Search results for " regional planning."
showing 10 items of 536 documents
Quality of life ranking of Spanish cities: A non-compensatory approach
2021
Abstract Urban areas are hubs of economic activity, but also consumption centers where a high quality of life may attract human capital and increase prospects of economic growth and well-being. We rank 73 Spanish cities on the basis of 35 individual indicators covering three basic facets of quality of life: socio-economic performance, general livability conditions, and residents' health status. We reject the conventional approach of compensability among different quality of life dimensions in favor of a Condorcet-inspired non-compensability approach. We obtain three partial composite indicators, one for each of the aforementioned dimensions, and a global indicator that synthesizes the three…
Normality against Sustainability - Mobility practices of well-to-do households
2016
By focusing on the daily and leisure mobility of well-to-do people in Finland, this study contributes to the discordant discussion on the sustainability of well-to-do consumers, whose consumption levels are relatively the highest, and concerns whether they are both aware of environmental matters and willing to pay for environmental protection. The interview analysis revealed that, despite general knowledge of environmental issues, sustainability is not relevant to daily practices, and the well-to-do studied here are not to any significant degree engaged in sustainable mobility practices, but in a complex organization of daily life. This study also shows that, while there is a shared underst…
The impact of COVID-19 on alternative and local food systems and the potential for the sustainability transition: Insights from 13 countries
2021
The COVID-19 pandemic has been a major stress test for the agri-food system. While most research has analysed the impact of the pandemic on mainstream food systems, this article examines how alternative and local food systems (ALFS) in 13 countries responded in the first months of the crisis. Using primary and secondary data and combining the Multi-Level Perspective with social innovation approaches, we highlight the innovations and adaptations that emerged in ALFS, and how these changes have created or supported the sustainability transition in production and consumption systems. In particular, we show how the combination of social and technological innovation, greater citizen involvement,…
The costs of putting Valencia on the map: the hidden side of regional entrepreneurialism, ‘creative city’ and strategic projects
2018
Strategic projects based on culture and sports have been one of the vectors of regional development since the 1990s. Accordingly, local and regional governments have drawn up entrepreneurial strate...
Urban Development and Cultural Policy “White Elephants”: Barcelona and Valencia
2015
AbstractThe importance of culture in defining new models of local development has been increasingly emphasized. However, less attention has been paid to the influence of local development models on local cultural policy. This article will focus on analysing two cities that have used culture as a central element in their economic and urban development. In both cases, they have followed different strategies but the two have finally finished generating two “white elephants”: the Universal Forum of Cultures in the case of Barcelona and the City of Arts and Sciences in the case of Valencia. From a comparison of the two cases, the paper analyses the causes of this urban phenomenon, which combines…
Aproximación a la Geografía del despilfarro en España: balance de las últimas dos décadas
2018
Este trabajo pretende ser una primera aproximación a la dimensión del despilfarro de recursos públicos en infraestructuras en España desde 1995 hasta la actualidad en los distintos niveles de gobierno. A partir de algunas precisiones sobre los conceptos de despilfarro y corrupción, se analiza, de una parte, la inversión y los sobrecostes en infraestructuras innecesarias impulsadas y ejecutadas por la Administración General del Estado en el ámbito de sus competencias, y de otra, infraestructuras, proyectos, eventos e inversiones fallidas, vacías o infrautilizadas acometidas por las Comunidades Autónomas y los gobiernos locales. Se abordan los déficit de marco institucional y de gobernanza te…
Spatial Localization in Manufacturing: A Cross-Country Analysis
2009
This paper employs a homogenous firms' database to investigate industry localiza- tion in European countries. More specifically, we compare, across industries and countries, the predictions of two of the most popular localization indices, i.e., the Ellison and Glaeser index (Ellison and Glaeser, 1997) and the Duranton and Over- man index (Duranton and Overman, 2005). We find that, independently from the index used, localization is a pervasive phenomenon in all countries studied, but the degree of localization is very uneven across industries in each country. Furthermore, we find that the two indices significantly diverge in predicting the intensity of the forces generating localization with…
Competing economies of worth in a multiagency music and reconciliation partnership: The Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation (2009-2018)
2020
The Sri Lanka Norway Music Cooperation (2009–2018) was launched to ‘stimulate the performing arts in Sri Lanka, thus contributing to the peace and reconciliation process’ in the aftermath of almost three decades of civil war between the Tamil minority and Sinhala majority populations of the island. Funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the project had many local and international stakeholders, from artists and civil society organisations, to government institutions, to a general public eager for enrichment through arts and culture. But despite high engagement and financial investment, the achievements of the SLNMC were generally unremarkable and short-term. This article argue…
Is culture-led redevelopment relevant for rural planners? The risk of adopting urban theories in rural settings
2016
In the paper, the author argues that cultural strategies and theories about urban planning may be irrelevant or even counterproductive outside urban and suburban contexts. In many rural settings the problem is not the destruction of the cultural heritage or how to counterbalance the influence from corporate interests, but rather the absence of such interests in the first place. From a study of two rural municipalities in southern Norway, the author demonstrates that culture-led strategies may be more of a distraction than an instrument for creating economic growth. Measured by the common goals for rural development in Norway, the cultural strategy has only been a success in one of the cases…
Socio-economic differentiation in the post-communist rural Baltics : the case of three kolkhozes
2016
ABSTRACTThis paper uses longitudinal quantitative data to examine socio-economic differentiation in the rural Baltic areas after decollectivization. It argues that the rural social structure in the post-Soviet Baltics is best determined by two criteria: source of income (income from farming entrepreneurship or income from salaries) and land holdings. Four rural groups are identified: people getting their main income from farming can be differentiated into large landowners engaged in the commercial production of agricultural goods and people with small or medium-sized farms; and people earning their main income from wages can be separated into people with no farming activities and people who…