New visual methods for teaching intersectionality from a spatial perspective in a geography and gender course

Intersectionality is a complex concept to deal with when doing research but also when teaching the interrelationships between space and social relations. Here we present “Relief Maps” as a visual tool for teaching intersectionality and its spatial dimension in higher education courses. “Relief Maps” are a model developed for research and applied in a Geography and Gender course at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) with the aim of promoting student reflection on the relationships between power structures, places and lived experiences, starting from their everyday lives.     

From Control to Terror: German Prostitution Policies in Eastern and Western European Territories during both World Wars

In both World Wars, the German armies enacted a prostitution policy in all the occupied territories of Western and Eastern Europe. Through a comparative study, this article uses archival research in Poland, France, Belgium and Germany as well as existing studies in five languages to examine the continuities and discontinuities in German prostitution policies between the Western and the Eastern territories during both wars. In exploring the question of continuity, we consider the interaction of local authorities with occupation forces and how prostitution policies in Western and Eastern countries differed from the German ‘home front’. Strong continuities existed between the First and Second World War, including a severe backlash against the abolitionist trend in Europe and the extension of regulatory controls beyond the prostitutes to include other ‘suspect’ women, often justified by concerns over the spread of venereal diseases and public morality and health. Despite these continuities, prostitution policies were even more regressive during the Second World War, with the racial ideology of Nazism as the main trigger for the brutalisation of prostitution policies. German authorities pushed the system to greater extremes, overseeing its evolution from control to terror.     

Emerging vacuums of strategic planning: an exploration of reforms in Finnish spatial planning

The paper offers a theory-based evaluation of the ongoing reforms in the Finnish spatial planning regime. The paper argues that Finnish planning is moving in a reactive and market-driven direction. This development is not being brought about solely through a direct decrease in public discretionary powers in planning, but is also unfolding indirectly through a process of rescaling in the spatial planning regime. These processes increase municipal autonomy in relation to other planning scales, despite problems observed in the municipality-centred market-driven planning orientation. The resulting reduction in manoeuvring room in public planning is conceptualized in the paper as expanding vacuums of strategic planning. Building on concepts from the literature on state transformation theory and scale theory, the paper draws together theoretical and empirical conclusions from several case studies conducted in close-to-administration projects.     

Der Weg zum Flussgebietsmanagement

Zusammenfassung Der Flussgebietsansatz ist ein zentrales Element der Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) und wurde in Deutschland im Zuge der organisatorischen Umsetzung der Richtlinie strukturell implementiert. Die Kooperationsstrukturen auf Flussgebietsebene sollen dabei einen funktionierenden Rahmen auch für die fachliche Umsetzung der Richtlinie bilden. Beim dazu erforderlichen strukturellen Wandel waren insbesondere die in den Flussgebieten bereits vorhandenen Kooperationsstrukturen von Bedeutung. Diese wurden entweder ausgebaut, umstrukturiert oder von neuen Strukturen zur Umsetzung der WRRL überlagert. Die dabei zum Teil entstandenen Doppelstrukturen erh?hen jedoch den Koordinierungsaufwand der Akteure stark, so dass es aktuell zu einer Zusammenführung und Konsolidierungsbewegung kommt. Allerdings wird auch nach der Konsolidierung eine gro?e strukturelle Vielfalt in den Flussgebieten verbleiben, die durch eine enge Zusammenarbeit der Akteure zu bew?ltigen ist. Es bleibt abzuwarten, inwiefern diese Strukturen sich auch eignen, um neuen Herausforderungen, wie beispielsweise den Folgen des Klimawandels, zu begegnen.     

Influence of Taoism on the invention of the purple pigment used on the Qin terracotta warriors

Until the 19th century, most pigments were based on naturally occurring colored minerals and dyes, with three significant exceptions: Egyptian Blue, Chinese Blue/Purple and Maya Blue. The former two are alkaline-earth copper silicates, and because of this similarity it has been proposed that the Chinese pigments were derived from Egyptian Blue. Herein, we analyzed clumps of pigment from the Qin warriors and discovered that in spite of the structural similarity to Egyptian Blue, the micro-structural morphology of Chinese Purple is very different. Therefore, we believe that the synthesis technology for the Chinese pigments was a by-product of high-refractive index glasses (artificial jades) produced by Taoist monks. Further, the disappearance of these pigments from Chinese art and monuments concurrently with the decline of Taoism not only substantiates the link between the two, but also gives a striking example of how cultural changes in the society affected the scientific developments in ancient China.     

Increasing Role of Services in Competitive Power and Innovativeness of Firms and Industrial Clusters

The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of different types of global services for industrial firms and clusters in terms of their economic competitiveness and innovative performance. The theoretical debates argue that globalization, deregulation and the new production organization make it necessary to use global services that are supplied easily with the help of new telecommunication technologies. The existing empirical studies provide some supporting evidence. However, they also indicate that global service firms can be attained by only smaller numbers of industrial firms and clusters. Still, in-house services besides temporal and informal mechanisms are important to meet the needs of the specialized services, even for the firms that try to become a part of the global production system. The paper focuses on three main questions: “What types of global services are becoming crucial for manufacturing firms and what type of services are still local and national? Is there a significant difference between the characteristics of firms that use the same type of services? To what extent is having access to global services important for the innovativeness of industrial firms and clusters? This paper looks for the answers to these questions based on existing case studies as well as this study of three industrial clusters in Turkey. The findings indicate that there is not a perfect match between theory and empirical evidence and there is a need for more refined theoretical discourses on industry–service relations.