Global Metropolitan-Regional Scale in Evolution: Metropolitan Intermediary Cities and Metropolitan Cities

The case of Madrid is used as empirical focus to propose a new classification of the metropolitan region urban medium-sized or secondary city system. Based on a methodology that integrates the morphological (size, location and socioeconomic history) and the functional dimensions (centrality index, advanced producer services (APS) concentration and commuting), the article compares new employment centres—cities with metropolitan origin—and historical cities—previously free standing cities, progressively integrated in metropolitan processes. The results show a distinction between (1) metropolitan cities, with a traditional intermediation role, and (2) metropolitan intermediary cities, that include an additional quality to their traditional intermediation role, that of concentrating APS. The article confirms that some medium-sized cities—metropolitan intermediary cities—linked to different origins and up to 100?km away from the metropolis are more visible in the global scene and are establishing an emerging global multicore-network at a metropolitan-regional scale.     

Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru

During the major Inca civil wars, Atahualpa had almost exterminated Huascar’s kin. Only a few capac women, those who descended from Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, remained alive. Atahualpa had planned to take them as his principal wives since only this type of marriage could successfully maintain the authority of the Incas over a large Andean territory. The Spanish arrival in 1532 interrupted his plans, but it did not eliminate Inca claims of sovereignty through marriage. In fact, it was through marriage that Atahualpa aimed to establish political alliances with Francisco Pizarro. While both Incas and Spaniards understood marriage on their own terms, there were many instances in which both were willing to redefine their own concepts of marriage in their struggle for power. In all of these, the women engaged in these unions were not only conscious about their political roles, but agents in the main historical events of this period.     

The ‘She-Land,’ social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. This analysis focuses upon the Patagonian territory and aims to reveal the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State's arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonia since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes the particular experience of Patagonian women to question the recognition of the problem behind the construction of landscape and the geographical and historical patriarchal order. As a result of this process, the possibility to argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape's official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.     

The paradox of ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ or how to mock heritage to make heritage

During the last 50 years, and due to the dilapidation of public funds, hundreds of unfinished public works have been erected Italy. In 2007, the group of artists Alterazioni Video declared these ruins a formal architectural style – ‘Incompiuto Siciliano’ – and, in doing so, their aim is to change the buildings’ dark side and turn it into something positive. One of the tangible outcomes within the artists’ proposal is the eventual creation of the ‘Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park’ in Giarre, a Sicilian medium-sized village that has the highest density of unfinished public works in Italy. This article analyses how such a provocative project contains serious implications in terms of heritage. It is stated that, in order to forge a positivized ‘unfinished heritage’, Incompiuto Siciliano Archaeological Park builds bridges between aspects that, in principle, seem to be the opposite of each other. This opens the possibility of putting traditional heritage assumptions in question through the production of a critical heritage whose novelty lies in the constructive use of irony, sarcasm and double meaning.     

Are All Policy Decisions Equal? Explaining the Variation in Media Coverage of the UK Budget

A country's budget is one of the most important public policy instruments, as it establishes the government's policy priorities and has the potential to determine winners and losers. The budget, however, is a mixture of different components and these get varying degrees of attention in the media. Drawing on sociology of news research, this paper seeks to explain this heterogeneous coverage of a budget's policy decisions. To do so, it uses a unique data set of over 5,000 articles of press coverage of six UK budgets (2008–2012). These articles are coded for the presence/absence of each of the budget's policy decision, via automated content analysis. On the basis of a multivariate negative binomial model, we find that the salience of a policy decision in the coverage is determined by its cost, whether it is negative (i.e., tax hikes and spending cuts) or positive, the income group that is the most affected by it, and the level of attention given to it by the government.     

Responses of South African Agate and Chalcedony When Heated Experimentally,and the Broader Implications for Heated Archaeological Minerals

Here we present a database of responses by South African agate and chalcedony to heat treatment. This will assist analyses of heated stone tools not only in South African archaeological sites, but wherever heated agate and chalcedony pieces were knapped. The minerals are abundant worldwide. To replicate potential heating methods during the Stone Age we placed some minerals in a wood fire, some under coals, and others were buried in sediments beneath fires. Thermal responses include lustrous flaked surfaces, pot lid fractures, semi-circular internal fractures, rough internal surfaces, and crazing. Aerobic heating is implied by pot lid fractures. To explain the thermal responses we analyzed the minerals using X-ray fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, and carbon and sulfur analyses. Our chalcedony contains more water and impurities than agate, making it more vulnerable to thermal damage. Our method of combining field experiments with chemical analyses has global applications even though we expect that mineral components of agate and chalcedony will vary slightly in different parts of the world.     

Late Prehistoric High-Altitude Hunter-Gatherer Residential Occupations in the Argentine Southern Andes

Test excavations were conducted at Risco de los Indios (RDLI), a site at 2480 masl with 29 residential features and a well-developed midden containing abundant floral, faunal, lithic, and ceramic materials. Analyses indicate the site was intensively used ca. 500 cal b.p. as a residential base for groups focused on hunting guanaco, supplemented by locally-available wild flora and fauna as well as domestic beans transported from the lowlands. Ceramic and obsidian artifacts indicate these groups were highly mobile and in contact with groups on the eastern and western margins of the Andes. These patterns compare favorably to those seen in the region’s other high altitude villages. It appears that the development of these patterns began with population increase and economic intensification in the lowlands ca. 2000 cal b.p. and that the move to slightly lower elevation settings like RDLI may have been conditioned by the onset of the Little Ice Age.     

First Evidence of Collective Human Inhumation from the Cardial Neolithic (Cova Bonica,Barcelona, NE Iberian Peninsula)

Excavations at Cova Bonica (Barcelona, Spain) have revealed 98 human remains, grouped into five age clusters and corresponding to a minimum of six non-articulated individuals. The remains are clearly associated with Cardial pottery, lithic artifacts, and ornaments suggesting an Early Neolithic horizon. The radiocarbon dating of three human individuals provides a reliable attribution to this period, with a range between ca. 5470 and 5220 cal b.c., identifying it as one of the few assemblages of human remains directly dated from this period. These remains correspond to a rare collective human inhumation and join a growing body of samples from the Cardial Neolithic, which is providing some of the important sites for the study of population movement and the spread of Neolithization along the western Mediterranean coast.     

The Origins of the Neolithic Along the Atlantic Coast of Continental Europe: A Survey

The main aim of this work is to compare the processes of transition to the Neolithic along the Atlantic coasts of continental Europe. Archaeological data on the late Mesolithic and the early Neolithic in the best known regions (central and southern Portugal, Cantabrian Spain, Atlantic France, the shores of the North Sea, and southern Scandinavia) are discussed. The transition to the Neolithic in Atlantic Europe can be viewed as a relatively late phenomenon, with several interesting particularities. Among those, we point out the fundamentally indigenous character of the processes; the existence of a long availability phase, in which hunter-gatherer groups maintained contact with neighboring agriculturalists and probably were familiar with farming and animal husbandry without applying them in a systematic way; and the later development of megalithic monumental funerary architecture. Finally, the main hypotheses so far proposed to explain the change are contrasted with the available evidence: those that argue that the change derives from economic disequilibrium, and those that opt for the development of social inequality as the fundamental cause.     

Housing Vancouver, 1972–2017: A personal urban geography and a professional response

The forum includes a research paper, preceded by a brief introduction and followed by five short responses from Pablo Mendez, Loretta Lees, Margaret Walton-Roberts, Ilse Helbrecht, and Alison Mountz. Mountz's introduction sets the context for the paper and makes some framing remarks on David Ley's career. The main paper examines the housing question in Vancouver, in the period from 1972 to 2017. Re-examining a number of Ley's research projects over this period, three broader themes are explored: the continuity of the housing crisis, and its reconfiguration over the period under study; the contrast between innovative and interventionist housing policy in the 1970s, with the later withdrawal of the state from significant intervention while endorsing market solutions; and the new centrality of housing as an empirical and analytical category in current human geography. This period saw upscaling from the 1970s welfare state to neoliberal globalization, including wealth immigration and off-shore property investment that accelerated serious metropolitan affordability problems. Following this research paper, colleagues and former students respond to the paper and locate the contributions in David Ley's broader career. Their commentaries address Ley's key contributions to debates in human geography, including his work on gentrification, urbanism, urban activism, global migration, art, aesthetics, and ethnography.