Die Europäische Route der Backsteingotik Impulsgeber für die regionale Entwicklung

Abstrakt Den Problemen peripherer Regionen stehen Chancen gegenüber – eine davon kann Tourismus sein. Die Europ?ische Route der Backsteingotik (EuRoB) gibt dem Kulturtourismus rund um die Ostsee Impulse. Sie greift das einmalige hanseatische Kulturerbe auf und vernetzt St?dte und Regionen in sieben Staaten. Damit tr?gt sie dazu bei, einer strukturschwachen Region touristisches Gewicht zu verleihen. Touristische Entwicklung ist wirtschaftliche Entwicklung. Das er?ffnet Perspektiven für die Bev?lkerung, eine Grundvoraussetzung für soziale, ?konomische und demographische Stabilisierung. Für die St?dte wiederum, die sich dadurch weiterentwickeln, ergeben sich Chancen im Wettbewerb, der zunehmend globaler wird und ganze Landstriche abzuh?ngen droht.     

„Beleuchtete Wiesen“ oder „Blühende Landschaften“?

Beleuchtete Wiesen oder Blühende Landschaften—zwischen diesen beiden Extremen schwanken die Beschreibungsmuster über die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung der Städte und Gemeinden in den neuen Bundesländern, die sich auch 14 Jahre nach der Vereinigung beider deutscher Staaten hartnäckig halten. Verläßliche Aussagen über den Wahrheitsgehalt dieser Stereotypen konnten bisher nicht vorgelegt werden, obwohl beide Klischees letztendlich einen räumlichen Zustand beschreiben, der über den Vermarktungsstand der nach der politischen Wende geschaffenen Gewerbeflächenpotentiale durchaus objektiv beschrieben werden kann.     

Review

Town Populations: The Aboriginal Component in the Australian Economy. Part 2. E. A. Young and E. K. Fisk (eds). Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982. Pp. xv + 171. Price $12.00 (paper).     

PERFECT REPRESENTATIONS OF SOVIET PLANNED SPACE

The article looks at mono‐industrial cities in the Baltic States during the Soviet era. In terms of economy, ethnicity and their urban appearance these heterotopic towns were outposts in the integration of the occupied European‐like territories into the Soviet Union. Thanks to the principles of planning and state‐favoured development that were applied across the Soviet Union, these towns, built for Russian speaking immigrants, stood out from the surrounding patterns of settlement that had developed naturally over time. The uranium producing town of Sillamäe in Estonia was built in secret and with lightning speed amidst the panic concerning the atom bomb immediately after the war, and provides us with a perfect model of Stalinist urban development. Stu?ka, built in the 1960s near a hydro‐electric power station in Latvia and Snie?kus, built in the 1970s next to a nuclear power station in Lithuania, were less separated from the surrounding landscape, but both provide a perfect example of Soviet modernism, which had been learned from mass‐housing in the West.     

‘An Organic Part of the Whole Structure’: John Curtin's Empire

In March 1957 Harold Macmillan expressed to Dwight Eisenhower that the British government was ‘considering abandoning Hong Kong’. The hitherto unknown Hong Kong Question in 1957 grew primarily out of Britain's imperial decline, and particularly the difficulties of defending Hong Kong. During the Cold War Hong Kong was a colony too valuable for Britain to abandon in peace, and yet too peripheral to be worth committing scarce resources to for its survival at war. The British dilemmas were exacerbated by the 1956 riots in Hong Kong and the general defence review undertaken by the Macmillan government in 1957, both of which raised serious questions about the adequacy of a reduced garrison to maintain internal security. The United States also showed concern about the future of the British colony in the light of Anglo-American differences over the Suez crisis and China policy. As a result of the Bermuda and Washington conferences in 1957, the Anglo-American relationship was restored by Eisenhower and Macmillan, a restoration which, as the latter saw it, made Hong Kong ‘a joint defence problem’ between the two allies. Together with the Chinese communist policy of leaving the colony alone, the Hong Kong Question was thus resolved inadvertently.