Urbanisation

During the last thirty-five years the capital of Greece has suffered from an enormous internal immigration. Its population has overpassed the five millions and today almost the half population of Greece is squeezed in Athens metropolitan area. Because of the significant increase of population, the urban expansion in the basin of Athens was also excessive and in some cases catastrophic.

New work in anthropology, archaeology and psychology shows just how similar we are to ancient hunter-gatherers, and what this means for a more radical understanding of 21st century cities. Follow link:
https://medium.com/whose-society-whose-cohesion/rethinking-cities-from-the-ground-up-73d92059b15f

Stories about depopulated towns in Mediterranean Europe have become commonplace in popular media. These sites are depicted as potential tourist havens or as dystopic locations that expose the material consequences of environmental change and modernisation. In academic scholarship, the emptying of these landscapes is frequently described as an inevitable outcome of trajectories that trace back to early-modern urbanisation. The historiography of migration, for example, continues to portray emptied towns as peripheries, opting for an approach that follows migrants and the impacts of migration out of and away from their places of origin. Few studies have located their subjects in the towns from which emigrants departed. From this gap, a transdisciplinary conversation is emerging (for example, see De Rossi 2018, del Molino 2019, Romero Renau 2018). Yet, rigorous studies of depopulation as historical process remain absent.

This panel explores how depopulated landscapes challenge knowledge about attachments between communities and their material environments. As debates about environmental change and the Anthropocene reach wide publics, scholars in the humanities and social sciences have begun examining the nexus of human and natural entanglements in new ways. Environmental history has a longer genealogy, but it tends to concentrate on agrarian political economy or large-scale industrialisation in 19th and 20th century rural contexts. Moreover, the epistemological underpinnings of this body of scholarship generally maintain strict divisions between ‘social’ and ‘natural’ histories. Emergent research in environmental change, however, questions this divide, and in doing so invites scholars to rethink the connected histories of migration and environment in the modern period.

This panel aims to examine depopulation by attending to relations between people and land within emptying landscapes. We invite papers from various disciplines that consider or connect any of the following methodological and historiographical questions:

Through which archives and material landscapes might we access histories of depopulation?
Which political and cultural practices are rendered visible by earthquakes, floods and landslides and other 'natural events' which punctuate histories of depopulation?
How do such events function as vehicles for social and political transformation?
How are emptying towns shaped parallel to urban expansion, bureaucratisation and other transregional movements?
What materials re-inhabit abandoned rural spaces?
In what ways do material histories connecting communities and land challenge understandings of European and Mediterranean centres and peripheries?

Before 30 September, please send up to 250-word abstract and a few biographical lines to: depopulatinglandscapes@gmail.com

Panel organiser: Joseph John Viscomi, Birkbeck, University of London
http://www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-staff/academic-staff/dr-joseph-viscomi

Urbanization is increasing worldwide and is happening at a rapid rate in China in line with economic development. Urbanization can lead to major changes in freshwater environments through multiple chemical and microbial contaminants. We assessed the impact of urbanization on physicochemical characteristics and microbial loading in canals in Suzhou, a city that has experienced rapid urbanization in recent decades. Nine sampling locations covering three urban intensity classes (high, medium and low) in Suzhou were selected for field studies and three locations in Huangshan (natural reserve) were included as pristine control locations. Water samples were collected for physicochemical, microbiological and molecular analyses. Compared to medium and low urbanization sites, there were statistically significant higher levels of nutrients and total and thermotolerant coliforms (or fecal coliforms) in highly urbanized locations. The effect of urbanization was also apparent in the abundances of human-associated fecal markers and bacterial pathogens in water samples from highly urbanized locations. These results correlated well with land use types and anthropogenic activities at the sampling sites. The overall results indicate that urbanization negatively impacts water quality, providing high levels of nutrients and a microbial load that includes fecal markers and pathogens.

In the EU-China 2020 Strategic Agenda for Cooperation a whole chapter addressed urbanisation. Both sides resolved to improve the governing framework of the EU-China Partnership, support the development of numerous relevant city pairings and steer EU-China urbanisation cooperation by the Joint Steering Committee of the EU-China Urbanisation Partnership.
A few years later officials from the European Commission and European External Action Service express feelings of disappointment with the results of the EU’s actions aimed at promotion of sub-state cooperation with China and the urbanisation disappeared from the top of the EU-China political agenda. In the EU’s Strategy towards China, published in 2016, the urbanisation partnership was not even mentioned. The Joint Steering Committee of the EU-China Urbanisation Partnership has never been established.
The paper answers the question why the urbanisation dialogue with China has not developed as planned. The author also sketched the list of activities that should be undertaken if the EU wants to benefit from the development of city-to-city contacts with China.

http://news.nus.edu.sg/sites/default/files/resources/news/2018/2018-12/2018-12-18/SEA-st-18dec-pA16.pdf

Dr Stefan Huebner of the Asia Research Institute at NUS discussed the pros and cons of floating cities which has been mooted as a solution to the challenges of urbanisation and climate change.

Urban development, and particularly the improvement of basic services delivery, is still approached in mostly technical terms by international development actors and municipalities of the Global South. Sanitation planning, for instance, remains the realm of engineers despite decades of evidence that conventional approaches focusing on infrastructure upgrading have failed to tackle socio-environmental challenges. Against this background, this paper explores sanitation planning in Mandalay, the second largest city of Myanmar. Here, the Asian Development Bank and a French consulting firm have seized the opportunity created by the country’s recent opening to embark with the municipality on a multi-million dollar scheme: the Mandalay Urban Services Improvement Project (MUSIP). Drawing upon insights from critical development studies, the paper argues that the MUSIP can be interpreted as an ‘anti-politics machine’ that ignored local needs and proposed disputable solutions to local sanitation challenges. The paper further explores how this machine jeopardised urban development in Mandalay more generally, and was eventually challenged by the municipality. The paper concludes that the case is not unique and illustrates how urban development is today being reshaped throughout Myanmar, while it also shows the continued relevance of the ‘anti-politics’ framework to understand contemporary urban development assistance projects.

Millet did share Baudelaire’s belief in both the need and appeal of depicting and canonizing the tumultuous present. He had been educated with the Bible and Virgil, and had read widely from Friedrich Grimm to Charlotte Bronte; upon his arrival in Paris, he educated himself with Vasari Le Vite dei Pittori and the masters at the Louvre. He could have easily produced Classical and mythological images, in respect to the tradition; but while his art was never free from citations and mythological associations (Pollock defines his art as capable of ranging from Fragonard’s pastoralism to “the darkest moments of Spanish art”), the figures that inhabit it are no Aeneas or Christ.  He wrote to Sensier, “One must be able to make use of the trivial to express the sublime, there is the real force”. Indeed he populated his paintings with nameless figures, and became by choice a painter of peasants, as his obituary defined him.

L'extension urbaine de l'Ile-de-France et de Londres augmente la vulnérabilité de ces deux agglomérations, face aux risques d’inondation. La réalisation d'équipements de lutte contre les crues, décidée par les pouvoirs publics, apporte un faux sentiment de sécurité aux habitants, et encourage les collectivités territoriales à étendre les zones constructibles - et notamment à construire des logements - sur d'anciens terrains inondables. Ces zones pourraient bien être inondées à nouveau, avec toutes les conséquences socio-économiques et humaines que cela impliquerait, en cas de crues majeures, comme celle de Paris en 1910 ou celle de Londres en 1928.

ABSTRACT Continuing urbanisation is triggering an increase in multi-titled housing internationally. This trend has given rise to a substantial research interest in the social consequences of higher density living. Fewer enquiries have been directed to examining how property title subdivisions generate social issues in multi-titled housing. This is a significant gap in the literature, as the tensions inherent in multi-title developments have significant implications for individuals, developments and entire metropolitan areas. This article employs a life cycle framework to examine the profound operational and governance challenges that are associated with the fusion of private lot ownership with common property ownership. The article calls for a more explicit recognition of these challenges by academics, policymakers, practitioners and the broader community.

A recent Nature article by Meredith Reba et al. has performed a valuable service in spatialising the data provided in Tertius Chandler's Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth, and George Modelski's World Cities-3000 to 2000. The purpose of this essay is to explore the large scale urbanisation data for Eurasia in graphical form. Beginning with the urban revolution of the third millennium BCE the essay traces the development of large cities through to 1600 CE. The essay demonstrates that large scale urbanisation only began in northern and western Europe under the influence of the Roman Empire and was soon in retreat. Large cities did not appear in Europe again until the Islamic Empire extended into Spain. While large scale urbanisation continued elsewhere, urban centres in Europe were overwhelmingly small. When large scale urbanisation finally took off in Europe it was as part of a more general upsurge in urbanisation across Eurasia. Even as late as 1600 CE northern and western Europe lagged behind the eastern end of the Eurasian continent in terms of large scale urbanisation.

After the implementation of economic reforms and opening-up policies in China, foreign direct investment flowed into the country, resulting in increasing demand for labour. Although the Chinese government eased migration controls, the hukou system was not abolished. The free movement of workers within the country was gradually made possible thanks to the removal of a number of obstacles that had completely prevented intercity mobility until then. Industrialization sparked off massive migration to the cities and gave birth to a new social class, the migrant worker, without whom this industrialization could have never occurred.
However, even though China’s urbanization rate increased from 29 per cent in 1995 to 52.57 per cent in 2012,  only 35 per cent of the urban population is registered under an urban permanent residence permit or hukou. Rural workers are usually referred to as ‘migrant workers’ (nongmin gong). Urbanization in China has for this reason been termed a ‘peri-urbanization’ situation.

As one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, China is experiencing the largest scale of urbanisation in
human history. More and more land is required to support this massive urbanisation. However, rural land acquisition
and compensation to the changes in farmers’ household registration (hukou) are complex issues in the process of
urbanisation under the dual land tenure between city and rural areas in China. Furthermore, local government has
been under increasing financial pressure after the tax sharing system was implemented in 1994. To raise funds and
develop urban construction, various cities have undertaken different strategies of land development during their ongoing
urbanisation, which is also discussed in this study. Urbanisation is a process of expanding urban space with a
view to develop the land efficiently. Therefore, the objective of this study is to introduce the dual land system in
China, the evolution of farmers' collective land ownership, and the process of governmental land acquisition.
Subsequently, we will examine the case of the case of Shanghai Pudong New Area, which develops land with an
insufficient financial support and its corresponding solutions. Finally, the authors highlight problems in the process
of land acquisition and land development.

This working paper examines the evolution of Chinese cities and the challenges they are currently facing. It aims to identify possible patterns of urbanisation in the next forty years. The first part analyses the transformation of Chinese cities as a consequence of the economic policies i􀅵ple􀅵e􀅶ted 􀇁ithi􀅶 the 􀄐ou􀅶t􀆌􀇇. The autho􀆌s a􀆌gue that the e􀄐o􀅶o􀅵i􀄐 􀆌efo􀆌􀅵 has a􀄐􀄐ele􀆌ated Chi􀅶a􀍛s urbanisation. Other factors of this massive urbanisation include the improvement of transport infrastructures and the transfo􀆌􀅵atio􀅶 of Chi􀅶a􀍛s i􀅶dust􀆌ies. The reform of the tax system between central and local authorities in 1994 is also examined, and its consequences on urbanisation, and its limitations. Based on this analysis, the second part introduces the possible strategies China may adopt for the development of its cities. The objective of these policies will be mainly to control the path of urbanisation to prevent the emergence of super large city and encourage the creation of city networks. Future urban policies will also need to tackle such issues as rural flight and environment protection.