scholarly journals Is Urban Sprawl Decoupled from the Quality of Economic Growth? Evidence from Chinese Cities

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinhai Lu ◽  
Danling Chen ◽  
Yue Wang
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
National Level ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Chinese Cities ◽  
Technological Efficiency ◽  
Spatial Differences

This paper investigates how urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth interact and further studies the spatial-temporal decoupling characteristics of both. To achieve this, a framework was developed to better explain both the different dimensional effects urban sprawl exerts on the quality of economic growth and their reverse feedback relation. A sample of 285 Chinese cities (2003 to 2016) were analyzed, employing both a decoupling model and spatial correlation analysis. The findings indicated that urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth are related via scale, structure, technological efficiency, and technological progress effects. In practice, with increasing quality of economic growth, the urban sprawl index decreases at the national level. At prefecture-city level, the types of decoupling between urban sprawl and the quality of economic growth showed clear periodical and unbalanced characteristics. Furthermore, decoupling showed a significant agglomeration effect in Chinese cities, which is mainly mediated by the types High-High and Low-Low. This study provides a significant contribution to the relevant acknowledge system by providing a comprehensive theoretical framework toward an understanding of how urban expansion interacts with the quality of economic growth. Furthermore, their decoupling types and spatial differences that are critical for the urban sustainable development have been identified, thus providing several important insights for both academics and urban policy makers.

scholarly journals What We Talk about When We Talk about Poverty: Culture and Welfare State Development in Britain, Denmark and France

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Cathie Martin ◽  
Tom Chevalier
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
National Level ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Welfare State Development ◽  
Political Agents ◽  
Cross National

Why did historical anti-poverty programs in Britain, Denmark and France differ so dramatically in their goals, beneficiaries and agents for addressing poverty? Different cultural views of poverty contributed to how policy makers envisioned anti-poverty reforms. Danish elites articulated social investments in peasants as necessary to economic growth, political stability and societal strength. British elites viewed the lower classes as a challenge to these goals. The French perceived the poor as an opportunity for Christian charity. Fiction writers are overlooked political agents who engage in policy struggles. Collectively, writers contribute to a country's distinctive ‘cultural constraint’, or symbols and narratives, which appears in the national-level aggregation of literature. To assess cross-national variations in cultural depictions of poverty, this article uses historical case studies and quantitative textual analyses of 562 British, 521 Danish and 498 French fictional works from 1770 to 1920.

Bureaucracy Meets the Environment: Elite Perceptions in Six Chinese Cities

2007 ◽  
Vol 189 ◽  
pp. 100-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanqi Tong
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Chinese Cities ◽  
Specific Policy ◽  
Development Level ◽  
Environmental Protection Policies ◽  
The Cost

A survey of local government officials and enterprise managers in six Chinese cities demonstrates relatively high environmental awareness. However, this awareness remains primarily an abstraction and does not always shape specific policy preferences. This article shows that the development-driven model works well overall, indicating the reluctance of policy makers to implement environmental protection policies at the cost of sacrificing the rate of economic growth. The pollution-driven model applies only to more developed areas, in which elites in more polluted cities are more concerned about environmental protection than those in less polluted cities. A non-linear model that takes into account the interaction between pollution and development works the best in explaining elites' policy preferences. It suggests that pollution becomes a significant factor affecting policy preferences only when a certain development level is reached.

scholarly journals Using Twitter to better understand online patient experience sentiments in the US (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kara Sewalk ◽  
Gaurav Tuli ◽  
Yulin Hswen ◽  
John S Brownstein ◽  
Jared B Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Patient Experience ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Survey Methods ◽  
National Level ◽  
Online Data ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Patient Views ◽  
The Us

BACKGROUND Traditional large-scale assessments of patient care in the US have difficulty in representing all aspects of health, beyond hospital care. There are documented differences in access to healthcare across the US. It is important to understand disparities in healthcare to better inform policy makers and healthcare administrations to improve quality of care provided. Previous research indicates online data is available from Twitter about patient experiences and opinions of their healthcare. Understanding patient views through sentiment analyses of Twitter data can be used to supplement traditional feedback surveys. OBJECTIVE We aim to provide a characterization of patient experience sentiments across the US on Twitter over a four year period. METHODS We developed a set of software components to auto-label and examine the patient experience Twitter dataset. The set includes: (I) a classifier to determine patient experience tweets, (II) a geolocation inference engine for social data, (III) a modified version of a sentiment classifier from the literature, and (IV) another engine to determine if the tweet is from a metro or non-metro area. RESULTS Of the 27.3 million tweets collected between February 2013 and February 2017 using a set of patient experience related keywords, the classifier was able to identify 2,779,555 tweets that were labeled as patient experience. After running the patient experience tweets through the geolocation classifier, we identified 876,384 tweets by approximate location to use for spatial analyses. At the national level, we observed 27.7% of positive, 36.3% neutral, 36% of negative Patient Experience tweets. Overall, the average sentiment polarity shifted towards less negative every year across all the regions in the country. The patient experience tweet rate also decreased across all the states over the four year study period. We also observed the sentiment of tweets to have a lower negative fraction during daytime hours, whereas the sentiment of tweets posted between 8pm and 10am tend to have a higher negative fraction. Additionally, tweet sentiment varied by region and by metro vs. non-metro analyses. CONCLUSIONS This study presents methodologies for a deeper understanding of online discussion related to patient experience across space and time, and demonstrates how Twitter can provide a unique and unsolicited perspective from users, which may not be captured from traditional survey methods for understanding patient views.

scholarly journals Walkable Urban Environments: An Ergonomic Approach of Evaluation

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (20) ◽  
pp. 8347
Author(s):  
Letizia Appolloni ◽  
Alberto Giretti ◽  
Maria Vittoria Corazza ◽  
Daniela D’Alessandro
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Urban Environments ◽  
Model Structure ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Definition Of

Background. The salutogenicity of urban environments is significantly affected by their ergonomics, i.e., by the quality of the interactions between citizens and the elements of the built environment. Measuring and modelling urban ergonomics is thus a key issue to provide urban policy makers with planning solutions to increase the well-being, usability and safety of the urban environment. However, this is a difficult task due to the complexity of the interrelations between the urban environment and human activities. The paper contributes to the definition of a generalized model of urban ergonomics and salutogenicity, focusing on walkability, by discussing the relevant parameters from the large and variegated sets proposed in the literature, by discussing the emerging model structure from a data mining process, by considering the background of the relevant functional dependency already established in the literature, and by providing evidence of the solutions’ effectiveness. The methodology is developed for a case study in central Italy, with a focus on the mobility issue, which is a catalyst to generate more salutogenic and sustainable behaviors.

Interpretations of sustainability beyond the middle class

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 246-263 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Beasy
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Life Stages ◽  
Cultural Backgrounds ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Practical Guidance ◽  
Critical Discourses ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractCritical discourses of sustainability challenge modern rhetoric of economic growth and challenge current modes of social development. Yet sustainability discourses are shaped predominantly by the perspectives and interests of middle-class, tertiary-educated urban policy makers or environmentalists, and have insufficiently engaged people beyond these cohorts, even in the advanced capitalist societies where they have originated. This article shares findings from a study that investigated how people who are not strongly engaged with sustainability discourses understand and engage with many of the underlying concerns that animate these discourses from the context of their situated, everyday experiences. This is important information for sustainability educators, because it challenges dominant ideas of what sustainability is and offers new and alternate ways of engaging different groups of people in actions for sustainability. Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and capital were used to inform the research design that employed focus groups and interviews with people from a range of socio-economic and cultural backgrounds and life stages in Tasmania, Australia. The findings provide insight into the ways in which people who are disengaged from discourses of sustainability may be actively engaged in practices of sustainability that may provide practical guidance for environmentalists and policy makers concerning how current discourses of sustainability reflect specific social contexts and experiences.

Geospatial Technology in Urban Sprawl Assessment

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-33
Author(s):  
Srutisudha Mohanty ◽  
Jagabandhu Panda ◽  
Sudhansu S. Rath
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Effective Measure ◽  
Geospatial Technology ◽  
Urban Models ◽  
Development Goals

The emergence of alienated patch in the periphery of the city or fragmentation of the main city are the results of irresponsible and poor planning. This global problem of sprawl is strengthening even more with the hasty pace of urbanization. Despite the existing policies and regulations, it is a huge failure to control the sprawl. Hence, city planners and policy makers need to be more efficient in designing the cities to achieve sustainable development goals. For that purpose, adequate and informative data of the urban morphology, growth pattern, sprawl characteristics are required. Geospatial technology is a cost-effective measure and best among currently available techniques for collecting real-time/near real-time geographical data of the entire globe. The geographic information system (GIS) provides numerous tools for assessment of multidimensionality of urban sprawl. This chapter discusses various urban models, different forms of urban expansion, and a few existing methods to quantify sprawl.

Urban Ecology of Shrinking Cities: An Unrecognized Opportunity?

2008 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Haase
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Ecology ◽  
Urban Sprawl ◽  
Demographic Change ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
Shrinking Cities ◽  
Urban Decline ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Land Use Development

Whereas environmental and social impacts of urban sprawl are widely discussed among scholars from both the natural and social sciences, the spatial consequences of urban decline are nearly neglected when discussing the impacts of land transition. Within the last decade, "shrinkage" and "perforation" have arisen as new terms to explain the land use development of urban regions faced with demographic change, particularly decreasing fertility, aging, and out-migration. Although shrinkage is far from being a "desired" scenario for urban policy makers, this paper argues that a perforation of the built-up structure in dense cities might bring up many positive implications.

scholarly journals The Post-Brexit Declaration on Social Quality in Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-167
Author(s):  
Alan Walker ◽  
Steve Corbett
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Economic And Monetary Union ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Social Quality ◽  
European Model ◽  
The Social ◽  
Unique Nature

Twenty years ago, at a public ceremony in Amsterdam, a group of European academics made a solemn declaration on the future of the European Union (EU). Eventually over 1000 scholars and policy makers signed the Amsterdam Declaration on the Social Quality of Europe and it was translated into sixteen languages. The main intention behind the declaration was to remind policy makers and citizens about the unique nature of the western European model of development, comprising aspirations for economic growth, competitiveness and social justice. The risk being warned against was that, in the process of Economic and Monetary Union, the politics of integration would neglect what was then labelled the ‘social dimension’ and, among other far-reaching consequences, this would lead to a loss of legitimacy for the whole European project. As the Comité des Sages put it, bluntly, in 1996, ‘Europe will be a Europe for everyone, for all its citizens, or it will be nothing’.

scholarly journals Defining and Measuring the Relevance of Criteria for the Evaluation of the Inflow of Goods in City Centers

Logistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Mladen Jardas ◽  
Ana Perić Hadžić ◽  
Edvard Tijan
Keyword(s):  
Traffic Congestion ◽  
Urban Policy ◽  
City Center ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
The Sustainable Development ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
Questionnaire Method ◽  
The City

The aim of this paper is to define and measure the relevance of the criteria for the evaluation of the inflow of goods in city centers, in order to improve delivery activities within city centers. The development of the city center leads to the grouping of numerous business operators, which results in the increase of the quantity of goods entering the city center, causing additional traffic congestion, higher levels of noise and emissions of harmful gases. In the long term, this leads to major dissatisfaction with the quality of life among city residents. Therefore, the planning of goods delivery must be in line with the sustainable development of city logistics, while at the same time considering the interests of relevant stakeholders. However, in the existing literature the criteria for evaluating delivery flows have not been comprehensively identified or evaluated by the stakeholders of city centers. In order to fill the research gap, the authors have defined four groups of criteria: technical-technological, economic-financial, organizational and social criteria. To determine the relevance of these criteria, it was necessary to use the questionnaire method to collect data from the stakeholder groups defined by the literature review. Regarding the relevant stakeholders (carriers, delivery recipients, residents and urban policy makers), the results have pointed out that the technical-technological and organizational criteria groups are considered the most relevant by the stakeholders regarding the inflow of goods in city centers.

scholarly journals Implementing Disaster Policy: Exploring Scale and Measurement Schemes for Disaster Resilience

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Cutter ◽  
Sahar Derakhshan
Keyword(s):  
National Level ◽  
Community Resilience ◽  
Disaster Resilience ◽  
Geographic Scale ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Disaster Policy ◽  
Data Resolution ◽  
Measurement Tools ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
Resilience Indicators

Abstract Resilience measurement continues to be a meeting ground between policy makers and academics. However, there are inherent limitations in measuring disaster resilience. For example, resilience indicators produced by FEMA and one produced by an independent academic group (BRIC) measure community resilience by defining and quantifying community resilience at a national level, but they each have a different conceptual model of the resilience concept. The FEMA approach focuses on measuring resilience capacity based on preparedness capabilities embodied in the National Preparedness Goals at state and county scales. BRIC examines community (spatially defined as county) components (or capitals) that influence resilience and provides a baseline of pre-existing resilience in places to enable periodic updates to measure resilience improvements. Using these two approaches as examples, this paper examines the differences and similarities in these two approaches in terms of the conceptual framing, data resolution, and representation and the resultant statistical and spatial differences in outcomes. Users of resilience measurement tools need to be keenly aware of the conceptual framing, input data, and geographic scale of any schema before implementation as these parameters can and do make a difference in the outcome even when they claim to be measuring the same concept.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document