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The article attempts to develop a preliminary practical framework for urban criteria in terms of the population, economy and spatial location of the smallest towns in Poland. Despite being of little significance, the fact that they lie near the border between being rural settlements and towns makes them an interesting subject for research and more detailed analysis. The current phenomenon of urban status being obtained by ever-smaller settlements is causing conceptual disorder. Therefore, the article may serve as an early contribution to a discussion about the need to define and unify urban criteria on a national scale. The qualitative and descriptive guidelines contained in official acts are insufficient and too general, which is why quantitative methods were used in the present research. Despite the limited data available, research on the topic of urbanity has proven the imperfection of the Polish administrative system and confirmed the premise that town status may be conferred inappropriately in numerous cases.

Safer homes, stronger communities: a handbook for reconstructing after disasters was developed to assist policy makers and project managers engaged in large-scale post-disaster reconstruction programs make decisions about how to reconstruct housing and communities after natural disasters. As the handbook demonstrates, post-disaster reconstruction begins with a series of decisions that must be made almost immediately. Despite the urgency with which these decisions are made, they have long-term impacts, changing the lives of those affected by the disaster for years to come. As a policy maker, you may be responsible for establishing the policy framework for the entire reconstruction process or for setting reconstruction policy in only one sector. The handbook is emphatic about the importance of establishing a policy to guide reconstruction. Effective reconstruction is set in motion only after the policy maker has evaluated his or her alternatives, conferred with stakeholders, and established the framework and the rules for reconstruction. As international experience and the examples in the handbook clearly demonstrate, reconstruction policy improves both the efficiency and the effectiveness of the reconstruction process. In addition to providing advice on the content of such a policy, the handbook describes mechanisms for managing communications with stakeholders about the policy, for improving the consistency of the policy, and for monitoring the policy's implementation and outcomes.

Russia's illegal, brazen and cynical full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on February 24th, 2022, and is still ongoing at the time of this research (July 2023). The damages incurred by Ukraine and its citizens during the years of occupation of the territories and the war are calculated in millions, although it is difficult to definitively determine both the methodology and specific numbers. To restore justice, it seems much more important to define a fair, transparent, and understandable procedure for compensating the losses suffered by citizens and businesses as a result of these events. This is especially important in the context of the need to implement the goals of sustainable development, in particular, ensuring equal access to justice for all. The article is devoted to these and related issues. To determine the procedure for compensating losses and damages caused by the war, we first determined what exactly can be compensated and who can apply for compensation. These and other factors determine the peculiarities of the procedure for the restoration of rights and compensation for damage caused by the war in Ukraine. In searching for an answer to the researched question, we analyzed the current legislation of Ukraine and draft laws proposed to regulate relations related to compensation for damages. We also conducted a comprehensive analysis of concepts such as losses, damages, compensation, reparations, and reimbursement as defined in national legislation and international treaties. The generalization of the case law of national courts (more than 200 analyzed decisions of the courts of the first and appeal and cassation instances for the period from February 20, 2014 to March 1, 2023, examples of which are presented in the study) indicates the presence of various approaches of compensation for damage, in understanding how to restore the violated rights of citizens.

This paper examines 23 recent case studies of post-disaster settlement and shelter across Africa, Asia, and Latin America to provide examples of implementing transitional settlement and shelter as a process and how to build more capacity for such programmes. The case studies are examined by using a four-part framework: (i) Safety, security, and livelihoods; (ii) the question \"Transition to what?\" in order to understand better how to connect post-disaster programmes to permanent communities and housing; (iii) fairness and equity; and (iv) connecting relief and development, which also explores root causes of vulnerability. The main lessons identify six specific activities that should be highlighted for capacity building in transitional settlement and shelter: site selection, good governance, participatory and consultative processes, land ownership, logistics, and monitoring and evaluation.

Bulldozer urbanism, fraught with violent demolition and forced relocation, exemplifies China’s urban transformation. Rural-to-urban migrant workers are particularly vulnerable during the process because of their in-between position in the socialist, territorialised hukou (residential registration) and land tenure systems. This paper presents in ethnographic details the practice of turning shipping containers into rental units for migrants seeking cheap housing alternatives to continue to live on Shanghai’s urban fringe. It reveals the nature and constraints of container housing that emerge out of the interplay between China’s socialist land tenure system, real estate marketisation, top-down population control and urban governance. Despite the neglected appearance of container housing, its existence and operation entail the acquiescence and surveillance of local state agents as well as entrepreneurs’ tactics of conformation, which results in formal informality and sustains structural inequality in state-led development. Container housing also contributes to the deterritorialisation of homemaking among migrant workers, who are channelled by hukou-related policies to invest and retire in their registered home places and feel removed from their urban dwelling in both time and space. The decreased significance of urban residence to migrant workers’ everyday life, as exemplified by container housing, facilitates bulldozer urbanism and perpetuates urban exclusion. 充满暴力拆迁和强制搬迁的推土机式城市化是中国城市转型的典型特征。从农村到城市务工的农民工在这一过程中尤其容易受到伤害，因为他们在社会主义、属地户籍和土地制度的夹缝中求生存。本文采用人类学方法详细介绍了将集装箱转变为出租单元的做法，这些出租单元供那些寻求廉价住房以继续在上海城市边缘生活的移民使用。它揭示了中国社会主义土地所有制、房地产市场化、自上而下的人口控制和城市治理之间相互作用产生的集装箱住房的性质和制约因素。尽管集装箱住房被忽视，但它的存在和运作需要当地相关政府部门的默许和监督以及企业家的适应策略，这导致了一种“正式的”非正规性，并维持了国家主导的发展所带来的结构性不平等。集装箱式住房也助长了移民住所的“非领域化 (deterritorialization)”，因为移民受户口相关政策的引导，只在他们注册的户口所在地投资和退休，在时间和空间上都对自己的城市住所感觉疏远。集装箱住房凸显了城市住所对移民工人日常生活的重要性下降，而这又反过来助长了推土机式的城市化，并使城市排斥永久化。

Drawing on a survey of migrants in 12 cities across four major urbanising areas in China, this paper analyses rural migrants' intention for permanent urban settlement. We focus on one sizeable but often overlooked group of rural migrants, that is, the self-employed. Our hypothesis is that the self-employed migrants tend to have stronger intention for permanent urban settlement since they are usually more ingrained in urban economy and society. The empirical evidence supports our hypothesis. Moreover, the social and economic choices made by the self-employed migrants are consistent with their expressed intentions: they are more likely to migrate with spouses and to live with their family members, more likely to have a plan for house purchase in cities; they are also more integrated into urban society in terms of learning local dialects and making friends with local permanent residents.

The welfare system can be a crucial factor in the urban settlement of rural migrants, but its effects are difficult to determine because to do so one must distinguish the effect of welfare entitlement from the effect of ‘migrant selectivity bias’, which widely exists in cities in developing countries. Using survey data from 15 Chinese cities, this study examines the ways in which social insurance – the most critical social welfare package in China – affects rural migrants’ urban-settlement intentions. The results show that there is a ‘migrant selectivity bias’ in Chinese cities, that is, rural migrants who are better off socio-economically are more inclined to participate in social insurance and are more inclined to pursue permanent urban settlement. Meanwhile, social insurance participation is significantly and positively related to rural migrants’ urban-settlement intentions, and this positive relation remains even after we discount the effect of ‘migrant selectivity bias’ in the analysis. We argue that, for rural migrants in China, the effect of social insurance participation on urban settlement intentions closely resembles that experienced by those who move to migration-managed regimes. We conclude that the Chinese government should establish a more inclusive social welfare system to enable rural migrants to permanently settle in cities. 福利制度可能是农村移民在城市定居的一个关键因素，但其影响很难确定，因为要做到这一点，必须将福利待遇的影响与发展中国家城市普遍存在的“移民选择性偏见”的影响区分开来。利用来自中国15个城市的调查数据，本研究考察了社会保险（中国最重要的社会福利一揽子计划）如何影响农村移民的城市定居意向。结果表明，中国城市存在“移民选择性偏见”，即社会经济条件较好的农村移民更倾向于参加社会保险，更倾向于寻求永久性的城市定居。同时，参与社会保险与农民工的城市定居意愿显著正相关，即使我们在分析中忽略“移民选择性偏见”的影响，这种正相关仍然存在。我们认为，对于中国的农村移民来说，参加社会保险对城市定居意愿的影响非常类似于那些向移民管理体制迁移的人所经历的影响。我们的结论是，中国政府应该建立一个更具包容性的社会福利体系，让农村移民能够永久定居城市。

The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the Chinese city? Reflecting on the long-established study of informal settlements and recent research on informality, it is argued that the informality in China has been created by the dual urban–rural land market and land management system and by an underprovision of migrant housing. The redevelopment ofchengzhongcunis an attempt to eliminate this informality and to create more governable spaces through formal land development; but since it fails to tackle the root demand for unregulated living and working space, village redevelopment only leads to the replication of informality in more remote rural villages, in other urban neighbourhoods and, to some extent, in the redeveloped neighbourhoods.

Whether qualitative or quantitative, contemporary civil-war studies have a tendency to over-aggregate empirical evidence. In order to open the black box of the state, it is necessary to pinpoint the location of key conflict parties. As a contribution to this task, this article describes a data project that geo-references ethnic groups around the world. Relying on maps and data drawn from the classical Soviet Atlas Narodov Mira (ANM), the 'Geo-referencing of ethnic groups' (GREG) dataset employs geographic information systems (GIS) to represent group territories as polygons. This article introduces the structure of the GREG dataset and gives an example for its application by examining the impact of group concentration on conflict. In line with previous findings, the authors show that groups with a single territorial cluster according to GREG have a significantly higher risk of conflict. This example demonstrates how the GREG dataset can be processed in the R statistical package without specific skills in GIS. The authors also provide a detailed discussion of the shortcomings of the GREG dataset, resulting from the datedness of the ANM and its unclear coding conventions. In comparing GREG to other datasets on ethnicity, the article makes an attempt to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses associated with the GREG database.

This paper tries to analyze the determinants and driving mechanisms of both settlement intention and hukou transfer intention for rural migrants in Chinese cities, which can help to understand the gap between de facto and de jure urbanization in China. Based on China Labor-force Dynamics Survey (CLDS) in 2014, 1145 samples with their settlement intention, hukou transfer intention, individual demographic characteristics, urban working and living conditions, rural resources and attachment, and geographic characteristics were collected. It suggested that compared with settlement intention, the rural migrants’ hukou transfer intention were much weaker. The rural migrants preferred small and medium cities for urban settlement but large and megacities for urban hukou conversion. By logistic regression analysis, a set of complex determinants of settlement intention was identified, including age, education attainment, marital status and spouse living together, as well as the trade-off between urban working and living conditions in the current host cities and rural landholdings and attachment in the hometown. In contrast, the hukou transfer intention was mainly determined by age, personal income, rural landholdings and the size of current host city, which highlighted the personal citizenization capacity and the trade-off between benefits related to urban and rural hukou . Moreover, by examining the characteristics of four sub-types of rural migrants with different settlement intention and hukou transfer intention, it was found that the rural migrants who intended to settle down and convert hukou at the same time usually had high personal citizenization capacity and preferred megacities; those who intended to settle down but rejected hukou conversion usually had high citizenization capacity and low migration cost; those who intended to convert hukou but rejected settling down in the cites preferred megacities instead of small cities; those who did not intend to settle down or convert hukou at all usually had low citizenization capacity and high migration cost. Based on these findings, it is recommended to promote the complete citizenization of rural migrants by improving their livelihood and well-being in the cities through kinds of policy reform about hukou , land, and social insurance.