Politics of the ‘creative industries’ discourse and its variants

The existing academic debate on creative industries can be summarised as ‘Trojan horse or Rorschach blot’: creative industries working as a neoliberal discourse or producing different effects depending on local context. Arguing that these are two sides of the same coin, this article looks closely at the discourse’s depoliticising and encompassing forces and their interplay on the discourse’s intersection to the broader new economy narrative. The article’s focus is South Korean variants of creative industries discourse. First, the country’s ‘content industries’ discourse served as a Trojan horse for the depoliticising narrative of knowledge economy while boosting the cultural sector discursively and financially. Second, ‘creative economy’ has very recently emerged as the current conservative government’s master economic narrative. This discourse allows the government’s neoliberal economic policies to be further justified while making cultural policy unable to persuasively claim that creativity belongs in the culture’s domain.     

Phytolith identification criteria for foxtail and broomcorn millets: a new approach to calculating crop ratios

Broomcorn and Foxtail millets were major crops in the Yellow River Valley region, Henan, China, during the Neolithic Yangshao period. Phytoliths and macro remains have been used to understand crop choices in this period. Distinguishing between phytoliths from millet crops and panicoid non cultigens can be challenging. We examine the effect of using only one or two identification criteria compared with a more stringent five or more with phytoliths from archaeological samples to examine crop ratios. We compare our results with the results from the macro remains. This demonstrates, firstly, that using more identification markers has a very definite effect on the results and secondly, phytoliths and macro remains are complementary proxies that when used together can produce more accurate results than used alone.     

Accessibility Measurement in Transportation Networks and Application to the Seoul Bus System

This study presents an algorithm for measuring the time‐distance accessibility based on the flow data of actual transportation networks and examines resulting accessibility distributions. Specifically, we construct an extended graph of the transportation network to take into account not only the average speed and transfer time extracted from the data set but also various possible trajectories taken via transfers. Employing the modified Floyd algorithm which finds the shortest time distance, we compute the time‐distance accessibility of every bus stop in the Seoul bus system, which yields distinctive skew distributions. We then introduce a time‐distance cutoff to focus on effective connections and probe the emergent spatial distributions as the cutoff is varied. Revealed are the characteristic scales as well as spatial structures of the system. It is suggested that the time‐distance accessibility can serve as a significant measure to describe and predict the urban land use pattern.     

Veblen goods and urban distinction: The economic geography of conspicuous consumption

A fundamental observation of 21st century cities is that they have become great centers of consumption. In this paper, we seek to understand the geographic variation in consumer behavior. Using Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE), we analyze how consumption differs across 21 major U.S. metropolitan areas, and the association between urban characteristics and consumption. We extend previous geographic analysis of consumption to include luxury goods that are socially visible (conspicuous consumption) and luxury goods that are relatively less visible (inconspicuous consumption). Our analysis shows that conspicuous consumption is more sensitive to an urban context than is inconspicuous consumption.     

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.     

Rethinking ‘Global Dickens’: The Case of the Cross-Cultural Transfer of David Copperfield

This article revisits and challenges some of the presumptions and methodologies pertaining to the current ‘global’ turn in Dickens scholarship, and Victorian studies in general. It uses the case of the cross-cultural transfer of David Copperfield from Britain to China in the early twentieth century to demonstrate the importance of attending to local differences and cultural specificities when examining cross-cultural interactions. This article investigates the influence of the Chinese life-writing traditions on the way in which the text was adapted and translated for the Chinese readership, and explores the relationship between self and society as manifested in the adapted work at a specific historic moment. It reveals the complexities surrounding cross-cultural interactions and demonstrates the intricate relationship between the global and the local, thereby challenging any simplified pursuit of the concept of ‘Global Dickens’.     

A Property Rights Analysis of Urban Planning in Spain and UK

This study compares urban planning and land management in Spain and the UK. Its purpose is to identify key differences in the legal bases for these activities in the two countries and to comment on the way in which the institutions that deliver them allocate property rights between the state and private organizations and individuals. In particular, we analyse the respective approaches to allocating rights to compensation and betterment value associated with land development, commenting on the efficiency and equity of each system and, in Coasian tradition, the influence the assignment of property rights has on municipal government behaviour.     

Immermann's Münchhausen and the Post-Romantic Predicament

This article analyzes Cuban novels Memorias del subdesarrollo (1965) by Edmundo Desnoes and Livadia (1999) by José Manuel Prieto in the context of two epochal historical events: the Cuban revolution and the Cuban postrevolution (or the beginning of the so-called Special Period). The essay explores the political precariousness of transitional regimes from three different points of view: epistemological, ideological, and emotional. I argue that transitional periods call for new modes of representation where the past and the uncertainty of the future coalesce to form nihilistic spaces, or to open up the possibility for new modes of narration.     

Developmentalities and Donor–NGO Relations: Contesting Foreign Aid Policies in New Zealand/Aotearoa

In this paper we draw on the concept of governmentality to examine the relationships between donors and northern non‐governmental organisations (NGOs) during moments of policy change. Our case study comes from New Zealand/Aotearoa where a change in government has seen aid policy shift from poverty alleviation to sustainable economic development. We detail three mechanisms through which the government sought to normalise this change: changes in language and fields of visibility; institutional reform; and funding delays and cuts. Far from being complete, however, we also trace how some NGOs contested the new agenda through engaging in the practice of politics and how, at least temporarily, new more politicised development subjectivities were created. While our study raises awkward questions about the autonomy of NGOs within current funding environments, we also emphasise the productive possibilities and openings that emerge as one set of development ideas and techniques, or developmentalities, shifts to another.     

Notice of Inscriptions and Antiquities,Discovered at Caerleon

This paper presents some of the background information considered necessary to expand the archaeological uses of aerial photography. Some problems encountered recording archaeological features from the air are discussed but the paper concentrates on the subsequent use of aerial photographs and covers the interpretation and plotting of archaeological features, use of different map scales, and outlines two schemes for the presentation of completed drawings which show air photograph evidence. The uses and potential of morphological analysis are included, as are comments on the relevance of fieldwork to air photograph interpretation.

An appendix considers the application of geophysical techniques to air photograph sites, and the deductions that may be derived from these non-destructive methods.