Policies of eviction: making visible the EU border in Sicily’s rural areas

Phlebotomine sandflies were captured in rural settlement and periurban areas of the municipality of Guaraí in the state of Tocantins (TO), an endemic area of American cutaneous leishmaniasis (ACL). Forty-three phlebotomine species were identified, nine of which have already been recognised as ACL vectors. Eleven species were recorded for the first time in TO. Nyssomyia whitmani was the most abundant species, followed by Evandromyia bourrouli, Nyssomyia antunesi and Psychodopygus complexus. The Shannon-Wiener diversity index and the evenness index were higher in the rural settlement area than in the periurban area. The evaluation of different ecotopes within the rural area showed the highest frequencies of Ev. bourrouli and Ny. antunesi in chicken coops, whereas Ny. whitmani predominated in this ecotope in the periurban area. In the rural settlement area, Ev. bourrouli was the most frequently captured species in automatic light traps and Ps. complexus was the most prevalent in Shannon trap captures. The rural settlement environment exhibited greater phlebotomine biodiversity than the periurban area. Ps. complexus and Psychodopygus ayrozai naturally infected with Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis were identified. The data identified Ny. whitmani as a potential ACL vector in the periurban area, whereas Ps. complexus was more prevalent in the rural environment associated with settlements.

Phlebotomine sandflies were captured in rural settlement and periurbanareas of the municipality of Guaraí in the state of Tocantins (TO), an endemicarea of American cutaneous leishmaniasis (ACL). Forty-three phlebotomine specieswere identified, nine of which have already been recognised as ACL vectors.Eleven species were recorded for the first time in TO. Nyssomyiawhitmani was the most abundant species, followed byEvandromyia bourrouli, Nyssomyia antunesiand Psychodopygus complexus. The Shannon-Wiener diversity indexand the evenness index were higher in the rural settlement area than in theperiurban area. The evaluation of different ecotopes within the rural areashowed the highest frequencies of Ev. bourrouli and Ny.antunesi in chicken coops, whereas Ny. whitmanipredominated in this ecotope in the periurban area. In the rural settlementarea, Ev. bourrouli was the most frequently captured species inautomatic light traps and Ps. complexus was the most prevalentin Shannon trap captures. The rural settlement environment exhibited greaterphlebotomine biodiversity than the periurban area. Ps.complexus and Psychodopygus ayrozai naturallyinfected with Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis wereidentified. The data identified Ny. whitmani as a potential ACLvector in the periurban area, whereas Ps. complexus was moreprevalent in the rural environment associated with settlements.

A deep learning classification approach using high spatial satellite images for detection of built-up areas in rural zones: Case study of Souss-Massa region - Morocco

INTRODUCTIONStudies have found that parental smoking is the primary source of secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among children, leading to respiratory illnesses, especially in non-smokers like children and women. Promoting a smoke-free home (SFH) is essential, especially among rural populations, and barriers or challenges to creating a SFH need to be better understood. This study aimed to determine the knowledge levels on SHS and to identify the beliefs, perceptions, barriers and facilitators of SFH practices among the rural population in Kuala Kubu Bharu, Selangor, Malaysia.METHODSThis study employed a mixed-methods design, conducted in two rural settlement areas in 2022. Data were collected through surveys on SHS and SFH knowledge and face-to-face interviews using a topic guide. The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS software while the qualitative data were analyzed using the thematic approach via NVivo 12.RESULTSSixty participants completed the survey. Most of the respondents had a good (38%) or moderate (48%) knowledge level of SHS. No association was found between sociodemographic factors and knowledge level. Seven of the nine interviewees knew specific SHS-related health risks. Most participants believed that implementing SFH requires quitting or reducing smoking. Barriers to establishing a SFH included personal convenience, habits, attitudes, and social influence. Family encouragement, practicability, government, and quitting smoking were the facilitators for SFH.CONCLUSIONSThese rural communities had moderate knowledge level of SHS and SFH. Men’s knowledge, beliefs and perceptions like associating SFH with quitting smoking may prevent SFH adoption. It is critical for the government and stakeholders to disseminate information and develop socially and culturally acceptable health promotion programs, incorporating the considerations from this study to increase the chances of SFH implementation in rural areas.

In this text I attempt to think over the matter concerning the settled rural worker's education, taking into account socio-cultural characteristics and educational necessities of the land claimant in the state of Sao Paulo; the socialeducative practices in progress in the rural settlement areas whose workers are organized by MST - Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (Landless Agricultural Workers Movement) in Ribeirao Preto region; and also the experience on the Pedagogic Course for the Land Use implementation, at UFSCar - Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos (Federal University of Sao Carlos), promoted by Pronera - Programa Nacional de Educacao da Reforma Agraria (National Program of Education in the Agrarian Reform). Keywords: Education in the Rural Areas; Work and Education; Work and Co-operation; Rural Encampments and Settlements; Social Movements and Education.

Assessment of decoupling between rural settlement area and rural population in China

Rural areas occupy a special place in the socio-economic life of Ukraine. They are home to a third of the population of our state and account for a larger share of its area. The importance of these territories is enhanced by their exceptional contribution to the formation of the foundations of food security and the expansion of the country’s export potential. These and other factors make the development of rural areas one of the main priorities of the state policy of Ukraine aimed at raising the living standards of the rural population, increasing the efficiency of the functioning of the agro-industrial complex, improving the state of the environment and improving the quality of human capital. However, more than 30 years of Ukraine’s independence have not brought the expected increase in well-being to ordinary peasants. According to the processed data of the State Statistics Service of Ukraine, it has been established that rural areas are in a catastrophic state: the ecological condition of natural resources is deteriorating, engineering and social infrastructure, and the system of social services have fallen into disrepair. From year to year there is a decrease in the number of medical institutions and enterprises of household services, communication offices, schools and especially preschool institutions. The construction of social facilities and housing for rural youth has practically stopped. The social infrastructure has been practically destroyed, and those institutions of social and cultural purpose, which are still functioning at least somehow, are in survival conditions. Migration processes and the depopulation of the rural population have increased sharply. The agro-ecological condition of soils, the quality of agricultural products grown in rural settlement areas, and the quality of drinking water are deteriorating. The destruction and decline of rural areas is the result of insufficient attention of state management bodies to their problems. Today, 30% of Ukraine’s population lives in rural areas and there are 28,369 villages, while in 1990, 32.6% of the population lived in rural areas and there were 28,845 villages. For the period 1990–2021, 476 rural settlements have disappeared. The demographic situation in Ukraine has received negative changes, it remains especially acute in rural areas, and during the Russian aggression against Ukraine, the demographic situation has generally become catastrophic.

Rural decline has become an indisputable fact and a global issue. As a developing country, China is simultaneously facing unprecedented rapid urbanization and severe rural decline. The coordinated development of its rural human–land relationship is therefore of great significance for ensuring the country’s food security and achieving both rural revitalization and sustainable development. Yet, the related research on this complex subject has mostly focused on a single element: rural settlements. Since studies of the rural human–land relationship tend to only discuss the coordinated change in rural populations vis-à-vis rural settlement area, their degree of spatial matching and intensive utilization level of rural settlements has been largely overlooked. To rectify this imbalance, using data on rural populations and rural settlement area in counties of Shandong Province in 2009 and 2018, this paper applied the methods of per capita rural settlement area, the Theil index, and Tapio’s decoupling model to quantitatively identify the rural human–land relationship along three dimensions: intensive utilization level, spatial matching degree, and change coordination degree. The results revealed that the per capita rural settlement area in Shandong Province was as high as 212.18 m2/person in 2018, which exceeded the standard to varying degrees in all cities, having an overall geographical pattern of being high in the north and low in the south. The Theil index for all cities was small, which indicates that the spatial matching between rural population and rural settlements is high. To sum up, there are small differences in the utilization of rural settlements among cities, and their extensive utilization of rural settlements is a common phenomenon. In addition, the relationship between the changes in the rural population size and rural settlement area corresponded to a discordant state, in the form of strong negative decoupling, expansive negative decoupling, and expansive coupling; however, among them, the strong negative decoupling type was the dominant type. It is worth noting that all of these three types will exacerbate the extensive utilization of rural settlements. Accordingly, this paper proposes policies and measures, such as the paid withdrawal of rural homesteads, an expanded scope of homestead transfer, cross-regional “increasing versus decreasing balance”, classified promotion of rural revitalization, and improved village planning.

The development of agriculture, the economic efficiency of agricultural activities and the level of rural life arrangement are the main factors for the formation of settlement in rural areas. The key to a systemic, comprehensive approach to providing sustainable rural development in regions remote from urban agglomerations and large cities is the sustainable development of the agricultural sector, ensuring the employment and high salary of rural residents. In the Russian agroclimatic conditions, agricultural production is only possible with non-normalized family labor, cheap hired labor and state support. The existence of a sociooriented, small-scale, mostly natural agricultural sector has a positive effect on employment and solving social problems in rural areas. The inflow of rural residents into the cities, where it is easier to find a job and better living conditions, and reduction the number of rural settlements are still strong. The main questions: how to improve life in small villages with few residents where the wearing of the preserved residential buildings exceeds 80-90% and what to do with such degraded settlements in rural areas, the maintenance of which local self-government can’t afford. To solve these issues in the process of development of rural areas, it is necessary to create land management and development schemes of the agro-industrial complex in the Non-Black Earth Region of the Russian Federation taking into account the subjects of the Russian Federation relating to territories with low and high population density, studying the structure of employment of the population, including employment in agriculture and other industries, and types of economic land use of these rural territories. The development of regional and municipal land management and development schemes of the agro-industrial complex will allow to identify forecast of the spatial development of agricultural land use, to determine the geographical boundaries and areas of arable lands, their expansion, compression or stabilization in bioclimatic limits to meet consumer demand in agricultural products, due to the level of development of the regional economy, interregional and export trade or import of agricultural production. Research and systematic analysis of the entire set of production-economic, socio-economic and natural-ecological factors in the development of the rural economy, its main sectors – agricultural and forestry, and the state of rural infrastructure – engineering (technical) and social (first-aid posts, schools, kindergartens) makes it possible to identify all interconnections between them and make reasonable management decisions.

Cape Town is undergoing rapid urbanization. South African vital statistics have routinely been stratified by racial categories but intra-urban and peri-urban geographical variations have been neglected. To examine variations in infant mortality rates (IMR) and proportional infant mortality between urban, rural and informally settled areas, stratified by racial category, birth notifications and infant death certifications recorded by a large health authority were analysed. The IMR per 1000 livebirths was as high for coloureds on rural farms (34, 95% confidence interval 29-40) as for blacks in informal settlements (35, 95% CI: 32-37) and an exceptionally high IMR (60, 95% CI: 43-82) was found for coloureds in informal settlements. Inequalities between racial categories (11 (95% CI: 9-14) for whites, 19 (95% CI: 18-21) for coloureds and 33 (95% CI: 31-35) for blacks) were as expected from other South African studies. Of rural farm deaths, 22% were ascribed to ill-defined causes. Low birthweight was the most common defined cause of death in all areas except rural farm areas (14% ascribed to pneumonia), and gastro-enteritis was important in informally settled areas (18%). Routine mortality data are more informative if stratified by robust and readily available indicators of socio-economic status such as residential area and racial category. Place of residence may distinguish risk strata as well as racial category, but the latter is helpful within socioeconomically heterogeneous residential areas.

The post office network has been developing in Japan since 1871. In the formation of this network, the post office has contributed to the formation of modern spatial organization in Japan. In order to explain this geographical situation concretely, the distribution of this communication facility during different development periods is compared with the growth of central places and the distribution of other public facilities, and so the hierarchical linkages in the postal system are presented as one example of a modern integrated system formed by rational interregional relations. This paper discusses these points based on a case study of Hiroshima Prefecture.The results obtained are as follows:(1) The history of the post office network can be divided into three phases (1871-1900; 1900-1945; 1945-), according to features of its growth.a) Before 1882, the post office network was developed in many places at the same time. This sudden expansion was caused by historical and political conditions in the Meiji era and the introduction of post office management by contractors. After 1882, a number of post offices were closed because of the contractors' financial difficulties. During the Meiji era, post offices developed in central places belonging to higher class than the lower order central places where primary schools and/or village offices were located.b) In the second phase (1900-1945) the post office network became denser. A number of non-collection-delivery post offices were concentrated in densely populated urban areas. On the other hand 70% of the settlements in rural areas having a town office or village office got post offices. The allocation of collection-delivery offices was nearly completed during this phase. The reformation of postal districts was carried out in order to bring them into conformity with administrative districts and the homogeneity of each area.c) The reopening of closed post offices in war-damaged cities (e. g. Hiroshima) characterized the locational development of these facilities in the postwar period. However the basic locational development pattern did not change. In urban areas the distribution of post offices has become denser in city centers and then expanded to suburban areas. Today most of the lower order central places in rural areas have also received post offices. Depopulation in rural mountainous areas has caused some closures of post offices in recent years. These closures will probably have an important effect on the locational development of post offices in the near future.(2) The hierarchical linkage among post offices is made clear by analyzing the internal organization of postal services. As indicators of this system, the grade of post offices, mail routes, the flow of funds used in post offices, and some designated post office were selected. As a result, it was found that the hierarchical linkage, which included the Hiroshima office as a first order center, and Kure, Fukuyama, Onomichi and Miyoshi offices as second order centers, has been formed and tightened in relation to modernization of the central place system. Especially, the centrality of the Fukuyama and Miyoshi offices has increased in recent years. Additionally, since the 1930's third order centers have began to appear, for example Mihara, Takehara, and Shobara offices. They have been established in central places reorganized as municipalities since the 1930's and had their status raised to ordinary post offices in the 1940's.Two aspects of the post office -its locational development and its hierarchical integration-were dealt with. These two aspects of the post office indicate effects of national policy and the reformation of the regional system at the same time.

Rural Settlement Areas Act was enacted on 27 May, 1987, by the Japanese Government. This act is controlled by both the Ministry of Construction and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. It is an epock-making from the viewpoint of the planning administration. And it has a special meaning with the fact that it gives planning registration control power to some parts of non planning control areas. However, this act ironically creates various new subjects related to the upper act such as City Planning Act and Agriculture Promotion Act. This paper discusses such a new subject related to the Rural Settlement Areas Act, pointing out the new way to approach to the City and Rural Planning Act in the future. The Rural Settlement Areas Act has the following three problematic points: 1. How should we decide the framework of Rural Settlement Areas Act? Unfortunately, the Japanese local government does not have a solid land use plan such as land use plan in West Germany (Flichennutzungsplan) . Therefore, it is necessary to make a new land use plan in order to adjust the framework of Rural Settlement Areas Development. 2. How should we execute land consolidation project in the framework of rural settlement areas development? According to the Rural Settlement Areas Act, we should make two plans separately, settlement site plan and settlement agricultural promotion plan, and we execute each project of land consolidation, namely land adjustment project by the management of the Ministry of Construction and land improvement project by the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries. However, from the point of views by farmers, one project should be introduced, not two projects. Especially, the basic survey of each lot should be executed with the one project. In this sense, land improvement project would be benefited more than land adjustment project, because, in case of land improvement project, total land ownership could be surveyed. 3. How should we adjust the different logics related to planning controls, land restrictions by settlement site plan and gricultural land conservation agreement? In this chance, we should promote the research to the establishment of “City and Rural Planning Act”.

The final decision of the owner of the plot who plans to build a house depends on many factors most of which are of legal and financial nature. The authors demonstrate that the decisions regarding specific location within the plot of land are influenced by intangible components as well, namely the intention to have the best view. The view is often related to the occurrence of landmarks with prominent visual impact in the landscape that determine visual connections. The rural landscape is determined by the spatial arrangement including the buildings, the shape of public spaces, ownership divisions, and the land distribution. Being an element of rural cultural heritage, the arrangement of buildings is influenced by a vast number of factors such as geographical, historical, physical, and socio-economic ones. This article focuses on determining the interaction between the settlement locations and zones with an excellent, unique view of characteristic, well-known architectural landmarks. Mapping of viewsheds of many features is a critical element of the landscape planning process and facilitates the protection of cultural heritage assets. The analysis involved LiDAR DTM (Digital Terrain Model created in Light Detection and Ranging technology), digital photographs, and historical maps. In terms of the administrative subdivision, the area comprises 20 localities. The landmark visibility analysis for locations of the buildings covered a 140 km2 area of Carpathian Foothills in southern Poland. The article combines experiences in the field of landscape architecture, spatial planning and the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) technology. The examples show that the modern development layout refers to the historical structure and the development of a new settlement tissue has a cultural background and is influenced by spatial landmarks.

Majority of world population live in poverty and struggle to fulfil the most basic needs like health, education, access to water and sanitation. Past studies indicate resources deprivation among residents in informal settlements. In Africa, 43% of individuals are living in destitution in urban territories a proportion which compares with 59% of people living in poverty in rural areas. Due to high rate of poverty the traders in urban informal settlements are unable to access financial services to unlock their business potential. This study focused on the influence of community currency on economic dynamics of community groups and networks among traders in the informal settlement in Kenya. This study was guided by Social Capital theory and SCALERS Model. The study results indicated a high correlation between community currency indicators and growth of small scale business among traders in urban informal settlements (R = .871 a ). The variation in growth of business of traders in informal settlement is explained upto 75.8% by community currency (R 2 = .758). further, the interaction between Community currency and entrepreneurial network on growth of businesses of traders in informal urban settlements reveal that the moderating effect of entrepreneurial network caused 77.0% of the variance in growth of small-scale business of traders in informal urban settlements (R 2 = .770). This shows that entrepreneurial network has a positive and significant moderating effect on growth of business of traders in the informal settlement. Keywords: Community Currency, Informal Settlements, Traders, Growth DOI: 10.7176/RJFA/13-22-07 Publication date: November 30 th 2022

This paper examines the potential of traditional home gardens in enhancing climate change resilience by understanding the characteristics and efficiency of microclimate regulation in rural settlement areas. This study combines empirical methods with field measurements, including the identification of vegetation structures and the measurement of microclimate parameters in the field, as well as remote sensing techniques for extracting land surface temperature (LST) images. The influence of tree coverage was used as a basis for analysis, aiming to delve deeper into the characteristics of the cooling effect at two spatial scales: house compound units and rural settlement areas. The results show that Javanese home gardens are productive private landscapes that have a cooling effect on house compound units, with an average decrease in air temperature of 1.7 °C. This study found that every traditional Javanese home garden features an agroforestry system with various productive tree species, but shares similarities in its configuration and balanced composition of open areas and tree coverage, which enables efficient microclimate regulation in the surrounding area. Furthermore, home gardens in village settlement areas are integrated and form networks that contribute to the distribution of cooling effects within the village settlement area.