Books on the topic 'Socio-spatial relation'

The monograph analyzes the policy in relation to cities and regions with monospecialization as one of the priority directions of state policy. The article considers the specifics of single-industry cities and regions as socio-political phenomena and objects of state regulation. The main principles, directions, mechanisms and tools for the implementation of state policy in relation to single-profile spatial formations are studied. Special attention is paid to the political and comparative analysis of foreign and domestic experience in the formation and implementation of this direction of state policy, as well as to identifying the degree of applicability of its main models in modern conditions. For specialists in the field of political science and related sciences, as well as anyone interested in this issue in its theoretical and applied dimensions.

Post-Growth Geographies examines the spatial relations of diverse and alternative economies between growth-oriented institutions and multiple socio-ecological crises. The book brings together conceptual and empirical contributions from geography and its neighbouring disciplines and offers different perspectives on the possibilities, demands and critiques of post-growth transformation. Through case studies and interviews, the contributions combine voices from activism, civil society, planning and politics with current theoretical debates on socio-ecological transformation.

Sustainability and resilience have become indispensable parts of the contemporary debate over the built environment. Although recognised as imperatives, the complexity and the variety of interpretations of sustainability and resilience have raised the necessity to again rethink their notion in the context of the built environment and to reframe the state-of-the-art body of knowledge. The book Sustainability and Resilience: Socio-Spatial Perspective so begins with the exploration of the broadest conceptual frame-of-reference of issues related to sustainability, and the re-establishment of the connection between the built environment and the conditions that are vital to its functioning, primarily in relation to energy, land use, climate, and economy. Subsequent discussion on resilience as a term, approach, and philosophy aims to conceptualise an interpretation of key resilience concepts, explain relationships and links among them, and propose the classification of resilience as applicable to the context of urban studies. By studying the processes of transition of the built environment, the book then reveals a coherent formula of ‘thinking sustainability + resilience’ aimed at improving the ability to respond to disruptions and hazards while enhancing human and environmental welfare. The necessity to integrate the two approaches is further accented as a result of a deliberative discourse on the notions of ‘social sustainability’, ‘sustainable community’, and ‘socio-cultural resilience’. The potential of measuring sustainable development and urban sustainability on the basis of defined social, human, and, additionally, natural and economic values is presented though an overview of different wellknown indicators and the identification of a currently relevant tangible framework of sustainable development. Correspondingly, the role of policies and governance is demonstrated on the case of climate-proof cities. In this way, the consideration of approaches to sustainability and resilience of the urban environment is rounded, and the focus of the book is shifted towards an urban/rural dichotomy and the sustainability prospects of identified forms-in-between, and, subsequently, towards the exploration of values, challenges, and the socio-cultural role in achieving sustainability for rural areas. In the final chapters, the book offers several peculiarised socio-spatial perspectives, from defining the path towards more resilient communities and sustainable spaces based on a shared wellbeing, to proposing the approach to define community resilience as an intentional action that aims to respond to, and influence, the course of social and economic change, to deliberating the notion of a ’healthy place’ and questioning its optimal scale in the built environment. The study of sustainability and resilience in this book is concluded by drawing a parallel between environmental, economic, and social determinants of the built environment and the determinants that are relevant to human health and well-being.

For most geographers, thinking geographically about the economy means something very different than for mainstream/geographical economists: what is heterodox for the latter constitutes geographers’ orthodoxy. Nineteen propositions about geographical political economy demonstrate how thinking geographically disrupts core propositions about capitalism in mainstream economic theory. The spatiotemporality and relational nature of inter-sectoral commodity production, shaped by the socio-spatial dialectic, implies that commodity production generally is far from equilibrium, (re)produces uneven geographical development, and cannot be divorced from political processes. With respect to exchange, markets are socio-spatial constructs, profit rates are positive, free trade is inequalizing, and financialization matters. With respect to distribution, globalizing capitalism (re)produces socio-spatial inequality, an outcome modulated by the necessity of llabour politics and state intervention. Trajectories of globalizing capitalism co-evolve also with cultural and biophysical processes: its constitutional failure to deliver on the promise of equal opportunity for all makes it necessary to countenance more-than-capitalist alternatives.

The research problem undertaken in the study is the occurrence of dispersed and concentrated built-up (in particular residential) area patterns caused by suburbanisation processes in a large urban agglomeration, on the example of the Warsaw metropolitan area. The research concerned the period after 1989, when the political and economic transformation in Poland began. The historical and contemporary socio-economic conditions of suburbanization and urban sprawl are described, which have the features of a spontaneous, chaotic dispersion, quite different than in Western countries. It is partly to blame for faulty spatial planning. The succession of urban development into rural areas is subordinated to the factors of the construction market. In the empirical part of the analysis, topographic data on all buildings in the urban agglomeration and databases on land use derived from satellite images were used to investigate settlement changes. A multidimensional study was carried out relating to various spatial scales, types of spatial relations and territorial units. Measures of spatial concentration of point patterns as well as landscape metrics were used for this purpose. The indicators used were subject to critical methodological evaluation afterwards. The study was performed in several temporal cross-sections. The locations of new development in agricultural, forest and wasteland areas have been identified. Finally, recommendations for the implementation of appropriate spatial policy and improvement of the spatial order in the Warsaw agglomeration were formulated

Why do conflict-generated diasporas mobilize in contentious and non-contentious ways or use mixed strategies of contention? Why do they channel their homeland-oriented goals through host-states, transnational networks, and international organizations? This book develops a theory of socio-spatial positionality and its implications for the individual agency of diaspora entrepreneurs, moving beyond essentialized notions of diasporas as groups. Individual diaspora entrepreneurs operate in transnational social fields affecting their mobilizations beyond dynamics confined to host-states and original home-states. There are four types of diaspora entrepreneurs—Broker, Local, Distant, and Reserved—depending on the relative strength of their socio-spatial linkages to host-land, on the one hand, and original homeland and other global locations, on the other. A two-level typological theory captures nine causal pathways, unravelling how the socio-spatial linkages of these diaspora entrepreneurs interact with external factors: host-land foreign policies, homeland governments, parties, non-state actors, and critical events or limited global influences. Such pathways produce mobilization trajectories with varying levels of contention and methods of channelling homeland-oriented goals. Non-contentious pathways often occur when host-state foreign policies are convergent with the diaspora entrepreneurs’ goals, and when diaspora entrepreneurs can act autonomously. Dual-pronged contention pathways occur quite often, under the influence of homeland governments, non-state actors, and political parties. The most contentious pathway occurs in response to violent critical events in the homeland or adjacent to it fragile states. This book is informed by 300 interviews and a dataset of 146 interviews with diaspora entrepreneurs among the Albanian, Armenian, and Palestinian diasporas in the UK, Germany, France, Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland, as well as Kosovo and Armenia in the European neighbourhood.

This book provides a theoretically informed, empirically rich account of the development, causes and consequences of public housing (council/local authority/social) estate regeneration within the context of London’s housing crisis and widening social inequality. It focuses on regeneration schemes involving comprehensive redevelopment – the demolition of council estates and their rebuilding as mixed-tenure neighbourhoods with large numbers of market properties which fuels socio-spatial inequalities via state-led gentrification. The book deploys an interdisciplinary perspective drawn from sociology, geography, urban policy and housing studies. By foregrounding estate residents’ lived experiences – mainly working-class tenants but also working- and middle-class homeowners – it highlights their multiple discontents with the seemingly never-ending regeneration process. As such, the book critiques the imbalances and silences within the official policy discourse in which there are only regeneration winners while the losers are airbrushed out of history. The book contains many illustrations and is based on over a decade of research undertaken at several London council-built estates. The book is divided into three parts. Part One (Chapters 2-4) examines housing policy and urban policy in relation to the expansion and contraction of public housing in London, and the development of estate regeneration. Part Two (Chapters 5-7) analyses residents’ experiences of living at London estates before regeneration begins. It argues that residents positively valued their homes and neighbourhoods, even though such valuation was neither unqualified nor universal. Part Three (Chapters 8-12) examines residents’ experiences of living through regeneration, and argues that comprehensive redevelopment results in degeneration, displacement, and fragmented rather than mixed communities.

The twin categories of the state and nature collectively embody some of the most fundamental reference points around which our lives and thinking are organized. Despite their combined significance, however, the complex relationships that exist between modern states and nature remain under-theorized and are relatively unexplored. Through a detailed study of different sites, moments, and framing strategies The Nature of the State challenges the ways in which geographers and social scientists approach the study of state-nature relations. The authors analyse different instances of state-nature interaction from all over the world, considering the geo-politics of resource conflicts, the operation of natural history museums, the organizational practices of environmental departments and ministries, the regulation of genetic science, and contemporary forms of state intervention within issues of climate change. Introducing original research into the different institutional, spatial, and temporal strategies used by states to frame the natural world this book provides a critical overview of the latest political and ecological theories and addresses a wide range of pressing socio-environmental debates.

The turn of the 20th and 21st centuries has been a very dynamic period of change in Poland and around the world; also a period of change in thinking about the economy and agriculture. The present work is a study of the decline, divestments and development of agriculture in the areas of fragmented farming structure. The reflections presented herein, upon the processes of the remodelling of agrarian structures, of divestments in farming, and disagrarisation, are mostly anchored in the achievements of the theory of spatial economy (land management), and the microeconomic theories of choice, including the theory of an agricultural holding (farm) and land rent theories. The work focuses on the economic issues of remodelling the agrarian structure, but due to the nature of the issues discussed herein, specifically in relation to family-owned farms, the social and environmental aspects also needed to be taken into account – in response to the need for a heterogeneous approach, which is increasingly stressed in economic sciences today. The main objective of the research was to diagnose and assess the scale and scope of the mechanisms and processes that inform the decline and growth of agricultural holdings in the areas with fragmented farming structure. The study covered the area comprising four regions (provinces) of south-eastern Poland, which – according to the FADN nomenclature – form the macro region of Małopolska and Pogórze. The study of subject literature has been enriched with an analysis of available statistics; data from the Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN); information obtained from the Department of Programming and Reporting at the Agency for Restructuring and Modernisation of Agriculture; and author’s own research conducted among farm owners. The information thus obtained made it possible to: • Determine the theoretical premises for the spatial diversity of agriculture, and the role of small farms in the shaping of agrarian structure. • Adapt the concept of “divestment” for the description and analysis of the phenomena occurring in agriculture. • Indicate the role and importance of the processes of divestment and disagrarisation in the restructuring of agriculture. • Assess the natural, social and economic determinants of the process of restructuring agriculture in areas with fragmented farming structure. • Assess selected aspects of economic efficiency of agriculture in areas with fragmented farming structure, with the focus on small and micro farms. • Carry out an ex ante evaluation of the impact of agricultural policy instruments on the process of restructuring of agriculture in the macro region of Małopolska and Pogórze. • Identify the indicators of decline and fall, and barriers to the liquidation of farms. • Assess the relationship between the level of socio-economic development, the structure of farming, and the quality of agricultural production space in a given territorial unit, versus the intensity of the economic and production disagrarisation processes in agricultural holdings. • Propose targeted solutions conducive to the improvement of the farming structure in areas with a high framentation of agriculture. Observation of the processes occurring in agriculture, and the scientific theories created on the basis thereof, have shown that even the smallest farms have a chance to continue in existence, provided that we are able to positively verify their adaptation to the changing conditions in the environment. Carrying out farming activity is a prerequisite for implementing the economic, social and environmental functions associated with family farms. At the same time, based on the analyses performed, we need to assume that the advanced processes of the production and economic disagrarisation of agricultural holdings are to a greater extent determined by the anatomical features of agriculture, and by the natural conditions, than by the level of socio-economic development of the given territorial unit. In the current economic climate, the remodelling of the agrarian structure is only possible with the active participation of the institutions responsible for the creation of economic growth and agricultural policy development. It is extremely important from the point of view of environmental protection, and the viability of rural areas, to support small farms engaged in agricultural activities, and to introduce such instruments that will enable the replacement of an economic collapse with divestments, carried out in a planned manner, and allowing for thus released agricultural resources to find alternative application in units with a higher development potential. The area of theoretical research requiring further exploration includes the issues such as transactional costs of the liquidation of agricultural holdings, and the assessment of the economic effectiveness of conducting divestments.

The novel as a great socio-literary institution, which projects the ideals of bourgeois class, becomes the maximum expression of modernity from the 18th century on. The genre, characterized by its malleability and ambivalence, reflects an individualistic and innovative orientation. In this sense, the novels of characters originate subtypes, as the Bildungsroman, whose paradigmatic model would be Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795), by the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Since the novel is a genre in constant becoming, the concept of Bildungsroman undergoes problematizations and revisions and, today, it is possible to consider a novel of formation which includes ethnic, racial and sexual minorities. Some important steps in male Bildungsroman, such as fulfillment in love from several experiences and the discovery of a professional vocation and a philosophy of life, are still problematic in female novels of formation along the 20th century, due to the small space dedicated to woman in society, making her formative experiences more subjective, and culminating, in most cases, in the failed end of characters who cannot escape the webs of social oppresion. In this book I try to show that there is a process of subjectification of the female characters, in which the formative experiences occur through spatial and identity displacements, characteristic of modern times. Thus in the novels of formation from the 21th century – such as Pérolas Absolutas (2003), by Heloísa Seixas, Algum Lugar (2009), by Paloma Vidal, and Azul-corvo (2010), by Adriana Lisboa, – amid globalization and the dismantling of great utopias and truths, they experience other conflicts and problems resulting from the fluidity of human relations in modern times.