Social ownership | EPFL Graph Search

Social ownership is the appropriation of the surplus product, produced by the means of production, or the wealth that comes from it, to society as a whole. It is the defining characteristic of a socialist economic system. It can take the form of community ownership, state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and citizen ownership of equity. Traditionally, social ownership implied that capital and factor markets would cease to exist under the assumption that market exchanges within the production process would be made redundant if capital goods were owned and integrated by a single entity or network of entities representing society. However, the articulation of models of market socialism where factor markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy. Social ownership of the means of production is the common defining characteristic of all t

Simultaneous Modeling of Endogenous Influence of Urban Form and Public Transit Accessibility on Distance Traveled

Laetitia Bettex, Luis Fernando Miranda Moreno

This paper describes an attempt to understand better the endogenous relationships between urban form, accessibility to public transit, and daily travel distance. A model of two simultaneous equations was implemented. The model took into account the interaction between the ownership of vehicles and the choice of household location as explanatory endogenous variables for total distance traveled by respondents. Choice of household location was defined on the basis of cluster analysis (neighborhood typology) driven by land use mix, population density, and accessibility to transit. With socioeconomic variables controlled for, the impacts of neighborhood typologies combined with car ownership levels as endogenous choices were estimated with the use of a model with simultaneous equations. This research used data from the Quebec City, Quebec, Canada, origin destination survey conducted in 2001. The data set included responses from more than 50,000 individuals. Among other results, the presence of endogeneity was confirmed. When endogeneity was not taken into account, the joint effects of car ownership and household location choices were underestimated. According to the model with simultaneous equations, the total distance traveled by individuals was primarily influenced by employment status and household structure. In fact, the total distance per individual had an average rate of growth of 50% when the individual was working full-time. The distance also increased by 5.7% per child and decreased by 2.4% per person. Although the elasticities of urban form and transit supply variables introduced individually into the model were small, the elasticities of neighborhood type as endogenous variables were much more relevant.

2011

Energy Challenges in the Global South

Silvia Hostettler

Energy needs at the global level are gigantic and steadily increasing while the need to reduce carbon emissions is vital if catastrophic climate change is to be avoided. In the Global South, a large part of the population still lacks access to energy, which is crucial for poverty alleviation via the creation of employment and better health and education systems. A great deal of hope is placed on sustainable energy to connect economic growth to increased social equity while preserving the environment. At the same time, energy efficiency and the share of renewable energies in the global energy mix needs to increase unceasingly. This book discusses the challenges of solving complex social and environmental problems with technology in the Global South. While encouraging technology interventions are presented, the limits of technology and the untapped potential of involving women as key stakeholders for energy initiatives constitute also a key focus of this publication. Providing sustainable, reliable, and affordable energy to all will require successful coordination and integration between sectors, stakeholders, policies, infrastructures, and technologies. Promoting renewables, increasing energy efficiency, determinedly addressing the challenges of tailoring solutions to unique socioeconomic contexts, creating local ownership, and aiming for massive upscaling remain the key issues.

Springer International Publishing2015

Policy, program and project in social housing of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of postwar Mediterranean models in translation of existenzminimum

Sila Karatas Basoglu

About 20 years after CIAM 2, themes of minimum dwelling for working class were put into large-scale practice for building welfare state and social democracy in all countries that participated in the Marshall Plan and postwar phenomena of transnational and local development. Spread in response to housing shortage in war-devastated European countries by reconstruction programs, but advanced within regional planning strategies to industrialize and populate rural territories by development programs, social housing programs of welfare states adopted existenzminimum in realization of workers’ habitats at peripheries of modern cities. These programs had similarities in terms of policies and governance, financial and organizational models, tenancy and ownership systems, planning and land use strategies, population and density patterns, settlement morphologies and architectural typologies as well as roles of policy-maker, planner, architect and community in postwar habitat development. While embracing Taylorist and Fordist planning, design and construction methods to maximize economic and spatial efficiency and revitalize construction economy through prefabrication of housing as well as promoting peripheral urban development, they redefined economic and hygienic dwelling. Sticking to rational urbanization in garden suburbs though, individualized middle class welfare within preindustrial patterns of community life superseded collectivized working class welfare of industrial domestic life. Yet, postwar social housing represents long-disappeared public practice for participatory and sustainable housing, and face privatization and gentrification by neoliberal urban practices. On that note, this proposal aims to comparatively analyse social housing programs introduced by welfare states of France, Italy, Greece and Turkey as the Mediterranean countries participated in the Marshall Plan and performed large-scale housing in planned industrial city-regions. It suggests an interdisciplinary portrayal of their schemata in housing production in terms of policy, program and project to trace their translation of urban, architectural and societal narrative of existenzminimum especially when bottom-up initiatives reclaim social housing against current housing crisis.

2019

Policy, program and project in social housing of the welfare state: A comparative analysis of postwar Mediterranean models in translation of existenzminimum

Sila Karatas Basoglu

2019