Dear
Colleagues,
Welcome
to the July 2013 newsletter of the Commission on Local and Regional Development.
Our role is to keep you updated on the commission activities and its
corresponding members' activities. Furthermore, our intention is to keep the commission's
news flowing to through corresponding members to a wider audience. You are also
welcome to visit our website to see the issues concerning our interest and to insert
your opinions into our blog.
Much
work has been going on to prepare for the Kyoto
conference this August. We are very grateful to our colleagues in Japan for their
support and hard work and we are looking forward to an exciting and fruitful conference
CONTENTS
1. Name
change
2. Activities Report
3. Future conferences
4. Publications
5.
Collaboration with other commissions
6. News from Our Colleagues
1. Name change
The commission submitted to the International Geographical
Union (IGU) executive a request for a name change, and recently we received the
formal approval for this request. The new name of the commission is "Local
and Regional Development" (CLRD).
The new name appears on the IGU Internet site:
See also the commission's Internet site:
2. Activities Report
The forthcoming annual meeting of the Commission is framed within the Kyoto
regional conference - August, 4th to 9th, 2013, in Kyoto , Japan .
We managed to organise 7 sessions which contain together 27 papers. The
distribution of papers by sessions is shown in the table below.
Session name
|
Number
of papers
|
Local development in
|
3
|
Local development in the rural space
|
8
|
Local development in the urban space
|
4
|
Local development: project and planning
|
8
|
Local and regional development in the Mediterranean basin
(Joint session with the Commission on
|
4
|
Prof. Atsushi Taira has been assisting the commission in
organising the meeting in Kyoto
for which we are very grateful. For more detailed information on the Kyoto conference, please
visit the conference's official website:
The program can be seen through the following link:
3. Future
conferences
A. The 2014 annual meeting will take place
within the IGU Regional Conference in Kraków ,
Poland , 18-22
August 2014. We were also invited to participate in the conference EURORURAL 14' which
will take place in Brno , Czech Republic , the week after
the meeting in Kraków, starting August 25.
B. The updated timetable of the Commission
on Local and Regional Development activities: 2014-2016
Year
|
Month
|
Place
|
Comments
|
Theme
|
2014
|
August 18-22
|
Kraków
|
IGU Congress
|
Changes, Challenges, Responsibility
|
2014
|
August 25-29
|
|
EURORURAL 14'
|
|
2015
|
August
|
|
IGU Regional Conference
|
To be decided
|
2016
|
To be decided
|
|
Commission annual meeting
|
To be decided
|
* I would like to inform all the corresponding members about a planned meeting including an extensive field trip to
C. Corresponding members should be aware, that the IGU
has moved to have three regional
conferences, rather than one, between the four-yearly
IGU Congresses. The Cologne Congress in 2012 will be followed by meetings in Kyoto (2013), Krakow (2014), Moscow
(2015), and Beijing
in 2016.
D. A
forthcoming forum
Date: October
8-12, 2013
Site: Warsaw , Poland
Organiser: Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization, Polish Academy
of Sciences; Ministry of Regional Development; Polish Geographical Society
Topics: This year’s Forum will be
focused on the concept of territorial capital, based on a foundation of
different sciences across multiple disciplines (geography, economy, sociology, etc.) as well as on the
basis of political documents of varied level. In particular, the Forum 2013 sessions include the discussions on the
following dilemmas:
·
The quality of
human resources and cooperation skills,
·
The shape of
cohesion policy as well as on directions of utilizing European funds in the new
financial perspective 2014-2020,
·
Public
governance,
·
Environmental
potential,
·
Public capital
and regional development.
Language: English
Fee: 150 €
Deadline: July 31, 2013
Contact:
4. Publications
A. Volume 27 of the periodical Rural Studies with
a selected list of refereed papers presented at the commission's sessions in the
annual meeting in Tel-Aviv, July 2010, appeared. The volume was edited by Jerzy
Banski.
Those
who are willing to receive a copy of the journal may approach Jerzy Banski: jbanski@twarda.pan.pl
B. Our
member Tony Sorensen is a co-editor of the Australasian Journal of Regional
Studies, the journal of the Australia
and New Zealand Regional Science Association. He is looking for quality
articles on regional analysis and development. The content need not be Australia and New Zealand specific and can be
largely theoretical. His email address for journal copy is Tony.Sorensen@une.edu.au.
5. Collaboration with other
commissions
In
the past we have collaborated with other commissions, particularly in operating
the annual meeting. This tradition is kept in the forthcoming Kyoto Regional Conference
where we have a joint session with each of the following commissions:
1.
Dynamics of Economic Spaces
2.
The Commission on Mediterranean
Basin
You
are welcome to offer future cooperation with other commissions as well. Write
to me to the following email address: soferm1@biu.ac.il
6. News from Our Colleagues
A. Dr Ashley Gunter
Department
of Geography, University
of South Africa
New publications and debates concerning local and regional development issues
1.
Gunter, A. (2012). Creating co-sovereigns
through the provision of low cost housing: The case of Johannesburg , South Africa . Habitat
International. Vol. 39(1): 278-283.
2.
Gunter, A, and Scheepers, L. (2012) "Crisylida
Capital”: Hatching Informal Township Property Markets to Benefit Low-Income
Residents in Johannesburg , South Africa . Urban
Forum. Vol. 23(2): 165-180.
Updates on research projects
In
2012 I was a visiting research associate in Department of Geography at the University of Oxford
where I worked with Dr Tony Lemon on local development in South Africa . The project focused
on the provision of social housing in South Africa and how this contributes to
local development, a number of working papers addressing this issue are
recently published or in-press.
B. Prof. Gilvan Guedes
Departamento
de Demografia, Universidade
Federal de Minas Gerais
1.
I am PI of a 3-years project funded by the Brazilian National Research Council
(CNPq) and the Minas Gerais Research Funding Agency (FAPEMIG) that focuses on
the drivers of people's willingness to take actions towards self and family
protection against extreme events, such as floodings. The research involves
fieldwork with data collection (representative survey) on approximately 1650
households stratified by age and sex on a municipality in the state of Minas
Gerais, Brazil , crossed by
the Rio Doce River .
The city is frequently hit by the river floodings, affecting thousand of
residents almost every other year. In addition to understanding the response
and adaptive capacity of the population to extreme events, the project seek to
explicitly measure and geo-reference the social networks of local residents and
overlay these spatially explicit social networks with data on height of
flooding in the city. These data will help us understand how the spatial
configuration of social networks may be limited to buffer against loss during
climate-induced events if their nodes are located in environmentally vulnerable
areas.
C. Prof.
Ton Dietz
Director of
the African Studies Centre, Leiden University
The
Netherlands
PADev:
2007-2013.
Research and
NGO partners from the Netherlands ,
Ghana and Burkina Faso worked together during the last six
years to develop tools for participatory and holistic assessment of development
and change at the scale of local areas (districts, villages) in a rural and
semi-rural setting in Africa . This PADev
project generated eleven reports and many other research and dissemination
products, which can all be found on www.padev.nl. Also
all basic data can be found on that website, as well as the PADev guidebook (in
English, French, Spanish and Chinese) and a final document (‘the PADev story’)
and a brief report of the final seminar that took place in June 2013. For
geographers working on local and regional development, and for evaluators
dealing with development and change the results will be useful and the
method/approach appealing.
D.
Prof. Tony Sorensen
School of
Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
I have been
working with Australia ’s
Regional Australia Institute, which is working on many fronts to improve
economic and social conditions across the regions. See http://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/. Their
web-site contains a wealth of information and ideas concerning local / regional
economic and social conditions, current research projects, important
publications, and discussions of policy issues. I am currently writing a
briefing paper for the Institute entitled Regional Development in an
Age of Uncertainty. The briefing paper is suggesting a radical reappraisal
of the nature of regional development problems and issues in remoter rural
areas. Consequently, I propose a radical policy agenda somewhat akin to trying
to instil the culture of Silicon Valley in
sparsely settled, but often quite wealthy and fast-changing regions sometimes
located hundreds of kilometres from major cities. An important inspiration for
these ideas came from Nassim Taleb’s work on Black Swans and Antifragility and
I’d recommend those works to readers of the Newsletter because they strongly
suggest that any attempts by governments and communities to develop detailed
economic development strategies is doomed to failure in age of (a) massive
economic and social uncertainty, (b) rampant and accelerating technological
change, (c) globalisation, and (d) plunging national and regional sovereignty.
Obviously the strength of these forces will be spatially variable, but Australia
– with its rapid global integration, sparse settlement systems, strong
currency, rapid population growth, and great internal distances is acutely
feeling the full force of change.
E. Prof. David López-Carr
Director,
Latin American and Iberian Studies
Department
of Geography, Human-Environment Dynamics Lab
UC
Santa Barbara
(UCSB)
A number of
recent publications related to the commission interest.
1.
Aide, TM, M. Clark, R. Grau, D. López-Carr, D. Redo, M. Bonilla, M.
Levy (2013). The deforestation and reforestation of Latin America and the Caribbean (2001-2010). Biotropica.
45(2): 262-271.
2.
López-Carr,
D. and J. Burgdorfer (2013)
Deforestation Drivers: Population, Migration, and Tropical Land
Use. Environment: Science
and Policy for Sustainable Development (55)1: 3-11.
3.
López-Carr,
D. (2012). Agro-ecological determinants of rural
out-migration to the Maya biosphere reserve, Guatemala . Environmental Research Letters. (7)4: 045603 (7pp).
4.
Ervin, D. and D.
López-Carr (2012). U.S. Poverty: Poverty and Latino immigration in
the United States . United States
Geography. ABC-CLIO, 2012. Web. 1 Nov. 2012.http://usgeography.abc-clio.com/Analyze/Display/1693074?cid=14
* * *
We
would like to increase the number of corresponding members. Please
spread the news about the commission among all those persons you might think
may have interest to take part in the LRD commission’s future sessions. Also, please let me know if we can add any of your
colleagues to the mailing list, perhaps new members in your department or
others you meet at conferences interested in our activities. Names of potential
corresponding people are welcome.
The information in this newsletter will be
uploaded to the Commission's web site at: http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/ge/igucomld/
For IGU updates check the Home of Geography website:
The
latest newsletter has been published in July 2011.
Also
check the new web site of the IGU
With
best wishes,
Michael
Sofer
Chairman,
Commission on Local and Regional Development, IGU