L'éternel retour de la transcendance

This article reflects on the feminist potential of a contemporary form of French female cinema stardom that John Orr (2004) names ‘free-fall’. According to Orr, free-fall is a genre of female stardom that has come to prominence in French cinema at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first. The free-fall star embarks on a journey of ‘ontological descent’, self-destruction and Kristevan abjection, but we cannot know her reasons for such actions. This article considers the gendered implications of the free-fall star with reference to her portrayal and modification of past French literary heroines in the genre of heritage cinema. It considers her presence in two film adaptations of Gustave Flaubert's literary ?uvre: Madame Bovary (Chabrol, 1991) with Isabelle Huppert, and Un C?ur simple (Laine, 2008) with Sandrine Bonnaire. The mystique of the free-fall star-text potentially challenges a modernist construction of femininity as the lowbrow Other of highbrow pioneering, but its feminist credentials cannot simply be taken for granted.     

REGIONAL PLANNING IN THE USSR

The theory and practice of drawing up and implementing regional plans, or “territorial plans,” as they are known in the Soviet Union, has been a matter of considerable debate in the Soviet literature, a debate that has been complicated by differences in terminology. The author discusses various Soviet definitions of “territorial planning” and points out disagreement concerning its nature and scope. The major forms of territorial planning as now practiced in the USSR are reviewed, and two forms in particular—regional economic planning and regional physical planning—are distinguished. It is concluded that territorial planning continues to have a somewhat uncertain status in the USSR, with inadequate official support, although the issue remains a matter of considerable interest to the leadership under the Gorbachev administration.     

Camels in the northern provinces of the Roman Empire

This paper describes the camel bones discovered in two Late Roman contexts from Arlon (Belgium). The morphological and metrical analyses identify the animal as a dromedary.     

Overdone overkill – the archaeological perspective on Tasmanian megafaunal extinctions

The reasons for megafaunal extinction in Australia have been hotly debated for over 30 years without any clear resolution. The proposed causes include human overkill, climate, anthropogenic induced habitat change or a combination of these. Most protagonists of the human overkill model suggest the impact was so swift, occurring within a few thousand years of human occupation of the continent, that archaeological evidence should be rare or non-existent. In Tasmania the presence of extinct megafauna has been known since the early twentieth century (74, 85 and 86) with earlier claims of human overlap being rejected because of poor chronology and equivocal stratigraphic associations. More recent archaeological research has not identified any megafauna from the earliest, exceptionally well-preserved late Pleistocene cultural sites. In 2008 however an argument for human induced megafaunal extinctions was proposed using the direct dates from a small sample of surface bone from two Tasmanian non-human caves and a museum sediment sample from an unknown location in a cave, since destroyed by quarrying (Turney et al., 2008). Turney et al. (2008) supplemented their data with published dates from other Tasmanian caves and open sites to argue for the survival of at least seven megafauna species from the last interglacial to the subsequent glacial stage.     

Agenda-Setters and Policy Influentials: Results from the Victorian Agendas Project

The Victorian Agendas Project (1991-93) used a snowball sampling method to produce annual peer-nominated lists of agenda-setters and policy influentials in six policy fields: economic policy, health, welfare, transport, education and the environment. Three hundred and fifty-six interviews were conducted with 214 influentials over the three-year period. Respondents identified high-priority issues and policy options on their current and future agendas. This paper deals with the question of who the agenda setters/policy influentials were. Was there evidence of a dominant elite or elites (e.g. business and banking elites) whose influence ranged across policy fields, or was there a more pluralist pattern in which influentials tended to 'specialise' in particular fields? How substantial was the turnover among influentials when the Liberal-National coalition government replaced Labor in 1992?     

AMENITIES VERSUS LABOR MARKET OPPORTUNITIES: CHOOSING THE OPTIMAL DISTANCE TO MOVE*

ABSTRACT. A recent debate in the regional economics literature has focused attention on the motivation behind an individual's decision to migrate. Human-capital migration models emphasize labor market disequilibria whereas alternative (hedonic) migration models stress households’altered demand for nontraded goods. In this paper, we test the relative importance of these two possible motivations for moving between metropolitan areas. We use an intercity hedonic model to decompose wages into equilibrium and disequilibrium components. We then compare the separate influences of amenities and the disequilibrium component of wages on the distance moved between two metropolitan areas. Our findings indicate that both economic factors and amenity differentials are significant factors in explaining regional migration.     

GEOGRAPHIC IMPLICATIONS OF MEGA-MALLS, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO WEST EDMONTON MALL

West Edmonton Mall (wem) is an internationally known shopping mall I leisure complex comprising approximately 4 million sq. ft. of leasable retail and service space. It contains more than 600 shops, plus a hotel and leisure and recreational facilities that are unmatched in any previous shopping centre. The superimposition of a single, massive development on a pre-existing urban structure has created both opportunities and problems for Edmonton, while the emergence of such an urban phenomenon, unprecedented in scale and character, should raise new questions and stimulate new thinking among academics. This introductory article provides a context for the articles that follow by outlining the developmental history of wem and assessing its significance as a mega-ma/ prototype, and by identifying themes to be addressed in detail in the subsequent articles.     

STRUCTURAL FEATURES OF WEST EDMONTON MALL

This article addresses the question of how West Edmonton Mall (wem) may be a new and distinctive component of retail spatial structure by analysing the retail and service attributes of the mall in the context of (I) Edmonton's retail structure at the regional shopping centre level, and (2) the internal structure of the mall. It is suggested that wem has added a new level to Edmonton's retail hierarchy, rivalling the downtown as the city's primate centre. The analysis of tenant changes leads to the conclusion that these changes tend to reflect a movement from unconventional to conventional tenant mix, and that wem is not much different, other than in sheer size, from most large regional shopping centres. The only unique structural characteristic appears to be the existence of enclaves not usually found in other malls.     

Interactions between urban systems and localized productive systems: An approach to endogenous regional development in terms of innovative milieu

From the 1970s onwards, the regional development suffers a change in its nature: it becomes more and more endogenous. The transition from a perspective of development from above to a perspective of development from below, and the transition from a problematic of redistribution to a problematic of resources creation, need more than a readjustment of the existing regional theories. It turns out to be necessary to focus on the endogeneization of the development mechanism, i.e. on the interactions leading to transformations and adaptations of localized production systems. In fact, it is a matter of building up theories of change that would be able to explain how a region can generate mechanism of wealth creation from its specific resources. Now, these different processes are closely connected to urban organization and their implementation depends on the milieu (i.e. innovative or non‐innovative).     

Book reviews

Plans, Pragmatism and People: the Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today's Cities. R. Antony French. London, UCL Press, 1995, 233 pp. US$19.95 pb, ISBN 0 82296 106 7

The Politics of Decentralisation: Revitalising Local Democracy. D. Burns, R. Hambleton and P. Hoggett. London, Macmillan, 1994, xvi + 304 pp., £12.50 pb, ISBN 0 333 52164 1

Environmentally Sustainable Business: a Local and Regional Perspective. P. Roberts. London, Paul Chapman, 1995, 271 pp., £16.95, ISBN 1 85396 240 6

International Perspectives in Urban Studies 3. Ronan Paddison, John Money and Bill Lever (Eds). London, Jessica Kingsley, 1995, 284 pp., US$37.50 pb, ISBN 1 85302 311 6

British Planning Policy in Transition: Planning in the Major Years. M. Tewdwr‐Jones (Ed.). London, UCL Press, 1996, 262pp., £14.95 pb, ISBN 1 85728 422 4, £40.00 hb, ISBN 1 85728 421 6