Interpreting cultural remains in airborne laser scanning generated digital terrain models: effects of size and shape on detection success rates

In this study, detection success rates were evaluated for cultural remains that were detected manually based on interpretation of digital terrain models (DTM) derived from airborne laser scanning data and with a resolution of 1, 5 and 10 points m⁻². The group of cultural remains included charcoal kilns, charcoal pits, hollow-roads, various pits, house foundations, tar kilns, grave mounds and pit-falls. The effects on the interpretation success of different types of cultural remains and their physical properties were studied: size, shape and elevation difference showing that the detection success rates varied considerably. The main tendency was that large cultural remains with clear geometrical shape (ovals and circles) and large elevation difference were much more successfully detected and classified compared to the smaller ones, especially those without a clear geometrical shape. The study also showed that it was the identification of the larger structures which profited most from an increased resolution of the DTM, and it was of no help to increase resolution in order to improve the identification of the irregularly shaped cultural remains.     

‘Mr Bourne's dilemma’. Consumer culture,property speculation and department store demise: the rise and fall of Bourne and Hollingsworth on London's Oxford Street

This paper explores the twentieth-century rise and fall of the traditional department store Bourne and Hollingsworth in London's Oxford Street as a means of re-examining the historical geographies of metropolitan consumption cultures. The research moves away from a preoccupation with urban retail's novelty and spectacle towards a consideration of the more conventional and conservative kinds of consumption that have been a vital part of the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century. The paper analyses the intersections of different dimensions of the history of metropolitan consumption: with a culturalist focus on consumer identity and urban microgrographies; but also an examination of this as a family-owned, paternalistic business, and as a material space, both as a building designed and refurbished by its owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. The final approach to Bourne and Hollingsworth as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city, allows a new understanding of the vulnerability of this kind of retailing by the later twentieth century. The study shows that an emphasis on the significance of cultures of consumption provides at best a partial explanation for changes in the landscapes of consumption: it is argued that cities are the sites of complex intersections between cultural practices and other kinds of geography, in this case those of asset values and opportunities for property speculation.     

THE SENSITIVITY OF INPUT-OUTPUT MULTIPLIERS*

The present paper derives analytical expressions for the sensitivity of input-output multipliers to errors in the data. The effects on the simple output multipliers are investigated for additive errors, multiplicative errors in the columns, multiplicative errors in the rows, error rectangles, the error couple and the single error, and price changes. In contrast to earlier investigations, the results are not obtained from the Leontief inverse. The present approach focusses on the effects of errors on the eigenvector corresponding to the dominant eigenvalue. It is indicated how similar expressions may be derived for several other multipliers.     

CALCULATING THE COST OF TRANSFERRING STUDENTS FROM PAROCHIAL TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS: AN EXAMINATION AND CRITIQUE

Public sector aid to K-12 parochial schools is often justified on the basis that providing assistance is cheaper than having to absorb all those students into public school systems. But is it? The cost of transferring students from parochial to public K-12 schools has never been satisfactorily calculated. This article points to the weaknesses in previous efforts and outlines the elements that must be present in a comprehensive estimate of transfer costs.     

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights into these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political-ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical-materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.