The Italian Apennines between earthquakes, high naturalness and urban growth

2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 716-731 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Zullo ◽  
Alessandro Marucci ◽  
Lorena Fiorini ◽  
Bernardino Romano
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Seismic Hazard ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Seismic Risk ◽  
Central Italy ◽  
The Past ◽  
Territorial Planning ◽  
Cultural Conservation ◽  
Italian Apennines

This paper sets out the results of a study conducted in the inland areas in central Italy on certain phenomena that, for decades, have evolved separately: urban and socio-economic growth, environmental and cultural conservation and the curbing of seismic risk. The study was carried out by analysing the urban conversion of land in the Italian Apennines over the past 50 years, focusing on areas of varying seismic hazard. Our analysis highlights that territorial planning has failed to tackle this risk in an integrated manner, implementing entirely uncoordinated actions that have produced poor results. Thus, our main goal is to study urban development and its effects on the Apennine system and devise possible strategies to mitigate the seismic risk in this area of significant worth, but made extremely vulnerable by policies and solutions that have never been “nature-based”.

Chasing the Concrete Dragon: China’s Urban Landscapes in Skate Video

2020 ◽  
pp. 120633122091639
Author(s):  
Duncan McDuie-Ra
Keyword(s):  
Built Environment ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Urban China ◽  
Urban Landscapes ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Encounter ◽  
China’S Cities

This article explores the centrality of China’s cities to skate video; the most popular form for capturing, circulating, and consuming skateboarding. China’s urban growth produces endless spots to skate; a spot is assemblage of objects and surfaces that offer the opportunity to perform skateboarding maneuvers (tricks). Skate video is the substance of skate culture, the once quintessentially Californian pastime turned global subculture and industry. After skateboarding left the skatepark for the streets in the 1990s, and once video became easier to circulate digitally through streaming platforms in the mid-2000s, the search for spots to perform and capture unsanctioned street skateboarding spread to China’s urban landscapes, beginning with Shenzhen. China’s cities are sites of global desire among skateboarders for the perfect surfaces and obstacles created in the built environment and the speed at which they are produced. Using skate video as an archive I make four arguments. First, China’s cities imputed with a mythical character; endless spots produced with miraculous speed. Second, skate videos re-map China’s cities through the skater’s gaze, a form of urban knowledge both unique and widely shared. Third, the search for spots indexes urban development in China, privileging the recent and shunning the past. Fourth, skateboarding in China’s cities create spaces for inter-cultural encounter between skateboarders and authority, the public and other skateboarders. The article concludes by discussing the utility of skate video as an alternative visual archive of urban China for foreign audiences and increasingly for skate communities in China itself.

scholarly journals Foreword: Advances in Multi-Parametric, Time-Dependent Assessment of Seismic Hazard and Earthquakes Forecast

2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerio Tramutoli ◽  
Filippos Vallianatos
Keyword(s):  
Seismic Hazard ◽  
Seismic Risk ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Vulnerability Factors ◽  
Short Term ◽  
High Exposure ◽  
Absolute Value ◽  
The Past ◽  
Geochemical Parameters ◽  
Very High

Until now proposed Operational Earthquakes Forecast (OEF) methods suffer of strong limitations in terms of their actual (too low absolute value of estimated probabilities) and general (forecast is substantially limited to earthquakes which are preceded by foreshocks) operational applicability [e.g. Wang and Rogers, 2014; Panza et al., 2014]. They become of some (unfortunately still marginal) usefulness just when such a low-probabilities are multiplied for very high exposure and/or vulnerability factors in order to obtain significant amounts of the estimated seismic risk. Mostly, due to these limitations they have been scarcely used in the past while the interest of the scientific community for the study of additional, not just seismological, geophysical/geochemical parameters that could provide useful indications about the evolution of seismic hazard in the medium/short term, is every day increasing.

scholarly journals The Evolution of Urban Planning in Medium-Sized Catalan Cities (1979–2019)

Urban Science ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Carme Bellet Sanfeliu
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Population Dynamics ◽  
Urban Planning ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Municipal Governments ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Neoliberal Urbanism ◽  
Land Consumption ◽  
City Models

Urban planning, as well as the type of city in which it takes place and is promoted, has changed a lot in Spanish cities since the return to democratically elected municipal governments in 1979. This work seeks to characterise the transformation that urban planning has undergone over the last 40 years. It sets out to do this by studying the cases of two medium-sized Catalan cities, their underlying city models, and the ways in which planning has been defined and managed in Catalonia. All of this was undertaken through a bibliographic and documentary analysis of the approved planning documents, which was accompanied by a study of the population dynamics and building cycles. In Spain, urban planning has been one of the instruments used to catalyse expectations for economic growth based on land consumption through urbanisation. Within this context, planning has progressed from fulfilling an initial requirement to regulate activities and urban growth (1979–1991) to facilitating urban development through a clearly expansive and speculative form of neoliberal urbanism (1993–2007) and, finally, to assuming a form in which these previous tendencies coexist with certain new orientations.

Concealment of Illegally Obtained Assets in Nigeria: Revisiting the Role of the Churches in Money Laundering

2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-121
Author(s):  
Kato Gogo Kingston
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Money Laundering ◽  
Financial Crime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Key Drivers ◽  
Nigerian Government

Financial crime in Nigeria – including money laundering – is ravaging Nigeria's economic growth. In the past few years, the Nigerian government has made efforts to tackle money laundering by enacting laws and setting up several agencies to enforce the laws. However, there are substantial loopholes in the regulatory and enforcement regimes. This article seeks to unravel the involvement of the churches as key drivers in money laundering crimes in Nigeria. It concludes that the permissive secrecy which enables churches to conceal the names of their financiers and donors breeds criminality on an unimaginable scale.

scholarly journals Urban Growth, Real Estate Development and Indigenous Property: Simulating the Expansion Process in the City of Temuco, Chile

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Francisco Maturana ◽  
Mauricio Morales ◽  
Fernando Peña-Cortés ◽  
Marco A. Peña ◽  
Carlos Vielma
Keyword(s):  
Real Estate ◽  
Urban Growth ◽  
Urban Expansion ◽  
Indigenous Communities ◽  
Objective Evaluation ◽  
Real Estate Development ◽  
Territorial Planning ◽  
The Future ◽  
Urban Scenario ◽  
The City

Urbanization is spreading across the world and beyond metropolitan areas. Medium-sized cities have also undergone processes of accelerated urban expansion, especially in Latin America, thanks to scant regulation or a complete lack thereof. Thus, understanding urban growth in the past and simulating it in the future has become a tool to raise its visibility and challenge territorial planners. In this work, we use Markov chains, cellular automata, multi-criteria multi-objective evaluation, and the determination of land use/land cover (LULC) to model the urban growth of the city of Temuco, Chile, a paradigmatic case because it has experienced powerful growth, where real estate development pressures coexist with a high natural value and the presence of indigenous communities. The urban scenario is determined for the years 2033 and 2049 based on the spatial patterns between 1985 and 2017, where the model shows the trend of expansion toward the northeast and significant development in the western sector of the city, making them two potential centers of expansion and conflict in the future given the heavy pressure on lands that are indigenous property and have a high natural value, aspects that need to be incorporated into future territorial planning instruments.

The Golf Boom in South Korea: Serving Hegemonic Interests

1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 372-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Minseok An ◽  
George H. Sage
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
South Korea ◽  
Political Stability ◽  
Golf Courses ◽  
Farm Land ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Incentives ◽  
The Social ◽  
Industrial Productivity ◽  
The Government

In the past decade, to help maintain political stability and promote economic growth, South Korea has committed substantial resources to commercialized sports, including golf. A major source of support for building golf courses has come from government leaders and economic and social incentives as well. In the past 4 years the government has given permission to build 135 new golf courses. The official government discourse about the new golf courses is that they are being built in the interest of “sport for all.” But the golf courses overwhelmingly require membership, which is extremely expensive. Despite the enormous power and resources of the dominant groups in Korea, there are elements of opposition. The golf boom has been severely criticized because it removes large amounts of land from agricultural and industrial productivity, contaminates farm land, and pollutes water. It also represents the worst aspects of the social imbalance of wealth.

Italians and others: some quattrocento views of nationality and the church

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 243-260
Author(s):  
Diana M. Webb
Keyword(s):  
Central Italy ◽  
Italian Society ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renaissance Period ◽  
The Church

In his excellent study of medieval Italian society, Hyde makes a thought-provoking comparison of ‘the Italians of the age of Dante’ with the humanists of a later generation. The former he sees as distinguished by ‘a sense of continuity with the past and with other parts of the Catholic world’ from the humanists who ‘concentrated on what was close at hand, digging deep rather than spreading wide, so that their world revolved around central Italy.’ It is not my intention here to dispute this assertion, but to use it to stimulate reflection on the nature of Italian self-awareness in the early renaissance period, in the light of a further contrast between Hyde’s two ages which he does not himself emphasise.

The structure and changes of China’s land system

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 471-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liu Shouying
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Institutional Change ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Structural Characteristics ◽  
Institutional Arrangements ◽  
Reform Process ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Past ◽  
Land System ◽  
Rapid Economic Growth

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to analyze the structure and changes of China’s land system. To achieve this aim, the paper is divided into four parts. The first part gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements; the second part analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change; the third part engages the discussion about the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes; and the final part is conclusion and some policy implications. Design/methodology/approach After 40 years of reforms and opening up, China has not only created a growth miracle unparalleled for any major country in human history, but also transformed itself from a rural to an urban society. Behind this great transformation is a systemic reform in land institutions. Rural land institutions went from collectively owned to household responsibility system, thereby protecting farmers’ land rights. This process resulted in long-term sustainable growth in China’s agriculture, a massive rural-urban migration and a historical agricultural transformation. The conversion of agricultural land to non-agricultural uses and the introduction of market mechanisms made land a policy tool in driving high economic growth, industrialization and urbanization. Findings Research shows that the role of land and its relationship with the economy will inevitably change as China’s economy enters a new stage of medium-to-high speed growth. With economic restructuring, low-cost industrial land will be less effective. Urbanization is also shifting from rapid expansion to endogenous growth so that returns on land capitalization will decrease and risks will increase. Therefore, China must abandon land-dependent growth model through deepening land reforms and adapt a new pattern of economic development. Originality/value This paper gives a brief introduction to the structural characteristics of the Chinese land institutional arrangements, analyzes the reform process of the land system in the past 40 years and its path of change, and evaluates the historic contribution made by the land institutional change to rapid economic growth and structural changes.

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