July 2013 NEWSLETTER

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:

http://www.igu-online.org/site/?page_id=1738

See also the commission's Internet site:

http://www.biu.ac.il/soc/ge/igucomld/

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 Japan	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 Mediterranean Basin)	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:

http://www.igu-kyoto2013.org/

The program can be seen through the following link:

http://oguchaylab.csis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/IGU2013/programme.html

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	Brno	EURORURAL 14'
2015	August	Moscow	IGU Regional Conference	To be decided
2016	To be decided	Beijing/ Belo-Horizonte, Brazil	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 Vladivostok that we are organising in association with the Pacific Geographical Institute of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, located in Vladivostok. We may consider having this meeting in 2015 after the Moscow conference, but we still have to determine the dates.

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

Warsaw Regional Forum 2013: “Territorial capital – concepts, indicators & policy”

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:

E-mail: forum@igipz.pan.pl

Internet: http://www.igipz.pan.pl/warsaw-regional-forum-2013.html

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

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

Brazil

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.

2. A paper I presented during the ICG Conference in Cologne, 2012, is now in print at the Brazilian Journal of Population Studies. The citation is:

Hull, J. R., Guedes, G. R. (2013). Rebuilding Babel: Finding common development solutions using cross-contextual comparisons of multidimensional well-being. Brazilian Journal of Population Studies, 30(1): 271-297.

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

University of New England, Australia

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:

http://www.homeofgeography.org/

The latest newsletter has been published in July 2011.

Also check the new web site of the IGU

http://www.igu-online.org/site/

With best wishes,

Michael Sofer

Chairman, Commission on Local and Regional Development, IGU