Selling the world city: A comparison of promotional strategies in Paris and London

Within the globalization process which creaks new common imperatives for cities, it is felt that cities are developing similar promotional approaches. Drawing on two case studies of the promotional strategies and institutions of Paris and London, this paper investigates the balance between economic and purely non‐economic factors in shaping these capitals’ responses to global pressure. The cities’ responses are found to be shaped by national and local factors (institutional, political, cultural) rather than economic ones. Two types of strategies and actors can be outlined, London bang more aggressive and flexible than Paris. Lastly, the report highlights the emergence of new types of institutions within the capitals.     

THE 'BLOB'

Canada will remember 1985 as the year of the ‘Blob,’ that mixture of toxic chemicals found in the St Clair River that attracted national attention. The ‘Blob’ was discovered by divers from the Great Lakes Institute (gli) of the University of Windsor, who were engaged in taking samples of sediment from the bottom of the river. The oily sludge was found to be a mixture of nasty chemical compounds - including dioxins. In the words of one government scientist, it was the most contaminated material ever found in the Great Lakes! Traces of the dread dioxin were found in the drinking water of municipalities downstream, and citizens demanded action from all levels of government. Did the chemicals come from spills from Chemical Valley industries? or industrial sewers? or seepage from deep wells where chemical waste has been stored? Do these toxic contaminants bioaccumulate in the food chain? And what is their effect on humans? No one knows the answers to these questions, but the problems have not gone away. One important result has been a great increase in research efforts. The Gli had been engaged for three years in research in the Essex region on four toxic contaminants — lead, cadmium, pcbs, and ocs (octachlorostyrene) under a contract with the federal Department of Environment. This research indicated that these contaminants are widespread in the sediments and clams of the rivers and Lake St Clair- and also in the soil and plants of the region. The latter finding is of concern, since recent research has shown that food (not drinking water) is the chief source of many contaminants to the human body. Since the ‘Blob’ findings, the Gli has received grants from the World Wildlife Fund and the Ontario Ministry of the Environment to pursue its research into toxic contaminants in the ecosystem. The ‘Blob’ incident has been a justification for the existence of the Great Lakes Institute. It demonstrated that university institutes could bring to public attention environmental hazards that may be concealed or minimized by private companies and overlooked or condoned by government agencies. The multidisciplinary cli was formed at the University of Windsor in 1981 to provide an alternative to government research on the Great Lakes. In Ontario at that time there was no university-based organization doing Great Lakes research, though all the Great Lakes states had such university institutes.     

‘It’s good but it’s not enough’: the relational geographies of social policy and youth mentoring interventions

Developing a critical analysis of the relational and situated practices of social policy, this paper draws on an evaluation of an early intervention project in Scotland (UK) where volunteer adult mentors supported young people ‘at risk’ of offending or antisocial behaviour. Contributing to ‘enlivened’ accounts of social practice, we explore how practices of mentoring developed through the co-presence of mentor and young person in the often transitory spaces of care which characterized the ‘diversionary activities’ approach in the project. We expand the notion of the relational in social practice beyond the care-recipient dyad to include wider networks of care (families, programme workers, social institutions). The paper explores how such social interventions might both be ‘good’ for the young people involved, and yet recognize critiques that more individualized models of intervention inevitably have limitations which make them ‘not enough’ to deal with structural inequalities and disadvantages. Acknowledging the impacts of neoliberalism, we argue critical attention to diverse situated relational practices points to the excessive nature of engagement in social policy and provides scope for transformative practice where young people’s geographies can be ‘upscaled’ to connect to the realms of social policy and practice.     

EVOLUTION OF URBAN SYSTEMS IN THE PARETO PLANE*

ABSTRACT Distributions of city sizes are usually characterized by their Pareto index. This, however, turns out to be a rather restrictive view, for the Pareto distribution is known to become singular whenever the Pareto index becomes smaller than one, a case which is fairly frequent in empirical distributions. We show that the introduction of finite Pareto distributions in which city sizes are bounded from above solves a number of difficulties encountered by the rank-size rule and by the unbounded Pareto distribution. Combined with the use of finite Pareto distributions, the green-belt model that has been introduced previously is reexamined. It implies definite constraints for the long-run evolution of urban systems; it is in the cases of countries experiencing a process of fast urbanization that these constraints are of greatest significance. The implications of the model are confronted with empirical evidence concerning the evolution of urban systems in major industrialized countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.     

Evaluating bone collagen extraction methods for stable isotope analysis in dietary studies

The specific purpose of this study was to compare three different collagen extraction methods commonly used in isotope laboratories conducting dietary studies. We evaluated their resultant differences in δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N, collagen quality and collagen yield. Our study was based on well-preserved skeletal material from the medieval period in Denmark. Our study shows that there is a systematic significant difference in the yield and the δ¹³C values between the three methods. Using the method of DeNiro and Epstein [DeNiro, M.J., Epstein, S., 1981. Influence of diet on the distribution of nitrogen isotopes in animals. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 45, 341–351] with NaOH as cleaning agent, will, according to our study, give δ¹³C values that are on average ±0.32‰ more positive than using the ultra-filtration method [Brown, T.A., Nelson, D.E., Vogel, J.S., Southon, J.R., 1988. Improved collagen extraction by modified Longin method. Radiocarbon 30 (2), 171–177, modified in Richards, M.P., Hedges R.E.M., 1999. Stable isotope evidence for similarities in the types of marine foods used by late Mesolithic humans at sites along the Atlantic coast of Europe. Journal of Archaeological Science 26, 717–722]. The third method, which is a modified version of the second method, excluded the ultra-filtration step. This method seems to give δ¹³C values that lie in between the other methods. Our study did not show any significant difference in δ¹⁵N values. Although the differences between the methods are very small, we conclude that the use of stable isotope analysis in food determination studies requires adherence to routine methods for preparing and measuring samples.