Search results for "Social and Economic Geography"
showing 10 items of 427 documents
Refugee Social Work Positioned Between Transnationalization, State Services and Volunteering: A Review from the German Context
2018
Social work has always been basically organized at the local and national levels. Nevertheless, in the face of globalization, social work has to be reconsidered far beyond national boundaries, because its clients’ social life worlds extend beyond local and state borders. This chapter analyzes the state of the art in the field of volunteering, refuge and social work and argues that due to its double mandate, social work could act as a bridge between state services and initiatives of the civil society and offer an insight into the ambiguities of cooperation between volunteering activities and professional social work using selected examples.
Cluster development and regional industrial restructuring: agency and asset modification
2021
The paper presents a novel theoretical framework to analyse the emergence and growth of industrial clusters. The framework focuses on the role of change agency for the modification of assets that i...
Social Space for Self-Organising: An Exploratory Study of Timebanks in Finland and in the UK
2018
The article examines the challenges to self-organisation and upscaling of alternative economies from the viewpoint of defending and negotiating social space. Timebanks in Finland and the UK are presented as examples, analysing the difference of defending such social space in the contexts of a traditional welfare state (in the case of Finland) and an austerity-driven government with a “Big Society” ideology (in the case of UK). Both systems of government present different kinds of pressures on timebanks, pushing them to a given ontological categories and to action in accordance with pre-defined political goals. This difference, along with timebank reactions and the question of prospects of o…
Reestimating a minimum acceptable geocoding hit rate for conducting a spatial analysis
2019
Geocoding consists in converting a textual description of a location into coordinates. Hence, geocoding a dataset of events has to be carried out before performing a spatial analysis of some data. ...
Smart city. Four approaches to the concept of understanding
2020
The paper analyzes the rhetoric of the smart city (SC) concept in order to recognize, categorize, and describe different perspectives of understanding the notion. Four approaches to the SC concept were isolated: three affirmative, and one rejecting. The approaches present a different understanding of the SC and indicate different elements creating urban ‘smartness.’ Despite differences, there is one common goal in every affirmative approach: to improve the quality of urban life. It is achieved through activities covering five dimensions distinguished within affirmative approaches. Together they can serve, i.e.,as a framework for SC case study analyses.
From fractal urban pattern analysis to fractal urban planning concepts
2014
International audience; Fractal geometry can be used to develop a multiscale approach toinvestigate the spatial organization of urban fabrics. First, the concepts behindfractal reference models are introduced so as to provide a better understandingof the results obtained from empirical analyses of urban patterns. Then, differentmethods for conducting fractal analyses are presented and the results obtained forurban patterns are discussed. It turns out that, despite their irregular appearance,urban patterns are often organized by an inherent fractal order principle, at leastacross a certain range of scales. More detailed analysis of the findings reveals linksbetween these fractal properties a…
Performing transnational family with the affordances of mobile apps : a case study of Polish mothers living in Finland
2020
Affordances provided by digital technologies and mobile apps (WhatsApp, Skype, Messenger) help in maintaining familyhood. These mobile apps enable the creation of in-app family groups. They also afford image sharing, which is used for phatic purposes. Digital connectivity provides the illusions of togetherness and belonging, and allows for performing family in a transnational context (emotional transnationalism). However, it also generates the feelings of guilt through infrequent communication. In the auto-driven visual elicitation interviews, the study looks at family constellations and technologically mediated communication from the perspective of five Polish mothers living in Finland. Ap…
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…
Communicating with home, coping without home – Trusting to the mediating capacity of blogging
2021
Abstract In the early 21st century, blogs exploded onto the digital media scene and soon became a popular means of travel writing. However, rather than considering blogs as a straightforward tool to simply share stories and experiences, in this article, we set out to explore the role of blogs as a mediating technology (Verbeek, 2005a), especially during difficult times abroad. By analysing the blogs of expatriate Australians who were volunteers in Bangladesh in 2014/2015 as well as interviews with the bloggers, we are able to show how the blogs' affordances inform the coping process, highlighted, in particular, in an active and highly reflective engagement with the blog's unique situatednes…
Troubling encounters: Exclusion, racism and responses of male African students in Poland
2016
This paper examines the experiences of a group of *African students in Poland, with the aim of understanding the affective and practical coping tactics they employ in response to social exclusion and racism. The analysis of coping strategies follows an in-depth overview of experiences of racialisation, othering and racial discrimination in both institutional and ordinary, day-to-day encounters. A significant body of literature and research highlights ways in which racism functions through material practices as well as overt and veiled dynamics of exclusion and territorialism. The study sheds light on the bodily nature of racism, highlighting the recurrent practices, contexts and interaction…