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1.
The paper summarises the history of human settlement in the Sudetes from the Bronze Age. A more intensive stage was reached in the Middle Ages when settlers from the west established new villages deep in the mountain valleys. By the beginning of the 20th century the Sudetes were already overpopulated but after a near-complete ethnic replacement from a German to a Polish population in 1945–8, population continued to grow until the 1980s. However, the economic system was hardly sustainable by this time. There were many polluting industries in the region and massive transboundary pollution from adjacent areas of Czechoslovakia and Germany had a devastating effect on the forests. Moreover, subsidised state agriculture placed heavy pressure on vulnerable mountain grazings. Since 1989 there has been a process of deindustrialisation in the Sudetes and surrounding areas and, with the disappearance of the state farms and the reduction in subsidies, agriculture is now better adjusted to the natural potential and is complemented by a promising start with agrotourism. The population of the region is growing relatively slowly (0.8% per annum 1956–1999), with the rural areas now in decline. A sustainable future for the region is now a possibility, but while there is a consensus for continued environmental reconstruction, supported by alternative economies, this will have to be carefully managed in the years ahead when EU accession may bring heavier development pressures than those evident at the moment. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

2.
Zsuzsanna Varga 《GeoJournal》1998,46(3):215-219
Although agricultural work is declining in Hungary, farming remains an important source of employment. However, the agrarian population should not be regarded as homogenous because many small farms are worked only for subsistence and family income supplement. This is because of prolonged economic crisis which makes for a shortage of job opportunities in other sectors of the economy. Until economic growth accelerates there is a need for transitional solutions to the problem of unemployment. It is argued that the present farming system could be diversified through labour-intensive programmes to provide piped water and drainage in small towns and villages and simultaneously engage many of the long-term unemployed who are no longer entitled to benefit and lack the qualifications for jobs that require special skills. The environment could also be protected by the afforestation of 300–400 000 ha of arable land or its conversion to grassland. Light industry could also generate employment while stimulating the growth of local farm production and the improvement of the infrastructure. Training for unemployed young people should also be a priority if the erosion of rural labour resources is not to become irreversible. A much more proactive approach is needed from government to safeguard rural labour resources and achieve greater integration between forestry, farming and processing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

3.
Peter Lindner 《Geoforum》2007,38(3):494-504
Soviet collectives in general and especially the kolkhozes in rural areas were much more than merely production units. They regulated a significant part of everyday life in the villages and thus have to be seen as all-embracing social institutions, constituting the bedrock for rural communities. Relying on the homogenising effect of the kolkhoz-mechanism most authors who analyse the process of transformation in the Post-Soviet Russian countryside highlight the failures of privatisation and consequently presume continuity and not change. This paper argues, first, that in view of the weakness of the central state in the 90s a considerable leeway existed at the local level for different ways and degrees to implement the reform legislation and, second, that the concrete outcomes of the restructuring can only be adequately understood focusing on interests and power relations on the micro level rather than dealing with farms as such as the ‘acting units’.The common vantage point for most of the kolkhozes was an “alliance for the locale” between management and workers. It had its roots in the fear to become “slaves on one’s own land” if non-local investors would be allowed to buy agricultural land, to remain without infrastructure like streets, water supply and kindergartens if the kolkhoz would be divided up and to lack the machinery to work the private plots without the support of the farms. But beyond this consensus the chairmen of the collective farms could rely on a bulk of different allocative and authoritative resources to stage-manage privatisation. This introduced a highly ‘individual’ moment in the process and led to rising disparities and an increasing disintegration of rural Russia in the 1990s. Using a farm in southern Russia as an example the closer look at these resources and the “failed privatisation” unveils, that not continuity, but hybrid amalgamations of old and new characterise the Post-Soviet Russian countryside.  相似文献   

4.
R. Kada 《GeoJournal》1982,6(4):367-371
Part-time farming is a wide-spread phenomenon in contemporary rural Japan. Characterized by an extremely small-scale rice farming and by a unimodal equitable rural development, most Japanese farm households have combined farming with off-farm employment. In this article, after an examination of the definition of part-time farming (farm household as the unit), the trend of and factors for part-time farming are described and analyzed. Growth and expansion of off-farm employment opportunities, continued small-sized farming, rapid increase in farmland prices and development and diffusion of labor-saving technology are among the major forces which encouraged part-time farming in Japan. Although the overall performance of part-time farms appears less efficient in the use of non-labor resources (e.g., land and machinery), part-time farms still occupy a significant share in the aggregate agricultural production and in the total farmland cropped. Various on-farm and off-farm adjustments are pointed out which have enabled dual employment patterns to be adopted by these people. In essence, due to the limited opportunities for farm-size expansion, part-time farming is considered a necessity, rather than a choise, for most Japanese farm families. But this has also caused some serious agricultural problems, especially with respect to its impact on farmsize structure and inefficient land use. At least for the purpose of maintaining a high income level and for equitable access to opportunities, part-time farming has seemingly contributed beneficially to the farming population of Japan.  相似文献   

5.
Since the late twentieth century, many developed countries have experienced population deconcentration, labelled as counterurbanization. There has been an academic discussion on the meaning, validity and universality of this concept, drivers of counterurbanization and its impacts on rural areas. To date, research on counterurbanization mostly apply static and discrete definitions of residence, migration and population, which is an increasingly simplistic view in the contemporary reality of a growing multitude of forms of mobility, often related to dual residence. Particularly large-scale quantitative studies on counterurbanization are confined by existing statistical practices. This paper attempts to overcome this obstacle and describe the transformation of the settlement system in Finland acknowledging the role of second home mobility. To achieve this goal, it introduces two alternative measures of population, seasonal and average population, and analyses their spatial dynamics between the years 1990 and 2010 based on georeferenced grid statistical data. The study finds that although registered population has been concentrating during the period in analysis, seasonal population has been increasingly dispersed due to the growing number of second homes. It shows that the counterurbanization process, though not noticed by conventional statistics, does occur in Finland, manifested by seasonal rather than permanent moves. The article concludes that various forms of mobility should be taken into account when analysing the urban–rural population dynamics and transformations of settlement systems as well as in rural development planning.  相似文献   

6.
Social change in rural China is to be understood as a complex interaction of global effects, state and regional actions and competing systems of valuation. An important implication of this model of path dependence is the development of distinctive forms of markets in different regions of the country. One such distinctive model that is emerging in southern Inner Mongolia is based on the independent commodity production of milk (on small dairy farms) for large, capitalist dairy corporations. Yet this production system is also being challenged by the emergence of large, capitalist dairy farms in this region. The outcome of the competition between these two forms of production will depend on locally specific trajectories of costs and opportunities. The long run evolution of this production system is thus not plannable in advance and is locally contingent.  相似文献   

7.
The link between natural resources and economic development is more and more regarded as a fact today even though the whole process of development is only partially understood. The awareness has now spread to the developing countries of the world where resources have yet to be developed to bring about an improvement in standards of living especially for rural populations, as well as a general improvement in the quality of life for the people. Unfortunately many of the resources of these countries are still to be surveyed and development planning is often based on flimsy, inadequate or even unreliable natural resource data. The improvement of data base for resource planning would go a long way to ensure more knowledge about natural resources in developing countries and better use and management of the available resources. There are economic, technological and environmental difficulties to be overcome before more efficient natural resource utilization in these countries could be achieved. The role of population growth in resource realization is still clouded with an inconclusive debate. But even more important is the need for technological assistance and the application of modern technology to food and agriculture and to other resources to ensure a better life for the populations of developing countries. Developments in agriculture will need the greatest attention since it is a primary resource which provides employment for large proportions of the population, food for the rural and urban populations and exportable surpluses required for the purchase of industrial goods for use in the other sectors of the economy. The activities of transnational corporations distort developments in agriculture and mining in many developing countries and many of these countries are today making greater moves to realize full sovereignty over their natural resources as a first step towards more efficient and meaningful planning for economic growth and development. Energy resources, and in particular the development of new and renewable sources of energy, present one of the greatest challenges to developing countries. Examples of the development of rural energy systems in China and India are promising to open the way to alternative forms of energy for the rural masses of other similarly placed developing countries. Finally, new developments in the natural resources debate concerned with the sharing of the resources of the oceans as seen in the Law of the Sea Conference are a pointer to a more equitable approach to the use of global resources for the continued development of the developed as well as the developing countries of the world.The view expressed in this paper are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent those of the United Nations University.  相似文献   

8.
Access to new information and communication technologies is widely viewed as a prerequisite for participation in the global economy, so that inequalities in such access have become a significant policy concern. Rural areas are especially underserved in terms of internet providers, and this is true in both developed and less developed economies. This article focuses on access to the internet within farming operations in the US as an important aspect of understanding the digital divide within rural areas. Using county level data from the 2007 US Census of Agriculture and multivariate regression analysis, our study examines the statistical relationship between farm internet access and a set of explanatory factors which include demographic characteristics of operators, economic characteristics of farms, and geographic location (region and metropolitan status) of the farm. Further, it seeks to understand whether access to the internet can be socially and locationally differentiated from access to high speed internet. Our findings indicate that existing social divides are replicated in terms of the digital divide, so that social inequalities are potentially a more pressing problem than infrastructural gaps in terms of rural access to the internet in the US.  相似文献   

9.
Conclusion Despite its uniqueness, the vitality inherent in the rural structure of Israel is of particular interest to other developing regions with a predominant rural-agricultural population. Latin American countries, for example, are investing considerable resources in the development of new lands through construction of penetration roads and other infrastructure. Several countries have created regional development authorities; some have policies designed to attract private investments into virgin areas.13) The general emphasis tends increasingly toward state-initiated and planned settlement, often in conjuction with agrarian reform programs — an approach dictated both by economic efficiency and welfare criteria.Past experience has shown that the rural population has to be organized in viable communities in order to become amenable to economic and cultural integration. Communities must likewise be spatially organized in an optimal way that will make it possible to provide them with amenities and so direct their production for the purpose of achieving economic status. At the same time, maximum flexibility must be preserved to fit varying developmental stages, since physical plans once carried into effect are extremely difficult to modify.In order to reduce the social and economic pull of existing urban centers it may be advisable to develop new settlement areas as self-sufficient enclaves, independent to some extent from the facilities existing in the region. The settlements would share the national infrastructure of communications and public services, but would gear their production to regional as well as extra-regional demand, bypassing the traditional local market place. Then, as the new communities consolidate as social and economic entities, the options for collaboration or competition with existing central places can be laid open on a more equitable basis.Admittedly such sheltered development may affect the role of the local intermediary and lessen the commercial activities of the urban sector, but it would also stimulate the development of an independent framework of handling, marketing, and an increasing degree of processing the settlements' produce. These complementary activities would help to retain part of the added value of the production and generate new sources of employment for successive village generations. The delay in the growth for the region's total output may well be worthwhile for achieving that social and economic transformation which in turn may lead to a more balance and sustained development of the entire region.14)  相似文献   

10.
B.M. Taylor 《Geoforum》2012,43(3):507-517
Extensive rural regions are facing major socio-economic, political and environmental change from the dual effects of agricultural restructuring and environmental degradation. While central governments often rely on regional level policy responses, local actors, such as rural local governments may resist these ‘top-down’ initiatives. This paper examines the oppositional response of 34 rural local governments to state-led regionalisation for economic development and natural resource management in the extensive and sparely populated Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. The analysis explores how state threats of amalgamation; shifting national policy empathies in rural development; and, local preferences for horizontal rather than vertical forms of cooperation are influential in catalysing a brand of defensive regionalism amongst local government actors. Adopting this defensive posture allowed local actors to both buffer state intervention and improve the effectiveness of their own cooperative planning and management activities for sustainable development. These observations are interpreted through concepts of collective identity formation, providing an analytical perspective that is sensitive to the inter-scalar politics in rural governance.  相似文献   

11.
In Xishuangbanna, southern Yunnan, Akha and Dai farmers, regarded in China as “backward”, passive recipients of state-led development, have been “getting rich” on rubber and expanding rubber cultivation into neighbouring Laos. State cash crop campaigns to raise minority farmers’ incomes inadvertently turned minority farmers into dynamic entrepreneurs. This paper builds on Vinay Gidwani’s use of development as a “regime of value” to raise social and economic value to analyze these unexpected results. Local state agents believe they are the agents of development, bringing modest social and economic improvements to minority farmers of obdurate backwardness. Minority farmers see themselves as improving their own incomes and “quality”, a term in China for social value, in an era when they are responsible for their own development. National development discourse encourages citizens to raise population quality by becoming entrepreneurial, a message heard by minority rubber farmers as well as urban elites. Through creative, post-Fordist production models and agile deployment of land, labour, and capital, minority farmers have achieved incomes that exceed those of workers on state rubber farms, large plantations whose Fordist production models are losing out in the uneven transition from a planned economy to a more capitalist market assemblage. Akha and Dai rubber farmers, the “backward” minorities on China’s periphery, have unexpectedly become the forerunners of flexible production arrangements that are prevailing in the arena opened up by China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.  相似文献   

12.
Bedford RD 《GeoJournal》1988,16(2):179-192
May 1987 is a month that will not be forgotten in the South Pacific. The first of two military coups d'etat led by Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka not only transformed the course of post-colonial political development in Fiji, but this event also had profound implications for international relations in the region. Co-incidentally, May 1987 was also the month when detailed results of Fiji's second national population census since Independence in 1970 became available. The 1986 census documents Fiji's population on the eve of a political revolution which has the potential to cause significant economic and social change. The demographic process most likely to be affected in the short-term by the coups is population movement, both within Fiji and to overseas destinations. This: paper examines developments in population movement between 1970 and 1986 with particular reference to an acceleration in levels of migration overseas by Indians and an exodus of Fijians from rural village communities for towns on Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. Trends in internal and international migration are evaluated at a range of spatial scales — national, regional and local. Some speculation on the effect of political and economic changes since May 1987 on these population movements attempts to provide a contemporary perspective on demographic developments over the last 15 years.  相似文献   

13.
The urban system in India is the product of a long and complex history and the urban-rural dichotomy is marked. While urban India is often viewed as ‘modern’ and ‘commercial’, rural India is generally characterised as myopic, backward and traditional. The diffusion of a modern commercial sector into traditionally agricultural areas is seen to be slow because of the lack of small sized towns, and many of the major cities are viewed as the centres of introverted economic systems. This paper seeks to examine these aspects of urban-rural relationships and levels of development in India at two scales, the national and the district. The national scale study analyses the urban and rural components of population potential surfaces. The study at the district level uses similar data, but at a finer scale, and in addition considers potentials of retail trade which gives a clearer illustration of ‘importance’ than population data alone. Several innovations in technique are discussed. The paper concludes with some general methodological comments about the nature of location as perceived by geographers.  相似文献   

14.
Borsdorf A 《GeoJournal》1978,2(1):47-60
The population of Latin America will be increasing by 130 % between 1970 and the year 2000. Due to excessive rural exodus the urban population grows almost twice as fast as the rural does. The urbanization of the subcontinent must be regarded as being the dominant spatial process in Latin America. It results in fundamental changes of the structure and the way of life of the population as well as in the size and character of the settlements. Three case studies (Popayán/Colombia, Sucre/Bolivia and Santiago/Chile) show that a process of westernization can be observed within the analogous to their size, in the course of which the compact structure of the colonial town pattern is succeeded by a sectorially or cellularly arranged cityorganism. From today's point of view a definite judgement on urbanization as a relevant phenomenon of development cannot yet be made. It can be stated, however, that the southern countries of Latin America which have been urbanized the most show distinct signs of a social and economic “take off”.  相似文献   

15.
Vu Thi Thao  Jytte Agergaard 《Geoforum》2012,43(6):1088-1098
The changing nature of rural–urban migration, in the context of transition economies of East and Southeast Asia, is usually interpreted as an outcome of structural transformation, while the longue durée of these migration flows tends to be neglected. Adopting a historical perspective, supported by the ’migration as resistance’ approach, this paper examines the changes in rural–urban migration dynamics in Vietnam from the 1950s to 2010 in relation to the country’s political and economic reforms (Ð?i M?i). Drawing on a case study of female migration between Phu Khe and Hanoi, it analyses how migrants resist and undermine state control over population mobility in order to pursue their movement and migration, and how they develop their migration networks over time. By doing so, the paper highlights a gradual process of the changing nature of rural–urban migration in which migrants themselves, through their resistance to governance of mobility and their establishment of migration networks prior to Ð?i M?i, play an important role.  相似文献   

16.
Jianfa Shen 《Geoforum》1995,26(4):395-409
Economic reforms since the late 1970s have brought about significant changes in rural China. A large number of surplus rural labourers have been released from the agricultural sector and there has been a massive transition of rural residents from agricultural to non-agricultural employment. These changes will be analyzed by examining the changes in the employment structure of rural residents. Rural to urban migration is another important option for many rural labourers. The size of China's urban population and the scale of rural to urban migration continue to be an ‘enigma’ due to several changes in the definition of the urban population. Several data sources will be used to provide more realistic estimates of rural to urban migrations on a set of comparable though different bases. Data on the new entries into urban employment and the urban ‘non-agricultural population’ will be used to illustrate the scale of migration by rural residents to the formal urban sector. This may only record those migrants who have changed their registration status from ‘agricultural population’ to ‘non-agricultural population’ which is tightly controlled by the government. The 1990 Census data provide some evidence on the rural to urban migration by the registered ‘agricultural population’. The 1987 1% population sampling data will be used to analyze the actual migrations among cities, towns and counties over the period 1982–1987. It is found that town and county populations tended to move to towns at the intra-provincial level, but to cities at the inter-provincial level. Out-migrants from cities tended to move to cities at both the intra- and inter-provincial levels.  相似文献   

17.
In South Africa attempts are being made to address the socio-spatial distortions of the apartheid era through a more equitable distribution of resources, and the re-drawing of municipal geographical boundaries. However, boundaries are not neutral geographic lines. Boundary changes are often associated with a redistribution of political power and resources. The aim of this paper is to analyse the effects of the contemporary territorial and administrative restructuring on urban dynamics in South Africa. More specifically, the focus is on how the process of territorial restructuring impacted on metropolitan areas as well as on secondary cities and their hinterlands. Examining and elucidating the manner in which various social, economic and political forces have manifested themselves in the process of boundary delimitation in a major metropolitan centre as well as adjacent rural areas is a central theme of this paper. There were considerable contestations over the delimitation of new local government boundaries. Affluent metro authorities like that in Durban were opposed to the spatial extension of their boundaries because of the costs of the providing services and infrastructure in the deprived margins. Similarly, there was concern that incorporation of rural areas will result in increased municipal service charges being imposed on these communities. Tensions were heightened between urban and rural regions because traditional leaders believed that their territorial jurisdiction and authority were being undermined. In other parts of the country, the merger of traditionally white and black fragments of secondary cities often resulted in many black locations continuing to be marginalized. There appears to be neither the political will nor the economic capacity to upgrade these zones of marginalized urban communities. While the Municipal Demarcation Board was largely successful in eliminating the political geography of apartheid at a macro- scale, this paper suggests that the greater challenge for government and policy makers is to reduce the socio-spatial and economic inequalities which appears to be still very high and perhaps increasing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.  相似文献   

18.
More than half of the US rural population lives inside metro or micropolitan areas and even at more disaggregated scales, such as the census tracts, most spatial units mix rural and urban population. At a national scale, only 30% of the country are inhabited by 100% urban or 100% rural population, implying that more than two third of the US territory are somewhere in between both situations. As the rural/urban dichotomy appears today to be blurred by the emergence of new phenomena like rurbanization or exurbanization, our perception of rural America may be somewhat twisted and the reality of rural areas underplayed. This paper focuses on using finer-grade spatial units such as the census blocks and block groups, in order to provide new elements about the extension, localization and characteristics of rural America as well as about its inner dynamics. To that end, we analyze and process geographical and social data at these two levels of information, and use population density as a main factor of analysis. This allows us not only to propose new measurement of the extent of rural space in the USA but also to propose a new vision of its spatial dynamics by studying how several social indicators such as income, median age or sex ratio reveal regional and micro-regional variations and situations in the rural part of the US.  相似文献   

19.
Limited capitalist development has meant that social classes in independent Sub-Saharan Africa are comparatively weak and the peasant farmers are the weakest of all. Isolated and divided, imbued with ethnic as opposed to class or broad policy consciousness, the peasant farmers may be politically unruly, but they are usually at the mercy of those in power. A by-product of peasant farmers political weakness in Africa generally is their economic exploitation by the state and dominant classes in the form of low prices for agricultural goods coupled with high prices for the manufactured products and a relatively high preference for urban over rural investment. Self-help initiative in Kenya is a politically valuable as a semi-autonomous peasant farmer-based institution oriented towards state policy. But self-help initiative is not a simple instrument of any class or the state. It is a contested terrain and embraces all the contradictions of the Kenyan political economy. Self-help has been a useful development strategy for peasant farmers. The Kenyan case study points to the need to examine what peasant farmers are doing for themselves, how they unite, form coalitions and manipulate state structures to their advantage. Finally, there are important struggles taking place quietly in the rural areas, the outcomes of which are by no means certain.  相似文献   

20.
Zs. Varga 《GeoJournal》1996,38(2):181-184
The Hungarian agriculture and food industry has changed greatly since 1989 and this sector is now in crisis. This essay will present an overview of the most important economic and social problems which are partly the heritage of the socialist system, but which also stem from the change in the political system. It will also deal with the specific problems of the transition in the northern hill region of Nógrad where the physical conditions for agriculture are relatively unfavourable. In 1970s and 1980s state farms and cooperatives tried to compensate for the low demand for labour in agriculture by setting up subsidiary enterprises, which in many cases were the only source of local jobs. Many other people in the rural areas commuted to work in factories in the towns as industry and construction became the largest sector in the county's economy (41.3 percent in 1990 compared with 19.8 in agriculture). However, many of the former commuters are now unemployed and the cooperatives have withdrawn from subsidiary enterprises. So while an unstable situation has developed in Hungarian agriculture generally, through changes in structure and ownership, the problems faced by the less-developed agrarian regions of northern Hungary have been accentuated. Further research is needed to explore the real nature of the crisis in order to make provision for remedial action that best meets the local situation.  相似文献   

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