Economies And The Transformation Of Landscape

Economies and the Transformation of Landscape explores both the general and specific ways in which local economic ventures around the world, such as mining, ranching, and farming, affect the environment.

Mountain regions are subject to a unique set of economic pressures: they act as collective enterprises which have to valorize rare resources, such as spectacular landscapes. While primarily rural in nature, they often border large cities, and the development of industries such as hydroelectric power and the rapid development of tourism can bring about sweeping socio-economic change and vast demographic alterations. The Spatial and Economic Transformation of Mountain Regions describes the socio-economic changes and spatial impacts of the last four decades, with the transformation of mountain areas held up as an example. Much of the real-world context draws on the Alps, spanning as they do the significant economies of France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria. Chapters address academic discourse on regional development in these mountain areas and suggest alternative approaches to the liberal-productivist societal model. This book will be essential reading for professionals, institutions, and NGOs searching for counter-models to the existing marketing approaches for peripheral areas. It will also be of interest to students of regional development, economic geography, environmental studies, and industrial economics.

This hugely important and timely work asks how politics and economics transform the landscapes we inhabit. It explores the connections between political economy and landscape change through a series of conceptual essays and case studies. In so doing, it speaks to a broad readership of landscape architects, geographers, and related fields of social and environmental research.

This book aims to explore the avenue of landscape economics and provides the building blocks (from different scientific disciplines) for an economic analysis of landscapes. What exactly constitutes and determines the value of a landscape? It focuses on the value of landscapes in its broadest sense, thereby covering a variety of topics including stakeholder involvement in landscape design, landscape governance and landscape perceptions from different countries. Merely saying that landscapes have value or are important is not sufficient – not when resources are scarce and have alternative uses. Measuring and quantifying the economic value of changes in landscapes would help ensure that landscape management decisions are both (economically) rational and sound.

Making sense of new cultural economies, it is argued, needs consistent attention to the resonances of individual lives. Otherwise, a discussion of cultural economies remains suspended in a detached virtualism (Miller, 2000). The idea of the remaking of geographies and cultural economies remains, necessarily, a consistent search to make the subject dynamic in its resonance with the contemporary world. In recent debates concerning the reframing of the cultural economies of geography, there is an evidence of increasing acknowledgement of the overlooked importance of subjectivities within geographical explanation. This has often been difficult when trying to attend to the large scale apparent dynamics of change. The shift of geographies to focus upon cultural economies combines two profound threads that inform this chapter: the acknowledgement of the breadth and inclusivity of what economies are and the refusal mutually to isolate the cultural and the economic. Thus the economic becomes engaged and even framed in relation to the cultural, and vice versa. Such an appraisal makes more robust the limits of ‘either – or’ claims from these two grounding components of geographical thinking and its representation of the world. These themes are sustained in different ways across the chapters of this book. This chapter seeks to build a critical discourse concerning space, embodied practice and lay knowledge. It does this in order to address the mechanisms through which individuals are engaged in the processes of new cultural economies.

The economic power of Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRICs) is rapidly increasing, changing the landscape of global economics and politics. Top scholars of international business address in this vital volume the markets, strategy implications, challenges and possibilities of this new economic reality. As these four nations acquire greater economic clout, the opportunities for other countries increase. The contributors describe the favorable circumstances these evolving economies could provide for the US and other countries, such as expanded markets and services, higher returns on investments, and new partners in building a more peaceful and prosperous world. In contrast, they also discuss risks to traditional industries and possible challenges to positions on human rights and intellectual property protections, environmental standards, free markets and democratic governments. The volume emphasizes the need for companies to adopt strategies to stay ahead in the changing business environment. Governments must also design and implement new policies geared toward mutually beneficial relationships with BRICs. This enlightening study will be of great interest to students and scholars of international business. Executives of large companies will find it of great practical use when planning their organization s future strategies.

The violent protests in Lhasa in 2008 against Chinese rule were met by disbelief and anger on the part of Chinese citizens and state authorities, perplexed by Tibetans' apparent ingratitude for the generous provision of development. In Taming Tibet, Emily T. Yeh examines how Chinese development projects in Tibet served to consolidate state space and power. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2000 and 2009, Yeh traces how the transformation of the material landscape of Tibet between the 1950s and the first decade of the twenty-first century has often been enacted through the labor of Tibetans themselves. Focusing on Lhasa, Yeh shows how attempts to foster and improve Tibetan livelihoods through the expansion of markets and the subsidized building of new houses, the control over movement and space, and the education of Tibetan desires for development have worked together at different times and how they are experienced in everyday life. The master narrative of the PRC stresses generosity: the state and Han migrants selflessly provide development to the supposedly backward Tibetans, raising the living standards of the Han's "little brothers." Arguing that development is in this context a form of "indebtedness engineering," Yeh depicts development as a hegemonic project that simultaneously recruits Tibetans to participate in their own marginalization while entrapping them in gratitude to the Chinese state. The resulting transformations of the material landscape advance the project of state territorialization. Exploring the complexity of the Tibetan response to—and negotiations with—development, Taming Tibet focuses on three key aspects of China's modernization: agrarian change, Chinese migration, and urbanization. Yeh presents a wealth of ethnographic data and suggests fresh approaches that illuminate the Tibet Question.

Winner of the Regional Studies Association's Best Book Award 2018. In the last few decades, many global cities and towns have experienced unprecedented economic, social, and spatial structural change. Today, we find ourselves at the juncture between entering a post-urban and a post-political world, both presenting new challenges to our metropolitan regions, municipalities, and cities. Many megacities, declining regions and towns are experiencing an increase in the number of complex problems regarding internal relationships, governance, and external connections. In particular, a growing disparity exists between citizens that are socially excluded within declining physical and economic realms and those situated in thriving geographic areas. This book conveys how forces of structural change shape the urban landscape. In The Post-Urban World is divided into three main sections: Spatial Transformations and the New Geography of Cities and Regions; Urbanization, Knowledge Economies, and Social Structuration; and New Cultures in a Post-Political and Post-Resilient World. One important subject covered in this book, in addition to the spatial and economic forces that shape our regions, cities, and neighbourhoods, is the social, cultural, ecological, and psychological aspects which are also critically involved. Additionally, the urban transformation occurring throughout cities is thoroughly discussed. Written by today’s leading experts in urban studies, this book discusses subjects from different theoretical standpoints, as well as various methodological approaches and perspectives; this is alongside the challenges and new solutions for cities and regions in an interconnected world of global economies. This book is aimed at both academic researchers interested in regional development, economic geography and urban studies, as well as practitioners and policy makers in urban development.