Towards and Integrated Sustainable Development Management Strategy for Torres Strait

Lying between mainland Australia and Papua New Guinea, Torres Strait is a region of high environmental value faced by a plethora of environmental management issues. Although the environment is protected to some extent by the Torres Strait Treaty, the situation is complicated by the desire of the traditional inhabitants for political and economic autonomy and by the involvement of three levels of government, two sovereign nations and a wide range of sectoral interests in environmental management. The failure to extend the moratorium on mining exploration and exploitation of the seabed may act as a catalyst for the development of an integrated and sustainable approach to environmental management in the region. Nevertheless, there are significant constraints which may prevent this. These include the politicisation of environmental issues, lack of effective environmental management at the local level and pressure for the exploitation of natural resources.     

The Tertiary Turn: Locating “The Academy” in Autobiographical Accounts of Activism in Manchester,UK and Auckland,Aotearoa New Zealand

Abstract: Activists often strategically negotiate sectoral boundaries by switching between public, private and voluntary sectors over the life course in order to pursue their aims. This paper draws on a cross‐national study that explored the extent of this inter‐sectoral movement and the specific “career pathways” activists developed in relation to governmental, private and voluntary/community sector organisations. Using an analysis of 46 biographical narratives gathered from activists in Manchester, UK and Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand during 2007 we situate “the academy” in these life stories of activism. Teasing out from these accounts the motivations behind a turn towards tertiary education at particular moments we examine how “academia” supports and sustains individual activists while legitimising and professionalising their activism. In so doing, we track the tactical transfer of knowledge, skills and expertise effected by contact with “the academy” to make substantive and conceptual claims around the future role universities might play in the knowledge economy.     

Memorialisation and remembrance: on strategic forgetting and the metamorphosis of psychiatric asylums into sites for tertiary educational provision

This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum.     

Feeling for the coast: the place of emotion in resistance to residential development

This paper considers the feelings that are evoked in, and by, coastal places. We are particularly interested in how emotional connections with the coastal environment can be a resource and motivation for place-protective action. We draw on stakeholder interviews undertaken in the northern New Zealand locality of Ngunguru in 2008–2009. This site was a ‘hot spot’ of community concern around a proposed major residential development. Our data reveal the depths of feelings for the character of the coastline, as well as the capacity of such feelings to generate mobilisation against change. These feelings encompassed general anxiety about coastal development in New Zealand and outrage at its motivations. Respondents also articulated a particular love for the Ngunguru coast, encompassing feelings of connection, sacredness and reverence. We conclude that concern for feelings is critical to understanding what is at stake in contests around coastal development. While these contests also entail the more readily quantified issues that tend to be highlighted in both planning and academic contexts, the nature of human affection for the coast means that emotions can play a formative role in shaping local understandings and motivating actions.     

New Zealand parents' understandings of the intergenerational decline in children's independent outdoor play and active travel

Children's independent mobility and physical activity levels are declining in Western countries. In the past 20 years New Zealand children's active travel (walking and cycling) has dropped on average from 130 to 72 minutes per week, and those travelling by car to school have increased from 31% to 58%. This paper describes parents' understandings of why 9–11-year-old primary school children in suburban Auckland are less likely to walk to school and play unsupervised outdoors than they were as children. Data gathered in focus groups show understandings range from proximate neighbourhood explanations to downstream impacts of a neoliberal policy context.     

Class,Citizenship and Regeneration: Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014

Abstract: Through a focus on “consumer‐citizenship” this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market‐led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform “problem people, and problem places” ( Damer 1989 , From Moorepark to “Wine Alley”) into sites of “active” consumption and “responsible” citizenship. Yet, access to this “consumer citizenship” is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist‐influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian‐inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.