An economic analysis of a National Theatre: The case of the ‘Abbey’

Abstract: This article asks how a regional community is culturally constructed as a policy subject in the centre/periphery relation of Finnish cultural policy. The focus is on the options the cultural recognitions analysed from the cultural policy documents of central government and the provincial administration of North Karelia provide for different political interests. It is stated here that the democratisation of cultural policy can be open for and a vehicle of the interests the prevailing spatial dominance attempts to get within the population of peripheries. North Karelia has for centuries been a geographic and economic periphery without inner cultural distinctions. Yet it is regarded as a culturally rich and specific area. The analysis shows that the regional community has continuously been used as a partisan identity for maintaining and reinforcing the spatial integration of national projects. Public cultural image would provide a symbolic compensation for the economically underprivileged. Furthermore, the strong cultural identity of North Karelia has constantly been taken by the regional establishment as an instrument to fight the “opponents of common regional interests” in political conflicts. Thus the principles of democracy have not always meant the capability or attitude to notice cultural polyphony within the region abreast of cultural political decision-making.     

Rejoinder to Professor Ho’s team on the article entitled ‘On evolutionary economic geography: a literature review using bibliometric analysis’

Professor Ho’s team has raised three questions about our paper entitled ‘On evolutionary economic geography: a literature review using bibliometric analysis’ published in European Panning Studies. The first one is about the number of articles in our search results. The second one is about the databases we have used in the Web of Science system. In the last comment, Professor Ho suggests a new searching strategy – ‘front page’ rule. We have responded to those three comments one by one in this rejoinder.     

China’s services sector: the new engine of economic growth

This paper presents a review of services sector development in China. It is found that China’s services have recently emerged as the dominant contributor to economic growth and job creation. Trade in services has also increased dramatically, although China maintains a huge deficit. In comparison with economies at a similar stage of development, however, China’s services sector is lagging behind. Both GDP and employment shares of the services sector are relatively small. Services trade also accounts for a relatively small share of China’s total trade. In particular, China’s new services are underdeveloped. As per capita income rises and resultant urbanization accelerates, the country’s services sector is expected to expand further and hence play a key role in rebalancing China’s economy away from its over-reliance on manufacturing and exporting. To reach this goal, further reforms and prudent government policies are needed.     

Women’s changing domestic responsibilities in neoliberal Africa: a relational time-space analysis of Lesotho’s garment industry

Since 2001 when Lesotho embraced the neoliberal African Growth and Opportunities Act that offers preferential access to the US market, its garment industry has expanded dramatically to become the nation’s leading employer. Elsewhere, large-scale employment of women in low-paid factory jobs has entailed spatial restructuring of gender and age relations. Lesotho is a distinctive context, with socio-spatial relations historically adjusted to male labour migration, high levels of contemporary male unemployment and alarming AIDS prevalence. Based on semi-structured interviews with 40 female factoryworkers and 37 dependents, this article applies a relational time-space analysis to explore how financial and spatio-temporal aspects of factory employment articulate to alter women’s relationships with those for whom they have culturally determined responsibilities: their children, those suffering from ill health and their (generally rural) home communities. The analysis highlights that such employment is not merely adding to women’s responsibilities, but transforming how they are able to undertake social reproduction, as practical, social and emotional roles are converted to largely financial obligations.     

Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Museums occupy many roles which are influenced by wider circumstances and changing conditions. This study deals with the case of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and the manner in which it is used to promote nation building in a multi‐ethnic and relatively newly independent state. In addition, it serves a political purpose and acts as an economic resource. The Asian Civilisations Museum illustrates some of the recent trends affecting the museum sector as a whole and also the particular challenges facing such institutions in a country like Singapore with its many distinctive qualities.     

Migration and regional inequality: changing characteristics of China’s economic inequality

Scholars studying economic inequality in China have maintained that regional inequality and economic divergence across provinces have steadily increased over the past 30 years. New studies have shown that this trend is a statistical aberration; calculations show that instead of quickly and sharply rising, regional inequality has actually decreased, and most recently, remained stable. Our study suggests that China’s unique migratory regime is crucial to understanding these findings. We conduct a counterfactual simulation to demonstrate how migration and remittances have mitigated income inequality across provinces in order to show that without these processes, we would have seen more of a rise in interprovincial income inequality. We conclude by arguing that inequality in China is still increasing, but it is changing and becoming less place-based. As regional inequality decreases, there are signs that point to the increasing importance of interpersonal inequality.     

Buried in a Head: African and Asian Parallels to Aesop’s Fable

There is a strange story among the fables ascribed to Aesop. It was preserved by Aristophanes and tells about the lark, who was born before the creation of the earth and had to bury her dead father in her own head. This article investigates Indian, Arabic, and North and West African parallels to this story. The analysed texts share several specific details, and the motif ‘buried in a head’ lying at the base of them is found worldwide only in a few areas of Eurasia and Africa; so there is most likely a historical connection between the examples.     

The Demographics of Dystopia: The Muslim City in Asia’s Future

This essay argues that UN projected population growth will not only lead to more Muslims in Asia’s cities in a purely numerical sense, but also to more Muslim cities in a proportional and cultural sense through the continuation of existing trajectories of ‘de-cosmopolitanization’. Urban life will be deeply affected by this increasing shift from cities that are not merely majority Muslim, but are also increasingly Muslim in moral, social or political terms. Inevitably such changes will affect the lives of urban citizens, none more so than women. The essay then asks whether population growth will allow these cities to maintain their ‘globalizing’ trajectory of increasing interconnection. Having framed its analysis around the ‘hard’ outcomes of demographic change, the analysis then turns to ‘soft’ outcomes by tackling the question of the likely contours of the increasingly divergent versions of Islam produced by the competitive religious economies of the modern Asian city.     

Impact of property rights and ownership on the development of Warsaw’s contemporary city centre

The paper raises the problem of the impact of unregulated property and ownership rights on the development of the city centre. It applies to Warsaw as a post-socialist city that has recorded fast economic growth since the country’s communist regime collapsed in 1989. We follow the course of changes in the city centre of Warsaw, in particular, those pertaining to land use and high-rise buildings for office use as investments that encounter difficulties under the unregulated status of construction sites and lack of clear regulations for private property restitution that was nationalized under socialism. To describe and explain the difficulties, we provide data showing the location of large companies and office buildings, and examples of conflicts as well. Unregulated ownership issues and property rights weigh on Warsaw’s city centre, now vastly dispersing and gravitating westwards, and prevent the district from rational and effective development.     

Going green: Sustainable development as a model of socio‐economic development in European post‐communist countries

The aim of the article is to present a conception of eco‐development as a model for the shaping of a broadly understood lifeworld. It seems to be especially promising in the new social reality of the post‐Communist states, where the lifeworlds have deteriorated badly, both at each spatial level as well as in its biophysical, psycho‐social and technical‐production aspects. First, an interaction model of a lifeworld is presented, followed by a conception of eco‐development with its basic, i.e. social, economic and technological, determinants. The article closes with a list of arguments for eco‐development as both an effective and humanist conception of socio‐economic development in its spatial dimension.     

Lampon’s Episode in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca: The Reformulation of a Goatherd

The article examines the figure of Lampon, an uncharacteristic goatherd appearing in a folk-tale-like story in Xenophon’s Ephesiaca 2.9–12. It has long been recognized by critics that the circumstances of the Euripidean Electra are recalled in the episode under discussion. Comparisons are made with the Euripidean scene and the “reshuffling” of the main roles is expounded, including the novelist’s decision to make Anthia the partner of a goatherd and not the wife of a lowly farmer. On the basis of thematic and verbal similarities, it is argued that Xenophon appears to have a direct knowledge of Euripides’ Electra, which he imaginatively exploits. Subtle details of occupation and name are also discussed in relation to the stereotypical α?π?λο? and the ?γροικο?. A characteristic feature recalling the Aristotelian notion of ?γροικ?α is pointed, and it is concluded that Xenophon skilfully subverts the stereotypes, as he does not endow Lampon with the traditional negative marking of ?γροικοι and α?π?λοι, and indeed moulds an anti-aipolos.     

The Representation of Joe Whelks: Charles Dickens’s Reflections on a Theatre Audience

This article explores how Charles Dickens both alludes to and occludes the Victoria Theatre’s looking-glass curtain in his article ‘The Amusements of the People’ (1850). This vast mirror curtain hung at the Victoria in the early 1820s and again in the mid-1830s. Contending that Dickens would have been aware of this spectacular novelty, this article argues that his reference to the Victoria Theatre’s management ‘holding up a mirror’ to its audience is an allusion to the curtain. The mirror curtain reflected the working-class audience at the theatre back to itself, putting it ‘on the stage’, a comment on the nature of representation and its relationship to reality. Like theatre itself, which it also figured, the mirror curtain had a heterotopic nature, both representing and contesting reality. This challenge was particularly unsettling to middle-class onlookers in the context of the representation of an unrepresented (disenfranchised) plebeian audience. I argue that Dickens’s article, like the mirror curtain, reflects the Victoria’s working-class audience and that he alludes to the mirror when making radical arguments concerning the political and class-based nature of aesthetic judgements about representation. His article, however, remains equivocal about the right to working-class self-determination and enfranchisement that the mirror curtain represented. Dickens gestures to, but occludes, the curtain and displaces it with his own representation of the Victoria’s audience and his mediation on their behalf. Ultimately, the challenge posed by the looking-glass curtain to the social and aesthetic order is too great to be fully acknowledged.     

All the World’s a Stage: Promotional Politics and Branded Identities in Asia

ABSTRACT

This article highlights key questions raised by the growing concern for global competitiveness and promotional politics in contemporary Asia. Global politics is increasingly governed by promotional imperatives and in the last two decades it has become a common practice for governments to engage in nation branding. Asian states have been particularly eager to implement such promotional strategies, as their rapid development in the last decades has increased their international presence and the overseas expansion of their national corporations. Why and how do Asian states promote themselves? Where and how do promotional imperatives interact with traditional state policies? How are national identities produced, reproduced and challenged through promotional practices in Asia? This article introduces a series of three articles that underline the significance of these policies with regard to renewed, market-based forms of nationalism in the region. It highlights the way questions of image projection within a global capitalist order are becoming crucial for major emerging Asian economies such as China as they integrate and seek to reshape the global political economy. Finally, it considers how, in several regimes in the region, nation branding and the necessities of image projection serve as powerful governance tools to recreate apolitical versions of national identities that serve domestic political purposes.     

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.     

‘… For it was founded upon a Rock’: Gibraltar and the Purposes of Empire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

In 1853–54, cholera in Britain forced the leadership at the tiny British fortress colony of Gibraltar to make a choice. Should the colony quarantine ships from Britain or leave the maritime frontier open to ships from the metropolitan centre of empire? The first choice secured imperial communication between London and the Rock, but it also jeopardised Gibraltar's land access to Southern Spain, as the failure to quarantine British ships would surely force Spanish authorities to close their border to protect against pandemic disease. Contrapuntally, the decision to protect Gibraltarian trade with Spain undermined any substantive claim to British ‘control’ over its colonial possession. The choice here was highlighted by Gibraltar's colonial governor, General Sir Robert Gardiner, who insisted that Gibraltar be governed as a British colony and kept open to the colonial centre at all costs, and Gibraltar's merchant community, a group that feared the economic consequences of a frontier closure at Gibraltar enough to favour keeping the Rock's quarantine policies in line with Spanish regulations rather than those set by Britain. As a result of this medical dispute, Gibraltar became a pivotal location, a metonym for a much broader conversation about the uses and purposes of Britain's overseas empire in the middle years of the nineteenth century.     

Soft balancing against the US ‘pivot to Asia’: China’s geostrategic rationale for establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank

The existing accounts about the China-led multilateral development bank—the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)—have focused on the USA’s policy concerns and the economic and commercial reasons for China having established it. Two deeper questions are left unaddressed: Was there any strategic rationale for China to initiate a new multilateral development bank and, if so, how effective is China’s strategy? From a neorealist balance-of-power perspective, this article argues that China has felt threatened by the Obama administration’s rebalance to the Asia-Pacific strategy. In response, China is opting for a soft-balancing policy to carve out a regional security space in Eurasia in order to mitigate the threat coming from its east. China’s material power, premised on the fact that the country is a huge domestic market and flush with cash, has proved irresistible for Asian states, with the exception of Japan, to be enticed away from the USA. On the one hand, this article adds weight to the claim that although the USA remains the pre-eminent military power in the Asia-Pacific, it has fallen into a relative decline in regional economic governance; on the other, China’s soft balancing has its own limitations in forming like-minded partnerships with, and offering security guarantees to, AIIB members. A China-led regional order is yet to have arrived, even with the AIIB.