Using SIMGRO for drought analysis – as demonstrated for the Taquari Basin, Brazil

Tools were developed and tested to quantify space–time development of droughts at the river basin scale. The spatial development of a hydrological drought in river basins brings different challenges to describe drought characteristics, such as: area in a drought and areal expressions for onset, duration and severity. We used the regional hydrological model SIMGRO in a GIS framework to generate the spatially-distributed time series for the drought analysis. Droughts in different hydrological variables (recharge and groundwater discharge) were identified by applying the fixed threshold concept to the time series. The method captures the development of both the duration and the severity of the area in a drought. The GIS helps to better understand the link between areal drought characteristics and spatially-distributed catchment characteristics. Functions, like agriculture, nature or navigation in a region, need to be considered more in defining the appropriate threshold levels. It is also important to take into account varying hydrological conditions like regions with deep or shallow groundwater levels, resulting in periods with capillary rise in the unsaturated zone in the latte

“My room is the kitchen”:Lived experiences of home-making, home-unmaking and emerging housing strategies of disadvantaged urban youth in austerity Ireland

The current Irish housing crisis shows that the 2008 financial crash lingers on in everyday lives and spaces. As especially poorer populations became increasingly excluded from affordable housing under austerity, it is increasingly felt as a ‘personal crisis’. This paper explores the impacts of austerity on home-(un)making to reveal home as a place where austerity becomes ‘lived’ and ‘felt’. Building on interviews with young people aged 18 to 25 in Cork and Dublin, it focusses on a group eager but unable to leave their parental home. Their experiences illustrate the immediate home-unmaking of austerity and the role of past memories and anticipated futures in home-unmaking under austerity. As future expectations and home-making strategies are adjusted to the austerity context, these reconfigure the facets and spheres through which crisis and austerity are experienced. The becoming-everyday of the financial crisis affects the places and spaces of everyday life, creating an all-encompassing ‘slow crisis’ that alters domestic routines and materialities, creates new forms of living together, and presents new strategies for housing and home-making. Housing and home are critical spheres through which austerity and recession become embedded in the everyday lives of disadvantaged urban youth and shape contemporary life courses in the city-after-austerity

Sense of Place as Spatial Control:Austerity and Place Processes Among Young People in Ballymun, Dublin

After the 2008 financial crisis, fiscal austerity policies have transformed the material and affective qualities of urban space. The material disruptions of austerity provide an opportunity to investigate the relationships between physical and social space. This chapter explores the impacts of austerity on sense of place for a group particularly affected by crisis and austerity, disadvantaged urban youth. Interviews with young adults from Ballymun, one of Dublin’s most deprived neighbourhoods, are analysed to understand the affective transformations of place under austerity. The six place processes, developed by Seamon (Life Takes Place: Phenomenology, Lifeworlds, and Place Making, Routledge, New York, 2018), are mobilised to illuminate the impact of austerity on the relations between people-in-place, the environmental ensemble, and common presence. Austerity negatively affected the formation of a sense of place among young adults. As their spatial neighbourhood identity remained strong, austerity’s negative effects on sense of place followed from an experienced loss of control over the spaces of everyday life.</p