Place Marketing,Strategic Planning and Competitiveness: The Case of Malta

This article investigates place marketing and strategic planning processes in the case of Malta Island as a competitive tourist destination. The article focuses on the main ingredients that compose the marketing and strategic planning performance and presents the repositioning process of Malta's image in the international tourism market. The article concludes that place marketing is a strategic process with particular phases of development that leads to the creation of a competitive and attractive destination. Finally, the article supports that strategic planning and place marketing could not operate by themselves, but they need to be built on partnerships among local actors and decision-makers.     

家族内人口与生活:以浦江义门郑氏为例

《(浦江)义门郑氏宗谱》拥有一个家族中以男性人口为主的详细资料,具有重要的研究价值,对于了解该家族的人口数量、人口增减的速度、职业、化状况、婚姻状况、寿命等等,都具有重要的研究价值。藉此数据为蓝本,加以比排分析,为后人了解一个家族的婚姻状况、平均寿命、化、职业等都可以展开新的视野。     

The Liberalization of the Land Market in Spain: The 1998 Reform of Urban Planning Legislation

Against a general climate of liberalization, the Spanish Government has made a concerted effort to bring about a reduction in house prices. A legislative reform in April 1998 has sought to liberalize land and planning, through (a) refining the category of land previously excluded from development to enable residential development to take place, (b) allowing for greater flexibility of land uses and building controls, and (c) reducing administrative controls. This paper discusses the extent to which such reforms are likely to meet their anticipated objectives, resulting in beneficial effects in the land and housing markets, as well as the territorial impact of such reforms from a sustainability perspective.     

When Communities Collide: Competing Claims for Archaeological Objects in the Market Place

Rather than recount a specific archaeological project and its community relationships, in the following, I consider the competing claims for archaeological objects by the various groups associated with the illegal and legal trade in antiquities. For nearly a decade I have examined the efficacy of cultural heritage laws in the protection of eastern Mediterranean archaeological landscapes. More specifically, I am interested in the contentious issues surrounding legalized antiquities markets as a means of protecting the archaeological past. In order to assess the value of various legal instruments I attempt to engage with the communities who claim an interest in the buying, selling, protection or appreciation of antiquities. The list of communities is long, varied and often at odds with each other. Reconciling these competing claims is a Herculean task, but one worthy of investigation as questions of inclusion, responsibilities and ownership of cultural heritage are at the forefront of an engaged archaeology.     

近代青岛城市规划与城市发展关系的历史研究及启示

青岛是中国近代城市中按规划建设发展起来的典型代表,在城市的形成和发展过程中,城市规划与城市发展体现了良好的互动关系。历史研究显示,合理的城市规划是城市发展的前提,对城市性质、城市空间形态、城市形象、城市经济活动乃至城市社会结构等方面都发挥具体的作用。近代青岛不仅用事实证明城市规划与城市发展的关系,而且对今天的城市规划工作,无论从进一步认识城市规划的作用,还是具体到规划的制订与实施等方面都有若干启示。     

Children and Urban Regional Planning: Participation in the Public Consultation Process through Story Writing

Blue Mountains City is a unique urban area of 75 000 people, located along a narrow mountain ridge and within a world heritage national park, between 60 and 120 kilometres west of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. The Blue Mountains City Council is currently developing a regional city strategy to guide development over the next 25 years. All sections of a very diverse community have been consulted in the public participation process, including children aged between six and 12 years. This paper deals with the analysis of 269 entries for a children's story-writing competition organised by the council. The children had to imagine that they were adults in 2025 and write a story about what their home and city would be like at that time. The paper discusses the complex problems of consulting with children on strategic regional planning matters, and the results from analysis of these competition entries in the light of those problems. The most important issues for the children as a whole were the impact of traffic, the impact of urban development on residential neighbourhoods, places for children to play, protection of the natural environment, for which the city is famous, and the ability to keep domestic pets. One of the most significant impressions emerging from the analysis is that children were far from optimistic about the future. Thirty-five per cent of entries had a negative tone, whereas only 24% were positive. The remaining 41% were written in a matter-of-fact narrative style that indicated neither enthusiasm nor disappointment with the future of the city. The children were more or less evenly divided on whether the future would be strongly based on advances in technology, much the same as now, or based on simpler technology than at present. The technique of story writing, despite some methodological difficulties in this particular case, was a useful tool for consultation with children of this age group.     

Commoditizing the safari and making space for conflict: Place,identity and parks in East Africa

Increased resource scarcity, the social construction of nature, the disintegration of moral economy and associated policy shifts are often cited as the main drivers of resource conflicts in East Africa. Research in geography, anthropology and rural sociology has unveiled how common explanations of resource conflicts overlook multi-scalar political, economic, social, cultural and environmental tensions. The purpose of this study is to provide more nuanced explanations of resource conflicts by incorporating three disparate but related threads of literature. Using literatures on the commodification of nature, multi-stranded notions of identity and geographical conceptualizations of ‘place’, I demonstrate how three transformational moments structure and propagate conflicts between herders and protected area managers around a national park in Kenya. I argue that the rise of a commoditized form of nature tourism coupled with idealized notions of ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ have altered the micro-geography of interaction between herders and protected area managers. These altered geographies of interaction have diluted the shared history and traditional relations of reciprocity, created new social milieux, and lead to the creation of binary identities among herders and protected area managers. The enforcement of these binary identities culminates in conflict.     

民间工艺传承中的家族、市场与展演——以山东菏泽穆李面塑工艺调查为例

民间工艺来自乡土,历经漫长岁月而生生不息,为我们展示了一个丰富多彩的民众生活世界。民间的美美不胜收,其旺盛的生命力背后所蕴藏的动力因素是什么呢?本文以山东菏泽面塑工艺为例,通过对田野资料的整理分析,笔者将民间工艺传承中的动力因素归纳为自我动力因素、以"市场需求"为导向的外动力和以民俗展演为特征的混合型动力机制。以此为基点,进而探讨村落社会结构、市场机制和民间互惠展演信仰体系对于民间工艺传承活动的影响。     

In Place and At Home in the City: Connecting privilege,safety and belonging for women in Toronto

In this article I theorize the connections between privileged social identities and women's sense of safety and belonging in a diverse urban environment, Toronto. Based on qualitative research with a small group of women who grew up in the suburbs of Toronto, and later chose to live in the city, this article is a preliminary investigation into the factors that make it possible for some women to feel ‘in place’ in the city. I suggest that confidence, a sense of belonging, and the ability to distance oneself from violence are all related to privileges such as whiteness and middle-classness. In the Canadian context, these identities function as the invisible norm, allowing women to feel at home in an ethnically and economically diverse city. Moreover, the ability to move into and through urban space may function in a reciprocal manner to reinforce privileged identities. I argue that it is important to examine interlocking systems of privilege and oppression in terms of both women's affective experiences of urban space, and the gendered constitution of urban spaces. This approach serves to problematize and complicate the concept of appropriation of urban space through an examination of the salience of privilege. I conclude by suggesting that this article may serve to open dialogue about the relationship of privileged identities to marginalized identities in the city, in order to add complexity to feminist research on women's everyday lives in the city.

Women are not merely objects in space where they experience restrictions and obligations; they also actively produce, define and reclaim space. (Koskela, 1997 Koskela, Hille. 1997. ‘Bold walk and breakings’: women's spatial confidence versus fear of violence. Gender, Place & Culture, 4: 301–319. [Taylor & Francis Online] [Google Scholar], p. 305)     

士绅的坚守与权变:清代苏州潘氏家族的家风与心态研究

苏州潘氏是徽商后裔,亦是江南著名的科第世家。潘氏家族发展过程中所形成的科举与经商迭相为用的二元价值观、学宗宋儒与讲究实用的家学传统,既是明清以来,尤其是晚清士商相混的结果,也是徽州和苏州两种不同地域文化整合的结果。而潘氏族人慎言慎行如履薄冰的仕途实践经验、行善与积福密切相连的因果报应观,则生动地反映了清代江南上层士绅的行为方式和源自于社会生活的伦理道德观。     

Revisiting Kalundu Mound,Zambia: Implications for the Timing of Social and Subsistence Transitions in Iron Age Southern Africa

African Archaeological Review - Novel trajectories of food production, urbanism, and inter-regional trade fueled the emergence of numerous complex Iron Age polities in central and southern Africa....     

Questions of Complexity and Scale in Explanations for Cultural Transitions in the Pleistocene: A Case Study from the Early Upper Paleolithic

Matching scales of observation and explanation is an essential challenge for archaeology, Paleolithic archaeology in particular. This paper presents a case study from the Early Upper Paleolithic (EUP) in the Eastern Mediterranean to illustrate some of the scalar issues in explaining transitions in the Pleistocene. The cultural sequence at Üça??zl? Cave I documents both continuity and change in a range of behaviors over approximately 12 ky. The sequence spans the transition from one EUP cultural unit, the Initial Upper Paleolithic (IUP) to another one, the Ahmarian. There is evidence for changes in lithic technology and retouched tool forms, human diets, and the role of the site within a regional land use system, but few if any of these changes are closely timed with the shift from one archaeological “culture” to another. In this particular case, local and regional transitions seem to be largely unconnected. However, considering the local situations allows a more precise focus on what the broader cultural transition represents and how it might be studied.