"With economic reforms underway for more than a decade in India, it is interesting to examine the responses of the Indian states to the newer challenges. This book addresses a wide range of issues, such as growth dynamics, income inequality, the fiscal behaviour of the states, the role of the banking sector, and the emerging institutional structure aimed at catering for social banking and strategies for agricultural growth"--Provided by publisher.

This book brings together academics and experts on Turkish network industries. It provides fundamental information on the current developments regarding regulation of the different network industries in Turkey. Turkey has gone through a liberalization process in most of the network industries during the past 20 years. In most of them, independent regulatory authorities have been established, but some network industries are still remaining under the central or local government regulatory regime. As a result, there is now a very complicated regulatory regime in place which makes Turkey's regulatory system difficult to understand for practitioners, academics, lawyers, researchers and investors. This book offers unique insight into Turkey's regulatory regime in various network industries. It also offers a historical background to regulation, a description of the current regulatory regimes, as well as an analysis of the foreseeable evolutions. The book covers all the important network industries in Turkey. No similar book is available on the market to date. Moreover, the book provides an extensive analysis of the current regulatory regimes in the energy, the transport, and the telecommunications industries. This book should be of interest to anyone wishing to understand Turkish regulation and will be very helpful handbook to researchers who are interested in regulation of network industries not only in Turkey but also in other developing countries, as Turkey is quite representative of other emerging countries. Readers will acquire a thorough understanding of the state of play of the Turkish network industries and their regulation.

This book highlights an interdisciplinary terrain where the humanities and social sciences combine with digital methods. It argues that while disciplinary frictions still condition the potential of digital projects, the nature of the urban phenomenon pushes us toward an interdisciplinary and digital future where the primacy of cities is assured.

Water is a key issue on the agenda of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours. The circumstances in which Gaza gained its autonomy leaves it in a disadvantageous position with respect to water, and a deal on the hotly contested issue of the West Bank aquifers will be a protracted process. This book brings together the work of individuals involved directly in the negotiations and experts from various disciplines who have devoted their professional lives to the study of water and its management in the Jordan Basin. It looks at the issue from many different perspectives, offers new ideas and presents a realistic picture for the future.

This book contests the negative portrayal of African immigrants as people who are not valuable members of South African society. They are often perceived as a threat to South Africa and its patrimony, accused of committing crime, taking jobs and competing for resources with South African citizens. Unique in its deployment of a deconstructionist theoretical and analytical framework, this work argues that this is a simplistic portrayal of a complex reality. Inocent Moyo lays bare, not only the failings of an exclusivist narrative of belonging, but also a complex social reality around migration and immigration politics, belonging and exclusion in contemporary South Africa. Over seven chapters he introduces new perspectives on the negative portrayal of African immigrants and argues that to sustain a negative view of them as the 'threatening other' ignores complex people-place-space dynamics. For these reasons, the analytical, empirical and theoretical value of the project is that it broadens the study of migration related contexts in a South African setting. Academics, students, policy makers and activists focusing on the migration and immigration debate will find this book invaluable.

This book demonstrates how local contexts of urbanization and cultures of work are intimately meshed together. Each chapter explores a discrete dimension of the way people organize their working lives in post-industrial cities, taking close account of the social and environmental impact of this balancing act. The book features cross-national and inter-city comparative household level research, highlighting significant contradictions underpinning the nature of production, consumer expectation, work-life balance and urban environmental quality.

This volume of 18 chapters is the work of more than 30 authors, many of whom are natives of the Central Asian region or are researchers who have dedicated a large part of their working lives to studying the development dynamics in this vast and fascinating region. The work focuses on the 20 years since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. But it also traces the attitudes of land users to the land dating from before the late 19th century, when Russian conquest and colonization occurred, and through the upheavals caused by Soviet-style collectivization and sedentarization. The book is rich with new data presented in 68 easy to understand charts/graphs (many in color) and 50 Tables. Information was generated for this book by experts working in-country. It presents for the first time in English a digest of plethora of previously inaccessible Russian reports and scientific literature that will be invaluable for development agencies, including UN, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Islamic Bank as well as to students of this vast and fascinating region who seek up to date and authoritive information."

This book investigates sociological, demographic and geographic aspects of aging in rural and nonmetropolitan areas of the United States. Population aging is one of the most important trends of the 20th and 21st centuries, and it is occurring worldwide, especially in more developed countries such as the United States. Population aging is more rapid in rural than urban areas of the U.S. In 2010, 15 percent of the nonmetropolitan compared to 12 percent of the metropolitan population were 65 years of age and older. By definition rural communities have smaller sized populations, and more limited healthcare, transportation and other aging-relevant services than do urban areas. It is thus especially important to study and understand aging in rural environments. "Rural Aging in 21st Century America" contributes evidence-based, policy-relevant information on rural aging in the U.S. A primary objective of the book is to improve understanding of what makes the experience of rural aging different from aging in urban areas and to increase understanding of the aged change the nature of rural places. The book addresses unique features of rural aging across economic, racial/ethnic, migration and other structures and patterns, all with a focus on debunking myths about rural aging and to emphasize opportunities and challenges that rural places and older people experience."""

What is family farming? How can it help meet the challenges confronting the world? How can it contribute to a sustainable and more equitable development? Not only is family farming the predominant form of agriculture around the world, especially so in developing countries, it is also the agriculture of the future. By declaring 2014 the "International Year of Family Farming," the United Nations has placed this form of production at the center of debates on agricultural development. These debates are often reduced to two opposing positions. The first advocates the development of industrial or company agriculture, supposedly efficient because it follows industrial processes for market-oriented mass production. The second promotes the preservation of family farming with its close links between family and farm. The authors of this book wish to enrich the debates by helping overcome stereotypes - which often manifest through the use of terms such as "small-scale farming, subsistence farming, peasant, etc." Research work has emphatically demonstrated the great adaptability of family farming systems and their ability to meet the major challenges of tomorrow but it has also not overlooked their limitations. The authors explore the choices facing society and possible development trajectories at national and international levels, and the contribution that agriculture will have to make. They call for a recommitment of public policies in favor of family farming in developing countries and stress the importance of planning actions targeted at and tailored to the family character of agricultural models. But, above all, they highlight the need to overcome strictly sectoral rationales, by placing family farming at the core of a broader economic and social project. This book is the result of a collaborative effort led by CIRAD and encapsulates three decades of research on family farming. It will interest researchers, teachers and students, and all those involved in national and international efforts for the development of countries in the South.

'Resilience' has become one of the first fully fledged academic and political buzzwords of the 21st century. Within this context, Geoffrey DeVerteuil proposes a more critically engaged and conceptually robust version, applying it to the conspicuous but now residual clusters of inner-city voluntary sector organisations deemed 'service hubs'. The process of resilience is compared across ten service hubs in three complex but different global inner-city regions - London, Los Angeles and Sydney - in response to the threat of gentrification-induced displacement. DeVerteuil shows that resilience can be about holding on to previous gains but also about holding out for transformation. The book is the first to move beyond theoretical works on 'resilience' and offers a combined conceptual and empirical approach that will interest urban geographers, social planners and researchers in the voluntary sector.

This book presents relevant and timely endogenous procedures for addressing the challenge of transforming ideas into sustainable opportunities in Africa. It explores how Africa could be understood in the context of emerging global realities, providing alternative frameworks that will not just be participatory in conception and practice, but equally show a contextual workability for the varying aspects of the developmental enterprise in Africa. Despite having alternative and less cumbersome sources of funding, with commendable economic growth indices, and several economies among the fastest growing globally, African countries have been unable to transmute related opportunities into sustainable human development outcomes for majority of its citizenry. Over four rich sections the authors cover subjects ranging from environment and natural resource management, to governance, economy and sustainable development. The book continues with a section on Education and Human Development and a case study in transnationalism. The final section discusses crime, conflict and regional dynamics, including highly disputed topics such as forced migration and sex trade. This indispensable resource will be of great use to students and researches globally in fields such as sociology, anthropology, environmental studies, politics and economics with a focus on contemporary Africa, as well as to policy planners and human rights activists invested in the future development of Africa.

Global Overshoot is a multidisciplinary analysis (including history and pre-history) from an ecological and evolutionary perspective of the contemporary world system. This book compares and critiques attitudes held by people with different world views to the hypothetical prospect of large widespread falls in quality of life. It also draws insights from these two analyses to develop and suggest a philosophy of Ecohumanism to people of good will who want to think constructively about the world's converging problems, i.e. think altruistically and 'think like an evolving ecosystem.'

By highlighting the factors that configured the emergence of India as an ICT superpower from the South and limited success of some countries that long since embraced liberal trade regime, this volume highlights the ways to transform the digital divide into digital dividend. Drawing from the detailed case studies of India and five ASEAN countries, it establishes the complementary role of innovation system and trade regime in promoting production and use of ICT and draws lessons for other developing countries that adopted a liberal trade regime to catch up with the ICT revolution.

In this edited volume leading scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds wrestle with social science integration opportunities and challenges. This book explores the growing concern of how best to achieve effective integration of the social science disciplines as a means for furthering natural resource social science and environmental problem solving. The chapters provide an overview of the history, vision, advances, examples and methods that could lead to integration.

The quest for integration among the social sciences is not new. Some argue that the social sciences have lagged in their advancements and contributions to society due to their inability to address integration related issues. Integration merits debate for a number of reasons. First, natural resource issues are complex and are affected by multiple proximate driving social factors. Single disciplinary studies focused at one level are unlikely to provide explanations that represent this complexity and are limited in their ability to inform policy recommendations. Complex problems are best explored across disciplines that examine social-ecological phenomenon from different scales. Second, multi-disciplinary initiatives such as those with physical and biological scientists are necessary to understand the scope of the social sciences. Too frequently there is a belief that one social scientist on a multi-disciplinary team provides adequate social science representation. Third, more complete models of human behavior will be achieved through a synthesis of diverse social science perspectives.

'Morland predicts the future of humanity in 10 illuminating statistics (could the Japanese and Italians now go the way of the dodo?) and looks back to how ebbs and flows of population have shaped history, such as the Soviet Union's plummeting birth rate in the 1960s, which hastened the end of the Cold War.' - The Daily Telegraph 'The Best Books for Summer 2022' The great forces of population change - the balance of births, deaths and migrations - have made the world what it is today. They have determined which countries are superpowers and which languish in relative obscurity, which economies top the international league tables and which are at best also-rans. The same forces that have shaped our past and present are shaping our future. Illustrating this through ten illuminating indicators, from the fertility rate in Singapore (one) to the median age in Catalonia (forty-three), Paul Morland shows how demography is both a powerful and an under-appreciated lens through which to view the global transformations that are currently underway. Tomorrow's People ranges from the countries of West Africa where the tendency towards large families is combining with falling infant mortality to create the greatest population explosion ever witnessed, to the countries of East Asia and Southern Europe where generations of low birth-rate and rising life expectancy are creating the oldest populations in history. Morland explores the geographical movements of peoples that are already under way - portents for still larger migrations ahead - which are radically changing the cultural, ethnic and religious composition of many societies across the globe, and in their turn creating political reaction that can be observed from Brexit to the rise of Donald Trump. Finally, he looks at the two underlying motors of change - remarkable rises in levels of education and burgeoning food production - which have made all these epochal developments possible. Tomorrow's People provides a fascinating, illuminating and thought-provoking tour of an emerging new world. Nobody who wants to understand that world should be without it.

This book presents 18 essays by leading scholars covering mortuary analysis, the archaeology of foraging and agricultural societies, cultural evolution, and archaeological method and theory, which transcend the processual/postprocessual debate in archaeology and provide examples of how archaeologists think about, and go about, studying the past. As archaeology encounters the 21st century, debate over the nature of the discipline dominates professional discourse. Archaeologists are embattled over isms: processualism, postprocessualism, scientism, and humanism are ubiquitous buzzwords in the literature. Yet archaeology is a craft practiced by individuals, learned from and influenced by other individuals. Sometimes a peson, through sheer force of intellectual spirit, rises above the debate to make a mark on the field in ways that cross out schools, paradigms, and factions. It is fitting to look back at the influence one such individual has had on archaeological methods, theory, data collection, and syntheses over the last half century. This volume draws on the experience of students and colleagues who worked with and were strongly influenced by James A. Brown's approach to the past. The volume is divided into five categories, each reflecting one distinctive facet of Brown's affect on archaeology: mortuary analysis, foraging and horticultural societies, complex agriculturalists, proto-historic and historic societies, and method and theory. These diverse categories, with articles by archaeologists of many backgrounds, are drawn together by the threads of Brown's intellectual legacy. Not all authors here are in agreement with Brown's views on their subjects, but all acknolwedge that his work in the area sets a standard that needs to be met if one is to succeed.

This book reviews a series of new urban ideas or themes designed to help make cities more liveable, sustainable, safe and inclusive. Featuring examples drawn from cities all over the world, the various chapters provide critical assessments of each of the various approaches and their potential to improve urban life. New Urbanism: creating new areas based on a more humane scale with neighbourhood cohesion Just Cities: creating more fairness in decision-making so all residents can participate and benefit. Green Cities: helping places become greener with environmental rehabilitation and protection Sustainable Cities: avoiding the waste of resources and harmful pollution in settlements Transition Towns: developing local initiatives for more sustainable actions Winter Cities: making cities in cold climates more comfortable and enjoyable Resilient Cities: strengthening cities to better enable them to withstand natural hazards Creative Cities: supporting cultural industries and attracting talented individuals Knowledge Cities: creating, renewing and spreading knowledge and innovation Safe Cities: ensuring that citizens are better protected against criminal actions Healthy Cities: making improvements in the health of people in cities Festive Cities: rediscovering the utility of festive events in settlements Slow Cities: enhancing locally unique activities, such as local cuisines and community interactions This volume offers a host of approaches designed to give a new direction and focus to planning policies, helping readers to fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of each potential idea. It seeks to solve the many current problems associated with urban developments, making it a valuable resource for university and college students in urban geography, urban planning, urban sociology and urban studies as well as to planners and the general public.

This book presents a compendium of the urban layout maps of 2-mile square downtown areas of more than one hundred cities in developed and developing countries-all drawn at the same scale using high-resolution satellite images of Google Maps. The book also presents analytic studies using metric geometrical, topological (or network), and fractal measures of these maps. These analytic studies identify ordinaries, extremes, similarities, and differences in these maps; investigate the scaling properties of these maps; and develop precise descriptive categories, types and indicators for multidimensional comparative studies of these maps. The findings of these studies indicate that many geometric relations of the urban layouts of downtown areas follow regular patterns; that despite social, economic, and cultural differences among cities, the geometric measures of downtown areas in cities of developed and developing countries do not show significant differences; and that the geometric possibilities of urban layouts are vastly greater than those that have been realized so far in our cities.

Arab entrepreneurs in Israel form part of a traditional, yet peripheral, ethnic minority attempting to integrate into Israel's larger economy. This study, based on extensive fieldwork, focuses on the obstacles that these Arab entrepreneurs and new industrialists must overcome in their development towards industrialization. The research exposes a highly flexible entrepreneurial culture making use of a limited set of opportunities and resources. The work makes a strong contribution to comparative cross-cultural research and theoretical formulations on issues of ethnic entrepreneurship.

The extraordinary stories of low-income women living in Sao Paulo, industrial case studies and the details of three squatter settlements, and communities in the periphery researched in Simone Buechler's book, Labor in a Globalizing City, allow us to better understand the period of economic transformation in Sao Paulo from 1996 to 2003. Buechler's in-depth ethnographic research over a period of 17 years include interviews with a variety of social actors ranging from favela inhabitants to Wall Street bankers. Buechler examines the paradox of a globalizing city with highly developed financial, service, and industrial sectors, but at the same time a growing sector of microenterprises, degraded labor, considerable unemployment, unprecedented inequality, and precarious infrastructure in its low-income communities. The author argues that informalization and low-income women's labor are an integral part of the global economy. Other countries are continuing to use the same kind of neo-liberal economic model even though once again with the latest global financial crisis, it has proven to be detrimental to many workers.

This volume is devoted to the geographical-or spatial-aspects of population research in regional science, spanning spatial demographic methods for population composition and migration to studies of internal and international migration to investigations of the role of population in related fields such as climate change and economic growth. If spatial aspects of economic growth and development are the flagship of the regional science discipline, population research is the anchor. People migrate, consume, produce, and demand services. People are the source and beneficiaries of national, regional, and local growth and development. Since the origins of regional science, demographic research has been at the core of the discipline. Contributions in this volume are both retrospective and prospective, offering in their ensemble an authoritative overview of demographic research within the field of regional science.

The globalized economy depends on local and context-specific factors. This edited volume addresses local-global nexuses via case studies of global interactions in developed and developing areas, and of particular firms' approaches to these issues. The chapters build up a prospectus on how best to create globally capable localities.

This book offers a unique contribution to the burgeoning field of Chinese historical geography. Urban transformation in China constitutes both a domestic revolution and a world-historical event. Through the exploration of nine urban sites of momentous change, over an extended period of time, this book connects the past with the present, and provides much-needed literature on city growth and how they became complex laboratories of prosperity. The first part of this book puts Chinese urban changes into historical perspective, and probes the relationship between nation and city, focusing on Shanghai, Beijing and Changchun. Part two deals with the relationship between history and modernity, concentrating on Tunxi, a traditional trade center of tea, New Villages in Shanghai and street names in Taipei and Shanghai. Part three showcases the complexities of urban regeneration vis-a-vis heritage preservation in cities such as Datong, Tianjin and Qingdao. This book offers an innovative interdisciplinary and international perspective, which will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese urban studies, as well Chinese politics and society.

The 'Year' That Changed How We View the North This book is about a new theoretical approach that transformed the field of Arctic social studies and about a program called International Polar Year 2007-2008 (IPY) that altered the position of social research within the broader polar science. The concept for IPY was developed in 2003-2005; its vision was for researchers from many nations to work together to gain cro- disciplinary insight into planetary processes, to explore and increase our understanding of the polar regions, the Arctic and Antarctica, and of their roles in the global system. IPY 2007-2008, the fourth program of its kind, followed in the footsteps of its predecessors, the first IPY in 1882-1883, the second IPY in 1932-1933, and the third IPY (later renamed to 'International Geophysical Year' or IGY) in 1957-1958. All earlier IPY/IGY have been primarily geophysical initiatives, with their focus on meteorology, atmospheric and geomagnetic observations, and with additional emphasis on glaciology and sea ice circulation. As such, they excluded socio-economic disciplines and polar indigenous people, often deliberately, except for limited ethnographic and natural history collection work conducted by some expeditions of the first IPY. That once dominant vision biased heavily towards geophysics, oceanography, and ice-sheets, left little if any place for people, that is, the social sciences and the humanities, in what has been commonly viewed as the 'hard-core' polar research.

This book explores new forms and modalities of relations between people and space that increasingly affect the life of the city. The investigation takes as its starting point the idea that in contemporary societies the loss of our relationship with place is a symptom of a breakdown in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This in turn has caused a crisis not only in taste, but also in our sense of beauty, our aesthetic instinct, and our moral values. It has also led to the loss of our engagement with the landscape, which is essential for cities to function. The authors argue that new, fertile forms of interaction between people and space are now happening in what they call the 'intermediate space', at the border of "urban normality" and those parts of a city where citizens experiment with unconventional social practices. This new interaction engenders a collective conscience, giving a new and productive vigor to the actions of individuals and also their relations with their environment. These new relations emerge only after we abandon what is called the "therapeutic illusion of space", which still exists today, and which binds in a deterministic manner the quality of civitas, the associative life of people in the city, to the quality of urban space. Projects for the city should, instead, have as their keystone the notion of social action as a return to a critical perspective, to a courageous acceptance of social responsibility, at the same time as seeking the generative structures of urban life in which civitas and urbs again acknowledge each other.