Women in US cities: urban captives
Abstract This article examines the contemporary position of women in US urban areas. It seeks to explain the increasing numbers of service-dependent women residing in urban locations through reference to the historical evolution of the urban political economy as it reflects the national and global political economy. More specifically, it recognizes that policies at the national level influence and change urban form and function, a process which has definite and identifiable consequences for society.
Woman and Urban Policy
Any analysis of the impact of urban policy on women is complicated by the absence of an urban policy. While the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has been in place since 1965 and hundreds of policies and laws affecting urban areas have been promulgated in the last forty years, there is no coordinated, directed policy with specific programs to achieve important goals. From this perspective, President Carter's announcement early in his term that he would present a national urban policy was a major step. The fact that his "policy" was largely a smorgasbord of already existing programs capped by some new ideas that Congress did not pass into law reflects the difficulty of creating coherence out of chaos when there is no consensus on goals and many vested interests with stakes in specific means. Within the arena of urban policy are several recognized but unresolved conflicts for which Carter's proposals did not display a clear preference. One of the most overwhelming is the sheer diversity of urban conditions. The phrase "urban crisis" suggests pervasive decay, but an ordering of cities by an "urban hardship index"1 shows that the crisis is concentrated in the older cities of the Midwest and Northeast, and "within these cities, to certain areas that have been characterized in recent years by a rapid process of decentralization."2 In part, the highly
Variations common to the interplanetary magnetic field, the zonal atmospheric circulation and the earth's rotation
A study of the cyclic fluctuations in the earth's rotation, the geomagnetic field, the global atmospheric circulation and solar activity reveals the existence of 50-day and 120-day oscillations common to all. Our results, as well as the results obtained by radiometric measurements from the satellites Nimbus-7 and the Solar Maximum Mission (Wilson 1982; Pap 1985), suggest that their origin lies in the physical processes in the sun. The mechanism remains unexplained but from this work it follows that the role of the interplanetary magnetic field could very well be important.