Privatising the suburbs: examining the trends and implications of 20 years of private residential development in Sydney,Australia

Master planned estates have been the subject of considerable academic interest since the publication of Blakely and Snyder's ( 1997 ) typology. The growing provision of private assets, facilities, and infrastructure in such estates has been documented and discussed. However, the extent of this form of residential estate in Australia has yet to be systematically documented. This paper seeks to contribute to knowledge in this field by reference to findings from an investigation in Sydney, Australia, using data from 300 private residential estates constructed under the New South Wales Community Land Development Act, 1989 (community title) over a 20‐year period. The aim is to understand the broad trends emerging in relation to the nature and extent of these types of developments and to consider some of their potential implications. This research suggests that there has been a quiet revolution in residential development and postulates that the extent of privatisation of essential neighbourhood infrastructure has been considerable. The study finds that master planned residential estate development has proliferated, particularly in the outer suburbs and in areas of relative disadvantage, and resulted in enclaves of comparative affluence disconnected from surrounding areas. In addition, the restrictive covenants usually applied in these estates are often designed to prevent change, including future densification or environmental adaptation. To this extent, the privatised nature of these estates puts them beyond the reach of broader urban planning goals.     

From Big Noise to Big Data: Toward the Verification of Large Data sets for Understanding Regional Retail Flows

There has been much excitement among quantitative geographers about newly available data sets, characterized by high volume, velocity, and variety. This phenomenon is often labeled as “Big Data” and has contributed to methodological and empirical advances, particularly in the areas of visualization and analysis of social networks. However, a fourth v—veracity (or lack thereof)—has been conspicuously lacking from the literature. This article sets out to test the potential for verifying large data sets. It does this by cross‐comparing three unrelated estimates of retail flows—human movements from home locations to shopping centers—derived from the following geo‐coded sources: (1) a major mobile telephone service provider; (2) a commercial consumer survey; and (3) geotagged Twitter messages. Three spatial interaction models also provided estimates of flow: constrained and unconstrained versions of the “gravity model” and the recently developed “radiation model.” We found positive relationships between all data‐based and theoretical sources of estimated retail flows. Based on the analysis, the mobile telephone data fitted the modeled flows and consumer survey data closely, while flows obtained directly from the Twitter data diverged from other sources. The research highlights the importance of verification in flow data derived from new sources and demonstrates methods for achieving this.     

Diderot: Les Dernières Années, 1770–84

This article provides an account of the Enlightenment dispute over hermeneutical skepticism with particular reference to the idea of hermeneutical probability in the philosophical work of Christian August Crusius. The essay sheds new light on the hermeneutical issues addressed in the philosophical school of the so-called Thomasians based mainly in Leipzig in the first half of the eighteenth century (inter alia Rüdiger, Hoffmann, and Crusius). The paper deals with Crusius’ wide-ranging efforts to cope with the uncertain character of most parts of human knowledge and his attempts to construct a workable theory of hermeneutical probability. This raises points of central interest relating to probabilism in the methodology of textual interpretation and connects Crusius to contemporary discussions of hermeneutical skepticism.     

The distribution of the Mesozoic ostracod genus Procytherura Whatley: palaeogeographical implications with special reference to Argentina

A review is undertaken of the nine species of Procytherura known to occur in Argentina and a new species, Procytherura serangodes sp. nov. is described. The global distribution of the genus indicates that it was more or less equally diverse and widely distributed in both hemispheres during most of the Lower and Middle Jurassic, but that in the Upper Jurassic and in the Lower Cretaceous, it became progressively restricted to the Southern Hemisphere. The widespread distribution of several Jurassic species of Procytherura, which occur in both Great Britain and Northwest Europe and in Argentina, is shown to be related to the availability of important migration routes, including the Tethys and the Hispanic Corridor. In the Lower Cretaceous, the very widespread distribution of Procytherura in the Southern Hemisphere, is used to support the existence of important routes along the eastern and western seaboards of Africa, the latter associated with the opening of the South Atlantic.     

Migration and Viking Dublin: paleomobility and paleodiet through isotopic analyses

During the early medieval period in Ireland, Dublin was established as the largest Viking settlement on the island in the ninth century AD. A previous biodistance study has suggested that the population of the town consisted of a polyethnic amalgam of immigrant and indigenous. In this study, we use biogeochemistry to investigate paleomobility and paleodiet in archeological human remains from the ninth to eleventh century levels at the sites at Fishamble Street II (National Museum of Ireland excavation number E172), Fishamble Street III (E190) and John’s Lane (E173), as well as twelfth-century remains from Wood Quay (E132). Through radiogenic strontium isotope, stable oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen isotope, and elemental concentration analyses, we investigate the origins of the individuals who lived and died in early and late Viking Dublin. Mean archaeological human enamel and bone isotope values from Dublin are ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr = 0.70975 ± 0.00139 (2σ, n = 22), δ¹³C_{carbonate(V-PDB)} = −14.8‰ ± 0.8‰ (1σ, n = 12), and δ¹⁸O_{carbonate(V-PDB)} = −7.2‰ ± 1.0‰ (1σ, n = 12). Archaeological human bone samples exhibit mean δ¹³C_{collagen(V-PDB)} = −20.8‰ ± 0.5‰ (1σ, n = 12) and mean δ¹⁵N_{collagen(AIR)} = +10.0‰ ± 1.7‰ (1σ, n = 12). Comparing these data with archaeological faunal data from Dublin and published data from northern Europe, we argue that there are no clear immigrants from other parts of the North Atlantic, although there is one clear outlier in both origins and diet. Overall, the relative homogeneity in both paleomobility and paleodiet may support models of acculturation in Viking Dublin, rather than a high number of first-generation immigrants or continued migration from Scandinavia.     

Memorialisation and remembrance: on strategic forgetting and the metamorphosis of psychiatric asylums into sites for tertiary educational provision

This paper builds on earlier investigations of psychiatric asylum closure by focusing on their not infrequent successor role as educational facilities. We ask two questions: what conditions underpin a transition to educational re-use, and how is former asylum use remembered and memorialised in the successor context? Through recounting and interpreting the histories of acquisition and adaptation at two sites (Carrington, Auckland and Lakeshore, Toronto), we build a narrative that suggests a variable response to the shadows cast by stigma and the vilification of asylum. We distinguish between memorialisation (material reminders on site) and remembrance (narratives of past use). Former asylum sites, we contend, are attractive for educational users for their campus-like settings, range of buildings and (now) suburban locations. For city residents and planners replacing one institutional use with another keeps the site green, brings employment, and retains semi-public access. Memorialisation is often strategically low-key and remembrance more personal and individual. The net result is a relict landscape that speaks to the transcendence of stigma despite the relatively recent demise of the asylum.     

Gender and daily mobility in a New Zealand city, 1920–1960

Although it is widely accepted that transport—like other social practices—is gendered, the concept of gender used in transport research is often one‐dimensional, with the focus on gendered variations in behaviour rather than on gendered meaning and identities. In this paper, I develop a more complex and multi‐stranded way of approaching the issue of gender and transport (or rather, daily mobility). A case study of a neighbourhood in the New Zealand city of Dunedin in the early decades of last century is presented to explore how the practices of daily mobility constituted gender. A three‐part concept of gender is developed as a basis for analysis: gender as a pattern of social relations, a cultural system of meaning and a component of personal identity. This is then used to analyse a collection of sixty oral histories. The period 1920–1960 is particularly interesting; in these decades extensive and widely used public transport systems (notably electric trams) shared urban streets with bicycles and pedestrians, and the emerging private modes of motorcycle and motor car. As new transport technologies were taken up, they offered the opportunity for new social practices to be formed around their use, for cultural meanings to be assigned to the technologies and for embodied individual subjectivities to be constructed. I argue that we can usefully interpret the shifting patterns of transport use through the lens of gender, and that we can come to understand the process by which gender is constructed by attention to everyday trip‐making and presence on the street.