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Abstract: Manufacture sector can be categorized as the most efficient economic sector to boost the employment rate. This research indicates that several regions in Central Java Province tend to have deindustrialization. The regions are Pemalang, Pekalongan, Batang, Klaten, Sukoharjo, Jepara, Cilacap, Banyumas, Banjarnegara, Wonosobo, Boyolali, Grobogan District, Tegal City, Semarang City, Surakarta City, and Salatiga City. The main factors which have push effect to the deindustrialization process are structural change of labor activity from manufacture to others, manufacture strengthening of prominent manufacture region that boost the manufacture divergence, and also the increasing of manufacture value added mainly in prominent manufacture region. Other factors that have less effect to the deindustrialization process are the decreasing of public modern financial activity and the decreasing of infrastructure development.Abstrak: Sektor manufaktur dapat dikategorikan sebagai sektor ekonomi yang paling efisien untuk memperbesar kesempatan kerja. Penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa beberapa daerah di provinsi Jawa Tengah mengalami deindustrialisasi. Daerah daerah tersebut yaitu Pemalang, Pekalongan, Batang, Klaten, Sukoharjo, Jepara, Cilacap, Banyumas, Banjarnegara, Wonosobo, Boyolali, kabupaten, kabupaten Grobogan, kota Tegal, kota Semarang, kota Surakarta, dan kota Salatiga. Faktor utama yang berpengaruh mendorong proses deindustrialisasi adalah perubahan struktural aktivitas tenaga kerja dari manufaktur ke aktivitas yang lain, sektor manufaktur memperkuat wilayah manufaktur besar yang dapat mendorong terjadinya divergensi manufaktur, dan juga menaikkan nilai tambah manufaktur terutama daerah manufaktur yang utama. Faktor lain yang sedikit berpengaruh pada proses deindustrialisasi adalah berkurangnya aktivitas keuangan umum modern dan menurunnya pembangunan infrastruktur.

O trabalho visa contribuir para o debate sobre desindustrialização no Brasil, atribuída à apreciação cambial que, para vários autores, decorre do aumento das exportações agrícolas. Do emprego do método constant market share sobre informações de comércio exterior da FAO, para o período 1991-2003, chegou-se à conclusão que a exportação agrícola brasileira cresceu mais que o potencial, resultado de aumento expressivo da competitividade. Depois da mudança cambial, em 1999, parte da competitividade foi neutralizada pelo aumento da participação na pauta de produtos com demanda mundial em declínio. Da decomposição do valor exportado prevaleceu o efeito do aumento da quantidade, fato mais evidente depois da mudança cambial, porque o efeito preço foi negativo. Mesmo descontando o efeito da depreciação real do câmbio, a mudança nos preços internacionais foi desfavorável à agricultura brasileira. O efeito flexibilidade da pauta, negativo em todo o período, indica grande participação de produtos em desacordo com a lei geral da oferta, fato mais grave no período recente, quando a maior parte dos produtos com aumento do volume exportado estava com preço em baixa no mercado internacional. O declínio da exportação de manufaturados e o maior crescimento do comércio de produtos básicos indicam tendência à desindustrialização da agricultura.This paper aims to contribute to the Brazilian deindustrialization debate, attributed to exchange appreciation that, for several authors, is the agricultural export increase effect. Constant market share method applied on FAO export data, for the 1991 to 2003 period, indicates that Brazilian agricultural export increased more than the potential rate, due to expressive competitiveness gains. After the exchange regime change, in 1999, the competitiveness increase was partly neutralized by growth share of products whose world demand was in decline. Exports value decomposition showed that the volume effect predominates, fact more evident after the flotation exchange adoption, when the price effect was negative. Even discounting the real exchange depreciation effect, the international prices change was unfavourable to the Brazilian agriculture. The flexibility effect negative sign during all the period indicates great participation of products in disagreement with the offer law, fact worsened recently, when most of the products whose exports increased in volume had falling prices in the international market. The manufactured export decline and the largest basic products trade growth indicated a tendency to agribusiness deindustrialization.

Are There evidences of deindustrialization in Brazil? This paper aims at analyzing the theoretical concept of deindustrialization, and evaluating if Brazil, following the implementation of economic reforms in the 1990's, has suffered from a " new Dutch disease" . Despite the manufacturing sector declining participation in the Brazilian Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the empirical evidence show that the changes in the economy structure since the mid-1980’s to the end of 2005 should not be described as deindustrialization. Since there was not evidence of either generalized reallocation of resources towards industries based on natural resources, or a pattern of export specialization in goods technologically based on natural resources or even on labor, one cannot conclude that Brazil was infected by a " new Dutch disease" .

The main objective of this paper is to emphasize particular aspects in connection with deindustrialization and globalization processes during transformation of the economic structure in postindustrial age. Conceptions and main features of globalization are presented, i.e. growing interdependence on the global level, then primary characteristics of industrial globalization as one of the forms of globalization process, and in general some brief considerations about the influence of the economic globalization on deindustrialization. In modern economic environment, transformation of production includes, besides other structural changes, modification of the geography of manufacturing and new industrial space - development of the newly industrializing countries, and new spatial forms of production allocation and possibilities for linking of various activities and services (technopolis, industrial, technology and science park, etc.).

5A scenic spots represent world-class tourist attractions, the highest level of officially certified scenic spots in China. This study uses the establishment of 5A scenic spots as a quasi-natural experiment to evaluate their impact on the local environment and economic growth using the difference-in-difference method. The results indicate that the establishment of 5A scenic spots is associated with an 11.2% drop in the local total volume of SO2 and a 10.5% drop in unit volume (total volume divided by area). This effect was larger in more economically developed cities. Emission reduction was achieved by the deindustrialization of industrial structures rather than the improvement of pollution control technology. It was mainly realized by a substantial drop in the number of newly added key polluting enterprises approved by local governments. Furthermore, deindustrialization associated with 5A spots benefited the tertiary industry, but hindered the secondary industry. The net effect of 5A spots on local GDP was positive on average. These findings indicate that the establishment of 5A scenic spots can reconcile the goals of environmental protection and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this lecture I have attempted to explain why the proportion of the electorate that supports the two major parties, Labour and Conservative, has steadily declined since the 1950s. I have suggested that historically Britain has had more of a multi-party system than we allow, and that to some extent the supremacy of the Labour and Conservative parties was historically unusual and depended upon a social and economic system that began to decay in the early 1960s. The decline in the total Labour and Conservative vote, which began then, was partly due thus to the enormous change in the country's social structure - a result of steady deindustrialisation - by which Britain became a predominantly 'middle-class' society; though it was a class difficult to define and with little in common. I have also argued that the policies often adopted by Conservative and Labour governments in order to prop up their declining electorates paradoxically hastened that decline by increasing the country's economic and social instability. In this, the enthronement of the financial sector and the political manipulation of private housing for party-political purposes, together with the inflation of the 1970s and 1980s, was particularly important. Furthermore, the Labour and Conservative electorates have decayed in all parts of the United Kingdom, often to the benefit of nationalist parties (most spectacularly in Scotland), and I have suggested reasons why that happened. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anas's impossibility theorem states that monopolistic competition or economies of scale alone are insufficient to explain growth of cities in response to growing population or decreasing trade costs (under constant urban costs); cities shrink. To enhance realism of assumptions, instead of Anas's normative approach, we study stable equilibria in the presence of another sector. Still, 'vanishing' remains robust! Ultimately, we argue that 'vanishing' mechanism looks realistic and can have an explanatory power: industries, free of externalities, should locate in small towns. Moreover, the comparative statics shows how such 'manufacturing' towns gradually decline, whereas other cities do not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a consequence of the international financial crisis in 2007, the region of Algarve, where tourism plays an important economic and social role, suffered a decrease in tourism demand, while unemployment increased sharply. Although tourism activities registered a quick recovery, unemployment levels continued to grow. This article examines the impacts of tourism activities on the sectorial structure of the regional economy, using a Bayesian vector autoregressive model. The results reveal that tourism growth did not automatically create the expected positive impacts on the economic performance of the other sectors, as was expressed by the objectives defined in the regional development strategies over the last two decades. The positive impacts of tourism were concentrated in the production of non-tradable goods and the construction sector, leading to a significant reduction of the weight of the tradable sector within the regional economy, similar to a process of deindustrialization described as the 'Dutch disease'. The decline of construction activities after 2007 has led to a significant increase of regional unemployment, although tourism growth has returned to 'pre-crisis' levels, revealing the lack of regional resilience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines trends in labour force participation of older men (55–64 years) in the Netherlands between 1992 and 2009 using Dutch Labour Force Survey data. In this period, the share of early retirees and disability recipients steadily decreased, while labour force participation of Dutch older men increased. The authors characterize these developments both theoretically and empirically in terms of policy reforms, normative change and deindustrialization. More specifically, institutional early retirement arrangements were abolished due to the rising costs associated with the ageing of the Dutch population. Older men, therefore, became more likely to be employed, unemployed or disabled compared to early retired between 1992 and 2009. The authors also find that deindustrialization increases the chances of employment for older men with a university degree. Moreover, a shrinking industry sector is particularly harmful for the lowest educated older men, as their likelihood to be in unemployment increases compared to early retirement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of socialist economic system in Croatia was followed by a period of economic transition during which the industry sector was affected by major changes. This study, on an example of Central Croatia, analyzes the spatial aspect of these changes between 1990 and 2011. The used data were taken from the National Bureau of Statistics and studies in which the transition period industry is researched from economic and geographical point of view. Calculations of most indicators referred to a county level while some indicators were calculated at the level of administrative cities and municipalities. It was found that, in Central Croatia, there had come to a process of deindustrialization, and in some rare cases a process of reindustrialization, an increase in importance of tertiary and quaternary activities, and calculation of some indicators such as degree of industrialization, location quotient, regional factor and index of specialization indicated on the existence of significant differences between individual parts of Central Croatia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a variety of visual art emerging from and about the American Rust Belt. Through an analysis of photography collections and gallery installations, it is argued that artistic projects interpret the ruins of the Rust Belt in competing ways, and much of this contestation occurs through a discourse about everyday life. A distinction is developed between a poetics developed from the ruins of space and the ruins in place. Ultimately, what's at stake in these visual poetics of the Rust Belt is a claim on the region's future, claims that are often invested with hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's involvement in Africa has caused much debate. The increasing presence in Africa has drawn mixed reactions from the academic and media platforms. It has been argued that China is sapping Africa's manufacturing potential and also extracting Africa's resources without any significant benefits to Africa. Thus China is seen as a contributor to Africa's underdevelopment and deindustrialization. However, some have seen China as Africa's partner for development. They see China's presence in Africa as beneficial to China and Africa. As a result, there is no settled opinion as to whether China's increasing presence in Africa is sustainable to Africa or whether the relationship is unsustainable. Although the relations between China and Africa are widely covered in the media, empirically the area has been underresearched. This article, therefore, contributes to literature by surveying the major political and economic issues around the China-Africa relations. The article considers several issues relevant to the China-Africa relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to Moretti (2013), deindustrialisation has been responsible for a 'great divergence' between cities that have moved to become centres of innovation and ideas, and those that have continued to produce material goods. Other authors however, place more emphasis on trends in specialisation and differences in productive bases as the driving forces behind urban divergence. Somewhat similarly, Storper (2013) argues that recent divergence been fundamentally been driven by the fact that some cities have become more specialised in knowledge intensive sectors. While most of this interest in urban divergence has been based on US cities, recent European research also reports divergent processes. The aim of this article is to examine the degree of divergence across UK cities and to analyse how far this has been driven by differences among cities in industrial structure and specialisation, tradable bases and productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Brazil’s industrial trajectory, beginning with an analysis of the process of import substitution industrialization and its role historically. This is followed by an analysis of industry after the transition to neoliberalism. The resulting evidence implies a clear process of deindustrialization, and upon examining the pattern of exports, a process of re-primarization as well. The paper concludes with a discussion of these troubling trends for the current trajectory of the Brazilian economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his first mayoral campaign in January 1989, Richard M. Daley insisted that “Everybody talks about bringing manufacturing back. There aren't going to be any more soap factories on Clybourn Avenue[.] … The city is changing. You're not going to bring manufacturing back.” Although this was a controversial statement at the time and Mayor Daley later embraced promanufacturing policies, it reflected an awareness of a fundamental economic shift in Chicago. By the late 1980s, the city had lost over half of its post–World War II manufacturing jobs, and companies were continuing to leave the city for more space, lower taxes, and a less expensive labor force. In fact, only months after Daley's comments, Procter & Gamble announced that it would close its fifty-nine-year-old soap plant at 1232 West North Avenue on the North Branch of the Chicago River, eliminating 275 manufacturing jobs in the process. Deindustrialization was under way, causing anxiety for politicians and pain for factory workers, but a new economy that was focused on real estate, finance, and culture was emerging in Chicago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines effects of postsocialist deindustrialization through a case study from Bucharest City, Romania. The paper use scientific papers and real estate company reports to analyse the postsocialist transformation of former industrial plants in Central and Eastern European countries and an industrial site survey and GIS mapping for Bucharest. The results show a common pattern for the postsocialist countries, with effects on diminishing the role of industry in the total economy, the tendency to convert the plants to residential and commercial use. In several cases the plants are fragmented in small production units or abandoned awaiting for a new purpose. Socio-economic transformation suggests a transition to service sector for the labour market. The paper concludes that transformation of postsocialist plants might require attention from owners and public administration, especially for the buildings with the historical and architectural meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economic geographers have traditionally concerned themselves with the primary and secondary sectors of the economy. As the world becomes more service-oriented, however, as much attention must be paid to the service economy and the role of technology. This article focuses on deindustrialization and the rise of the contemporary service—and technology-based economy to provide a needed conceptual framework for curriculum development and student learning. In doing so, the article presents teaching tools and concepts adapted for use in AP Human Geography classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of automation on the working class in the U.S. It notes that the working class fears to be replaced by robots due to technological advances. It provides a background on the rapid automation of manufacturing in 1970s and how the Black workers were affected by the pressure of automation. It notes that the technological advances bring slow productivity growth instead of an increase in economic productivity.

Background: Applying the "risk environment" approach proposed by Rhodes (2002, 2009), this study considers the diverse contextual factors contributing to drug overdose in a deindustrialized region of the United States. The Monongahela Valley of Pennsylvania, once a global center of steel production, has suffered a mass exodus of jobs, residents, and businesses since a national manufacturing crisis erupted in the early 1980s; more recently, it has seen a dramatic uptick in accidental drug poisoning deaths. Where recent local and national media attention to overdose has focused on suburban areas and middle class victims, this study concentrates instead on the deteriorating mill city of McKeesport, Pennsylvania.Methods: Eighteen clients of the city's sole drug treatment facility participated in in-depth interviews concerning their direct experience with accidental overdose. Specifically, participants were asked to describe their own most recent overdose event and/or the last overdose they had personally witnessed. They were also asked to speculate upon the roots of the local overdose epidemic, while venturing possible remedies.Results: In relating their overdose experiences, participants characterized a micro-level risk environment that was hidden behind closed doors, and populated by unprepared, ambivalent overdose "assistants." Tasked with explaining a geographic concentration of overdose in and around McKeesport, interviewees referenced the hopelessness of the area and its lack of opportunity as driving the use of heroin, with many explicitly suggesting the need for jobs and community reinvestment to reduce fatalities.Conclusion: While state and county efforts to ameliorate overdose mortality have focused upon creating an open market in naloxone, this study suggests the need for interventions that address the poverty and social isolation of opiate users in the post-industrial periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I document a significant deindustrialization trend in recent decades that goes considerably beyond the advanced, post-industrial economies. The hump-shaped relationship between industrialization (measured by employment or output shares) and incomes has shifted downwards and moved closer to the origin. This means countries are running out of industrialization opportunities sooner and at much lower levels of income compared to the experience of early industrializers. Asian countries and manufactures exporters have been largely insulated from those trends, while Latin American countries have been especially hard hit. Advanced economies have lost considerable employment (especially of the low-skill type), but they have done surprisingly well in terms of manufacturing output shares at constant prices. While these trends are not very recent, the evidence suggests both globalization and labor-saving technological progress in manufacturing have been behind these developments. The paper briefly considers some of the economic and political implications of these trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study provides a sketch on the trends of domestic production and labor productivity in agriculture, industry and services sector of 155 countries from across the globe during the period of 1980 to 2012, while focusing mainly on the impact of income and size of the stated economies on their domestic productions and labor productivity. Findings confirm that the trend of production is decreasing for agricultural sector while increasing for service sector whereas, parabolic trend is found observed for it in industry sector, while the trend of labor allocations is found upward in industry and service sectors in contrast to downward trend in agricultural sector for all of the stated nations as the whole. It was noted that the average labor productivity was found with negative trend for all of the stated sectors. The findings further confirms that the income and size of the economies positively affect the productions in agriculture and industry sector substantially while manage to affect the service sector somehow as well. While the size of economy also effect the labor productivity in all of sectors of selected nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines wage inequality in Australia from 1982 to 2012 using income distribution data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The analysis shows that wage inequality grew steadily during this period, and that the growth was particularly strong from 1996 onward. Through the use of quantile regression it is possible to decompose the growth in inequality into three components: changes in the wage structure, changes in workforce characteristics and a residual (‘unobservables’). The results of this analysis are conclusive among male full-time employees: despite the conventional wisdom that the changing nature of the workforce contributed to the growth of inequality, I find that the changes in the wage structure accounted for more than three-quarters of this growth. In the case of female full-time employees, changes in the wage structure accounted for about half of this growth. The article locates these findings within an analysis of neoliberalism in Australia and suggests that deindustrialisation and financialisation appear to be closely related to increased wage inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transformation of the postindustrial city in terms of its temporal structure. It takes concepts of time geography, routine, and rhythmicity of the classic Lund school, Lefebvre’s analysis of rhythms, and Crang’s geographic application of the chronotope concept as its starting points. Analyzing changes in the city bus transport services in Brno between 1989 and 2009, the paper attempts to capture in empirical terms the onset of the postindustrial phase of the city’s development. While temporality of an industrial city can be characterized by a shared rhythm determined by a small number of dominant pacemakers (industrial plants), the deindustrialized city is associated with a significant weakening of such pacemakers cutting across the society and thus with a distinctive individualization of urban rhythmicity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past 20 years, feminist geographers have gone to great lengths to complicate notions of ‘the field’ and make clear that the field is not an easily bounded space. This body of work has demonstrated the complexity of field spaces, explored ways to destabilize boundaries, and traced the power relations between researchers and participants. Ultimately, this work takes the breaking down of boundaries as an inherent good in field research, and, subsequently, little work has focused explicitly on the utility of physical and emotional boundaries that develop in field research. Our experiences as feminist geographers who reside in our fields show there is much left to understand and subsequently disrupt regarding the boundaries of ‘the field.’ In this article, we build on the concept of ‘intimate insiders’ to discuss the complex negotiation of doing research in the places where we have created personal lives and our sense of community. We often found ourselves struggling to define the physical and emotional boundaries of ‘the field’ on the outside for the sake of our participants and ourselves. In this article, we reflect on boundary-making as a specific feminist methodological practice for addressing the complexity of fieldwork. We discuss the techniques and strategies we used for conducting research in the communities in which we are long-term community residents. In the tradition of feminist methodology, we draw from our research experiences in State College and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to reconsider how producing distance through boundary-making has the potential to benefit our participants, our projects, and ourselves. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Latin America has for centuries been subject to the will and whim of external powers and thus it is not surprising that there are well-founded reservations among the peoples of the region in the face of China's increasing presence in their midst. The United States, in turn, is similarly uneasy about the new stakeholder in the hemisphere it has traditionally perceived as its zone of influence. This paper argues that analysts have paid insufficient attention to the declared intentions that consistently accompany Beijing's approach to Latin America, and that these offer strong evidence for a comparatively even-handed and fundamentally non-competitive approach. It draws out details of Chinese foreign policy rhetoric over an eight-year period and reviews it alongside US statements towards Latin America over the same time span, and concludes that there is much space for collaborative development, and little reason for contention, although risks of dependency and further deindustrialization remain: there is an urgent need for Latin American and North American scholars, pundits and government officials to pay attention to and understand China's declarations of intent towards Latin America, and engage with this rising power on her terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of Detroit's deindustrialization is intimately connected to the long dislocation in the auto industry. This article highlights how the spatial fixes endemic to capital determined the parameters of that deindustrialization through several key moments. In particular, the role of black autoworkers and Detroit residents contending with such spatial fixes will be examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of recent research [5,15,16,27] highlight the fundamental idea that the manufacturing sector represents a cornerstone of many national economies, a crucial sector to the generation of structural change, productive jobs and sustainable economic growth. The aim of this paper is to highlight the place and role of the Romanian industry, especially the manufacturing sector, in the national economy and its impact on employment and sustainable development. The results of this research show that, Romania has entered a process of deindustrialization for over two decades. After 2000, the intensity of the deindustrialization process decreased which allowed manufacturing to remain the backbone of the Romanian industry and whole economy. A real challenge of the Romanian manufacturing is the low level of labour productivity and low level of medium and high-technology manufacturing activities. In order to increase the resilience of the Romanian economy in the context of economic globalizations and to assure sustainable economic growth and development a reindustrialization through sustainable and productive manufacturing is necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Large tracts of abandoned urban land, resulting from the deindustrialization of metropolitan areas, are generating a renewed interest among city planners and community organizations envisioning the productive use of this land not only to produce fresh food but to effectively manage stormwater and mitigate the impact of urban heat islands. Healthy and productive soils are paramount to meet these objectives. However, these urban lands are often severely degraded due to anthropogenic activities and are generally contaminated with priority pollutants, especially heavy metals and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Characterizing these degraded and contaminated soils and making them productive again to restore the required ecosystem services was the theme of the "Soil in the City- 2014" conference organized by W-2170 Committee (USDA's Sponsored Multi-State Research Project: Soil-Based Use of Residuals, Wastewater, & Reclaimed Water). This special section of Journal of Environmental Quality comprises 12 targeted papers authored by conference participants to make available much needed information about the characteristics of urban soils. Innovative ways to mitigate the risks from pollutants and to improve the soil quality using local resources are discussed. Such practices include the use of composts and biosolids to grow healthy foods, reclaim brownfields, manage stormwater, and improve the overall ecosystem functioning of urban soils. These papers provide a needed resource for educating policymakers, practitioners, and the general public about using locally available resources to restore fertility, productivity, and ecosystem functioning of degraded urban land to revitalize metropolitan areas for improving the overall quality of life for a large segment of a rapidly growing urban population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban population growth, together with the contemporary deindustrialization of metropolitan areas, has resulted in a large amount of available land with new possible uses. It is well known that urban green areas provide several benefits in the surrounding environment, such as the improvement of thermal comfort conditions for the population during summer heat waves. The purpose of this study is to provide useful information on thermal regimes of urban soils to urban planners to be used during an urban transformation to mitigate surface temperatures and improve human thermal comfort. Field measurements of solar radiation, surface temperature (Ts), air temperature (Tair), relative humidity, and wind speed were collected on four types of urban soils and pavements in the city of Florence during summer 2014. Analysis of days under calm, clear-sky condition is reported. During daytime, sun-to-shadow differences for Tair, apparent temperature index (ATI), and Ts were significantly positive for all surfaces. Conversely, during nighttime, Tair differences among all surfaces were significantly negative, whereas ATI showed significantly positive differences. Moreover, Ts was significantly negative for grass and gravel. Relative to the shaded surfaces, Ts was higher on white gravel and grass than gray sandstone and asphalt during nighttime, whereas gray sandstone was always the warmest surface during daytime. Conversely, no differences were found during nighttime for ATI and Tair measured over surfaces that were exposed to sun during the day, whereas Ts showed higher values on gravel than grass and asphalt during nighttime. An exposed surface warms less if its albedo is high, leading to a significant reduction of Ts during daytime. These results underline the importance of considering the effects of surface characteristics on surface temperature and thermal comfort. This would be fundamental for addressing urban environment issues toward the heat island mitigation considering also the impact of urban renovation on microclimate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European mining industry restructuring, initiated in 1990, had a negative impact on the demographic and socio-economic status in E.U. States. In Romania, the Government's decision, in 1997, of closing unprofitable mines was not accompanied by economical reconversion measures, thus leading to a poverty and depopulation phenomenon in the mining areas. This article aims to highlight the negative impact of mining cessation on demographic characteristics and socio-economic development in the mining area Altân Tepe, Stajaru village, Tulcea county, where the deposit with the highest concentrations of copper in Romania is located. The statistics show that the Government's decision to stop mining in 2003 caused an increase in the locals' dependency to social aid and resulted in halving Altân Tepe's inhabitant's numbers between 2003 and 2014. The results were based on comparative analysis of three indicators: Evolution of the number of inhabitants in Altân Tepe between 1990 and 2003, Evolution of the number of inhabitants of Altân Tepe between 2003 and 2014, and Evolution of the number of social aid beneficiaries between 2004 and 2014. The study highlights that stopping mining at Altân Tepe has turned one of the richest places in natural resources of Romania into a disadvantaged area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses affects of globalization, urbanization and deindustrialization in the twenty-first century, which are rapidly changing contemporary local economies, forcing cities across the world to adopt advanced information and communication technologies. Topics discussed include knowledge-based urban development (KBUD), issues related to economic prosperity, environmental sustainability and good governance to cities, and retain high-skilled workers and innovative companies.