Planning Under a Scottish Parliament: A Missed Opportunity?

Devolution has naturally led to expectations of legislative and policy divergence. Given its largely unitary nature across the UK such anticipation has also been a characteristic of planning debates. In Wales and Northern Ireland there is evidence of some progress in developing planning to better meet the needs of those areas. In Scotland, however, there have been far more modest achievements to date. Far from charting a new course for planning through legislative and policy change the trajectory for planning in Scotland post-devolution has been very similar to that south of the border. This article explores the changes to planning under the Scottish Parliament and discusses some of the reasons for the apparent lack of ambition and progress.     

‘Enormous Opportunities’ and ‘Hot Frontiers’: Sub-Saharan Africa in U.S. Grand Strategy, 2001-Present

Abstract

This article argues that, in the 21st century, there has been a significant turnaround in the US approach to Sub-Saharan Africa. No longer is the region viewed solely as the site of human tragedy and internal wars where Washington has no tangible interests. Instead, US policymakers have increasingly viewed this part of Africa as a site of valuable commercial, geopolitical, and security interests—with particular emphasis on petroleum reserves, the market potential of its growing population, and its apparent locus as a site of transnational Islamist terrorism. Sub-Saharan Africa is now considered in grand strategic terms. Unintended consequences of US intervention are already visible, however; as it integrates the region into its global strategic calculus, the United States has begun to repeat mistakes made in other key regions of the world.     

‘Science in the Hands of Love’: British Evangelical Missionaries and Colonial Development in Africa,c. 1940–60

During the era of colonial development, the Church Missionary Society (CMS) and the London Missionary Society (LMS) revitalised their work by taking advantage of the 1940 Colonial Development and Welfare Act to uplift British Africa. These evangelical organisations did not simply appropriate governmental ideas of development, but formulated their own concepts based on the incarnational theology of the ‘whole man’ with body and soul. In implementing their developmental policies, these evangelicals promoted Christ's example of a ‘servant’ to guide missionary conduct as they encountered increased African criticism of colonialism following the Second World War. Both organisations shifted to focusing more closely on souls rather than bodies when African independence movements strengthened during the mid and late 1950s in hopes that Christian ideology would steer Africans towards Christian democracies. By 1960, the CMS and LMS stressed their relationship within the ecumenical Church in their efforts to emancipate themselves from their colonial ties. Through examining missionary discourse on colonial development, this article reveals not only the complexity of development discourse, but also the various ways in which evangelical missionary organisations sought relevance within the context of the Cold War, the rise of the welfare and expert state, and decolonisation.     

Claiming ‘creativity’: discourse, ‘doctrine’ or participatory practice?

Drawing on empirical work with a third sector community organisation in the UK and the young NEET adults (16–20 years old, ‘not in employment or education or training’) they ‘creatively’ work with, this paper explores the practices and meanings of creativity as they emerged through a project funded through public and third sector organisations. The paper argues that there is an increasing disjuncture between creativity as a process or method, evidenced in the approaches, practices and ethos of the community organisation I worked with, and the notion of creativity as productive outcome seen in wider policy. This is having an impact on the practices and values of community organisations, particularly as they are pushed to rationalise processes as a result of austerity measures. Indeed, in the era of wider public and third sector cuts, creativity as a process or method is becoming harder to sustain on a day-to-day basis.     

Fashioning a City of Culture: ‘life and place changing’ or ‘12 month party’?

The current trend in public policy is to valorise culture as a tool for social, economic and political transformation. This paper offers a direct contribution to debates that seek to unpack and problematise cities of culture. We adopt a more circumspect approach towards some aspects of the anticipated transformative powers of culture, and in particular the tendency to fetishize the economics of culture. Our empiricism is grounded in a detailed study of Derry~Londonderry as the inaugural UK City of Culture in 2013. We question whether City of Culture was ‘life and place changing’ or a ’12 month party’, and reveal different interpretations of success. In our view there is more potential in viewing culture as a peace resource for overcoming divisions in a socially and culturally segregated city, rather than its ability to tackle entrenched economic problems. Moving beyond the specifics of the case study we also provide lessons for future cities of culture and more generalizable insights for the academic and policy literatures.     

‘Confusion,Heaven and Honour’: Being Chinese in South Africa

Abstract

This review article investigates the state and development of overseas Chinese studies, in both its global and South African context. It points to the common difficulties related to research in this field and indicates how these have been addressed. It argues that only since the latter half of the twentieth century, both the reading population and publishers in South Africa, have become more receptive to the voice of the ‘other’. While comparatively little work has been published on the Chinese in South Africa, the three major works that have appeared reflect on a little known but integral part of our multicultural society. A brief outline of the range of work done on this topic provides the context for a closer assessment of the most recently published sociological study.     

Sticky stories,fluid narratives,or vanishing tales: The fate of ‘nations’ in a globalised world

In the scientific methodology of Karl Popper the following deductive sequence is stressed: initial problems, tentative solutions, error elimination, resultant problems. This sequence produces two difficulties, concerning the source of the initial problems and the criteria for testing the proposed solutions. Discussion of these problems is relevant to geography, where they have arisen as in any other science. Particularly relevant to geography is Popper's scheme of the “three worlds”: World 1, objective reality; World 2, subjective consciousness and appraisal; World 3, objective knowledge. Geographers study not merely World 1 but rather its logical articulation in World 3. Acceptance of such a scheme helps to reduce not only any supposed dichotomy between physical and human geography but also any supposed division between field workers and so‐called “armchair” geographers. The open‐ended approach of Poppsr's deductive sequence leads naturally to the problems of prediction and planning. The Popperian philosophy of science is finally briefly contrasted with that of T. S. Kuhn when the paradigm concept is called in question.     

‘Ain’t I a feminist?’: the politics of gender violence,anti-violence,and education in Oakland,CA

This article focuses on the ways gender violence politics become reduced to liberal narratives of victimization in contemporary U.S. deployment of feminist identity politics, within academic and activist discourses. Such victimization narratives, I argue, exploit suffering and reproduce social stratification between a growing middle class in the academy and poor black people outside of it. This article draws from moments in California’s Bay area when questions of feminism, gender violence, and anti-violence in schools arose. In each case, left feminists had an opportunity to reshape these questions towards new political paradigms and new academic discourses. Instead, amidst the ‘safety’ of left discourse and practice, each moment confronted contradictory silences that called into question such ‘safety’ and made generative political movement impossible. I analyze the dynamics of this silencing as constitutive of the co-optation of feminist identity politics within a capitalist university that reproduces an oppressive race and class order. We face a problem of language to adequately explain and disrupt the incapacity for collective social change that victimhood, identity politics, and reformism have produced. Each instance I present function as moments of history making from which we may reflect and strategize forward movement against capitalist oppression and racial dehumanization.     

William Shakespeare’s New Place: investing in,or inheriting a legacy?

SUMMARY: New Place is the name of the house that William Shakespeare purchased in 1597 and the place in which he died in 1616. The house was constructed in Stratford-upon-Avon over a century previously but had disappeared by 1759, leaving only an empty gap in the street frontage. How much time Shakespeare spent there has long been debated, but recent excavation and analysis of the surviving evidence has led to the notion that New Place was carefully chosen by Shakespeare to be his primary residence and the place to live with his family and compose much of his later writing. The importance of Hugh Clopton, the former owner and builder of New Place, and the welcome associations that his name brought to the property, is also debated here. Shakespeare’s motives, his pursuit of status, desire for investment and obligation to his family are all explored through the use of archaeological data and the historical evidence for the house.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.     

‘Eadem,sed aliter’: Arthur Schopenhauer as a Critic of ‘Progress’

Summary

Scholars have tended to overlook the political import of the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860). This is perhaps unsurprising, since Schopenhauer himself was not a political philosopher and wrote relatively little about political matters. But Schopenhauer's near-silence on political topics should warrant our attention: why would a systematic philosopher, who made lasting contributions in metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, devote so little attention to politics? Connecting his political thought with his philosophy of history, I argue that Schopenhauer can best be regarded as a critic of the idea of progress, especially ‘progress’ conceived of as national development or the growth of the state.     

‘We or them,’ ‘you and I,’ and ‘I’: spaces of intimacy and (not so) public displays of affection in Hanoi

Through an exploratory study of romantic heterosexual couples in a public park situated in Hanoi’s outskirts, this article offers a conceptual rethinking of a western understanding of the park’s public/private dichotomy which can then be used to better appreciate how these categories are evolving in western urbanizing societies and their impacts on gender relations. By developing a relational, spatialized understanding of how young romantic couples justify their ‘transgressive’ displays of sexual intimacy in public spaces in contemporary urban Vietnam, this article focuses on how couples, especially women, manage their visibility. This analysis confronts the public civilizational discourse on Vietnamese sexual restraint by analyzing how young couples justify their romantic displays by creating an intimate space within a public environment. This space of visible intimacy is justified through their commitment to marriage. For the individuals involved in these romantic couples, visibility is justified, particularly for young women, through the enjoyment of a newly gained sexual autonomy as they migrate to the city.     

Feminicide as ‘act’ and ‘process’: a geography of gendered violence in Oaxaca

Feminicide in Mexico is most notoriously associated with the serial deaths of women in and around Ciudad Juárez. A 2005 congressional investigation expanded, nonetheless, the geographical scope of feminicide, arguing that the phenomenon was present throughout the country. One location that was identified early on as also experiencing a high rate of feminicide was the state of Oaxaca, in the southern part of Mexico. Inscribed within this shifting geopolitical terrain, this article draws on an understanding of feminicide as both act and process in order to offer a critical portrayal of feminicide in Oaxaca. Beginning with a discussion of the profiles of feminicide in Oaxaca, the analysis moves out to explore the multifaceted processes that enable feminicide to occur. In so doing, we also explore how feminicide intertwines with other forms of social and political violence in Oaxaca. From an ethical-moral terrain, this article joins a broader movement in certain corners of feminist geography that is concerned with ‘making bodies count’ and the politics of witnessing acts of violence.     

Archives and Heritage in Singapore: The Development of ‘Reflections at Bukit Chandu’, a World War II Interpretive Centre

On 15 February 2002 a new World War II interpretive centre was opened in Singapore. A colonial bungalow was redeveloped by the National Archives of Singapore to commemorate the Malay Regiment and particularly the officers and soldiers who made a heroic stand against Japanese forces in one of the last battles before the fall of Singapore. This centre, Reflections at Bukit Chandu, has significance in terms of local heritage development, public memory of war, national education initiatives, and also in relation to the changing role of archives in Singapore. This paper serves as an exploration of this heritage site and uses this as a starting point for considering public history in Singapore and importantly a new direction for the National Archives of Singapore, as it played the key role in developing this site.     

Towards a Language of ‘Europe’: History,Rhetoric, Community

From Herder to Benedict Anderson, language and nation have been at the centre of ideas about (imagined) community. This hypothesis, however, poses a problem for analysing ideas about Europe. How can we understand “Europe” as a concept or form of identity when language and nationality are considered the foundation of imagined communities and loyalties? This article addresses this difficulty. It uses J. G. A. Pocock’s definition of “sub-languages” to suggest that one can investigate the rhetorical strategies, images and vocabularies with which texts articulate ideas about Europe. These sub-languages evoke imagined communities, most obviously when texts name and identify particular groups of people as “Europeans.” But by using images and rhetorics about Europe, these texts also appeal to a readership that comprehends—even if it does not fully accept—certain assumptions about the continent. In this way, texts evoke an imagined community of readers who purportedly share a similar way of understanding Europe, or who can perhaps be persuaded to think about it in similar terms. These processes are historically particular, and so the article concludes with concrete examples. It focuses on how early-nineteenth-century philhellenes evoked a European imagined community to solicit support for the Greek Revolution (1821–32).     

Vulnerability,Control and Oil Palm in Sarawak: Globalization and a New Era?

In the post logging era, Sarawak is being restructured to make way for large‐scale oil palm plantations. In this restructuring, the vulnerabilities of particular areas are being used in a wider battle to control production, particularly for export. Native customary lands, considered ‘unproductive’ or ‘idle’ by officials, are the target of oil palm plantation development under a new land development programme called Konsep Baru (New Concept). This article looks at the contradictions generated by the complex process of laying claims to ‘idle’ native customary land and focuses on Dayak organizing initiatives in northern Sarawak, Malaysia.     

Yeats,Samhain, and the aesthetics of cultural nationalism: ‘a supreme moment in the life of a nation’

Together, in the plays and essays published in the 1903 issue of Samhain, William Butler Yeats assembled writings that endorse his vision of cultural nationalism in that they stress the possibilities of an artistic regeneration that that has the power to reconcile perceived exclusive strata within Irish society and also to herald a new age not only for Irish culture but for the Irish nation. Yeats, in his cultural nationalism, ultimately vested faith in an Ascendancy tradition, defined not by birth as much as by a willingness to surrender not just political ambitions but all ambition to that of the artist.