Shanghai: demolitions going on.
Good report from canadian team “bricoleururbanism”.
Migrant Workers in Shanghai
As China’s economy turns to globalisation, at home the issue of a floating workforce is becoming more intense and complex. In Shanghai, low-skilled migrants are subject to economic and social segregation. This comes with a social stigma and restricts the migrants to particular economic sectors within a fragmented labour market. Nonetheless, the itineraries the migrants follow allow them to acquire certain skills and resources. Their survival strategies produce what have been called “situations of affiliation and disaffiliation” within an overall situation of general insecurity.
Material Commonalities
The term ‘material commonalities’ is a reference to Walter Benjamin’s language of things; as we develop new forms of mapping human and non-human actors, questions of representation remain central and continue to take their inspiration from multiple practices of visualization.
New Media Workers Across Asia and Europe
A Research Platform for Interregional Collaboration
Shanghai, 8-11 July 2010
Organized by HBK Saar and the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, the Shanghai platform is the first of three research platforms (Kolkata 2011, Sydney 2012) in the ARC project ‘Culture in Transition: Creative Labour and Social Mobilities in the Asian Century’.
China’s Media Coverage of Environmental Issues
One of the best bloggers on environmental law based in Shanghai. Unluckily, we knew since a while, that he has left to the US and is no longer working in china.
Air quality forecasting challenges
The problem of air quality forecasting is different in many ways from the problem of weather forecasting. The latter typically is focused on prediction of severe, adverse weather conditions, while the meteorology of adverse air quality conditions frequently is associated with benign weather. Boundary layer structure and wind direction are perhaps the two most poorly determined meteorological variables for regional air quality prediction. Meteorological observations are critical to effective air quality prediction, yet meteorological observing systems are designed to support prediction of severe weather, not the subtleties of adverse air quality. Three-dimensional meteorological and chemical observations and advanced data assimilation schemes are essential. In the same way, it is important to develop high-resolution and self-consistent databases for air quality modeling; these databases should include land use, vegetation, terrain elevation, and building morphology information, among others. New work in the area of chemically adaptive grids offers significant promise and should be pursued. The quantification and effective communication of forecast uncertainty are still in their early stages and are very important for decision makers; this also includes the visualization of air quality and meteorological observations and forecasts. Research is also needed to develop effective metrics for the evaluation and verification of air quality forecasts so that users can understand the strengths and weaknesses of various modeling schemes. Last, but not of least importance, is the need to consider the societal impacts of air quality forecasts and the needs that they impose on researchers to develop effective and useful products.Douglas L. Westphal Naval Research Laboratory, Monterey, California
Are air quality forecasters and their monitoring devices a new media?
Institutional video showcasing the monitoring process of air quality in Shanghai. This real time air quality monitoring service was launched at the World Expo. Or is better to say, because of it. China is doing huge efforts to curbe the criticisms on the air quality of its bigger cities. So, they are using these megaevents (the last year Olympics at Beijing, the now World Expo at Shanghai) to launch new environmental initiatives. In this case by making visible the effort of monitoring air quality conditions with better accuracy.
Shanghai, China’s commercial and industrial hub, staged a massive cleanup for the World Expo, which began May 1 and is expected to draw up to 70 million people. It razed old steel mills and shipyards to make way for the Expo along the banks of the Huangpu River and closed down heavily polluting factories, or moved them to distant suburbs.The city also has sought to reduce car emissions by raising standards required of vehicles that travel into the city’s center. But cleaning up the city is only half the battle, since Shanghai lies downwind of heavily industrialized regions further inland. At times, farm fields in neighboring provinces are burned to clear stubble, leaving the city enveloped in a mucky haze.
The makeover of Shanghai before the expo.
The city says that to clear a huge site along the Huangpu River, which snakes through the heart of Shanghai, it relocated 18,000 families and about 270 factories, including the colossal Jiang Nan Shipyard, which employs 10,000 workers.
Shanghai "expo-based" real time air quality monitor.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Shanghai Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB) have launched AirNow International, with real-time air quality data reporting from the 2010 World Expo, which runs from May 1 to October 31. The Shanghai EPB will use technology developed by EPA to send air quality data to Shanghai citizens through the Internet.
Monitoring air quality at Shanghai:Input data flowcharts and API index.
Shanghai Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau
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Descriptions of the major duties of this city “agency”.
