Felicia H. M. Liu, Karen P. Y. Lai, Bertrand Seah
et al.
Abstract This paper critically assesses the complex interplay between urban transitions of digitisation and sustainability. Building on a mixed-method research design, we unpack the challenges of decarbonising digital infrastructure while attending to urban sustainability goals in a land- and water-scarce country facing significant physical climate risks. We identify transferrable lessons on the economic, technological, and environmental synergies and trade-offs behind data centre development and argue that stewarding the global data centre sector towards sustainability requires an ecosystem-wide approach. We identify implementation gaps across five key dimensions: technological innovation, policy and regulation, finance, infrastructure, and people. We find that the progress and uptake of sustainability initiatives are often impeded by risk-averse DC operators, who are most concerned with real and perceived risks of downtime. We conclude with recommendations for data centre stakeholders to align the low-carbon transition of the data centre sector with broader objectives of climate resilience, smart city development, and sustainable finance.
With the emergence of a green environment and green business, the banking sector has also enforced green practices. This study aims to explore the impact of motivational factors and green behaviors on the environmental performance of banking sector employees. This is a quantitative study and data has been collected through a cross-sectional survey of the questionnaire in the banking sector. 300 questionnaires were distributed to the bank employees. PLS-SEM was used to find the statistical results. The study finds a positive impact of Extrinsic motivation and Intrinsic motivation on Employee Environmental Performance, the mediating effect of Task-related Green Behaviors was also found to be positive. The study does not support the effect of Voluntary Green Behaviors on Employee Environment Performance and its mediating effect was also not supported. The study findings and deep knowledge of the impact of motivational and behavioral employee environmental performance on banking sector employees have provided new directions for researchers and policymakers. This study will help the policymakers in strategically developing rewarding policies for the employees that would definitely create a positive impact on performance. The results of the study have provided empirical confirmation of employees’ motivational needs and their impact on green behaviors that collectively impact employee environmental performance.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Kennedy Machira, Wisdom Richard Mgomezulu, Mark Malata
Poverty alleviation remains one of the ancient goals of Malawi as the country has since 1994 adopted a poverty alleviation strategy throughout its developmental programs. Through the support of the World Bank, a poverty monitoring system was put in place whose data are collected through the Living Standards Measurement Surveys (LSMS). However, since the establishment of the LSMS, findings of different assessments and eras have revealed instabilities in the country’s poverty levels overtime. What remains unclear is whether households have been able to move out of poverty or not. The current study employed a two wave LSMS panel of 2016 and 2019 and assessed poverty dimensions including poverty incidence, depth and severity. The study further assessed the determinants of poverty transitions in order to understand movements in and out of poverty. Household size, gender of household head, education level of the household head, agricultural land holding sizes, access to credit, residence (urban or rural) and expected shocks significantly influenced the poverty dimensions and poverty transition. It is hence imperative that proper strategies that embrace robust and sustainable credit systems, improvement in literacy levels of the Malawian population, and further improving agricultural land productivity can help reduce poverty and further move households out of poverty. Such initiatives should take into consideration the gender divide and the rapid population growth faced by the country.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
Are institutional trust and interpersonal trust threatened by globalisation? For nineteen countries in Europe, using a fixed effects model for a panel data set relating globalisation to several economic and social macro variables, like income inequality and diversity, to average institutional and interpersonal trust derived from responses in European Social Surveys, we do not find any significant relation between the relatively moderate globalisation of the first two decades of the 21st century on average interpersonal and institutional trust. At the same time, occurrences of economic decline in a country are negatively related to institutional trust. GDP has a positive effect on both institutional and interpersonal.Combining the macro factors with the individual traits of respondents using pooled repeated cross-sectional data demonstrate the dominance of personal characteristics in individual levels of trust, with only institutional quality emerging as a macro variable which is significantly and positively related to trust, especially for the Socio-Economic Groups 3 to 7 (of the eight groups distinguished). Those who are born in the country exhibit higher levels of interpersonal trust, in particular in the higher SES groups 4–7, but show significantly lower institutional trust for the SES groups 0–2. Age is negatively related to institutional trust for all SES groups, but positively related to interpersonal trust for SES groups 4–7.These findings appear to imply that those who are concerned with the level of institutional trust in the population as a basic requirement for democracy in Europe should focus on the quality of institutions and not on globalisation.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
China's automotive industry is recovering rapidly in 2022 and is directly affecting the economies of many countries, and the electric car market is competing with the world's largest car companies and is the most promising for investment. Cars have revolutionized the concept of mobility, making it easier for goods and people to move around geographical regions than ever before. Over the decades, developed countries have witnessed how increased vehicle ownership and improved transport infrastructure have led to countering urbanization - the migration of people, businesses and industry from cities to the recently underdeveloped suburbs. This trend is spreading to emerging economies. There is one car for every five people worldwide; in the US there is one car for 1.25 citizens. However, in China, despite the 300 million cars per 1,000 people, there are only 173 cars. But, in 2009, the Chinese car market became the largest in the world, surpassing the US market in both sales and production. The automotive industry has provided 5% of the country's annual GDP annually since 2002, and accounted for 7.4% of GDP in 2010. Cars can improve the quality of life by increasing mobility, comfort and safety. For the Chinese society, the automotive industry has always been an attractive topic. On the one hand, this industry has long remained outside the system of state planning. Due to the emphasis on industrial capital goods rather than consumer goods, the passenger vehicle sector (including car manufacturing) has not been a key industry for decades, which is a typical Gerschenkron strategy of industrialization. It was only after China's "automotive policy of 1994" that car production was recognized as a national industry, along with the entire automotive sector. This, in turn, has led not only to an increase in the number of car factories, but also to a deterioration of the air in the country. This, of course, had an additional negative impact on people's lives, forcing them to leave the city to live in cleaner areas
Residential mobility is an economic and social recovery process that determines urban growth and regional development. The urban population relocates due to the events in their lives or their dissatisfaction with the conditions. Such individual movements play a role in the construction of urban geography. The aim of the present study was to discuss the factors that affect the residential mobility in Ortahisar district in Trabzon, Turkey. To determine the mobility, a survey was conducted with 445 individuals in 11 neighborhoods with different socio-demographic, economic and physical attributes in Trabzon urban center. The survey findings were analyzed based on a) the analysis of the socio-demographic structure of households, b) evaluation of the residential buildings, c) the analysis of historical mobility, and d) the assessments of causality in mobility. In the study, the causal factors were analyzed based on the life cycle, life course and satisfaction approaches and mobility classification available in the literature, and the study findings were analyzed with descriptive statistics. It was determined that residential ownership, the structure of the household members, and proximity to the workplace factors were effective on residential mobility in Trabzon.
Transportation engineering, Urbanization. City and country
Urban planning is one of the sectors that is able to provide a contribution to the definition of a desirable scenario for the future of the city and the territory as it deals with the physical and functional organisation of human settlements, more than others, also for reasons related to its historical origin.
The paradigms now acquired from a disciplinary point of view, such as densification, sustainable mobility, mixitè, urban green, etc., raise the issue of compatibility with the needs of social distancing imposed by the health emergency.
One wonders if and how the principles and criteria for the physical and functional organisation of settlements, which inform and substantiate the technical-scientific documents and the spatial and urban planning instruments themselves, will change.
The response confirms the overall goodness of the organisational model shared by the community of urban planners. This can only be a stimulus to continue the research and application activities in the field with even greater commitment and determination.
The crisis must in any case build an opportunity to rethink the functioning of the city, its spaces, its times and its forms of social and economic interaction, as we imagine will happen in all other fields
Transportation engineering, Urbanization. City and country
In this article, I interrogate the depiction of Lagos and its residents in the BBC’s documentary, Welcome to Lagos for the ways in which these representations reflect, historicize, and critique cultural and economic responses to contemporary urbanization and globalization in Nigeria. Using a literary approach, I argue that it is implicated – by design or otherwise – in Western representations of Africa that continue to draw criticism for being reductive and negatively skewed. I show, in this regard, the ways in which the documentary’s featured slums, the city of Lagos and the postcolonial nation as a whole are conflated as part of the film’s overarching aesthetic and discursive strategy. A significant consequence of this conflation is that the image of the slum is made to operate as the default and totalized metonym not only of the city but also of the country. I demonstrate, furthermore, how the documentary reflects on Nigeria’s recent socio-political transition from military dictatorship to civilian rule and how it highlights the role of politics (both during decolonization and after independence) in shaping the dynamics of modern urbanization in Nigeria in particular and in the global South in general.
A city is a place whose meaning is found in the poetry created there. In Kevin Lynch’s words, a city presents the imagination with an unlimited potential for “readability”. If we consider this unlimited readability through poetry, it can be said that attempts to find the
zeitgeist of a city at a certain time through literary texts must evaluate the poetry, the city and the time. This is because poetry (or literature in general), just like a city, has an important memory which oscillates through ideas of its past and future. In this sense, divan poetry and one particular example of it—historical “manzume” poems—are memories which richly illustrate the ‘continuity’ and ‘change’ within a period. This work, on 19th century Ankara, aims to evaluate the traces reflected in historical manzume poems of the time they were written.
Five historical manzume poems in three texts out of seventy 19th century divan collections scanned for this work were found to be about Ankara. Two of these manzumes are by Cazib, one by Ziver Pasha, and one by Mahmud Celaleddin Pasha. The first of these is on Ankara’s dervish lodge; the second on a barracks being built in Ankara; the third on Vecihi Pasha’s governorship of Ankara; the fourth on the the Mayoral Residence. In addition to these, a manzume on the construction of Hamidiye Caddesi by Mahmud Celaleddin Pasha is discovered with in scope of the work. The aim of this work is to provide a contribution to city history through a commentary on elements
of 19th century poetry concerning Ankara.
The vulnerability of cities is often discussed in terms of physical hazards and disasters such as earthquakes, floods or terrorist attacks. In contrast, this paper opens up a social-constructivist perspective, describing the vulnerability of cities as a result of discursive based communications. The article looks at the extent to which collective identities in cities are vulnerable to stigmatisation in the media and the ways in which local actors find to cope with this. Key terms of stigma and identity research are presented and the transferability of stigma and identity concepts of social groups to cities is discussed. Taking the examples of Sangerhausen and Pirmasens, which have for several decades been affected by peripheralisation, the article describes stigma processes in the national media, how this is addressed in the city and what coping strategies the actors have developed. Finally the key findings are summarised and conclusions with regard to the vulnerability of collective identities are interpreted.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country
A high proportion of Cebu City’s population lives in informal settlements. This paper describes the range of partnerships between government and non-government organizations in the city which provide services targeted at low-income groups or at settlements with a predominance of low-income households. It also describes how a coalition of NGOs and people’s organizations seeks to ensure the election of mayors with pro-poor policies and to ensure these policies are implemented. It discusses the successes, which mainly involve improved service provision, and the limitations, which include very limited economic benefits for low-income groups despite rapid economic growth, the difficulties that such groups face in acquiring land for housing and the limited influence of NGOs and people’s organizations on the policies of city government.
This article examines the short-term regional economic effect of universities. The methodology used differs substantially from previous studies as it focuses on the additional resources attracted to the region by the establishment of universities. The effects of the attracted resources are therefore related to the basic financing provided by the federal state (Land). We call these relations the regional rates of return on university financing. We demonstrate the regional rates of return using the experience of the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg and the college of higher education Magdeburg-Stendal as examples. The results indicate that the financing of universities is an effective means to create both jobs and economic prosperity. In turn, the reduction of public funding for universities causes substantial opportunity costs for the region, even in the short term.
Cities. Urban geography, Urbanization. City and country