Bilingual districts as an instrument in Canadian language policy

"Accommodation of a multi-ethnic population within the territory of a single state has been recognized as a world-wide problem. Within such a society language maintenance is frequently the avenue through which cultural groups seek to preserve their identity. This paper describes and evaluates the Canadian experience of language planning by concentrating on the bilingual district, the key spatial instrument in the federal Official Languages Act. The paper argues for a cautious and spatially varied application of the 1969 Act and seeks to suggest ways in which a geolinguistic analysis may further our understanding of plurilingual societies."     

Welfare Theory,Public Goods,and Public Facility Location

The paper discusses a number of issues that are important to the development of a useful normative “welfare theory” of the public space economy. Attention is specifically focused on theoretical welfare economic models of public goods provided at facilities to which consumers must travel for consumption. The recent analysis of Bigman and ReVelle [2] is subjected to critical scrutiny and found wanting. An alternative, more complex but still very simple, analysis is provided.     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.     

Atomic structures: the architecture of nuclear nationalism in India and Pakistan

Abstract

A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.