Elemental mobilities: atmospheres,matter and cycling amid the weather-world

Abstract

Everyday experiences of movement have become a central concern for social and cultural geography in recent years. Work here has begun to unpack the specific meanings, imaginaries and experiences that come to be bound up with mobile bodies and their practices. However, it has been suggested that more could be done to examine the material, elementary, molecular and physical aspects of movement which are significant to the experience of being on the move. Therefore, this paper explores the experience of cycling amid such turbulent ‘elemental’ materialities. Such ‘matters’ matter to cycling in the way that they (re)make both mobile environments and mobile subjectivities. Cyclists come to have quite immediate and intimate relationships with the material and ‘elementary’ aspects of the environments they move through given their relatively unmediated encounters with them. This paper draws on video-interview based research with 24 commuter cyclists in Plymouth, UK to consider cyclists’ experience of atmospheric conditions in terms of air’s force and air quality. From this, the paper reflects on how the experience of such ‘elemental’ matters might be significant to future research on and planning for cycling.     

中国民用机场竞争优势的空间分布特征

经过近20年的高速发展,我国民用机场业的整体竞争实力得以提高,但伴随繁荣发展的却是机场竞争优势的区域空间分布非均衡性矛盾的突出。无论是机场数量、机场等级、机场业务量、机场业务结构,还是机场的产权结构、经营模式和经营业绩,东部都占有绝对优势。基于机场竞争优势的空间非均衡性,也形成了非均衡发展的航空运输网络,这在一定程度上加剧了区域经济发展的非均衡性。因此,为了缩小地区机场竞争实力差距,提高中西部地区机场的竞争优势,各级政府应制定相关政策,加快中西部机场发展。增建中西部新机场,提高大中型机场等级,制定相应政策,加快中西部机场产权和经营模式改革,拓宽机场的融资渠道,开拓货邮市场,吸引和引导民营资本和外国资本注入中西部机场,为中西部机场提供高效运营、不断提高竞争实力的平台。     

‘Aerial Silk Roads’: Airport Infrastructures in China's Belt and Road Initiative

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is widely touted as China's answer to development through international connectivity. The scheme has often been linked to China's objectives of crafting a new world order centred on itself and/or stabilizing its economy through externalizing surplus capacity. While important in broadly framing China's relationship with the world, this article posits that such a fixation on state-centric visions of development leaves the door open for misinterpretation, mistaking the BRI for a coherent set of projects imposed ‘from above’. Delving into the execution of infrastructure planning on the ground, this article argues that taking a practice-oriented approach to large-scale developmental schemes can more accurately shed light on their internally fractured processes. Two airport projects in central China branded as part of the country's ‘aerial Silk Roads’ are examined to illustrate these dynamics, with particular attention paid to the airports’ shifting conceptualizations, the competitive motivations behind their (re)construction, and the social relations sustaining them. The authors argue that closely tracking the unfolding of a range of infrastructure planning practices within specific projects can demystify modern-day developmental programmes like the BRI, by revealing how their ‘grand’ visions are often reinterpreted, altered and frustrated at local levels, even before they have a chance to influence the world.     

旅游机场吞吐量影响因素初探

近年来,在旅游者航空需求推动下,旅游热点地区兴建旅游机场已成为一大趋势。本文对旅游机场的概念、特点进行了归纳,认为旅游机场至少可以根据其对旅游客流的依赖程度区分为旅游景区机场和旅游城市机场。对机场吞吐量统计数据的分析发现,宏观地理区位是导致游客选择航空旅行方式比重存在差异的主要原因。对黄山和九寨沟等多个旅游机场的案例分析发现,具体的旅游线路组织方式、地面交通方式和其他机场的分流作用是导致旅游机场吞吐量悬殊的深层原因。在此基础上提出了旅游机场吞吐量影响因素的概念模型并将之用于喀纳斯机场和宜昌机场的分析。     

THE BUSINESS OF WELFARE

A common narrative in welfare state research is that Sweden exemplifies a specific model of welfare, ‘the Swedish model’, or ‘the Social democratic welfare regime’. From this perspective the emerging welfare state left little room for private initiatives – the stage was set for the development of an encompassing welfare state in the 1950s. In this article I argue that this, virtually hegemonic, perspective has hindered an analysis of how private insurance co-existed and thrived within the emerging Swedish welfare state. As an alternative approach to ‘modelling’ – the concept of welfare-formation is developed to analyse mutually sustaining practices of welfare. I show how the insurance business and its protagonists influenced the settings of public pension schemes in a way that underpinned their own interests. A close cooperation with the state apparatus was fundamental for creating a trustworthy insurance market and legitimizing the business claim of fulfilling a social mission. The business adaptability in the shifting landscape of social policy also influenced perceptions of security and welfare in general. Commercial ideals became an essential dimension of the welfare state. By exploring this marginalized history – the business of welfare – the study deepens our understanding of modern welfare societies.     

Caring for Country: History and Alchemy in the Making and Management of Indigenous Australian Land

This paper traces the history of ‘caring for country’ tropes in writing about indigenous Australian land and land management. While ‘caring for country’ initially referred to dynamic land use and ownership practices, it progressively became a less historical, more primordial, conception of indigenous land ownership, use, and management. In reviewing constructions of ‘land’ in scholarly literatures and policy debates, I seek to explain how they interact with local indigenous practices and idioms. Drawing on examples from the cultural and linguistic fields of A?angu, speakers of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, I examine a variety of concurrent uses of ‘country’, ‘caring’, or ‘nurturance’ and ‘caring for country’. A cross‐linguistic perspective on these objectifications – in English, Aboriginal English, and central Australian indigenous languages – shows how they may attend selectively to the historical specificity of indigenous experience. But this, I argue, may be the key to their efficacy in intercultural projects. Coded messages in bilingual documents reflect a kind of agency whereby A?angu choose to leave equivocal histories unstated and thereby reconstitute government projects in terms that work for them. The referential flexibility around idioms of land and nurturance is a kind of alchemy in language and social life that is the condition of the success of actual land management activities. Terms including ‘country’ and ‘caring for country’ elide the socio‐political dynamics that otherwise complicate actual rights and uses of land. That is why they can form the social basis of common activities, the production of ‘congeniality’ both within A?angu social life and at the interface with outsiders, in land management and other fields.     

The Making of an Australian ‘Airport City’

Globally, the changing nature of airports, and particularly the juxtaposition of general commercial land uses alongside aviation functions, is captured in the concept of the ‘airport city’. In Australia, commercialisation has impacted nearly all privatised capital city and general aviation airports. Essendon Airport's contested transformation from a run‐down general aviation facility into an emergent business and retail hub in Melbourne's north‐western suburbs serves as an instructive case study of the evolution of the airport city as a new suburban typology. Drawing in part on in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders involved in the redevelopment process, this paper examines the conflicting forces that have driven commercialisation since the late 1990s, the spatial outcomes and the wider planning issues arising.     

Calling 911: intimate partner violence and responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era

For most of United States’ history, the state did not intervene in violence perpetrated within the home or intimate relationships. Women experiencing intimate partner violence had little recourse from state institutions for security or legal justice. This article’s inquiry centers on two policing practices – preferred arrest and evidence-based prosecution – that emerged in the 1980s to redress the state’s long history of ignoring intimate partner violence. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how these two policing practices affect the experience of citizenship for intimate partner violence survivors by showing how the state creates a distinction between ‘cooperative’ victims who support the arrest and incarceration of their abusers and ‘uncooperative’ who do not. To develop this argument, I conceptualize the policing and prosecution response to intimate partner violence as a social contract of rights and responsibilities that mediates the relationship between the state and women who experience intimate partner violence. By illustrating how the state discursively constructs ‘uncooperative’ victims as irrational, this article utilizes a feminist geographic analytic to examine the everyday discursive and material technologies that the state employs to reregulate responsible citizenship in a neoliberal era.     

Dorsetshire Numismatics; The Ancient Mints,with Notices of Some Medals Connected with the County

For several years, studies of popular religion within pre-Reformation England have tended to emphasize that religious practice within the medieval parish church had become increasingly privatized and exclusive, as a result of the foundation of so-called ‘private’ chantry chapels. In many cases, these works have neglected the wider role of the chantry in shared religious experience at parish level, a deficit that has only recently been challenged by historians. This paper sets out to consider how the structural analysis of surviving above-ground evidence for former chantry chapels can uncover a wider context for chantry foundation in the medieval parish church. This paper based on recent research in the south and west of England discusses how the analysis of church space, light and, particularly, vision enables the reconstruction of aspects of chantry chapel foundation and can illustrate their wider social dimension. It examines the nature of the architectural feature known as the ‘squint’ and discusses how it can help in the analysis of former ritual topography and shed light on the level of private and communal piety. Furthermore, this paper shows how the use of archaeological approaches can illuminate aspects of medieval religious practice only hinted at in historical documents.     

‘Looking alright,feeling alright’: emotions,sizing and the geographies of women's experiences of clothing consumption

Recent work within geographies of consumption has focused on the practices of consumption as a means to find out ‘what people do when they go shopping’. This paper argues that few of these accounts of consumption have considered the significance of emotions in understanding the intricacies of consumer experience. Drawing on material from research about women's experiences of clothes shopping this paper, therefore, utilizes recent work in the social sciences which understands emotions not as inherent or as induced by practices or commodities and instead emphasizes the intersubjective nature of emotions whereby emotions ‘are self‐reflective, involving active perception, identification and management on the part of individuals’ (Lupton : 16). In short, this view posits that the consumer has the capacity to ‘manage’ or to experience and re‐experience emotions in particular consumption moments. Such an understanding offers a conceptualization which does not conceive of women's engagements with consumer culture within a victim/resistance dichotomy, instead uncovering geographies of consumption in which women may feel uncomfortable or depressed in a particular moment but then engage in practices through which they experience that moment differently. These emotional experiences are explored through considering the significance of the spatialities of the changing room, shop floor and the corporeal space of the ‘sized’ body, and the consumption practices of cheating, coping and connecting.     

DUNG BY PREFERENCE: THE CHOICE OF FUEL AS AN EXAMPLE OF HOW ANDEAN POTTERY PRODUCTION IS EMBEDDED WITHIN WIDER TECHNICAL,SOCIAL, AND ECONOMIC PRACTICES*

A discussion of how Andean potters acquire and use their fuels is used to demonstrate the ‘embedded’nature of ceramic technology. The most common choice of fuel in the highlands of Peru and Bolivia is animal dung (mainly cow, sheep, and llama). This technological choice is related to wider social and economic practices (particularly in relation to animal husbandry) which has further repercussions that affect other technologies (such as agriculture practices). Such a succession of interrelated activities is not unique to pottery; it is fundamental to all technologies and should be considered within archaeological analysis.     

‘Narratives of Survival in the Post-Colonial North’

Scholars have recently paid more attention to narratives of colonial contact in Australia, as elsewhere (cf. Hill 1988). Western elements and characters (such as Captain Cook) have been widely documented in Australian Aboriginal narratives which nevertheless are clearly not close accounts of past events. This has promoted reconsideration of the distinction between ‘myth’ and ‘history‘. If we follow Turner's (1988) suggestion that myth is the formulation of ‘essential’ properties of social experience in terms of ‘generic events‘, while ‘history’ is concerned with the level of ‘particular relations among particular events’, we need not restrict ourselves to seeing myth as charter for a social order distinct from western influence. In the paper I examine two stories of cultural and physical survival from the Katherine area, Northern Territory, and seek to identify in them fundamental themes and enduring narrative precipitates of social experience lived in intense awareness of colonial and post-colonial relationships between Aborigines and whites.     

The tourist landscape paradox

This paper is about tourist practices of landscape. Landscape has long been a key reference point in the construction of tourist imaginaries and, to this day, plays an important role in tourists' experience of travelling and their encounters with Otherness. Yet the ambivalent ways in which tourists conceptualize landscape is inherently paradoxical; indeed, it is by travelling that tourists try to overcome the tension produced by such a paradox. Putting into practice two alternative conceptions of landscape at once—a ‘Vidalian’ landscape-as-essence and a ‘Cosgrovian’ landscape as ‘way of seeing’—the tourist inevitably falls into an intriguing epistemological trap. Tourists' embodiment of the landscape experience becomes an attempt to evade that trap. In this paper, I note how this is exemplified in the ways in which tourist rhetoric frames the idea of Morocco and, in particular, the Jamaa el Fna square in Marrakech, the most ‘landscaped’ (and photographed) tourist site in the Maghreb. To help unpack this paradox, I take a brief look at what tourists actually do in the Jamaa el Fna, in order to reproduce, in place, their landscape-driven idea of Moroccan cultural space. The spatial practices of most tourists in that iconic place reveal, indeed, that the landscape paradox that drives tourist readings of the Jamaa el Fna cannot be avoided, but only endlessly performed, for this paradox is constitutive of the very formation of the Modern travelling European subject.     

‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.     

GUNGARAKAYN WOMEN SPEAK: REPRODUCTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF TRADITION

This paper analyses the instrumental purposes served by representations of female spirituality deployed by Gungaraakayn claimants in the course of the Finniss River Land Claim. I address the problem of how gender is shaped by configurations of power within and between groups and how, in turn, it shapes those configurations. The paper is thus a critique that seeks to understand the political significance of ‘tradition’ in the present, demonstrating how social formations may be transformed by the operations of practice.     

Global TransPark: New Competitiveness for Hong Kong and South China Based on Air Logistics

Economic globalization in the past two decades has led to a fast pace of growth of many economies in Asia Pacific, and impacted on the region's growth in air cargo. This paper discusses the future of airport infrastructure and its effect on regional competitiveness in the form of a new type of airport — Global TransPark (GTP). It identifies China's need to forge such a critical infrastructure in the New Economy, and that South China is its best location. The Hong Kong Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR) in South China stands out among competitive regions in Asia in terms of geopolitical and institutional setting under ‘One Country, Two Systems’ as the best general location for Asia's first and potentially largest GTP. Forging a GTP will promote the EMR's overall competitiveness and hastens its economic restructuring. The paper then discusses the advantages of Zhuhai Airport as the site of the potential GTP which will also incorporate the other four nearby airports within the EMR. The GTP is also a new challenge for intra-EMR cooperation in terms of customs and tariff, air rights, ground handling, and land and water transport coordination between its airports and respective local governments.     

Frank Cass THE JOURNAL OF DEVELOPMENT STUDIES

Much environment and development discourse assumes that women are the ‘natural’ constituency for conservation interventions. This article attempts to illuminate this assumption with the lens of a gendered critique of environmentalisms (technocentric, ecocentric and non-western). How do the intellectual roots of Western environmentalisms influence the positions, or non-positions, of contemporary environmentalism with regard to gender? What does research on environmental perceptions in non-Western societies imply about gender differentiation in environmental relations? The article concludes that there are no grounds for assuming an affinity between women's gender interests and those of environments and that such a view is symptomatic of the gender blind, ethnocentric and populist character of western environmentalisms. By contrast the application of gender analysis to environmental relations involves seeing women in relation to men, the disaggregation of the category of ‘women’, and an understanding of gender roles as socially and historically constructed, materially grounded and continually reformulated. The issue of how far women's gender interests and environmental interests go hand in hand leads us to pose a broader question of the degree to which environmental conservation is premissed upon social inequality.     

THE AIRPORT HOTEL AS BUSINESS SPACE

This article seeks to contribute to debates about the mobile nature of contemporary economic practice, through a discussion of some key themes in the evolution of airport hotels as business spaces. It argues that despite being emblematic of a hypermobile business elite, the nature of hotels as business spaces requires careful unpacking. The article begins by discussing the evolution of the airport hotel, charting the shift from basic lodging standards to recent developments of five star airport hotels. It then seeks to explain the locational geographies of airport hotel development, in response to these new trends. Finally, the article describes how the business traveller is conceived of and (speculatively) catered for by airport hotel operators and designers within a discourse of connectivity, before providing some counter-examples of how such claims fail to address the hotel's place within the complexity of airport spatial organization.     

An architectural analysis of the Hot Bath and Cross Bath,Bath, 1997–2003

Abstract

These baths represent two very significant architectural pieces within a city famed for innovation in that field. The Hot Bath was designed by the internationally renowned John Wood the Younger, the Cross Bath by Thomas Baldwin, ‘principal creator of Bath’. As public buildings focused on bathing, their design needed to reflect changing social attitudes as well as the latest architectural fashion. An opportunity to study the buildings between 1997 and 2003 demonstrated how circulation and division within public buildings could be used to help manage ever-changing social demands, whilst maintaining at least some of the integrity of their historic, architectural vision.     

Managing Neoliberal Urban Spaces: Commercial Property Development at Australian Airports

Airports are remaking Australian cities as they remake themselves as privatised enclaves of commercial entrepreneurialism. In line with overseas trends towards airport cities, all major federally leased Australian airports now derive a significant proportion of their revenue from non‐aeronautical property development. New land uses such as direct factory outlets, big‐box retailing, and even brickworks have proven most controversial. State governments, local councils, community groups, industry, and professional associations have expressed concerns about these commercial developments with statutory responsibility for development approvals vested solely in the federal government. The paper draws on the concept of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ to interpret the making of the new market‐driven airport spaces, the controversies which have ensued, and the re‐regulatory interventions of the Commonwealth required to address community tensions. The debate about development of non‐aeronautical activities on federally leased airport land is explored through the lens of the National Aviation Policy Review. The recommendations of this Review aim to incrementally reconfigure the policy commitment to ‘light handed’ regulation but future planning conflicts seem inevitable.