Search results

This study investigated four different economic level areas of China (Shanghai, Shandong, Shaanxi, and Guizhou) to analyze the eastern and western urban and rural media service status at different development stages. This set of data comes from the comparison of regional urban and rural areas and indicates the various aspects of differences in the survey area, including the media use habits, media resources, media consumer demand, evaluation of media services, the role of media in public life, public knowledge level, and so on. On analyzing data comprehensively, one thing can be found that there is a positive correlation between the public media contact degree and the public knowledge level. The media plays an extremely important role in public life and regional public knowledge gap between urban and rural areas exists. Furthermore, this gap is positively correlated to the media resources and media exposure. The trend of media using on mobile phone and computer in urban areas increases significantly greater than in rural areas. Then, how to narrow the urban–rural and regional public knowledge gap and reduce the negative impact of the digital divide will be an important urgent task.

Just who is the ‘analyst’ who practices rhythmanalysis? The extension of the name ‘rhythmanalyst’ to other than scholarly practitioners makes possible an investigation of the relationship of rhythmanalysis to other rhythmanalytic forms of knowing and representing urban space and the ways in which these differing but related practices may challenge, undermine or inform each other. In this paper, drawing on years of ethnographic and autoethnographic research in three North American cities, I discuss the rhythmanalytical practice involved in cabdriving, as this is shaped by the technologies drivers use to sense the city and by the transformation of the taxicab into the ‘ridesharing’ or soft cab. First, I discuss the occupational knowledge and wayfinding practice of cabdrivers and the extent to which their work requires the development by means of a variety of tools and practices, of a sense of the city as composed of multiple interacting rhythmic movements or polyrhythmia, with which they must strategically converge and facilitate. Second, I discuss the redelegation of the role of rhythmanalyst to predictive algorithms and mobile interfaces, as part of the reinvention of the taxicab, and its associated micropolitics and power/knowledge relations, by smartphone-enabled hailing and dispatching services. Struggles over, and transformations of, these non-academic forms of rhythmanalysis may provide insight, in turn, into the contemporary politics of the production of social space.

This paper provides an extensive review of surveys and data-collection programmes focused on urban goods movement (UGM). Surveys investigating passenger urban travel have a decades-long tradition. The same is not true for UGM. The first specific UGM surveys appeared about 10 years ago in response to the rapid growth of car traffic, congestion, pollution and lack of space. Most of the time, these surveys have been carried out to resolve specific, local problems concerning traffic. Only a few of them have taken a global approach to urban logistics by including all logistics operators (own-account and carriers), all delivery vehicles (heavy and light vehicles), all deliveries and pickups (from express to full payload) and an entire metropolitan area and surroundings. Due to various European programmes, an inventory has been created to analyse urban goods data collection according to spatial level and methodology of capture. With this inventory, European urban freight indicators can be described, along with the units in which they are measured and their purposes. The relevance of urban goods transport surveys lies in their capacity to give decision-makers an account of urban freight transport functioning, ratios and data, so as to help in formulating planning, regulation and forecasting. It appears that focusing on the movement (delivery/pick-up), as the unit of analysis in establishment-driver surveys is the most efficient approach to describe the generation of vehicular flow in the city. This fact is revealed in the French UGM surveys, which take into account the complexity of urban logistics.

This chapter is guided by Abdulkader Mokhtari's reflections on participation in the Writers in the Schools Collaborative. As a member of the professional development program on two campuses in the Houston Area, Mokhtari recalls the program model as part of a structured enactment of DuFour and Eaker's (1998) Professional Learning Community concept and an organically nurtured, portfolio-based knowledge community (Craig, 2007). During what he recalls to be a difficult time on campuses seeking to engage learners in a fresh approach to literacy, Mokhtari recounts pivotal moments of success and struggle to Chestin T. Auzenne-Curl and KaLeah Hicks, both former high school teachers and contributors to research on teacher development programs.

The city is a complex entity and comprehending that complexity has long challenged and extended the methodological repertoire of social scientists, artists, and other commentators. The complexity and scale of urban life, and the managerial interventions that this demands in terms of planning and maintenance logistics, has meant that urban scholarship has had a strong, and at times dominant, tradition of quantitative research. Within this methodological hegemony, qualitative methods were a tolerable adjunct, subsidizing (often by way of the exceptionally-framed ‘case study’) the more real and relevant knowledge generated by large-scale quantitative surveys and data sets. This bifurcated rendition of quantitative and qualitative approaches is difficult to by-pass and has, in my view, a range of unfortunate effects. Not least it implies that one type of approach and one style of knowledge is more important and relevant than the other. But of course whether a particular style of urban knowledge is better or more relevant than another depends always on the destination of that knowledge. Is it, for example, acquired to account for the presence of cities through explanatory frameworks of urbanization (why cities)? Or is it to render more accurately the complexity of life, processes, and systems that are in the urban context (how cities)? The importance of these different explanatory styles (and the methodological approaches that attend them) is inevitably contingent rather than absolute. In this essay I want to chart (in a very partial way) aspects of that contingency and revisit the shifting fortunes of qualitative approaches to the city.

President Obama’s policies, while broad in scope, offer some specific attention to college and career readiness (CCR) and are necessary for urban youth to realize their career potentials. However, by primarily defining CCR in terms of academic achievement, many of the previously mentioned policies ignore the varied college access skills needed to ensure successful preparation for, enrollment in, and graduation from postsecondary institutions.

This chapter explores the current definition of CCR represented in the Obama administration’s policies, while also expanding the definition to include missing policy pieces related to college access.

The underutilization of school counselors and classroom teachers as college access facilitators who can expand CCR for urban schools is addressed. The paper discusses recent Obama administration initiatives and recommendations for urban schools and higher education institutions.

The administration initiatives and recommendations recently put in place by the Obama administration for urban schools and higher education institutions, if integrated within urban schools, may facilitate the realization of one of President Obama’s educational reform goals of ensuring that every student graduates from high school well prepared for college and a career.

This introductory chapter starts off by discussing the differences and interconnections of visual sociology and urban sociology in their quest to understand human settlements. It then moves to argue for expanding the focus to other disciplines that are equally geared toward researching aspects of the city in visual and multimodal ways, since the urban context cannot be studied comprehensively without engaging a multitude of disciplines and trying to make productive connections between them. The chapter continues with a concise overview and discussion of each of the contributions in this first of two volumes of “Visual and Multimodal Urban Sociology” in the “Research in Urban Sociology” series. These twin volumes explore multiple ways in which the city and city life may be approached, studied, and expressed through visual and multimodal means and methods, thereby as much as possible including sensory experiences other than those related to seeing and hearing. It concludes with drawing some contours and challenges of visual and multimodal urban studies and the critical role of technology in advancing this cross-disciplinary field of inquiry.