Suchergebnisse

We develop a cellular automaton (CA) model to produce spatiotemporal population maps that estimate population distributions in an urban area during a random working day. The resulting population maps are at 50 m and 5 minutes spatiotemporal resolution, showing clearly how the distribution of population varies throughout a 24-hour period. The maps indicate that some areas of the city, which are sparsely populated during the night, can be densely populated during the day. The developed CA model assumes that the population transition trends follow dynamics and propagation patterns similar to a contagious disease. Thus, our model designed to change the states of each grid cell (stable or dynamic) in a way that is similar to changes in the condition of individuals who are exposed to an infectious disease (susceptible or infected). In addition, the modeling space is informed by several geographic features, such as the transport routes, land-use categories, and population attraction points. The model is geosimulated for the city of Trondheim in Norway, where the synthetic day population could be validated using an estimated day-population map based on the registered workplace addresses and employee statistics. The generated maps can be used to estimate a value for the population-at-risk in the wake of a major disaster that occurs in an urban area at any time of a day. In addition to assessing exposure to hazards, the resulting maps also reveal movement patterns, transition trends, peak hours, and activity levels. Possible applications range from public safety, disaster management, transport modeling, and urban growth studies to strategic energy distribution planning.

In this article we examine attitudes of ethnonationalism in two countries that have experienced ethnic civil war: Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. We analyse the strength of attitudes of ethnonationalism on the individual level, and how ethnonationalism is related to local ethnic settlement patterns and previous experiences of local inter-ethnic violence. We combine data at the municipality level with data from the South-East European Social Survey Program from 2003 and conduct a multilevel analysis for each case. In both cases, ethnonationalism dominates, but it is stronger in Kosovo than in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We find a clear difference between members of local majorities and minorities, but the effect in Bosnia-Herzegovina is the opposite of the effect in Kosovo. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, members of both minority and majority groups tend to be more ethnonationalist the larger their group. Contrary to our initial expectations, people express less ethnonationalism in municipalities that were more severely hit by violence, whereas in Kosovo no effect of local violence can be found. The more recent conflict and less consolidated institutions in Kosovo may help explain these divergent results. Still, the lack of consistent findings makes it hard to infer beyond the two cases examined.

This article presents a GIS-aided visibility and dominance analysis used for a visual-impact assessment of a planned high-rise building located in a central area in Trondheim, Norway. The visibility analysis calculates fields of intervisibility between the high-rise building and locations in the urban landscape. Visual obstacles such as existing buildings and trees are included. The dominance analysis adds to the visibility analysis a measure of how visually dominant the high-rise building would be. The dominance measure is based on the distance to the building and how much of the building would be visible from any observation point. The result is an assessment of visibility and dominance throughout the entire study area as opposed to using photomontages for assessing visibility and dominance from single standpoints.

Large segments of populations in the industrialized West believe that immigrants cause crime. Some scholars suggest that it is generous welfare that attracts so-called "welfare magnets," increasing the possibility that the worst kind of immigrant locates in strong welfare states. Empirical studies on crime, however, do not support the view that immigrants are more to blame for crime than natives, although some immigrant groups might be overrepresented in crime statistics. We address this question by examining if immigration increases crime within Norwegian municipalities, thereby, indirectly testing whether Norway, one of the most generous welfare states, acts as a magnet for "bad" immigrants. Our results do not support the view that a strong welfare state with a lenient penal system generates moral hazard, nor that welfare states systematically attract the "bad" immigrants. These results support a host of studies from other industrialized countries, particularly the US, showing higher immigrant populations associated with lower crime. The results from Norway, thus, while showing some support for the view that welfare potentially cushions the many pathologies associated with crime and victimization, mitigating the development of criminogenic environments, are also in line with an emerging academic consensus. This consensus suggests that immigration reduces crime, which is good news for progressive policy and for generating a more nuanced discourse on the subject.

Conflict appears more often between neighboring states. Adjacency generates interaction opportunities and arguably more willingness to fight. We revisit the nature of the border issue and measure geographical features likely to affect states' interaction opportunities as well as their willingness to fight. We do so for all on-shore borders from the period 1946–2001. Although each border is unique, a general result shows that the longer the border between two states, the more likely they are to engage in low-intensity conflict. This is particularly so for conflicts active during the Cold War and located in highly populated border regions.

Previous quantitative research on ethnic civil war relies on macro-level proxies in an attempt to specify the conditions under which ethnic minorities rebel. Going beyond an exclusive focus on minorities, the present study employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a way to model ethnic center—periphery dyads that confront governments with excluded groups. We construct and analyze a new dataset of geo-referenced politically relevant ethnic groups, covering the entire world during the period from 1951 through 2005. Our results show that the conflict probability of marginalized groups increases with the demographic power balance compared to the group(s) in power. Furthermore, the risk of conflict increases with the distance from the group to the capital, and the roughness of the terrain in the group's settlement area. We also find that while the results for demographic group strength hold for all ethnic civil wars, the geographic factors apply for territorial ethnic conflicts only.