Due to the inappropriate planning and explosive population growth in urban areas, especially in developing countries, sustainable and disaster-safe urbanization has become the most important challenge for governments. Urbanization presents benefits in different ways but has led simultaneously to changes in land use/land cover (LULC), impacting soil quality, runoff, surface temperature, water quality, and promoting climate change. The environmental implications of LULC changes cannot be understood well enough to take precautions without the knowledge of LULC change. This reality is the driving force behind my research, which focuses on impacts of urbanization on flood and soil erosion hazards in Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul is the biggest city in Turkey with its almost 15.000.000 population. In 1999 the Marmara earthquake destroyed the city especially the newly developed zones. Every year Istanbul suffers also from flood damages. Istanbul has been experiencing uncontrolled migration, chiefly from rural areas, since the economic reform policies took place in the second half of the 20th century. These policies forced the city to expand towards the agricultural land and to the coastal areas. Istanbul has been faced with illegal housing and uncontrolled development since then. This development has produced significant decreases inproductive agricultural lands and created more impervious areas. Infrastructure development has not matched the rate of the population increase and uncontrolled urbanization, making the city vulnerable increasingly to natural disasters. This dissertation aims to understand the impacts of urbanization on flood and erosion hazards in Istanbul by examining changes in the city using remote sensing (RS) and geographical information systems (GIS) methods. LULC was examined first: Two change detection methods were applied to choose the best performer for Istanbul. The post-classification comparison (PCC) method produced better results than the principal component analysis (PCA). PCC utilized 1984, 1997, 2001, 2007 and 2010 Landsat images of the study area. These Landsat images were corrected atmospherically and radiometrically using COST Model (Markham and Barker, 1986). After the corrections geometric rectification was performed with the help of 1987 topographic map, 1995 orthophotos, 2005 GPS data. Location and nature of the change were derived for the time periods. Results show that since 1984, agricultural land have been replaced increasingly by urbanization. Flooding and related soil erosion are both natural events. Yet these events can be hazardous; they can harm/destroy lives and property. In recent years these events have become disasters for Istanbul. We investigated the role of urban growth in such disasters. To understand the urbanization and flood relation better, flood events for each time period were examined using LULC change, runoff information and watershed analysis. Soil erosion events occur slowly and in Istanbul they do not happen frequently (yearly) as with flooding. But some of the locations of erosion that occurred in the past are now urbanized areas. It is thus important to understand how the built environment affects soil erosion. We applied the Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (RUSLE) method for each year in the time series. Prior erosion locations digitized from General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration were compared to predicted locations. The resultant maps indicates that European side of Istanbul is more prone to erosion than Anatolian side.

This study analyzes the relationship between the access to capital and the individual's construction of gender as presented in six Latin American cinematic depictions from Argentina, Brazil and Mexico that focus the point of view on young women in the urban space. David Harvey's theory on the urbanization of consciousness is used to analyze the females' relationship to family, class, community and state in terms of how each of these elements will impact the access to capital. The interaction with these factors determine that capital will also impact the construction of gender in the city-space. The films analyzed are as follows: Perfume de Violetas (2000) directed by Maryse Sistach, Àngel de fuego (1991) directed by Dana Rotberg Un día de suerte (2002) directed by Sandra Gugliotta, Hoy y mañana (2006) by Alejandro Chomsky, Uma Vida em Segredo (2001) by Suzana Amaral and Antônia (2006), by Tata Amaral. Film theory, feminist film theory, and gender studies are applied in the analysis of films.

No description available.

Most of the arable land in the lowlands of Lesotho including Maputsoe is under infrastructural development of residential settlements, large scale industries, roads and slum settlements which includes shacks and roadside spaza shops. These settlements have large human populations that derive their livelihood through wide range of activities. These activities comprised of subsistence agriculture in the form of crop production, livestock and vegetable production, formal work in both primary and secondary labour market, informal work such as niche markets in the service sector, petty commodity production and others. This thesis attempts to shed light on the impact of urban development on household livelihood strategies in the lowlands of Lesotho with specific focus to Maputsoe town. Although literature review indicates livelihood and urbanisation as two broad subjects that need special research on their own, the aim of this research focuses on impact of urbanisation on livelihood strategies. To achieve this the study looks at the activities entitled to households to generate livelihood as well as social and economic characteristics determining household livelihood strategies. To determine whether urban development has an effect to household livelihood strategies, the study compares household livelihood strategies in urban household sample (Maputsoe) to rural household sample (Fobane). The basis for choosing these two settlements was based on the understanding that household perceptions and opinions on impact of urbanisation on livelihoods will be different since Maputsoe is located in urban and Fobane in the rural area. To gather household perceptions, survey was conducted in both urban and rural area. Survey questions were formulated so as to determine factors affecting livelihood strategies as well as activities entitled to households to generate livelihood strategies. The analysis of results suggests three mam points influencing household livelihood strategies (they include household characteristics and social structure among both urban and rural households in the sample. They further include opportunities to employment among urban and rural households in a sample as well household assets among both urban and rural households. They show that both two samples are liable to less diverse livelihood strategies but due to conducieve environment favouring urban location. Maputsoe narrowly has more livelihood strategies per household than did Fobane. The results further prove the contention that urban development is likely to affect household livelihood strategies negatively or positively. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2001.

<p>This dissertation examines the conjuncture of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and migrant social life in the urban space of Beijing as a problematic of what Foucault called biopower, where distinct logics of market and state power deploy techniques of civil society and culture in the form of public-private partnerships. The unique effect of this conjuncture is an expanding logic of power that obfuscates lines of antagonism between capital and labor, requiring new theoretical and methodological insight into how power, resistance, and antagonism might be conceived in the biopolitical era. </p><p>Drawing on recent work on biopower and new theories of antagonism and subjectivity, I argue (following Badiou's work) that both power and resistance must be articulated in their divided tendencies, which allows us to work through how certain tendencies may be contradictory and complementary, and to redraw the lines of antagonism at the level of subjectivity in terms of these divided tendencies. These lines of antagonism don't fall between public/private, market/state, or civil society/state, but along a process by which subjectivities are produced and sustained at a "distance" from the logic of their placement in society, or integrated into power by various strategies of civil society and culture. The practices and theoretical productions of one migrant cultural organization in Beijing, whose project centers on the production of new migrant subjectivity and culture in the transformation of self and society, provides insight into how we might conceive of politics as new forms of "distance" from the logic of biopower.</p><p>Through over twelve months of intensive fieldwork from 2010-2011 and follow up trips the following year on the intersection between Corporate Social Responsibility and migrant social life in Beijing, I trace the techniques by which antagonistic subjectivity is intervened upon. First, I examine the surrounding discourses, logics, and conditions of knowledge production on culture that inform the projects of migrant subjectivity from a historical perspective, and reveal a theoretical impasse in the displacement and disavowal of revolutionary culture to grapple with how to re-think antagonistic contradictions in the pervading market logic of difference. The continuation of this impasse into the biopolitical era is brought into focus through the state and market turn to "culture industries" that include, mirror, and delimit migrant social life in Beijing. Problematizing the rise of self-articulated migrant subjectivity and migrant culture amidst these public-private projects, I then turn to the practices of one migrant organization whose project draws upon a legacy of struggle for self-organized and self-run migrant collective practices to successfully confront and block a situation of forced demolition and displacement. Analyzing how elements from state, market, and "civil society" interacted through public-private partnerships in the situation of daily migrant struggles, I identify the importance of the rise of Corporate Social Responsibility in the urban space of Beijing and the growth of biopolitical practices of intervention upon the migrant issue. I argue that the effect of the diffusion of Corporate Social Responsibility as a social practice is to enroll migrants as active participants in a social life that makes their subjectivities and productive activities visible to the public sphere. Lines of antagonism can thus be drawn by taking up distinctions between subjectivities oriented toward "the public," "self-governance," and the CSR "community," versus collective self-organizing. I conclude by arguing that if biopower seeks to mirror practices of resistance and power by drawing upon the self-activities of cooperative subjects, then thinking about the self-organized and self-run migrant organization as a new form of "distance" may shed light on how antagonism and political struggle might be redefined today.</p> / Dissertation

This study examines the relationship between baseflow and urbanization over time with the help of spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems. The urbanization parameters used were population and urban land use. Five urban and three non-urban streams were chosen for analysis in the state of Georgia. Four percentile baseflows for each stream were identified and analyzed for trends over time. A correlation analysis was also run to determine how baseflow varies as a function of urbanization. According to the trend analysis, the baseflows over time were considered stable or had no statistically significant trend. The correlation analysis between baseflow and urbanization revealed some scattered relationships though a general conclusion cannot be drawn. The simplicity of the study may have contributed to not capturing all of the baseflow changes with the urbanization parameters.

Urban areas in Ethiopia have been growing very quickly in recent decades, which haveled to ever increasing demand for land in peri-urban areas for housing and other nonagriculturalactivities. This has had several transformative impacts on the transitionalperi-urban, areas including engulfment of local communities and conversion of landrights and use from an agricultural to a built-up property rights system. Peri-urban areasalso display all forms of competition for land among people of diverse backgrounds.Research on the challenges of urbanization in peri-urban land tenure system and theongoing changes in Ethiopia is limited, and the situations and actors interested in periurbanland are constantly changing. Therefore, the purpose of this research is toinvestigate the challenges imposed on peri-urban land rights as a result of the growingdemand for land for urbanization. The project also encompasses an attempt to discoverthe process of informal transaction and development of peri-urban land and the principalactors involved. The study comprises a summary essay and four articles which were conducted using casestudy and desk review research approaches. Following the case study tradition, acombination of different data collection instruments such as questionnaires, FGDs, keyinformant interviews (both structured and open-ended) and direct field observations wasemployed to collect research data from the case study areas. Bahir Dar CityAdministration was selected purposively as case study area at the first stage and two periurbanvillages, Weramit and Zenzelima, were selected from Bahir Dar CityAdministration at the second stage of the case study area selection process. The research has revealed that urbanization and urban development in Ethiopia areaccompanied by contentious land tenure changes which favor the urbanities above localperi-urban communities. As a result, urbanization has precipitated a wave ofdispossession and proliferation of informal settlements in peri-urban areas. Thus,addressing the challenges of urbanization and its effect on the land rights of local periurbancommunities requires the introduction of an inclusive and participatory landdevelopment tool like land readjustment, which can encourage voluntary contribution ofland for urbanization by the local peri-urban landholders themselves. / <p>QC 20150114</p>

The urbanization of the French Canadian parish, which took root in rural Quebec, can best be understood by realizing what the parish was like at the time when it became the social unit of French Canada and then tracing it through the various phases which it has taken in response to its environment There are many different types of parishes—ranging from the inclusive primary group in remote rural surroundings to the highly urbanized parish in a city like Montreal. What was the nature of the early social life in French Canada, where the dominant form of social grouping was to be the parish? Much has been written of the early French seigneurs-- the noblemen who came to the wilderness that was Canada, and who established their large estates, or seigneuries. But it is significant that this so-called superior class contributed little to the actual colonization of Canada, and left no lasting institution.[...]

Aboriginal urbanization has increased dramatically in Canada over the last half century. Aboriginal rights may be an important factor in shaping Aboriginal peoples’ experiences of urbanization, as they are largely restricted to those living on reserves. Through their impacts on social determinants of health, these differences in spatial access to Aboriginal rights may have implications for the health of Aboriginal peoples living in urban areas. Using mixed quantitative (statistical analysis of the Aboriginal Peoples Survey) and qualitative (in-depth interviews with Aboriginal women and men in Toronto) methods, this thesis explores relationships between Aboriginal urbanization and Aboriginal rights, focusing on how they may differentially impact the health of Aboriginal women and men living in urban areas. Findings suggest that the perceived lack of respect for Aboriginal rights in urban areas is negatively related to health, and that Aboriginal women and men may experience these impacts differently.

This thesis is a comparative, data-based analysis of the empirical validity of three competing sociological models of the psychological impact of size of place of residence. The theories subjected to statistical investigation are: the ecological school of Wirth (1938), the compositionalist approach of Gans (1962) and the subcultural arguments of Fischer (1976). A secondary data analysis of selected variables from the 1979 Canadian Quality of Life Survey forms the core of this thesis. Two dimensions of the potential psychological impact of urban size are examined: powerlessness, measured by an index variable of a "sense of personal competence" and social isolation, measured by a reported sense of loneliness and contacts with significant others. Consistent with the compositionalist model, the analysis of variance performed in this research shows no association between urban size and powerlessness, after controlling for socio-economic and demographic factors. Loneliness however, shows a curvilinear negatively sloped relationship with urban size after controlling for factors lending partial support to the subcultural model. Neighbourhood involvement exhibited a significant negative association with urban size. This finding, is attributable to the relative lack of importance of proximity in the urban setting which reduces neighbourhood contacts in favour of trans-local ones. Finally, when controlling for distance of residence of children living away from home, the effect of the size of place of residence on the frequency of contact with children living away from home, reported by the respondents was significantly reduced thus, partly supporting the subcultural model's proposition.