A Missing Citizen? Issue Based Citizenship in City-Regional Planning

City regions are significant sites of economic development, policymaking, and everyday living. Yet in many countries they are weakly institutionalized and therefore lack established democratic practices. This article is based on a study exploring citizen participation in city-regional planning in Finland, where traditional participatory means have largely failed to invite and involve citizens. The analysis approaches city regions relationally, as evolving processes with a changing spatial shape and scope. Through the notion of lived citizenship, including the dimensions of status, practices and acts, the article reveals how the dominant ideas of citizenship in city-regional planning hide from view elements that are significant for citizen participation. Whereas people's rights to participation can largely be fulfilled on a territorial basis in municipalities and states through legal membership in political communities, in the context of weakly institutionalized city-regional planning such status-based forms of participation are typically not available. This vagueness has created an image of a missing city-regional citizenry, which the article sets out to challenge and rework through the notion of issue-based participation as lived citizenship.     

Corruption as Infrastructure: Rendering the New Saigon Global

Corruption is regularly treated as a barrier to infrastructure, development and growth. However, in Saigon, corruption itself has become an infrastructure in Vietnam's late-socialist urban transformation. This infrastructure facilitates not only growth in the form of transnational investment, property speculation and construction, but allows for different kinds of planning and development practice as well. Perceptions about corruption in Vietnam, and in Saigon specifically, shape market and planning practices that structure the terms on which interested parties from abroad and internally speculate upon and ultimately develop urban projects. This is not a static formulation of corruption. Rather, corruption and the various political and policy responses to it constantly shape how brokers, developers and financiers renegotiate how the city becomes a knowable object for investment, legible to the calculations of both risk and reward used by global investors as well as to those who enact the embedded bureaucratic, legal and political practices that create Saigon's built environment. In this article I argue that different definitions and policy responses to corruption in effect create variable ways of seeing the city (as well as modes of being seen) that have an impact on the material realities of the metropolis—the types of connections produced with transnational finance, the legal and regulatory structure under which urbanization unfolds, and the types of players, firms and officials involved.     

Urban Ecological Enclosures: Conservation Planning,Peri-urban Displacement,and Local State Formations in China

Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri-urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri-urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site-specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi-state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post-socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city-level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.     

Researching the future of purchasing and supply management: The purpose and potential of scenarios

Drawing on prior research, the value of scenario planning as a methodology for researching the future of purchasing and supply management (PSM) is explored. Using three criteria of research quality – rigour, originality and significance – it is shown how developing scenarios and analysing their implications present new, important research opportunities for PSM academics, practitioners, and leaders of the profession. Researching the future of PSM supports the identification of uncertainties and anticipates change across many units and levels of analysis of interest to PSM scholars and practitioners, such as the profession/discipline, markets/sectors, or organisations. Scenarios are particularly effective for: considering how the complex interaction of macro-environmental factors affects the PSM context; avoiding incremental thinking; surfacing assumptions and revealing significant blind spots. PSM research using scenarios aligns with Corley and Gioia's (2011) call for prescience-oriented research in which academics aim for more impactful research, enhancing sense-giving potential and theoretical relevance to practice, to better perform their adaptive role in society.     

谈计划生育档案管理存在的问题及对策

计生档案管理作为计生部门的基础性工作,是国家档案事业的组成部分,也是计划生育的基础材料。就目前来看,我国计生部门以及医院在计生档案管理上还存在很多问题,如认识不足、管理不到位等,这要求相关单位、部门做好计生档案的管理工作,提高自身的管理意识,采用先进的管理方式,提高档案管理有效性。论文就当下我国计生档案管理中存在的问题展开合理的分析,并提出建设性的解决对策,促进我国人口健康事业的全面发展。     

Comparing proximity for couples of close airports. Case studies on city-airports in the pre COVID-19 era

Following the existing relationships between cities and airports, well depicted in the sectorial literature ((Thierstein and Conventz, 2018), (Tira et al., 2006), (Freestone, 2009), (Percoco, 2010), (Ventura et al., 2020))), this paper aims to investigate the linkages between the touristic traffic of some airports and the related development of the cities in which they are placed. The chosen case studies regard different remote regions (ONU, 2018) of three different countries (Italy, Norway, Cyprus), considering couples of near airports (Dziedzic and Warnock-Smith, 2015). The paper focuses the analysis on four couples of near airports, two from the South of Italy (Bari and Brindisi in the Apulia Region; Palermo and Trapani in Sicily), one in the North of Norway (Bødo and Narvik in Hålogaland) and the last one in the Republic of Cyprus (Larnaca and Paphos).A GIS analytic methodology has been used to describe the differences between the different couples of airports. Managed by the GIS analytical evaluation, the purpose of this paper is to give support to the different theories about the development of couples of close airports, using geographic tools to support economic and financial planning ((Cook and Billig, 2017) (Graham, 2014), (AntonínKazdaa et al., 2017) (Young and Wells, 2011))]. There has been pointed out the results of the adopted methodology on the working Norwegian network system analysis.     

“营改增”下建筑业企业实际税负变动研究

在营改增的背景下,结合数据分析与理论分析对建筑业企业的实际税负变动情况进行研究,评估营改增对建筑业企业带来的减税效应.研究结果表明,营改增后,中国建筑业整体的实际税负有所下降,但不同企业面临的实际税负与其税收筹划密切相关,建筑业自然人从业者的实际税负不降反增.在此基础上,为建筑业一般纳税人提供了税收筹划建议.     

基于采购视角的建筑业增值税税收筹划

自正式实施营改增政策以来,中国建筑业涉及的主体流转税从营业税转化为增值税,对建筑业产生较大的影响.在经营过程中,建筑业通过选择拆分合同项目、选择甲供工程的计税方法、选择物料的供货渠道以及选择劳务用工形式进行采购环节的税收筹划,以减轻整体税负,促进自身可持续发展.     

Innovation as recovery strategy for SMEs in emerging economies during the COVID-19 pandemic

The quarantine and disruption of non-essential activities as measure to contain the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively affected all economies around the World. This has had a deeper impact on small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in emerging economies because they have very limited resources and vulnerable supply chain and business-to-business/business-to-clients relationships. In this context, it is expected that after the pandemic many of these enterprises will disappear as the “new normality” will require changes in business and infrastructure management. To reduce this risk, innovation is identified as a key aspect of business recovery in the ongoing and post-COVID-19 pandemic period. This work presents a multidisciplinary methodological approach to guide these enterprises to innovate their products for new markets and making a better use of their limited available resources. As an example of this approach, the research-supported development of a new product for a family-owned SME was performed in a zone with high COVID-19 risk. The results provide insight regarding innovation as a survival tool for SMEs during and after the COVID-19 contingency, and the use of digital resources is identified as the main facilitator for networking and research-based design of innovative products within the “social distance” context.     

Reterritorialization practices and strategies of campesinos in the urban frontier of Bogotá, Colombia

Much of the research on urbanization has focused on how rural populations move to cities for work opportunities. This paper takes a different perspective on the relations between rural populations and urbanization. The livelihoods of rural dwellers on the outskirts of the city of Bogotá in Colombia are increasingly affected by the expansion of urban activities and infrastructure. Therefore, urbanization takes place in the areas of residence of the rural populations; these people do not migrate to the city but, rather, the city migrates to them. Consequently, rural ways of life face growing competition from the production of commodities and services on the urban-rural fringe, including quarrying and landfills serving the needs of industries and urban populations. We explore how rural populations and their livelihoods have transformed as a response to these urban dynamics and the expansion of the city. We focus on the strategies that the rural populations employ to deal with the physical and socio-ecological impacts of this change. The defense of peri-urban livelihoods through these strategies is simultaneously social and spatial and has been partially successful. However, increasing social and environmental inequality, including worsening access to land, water and vital ecological functions, tends to lead to a general reduction in the quality of life in the urban frontier.