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International Comparative Analysis of Poverty in Asia: Urbanization, Migration and Social Policy Symposium held at Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, China, November 1-4, 2012 Southwest Jiaotong University (SWJTU) and the Institute for Poverty Alleviation and International Development (IPAID) are jointly organizing a symposium in October 2012 on the effects of urbanization and poverty alleviation in Asia. The main purpose is to address the widening income gap between rural and urban areas in Asia in the past thirty years. Development scholars, researchers, and practitioners are invited to submit high-quality papers with a focus on the symposium theme of urbanization and migration in Asia and its affect on poverty in both rural and urban areas. The symposium aims to create a dialogue among scholars of Asian development studies to address effective urban and rural poverty reduction strategies. The symposium will focus on the following set of issues which include (but are not limited to): Rural development and urbanization in Asia International standards of poverty alleviation Access to land and land right education (rights, inequity, and poverty) Labor mobility and poverty Gender based income inequality Social policy to tackle poverty and inequality Housing, transportation and infrastructure development National policies and measures for the eradication of poverty The symposium will conclude with an excursion to disaster areas in Chengdu affected by the 2008 earthquake which killed an estimated 69,000 people. SWJTU has taken a lead in the recovery efforts and research cooperation in the field of poverty alleviation in Western China's less developed areas. Selected papers from the symposium will be published in a special edited volume of the Journal of Poverty Alleviation and International Development (JPAID) in 2013. Submission Deadlines Submission of a 500 word abstract is due by September 15, 2012. If accepted, SWJTU will communicate with you in

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China April 9, 2013 - April 12, 2013 Second international symposium exploring emerging issues in corporate responsibility and sustainable development. Presentations and debates will highlight current thinking and how these issues are being addressed around the world nowadays. Promoted by: Centre for Corporate Responsibility (London Metropolitan University Business School) http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/lmbs/research/ccr/csr_home.cfm Institute for the Study of Corporate Social Responsibility (Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University) http://www.ryerson.ca/csrinstitute

DOI : http://dx.doi.org.gate3.inist.fr/10.1016/j.euroecorev.2012.02.012 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Siqi Zheng (Tsinghua University, China), Jing Wu (University of California at Los Angeles), Matthew E. Kahn (National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), USA), Yongheng Deng (National University of Singapore, Singapore) Paru dans : European Economic Review Volume 56, Issue 5, July 2012, Pages 974-984, "Green Building, the Economy, and Public Policy" Abstract In recent years, formal certification programs for rating and evaluating the sustainability and energy efficiency of buildings have proliferated around the world. Developers recognize that such "green labels" differentiate products and allow them to charge a price premium. China has not formally adopted such rating standards. In the absence of such standards, developers are competing with each other based on their own self-reported indicators of their buildings' "greenness". We create an index using Google search to rank housing complexes in Beijing with respect to their "marketing greenness" and document that these "green" units sell for a price premium at the presale stage but they subsequently resell or rent for a price discount. An introduction of a standardized official certification program would help "green" demanders to acquire units that they desire and would accelerate the advance of China's nascent green real estate market. Highlights ► China has not formally adopted rating standards for "green" buildings. ► We create a Google index to rank "marketing greenness" of housing complexes in Beijing. ► Developers charge a price premium for self-reported buildings' "greenness" during presale. ► These "green" premiums disappear in the subsequent resells and the rental market. ► A standardized certification program would advance China's nascent green real estate market.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org.gate3.inist.fr/10.1016/j.worlddev.2011.11.002 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Shiqing Jiang (Fudan University, Shanghai), Ming Lu (Zhejiang University, Hangzhou), Hiroshi Sato (Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo) Paru dans : World Development, Volume 40, Issue 6, June 2012, Pages 1190-1200 Summary This paper presents the impact of income inequality on subjective well-being using data from the 2002 Chinese Household Income Project (CHIP) Survey. We find that people feel unhappy with between-group inequality, as measured by the income gap between migrants without local urban hukou (household registration identity) and urban residents, irrespective of whether they are urban residents with or without local hukou. However, when we control for identity-related inequality and other individual, household, and city-level characteristics, inequality (as measured by city-level Gini coefficients) positively correlates with happiness. This study contributes to the inequality-happiness literature by distinguishing between the different effects of between-group and general inequality on happiness.

Sur le site "The Urban China Initiaitve" 4/05/2012 By Li Jing ( China Daily) Urban leaders do more to safeguard environment, conserve resources Small and medium-sized cities are more livable than big cities such as Beijing and Shanghai gauged by their air quality, waste treatment capacity and built environment, according to newly published research by Urban China Initiative. A woman rides a bicycle on a windy day in Beijing. According to recently published research by Urban China Initiative, Beijing and Shanghai were absent from a ranking of the top 10 Chinese cities gauged by their environmental sustainability. [Photo/China Daily] UCI, a think tank launched by Tsinghua University, McKinsey & Co and Columbia University, gauged the sustainability of 112 major Chinese cities using 17 indicators in four categories - society, economy, environment and resources. Beijing ranked first in sustainability thanks to its heavy investment in social welfare - including social security, education and healthcare - and its economic achievements. The top 10 cities in overall score - including Xiamen, Fujian province, Haikou, the capital of Hainan province, Dalian in Liaoning province, and Shanghai - are all medium and large-sized cities. However, small and medium-sized cities are taking the lead in environmental sustainability. Both Beijing and Shanghai were absent from the top 10 in this category. According to the research, Haikou has the best air quality, while Hefei, capital of Anhui province, took the lead in waste treatment facilities. And Xining, the capital of Qinghai province, boasts the best built environment - man-made surroundings that serve as the setting for human activity. "Such a result shows that small cities have a better quality of life, though people living in megacities like Beijing and Shanghai have better access to medical and educational resources," said Jonathan Woetzel, co-chair of UCI, as well as a senior global dir

Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China 18th to 19th October 2012 The conference will comprise the academic strand - as part of the international 'Masterplanning The Future' conference. About the Academic Conference Strand: One hundred years have passed since Le Corbusier's Voyage to the Orient. Although he didn't venture into the Far East, his influence - and that of Modernism - is recognizable across the world. This conference will explore Modernism's significance in architecture and urbanism from Europe to India and the Far East. It will explore its lasting, or its fading, influences on China; and China's influence on it. But is also looks at Modernism from the Americas to Africa to Asia; we want to get as many stories of the changing face - and the new face - of "the modern" as possible. Architecture, and indeed the world, has changed massively over the last century, so this conference will explore what contemporary ideas can be drawn from different historical periods and different social circumstances. With the rapidly urbanizing conditions of India and China, what can Modernism tell us about the global urban condition? Indeed, is there such a thing? How has Modernism fared? How are architectural ideas portrayed today and what are the connections with the past? This conference is an international forum within China, bringing together researchers and experts from across the world. In this way, the exchange of ideas and experiences will stimulate a better understanding of modern and vernacular architecture, contemporary and traditional urbanism; and regionalist and universalist design ideals. Themes: Papers are welcomed to address a range of topics, which include (but are not exclusive to) the following: Modernism from the West to the East and across the world.; Modernism and the role of manifestos; Chandigarh: then and now; Metabolism; Asian development; Em

Authors: Chao Li (University of Waikato) John Gibson (University of Waikato) Abstract China's local populations can be counted in two ways; by how many people have hukou household registration from each place and by how many people actually reside in each place. The counts differ by the non-hukou migrants - people that move from their place of registration - who have grown from fewer than five million when reform began in 1978 to over 200 million by 2010. For most of the first three decades of the reform era, the hukou count was used to produce per capita GDP figures. In coastal provinces the resident count is many millions more than the hukou count, while for migrant-sending provinces it is the reverse, creating a systematic and time-varying distortion in provincial GDP per capita. Moreover, a sharp discontinuity occurred when provinces recently switched from the hukou count to the resident count when reporting GDP per capita. A double-count also resulted because some provinces switched before others and initial resident counts were incomplete. This paper describes the changing definition of provincial populations in China and their impact on inequality in provincial GDP per capita. We show that much of the apparent increase in inter-provincial inequality disappears once a consistent series of GDP per resident is used.

[ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Giuseppina Siciliano, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology, Autonomous University of Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain / University IUAV of Venice, Ca' Tron, Santa Croce 1957, 30135 Venezia, Italy Paru dans : Land Use Policy Volume 29, Issue 1, January 2012, Pages 165-178 Abstract This paper links urbanization strategies to changes in land use and associated impacts on rural communities and agro-ecosystems in a rural area of China. Energy, monetary and human time variables as well as information on environmental pressures, have been combined to compare different typologies of households and the metabolism of different patterns of land use from an integrated perspective. The results show that urbanization strategies, aimed at shifting the current land use and at displacing the local population, while increasing the economic efficiency is also associated with an increase in fossil energy consumption and environmental pressure, as well as a reduction of the multifunctional characteristic of the area under investigation. Based on these findings the paper also offers a critical discussion of the Chinese rural development policy arguing that the multifunctionality of rural areas should be taken into account by Chinese policy-makers and planners as a viable strategy to achieve rural development targets. Highlights ► Urbanization strategies in China drive the land use change of rural areas. ► Forced migration decreases rural food self-sufficiency and diversification of risk. ► HEPA patterns have higher economic efficiency and energy intensity than LEPA. ► Rural-urban migrations favor the creation of mono-functional agricultural systems.

August 19th, 2011 Author: Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington "In the popular media and the business world, urbanisation is often cited as the fundamental driver of global economic growth, especially for the next few decades. The assumption is that a rural-urban shift will transform poor farmers into industrial and office workers, raising their incomes and creating a massive consumer class. Imagine farmers who once led simple, subsistence lives becoming workers in the city, buying up apartments and furnishing them with appliances."

August 19th, 2011 Author: Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington In the popular media and the business world, urbanisation is often cited as the fundamental driver of global economic growth, especially for the next few decades. The assumption is that a rural-urban shift will transform poor farmers into industrial and office workers, raising their incomes and creating a massive consumer class. Imagine farmers who once led simple, subsistence lives becoming workers in the city, buying up apartments and furnishing them with appliances.

June 23rd, 2012 Author: Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington "Last year, for the first time in Chinese history more people lived in cities and towns than in the countryside. Some 690 million urban dwellers now account for 51.3 per cent of China's total population. Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz has said this urban transition will be one of the two main forces shaping the world in the 21st century...."

June 23rd, 2012 Author: Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington Last year, for the first time in Chinese history more people lived in cities and towns than in the countryside. Some 690 million urban dwellers now account for 51.3 per cent of China's total population. Nobel laureate in economics Joseph Stiglitz has said this urban transition will be one of the two main forces shaping the world in the 21st century.

From Scholar to Official Cui Zhiyuan and Chongqing City's Local Experimental Policy by Emilie Frenkiel [06-12-2010] An interview with a Chinese political scientist trained in American universities gives us an insight into China's pragmatic policy of local experimentation. It chronicles how officials in the municipality of Chongqing have seized the opportunity offered by its special status to launch a unique blend of liberal and socialist economic policy.

Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies, The University of Nottingham Ningbo China 27th to 28th October 2012 Ningbo, Zhejiang, China The building sector is one of the highest energy consuming sectors in China accounting for about 30% of total energy usage and also contributes to a significant proportion of pollutant emissions in China. Meanwhile, building construction activities are contributing significantly towards China's economic growth and infrastructure development under the current urbanisation programme. It is estimated that half of the world's buildings being constructed between now and 2020 are expected to be built in China and if nothing is done to control the upward energy trend, building-related energy consumption could double and have a devastating effect on the environment and the economy as a whole. The objective of this international symposium is therefore to provide a forum for academics, government officials, researchers and practitioners to present and discuss recent research and demonstration projects related to low carbon buildings in China. The event will feature well known international experts in this field as Keynote speakers. General topic areas * Sustainable Energy Technologies * Energy storage technologies * Energy and Environmental Policy * Modelling and simulation of buildings * Thermal Energy Management systems * Low carbon construction materials * Eco-building design * Integration of renewable energy technologies in refurbished buildings * Life cycle analysis of low carbon buildings * Waste and water management * Energy Management Contract systems * Post occupancy evaluation of low carbon buildings * Green Architecture * Design for low impact healthcare buildings * Improving sustainability (and resilience) of healthcare facility * Sustainable Urbanism * Urban form and Energy use or Low carbon cities * Green and liveable cities Website: http://www.nottingh

LESLIE L. SHIEH Ph.D. THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) March 2011 China's nationwide Shequ (Community) Construction project aims to strengthen neighbourhoodbased governance, particularly as cities wrestle with pressing social issues accompanying the country's economic reforms. This policy has produced astounding outcomes, even though it is implemented through experimentation programs and the interbureaucratic document system rather than through legislation. It has professionalized the socialist residents' committees and strengthened their capacity to carry out administrative functions and deliver social care. Thousands of service centres have been built, offering a range of cultural and social services to local residents. This research addresses how the centrally promulgated policy is being implemented locally and what its impacts are in various neighbourhoods. The lens of community building is used to explore how the grass roots organize themselves and how they are defined and governed by the state. The research thus seeks to analyze the impact of Shequ Construction, not through measuring outcomes against the intentions set out in policy documents, but through considering the wider, sometimes unforeseen, implications for other processes going on in the city. Based on fieldwork in Nanjing, the chapters explore the meaning Shequ Construction has in four areas of urban governance: 1) fiscal reform and decentralization of public services, 2) suburban village redevelopment, 3) community-based social service provisioning through the emergent nonprofit sector, and 4) role of homeowners' association under housing privatization and neighbourhood inequality. By examining the interaction of Shequ Construction with a diverse set of policies, this research demonstrates how policy becomes interpreted during the course of implementation by local agencies as they contend with realities on the ground; and conversely how the Shequ pol

K. Sophia Woodman Ph.D. THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) October 2011 This study uses the China case to revisit some of the central assumptions of the literature on citizenship, showing how citizens and states are formed in and through the local places where citizenship is practiced. It suggests that the location of the political and of citizens have been an understudied aspect of citizenship orders, not just in relation to the growing impact of global and transnational forces, but also in sub-state entities. Through fine-grained examination of the daily interactions between citizens and state agents, this study shows how citizenship in China is embedded in local relationships of belonging, participation and entitlement anchored in institutions that organize people in workplaces, urban neighborhoods and rural villages. Based on 10 months of ethnographic fieldwork in four communities in Tianjin, China, the study examines how two such institutions, the villager and residents committees, act as a nexus for participation and formal rights, while also providing social welfare to the needy. The practices of these institutions bind citizens to the state through a face-to-face politics that acts both as a mechanism of control and a channel for claims-making and pressure from below, a mode of rule I call "socialized governance." Both enabling and constraining, this exists in tension with bureaucratic-rational forms of governance, such as the current Chinese leadership's objective of "ruling in accordance with law." While the frameworks for citizenship are set at the national level, its local, cellular character means great variation among places in both form and practice. My model of local citizenship helps explain patterns of economic and social inequality and of contentious politics in contemporary China. While the unsettling of the congruence between the national and citizenship has been widely noted, this study points to

Gregory Bracken, Aspects of urbanization in China : Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Amsterdam university press, 2012, 212 p. Abstract : China's rise is one of the transformative events of our time. Aspects of urbanization in China: Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou examines some of the aspects of China's massive wave of urbanization - the largest the world has ever seen. The various papers in the book, written by academics from different disciplines, represent ongoing research and exploration and give a useful snapshot in a rapidly developing discourse. Their point of departure is the city - Shanghai, Hong Kong and Guangzhou - where the downside of China's miraculous economic growth is most painfully apparent. And it is concern for the citizens of these cities that unifies the papers in a book whose authors seek to understand what life is like for the people who call them home. Disponible en ligne, intégralement, à l'adresse : http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=418533;keyword=bracken

Sunday, 4 November, 2012 to Tuesday, 6 November, 2012 Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Berlage Zalen Julianalaan 134 Delft 2628 BL Netherlands The Delft Roundtable will be the first of four major, annual events bringing together all partner institutes of the Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA).

n the spring of 2012 staff from the Centre for Urban History at the University of Leicester travelled to China and Colombia.

Xuefei Ren's work on the high-end of the building boom in China brings together the sociology of globalization with the study of architecture and the built environment. Building Globalization treats architectural production as crucial to the material and symbolic ways in which global cities are made. Based on Ren's doctoral research at the University of Chicago, the book draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing and Shanghai between 2004 and 2008, covering the bull years leading up to the Beijing Olympics. China is now taken to exemplify the geo-demographic shift that has seen developing countries lead current processes of urbanisation. However the Chinese government's attitude towards quanqiuhua chengshi (global cities) and its support for rapid urban growth from the mid-late 1990s represented a striking reversal of official policy which had been to limit the growth of large cities and promote instead the development of small-medium centres (p.11). The re-scaling of state power to metropolitan level in the interests of enhancing urban competitiveness has been an international trend in recent decades. In China this has proved particularly effective in driving urban growth, given state ownership of land and government control over household registration, urban planning and development decisions. Metropolitan governments in China have the kind of ownership and discretionary powers of which the most boosterist western city mayors can only dream. Ren argues convincingly that the processes shaping these cities are increasingly transnational; in particular, the forces that make buildings 'operate beyond national boundaries, as seen in the circulation of investment capital, the movements of built-environment professionals, and the diffusion of new technologies' (p.6). However, while Chinese economic growth may have destabilized a global balance of power dominated by the triad of the USA, the European Union and Japan, Ren's analysis suggests that older core-peripher

DOI : http://dx.doi.org.gate3.inist.fr/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.08.001 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Fulung Wu (Bartlett School of Planning, University College of London, United Kingdom) Paru dans : Geoforum Volume 43, Issue 2, March 2012, Pages 169-171, SI - Party Politics, the Poor and the City: reflections from South Africa "Following the fever for 'development zones' in the early 1990s and the 'global city' in the late 1990s, Chinese local governments - and municipal governments in particular - are now enthusiastic to build more 'eco-cities'. The Dongtan project on Chongming Island in Shanghai was the first experiment. This project started in 2005 when the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC) contracted Arup, a UK-headquartered international engineering consultancy firm, to prepare a master plan. As a strategic partner of SIIC, Arup took the responsibility of planning the 80 km2 of land at Dongtan. The project received widespread attention around the world, partially because of excellent information dissemination by the project. Dongtan originally aimed to accommodate 10,000 people in the first phase by 2010 when World Expo was held in Shanghai, and would expand to 80,000 people by 2020. By 2050, Dongtan would be built into a new city of half a million people [...]"

DOI : http://dx.doi.org.gate3.inist.fr/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2012.01.028 [ScienceDirect, via Biblio-SHS] Auteur : Chia-Lin Chen (The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London) Highlights ► The introduction of Chinese high-speed train development and approaches. ►Chinese spatial development strategies and anticipated regional and urban impacts. ► Key challenges in reshaping Chinese space economy through high-speed trains at regional and urban scales. Paru dans :