Urban Planning in Italy: The Future of Urban General Plan and Governance

This article aims to highlight and, whenever possible, demonstrate that the urban general plan is still the instrument of the utmost importance to trigger and steer urban transformations. Within the current Italian context, the article examines the characteristics, contradictions, weaknesses and opportunities of urban planning set of rules and practices and tries to propose concrete answers to questions and issues strictly connected that affect the municipality's urban planning: how to manage and govern a contemporary metropolis or city agglomeration, the concerns associated with overlapping jurisdictions and different rules for various hierarchical administrative levels, the costs of social and common services, the need to include in the urban plan the possible use of European Union Structural Funds, the real estate market affecting new development and urban regeneration programmes and investments. All these aspects should be included in a unifying and strong planning instrument, the urban plan, which could address and steer effectively the urban planning policies and their governance.     

Labours of land: domesticity,wilderness and dispossession in the development of Canadian uranium markets

This article examines the role played by gendered constructions and categories in Canadian cold war appropriations of Aboriginal lands for nuclear production. Focusing primarily on the ways in which gendered tropes were mobilized by wives and companions of uranium workers recently arrived in the Serpent River watershed (home of the Serpent River Anishinabe) at the end of the first global uranium boom in which uranium production in the watershed was severely threatened, I explore how gendered constructions and categories provided important cartographies and reference points with which to order and maintain possession of the lands of the Serpent River watershed as a singular, Canadian, nuclear space. Drawing on Kaika's (2004) work on the discursive production of ‘home’, I argue that representations of the watershed as home in the wilderness and as imperilled domestic space, as well as the important ways in which they worked to secure discursive rights to space within the broader registers of white Canadian post war gender difference, relied on the near-complete erasure of Aboriginal presence and culture from the land for continuity. I conclude that while this erasure facilitated (morally and practically) the further incorporation of the watershed into Canadian geographies of nuclear production, it also worked to obscure the ways in which the industry and uranium economy were able to capitalize on Aboriginal lands, labour and their subordinate position in Canadian society.     

Tourism and cultural encounters in ‘the last frontiers’

Host-guest encounters often play a key role within tourist experiences of culture and heritage. However, these encounters have increasingly been seen to shape and negatively influence local culture. In his report from early 2011, Shackel presents an example of the cultural encounter between local residents and one-day tourists arriving to the Eastern Greenlandic village of Kulusuk. While much of his account revolves around the covert resistance of locals, he also critically addresses the validity of authentic tourist experiences. This brief note attempts to elaborate on the concept of authenticity, and suggests some issues to consider when discussing tourist experiences, local resistance and future tourism developments in a place like Kulusuk.     

Placemaking Through Protest: An Archaeology of the Lees Cross and Endcliffe Protest Camp, Derbyshire, England

The article describes the preliminary results of an archaeological survey of a protest camp occupied since 1999 in Derbyshire, England, and reflects briefly on the role of archaeology in researching contemporary activism and protests. The camp is structured by the everyday activities involved in living in the landscape, by the ‘manufactured vulnerability’ created using characteristics of the environment to contest an attempted eviction, and the public statements of protest that symbolise the campaign to the wider world. Through its longevity and the high profile of the wider anti-quarry campaign the camp is now a key element in the history of its landscape, and it is on these terms that it became the subject of archaeological research.     

Scales of Analysis, Scales of Value: Archaeology at Bush Hill House, Barbados

The excavations at Bush Hill House were sponsored because of its association with a notable historical figure, yet the archaeologists were more interested in what we saw as the “bigger” picture: colonialism; slavery; the Atlantic World. This paper addresses both the micro scale—individual deposits and individual people—and the macro scale—placing this site within the larger world of the British Atlantic of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Not surprisingly, both scales, when considered explicitly, offer insights into past social worlds and archaeologists’ means of discovering them.     

GENTRIFICATION IN CENTRAL MOSCOW ‐ A MARKET PROCESS OR A DELIBERATE POLICY? MONEY,POWER AND PEOPLE IN HOUSING REGENERATION IN OSTOZHENKA

ABSTRACT. The recent process of housing redevelopment in central Moscow is examined in the light of the theory of gentrification. The study is based on the case of Ostozhenka as an emblematic example of a large–scale transformation of a central residential neighbourhood into the most expensive quarter of central Moscow. Using data collected through interviews, archive enquiries and field surveys, the paper addresses the preconditions, dynamics and mechanisms of this socio–political process. It is argued that gentrification in Ostozhenka shares many features observed in the other large cities of the world but, as predicted by theory, is locally embedded. It has been a product of a complex interplay of the market pressure aiming to meet demands from Moscow's successful post–Soviet economy and Moscow government's entrepreneurial and pro–development strategy for the city centre regeneration. The government privileges market forces: it empowers them vis-à-vis the original population and allows them to circumvent conservation institutions, while the achieved profit is shared between the private and public sides. Whereas the physical improvement of the city centre signifies departing from the Soviet legacies of under–investments in the housing built environment, the growing socio–spatial polarization undermines the social achievements of the Soviet system and denotes the triumph of the neoliberal urban regime in Moscow.