The Meaning of Heritage According to Connoisseurs,Rejecters and Take-it-or-leavers in Historic City Centres: two Dutch cities experienced

In various disciplines, a renewed attention to history and the past can be discerned, not least in the field of urban analysis and urban planning. To understand the ways in which heritage can contribute to the functioning of cities today and tomorrow we need insight into the meanings of heritage for the cities? residents.With the help of the two concepts ?tied to the city centre? and ?solidarity with the city centre?, three city-centre resident types are theoretically constructed who are the ?connoisseurs?, the ?take-it-or-leavers? and the ?rejecters?. The empirical data collected in two Dutch cities, Leeuwarden and Alkmaar, made it possible to search for these assumed types to see whether they really exist and to find out if the different types give different meanings to urban heritage. Differences in the meaning of heritage means that the distinctions among ?connoisseurs?, ?take-it-or-leavers? and ?rejecters? could be used in setting heritage policy.     

On the origins of border effects: insights from the Habsburg Empire

What are the origins of border effects on trade and why do borderscontinue to matter in periods of increasing economic integration?We explore the hypothesis that border effects emerged as a resultof asymmetric economic integration in the unique historicalsetting of the multi-national Habsburg Empire prior to the FirstWorld War. While markets tended to integrate mainly due to improvedinfrastructure, ethno-linguistic networks had persistent tradediverting effects. We find that the political borders whichseparated the empire's successor states after the First WorldWar became visible in the economy from the mid-1880s onwards,already 25–30 years before the First World War. This effectof a ‘border before a border’ cannot be explainedby factors such as administrative barriers, physical geography,changes in infrastructure or patterns of integration with neighbouringregions outside of the Habsburg customs and monetary union.However, controlling for the changing ethno-linguistic compositionof the population across the regional capital cities of theempire does explain most of the estimated border effects.     

The Groningen museum: Urban heritage in fragments

Abstract

Changes in West European cities are discussed by many writers in many different ways with the intention of questioning the aim of post‐modern theories. The new perspective has much influence on social, economic and political forms, and on activities in the city centre: Renewed views of the changes in, and the attention to, the roles that heritage plays or could play in the urban area may be helpful in finding adapted forms of post‐modern management of heritage. Heritage has many intrinsically post‐modern aspects such as its eclecticism, its non‐linearity in time and its fragmentation. To explore some post‐modern aspects of urban heritage, the three main points in the post‐modern discussion: the discussion about reproduction, hyper‐realities and legitimacy, are illustrated and examined on the basis of the Groningen Museum, a local museum built a few years, ago in a medium‐sized city in the northern Netherlands.     

Contested Understandings in the Global Garment Industry after Rana Plaza

This Introduction synthesizes the key themes of this special cluster of articles and explores the implications of the three contributions on garment supply chains after the Rana Plaza disaster. The three articles examine the perspectives of key stakeholders in garment value chains — global buyers, managers of garment factories in Bangladesh, and workers at these factories — and analyses their responses to the new governance initiatives that emerged in the aftermath of Rana Plaza. Placing the contrasting perspectives of these stakeholders alongside each other starkly reveals how their different positions within hierarchically organized global value chains form the particular lens through which they view post-Rana Plaza initiatives. This special cluster scrutinizes the particular understandings of these stakeholders and reveals the very different capacity for voice and influence that they bring to bear in shaping outcomes. It reflects on the contradictory imperatives faced by actors in the garment industry caught between a logic of competition on the one hand and global labour standards norms on the other. The Introduction concludes by examining the prospects for a re-embedding of the market in global value chains via the activation of civil society.     

ONCE AGAIN: TESTING FOR REGIONAL HOMOGENEITY*

ABSTRACT. Summarizing the foregoing discussions in this journal on testing for regional homogeneity the present note shows that in the model of Zellner's seemingly unrelated regressions one test statistic may be used not only to test for overall homogeneity but also to examine for individual coefficient homogeneity. This aim is achieved by varying the linear restrictions in the test statistic according to different problems. To illustrate these tests regional consumption functions for the 11 Bundesläder (States) of the Federal Republic of Germany are used.     

‘One in,all in?’ NATO’s next enlargement

In 1999 NATO heads of state invited three states to join the alliance and are set to invite yet more states to join in November 2002 at the Prague summit. At present there are ten states that have declared their interest in gaining accession to NATO councils, and the prospect is that even more states will most likely be interested in joining in the years to come. The question for NATO is no longer whether to enlarge but how to manage enlargement. This article argues that NATO should invite seven of the ten currently declared aspirant states to join the alliance, on the condition that before actual accession occurs, each state must subsequently meet political, military, economic, security and legal standards that are set forth in an annexe to the official invitation. Furthermore, NATO should determine to hold a summit meeting of the North Atlantic Council triennially, for the purpose of assessing the candidates' membership progress in meeting the criteria, and to this end establish a mechanism, in the form of identified bodies, for the assessment of the candidate members' progress. Such a formal process sets forth a graduated yet assured process that aspirant states must progress through that will result in guaranteed accession to NATO councils and protection. A formal process such as this will ameliorate many of the problems that will almost surely arise from proceeding in a more ad hoc, piecemeal manner, while at the same time keeping the door open to other states who may want to join in the future.