4,908 research outputs found
Ukraine at a Crossroads
No full textThe Orange Revolution in the fall of 2004 built great hopes for a better future for Ukraine. However, three years later those hopes have been replaced by disappointment, frustration and confusion. Although progress in the areas of political freedom, pluralism, civil rights and freedom in the media remains unquestionable the record of economic, institutional and legal reforms is much more problematic. The key macroeconomic indicators are not better than they were few years ago and the business climate has barely improved. The WTO accession process remains incomplete. The perspectives of Euro-Atlantic integration are continually subject to heated domestic political controversies. The political situation remains unstable, mostly due to the hasty constitutional changes that were adopted during the Orange Revolution. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the state of the Ukrainian economy at the end of 2007 and reflect upon what kind of reform program the Ukrainian government should consider, regardless of its political color. The reforms suggested in this paper involve a broad agenda of macroeconomic, social, structural and institutional measures. This agenda goes beyond the purely economic sphere and also addresses issues of legal, administrative and political reforms. The politics and political economy of any future reform effort will not be easy because the country is deeply divided in political, cultural, regional and ethnic terms. In such an environment, crucial reforms and strategic decisions will require a wider cross-party political consensus.Ukraine, Orange Revolution, CIS, transition, European Naighborhood Policy, Euro-Atlantic integration
A Hermeneutic Historical Study of Kazimierz Dabrowski and his Theory of Positive Disintegration
No full textThe inquiry is a hermeneutic historical study of the historical factors in the life of Kazimierz Dabrowski which contributed to the shaping of his Theory of Positive Disintegration. Relatively little information has been written on the life and theory of Kazimierz Dabrowski. The researcher contends that knowledge of Dabrowski, the man, will aid in an understanding of his theory.
The journey in which an individual "develops" to the level at which "the other" becomes a higher concern than the self, is the "stuff" of Kazimierz Dabrowski's Theory of Positive Disintegration. It is a paradoxical theory of human development, based on the premise that "good can follow from bad." Crisis and suffering act as the propellents into an internal as well as external battle with self and environment to move out of the "what is" and travel to the "what ought to be." Illuminated within this study, is how the life of Dabrowski demonstrates this moral and psychic struggle.
Data collection for this qualitative study was accomplished over a four year period through a "deep" reading of the works of Dabrowski and a search for biographical material. The researcher was the first to utilize a ten volume file on Dabrowski housed in the National Archives of Ottawa in Canada which houses a plethora of Dabrowski's books and papers. The researcher, following a hermeneutic research approach, traveled to Poland to "walk in Dabrowski's footsteps." Within this journey, the researcher utilized the facilities of many archives in Poland - at libraries, and within prisons. Given the researcher's Polish heritage, a basic knowledge of the Polish language aided the researcher greatly in these endeavors. The journey served to deepen the researcher's understanding of Dabrowski, the man - his history and his country. Finally, the researcher interviewed several of Dabrowski's friends, co-authors, students and associates.
This study serves as a baseline endeavor for additional research. The researcher's purpose was to aid in understanding Dabrowski - the man and his theory. The research journey was an attempt by the researcher to keep alive and renew interest in a theory of human development that is in danger of being forgotten.Ph. D
The Noncommutative Geometry of the Quantum Projective Plane
No full textWe study the spectral geometry of the quantum projective plane CP^2_q, a
deformation of the complex projective plane CP^2, the simplest example of a
spin^c manifold which is not spin. In particular, we construct a Dirac operator
D which gives a 0^+ summable spectral triple, equivariant under U_q(su(3)). The
square of D is a central element for which left and right actions on spinors
coincide, a fact that is exploited to compute explicitly its spectrum.
Comment: v2: 26 pages. Paper completely reorganized; no major change, several
minor one
Dirac Operators on Quantum Projective Spaces
No full textWe construct a family of self-adjoint operators D-N, N is an element of Z, which have compact resolvent and bounded commutators with the coordinate algebra of the quantum projective space CPql, for any l >= 2 and 0 < q < 1. They provide 0(+)-dimensional equivariant even spectral triples. If l is odd and N = 1/2 (l + 1), the spectral triple is real with KO-dimension 2l mod 8
Four Clusters o fThought on Flood Resilience and Climate Adaptation: The state of the art and new directions for spatial planning
No full textThe need to respond to increasing flood risk, climate change, and rapid urban development has shaped innovative policies and practices of spatial planning in many countries over recent decades. As an instrumental–technical intervention, planning is mainly used to improve the physical environment (through concepts such as regulating waterproof facades of architecture, setting buffering zones, and designing green-blue corridors). However, the implementation of the proposed physical interventions is often challenging and necessitates assistance from practices such as climate assessment, policy disciplines, civil societies, and economic resources. These extensive perspectives have spawned many new research domains in the realm of spatial planning. This chapter provides a review of the recent developments in flood resilience, risk management, and climate adaptation; based on this, it positions planning research and practice within these works of literature. Four clusters of thought are identified, mainly in the European and American scholarship of the last two decades. They are environmental concerns, disaster management concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns. Current planning research concentrates on disaster management in the underlying belief that planning is functionally efficient. The attention to environmental concerns, socio-economic concerns, and institutional concerns of planning research remains insufficient but has been growing. This, in turn, enlarges the scope of planning research and indicates future directions for study. These new concerns relate to spatial planning’s ability to operate effectively in a multi-sectoral setting, despite limited resources and in the face of uncertain risk.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Introduction: drawing lessons from international policy-transfer initiatives in regional and urban development and spatial planning
No full textThe collection of papers in this issue brings new insights to the processes of international policy transfer and learning in the fields of regional and urban development policy, regional innovation and transit-oriented development. It explores, through the perspective of different disciplines, the motivations of actors, tangible and non-tangible outputs, the role of factors affecting the process, and the spillover effects of such process. The contributions bring new insights into what represents success and failure in policy transfer and provide valuable lessons for policy-makers facing the challenges of a fast-changing global context.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Vision and strategy making: Teaching spatial planning in design education on a situated learning environment
No full textThis chapter introduces the pedagogical approach of guiding vision and strategy making in university design studios. This is a unique way of teaching spatial planning in design education, bridging research, planning, and design. It will use one of the master’s courses at the Urbanism Department of TU Delft as an example: the regional design studio ‘Spatial Strategies for the Global Metropolis’. This approach is based on the tradition of planning schools with design education – using the design studio as a key method for teaching. This tradition has made spatial planning in design education different from other planning schools that focus on policies or social/environmental sciences. The approach being introduced is not only evidence-based/scientific but also explorative at the same time, prone to search for the more plausible and desirable future scenarios. It is in line with the role of regional design in practice, in the context of collaborative planning. To teach such practice-related skills, an authentic assignment from and the interaction with the ‘real world’ are needed, namely a situated learning environment, which mimics the actual situation and collaborative efforts of spatial planning. Spatial vision and development strategy are both tools of spatial planning in practice, meant to frame and steer the development towards a more sustainable future, with the involvement of stakeholders. In design education, they are also seen as design products students could and should work on to understand the roles of these tools in spatial planning and how to use them to develop regional design proposals.Spatial Planning and Strateg
Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning
No full textThis book is composed of a general introduction followed by 18 chapters written by teachers and researchers from TU Delft, as well as frequent collaborators, each describing an issue or tool used in Spatial Planning, as it is taught and researched at our university. The book aims to give readers around the world an introduction to how spatial planning is conceived at TU Delft. Spatial planning is a highly idiosyncratic discipline and is conceived differently around the world. In most places, spatial planning is part of an architectural approach to the city, in which design exists almost autonomously, while in other places it is part of a political-economical approach to the city. What distinguishes Delft is the bridge we have managed to build between design and politics, and the way we understand space as foundational for the understanding of socio-economic processes. This is anchored on a Dutch tradition of city-making in which issues of “maakbaarheid” (roughly translated by “feasibility”), a guiding concept in Dutch society, which was built upon an exceedingly difficult territory to plan, design and manage. Spatial planning in the Netherlands is hence a combination of planning, design and management that is unique. Simultaneously, spatial planning as a discipline in the Netherlands is rather forward-thinking and uniquely equipped to deal with the great societal challenges of our time (climate change, pandemics, growing inequality, etc) and may be useful for students and teachers elsewhere seeking to learn from other traditions. Each chapter addresses issues that we see as central to the way of teaching and researching spatial planning
Twisted Reality and the Second-Order Condition
No full textAn interesting feature of the finite-dimensional real spectral triple (A, H, D, J) of the Standard Model is that it satisfies a "second-order" condition: conjugation by J maps the Clifford algebra Cl-D (A) into its commutant, which in fact is isomorphic to the Clifford algebra itself (H is a self-Morita equivalence Cl-D (A)-bimodule). This resembles a property of the canonical spectral triple of a closed oriented Riemannian manifold: there is a dense subspace of H which is a self-Morita equivalence Cl-D (A)-bimodule. In this paper we argue that on manifolds, in order for the self-Morita equivalence to be implemented by a reality operator J, one has to introduce a "twist" and weaken one of the axioms of real spectral triples. We then investigate how the above mentioned conditions behave under products of spectral triples
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