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Urbanization

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Full-Text Articles in Human Geography

China's Urbanization Model And Its Practice In Western China: A Case Study Of Urbanization In Xining, Qinghai, Xin Li Oct 2021

China's Urbanization Model And Its Practice In Western China: A Case Study Of Urbanization In Xining, Qinghai, Xin Li

Doctoral Dissertations

China’s unprecedented urban expansion has drawn extensive scholarly and public attention. The mechanisms and fundamental changes that the urbanization process has brought to Chinese cities have been heatedly discussed in the academic realm. However, research attention has been largely paid to the eastern coastal region. Western Chinese cities in contrast, although they have been catching up with the economic and urban development with two-digit growth in the past two decades, have received relatively little attention. This dissertation analyzes the driving forces, characteristics, and impacts of this recent urban expansion in western Chinese cities. In particular, it focuses on Xining, a …


Jungle Gyms Of Justice: Understanding The Urban Park Accessibility Problem, Victoria Holmes Nov 2019

Jungle Gyms Of Justice: Understanding The Urban Park Accessibility Problem, Victoria Holmes

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Urban parks and green spaces have the potential to provide outstanding benefits to both children and adults. However, increased urbanization and the disproportionate placement of urban parks and green spaces can make these benefits elusive. Case studies focused on Los Angeles, Denver, and Chicago have found that access to urban parks and green spaces is more challenging for non-white and low-socioeconomic status populations. The present study, focused on the much smaller, much less populated city of Harrisonburg, Virginia, builds on this work using geographic information system (GIS) buffer analysis to find that all socioeconomic groups face access issues to some …


Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp Sep 2018

Corporate Urbanization: Between The Future And Survival In Lebanon, Deen S. Sharp

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you look today at the skyline of downtowns throughout the Middle East and beyond, the joint-stock corporation has transformed the urban landscape. The corporation makes itself present through the proliferation of its urban mega-projects, including skyscrapers, downtown developments and gated communities; retail malls and artificial islands; airports and ports; and highways. Built into these corporate urban structures are edifices of politics, ideology and certain forms of socio-spatial and temporal organization. The corporation, however, has largely escaped critical scholarly analysis in Geography and/or Urban and Middle East Studies. In this thesis, I argue that the corporation is far more than …


Assessment Of The Socio-Environmental Impacts Of The Urban Expansion Using Gis And Remote Sensing In The City Of Guayaquil, Ecuador., Erika P. Jimenez Rivera May 2018

Assessment Of The Socio-Environmental Impacts Of The Urban Expansion Using Gis And Remote Sensing In The City Of Guayaquil, Ecuador., Erika P. Jimenez Rivera

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the impacts of the urban expansion from 1990 to 2010 in Guayaquil, Ecuador using geospatial technologies. It incorporates census and land cover data to identify the social and environmental repercussions through Hot Spot Analysis, land cover classification, and Markov chains model.


No. 12: Compounding Vulnerability: A Model Of Urban Household Food Security, Cameron Mccordic Dec 2017

No. 12: Compounding Vulnerability: A Model Of Urban Household Food Security, Cameron Mccordic

Hungry Cities Partnership

The efficiency of the infrastructure systems in cities will define the extent to which dystopic visions of urban futures become a reality. At the level of the individual household, vulnerability to hazards in cities is defined, in part, by the ability to access essential resources and services. This discussion paper proposes a model to help explain the relationship between access to urban infrastructure systems and household vulnerability to food insecurity. Food access in cities is primarily achieved through food purchases, where households convert assets into food at retail locations. When a household falls into food insecurity through trading household assets …


No. 11: Urban Food Security, Rural Bias And The Global Development Agenda, Jonathan Crush, Liam Riley Sep 2017

No. 11: Urban Food Security, Rural Bias And The Global Development Agenda, Jonathan Crush, Liam Riley

Hungry Cities Partnership

This discussion paper sets out the global, African, and South African contexts within which both urban development and food security agendas in Africa are framed. It argues that the pervasive rural bias and anti-urbanism identified in the international and regional food security agendas in the first decade of the 21st century have persisted into the second. In examining whether the last decade has brought any significant changes to the dominant discourse and its accompanying sidelining of urbanization and urban food security in policy debate and formulation, the authors find that there are promising signs for cracks in the edifice but …


Measuring Quality Of Life For Shanghai’S Floating Population Employed In Urban Renewal Sites, Jacob A. Watkins, Gregory Veeck Apr 2017

Measuring Quality Of Life For Shanghai’S Floating Population Employed In Urban Renewal Sites, Jacob A. Watkins, Gregory Veeck

Research and Creative Activities Poster Day

Chinese internal migrants continue to struggle to obtain social and economic equity in some of China’s largest cities. Shanghai, China’s largest city, houses one of the largest floating populations in the country. As city officials and the CPC continue to spend on urban renewal sites in the city proper, new opportunities may be emerging for migrant workers. These sites contain hundreds on new commercial and service based businesses that could potentially provide stable employment for rural-to-urban migrants in Shanghai and influence migrant quality of life as well as provide the means for migrants to remain in the city long-term. This …


No. 09: Comparing Household Food Security In Cities Of The Global South Through A Gender Lens, Liam Riley, Mary Caesar Apr 2017

No. 09: Comparing Household Food Security In Cities Of The Global South Through A Gender Lens, Liam Riley, Mary Caesar

Hungry Cities Partnership

Understanding the determinants of urban food insecurity requires sensitivity to local cultural contexts and taking into account a globally relevant framework for analysis. A gender lens is amenable to this kind of analysis because it is rooted in local configurations of households, livelihoods and consumption patterns, while also being animated by a longstanding global effort to create a world in which men and women are equal. This discussion paper is aimed at academic researchers and development practitioners concerned with urban food insecurity. It demonstrates the usefulness of a gender lens of analysis for generating new insights and questions about household …


No. 08: International Migration And Urban Food Security In South African Cities, Jonathan Crush, Godfrey Tawodzera Mar 2017

No. 08: International Migration And Urban Food Security In South African Cities, Jonathan Crush, Godfrey Tawodzera

Hungry Cities Partnership

The drivers of food insecurity in rapidly growing urban areas of the Global South are receiving more research and policy attention, but the precise connections between urbanization, urban food security and migration are still largely unexplored. In particular, the levels and causes of food insecurity amongst new migrants to the city have received little consideration. This is in marked contrast to the literature on the food security experience of new immigrants from the South in European and North American cities. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on urban food security in the South by focusing on the case …


No. 02: Approaching Sustainable Urban Development In China Through A Food System Planning Lens, Zhenzhong Si, Steffanie Scott May 2016

No. 02: Approaching Sustainable Urban Development In China Through A Food System Planning Lens, Zhenzhong Si, Steffanie Scott

Hungry Cities Partnership

After more than two decades of rapid urbanization, Chinese cities now face severe sustainability chal- lenges in terms of balancing economic viability, social justice, and environmental protection goals. While various types of planning have long been adopted to cope with these challenges, food as a centrepiece of daily life and of social and economic activity in cities has rarely been considered as a focus of urban planning in China, despite a lot of recent attention to food waste and food safety concerns. China’s food policy is largely fragmented in terms of its multiple regulatory agencies and diverse policy goals. Amid …


No. 01: Hungry Cities Of The Global South, Jonathan Crush May 2016

No. 01: Hungry Cities Of The Global South, Jonathan Crush

Hungry Cities Partnership

The recent inclusion of an urban Sustainable Development Goal in the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda represents an important acknowledgement of the reality of global urbanization and the many social, economic, infrastructural and political challenges posed by the human transition to a predominantly urban world. However, while the SDG provides goals for housing, transportation, land use, cultural heritage and disaster risk prevention, food is not mentioned at all. This discussion paper aims to correct this unfortunate omission by reviewing the current evidence on the challenges of feeding rapidly-growing cities in the Global South. The paper first documents the magnitude of the …


How The City Grows: Urban Growth And Challenges To Sustainable Development In Doha, Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner Sep 2014

How The City Grows: Urban Growth And Challenges To Sustainable Development In Doha, Qatar, Andrew M. Gardner

All Faculty Scholarship

This book chapter considers how sustainable development fits in the social, political, and cultural context of contemporary Doha, Qatar. After a review of sustainable development and urban development in Qatar, this chapter makes several contentions. First, it contends that sustainable development poses a challenge to the political stability of a society that distributes state-controlled wealth to its citizenry through urban development. Second, it points to the fact that Qatar's tribal/authoritarian political regime is antithetical to some of the bottom-up democratic principles thought to underpin sustainable development. Finally, it suggest that the consignment of sustainable development efforts to the spatial discourse …


The Urban Fabric Of The Great Plains, Andrew Becker Dec 2011

The Urban Fabric Of The Great Plains, Andrew Becker

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

To most Americans the Great Plains region of North America is mysterious place. There are disagreements when defining its limits, and some people just refer to it as the Midwest. The Great Plains has been a place under an ocean, a place under glaciers, and a place on fire. It was once dubbed “the Great American Desert,” but is now known for its agricultural viability. The Great Plains sparks imagination because it is so massive and was one of the final frontiers for Euro-American settlement. The Great Plains is seen as a rural place but the majority of the region’s …


Migration, Food And Cultural Production Across Changing Afro-Ecuadorian Geographies, Amelia J. Swinton Jan 2010

Migration, Food And Cultural Production Across Changing Afro-Ecuadorian Geographies, Amelia J. Swinton

Honors Theses

The human geography of Ecuador is changing. Urban Afro-Ecuadorians now outnumber those living in the two rural regions that have been the ancestral homelands of the population. This physical transformation assaults Ecuador's historically racialized geography, which conflated cities, modernity and white-mestizo identity. Though Afro-Ecuadorians living in the rural north had previously been physically and figuratively located outside of the national project, Ecuador’s new constitution has sought to reverse this institutionalized exclusion. National belonging has been reframed through the concept of interculturality, which recognizes diversity and equality at the same time. I conducted two periods of fieldwork in the north-central Chota …