Voices From This Long Brown Land: Oral Recollections of Owens Valley Lives and Manzanar Pasts

Nestled between the Sierra Nevada and the White-Inyo mountainranges in eastern California, the Owens Valley is geographicallyisolated and spatially bound. Yet this secluded sliver of Californiapossesses a history that blatantly transcends the local. Asa major site of the well-known water wars, the Owens Valleybecame a significant, albeit controversial source of water,enabled Los Angeles’ burgeoning development in the earlytwentieth century. Conceived of in 1904 and completed by 1913,the Los Angeles aqueduct literally bound the Owens Valley tothe demands of the growing metropolis. Several decades later,in the wake of Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, the agriculturallyand economically floundering Owens Valley was chosen as     

Exclusion in Area-based Urban Policy Programmes

Area-based urban regeneration programmes such as the New Deal for Communities in the UK, the German Soziale Stadt and the Danish Kvarterloft are based on a participatory approach emphasizing active citizen participation and the involvement of local stakeholders. The article argues that these initiatives are not as open and inclusive as they strive to be, and in this article, we explore the different types of exclusion that can take place when such programmes are implemented. Based on the theoretical literature and on empirical data from the Danish Kvarterloft project, we identify three types of exclusion—structural, discursive and deliberate exclusion—and offer a theoretical analysis and an empirical account of these exclusions. The article concludes that practitioners as well as politicians need to reflect critically on different types of exclusion in order to create transparent and inclusive democratic processes.     

Beta Phase Communities: Open Source Software as Gift Economy

In this paper, I discuss how gift economy tenets exist within capitalist systems and in what ways the alternative logic of gift economies could be used within capitalist firms to create a more fair economy overall, citing open source software within the technology sector as one example.

To do this, I begin by striking a dialectic between John Milbank's theological and David Graeber's anthropological conceptions of gift economies, illuminating crucial aspects of each to uncover what alternative economic principles are applicable to standard capitalist economic ideologies.

I then turn to a practical application of where these gift economy ideologies are already being utilized to a degree, arguing specifically that open source software provides an alternative economic logic for countless members of the technology sector. On a broad level, I hope to show that capitalism provides the means to alter itself within its own ethos, as certain economic ideologies – like gift economies – could potentially assuage those economic models that contribute to economic inequality. By accentuating these alternative logics within technology firms, they can be expanded and made more substantial, subsequently altering capitalism from the inside out.     

DESTRUCTION AND REALLOCATION OF SKILLS FOLLOWING LARGE COMPANY CLOSURES

This paper analyzes what happens to redundant skills and workers when large companies close down and whether their skills are destroyed or reallocated. The analysis is based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data of the closure of four companies. Getting a job in a skill‐related industry or moving to a spinoff firm leads to skill reallocation. Thus, the result depends on regional idiosyncrasies such as industry structure and urbanization. If local policy makers and the owners exert a coordinated effort, it is possible to create success stories of less skill destruction in urban as well as peripheral regions.