Rich,Wrinkly and Rowdy politicians: Is this how teenagers ‘read’ television news?

Australian legislators have expressed concern about the indifference shown by young Australians toward government (SSCEET 1988, 1991). Those educators who have taken up their call for programmes in ‘active citizenship’ must look closely at what adolescents take from TV news. TV has sometimes been blamed for popular disenchantment with politics. Such arguments have been rejected because TV news shows no anti‐institutional bias, but instead underlines the importance of government However, like any text, the meaning of TV news is polysemic and not fixed by its producers. The interviews on which this article is based show that fifteen and sixteen year olds will decode TV news in ways quite unintended by its authors. They can see suits in which male politicians are shown as signifying their affluence and distance from their own lives, or read into the ages of politicians that politics concerns old people and not them.     

Down by the sea: visual arts,artists and coastal regeneration

This paper takes a critical approach to the arts-led regeneration of Margate, south east England. It argues that regeneration policy has effectively utilised local characteristics to recreate Margate as an artful space, and has stimulated a local milieu of artistic and cultural activity. However, though the work of local artists is vital in producing Margate as a creative place, local artists are marginalised by policy interventions focussed on attracting new consumers and investors. Thus, this paper argues that a misplaced policy emphasis is failing to support the labour and social relations on which the interpretation of places as ‘creative’ is built, and arguably undermines the sustainability of an arts-based regeneration. This has implications for culture-led policy, calling for greater attention to be paid to the specific locations in which it is deployed, and to the networks of producers whose labour is critical to its success.     

Big spending on the small screen: Televised party political advertising and the 1980 campaign

Over the last decade television advertising has become a central feature of the campaign strategy of the major Australian political parties. The 1980 federal campaign affords a glimpse of this. During the campaign details of the advertising schedule initially prepared by the Masius agency for the Liberals in Victoria were leaked to the press. These, set alongside similar details of the ALP's Victorian campaign, provide a profile of the place of electronic media‐based marketing in contemporary Australian politics. As details of the purchase of time on commercial radio and television for political advertising provided to the Senate by the Minister for Communications confirm, Liberal advertising in 1980 was far more extensive and expensive.     

Book reviews

The Political Economy of Spanish America in the Age of Revolution. 1750–1850. Edited by KENNETH J. ANDRIEN and LYMAN L. JOHNSON. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994. Pp. viii, 263.

Mexico in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, 1750–1850. Edited by JAIME E. RODRIGUEZ O. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1994. Pp. xiii, 330.

Transiciones hacia el sistema colonial andino. By CARLOS SEMPAT ASSADOURIAN. Lima: El Colegio de México—Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1994. Pp. 304.

El Comercio Libre en el Perú. Las estrategias de un comerciante criollo: José Antonio de Lavalle y Cortés Conde de Premio Real, 1775–1815. By CRISTINA ANA MAZZEO. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad Católica, 1994. Pp. 279.

Barbarie y canibalismo en la retórica colonial. Los indios Pijaos de Fray Pedro Simón. By ALVARO FELIX BOLAÑOS. Bogotá: CEREC, 1994. Pp. 243.

America in European Consciousness, 1493–1750. Edited by KAREN ORDAHL KUPPERMAN. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xiii, 428.

After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements. Edited by GYAN PRAKASH. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995. Pp. viii, 352.

A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. By ELINOR G. K. MELVILLE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xiii, 203.     

Migration,myth and magic in Papua New Guinea

The author examines some of the assumptions, classifications, and techniques that affect the study of migration in specific countries. Using migration in Papua New Guinea as an example, he critically reviews the conventional approaches to the study of migration     

Repatriating the Japanese from New Caledonia, 1941–46

This paper considers the negotiations for the repatriation of the Japanese residents of New Caledonia who were transferred to Australia for internment after the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. It shows that whilst the Japanese residents’ place of origin was New Caledonia, it was deemed instead to be Japan, and they were repatriated to Japan either as part of the Anglo–Japanese civilian exchange of September 1942 or after the cessation of hostilities. The paper also shows that the Australian government had security concerns regarding the Japanese before and during the war but was willing to repatriate the Japanese to New Caledonia after the war should the New Caledonian authorities have been willing to accept them back. The New Caledonian authorities’ decision not to accept the Japanese back in New Caledonia resulted in their repatriation to Japan even though some expressed the wish to return to New Caledonia.     

Excavating the Logic of British Urban Policy: Neoliberalism as the "Crisis of Crisis–Management"

This paper suggests that crisis theories provide a framework for analyzing the urban spaces of neoliberalism. Drawing on crisis–theoretic approaches to state theory, we examine the path–dependent links between neoliberalism, urban policy, and Britain's cyclical and crisis–prone cities through three tendencies: the geographies of state regulation, the institutionalization of interurban competition, and rescaling as the "crisis of crisis–management." These are used to explore the argument that Britain's cities are hosts to ineffectual regulatory strategies because urban policy appears to be a response to the sociopolitical and geographical contradictions of previous rounds of urban policy, and not the underpinning contradictions of accumulation.
Whether state power is able to manage and reproduce the highly oppressive, irrational, and self–contradictory capitalist system is of course an open question. (Offe 1984:257)     

Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City

Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so–called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner–city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None–the–less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized 'public' spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment 'out there'. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a 'fortified' or 'revanchist' urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork–quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do.