New rent seeking strategies in housing in Spain after the bubble burst

This paper analyses the new rent seeking strategies in housing implemented during Spain’s financial crisis. The Spanish Model presents a paradigmatic case of the need for capital to reinvent itself through the articulation of new mechanisms for the production and appropriation of urban rent, as the crisis revealed the limits of strategies that were implemented during the bubble period. Amongst these new strategies, the paper analyses the rescue of financial entities, the creation of a ‘bad bank’ and the establishment of Spanish REITs. These mechanisms are leading to financialisation of rental housing and the emergence of vulture funds as new transnational owners of housing.     

‘Defending the race’: the Italian reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism

Abstract In 1938 the regime's popular periodical La Difesa della Razza published the portrait of Saartjie Baartman (a Khoisan woman known to the western world as ‘The Hottentot Venus’) to discourage miscegenation in the empire of Italian East Africa. But by 1938, Italian public and scientific interest in the Hottentot Venus had long faded away. In addition, readily available photographs of Italo-Eritreans could have been used to show the ‘outcome’ of miscegenation. Why then did the regime's organ publish a portrait of ‘The Hottentot Venus’? This article addresses this question, and explores how Baartman's story could serve the regime's aim of forging a new ‘racial consciousness’ among Italians. By focusing on the transformation of scientific discourses from the 1850s to the late 1930s, and on their silences, the article illuminates the process through which some of the regime's anthropologists constructed a new, ‘made in Italy’ story for the Hottentot Venus. Deliberately leaving out all the main issues long debated during the previous century, they turned this figure into an empty icon to support Fascist colonial obsession with the purity and prestige of the Italian race.     

Italian religious historiography in the 1990s

Abstract

This article examines Italian religious historiography of the past decade, taking into account the difficulty of this national limitation, given the increasingly frequent arid profitable exchanges among the diverse European traditions. The review first examines some general works and then focuses on certain themes that mark the historiographical trends: ecclesiastical institutions, with particular reference to the period of the Reformation and the Counter‐Reformation; religious complexity, with special reference to heterodox movements, to Jewish culture and to the Islamic presence; and people's religious experiences, with particular emphasis on those of women, in their interaction with both cultural production and social history.     

The Port‐Vendres 4 Shipwreck Cargo: evidence of the Roman wine trade in the western Mediterranean

The Port‐Vendres 4 shipwreck is evidence of coastal export trade between Hispania Citerior and Narbonne in 40/30 BC. The cargo is made up of a particular assemblage of Roman wine amphoras (Pascual 1, Dressel 1B and Lamboglia 2) destined for Gallic markets. Archaeological and archaeometric analyses conducted on a selection of the amphoras allowed the provenance of the cargo to be identified as Hispania Citerior and the central‐southern Tyrrhenian coast of Italy. Iluro and/or Baetulo are proposed as the ports of departure, enabling the reconstruction of the trade route and the historical and economic significance of this shipwreck.     

The Nice Musical Chairs Model: Exploring the Role of Competition and Cooperation Between Farming and Herding in the Formation of Land Use Patterns in Arid Afro-Eurasia

Following a strictly theory-building approach, we developed an agent-based simulation model, the Nice Musical Chairs model, to represent the competition between groups of stakeholders of farming and herding activities in the arid Afro-Eurasia. The model deepens the questions raised by the results of our former model, the Musical Chairs model, and further introduces three socio-economic mechanisms, which modulate the behavior and performance of stakeholders and their groups. First, we define land use pairing as the awarding, regarding productivity, of any direct cooperation between farming and herding within a group. Second, group management is modeled as the prerogative of a group leadership to manage stakeholders to pursue a particular proportion between farming and herding. Third, we introduce restricted access to pasture as the engagement in territorial control of rangelands in opposition to an open access regime. An exhaustive exploration of scenarios and parameters placed the control over rangelands as the most significant factor in the formation of land use patterns, followed by land use management. While the effect of land use pairing is mild in comparison, it is still a significant factor in group selection and thus in the persistence of particular land use patterns in the long run.     

Les «yeux d’Argos» et les «étoiles d’Astrée» pour mesurer l’univers les jésuites italiens et la science nouvelle

As what happened for thenova in 1604 and for the three comets which appeared in 1618 starting the debate between Galileo and the Jesuits of the Roman College, even the comet of 1644 enhanced the curiosity and expectations in astrometers’ and astrologers’ minds. This work focuses on some aspects of the European debate, by fixing our attention on the Bolognese observatory school of Santa-Lucia in particular, where Giovan Battista Riccioli and his socios had started an experimental activity which was known and appreciated for its accuracy all over Europe. It also closely examines the revaluation of the «medium sciences», such as geography and hydrometry, to point out the sociocultural conditions that originated the growth of new professional characters like engineers and technicians in Bologna.     

Land Use Patterns in Central Asia. Step 1: The Musical Chairs Model

Herding and farming coexisted in Central Asia for several thousand years as main options of preindustrial economic production. The relationship between people practicing different variants of these modes of subsistence is known to have been dynamic. Among the many possible explanations, we explore this dynamic by modeling mechanisms that connect aggregate decisions to land use patterns. Within the framework of the SimulPast project, we show here the results from step 1 of our modeling program: the Musical Chairs Model. This abstract agent-based model describes a mechanism of competition for land use between farming and herding. The aim is the exploration of how mobility, intensity, and interdependence of activities can influence land use pattern. After performing a set of experiments within the framework of this model, we compare the implications of each condition for the corroboration of specific land use patterns. Some historical and archaeological implications are also discussed. We suggest that the overall extension of farming in oases can be explained by the competition for land use between farming and herding, assuming that it develops with little or no interference of climatic, geographical, and historical contingencies.