The myth and the stones of Venice: an historical geography of a symbolic landscape

John Ruskin's Stones of Venice criticized the Victorian city and Victorian society in the light of a reconstruction of medieval Venice. But Ruskin's reconstruction embodied elements of a long-standing myth propagated by Venetians themselves and inscribed in their organization of urban space and urban landscape. The geographical dimensions of the myth, its changing character through time, its iconographic expressions and its significance for English attitudes to Venice are described and explained. Ruskin used the myth to support his ideology, constructing a homology between architectural development and social structure. But the appeal of Venice transcends historical contingency and may, in part, be understood by reference to psychoanalytic categories, specifically sexual symbolism.     

Urbanism and economic development in a pre-industrial context: the case of southern Russia

Russia's southern frontier in the seventeenth century was continuously menaced by the nomadic Tatars who inhabited the open steppe grasslands. In this situation the Russian government attempted to harness all the frontier's sources to the cause of defence by founding a series of military towns which could control and direct the process of settlement. Government control, however, did not extend to the widespread illegal migration and settlement of runaway serfs. In a later period, as the Tatar threat subsided and colonization continued, the importance of most of the towns diminished and a system of secondary central places arose as trade expanded. But the oldest towns retained their importance in this changing social and economic situation, becoming higher-order central places for long-distance trade and, increasingly, centres for agricultural processing.     

MAPPING FINANCIAL LITERACY: COGNITION AND THE ENVIRONMENT

Recent research suggests that regions can be characterized according to their (more or less) financial literacy. One implication is that there may be regional ecologies of finance nested within national institutions and global markets. This article begins by situating behaviour in time and space, linking behaviour to the interaction between cognition and the environment. This is followed by a substantive account of the geographical scale of the “environment” working from the global to the local and in return from the local to the global. By implication, maps of financial literacy reflect the skills and expertise of resident populations, affecting how they sort amongst the relevant information to make effective decisions (which have a material effect on their long‐term welfare). Explaining how and why this is the case is one goal of the article. It is also acknowledged that representing the relationship between behaviour and the environment is conceptually and empirically challenging. Reference is made to new findings about the ways in which people “sample” the world around them, suggesting that cognition and the environment are intertwined in ways that may reinforce existing urban and regional inequalities. In conclusion, implications are drawn for the design and implementation of pension and retirement saving policies.