Gardens and the Bush: Gardeners’ Attitudes,Garden Types and Invasives

Garden plants that invade native vegetation can be a threat to native ecosystems. The species composition of gardens near the bush in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia is shown to relate to environmental variation and the attitudes of gardeners to their recreation, to native plants and to the bush. Four types of gardens are discriminated: the species‐poor shrub garden; the local native garden; the woodland garden; and the gardenesque. A group of gardeners who valued functional gardens, and the hard work in creating a garden, largely produced gardenesque outcomes. A strongly conservationist group of gardeners had native, woodland or shrub gardens. A group of gardeners who valued romance and privacy largely had woodland gardens. A small group of gardeners who liked gardens to create themselves, and preferred to minimize the act of gardening, tended to the shrub garden outcome. Plant species that invade the bush are least frequent in the more manicured shrub and gardenesque styles of garden than in the more informal local native and woodland gardens, in a dissonance between expressed attitudes and outcomes. Most of the most invasive weeds in the bush are shown to be independent of their occurrence in adjacent gardens, suggesting that integrated control programs involving both all gardeners within dispersal range, and bush managers, are necessary. The existence of a small number of respondents who see benefits in environmental weeds in their gardens, suggests that such programs would be ineffective without regulation, a solution offered by no respondent. However, regulation might be ineffective without community understanding, the raising of which was the main solution suggested by the interviewed gardeners.     

Memories of vacant lots: how and why residents used informal urban green space as children and teenagers in Brisbane,Australia, and Sapporo,Japan

Contact with nature is vital for the development of children and teenagers. In the past, informal urban green spaces (IGS) such as vacant lots appear to have been used for such purposes. We need to better understand how previous generations used IGS to make sure young people today can also enjoy its social, mental, emotional and physical health benefits. This study quantitatively compared adult residents' memories of IGS use in their childhood and teenage years in two geographically and culturally distinct cities: Brisbane, Australia, and Sapporo, Japan. The results showed most respondents (>70%) remembered using IGS in the past, and preferred it over other green space because it was easily accessible. Most (>70%) recalled experiencing no problems (e.g. danger of injury) when using IGS, a contrast to recently increasing parental concern for children's safety. Such factors may limit present IGS use and prevent it from fulfilling the important role it played for previous generations' recreation.     

A geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effects of contaminated sites

While the links between contaminated sites and adverse effects on human health and well‐being are being increasingly recognised, some argue that the magnitude of the health problem is inadequately addressed because it is largely invisible. Health geographies literature has sought to highlight this invisibility by focusing on the link between contaminated sites and health. This study adds to health geographies by presenting unique insights into the geography of residents' worry about the disruptive effect of environmental contamination on health and well‐being. It analyses a sample of residents (n = 485) living near 13 contaminated sites across Australia. Ordinal logistic regression analysis of closed‐format survey questions was combined with coding of open‐ended survey questions to reveal the geography of residents' worry about contamination from nearby sites. First, the study explores some of the main relationships between residents, their environs, and contaminants from nearby source sites, which determines their levels of worry: residents' demographics, residents' proximity to sites, contaminant boundaries and borders, and type of contaminant. Second, the study investigates how worry affects residents' health and well‐being, ranging from effects on their personal functioning through to their sense of ontological security, which depends in part upon their perceptions of contaminants' impacts. Despite having identified a range of diverse and negative effects of worry about contamination on residents, we found that worry for contamination can also prompt coping strategies and problem‐solving, reinforcing the need for more research on this subject.     

WHOSE KNOWLEDGE,WHOSE POWER? ETHICS IN URBAN REGENERATION PROJECTS WITH COMMUNITIES

This paper examines “moments of residents' awareness” and their ethics in three planning processes, each representing different relations between local and professional knowledge in the course of the three‐year regeneration project in Meonot Yam neighborhood, Bat Yam, Israel. This new terminology emphasizes how nuanced relations between various types of knowledge better explain the challenges faced by planners and residents in regeneration projects. These moments reflect residents' empowerment, challenging the binary view of professional/powerful versus local/ powerless knowledge that characterizes modernist thinking. The paper proposes that in such complicated processes it helps to analyze moments of power/knowledge transformation, from which one can learn that conflict and disagreement, and not only consensus, can lead to residents' empowerment.     

Sense of place and tourism business development

This study is to investigate the role of sense of place on residents' participation in tourism-related businesses. Emphasis was placed on understanding whether and how sense of place influenced people's decisions to operate a tourism-related business. Thus, this framework and the empirical validation presented are the result of triangulating quantitative survey data (n = 118) tourism business operators and follow-up with qualitative interviews (n = 72) respondents in Tai O, Hong Kong, the linkages between sense of place and small and medium business enterprises (SMTEs) were explored. The findings revealed that sense of place played an important role in encouraging move-out residents and their descendants to return and participate in a tourism-related business. Sense of place also influenced some people's decisions regarding the type of business they were involved in and the manner in which they operated their business. The findings suggested that operators of tourism-related businesses who have a strong sense of place, whether local residents or outsiders, can contribute to preserving a community's culture and for sustainable tourism development.     

Residents' Spatial Knowledge of Neighborhood Continuity and Form

This paper discusses residents' cognition of neighborhood form in terms of linear-based and areal-based knowledge structures. Cognitive and behavioral data are used to create surfaces of residents' familiarity with, and experience of, a neighborhood in San Diego, California. The complexity of the data required the topological and relational sophistication of an ARC / INFO-based geographic information system. Cellular-based data were collected to identify place-specific measures of residents' familiarity and experience within the community. The cellular data facilitated aggregation of residents' cognitive surfaces as absolute spaces, and also relative to their homes. Spatial autocorrelation and directional autoregression techniques are used in association with standard cognitive mapping to establish the continuity and form of residents' familiarity and experience with their neighborhood. The findings suggest that there is a structural difference in the spatial familiarity of residents who perceive their neighborhood as an area and those who perceive it as a network. North-south and east-west street networks played an important part as the basis for both linear-based and areal-based knowledge, but noncardinal directions were more prominent in the familiarity surfaces of those residents who had an areal-based perception of neighborhood form. In terms of theories of spatial knowledge acquisition, the findings suggest that (i) there may not be a direct sequential link between linear-based and areal-based knowledge structures, (ii) knowledge of a complex network may not be sufficient to provide areal-based knowledge, and (iii) an areal-based knowledge structure does not necessarily comprise an understanding of survey procedures.     

Engaging with risk (or not): shared responsibility for biosecurity surveillance and the role of community gardens

Governance of risks to native flora and fauna and agriculture from disease and pests increasingly emphasises the importance of a ‘shared responsibility’ for biosecurity. Few studies, however, have examined factors that influence stakeholders' engagement with such risks and responsibilities, particularly in community, rather than agricultural, settings. In this paper, we focus on a group of stakeholders in a context of heightened regional biosecurity activity, in northern Queensland, Australia. We explore the role that community garden actors may or may not play in biosecurity surveillance. Through interviews with 16 community garden group leaders and local government representatives, we unpack external social factors that contributed to stakeholders' engagement, unengagement, or disengagement with and from biosecurity risks. These factors included institutional characteristics such as land tenure and the presence or absence of management policies and guidelines. However, we found that less formal institutional characteristics such as social networks played a greater role in shaping stakeholder engagement. Unengaged stakeholders were typically unaware of risks posed by plant pests and diseases and had limited network connections to relevant government agencies but expressed an interest in learning and participating in biosecurity surveillance networks. Disengaged stakeholders were more knowledgeable of biosecurity risks and had established network connections but expressed a low interest in or willingness to report a potential biosecurity threat. This case study provides insights into important social dimensions of governing risk among stakeholders and offers recommendations to improve stakeholder engagement within biosecurity surveillance networks.     

‘ORGANIC TEMPER’ AND THE EARLY NEOLITHIC POTTERY PRODUCTION: INTERPRETATIONAL CHALLENGES

Well-preserved plant remains found in clay bodies of Early Neolithic pottery of Southeastern Europe have been largely understudied. The characteristics and provenance of this ‘organic temper’ remain mostly unknown, making interpretations obscure. Based on a range of research methods, this article explores the macro and micro plant remains within the pottery clays, considering such aspects as the use of domesticated versus wild plants and actual functional temper versus organic inclusions as background noise. This innovative approach is applied to explore three different Early Neolithic Balkan sites, demonstrating the importance in distinguishing between (a) deliberate addition of selected temper as a technological prerequisite; (b) sporadic occurrence of plant parts in (domestic) areas where pottery was made, (c) natural characteristics of the local clays containing organics and used as raw materials, and (d) plant use pointing towards more specific pottery-making techniques. Possible misinterpretations and pitfalls are discussed in using the applied integrated methodology, thus revealing crucial details on the variability of the technological approaches applied during the Early Neolithic of Southeastern Europe.     

The Resinous Cargo of the Java Sea Wreck

A number of blocks of resinous materials were found in the cargo of a 12th‐ to 13th‐century shipwreck, discovered in the late 1980s in the Java Sea near the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Java and excavated in 1996. These well‐preserved blocks presumably were trade materials used for religious, medicinal, cosmetic, decorative or practical purposes. Such materials, derived from plants and termed exudates, generally include frankincense, myrrh, ‘gum benjamin’, liquidambar, dragon's blood, dammar, copal and amber. The source of the cargo resin could not be determined from the site. Investigation by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has revealed that the molecular structure corresponds to that of modern resin from the plant family Dipterocarpaceae, known in trade as dammar and closely resembling Group B copal and amber. Other molecular classes of exudates are excluded. Such materials are not present in the Middle East, which then cannot be their source. The NMR spectra differ from those of Group B samples from Australia, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, but resemble those from India or Japan. The spectra indicate that the saline environment had a similar effect on the molecular structure to heating and aging.     

Evaluation of community planning and life of senior cohousing projects in northern European countries1

Cohousing schemes were evolved as alternative housing to reduce housework for working women, and to reduce loneliness of elderly people by promoting active mutual relationship with community residents in northern European countries. This article discusses how residents manage their life in senior cohousing projects in Sweden and Denmark. The purpose of this study is to investigate residents' life satisfaction connected with demographic characteristics of residents, physical environment and common activities in the senior cohousing communities, so that it could offer usable information for the establishment of new senior cohousing projects in other countries, as well as an empirical evaluation of the existing projects in Scandinavian countries themselves. Important variables influential to residents' life satisfaction are also discussed in order to improve senior citizens' quality of life. The methods used for the study are literature review, interviews, field trips and questionnaire. Nine hundred and thirty‐five postal questionnares were sent to 28 senior cohousing communities throughout Denmark and Sweden. Of those 536 replies were collected and analysed by SPSS program using frequency, mean and Chi‐square test. As a result, it was found out that most of the respondents are healthy, 70‐year‐olds, and satisfied with their current living in the community. The majority of them also would like to strongly recommend others to move to senior cohousing schemes to improve quality of life in their later years. Residents' intensive concern about building location and design is a noteworthy reminder for designers and architects as well as for professionals and decision‐makers who work in the elderly welfare sector.     

Local government perceptions of water related issues in rural Australia

Water supply has long been regarded as a limiting resource in the further development of Australia. Active management has been necessary in both more densely settled areas and in areas of moderate settlement density but low rainfall such as the Murray-Darling system. The recently released Water 2000 Report details current knowledge about the quality and distribution of these resources. Following on from this Report this article presents perceived problems with water quantity and quality (in particular, salinisation) obtained from a survey sent to rural local governments in late 1982. The survey requested information on the relevance of twenty-two land use issues, known from earlier work to be representative of common concerns throughout Australia. Public perceptions were remarkably similar to the results of the Water 2000 Report. Water quantity/quality and salinisation issues were the sixth and seventh most commonly cited issues throughout Australia, but were of much greater concern in specific areas. Tasmanian local governments reported major problems of water supply, those in southwest Western Australia exhibited a very high level of concern with dry land salinisation, local governments in the Murray-Darling Drainage Division reported concern with salinisation, droughts, floods and general water quality, while local governments in the Gulf of Carpentaria Drainage Division consistently cited flooding as being a major problem. Information from surveys such as this, and others where the respondents are the end-users, need to be combined with expert opinion in order to increase the effectiveness of the management of our water resources.     

Living in commodified history: constructing class identities in neotraditional neighbourhoods

This paper examines how residents of neotraditional neighbourhoods in the Netherlands socially construct a ‘classed’ place identity and what role the historicised architecture plays within that process. Given that place identity is constructed through social and cultural practices, the paper argues that residents' consumption of historicised environment is bound up with drawing symbolic boundaries that have been explored here by analysing residents' narratives. Three prominent types of narratives were found: (1) residents' locational choice, (2) their aesthetic judgement of the residential environment and (3) the way they use it. Through these layered narratives, all interviewees appear to use historicised aesthetics to classify themselves as part of a valued social category. However, the way of boundary drawing took several forms, based either on fostering moral judgements of social behaviour accompanied by sophisticated efforts to keep neighbourhoods' historicised image unchanged, or by conducting cultural practices shared with fellow residents by which ‘the other’ living outside the neighbourhood is ‘bracketed out’ symbolically and socially.     

This Land is My Land: Oklahoma's Changing Vernacular Regions

Over 1000 long-term local residents responded to a survey of Oklahoma's vernacular regions. They indicated that their local regions had changed names over time. A majority of respondents in more than 40 of Oklahoma's 77 counties recall that their localities were called "Indian Territory" or some more specific variation on that theme in the past. Because "Indian Territory" was a term produced by the Federal government, this suggests that the central government exercised substantial control over the toponymy of that time. Other institutions currently dominate the state's toponymic process. Respondents in almost one-half of Oklahoma's counties refer to their local regions with names generated by the state's Department of Tourism and Recreation. Residents in a small number of multi-county regions employ terms derived from their local cultural and economic histories, and others inagroup of single-county regions use extremely localized terms. As a result, it appears that Oklahoma's state bureaucracy has become the dominant toponymic force among local residents, displacing the once-powerful Federal government. Interestingly, Oklahomans now recognize more locally-defined regions than they did in the past as well.     

Troubled water? Acquiescence,conflict, and the politics of place in watershed management

Controversy surrounds proposed revisions in access and recreation policy at central Massachusetts' Wachusett Reservoir, a crucial source of drinking water for metropolitan Boston. This policy conflict illuminates a broader tension between rural and exurban resource-supply areas and metropolitan areas that are committed to resource extraction and urban growth. Boston dominates the reservoir region and extracts its resources, while less powerful local residents disagree with and sometimes protest against policies detrimental or perceived to be detrimental to their interests. Despite this tension, data gathered from surveys at the reservoir, supplementary interviews, archival research, and attendance at public meetings reveal that many potential sites of acrimony are characterized by positive attempts to reclaim place rather than direct opposition to outside domination. Findings suggest that residents in the reservoir region have attached their own values to the reservoir, including both rational valuation of specific non-drinking-water benefits and non-instrumental valuation of the reservoir as an integral part of residents' lifeworlds. Although tensions persist between Boston and the Wachusett region, area residents' complex valuation of the reservoir as a space of utility and a place of everyday life suggests opportunities for consensual resource coalitions and initiatives.     

The garden city idea in Australia

Ebenezer Howard's Garden City idea occupies an important place in the history of British planning, and in various guises it made a significant international impact. A preliminary exploration of the history of the idea in Australia is attempted, focussing on its meaning as a schema for social reform and on its impact on the landscape. The first two ‘phases’ saw the rise of ‘garden city principles’ to describe a model house and garden suburbia which was to redeem urban Australia. In the 1920s these ‘town planning principles’ were used mainly to sell land, but in a fourth phase beginning in the early 1930s they were refined into neighbourhood planning ideas, combining with previously neglected concepts of the satellite town and green belt to approach more closely the original vision of a garden city. This reformist text emerged as town planning was finally accorded professional respectability; however, with the ambiguous exception of Canberra, the promise of neither has been realized.     

The UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Program in Australia: constraints and opportunities for localized sustainable development

Since their creation under the auspices of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Man and the Biosphere (MAB) Program in 1976, biosphere reserves have provided an international framework for linking protected areas with their associated working landscapes. In Australia, twelve biosphere reserves were added to the World Network between 1977 and 1982. That initial flurry of activity has been followed by twenty-five years of limited interest and development in biosphere reserves in this country, although evidence suggests that new energies are being directed to it. After sketching the origins of the biosphere reserve concept and its central tenets, we explore those environmental, cultural and institutional factors that may be promoting renewed interest in the program. We then review the initial implementation and current status of the Australian Biosphere Reserve Program. Factors supporting the limited success that exists in the program in Australia are highlighted, and the new form of biosphere reserve is illustrated with reference to Australia's recent and only urban biosphere reserve, at the Mornington Peninsula, in the state of Victoria. We speculate that prospects for biosphere reserves in Australia are brighter because of the provision for biosphere reserves under the Commonwealth of Australia's Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (DEH 1999), the conceptual relevance of the biosphere reserve to bioregional and catchment management more generally and the continued success of existing model biosphere reserves.     

Cultivating belonging: refugees,urban gardens,and placemaking in the Midwest,U.S.A.

In the aftermath of failed urban renewal projects and the decline of central cities, community gardens have become increasingly popular in urban planning, public health, and environmental circles. However, gardens still occupy a tenuous and contradictory position in the city. While urban gardens are bounded spaces, they are also dynamic places where different understandings of (agri)culture, land use, and belonging are enacted and contested. In this paper, we identify three distinct ways in which gardens in a small Midwestern city are used and experienced by refugee gardeners and local officials: the material garden, the imagined garden, and the community’s garden. The material garden, embodied in the biophysical aspects of the soil, seeds, and resources needed to cultivate plants, shapes what can grow in the garden and the transformations by refugee agricultural practices. While planners tend to see urban gardens as temporary spaces that can promote limited pathways of migrant incorporation, gardeners practice, and imagine gardening differently through social, cultural, and economic interactions. We argue that these practices challenge traditional understandings of nature and urban planning, and can promote inclusive understandings of agriculture, cities, and sustainability, embodied in the ideal of the community’s garden.     

Philosophers,Naturalists, and Antipodean Encounters, 1748-1803

This article addresses a complex nexus of discourse and praxis: varying Enlightenment visions of Man; emergent ideas about human differences; and encounters between European scientific voyagers and Indigenous people in New Holland (Australia) and Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) at the start of the nineteenth century. Discursively, I trace two strands of ‘anthropological’ thinking. One, philosophical and economic, is epitomized in French and Scottish stadial theory. The other is naturalist and culminated in Buffon's natural history of man. Both were appropriated from the late eighteenth century by a nascent science of race. With respect to praxis, I chart the reciprocal impact of metropolitan theory, antipodean experience and local agency by selective comparison of materials produced by the voyages of Matthew Flinders and Nicolas Baudin in Australian waters in 1801–1803.     

Reserve Selection for Nature Conservation in South Australia: Past,Present and Future

This paper re‐examines the chronology of reserve selection in South Australia in the context of changing social, political and economic attitudes. The effect of these changing attitudes on reserve selection in South Australia is assessed in the light of the principles of a comprehensive, adequate and representative (CAR) National Reserve System. The outcome of reserve selection in South Australia is the establishment of a vast network of reserves in the arid regions and many fragmented and small reserves in the agricultural regions. It is likely that the remnant ecological system in the agricultural regions is not representative of the regional environmental diversity and that land clearance has precluded the establishment of a CAR reserve system in South Australia. The rate of reserve selection for nature conservation has decreased over the past decade as the opportunities for reserve acquisition decrease. It is concluded that large‐scale and strategic revegetation will be required to facilitate a CAR reserve system in South Australia.     

NEW DATA ON THE TECHNOLOGY OF FAIENCE PRODUCTION IN CENTRAL EUROPE IN THE EARLY BRONZE AGE

New data on faience production technologies in central Europe come from an analysis of 12 faience beads from an Early Bronze Age cemetery in Poland. The beads were tested with the EPMA method. Altogether 65 measurements were made. In terms of morphology, the artifacts are all the same, but they differ in microstructure and chemical composition. For some a mixed alkali flux was used, for others soda-rich plant ashes. Even so, all of the beads seem to have been made from local raw materials in central Europe (soda-rich plant ashes could have come from plants growing near one of the mainland salt sources, which are frequent, for example, in south-eastern Poland).