Urban politics: Theory and practice

Blair Badcock, Unfairly Structured Cities, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 395, $17.95 (paper).

John Halligan and Chris Paris (eds), Australian Urban Politics: critical perspectives, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1984, pp. 247, $12.95 (paper).     

Theory and practice in urban pottery seriation

The paper discusses the principles and a procedure for analysing urban archaeological sequences using pottery seriation. Interpretations of particular shapes of seriation curve are offered and the problem of residuality is confronted. The method is suggested as having direct relevance for the definition of stratigraphic events and historical activities on urban sites.     

Economic transformation in central and Eastern Europe: The role of regional development

The spatial impact of transition in Central and Eastern Europe is becoming an increasingly important question. Two main areas of regional disparity have emerged—core‐periphery contrasts and a West‐East gradient, with more positive development in core and Western areas respectively. A recent embryonic regional policy response is evident in the Visegrad Four countries, including the creation of a distinct Ministry in Hungary, the designation of assisted areas, and the provision of spatially focused instruments. The institutional infrastructure for regional development remains a central problem, including issues of coordination, strategy, implementation and territorial administrative structures. There is both an economic and political rationale for future development, with some potential for the transfer of western experience.     

Tackling human capital loss in shrinking cities: urban development and secondary school improvement in Eastern Germany

Selective migration, and the loss of highly qualified employees that it implies, is frequently mentioned as a major problem related to urban shrinkage [Fol, S. (2012). Urban shrinkage and socio-spatial disparities: Are the remedies worse than the disease? Built Environment, 38(2), 259–275.] However, despite the fact that research conducted on the issue of shrinking cities has increased, urban development strategies targeting human capital loss are rarely discussed in the literature on urban decline. This paper addresses this research gap. It focuses on the investment in secondary school infrastructure in Eastern Germany and presents the findings of an empirical study that observed how the issue of secondary education improvement was integrated into the urban development strategies of shrinking cities. Two case studies will be discussed in order to highlight initiatives for educational advancement, which directly targeted the problem of human capital loss. On the basis of this ‘reality check', the paper argues that an investment in secondary education is part of a potentially rewarding strategy in dealing with urban shrinkage that may be linked to the concept of social innovation.     

Disastrous hydropower,uneven regional development,and decolonization in India's Eastern Himalayan borderlands

Sikkim, a small Eastern Himalayan state in India has twenty-seven hydropower projects proposed under the Indian Power Ministry's hydropower initiative that envisions the Himalayan region as the country's "future powerhouse" (Dharamadhikary 2008; Kohli, 2011). In 2011, a 6.9 magnitude earthquake rocked Sikkim, the epicenter of which was located eerily close to two under construction dams and the Dzongu reserve, revered as sacred by Sikkim's Indigenous minority Lepchas. Drawing on interviews with Lepcha residents of Dzongu, and state geologists and disaster management officials, I center my analysis on their encounters with disasters and hydropower infrastructure. Building on decolonial theorizations and scholarship on Himalayan borderlands, I argue that disastrous hydropower forms on historical terrains shaped not only by geophysical conditions but also generations of uneven regional development, and the racialized colonial and postcolonial governance of the Eastern Himalayan frontier. In placing ‘disastrous’ as a prefix to hydropower, I follow my interlocutors who implicate state and private developers in producing disaster conditions in Sikkim even as they evade culpability by discursively shifting blame onto the region's “inhospitable terrain” (GoI 2008: 27). I demonstrate that despite key differences in their relation to state power both Dzongu Lepchas and Sikkimese technocrats, forward a materialist, place-based understanding of precarity, differential vulnerability, and uneven regional development. Centering Indigenous and regionalist critiques, I argue that the recent entry of hydropower development in the Eastern Himalayas, conceptualized by colonial authorities as India's “Mongolian Fringe” (Baruah, 2013), requires a closer attention to the entanglements of frontier-making and racialization in India. More broadly, I demonstrate how disastrous hydropower development in a racialized frontier region offers a productive entry into decolonial theorizing in the Indian context.     

由方志理论研究及实践的随意性说开去

首届修志使方志界获得了丰富的理论和实践成果,但在实际工作中仍然存在实践的随意性现象。具体有多种表现,这造成许多有价值的理论成果的浪费,也阻碍了我们工作的进一步发展和提高。     

Metallurgy in Ancient Eastern Asia: Retrospect and Prospects

Metallurgy has been taken as essential to the development of Chinese civilization. Archaeological study has been particularistic and evolutionary, tied to traditional Chinese historiography, and modern Marxist models of social development. Modern studies suggest that metallurgy emerged independently in a ‘core’ area and then spread to ‘peripheral’ areas by way of political expansion and cultural diffusion over many millennia, and that metallurgy was also homegrown. New excavations suggest: multiple early centers of production; that the Chinese case belongs to a regional context; that native sources of ores were significant; that metals were used in several pre-state level societies.     

Entrepreneurial Urbanism After the Crisis: Ireland's “Bad Bank” and the Redevelopment of Dublin's Docklands

The development of Dublin's Docklands was paradigmatic of the speculative storm that overwhelmed the Irish economy between the late 1990s and the crisis of 2008. It also served as a textbook case of entrepreneurial urbanism, with the development agency driving private‐led development on a former industrial and waterfront site. Following the crash, however, the key actors have been decimated: the development agency itself, the developers and the banks. This article traces the re‐emergence of Docklands development in order to analyse post‐crisis urban development. I argue that the latest phase of development reproduces key aspects of entrepreneurial urbanism, but also includes novel aspects. In particular, the National Asset Management Agency, a “bad bank” set up to rescue the financial sector, emerges as a major force. The article contributes to debates on urban development after the crash, and the specific relationship between post‐crisis entrepreneurial urbanism and financialization.     

Beyond the predicted: expanding our understanding of creative agency in international development through practice and policy

This article analyses the framing of creative agency within the field of international development before going on to challenge some of the limitations of that framing. The critique is informed by research undertaken with artist-led initiatives in Central America that reveals the political implications of that framing and, at the same time, points to alternative forms of creative agency at work. The paper highlights the approaches of a number of international development donors whose policies appear able to support more expansive and emancipatory conceptions of agency for artists and artist-led initiatives, and makes a claim for the political importance of such policy platforms, despite some on-going limitations.     

Soil fertility and slope processes in the Western Cumberland Escarpment of Kentucky: influences on the development of horticulture in the Eastern Woodlands

The archaeological record of dry rockshelters in the Red River Valley of eastern Kentucky contains botanical remains of several weedy annual seed-bearing plants that point to the independent development of agriculture during the Late Archaic and Early Woodland Period. The objective of this study is to gather quantitative data through the chemical and physical analysis of soils collected within a valley transect to gain insights into landscape processes and soil fertility that may have played a role in the early development of plant domestication and the location of garden plots in relation to rock shelter sites in the upper Cumberland Plateau region of eastern Kentucky. Soils on upland benches formed in limestones have soil fertility values that are comparable to fertile floodplain soils. Upslope outcrops of calcareous bedrock are contributing basic cations to these bench soils. Additionally, in comparison to other landscape positions these upland soils have high levels of organic carbon, available P and greater C:N ratios. Soil morphology, radiocarbon dates, and archaeological evidence indicate that many of the numerous earthflows and debris flows within the region are Early to Middle Holocene in age. These slides were likely generated by Mid-Holocene climatic shifts in which the frequency and intensity of summer precipitation increased across the southeastern United States. These slope failures may have contributed to the development of plant domestication by creating forest canopy gaps and disturbed soils in which weedy plants thrived.     

Discovering Eastern Europe: Perspectives on WAC's future cooperation with Bulgaria and Eastern European countries

En este artículo yo demuestro la relación entre la formación de WAC como una reacción polítical y moral al régimen de aparteid en Sur áfrica y los cambios en Europa después de la caída del Muro de Berlín. Arqueología como una disciplina en su propio derecho no puede continuar escondida tras objectivismo falso. La necesidad para re-evaluar los problemáticos pasados nacionalista de la mayoría de los países europeos crea un imperative para re-analizar los vínculos entre arqueología y los regímenes nazi y comunista. Es más, yo considero las realidades post-comunistas en Bulgaria y las maneres que los arqueóloqos reaccionan a la comercialización del Control de Herencia Cultural. Yo se?alo áreas que son importantes para cooperación entre el WAC y Bulgaria y otros países de Europa Oriental. Lo más importante son los esfuerzos cooperativos entre el WAC y los arqueólogos de los Balcanes para humanizar la disciplina. Durante los 1990s fue obvio que a través de sus “representaciones visuales” la arqueología contribuyó enormemente a mantener las actitutes nacionalistas que promovieron la guerra en los Balcanes.

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Résumé Dans cet article, je considère la relation entre la création du WAC, comme réaction morale et politique, le régime de l'apartheid en Afrique du Sud et les changements en Europe après la chute du mur de Berlin. L'archéologie, en tant que discipline dans son plein droit, ne peut plus se cacher derrière un faux objectivisme. Le besoin de ré-évaluer le passé nationaliste, trouble de la plupart des Etats Européens crée comme impératif le réexamen des liens entre l'archéologie et les régimes Nazi et Communiste. De plus, j'examine les réalités du post-comunisme en Bulgarie et la fa?on dont les archéologues réagissent à la commercalisation de la gestion du Patrimoine Culturel. Je souligne les domaines qui sont importants pour la coopération entre le WAC et la Bulgarie comme d'autres pays d'Europe de l'Est. Le plus important sont les efforts coopératifs entre le WAC et les archéologues des Balkans pour humaniser la discipline. Dans les années 90, il est devenu évident qu'à travers ses représentations visuelles l'archéologie a contribué énormément à maintenir des attitudes nationalistes qui ont favorisé la guerre dans les Balkans.

     

The Suakin Dilemma: Conservation and Heritage Management in Eastern Sudan

Abstract

A four-step process for the stabilization of fragile, exposed historic adobe structures has been developed. The structures are first stabilized by consolidation with an alkoxysilane. Protection for the tops of walls is provided by capping with mud made with an acrylic polymer emulsion instead of water. A similar modified mud is then sprayed over the entire structure to provide a veneer that does not significantly change the appearance of the wall surface. Finally, when dry, this is covered with a polysiloxane water repellent. Small test sections of walls of the adobe ruins at Fort Selden, New Mexico, USA, were subjected to various treatment combinations. After two winters, it was found that the four-step procedure gave the best results.