Uneven Development (uneven + development)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Racial Profiling, Insurance Style: Insurance Redlining and the Uneven Development of Metropolitan Areas

JOURNAL OF URBAN AFFAIRS, Issue 4 2003
Gregory D. Squires
This article examines the role of racial profiling in the property insurance industry and how such practices, grounded in negative racial stereotyping, have contributed to racial segregation and uneven metropolitan development. From a review of industry underwriting and marketing materials, court documents, and research by government agencies, industry and community groups, and academics, it is clear that race has long affected and continues to affect the policies and practices of this industry. Due to limitations in publicly available data, it is difficult to assess precisely the extent to which race shapes industry practices. Research and public policy initiatives are explored that can ameliorate the data problems, increase access to insurance, and foster more equitable community development. [source]


Uneven Developments: From The,Grundrisse To,Capital

ANTIPODE, Issue 5 2008
Joel Wainwright
Abstract:, Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the,Grundrisse and the first volume of,Capital. This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its "problematic of uneven development", that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the,Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence of capitalism from precapitalist relations. While this analysis is not entirely absent from,Capital (cf the discussion of primitive accumulation), precapitalist formations are not treated as systematically in,Capital. By contrast, uneven development enters,Capital in the final section, particularly where Marx criticizes Wakefield. Reading these two texts together, I argue that the problematic of uneven development shifts from,Grundrisse to,Capital in a way that underscores Marx's growing stress on capital's imperial character. This shift has its roots in political events of the period when Marx rewrote,Grundrisse into,Capital. [source]


Hierarchical Integration: The Dollar Economy and the Rupee Economy

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 2 2008
Anirudh Krishna
ABSTRACT While contemporary globalization makes the world more interconnected, it also reworks and builds on existing cleavages and uneven development. This is an under-researched dimension of the emerging twenty-first century international division of labour. The core question is whether new developments (associated with exports, offshoring and outsourcing) spin off to the majority in the countryside and the urban poor. This article examines the relationship between the dollar economy and the rupee economy in India. It documents the ways in which inequality is built into and sustains India's development. The authors discuss other instances of multi-speed economies and analytics that seek to come to grips with these relations, from combined and uneven development to global value chains. They present three ways of capturing contemporary inequality: asymmetric inclusion, enlargement-and-containment and hierarchical integration, each of which captures different dimensions of inequality. [source]


Evolutionary Economic Geography, Institutions, and Political Economy

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2009
Jürgen Essletzbichler
abstract In this response to MacKinnon et al. (2009), I argue that the theoretical development of evolutionary economic geographies is necessary in order to evaluate its unique contribution to an understanding of the uneven development of the space economy; that the distinction between evolutionary and institutional economic geographies is overdrawn; that the neglect of class, power, and the state reflect empirical rather than theoretical shortcomings of the evolutionary approach; and that there is significant potential overlap between evolutionary and political economy approaches. [source]


Agricultural and Rural Development in China: Achievements and Challenges Entwicklung der Landwirtschaft und des ländlichen Raums in China: Erfolge und Herausforderungen Le développement agricole et rural en Chine : résultats et défis

EUROCHOICES, Issue 2 2009
Chen Xiaohua
Summary Agricultural and Rural Development in China: Achievements and Challenges China has made great advances in its agricultural and rural development since the reforms and opening-up that began in 1978. It has not only fed its population of 1.3 billion, but has also contributed to international agricultural development and food security. Agricultural production registered great development, providing sufficient food and clothes for 21 per cent of the world's population with 9 per cent of the arable land. In the process farmers' living standards improved remarkably and rural public utilities and services were greatly enhanced. China is now in a key transition period of accelerating the transformation and modernisation of traditional agriculture and rural society. It is facing significant challenges. Agriculture is still one of the weakest industries in China and it is proving difficult to sustain increases in grain output and farmers' incomes. The problems of uneven development in rural areas have become increasingly prominent and the gap between urban and rural development is tending to widen. The Chinese government will respond strategically to these challenges and will firmly pursue the construction of a new efficient and sustainable socialist countryside, along the path of modernisation with Chinese characteristics. It will also make greater contributions to world agriculture and rural development. Les progrès de la Chine en termes de développement agricole et rural depuis le début des réformes et l'ouverture en 1978 ont été considérables. Non seulement le pays a nourrit une population de 1.3 millions d'habitants mais il a contribué au développement et à la sécurité alimentaire au niveau international. La production agricole a fortement augmenté et a fournit suffisamment de nourriture et de vêtements à 21 pour cent de la population du monde avec 9 pour cent des terres cultivables. Ce processus s'est accompagné d'une hausse considérable du niveau de vie des agriculteurs et d'une grande amélioration des services publics dans les zones rurales. La Chine est maintenant à un moment clé de sa période de transition, caractérisé par une accélération de la transformation et de la modernisation de l'agriculture et de la société rurale traditionnelles. Des défis importants se présentent à elle. L'agriculture reste une des industries chinoises les plus fragiles et il se révèle difficile de continuer à augmenter la production céréalière et les revenus des agriculteurs. Les problèmes d'inégalité de développement dans les zones rurales deviennent de plus en plus visibles et l'écart de développement entre les zones urbaines et les zones rurale tend à s'accroître. Les pouvoirs publics chinois vont apporter une réponse stratégique à ces défis et vont poursuivre fermement la construction d'une nouvelle campagne socialiste efficace et durable, en suivant une voie de modernisation typiquement chinoise. Ils vont aussi accroître les contributions de la Chine au développement agricole et rural mondial. Seit Beginn der Reformen und der Öffnungspolitik 1978 hat sich Chinas Landwirtschaft und ländlicher Raum enorm weiterentwickelt. China hat seitdem nicht nur seine 1.3 Milliarden Einwohner ernährt, sondern auch zur internationalen Agrarentwicklung und Ernährungssicherung beigetragen. Die Agrarproduktion wurde erheblich ausgeweitet und deckt nun 21 Prozent des weltweiten Bedarfs an Lebensmitteln und Kleidung bei gerade einmal 9 Prozent der Weltackerfläche. Dabei haben sich die Lebensbedingungen für die Landwirte sowie das Angebot an öffentlichen Einrichtungen und Dienstleistungen im ländlichen Raum deutlich verbessert. China durchläuft gerade eine wichtige Übergangsphase, in der sich der Wandel und die Modernisierung der traditionellen Landwirtschaft und der Landbevölkerung noch schneller vollziehen, und steht großen Herausforderungen gegenüber. Die Landwirtschaft ist nach wie vor einer der schwächsten Sektoren in China, und es erweist sich als schwierig, die Steigerungsraten bei der Getreideerzeugung und den Einkommen in der Landwirtschaft aufrecht zu erhalten. Die Probleme der ungleichmäßigen Entwicklung in ländlichen Gebieten werden immer offensichtlicher, und die Kluft zwischen städtischer und ländlicher Entwicklung droht sich auszuweiten. Die chinesische Regierung wird diesen Herausforderungen strategisch begegnen und , ganz im Sinne einer Modernisierung mit chinesischen Merkmalen , daran festhalten, einen neuen sozialistischen ländlichen Raum effizient und nachhaltig zu gestalten. Sie wird ebenfalls einen noch größeren Beitrag zur Weltlandwirtschaft und zur Entwicklung des ländlichen Raums leisten. [source]


Brand and Branding Geographies

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 1 2009
Andy Pike
Brands and branding can sometimes seem pervasive. Yet, the geographies of brands and branding have been relatively neglected and under-researched, especially in economic geography. The focus here is the historically longstanding and well-established brands and branding of goods and services. Drawing on empirical examples to ground its claims, the argument seeks to establish the entangled geographies of branded objects and branding processes, advocates reading their socio-spatial histories, explains their uneven geographies and relationships to uneven development and explores their potential and pitfalls for territorial development locally and regionally. The conclusion is that brands and branding geographies have the potential to stimulate a novel approach to addressing spatial questions at the intersections of economic, social, cultural, political and ecological geographies that can transcend the more ,traditional' and longstanding foci of firms and industries for ,new economic geographies'. Ideas to contribute to future research on brand and branding geographies are then sketched out. [source]


Upgrading, uneven development, and jobs in the North American apparel industry

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 2 2003
Jennifer Bair
In this article we examine the developmental consequences of globalization at multiple scales, using a commodity chains framework to investigate the case of the North American apparel industry. In the first section we outline the apparel commodity chain and offer a brief typology of its lead firms. In the second section we discuss the concept of industrial upgrading and describe several main export roles in the global apparel industry. In the third section we focus on the regional dynamics resulting from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). We contrast the Mexican experience with that of countries in the Caribbean Basin to show the impact of distinct trade policies on export-oriented development. We argue that NAFTA is creating upgrading opportunities for some Mexican firms to move from the low value-added export-oriented assembly (or maquila) model to full-package production. In the fourth section we explore the unevenness of upgrading dynamics through a comparison of two blue jeans manufacturing clusters in the United States and Mexico: El Paso and Torreon. Our conclusions about upgrading and uneven development in the North American apparel industry emphasize the importance of local, national and regional institutional contexts in shaping inter-firm networks and their development impact. [source]


The Trickle-down Effect: Ideology and the Development of Premium Water Networks in China's Cities

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 1 2007
ALANA BOLAND
This article examines the relationship between networked infrastructure and uneven development in transitional cities through a study of premium water networks in China. Beginning in the mid-1990s, select buildings and housing enclaves began to bypass municipal tap water supply systems through the construction of small-scale secondary pipe networks for purified drinking water. I focus on the early development of these premium water networks to highlight the ideological interplay between a new more market-based approach to networked supply and the existing model characterized by relatively universal and uniform access within cities. I illustrate how this dual water supply model was well suited to the ideological conditions and contradictions associated with China's economic liberalization in the 1990s. While the emergence of premium water networks can be linked to ascendant forms of market reasoning in the environmental and social spheres, I also argue that they were enabled by unresolved ideological tensions associated with China's transitional program. Rather than providing a basis for resistance in the early development of premium water supply, the socialist legacy in urban water supply left its mark more in the noticeable absence of debate regarding the distributional outcomes. By examining premium water networks in relation to the politics of ideology in China's transitional period, my analysis highlights the complex and sometimes unexpected ways that ideologies can influence the development of new infrastructural spaces and processes of splintering urbanism. [source]


Non-Economic Factors in Economic Geography and in ,New Regionalism': A Sympathetic Critique

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2006
COSTIS HADJIMICHALIS
In the current debate on local and regional development and after several ,turns', dominant critical models have found some security in institutional, cultural and evolutionary approaches. Interest today centres on success and competitiveness and how they are reproduced in a few paradigmatic regions. A distinctive feature of these regions and places is the embeddedness of certain non-economic factors such as social capital, trust and reciprocity based on familiarity, face-to-face exchange, cooperation, embedded routines, habits and norms, local conventions of communication and interaction, all of which contribute to a region's particular success. Although these approaches may not deny the forces of the capitalist space economy, they do not explicitly acknowledge them or take them on board and so they tend to discuss non-economic factors and institutions as autonomous forces shaping development. This essay provides a critique of these concepts based on their (1) inadequate theorization, (2) depoliticized view of politics and de-economized use of economics and (3) reduction of space to territory. The essay concludes that we need a far more penetrating renewal of radical critique of the current space economy of capitalism. Old concepts such as uneven development, the social and spatial division of labour, the geographical transfer of value, accumulation and imperialism must be combined with cultural and institutional issues, with those non-economic factors mentioned above. [source]


,Amsterdam is Standing on Norway' Part II: The Global North Atlantic in the Ecological Revolution of the Long Seventeenth Century

JOURNAL OF AGRARIAN CHANGE, Issue 2 2010
JASON W. MOORE
,Amsterdam is standing on Norway', this was a popular saying in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century. There was more than one inflection to the phrase. Amsterdam was, in the first instance, built atop a subterranean forest of Norwegian origin. But southern Norway was also a vital resource zone, subordinated to Amsterdam-based capital. This paper follows the movement of strategic commodity frontiers within early modern Europe from the standpoint of capitalism as world-ecology, joining in dialectical unity the production of capital and the production of nature. Our geographical focus is trained upon the emergence of the Global North Atlantic, that zone providing the strategic raw materials and food supplies indispensable to the consolidation of capitalism , timber, naval stores, metals, cereals, fish and whales. I argue for a broader geographical perspective on these movements, one capable of revealing the dialectical interplay of frontiers on all sides of the Atlantic. From its command posts in Amsterdam, Dutch capital deployed American silver in the creation of successive frontiers within Europe, transforming Scandinavian and Baltic regions. The frontier character of these transformations was decisive, premised on drawing readily exploitable supplies of land and labour power into the orbit of capital. We see in northern Europe precisely what we see in the Americas , a pattern of commodity-centred environmental transformation, and thence relative ecological exhaustion, from which the only escape was renewed global conquest and ever-wider cycles of combined and uneven development. [source]


The relevance, practicality and viability of spatial development initiatives: a South African case study

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION & DEVELOPMENT, Issue 5 2003
John M. Luiz
Policymakers have for long had an ambivalent attitude towards space and have been hesitant in dealing with intra-national models of uneven development. Issues surrounding regional development have always been tainted with ideological and political influences rather than being a purely economic consideration. This article addresses the thinking behind regional development policies and questions the role of spatial policy. It confronts this question in the South African case where local government capacity is particularly constrained and the boundaries between government tiers unclear. The first section outlines a selected critical history of the regional policy literature as it applies to South Africa. This is followed by an examination of South Africa's post-apartheid policy of spatial development initiatives (SDIs) focusing on the most contentious of these, namely the Fish River SDI, which has been plagued by controversy. It focuses on the tensions involved in development planning between government agencies and between politicians and technocrats. It also highlights the growing schism between government and civil society with the former emphasising mega-projects which reinforce its global competitive strategy but with limited apparent benefit to the local community. Lastly, it concludes that little effort was made to integrate the SDI into a provincial poverty strategy and argues that instead of utilising industrial decentralisation to redress inequality and poverty, a ,first-best' option may be for the government to target poverty directly by investing in various forms of human capital. Such an approach would lead to long-term economic growth and also improve South Africa's international competitiveness. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


Restructuring, gender and employment in flux: a geography of regional change in Cornwall, Ontario

THE CANADIAN GEOGRAPHER/LE GEOGRAPHE CANADIEN, Issue 2 2001
MEGAN K.L. MCKENNA
For the past two decades, uneven development in general, and the changing structure of the labour market in particular, have figured prominently in geographic literature explaining the possible trajectories of restructuring events in industrial countries. This paper explores the regional nature of various socio-economic processes shaping gendered employment patterns in Cornwall, eastern Ontario. Focussing on the dimensions of workforce ,feminisation' we argue for a critical reexamination of gender-neutral regional geographies in understanding how gendered divisions of labour and local identity formation and concepts of ,class' are in flux. [source]


Climate change-induced migration in the Pacific Region: sudden crisis and long-term developments1

THE GEOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL, Issue 3 2009
JUSTIN T LOCKE
With so many other social, economic and environmental factors at work establishing linear, causative relationships between anthropogenic climate change and population dynamics it has been difficult to pinpoint the specific human consequences of climate change on respective populations. Qualitative information was examined based on interviewees' testimonies and personal experience, as well as a descriptive analysis of population records, climate-change related impacts, and consequences of uneven development in the Republic of Kiribati and Tuvalu, two low-lying atoll nations in the Pacific region taken as examples to illustrate the issues involved. Strong evidence was found that recent influxes in population movements to urban central islands from rural outer islands experienced in these countries can be attributed to a combination of the adverse impacts of climate change and socioeconomic factors inherit in small island developing states. Moreover, internal migrants cannot be accommodated in their states of origin, putting pressure on local infrastructure and services. This, combined with a recent population boom, has led to a decline in human development indicators and a general livelihood decline. [source]


Uneven Developments: From The,Grundrisse To,Capital

ANTIPODE, Issue 5 2008
Joel Wainwright
Abstract:, Since its publication, Marxists have debated the relation between the,Grundrisse and the first volume of,Capital. This paper offers one entry point into this debate by comparing the way each text frames its "problematic of uneven development", that is, the way that capitalism's inherently uneven development is thematized as a problem for explanation. In the,Grundrisse the uneven nature of capitalism as development is explained by the emergence of capitalism from precapitalist relations. While this analysis is not entirely absent from,Capital (cf the discussion of primitive accumulation), precapitalist formations are not treated as systematically in,Capital. By contrast, uneven development enters,Capital in the final section, particularly where Marx criticizes Wakefield. Reading these two texts together, I argue that the problematic of uneven development shifts from,Grundrisse to,Capital in a way that underscores Marx's growing stress on capital's imperial character. This shift has its roots in political events of the period when Marx rewrote,Grundrisse into,Capital. [source]


Marginalization, Facilitation, and the Production of Unequal Risk: The 2006,Paso del Norte,Floods

ANTIPODE, Issue 2 2010
Timothy W. Collins
Abstract:, Drawing upon insights from the field of urban political ecology, this article extends the critical hazards concept of,marginalization,by incorporating a relational focus on,facilitation. Facilitation connotes the institutionally mediated process that enables powerful geographical groups of people to minimize negative environmental externalities and appropriate positive environmental externalities in particular places, with unjust socioenvironmental consequences. The article demonstrates the utility of a marginalization/facilitation frame for understanding the production of unequal risk based on a case study of the 2006 El Paso (USA)-Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) flood disaster. The case study reveals how uneven developments have produced complex sociospatial patterns of exposure to flood hazards and how processes of facilitation and marginalization have created socially disparate flood-prone landscapes characterized by unequal risks. The paper concludes by outlining how the frame presented helps clarify understanding of the production of unequal risk. [source]