The Ordinary City

As debates on globalization have progressed from an earlier phase in which commentators saw the intensification of world-scale flows and processes as the negation of local identities and autonomies, the city has been 'rediscovered' as the powerhouse of the globalized economy. Against the view that questions, for example, the continued specificity of the urban in an era increasingly mediated by locationally liberating, advanced telecommunications and rapid transport networks, some strands of urban research assert that cities are becoming more important as the key creative, control and cultural centres within globalizing economic, cultural and social dynamics. Building on these strands, this paper evaluates the assets that cities and metropolitan regions provide in an era of globalization. It attempts to develop an alternative perspective on the city based on the idea that contemporary urban life is founded on the heterogeneity of economic, social, cultural and institutional assets, and concludes by using this perspective to develop implications for urban policy and the quest for social and territorial justice.     

The Role of Ordinary Goods in Premodern Exchange

The use of consumption studies to examine the social as well as the utilitarian role played by ordinary domestic goods helps to explain why exchange is a compelling social phenomenon. Under conditions of emergent social complexity, exchange activities become even more important, because a diversity of goods enables an ever-growing number of individuals to demonstrate membership in cross-cutting social groups based on status, ethnicity, age, gender, and profession. An archaeological case study in central India, in which it was found that nonlocal goods were widespread in a medium-sized town in the early centuries A.D., provides data for the evaluation of consumption activities at the household level, in which social subsistence was manifest in the acquisition and use of a shared material culture.     

Meeting at Manchester

Abstract

The grammatical and historical evidence cited above strongly suggests that an administrative system was in vogue among the ancient Israelites through which servants of the crown were supported by the income from estates. The ‘ownership’ of many of these estates was granted (or at least sanctioned) by the king.     

Monthly London Meeting

When the Catholic Mass was outlawed by Edward VI, ‘The sacrifice of Masses, in which it was commonly said that the Priests did offer Christ for the quick and the dead, to have remission of pain or guilt, were blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits’—the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England, 1553, Article Thirty-one (Bickwell 1955, 410), not only were priests loyal to Rome forced underground, but altars, vestments and chalices used in the Mass were destroyed. Clandestine priests had to either rescue and hide such items or purchase new ones.

Few chalices survived this iconoclasm and most Catholic priests must have had to purchase new plate, and there is evidence that some such plate was made in base-metals, an area which has so far been little researched.