France's Charter for the Environment: Of Presidents,Principles and Environmental Protection

France amended its constitution in 2005 to include a Charter for the Environment. The Charter lays out France's commitment to supporting the right to a ‘balanced environment’. This article first traces the Charter's origins to a legacy-building presidential initiative. Jacques Chirac decided to invest in a neglected policy domain in which his own majority had shown little interest. He was obliged to intervene repeatedly in order to bring this project to a successful conclusion. In doing so, he staked out environmental affairs as an area of potential presidential supremacy. Next, the content of the Charter is examined. In this document, French traditions of universalism come together with an international movement for anticipatory environmental protection. This is reflected in the constitutionalisation of the precautionary principle, which emerged as the most controversial part of the Charter. The debates this provoked tended to caricature a risk-management principle whose meaning has been carefully refined to forestall objections. Finally, the Charter's potential efficacy is analysed. The post-Charter record of legislative and judicial activity concerning the environment is meagre, but not wholly inauspicious.     

Fox Palaces: the playful occupation of a Johannesburg city park

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the playful occupation of an inner-city park in Johannesburg, South Africa, by the Hummingbird Play Association. Playful occupation emerged as a strategy to create and demand spaces for children’s play, demonstrating through practice the possibilities for public play provision. Children’s play is read as a form of folklore, through which children’s and adult’s spatial experiences and imaginings of the city can be viewed. It considers how opportunities for play facilitated with Playwork Principles in mind can co-create safe spaces for children which could act as tools for social transformation and justice in the urban public realm.     

The Fossil Human from Rabat-Kébibat (Morocco): Comparative Study of the Cranial and Mandibular Fragments

As part of the geological and chronological recontextualization of the Rabat-Kébibat quarry performed by a Franco-Moroccan team of geologists, the human remains discovered in the site and already published were reassessed. The human remains assemblage is composed of 23 cranial fragments, a mandible (including on the right I1, P3, P4, the roots of M1, M2, and M3, and of the left I1, I2, C, P3, P4, and M1), and the left half of the maxillary (including I1, I2, P3, P4, M1, and M2). Through a micro-computerized tomography analysis, the internal structure of the parietal fragment (evaluation of the thickness of the compact table and diploe) and the mandible was examined. Geometric morphometrics were applied on the tridimensional model of the mandible to investigate the conformation of the symphyseal outlines. Results were compared to a large reference collection composed of African, Asiatic, and European hominin fossils, from different chronological range. Our results allow us to clarify the phylogenetic position of the human remains from Rabat-Kebibat, in particular their relationship with other North African hominins.     

Tourism and cross-border regional development: insights in European contexts

This paper aims to structurally analyse the role of tourism in regional development processes in European cross-border regions with different historical development paths. Departing from an institutional perspective, the research is based on comparison of the position of tourism in region-building processes in the newly developing German–Czech cross-border region and the more ‘mature’ German–Belgian borderlands. Results indicate that the development of local cross-border tourism projects is no guarantee for positive destination-wide regional development impacts. In some cases, these projects may even reinforce asymmetrical socio-economic development directions of neighbouring borderlands. Rather, the socio-spatially equitable distribution of tourism benefits in cross-border contexts depends on several process-based aspects. These include the presence of ‘thick’ (cross-border) institutional arrangements, multi-scalar representation of tourism stakeholders in decision-making processes and a transversal position of tourism in regional development strategies. However, both with cross-border institutional ‘under-mobilization’ (Germany–Czech Republic) and with institutional ‘over-mobilization’ (Germany–Belgium), the informal network position of institutional brokers proved key for safeguarding the integrative character of tourism in the inevitably complex cross-border region-building process.