The programme local d'habitat: preparing a housing strategy for Lille

By the end of the 1970s, the French government had begun to realize that the large‐scale provision of social housing had created as many problems as it had solved. Social exclusion, unemployment and racial tension appeared to be particularly concentrated in the peripheral housing estates that had been the result of the housing policy of the 1960s. In the 1990s, the government developed the programme local d'habitat (PLH; local housing programme) as a means of creating an integrated housing policy across the whole of a given urban area. This article looks at the origins and evolution of the PLH, and presents the programme in the context of local administration and the structures in place for the provision and improvement of housing. It then turns to the application of the PLH to the communauté urbaine of Lille. It boks at the problems to be addressed within the Lille conurbation and the way the PLH responded to them. The article concludes with a reflection on why the PLH has not proceeded and what may be learnt from this apparent failure.     

Precarious Debt: Microfinance Subjects and Intergenerational Dependency in Cambodia

This paper tells a story of debt within a rural Cambodian family in order to understand how microfinance produces more‐than‐individual financial subjects that are entangled in changing social relations of dependency. We draw upon 20 months of joint ethnographic research in Cambodia, where the microfinance industry is one of the largest per capita in the world. Informed by Judith Butler's notions of precariousness and precarity, we argue that even in the context of deepening financialisation, people's lives remain dependent upon others, especially within families. We analyse how these family relations of dependency are reworked along generational lines and spatially stretched due to precarious economic conditions of indebtedness, household migration, and distant labour markets. We conclude that reframing financial subjectivity in terms of precariousness helps us to analyse the relationship between households and financial markets, as well as inform a critical politics of finance.     

Future challenges for Australian and world interpretive methodology

Abstract

When Tilden wrote his book Heritage Interpretation in 1957 he could never have imagined the full extent of socio‐ecological challenges that would be facing humanity at the millennial dawn.This paper defines nine suggested challenge areas for world heritage interpretation and some of the issues that must be urgently addressed if interpretation is to remain a positive force for the survival of humanity and ecological systems.     

Notice of New Publications

The Roman earthworks at Burnswark, Dumfries and Galloway, have long been the subject of different interpretations. Were the Roman camps on either side of the hill-fort erected as part of a siege or as a training ground for the Roman army? This paper reviews the evidence, quoting extensively from the excavation reports and surveys of the site in the hope that one interpretation might predominate.