Restoring Berlin's Unter den Linden: ideology,world view,place and space

Berlin's Unter den Linden, a primary thoroughfare and ensemble of historic architecture and nationally significant cultural institutions, lay in ruins at the close of the Second World War. The buildings, public spaces, and public art forming this street bore testimony to diverse facets of German history, presenting a range of semantic issues to those interested in their future. Differences in key groups' world view resulted in different interpretations of these spaces, thus different approaches to policy development with regard to their future. Initially, the German cultural elite was determined to restore significant architecture, asserting architectural value while avoiding mention of ‘Prussian’ or ‘German’ identity. However, the German communist leadership viewed these same structures as testimony to ‘Prussian–German militarism’ and sought their effacement. The Soviet Military Administration remained largely indifferent to all but spatial value until 1947, when they began to use architecture to represent the Soviet Union. Finally, with the founding of the German Democratic Republic and import of Soviet ‘socialist-realist’ urban theory, architecture considered progressive was restored as national cultural heritage, although sites with considerable ‘militaristic’ content prompted more debate over their future.     

日本批准《1930年伦敦海军条约》过程及对其政局的影响

1930年伦敦海军会议是对美、英、日、法、意五国海军辅助舰作出限制的一次会议。会上签订的《1930年伦敦海军条约》在日本国内的批准过程颇费周章,在政府做出大量让步的情形下条约才勉强获得批准。其结果对日本政局以及政治走向产生了重大影响：条约的签订非但未能有效遏制法西斯势力的崛起,延续政党政治的强势力量,反而使海军内部分裂、派系之争明显,并加速了日本对美国发动战争的进程。     

Literacy,reading, and writing in the medieval West

Over the last quarter century, a plethora of studies on literacy, reading, and writing in medieval Europe have contributed significantly to our understanding of medieval society and culture. Nevertheless the sheer number of these studies and their authorship by scholars in several different disciplines have obscured the relationships between these studies, their common themes and their differences. This essay seeks to survey this literature and its background, to explicate its contributions to the field of medieval history, and to suggest avenues for future study. It also reveals how approaches developed outside medieval studies were borrowed and adapted by medievalists, and how the study of literacy, reading, and writing in the Middle Ages has, in turn, influenced the work of ancient and modern historians.     

Characterizing and evaluating rival discourses of the ‘sustainable city’: Towards a politics of pragmatic adversarialism

For many, shifting economic and social contexts have created the conditions for a radical reappraisal of the orthodox image of the 'sustainable city'. However, in assessing such potentialities, there is insufficient knowledge about the way in which local actors construct, live out and are gripped by this signifier. This article responds to this deficit by exploring how key actors engaged in urban development actually interpret the challenges of the 'sustainable city'. In part, using a Q methodology study in Bristol and Grenoble, we discern and construct three distinctive discourses of the sustainable city, which we name progressive reformism, public localism, and moral stewardship. Our findings challenge previous critiques of sustainable urbanism. We observe no consistent support for mainstream conceptions of sustainable urban development, but neither do we find significant support for entrepreneurial or radical green localist discourses of the sustainable city. Instead, we identify a common indifference to the tenets of ecological modernization (and, by extension, entrepreneurialism), and a shared skepticism of local self-sufficiency. We thus argue that such discourses offer uncertain foundations upon which to construct new visions of the 'sustainable city'. In our view, this is because of the transformation of the 'sustainable city' from a relatively fixed idea into a floating signifier, coupled with the practices of local practitioners as policy bricoleurs. We conclude that efforts to develop new visions of 'sustainable cities' are best served by fostering an agonistic ethos of 'pragmatic adversarialism' amongst strategic leaders and stakeholders, which foregrounds politics and the right to difference.     

19世纪后期至20世纪初期美国城市政治改革

19世纪后期美国城市的迅猛发展和城市政治体制的缺陷造成城市社会形势的严重恶化和腐败行为的泛滥,从而引发了城市政治改革运动的兴起。改革家虽然都出身于中上层阶级,但改革的方向有多种,改革的支持也复杂多样。总体来说,城市政治改革的进行实现了城市政治体制的重大发展,增强了城市政府治理城市的能力,政治腐败也得到一定程度的遏制。     

World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.     

‘Mr Bourne's dilemma’. Consumer culture,property speculation and department store demise: the rise and fall of Bourne and Hollingsworth on London's Oxford Street

This paper explores the twentieth-century rise and fall of the traditional department store Bourne and Hollingsworth in London's Oxford Street as a means of re-examining the historical geographies of metropolitan consumption cultures. The research moves away from a preoccupation with urban retail's novelty and spectacle towards a consideration of the more conventional and conservative kinds of consumption that have been a vital part of the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century. The paper analyses the intersections of different dimensions of the history of metropolitan consumption: with a culturalist focus on consumer identity and urban microgrographies; but also an examination of this as a family-owned, paternalistic business, and as a material space, both as a building designed and refurbished by its owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. The final approach to Bourne and Hollingsworth as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city, allows a new understanding of the vulnerability of this kind of retailing by the later twentieth century. The study shows that an emphasis on the significance of cultures of consumption provides at best a partial explanation for changes in the landscapes of consumption: it is argued that cities are the sites of complex intersections between cultural practices and other kinds of geography, in this case those of asset values and opportunities for property speculation.     

‘Meddling with Politics’: The Political Role of Foreign Missions in the Early Nineteenth Century

The proper character of the relationship between missionaries and politics shaped one of the most contentious debates within the first century of the modern missionary movement. While the leadership of the missionary societies repeatedly insisted upon the separation between the work of the gospel and politics, missionaries in the field frequently found it difficult to remove themselves from political controversies. John Philip and James Read served with the London Missionary Society in the Cape Colony for most of the first half of the 19th century. Their persistent defence of the interests of the colonial Khoi made them controversial figures in the debates over the social, political and economic structures of the Cape Colony. Missionaries like Read and Philip, rarely described their activities as ‘political’, and certainly did not conceive of their work as in any way related to the patronage‐ridden political system of the early 19th century. Nonetheless, in their promotion of the ideas of religious and civil equality, and in their effective use of public opinion to shape government and public perception of colonial policy, their actions reflected many of the important changes taking place in contemporary British politics. Dissenting political activity focused on the issues of the defence of religious liberty, the struggle to secure their own civil equality, and the debate over the proper relationship between church and state. These issues also played a crucial role in colonial politics throughout the period. This essay will illustrate the important role of the foreign missionary movement in this process. Examining the work of Philip and Read enables us to identify the ways that issues of domestic politics helped to shape the political debates emerging in Britain's expanding empire.     

Italy 1990–2014: the transition that never happened

This introduction explains how the contributors to this special issue draw on interdisciplinary approaches to explain why after 1992–94 Italy never experienced a true transition and why the crisis has become systemic, affecting the entire Italian political, economic, financial and institutional system with far-reaching consequences for Italian society and its future.     

Between myth and reality: the euro crisis and the downfall of Silvio Berlusconi

In mid-November 2011, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi tendered his formal resignation to President Giorgio Napolitano. It was a humiliating ‘political exit’ for the controversial Italian leader who had been the dominant figure in Italian politics since the mid-1990s. With Italy in the throes of an unprecedented financial crisis, Berlusconi’s squabbling centre-right coalition had appeared increasingly incapable of dealing with the economic emergency engulfing the country. To restore credibility, Napolitano appointed Mario Monti who quickly put together an emergency government. Since then, the downfall of Italy’s longest-serving post-war prime minister has generated a good deal of controversy. Allegations that Berlusconi was pushed out of power by a cabal of domestic and international detractors have been rife both inside and outside Italy. But how plausible are these claims? Was Berlusconi brought down by a conspiracy orchestrated by Napolitano and instigated by Italy’s EU partners? This article will address these questions and, to do so, it will chart the dramatic events that led to his downfall and examine the international and domestic contexts in which these events took place.