Using GIS as an Aid to Understanding Urban Consolidation

Major initiatives to encourage urban consolidation in Sydney have been undertaken by the New South Wales Government in the last twenty years. The contribution of the research described in this article is to show the central importance of GIS in the methodology of analysing the policies, processes and outcomes of this urban consolidation activity. While the use of GIS to interrogate data from the Population Censuses conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to describe spatial distributions and characteristics is reasonably common, it can be used with local records to build up a picture of the character and impact of building the different kinds of dwellings defined as constituting urban consolidation. In this way ABS data can be used as a context within which to place GIS analysis of the registers of development applications as indicated in studies of three local councils in the south and south–west of Sydney. This approach shows the usefulness of using similar but not completely congruent data sets to investigate complex phenomena such as urban consolidation. It also highlights the importance of classifying and recording local information about urban development and change in a form that enables more proactive programs of policy formulation and operation.     

LET MANY FLOWERS BLOOM

In this rich and sensible assessment of historians' practice and prospects, Allan Megill focuses on the obligation that historians have to support their accounts with evidence. He does this, first, by illustrating the difference between real and merely claimed evidence and, then, by giving an analysis of the underlying nature of evidence in historical accounts. Turning later to the question of how historians and their public should feel about diminishing unity (fragmentation) in historiography and the practices that generate it, Megill explains the sources of fragmentation and then argues that it doesn't matter whether historians are doing the same thing and/or doing it in the same way. What matters, rather, is whether they are doing interesting things and doing them well.     

War Clubs in Southern California: an Interdisciplinary Study of Blunt Force Weapons and Their Impact

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory - Previous studies on violence have focused on patterns of trauma based on bioarchaeological studies of human remains or on architectural features such...     

Notes,Bibliographies, and Documents

John Cudahy, Eamon de Valera, and the Anglo-Irish Negotiations in 1938: The Secret Dispatches to Washington; Raymond J. Raymond     

Book Reviews

Eduardo Lozano.Community Design and the Culture of Cities. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991, xiii and 340 pp., Hardcover $65.00, Paperback $24.95.

Jonathan Barker, Rural Communities under Stress: Peasant Farmers and the State in Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 228 pp., $44.50 hardbound, $13.95 paper and David J. Arnold, Famine: Social Crisis and Historical Change, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988, vii, 154 pp., $17 paper.

David M. Hummon, Commonplaces: Community Ideology and Identity in American Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990, xv and 236 pp., $49.50 (hardbound); $16.95 (paper).

William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, x and 365 pp., $38.50 (hardbound).

F.M.L. Thompson, ed. The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750- 1950. 3 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Vol. I, Regions and Communities, xv and 588 pp., $69.50; vol. II, People and Their Environment, xv and 373 pp., $59.50; vol. Ill, Social Agencies and Institutions, xiii and 492 pp., $59.50; the set, $150.00

Luke B. Knapke, ed. Liwwät Böke, 1807-1882, Pioneer. Minster, Ohio: The Minster Historical Society, 1987, 197 pp. and pen and ink sketches, $22.25 (hardbound).

Timothy R. Mahoney. River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820-1870. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, xi and 319 pp., $39.50 (cloth).

James S. Duncan. The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, xiv and229 pp., index, figures, $49.50 (hardbound).