Narrow Results

One of the main challenges facing rural areas in Iran is a lack of disaster risk management. This calls for a comprehensive framework for assessing resilience in small communities. This study seeks to establish such a framework based on the general principles of the Sendai Framework. So, an attempt is made to use a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to operationalize and score indicators and risk management components, and then choose one of the rural areas in northern Iran as a sample for the framework’s implementation. The results show that a resilience assessment on small communities should do two things: outline the resilience situation and create a platform for dialogue and mutual thinking. Residents should be able to talk about risk reduction continuously and purposefully and take small, purposeful steps in this direction. It seems that Iran’s centralized planning system is more flexible in entrusting affairs to small communities and is more likely to form active cooperative cores. For this reason, it can be seen that voluntary activities have played an essential role in providing social services during the COVID-19 pandemic and quarantine period, and the volunteers themselves have also benefited from voluntary activities. As a result, volunteer groups have gained opportunities to promote local development and foster ownership and responsibility. However, there are concerns about the sustainability of these activities, which are related to the two issues of ensuring financial stability and providing volunteers in the long term.

Cultural Heritage is comprehensible within an integrated vision, involving economic, cultural and ethic values, typical of not renewable resources. It is an open system that doesn't correspond just to monuments but is made by the complex interactions of a built environment. The systemic relationships between cultural goods (object, building, landscape), and their environmental context have to be considered of the same importance of the systemic relations established with stakeholders/observers.

A first partial answer to Cultural Heritage systemic nature has been the creation of "networks" of cultural institutions, that afterwards have been evolving in "cultural systems" and have been recently followed by "cultural districts".

The Cultural District model put forward a precise application for the theory of emergence. But its systemic nature presents also some problematical identifications.

For Cultural Heritage the point is not any more limited to "direct" actions. We must consider stakeholders/observers, feedback circuits, emergence of activation of social/cultural/human capital, more than that linked to the architectural design process.

This chapter aims to provide a critical examination of the China Model of development. This chapter has three parts: first, a discussion what the major characteristics of the China Model are and why it is attractive to developing countries; second, an argument that researchers should not take the China Model for granted as its constituents are highly contested, and the term “Beijing Consensus” ironically belies the fact that there is no consensus on how to characterize China's developmental experience over the past thirty years; third, an analysis of the implications of the China Model for developing countries by examining the following three questions: (1) How can researchers move beyond the ideological fault line in the China field? (2) Why does the China Model work while other models such as neoliberalism and state socialism fail? (3) Can the China Model be copied?