The European Union and Major Infrastructure Policies: The Reforms of the Trans-European Networks Programmes and the Implications for Spatial Planning

The European Union (EU) has been involved in influencing major infrastructure in the fields of transport and energy mainly by means of the Trans-European Networks (TENs) programme begun in the 1990s. Other macro-planning and wider spatial planning exercises, including the European Spatial Development Perspective, made reference to such infrastructure systems, particularly in relation to the need for connectivity and mobility, but normally did not attempt to intervene in an area seen as one of the prerogatives of national states. Much more important have been the wider programmes of liberalization pressed by the EU since the 1980s, but these have had no specific geographical content. A revision of the TENs programmes since 2008 has led to proposals to increase the role of the EU, by drawing up continent wide schemas indicating needs for future investment in many fields of both transport and energy, and introducing new procedures to streamline decision-making by designating projects as of European interest. The initiatives in transport and energy are described here, including the two Regulations currently under discussion within the EU institutions. These include major proposals for cross-European multi-modal transport corridors within an EU core network, and regional schemas for energy drawn up primarily by energy industries and government counterparts. Both are likely to be of real significance for spatial planners throughout the continent, and have major impacts on the shapes of future infrastructure networks. These proposals are analysed, as cases of the rescaling and re-ordering of government, giving more force to the EU in these fields, and reinforcing sectoral- or silo-based decision-making. It is argued that somewhat different outcomes will result in the few areas, such as the Baltic, where long-term macro-regional collaboration has been present, from the rest of Europe, where these sectoral programmes may complicate further the mix of planning impacting on each region, making even more confused the accountability of governance. Suggestions are made for the careful assessment of these schemas by national and regional governments, and for the creation of some spatial planning analytical capability at the EU level, which could examine this type of proposals, with powerful spatial impacts.     

Deconstructing the Lapita Cultural Complex in the Bismarck Archipelago

Within the Pacific Islands, the archaeological phenomenon called the Lapita Cultural Complex is widely regarded as first appearing in the Bismarck Archipelago of Papua New Guinea and then spreading southward. This complex supposedly represents the sudden arrival of migrants from Island Southeast Asia with new technologies, foreign languages, and a different worldview. We question these interpretations and the assumptions behind them and suggest instead that current evidence supports the introduction of new cultural traits over several centuries, rather than the sudden intrusion of foreign migrants.     

Creative class politics: unions and the creative economy

This article examines how cultural workers participate in the construction and contestation of the creative economy at the policy level. An analysis of the role unions play in the film and television industry association FilmOntario demonstrates the paradox that the creative economy, as an economic development strategy, presents to the cultural workforce. FilmOntario has succeeded in attracting a high volume of work to the province through film and television tax credit advocacy. Although FilmOntario’s success in policy advocacy is deeply tied to union resources, the unions’ decision to work within creative economy discourses, and in association with employers, has prevented core issues related to the quality of work from being articulated as a function of policy design. The argument is that the discursive and associational choices unions, as the collective voice of the (creative) working class, make as policy actors have a significant impact on the degree to which cultural labour problems are understood as cultural policy problems.     

Comments on Christopher Tilley: The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

In response to a hydroelectric dam and power‐plant construction project in the inner Sognefjord mountain region, archaeological investigations have been carried out since 1981. Investigation results include localization of extensive Stone Age and Bronze Age/Pre‐Roman Iron Age sites at great distance from lakesides, where such sites traditionally have been found. Intensified utilization of the area, from 500 BC until the Viking Period 1050 AD seems to be related to a general settlement expansion in this period and thereto related demands for mountain pastures.     

Quality Quartz: working stone at a bronze age kerbed Cairn at Olcote,near Calanais,Isle of Lewis

This paper discusses an assemblage of worked and smashed quartz associated with a Bronze Age kerbed cairn at Olcote. Most analytical treatments of quartz in Scottish prehistory have been structured around a pervasive dualism: quartz working is either the mundane use of a low quality raw material or the ritual use of a symbolically laden referent. The assemblage from Olcote highlights the dangers of such dichotomous analytical positions.