Hasil untuk "Urbanization. City and country"

Heejun Chang, Alexander Reid Ross

J. R. Rayfield

Opening ParagraphThe main purpose of this paper is to show how recent research into the process of urbanization in Africa and into the structure of African cities and nations compels us to rethink our theories of urbanization in general.The relationship between theory and research is a reciprocal one. New research compels the creation of new models, and new models suggest new subjects and methods of research. But both theory and research are affected by politics in the broadest sense of the term. Many African scholars consider the study of modern Africa by Westerners an extension of economic and political colonialism, especially when African cities are studied in terms of Western models. And many African governments, aware of the social problems involved in urbanization, seriously study the work of both African and non-African social scientists. The period since 1960 has been one of rapid development in the study of urbanization in Africa and the rest of the world, and the African material should throw new light on general theories of urbanization.

Pavel Horák

Dean Keyworth

Sarah Knuth

This chapter explores the flipside of public land disposal, turning to the financial dynamics that have led institutional investors to aggressively incorporate rural farmland, long-term commercial leases, surplus public land inventories, and other low-rent-yielding properties into their portfolios, thereby transforming land into a fungible global asset. It investigates how shocks in asset prices in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis led investors to mobilize defensive understandings of land. In contrast to the more commonly studied speculative storylines of closing rent and yield gaps, the chapter exposes how the narration of land as a “safe” asset is significant in shaping patterns of global land investment, banking the stability of financial markets on social presumptions of land's countercyclicality and capacity to retain value. While these performative storylines build on historical patterns and statistical pictures, the fiction of safety that they collectively enact also fuels fresh risk taking, putting land to use in ways more tightly attuned to the logics and cycles of international finance and thereby undermining the fixity of the ground itself. Ultimately, the chapter aims to shed light on the financial sector not only as a key driver of global land and property transformations but one whose defensive strategies continue to shape US security in divergent ways.

Akira Maruoka, Bumpei Nakade

Harry W. Richardson

Bantom Michael

Howard K. Rabinowitz

Fredj Stambouli