Investing in Healthy, Sustainable Places Through Urban Agriculture

The purpose of this paper is to provide funders with an overview of urban agriculture and its benefits; its connections to the community-based food system; and how foundations are supporting and encouraging urban agriculture as a public health, social enterprise, environmental stewardship, and/or economic development strategy. With bibliographical references

Shared Value in Emerging Markets: How Multinational Corporations Are Redefining Business Strategies to Reach Poor or Vulnerable Populations

This report illuminates the enormous opportunities in emerging markets for companies to drive competitive advantage and sustainable impact at scale. It identifies how over 30 companies across multiple sectors and geographies design and measure business strategies that also improve the lives of underserved individuals

The countryside in urbanized Flanders: towards a flexible definition for a dynamic policy

The countryside, the rural area, the open space, … many definitions are used for rural Flanders. Everyone makes its own interpretation of the countryside, considering it as a place for living, working or recreating. The countryside is more than just a geographical area: it is an aggregate of physical, social, economic and cultural functions, strongly interrelated with each other. According to international and European definitions of rural areas there would be almost no rural area in Flanders. These international definitions are all developed to be used for analysis and policy within their specific context. They are not really applicable to Flanders because of the historical specificity of its spatial structure. Flanders is characterized by a giant urbanization pressure on its countryside while internationally rural depopulation is a point of interest. To date, for every single rural policy initiative – like the implementation of the European Rural Development Policy – Flanders used a specifically adapted definition, based on existing data or previously made delineations. To overcome this oversupply of definitions and delineations, the Flemish government funded a research project to obtain a clear and flexible definition of the Flemish countryside and a dynamic method to support Flemish rural policy aims. First, an analysis of the currently used definitions of the countryside in Flanders was made. It is clear that, depending on the perspective or the policy context, another definition of the countryside comes into view. The comparative study showed that, according to the used criteria, the area percentage of Flanders that is rural, varies between 9 and 93 per cent. Second, dynamic sets of criteria were developed, facilitating a flexible definition of the countryside, according to the policy aims concerned. This research part was focused on 6 policy themes, like ‘construction, maintenance and management of local (transport) infrastructures’ and ‘provision of (minimum) services (education, culture, health care, …)’. For each theme a dynamic set of criteria or indicators was constructed. These indicators make it possible to show where a policy theme manifests itself and/or where policy interventions are possible or needed. In this way every set of criteria makes up a new definition of rural Flanders. This method is dynamic; new data or insights can easily be incorporated and new criteria sets can be developed if other policy aims come into view. The developed method can contribute to a more region-oriented and theme-specific rural policy and funding mechanism

Government support for monotowns in the Republic of Kazakhstan

The objectives of the study are to identify the role of single-industry towns (also known as “monotowns”) in the economic development of the Republic of Kazakhstan, to determine the specific features of monotowns and to assess the effectiveness of government program documents aimed at supporting these entities. A number of research methods were used, including logical, systematic, structural-functional, comparative analysis, statistical and index methods, economic forecasting and sociological surveys. Using these methods in combination allowed the researcher to consider the phenomena and processes, the dynamics and development, thus providing evidence as to the reliability of the conclusions obtained. As a result of this study, distinctive features of the socio-economic development of monotowns in the Republic of Kazakhstan were revealed. In addition, an evaluation was made of the main program documents aimed at supporting the development of monotowns; and the factors affecting their further development were identified. Proposals have been made in this study with regard to best ways in which to improve the monotown management systems both in terms of improving the program documents and in developing new evaluation tools. The principal novel feature of this study is the identification of the main trends in the development of monotowns in the Republic of Kazakhstan. These trends reveal that, although monotowns do play an important role in the economy of the country, they also tend to develop in extremely uneven and inconsistent ways and are characterized by having weak economic diversification and a strong dependence on the town-forming enterprises, with these enterprises mainly being mining companies. The recommendations in this study are based on the need to improve both the administrative and economic methods used for the state regulation of monotowns. During this study, the feasibility of making adjustments in the current development programs aimed at supporting monotowns and the consistency of development programs were considered.The empirical basis of the analysis was the results of studies conducted in the framework of the R&D work “Development of theoretical and methodological fundamentals of corporate governance of regional technical higher school in the conditions of industrialinnovative development of Kazakhstan”, performed under grant funding of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Kazakhstan (grant number: 1274/GF4)

Impact of the Smart City Industry on the Korean National Economy: Input-Output Analysis

The characteristics of the smart city industry and its effects on the national economy of Korea are investigated using input-output analysis. The definition and industrial classification of a smart city are established using the Delphi technique for experts in various fields, from information and communication technologies (ICT) to governmental policies for urban matters. The results of the analysis, including the production, value added and employment induction effects, show that the smart city industry has intermediate characteristics between ICT and urban construction industries, indicating that acquisition of the competitive edge of both the ICT and construction industries is the key to the success of the smart city industry. The crucial industries related to the smart city industry are identified based on an analysis of the forward and backward linkage effects, the results of which suggest the importance of the relevant service industries. The economic effects on the national economy induced by the governmental program for smart city demonstration are estimated using input-output analysis results. Overall, the results of this study indicate that facilitation of the smart city industry plays a key role not only in the sustainable city, but also in the growth of the national economy

Harnessing the power of the general public for crowdsourced business intelligence: a survey

International audienceCrowdsourced business intelligence (CrowdBI), which leverages the crowdsourced user-generated data to extract useful knowledge about business and create marketing intelligence to excel in the business environment, has become a surging research topic in recent years. Compared with the traditional business intelligence that is based on the firm-owned data and survey data, CrowdBI faces numerous unique issues, such as customer behavior analysis, brand tracking, and product improvement, demand forecasting and trend analysis, competitive intelligence, business popularity analysis and site recommendation, and urban commercial analysis. This paper first characterizes the concept model and unique features and presents a generic framework for CrowdBI. It also investigates novel application areas as well as the key challenges and techniques of CrowdBI. Furthermore, we make discussions about the future research directions of CrowdBI

Mining Urban Performance: Scale-Independent Classification of Cities Based on Individual Economic Transactions

Intensive development of urban systems creates a number of challenges for urban planners and policy makers in order to maintain sustainable growth. Running efficient urban policies requires meaningful urban metrics, which could quantify important urban characteristics including various aspects of an actual human behavior. Since a city size is known to have a major, yet often nonlinear, impact on the human activity, it also becomes important to develop scale-free metrics that capture qualitative city properties, beyond the effects of scale. Recent availability of extensive datasets created by human activity involving digital technologies creates new opportunities in this area. In this paper we propose a novel approach of city scoring and classification based on quantitative scale-free metrics related to economic activity of city residents, as well as domestic and foreign visitors. It is demonstrated on the example of Spain, but the proposed methodology is of a general character. We employ a new source of large-scale ubiquitous data, which consists of anonymized countrywide records of bank card transactions collected by one of the largest Spanish banks. Different aspects of the classification reveal important properties of Spanish cities, which significantly complement the pattern that might be discovered with the official socioeconomic statistics.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, to be published in the proceedings of ASE BigDataScience 2014 conferenc

What is smart for retailing?

AbstractWhile the last decade has seen increasing interest in the smart city phenomenon from both scholars and practitioners, little attention has been paid to what extent retailing might be considered as part of smart cities, with benefits for all the actors involved in the process. In fact, retailing is subject to a radical innovation force that makes available several technologies that can be successfully applied. The extensive use of advanced systems gives rise to new questions concerning the smart use of technologies. Moreover, the application of advanced technologies is part of a trend towards the creation of smart cities for a better urban society. In this scenario, the idea of smartness goes beyond the concept of application of new technologies by also including more important dimensions, such as organizational structure. Hence, our work aims at identifying what can be considered smart for retailing, in terms of features of smart technology for retailing, and the challenges emerging from the adoption of such smart technologies