Water wizards: reshaping wet nature and society

The article investigates how humans ‘networked’ wet nature and how this affected the shaping of Dutch society. First, it takes a grand view of Dutch history and describes how wet network building intertwined with the shaping of the Dutch landscape, its economy and its polity. Second, it investigates the specific challenges of wet network building—integrating potentially conflicting uses of water into one design—for the case of the national fresh water supply network (1940–1971). Finally, it discusses ecological damage, emerging new risks and cultural patterns related to wet network building.     

Networking Europe

The paper explores processes of transnational network building in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. The first section reviews several relevant literatures. It concludes that historiographies of Europe often recognize the pivotal importance of transnational network building, but fail to analyse network developments as well as their entanglement with wider historical processes. Specialized infrastructure studies exist in economic and technological history, but have a distinct (sub)national focus. The networking of Europe has not been investigated. The second section presents a preliminary narrative of transnational network building in the 19th and 20th century. It highlights the relationship between network building and political events in different eras, as well as different types of ambiguities or tensions. The conclusion suggests a number of topics for further research.     

The man within the breast,the supreme impartial spectator,and other impartial spectators in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Adam Smith infused the expression ‘impartial spectator’ with a plexus of related meanings, one of which is a super-being, which bears parallels to monotheistic ideas of God. As for any genuine, identified, human spectator, he can be deemed impartial only presumptively. Such presumptive impartiality as regards the incident does not of itself carry extensive implications about his intelligence, nor about his being aligned with benevolence towards any larger whole. We may posit, however, a being who is impartial and who holds higher levels of intelligence and of benevolence, and then converse over what her sentiments would be about the matter under discussion. It is natural to conceive of a being who is unsurpassable in such qualities, who is morally supreme, and who naturally takes the definite article the without having been definitized by the writer (because unnecessary, just as we speak of ‘the world’). Signal passages, new to edition 6, suggest that Smith formulates the man within the breast as a representative of the always present and everywhere morally supreme impartial spectator. When Smith speaks of the man within the breast as ‘the supposed impartial spectator’ (all new to edition 6), we interpret ‘supposed’ as sup-pos-ed (purported), not sup-pos’d (posited).     

“Brain Drain” or “Brain Gain”? Students’ Loyalty to their Student Town: Field Evidence from Norway

In the global economy regions fight a two-front “war” to attract young people. On the one hand, they compete against more urban areas because young people leave home to study and do not return to their home region (“brain drain”). On the other hand, they struggle to attract new residents, students and entrepreneurs to their local region (“brain gain”). The context is a student town of a strong industrial region characterized by a net export of young people and an increasing demand for highly qualified labour. The purpose is to gain insight into how student loyalty to a student town may be enhanced. A partial least square path modelling approach is used to estimate a structural equation model of student town loyalty. One finding is that the creation of student town satisfaction has more influence on student town loyalty than reputation building. “Social activity” is the most important loyalty driver. This antecedent is mediated through student town satisfaction and reputation, as well as university college reputation. The town municipalities and the university college should thus be coordinated in their effort to increase student town loyalty to bring down the “brain drain” and increase the “brain gain” in the region.     

Preferences for Housing, Jobs, and Commuting: A Mixed Logit Analysis

This paper reports stated preferences of Dutch workers for combinations of housing, employment, and commuting. The analysis uses standard logit models as well as mixed logit models. Estimation results offer insights into the relative importance of various aspects of housing, employment, and commuting. Households dislike commuting and the value of commuting time implied by the model is high in comparison to the wage rate. Nevertheless, preferences for some housing attributes are strong enough to make substantially longer commuting acceptable to most workers. Of special interest is the strong preference for living in small-or medium-size cities, especially among two income households. Using a mixed logit model instead of a standard logit model results in a substantial improvement of the loglikelihood, reflecting the importance of heterogeneity among respondents. If no individual characteristics are incorporated into the model, the mixed logit implies substantially lower average monetary evaluations of most attributes. These differences are much smaller if some individual characteristics are incorporated into the model.     

Probing A Traffic Congestion Controversy: A Comment

Ohta (2001) claims to have resolved a die-hard controversy on traffic congestion modeling by defining an inverse aggregate demand function that has traffic density as its argument—in Ohta's terminology the 'primitive term.'Using this demand function, Ohta shows that 'hypercongestion' may very well be an optimal stationary state. This contribution argues that at least if what road users demand is completed trips, and if time spent on the road while traveling implies a cost, then Ohta's approach is fundamentally flawed. Also the conclusion that hypercongestion can be optimal is no longer valid.     

Scaling the City: The Political Economy of 'Glocal' Development - Brussels' Conundrum

In this contribution, the new position of the city in the urban political economy will be considered in the context of the shifting realities that characterize an increasingly hybridizing and cosmopolitan global (dis)order. We shall argue that globalization is paralleled by a restructuring of the city and with an increasing importance of the urban in a context of intensifying inter-urban competition. The success of cities is dependent on their local 'embeddedness' in institutional and other networks of power. Attention will be paid to the role of local elites and to the need to forge 'growth coalitions'. We shall conclude that the formation of an inclusive and cohesive growth coalition is a key condition for the future development of Brussels in a context of intense inter-urban competition. However, this poses a host of political problems. Not in the least, the fact the new 'glocal' elites often refuse to partake in local institutional or political networks. The commitment to place that invariably comes with a greater 'local' institutional embedding which may militate against their global strategies and aspirations. The key question for 'local' politics then becomes one of how to forge networks and linkages that force 'glocal' elites to become inserted actively in the regional armatures of governance.