The bricolage of the here: young people's narratives of identity in the countryside

Memories are crucial to our construction of place. They simultaneously offer an anchor for identity and different temporalities to encounters with landscapes. Memory allows different spaces, pasts, and futures to become embedded in particular locales. Yet the spontaneous assemblages of meaning that memory enables are not apolitical. Thus the mechanisms and processes by which meaning is articulated in these encounters are fundamental to our understandings of place. This paper, therefore, brings together the work of Henri Bergson on memory and Paul Ricoeur on narrative, to examine the stories individuals produce which define the self. By drawing on research into the lives of young people in the countryside, the paper does three things: it discusses the role of memory in creating identity; it examines the political process of narrative by which memories become woven into understandings of place and create a bricolage of the here; and finally, it offers the ‘storied-self’ as a resolution of the competing constructions and experiences of personal continuity and the inconsistencies and constant change in the project of the individual.     

Robustness of econometrically estimated local multipliers across different methods and data

Local traded‐goods employment multiplier estimates play an important role in the decision making of local policy makers. Therefore, it is important to understand the robustness of the approaches and quality of the data used in empirical studies. The local employment multiplier estimates by Moretti (AER; 2010) are a good benchmark for departure. In this paper, I find the traded‐goods multiplier falls within the range of 1.17 to 1.93, which is substantially lower than the estimate of 2.6 obtained by Moretti. I use multiple estimators in combination with two data sets, a range of controls and different ways of classifying traded industries to show the robustness and variability of local employment multiplier estimates. Finally, I demonstrate the sensitivity of Moretti's results. The most notable result being that Moretti's multiplier for separate skilled or unskilled workers in the nontraded sector is overestimated by a factor of 2.     

The acceleration of transitions to urban sustainability: a case study of Brighton and Hove

Cities raise major challenges and opportunities for achieving sustainability. Much literature on urban sustainability focuses on specific aspects such as planning practices, urban policy or the diffusion of more sustainable technologies or practices. However, attempts at understanding the mechanisms of structural change towards sustainability have resulted in the emergence of an interdisciplinary field of sustainability transitions research. Transitions research has developed a phase model of transitions in which predevelopment, take-off, acceleration and stabilization phases are distinguished. However, the acceleration phase has received limited attention so far. This is a crucial gap as policy-makers are keen to accelerate transitions. This paper aims to enhance our understanding of how local actions contribute towards accelerating urban sustainability transitions. It does so by testing an acceleration mechanisms framework through exploring the collective agency of local initiatives in urban sustainability transitions. Drawing on a case study of the city of Brighton and Hove (UK), the paper finds that despite favourable local political conditions, there is a lack of evidence of acceleration apart from in individual domains such as food or mobility. Progress is found to depend on the agency of initiatives to both scale up sustainable practices and embed these practices into local governance arrangements.     

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.