„Was für Grün in der Stadt?“

Urban green space is a key subject of actual urban negotiation processes on how the city shall develop. Visions of the ideal city are reflected in the meanings currently ascribed to urban gardening. Thereby the relation between human and nature as well as between build and natural environment in the city plays a central role. Results from different Swiss cities show that allotment gardens as well as newer forms of urban gardening are oscillating between a compensatory and a complementary understanding of nature, and they equally combine the desire for pristine nature with the demand for functional green space in the city.     

A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

After Structure Planning: The New Sub-regional Planning in England

The reformed planning system introduced in England in 2004 weakens the position of counties and unitary authorities. Regional bodies and central government have a larger say on the future shape of localities under these arrangements. In particular sub-regional strategies have a much bigger role within the new Regional Spatial Strategies. This paper examines the prospects for the influence of this new tier of planning, based on government guidance about sub-regional planning and on the evidence on emerging practice, particularly in the southern regions of England. The balance of influence of different actors is changing, both between government tiers and in wider governance relations. The prospects for integrated action in spatial terms are changing, as are the relationships to implementation.     

The Unflinching Mr. Smith and the Nuclear Age**

This article focuses on the U.S. diplomat and nuclear arms control negotiator Gerald (Gerry) Coat Smith in order to cast new light on the importance of diplomats in the context of the set of international activities currently labelled as “science diplomacy.” Smith, a lawyer by training, was a key negotiator in many international agreements on post-WW2 atomic energy projects, from those on uranium prospecting and mining, to reactors technologies to later ones on non-proliferation and disarmament. His career in science (nuclear) diplomacy also epitomized the shortcomings of efforts to align other countries’ posture on nuclear affairs to U.S. wishes. In particular, the unswerving diplomat increasingly understood that strong-arm tactics to dissuade other countries from acquiring nuclear weapons would not limit proliferation. Not only did this inform later U.S. diplomacy approaches, but it lent itself to the ascendancy of the new notion of “soft power” as critical to the re-definition of international affairs.     

The Old and the New: Qualifying City Systems in the World with Classical Models and New Data

Zipf's rank‐size rule, lognormal distribution, and Gibrat's urban growth models are considered as summarizing fundamental properties of systems of cities. In this article, they are used as statistical benchmarks for comparing the shapes of urban hierarchies and evolutionary trends of seven systems of cities in the world including BRICS, Europe, and United States. In order to provide conclusions that avoid the pitfalls of too small samples or uncontrolled urban definitions, these models are tested on some 20,000 urban units whose geographically significant delineations were harmonized in each country over 50 years between 1960 and 2010. As a result, if the models appear not always statistically valid, their usefulness is confirmed since the observed deviations from empirical data remain limited and can often be interpreted from the geohistorical context of urbanism proper to each world region. Moreover, the article provides new free software which authorizes the reproducibility of our experiments with our data bases as well as with complementary data.     

Change in the Innovation Process: New Knowledge Production and Competitive Cities--The Case of Stuttgart

The global integration of economic activities is bringing with it major changes in innovation processes. New kinds of innovation, such as service and organizational innovations, became increasingly important in the 1990s. The shift to new forms of knowledge creation reflects the emerging knowledge based economy. This has effects on the existing comparative advantages of metropolitan innovation systems and is a major challenge to the ability of cities to adjust, especially those in mature industrial sectors whose competitiveness is based on innovations in industrial technology and scientific and technological knowledge production. Stuttgart is one of these cities. Much of the comparative innovative strength of the Stuttgart region derives from the generation of synergy effects of its technological and institutional development paths. The high levels of industrial exports and the competitiveness of the global players in the Stuttgart region indicates how advantageous the technology based knowledge production and diffusion in the region has been for the innovativeness of the core industrial branches. The crisis at the start of the 1990s showed that the economic success of particular firms does not mean that the metropolitan region as a whole is innovative and competitive. The institutional structures used to establish and maintain the comparative innovative advantages of the industrial sector have hindered adjustment to new forms of knowledge production and diffusion. The paper examines the adjustment processes in the Stuttgart region which are changing the organization of innovation and learning in a way that makes it receptive to new forms of knowledge production and diffusion.