Urban Planning in Italy: The Future of Urban General Plan and Governance

This article aims to highlight and, whenever possible, demonstrate that the urban general plan is still the instrument of the utmost importance to trigger and steer urban transformations. Within the current Italian context, the article examines the characteristics, contradictions, weaknesses and opportunities of urban planning set of rules and practices and tries to propose concrete answers to questions and issues strictly connected that affect the municipality's urban planning: how to manage and govern a contemporary metropolis or city agglomeration, the concerns associated with overlapping jurisdictions and different rules for various hierarchical administrative levels, the costs of social and common services, the need to include in the urban plan the possible use of European Union Structural Funds, the real estate market affecting new development and urban regeneration programmes and investments. All these aspects should be included in a unifying and strong planning instrument, the urban plan, which could address and steer effectively the urban planning policies and their governance.     

Winning back more than words? Power,discourse and quarrying on the Niagara Escarpment

This paper explores the controversy and public hearing on the proposed extension of the largest limestone quarry in Canada, operated by Dufferin Aggregates at Milton, Ontario. The quarry constitutes an important source of construction material for the nearby Greater Toronto Area. However, the quarry is protected by the provincial Niagara Escarpment Planning and Development Act and located inside the UNESCO-designated Niagara Escarpment Biosphere Reserve. The proposal has therefore attracted considerable opposition from the public institution charged with its protection, the Niagara Escarpment Commission, as well as environmental groups and local residents. To make sense of the tensions, conflicts and outcome of the Dufferin case, we consult and apply several critical literatures. We see the conflict as part of a transformation of the countryside from a space of production to a space of consumption, where there is a shift in emphasis from resource extractive to scenic and ecological landscape values, and the displacement of productive classes, farmers and workers, in favour of a service class of professionals and retirees. Within this transformation, we identify a 'power geometry' of actor networks of different coalition groups that form allegiances and engage in struggles at different geographic scales. These actor networks operate within the set frames of a dominant development discourse and a popular environmentalist discourse that both include and exclude other ways of seeing and managing the escarpment.     

Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Policy Change

The advocacy coalition framework (AC) explains policy stability The policy entrepreneurship model (PE) explains dynamic policy change. Thus, augmenting the AC with insights from the PE provides a method of explaining a common empirical phenomenon: policy stability punctuated by dynamic policy change. This analytical strategy could be used to explore stability and change in many policy arenas. Here, we use it to interpret the background lo and dynamics of recent education policy reform in Michigan.     

Managing the Discourse of Resource Management: the Case of Sasi from ‘Southeast’ Maluku,Indonesia

Co-management of protected areas and renewable resources, with its focus upon local community involvement, is often proposed as some form of ‘magic cure’ for environmental ailments and social injustices. Notwithstanding the inherent romanticism of some of the proponents of management from ‘the bottom up’, there is a strong tendency to view this approach in overly utilitarian, ahistorical and often essentialist terms. In the process, the cultural, historical and political specificities and effects of this discourse are either neutralised or totally disregarded. While a number of authors have identified some of the limitations and problems associated with the implementation of community-based, co-management programmes, there is still a general reluctance to question the logic which informs and is constitutive of this discourse. In this paper, I explore the discourse of resource management in relation to the varied practices and perceptions associated with and identified as sasi. This discussion of sasi focuses upon the island of Luang, and the 1800 or so people who inhabit this island located in the southern waters of the Banda sea. The environmental and economic circumstances of Luang make it an ideal context for the investigation of ‘community-based, marine resource management’ strategies. However, while this context seems to comply with some of the truths produced by the discourse of resource management, in this paper I argue that the very canons of this discourse are placed at risk through people's enactment of their own projects and the expression of their own representations.     

The Geographer as Itinerant: Peter Scott in Flight, 1952–1996

Mobility is the keystone of the ‘new’ regional geography. Attention is drawn to the outpouring of work on travellers throughout history. Surprisingly, little mention is made of geographers who have crossed borders, been immigrants and have engaged in writing about movement. As is evident from Peter Scott's pocket log diary of air travel and airports, there is scope for a study of the whole range of spatial practices of individual geographers through an examination of maps, diaries, stories, books and television programs. As all geographers are travellers, it is perhaps more appropriate to create the spirit of the time so that we can position ourselves in the bigger picture and enjoy our private reveries. This paper, therefore, seeks to recreate the air transport geography of the mid-1960s and to list key changes over the following thirty years, before examining air transport geography in the mid-1990s. Attention is paid to advertising signs and images of each period.     

Mabo and Museums: ‘The Indigenous (Re)Appropriation of Indigenous Things’

In this paper I extend upon the categories of appropriation identified by Beings, land and people. Using the work of Nancy Munn (1984) and Annette Weiner (1992), I argue that the relationship between objects, place, Beings and people is of a consubstantial and inalienable nature. Following on from this argument, I propose that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and interests in land or waters, as defined by the recent Native Title legislation, cannot be alienated from rights and interests in other cultural possessions. These other cultural forms include tjurunga, as well as songs, ceremonies and paintings. As this suggests, in the post-Mabo landscape museums represent important collecting sites for indigenous people; a somewhat different identity to the former status of museums as sites of indigenous collections.     

Portraits of the Artist as Politician,the Politician as Artist: Commemorating the Disraeli Phenomenon

This article examines the reception of Benjamin Disraeli as a bestselling novelist and respectable elder statesman as reflected in obituaries and biographical sketches appearing in the wake of his death in 1881. It starts out by tracing Disraeli’s entry into the popular imagination during his lifetime before focusing on the intersections of literary and political fame in late nineteenth-century commemorations. Disraeli’s posthumous media reception reveals that his deft migration between the literary and the political fields as closely interconnected arenas of self-fashioning crucially influenced his position as one of the most eminent figures in Victorian public life. It will be shown, however, that the narrative of the duality of Disraeli’s public acclaim is complicated by the celebrifying impact of his lifelong position as a social, ethnic, and intellectual outsider who transgressed Victorian norms and categories. In its attempt to unpick the multiple layers of Disraeli’s Victorian pre-eminence from the angle of Celebrity Studies, this article illuminates the tension between processes of self-fashioning and media appropriation that informs the production and consumption of fame and celebrity in nineteenth-century Britain and beyond. It thus participates in an ongoing scholarly conversation about the cultural history of fame and celebrity, presenting Disraeli as a type of media celebrity whose public profile was fashioned from a variety of dynamically interacting and mutually sustaining manifestations of fame.     

Children and young people as co-researchers – researching subjective well-being in residential area with visual and verbal methods

In this article, we focus on child perspective methodology when co-researching well-being with children and young people. The paper explores how to produce and analyse data produced with children and young people, and how to further develop the method of co-researching with them? We combined visual and verbal methods by using photo elicitation interviews (N?=?16) and drawing group discussions (N?=?49) to study the subjective well-being of 2–16-year-olds in their residential areas. We found out that by combining two methods it is possible to achieve a wider view of children’s subjective well-being. However, we must be aware that well-being is a complex entity and that there are barriers to use child perspective methods. Co-researching requires situationality, reciprocity and the researcher’s willingness to hear the perspectives of children.