This paper presents a review of combined vacuum consolidation and surcharge preloading which is arguably more sustainable approach to soft-soil ground improvement than other strategies in reducing post-construction settlements. Vacuum consolidation has become more prevalent with technological developments in vertical drains, pumps and geosynthetics. Satisfactory vacuum pressures can be sustaine...

Functional and humanist perspectives relevant to counterurbanization studies are applied to examine the processes of growth and development of rural settlements affected by tourism. Based on a survey of tourism lodges located in several settlements in the Annapurna region of Nepal, this paper analyzes tourism-induced growth in such accommodations and its implications on changing characteristics...

1. introduction today, sustainability of rural and urban settlements and their population in developing world is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. however, today due to development of urbanization, the rural areas have undergone many changes . these changes have been concurrent with the developing process of urbanization and unorganized expansion of cities on the one hand, and...

The Biosphere Reserve (BR) model of UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme reflects a shift towards more accountable conservation. Biosphere Reserves attempt to reconcile environmental protection with sustainable development; they explicitly acknowledge humans, and human interests in the conservation landscape while still maintaining the ecological values of existing protected areas. Conceptu...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to compare socioeconomic characteristics of the Roma population living in Roma settlements with the majority population. Moreover, it was aimed to assess socioeconomic differences in health and health-related behaviour within the population living in Roma settlements. METHODS Data from the cross-sectional HepaMeta study conducted in Slovakia in 2011 were u...

The formation of informal settlements in and around urban complexes has largely been ignored in the context of procedural city modeling. However, many cities in South Africa and globally can attest to the presence of such settlements. This paper analyses the phenomenon of informal settlements from a procedural modeling perspective. Aerial photography from two South African urban complexes, name...

Affordable shelter; Egypt; Housing policy; Informal settlements; Upgrading strategies; Urban poor Abstract The issue of informal settlements represents a key challenge not only in Egypt, but also worldwide. A review of informal settlements upgrading policies shows that governments have moved away from eradication policies to provision, enabling and participatory policies. This shift was motivat...

A person's living behavior patterns are closely related to three types of settlements: real-life settlements, imagined settlements, and pseudo-settlements. The term "pseudo-settlement" (PS) refers to the places that are selectively recorded and represented after the mass media chose and restructure the residence information. As the mass media rapidly develops and people's way of obtaining infor...

Negotiation can be conceptualized as a problem-solving enterprise in which mental models guide behavior. We examined the association between negotiation outcomes and mental models, as measured by negotiators’ associative networks. Four hypotheses were supported. First, negotiators who reached optimal settlements had mental models that reflected greater understanding of the negotiation’s payoff ...

While the variation in childbearing patterns across countries and between socio-economic groups within a country has been studied in detail, less is known about the differences in fertility patterns across settlements within a country. Using aggregate and individual-level register data, we examine fertility variation across settlements in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. We observe a signi...