Difference in Housing Finance Usage and Its Impact on Housing Wealth Inequality in Urban China

With the increasing importance of financial loans in home purchases in urban China, the role of housing loans in the accumulation of housing wealth needs to be unraveled. Using the data from the 2017 China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), this study investigates the use of housing loans and their impact on housing wealth inequality. It has been found that people with higher socioeconomic status and institutional advantages benefit more from housing provident fund loans and are more likely to fully invoke different financing channels to accumulate housing wealth. On the contrary, disadvantaged groups have to resort to costly market-based mortgages to finance their home purchases. This leads them to fall further behind in housing wealth accumulation. The spatial stratification of housing wealth accompanying the urban hierarchy was also observed and found to be closely linked to the type of housing loans. In this increasingly financialized era, relying on financial instruments in the process of household asset accumulation may further amplify the existing wealth inequality among social groups.

rassta: Raster-based Spatial Stratification Algorithms

Spatial stratification of landscapes allows for the development of efficient sampling surveys,the inclusion of domain knowledge in data-driven modeling frameworks, and the production of information relating the spatial variability of response phenomena to that of landscape processes. This work presents the rassta package as a collection of algorithms dedicated to the spatial stratification of landscapes, the calculation of landscape correspondence metrics across geographic space, and the application of these metrics for spatial sampling and modeling of environmental phenomena. The theoretical background of rassta is presented through references to several studies which have benefited from landscape stratification routines. The functionality of rassta is presented through code examples which are complemented with the geographic visualization of their outputs.

Biofilms can act as plasmid reserves in the absence of plasmid specific selection

Plasmids facilitate rapid bacterial adaptation by shuttling a wide variety of beneficial traits across microbial communities. However, under non-selective conditions, maintaining a plasmid can be costly to the host cell. Nonetheless, plasmids are ubiquitous in nature where bacteria adopt their dominant mode of life - biofilms. Here, we demonstrate that biofilms can act as spatiotemporal reserves for plasmids, allowing them to persist even under non-selective conditions. However, under these conditions, spatial stratification of plasmid-carrying cells may promote the dispersal of cells without plasmids, and biofilms may thus act as plasmid sinks.

Sampling and its effect on the composition of archaeobotanical assemblages from the Roman Period

The subject of the presented study is taken from a dissertation project by one of the authors who focused on the processing of archaeobotanical assemblages from the Roman Period. The main aim of the research was the reconstruction of selected aspects of the subsistence strategy of the population in the given period based on the evaluation of archaeobotanical data from various chronological and cultural contexts in a designated region, available to author. The analysed sets were obtained during field excavations primarily conducted in the last third of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. Uniform methods of archaeobotanical sampling were not applied in the acquisition of these assemblages. Source information on the origin of the samples was considerably heterogeneous and, in many cases, distinctly fragmentary. This was the impulse behind the investigation into the question as to whether, and to what extent, the method of sampling affects the interpretive value of the investigated dataset and what are the limitations of the analysis of such a dataset. The principal aim of this study is not the archaeobotanical evaluation of samples, but rather to investigate a possible effect of their formal properties on the composition of archaeobotanical finds. The formal properties studied include the volume and the number of collected samples, and the spatial stratification of samples (context/feature). Intuitively, it would appear that the heterogeneous quality of this information may have a certain impact on the interpretive value of an archaeobotanical assemblage. We discuss the effect of the chosen method of sampling on the composition of macro-remains in archaeobotanical samples and assemblages with the use of statistical models.

Citizenship acquisition and spatial stratification: Analysing immigrant residential mobility in the Netherlands

Whereas the so-called ‘citizenship premium’ in the labour market has been widely studied, we know little about how naturalisation affects immigrants’ lives beyond work and income. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper analyses the relationship between citizenship acquisition and immigrant residential mobility, in particular the propensity of immigrants to move away from areas with high concentrations of migrants. We draw on register data from Statistics Netherlands ( N = 234,912). We argue that possessing Dutch citizenship reduces spatial stratification by diminishing the risk of housing market discrimination, thereby facilitating mobility outside of migrant-concentrated areas. Our findings show that naturalised immigrants are 50% more likely to move out of concentrated neighbourhoods, all else constant. The effect of naturalisation is especially relevant for renting without housing benefits and for home ownership, and for mid-risk immigrants who earn around the median income and hold permanent jobs, whose applications face strong scrutiny from landlords, rental agencies and mortgage lenders.

Planning beyond Mass Incarceration

The policing and penal systems play an oversized role in shaping the built environment and budgets of cities, alongside the lives of urban residents. Law enforcement systems are also deeply inequitable with poor residents, and communities of color disproportionately harmed by the violences of the system. Planning’s contribution to the creation of durable spatial stratification in the built environment implicates planning in the class and race disparities in law enforcement systems. Planning research and theory has also supported this inequity by largely neglecting the relationships between policing and penal systems and planning. The articles in this volume address this neglect and employ a wide variety of core theories, methods, and methodologies from planning to engage with the relationships between planning and law enforcement. The articles are connected through attention to racial justice including analyzing moments where planning supported and produced injustice, and identifying opportunities to support greater equity, decarceration and even abolition where planning practice, education and research support the creation of systems of safety and care beyond mass incarceration.