Traveller＇s Tale From Forbidden City （I）——From Zooming Cars to Highrises, Lhasa is a Transformed City

Lhasa: No other land has been transformed so completely as that of Tibet, particularly after the Dalai Lama went into exile in 1959.     

Songs Wafted From the Tea-Horse Trade Route(Ⅰ)

A small passage cutting through Hendu-an Mountains and the Himalayas in southwest China has been bustling with shuttling traders driving caravans of fully loaded beasts of burden for a millennium. Unlike the Silk Route that is known to all in the world, this route hidden away in high mountains and skirted by flowing streams is almost unknown to the outside world. Such a situation lasted until the 1990s when a number of young scholars surveyed its darkened byways and named it the Tea-Horse     

Black-and-White Photography in Batcham: From a Golden Age to Decline (1970–1990)

In this article, I explore the biographies of three professional black-and-white photographers of the 1970s from Batcham, West Cameroon. They are Edouard Fofou, alias Photo-Edouard; Michel Kenne, also known as Photo-Kmichel and Gaspard Vincent Tatang, alias Tagavince. They and their work stands as an example of the very many African photographers whose work could be archived but probably will not be. If we know of a few celebrated names like Malik Sidibe but not Vincent Tatang it is as much by chance as anything else. This then is an exploration of a possible but unrealized archive. What we could call an archival path not taken.     

A Long Way to Complexity: Nonlinear “Growth Stages” and Spatially Uncoordinated Settlement Expansion in a Compact City (Athens,Greece)

Recent urbanization trends reflect an increasing dependence on regional economic transformations, local population dynamics, and planning constraints, becoming intrinsically complex and nonlinear. Following this assumption, the present study proposes a new approach for the analysis of long-term urban expansion in a compact metropolitan region (Athens, Greece), clarifying the importance of spatial heterogeneity and volatility in building activity over more than one century. A spatially explicit statistical approach was used to define a development cycle reflecting the stratification of heterogeneous waves of compact and dispersed urbanization at municipal scale. While resulting in distinctive spatial patterns of building activity, long-term urban growth emerged as a multifaceted response to market stimuli, social change, and diversified territorial contexts. Results of a spatially explicit analysis of long-term urban expansion based on official statistics shed further light on processes of metropolitan growth and change, and contribute to design integrated strategies enhancing spatial coordination and a more balanced socioeconomic development of contemporary cities.     

Adapting (Municipal) Form to (Provincial) Function: City–County Separation and the Introduction of the Consolidated Municipal Service Manager System in Ontario,Canada

In 1998, the province of Ontario introduced the Consolidated Municipal Service Manager (CMSM) system, which effectively downloaded the responsibility for delivery and partial funding for a range of social services to municipalities. Separated cities and counties—a unique system of municipal organization in Ontario that draws a sharp institutional distinction between urban and rural areas—were given a particularly wide range of discretion over the implementation of these services. A number of these jurisdictions experienced an array of problems reaching a local solution. Some even wound up in arbitration. This article examines the implementation of the CMSM, focusing specifically on the unique institutional arrangement found in counties with separated cities, finding that the provincial government overlooked the institutional design of city–county separation, hindering the policy downloading process. Overall, it is argued that the local institutional environment is key when shifting policy responsibility from central to local actors.     

Science,industry and the colonial state: a shift from a German- to a Dutch-controlled cinchona and quinine cartel (1880–1920)

This study shows how control over delicately balanced supply chains from raw material to the final product shifted from one national industry to another. By 1920, Dutch cinchona producers and quinine manufacturers dominated the international cartel that controlled the worldwide production and distribution of quinine (an antimalarial), quinine sulphate (a semi-finished product) and cinchona (the raw material). Twenty years earlier, however, this cartel had been controlled by the German pharmaceutical industry. How can we understand the shift of power in the world’s first pharmaceutical cartel? We argue that the internal shift of power was largely the result of the following three factors: a global industrial laboratory revolution; the vertical integration of a transoceanic network of cinchona producers, quinine manufacturers, (colonial) scientists and state officials across the Dutch Empire; and Germany’s economic isolation during the First World War.     

Talking to Workers: From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad,how the Islamic Republic’s Discourse on Labor Changed through May Day Speeches (1979‒2009)

This paper explores the transformations of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives on labor between 1979 and 2009. By analyzing official May Day speeches of this period, it navigates multiple constructions of workers’ roles, which were systematically propagated by the IRI’s Supreme Leader and president over time. The analysis relies on the following primary sources: from the 1979 May Day sermon, pronounced by Ruhollah Khomeini, to the 2009 speech given by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, together with messages sent by Ali Khamenei, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami. Showing how workers’ role—understood as a collective and distinct group—was gradually minimized, this paper argues that a bottom-up cleaning up process slowly purified May Day. In fact, the IRI progressively neglected workers as (revolutionary) social actors and interlocutors, as it stopped talking to masses and started speaking to middle classes.     

From huey altepemeh to civitates christianae: Considering a Franciscan collective agency project on Indian cathedral cities in post-Tridentine Central Mexico (1567–1585)

In this paper, we suggest a new analytical approach on a less-known and poorly investigated topic about early Church history in New Spain: the will to develop an institutionalized regular diocesan machinery in order to rearrange a Franciscan missionary Indian project with Tridentine Catholic ecumenical outcomes. To achieve that, we both report and analyze a wide spectrum of European and New Spain archival, documentary, and bibliographical sources related to the main Indian settlements, urbanism, and populations; Seraphic authorities, and civil vice-regal and royal officers. Preliminarily, we hypothesize that Indian ciudades were assumed to be the principal laboratories of this Seraphic-led project to strengthen friars’ traditional preeminence in a highly disputed colonial Christian theatre.     

Universities,the Second Academic Revolution and Regional Development: A Tale (Solely) Made of “Techvalleys”?

Universities are crucial organizations in the knowledge society. As such, a new social contract between academia and society is being developed, inducing significant dynamics of change in academia. Change is configured by the integration of economic development in the mission realm of universities, together with teaching and research, which set off an academic revolution. This revolutionary move within academia is being scholarly analysed mostly from the perspective of technology transfer and spin-off firms' development. Taking into account the nature and challenges of the contemporary society, this paper acknowledges that these dominant approaches to the changing academic mission provide an incomplete picture of the role universities can play in development processes. Accordingly, it uses a broader perspective on the academic revolution in order to detail the developmental role played by higher education and the relevant development resources that universities can provide and left out of the mainstreamed picture. It suggests that the need for broadening the perspective gains increased relevance when trying to know more about the role universities play in regional development. It asserts that universities, as regional development agents, are essential to help regions to combine and mobilize the knowledge and relational resources that nourish the capacity for collective action, i.e. to build up regional institutional capacity.     

‘The Republic is lived with an uncovered face’ (and a skirt): (un)dressing French citizens

The title of this article refers to the campaign carried out by the French government, in April and May 2011, to publicize and promote the law banning the full veil from public spaces, ‘la République se vit à visage découvert.’ The article examines ways in which political discourses, during the 2009–2012 period over which this law was first discussed, and then applied, used specific norms of female dress in order to establish a certain understanding of citizenship. Drawing on Rancière's notion of the ‘police’ and Dikeç's theorization of ‘aesthetic regimes,’ the article discusses the entanglements of female dress with French republicanism. These are illustrated through controversial representations of ‘Marianne,’ the female embodiment of the Republic, which raise the issue of color, in a country where race remains taboo. Turning more specifically to the report produced by a Parliamentary committee prior to the discussion of the burqa ban, the article discusses the paradoxical promotion of skirts as the epitome of French femininity, and shows how the discussion of women's right to wear skirts challenged ideas about the location of sexism, and the subject of politics, in French society.     

A Golden Bridge (Ⅰ)——Construction of the Qinghai-Tibet Railway

The world knows China is building a railway from Qinghai to Tibet, a project that began in the early days of this new century. The Tibetans hail it as a golden bridge. How much progress has been made in this regard? Beginning with this issue, we will devote some space to this subject.     

From Reconstruction to Development: The Early Years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conceptualization of Rural Welfare, 1945–1955

This paper examines the early years of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and its conceptualization of ‘rural welfare’, an approach that foresaw the modernization of agricultural societies and the alleviation of poverty through improvements in labor, housing, health, education of people working in agriculture. Based on the correspondence of FAO officials and experts, the paper shows how in the late 1940s, the Rural Welfare Division, under the leadership of its Director Horace Belshaw, promoted a low-modernist and local-sensitive approach to rural development that emphasized the subjectivity of welfare and that was skeptical of top-down development programs. As the paper argues, Belshaw's holistic understanding of rural communities was abandoned in the early 1950s in favor of an increasingly technical development consultancy, characterized by short-term interventions rather than by an intellectual and scientific debate about the larger implications of development.     

From invisibility to visibility? The appropriation of public space through a religious ritual: the Filipino procession of Santacruzan in Padua,Italy

Mainly employed as domestic workers and care providers since the 1980s, Filipino migrants have been, and still are, largely invisible in Italian public space. Since 1991, once a year, on the last Sunday of May, they transform the streets of Padua, city of Saint Anthony, into their own temporary ‘sacred space’ celebrating the finding of the Holy Cross (Santa Cruz). Based on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the paper analyses the preparation of the ritual and the embodied performance as a means to interpret the Filipino local and transnational territorialisation in the Italian context. The discussion underlines how the Italian setting affects the relationship between the sacred and the secular and between majority and minority religions in the urban texture. Urban space being the symbolic arena where identity and the process of boundary making are inscribed, we consider public space as a social process constituted by three levels: accessibility, temporary appropriation and visibility. Drawing on this immigrant religious ritual, we apply this perspective to look at the interactions between local society and newcomers and the blurring boundaries between religious and non-religious in the ambiguous Italian public space.