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The aim of the current research is to investigate the position of NGOs in improving the economic, political and social conditions of citizens in Tehran Municipality between 2010 and 2018. The statistical population of this research is the managers and senior experts of the 22 districts of Tehran and their related 121 districts, of which 220 people including the mayors of each district and its districts and senior managers will be selected as a statistical sample in the order of position priority. The required information was also collected through a researcher-made questionnaire whose validity and reliability were confirmed, and the results were obtained based on Friedman’s test, quadratic factor analysis method, and using SPSS and Lisrel software. The obtained results indicate a significant difference in the components of urban management and confirm NGOs’ role in improving urban management (urban social sciences, urban economics and urban politics) in Tehran Municipality from 2018 to 2019. Based on the Friedman test, the significant difference in the components has been investigated. The result of the ranking shows that the urban economy component has the highest rank and is the component in which NGOs play a more effective role. Finally, after performing the exploratory factor analysis, the fitting of the model and second-degree confirmatory analysis were done, the findings of which show that NGOs played an influential role in the component of social sciences, urban economy and urban policy improvement in Tehran Municipality between 2010 and 2018. has it. The main role of NGOs is related to the urban economy component. Considering that providing citizens’ needs, and providing welfare services, are basically infrastructures that are established by municipalities. All of them ultimately lead to the dynamism of the city’s economy and the improvement of the citizens’ well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan planning in Australia is argued to suffer from a 'governance deficit', alongside various calls for planning reform. The Greater Sydney Commission (renamed the Greater Cities Commission in 2022) was established in 2015 as a state‐appointed planning commission to preside over new strategic and statutory planning powers; local governments' metropolitan integration is one tenet of the reform's ambition for a more cohesive system. While the grounds for reform are often argued on effective terms, there is a clear need to explore the ways it may suffer from a 'democratic deficit' or be democratically defensible. This study explores the shifting planning powers, accountabilities, and forms of interest representation at the local level of the political system, in Australia's most concerted contemporary metropolitan reform attempt. Points for practitioners: The reformed planning process promoted new forms of substantive exchange and coordination from the local government sector informing local, district, and metropolitan planning processes.Interest representation outside of local governments' required plans is largely voluntary; Western City District councils demonstrated considerably more inter‐council collaboration as well as collaboration with the Commission than the Central City District. New forms of inter‐local exchange and coordination may help address 'fragmented' localism.The reform has improved prior democratic qualities of local strategic planning and improved policy accountabilities between councillors, the community, and planners in a loose compliance framework.The state's governance of housing growth targets and land use was said to contradict what had been negotiated between councils and the Commission, alongside local governments' increasingly narrow land‐use and development approval powers and policy churn of its governance.Practitioners can use the meta‐governance framework to consider the democratic 'performance' or defensibility of the Greater Sydney Commission's governance system and improve this or similar metropolitan governance reform settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Histories of politics in the late medieval European town present a struggle between town oligarchs and town citizens. While the conclusions that historians draw differ, the stakes of politics are the same: exclusion, participation and representation in town government. Politics is the 'public' domain of officeholding, elections and voting, its actors exclusively male, its locations the council chamber, the craft guild, the workshop. Starting and ending with the evidence of a 1532 'insurrection of women' in the English city of Norwich, this article seeks to reconceptualise town politics in the late Middle Ages. Its premise is that urban citizenship was a social and performative practice as much as a formal legal and political status. It argues that the relationship between home, household and family was fundamental to the lived experience of citizenship. The urban household was a complex source of political agency, where the official separation between citizen and non-citizen was difficult to sustain. The 1532 insurrection of women allows us to connect the politics of the household to the politics of the town hall and to write a social history of town politics, in which women were political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critically evaluates a 1967 consultancy report on the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG) by Professor William A. Robson. Robson, a pioneer of public administration science based at the London School of Economics his whole academic life, provided an in-depth analysis of the state of the Japanese capital during its high-speed growth spurt and at the beginning of the socialist Minobe prefectural administration. While many of Robson's assessments and criticisms were poignant, his report failed to appreciate contextual intricacies as well as Tokyo's distinctive path of urban development. A re-reading of the report with this in mind expands our understanding of the Japanese capital's postwar history more than 50 years after the report's publication. Its critical assessment also contributes to our understanding of how urban knowledge 'travels' across geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environmental & Social Management Journal / Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental is the property of Environmental & Social Management Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Political Science Studies / Studia Politologiczne is the property of University of Warsaw and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Municipal mergers are a common administrative reform worldwide, but their effects on public employment size and citizen satisfaction remain poorly understood. This study investigates these effects by focusing on a city-county merger in South Korea after 2000. Using the synthetic control method and multivariate regression, we find that municipal mergers increase the number of public employees, primarily low-ranking officials, while negatively impacting citizen satisfaction. This suggests that the goal of enhancing administrative efficiency through local government consolidation does not yield positive outcomes for organizations' personnel or residents' welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The novel SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has redefined global health and response to Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI). The outbreak of a cluster of influenza-like illnesses in Wuhan, China, has morphed into a pandemic in the last quarter of 2019, stretching from South East Asia to Europe, The Americas, Africa, and the Australian subcontinent. We evaluated the prevalence of depression among outpatients diagnosed with ARI. Materials and methods: We utilized a cross-sectional, observational design and investigated the prevalence of symptoms of depression among outpatients with ARI and described the characteristics of outpatients with ARI in Kaduna State. Results: The prevalence of symptoms of depression was 19.6% for respondents with symptoms of ARI and 14.4% for those without symptoms of ARI. On no risk of depression, we had a higher proportion of the respondents without symptoms of ARI (86%) than those with symptoms of depression (80%) (M = 318.4, SD = 29.62 case, and M = 344.0, SD = 14.2 control, r = 0.88, CI = 13.5 to 6.5, P = 0.000952). Likewise, in the category with mild risk of depression, respondents without symptoms of ARI were fewer (10%) than those with symptoms of depression (15%) (M = 58.4, SD = 26.0 case, and M = 42.1, SD = 12.7 control, r = 0.86, CI = 11.8 to 5.8, P = 0.0136. There was no significant difference between respondents with symptoms of ARI and without symptoms of ARI in the categories of moderate (M = 13.6, SD = 5.1 case, and M = 11.6, SD = 4.6 control, r = 0.87, CI = 2.3 to 2.1, P = 0.178) and high (M = 5.6, SD = 2.5 case, and M = 4.4, SD = 3.2 control, r = 0.61, CI = 1.2 to 1.5, P = 0.174) risk of depression. Conclusion: Symptoms of depression were commoner among respondents who presented with symptoms of Acute Respiratory Infection (ARI) at the Outpatient Department (OPD). However, further explanatory research is needed to establish causality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several studies have explored the challenges that accompany the creation of metropolitan governments, with particular reference to the institutional relations and power dynamics that potentially subordinate smaller towns to logics and objectives defined in the core area. This paper argues that the establishment of new governance arrangements exercising autonomous metropolitan political power may overcome the institutional fragmentation of metropolitan regions, but it may also overshadow the role played by the smaller towns, which often lack the opportunity or the necessary institutional capacity to participate in the process. The effectiveness of existing metropolitan settings from the small-town perspective is addressed comparatively in the contexts of England, France and Italy, three European countries that have experienced recent metropolitan reforms. The authors trace the history of the administrative reforms that have characterised the three countries, the spatiality of their metropolitan authorities, and the instruments and mechanisms that allow for the engagement and cooperation of small towns with(in) metropolitan authorities. They argue that the actual potential for the engagement of small towns within metropolitan governance dynamics is path- and contextdependent and often hampered by the institutional preconditions that gave birth to metropolitan governance in a specific context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The imaginary significance of cities to address the climate change crisis seems to have no ceiling. But the outcomes of urban climate governance have fallen short of the high promise placed on cities to contribute climate solutions. This research examines the widely observed gap between the highly expected role of cities in climate control and the disappointing reality from a perspective of the environmental state. Through a comparative study of two low-carbon city (LCC) experiments in Shenzhen and Huizhou, as well as an analysis of nation-wide administrative legal disputes related to decarbonization issues, this paper identifies an interesting legitimacy space created and manipulated locally along with the emergence of a carbon-focused environmental nation-state. Four rationales, namely carbon re-regulation, carbon formalization, carbon rationalization, and carbon exceptionalism, are identified underpinning different urban actors' articulation and leverage of the national priority of decarbonization to advance their respective agendas. Success or failure of urban climate experiments is found to be contingent upon the effective management and mediation of different rationales, giving rise to a distinctive process of "localizing the low-carbon state." The findings of this research shed light on the multifaceted effects of the greening state on the urban politics of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A detailed investigation of walking spaces is essential for ensuring the safety of mobility-impaired pedestrians because the conditions of walking spaces affect the daily lives. Seoul Metropolitan Government is exploring barrier-free policies and the Seoul universal design guidelines define the structure of pedestrian spaces. However, these guidelines apply to only a few representative pedestrian-friendly areas or public institutions, causing mobility-impaired people to experience restrictions in other areas. This study propose possibility to investigate condition of pedestrian space using smartphones and strollers with a crowdsourcing model. A smartphone was attached to the cup holder of a stroller to acquire data during its drive through a residential complex. While the stroller was driving, acceleration, rotation, location, and photo data were obtained using a free app installed on a smartphone. As a result of experiment, the acquired data showed different variations in linear acceleration depending on the roughness of the surface. When there was a slope, there was a change in the vertical angular. Therefore, possibility was determined to investigate the flatness of the walking space using a smart device and a four-wheeled vehicle. Additionally, a crowdsourcing model was proposed to survey the entire city in a short period of time. This model includes providing highly feasible rewards to increase citizen participation in surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, several studies have explored the challenges that accompany the creation of metropolitan governments, with particular reference to the institutional relations and power dynamics that potentially subordinate smaller towns to logics and objectives defined in the core area. This paper aims at shedding further light on the matter as it argues that, whereas the establishment of institutions and governance arrangements exercising autonomous metropolitan political power may overcome the institutional fragmentation of metropolitan regions, it may on the other hand overshadow the role played by the smaller towns, which often lack the opportunity or the necessary institutional capacity to participate in the process. More in detail, the effectiveness of existing metropolitan settings from the small-town perspective is addressed comparatively in the contexts of England, France and Italy, three European countries which have been characterised by relevant reforms on the matter in the last decades. By tracing (i) the history of the administrative reforms that have characterised the three countries, (ii) the spatiality of their metropolitan authorities and (iii) the instruments and mechanisms that allow for the engagement and cooperation of small towns with(in) metropolitan authorities, the authors argue that the actual potential for the engagement of small towns within metropolitan governance dynamics is path and context-dependent and often hampered by institutional preconditions that gave birth to metropolitan governance in a specific context.

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyses the relationship between cities, governance, and sustainable development. It emphasizes the importance of local governments in providing effective services and contributing to development. The study examines the concepts of city, urbanization, and sustainable development and the relationship between them. The impact of urbanization on economic growth and demographic changes is emphasized and discussed. The study employs a qualitative methodology and includes a development-based content analysis of local government legislation in Türkiye. The study also emphasizes the role of metropolitan governments in urban development and the need for development-oriented legislation and concludes with the suggestion that the legislation regulating local government institutions should be redesigned to prioritize economic development and sustainable practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, the issue of decentralization in urbanization has been a subject of debate, particularly in the context of local governance structures within metropolitan areas. Initially, there was a preference for a decentralized multi-actor approach. However, this evolved towards the consolidation and integration of local governments, aiming for larger-scale, single or two-tiered governance structures. Turkey followed this path, starting with its first metropolitan municipality law in the early 1980s. Law No. 6360 in December 2012 further implemented consolidation in Turkish metropolitan areas, transforming rural settlements into urban neighborhoods under the jurisdiction of metropolitan municipalities. This article delves into the merger of rural settlements with urban areas in Turkish metropolitan municipalities and the resulting challenges. It highlights issues such as the loss of legal identity for rural neighborhoods, shifts in economic strategies, and difficulties accessing public services. The article stresses the importance of accurately identifying rural areas and the need for a sound process in doing so. While recognizing the significance of the Spatial Address Registration System used during this transformation, it suggests that a one-size-fits-all international comparison model may be insufficient for domestic policy-making. Thus, it advocates for each country to establish tailored criteria based on its unique circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since December 30, 2017, the Seoul Metropolitan Government, Republic of Korea, has been implementing emergency reduction measures (ERMs) restricting the operation of industrial sites, thermal power plants, and vehicles when air quality is expected to deteriorate. ERMs are implemented when the present observed concentration of particulate matter (PM) of aerodynamic diameter less than 2.5 μm (PM2.5) and/or the predicted values for the following day exceed a threshold value. In this study, the effectiveness of ERMs was evaluated for 33 days with and 6 days without ERM implementation but where the PM2.5 concentration exceeded the threshold value, until March 15, 2021. Of the 33 days of ERM implementation, on 7 days it was executed despite the thresholds not being met. The ERM on these days might have been properly executed because the pre-notice and implementation of ERM might have reduced the local emissions of air pollutants. Our major findings are that even on days of ERM implementation, there were marginal reductions in vehicle traffic, thermal power generation, and industrial emissions. Second, the concentrations of PM2.5 and related air pollutants in Seoul were almost unchanged for most ERM implementation episodes. Third, most of the 39 (= 33 + 6) days when the air quality worsened were caused by the transboundary transport of air pollutants from China. In conclusion, it was revealed that the currently executed ERM law is insufficient for effectively reducing PM2.5. To achieve the required reductions, it is necessary to undertake stricter policies in Seoul and its neighboring regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the strategies local governments can employ to stimulate the growth of the local social economy sector—a sector associated with improving residents' subjective well-being. Acknowledging the under-explored but potentially pivotal role of local government as a catalyst, our research uses an institutionalist lens—focusing on institutional work, support, and public-sector entrepreneurship—to examine how local governments can encourage the establishment of social economy organizations. We adopt a Partial Least Squares Model-Structural Equation Modeling approach to analyze data from 69 South Korean urban metropolitan local governments between 2018 and 2020. Our findings reveal a significant positive relationship between the regulatory, administrative, and intermediary support mechanisms implemented by local governments and the scale of the local social economy. By integrating public-sector entrepreneurship with institutional perspectives, our findings enrich existing literature and provide insight into the strategic initiatives local governments can adopt to foster social entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender dimension, from a feminist perspective, in urban policies is a subject that urban planners, urban sociologists, politicians, and activists have often grappled with over time. However, the need to achieve an overall feminist take (Mol) or a gender urban advocacy approach (Kern, 2020) has frequently clashed, in urban activism or in the analysis of policy areas and segments open to gender issues, with a cultural climate resistant to gender inequalities, especially in the context of the neoliberal city. The latter is focused on maximizing its ability to extract value from cities and citizens, and naturally tends not to pay the necessary attention to the spatialization of inequalities (both gender and intersectional) that occur in the urban context. On the other hand, the increasingly widespread adoption of the gender mainstreaming paradigm seems to permeate various institutional levels, descending from the supranational level of the EU, where it was formulated, down to a more formal than substantive incorporation in urban contexts. This paper aims to analyse, first and foremost, from a theoretical perspective with the necessary reference to the gender claim of urban space and the introduction of the gender mainstreaming paradigm in public policies, and secondly with an empirical approach dedicated to Italian metropolitan cities, the ways in which the right to the city (Lefebvre) is interpreted in terms of gender. The goal of the work is to highlight a formalistic and non-substantive adherence to the gender mainstreaming paradigm in the context of Italian cities, where, in the light of references to gender equality in the right to the city, predominantly symbolic and commemorative references to the role of women are made, proceeding only in limited cases towards planning urban spaces and services tailored to women, supporting women's participation in city life, and fully integrating gender issues into the programming of social, educational, and city-sized welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the strategies for guarantying urban rights, such as housing, public space, mobility, and metropolitan government, implemented by the municipalities that constitute the Rionegro Agglomeration--Rionegro, Marinilla, La Ceja, Guarne, and El Carmen de Viboral-- in the eastern subregion of Antioquia through its development plans and territorial organization in force between 2014 and 2018. The latter is explored through a comparative method that allows verifying that in the face of an agglomeration phenomenon, municipalities are not cooperation and coordination that would enable guaranteeing citizens' demands and rights beyond political-administrative limits mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: For public libraries to effectively collaborate with related organizations and further promote the resolution of issues faced by local communities and residents, it is effective to analyze how related organizations implement their policies. This study focuses on the support for entrepreneurship by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government (TMG), and investigates its policies, programs, and projects to identify the challenges involved in achieving policy objectives. Further, I discuss how public libraries can collaborate and complement the implementation of policies in related organizations. Method: The policy analysis was conducted through a summary content analysis of TMG's comprehensive plan. In the analysis of programs, I organized the system through publications of the Bureau of Industrial and Labor Affairs, and conducted a summary content analysis of TOKYO Startup Station's programs using the publications and website. For the projects analysis, I conducted participant observation of seminars. Result: I identified policy issues in (1) "step-by-step support for realizing entrepreneurship," (2) "identifying and disseminating information on entrepreneurial leaders," and (3) "building an entrepreneurial environment through collaboration with related organizations," and discussed how to collaborate in (1) "support for obtaining information by librarian," (2) "promotion of the appeal of entrepreneurship through libraries," and (3) "implementation of library services that connect related organizations with residents." This study's approach could be useful for other municipalities and services in examining how public libraries can contribute to policy implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games (the Games) were held from 23 July to 5 September 2021 in Tokyo, Japan, after a 1-year delay due to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government was responsible for monitoring and responding to infectious disease outbreaks other than COVID-19 during the Games. A multi-source surveillance system was used from 1 July to 12 September 2021 for the early detection and rapid response to infectious diseases. This included routine notifiable disease surveillance, sentinel surveillance, syndromic surveillance, cluster surveillance, ambulance transfer surveillance and the Tokyo Infectious Alert system. Daily reports were disseminated summarizing the data collected from the multi-source surveillance system. No case of infectious disease under the Tokyo Metropolitan Government system required a response during the Games. The multi-source surveillance was useful for providing intelligence during the Games and, if required, could contribute to the early detection and rapid response to outbreaks during other mass gatherings. The system could be improved to overcome the challenges implied by the findings of this multi-source surveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of their reconstruction of the city following Allied bombing during World War II, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government infilled medium to small inland waterways (namely, canals and moats constructed during the 17th century) and utilised the resultant terrestrial strips for new purposes. Wartime damage reconstruction was conducted as part of the official city planning of Tokyo. During the 1940s, various waterways in Tokyo were infilled primarily with debris resulting from wartime bombing and, thereby, these landfills presented a model for the disposal of debris from disasters. In Japan, 115 municipalities were designated as war-damaged cities by the government, whose reconstruction was conducted as official city planning. The article examines how common the disposal of wartime debris via the in-filling of inland waterways was. The in-filling of Tokyo's inland waterways caused the loss of watery spaces that are nowadays regarded as cultural heritage assets with recreational potential. Studies have either criticised the infilling of waterways or else underscored opposition to the activity. How then was it possible for the authorities to decide on infilling and land reclamation as city planning? Was there any social support for this project? Relatedly, should the decision by the metropolitan government to infill inland waterways be regarded as inappropriate? This article considers these questions and evaluates the modification of such areas after WWII. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Anales de Geografía de la Universidad Complutense is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Over the past decades, government agencies have been under increasing institutional pressures to improve performance while engaging the public in decision-making processes. This study aims to explore how agency managers perceive institutional pressures and how these pressures shape their network behaviors for interagency collaboration. Specifically, this research focuses on structural holes, which refer to network positions that connect otherwise-disconnected agencies. Drawing on the literature of public management, citizen participation, and social networks, this research develops a theoretical model of an agency's network position and proposes hypotheses. This research tested two hypotheses using network and survey data collected from agency managers in the Seoul Metropolitan Government in 2009. The results of the study showed that agencies under greater performance pressure tended to locate themselves in interagency networks with structural holes, while agencies facing greater citizen participation demands tended to embed themselves in interagency networks with fewer structural holes. This implies that performance pressure drives city agencies to seek competitive structural positions in interagency networks, while citizen participation demands lead agencies to locate in dense interagency networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Park Won‐soon, the former mayor of Seoul, put forward a new vision of Seoul as a progressive city, and one of his signatures was the promotion of a new urban regeneration policy called the Seoul‐type Urban Regeneration Model (SUR). It was first presented as a solution to compressed and profit‐oriented urban redevelopment but evolved into an alternative model which conveyed the worlding desire of the Seoul Metropolitan Government to redefine Asian urbanism beyond developmentalism or neoliberalism. In this article, we argue that the SUR demonstrates a mixture of post‐developmentalist features and the lingering impact of neoliberal rationalities. Specifically, we problematize SUR's hybrid aspirations for urban competitiveness, improved quality of life and participatory governance by articulating how the pursuit of a globally competitive city conflicts with and overrides other values and how citizen‐centered governance was exploited as an efficient mechanism of neoliberal urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the effect of a means-tested COVID-19 stimulus payment, which was provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Government in South Korea, on consumer spending. The Seoul government issued a one-off payment in the spring of 2020 for residents in the city living below the national median income. We use daily card transaction data aggregated by users' age, income and location of residence, and apply a difference-in-differences approach to assess the effect of the stimulus payment. We compare consumption for the treatment (eligible for the payment) and control (ineligible but with a similar level of income) groups before and after the implementation of the payment. The results show that the payment increased consumer spending for the treatment group by about 12%. Recipients of the means-tested payment have a marginal propensity of consumption at no less than 59%, larger than that found for a universal emergency payment made by the Korean government and similar stimulus checks in other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows how the bids for the Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2016 and 2020 were built on the completion of the Waterfront Sucenter plan from the 1980s. Using a method of analyzing geographical data available on Internet databases, and comparing it with documents produced by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for the Tokyo harbor, the Olympic urban project appears to be dependent on preexisting patterns of the bids. This paper highlights the importance of deconstructing the narrative of the Tokyo Olympic project by analyzing urban strategies and their dependence on choices made several decades earlier. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, cities place important value on "Sustainable Cities" and "Cities for all", concepts which mean that consideration for people with disabilities has become an essential element in urban planning and development. Moreover, the number of people with disabilities living in cities is steadily growing. In this context, the purpose of this study was to compare the happiness levels of people with and without disabilities living in Seoul, using the Seoul Survey data provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, and to identify a structural model of urban factors that affect the happiness of people with disabilities. Under this purpose, a partial least squares multi-group analysis (PLS-MGA) was conducted by setting up an analysis model (disabled group) and a contrasting model (non-disabled group) to determine differences between the groups (disabled and non-disabled). The results of the analysis were as follows. First, unlike in the non-disabled group, in which all factors had a significant effect on the levels of happiness, only a few factors were significant in the disabled group (the private, residential, and culture and leisure characteristics were not significant). Second, compared to the non-disabled group, social capital, urban safety, and living environment satisfaction were more important than personal attributes in the disabled group. Third, the relationship between the happiness levels of people with disabilities and urban factors was multidimensional rather than unidimensional. Fourth, the two groups differed in their structural models and pathways, and the differences were statistically significant. The present study made significant academic and policy contributions as it investigated the levels of happiness of people with disabilities living in the city and their perceptions of the city and used PLS-MGA to identify the multidimensional relationship between urban factors and happiness level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online version of the original article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-021-00585-7 B Author Correction: Public Organization Review b https://doi.org/10.1007/s11115-021-00585-7 The original version of this article unfortunately contained mistakes which are listed below. Page 7-8: The mathematical formulas described from the end of page 7 to the top of page 8 and the formulas in lines 12-13 of page 8 should be replaced by the formulas shown in (1) and (2) below, respectively. [Extracted from the article]

Japanese local governments have been significantly undergoing reform to pursue better efficiency of public services, where public assets play a pivotal role. Optimizing public asset utilization possibly entails efficiency improvement. Using a two-stage Data Envelopment Analysis, this paper estimates efficiency scores, regressed on various composites of public assets for Tokyo's 49 local governments (23 special wards and 26 Tama cities) over the 2008–2017 period. Our evidence suggests that the special wards could invest more in living and infrastructure and lessen shared services with their higher-tier government. In contrast, the Tama cities could increase their educational assets and curtail infrastructure investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the discourses of urban politics around the decision-making processes and the implementation of two sustainability projects in Seoul – the Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project and the Remaking Sewoon Project. Using an archival analysis, it investigates how the recent rapid socio-economic transformations in Korea have affected the discourses around the urban politics of sustainable policies in Seoul. "Green" has become a new paradigm for urban redevelopment in Korea since the early 2000s, and the research finds that the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG) uses sustainability plans as a "sustainability fix" heavily focused on "pro-growth" development to win support for its restoration projects among citizens and for global approval. However, with increased democratization and the growing role of civic groups in urban politics, we see a move towards more just sustainability in urban sustainability planning in Korea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics: Political Theology, Natural Law, and the American Founding" by Kody W. Cooper and Justin Buckley Dyer is a book that explores the origins of American politics. However, the book's focus is not solely on classical or Christian origins, but rather on advancing theological arguments about the true nature of Reformed Protestantism and America's authentic liberal Christian inheritance. The authors argue that the political thought of the founders was influenced by a body of Christian thought that is not necessarily distinct from other religious and philosophical beliefs. The book challenges the views of eighteenth-century American pastors, prominent Reformed theologians, and contemporary political theorists, as well as conservative orthodox Protestants and Catholics. [Extracted from the article]

The current regime of biopolitics is characterized by its advanced capability of communicating life as a fact to be optimized through its biomedical and bio-capitalist apparatuses. Seoul Metropolitan Government's launch of its new community platform, 'Take Care of Stray Cats', in 2014 was an attempt to apply this biopolitical optimization of life to the condition of the city's stray cat lives. Indispensable for the success of this platform was the participation of individual cat lovers, who were then asked to work as citizen geo-taggers to convert the physical presences of stray cats into the markers on its map app so that other geo-tagged corporate and governmental apparatuses, such as veterinary clinics, cat shelters, and feeding and resting areas could communicate about their presences. So, some cat lovers' petition against the platform that led to its early shutdown in 2015 has been criticized as revealing their ignorance of the ethical and communitarian rationale of the platform. This paper, on the other hand, focuses on a different ontology of life on which the cat lovers' everyday caring practices were based and how its care for the cats' responsiveness, rather than simple geo-taggable facts, evolved into their ontological politics as the countermethod to biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article points to the 1820s as a crucial period that saw a great reversal in the location of sovereignty in Belize. The article employs two inflection points—first, an 1822 case of 'Indian' slaves from Mosquito Shore, and second, slave desertion in 1825—to point to unprecedented challenges to settler sovereignty over slavery in Belize that arose during the 1820s. While British amelioration allowed the metropolitan government to bring frontier and borderland regions within its legal purview, thus challenging settler autonomy, the concurrent event of Central American emancipation provided enslaved people in Belize additional opportunity to desert their masters at a moment when restitution of runaway slaves became increasingly difficult. Yet, this essay is about more than just the fracturing of settler sovereignty over slavery. Rather it also illuminates how settlers responded to these challenges by using force, diplomacy, and the print media. The settlers' most potent response was in portraying Belizean slavery as 'benign,' creating a surprisingly robust narrative that would endure for generations. The essay illuminates how emancipation and imperialism remained inextricably linked in borderland areas such as Belize, which straddled the boundaries between Spanish America and the British Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies the impact governance types can have on the transfer of city-scale climate change policy. We develop a new adaptation of the policy transfer heuristic (based on the work of Dolowitz and Marsh 1996) which draws attention to different types of multilevel governance systems (Hooghe et al. 2003). This new adaption, "Policy Transfer Across Governance Systems" (PTAGS) heuristic helps to anticipate challenges and opportunities for potential transfer (Manwaring 2016). To demonstrate this, we present three hypothetical scenarios of policy transfer from the European Union Green Capital Awards (EUGCA) to Australia. Using PTAGS reveals three main complexities that policy actors' may face when developing city-scale climate change policy. These are: problem identification; the type of transfer networks used; and what aspects of policy contents and goals can be transferred. We argue that the adapted PTAGS heuristic enables a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of transfer across different governance systems. This can better equip policy actors and relevant stakeholders to develop more holistic city-scale climate change adaptation policy that draws on the strengths of governance systems rather than amplifying their weaknesses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aimed to characterize the adverse events of dietary supplements provided by medical professionals and to examine whether there are challenges when applying each case to the causality evaluation algorithm. Data from 290 individual cases collected by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government in cooperation with the Tokyo Medical Association and Tokyo Pharmaceutical Association were analyzed. The causality evaluation algorithm that was used in this study was reported previously. Female patients accounted for 73% of those who experienced adverse events. Both male and female patients who had adverse events were in their 60s and 70s. Many of the participants had underlying diseases and aimed to improve their medical conditions. Furthermore, skin symptoms were the most common. Many of the supplements were made from natural substances, with an average of 7.7 ingredients in each product. More than half of the products were used for less than one month. In most cases, symptoms improved after discontinuation of the products or after the administration of medications. When each event was applied to the causality assessment algorithm, it was necessary to understand the information as follows: in cases of product discontinuation with simultaneous medications recovery was not concluding the product discontinuation, and the physician’s judgement should be place as objective evidence. The algorithm was successfully applicable to cases provided by medical professionals and the evaluated results for all cases were 30% possible and 62% highly possible. The evaluated results indicate the relationship between products/ingredients and the symptom, and by adding information on the symptom and its severity, it is possible to clarify the phenomenon to be noted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated a resurgence in counter-urbanisation in Australia with ex-urban populations leaving behind the perceived disamenity of city life for simpler, cheaper and lockdown-free lives. This article investigates the drivers of in-migration and net migration into non-metropolitan New South Wales from the metropolitan zone between 2011 and 2016, focusing on the potential draw of rural amenity, together with the potential 'push' factors of urban disamenity. The results show that non-metropolitan NSW is becoming less dependent on counter-urbanisation flows from Sydney, while simultaneously seeing stronger net migration gains from interchanges with the broad metropolitan zone. Hypothesis testing upheld the contention that rural amenity accounted for a statistically significant share of the variance in in-migration - and net migration - from Sydney. However, the hypothesis that Sydney's perceived disamenity is leading to out-migration flows and net migration losses was not well supported, confounded by mis-specification issues. High population densities are associated with out-migration from the Sydney region to all categories of settlement within the remainder of NSW and Australia. However, changes in density are only a strong and reliable influence on net migration within the broad Sydney metropolitan area but the direction of that influence is positive rather than negative. The article reveals that the proportion of immigrants within a metropolitan local government area population is negatively associated with out-migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metropolitan reforms, which include the creation of unified metropolitan governments through municipal mergers and reclassification, are emerging as one strategy to address planning and service delivery challenges in the wake of increasing urbanisation across sub-Saharan Africa. Although metropolitanisation adds service area and mandates, well-functioning secondary cities that are part of a two-tier governance system in South Africa are pursuing metropolitanisation. The case of Mangaung, an early instance of secondary city metropolitanisation, is an opportunity to examine the motivations underlying these reforms, the politics involved and their impacts on urban governance. Mangaung's political and administrative leadership pursued metropolitanisation to jump scale, attain greater political autonomy vis-à-vis other tiers of government, and obtain fiscal and technical resources available only to metropolitan municipalities in South Africa's urban municipal hierarchy. Metropolitanisation was no panacea for Mangaung's governance challenges, however, since it did not resolve the underlying weaknesses in municipal capacity or the regional economy, nor did it address the spatial legacies of apartheid that produced a sprawling metropolitan service area. As other South African secondary cities contemplate metropolitanisation, we recommend revising municipal structures and mandates and strengthening administrative capacities and economies in secondary cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public‐Private Innovation (PPI) Partnerships can generate innovative approaches to improving public services. However, incomplete contract theories point to difficulties in making public‐private collaborations work effectively and efficiently. Drawing on these theories, we analyze the transfer of the management of a children's social services department in a large metropolitan government in England to an "improvement partnership" between the local government and two private firms. Using a synthetic control method approach, we find little evidence of improved health or educational outcomes for looked after children during the years following the creation of the partnership. However, there appears to be an increase in the costs of providing children's social services, which documentary evidence suggests may be attributable to weak contract management capacity, difficulties embedding performance monitoring, and additional expenditures on the partnership's reform programme. Our findings therefore highlight that effective supervision of PPI partnerships is essential for making them a success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to analyze how the degree of carbonation and the application of waterproofing and anticorrosive materials affect carbonation in water reservoirs among the water treatment facilities managed by the Seoul Metropolitan Government. To guarantee similarity of the experimental group, 42 highly similar water reservoirs were selected from among the water supply reservoirs currently in operation in Seoul. On-site carbonation assessments were performed in order to derive the carbonation rate coefficients. In the water reservoirs with applied waterproofing and anticorrosive materials immediately after public service, the upper and lower limits were D = 1.13 t and D = 0.29 t , respectively, whereas those of the water reservoir applied with waterproofing and anticorrosive materials after 15 years of service life were D = 1.89 t and D = 0.94 t , respectively. The comparative analysis showed that the rate of reduction in the carbonation rate was about 10.4% to 16.8% in the water reservoirs applied with waterproofing and anticorrosive methods after 15 years of service life. However, reduction in the carbonation rate was about 46.4% to 74.3% in the water reservoirs applied with waterproofing and anticorrosive methods at the initial stage of service life. It was confirmed that the early application of waterproofing and anticorrosive materials is effective in suppressing carbonation of concrete water reservoir structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the study is to recognize the understanding and implementation of the smart city concept by local governments in the Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot Metropolitan Area in the north of Poland. Therefore, the authors examined local governments' interest in "smart" strategy and identified human- and technology-oriented initiatives. In order to achieve the research aim, a survey with representatives of local governments and a content analysis of strategic documents were conducted. The results show that core cities of the metropolitan area try to be initiators of smart urban life while many other municipalities are not very active in this area. Most of the smart city initiatives referred to hard infrastructure, and only a portion of them are oriented toward improving human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides decision-makers with important guidance on how to realistically assess the benefits of municipal mergers. ABSTRACT Municipal amalgamations raise high expectations, but often do not deliver as expected. This paper analyses how pre-existing institutional and service delivery arrangements influence the expected outcomes of amalgamations in terms of cost reductions and service delivery enhancement. In the light of an historical institutionalist background, the authors analyse five cases of voluntary mergers in Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy, between 2014 and 2017. The findings contribute to research on local government consolidation and to the analysis of reform implementation and policy change where intent, process and uncertainty play a crucial role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]