The article examines aspects of middle-class life by a group of 75 gentrifiers in Islington in north London. The study demonstrates that in their day-to-day lives almost all the respondents lived ...quite apart from non-middle-class residents in Islington. This was demonstrated by their educational strategies which involved finding schooling for their children out of the borough in both the private and state sectors. Their children had almost no contact with children from other social backgrounds. It is suggested that, despite a strong rhetoric in favour of social integration, the current gentrifiers of Islington, unlike the pioneers of the 1960s and 1970s, are unwilling to invest social capital in the area and that their relationships are almost entirely with 'people like us'. It is suggested that this is likely to lead to an increasingly polarised social structure in which the middle classes and their children inhabit entirely separate social spaces from other, and more disadvantaged, groups. The long-term consequences of this are uncertain but are unlikely to lead to greater social cohesion.
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This paper is intended to contribute to the discussion of the differential level of adoption of Big Data among research communities. Recognising the impracticality of conducting an audit across all ...forms and uses of Big Data, we have restricted our enquiry to one very specific form of Big Data, namely general purpose taxonomies, of which Mosaic, Acorn and Origins are examples, that rely on data from a variety of Big Data feeds. The intention of these taxonomies is to enable the records of consumers and citizens held on Big Data datasets to be coded according to type of residential neighbourhood or ethno-cultural heritage without any use of questionnaires. Based on our respective experience in the academic social sciences, in government and in the design and marketing of these taxonomies, we identify the features of these classifications which appear to render them attractive or problematic to different categories of potential user or researcher depending on how the relationship is conceived. We conclude by identifying seven classifications of user or potential user who, on account of their background, current position and future career expectations, tend to respond in different ways to the opportunity to adopt these generic systems as aids for understanding social processes.
Air pollution is a pressing issue that is associated with adverse effects on human health, ecosystems, and climate. Despite many years of effort to improve air quality, nitrogen dioxide (NO2) limit ...values are still regularly exceeded in Europe, particularly in cities and along streets. This study explores how concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NOx = NO + NO2) in European urban areas have changed over the last decades and how this relates to changes in emissions. To do so, the incremental approach was used, comparing urban increments (i.e. urban background minus rural concentrations) to total emissions, and roadside increments (i.e. urban roadside concentrations minus urban background concentrations) to traffic emissions. In total, nine European cities were assessed. The study revealed that potentially confounding factors like the impact of urban pollution at rural monitoring sites through atmospheric transport are generally negligible for NOx. The approach proves therefore particularly useful for this pollutant. The estimated urban increments all showed downward trends, and for the majority of the cities the trends aligned well with the total emissions. However, it was found that factors like a very densely populated surrounding or local emission sources in the rural area such as shipping traffic on inland waterways restrict the application of the approach for some cities. The roadside increments showed an overall very diverse picture in their absolute values and trends and also in their relation to traffic emissions. This variability and the discrepancies between roadside increments and emissions could be attributed to a combination of local influencing factors at the street level and different aspects introducing inaccuracies to the trends of the emission inventories used, including deficient emission factors. Applying the incremental approach was evaluated as useful for long-term pan-European studies, but at the same time it was found to be restricted to certain regions and cities due to data availability issues. The results also highlight that using emission inventories for the prediction of future health impacts and compliance with limit values needs to consider the distinct variability in the concentrations not only across but also within cities.
In this paper the authors investigate whether the distance between school and the pupil's home is related to social background in a six borough area of East London. Also investigated is the extent to ...which schools in the area perform in line with expectations on the basis of the social composition of their intake. The research involves analysis of the Pupil Level Annual School Census (PLASC) to which geodemographic codes supplied by Experian have been attached. They demonstrate that the six schools in the area which achieved the highest average points score at GCSE recruit pupils widely from within the area (and to a lesser extent outside), whilst the lowest performing six schools recruit from much more narrowly defined catchment areas. In terms of school performance, is shown that whilst we might expect schools to perform better as they become more distant from inner East London and nearer to the M25, this is not necessarily the case. In the conclusions they argue that these data support the claims made on the basis of ethnographic data about the class nature of school selection and parental choice. (DIPF/Orig.).
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The shale gas debate has taken center stage over the past decade in many European countries due to its purported climate advantages over coal and the implications for domestic energy security. ...Nevertheless, shale gas production generates greenhouse gas and air pollutant emissions including carbon dioxide, methane, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds. In this study we develop three shale gas drilling projections in Germany and the United Kingdom based on estimated reservoir productivities and local capacity. For each projection, we define a set of emission scenarios in which gas losses are assigned to each stage of upstream gas production to quantify total emissions. The “realistic” (REm) and “optimistic” (OEm) scenarios investigated in this study describe, respectively, the potential emission range generated by business-as-usual activities, and the lowest emissions technically possible according to our settings. The latter scenario is based on the application of specific technologies and full compliance with a stringent regulatory framework described herein. Based on the median drilling projection, total annual methane emissions range between 150–294 Kt in REm and 28–42 Kt in OEm, while carbon dioxide emissions span from 5.55–7.21 Mt in REm to 3.11–3.96 Mt in OEm. Taking all drilling projections into consideration, methane leakage rates in REm range between 0.45 and 1.36% in Germany, and between 0.35 and 0.71% in the United Kingdom. The leakage rates are discussed in both the European (conventional gas) and international (shale gas) contexts. Further, the emission intensity of a potential European shale gas industry is estimated and compared to national inventories. Results from our science-based prospective scenarios can facilitate an informed discussion among the public and policy makers on the climate impact of a potential shale gas development in Europe, and on the appropriate role of natural gas in the worldwide energy transition.
Air pollution is a pressing issue that is associated with adverse effects on human health, ecosystems, and climate. Despite many years of effort to improve air quality, nitrogen dioxide (NO.sub.2) ...limit values are still regularly exceeded in Europe, particularly in cities and along streets. This study explores how concentrations of nitrogen oxides (NO.sub.x = NO + NO.sub.2) in European urban areas have changed over the last decades and how this relates to changes in emissions. To do so, the incremental approach was used, comparing urban increments (i.e. urban background minus rural concentrations) to total emissions, and roadside increments (i.e. urban roadside concentrations minus urban background concentrations) to traffic emissions. In total, nine European cities were assessed. The study revealed that potentially confounding factors like the impact of urban pollution at rural monitoring sites through atmospheric transport are generally negligible for NO.sub.x . The approach proves therefore particularly useful for this pollutant. The estimated urban increments all showed downward trends, and for the majority of the cities the trends aligned well with the total emissions. However, it was found that factors like a very densely populated surrounding or local emission sources in the rural area such as shipping traffic on inland waterways restrict the application of the approach for some cities. The roadside increments showed an overall very diverse picture in their absolute values and trends and also in their relation to traffic emissions. This variability and the discrepancies between roadside increments and emissions could be attributed to a combination of local influencing factors at the street level and different aspects introducing inaccuracies to the trends of the emission inventories used, including deficient emission factors. Applying the incremental approach was evaluated as useful for long-term pan-European studies, but at the same time it was found to be restricted to certain regions and cities due to data availability issues. The results also highlight that using emission inventories for the prediction of future health impacts and compliance with limit values needs to consider the distinct variability in the concentrations not only across but also within cities.
We perform a source attribution for tropospheric and ground-level ozone using a novel technique
that accounts separately for the contributions of the two chemically distinct
emitted precursors ...(reactive carbon and oxides of nitrogen) to the
chemical production of ozone in the troposphere.
By tagging anthropogenic emissions of these precursors according to the geographical region
from which they are emitted, we determine source–receptor relationships for ground-level ozone.
Our methodology reproduces earlier results obtained via other techniques for ozone
source attribution, and it also delivers additional information about the modelled processes
responsible for the intercontinental transport of ozone, which is especially strong during
the spring months.
The current generation of chemical transport models used to support international negotiations
aimed at reducing the intercontinental transport of ozone shows especially strong inter-model
differences in simulated springtime ozone.
Current models also simulate a large range of different responses of surface ozone to methane, which is one of the
major precursors of ground-level ozone.
Using our novel source attribution technique, we show that emissions of NOx (oxides of nitrogen)
from international shipping over the high seas
play a disproportionately strong role in our model system regarding the hemispheric-scale response of surface ozone
to changes in methane, as well as to the springtime maximum in intercontinental transport of ozone
and its precursors.
We recommend a renewed focus on the improvement of the representation of the chemistry
of ship NOx emissions in current-generation models.
We demonstrate the utility of ozone source attribution as a powerful model diagnostic tool and
recommend that similar source attribution techniques become a standard part of future
model intercomparison studies.
In this article, we consider briefly some of the arguments advanced by Tom Slater and others about the direction taken by gentrification research and, in particular, the arguments that the working ...class has been evicted from such research in favour of a perspective that is overly sympathetic to a middle-class view of the city. Whilst accepting some of the critique advanced by Slater and others, we refute his arguments about the nature of class and class change in contemporary cities. In particular, we argue that gentrification research needs to come to terms with a new urban class map in which the largest occupational grouping, by some distance, is the middle class and that the next largest group is often the economically inactive.
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