The monuments of Kings Cross: a visit to the new ruins of London

In his 1967 photo essay “The monuments of Passaic” the American land artist Robert Smithson presented a New York suburb as a seedbed of urban entropy. His research methods, publication strategies and reflections on decline provided a touchstone for the generation of cultural mappers that followed. But have theoretical expectations of metropolitan space perhaps shifted? Is it not in the city centre, rather than periphery, that decay is thought to set in? In which case, what forms – material, cultural, political – does it assume? And what, meanwhile, has become of the suburbs? In an inversion of the Passaic essay, this narrative takes the reader, first by train and then on foot in search of new ruins at the heart of a metropolis. The city is London and the destination Kings Cross, the largest building site in Europe and marketed as tomorrow’s neighbourhood of leisure and information. By way of an art practice, and through the lens of an art and architectural history, the paper reports on the site – its structures and objects, as well as the acts and interventions that the Kings Cross marketing machine has failed to sublimate.     

Conveyor‐Belt Justice: Precarity,Access to Justice,and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no‐choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three‐year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.     

A Right-of-Centre Triumph: The 2004 Australian Half-Senate Election

The Australian Senate is a significant part of the Australian parliamentary system and the electoral contest for the Senate results in representational outcomes that will influence the way the Senate will perform. This paper argues that the 2004 half-Senate election result was significant because it resulted in the Liberal–National Coalition obtaining a majority in the upper house. It accounts for this outcome by examining the contest by way of inter- and intra-party bloc contests. It finds that a particularly strong Right-of-Centre performance in Queensland, to which voters voting for Ms Pauline Hanson made a major contribution, delivered the Senate majority to the Howard government. The significance of the result also lies in the way it confounded previously held views that the combination of proportional representation used for the Senate with the need to elect six senators from each State would make it unlikely for either Labor or the Liberal and National Parties to ever win an upper house majority in the future.     

The theory of polynuclear urban regions and its application to central Scotland

The idea of strategic planning for networks of cities and towns, encapsulated in the polynuclear urban region concept, has attracted growing interest in many European regions. Key themes include cooperation between neighbouring cities and coordination between functional policies. This article explores the theoretical benefits, including increased economies of scale and improvements in the strength and quality of internal interactions. It also applies these arguments to Central Scotland. As the largest concentration of economic activity in Scotland, with a high level of organizational fragmentation but growing cross boundary issues and coincident growth pressures and deficiencies, there are potential gains from a common strategic perspective. These include improved communications for inter‐firm collaboration and trade, more efficient labour and housing market interactions, and an institutional framework for planning and marketing important regional assets. Closer cooperation within a regional perspective could help the Central Belt to function better as an economic unit and facilitate its ongoing development.     

Watercourses and Discourses: Coalmining in the Upper Hunter Valley,New South Wales

ABSTRACT Water is a resource that both unites and divides people in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, where many communities are facing the prospect of large‐scale open‐cut coalmining developments on productive mixed use land, or already live in proximity to mines and power stations. This article analyses conflicts over a proposed coal mine at Bickham in the Upper Hunter Valley, by contrasting the various protagonists' discourses of water scarcity, supply, and connectivity. It examines the ways in which the terms of opposition are narrowed to the arena of state and industry supported science and economic development, marginalising other cultural values and environmental ethics that are integral to opponents' discourses. Opponents have achieved some measure of success through contestation of the uncertain science of hydrological modelling, bolstered by the context of drought and increasing public acceptance of climate change science.