• Informatization Policy
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• v.19 no.2
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• pp.39-56
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• 2012

The authors utilized two contested perspectives on the use and non-use of ICTs, especially the Internet, to verify three assumptions of urban ghettos as fundamentally excluded from the ICT structure, ghetto people as behaving in the same way, and deficiency as the sole explanatory variable of their non-use. The first assumption that the urban ghettos would be fundamentally excluded from the urban ICT structure can be nullified by our finding about the prevalence of ICTs in that area, albeit apparent lower level of access to ICTs compared to that of the urban core. The second assumption that the urban ghetto residents would display the same information behaviors would be challenged by our finding that the availability and usages of the Internet would be hardly consistent by gender, age, occupation, family size, and locational characteristics. The third assumption that deficiency would capture the Internet non-use by ghetto residents was found very tenable but could be rivaled by the choice perspective that use or non-use is simply a result of situated choice. Theoretical and practical implications were suggested.

• Land and Housing Review
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• v.4 no.3
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• pp.211-223
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• 2013

Massive migration is underway in rapidly urbanizing Guangzhou, the south gate of P. R. China. Over half the migrants choose to rent in "villages-in-the-city" in the downtown area because of the low-cost and prime location. The overpopulation and resulting poor environment and high crime-rate turn villages-in-the-city into de facto ghettos. As a result, these ghettos are undergoing a manner of demolition-development, leaving migrants' housing needs unmet. A private-sector initiative-the Tulou Commune-intends to address this considerable market potential. Targeting low-income groups, the Tulou Commune creates a socio-spatially exclusionary enclave. This paper analyzes the Tulou Commune and the implications if more low-income migrants shifting from village-in-the-city (excluded ghetto) to Tulou Commune (exclusionary enclave). This study argues that the intervention of the private sector causes the demographic, social, and spatial similarities and differences of the two living arrangements. Socioeconomic and institutional factors also affect the initiative. This study also provides more empirical evidence in the field of low-cost housing and socio-spatial development in transitional Chinese cities. As the first project of its kind, the analysis of the case can suggest how to improve strategies for accommodating migrants in the future.

• English & American cultural studies
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.1-26
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• 2014

Multicultural theories fully fledged around the 1980s and the early 1990s. Emerging in the 1960s thanks to the Civil Rights movement, multiculturalism has become the grand American national narratives, whose tenets recognize and respect people with diverse racial and cultural backgrounds. This period, however, witnessed the eruption of violent and destructive rebellions or uprisings involving racial minorities. Racial conflicts and tensions exploded at the moment when multiculturalism was widely practiced in areas including education and public policy revealing that complicated problems are embedded in the urban ghettos. American popular culture, specifically addresses antagonisms among different races or ethnicities in Bed-Stuy in New York. Although the film is mainly concerned with the collision among races, it lets ambivalent and cacophonous values and ideologies be present in the black community. On the other hand, Ice Cube's "Black Korea" empowers the black community when it deals with the turbulent relationship between black residents and Korean American merchants. Simultaneously, it denigrates Korean Americans as gasta raps often target the institution like government or police. In short, while attempts to search the ideas of coexistence and juxtaposition through polyphonic features embodied in the film "Black Korea" seems to depend on the dualistic system when it deals with the black-Korean conflicts and as a result it just reveals the chasm between two communities.

• Journal of the Korean association of regional geographers
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.305-322
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• 2006

An increasing number of cities employ rescaling strategies that not only construct metropolitan production network scaled down from national context, but also tune up new governance to effectively control local geographies of the city. In this context, urban redevelopment has emerged a key 'global' strategy to empower governmental institutions of the city, which not only eliminate such threatening spatial variables as deteriorated housing, working-class ghettos, and crime areas, but also increase and extract exchange value of those spaces. I view such practices a process of 'glurbanization'. This paper investigates how state/city government employs the discourse of urban re/development for 'inventing' poverty at an urban scale: how it institutionalizes the discourse for implementing concrete projects: and how urban institutional apparatus appropriate their discursive practices of redevelopment for their own ends in the city. By particularly focusing on the California Redevelopment Law and the Community Redevelopment Agency of the City of Los Angeles, this paper analyzes the ways in which the law and the agency extract value from what they define 'blight areas' by means of eminent domain and tax increment revenues. For empirical analysis I employ discourse analysis and institutional ethnography. I conclusively argue that the urban spaces stigmatized as 'blight areas' are increasingly entrapped by the urban redevelopment agency, which extracts increased exchange value from the areas and redirects it for supporting external investors, private developers, and the body of the agency itself.