Speed,Vitality and Innovation in the Reinvention of Georgian Planning Aspects of Integration and Role Formation

In this paper, we investigate the influence of speedy reform in a transitional country on the reinvention of spatial planning. For the country of Georgia, we briefly outline the evolution of the planning system since communism, and then analyse through two case studies how the specific transitional pathway of Georgia manifests itself in the reorganization of spatial governance in city (Tbilisi) and natural areas (Borjomi). It is argued that role formation and transformation play a crucial role in such processes, roles being catalysts and modifiers of further reform. We analyse and argue that the mixed results of reform speed and re-centralization of power enable fast change of formal institutions but simultaneously raise obstacles for the crystallization of roles necessary to implement those formal reforms. Our analysis incorporates key concepts derived from institutional economics (in the line of Douglass North) and social systems theory, in Niklas Luhmann's version.? ^? This paper is based on a presentation at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, in November 2009. View all notes     

An airline at the crossroads of the world: Ariana Afghan Airlines,modernization, and the global Cold War

In 1957, the United States government provided funding for Pan American World Airways to purchase a 49% share in Afghanistan’s national airline, Ariana Afghan Airlines. While unusual in its scope, the arrangement was part of a broader program of US technical assistance, administered jointly by government agencies and private corporations, to newly formed airlines in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Between 1955 and 1965, technical assistance for commercial aviation was critical to the USA’s Cold War strategy to win ‘hearts and minds,’ and to contain Soviet influence, in the developing world. Using Ariana as a case study, this article examines what was at stake for the USA – politically, economically, and culturally – in aviation technical assistance projects. However, the article also argues that such projects should be seen as instances of ‘co‐production,’ in which recipients of technical assistance exploited superpower rivalries and actively shaped the airplane’s uses and meanings.     

Landscape as a Medium for Integration in Design Practice: The Case of Flanders,Belgium

The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable revival of interest in landscape by disciplines of spatial design, such as landscape architecture, urban design and architecture. Inspired by the principles of the European Landscape Convention (ELC), several authors have suggested extending the concept of landscape into a metaphor for inclusive multiplicity and pluralism in design and planning. However, the implementation of the ELC is rather complex as it deliberately contains no methodological or practical guidelines. In this paper, we explore whether or not the holistic approach towards landscape in the spirit of the ELC actually affects Flemish design in practice. To this end, we study interviewees' perspectives on the use of landscape in design and their experiences with it by means of a qualitative interpretive research design with multiple triangulation of data collection methods. First, we present the perspectives of the study on landscape as a medium to facilitate integration in design projects, by discussing four separate topics where this is the case. Second, we conceptualize the integration of landscape in spatial design as an expertise which can be obtained by spatial designers, regardless of their disciplinary background through awareness-raising, training and education.     

Contested Spaces? The Use of Place Concepts to Communicate Visions for Peri-Urban Areas

In Dutch planning, there has always been an important role for spatial concepts. Their role has arguably changed with the recent decentralization of planning to the regional and local level. At the national level, guiding concepts of a more procedural nature have replaced the more substantive and place-based spatial concepts, leaving more room for regional and local interpretation. At the regional and local level, spatial concepts are still in use, but this seems to be in a more communicative, negotiating and developing role than before. In this paper, we analyse how place concepts are used to exercise power, mobilize recourses and frame meaning over the use of the peri-urban areas, in the changing Dutch planning context. This paper focuses on two competing place concepts for overlapping green urban fringe areas in The Hague Region, which have been promoted by different actor constellations and which represent different visions about the meaning of these peri-urban areas. The case study allows conclusions about the changing role of spatial concepts in Dutch spatial planning.     

An Economic Regionalization of North Vietnam

A North Vietnamese graduate student at Moscow University offers a division of North Vietnam into four economic regions and assesses their future development in terms of energy-and-production cycles (groups of technologically interrelated activities proposed by N. N. Kolosovskiy). In a second paper, the author conceptualizes economic regions as consisting of a core or center, accounting for most of the production; an inner shell dependent on the core, and an outer shell that may gravitate to any of a number of adjoining core areas depending on the purpose of the study. The original boundaries of the four-region system of North Vietnam are reviewed in light of the “outer shell” concept. The four-region system is essentially confirmed, but the allocation of some provinces in the “outer shell” is found to be disputable, and regional boundaries have been adjusted.     

‘Womanly Qualities’ and Contested Methodology: Gender and the Discipline of Economics in Late Imperial Germany

This article analyses the affinities between two debates of the 1890s in Germany: one over women's intellectual abilities and one over the production of knowledge in economics. Economists and advocates for women's higher education found common cause and language because of the rhetorical centrality of the working woman, family and motherhood to a social reform discourse that connected the university, the women's movement and the state. The historical economists conceptualised their ‘science’ in a way that allowed ‘womanly qualities’ to be identified as appropriate to its optimal practice. A limited comparison with the United States highlights the historical specificity of this construction of social‐scientific knowledge.     

As nation,people and public collide: enacting Dutchness in public discourse

In recent decades, Dutchness has become an intensely debated issue in Dutch public sphere. The article problematises the labelling of nations and nationalisms that occurs in public and academic understandings of these developments. Craig Calhoun's concept of discursive formation is argued to be more fruitful for understanding the recent contestations over Dutchness. Yet Calhoun's theory is itself in need of elaboration. Whereas Calhoun proposes to focus on the extent to which nations are constructed as publics of highly differentiated members, it is precisely this image that is central to an exclusionary discourse of Dutchness and enables the exclusion of cultural others from the Dutch imaginary. By analysing the enactment of Dutchness through discourses on citizenship, the surprising congruence of pluralism and exclusion in the Dutch context is explored.     

Naming,Mnemonics, and the Poetics of Knowing in Vula'a Oral Traditions

For the Vula'a people of south‐eastern Papua New Guinea names are a way of knowing that is intimately linked to a particular mode of being. The ethnography of Vula'a naming practices presented here, and an analysis of their stories – traditionally known as rikwana – suggests that names are essential in the Heideggerian sense that they bring the past, present, and future into proximity and thus may be understood as a form of historicity. In certain contexts names are also powerful because they are implicated in the kinds of transformations commonly described by anthropologists as magical. Magical names link knowing and speaking with a vital aspect of Vula'a cosmo‐ontology known as iavu (heat).