Resistance and the Rule of Law in Mexico

Judicial reform and promotion of the rule of law are at the very top of the political agendas of many developing countries. Moreover, in the context of democratization and a growing concern for human rights and citizenship, many social groups are prepared to use the law as a means to challenge the State. This article looks at how a group in Mexico used the law to resist the State's attempt to expropriate land for urban development. The law was used as a method of opposition as well as a symbol, by allowing the resistance to be represented in the form of ‘rights’. In so doing, the legal discourse exposed deeper concerns for justice, ethnicity and nationhood. The solution to the conflict, however, is shown to bear little relation to either the legal framework which structured the resistance or the legal principles which the confrontation sought to establish.     

Approximating the Length of Vehicle Routing Problem Solutions Using Complementary Spatial Information

Accurately estimating the length of Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) distances can inform transportation planning in a wide variety of delivery and service provision contexts. This study extends the work of previous research where multiple linear regression models were used to estimate the average distance of VRP solutions with various customer demands and capacity constraints. This research expands on that approach in two ways: first, the point patterns used in estimation have a wider range of customer clustering or dispersion values as measured by the Average Nearest Neighbor Index (ANNI) as opposed to just using a Poisson or random point process; second, the tour coefficient adjusted by this complementary spatial information is shown to exhibit statistically more accurate estimations. To generate a full range of ANNI values, point patterns were simulated using a Poisson process, a Matern clustering process, and a simple sequential inhibition process to obtain random, clustered, and dispersed point patterns, respectively. The coefficients of independent variables in the models were used to explain how the spatial distributions of customers influence the VRP distances. These results demonstrate that complementary spatial data can be used to improve operational results, a concept that could be applied more broadly.     

What “Is” Territorial Cohesion? What Does It “Do”?: Essentialist Versus Pragmatic Approaches to Using Concepts

The question, “what is territorial cohesion” has reverberated through European spatial policy since the publication of the European Spatial Development Perspective in 1999. Over the last 10 years, the European Spatial Policy Observation Network (ESPON) has made many efforts to define and measure the concept of “territorial cohesion”. Many such attempts assume that a policy concept must be defined in order to be “operationalized”. Or, in other words, that we must determine what the concept is before we can determine what it can or should do. This paper challenges this assumption in two parts. In the first, I review a number of ESPON projects to show how complex and uncertain these essentialist definitions have become. In the second, I analyse a number of national, regional and local government responses to the 2008 Green paper. I show that, whilst a clear and coherent definition has not been established, this concept is already operationalized in different policy frameworks. Bringing this together, I argue that users of such concepts ought to approach the issue differently, through a pragmatic line of enquiry: one that asks what territorial cohesion does, what it might do and how it might affect what other concepts, practices and materials do.     

The role of culture and community in frontier prairie farming

Frederick Jackson Turner described the American frontier as the great democratizer, a place where people from diverse backgrounds came together, shook off the shackles of their former cultures and blended into the American nation. Detailed study of nineteenth-century rural settlement in the Upper Middle West reveals a more complex picture. A marked spatial clustering of groups from the same country, province and even parish is readily observed. Often these groups were bound together in a close-knit community through the agency of a common church. This paper traces through four decades the farming behaviour and economic fortunes of several such groups who settled on the prairie of Kandiyohi County, Minnesota. The findings indicate that the ethnic community, especially where it consisted of people from a relatively restricted district in the old country, did help to make the frontier experience of its people rather different from that of their neighbours.     

Capturing the geography of children’s active and sedentary behaviours at home: the HomeSPACE measurement tool

ABSTRACT

Children spend much of their time at home, indoors and sedentary. This study reports on the development, exploratory factor analysis, validity and reliability of the HomeSPACE Instrument. The instrument assesses features of the home physical environment that influence children’s sedentary behaviour and physical activity, and the family influences that create this environment. The space and equipment audit achieved good to excellent criterion validity and test-retest reliability for equipment, outdoor features and home design measures (Study 1, n?=?36 parents). Family influence scales showed acceptable internal consistency and test-retest reliability (Study 2, n?=?96 parents). Factor analysis highlighted fifteen scales to assess the importance, preferences and supportiveness of the home environment for activity. The HomeSPACE Instrument extends previous tools to provide a valid and reliable assessment of home influences on children’s sedentary behaviour and physical activity, that is adaptable for varying home physical environments.     

THE SPATIALITIES OF ACTUALLY EXISTING NEOLIBERALISM IN GLASGOW, 1977 TO PRESENT

Resisting the temptation to view the neoliberalization of urban policy as unidirectional, pure and hegemonic, this article sets out to make sense of the biography of the process in one city in particular, Glasgow. It attempts to organize, marshall and discipline existing literature on the city's local economic, planning and welfare policies, so as to offer a longitudinal reading of Glasgow's encounter with neoliberal reform across the period 1977 to the present. The article questions whether Glasgow's new political‐economic dispensation is capable of stabilizing local capitalist social relations and securing a new local growth trajectory. Space emerges as a critical part of the story. Neoliberalism has interlaced with historical structures, ideologies and policies to produce a range of new hybrid and mutant socio‐spatial formations and because it does not amount to a pure and coordinated project these socio‐spatial formations contradict and collide as often as they reinforce. Precisely because of the contingent and complicated spatialities it deposits, neoliberalism will continue to struggle to secure a regulatory framework capable of stabilizing local accumulation indefinitely.     

Introduction to volume 4

Introduction to volume 4