Using GIS in community design charrettes: Lessons from a Japan–U.S. collaboration in earthquake recovery and mitigation planning for Kobe

Charrettes have become popular in the urban design field, especially for use among multidisciplinary teams of professionals and non-professional community stakeholders seeking to incorporate a rich array of expertise in short visioning activities. Geographic Information Systems are among the technologies with potential to provide sophisticated spatial information to charrette participants efficiently. This article reports on a charrette carried out jointly by teams from Kobe University and the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, using GIS to inform urban design in three neighborhoods affected by the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake of 1995 in Kobe, Japan. The article describes the charrette itself, and discusses the utility of GIS, given the challenges of disaster recovery in a context of undeveloped institutions for public participation, and with participants of different linguistic and educational backgrounds. In combination with electronically storable drawing technology, GIS proved useful in enlarging the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural reach of urban design; in incorporating new layers of pre-prepared expert data, and in combining such data with dynamically-generated “advice maps” and design ideas. For GIS-based charrettes to become more widely useful in community-scale design in Japan, however, additional property-scale data need to be available.     

Good health and the bridging of structural holes

Bridges that span structural holes are often explained in terms of the entrepreneurial personalities or rational motivations of brokers, or structural processes that lead to the intersection of social foci. I argue that the existence and use of bridges in interpersonal networks also depends on individuals’ health. Poor health may make it more difficult to withstand the pressures and to execute some of the common tasks associated with bridging (e.g., brokerage). I examine this possibility using egocentric network data on over 2500 older adults drawn from the recent National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP). Multivariate regression analyses show that both cognitive and functional health are significantly positively associated with bridging, net of sociodemographic and life-course controls. The relationship between functional (kinesthetic) health and bridging appears to be partially mediated by network composition, as older adults who have poorer functional health also tend to have networks that are richer in strong ties. Several potential mediation mechanisms are discussed. Cognitive function remains significantly associated with bridging net of network composition, suggesting that the inherent challenges of maintaining bridging positions may be more difficult to cope with for those who have cognitive impairments than for those who have functional impairments such as limited mobility. An alternative explanation is that cognitively impaired individuals have more difficulty recognizing (and thus strategically using) bridges in their networks. Theoretical implications and possibilities for future research are discussed.     

How do International Volunteering Characteristics Influence Outcomes? Perspectives from Partner Organizations

This study examines how different types of international volunteering influence common program outcomes such as building organizational capacity, developing international relationships, and performing manual labor. Survey responses were collected from 288 development-oriented volunteer partner organizations operating in 68 countries. Data on the duration of volunteer service, the volunteers’ skill levels, and other variables were used to develop a rough typology of international volunteering. Binary logistic regression models then assessed differences in outcomes across five volunteering types. Findings suggest that future research needs to be more precise about how the nuances and complexity of diverse forms of international volunteering influence outcomes.     

Designing a Programme to Support Smallholder Agriculture in Mexico: Lessons from PROCAMPO and Oportunidades

This article argues that there is a gap in current Mexican rural development policy that could be filled by a smallholder‐targeted programme. The gap exists because agricultural programmes tend to benefit better‐off farmers, while social programmes tend to focus on long‐term investment in human capital, specifically for the children of today's poor. Drawing on lessons from PROCAMPO and Oportunidades, it offers a specific design for such a programme at a time when the government is considering how to reform PROCAMPO, given that, after 15 years, it is due to come to an end.     

Learning to negotiate network relations: social support among working mothers living in poverty

This study promotes our understanding of the complex and dynamic role that social support networks play in the everyday life of working mothers living in poverty, by focusing on the processes of negotiation involved in the creation, maintenance and mobilization of social ties. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 12 Israeli-Jewish working mothers who participated in an economic empowerment workshop. Findings indicate that the participants received much social support from relatives, friends and community activists. However, they further reveal the hard hidden work of negotiation and the process of learning involved in obtaining support. Particularly important in this context of poverty was the need to learn how to ask for support by overcoming feelings of shame and concerns about respectability, and to reduce social burdens by, among other things, refusing to participate in the ‘gift economy’ and limiting constraining social relationships. Finally, this study shows how the seemingly divergent interpretations of negotiation in social-exchange theory and symbolic interactionism (reaching an agreement that maximizes benefits versus preserving the relationship) often converge in everyday life situations.     

Liberalisierungspolitik

Political-economic classics of different schools agreed that capitalism inherently and inevitably leads to a decline of market principles. We analyze indicators of liberalization policies for 21 OECD-countries in five economic and social policy fields and demonstrate that western industrialized countries are subject of a convergent trend towards market-creating policies??in stark contrast to the theoretical expectations of several political economy authors. At the latest during the first half of the eighties, the western democracies entered a new phase of economic liberalization, which continues up to the present. A methodological implication of our findings suggests that the methods of causal analysis of convergent liberalization policies may not be the same as those who have been applied for the analysis of development and consolidation of the varieties of capitalism in the postwar era.     

Duality of the improved algebraic method (DIAM)

In this note we present a variant of the improved algebraic method (IAM) using a duality analysis to solve linear programming (LP) problems where more insights to the method are presented. When the coordinates of all vertices are computed, any feasible point can be expressed as a linear combination of the vertices. The objective function is expressed as a weighted sum of its evaluation at the feasible vertices and the optimal point is associated with the highest/lowest coefficient of the weighted sum.