soils are increasingly required to contain the expansion of dispersed settlements and preserve relict agricultural systems from land conversion to urban use.


2008 ◽  
pp. 61-76
Author(s):  
A. Porshakov ◽  
A. Ponomarenko

The role of monetary factor in generating inflationary processes in Russia has stimulated various debates in social and scientific circles for a relatively long time. The authors show that identification of the specificity of relationship between money and inflation requires a complex approach based on statistical modeling and involving a wide range of indicators relevant for the price changes in the economy. As a result a model of inflation for Russia implying the decomposition of inflation dynamics into demand-side and supply-side factors is suggested. The main conclusion drawn is that during the recent years the volume of inflationary pressures in the Russian economy has been determined by the deviation of money supply from money demand, rather than by money supply alone. At the same time, monetary factor has a long-run spread over time impact on inflation.


2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Barthel ◽  
Ewelina Barthel

Abstract This paper focuses on the largely unexamined phenomenon of the developing trans-national suburban area west of Szczecin. Sadly the local communities in this functionally connected area struggle with national planning policies that are unsuitable for the region. The paper examines the impact of those processes on the border region in general and on the localities in particular. The paper investigates the consequences for local narratives and the cohesive development of the Euroregion and what position Polish and German communities took to develop the region, even without the necessary planning support. The region has succeeded in establishing grass-roots planning mechanisms which have helped to create a metropolitan-region working from the bottom up.


This survey of research on psychology in five volumes is a part of a series undertaken by the ICSSR since 1969, which covers various disciplines under social science. Volume Five of this survey, Explorations into Psyche and Psychology: Some Emerging Perspectives, examines the future of psychology in India. For a very long time, intellectual investments in understanding mental life have led to varied formulations about mind and its functions across the word. However, a critical reflection of the state of the disciplinary affairs indicates the dominance of Euro-American theories and methods, which offer an understanding coloured by a Western world view, which fails to do justice with many non-Western cultural settings. The chapters in this volume expand the scope of psychology to encompass indigenous knowledge available in the Indian tradition and invite engaging with emancipatory concerns as well as broadening the disciplinary base. The contributors situate the difference between the Eastern and Western conceptions of the mind in the practice of psychology. They look at this discipline as shaped by and shaping between systems like yoga. They also analyse animal behaviour through the lens of psychology and bring out insights about evolution of individual and social behaviour. This volume offers critique the contemporary psychological practices in India and offers a new perspective called ‘public psychology’ to construe and analyse the relationship between psychologists and their objects of study. Finally, some paradigmatic, pedagogical, and substantive issues are highlighted to restructure the practice of psychology in the Indian setting.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 592-605
Author(s):  
Melchior Bria ◽  
Ludfi Djakfar ◽  
Achmad Wicaksono

Abstract The impacts of work characteristics on travel mode choice behavior has been studied for a long time, focusing on the work type, income, duration, and working time. However, there are no comprehensive studies on the influence of travel behavior. Therefore, this study examines the influence of work environment as a mediator of socio-economic variables, trip characteristics, transportation infrastructure and services, the environment and choice of transportation mode on work trips. The mode of transportation consists of three variables, including public transportation (bus rapid transit and mass rapid transit), private vehicles (cars and motorbikes), and online transportation (online taxis and motorbike taxis online). Multivariate analysis using the partial least squares-structural equation modeling method was used to explain the relationship between variables in the model. According to the results, the mediating impact of work environment is significant on transportation choices only for environmental variables. The mediating mode choice effect is negative for public transportation and complimentary for private vehicles and online transportation. Other variables directly affect mode choice, including the influence of work environment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232172110087
Author(s):  
Stig Hebbelstrup Rye Rasmussen ◽  
Aaron Weinschenk ◽  
Asbjørn Sonne Nørgaard ◽  
Jacob von Bornemann Hjelmborg ◽  
Robert Klemmensen

In this article, we examine the nature of the relationship between educational attainment and ideology. Some scholars have argued that the effect of education on political variables like ideology is inflated due to unaccounted-for family factors, such as genetic predispositions and parental socialization. Using the discordant twin design and data from a large sample of Danish twins, we find that after accounting for confounders rooted in the family, education has a (quasi)-causal effect on economic ideology, but not social ideology. We also examine whether the relationship between education and economic ideology is moderated by levels of economic hardship in the local context where individuals reside. We find that the (quasi)-causal effect of education on economic ideology increases in economically challenged areas.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 45
Author(s):  
Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir ◽  
Ali Qadir ◽  
Pia Vuolanto ◽  
Hans Petteri Hansen

This article explores how two seemingly contradictory global trends—scientific rationality and religious expressiveness—intersect and are negotiated in people’s lives in Nordic countries. We focus on Finland and Sweden, both countries with reputations of being highly secular and modernized welfare states. The article draws on our multi-sited ethnography in Finland and Sweden, including interviews with health practitioners, academics, and students identifying as Lutheran, Orthodox, Muslim, or anthroposophic. Building on new institutionalist World Society Theory, the article asks whether individuals perceive any conflict at the intersection of “science” and “religion”, and how they negotiate such a relationship while working or studying in universities and health clinics, prime sites of global secularism and scientific rationality. Our findings attest to people’s creative artistry while managing their religious identifications in a secular, Nordic, organizational culture in which religion is often constructed as old-fashioned or irrelevant. We identify and discuss three widespread modes of negotiation by which people discursively manage and account for the relationship between science and religion in their working space: segregation, estrangement, and incorporation. Such surprising similarities point to the effects of global institutionalized secularism and scientific rationality that shape the negotiation of people’s religious and spiritual identities, while also illustrating how local context must be factored into future, empirical research on discourses of science and religion.


Urbanisation ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 245574712110165
Author(s):  
K. Sivaramakrishnan

Agrarian urbanisation has gathered pace and intensity in the last few decades after economic liberalisation in India. A faster rate of economic growth has exacerbated the extraction of rural natural resources to supply increased urban demands. At the same time, rural landscapes have been transformed by expanded infrastructure, new industrial ventures, conservation projects and urban sprawl. These processes have been mediated by shifting patterns of caste power and political mobilisation. However, they also seem to have exacerbated social inequality while making historically marginalised groups such as Dalits and Adivasis suffer greater dispossession and livelihood precarity. Case studies from different regions of India reveal both the socio-economic dynamics of regional variation in these broad outcomes of agrarian urbanism, and the cross-regional patterns of environmental degradation, exacerbated inequality and difficulties faced by agrarian society in reproducing itself as an integral part of Indian prosperity and progress.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (10) ◽  
pp. 5250-5259 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Manuel Aburto ◽  
Francisco Villavicencio ◽  
Ugofilippo Basellini ◽  
Søren Kjærgaard ◽  
James W. Vaupel

As people live longer, ages at death are becoming more similar. This dual advance over the last two centuries, a central aim of public health policies, is a major achievement of modern civilization. Some recent exceptions to the joint rise of life expectancy and life span equality, however, make it difficult to determine the underlying causes of this relationship. Here, we develop a unifying framework to study life expectancy and life span equality over time, relying on concepts about the pace and shape of aging. We study the dynamic relationship between life expectancy and life span equality with reliable data from the Human Mortality Database for 49 countries and regions with emphasis on the long time series from Sweden. Our results demonstrate that both changes in life expectancy and life span equality are weighted totals of rates of progress in reducing mortality. This finding holds for three different measures of the variability of life spans. The weights evolve over time and indicate the ages at which reductions in mortality increase life expectancy and life span equality: the more progress at the youngest ages, the tighter the relationship. The link between life expectancy and life span equality is especially strong when life expectancy is less than 70 y. In recent decades, life expectancy and life span equality have occasionally moved in opposite directions due to larger improvements in mortality at older ages or a slowdown in declines in midlife mortality. Saving lives at ages below life expectancy is the key to increasing both life expectancy and life span equality.


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