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Slum Formation or Urban Innovation? – Migrant Communities and Social Change in Chinese Megacities
“China’s economic success over the last 20-30 years has been accompanied by rapid urbanisation based mainly on rural-to-urban migration flows. Many observers expect highspeed urbanisation and massive population redistribution to continue for another one or two decades. Nevertheless, China seeks and claims to be pursuing a process of urbanisation that […]
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The Self-Culturalisation of the City: On the Transformation of Modern Urbanity in the ‘Creative City’
“The expression creative city is on everyone‟s lips. If there has been talk of a „Renaissance in cities‟ since the 1990s, then at the interface of political, media and social science debates, this is regularly linked with the concept of the „creative city‟. From the widely discussed revitalisation of Berlin‟s […]
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A review of the main challenges to urban sustainability
Considering the existential threat that global warming poses to humanity, the current focus on climate change is undoubtedly justified. However, this should not overshadow the fact that sustainable development does not only end with environmental concerns but also covers social and economic domains that are mediated through physical spaces and […]
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Natural Disasters and the Risk of Violent Civil Conflict
Does the occurrence of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, hurricane, epidemic, heat wave, and ⁄ or plague increase the risk of violent civil conflict in a society? This study uses available data for 187 political units for the period 1950–2000 to systematically explore this question […]
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The Open Society Assesses Its Enemies: Shocks, Disasters and Terrorist Attacks
This paper conducts a first systematic investigation of the determinants and costs of terrorism attacks at the aggregate level. We use newly assembled datasets on terrorism attacks, natural disasters and bank and currency crises to answer three questions: what are the determinants of terrorism incidence, is there an output cost […]