Business Improvement Districts and the Discourse of Contractualism

Business improvement districts (BIDs) are increasingly being advanced in a range of national contexts as a new delivery mechanism for securing improvement, regeneration and enhanced service delivery in specifically delineated districts. This paper considers BIDs as an example of a modern institutional design that is reconfiguring existing economic and legal regimes within town centres. Drawing on the theories of new institutional economics and transaction costs, the paper discusses how the contractual turn in urban governance advances our conceptual understanding of the rationale, scope and significance of partnership working. The discussion brings together emerging literatures around new ways of understanding partnership working in government thinking. It contrasts the advocacy and use of BIDs with the (previously established) practices of town centre management. It asserts that BIDs represent a new form of formalized and contractualized partnership working in sub-municipal governance, which has particular spatio-temporal implications for state–market–civil relations.     

Unfolding dialogues about gender,care and ‘the north’: an introduction

This paper introduces a special themed section which arose out of a successful symposium, Caring for the North: Gender, Care and Northern Places, held in 2006 at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada. Considering feminist and geographical research on care, we argue (1) that feminist perspectives have provided key developments for thinking about care, and (2) that care research must take place seriously to allow for both specificity and complexity of approaches to the relationships of gender, care and ‘northern’ places. We then briefly introduce the special issue contributions which address these eponymous concerns, suggesting this collection is an opportunity for unfolding dialogues about the intersections of gender, care and ‘the north’. We hope the diversity of the work that follows demonstrates the range of possibilities for feminist approaches to care and place and furthers the necessary cross-disciplinary conversations.     

Charlemagne's silver tables: the ideology of an imperial capital

Charlemagne's last will and testament says that a silver table with a picture of Constantinople was to be sent to St Peter's at Rome, and a table with a picture of Rome was to be sent to the bishopric of Ravenna. The imagery on these tables seems to reflect a late antique tradition of depicting pairs of cities; the pairings Rome–Constantinople and Rome–Ravenna offer insights into the importance of Ravenna for Charlemagne's imperial ideology, and specifically how Ravenna functioned as a model for Charle-magne's imperial capital at Aachen.     

Gender,Retail Employment and the Clothing Commodity Chain

This article analyzes the conditions of employment in fashion retailing, arguing that fashion retailing constitutes a distinct sector of retailing. The fashion commodity chain is characterized by a unique spatiality and temporality and as a result, female retail workers share much in common with women situated at production, advertising and consumption sites in the chain. Given that many of the issues women confront at different sites are similar, the sector is amenable to organizing across the chain.     

Constructing the ‘Neighborhood Sphere’: Gender and Community organizing [1]

This article examines organizing styles and issues in neighborhood activism to illustrate how activists seek to constitute a neighborhood community. It identifies the ways in which community organizing is gendered in both style and content, often separating 'women's' and 'men's' issues along an artificial public-private divide. This research illustrates, however, how neighborhood activists can use and challenge gendered forms of activism to integrate both public and private into an ideal of a neighborhood community. Using a case study of the Thomas-Dale Block Clubs in St Paul, Minnesota, the article examines how residents use gender-essentializing discourses of safety and parenting to insert household and family issues into a broader community arena. Further, it identifies how these discourses overlay cultural tensions in a diverse neighborhood. The activism in the block club organization studied here reflects a wide variety of community organizing strategies and concerns, focusing on defining and creating a neighborhood public sphere, to which, as the organization argued, every resident ought to be responsible and accountable.     

Welfare Warriors: Towards a Genealogy of the Soldier Citizen in Canada

Over the past few decades, new forms of citizenship have emerged in the context of a globalizing and urbanizing world. The government of citizens and economies, it is argued, is increasingly trans‐, supra‐, or sub‐national in scale, and characterized by the eclipse of Keynesian welfarism and rights‐based citizenship. Scholars have documented the emergence of targeted, risk‐based, and workfarist governmentalities and political economies at various spatial scales, and have even described emergent forms of citizenship as "post‐national". And yet, in many countries we are concurrently confronted with massive symbolic and fiscal reinvestment in national militaries, particularly in the welfare of personnel. Given this, and the longstanding relationships between the nation‐state and military service, it is curious that the soldier has hardly figured in recent discussions about citizenship. This paper provides a genealogy of the soldier‐citizen in Canada, from iconic national worker‐citizen in the post‐World War II period to its recent anxious positioning at the intersection of "domestic", entrepreneurial, workfarist citizenship, and the widespread re‐emergence of militarism and national security. It demonstrates that the military citizen has at key times been a template for innovations in social forms of national government, and argues that the soldier has been a crucial figure in their re‐engineering in recent years. Situated amidst transformations in work and worker‐citizenship, and at the intersections of political struggles in both the domestic and international spheres, the soldier provides a unique lens on questions of the national and the social. Through an engagement with the labour of social citizenship, and the war work that initiated many of its governing techniques, the military citizen emerges as a critical figure in the contemporary neoliberal nation.     

The Effects of Universal Pre-K in Oklahoma: Research Highlights and Policy Implications

Oklahoma is one of only three states in the nation to offer a free pre-kindergarten (pre-K) program to all students in participating school districts on a voluntary basis. Fortuitous circumstances in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the state's largest school district, permitted an unusually rigorous evaluation of the pre-K program in Tulsa. Because four-year-olds beginning pre-K and five-year-olds beginning kindergarten were administered the same test in September 2001 and because strict eligibility cut-offs were applied, based on date of birth, it was possible to control for selection effects, in addition to gender, race/ ethnicity, school lunch eligibility, and precise date of birth. The evaluation showed strong positive effects of the pre-K program on children's language and cognitive test scores. Hispanic children benefited most from the program, and black children also showed sharp gains, especially when they attended full-day programs. The results are discussed in light of contemporary controversies regarding targeted or universal pre-K programs; full-or part-day programming; public school or multiple delivery sites; strategies for ensuring high quality, effective programs; and the need for rigorous program evaluations.