•We discerned the detailed evolution of rural settlements over a long period.•Variations in scale, pattern, and density of rural settlements are revealed.•Spatial expansion of rural settlements is ...predicted by land transformation model.•Rural settlement areas in Tongzhou increased by 146.64 % from 1961 to 2015.•Four spatial evolution modes emerged for the rural settlements in the past 50 years.
Rural settlement is an important land use type in China due to the country’s large rural population. In recent years, China's social economy has undergone dramatic transformation, and the land use pattern of rural settlements has also significantly changed. Against this background, it is important to reveal the evolution rules of rural settlements to provide references for rural settlement rearrangement. Based on interpreting high-precision military satellite remote sensing images, we selected Tongzhou District of Beijing as a case to discuss the evolution process of rural settlements during 1961–2015. Tongzhou has a history of rural settlement construction for more than 2000 years and will face rapid changes in rural settlement patterns due to the new urbanization policies. The land transformation model (LTM) was employed to simulate the spatial expansion of rural settlements in 2030. The results showed that the number of rural settlement sites in Tongzhou continuously decreased during the past 50 years, with a total decrease by 43.30 %, whereas the total area continuously increased during 1961–2015 (146.64 %). The spatial pattern of the rural settlements was regularized continuously, but the spatial distribution of density varied in different stages. In total, spatial density first presented a decreasing trend, followed by an increase. For over 50 years, there were mainly four evolution modes for the spatial distribution of rural settlements in Tongzhou, namely the extinction, the diffusion, the infilling, and the merging mode. The simulation results obtained by the LTM showed that the rural settlements of Tongzhou all expanded, albeit to varying degrees, and that their expansion mostly followed the diffusion mode, based on the existing rural settlement sites.
The book analyses how social processes impact on knowledge production and dissemination; investigates how differences between actors impact on knowledge dissemination and appropriation; explores how ...existing knowledge frameworks affect knowledge analysis and acceptance and how people bridge the gap between 'outside' and 'local' forms of knowledge.
•We attribute new built-up land to changes in density and changes in population for 75,102 regions worldwide.•Between 37.5% and 49.6% of all built-up land expansion is related to density decrease.•We ...find most densification in large cities and in the Global South.•Densification of large cities leads to a polarization effect, with increasingly sparser rural areas.•We argue for a critical scrutiny of urban densification policies beyond land take only.
Globally, urban areas are growing at a faster rate than their population, potentially reducing environmental sustainability due to undesirable land take in (semi)natural and agricultural lands. However, it is unclear to what extent this trend varies locally, which may hamper the formulation and implementation of local-scale policies in the context of the global competition for land. Here, we attribute built-up land change to population dynamics and changes in land take per person, for >75,000 administrative regions worldwide, typically representing municipalities or counties. Results show that changes in land take per person, expressed as the area of built-up land per capita, relate to 38.3%, 49.6%, and 37.5% of the total increase in built-up land during the periods 1975–1990, 1990–2000, and 2000–2015, respectively, but with large local variations. Interestingly, we find that centres of large cities densify in all three periods, while their rural areas show an opposite development, suggesting an urban polarization effect. We also find densification in many regions in the Global South that already have a high population density, leading to potential trade-offs in terms of human wellbeing. Therefore, our work provides novel insights into the debate on sustainable urban development at a global scale.
•A workflow is provided for understanding urban patterns based upon meaningful measurements of urban form elements.•Interpretable urban patterns are derived through publicly accessible data and tools ...ensuring workflow scientific validity.•EO has a shifted but important role for the potential of interpreting socioeconomic patterns through urban forms.
Earth Observation (EO)-based mapping of cities has great potential to detect patterns beyond the physical ones. However, EO combined with the surge of machine learning techniques to map non-physical, such as socioeconomic, aspects directly, goes to the expense of reproducibility and interpretability, hence scientific validity. In this paper, we suggest shifting the focus from the direct detection of socioeconomic status from raw images through image features, to the mapping of interpretable urban morphology of basic urban elements as an intermediate step, to which socioeconomic patterns can then be related. This shift is profound, in that, rather than abstract image features, it allows to capture the morphology of real urban objects, such as buildings and streets, and use this to then interpret other patterns, including socioeconomic ones. Because socioeconomic patterns are not derived from raw image data, the mapping of these patterns is less data demanding and more replicable. Specifically, we propose a 2-step approach: (1) extraction of fundamental urban elements from satellite imagery, and (2) derivation of meaningful urban morphological patterns from the extracted elements. We refer to this 2-step approach as “EO + Morphometrics”. Technically, EO consists of applying deep learning through a reengineered U-Net shaped convolutional neural network to publicly accessible Google Earth imagery for building extraction. Methods of urban morphometrics are then applied to these buildings to compute semantically explicit and interpretable metrics of urban form. Finally, clustering is applied to these metrics to obtain morphological patterns, or urban types. The “EO + Morphometrics” approach is applied to the city of Nairobi, Kenya, where 15 different urban types are identified. To test whether this outcome meaningfully describes current urbanization patterns, we verified whether selected types matched locally designated informal settlements. We observe that four urban types, characterized by compact and organic urban form, were recurrent in such settlements. The proposed “EO + Morphometrics” approach paves the way for the large-scale identification of interpretable urban form patterns and study of associated dynamics across any region in the world.
Abstract
The work synthesises in 26 monographic chapters the results of a six-years long (2012 – 2018) interdisciplinary international project whose aim was to present the state of knowledge on ...today’s Poland during the Migration Period, and to compare the evolution of its settlement with that of its neighbours. One of its main results – the accordance between the palynological evidence of the change of environment (extensive reforestation and drastic reduction of anthropogenic indicators) and the archaeological reconstruction of the change of settlement (disappearance of the Przeworsk, Wielbark and other cultures of the Roman Period by the mid-fifth century) – conclusively confirms the often questioned verdict of a sudden severe depopulation of the lands between the Vistula and the Oder, similar to that revealed in the rest of Central/Eastern Europe (disappearance of the Elbe and Chernyakhiv-Sântana de Mureş cultures). An entirely new perspective opened by the project is the survival of enclaves with contacts all round the compass (the Eastern Empire, the Merovingian West, the Danubian lands, Scandinavia, the Western Balts). None of them yielded Slavonic material, even the longest-lived one recently discovered at Gąski-Wierzbiczany in Kujawy, evidently one of the main centres of the European Barbaricum and in the third and fourth century the Roman army’s recruiting station, which continued till the early seventh century; this evidence (or lack of it) is the death-blow to the theory of a supposed continuity of settlement – and so of ethnicity, necessarily Slavonic – from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages. Through these enclaves, southern cultural influences reached Scandinavia during the Younger Germanic Iron Age; the one at the mouth of the Vistula seems to have been the earliest and greatest recipient of the Imperial
solidi
in the Baltic zone, from which they were redistributed to the Nordic lands. A sample of other topics: tracing the extent (quite limited) of the Hunnic presence north of the Carpathians; evidence on fugitives from Hermanaric’s realm, including what appears to be the earliest known assemblage of the Dančeny-Brangstrup horizon; the Migration Period among the Western Balts, neighbours and cultural cousins, who did not take part in the
Völkerwanderung.
In the end, two leitmotifs of the work, one pessimistic, the other optimistic: short-sightedness and harmfulness of the official persecutive policy, in Poland and the majority of other European countries, with regard to amateur metal detecting, which only makes priceless potential evidence disappear without a trace; material remains and relative written sources (in this case Iordanes and Procopius) reflect the same historical reality and can legitimately be used to support one another.
As China is transformed, relations between society, the state, and the city have become central. The Great Urban Transformation investigates what is happening in cities, the urban edges, and the ...rural fringe in order to explain these relations. In the inner city of major metropolitan centers, municipal governments battle high-ranking state agencies to secure land rents from redevelopment projects, while residents mobilize to assert property and residential rights. At the urban edge, as metropolitan governments seek to extend control over their rural hinterland through massive-scale development projects, villagers strategize to profit from the encroaching property market. At the rural fringe, township leaders become brokers of power and property between the state bureaucracy and villages, while large numbers of peasants are dispossessed, dispersed, and deterritorialized, and their mobilizational capacity is consequently undermined. The Great Urban Transformation explores these issues, and provides an integrated analysis of the city and the countryside, elite politics and grassroots activism, legal-economic and socio-political issues of property rights, and the role of the state and the market in the property market. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199568048/toc.html
Ours to Lose Starecheski, Amy
2016, 2016-11-07, Letnik:
57734
eBook
"The fascinating and little-known tale of the Lower East Side squatters of the Eighties... a radical, European-inspired housing movement" ( The Village Voice ). Though New York's Lower East Side ...today is home to high-end condos and hip restaurants, it was for decades an infamous site of blight, open-air drug dealing, and class conflict—an emblematic example of the tattered state of 1970s and '80s Manhattan. Those decades of strife, however, also gave the Lower East Side something unusual: a radical movement that blended urban homesteading and European-style squatting in a way never before seen in the United States. Ours to Lose tells the oral history of that movement through a close look at a diverse group of Lower East Side squatters who occupied abandoned city-owned buildings in the 1980s, fought to keep them for decades, and eventually began a long, complicated process to turn their illegal occupancy into legal cooperative ownership. Amy Starecheski here not only tells a little-known New York story, she also shows how property shapes our sense of ourselves as social beings and explores the ethics of homeownership and debt in post-recession America. "There are many books about the Lower East Side and its recent transformation, yet none has included engagement or oral history with primary organizers in the way Starecheski has. Ours to Lose is a unique and substantive contribution to our understanding of a most distinct practice in the shaping of urban space." — Metropolitiques "What is significant is that the author demonstrates how some New Yorkers addressed the housing crisis in an unconventional manner. Recommended." — Choice
In designing and implementing initiatives to conserve biodiversity and ensure the flow of ecosystem services, it is crucial to understand the perspectives of communities living near protected areas. ...Improving conservation efforts may depend on analyzing socio-ecological factors and their impact on Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) and perceptions of ecosystem services. We employed participatory methodologies with 80 farmers from agrarian settlements adjacent to protected areas in the Cerrado biome, Brazil, we quantified LEK and assessed perceptions of ecosystem services using an adaptation of the Q-methodology. We collected data on thirteen socio-ecological variables, including age, gender, farm size, education, engagement with conservation initiatives, and interactions with protected areas and Legal Reserves. Using artificial intelligence in a Random Forest (RF) modelling approach, we identified the most influential variables on LEK and perceptions. Our findings demonstrate that engagement in nature conservation and restoration initiatives, along with the use of native areas (protected and managed areas) significantly influence LEK levels within the farmers' communities. Farmers with full participation, from conception to implementation and evaluation of the initiatives, had a significantly higher LEK level (28.5 ± 13.0) compared to farmers without participation in those initiatives (11.4 ± 5.9). Farmers who used the cerrado for leisure and education (28.2 ± 21.2) had significantly higher LEK levels compared to farmers who do not attend or use the cerrado areas (13.5 ± 8.9) and those using areas of native vegetation for cattle raising (12.8 ± 6.8). These results highlight that, in addition to farmers' participation in conservation and restoration initiatives, the sustainable use of natural areas is fundamental to strengthen their local knowledge of ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, we found that the type of agroecosystem present on farms strongly? shapes farmers' perceptions of ecosystem services. Farmers perceive different ecosystem services depending on land use, indicating the need for tailored interventions for the planning and management of conservation areas. Farmers practicing soybean monoculture had significantly lower perception scores on ecosystem services (−5.1 ± 3.8) than to the other four evaluated groups. Overall, the study highlights the critical role of incorporating local knowledge and perceptions for the design of effective management strategies to increase ecosystem services provision and biodiversity conservation in areas adjacent to protected areas.
•We investigated the factors influencing farmers' knowledge and perceptions of biodiversity and ecosystem services.•Participation in conservation initiatives and use of native areas were the variables that most influenced the LEK.•The predominant use and primary purpose of the farms are strongly associated to farmers' perceptions of ecosystem services.•Farmers engaged in soybean production have distinct perceptions of ecosystem services compared to other groups of farmers.•Including LEK, farmer perceptions, socio-ecological structure is key to managing ecosystem services near protected areas.
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