A Little Bit of Dirt

An examination of the surface deposit of an Etruscan cup said to have been dug up in Cheshire suggests instead that it had been buried in Italy and brought to England in recent times. The method described here might usefully be employed to assess the provenance of buried artefacts.     

Bilingual districts as an instrument in Canadian language policy

"Accommodation of a multi-ethnic population within the territory of a single state has been recognized as a world-wide problem. Within such a society language maintenance is frequently the avenue through which cultural groups seek to preserve their identity. This paper describes and evaluates the Canadian experience of language planning by concentrating on the bilingual district, the key spatial instrument in the federal Official Languages Act. The paper argues for a cautious and spatially varied application of the 1969 Act and seeks to suggest ways in which a geolinguistic analysis may further our understanding of plurilingual societies."     

Urban commons are more‐than‐property

Urban commons are characterised in the literature as collectively shared property in the city shaped by a context of scarce resources, population density, and the interaction of strangers. In the broader commons literature, commons appears as a verb, a noun, and a process made by practices of commoning—albeit still with a focus on property. In this paper, I argue that an understanding of urban commons as more‐than‐property is needed to recognise how present but elusive urban commons are. I use examples from interviews and observations conducted at a Women's Library to discuss how the access, use, benefit, care, responsibility, and ownership of this urban commons bring it into being through particular practices of commoning. By questioning current ways of defining urban commons, urban scholars gain a grounded understanding of the role of property, and other practices, in maintaining an urban commons over time.     

Governing urban regeneration in the UK: a case of ‘variegated neoliberalism’ in action?

The article focuses on the redevelopment of previously developed land by public-private sector partnerships in three cities/towns in South-West England, two of which can be described as medium-sized places with little previous experience of such developments. In each case we situated the redevelopment process in its wider multi-level and horizontal relationships using Social Network Analysis to produce network and centrality maps to reveal the complex network of relationships the process was embedded within and shaped by. These developments took place in what is termed the ‘roll-out’ phase of neoliberalism and we illustrate how the overarching planning and regulatory regimes (including contracts), along with wider economic conditions, shaped the development process, with the proviso that in each case these factors were mediated and themselves shaped by the assortment and interaction of local organizational, political, economic and civic forces. These included local planning committees and their interpretation of planning regulations and the developers involved, but also opposition to the developments from local sources. Much, however, depended on the ‘capacity to act’ of the relevant partnerships, in the sense of mobilizing and deploying available resources to realize the proposed developments.     

How Political Support Influences Red Tape through Developmental Culture

This study examines the interrelationship between external political support, internal organizational factors, and red tape, using a sample of information managers from state health and human service agencies. The study defines a red tape model and tests the model by structural equation modeling method. The study finds that political support has a direct effect on red tape. The higher the political support, the lower the level of red tape. The study also confirms an indirect effect of political support on red tape, mediated by developmental culture. Indirect effect through goal clarity has the correct sign but is not statistically significant. Practical recommendations are made for the political environment to provide the opportunity for managerial reforms that are often advocated.