Zoning,More Than Just a Tool: Explaining Houston's Regulatory Practice

The intent of this article is to understand why Houstonians reject zoning while simultaneously adopting a collection of mechanisms that serve zoning-type functions. The answer is found in discursive-institutionalist approaches that emphasize the symbolic meaning (besides the instrumental value) that people give to regulatory tools. Zoning as a label is generally associated with an interference with individual liberty. Apparently, the other interventionist instruments do not carry the same negative value, which makes it possible to implement them without much opposition. Discourses shape institutions, like planning regulations, and we need to unravel and to understand these processes in order to increase the performance of planning.     

Spatial Point Processes Applied to the Distribution of River Junctions

The notion of randomness has been extensively applied to topological (nondimensional) properties of drainage networks. The spatial (dimensional) organization of five fluvial hierarchies is examined herein through the application of quadrat analysis to random and clustered spatial probability models. The Poisson, Polya-Aeppli, and negative binomial models are compared with point-pattern distributions of river junction location for three basins in Indiana and two fossil systems on an erosion surface in semiarid Australia. The negative binomial model best fits all five networks, suggesting that the branching behavior of fluvial systems follows the mathematical precepts leading to clusteredness of junctions. The degree to which the Polya-Aeppli model fits the data suggests the imposition of a temporally limited set of environmental conditions optimally suited for network growth. Only for the two fossil systems does the Poisson model agree. It is speculated that the effect of prolonged subaerial erosion may be to shift a clustered distribution towards the random state as the surface approaches a pediplained state.     

World on fire: the politics of napalm in the Global Cold War

This essay discusses the ways in which napalm contributed to the militarisation of global landscapes during the 1960s and 1970s, shaped distinctly by the interrelated geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War, decolonisation, and the rise of global public opinion against napalm and other weapons of terror. Using case studies and primary documents from British Archives, I argue that napalm played a significant role in shaping multiple military landscapes during this period, not just in terms of its direct effects on people, places, and the natural environment, but as a result of the moral, cultural, and political consequences of those effects.