Abstract This article introduces the MoPEI (Mechanisms of Precarious Economic Incorporation) framework, a conceptual-analytical tool for explaining how refugees are steered into precarious labor through the relational and layered intersections of multiple mechanisms. Considering the labor market realities of Central and Eastern Europe, MoPEI identifies six such mechanisms – structural constraints, temporal and legal ambiguity, migration infrastructures, semi-compliance, normative pressures, and bounded agency – and models their interplays using network analysis. We apply this framework to a case study of forcibly displaced Ukrainians in Czechia, where our evidence points to their substantial engagement in informal, semi-formal, and precarious economic activities alongside rapid labor market entry. Drawing on two waves of survey data (2022, 2023) and focus group discussions, our findings demonstrate how the MoPEI mechanisms interact to facilitate and institutionalize precarious incorporation, shaped by entrenched brokerage practices, weak protection, limited agency, and structural disadvantages. In doing so, MoPEI addresses the limits of fragmented and thematically specific explanations by offering a relational account of how precarious incorporation is co-produced.
Cities are investing in data-driven smart technologies to improve performance and efficiency and to generate a vast amount of data. Finding the opportunities to innovatively use this data help governments and authorities to forecast, respond, and plan for future scenarios. Access to real-time data and information can provide effective services that improve productivity, resulting in environmental, social, and economic benefits. It also assists in the decision-making process and provides opportunities for community engagement and participation by improving digital literacy and culture. This paper aims to review and analyze current practices of data-driven smart applications that contribute to the smooth functioning of urban city systems and the problems they face. The research methodology is qualitative: a systematic and extensive literature review carried out by PRISMA method. Data and information from different case studies carried out globally assisted in the inductive approach. Content analysis identified smart city indicators and related criteria in the case study examples. The study concluded that smart people, smart living, and smart governance methods that have come into practice at a later stage are as important as smart mobility, smart environments, and smart economy measures that were implemented early on, and cities are opening up to new, transparent participatory governance approaches where citizens play a key role. It also illustrates that the current new wave of smart cities with real time data are promoting citizen participation focusing on human, social capital as an essential component in future cities.
Katrin Schwanitz, Valeria Ferraretto, Agnese Vitali
et al.
Ideations and intentions are important precursors of actual behaviour but are still understudied in the literature on the transition to adulthood. This article provides a descriptive overview of ideations and intentions about the timing of four key events in the transition to adulthood – exit from the parental home, cohabitation, marriage, and parenthood – using cross-national representative data for 33 European countries from the Generations and Gender Survey and European Social Survey. Results show that ideations and intentions about the transition to adulthood are, like behaviours, gendered and display distinctive country differences. The analysis of age-graded ideations and intentions suggests a mismatch between the ideal and actual ages at which key events occur during the transition to adulthood. Young people aged 18 to 34 in Europe consider it ideal to start a non-marital cohabitation, marry, and become parents during their 20s but, on average, experience these events later than their ideal timeline. This mismatch is particularly pronounced among men and for the events of marriage and parenthood.
Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Ricardo de S Alencar, Fabiano L. Ribeiro, Horacio Samaniego
et al.
\abstract{Urban scaling theories posit that larger cities exhibit disproportionately higher levels of socioeconomic activity and human interactions. Yet, evidence from developing contexts (especially those marked by stark socioeconomic disparities) remains limited. To address this gap, we analyse a month-long dataset of 3.1~billion voice-call records from Brazil's 100 most populous cities, providing a continental-scale test of urban scaling laws. We measure interactions using two complementary proxies: the number of phone-based contacts (voice-call degrees) and the number of trips inferred from consecutive calls in distinct locations. Our findings reveal clear superlinear relationships in both metrics, indicating that larger urban centres exhibit intensified remote communication and physical mobility. We further observe that gross domestic product (GDP) also scales superlinearly with population, consistent with broader claims that economic output grows faster than city size. Conversely, the number of antennas required per user scales sublinearly, suggesting economies of scale in telecommunications infrastructure. Although the dataset covers a single provider, its widespread coverage in major cities supports the robustness of the results. We nonetheless discuss potential biases, including city-specific marketing campaigns and predominantly prepaid users, as well as the open question of whether higher interaction drives wealth or vice versa. Overall, this study enriches our understanding of urban scaling, emphasising how communication and mobility jointly shape the socioeconomic landscapes of rapidly growing cities.
Abstract Low-wage labor migrants experience major human and working rights abuses in the Gulf Cooperation Council countries despite national labor laws and signatures to various human rights conventions. On paper, India has established an institutional framework of transnational social protection for its officially estimated 5.5 million low-wage workers migrating to the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, e.g., financial emergency support, repatriation services, and walk-in centers. However, migrants in low-wage employment often cannot access substantive social rights in practice. Indian upper/middle-class migrant civil society groups mediate their access to Indian embassies’ services and the destination countries’ state institutions. The realization of social rights via informal, third-party representation stems from a representational disjuncture between low-wage labor migrants and the Indian state, which is rooted in their historical socioeconomic marginalization, limitations of the formal political system, and the constitutive role of informality in shaping and structuring citizen-state interactions in India. Through the lens of Piper and von Lieres’ (2015) concept of mediated citizenship and based on data from semi-structured interviews and participant observation of migrant support networks in the Gulf countries, this article examines why mediation takes place and how volunteers speak and take action for marginalized migrants in low-wage employment and consequences of mediation. It argues that migrant volunteer organizations and individuals are powerful stakeholders in the migration governance in the GCC region, as they possess leverage over who has (better) access to state institutions and the provision of social and human rights. Their status as intermediaries underlines the disaggregation of Indian citizenship along class and caste lines, which can be (mis)-used by mediators to pursue their interests, resulting in ambiguous effects. The article contributes to perspectives on migration governance in the GCC region, transnational social policies, and migrant volunteering.
Hosting large numbers of refugees in private homes rather than in refugee camps is a fairly unusual phenomenon in the broadly understood Western context, including the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, explorative research is much needed to determine the fundamental problems triggered by this novel situation. Based on a series of individual in-depth interviews with Polish hosts who invited Ukrainian refugees to live in their homes, this paper puts under scrutiny the micro-relations between the hosts and the guests. The study identified 6 kinds of ‘difficulty’, including (1) negotiating everyday routines, (2) dealing with difficult life situations and stress, (3) quarrels and divisions among migrants, (4) neglecting one’s own family, (5) a too strong emotional attachment to the guests and (6) irreconcilable sets of expectations.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
The digital transformation of modern cities by integrating advanced information, communication, and computing technologies has marked the epoch of data-driven smart city applications for efficient and sustainable urban management. Despite their effectiveness, these applications often rely on massive amounts of high-dimensional and multi-domain data for monitoring and characterizing different urban sub-systems, presenting challenges in application areas that are limited by data quality and availability, as well as costly efforts for generating urban scenarios and design alternatives. As an emerging research area in deep learning, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have demonstrated their unique values in data and code generation. This survey paper aims to explore the innovative integration of generative AI techniques and urban digital twins to address challenges in the realm of smart cities in various urban sectors, such as transportation and mobility management, energy system operations, building and infrastructure management, and urban design. The survey starts with the introduction of popular generative AI models with their application areas, followed by a structured review of the existing urban science applications that leverage the autonomous capability of the generative AI techniques to facilitate (a) data augmentation for promoting urban monitoring and predictive analytics, (b) synthetic data and scenario generation, (c) automated 3D city modeling, and (d) generative urban design and optimization. Based on the review, this survey discusses potential opportunities and technical strategies that integrate generative AI models into the next-generation urban digital twins for more reliable, scalable, and automated management of smart cities.
3D multimodal question answering (MQA) plays a crucial role in scene understanding by enabling intelligent agents to comprehend their surroundings in 3D environments. While existing research has primarily focused on indoor household tasks and outdoor roadside autonomous driving tasks, there has been limited exploration of city-level scene understanding tasks. Furthermore, existing research faces challenges in understanding city scenes, due to the absence of spatial semantic information and human-environment interaction information at the city level.To address these challenges, we investigate 3D MQA from both dataset and method perspectives. From the dataset perspective, we introduce a novel 3D MQA dataset named City-3DQA for city-level scene understanding, which is the first dataset to incorporate scene semantic and human-environment interactive tasks within the city. From the method perspective, we propose a Scene graph enhanced City-level Understanding method (Sg-CityU), which utilizes the scene graph to introduce the spatial semantic. A new benchmark is reported and our proposed Sg-CityU achieves accuracy of 63.94 % and 63.76 % in different settings of City-3DQA. Compared to indoor 3D MQA methods and zero-shot using advanced large language models (LLMs), Sg-CityU demonstrates state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in robustness and generalization.
Mohammad Yousuf Mehmood, Syed Junaid Haqqani, Faraz Zaidi
et al.
Cities are widely considered the lifeblood of a nations economy housing the bulk of industries, commercial and trade activities, and employment opportunities. Within this economic context, multinational corporations play an important role in this economic development of cities in particular, and subsequently the countries and regions they belong to, in general. As multinational companies are spread throughout the world by virtue of ownership-subsidiary relationship, these ties create complex inter-dependent networks of cities that shape and define socio-economic status, as well as macro-regional influences impacting the world economy. In this paper, we study these networks of cities formed as a result of ties between multinational firms. We analyze these networks using intra-regional, inter-regional and hybrid ties (conglomerate integration) as spatial motifs defined by geographic delineation of world's economic regions. We attempt to understand how global cities position themselves in spatial and economic geographies and how their ties promote regional integration along with global expansion for sustainable growth and economic development. We study these networks over four time periods from 2010 to 2019 and discover interesting trends and patterns. The most significant result is the domination of inter-regional motifs representing cross regional ties among cities rather than national and regional integration.
In the context of the intensification of labor activity, the spread of unstable forms of employment, the growth of informatization and digitalization of social development, the unstable economic situation, the issues of ensuring a balance between the work and personal life of the working population are being actualized. This is especially important for workers with families and, most importantly, children, because in the modern realities (depopulation, high mortality rate in working age, low birth rate), the importance of determinants of family well-being increases significantly. And in a situation where parents are successful workers building a career or developing their business, the problem of the balance between work and living space is even more relevant. The purpose of the article is to analyze the balance of personal life and work of successful working parents. The context of the success of working parents in the analysis of the work-life balance is the scientific novelty of the study, the practical significance is connected with the possibility of using data in the management activities of economic entities in development of social support measures for employees. The information base of the study was made up of data from sociological studies: the pilot sociological study "Modern Successful Man" conducted in 2018 (no. = 492 people) by an international scientific group (psychologists, economists, sociologists) in the cities of Vologda, Cherepovets, Petrozavodsk and Kolomna (Russia), Minsk (Belarus), Lublin (Poland), as well as monitoring the quality of labor potential (no.=1500people) conducted in Vologda oblast by employees of the Vologda Research Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 57% of the cross-country study participants identify themselves with successful people. 100% of working parents in Vologda oblast agree with the statement that "work is a way to achieve success." It was found out that working parents who consider themselves successful people show significantly higher satisfaction with life and work in general, including directly with the balance of personal and work life. It is shown that having a family not only does not interfere with the career aspirations of spouses, but even contributes to them. balance, work, personal life, working parents, work satisfaction.
This article reflects on the role that Hungary has played with respect to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. It elaborates on two issues. The first is Hungary’s relatively amicable relationship with Russia and how the Hungarian political elite has approached the Ukrainian crisis in view of its domestic political goals. The second is the migration policy that Hungary adopted when faced with the arrival of irregular Middle Eastern refugees and the mitigations in this policy to respond to the Ukrainian arrivals. The paper discusses the evolution in the governance of migration in Hungary and the actors and the politics underpinning the Hungarian reception policy from the perspective of these two issues. In this context, it draws on the literature on leadership and how the latter affects political contexts and social realities, particularly with respect to migration politics.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Yasmin Öztürk, Eveline Reisenauer, Laura Castiglioni
et al.
Abstract Even if families in migration contexts have been the subject of an increasing amount of attention in migration research in the recent years, there is a noticeable knowledge deficit with regard to current parenting practices and socialization goals of immigrant families living in Germany. This is particularly striking since child-rearing is of central importance for children’s development and their educational pathways. This paper seeks to fill this gap, drawing on the survey “Growing up in Germany: Everyday Life” (AID:A) provided by the German Youth Institute (DJI). Similarities and differences in attitudes towards parenting among immigrant mothers compared to mothers without migration backgrounds were analyzed with regard to parenting practices (emotional warmth, punishment and child’s active participation) and socialization goals (performance/self-control and positive social behavior). In a sample of 5870 mothers reporting on a child under the age of nine, mothers in families where both they and the father had Turkey, Russia or Poland as their country of origin were included and compared to autochthonic families. The results revealed significant differences in parenting practices and socialization goals between mothers with and without migration backgrounds. Concerning parenting practices, Turkish and Russian mothers differed significantly from German mothers with regard to emotional warmth and punishment. In terms of socialization goals, all immigrant mothers placed more emphasis on both performance/self-control, as well as positive social behavior for their children than mothers without migration backgrounds in Germany.
Teachers are faced with numerous difficulties during the COVID-19 Pandemic, particularly in ensuring that the learning process continues to run smoothly in the face of uncertainty. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between learning agility and commitment to change among preschool teachers. The sample in this study were 118 preschool teachers in Buleleng District. The results indicated that there is a significantly positive relationship between learning agility and commitment to change, r (118) = 0.234, p < 0.01. Further results showed that learning agility is also correlated with two dimensions of commitment to change, namely affective commitment to change r (118) = 0.438, p < 0.01 and normative commitment to change r (118) = 0.181, p < 0.05. The results contribute to theoretical advances in understanding learning agility and commitment to change as well as promoting the success of change in early childhood educational institution.
Education, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Discourses around the so-called digital economy are increasingly more present in contexts of forced displacement, with digital inclusion of refugees being framed by humanitarian agencies as a fundamental human right and an essential tool to promote access to income and skills development. While digital work can certainly bring about positive changes in forced migration settings, imaginaries around the role of the digital in refugees’ economic lives reflect a broader neoliberal project that envisions a retreat of the welfare state and that places on refugees the responsibility to integrate. This article draws on spatial imaginaries frameworks to advance the theoretical understanding of power differentials that are embodied in the use of technologies to promote refugee livelihoods. A combination of interviews, participant and non-participant observations was used to examine the perspectives of Venezuelan refugee women and humanitarian actors in the context of a digital work initiative in the city of Boa Vista, Brazil. The analysis reveals a mismatch between the imaginaries underpinning digital work opportunities and the expectations and plans of the refugee women themselves about the use of ICTs and engagement in digital forms of employability. Such disconnect can reinforce inequalities for refugee’s agency in the digital economy.
City population. Including children in cities, immigration
For many women situated in post-socialist countries, the end of communism entailed the loss of state protection and social security. This often resulted in migration, underpinned by the hope for a better future and facilitated by trust in social networks. Trust and hope are often highlighted in the social-science literature as being indispensable means for navigating migration. What this perspective lacks, however, is an eye for the detrimental effects of the work of hope and for the beneficial effects of the work of distrust. For it can be hope that relates a subject to its exploiter and/or exploitative circumstances and it can be distrust that provides an escape route and increases agency. This article considers the illusive dimension of hope and the mobilising effect of distrust by referring to the experiences of Georgian migrant women in Thessaloniki (Greece). It shows how hope occasionally emanates out of distrust and how the combination of the two allows for new perspectives of action.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
This discussion was held in April 2020 as a part of the Volpower Academic Workshop: Challenging Integration through Everyday Narratives. This is a creative effort to involve a live discussion and reflection on the theme and studies of integration in this special issue. It brings together Adrian Favell, Kesi Mahendran, Jenny Phillimore, and Jon Fox as established scholars and critiques of policy and research in the integration field in discussion with each other while queried by Peter Scholten.
Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration, City population. Including children in cities, immigration
Alexander Timans, Nina Wiedemann, Nishant Kumar
et al.
Despite the strong predictive performance of deep learning models for traffic prediction, their widespread deployment in real-world intelligent transportation systems has been restrained by a lack of interpretability. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods provide an approach to induce probabilistic reasoning, improve decision-making and enhance model deployment potential. To gain a comprehensive picture of the usefulness of existing UQ methods for traffic prediction and the relation between obtained uncertainties and city-wide traffic dynamics, we investigate their application to a large-scale image-based traffic dataset spanning multiple cities and time periods. We compare two epistemic and two aleatoric UQ methods on both temporal and spatio-temporal transfer tasks, and find that meaningful uncertainty estimates can be recovered. We further demonstrate how uncertainty estimates can be employed for unsupervised outlier detection on changes in city traffic dynamics. We find that our approach can capture both temporal and spatial effects on traffic behaviour in a representative case study for the city of Moscow. Our work presents a further step towards boosting uncertainty awareness in traffic prediction tasks, and aims to highlight the value contribution of UQ methods to a better understanding of city traffic dynamics.
The prevalence of disordered eating is increasing among adolescents in Asia. The prevalence and predictors of disordered eating in boys have often gone unrecognized. This study examined gender-specific responses to multifaceted factors associated with disordered eating, including personal, behavioral, family, and school-related characteristics. After excluding responses with incomplete information, a sample of 729 adolescents (48.97% boys) between the ages of 13 and 16 were surveyed through convenience sampling from 37 classrooms in three junior high schools in New Taipei City of Taiwan were analyzed. The Eating Attitudes Test-26 questionnaire was used to identify disordered eating. No difference in the prevalence of disordered eating between the genders was found. Adolescent girls exhibit a preoccupation with fatness and a desire to be thinner, whereas boys are more likely to engage in extreme dieting behaviors such as vomiting, keeping the stomach empty, and avoiding sweets. Girls engaging in disordered eating reported relatively high levels of interpersonal stress involving family member weight-teasing, low peer acceptance, and high peer pressure to control weight. High intensity of regular exercise was found in girls with disordered eating. The perception of body weight is a more critical factor of engaging in disordered eating for boys than girls. Adolescents with immigrant parents were associated with disordered eating among both genders. Changing gender-specific weight-related norms in schools and families is essential to reduce the prevalence of disordered eating, particularly among girls. Future studies using representative samples to confirm this study’s findings are warranted. This study examined gender-specific responses to multifaceted factors associated with disordered eating, including personal, behavioral, family, and school-related characteristics. This study did not discover a significant difference in the prevalence rate of disordered eating between the genders. However, adolescent girls appeared preoccupied with fatness and a desire to be thinner. Boys tended to engage in extreme dieting behaviors such as vomiting after meals, keeping their stomach empty, and avoiding sweets. Relative to adolescent boys, adolescent girls who engaged in disordered eating reported more interpersonal stress from family members’ weight-related teasing, friend pressure to control their weight, low peer acceptance, and being in an extended family. A high frequency of regular exercise was found in girls engaging in disordered eating. The self-perception of body weight seems to be a more critical factor for boys than girls. Boys with fathers of high education and boys who perceived more peer support tended to engage in disordered eating. More attention should be directed to exploring male-specific factors related to disordered eating. The background of immigration is associated with disordered eating among both genders. As the number of mixed-culture marriages increases in Taiwan, this finding highlights the need to explore the health of immigrant parents' children. This study’s strengths and limitations must be considered in interpreting the results. The study’s key strength is its assessment of various personal, behavioral, family, and school environmental variables of potential relevance to disordered eating among the genders in Taiwan. However, the measures adopted in the current study were brief and based on self-reporting, suggesting a need for further exploration of gender differences in disordered eating in a more extensive and comprehensive population-based study.
Abstract This article compares the paradoxical conditions of migrant care workers in two major receiving countries in Asia: Taiwan’s policy regime has positioned live-in care workers as “unskilled” foreigners, who nevertheless have gained increasing desirability and mobility in the labor market. By contrast, Japan has maintained the regime of skilled migration but the recent expansion of the trainee program reinforces paternalistic control over migrant caregivers, who are considered culturally inadequate. Contesting the assumption that skills indicate desirability and mobility in the labor market, I argue that we must examine the context-dependent constitution of skills at the intersection of migration, care, and skill regimes. I propose a multifaced framework to examine how the state and intermediary agencies co-produce the skill regime of care migration, including the following dimensions: migrant skills as a political language and structure of governance, care work skills as social and cultural constructions, the infrastructure of recruitment and training, and the consequence of labor market mobility.
Carolina Coimbra Vieira, Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Marília R. Nepomuceno
et al.
Missing children, i.e., children reported to a relevant authority as having "disappeared," constitute an important but often overlooked population. From a research perspective, missing children constitute a hard-to-reach population about which little is known. This is a particular problem in regions of the Global South that lack robust or centralized data collection systems. In this study, we analyze the composition of the population of missing children in Guatemala, a country with high levels of violence. We contrast the official aggregated-level data from the Guatemalan National Police during the 2018-2020 period with real-time individual-level data on missing children from the official Twitter account of the Alerta Alba-Keneth, a governmental warning system tasked with disseminating information about missing children. Using the Twitter data, we characterize the population of missing children in Guatemala by single-year age, sex, and place of disappearance. Our results show that women are more likely to be reported as missing, particularly those aged 13-17. We discuss the findings in light of the known links between missing people, violence, and human trafficking. Finally, the study highlights the potential of web data to contribute to society by improving our understanding of this and similar hard-to-reach populations.