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Five Decades of Research on Urban Poverty: Main Research Communities, Core Knowledge Producers, and Emerging Thematic Areas
Abstract
Urban poverty represents one of the greatest and most urgent challenges that modern society is facing. The criticality of this global issue is represented by a rapidly growing body of academic literature which aims to explain the dynamics of urban poverty and promote effective and enduring solutions. However, despite many years of research, no studies have been conducted yet which reveal and analyze the overall intellectual structure of the urban poverty research field. In light of this gap, a bibliometric study was undertaken of 52 years of scientific literature on urban poverty (1965-2017). The bibliometric study combines author citation analysis and text-mining techniques to map the main research communities and core knowledge producers which are shaping the urban poverty research field and to identify the thematic areas that these communities are focusing attention on. The results of this investigation reveal a significant growth in the volume of academic literature produced post-1990, which is mainly driven by the collaborative efforts of five research communities, each of whom are seen to focus attention on a specific thematic area: (A) Policy-oriented research; (B) Urban poverty concentration; (C) The rise of poverty in Chinese cities; (D) Youth-behavioral and mental-health aspects of urban poverty; and (E) Urban poverty and health in the Sub-Saharan and Asian slum areas. The practical relevance and scientific contribution of this study is evidenced in its capacity to assist those actors working to alleviate urban poverty, in particular research communities, governmental and inter-governmental institutions, and funding bodies. In addition to help them grasp the overall intellectual structure of the urban poverty research field, the insight offered by this study is instrumental in supporting the articulation of a global, action-oriented agenda for future interdisciplinary research on urban poverty.
... Our choice of Elsevier database/Scopus for this review is based on its visibility, accessibility, incomparable amount of SD-related publications, and the SD focus of many journals within the database. Scopus/Elsevier is an authoritative scientific database and has been adopted for such analyses by many other researchers (see for instance Panori et al., 2019;Schraven et al., 2021;Tamala et al., 2022;Beck and Ferasso, 2023). The Boolean operator was used to determine the retrieval formula as out- 1. "Sustainable development"; "sustainable development in Africa"; "sustainable development in Americas"; "sustainable development in Asia"; "sustainable development in Australia"; ...
... Consistent with Panori et al. (2019), we used the key search terms, "TITLE-ABS-KEY ("sustainable development policies") to identify and select ten key subject area-focused publications in Environmental Science, Energy, Social Science, and Agricultural and Biological Sciences. These publications were examined and reviewed to provide an in-depth concise understanding of their key conclusions as well as to highlight the subject area contributions of academia to the discourse on sustainable development (Table 1). ...
... Schraven et al. 2021 The SDGs offer useful guidance for urban planning and practice, specifically by encouraging policymakers and practitioners to make balanced environmental sustainability choices when mobilizing city labels (e.g., when drawing up short-and longterm master plans or promoting city initiatives). Energy Panori et al. 2019 The type and process of urbanization as well as poverty formation mechanisms play key roles in the identification of appropriate energy policy interventions, such as governance and institutional effectiveness. These are also central to urban poverty research. ...
Sustainable development has become a global watch phrase among policymakers, policy implementers, development practitioners, academic and non-academic institutions, governments, and non-governmental organizations for pursuing and creating a just and sustainable future for all. Here, a descriptive bibliometric analysis of the contributions of the academic community to the sustainable development discourse was carried out. The results indicate that between 1999 and 2022 over 160,076 works were published by academics on sustainable development, with a huge proportion of these publications being research articles. Most of these publications are in the areas of environmental science, energy, and social sciences, among others. Furthermore, the majority of the publications on sustainable development in Africa are on social sciences compared to the environmental science focus for the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Regarding publications on sustainable development policies, there are 1781 publications between 1998 and 2022 with the majority focusing on environmental sciences, energy, and social sciences. Only 37 publications were recorded across the world between 2000 and 2022 with a focus on sustainable development interventions, and the majority were on social sciences and environmental science. In conclusion, the academic community has made a noticeable but imbalanced contribution to the sustainable development discourse and global transformation agenda.
... For that reason, a "lack of income is [deemed] the underlying cause of poverty" (Njoya & Seetaram, 2017: 513). Globally, the eradication of poverty, specifically in urban areas, is a critical concern (Panori et al., 2019). Poverty in cities, which is recognised as a complex construct (Panori et al., 2019), has the potential to undermine sustainable development and degenerate into urban risks. ...
... Globally, the eradication of poverty, specifically in urban areas, is a critical concern (Panori et al., 2019). Poverty in cities, which is recognised as a complex construct (Panori et al., 2019), has the potential to undermine sustainable development and degenerate into urban risks. Amongst the risks emanating from poverty are gender-based violence and prostitution (Hunter, 2007;Magadi, 2016;Rodrigo & Rajapakse, 2010), and theft or burglary . ...
... Urban areas are generally associated with economic development and greater prosperity, yet instances of inequity and severe deprivation among poor urban communities in Windhoek show that tourism has not done enough to help this country move towards achieving SDG 10. Due to the inseparability of SDGs and the complexity of poverty in urban settings (Panori et al., 2019), it can also be argued that tourism has done little to help the country achieve SDG 1. ...
Africa is known for its pristine destinations, mainly associated with rich fauna
and flora. This explains the existence of vast material, written and visual on rural
environments or nature-based destinations. However, little has been written on
urban tourism within an African context except South Africa with some remarkable
work on slum tourism. The link between urban risks, urban tourism and
sustainable development has also been limitedly explored in the academia and
under-researched in the Global South, especially on the African continent. This
book provides theoretical and empirical evidence on the interactions between
urban risks, tourism and sustainable development in sub-Saharan African urban
spaces. At the backdrop of vast natural, cultural and historical resources in African
urban areas are numerous environmental, social and political challenges. The
book, therefore, provides in-depth analysis of the linkages between tourism and
urban risk in African cities, towns and townships. This book is a toolkit of the
urban tourism development on the African continent, valuable to tourism, geography
and social science students and practitioners. The discussion on tourism
and urban risk provides a platform to interrogate possible efficient development
approaches on tourism in urban spaces. This volume showcases the many facets
of urban tourism through examining broad and localized empirical studies
and conceptual frameworks. It addresses the underlying issues of governance,
power, ownership, collaboration, justice, community empowerment and policies
that influence tourism decision-making at local, national and regional levels. It
further contributes to understanding the intricate relationships between tourism
stakeholders across the social, class, racial and national strands.
... Yet many studies show that poverty and inequality are critical challenges to urban sustainability in Africa (Cobbinah, Erdiaw-Kwasie, & Amoateng, 2015;Pieterse et al., 2018), ultimately threatening sustainable urbanization (Kuusaana, Kosoe, Niminga-Beka, & Ahmed, 2021). Urban poverty in African cities inhibits household's access to both the social and energy services needed for basic human security (Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019;Poku-Boansi, Amoako, Owusu-Ansah, & Cobbinah, 2020;Visser, 2013). Access to energy services, for example, is both a cause and consequence of poverty in African cities (International Energy Agency, 2014). ...
... Most of the studies on urban poverty especially in the context of lowincome countries have focused on megacities (Ahmed et al., 2020;Panori et al., 2019). The same can be said of Ghana, the study country, where most of the urban scholarship has focused on Accra and Kumasi, the two largest cities, rather than secondary cities. ...
... However, most studies often highlight that the inability of urban dwellers to meet their basic needs often results from migration, lack of skills, cost of living, housing, unemployment and lack of access to land (Awumbila, Owusu, & Teye, 2014;Chirisa & Matamanda, 2016;Hjorth, 2003;Mitlin, 2003). To understand the geographies of urban poverty, Panori et al. (2019) used over 52 years of literature to provide an intellectual structure of the scientific literature. Their analysis highlights five epistemic communities and knowledge concentrations as shown in Table 1. ...
Urban poverty research on African cities has focused mainly on megacities and large metropolitan areas. Despite their critical role in Africa's urbanization and development, secondary cities have received limited scholarly attention. Studies on secondary cities are unidimensional and rely mostly on secondary information from national census data. Using Wa, a secondary city in Ghana, this study assesses spatial patterns and determinants of multidimensional poverty, measured by two metrics: multidimensional poverty index (MPI) and multidimen-sional energy poverty index (MEPI). Spatially explicit primary data were collected from 775 households differentiated into core and fringe neighbourhoods. Mean MPI was significantly lower in core neighbourhoods than in fringe neighbourhoods. However, we found no statistically significant difference in MEPI between core and fringe neighbourhoods. The distribution of MPI is variably influenced by location and space but not MEPI. Although MPI was generally low, most areas with low MPI still had high MEPI, suggesting that energy access may be major problem even in secondary cities with low poverty. MPI was largely influenced negatively by household size and education. There was a significant negative relationship between MEPI and the food consumption score, suggesting a strong inverse relationship between food security and energy poverty. Together, the findings imply that scaling up the adoption of clean cooking energy in secondary cities can play a key role in addressing multidimensional urban poverty and advancing urban sustainability.
... For that reason, a "lack of income is [deemed] the underlying cause of poverty" (Njoya & Seetaram, 2017: 513). Globally, the eradication of poverty, specifically in urban areas, is a critical concern (Panori et al., 2019). Poverty in cities, which is recognised as a complex construct (Panori et al., 2019), has the potential to undermine sustainable development and degenerate into urban risks. ...
... Globally, the eradication of poverty, specifically in urban areas, is a critical concern (Panori et al., 2019). Poverty in cities, which is recognised as a complex construct (Panori et al., 2019), has the potential to undermine sustainable development and degenerate into urban risks. Amongst the risks emanating from poverty are gender-based violence and prostitution (Hunter, 2007;Magadi, 2016;Rodrigo & Rajapakse, 2010), and theft or burglary . ...
... Urban areas are generally associated with economic development and greater prosperity, yet instances of inequity and severe deprivation among poor urban communities in Windhoek show that tourism has not done enough to help this country move towards achieving SDG 10. Due to the inseparability of SDGs and the complexity of poverty in urban settings (Panori et al., 2019), it can also be argued that tourism has done little to help the country achieve SDG 1. ...
"Urban tourism in the developing world is an underappreciated yet vital topic. Increased urbanisation, often poor public infrastructure, and increased threats, not least of which are global environmental change and the climate crisis, highlight the need for greater research on the interrelationships between urban tourism, risk and resilience at various scales. This edited volume on Sub-Saharan Africa is extremely timely and welcome and provides a rich source of insights and experiences that will prove extremely valuable for those concerned with tourism and urbanisation both now and in the future. This volume is strongly recommended." - Professor Michael Hall, Department of Management, Marketing and Entrepreneurship, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
"Sustainability debates concerning tourism in sub-Saharan Africa traditionally are framed in the context of the continent’s rural and protected areas. This volume breaks new ground in African tourism scholarship by re-focussing sustainability debates upon Africa’s growing cities, acknowledging them as leading tourism destinations, and interrogating the linkages between urban risks, tourism and urban sustainability. Leonard, Musavengane and Siakwah have assembled a rich original collection of theoretical and empirical material which provides a new benchmark for researchers on sustainability and tourism in the global urban South in general and sub-Saharan Africa more specifically." - Professor Christian M. Rogerson, Research Professor, School of Tourism & Hospitality, University of Johannesburg, South Africa
"This book is a highly recommended source for researchers who are interested in urban tourism development in sub-Saharan Africa. The book highlights the challenges and risks involved, but also showcases the potential benefits of tourism on natural, cultural, political, and historical resources of the continent’s urban areas by exploring four main themes: (1) urban tourism and environmental pollution risks, (2) peace tourism, battlefields and war risks, (3) tourism, climate change and flood risks, and (4) inclusive urban tourism and enclaves. This is a must have reference book for academics and practitioners who are interested in urban tourism development in sub-Saharan Africa." - Professor Dogan Gursoy, Taco Bell Distinguished Professor, School of Hospitality Business Management, Carson College of Business, Washington State University
"Africa will be the epicentre of tourism in the future as it will be one of the few places offering authentic experiences. This book is a welcome addition to the literature about tourism in Africa supporting the continent to develop travel and link urban tourism, risks, and sustainable development. This book is highly recommended as it interrogates these relations in the sub-Saharan African urban spaces. It does this by drawing on themes such as governance, environmental justice, power, ownership, xenophobia, collaboration, empowerment, climate change, human settlements and policies that influence tourism and tourism decision-making at various local, regional and national levels. Through its rich theoretical and empirical contributions by African scholars the book will be of value to academics, decision makers, city planners, tourism managers and students alike to reflect on how sustainable urban tourism can be achieved in African urban spaces." - Professor Dimitrios Buhalis, Distinguished Professor, International Centre for Tourism and Hospitality Research, Bournemouth University Business School, United Kingdom
... Urban poverty is considered one of the most critical challenges of modern societies (Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019). The definition of urban poverty is not fundamentally more than the phenomenon of poorness in urban areas, but it presents various issues that are different from general poverty. ...
... When the challenge is urban generational poverty, there needs to be a mix of various anti-poverty programs and methods (Panori et al., 2019), which can assist in responding appropriately to the main purpose of the research as well as the research objectives. A thorough review of theories of poverty shows that three theories are potentially related to the smart city concept, including the 'culture of poverty' , 'the right to the city' , and 'space of flows'/'space of places' (Castells, 1997(Castells, , 2004. ...
... Urban poverty is a complicated phenomenon affecting several dimensions of urban life, including sanitation, housing, natural environment, social inclusion, health, education, and security(Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019). As mentioned earlier, governments and international agencies measure and monitor poverty based on monetary factors, although many of the socio-cultural deprivations in cities have little or no link to income. ...
Typically, researchers and municipalities use the smart city concept to address technical
dimensions of urban projects. Smart cities studies frame their work across six major
categories (i.e., government, people, living, mobility, economy, and environment) and
utilize many specific measures. Technology functions as a facilitator to enable analysis
and identify opportunities across all categories. An expanded role of smart cities offers
authorities, urban planners, and decision makers a tool to provide better public and
private services in many facets of life. To date, exploring and identifying social
challenges has received relatively little attention in smart cities projects and literature.
This dissertation aimed to address this gap by focusing on the generational poverty
challenge within the city of Saint John, New Brunswick. The main objective of this
research was to develop a new problem-solving process for urban social projects using
smart cities initiatives. This dissertation was based on a three-step process: (1)
identification – to investigate the main perceptions of causes of poverty in the city; (2)
exploration – to identify smart cities indicators related to both the poverty challenge and
the role of key stakeholders; and (3) recommendation – to suggest practical smart
solutions to address the issue. Data were obtained through analysis of past poverty reduction projects, two surveys with city stakeholders, and a review of past, ongoing,
and planned poverty-reduction projects at the local and provincial levels. The results
identified expected (e.g., education) and unexpected (e.g., social isolation) perceived
reasons for poverty in Saint John, and showed important gaps in the interface between
poverty and smart city projects, namely, a lack of a collective approach and a lack of
real-time data about vulnerable groups. Although education was a top priority in terms of smart city indicators, stakeholders considered only the technological dimension of the
concept. Overall, the process undertaken for this research demonstrated how the smart
city concept can be applied to urban social projects using the “identify, explore,
recommend” framework. Planners and researchers can utilize this framework in the
future to employ smart cities initiative to address social challenges in communities.
... Slum-dwellers live amidst inequality and precarity and face various environmental hazards and social crises, the frequency of which has increased significantly during the last few decades (UN-Habitat, 2009, 2013. These settlements' growth is often allied to urban poverty (Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019;Uddin, 2018). Approaches to informal settlements and slums have varied from destruction and resettlement to attempts to 'formalize' the informal (Finn, 2018;Finn & Oldfield, 2015;Minnery et al., 2013). ...
... Levels of neighbor interaction and public participation in problemsolving and accountability need strong improvement in Yazd's informal neighborhoods. Urban poverty and low income increase the tendency for precarity and decrease security among residents (Panori et al., 2019). More than 75 % of the neighborhood residents studied are underprivileged and indicate feeling a lack of place attachment, reduced public participation and social interaction, and emphasize the lacuna created by a lack of efficient urban management. ...
Informal settlements constitute a prominent form of urbanization across the world. The rapid growth of Yazd presents an example of informal urbanization in Iran at the nexus of development, poverty, and inequality. While scholarship on urban informality is abundant, a lacuna exists in the literature on systematic quantitative research on informality among urban residents. The present study investigates residents' perceptions regarding informality and captures their responses before and after the expansion of an informal settlement in Yazd. Through this quantitative research, we aim to articulate and highlight specific domains of informality, offering a framework assessing the complexities of informality that extend beyond only Iranian informal settlements. This paper analyzes the status of urban informality and migration in terms of their social, economic, physical, environmental, and urban management characteristics in “Airport Neighborhood”, a prominent Yazd neighborhood. This paper seeks to add theoretical and empirical depth to the categorization of distinct yet overlapping domains of informality. Our quantitative approach to migration and informality informs our central research question: How does the complexity of informality affect different groups of people living in one informal settlement? We find that recent migrants to the settlement are less involved in urban governance, women experience improved work opportunities after moving to the informal settlement but remain marginalized, and insufficient and poorly maintained infrastructure operates as a significant barrier to socio-economic stability and mobility. We also find that urban settlement results in increased debt among residents in Airport Neighborhood, and that youth unemployment is a significant issue that did not improve for recent migrants to the neighborhood despite young people citing employment as a key motivating factor for migration. Our empirical work highlights the theoretical complexity of informality, as subgroups of people face varying challenges that correlate with their age, gender, and time spent in a particular informal settlement.
... By adopting metrics of proximity or distances (Gl€ anzel et al., 2019), community detection algorithms can be used to split a research field into clusters of thematically related publications (Panori et al., 2019). Thematic clusters are high-dimensional knowledge spaces in which huge amounts of textual data is gathered and connected by an intricate network of semantic links . ...
... Only AV-related intellectual work which has been cited by or has cited other AV publications has been included. This methodological approach considers citations as a similarity measure and a mean for connecting publications dealing with a mutual intellectual interest (Fitzpatrick et al., 2018), and it indicates that central topics and core research themes of a research field are rooted in its highly cited publications and the chain of publications which have subsequently built on their contents (Panori et al., 2019). ...
Scientific knowledge on autonomous-driving technology is expanding at a faster-than-ever pace. As a result, the likelihood of incurring information overload is particularly notable for researchers, who can struggle to overcome the gap between information processing requirements and information processing capacity. We address this issue by adopting a multi-granulation approach to latent knowledge discovery and synthesis in large-scale research domains. The proposed methodology combines citation-based community detection methods and topic modeling techniques to give a concise but comprehensive overview of how the autonomous vehicle (AV) research field is conceptually structured. Thirteen core thematic areas are extracted and presented by mining the large data-rich environments resulting from 50 years of AV research. The analysis demonstrates that this research field is strongly oriented towards examining the technological developments needed to enable the widespread rollout of AVs, whereas it largely overlooks the wide-ranging sustainability implications of this sociotechnical transition. On account of these findings, we call for a broader engagement of AV researchers with the sustainability concept and we invite them to increase their commitment to conducting systematic investigations into the sustainability of AV deployment. Sustainability research is urgently required to produce an evidence-based understanding of what new sociotechnical arrangements are needed to ensure that the systemic technological change introduced by AV-based transport systems can fulfill societal functions while meeting the urgent need for more sustainable transport solutions.
... Higher unemployment rates can lead to an increase in poverty in Indonesia. Urban poverty is one of modern society's biggest and most pressing challenges (Panori et al., 2019). Poverty is generally described as low income to meet basic needs. ...
The success of development depicts economic growth. Nevertheless, it is pertinent to emphasize that a significant increase in economic growth may not eradicate poverty, unemployment, and health issues. The prevalence of poverty in Palembang City in 2021 was considerably elevated, amounting to 11.34 percent, while the unemployment rate has exhibited an upward trend, reaching 10.11 percent. Additionally, there was a decline in employment within the labor market, accompanied by a corresponding rise in the number of individuals actively seeking job opportunities. This study aims to examine the various elements contributing to poverty and unemployment and formulate an integrated and sustainable model for poverty reduction and lowering unemployment in urban areas. The data collection technique uses a concurrent mixed method through questionnaires distributed to the public by purposive random sampling of 215 informants and Focus Group Discussions with relevant stakeholders in Palembang City in November 2022. The results of the study found that four factors contribute to poverty in Palembang City: education level, economic growth, health, and labor force participation rate. The level of education is the most dominant factor that plays a role in the occurrence of poverty and unemployment in Palembang City. The strategy formulated is the provision of educational scholarship programs for poor families at the primary and secondary education levels through the utilization of operational costs. It can be concluded that education has a big role in reducing poverty and unemployment, so it is important to invest in education. Investment in education, including improved access and quality of education, can help address issues of poverty and unemployment by giving individuals better opportunities for decent work.
... Scientific publication is one phase in the development of research and technology that relies on peer review to assure validity and objectivity (Panori et al., 2019, J. Liu et al., 2021. Thus, bibliometric analysis methods may be employed to acquire the intellectual structure of past works on the determination and analysis of lithium in a sample. ...
Citation: Rohiman A., Setiyanto H., Saraswaty V., Amran M. B. (2023) Review of analytical techniques for the determination of lithium: From conventional to modern technique, Mor. J. Chem., Abstract: Renewable energy development and usage have spread around the world. This issue occurs as part of attempts to minimize the world's reliance on increasingly finite fossil resources. This has accelerated the transition from fossil-fuel cars to battery-powered electric vehicles. Lithium is a critical component of the battery. As a result, the worldwide usage of lithium will rise as the use of lithium batteries rises. Therefore, a quick and precise technique for identifying lithium is critical in exploration to fulfill the worldwide demand for lithium. Furthermore, a reliable lithium test for monitoring medicine doses for people with bipolar illness and areas contaminated with lithium battery waste is required. Thus, this research presents critical views on the literature addressing various lithium monitoring strategies. This work then examines the progress of lithium technology using conventional, spectroscopic, and electrochemical methods. Furthermore, bibliometric analysis is used to identify trends in the future usage of the desired technology. This leads to the creation of analytical equipment and portable systems for lithium detection in geological exploration, environmental, and medical domains.
... A pobreza é um dos "fatores de pressão" mais críticos para a exploração do trabalho, pois cria um ambiente fértil para os piores tipos de exploração (O'Connell, 2012;Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019;Phillips & Sakamoto, 2011). ...
Resumo Algumas pesquisas sobre a escravidão moderna mostraram como esse fenômeno prospera e persiste, apesar das pressões institucionais contra práticas desumanas na vida social. Para analisar esse fenômeno do ponto de vista institucional e responder à pergunta sobre quais são os principais fatores no campo institucional que sustentam a escravidão moderna, foram coletados dados qualitativos no contexto brasileiro, já que o país é amplamente reconhecido por suas ações significativas contra práticas de escravidão. Este estudo é baseado em dados primários e secundários, coletados por meio de entrevistas em profundidade e observação participante em conferências sobre o tema, bem como documentos cujos conteúdos foram analisados usando o software NVivo. O estudo sugere que certas condições contextuais legitimam as práticas organizacionais de empresas formais e informais, o que é chamado de deflexão institucional. Como contribuição aos padrões de gestão da escravidão moderna, este artigo apresenta a “Roda da Escravidão Moderna” a partir dos resultados, definida como um ciclo dinâmico que incorpora e sistematiza os elementos que sustentam o fenômeno. Os mecanismos da roda, quais sejam as condições favoráveis, a recorrência, o aliciamento e o “sistema de barracão” (truck system) contribuem para as práticas de escravidão moderna e sua manutenção ao longo do tempo. Além disso, sugerimos que esses mesmos mecanismos também podem ser a solução para romper o círculo vicioso da Roda da Escravidão Moderna.
... Poverty is one of the most critical "push factors" to the worst labor exploitation since it creates a fertile environment for the worst kinds of exploitation (O'Connell, 2012;Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019;Phillips & Sakamoto, 2011). ...
A few research papers on modern slavery have outlined how this phenomenon flourishes and persists despite institutional pressures against inhumane practices. In order to analyze slavery from an institutional perspective and answer the question of the main factors in the institutional field that sustain modern slavery, qualitative data were collected in the Brazilian context, where the country is widely recognized for its significant actions against modern slavery practices. This study draws on primary and secondary data collected through in-depth interviews and participant observation at conferences, as well as content analysis of documents using NVivo software. The study suggests that certain contextual conditions legitimize organizational practices of formal and informal firms, called institutional deflection. As a contribution to modern slavery management patterns, this article presents the “modern slavery wheel” based on the results of a dynamic cycle that incorporates and systematizes the elements that support the phenomenon. Wheel mechanisms such as favorite conditioning, recurrence, enticement, and truck system seem to contribute to modern slavery practices and their maintenance over time. Moreover, we suggest that these same components may also contribute to breaking the modern slavery wheel
... When using the information reported from science and technology information systems, it is common for there to be errors in the dataset extracted (Adam, 2002). Herein, manual verification was performed (Panori et al., 2019) in which some minor errors were corrected, not allowing the database to rectify the nomenclature when different ways of referencing the same author were identified. However, although it is necessary to consider this detail when interpreting the results of this study, previous studies have shown that the lack of accuracy in these terms does not affect the establishment of general patterns (Rodríguez Gutiérrez et al., 2017). ...
In the field of qualitative research, life stories are consolidated as one of the most important techniques within the biographical method. However, due to the multiplicity of techniques covered by this method and the disciplines in which it is applied, the contributions and scope of life histories do not present a clear delimitation. By contrast, a considerable conceptual confusion persists and the transfer of its production remains very narrow. In this sense, this article aims to clarify the field of knowledge generated through life stories. To this end, it innovatively applies the bibliometric method. Making use of performance analysis and scientific mapping through the VosViewer application, it studies a body of 2670 articles indexed in the Web of Science. The results show how knowledge transferred from psychology through its major schools of thought occupies a central place. This leaves in a secondary position the knowledge produced by other disciplines such as sociology or anthropology, which is not transferred in the main forums of scientific impact. In this way, the conclusion points to the need to open up new lines of research to find out the differences between the different techniques and disciplines when applying this methodology.
... The population in urban areas is substantial, and the pace of development of urban areas in developing countries has severe social, economic and physical impacts (Hove et al., 2013). As a result, one of the problems is that urban poverty is one of the biggest and most urgent challenges facing modern society (Panori et al., 2019). The Central Bureau of Statistics uses the concept of the ability to fulfil fundamental rights to measure poverty in Indonesia. ...
This paper aims to assess sociodemographic and environmental factors on food consumption expenditure of urban poor households in 33 provinces in Indonesia from 2008-to 2019. The data used in this study were sourced from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The method used is panel data econometrics with a fixed-effect model. This study provides empirical evidence that income per capita, population, family planning acceptors, and single residents have a positive and significant effect on the food consumption expenditure of the urban poor. Meanwhile, access to drinking water and improved sanitation has a negative and significant effect on food consumption expenditures for the urban poor. The policy implication that can be prioritized is to increase human capital investment because it will increase competence and employment opportunities so that the income earned can increase consumption. Increasing family planning acceptors is also needed to suppress the population growth rate because if there are additional family members, it will increase the consumption burden. This will impact increasing poverty if a level of welfare does not accompany it. In addition, access to drinking water and improved sanitation needs to be improved because they impact the health of the population in the long term.
... Associated with the emergence of smart city development, the concern of whether a focus on smart cities will contribute to widening the already existing spatial inequalities is evolving (Anand and Navío-Marco, 2018). Inequality has become a key challenge to sustainable development (Panori et al., 2019) and an issue that smart city development needs to manage (Mora and Deakin, 2019). In this regard, there is an identified need to target spatial inequalities from a bottom-up approach (Mora et al., 2019c) and provide tailormade strategies for smart city development (Komninos and Mora, 2018). ...
... To group words and phrases in clusters of thematically related textual components, we used the Louvain community detection algorithm (Blondel, Guillaume, Lambiotte, & Lefebvre, 2008). The clustering process was conducted in Gephi (Panori, Mora, & Reid, 2019) by adopting a trial-and-error approach (Sun & Sun, 2006). An initial attempt was made to join all available expressions, which formed a 13,894 × 13,894 co-occurrence matrix. ...
An overly favorable narrative has developed around the role played by digital technologies in containing Covid-19, which oversimplifies the complexity of technology adoption. This narrative takes sociomaterial arrangements for granted and conceptualizes technology affordance - the problem-solving capability of a technology - as a standard built-in feature that automatically activates during technology deployment, leading to undiversified and predetermined collective benefits. This paper demonstrates that not everything is as it seems; implementing a technology is a necessary but insufficient condition for triggering its potential problem-solving capability. The potential affordance and effects of a technology are mediated by the sociomaterial arrangements that users assemble to connect their goals to the materiality of technological artifacts and socio-organizational context in which technology deployment takes place. To substantiate this argument and illustrate the mediating role of sociomaterial arrangements, we build on sociomateriality and technology affordance theory, and we present the results of a systematic review of Covid-19 literature in which 2187 documents are examined. The review combines text data mining, co-occurrence pattern recognition, and inductive coding, and it focuses on four digital technologies that public authorities have deployed as virus containment measures: infrared temperature-sensing devices; ICT-based surveillance and contact-tracing systems; bioinformatic tools and applications for laboratory testing; and electronic mass communications media. Reporting on our findings, we add nuances to the academic debate on sociomateriality, technology affordance, and the governance of technology in public health crises. In addition, we provide public authorities with practical recommendations on how to strengthen their approach to digital technology deployment for pandemic control.
... In this first stage of liminality (Turner, 1974), our research shows a nuanced malleability in how people move into, and navigate, a period of fluid vulnerability away from normalised food practices (Hamilton, 2009). Echoing previous research (Garthwaite, 2016;Peterie et al., 2019;Purdam et al., 2016), structural factors such as austerity and welfare reform, coupled with limitations in material and social capital (Panori et al., 2019), contribute to people's transitions from food-secure to food insecurity: My daughter . . . she's tried to help but I don't want to depend on my children. ...
This article examines lived experiences of food insecurity in the United Kingdom as a liminal phenomenon. Our research is set within the context of austerity measures, welfare reform and the precarity experienced by increasing numbers of individuals. Drawing on original qualitative data, we highlight diverse food insecurity experiences as transitional, oscillating between phases of everyday food access to requiring supplementary food, which are both empowering and reinforcing of food insecurity. We make three original contributions to existing research on food insecurity. First, we expand the scope of empirical research by conceptualising food insecurity as liminal. Second, we illuminate shared social processes and practices that intersect individual agency and structure, co-constructing people’s experiences of food insecurity. Third, we extend liminality theory by conceptualising paraliminality, a hybrid of liminal and liminoid phenomena that co-generates a persistent liminal state. Finally, we highlight policy implications that go beyond short-term emergency food access measures.
... The scientific publications are the basic unit of the intellectual structure of any research domain, and they are produced through the concerted effect of a large community of researchers and grouped by way of related subjects [56]. To obtain the intellectual structure of the research on thermal hazards of LIBs with bibliometric methods, the relevant publications need to be identified, collected, and used to extract the critical information to conduct the investigation [57]. ...
Lithium ion batteries (LIBs) play an ever-increasing role in our daily life due to their excellent energy storage performance. However, the thermal hazards of LIBs, occasionally accompanied with fires or explosions, are also severe and worrying issues, which have been concerned by numerous scholars for decades. This paper aims to perform a macroscopic bibliometric reivew on publications related to the thermal hazards of LIBs to date. A total of 826 relevant publications are retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection database in the period of 1996–2019. A bibliometric study of research on thermal hazards of LIBs is conducted by means of visualization software VOSviewer and CiteSpace. The results are analyzed from the perspectives of the annual publications, countries, institutions, authors, terms, and references. As a result, the analysis presents networks of geographical and institutional cooperation, co-authorship, terms co-occurrence, and co-cited references, as well as corresponding clusters, indicating their contributions to the publications on thermal hazards of LIBs. The results provide a comprehensive overview on the evolution of research hotspots in this domain and can help those researchers who are willing to engage in this research field to quickly understand the research frontier and overall situation.
... According to the data source, the search terms in JSTOR can be selected and screened. We finally establish 12 key notions after reading a series of previous relevant studies (Meshelemiah, 2012;Panori et al., 2019). They are as follows: 'poverty', 'food', 'income', 'households', 'crime', 'disease', 'traffic', 'environment', 'price', 'crisis', 'trade' and 'slum'. ...
Poverty is a global problem, and fighting it is a historical task faced by humanity. The outbreak of poverty crises has a certain cyclicality, and the development of economic research may react to poverty cycles. To validate this view, we take the United States as an empirical example and establish a quantitative research architecture based on the bibliometrics and econometrics. In the first place, we conduct a bibliometric analysis of selected search terms relevant to poverty cycles. After that, the time-series data in the actual economy are collected for reflecting the trends and fluctuations in economic activity affected by poverty cycles. Meanwhile, with both bibliometric and economic data, a detrending measure via the band-pass (BP) filter is performed to estimate cycles. Finally, the Granger causality tests are implemented to explore the interaction between poverty cycles and economic research directly. As a supplement, this paper also provides a quantitative evaluation analysis, namely impulse-response functions, to investigate the influence of economic variables on bibliometric ones. The final results show there indeed exists an impact of poverty cycles in economic activity on relevant discussions in the scientific literature.
... Associated with the emergence of smart city development, the concern of whether a focus on smart cities will contribute to widening the already existing spatial inequalities is evolving (Anand and Navío-Marco, 2018). Inequality has become a key challenge to sustainable development (Panori et al., 2019) and an issue that smart city development needs to manage (Mora and Deakin, 2019). In this regard, there is an identified need to target spatial inequalities from a bottom-up approach (Mora et al., 2019c) and provide tailormade strategies for smart city development (Komninos and Mora, 2018). ...
Spatial inequality in basic service provision is a key challenge for smart city development strategies. With a focus on walkable accessibility, this paper proposes a new methodological approach to analyzing such spatial inequalities in metropolitan cities. In addition to proving the effectiveness of the proposed methodology by using New York City as an empirical case, the insights offered by the analysis contribute to an improvement in the current understanding of the negative implications that spatial inequalities can have on public health. Policies concerning local public service rearrangement should consider spatial inequalities to promote more effective forms of public participation both in the United States and globally.
Detroit has lost its 29.06% population over the last two decades. All negative signs of urban shrinking, such as population and job loss, disinvestment, property devaluation, and commercial decline, happened at the worst time when Detroit became poorer and blacker. Meanwhile, capitals are relocated to suburban and exurban places, reallocating political power and public resources to the increasingly privatized, exclusionary world of white suburbia. Geography matters, and the shrinking and expanding composes a stunning spatial tessellation. However, geographic exploration of the spatial processes and patterns and underlying political, economic, and social driving forces of the shrinking city of Detroit is still sporadic. This chapter examines urban declining in Metropolitan Detroit by developing a hierarchical linear mixed model (HLM) based on a hypothetical spatial unit, road network analysis zones (RNAZs). RNAZs are generated through the road network areal interpolation developed in Chap. 6. The introduction of RNAZs into the HLM model enables us to describe the spatial extent and evolution processes of urban decline in the city of Detroit and its adjacent towns and cities.
The HLM model consists of three scales, 1330 Census Tracts (CT), 20 RNAZs, and seven counties in Southeast Michigan with eight environmental and 17 socioeconomic variables to explore spatial dynamics of urban decline. The HLM model treats CT, RNAZ, and County as random effects to examine hierarchical and spatial heterogeneities of the impacts of the 25 variables on the urban decline. The findings conclude that shrinking Detroit is driven by three groups of driving factors reflecting inequality, persistent poverty, and poor housing. The fixed effect counts 72.6% vacancy variation within RNAZs between tracts. The random effects explain 16.4% of the vacancy variation between counties and 11.0% within counties between RNAZs. The log-likelihood ratio tests confirm that the random effects at both County and RNAZ levels are statistically significant.
Furthermore, the HLM model reveals the existence of the interactions between the vacancy-driving factors and the cross-space interactions. There exist within-tract interactions, cross-tract-RNAZ interactions, and cross-tract-RNAZ-county interactions. The within-tract interactions significantly impact urban shrinking (the interaction random intercept model). The cross interactions confirm that the effects on urban shrinking display distinct spatial variations. Urban decline in Metropolitan Detroit discloses evident spatial dynamics, expanding toward the west and northwest (Livonia, Southfield, and Dearborn) but breaking into the north, northwest, and south. These findings have significant regional and urban planning implications for averting urban shrinking.
The impact of Asia’s infrastructure development and inclusive income growth on poverty alleviation from 2000 to 2020 is well-documented in this research by applying the generalized method of moments (GMM). With the use of economic and social indices, it has been established that infrastructure improvement significantly impacts reducing poverty levels. The findings demonstrate the important impact of energy poverty alleviation on income-inclusive growth. It is easier to survive poverty in rural areas with access to water infrastructure and health insurance. Infrastructure and poverty seem to have a bidirectional causal relationship in the long term. To put it another way, boosting infrastructure investment might be a key to promoting poverty reduction. At the same time, greater performance in the public sector may result in a more effective allocation of resources toward building large infrastructure. Thus, it is postulated that with increasing knowledge, infrastructural development in most developing nations, including South Asian countries, is insufficient; fresh and sustained infrastructure investments are crucial for poverty reduction. This research sheds light on the critical role that energy out-of-poverty plays in inclusive development and infrastructure development for all people, regardless of their income level.
Modern energy services that are close to perfect are the basis for sustainable development. Measuring energy poverty from a multidimensional perspective and revealing its dynamic evolution has important practical significance for formulating and improving energy policies. After measuring the multidimensional energy poverty index of China's six provinces using data from 2009, 2011, and 2015, this study divided households into three states: non-multidimensional energy poverty, multidimensional energy poverty, and severe multidimensional energy poverty. The stay proportion and migration probability of households in different states were estimated by the mover-stayer model, and their determinants were analyzed at the household and community levels by the hierarchical linear model. The results show that the multidimensional energy poverty of China's six provinces declined. Most households migrated to better states, which indicates that there is no energy poverty trap in China. However, there are risks of returning to poverty in some households. For stayers, the change of their status is formed by the joint action of the household and community, whereas for the movers, it is mainly due to the household conditions. We suggest that, according to the different levels of energy poverty, energy policies should be formulated at different levels and stages.
The article is dedicated to the analysis of the regional programs as an instrument of diminishment of poverty level in the regions of Russia. On the basis of the examination of 14 regional programs, in accordance with the methodology, developed by VNII of Labour, it was found that the goals of all regional programs are aimed at a steady increase in the income of citizens and a decrease in the proportion of the population with incomes below the subsistence level. Despite the existing variability of formulations, according to the semantic load, the tasks of all regional programs can be combined into four blocks: increase in the level of income of citizens and an excess of the growth rate of income of citizens, including average wages, over the rate of growth of inflation; development of a system of social assistance to citizens in need; development of the social contract system; organization of social adaptation of low-income citizens.
Rapid urbanization in China is driving the need of urban rainfall-runoff pollution control technologies due to adverse impacts on water environment. In this study, literature from China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Web of Science and Scopus in 1995/1/1–2019/5/15 are used to review research hotspots, development process and future directions of urban rainfall-runoff pollution control technologies in China and global world. Temporal evolution of publications showed that source reduction played better growing trend in urban rainfall-runoff pollution control field for both China and global world. Furthermore, with bibliometric tool, density visualization maps and co-occurrence network maps were created to identify research hotspots in China and global world. By comprehensively analyzing research hotspots above and development process from extracted literature, future directions of urban rainfall-runoff pollution control technologies were predicted. For model and strategy, both China and global world would concern on the accuracy of models to evaluate combination technologies. For source reduction, China would explore rainwater purification in sponge city, while global world would investigate match characteristics between specific regions and control technologies, combination between model and technologies, and improvement of pollutants removal. For process control, China would enhance ecological gutter inlet performance, whereas global world would concentrate on optimization of rainwater harvesting system. For post treatment, China would estimate modified hydrocylone and coagulation technology, and improve performance of filtration systems, riparian buffers and constructed wetlands, while global world would explore ecological and landscape function of constructed wetlands. Since China ranked first in producing Western publications and was the second most cited country for Western publications recently, China would significantly influence future development of urban rainfall-runoff pollution control technologies around the world. Meanwhile, some directions including infiltration basin and rainwater harvesting system were still shortcomings for China due to a late start of urban rainfall-runoff pollution control technologies in China.
The report presents the main findings of the large-scale survey that has been conducted during the Pop-Machina project aiming to capture the insights about makerspaces' acceptance, main drivers and barriers. The large-scale survey included all EU countries and the analysis of the results will focus on capturing the main outcomes regarding general EU citizens' perceptions and potential differences between EU Member states. The report is structured as follows. Section 3 presents a literature review regarding the main drivers, barriers and challenges of makerspaces, in order to present the current state-of-the-art in the field of collaborative production. Section 4 includes all information related to the survey design and the implementation. In Section 5, we present some initial descriptive findings closely related to individual perceptions and levels of acceptance and highlight any significant variations between different EU areas. Section 5 also includes the main statistical analysis of the dataset by including the outcomes of the factor analysis and logit model that we have built. KPIS related to this deliverable are presented in Section 6, whereas conclusions and further discussion are given in Section 7. This report constitutes Deliverable 2.2, for Work Package 2 of the Pop-Machina project. August 2020 © 2020-Pop-Machina, Collaborative production for the circular economy; a community approach,-project number 821479.
Untangling Smart Cities: From Utopian Dreams to Innovation Systems for a Technology-Enabled Urban Sustainability helps all key stakeholders understand the complex and often conflicting nature of smart city research, offering valuable insights for designing and implementing strategies to improve the smart city decision-making processes. The book drives the reader to a better theoretical and practical comprehension of smart city development, beginning with a thorough and systematic analysis of the research literature published to date. It addition, it provides an in-depth understanding of the entire smart city knowledge domain, revealing a deeply rooted division in its cognitive-epistemological structure as identified by bibliometric insights. Users will find a book that fills the knowledge gap between theory and practice using case study research and empirical evidence drawn from cities considered leaders in innovative smart city practices. Key features: Provides clarity on smart city concepts and strategies; Presents a systematic literature analysis on the state-of-the-art of smart cities' research using bibliometrics combined with practical applications; Offers a comprehensive and systematic analysis of smart cities research produced during its first three decades; Generates a strong connection between theory and practice by providing the scientific knowledge necessary to approach the complex nature of smart cities; Documents five main development pathways for smart cities development, serving the needs of city managers and policymakers with concrete advice and guidance.
Information on the size of academic search engines and bibliographic databases (ASEBDs) is often outdated or entirely unavailable. Hence, it is difficult to assess the scope of specific databases, such as Google Scholar. While scientometric studies have estimated ASEBD sizes before, the methods employed were able to compare only a few databases. Consequently, there is no up-to-date comparative information on the sizes of popular ASEBDs. This study aims to fill this blind spot by providing a comparative picture of 12 of the most commonly used ASEBDs. In doing so, we build on and refine previous scientometric research by counting query hit data as an indicator of the number of accessible records. Iterative query optimization makes it possible to identify a maximum number of hits for most ASEBDs. The results were validated in terms of their capacity to assess database size by comparing them with official information on database sizes or previous scientometric studies. The queries used here are replicable, so size information can be updated quickly. The findings provide first-time size estimates of ProQuest and EbscoHost and indicate that Google Scholar’s size might have been underestimated so far by more than 50%. By our estimation Google Scholar, with 389 million records, is currently the most comprehensive academic search engine.
This study explores the extent to which bibliometric indicators based on counts of highly-cited documents could be affected by the choice of data source. The initial hypothesis is that databases that rely on journal selection criteria for their document coverage may not necessarily provide an accurate representation of highly-cited documents across all subject areas, while inclusive databases, which give each document the chance to stand on its own merits, might be better suited to identify highly-cited documents. To test this hypothesis, an analysis of 2515 highly-cited documents published in 2006 that Google Scholar displays in its Classic Papers product is carried out at the level of broad subject categories, checking whether these documents are also covered in Web of Science and Scopus, and whether the citation counts offered by the different sources are similar. The results show that a large fraction of highly-cited documents in the Social Sciences and Humanities (8.6–28.2%) are invisible to Web of Science and Scopus. In the Natural, Life, and Health Sciences the proportion of missing highly-cited documents in Web of Science and Scopus is much lower. Furthermore, in all areas, Spearman correlation coefficients of citation counts in Google Scholar, as compared to Web of Science and Scopus citation counts, are remarkably strong (.83–.99). The main conclusion is that the data about highly-cited documents available in the inclusive database Google Scholar does indeed reveal significant coverage deficiencies in Web of Science and Scopus in several areas of research. Therefore, using these selective databases to compute bibliometric indicators based on counts of highly-cited documents might produce biased assessments in poorly covered areas.
Coverage is an important criterion when evaluating information systems. This exploratory study investigates this issue by submitting the same query to different databases relevant to the query topic. Data were retrieved from three databases: ACM Digital Library, Web of Science (with the Proceedings Citation Index) and Scopus. The search phrase was “information retrieval,” publication years were between 2013 and 2016. Altogether 8,699 items were retrieved, out of which 5,306 (61%) items were retrieved by a single database only, and only 977 (11%) items were located in all three databases. These 977 items were further analyzed: citation counts retrieved from the three databases were compared. Citations were also compared to altmetric data of these publications, collected from Mendeley.
The challenge of detecting research topics in a specific research field has attracted attention from researchers in the bibliometrics community. In this study, to solve two problems of clustering papers, i.e., the influence of different distributions of citation links and involved textual features on similarity computation, the authors propose a hybrid self-optimized clustering model to detect research topics by extending the hybrid clustering model to identify “core documents”. First, the Amsler network, consisting of bibliographic coupling and co-citation links, is created to calculate the citation-based similarity based on the cosine angle of papers. Second, the cosine similarity is also used to compute the text-based similarity, which consists of the textual statistical and topological features. Then, the cosine angle of the linear combination of citation- and text-based similarity is considered as the hybrid similarity. Finally, the Louvain method is applied to cluster papers, and the terms based on term frequency are used to label clusters. To test the performance of the proposed model, a dataset related to the data envelopment analysis field is used for comparison and analysis of clustering results. Based on the benchmark built, different clustering methods with different citation links or textual features are compared according to evaluation measures. The results show that the proposed model can obtain reasonable and effective clustering results, and the research topics of data envelopment analysis field are also analyzed based on the proposed model. As different features are considered in the proposed model compared with previous hybrid clustering models, the proposed clustering model can provide inspiration for further studies on topic identification by other researchers.
This study examined predictors of depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood in a sample of 1142 individuals (94% African American) who grew up in urban poverty. Data were drawn from a longitudinal study that followed participants from age five and included participant, parent, and teacher surveys, and administrative records. Depressive symptoms were self-reported at age 22–24 using a modified version of the Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI; Derogatis, 1975). Binary logistic regression analyses identified several significant predictors of depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood, including: sex, adverse childhood experiences (ACE) score, socio-emotional adjustment in the classroom, juvenile arrest, and on-time graduation. Significant sex differences were also detected, with the final models fitting the male sample better than the full study or female samples. Implications for future research and intervention are discussed.
This paper reports on the first two decades of research on smart cities by conducting a bibliometric analysis of the literature published between 1992 and 2012. The analysis shows that smart-city research is fragmented and lacks cohesion, and its growth follows two main development paths. The first one is based on the peer-reviewed publications produced by European universities, which support a holistic perspective on smart cities. The second path, instead, stands on the gray literature produced by the American business community and relates to a techno-centric understanding of the subject. Divided along such paths, the future development of this new and promising field of research risks being undermined. For while the bibliometric analysis indicates that smart cities are emerging as a fast-growing topic of scientific enquiry, much of the knowledge that is generated about them is singularly technological in nature. In that sense, lacking the social intelligence, cultural artifacts, and environmental attributes, which are needed for the ICT-related urban innovation that such research champions.
Background
Poverty is a global problem. The war against poverty requires not only financial support, but also poverty-related research to pinpoint areas of high need of intervention. In line with international efforts to fight poverty and negative consequences, we carried out this study to give a bibliometric overview of medicine-related literature on poverty. Such a s study is an indicator of the extent of interaction of various international key players on the war against poverty-related health problems.
Methods
Scopus was used to achieve the objective of this study. The time span set for this study was 2005–2015. Poverty-related articles under the subject area “Medicine” were used to give bibliometric indicators such as annual growth of publications, international collaboration, highly cited articles, active countries, institutions, journals, and authors.
Results
The total number of retrieved articles was 1583. The Hirsh-index of retrieved articles was 56. A modest and fluctuating increase was seen over the study period. Visualization map of retrieved articles showed that “HIV”, infectious diseases, mental health, India, and Africa were most commonly encountered terms. No significant dominance of any particular author or journal was observed in retrieved articles. The United States of America had the largest share in the number of published articles. The World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Prevention and Control were among top active institutions/organizations. International collaboration was observed in less than one third of publications. Top cited articles focused on three poverty-related health issues, mainly, infectious diseases, malnutrition, and child development/psychology. Most of top articles were published in high impact journals.
Conclusions
Data indicated that articles on poverty were published in high influential medical journals indicative of the importance of poverty as a global health problem. However, the number publications and the extent of international collaborations was lower than expected given the huge burden of poverty-related health problems.
Background:
Communities in urban slums face multiple risks to their health. These are shaped by intermediary and structural determinants. Gaining a clear understanding of these determinants is a prerequisite for developing interventions to reduce the health consequences of urban poverty. With 828 million people living in slum conditions, the need to find ways to reduce risks to health has never been greater. In many low income settings, the kitchen is the epicentre of activities and behaviours which either undermine or enhance health.
Methods:
We used qualitative methods of semi-structured interviews, observation and participatory workshops in two slum areas in Kathmandu, Nepal to gain women's perspectives on the health risks they faced in and around their kitchens. Twenty one women were interviewed and four participatory workshops with a total of 69 women were held. The women took photographs of their kitchens to trigger discussions.
Findings:
The main health conditions identified by the women were respiratory disease, gastrointestinal disease and burn injuries. Women clearly understood intermediary (psychosocial, material and behavioural) determinants to these health conditions such as poor ventilation, cooking on open fires, over-crowding, lack of adequate child supervision. Women articulated the stress they experienced and clearly linked this to health conditions such as heart disease and uptake of smoking. They were also able to identify protective factors, particularly social capital. Subsequent analysis highlighted how female headed-households and those with disabilities had to contend with greater risks to health.
Conclusions:
Women living in slums are very aware of the intermediary determinants-material, behavioural and psycho-social, that increase their vulnerability to ill health. They are also able to identify protective factors, particularly social capital. It is only by understanding the determinants at all levels, not just the behavioural, that we will be able to identify appropriate interventions.
Socioeconomic inequality is on the rise in major European cities, as are concerns over it, since it is seen as a threat to social cohesion and stability. Surprisingly, relatively little is known about the spatial dimensions of rising socioeconomic inequality. This paper builds on a study of socioeconomic segregation in 12 European cities: Amsterdam, Athens, Budapest, London, Madrid, Oslo, Prague, Riga, Stockholm, Tallinn, Vienna, and Vilnius. Data used derive from national censuses and registers for 2001 and 2011. The main conclusion is that socioeconomic segregation has increased. This paper develops a rigorous multifactor approach to understand segregation and links it to four underlying, partially overlapping, structural factors: social inequalities, globalization and economic restructuring, welfare regimes, and housing systems. Taking into account contextual factors resulted in a better understanding of actual segregation levels, while introducing time lags between structural factors and segregation outcomes will likely further improve the theoretical model.
Overview
Notions of community quality underlie the clustering of networks. While studies surrounding network clustering are increasingly common, a precise understanding of the realtionship between different cluster quality metrics is unknown. In this paper, we examine the relationship between stand-alone cluster quality metrics and information recovery metrics through a rigorous analysis of four widely-used network clustering algorithms—Louvain, Infomap, label propagation, and smart local moving. We consider the stand-alone quality metrics of modularity, conductance, and coverage, and we consider the information recovery metrics of adjusted Rand score, normalized mutual information, and a variant of normalized mutual information used in previous work. Our study includes both synthetic graphs and empirical data sets of sizes varying from 1,000 to 1,000,000 nodes.
Cluster Quality Metrics
We find significant differences among the results of the different cluster quality metrics. For example, clustering algorithms can return a value of 0.4 out of 1 on modularity but score 0 out of 1 on information recovery. We find conductance, though imperfect, to be the stand-alone quality metric that best indicates performance on the information recovery metrics. Additionally, our study shows that the variant of normalized mutual information used in previous work cannot be assumed to differ only slightly from traditional normalized mutual information.
Network Clustering Algorithms
Smart local moving is the overall best performing algorithm in our study, but discrepancies between cluster evaluation metrics prevent us from declaring it an absolutely superior algorithm. Interestingly, Louvain performed better than Infomap in nearly all the tests in our study, contradicting the results of previous work in which Infomap was superior to Louvain. We find that although label propagation performs poorly when clusters are less clearly defined, it scales efficiently and accurately to large graphs with well-defined clusters.
The aim of this study was to show the current state of scientific research regarding wine tourism, by comparing the platforms of scientific information WoS and Scopus and applying quantitative methods. For this purpose, a bibliometric study of the publications indexed in WoS and Scopus was conducted, analyzing the correlation between increases, coverage, overlap, dispersion and concentration of documents. During the search process, a set of 238 articles and 122 different journals were obtained. Based on the results of the comparative study, we conclude that WoS and Scopus databases differ in scope, data volume and coverage policies with a high degree of unique sources and articles, resulting both of them complementary and not mutually exclusive. Scopus covers the area of wine tourism better, by including a greater number of journals, papers and signatures.
A combination of increasing urbanization, behaviour change, and lack of health services in slums put the urban poor specifically at risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD). This study aimed to evaluate the impact of a community-based CVD prevention intervention on blood pressure (BP) and other CVD risk factors in a slum setting in Nairobi, Kenya.
Prospective intervention study includes awareness campaigns, household visits for screening, and referral and treatment of people with hypertension. The primary outcome was overall change in mean systolic blood pressure (SBP), while secondary outcomes were changes in awareness of hypertension and other CVD risk factors. We evaluated the intervention's impact through consecutive cross-sectional surveys at baseline and after 18 months, comparing outcomes of intervention and control group, through a difference-in-difference method.
We screened 1,531 and 1,233 participants in the intervention and control sites. We observed a significant reduction in mean SBP when comparing before and after measurements in both intervention and control groups, -2.75 mmHg (95% CI -4.33 to -1.18, p=0.001) and -1.67 mmHg (95% CI -3.17 to -0.17, p=0.029), respectively. Among people with hypertension at baseline, SBP was reduced by -14.82 mmHg (95% CI -18.04 to -11.61, p<0.001) in the intervention and -14.05 (95% CI -17.71 to -10.38, p<0.001) at the control site. However, comparing these two groups, we found no difference in changes in mean SBP or hypertension prevalence.
We found significant declines in SBP over time in both intervention and control groups. However, we found no additional effect of a community-based intervention involving awareness campaigns, screening, referral, and treatment. Possible explanations include the beneficial effect of baseline measurements in the control group on behaviour and related BP levels, and the limited success of treatment and suboptimal adherence in the intervention group.
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The objective of this paper is to examine the achievements of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and India Vision 2020 in the context of the slums of Varanasi city. India has been facing the problem of growing urban poverty due to rapid urbanisation. According to the Census of India 2011, about 65 million people live in urban slums, which are overcrowded, polluted, unhygienic, and deprived of basic services. This paper compares the goals and targets of UN MDGs and India Vision 2020 with the status of the slum dwellers of Varanasi city. The study is based on primary data, which includes survey of 150 households of five different slums of Varanasi city. The study reveals that more than 70% people are illiterate, less than 35% of population access government health facilities, only 36% household use tap water, etc. This comparison portrays a pathetic picture of slums and the inabilities to achieve both MDGs and national goals.
Key words: MDGs, India Vision 2020, Slums, Poverty, Quality of life, Varanasi City, India
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Fostering resilience in the face of environmental, socioeconomic, and political uncertainty and risk has captured the attention of academics and decision makers across disciplines, sectors, and scales. Resilience has become an important goal for cities, particularly in the face of climate change. Urban areas house the majority of the world's population, and, in addition to functioning as nodes of resource consumption and as sites for innovation, have become laboratories for resilience, both in theory and in practice. This paper reviews the scholarly literature on urban resilience and concludes that the term has not been well defined. Existing definitions are inconsistent and underdeveloped with respect to incorporation of crucial concepts found in both resilience theory and urban theory. Based on this literature review, and aided by bibliometric analysis, the paper identifies six conceptual tensions fundamental to urban resilience: (1) definition of ‘urban’; (2) understanding of system equilibrium; (3) positive vs. neutral (or negative) conceptualizations of resilience; (4) mechanisms for system change; (5) adaptation versus general adaptability; and (6) timescale of action. To advance this burgeoning field, more conceptual clarity is needed. This paper, therefore, proposes a new definition of urban resilience. This definition takes explicit positions on these tensions, but remains inclusive and flexible enough to enable uptake by, and collaboration among, varying disciplines. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the definition might serve as a boundary object, with the acknowledgement that applying resilience in different contexts requires answering: Resilience for whom and to what? When? Where? And why?
Poverty and governance are both issues high on the agenda of international agencies and governments in the South. With urban areas accounting for a steadily growing share of the world's poor people, an international team of researchers focused their attention on the hitherto little-studied relationship between urban governance and urban poverty. In their timely and in-depth examination of ten cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America, they demonstrate that in many countries the global trends towards decentralization and democratization offer new opportunities for the poor to have an influence on the decisions that affect them. They also show how that influence depends on the nature of those democratic arrangements and decision-making processes at the local level, as well as on the ability of the poor to organize. The study involved interviews with key actors within and outside city governments, discussions with poverty groups, community organizations and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), as well as analyses of data on poverty, services and finance. This book presents insights, conclusions and practical examples that are of relevance for other cities. It outlines policy implications for national and local governments, NGOs and donor agencies, and highlights ways in which poor people can use their voice to influence the various institutions of city governance.
Bibliometric methods are used in multiple fields for a variety of purposes, namely for research evaluation. Most bibliometric analyses have in common their data sources: Thomson Reuters' Web of Science (WoS) and Elsevier's Scopus. This research compares the journal coverage of both databases in terms of fields, countries and languages, using Ulrich's extensive periodical directory as a base for comparison. Results indicate that the use of either WoS or Scopus for research evaluation may introduce biases that favor Natural Sciences and Engineering as well as Biomedical Research to the detriment of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities. Similarly, English-language journals are overrepresented to the detriment of other languages. While both databases share these biases, their coverage differs substantially. As a consequence, the results of bibliometric analyses may vary depending on the database used.
This is the final report (eindrapport) of the national Knowledge for Climate (KfC) research program. The program was set up in 2007 to explore the consequences of climate change for the Netherlands and how they should be managed. To that end, an independent foundation was established with the objective of “promoting evidence-based and practice- driven knowledge about climate in the public interest, including making that knowledge available to the public. The foundation has achieved that objective, together with stakeholders, by organizing and funding research and encouraging the processes of knowledge dissemination and application. Follow-up foundations are: Delta Alliance International, Climate Adaptation Services, Waterbuffer Foundation. The program did not aim to influence regional and local authorities directly. It provided the knowledge needed to improve decision-making regarding long term spatial planning investments. The program provided the tools – for example the Climate Adaptation Atlas – so that local and regional authorities can get to work on adaptation.
Google Scholar (GS), a commonly used web-based academic search engine, catalogues between 2 and 100 million records of both academic and grey literature (articles not formally published by commercial academic publishers). Google Scholar collates results from across the internet and is free to use. As a result it has received considerable attention as a method for searching for literature, particularly in searches for grey literature, as required by systematic reviews. The reliance on GS as a standalone resource has been greatly debated, however, and its efficacy in grey literature searching has not yet been investigated. Using systematic review case studies from environmental science, we investigated the utility of GS in systematic reviews and in searches for grey literature. Our findings show that GS results contain moderate amounts of grey literature, with the majority found on average at page 80. We also found that, when searched for specifically, the majority of literature identified using Web of Science was also found using GS. However, our findings showed moderate/poor overlap in results when similar search strings were used in Web of Science and GS (10–67%), and that GS missed some important literature in five of six case studies. Furthermore, a general GS search failed to find any grey literature from a case study that involved manual searching of organisations' websites. If used in systematic reviews for grey literature, we recommend that searches of article titles focus on the first 200 to 300 results. We conclude that whilst Google Scholar can find much grey literature and specific, known studies, it should not be used alone for systematic review searches. Rather, it forms a powerful addition to other traditional search methods. In addition, we advocate the use of tools to transparently document and catalogue GS search results to maintain high levels of transparency and the ability to be updated, critical to systematic reviews.
The high and volatile food prices that triggered a renewed interest in food security since the 2008–09 crisis are expected to continue because of factors that include the impacts of climate change. Current policy prescriptions focus on food production; however, a broader approach based on food systems is more appropriate as it encompasses all aspects of food production, storage, distribution and consumption, all of which will be affected by climate change and especially by the growing frequency and severity of extreme weather events. As most low-income groups in both rural and urban areas are net buyers of food, access and affordability are central concerns. There is also a need for more attention to urban food security. While more than half of the world’s population now live in urban centres and on average benefit from higher incomes and better living conditions than rural residents, there is also considerable inequality between wealthier groups and the residents of low-income and informal settlements. Low and irregular incomes are the root cause of urban food insecurity, but inadequate housing and basic infrastructure and limited access to services contribute to levels of malnutrition and food insecurity that are often as high if not higher than in rural areas. They also increase exposure and sensitivity to the impacts of climate change and affect the ability to build resilience. Effective policies need to address urban food insecurity in both its income and non-income dimensions, and their impact on gendered disadvantage.
Growing inequalities in Europe, even in the most egalitarian countries, are a major challenge threatening the sustainability of urban communities and the competive-ness of European cities. Surprisingly, though, there is a lack of systematic and representative research on the spatial dimension of rising inequalities. and Vilnius. This introductory chapter outlines the background to this international comparative research and introduces a multi-factor approach to studying socioeconomic segregation. The chapter focuses on four underlying universal structural factors: social inequalities, global city status, welfare regime and the housing system. Based on these factors, we propose a hypothetical ranking of segregation levels in the thirteen case study cities. As the conclusions of this book show, the hypothetical ranking and the actual ranking of cities by segregation levels only match partly; the explanation for this can be sought in context-specific factors which will be discussed in-depth in each of the case study chapters.
A surprisingly huge proportion of medical research still shows poor quality in design, conduct and analysis, leading to far from optimal robustness of findings and validity of conclusions. Research waste remains a problem caused by a number of reasons. Asking the wrong research questions and ignoring the existing evidence are possible preventable ones. Evidence maps are tools that may aid in guiding clinical investigators and help in agenda setting of future research. In this article, we explain how they serve such a goal and outline the steps required to build effective evidence maps.
Nigeria, with a population of about 186 million people (48% living in urban areas) in 2016, is the most populous country in Africa and eighth in the world, and by 2050 it is projected to become the third largest country in the world. This chapter highlights major challenges of rapid urbanization in Nigeria, caused mainly by in-migration of rural dwellers in search of better living conditions and employment opportunities. They include unemployment and urban poverty, social exclusion and crimes, poor housing and slum, inadequate provision of public services and proliferation of the informal sector. Notwithstanding, Nigeria can exploit these urbanization challenges and turn them into opportunities for socioeconomic development. As such, some key opportunities for sustainable urbanization in Nigeria has been discussed: (a) local economic development; (b) promoting urban sustainability; and (c) smart and knowledge city initiative. The chapter concludes with some future research directions.
Bibliometrics is a powerful tool for analyzing knowledge domains and revealing their cognitive-epistemological structure. Different mathematical models and statistical techniques have been proposed and tested to carry out bibliometric analyses and demonstrate their effectiveness in uncovering how fields of research are intellectually structured. These include two hybrid techniques that allow clusters of related documents obtained from a co-citation analysis to be labeled using textual data. This paper reports on the findings of a bibliometric study in which these hybrid techniques are combined to: (1) build and visualize the network of publications shaping the intellectual structure of the smart city research field by considering the first two decades of literature dealing with this subject; (2) map the clusters of thematically-related publications; and (3) reveal the emerging development paths of smart cities that each thematic cluster represents and the strategic principles they embody. The five development paths which the analysis uncovers and the strategic principles each stands on are then compared by reviewing the most recent literature on smart cities. Overall, this bibliometric study offers a systematic review of the research on smart cities produced since 1992 and helps bridge the division affecting this research area, demonstrating that it is caused by the dichotomous nature of the development paths of smart cities that each thematic cluster relates to and the strategic principles they in turn support
This paper reflects critically on the progress made towards implementing Fair Trade gold programs capable of empowering subsistence artisanal miners in developing countries. Drawing on interviews with ‘ethical’ jewellers and officials at certification bodies, the very parties which have conceived and are ultimately driving these initiatives, it is argued that despite being projected as ‘pro-poor’, schemes are not empowering, nor in many cases even targeting, impoverished mining groups. Further analysis reveals that officials at certification bodies are chiefly responsible for this. Many have used stories of poor miners to engage ‘ethical’ jewellers enamoured with the idea of potentially alleviating poverty in developing countries through purchasing gold that can also be traced to the source. The case study reinforces claims that what constitutes ‘fair’ differs markedly throughout the supply chain.
This paper examines journal publications and article citations on the subject of the spatial dimensions of income inequality within the social sciences. A systematic literature review methodology is used to develop a dataset containing 2944 articles published between 1980 and 2014. Analysis reveals that the number of papers soared in the late 1990s with significant differences (1) between papers focusing on the causes versus consequences of inequality; and (2) in the spatial scales studied. Increases in interdisciplinary and multidimensional approaches to understanding regional inequalities are also key features of the literature. Areas for future work on spatial inequality are outlined.
Concentrated urban poverty in the United States is addressed from a dual perspective. The first viewpoint is derived from the social science literature. To advance the existing base of knowledge, reference is made to a specific research program, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. This effort is currently in mid-course of a decade-long study of children from all major racial/ethnic, social class, and neighborhood groups in the city and is demonstrating the negative impacts on children's behavioral and social development of being raised in zones of concentrated poverty. The second perspective views urban poverty in the context of widening in come disparity and through the lens of the economic and social rights accorded to citizens of a democracy. Political leadership is urgently needed to challenge this level of disparity and to acknowledge concentrated urban poverty as an insidious violation of human rights, particularly those of African American children.
As Google Scholar (GS) gains more ground as free scholarly literature retrieval source it’s becoming important to understand its quality and reliability in terms of scope and content. Studies comparing GS to controlled databases such as Scopus, Web of Science (WOS) and others have been published almost since GS inception. These studies focus on its coverage, quality and ability to replace controlled databases as a source of reliable scientific literature. In addition, GS introduction of citations tracking and journal metrics have spurred a body of literature focusing on its ability to produce reliable metrics. In this article we aimed to review some studies in these areas in an effort to provide insights into GS ability to replace controlled databases in various subject areas. We reviewed 91 comparative articles from 2005 until 2016 which compared GS to various databases and especially Web of Science (WOS) and Scopus in an effort to determine whether GS can be used as a suitable source of scientific information and as a source of data for scientific evaluation. Our results show that GS has significantly expanded its coverage through the years which makes it a powerful database of scholarly literature. However, the quality of resources indexed and overall policy still remains known. Caution should be exercised when relying on GS for citations and metrics mainly because it can be easily manipulated and its indexing quality still remains a challenge.
Based on a dataset on Astronomy and Astrophysics, hybrid cluster analyses have been conducted. In order to obtain an optimum solution and to analyse possible issues resulting from the bibliometric methodologies used, we have systematically studied three models and, within these models, two scenarios each. The hybrid clustering was based on a combination of bibliographic coupling and textual similarities using the Louvain method at two resolution levels. The procedure resulted in three clearly hierarchical structures with six and thirteen, seven and thirteen and finally five and eleven clusters, respectively. These structures are analysed with the help of a concordance table. The statistics reflect a high quality of classification. The results of these three models are presented, discussed and compared with each other. For labelling and interpreting clusters, core documents representing the obtained clusters are used. Furthermore, these core documents help depict the internal structure of the complete network and the clusters. This work has been done as part of the international project ‘Measuring the Diversity of Research’ and in the framework a special workshop on the comparative analysis of algorithms for the identification of topics in science organised in Berlin in August 2014.
Lawrence Haddad, Corinna Hawkes and colleagues propose ten ways to shift the focus from feeding people to nourishing them.
In the light of recent research debates on computational social science and Digital Humanities (DH) as meanwhile adolescent disciplines dealing with big data (Reichert, 2014), I strove for answering in which ways Text Mining (TM) applications are able to support Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) in the social sciences in a manner that fruitfully integrates a qualitative with a quantitative perspective. The guiding assumption was, the more modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms enable us to identify patterns of `meaning’ from global contexts of mass data collections, while at the same time preserving opportunities to retrieve identified patterns again in local contexts of single documents, the more they allow for a fruitful integration of qualitative and quantitative text analysis. By combining extraction of qualitative knowledge from text to buttress understanding of social reality with quantification of extracted knowledge structures to infer on their relevancy, utilizing TM for QDA is inherently a mixed method research design.
Background
The relationship between HIV and poverty is complex and recent studies reveal an urban–rural divide that is not well understood. This paper examines the urban–rural disparity in the relationship between poverty and HIV infection in Kenya, with particular reference to possible explanations relating to social cohesion/capital and other moderating factors.
Methods
Multilevel logistic regression models are applied to nationally-representative samples of 13 094 men and women of reproductive age from recent Kenya Demographic and Health Surveys.
Results
The results confirm a disproportionate higher risk of HIV infection among the urban poor, despite a general negative association between poverty and HIV infection among rural residents. Estimates of intra-community correlations suggest lower social cohesion in urban than rural communities. This, combined with marked socio-economic inequalities in urban areas is likely to result in the urban poor being particularly vulnerable. The results further reveal interesting cultural variations and trends. In particular, recent declines in HIV prevalence among urban residents in Kenya have been predominantly confined to those of higher socio-economic status.
Conclusion
With current rapid urbanization patterns and increasing urban poverty, these trends have important implications for the future of the HIV epidemic in Kenya and similar settings across the sub-Saharan Africa region.
How to react to rapid expansion has become an essential issue for most large cities in not only the US, but also in the developing countries like China and India. The authors consider how these Urban Sprawl affect, and are affected by, the rapid population decline of the city center region and consequently followed by urban poverty; and attempt to understand how social and economic changes affect urban poverty and homelessness. Since homelessness is largely about poverty, we can attribute some of its structural causes to this late 20th century capitalist economic predicament. But what are the specific economic reasons for the rise in homelessness within the framework of these general contemporary conditions of poverty, especially in the process of modernization? And what additional structural problems account for homelessness in America today? © 2015 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Between 2000 and 2012, the Santa Isabel area of the Santiago-Centro comuna (municipal district) saw increasing capital concentration in middle-income-oriented, new-build real estate. Whilst large developers devised several ways to pay low land prices to original owner-residents, the average sale price of new apartments rose, reducing the amount of housing options in the area by at least 50% for original low-income residents—a form of exclusionary displacement. In parallel, state regulations intensified the Floor Area Ratio in order to anchor real-estate investment to their territories, substantively leading to development projects with much higher density rates, higher rents, and smaller living spaces. In this article, I draw upon an analysis of 262 land plots that were redeveloped into 65 new high-rise projects and a survey of 195 original households who lived in the still non-redeveloped properties inside the case study area, in order to analyze how Santiago’s high-rise urban renewal (usually) means new-build gentrification led by the state and monopolized by large-scale developers.
Economic crises are often associated with increasing levels of income segregation and income polarization. Poor neighborhoods generally hit more severely, with unemployment levels increasing and income levels dropping more than in better-off neighborhoods. In this article, we study the correlation between economic recession and income segregation in Malmö, Sweden, with focus on development in the regions’ poorest neighborhoods. We compare and contrast these areas’ development during a period of economic crisis (1990–1995) with development during a period characterized by relative economic stability. Our findings suggest that (1) income segregation and income polarization indeed increased during the period of economic crisis; (2) neighborhoods that were already poor before the crisis fared worse than the region in general; and (3) this development was due to both in situ changes and to residential sorting, where the differences in income and employment status between people moving into a neighborhood, those moving out, and those who remained in place were greater during the period of recession compared to the more stable period.
The study analyzed four urban communities in four very different regions: Chawama, in Lusaka, Zambia; Cisne Dos, in Guayaquil, Ecuador; Commonwealth, in Metro Manila, the Philippines; and Angyalfold, in Budapest, Hungary. Although these four case studies revealed interesting contrasts, they also showed important similarities. The findings show that a community's ability to cope with the stress of economic difficulties, is largely affected by its material well-being, as expected. But they also show that a community's coping ability is influenced by its social capital - the trust, reciprocal arrangements, and social networks linking people in the community. Not surprisingly, the study's findings bring out the role of women in vivid relief. Their networks are therefore extremely important as a defense against increased vulnerability and as a basis for action to overcome the conditions of extreme poverty.
The aim of this article is to illustrate the links between daily travel and spatial segregation in Sub-Saharan Africa cities. In a context of rapid demographic growth, unplanned urban sprawl and increasing poverty of the public sector and the population, in Dar Es Salaam and Dakar, like in other large African cities, trips between distant districts are problematic. The case studies highlight differential access to the urban space between the "confirmed pedestrians" and the users of motorised means of transport, and between the residents from the well-off planned and accessible districts and those from the poor unplanned and inaccessible ones. Deficiencies in the supply of basic facilities and in the accessibility to the neighbourhoods reinforce the negative impact of low incomes on daily travel, and encourage the confinement of populations in their neighbourhood with the risk of increasing urban poverty and segregation.
It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Back in the 1960s tackling poverty “in place” meant focusing resources in the inner city and in rural areas. The suburbs were seen as home to middle- and upper-class families affluent commuters and homeowners looking for good schools and safe communities in which to raise their kids. But today’s America is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem, but increasingly a suburban one as well. In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. After decades in which suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, the 2000s marked a tipping point. Suburbia is now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country and more than half of the metropolitan poor. However, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. As Kneebone and Berube cogently demonstrate, the solution no longer fits the problem. The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including shifts in affordable housing and jobs, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. The phenomenon raises several daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they work in more scaled, cross-cutting, and resource-efficient ways to address widespread need. This book embraces that opportunity. Kneebone and Berube paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America offers a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize poverty alleviation and community development strategies and connect residents with economic opportunity. The authors highlight efforts in metro areas where local leaders are learning how to do more with less and adjusting their approaches to address the metropolitan scale of poverty for example, integrating services and service delivery, collaborating across sectors and jurisdictions, and using data-driven and flexible funding strategies. “We believe the goal of public policy must be to provide all families with access to communities, whether in cities or suburbs, that offer a high quality of life and solid platform for upward mobility over time. Understanding the new reality of poverty in metropolitan America is a critical step toward realizing that goal.”.
Although poverty in India remains disproportionately rural at the aggregate level, urban poverty is growing in importance. Efforts to address urban poverty should note its spatial distribution. This paper shows that the incidence of poverty in India’s small towns is markedly higher than in large metropolitan areas. It is also in small and medium-sized towns that a large majority of the urban poor reside. Moreover, access to key services and institutions in small towns lags behind the larger cities. Agglomeration externalities are found to arise at the level of individual towns and cities and likely provide part of the explanation of the city-size poverty relationship, but inequalities in infrastructure access and proximity to a dominant metropolitan area also play a role. Efforts to combat poverty in India’s small towns may also contribute to rural poverty reduction. A small but growing literature points to a causal link from urban to rural poverty reduction. Evidence suggests that the association is stronger if the urban center is a small town than if it is a large city. There is thus an instrumental case for special attention to small towns in urban poverty reduction efforts, alongside the strong intrinsic interest in such a focus.
This book presents a compilation of studies on China’s labour market. These explore institutional and political constraints on the operation of the market, and their changes over time. The book is divided into four parts. Part I studies the Chinese labour and wage system under the planned economy, labour market reforms, their evolution, and their consequences. Part II examines the various aspects of the labour market such as wage structure and segmentation. Part III analyses the rural labour market. Part IV discusses the imperfect labour market.
'Market reform has brought new forms of poverty to urban China, even while the standard of living of most urban residents has greatly improved. This research uses interviews with people in six cities to document their situation and to show how poverty is rooted in the failure of support systems in their neighborhoods and communities. It offers a stark evaluation of a system of inequalities that is only beginning to be addressed by state policy.' © Fulong Wu, Chris Webster, Shenjing He and Yuting Liu 2010. All rights reserved.
Although there is now a large body of empirical research on neighbourhood effects, we know relatively little about the causal mechanisms responsible for relationships between neighbourhood attributes and individual outcomes. A list of 15 potential causal pathways which may lead to neighbourhood effects is given, grouped into four categories: social-interactive mechanisms, environmental mechanisms, geographical mechanisms, and institutional mechanisms. The ultimate goal of neighbourhood effects research is not only to identify which mechanisms are responsible for neighbourhood effects, but also to quantitatively ascertain their relative contributions to the outcome under investigation. A pharmacological metaphor of dosage-response is used to understand how the theoretical mechanisms could be causally linked to individual outcomes. This metaphor refers to questions regarding the composition and the administration of the neighbourhood dosage, and the neighbourhood dosage-response relationship. This chapter concludes that despite the ever growing literature on neighbourhood effects, there is far too little scholarship to make many claims about which causal links dominate for which outcomes for which people in which national contexts and any conclusions on the existence of such effects should be treated as provisional at best. © 2012 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. All rights reserved.
In determining whether a country's higher education system should be expanded, it is important for policymakers first to determine the extent to which high private returns to post-secondary education are an indication of the scarcity of graduates instead of the high unobserved ability of students who choose to attend post-secondary education. To this end, the paper identifies the returns to schooling in urban China using individual-level variation in educational attainment caused by exogenous city-wide disruptions to education during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. For city-cohorts who experienced greater disruptions, children's educational attainment became less correlated with that of their fathers and more influenced by whether their fathers held administrative positions. The analysis calculates returns to college education using data from the China Urban Labor Survey conducted in five large cities in 2001. The results are consistent with the selection of high-ability students into higher education. The analysis also demonstrates that these results are unlikely to be driven by sample selection bias associated with migration, or by alternative pathways through which the Cultural Revolution could have affected adult productivity.