Planning for Housing and Food Security with Sustainable Design

Despite the social and economic success in Canada, both housing and food are recognized as important issues that are without a comprehensive framework that identifies the intersections between the two. Currently, there is the National Housing Strategy, and the National Food Strategy that will be released in Fall 2018, but these initiatives and others like them may not be enough to tackle the dilemma that the City of Toronto is facing. The concentration of people that are unable to afford and access adequate housing and food challenges the future health of communities. Given that, this paper is a compilation of meaningful literature and dialogue with planners, officials, housing providers, food advocates, and stakeholders in Toronto. Using this, there will be a discussion of strategies and plans aimed at housing and food in Canada. This will provide context, and explore the case for sustainable design as a possible way for bringing the issues of housing and food together in a more integrated framework. This paper offers potential recommendations through literature review, case studies, and interviews, and will conclude by looking at programs that can help to manage these problems and change the experiences of people

The Age-Sex Structure of Religion as a Determinant of the Social Inclusion of Internal Migrants in Maroua

We set out to find out how the sex-age structure of religion of internal migrants influences their integration in the socio-economic activities of Maroua. We used the exponential non-discriminative snowball sampling method to collect data in which each new referral provided us with more data for referral until we got enough number of subjects for the sample. We concluded that: if one is a Muslim, one will have a stable and progressing business because Muslims maintain a good relationship with their neighbors and they also practice a relationship of solidarity. However, the socio-economic activities of Catholics, Pentecostals and Protestants suffer because they lack the cultural capital that Muslims enjoy. However, age plays a major role: when they are 45–54 years old, the income of the internally migrated Muslims and Catholics drastically decline while that of Pentecostals and Protestants increases. Older Muslims and Catholics earn basically very low income unlike Protestants who earn very high salary. The income inequality among men is much higher than that among women. Generally, men have a more conflictual relationship with their neighbors than women and women diversify their relationship with the natives more than men

La ciudad inteligente en países en vía de desarrollo: un modelo de desarrollo sostenible en Latinoamérica y el Caribe

Descargue el texto completo en el repositorio institucional del Politecnico di Milano: http://hdl.handle.net/10589/140593Las ciudades son sistemas complejos que causan alto impacto en el medio ambiente, por lo que se deben orientar esfuerzos hacia un desarrollo sostenible. En ese sentido, el modelo de ciudad inteligente invierte en capital social, tecnología y uso eficiente de recursos, representa una herramienta válida para potenciar y mejorar la habitabilidad, propiciando que los ciudadanos tengan un rol más activo en la transformación de sus ciudades. Aunque el tema ha sido ampliamente debatido en occidente, la literatura no distingue su enfoque en los países en desarrollo, quienes son más vulnerables a desafíos urbanos y tienen recursos económicos limitados. Debido a que las principales ciudades de América Latina y el Caribe alcanzarán la condición de megaciudades, están cambiando su agenda urbana y apuntando esfuerzos hacia la sostenibilidad, incluyendo el concepto de ciudad inteligente y construyendo una visión integral del territorio. En la presente tesis, la ciudad inteligente se explicará como un modelo sostenible, pero considerando que la inteligencia se aborda distintamente en la región de América Latina y el Caribe. Se realiza un mapeo y listado de las sinergias internas y soluciones de servicios urbanos y, finalmente, se aborda el caso de Lima en Perú como ejemplo de inteligencia colectiva.In the present thesis, the smart city will be explained as a model to reach urban sustainability in developing Countries, but considering that smartness cannot be approached the same in developed countries due to the different goals in urban management, target and problems. It will explore some urban innovations in the region of Latin America and the Caribbean that has been labelled as one of the most promising communities in terms of urban expansion, social development and that represents a potential target for ICT companies as a market for smart technologies. Through the method of tracking and mapping urban innovation projects, it will be presented the different areas of interventions, policy strategies and alignments that cities are focusing on. Furthermore, the internal synergies of the cities and their particular needs have produced many smart initiatives that are simply based in terms of technology but that represent a valuable solution and the real re-adaptation of the smart concept considering the complexity and context of the city. Therefore, the experience of Lima in Perú will be explained as an example in which the collective intelligence is the way to achieve smartness.Italia. Politecnico di Milano: Merit-based Gold scholarshi

Children's experiences of divorce in Botswana

This study explores children and mothers' perceptions of children's experiences of divorce in Botswana. To illuminate this complex topic, the study draws on two main overlapping theoretical perspectives. These are the social constructionist approach and the sociology of childhood approach. The concept of resilience as well as some concepts of feminist theory, social network theory and family stress theory were also used in the study. A few children believed their experiences had long-term effects on them. These were mainly children who experienced multiple stressors. For example, they perceived: their relations with mothers (who were their custodial parents) as negative, their relations with fathers were not close, they believed they experienced severe economic declines, they changed neighbourhoods and schools many times, witnessed and / or were victims of parental violence either for many years prior to the separation or continued to be exposed to violence even after the legal divorce. This study has explored an issue that remains largely unexplored in developing countries. Some of its findings are similar in broad terms to those of studies that have been conducted in developed countries, but they manifest themselves differently. For example, women in this study stayed in unhappy marriages for many years partly because of lack of services for them, customary laws that make divorce more difficult for women than for men, cultural expectations that require women to persevere in order to preserve their marriages and fear of stigma as well as economic hardships. Therefore when violence occurred, its impact on their children can be much more severe compared to their counterparts in developed countries. Findings of this study are also manifested differently from those of studies from developed countries in relation to children's experiences of economic hardship during the post-divorce period. Studies from both developing and developed countries attest to the low family income in maternal custody families following divorce. However, children in developing countries such as Botswana experience more severe economic hardships than their counterparts in developed countries because welfare programmes in the countries are less generous and the criteria used to determine eligibility exclude able-bodied unemployed mothers. The major policy implications arising from this study that need close attention therefore are: the need to improve the economic circumstances of children, the need to reduce if not eliminate children's exposure to parental violence, as well as the need to educate parents about how they can help their children to cope with the divorce process

Beyond the Naughty Step: The intersections of class and gender in contemporary parenting culture

This thesis examines the texture of contemporary parenting culture, examining how 'childrearing', as the activity of raising children, has been rhetorically eclipsed by 'parenting', as a broader orientation towards one's children, oneself and the future. Parenting has been increasingly visualised across culture and policy as both a classless activity and as the key to transcending social inequalities of all kinds. In these visualisations, it is poor parenting which limits and constrains children. Consequently, good, competent or responsible parenting has become imbued cross a range of sites with enormous explanatory power, and is invoked to account for developmental differences in behaviour, vocabulary, and cognition. This thesis critically examines these socio-cultural shifts and explores how parenting discourse is implicated within these drifts away from a sociological imagining of inequality and towards a more psychological account of social change. It pays specific attention to one television programme, Supernanny (Richochet Productions, 2003-), which proved highly popular amongst viewers and highly tenacious in policy circles; a programme in which the staging of 'poor parenting' became an opportunity for Both education and entertainment. This thesis pays close attention to the subjectivising encounters between parenting culture and parents. It argues that, far from parenting being a classless activity, it has emerged as a new site for the production of social distinction

Entrepreneurial managerialism: mobilisation of redistributive mechanisms for entrepreneurial redevelopment of Penghuqu in a Chinese third-front city

This thesis aims to investigate the change of urban governance in post-socialist China, as illustrated by the redevelopment of a shantytown or penghuqu neighbourhood established during the Third Front Construction (1964-1981) in Luzhou, a city in Western China. In the literature on Western cities, the change of urban governance in the neoliberal era has been described as a shift from managerialism towards entrepreneurialism. While this is often depicted as to entail a qualitative transformation of the state, we cannot regard such a change as a fundamental shift. As argued in this thesis, the state, however entrepreneurial it is, would still maintain some redistributive functions, rendering the mode of urban governance nowadays bearing the characteristics of managerialism and entrepreneurialism simultaneously. This would be evident in China. On the one hand, the local state in China, which depends heavily on a land-based accumulation system, is becoming more entrepreneurial. On the other hand, as China remains a “socialist state”, the legitimacy of the state is still founded partly upon accountability to its people, especially those disadvantaged ones. Drawing upon a series of ethnographic data collected from fieldwork between 2015 and 2017, this thesis will argue that entrepreneurialism and managerialism not only co-exist in the contemporary mode of urban governance in China, but intertwine in an integrated way, which may be termed “entrepreneurial managerialism”. The redevelopment of penghuqu, a national project aiming at improving the living conditions of disadvantaged urban residents with some degree of managerial features, has been strategically appropriated by the local state to serve its entrepreneurial vision. Furthermore, within the course of housing expropriation, the redistributive mechanism that could be dated back to the Maoist era with some modifications, have been mobilised to differentiate residents, and legitimise expropriation. The mode of urban governance that combines managerialism with entrepreneurialism also has significant implications for residents, shaping their minds and responses that bear such dual features

Contested understandings: The Lansbury estate in the post war period.

PhDThe Lansbury estate was the LCC's first post-war reconstruction area, it formed the Exhibition of Architecture during the Festival of Britain, and received considerable media, political, architecutral and planning attention. This coverage articulated hegemonic post-war ideas about the future, the East End and communities. I have examined this material and the representation and understandings about the estate from non-hegemonic groups. My intention has been to explore these representations and emphasise the complexity associated with the creation and negotiation of understandings about places. While the research is concerned with understandings of the Lansbury estate,I have examined the ways those meanings and understandings are created,and based my work around a conceptual critique of cultural geography. I argue that cultural geography has overly relied on hegemonic discourses produced by the powerful and neglected less powerful groups' understandings. As a result of this, some cultural geographers have over-simplified the complex ways meanings about places are created,reproduced and contested,and failed to address the range of meanings about places. This work, therefore is offered as a response to these limitations, and aims to show that to appreciate the meanings of places it is necessary to examine the understandings of hegemonic and nonhegemonic groups, and emphasise the relationships between those groups

Гласник Етнографског института САНУ 63 (1) / Bulletin of the Institute of Ethnography SASA 63 (1)

Тема броја: Град у Србији и Бугарској: компаративно ишчитавање актуелних процеса / Topic of the issue: The Town in Serbia and Bulgaria: a Comparative Reading of Current Processe