The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of ‘the city’ and of ‘nature’ are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.     

Roi mineur et naissance de la majesté dans les discours auliques

The numerous treatises on reason of State are part of a genre which theorises political actions a posteriori. It is not possible for reason of State to be expressed directly and publicly ? How is it staged by the State itself ? Courtly literature, with its subtle dialectic of imitation and idealization, contains abundant material exemplifying this manifestation as representation, all the more significant when it concerns an interregnum. The minor age of the prince, his crowning and the ceremony of his coming of age are essential moments which are surrounded by the rhetoric of praise and during which the State institutes in the prince both the faculty of reason and its own reason: a panegyric reason of State.     

The conflicting logics of cross-border reterritorialization: Geopolitics of Euroregions in Eastern Europe

Europe is currently experiencing an unprecedented process of reterritorialization in the context of European Union integration. Central to this process is the implementation of various cross-border cooperation schemes, commonly known as Euroregions, aimed at redefining fixed, border-induced Westphalian territoriality. The literature on Euroregions has primarily examined the reterritorialization of state power and institutions across borders, documenting the emergence of cross-border governance networks. However, the territorial underpinning of cross-border reterritorialization, as well as the process of territorial constitution of cross-border spaces has been less well explored. This paper examines cross-border reterritorialization from a geopolitical perspective informed by multi-scalar conceptualizations of political territoriality. Actors at supranational, national and local scales often follow territorial logics that are at odds with each other. Competing meanings of territory and territoriality interact to produce a geopolitics of Euroregions that shapes cross-border reterritorialization. The paper focuses on the Euroregions established at the current fringes of the EU, in the Romanian–Ukrainian–Moldovan borderlands.     

A Spatial Typology of Israel on the Basis of Partial-Order Analysis

In the present study, a relatively new analytical technique—“Partial Order Scalogram Analysis with Base Coordinates” (POSAC)—is used to integrate subjective and objective measurements in the same way that other clustering techniques can be used to reduce a large number of observations to a limited number of major groups. The technique is applied to a geographical problem, involving 34 regions in the State of Israel, the economic welfare of which is characterized by means of ten objective socioeconomic variables and five subjective variables. The 34 regions are reduced to 5 manageable geographical spheres.