Spatial Governance across Borders Revisited: Organizational Forms and Spatial Planning in Metropolitan Cross-border Regions

In Europe, cross-border cooperation in spatial planning has intensified in recent years. Organizations with varying institutional characteristics have emerged in urban areas that cross a national border. They deal with problems stemming from the cross-border situation. The institutional and spatial aspects of organizations on the sub-national level in nine European cross-border metropolitan regions are compared in this article. The analytical concept of metropolitan governance applied here takes into account the simultaneous existence of different cross-border organizations as well as their spatial and functional relationships. Subsequently, this article assesses the impact of governance on spatial planning in two cases, Basel and Lille, where institutional changes occurred on the sub-national level between 2000 and 2010. The way organizational and spatial attributes of new forms of cross-border metropolitan governance influence the coordination of spatial policies is discussed here. The comparison of organizational characteristics and capacity to coordinate reveals important differences. Furthermore, comparing spatial scales shows how new cross-border perimeters are drawn along existing national territories. Organizations' competences and interests are decisive for the coordination and implementation of spatial policies.     

The Trial of Socrates Revisited

Different sorts of people have been revisiting the trial of Socrates for almost 2,500 years: philosophers, political theorists, politicians, jurists, historians, journalists and artists. Each has his or her own agenda for reconstructing the motives of the prosecution, the thinking of the jurors, and the apparently perverse behaviour of Socrates himself. This paper examines some of the more influential approaches to Socrates (including those of his contemporaries, Plato, Xenophon and Aristophanes), and attempts to set them in appropriate contexts. By way of a conclusion, there is an exploration of the background and context to the trial itself, taking into account recent work on Athenian law, religion and punishment, closing with an attempt to explain the significance of the likely location of the law-court, within the Agora or city square of Athens.     

From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and theGeography of Capitalism

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital structures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequently relegate labor to the status of "variable capital." Both approaches present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how workers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that workers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is made; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call "labor's spatial fix" and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spatial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as geographical agents into understandings of the production of space under capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create "labor's spatial fix" are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor Geography ) and so to write less capital-oriented economic geographies.     

Appeasement Revisited

R. A. C. PARKER. Chamberlain and Appeasement: British Policy and the Coming of the Second World War. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. v, 388. £35.00;

GAINES POST, JR. Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense, 1934–1937. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993. $48.50 (US);

R. J. Q. ADAMS. British Politics and Foreign Policy in the Age of Appeasement, 1935–39. London: Macmillan, 1993. Pp. xii, 192. £40.00;

MICHAEL J. COHEN and MARTIN KOLINSKY, eds. Britain and the Middle East in the 1930s: Security Problems, 1935–1939. London: Macmillan, 1992. Pp. xvii, 231. $40.00;

BENNY MORRIS. The Roots of Appeasement: The British Weekly Press and Nazi Germany during the 1930s. London: Frank Cass, 1992. Pp. 212. $40.00 (US);

GERARD J. DE GROOT. Liberal Crusader: The Life of Sir Archibald Sinclair. New York: New York University Press, 1993. Pp. xi, 266. $35.00 (US);

CLEMENT LEIBOVITZ. The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal. Edmonton, Alberta: Les Éditions Duval Inc., 1993. Pp. viii, 544. No Price Available.