Pandemic preparedness and response in service hub cities: lessons from Northwestern Ontario

Purpose Responding to the needs of homeless and marginally housed persons has been a major component of the Canadian federal and provincial responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, smaller, less-resourced cities and rural regions have been left competing for limited resources (Schiff et al., 2020). The purpose of this paper is to use a case study to examine and highlight information about the capacities and needs of service hub cities during pandemics. Design/methodology/approach The authors draw on the experience of Thunder Bay – a small city in Northern Ontario, Canada which experienced a serious outbreak of COVID-19 amongst homeless persons and shelter staff in the community. The authors catalogued the series of events leading to this outbreak through information tracked by two of the authors who hold key funding and planning positions within the Thunder Bay homeless sector. Findings Several lessons may be useful for other cities nationally and internationally of similar size, geography and socio-economic position. The authors suggest a need for increased supports to the homeless sector in small service–hub cities (and particularly those with large Indigenous populations) to aid in the creation of pandemic plans and more broadly to ending chronic homelessness in those regions. Originality/value Small hub cities such as Thunder Bay serve vast rural areas and may have high rates of homelessness. This case study points to some important factors for consideration related to pandemic planning in these contexts.

Evaluating Changes in Spatial Accessibility to Airports in Turkey between 2000 and 2018

The present study aims to investigate the changes that occurred between 2000 and 2018 with regard to spatial accessibility to airports for each district in Turkey. Within this scope, first, the service coverage area of each airport within 1 to 2 h travel time by car for 2000, 2009, and 2018 using the available road networks for the given years is evaluated and each district that can reach at least one airport within 1 to 2 h by car determined. Secondly, the catchment areas of each airport are defined based on geographical distribution and the catchment populations of airports found. Thirdly, the regionalization coefficient for each airport in the given years is calculated to understand the availability of each airport by comparing the catchment area population with the number of domestic passengers. Finally, a gravity-based formula is employed to measure the spatial accessibility value of each district to the airports within the catchment area of 2 h travel time in the given years. The main findings from the study provide clues about the direction of future policies. The last airports to open have reduced the maximum distance covered, especially in eastern Turkey; consequently, airports’ catchment populations have shrunk. However, the regionalization coefficients of airports located in regional centers and hub cities have increased in consequence of the increase in the number of air passengers over the given period. In summary, travel time to main hubs and airports’ total catchment populations have had combined effects on the number of air passengers and spatial accessibility values of districts in Turkey.

Network Structure of Intercity Trips by Chinese Residents under Different Travel Modes: A Case Study of the Spring Festival Travel Rush

With the advent of big data, the use of network data to characterize travel has gradually become a trend. Tencent Migration big data can fully, dynamically, immediately, and visually record the trajectories of population migrations with location-based service technology. Here, the daily population flow data of 346 cities during the Spring Festival travel rush in China were combined with different travel modes to measure the spatial structure and spatial patterns of an intercity trip network of Chinese residents. These data were then used for a comprehensive depiction of the complex relationships between the population flows of cities. The results showed that there were obvious differences in the characteristics of urban networks from the perspective of different modes of travel. The intercity flow of aviation trips showed a core-periphery structure with national hub cities as the core distribution. Trips by train showed a core-periphery structure with cities along the national railway artery as the core. This gradually decreased toward hinterland cities. Moreover, the intercity flow of highway trips indicated a spatial pattern of strong local aggregation that matched the population scale.

STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN JAPAN’S URBAN SYSTEM FROM 1990 TO 2010

An urban system is a group of cities acting in close cooperation with one other. An examination of the factors of change in an urban system at the national scale remains to be done, given data limitations and research issues (e.g., scale, boundary). This study aims to clarify the spatiotemporal pattern of Japan’s urban system (JUS) and then to elucidate the characteristics of change and the related factors, based on an inter-regional travel survey conducted in Japan from 1990 to 2010, as well as numerous official censuses. The results demonstrate the entire system’s compactness, the dominance of the metropolises and the local system’s bipolarization under the hierarchical structure of JUS, with the establishment of hub cities and the development of infrastructure during the two decades from 1990 to 2010. Finally, this study explains the factors of change with consideration of socio-economic characteristics and inter-regional interaction.

A Synopsis of Incubators in Non-hub Cities in the Southeast United States

Business incubators are organisations that support the growth of small companies, including start-ups, by providing various resources and services. The aims of this article were to assess the characteristics of business incubators in non-hub cities located in Georgia and South Carolina and to describe the major differences between incubators located in non-hub and hub cities. We surveyed 5 non-hub incubators and visited and analysed qualitatively 10 incubators, 5 in hub cities and 5 in non-hub cities. Results showed that incubators in non-hub cities have less focus and less access to funding capital compared with incubators in hub cities. The implementation of a mesh network among incubators in non-hub cities may help sharing resources, know-how, talents and investments with the goal of being able to compete with incubators in hub cities. While currently incubators in non-hub cities cannot offer the same services to their members, they can still play an important role in giving the people in their communities an opportunity to start a new business, find jobs and increase their income. Business incubators in non-hub cities can ultimately positively impact the overall quality of life of the population they serve. Finally, we proposed that a focus on public health innovation may help incubators in non-hub cities to be successful.

A Novel Effective Indicator of Weighted Inter-City Human Mobility Networks to Estimate Economic Development

Estimation of economic development in advance is benefit to test the validity of economic policy or to take timely remedial measures for economic recession. Due to the inevitable connections between human mobility and economic status, estimation of economic trend in advance from easily observable big data in human mobility has the superiority of authenticity, timeliness, and convenience. However, high-precision quantitative relations between human mobility and economic growth remain an outstanding question. To this issue, we firstly analyzed and compared the general patterns of human mobility and economic development; then, a novel, simple, and effective hybrid human mobility indicator ( H H M I i ) of weighted human mobility networks was proposed to quantitatively estimate economic growth. H H M I i contained two parts, that is, the interaction volumes of a given city with all participation cities and only top hub cities, respectively. This implied that the economic growth of a city is affected by not only its own strength, but also the cooperation with hub cities. Several empirical experiments demonstrated that the proposed H H M I i had an exceedingly high estimation ability of economic growth, especially for the tertiary industry. Compared with other complex network indicators, H H M I i had a distinct advantage and its best accuracy reached 0.9543. These results can provide policy-making supports for inter-city sustainable coordinated development.

Communism or Neo-Feudalism?

In her article, Jodi Dean formulates the hypothesis that we are witnesses to a regressive transformation of the capitalistic historical formation into something new, which can be tentatively called neo-feudalism. Capitalism is no longer valorizing itself, that is, reproducing its social conditions and fostering certain new conditions; it is becoming less oriented toward the organization of labor and more inclined to coercion and direct domination. A reflexivization of capitalism is taking place in its attitudes toward supremacy, and the latter is becoming more explicit. Dean indicates the four main tendencies of neo-feudalization: parcellation (fragmentation but reinforcement) of sovereignty; a new quasi-class hierarchy (an exponential increase in inequality); geographic polarization between megalopolises and the provinces or hinterlands (not only along the postcolonial North-South axis, but between hub cities and small cities within the developed countries); and increasing insecurity and apocalyptic fantasies (from which citizens shield themselves with drugs). This quartet of tendencies strikingly resembles the central features of the European Middle Ages, but this time they are taking quite different social and technological forms. Communicative capitalism makes citizens entirely dependent on the platforms where they are not merely free workers but also passive providers of data. If Dean’s hypothesis is correct, then such palliative means of struggle against inequality as democracy and free elections will not work any longer. The author for-mulates the alternative between communism and feudalism and claims that, in a neo-feudal situation, the struggle for communism would by familiar stages become easier as oppression and the prerequisites for communism become more evident.