1,721,014 research outputs found
Mobilising labour : a spatial analysis of railway infrastructure, commuting flows and rural-urban relations in Belgium, 1846-1961
No full textAbstract: In contemporary debates on sustainable environments, the intertwinement of transport policies, mobility flows and urbanisation patterns is common. In historical studies of mobility and migration, urbanisation, transport, planning and in historical geography, on the other hand, only aspects of this tripartite are studied. This dissertation bridges that disciplinary gap by asking how the novel practice of governments to plan railway infrastructure top-down in the nineteenth century affected labour mobility and urban morphology. The double pioneering role in railway policies made Belgium a suitable case-study: Belgian policy makers were not only the first to build and finance a coherent public railway network, but they were also the first to support railway commuting on a national scale. In 1869, the Belgian government decided to create a national rural-urban continuum for solving the societal problems that overcrowding in the cities of the nineteenth century caused. To realise this spatial model, railway policies were developed that allowed rural households to remain in their village while having access to industrial and urban labour markets. By the early twentieth century, the strategy to make railway commuting an affordable alternative to labour migration for wage workers had led to a successful establishment of the intended rural-urban continuum, as studies on the use of cheap railway subscriptions demonstrated. Yet, the spatial patterns that the commuting and population data displayed for the years 1846 to 1961 refuted a straightforward link between gained railway access and rising commuting rates. The national scale of these empirical maps directed the attention to labour markets, livelihoods and rural agency, alongside transport technology\u2019s ability to deal with the friction of distance, as key variables in understanding home-work configurations. Moreover, William Cronon\u2019s identification of commodity markets as the linchpin around which nineteenth-century transformations of rural-urban landscapes revolved, led to the understanding that the rise of large-scale production and trade have turned commuting into an economic imperative to provide for a livelihood. Therefore, to prevent making mobility injustice a structural part of planned sustainable environments, requires an approach to commuting first as a contemporary necessity to provide for a livelihood and only then as a privilege to realise location preferences
Tussen landbouw en de markt : de rurale middenstand in Doel, 1614-1900
No full textAbstract: During the Early Modern period and the nineteenth century the non-agrarian population on the Western-European countryside grew extensively. Remarkably up until this point this group did not receive much attention from scholars. Rural craftsmen, retailers and service providers only played a marginal role in historical research, which focused primarily on rural producers and their agrarian and proto-industrial activities. This neglect is happened because most scholars believe that between the sixteenth and nineteenth century rural demands was insufficient to develop these crafts and trades into industries, an evolution that did in fact take place in the urban context. This PhD casts a new light on the social and economic worlds of rural middle groups by looking at a case-study of the Flemish polder village of Doel. During the Early Modern period and nineteenth century countless artisans, retailers and service providers inhabited the village and supported the commercial polder agriculture. This book pays attention to the professional organisation of the households under study, their spatial organisation in the polder and the village, their material culture, and the web of relations they constructed with people within and outside the Doelpolder. Results show that the spatial and the socioeconomic organisation both provided strong and functional support for the polder agriculture, which in it\u2019s turn provided the secondary and tertiary sector in the village to grow even stronger. This even provided some members of the rural middle group to specialise onto a level where they could provide their craft or service throughout the entire year, without a need to combine it with agricultural or proto-industrial activities. Simultaneously it was observed that specialisation was not necessarily the only path to success. Several artisans, retailers, and service providers combined multiple activities within the secondary and tertiary sector and grew more wealthy than some of their colleagues who specialised in one craft or service. This research concluded that rural demand indeed played an important role in the evolution of the rural secondary and tertiary sector. But within those sectors multiple divergent paths existed, which further research needs to take into account
The lodging house and the city : accommodating migrants in urban space, Antwerp, 1850-1914
No full textAbstract: This dissertation studies the lodging house sector and its relation to changes in migration and urbanisation in Antwerp during the late nineteenth century (ca. 1850-1914). Although omnipresent in the historical cityscape, the lodging house features only scarcely in the works of historians. This dissertation aims to fill in this gap. It argues that the lodging house functioned as a crucial link between two of the period\u2019s most impactful transitions: the urban transition and the mobility transition. The processes and social mechanisms that connected these two together, have often remained implicit. In this dissertation, the lodging house is treated both as an expression of these transition \u2013 and thus a peculiar historical phenomenon meriting an understanding of its own internal mechanisms \u2013 and a lens on them, a key site to investigate how such transformations reverberated in the lives of ordinary people. With this goal in mind, this thesis adopts an approach that is fundamentally spatial and relational across scales. This method is applied through novel digital tools like GIS-mapping and building biographies, to a broad variety of sources ranging from police documents, legislative texts, population and lodging registers, newspapers, and historical novels and imagery. The dissertation is structured around five chapters, which each deal with one of the main perspectives on the topic, namely: the city, control, housekeepers, lodgers, and finally the lodging house itself. As the city and its migrant flows expanded and diversified, so too did the lodging sector, but not uniformly. Growth was segmented across urban space, and the sector adopted varying functions for different migrant groups across neighbourhoods. The specialisation of the sector was not new in the nineteenth century, but both transitions did strengthen this trend. In this process, lodging houses appropriated important functions for the city, and its labour market especially. Through their flexibility, the lodging house constituted a crucial pivot in rhyming the inherent dynamism of urban migration and work with a relatively more static built urban space. In conclusion, this thesis shows that, for understanding processes of migrant and urban change in the nineteenth century, the lodging house can no longer be ignored
Novel TOD planning approaches : prototypes sustainable mobility urbanisation processes
No full textAbstract: The handbook aims at raising awareness on the challenge of extending TOD to RUR, the social and environmental challenges, and offers planners, NGOs and interest groups hands-on methods and approaches to understand and analyse prototypes of environmental sustainable mobility-urbanisation processes. It presents different research approaches, as well as their implementation in research of TODs in different European contexts
Novel TOD planning approaches : local landscape values
No full textAbstract: The handbook aims at raising awareness on the challenge of extending TOD to RUR, the social and environmental challenges, and offers planners, NGOs and interest groups hands-on methods and approaches to understand and analyse local landscape values of station areas in RURs. It presents different research approaches, as well as their implementation in research of TODs in different European contexts
Dryland : afforestation and the politics of plant life
No full textAbstract: Dryland elevates the aliveness of plants by exploring afforestation, the practice of planting trees in otherwise treeless environments. By surveying the connection between ecology as a twentieth century science and plants as living organisms, the loss of global diversity is examined in order to recognize the challenges of conservation. Chapters address the overlooked tradition of dryland afforestation through the rise of scientific forestry in the American Prairies, the control of colonial holdings in Sub-Sahelian Africa, and the spread of environmental decline in hyper-arid China. Including plant life as a political subject not only problemizes practices such as tree planting, it expands what usually counts as politics. Thus conceived, Dryland suggests that planting a tree can either be one of the ultimate offerings to thriving on this planet, or one of the most extreme perversions of human agency over it. Afforestation is the deliberate planting of trees in an otherwise treeless environment. Another dictum could be the deliberate insertion of a forest in a grassland or desert biome. There is nothing \u201cnatural\u201d or restorative about the procedure. As a specific form of anthropogenic disturbance, afforestation is an intensely political maneuver. Dryland explores the politics of tree planting by indexing afforestation through the rise of scientific forestry in the United States, the control of colonial holdings in Africa, and the spread of environmental decline in China. The argument culminates in critique of global tree planting as a means to offset extreme deforestation. Projects are situated across the 20th century in order to resist the categories of specific intervals, movements or historical versus contemporary labels, relying on precedent to substantiate afforestation as a global practice. The term plant life is used to help us help us think about how we might organize our transactions differently and more carefully, when the concept of planting is replaced with the aliveness of plants. This gives agency to the plant and distributes it away from the human. Expanding the terms of plant life beyond professional operations makes it possible to take account of how plant science is appropriated as a means to further global development, confusing knowledge and politics by conflating speculation with certainty. It further argues that these assumptions continue to ripple through novel discourses including the \u2018stuff\u2019 of social theory, the monolithic concept of nature proposed by the Anthropocene and the challenge of a rapidly warming climate. Therefore, one of the central agendas is to distinguish between the plant as a sessile tool and its actual aliveness, in order to explore the connection between ecology as a twentieth century science and plants as living organisms
From sociobiology to urban metabolism : the interaction of urbanism, science and politics in Brussels, (1900-1978)
No full textAbstract: Today, urbanism and urban design are engaging in a productive alliance with the natural sciences, leading to the international rise of ecological forms of urbanism. In the Brussels region, socio-ecological approaches are rethinking the urban landscape through a biological perspective, and the turn towards landscape design as well as metabolic schemes and circular economy goals show that the region has become a telling manifestation of these evolutions. Still, the implications of these interactions remain unclear, and this dissertation therefore provides the necessary historical background to understand and critically assess today\u2019s alliance of ecology and urbanism. Indeed, while this use of ecology in urbanism, planning and design seems new and innovative, the history of Brussels \u2013 a crossroads of ideas and practices in urbanism \u2013 is littered with examples in which disciplinary constellations of urbanists, landscape designers, scientists and politicians created \u2018ecological\u2019 or \u2018environmental\u2019 forms of urbanism theory and prac\uadtice. After the First World War, urbanists and landscape architects started to design garden cities fusing urban housing and rural landscapes in the vicinity of Brussels, based on sociobiological urban theories. In the post-Second World War period highway construction centred around Brussels created possibilities for landscape designers to rethink and redesign the green structure of the city. In the 1970s, the advent of urban ecology in Brussels as a new scientific field went hand in hand with new zoning plans, rethinking the city-nature dichotomy through new regional planning policies. All these episodes of environmental forms of urbanism were created by specific historical constellations of actors working on urban questions in Brussels. This dissertation delves into these particular episodes of Brussels\u2019 urban history and zooms in on the work and network of three experts \u2013 urbanist Louis Van der Swaelmen, landscape architect Ren\ue9 Pech\ue8re, and urban ecologist Paul Duvigneaud \u2013 who serve as entry points to map the alliances of disciplines that created different hybrid urbanism theories. It tracks down the different uses of ecological discourses in urbanism and unearths the political aspects of ecological urban design. This research therefore builds a critical historical reflection on ecological urbanism theory and gives insight into the ways in which socio-ecological ideas and concepts find traction and are reshaped by urban de\uadsign and the urban reality
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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