The right to Belfast City Centre: From ethnocracy to liberal multiculturalism?

This paper outlines a longitudinal study of struggles to control the public space of Belfast City Centre, the capital of Northern Ireland and a city divided by the competing political aspirations of British unionists and Irish nationalists. While the City Centre was once proscribed to nationalist groups, since 1993 nationalist groups have claimed equal use of this ‘sacred space’, once the spatial preserve of unionism. I examine this opening access of the City Centre in terms a shift from an ‘ethnocratic’ form of citizenship to one inflected by liberal multiculturalism, from one of ethnic exclusion to one informed by forms of power-sharing between nationalists and unionists. While many commentators have critiqued this form of conflict management for institutionalizing sectarianism and facilitating zero-sum conceptions of space, I argue that current strategies of creating a ‘shared space’ can be critically viewed as a successful form of liberal multiculturalism.     

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

EDITOR'S NOTE: From July 19-27, upon invitation from theChina Association for Conservation and Development of Tibetan Culture,a group of eight Indian journalists visited Beijing and Tibet.Upon home, they wrote stories on their visit. With their agreement,we publish some of these stones without making any changes.     

Public parks in Ghent's City life: From expression to emancipation?

With three empirically based and theoretically framed case studies, this paper contributes to the understanding of how public spaces, more specifically urban parks, can mediate between different subgroups of society, such as women, seniors, gays and skaters, and how gender related connotations play an important role in these respects. This study draws upon a comparative analysis of three parks in Ghent, Belgium. The elements of analysis are the physical morphology, history, signification and the use by different kinds of park visitors. The article shows a new approach to design of public spaces.     

Industry builds the city: the suburbanization of manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940

The San Francisco Bay Area demonstrates how industrial dispersal had created the sprawling form of the American metropolis. Neither change in transport modes nor residential suburbanization is principally responsible for shaping the outward spiral of urbanization. Manufacturing began its outward march from the outset of the city's industrialization, establishing peripheral nodes of employment and working class residence within San Francisco, then beyond the city limits in South San Francisco and especially the East Bay. The main cause of decentralization has been industrial shifts; the outbreak of new activities in new places, normally in the form of industrial districts at various spatial scales. A second cause has been the orchestration of development by business leaders through property ownership and political manoeuvring guided by a general vision of metropolitan expansion, whether in co-operation or competition with one another.     

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.     

From English to British liberty, 1550–1800

This essay was written for a symposium on Dutch conceptual history in a comparative European perspective. The concept in question here is liberty, and the context first English and then (following the creation of the United Kingdom in 1707) British. What follows primarily addresses two themes, both challenging. First, what role did the concept of liberty play over an exceptionally long and turbulent period of English history punctuated by two revolutions? Second, what relationship existed during this period between English and Dutch understandings and experience of this concept?     

STRUCTURES SOCIO-DEMOGRAPHIQUES ET REVOLUTION INDUSTRIELLE: Verviers, 1806–1846

Abstract

The author constructed measures of market structure for the music recording industry for the years 1890 to 1988. This measure can be used both to test a variety of hypotheses about the industry itself and to serve as part of a broader study of culture-based industries. For example, data were used to test a hypothesis relating market structure to the diversity of products issued by the industry (P. J. Alexander 1997). The main finding was that a moderately concentrated market structure provided greater product diversity than an atomistic or monopolistic market structure. Whereas census data and previous studies of the industry provide some information about industry structure, these sources are severely limited in scope and detail. Finally, similar rankings in other culture-based industries (e.g., broadcast television, radio, cable television) might provide a useful index of concentration in those industries.