THE HOUSING EXPERIENCE OF CHRONICALLY MENTALLY DISABLED CLIENTS IN HAMILTON, ONTARIO

The chronically mentally disabled (CMD) are seriously disadvantaged in the housing market by reason of disability and low socio-economic status. In many North American cities, the CMD are among the groups most vulnerable to homeiessness. Little attention has been paid to the housing situation and residential history of the CMD despite their supposed effects on coping ability and community tenure. This analysis of the residential experience of CMD clients in Hamilton, Ontario, is part of a larger study examining the factors affecting coping and satisfaction among the CMD in the community. The ghettoization of clients into board and care homes in the inner city is replicated in Hamilton. Serious disadvantage in the housing market is confirmed; clients frequently have to accept unsatisfactory living conditions despite repeated efforts to achieve improvements. In terms of residential mobility, two groups of clients are identified: the highly mobile and the more stable. The strongest predictors of mobility, education, and preference for independent living imply the effects of housing expectations and the difficulties associated with congregate living situations. Strong association is shown between housing satisfaction and composite indices of client coping in the community. Les clients psychiatriques (CP) ont des problèmes sérieux de logement pour des raisons d'incapacité et de statut inférieur au rang socio-économique. Dans plusieurs cités Nord-américaines, les CP sont parmi fes groupes les plus vulnérables dêtres sans logis. ll y a un manque d'égards envers les CP vis-à-vis la crise du logement et du dossier résidential, malgré leurs efforts prétendus de se débrouiller et de demeurer dans la communauté. Cette analyse d'expérience résidentielle de CP à Hamilton, Ontario, fait partie d'une plus grande étude qui examine les raisons qui influent sur la qualité de la vie parmi les CP de la communauté. Le phénomene de l'amalgamation des clients dans des pensions de famille au centre-ville est reproduit à Hamilton. Les problèmes sérieux de logement sont confirmés; les clients doivent souvent accepter des conditions de vie peu satisfaisantes, malgré les efforts répétés pour les améliorer. Au point de vue de la mobilité résidentielle deux groupes sont identifiés: les plus mobiles et les plus stables. fa plus grande correspondance de mobilité, d'éucation et de préférence pour la vie indé-pendante, donne à entendre fes effets d'espérance de logement et les difficultés associees avec une vie en groupes. ll y a une forte association entre la satisfaction du logement et les indices composés du client qui se débrouille dans la communauté.     

THE EFFECT OF THE REGIONAL WIND ON AIR POLLUTION IN HAMILTON, ONTARIO

Summary: By plotting low-volume aerosol counts as indices of pollution in Hamilton a pattern of dual pollution cells of equal intensity centring on the downtown business area and the heavy industrial zone emerges. Pollution levels are twice as great under east winds with accompanying atmospheric stability than for winds from all other sectors. With winds from the easterly sector the industrial pollutants are forced and locked into the lower city. When a major source of industrial pollution disappears, as happened during the 1969 shutdown of the Steel Company of Canada plant, the industrial cell vanishes and the pollution count under east winds drops to a level normal for other wind directions. With a wind change from the east to the west new pollution patterns are formed within six hours. The average pollution count for the city drops substantially but in the east end it increases as the pollution haze formerly trapped in the city is released and carried eastward.     

HISTORIOMETRICS,HISTORICAL AND CARTOGRAPHIC INFORMATION,AND COMPUTERS

Abstract

Accessibility is frequently used in transportation planning to measure the efficiency of new infrastructure in terms of travel time and population served. In this article, the authors apply accessibility concepts based on the geo-historical angle. The aim of this study is to investigate the relationships between population dynamics and the railway expansion from 1830 to 1930. Their approach considers a local scale composed of some 36,000 French communes for the demographic data and more than 28,000 kilometers for the railway network. The methodological framework of this database is based on historical geographic information systems completed by anamorphosis analysis. In this way, they are able to map the changing contours of accessibility from the local to the regional and national scales for historical time.     

LEVIATHAN AND KRAKEN: STATES,CORPORATIONS, AND POLITICAL ECONOMY

In our politico-philosophical bestiary, no monster has historically been more prominent than the Leviathan, the whale of the Book of Job, transformed by Hobbes, which has long been ubiquitous as a metaphor or as a signifier in all intellectual traditions touching upon the political. Like the state itself, we argue, the Leviathan has played an outsized role in the way we theorize and imagine relations of sovereignty in the world. This essay seeks to add a new hermeneutical creature to the bestiary: the Kraken. Said to be huge and to lurk in Norway's icy waters, the Kraken first emerged in the accounts of natural philosophers in the eighteenth century, at the very moment when political economy was becoming the premier science of governance in Europe. Leviathan is an emblem of a kind of state that no longer exists and has never existed, and it remains our most potent emblem of the state's reification, a relentlessly compelling figure that has long blinded historians to alternate sovereignties within, across, and outside the physical territories of states. From stateless financial capital to multinational corporations acting like states on the world stage, such forms of sovereignty are an essential feature of the global politics we are now living. These forms are not new, nor is their emblem: the Kraken.     

BIOREGIONALISM AND REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY: PLACE, PEOPLE, AND NETWORKS

'Bioregionalism' is a term referring to an action-oriented movement based on ecological principles. It has not been strong in academic geography, though it clearly has space and place as its concerns. From a merging of classical regional geography and general systems one might have expected a bioregional synthesis to emerge. The bio-regional ideal can be given rigorous expression in a regional system comprising three sub-systems - a biophysical sub-system, an inhabiting sub-system, and a network sub-system.
Le mot 'biorégionalisme' s'attache à un mouvement ďaction et de pensée écologiste. Peu representé au sein de la géographie 'officielle, ii a néanmoins des rapports avec le problématique de ľespace et des lieux. On aurait du attendre que la convergence de la géographie régionale classique et ľétude des systèmes nous ameneraient à un synthèse 'biorégional.'Ľesprit biorégional peut s'exprimer ďune façon rigoureuse sous forme ďun système régional, comprenant trois sous-systèmes - sous-système biophysique, sous-système ďhabitat, et sous-système des liaisons et des réseaux.     

CITIES,TASKS, AND SKILLS

This research applies a task‐based approach to measure and interpret changes in the employment structure of the 168 largest U.S. cities in the period 1990–2009. As a result of technological change some tasks can be placed at distance, while others require proximity. We construct a measure of task connectivity to investigate which tasks are more likely to require proximity relative to others. Our results suggest that cities with higher shares of connected tasks experienced higher employment growth. This result is robust to a variety of other explanations including industry composition, routinization, and the complementarity between skills and cities.     

LEVINAS,HISTORY, AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

In this book Anton Froeyman has provided us with a colorful and intriguing account of a Levinasian approach to historical inquiry and historical writing. In my discussion of his book I describe central features of his account and notice how he uses, to develop his view, recent developments in historiography—including the work of figures like Natalie Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, in philosophical thinking about history and historiography, and in various postmodern developments. I sketch central features of Levinas's ethical metaphysics and show that Froeyman's focus on Levinas's interest in our relations with other persons and in particular with their relative differences from us is too narrow. A proper understanding of our infinite responsibility to and for all others, as Levinas portrays it, leads to a broader account than the one Froeyman gives and one that enables us to understand with greater clarity how historiography fits into the Levinasian understanding of our temporal and interpersonal relations with others.     

DISCIPLINE,PHILOSOPHY, AND HISTORY

Gorman proposes to investigate historical practice under the rubric of a philosophy of disciplines. Such philosophy must first “recover historically” the self‐constitution of the discipline in order then to appraise its procedures for warranting claims. Gorman's concept of discipline would have profited from consulting the substantial body of empirical research and theory regarding disciplinarity, and his “historical recovery” of the discipline of history leaves a lot to be desired. These insufficiencies vitiate the interesting arguments he has to offer concerning the question of the truth‐claims of whole historical accounts. A better reconstruction of disciplinarity might also have provided him with stronger rejoinders to the postmodern challenge to historical practice that he sees himself called to rebut.     

APHASIA,HISTORY, AND DURESS

This essay celebrates the publication of Duress, explores its concepts and themes, focuses on the way Ann Stoler rejects the notion of historical forgetting and develops a heuristic of “colonial aphasia” in an ethnographic chapter on the emergence of France's Far Right near Marseille in the 1990s. The essay also tracks how postcolonial scholars are using the notion of aphasia, drawing on Stoler's colonial usages in contexts like the Netherlands and Britain as well as using the notion to periodize. Those who came to aphasia before and without Stoler are also present here, and their contributions suggest a range of ways to think through radical, countercultural, and philosophical thought. That Gilles Deleuze and Paolo Virno use aphasia in contrary ways suggests that once aphasia departs from clinical settings, its poetics are rather up for grabs even if contained within activist gestures; both rethink matters of politics, dissent, and language. The example of Kurt Goldstein is also imported to show that clinical aphasia may go with the “detours” of patients, those stricken by war, catastrophe, and these peculiar speech disorders. That “detour” is also a Deleuzian word opens wide a “minor” register to history, speech, and forms of oppression. The semantic spectrum for aphasia in histories of politics and language is wide, from Stoler's colonial version that applies most to the privileged, to Deleuze's poetic transpositions that propose aphasia as an accomplishment, a rebellious refusal of communication. Aphasia has much promise as a historical category in and outside of colonial forms of duress.     

ENTREPRENEURSHIP,INFORMATION, AND GROWTH

We examine the contribution to economic growth of entrepreneurial marketplace information within a regional endogenous growth framework. Entrepreneurs are posited to provide an input to economic growth through the information revealed by their successes and failures. We empirically identify this information source with the regional variation in establishment births and deaths. To account for the potential endogeneity caused by forward‐looking entrepreneurs, we utilize instruments based on historic mining activity. We find that the information spillover component of local establishment birth and death rates have significant positive effects on subsequent entrepreneurship and employment growth for U.S. counties and metropolitan areas.