Sustainable Development, Rolled‐out Neoliberalism and Sustainable Communities

Recent contributions by geographers on the relationships between states and citizens have documented the rise of rolled‐out neoliberalism. Development agendas are, it is argued, increasingly dominated by the principles of market‐driven reforms, social inequality, and a drive towards enhancing the economic competitiveness of the supply side of the economy. However, at the same time, a parallel set of discourses has emerged in the development literature which argues that it is principles of sustainable development that have, in practice, become dominant. The emphasis is, instead, on democratic empowerment, environmental conservation, and social justice. This paper examines the relationships between these ostensibly very different interpretations of contemporary development with an assessment of one of the Labour government's most ambitious planning agendas—the publication in February 2003 of the document Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future . The proposals are promoted as a "step change" in the planning system with a new emphasis on tackling shortages of housing in the South East and reviving the economy of the Thames Gateway area. The paper assesses the different ways in which such programmes can be interpreted and argues that contemporary development practices in countries such as Britain are constituted by a hybridity of approaches and rationalities and cannot be reduced to simple characterisations of rolled‐out neoliberalism or sustainable development.     

真品与高仿、粗仿青花瓷热释光及成分分析对比实验

为了防止有人以假乱真,扰乱古董市场的健康发展,为此通过三种青花瓷碎片(真品、高仿、粗仿)的热释光及微探针型X荧光分析对比,找出三者的不同。结果表明,热释光法可以直接给出真伪。从X荧光得到成分来对比此三种瓷片的异同结果,建议用瓷胎的多个主、微量元素一起来分析对比,才易于得到正确的结论。     

Augmenting the landscape scene: students as participatory evaluators of mobile geospatial technologies

This paper provides a two-phase study to compare alternative techniques for augmenting landscape scenes on geography fieldtrips. The techniques were: a pre-prepared acetate overlay; a custom-designed mobile field guide; a locative media app on a smartphone; a virtual globe on a tablet PC; a head-mounted virtual reality display, and a geo-wand style mobile app. In one field exercise the first five techniques were compared through analysis of interviews and student video diaries, combined with direct observation. This identified a particular challenge of how to direct user attention correctly to relevant information in the field of view. To explore this issue in more detail, a second field exercise deployed “Zapp”, a bespoke geo-wand-style app capable of retrieving information about distant landscape features. This was evaluated using first-person video and spatial logging of in-field interactions. This paper reflects upon the relative merits of these approaches and highlights particular challenges of using technology to mimic a human field guide in pointing out specific aspects of the landscape scene. We also explore the role of students acting as design informants and research co-participants, which can be mutually beneficial in promoting a critical appreciation of the role of technology to support learning about the landscape.     

Seeing like an investor: urban development planning,financialisation, and investors’ perceptions of London as an investment space

There is a growing orthodoxy that since the global financial crisis European policy-makers and planning systems have become more dependent on inward investment and the availability of global finance to fund welfare services and projects. This process of financialisation, it is claimed, is driven by the needs of developers and investors, who are focused on maximizing returns and limiting their social and economic liabilities. Planning agencies and traditional territory-based arrangements are viewed with increasing suspicion, as standing in the way of investment and acting as a brake on much needed house-building and regeneration. However, in this paper, drawing on detailed research with investors and developers in London, we argue that there needs to be a stronger focus in academic and policy writing on the multiple, variegated, and diverse calculations and framings that private sector actors take when making investment decisions. Too often their perspectives are caricatured and/or over-simplified. We show that and imaginations of planning and regulation are complex and that many firms have realized that market success results from becoming more deeply embedded in the local political, social, and regulatory environments in which they are investing. A greater understanding of these multiple forms of calculation, in turn, opens up opportunities for the maintenance and/or implementation of more effective forms of territorially-based soft and hard regulation. The paper concludes by outlining a broader research agenda for planning and urban studies.     

Collagen fingerprinting of archaeological bone and teeth remains from Domuztepe,South Eastern Turkey

We applied a recently developed method of collagen peptide mass fingerprinting for taxonomic identification in faunal remains to 111 specimens from the Neolithic site of Domuztepe in southeastern Turkey. Advances on the published technique allow us to move beyond the key domesticated fauna (sheep, goat, pig and cattle) to include non-domesticates (deer and gazelle, as well as humans). As the animal economy of Domuztepe was dominated by domestic sheep and goats, a large number of the samples tested were morphologically indistinguishable sheep/goat remains. A number of samples represented elements that provide information on age (i.e., mandibles) or sex (pelvis); thus, this represents the first major study to attempt to improve kill-off profiles using collagen fingerprinting. We also show that the collagen extracted from dentine is equally amenable to the proposed methodology as bone collagen.