New community in a new space: artificial,natural, created,contested. An idea from a golf estate in Johannesburg

Attention is constantly devoted to the question of living together and sharing spaces, which is often translated as a matter of social and spatial segregation and belonging to a community. New spatial, social and institutional geographies have emerged as a potential cornerstone of separateness and togetherness in South Africa with the emergence of the gated community. This article tackles the concept of “community” within the space of a golf estate (a type of gated community) located in the West Rand, Johannesburg. It aims to understand new geographies of the city through an analysis of the organisation and social life inside and outside the estate. The notion of community is explored by looking at the system engendered by the main legal actor within the estate, the Homeowners Association (HOA). It will be argued that some of these new spaces are made neutral through the action of the HOA, an agent that institutionally constructs a communitarian lifestyle, accepted and contested simultaneously by the residents. Through the formalisation of a system in which holiday-style living is promoted, life is represented as real to the residents but lived in a virtual way when linked to broader societal and urban changes, thus reframing the notion of segregation.     

Members Only: Gated Communities and Residential Segregation in the Metropolitan United States1

Using the American Housing Survey for 2001 and Census 2000, I examine the link between gated communities and residential segregation. I hypothesize that gating and segregation are defined by similar mechanisms, thus reinforcing urban inequality in U.S. cities. The results, however, indicate a more complex relationship. On the one hand, there are common mechanisms behind the two processes: the pursuit of higher property values, fear of crime, and fear of increased social heterogeneity. An increase in percent recent immigrants leads to higher levels of both segregation and gating. On the other hand, factors such as region, percent black, percent Hispanic, percent college graduates, and functional specialization affect the two processes differentially. Although segregation is less pronounced and declining in the U.S. urban Southwest, gated communities are much more prominent there. The results challenge the notion that the declines in residential segregation in recent decades indicate social progress.     

Incorporation and Gated Communities in the Greater Metro-Los Angeles Region as a Model of Privatization of Residential Communities

ABSTRACT

The privatization of urban public space has accelerated through the closing, redesign, and policing of public parks and plazas, the development of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) that monitor and control local streets and parks, and the transfer of public air rights for the building of corporate plazas ostensibly open to the public. In the suburbs, privatization also takes the form of conservation easements that restrict access to public lands, the creation of shopping malls and new town centers relocated within these private commercial developments, and the building of gated residential communities. Accompanying this expansion of private interests are changes in strategies of governance and regional differences in how local governments and residents are encouraging private encroachment on public space. This article focuses this third set of privatization practices by discussing how gated communities manipulate municipal and town planning laws to control public space and tax dollars. To accomplish this task, I discuss the emergence of gated communities as a new form of privatization of urban/suburban space and then tease out the legal and institutional underpinnings of this spatial governance. The geography of gated communities in greater metro-Los Angeles region and their use of the strategy of incorporation to capture public taxes for private use is employed as a model for understanding the future of gating in the United States. The Los Angeles model is then compared to current gating patterns in urban and suburban gated communities in New York and Texas. These manipulations of private land use controls in the United States are not necessarily new, but with gating there is an accelerating trend away from governmental and public control of land use toward an increased reliance on privately created controls. The consequences of this shift toward privatization of land use control is an impoverishment of the public realm and access to public resources, especially public space.     

Micro-simulation of households: a new tool to assess the impact on society of food safety policies

Public concerns about the risk from food hazards have spread in recent years, boosted by a number of well-publicized food scares. As a result, food safety issues are high on the policy agenda in Europe and elsewhere, and a range of policies have been developed to deal with them. The paper illustrates and makes a case for the use of micro-simulation models as support for better economic assessment of food policies. When households deal with food safety issues they can show heterogeneous behaviors, and micro-simulation can provide a useful tool to take into account this heterogeneity. However, to the author's knowledge, no attempt to use micro-simulation in the analysis of food safety policies has taken place so far. After an illustration of the way economists evaluate food safety policies, micro-simulation methodologies are introduced, stressing their potentiality for the assessment of food safety policies.     

There's more to the picture than meets the eye: Measuring tangible and intangible capital in two marginal communities in rural Denmark

A missing link in economics has been what Veblen in 1908 termed intangible capital. This includes common norms, trust and high levels of cooperative performance. Intangibles are invisible to the eye and not easily measured in quantitative terms. They nevertheless involve visible, socioeconomic outcomes and should therefore rightly be seen as productive, like tangibles. Thus, uneven levels of intangible capital would explain Differential Economic Performance (DEP) between, say, two firms containing exactly the same stock of physical, economic and human capital. Despite this common sense observation, most economists have failed to see that ‘there's more to the picture than meets the eye’, as Neil Young once sang. We use statistical, historical and fieldwork data from two Danish, marginal rural communities both rich on intangible capital. This to show how intangible capital in the form of social, organisational and cultural capital is accumulated and utilised in situ, at the microlevel. We suggest that the difference between these two, very similar communities should be explained in their varying ability to utilise local stocks of tangible and intangible capital. Drawing on seminal ideas from Bourdieu [The forms of capital. In: Richardson, J.G. (Ed.) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Greenwood Press, New York, Westport, CT and London, 1986, pp. 241–58] and the DORA project [Bryden, Differential economic performance in rural areas. In: International Conference on Rural Communities and Identities in the Global Millennium. Malpasino University College, Nainamo, BC, Canada, 2000], we want to develop a ‘total capital’ assessment tool for mapping and measuring socioeconomic development in marginal rural communities. In this way, we hope to count in ‘all’ capital as Schultz [Investment in human capital. In: Kiker, B.F. (Ed.) Investment in Human Capital. Columbia, 1971, pp. 3–21] prophesised. This in order to explain what we term Differential Local Development (DLD), where ‘good’, sustainable development is associated with high economic performance and increase in population.     

Urban and Indigenous: The Challenges of being a Native American in the City

The United States is home to more than 4 million Native Americans, the majority of whom live in urban areas. Urban Native Americans often experience significant social, health, and economic problems while having access to substantially fewer Native-specific resources than their reservation-based counterparts. They also face challenges with access to tribal services and political processes, as well as identity-sustaining cultural resources. This article describes the urban nature of many contemporary Native American communities. Examples from various urban Native American communities highlight the challenges faced by urban Native people, as well as creative initiatives developed to serve this population. This paper draws on and synthesizes the literature on contemporary urban Native communities, thus providing needed information for service providers and researchers working in these communities.     

Expanding the focus of cost–benefit analysis for food safety: a multi-factorial risk prioritization approach

A pressing need in the area of food safety is a tool for making overall, macro-judgments about which risks should be given priority for management. Governments often seek to base this prioritization on public health impacts only to find that other considerations also influence the prioritization process. A multi-factorial approach formally recognizes that public health, market-level impacts, consumer risk preferences and acceptance, and the social sensitivity of particular risks all play a role in prioritization. It also provides decision-makers with a variety of information outputs that allow risk prioritization to be considered along different dimensions. Macro-level prioritization of risks based on multiple factors is an important expanded use of cost–benefit analysis to manage risk.     

Why some greens are more powerful than others: on destabilisation,power shifts and the democratic potential of NGOs

This article studies how the collective empowerment of NGOs that is embodied in the destabilisation of world politics is distributed among individual organisations in the NGO community. The article focuses on non-governmental power in three global environmental conventions. It seeks to explain power differences between individual organisations in terms of possession of resources such as income, expertise, prominence and independence. In contrast to previous NGO research, this article applies an extensive and statistical approach. The main finding is that there is a global green elite of well-equipped NGOs that is allotted most power. This result is discussed in the light of recent debates on the democratic potential of an expanded role for NGOs in global politics.     

The supportive community: a new concept for enhancing the quality of life of elderly living in the community

This study examines supportive community programs in Israel, which aim to improve the quality of life of the elderly. These innovative programs pool existing resources to provide a benefits package that includes medical services, an emergency call switchboard, a "neighborhood facilitator," and social activities. Data were collected in 2000-2001 using qualitative and quantitative methods. The program provides specific services to meet needs that otherwise are not adequately addressed. The major contributions of the program reported by the members was increasing their personal security (two-thirds), easing the burden on their children (one-third), and enabling them to remain at home (one-quarter). The supportive community program enriches the variety of services available, thus providing the elderly with the choice of staying within their familiar surroundings of their homes and neighborhoods. This model appears to be both a cost-effective way to facilitate aging in place and a way to meet many of the elderly's essential needs, thereby maintaining their quality of life.     

More than just the media: Considering the role of public relations in the creation of sporting celebrity and the management of fan expectations

This article considers the complex nature of sporting celebrity and the role of media and public relations in the creation of both sports celebrity and the fan expectations associated with that celebrity. While public relations literature has traditionally considered PR as a promotion and communication tool, this article acknowledges that in the cultural and ideological world of sport, PR has a much more sophisticated role to play. In the event of either positive or negative media attention, a sporting celebrity is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny and the increasingly high expectations of fans. However, the expectations of fans are not based on the simple notion of hero worship and role models, and this exploratory study suggests that fans are capable of very complex reactions to the behaviours and marketing personas of sporting celebrities. The use of PR in sport deserves close examination and the reactive spin doctoring techniques of the past should give way to the strategic integration of public relations and media planning in both the creation of the sporting celebrity, balancing the sport vs. private sides of that celebrity, and the varying fan expectations associated with each.     

Digital crime,trauma, and abuse: Internet safety and cyber risks for adolescents and emerging adults in the 21st century

ABSTRACT

The shift in the technology landscape has altered the technology ecosystem of adolescents and emerging adults in the 21^st century. Yet, with greater use of digital gadgets comes greater mental health risks that technological advancement brings. This study provides a narrative review of contemporary cyber risks faced by adolescents and emerging adults. In particular, this review will cover dangers and effects of cyber-bullying, social media, cyber-dating violence, sextortion, sexting, revenge porn, online dating, catfishing, and scammers, with an emphasis to raise awareness and encourage proactive efforts dedicated to address these social concerns as the digital era continues to evolve.     

Precarious in Piraeus: on the making of labour insecurity in a port concession

ABSTRACT

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO’s subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity’s intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance.     

In a league of their own: Mental leveling and the creation of social comparability in sport

Social measurement involves comparison across highly varying subjects, possible only when a degree of similarity is perceived among disparate events. Assuming sport as a prototype, this paper argues that such comparability derives from a three-pronged process of mental leveling.By (1) matchingopponents according to characteristics thought to influence the object or trait in question, (2) standardizingtheir performances, and (3) scalingthe resulting competitive leagues against one another, leveling yields a stratified meaning system through which individual performances can be ranked. This examination reveals that creating comparability among discrete objects is not without its price; the same mental gridwork that secures comparabilit withinleagues precludes comparison acrossthem, leading to a stratified system whose classes are separated by formidable mental and institutional boundaries. This point becomes particularly salient when one considers the invocation of this model in realms other than sport.     

Planning for community: understanding diversity in resident experiences and expectations of social connections in a new urban fringe housing estate,Australia

Master-planned estates are a major source of new housing for growing cities. Much research finds these residential developments lack genuine social connections between residents despite marketing of ‘close-knit’ community. Selandra Rise is a new residential development on the urban fringe of Melbourne, Australia. The estate was planned with a focus on community infrastructure and resident well-being. The resident population was younger and more culturally diverse than most other master-planned community case studies. A longitudinal research design was used to explore resident understanding, experiences and needs relating to place-based community. Interviews were conducted with residents before moving to the estate and 9–18 months after moving. Some residents considered community as an amenity provided by the master-planned environment that did not require their social participation. Others aspired to make social connections with neighbours but had varying levels of success. Past experiences which contributed to aspirations for connecting with local community, and the ways that these aims were realised or hindered, are discussed. Understanding diverse resident expectations of community and insights from their lived experience are used to make recommendations for planning new neighbourhoods and designing community development programmes.     

“It’s not just talk”: ideas,discourse, and the prospects for transformational change in a homogenous nation-state

ABSTRACT

Despite decades of large-scale immigration, systemic and institutionalized racism and ethnonationalism remain very strong in South Korea. One reason is obvious: South Korea is the quintessential homogeneous nation-state. Many observers, in fact, believe that it is one of the few societies in the world that is naturally homogenous. For this and other reasons, the prospect that South Korea can or will transform from homogenous nation-state to multicultural society is generally given very short shrift. I argue, however, that small but extremely significant steps toward a multicultural society have already been made and that the key reason is due to the introduction of ‘multiculturalism’ as an idea and discourse in Korean society. While a focus on ideas/discourse is hardly new, this paper contends that it has been seriously underappreciated, particularly in analyses of South Korea, as a cause of institutional stability on the one hand, and of institutional change and transformation, on the other hand.     

Antecedents or Effects of Being a Manager in the Nonprofit,Public, or Private Sector

In this correspondence I postulate a complementary consideration to an article recently published in Nonprofit Management & Leadership: “Factors Attracting Individuals to Nonprofit Management over Public and Private Sector Management” (LeRoux and Feeney 2013). The aim of this correspondence is to provide avenues for further research based on an evaluation of the authors’ analysis and their embedded assumptions on causality and interdependency of the variables used. I perform an extended empirical analysis of the same data as used in LeRoux and Feeney (2013) in which inherent assumptions are adjusted based on available literature. Results show that their conclusions need nuancing, and that further research could focus on (1) a clearer distinction between antecedents and effects of sector of employment, and (2) the different relationships across sectors between work‐related variables, such as job satisfaction, job flexibility, or job clarity.     

Evaluation of a drug and alcohol safety education program in aviation using interrupted time series and the Kirkpatrick framework

Compliance with drug and alcohol regulations are required by 14 CFR Part 120/ and 49 CFR Part 40. These regulations affect approximately 7200 aviation-related companies and their associated services. Consequences for noncompliance can include loss of revenue from imposition of civil penalties, suspension, or revocation of the company’s certificate to conduct business. Front End Analysis (FEA) was conducted to determine specific performance problems and provide five tailored educational interventions to address them. Program evaluation was conducted using Interrupted Time Series (ITS) modeling. Results showed significant (p < .05) decreases in nonconformities across all five models with small to moderate effect sizes. Based on the relative effects, values for reductions in civil penalty costs between 16% and 47%, were predicted. Actual sanction reductions from the pre-to-post-intervention periods were confirmed to be 24.21%. The study supported the efficacy of the ITS approach for implementation of level four Kirkpatrick evaluation.     

Why the principle of informed self-determination does not help local farmers facing land loss: a case study from oil palm development in East Kalimantan,Indonesia

ABSTRACT

The principle of informed self-determination has been celebrated as a means to prevent involuntary land transfer and the resulting dispossession of affected communities in agricultural investments of developing countries. Based on qualitative field research conducted in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, this paper argues that such optimistic recognition needs reexamination. Drawing on a case study of indigenous Dayak communities that have faced advancement of large-scale oil palm estates since 2007, the paper examines what informs communities’ decisions to release land to estates. The underdevelopment created by government neglect and the lack of future prospects for autonomous development are shown to have contributed to communities’ decisions to release land. After a decade, encroaching palm oil has produced land shortages and depleted forest resources. This study highlights the need for meaningful state interventions to alleviate poverty and create conditions that allows local communities to make meaningful choices during the consultations over land release.