Aerostatic spacing: on things becoming lighter than air

The development of practical aerostatic or lighter than air balloon flight in 1783 marked the emergence of a new way of being and becoming mobile, one that also involved an important technical and experiential transformation in earth–atmosphere relations. This paper narrates an account of the distinctive kinds of spaces of which aerostatic flight is generative. At the centre of this account is the claim that the affective materiality of aerostatic flight is simultaneously processual and possessing of what political theorist Jane Bennett calls 'thing-power'. In developing this claim, the paper draws from a range of historical and contemporary accounts of aerostatic flight in order to elaborate upon three aspects of the spaces of things becoming aerostatic: the distinctive kinds of sensing of which aerostatic flight is generative; the differential qualities of affectivity in which the movement and materiality of aerostatic things participates; and the kinds of vertiginous events in which the felt movement – actual or anticipated – of aerostatic things is implicated. The paper concludes by speculating upon how attending to the distinctive and sometimes disquieting materiality of aerostatic things might contribute to geographical engagements with the spaces of air and atmosphere.     

Radiocarbon Wiggle-Match Dating in the Intertidal Zone

Radiocarbon wiggle-match dating is a technique that can combine the versatility of radiocarbon dating with chronological information from tree-rings. This makes it useful in contexts where timbers are preserved, but dendrochronological dating is impossible. As intertidal and marine timbers are waterlogged, this can favor their preservation and hence allow wiggle-match ¹⁴C dating, which can be of significant help in deriving relatively precise chronologies for a range of coastal structures. As the technique depends on making multiple radiocarbon measurements towards a single date, efficiency in application is the key and hence a number of practical considerations need to be taken into account in advance of conducting a dating program. This paper discusses some of these practical concerns and reviews them in the context of the intertidal crannogs in the Firth of Clyde on the west coast of Scotland.     

Punctuated Equilibria in the Private Sector and the Stability of Market Systems

The article examines longitudinal trends in expenditures by over 1,200 private firms, finding evidence of punctuated equilibrium—a pattern of change widely interpreted as evidence of stick‐slip dynamics in decision‐making processes. Levels of punctuation in the private sector closely resemble those observed in studies on public budgeting, suggesting that the private sector is not on average any less resistant to change than government. Both private‐ and public‐sector decision making is a function of deliberative processes, which the article compares to market systems. Deliberative decision making takes place when a group comes to a consensus about the allocation of resources. Market processes aggregate the actions of many independent decision makers to arrive at an outcome, such as the value of a commodity. The article considers the relative informational efficiency of these two processes and concludes that market systems should be more adaptive to incoming information. Three case studies provide natural experiments to investigate the stability of outputs during periods of deliberative and market control. A key finding is that when outputs are determined by market systems it greatly reduces the magnitude of punctuation.     

Complexity,Capacity, and Budget Punctuations

The budgeting literature has long focused on “institutional friction” as a cause of ubiquitous punctuated equilibrium (PE) findings. A recent wave of scholarship looks to identify specific institutional mechanisms that affect the number of punctuations in policy outputs. We contribute to this growing body of research by focusing on the complexity of the institutional environment surrounding a policy area as well as that of the government as a whole. These factors have opposite effects: the more complex a policy area, the greater the likelihood of extreme spending changes. But, higher institutional capacity in general leads to greater stability. To test these ideas, we develop a novel index of budgetary change that balances the conceptual importance of extreme changes while analyzing the entire distribution of budget changes, not only the tails. In addition, we also demonstrate that findings are robust to a number of important distinctions, such as between series associated with slowly moving demographic trends or quickly moving stochastic events. We, therefore, demonstrate the robustness of important findings from the established literature, add a new measure of the dependent variable, and push the literature forward with a new focus on issue complexity and institutional capacity.     

“Partitioning the Sensible” at Park 51: Rancière,Islamophobia, and Common Politics

Abstract: This paper uses Jacques Rancière's conception of the partition of the sensible to interrogate the aesthetic regimes and spatial coordinates that animated public debate about Park 51—the Islamic community center near the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. Understanding conflicts over mosques as potential struggles over the conditions of membership in a community, I suggest that many of the arguments in favor of Park 51 reinforced a partition of the sensible in which Islamophobia could resonate. At stake in these debates—which turned on different understandings of the distance that separated the proposed center from the WTC site—is the relationship between American Muslims and the narratives of trauma constructed around the September 11th attacks. I conclude by exploring the projects proposed by Park 51 organizers as potential sites of everyday micropolitics that could subtly “jolt” existing orders in the interest of reconfiguring the “common sense” of a community.     

Street naming and the politics of belonging: spatial injustices in the toponymic commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr

Although the critical turn in place name study recognizes the central and contested place that toponyms hold in people's lives and identity struggles, little work has explicitly analyzed place naming rights in terms of social justice, citizenship, and belonging. We introduce readers to the naming of streets for slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr and use two brief case studies from the southeastern USA (Statesboro, Georgia and Greenville, North Carolina) to discuss the barriers that hinder the creation of a landscape that truly reflects the teachings of King. Naming opponents, sometimes with the (un)witting cooperation of black activists, impose spatial, scalar limits on the rights of African Americans to participate in the street naming process and to appropriate the identity of streets outside of their neighborhoods, even though challenging historically entrenched patterns of racial segregation and marginalization is exactly the purpose of many street naming campaigns. The case of King streets prompts us to think about place naming as a mechanism of spatial (in)justice, demonstrating the fundamental role that geography plays in constituting and structuring the processes of discrimination or equality.     

Scotland's coast: Understanding past and present processes for sustainable management

The coastline of Scotland is extremely long and varied. It comprises most of the major types of coastal environment and includes machair, a sand dune system that is unique to the western seaboard of the British Isles. Such variety has its roots in the geology and sea level inheritance of Scotland and demonstrates that long‐term processes still exert a profound influence on coastal form and functioning. Understanding how these processes affect the coast and influence such diversity is essential to efficient coastal management, although it is also imperative that the vision, strategy and political will to deliver such management are also in place.     

Reviews of books

The publication in July 1998 of the Government's White Papers on integrated transport marked the most comprehensive review of transport policy for 30 years. In spite of this, the measures brought forward by the Government are timid and are unlikely in their present form to tackle the underlying problems of increasing car dependence. This paper reviews the Government's Scottish document, Travel Choices for Scotland, and highlights key policy debates in which the voices of geographers should be better heard.