Urban heritage ‘space’ under neoliberal development: a tale of a Jordanian plaza

What happens when urban heritage spaces within developing countries, such as Jordan, are subject to touristic development funded by international bodies, such as the World Bank? This question is explored theoretically and practically by considering a popular local plaza in the secondary Jordanian city of Jerash that has been subject to three tourism development projects funded by the World Bank. The study, which incorporates and critiques the discourse of neoliberalism within urban heritage development studies, seeks to analyse the World Bank projects and, more specifically, how they have defined, approached and produced outcomes in the Jerash plaza and its context. In so doing, the study triangulates the analysis with accounts by local respondents that identify major drawbacks in the World Bank approach, particularly its emphasis on conventional ‘readings’ of urban space that highlight universal values and histories, while neglecting and marginalising local values and understandings. The triangulation offers attentive ‘readings’ of the plaza as a place understood and experienced by a people. The challenge is to break with the neoliberal paradigm that dominates urban heritage development programmes (and their associated West–East dualisms and top-down approaches) by presenting local sociocultural and economic contexts as assets to enrich development projects, rather than obstacles to be ‘fixed’ and ‘fitted’ for tourism.     

“进步主义”背后的另一个面相:美国纽约市政改革中的坦慕尼协会

作为城市政治机器的代表,美国纽约市的坦慕尼协会一度被视为城市“毒瘤”,尤其在进步主义时代,改革者将其视为阻遏市政改革的罪魁祸首。这一脸谱化的负面形象在某种程度上是历史的选择性“记忆”,而坦慕尼协会对纽约城市发展的贡献却被选择性地“遗忘”。同时,坦慕尼协会的衰落并非缘于与城市进步主义运动互斥,相反,正是因为其拥抱改革,才瓦解了原有坦慕尼组织的权力网络。如果将坦慕尼协会置于更加宏观的历史视域下考察,还会发现美国政府与社会之间权力的消长,直接影响了坦慕尼协会的命运,而在其兴衰演变的过程中,美国政党政治从中获得了更大的发展空间。     

The Role of Wampum Production at the Albany Almshouse

This paper presents the archaeological and documentary evidence for wampum production at the Albany almshouse within its historical and cultural contexts and in light of Dutch notions of charity, while considering the continually shifting functions and meanings of wampum. It suggests that in the mid-eighteenth century, both the Dutch Reformed Church and private entrepreneurs were involved in producing wampum for trade on the northern and western frontiers.     

The Archaeology of Slavery at the Van Cortlandt Plantation in the Bronx,New York

Excavations at the Van Cortlandt Mansion, the central structure of an eighteenth-century plantation located in Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, New York, highlight the difficulty of using archaeological evidence to document the story of enslavement in early America. While the documents indicate the extent of the Van Cortlandts' involvement in the slave trade and in the reliance on enslaved labor to build and run their enterprise, the excavations carried out over several years have not yielded concomitant evidence.     

Bad elements: Katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction

Hurricane Katrina scoured the political economic landscape of New Orleans revealing the toll of decades of disinvestment in and ‘hostile privatism’ toward social reproduction in a city with corrosive inequalities around class, race, and gender. This piece addresses the failures of the state and capital around issues of social reproduction in the wake of Katrina, and gestures toward the sorts of activism these failures have called forth. Organized around five elements of social reproduction, including the environment and relief infrastructure, health care, education, housing, and social justice, the essay argues that the absence of these elements of the social wage both created conditions that made Katrina a disaster and thwarted response to the storm's social, economic, and physical destruction in New Orleans. The costs can be seen most obviously in the unevenness of neighborhood and infrastructural recovery, the difficulty of establishing a stable workforce of residents because of the lack of support for workers and their families which especially affects women and lone parents, and the deepening of various neoliberal tendencies toward privatization in education, health care, and housing. Examining the classed, gendered, and racialized nature of these issues, I will look at community based social movements working to redress this situation, and interrogate the underlying politics and policies – explicit and implicit – that have produced this situation.     

Nationality and children's drawings — pictures ‘about Scotland’ by primary school children in Edinburgh,Scotland and Syracuse,New York State

The way that children perceive and understand places and locations is an area of geographical research that had an intermittent history until the 1990s saw a sustained interest in ‘children's geographies’. Here I build upon these studies and those of spatial cognition, developmental psychology, constructions of nation and nationality, by asking children to draw pictures about a nation. I review this methodology and analyse drawings collected from work with children in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Syracuse, New York State. I obtained 127 pictures ‘about Scotland’ drawn by six to nine year olds. These drawings reveal a range of stereotypical images of Scotland that are learned, both nationally and internationally, by this early age. They also suggest that knowledge and experience of Scotland varies by school district in each location and that these children often intertwine personal and national narratives when representing Scotland.