We highlight the complexity of land-use/cover change and propose a framework for a more general understanding of the issue, with emphasis on tropical regions. The review summarizes recent estimates on changes in cropland, agricultural intensification, tropical deforestation, pasture expansion, and urbanization and identifies the still unmeasured land-cover changes. Climate-driven land-cover modifications interact with land-use changes. Land-use change is driven by synergetic factor combinations of resource scarcity leading to an increase in the pressure of production on resources, changing opportunities created by markets, outside policy intervention, loss of adaptive capacity, and changes in social organization and attitudes. The changes in ecosystem goods and services that result from land-use change feed back on the drivers of land-use change. A restricted set of dominant pathways of land-use change is identified. Land-use change can be understood using the concepts of complex adaptive systems and transitions. Integrated, place-based research on land-use/land-cover change requires a combination of the agent-based systems and narrative perspectives of understanding. We argue in this paper that a systematic analysis of local-scale land-use change studies, conducted over a range of timescales, helps to uncover general principles that provide an explanation and prediction of new land-use changes.

Dynamics of Land-Use and Land-Cover Change in Tropical Regions

Attention to global and world cities has directed the field of urban studies to the significance of international and transnational processes in shaping city economies. This article evaluates these approaches, from a position off their maps. I argue that the circulation of these approaches in academic and policy realms adversely impacts on cities which do not fall into these categories by setting up the idea of the global city as a ‘regulating fiction’, a standard towards which they aspire. It establishes a small sector of the global economy as most desirable in planning the future of cities. By contrast, mega–cities function as the dramatic ‘other’ of world and global cities, and highlight the developmentalist discourse through which most cities in poor countries are assessed as fundamentally lacking in qualities of city–ness. I argue that the long–standing categories of western/third–world cities have been translated into the apparently transnational accounts of global and world cities. Western cities continue to be the primary site of production of apparently unlocated urban theory; so–called third–world cities (and other cities off the map of the world cities cartography) are interpreted through a developmentalist lens and, where they are referred to at all, are framed in terms of ‘difference’ or irrelevance. This article draws attention to the emergence of an alternative set of theoretical approaches, which are more inclusive in their geographical reach and which are concerned with the diverse dynamics of ordinary cities. These approaches have not yet realized that they have the potential to broaden the base for theorizing about cities and, with this in mind, the article explores the potential for a more cosmopolitan urban theory. The policy stakes in this are high, and the article notes that there are important political reasons to promote the analysis of ordinary cities in the face of the persistence of ambitions in many cities to become ‘world cities‘.

L’attention accordee aux villes planetaires et mondiales a oriente le champ des etudes urbaines vers l’importance des processus internationaux et transnationaux dans la configuration economique des villes. Partant d’un point situe hors de leur cartographie, l’article evalue ces approches. La circulation de celles–ci dans les spheres politiques et intellectuelles a une incidence nefaste sur les villes qui n’appartiennent pas a ces categories, car elle instaure l’idee d’une ville planetaire en tant que ‘fiction regulatrice’, norme a laquelle aspirent les villes. Un secteur restreint de l’economie mondiale est ainsi etabli comme le plus recherche dans la planification urbaine. Par contraste, les megacities fonctionnent comme l’impressionnant ‘autre’ des villes mondiales et planetaires, valorisant le discours developpementaliste selon lequel l’evaluation des villes des pays pauvres indique le plus souvent des lacunes fondamentales dans les qualites propres a une ville. Les anciennes categories de villes (Occident/tiers–monde) ont ete converties en justifications apparemment transnationales des villes planetaires et mondiales. Les villes occidentales restent le site de production principal d’une theorie urbaine manifestement non–localisee; les villes dites du tiers monde (et autres villes ignorees de la cartographie des villes mondiales) sont interpretees a travers une optique developpementaliste et, si on en parle, sont depeintes en termes de ‘difference‘ ou d’inadequation. Cet article souligne l’emergence d’un autre ensemble d’approches theoriques, plus inclusives dans leur geographie et soucieuses des diverses dynamiques des villes ordinaires. Sachant que ces demarches ne sont pas encore conscientes de pouvoir etendre la base theorique sur les villes, l’article explore la possibilite d’une theorie urbaine plus cosmopolite. Les enjeux strategiques sont serieux et il existe des raisons politiques importantes d’encourager l’analyse des villes ordinaires face aux ambitions persistantes dans de nombreuses villes de devenir les ‘villes mondiales’.

Global and world cities: a view from off the map

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/231.pdf

A roster of world cities

The Amazon rain forest covers more than five million square kilometers, amid the territories of nine different nations. It represents over half of the planet's remaining rain forests. But is it truly in peril? And what steps are necessary to save it? To understand the future of Amazonia, one must know how its history was forged: in the eras of large pre-Columbian populations, in the gold rush of conquistadors, in centuries of slavery, in the schemes of Brazil's military dictators in the 1960s and 1970s, and in new globalized economies where Brazilian soy and beef now dominate, while the market in carbon credits raises the value of standing forest. Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn show in compelling detail the panorama of destruction as it unfolded and also reveal the extraordinary turnaround that is now taking place, thanks to both social movements and the emergence of new environmental markets. Exploring the role of human hands in destroying - and saving - this vast, forested region, \"The Fate of the Forest\" pivots on the murder of Chico Mendes, the legendary labor and environmental organizer assassinated after successful confrontations with big ranchers. A multifaceted portrait of Eden under siege, complete with a new preface and afterword by the authors, this book demonstrates that those who would hold a mirror up to nature must first learn the lessons offered by some of their own people.

The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon

Globalization has renewed interest in the place and role of cities in the international system. Recent literature proposes that the fate of cities (and their residents) has become increasingly tied to their position in international flows of investment and trade. Data on the branch locations of the world’s 500 largest multinational enterprises in 2000 are subjected to two broad types of network analytic techniques in order to analyze the “world city system.” First, 3,692 cities are analyzed in terms of three measures of point centrality. Second, blockmodeling techniques are employed to generalize further about the positions and roles played by cities in the system. These techniques are used to trace out the structure of the world city system, locate cities in the context of a global urban hierarchy, and explore the degree to which this diverges from a simple one‐to‐one matching of cities onto nation‐states in the world system.

/pdf/power-and-position-in-the-world-city-system-7p8wq4w49o.pdf

Power and position in the world city system

Amazonia has undergone a significant urban transformation since the late 1970s. This is the first comprehensive analysis of urbanization in the Brazilian Amazon. Drawing on comparative household and sectoral survey research, the authors find that the growth of Amazon cities fits no single current theory of urbanization; instead they propose a pluralistic theory of "disarticulated urbanization" to explain the region's varied and volatile settlement patterns.

Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon

World-city literature often relies on a priori assumptions rather than quantifiable measures to discern the global urban hierarchy. In search of comparable international indicators, many studies use the corporate headquarters of multinational corporations (MNCs) as primary locational data. Recognizing that MNCs play a dominant role in the global economy, we argue that reliance on headquarters locations alone distorts the contours of the urban hierarchy. The method overstates the importance of urban centers in the developed countries and economies dominated by large corporations; conversely, it underestimates the importance of lower-level circuits of regional communication, transaction centers in developing countries, and cities in less-centralized economies. This bias is not simply a technical matter: it asserts the power of the core economies, while understating the diversity and complexity of global interactions. We propose to include MNC first-level subsidiary locations in a more refined measure of wor...

Ranking world cities: multinational corporations and the global urban hierarchy

Boom Towns of the Amazon

The vertical earthquake of the 1970s and 1980s destroyed what was left of a tradition and covered it with a new city that bears no resemblance to what had gone before, The piledrivers were singing the song of the big buck. - Herb Caen, "The Vertical Earthquake," 1993 Mayors are known for what they build and not anything else, and I intend to cover every inch of the ground that isn't open space. - Mayor Willie L. Brown Jr., 1997 To the late Herb Caen, longtime San Francisco Chronicle newspaper columnist, a contemporary "vertical earthquake" of high-rise development threatened to turn to a unique city of "breathtaking vistas" and "sacred view corridors" into "any other skyscraper-plagued metropolis" (Caen 1992, 120-122). After 1960, the expansion of San Francisco's financial, corporate, and service-related activities - and the departure of port, wholesale, warehouse, and industrial functions - resulted in a towering high-rise core. The city's bell-shaped duster of skyscrapers symbolized both the promise and the peril of San Francisco's postindustrial transition. Although a racially and socially diverse population approximating 780,000 now resides within a compact urban area of 46.7 square miles and maintains the lingering contrarian spirit for which San Francisco is renowned, economic restructuring and skyrocketing housing costs increasingly homogenize the city in an affluent mold.(1) Accompanying pressures for revitalization of central neighborhoods - such as the Haight-Ashbury, the Western Addition, the Castro District, Noe Valley, Potrero Hill, Bernal Heights, and the Mission District - where quaint and low-priced "Victorian" housing awaited renovation, made gentrification and displacement potent political issues in the 1970s and 1980s (Castello 1983; Godfrey 1988; Walker 1998). The dramatic contemporary transformation of San Francisco's skyline has provided ideological fodder in ongoing arguments between advocates and critics of the city's contemporary economic restructuring [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Agreeing with the arguments of preservationists and neighborhood activists, San Francisco voters narrowly passed a stringent growth-control ordinance in 1986. The subsequent slowing of downtown expansion marked the ascendance of what Richard DeLeon (1992) calls "the urban antiregime." Actually, the emergence of a slow-growth movement reflected long-standing concerns that urban revitalization was creating a sterile city of affluent professionals, tourist attractions, and chain-store franchises. Since the "Great Freeway Revolt" of the late 1950s, in which neighborhood activists persuaded the Board of Supervisors to reject the construction of new state-financed but view-obstructing freeways, assertive grassroots movements for historic preservation have arisen. Yet preservation has inevitably led to gentrification. Since the 1960s, neighborhoods once noted for their idiosyncratic local charms, ethnic cultures, and nontraditional identities have been revitalized as bland imitations of their former vibrant selves (Godfrey 1984, 1985). As new businesses opened and "Victorian" buildings were renovated, an affluent population of professionals and tourists appeared, often displacing lower-income residents and small businesses. As I have argued previously, the widespread appeal of nontraditional social identities - particularly of the Beat, countercultural, and gay communities - unintentionally encouraged gentrification. Despite liberal or even radical neighborhood politics, real-estate prices have steadily escalated through successive local cycles of bohemian influx, middle-class transition, and bourgeois consolidation (Godfrey 1988).(2) Ultimately, the cumulative social impacts of economic restructuring and gentrification have created a less oppositional city. By the late 1990s Richard Walker could justifiably contend that in San Francisco "the wellsprings of opposition have been drying up. …

Urban development and redevelopment in san francisco

In recent years small-scale gold mining has become the leading economic sector in large areas of Amazonia. Associated interregional migrations and urbanization challenge common assumptions about the agrarian frontier. Surveys conducted in southern Para [Brazil] indicate that migrants maintain significant urban linkages and view gold mining as a viable alternative to agricultural work. Public policy is better directed at ameliorating severe environmental problems in the mines than at eliminating the resilient mining sector. (EXCERPT)

Brian J. Godfrey

Papers

Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon

Ranking world cities: multinational corporations and the global urban hierarchy

Boom Towns of the Amazon

Urban development and redevelopment in san francisco

Migration to the gold-mining frontier in Brazilian Amazonia.