Work and Demand Making: Productionist and Consumptionist Politics in Latin America

How does the world of work in Latin America affect the way workers act to defend their interests? To what extent have “productionist” demands, those concerning jobs, work conditions, and wages, which are highly salient across the region, been “displaced” by consumptionist or political demands? While the literature has distinguished formal and informal work grosso modo, we explore individual traits of work, which cross-cut the formal-informal distinction. Analyzing survey data from four Latin American capital cities, we find, not surprisingly, that both work-based atomization and insecurity depress demand making in the work arena. But these traits of work also affect demand making on the state, albeit in somewhat different ways. Insecurity is associated with a shift from productionist to consumptionist and political demands, while atomization is associated with a more generalized demobilization across issues. These findings have implications for the representation of worker interests in light of current labor market restructuring and raise the question if labor can reclaim an important voice in that restructuring process.

The “New Transamazonian Highway”: BR-319 and Its Current Environmental Degradation

The Brazilian government intends to complete the paving of the BR-319 highway, which connects Porto Velho in the deforestation arc region with Manaus in the middle of the Amazon Forest. This paving is being planned despite environmental legislation, and there is concern that its effectiveness will cause additional deforestation, threatening large portions of forest, conservation units (CUs), and indigenous lands (ILs) in the surrounding areas. In this study, we evaluated environmental degradation along the BR-319 highway from 2008 to 2020 and verified whether highway maintenance has contributed to deforestation. For this purpose, we created a 20 km buffer adjacent to the BR-319 highway and evaluated variables extracted from remote sensing information between 2008 and 2020. Fire foci, burned areas, and rainfall data were used to calculate a drought index using statistical tests for a time series. Furthermore, these were related to data on deforestation, CUs, and ILs using principal component analysis and Pearson’s correlation. Our results showed that 743 km2 of forest was deforested during the period evaluated, most of which occurred in the last four years. A total of 16,472 fire foci were identified. Both deforestation and fire foci occurred mainly outside the CUs and ILs. The most affected areas were close to capital cities, and after resuming road maintenance in 2015, deforestation increased outside the capital cities. Current government policy for Amazon occupation promotes deforestation and will compromise Brazil’s climate goals of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and deforestation.

Urban Open Platform for Borderless Smart Cities

As a network of connected sensors to transform data into knowledge, Urban Platforms have been rooted in several smart city projects. However, this has often resulted in them being no more than IoT dashboards. More recently, there has been an increased interest in supporting the data governance and distributed architecture of Urban Platforms in order to adjust these with the administrative structure in a specific city. In addition, Urban Platforms also deal with data roaming between different stakeholders including other cities, different government levels, companies and citizens. Nevertheless, the first deployments have led to an inflexible “smart cities in a box” approach that does not help with building digital skills and causes vendor lock-in to products that do not scale. There is a need to start with simple and widespread urban services through a collaborative joint cross-border, hands-on effort. In order to meet the level of interoperability, international standards should be adopted. The aim of an Urban Open Platform (UOP), introduced in this paper, is to support not only data acquisition but also various types of data processing: data is aggregated, processed, manipulated and extended within the city context. Conceptually, special attention has been put on scalability, roaming and reliability in urban environments. This article introduces the UOP uniquely in the cross-border data exchange context of two European capital cities, Helsinki and Tallinn, and validates it with 10 real-life urban use cases.

States of Emergency

More than one hundred years after the conclusion of the First World War, the edited collection States of Emergency. Architecture, Urbanism, and the First World War reassesses what that cataclysmic global conflict meant for architecture and urbanism from a human, social, economic, and cultural perspective. Chapters probe how underdevelopment and economic collapse manifested spatially, how military technologies were repurposed by civilians, and how cultures of education, care, and memory emerged from battle. The collection places an emphasis on the various states of emergency as experienced by combatants and civilians across five continents—from refugee camps to military installations, villages to capital cities—thus uncovering the role architecture played in mitigating and exacerbating the everyday tragedy of war.

The Making Of Capital City Tourism In South Africa

Capital city tourism is a significant theme for urban tourism scholarship. Existing international research on capital city tourism mainly concentrates on the global North. For the global South as a whole limited research examines capital cities as tourism destinations and for sub-Saharan Africa scholarship is minimal. This study contributes to the small body of writings that interrogate capital city tourism in the global South. Further, it marks a departure from the mainstream research focus on contemporary issues of capital city tourism by adopting an historical perspective on capital city tourism. Using a range of archival and documentary sources the analysis highlights the making of South Africa’s capital city as a tourism destination. Under scrutiny is the historical evolution and changing character of tourism in Pretoria over a period of a half century from 1920 to 1975. It is shown that the distinctiveness of Pretoria’s early tourism products were a reflection of its capital status. Definition of the tourism product base and its promotion were facilitated by the activities undertaken by national government promotion and the local Pretoria Publicity Association. An historical challenge for tourism development was the poor quality of local hotels, which were at a standard below international norms until at least the late 1960s. The difficulties of the accommodation services sector were compounded by the enactment of apartheid legislation from 1948 onwards, which required the existence of hotels as racialized and segregated spaces.

‘The province…But, indeed, that is Russia!’

“The Imagined Province” investigates the shifts in what the “idea of the province” in the period of world war and the Russian revolution and civil war. I argue that the mental and emotional valence of Russia’s map changed markedly over these nine years as regionalist and provincial pride came into literary culture, urging a fresh view of central Russia outside the capital cities. This change of perspective emerges in essays, stories, and poetry throughout Central Russia, though this article focuses mainly on the Volga Region. Authors of many different political stripes contributed to this shift—among them, regionalists like Evgenii Chirikov and Nikolai Kliuev, pro-revolutionary socialists such as Maksim Gor’kii and Matvei Dudorov, and Bolsheviks like Aleksei Dorogoichenko and Fedor Bogorodskii. As the Bolsheviks regathered Russia, these provincial voices were overpowered by more prominent voices from the center. Nonetheless, they established a “usable history” that remains a substrate of Russian culture even today, challenging the simplistic binary juxtaposing “capital” and “province.”

Transformation and Sustainable Development of Shopping Centers: Case of Czech and Slovak Cities

The aim of the paper is to critically evaluate the similarities and differences in the development of the temporal and spatial structure of shopping centers in the Czech and Slovak republics. We focused on the retail transformation and sustainable manifestations of the location and construction of shopping centers. We classified shopping centers according to their genesis, location in the city, and size of the gross leasable area. To analyze migration trends and geographic distribution characteristics of shopping centers in the capital cities of both countries (local level of analysis), we used spatial gravity and standard deviational ellipse. Generally, there is an analogous trend in the development of shopping centers in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, with a particular two- to four-year lag in Slovakia (west–east gradient). Despite this, we still perceive the demand for shopping centers in both countries as above average, and it is not declining. The construction of shopping centers, mainly in small towns, also indicates this trend. In Prague and Bratislava, the pattern of spatial expansion of shopping centers differs. Prague probably represents a more advanced phase of shopping center agglomeration. However, neither country has reached the state of clustering.

The role of geographical factor in the formation and development of human potential

This article summarizes the results of the study on development and analysis of the typology of Russian regions according to criteria for the quality of human potential. Prior to this, ten clusters of this typology were studied separately, exceptions from the typical entry into clusters with neighboring regions were considered. Although among the qualitative characteristics of human potential there was not a single one, reflecting the territorial location of the regions, but in the typology they were distributed precisely on the basis of geography. Unobserved factors, whose effects on human potential are mediated by study-driven indicators, played a crucial role in clustering regions. Such a result naturally brought us to the works of L.N. Gumilev, which were studied in terms of the role played by geography of territories, landscapes and climate in the formation of human potential. In many ways, geographical conditions also determine the nature of economic activities, which form the abilities and skills of the population that characterize human potential. It was concluded that the typology of regions obtained on the characteristics of human potential corresponds to the composition of federal districts, with the exception of four small clusters, three of which — with a pronounced raw material specialization and one — with the financial advantages of two capital cities. Accordingly, this implies the expediency of using the administrations of federal districts to solve the problem of improving the quality of human potential. The protracted process of giving administrative status to federal districts can be completed by setting them the important social task of developing and implementing a strategy for improving the qualitative characteristic of population.