Culture-led urban regeneration policies in the Ibero-American space

ABSTRACT

This article examines cultural policy strategies supporting urban regeneration, focusing on its particular characteristics in the Ibero-American context. We start by developing a systematic contrast between the different circumstances that have led to the emergence of these strategies in the Ibero-American sphere and in other parts of the world. Our examination of the Ibero-American regenerative experience also includes a consideration of the paradigmatic cases that arose initially in the Iberian Peninsula and the typological analysis of subsequent Latin American experiences. The consideration of all these different elements ends up providing a global vision of the specificity of the phenomenon in its Ibero-American context.     

Between National Socialism and expert internationalism: Karl Strölin and transnationalism in urban planning, 1938–45

This essay examines the transnational activities of National Socialist experts, focusing on the endeavours of the burgomaster of Stuttgart, Karl Strölin. In 1938, Strölin became president of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (IFHTP), one of the most distinguished international expert institutions for European and North American urban planning. The article discusses his belief that promoting an international convention on the protection of urban populations would contribute to German diplomacy in the initial period of the Second World War. Then it investigates the IFHTP president’s efforts to transform his institution into an outlet for National Socialist ideas against the background of the German advance through Europe. A final section deals with Strölin’s attempts to transform the IFHTP into a forum for evaluating urban reconstruction policies in the last year of the war. This biographical study shows how it was possible to juggle the logics and expectations of seemingly contradictory spatial and political realms during and after World War II. National socialist politics and ideology exacerbated the tensions between local, national and international affiliations, but at the same time never fully permeated the mechanisms of expert internationalism. By revealing how Strölin navigated between local ambitions, the demands of domestic foreign policy and the ethics of expert internationalism in three markedly different projects, this essay contributes to a growing body of scholarship on the cross-border activities of National Socialist professionals in (occupied) Europe.     

A Bayesian approach to rapid seismic vulnerability assessment at urban scale

The seismic vulnerability of city centers is commonly assessed by extending the study methods applied to single buildings to urban aggregations. This approach is not always applicable at territorial scale, as it is uneconomical in terms of time and costs. An innovative method provides reasonable large-scale a priori estimation of parameters not directly evaluable from the exterior of buildings by elaborating values which can be measured from the outside. Those parameters are treated as continuous variables, by assigning them a suitable probability density function. The Bayesian approach is adopted, which allows the update of initial hypotheses by using new data gathered during on-site surveys. In this regard, a rapid survey form for the on-site data collection is proposed. An example of its application to a façade of a building structural unit in Santo Stefano di Sessanio in L’Aquila province (Italy) is proposed, showing promising preliminary results for buildings belonging to Italian historical centers.     

Zopilotes,Alacranes, y Hormigas (Vultures,Scorpions, and Ants): Animal Metaphors as Organizational Politics in a Nicaraguan Garbage Crisis

While scholars frequently frame conflicts over urban waste in terms of a politics of infrastructure, this article frames such conflicts in terms of a politics of organization. In 2008, self‐employed recyclers in and around Managua, Nicaragua blockaded local dumps in an effort to secure rights to scavenge for resellable material. Over the course of this “garbage crisis”, a material and semiotic entanglement of human labor organization with animal ecology became politically salient. At different points, recyclers were compared to ants (hormigas), vultures (zopilotes), and scorpions (alacranes). State officials, NGOs, and recyclers themselves used these animal metaphors to describe the organization of waste collection. Drawing on theories of value from political ecology and economic anthropology, as well as analysis of the deployment of these “organic” metaphors, we outline an “organizational politics” of urban waste.     

Woman's Work in the Service of Empire: Lady Margaret Field (1905–94) from School Teacher to Governor's Wife

The presence of single and also of married British women in overseas colonies, especially those employed by or married to men in the Colonial Service in the later colonial period, has been the subject of scholarly enquiry. Their lives, roles and values and their distinctive contribution, if any, to the development of empire and of its ending have been debated. Their gendered roles were usually subordinate in a masculine culture of empire, and especially as wives they are commonly regarded as marginalised. The archived records left by Lady Margaret Field reveal her commitment as a single woman to a colonial mission and her sense of achievement as a school teacher and educational administrator, while also acknowledging the independence and career satisfactions she subsequently lost when she married a senior Colonial Service officer who rose to be a governor. But it is also apparent that, though incorporated and subordinate as a governor's wife to her husband's career, she was not marginalised to a separate sphere. As is evident from this case study, governors’ wives had important and demanding political duties, and such responsibilities need to be acknowledged.     

The religious geography of Marvell’s “An Horatian Ode”: popery,presbytery, and parti-coloured picts

ABSTRACT

Marvell’s “Ode” (1650) is an English poem about a British problem – a problem further problematized by religion. The “Ode” lauds Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns, but English responses to these “colonial” wars were in reality complicated by protestant infighting among presbyterians, independents, and sectarians. Writers like Milton and Nedham rallied English support for Cromwell’s Irish campaign by recycling Spenserian stereotypes of Irish catholic barbarity. But Milton and Nedham also undercut English protestant unity by flinging these same anti-catholic stereotypes at Scottish presbyterians in Belfast and Edinburgh. Departing from previous studies, this article argues that Marvell’s “Ode” eschews Milton and Nedham’s anti-Presbyterianism in ways calculated to elide, rather than divide, protestant communities. The article explores how the “Ode” presents Cromwell’s Irish and Scottish campaigns as exclusively anti-catholic (rather than anti-presbyterian) crusades, comparing Marvell’s presentation of Cromwell in the “Ode” with his identification of Cromwell as an anti-catholic crusader in “First Anniversary” (1655). Both poems anticipate in this respect Marvell’s later anti-catholic, but pro-nonconformist, approach to Ireland in Rehearsal transpros’d (1672–1673). The article is therefore concerned to root Marvell’s post-Restoration commitment to protestant tolerationism within the anti-catholic language of the “Ode”.     

An Archaeological Study of a Streetcar Suburb: The East Main Streetcar Barns and Hayward-Hobbie Subdivisions,City of Rochester,New York

ABSTRACT

In order to appreciate the social dimensions of the industrial past, any research examining how working people both laboured and lived must recognise that sites of production and distribution may share a close relationship with the household, a relationship that will influence consumption and settlement patterns. Using artefactual and documentary evidence, this paper examines the initiation and growth of the Beechwood neighbourhood, a former streetcar suburb, located in the eastern section of the City of Rochester in western New York State. Streetcar suburbs in cities throughout the United States have received attention from geographers and urban historians for some time. This paper builds on previous studies by considering how transportation infrastructure — here, a maintenance facility and railyard for repairing inter-urban and intra-urban trolley cars — influenced the demographic and material patterns in one section of the neighbourhood in the first decades of the 20th century.     

To understand and be understood: facilitating interdisciplinary learning through the promotion of communicative competence

Whilst interdisciplinarity has become a central concern of research and learning in geography, few from the discipline have considered the practical facilitation of interdisciplinarity in the classroom. Module convenors, I argue, must pay greater attention to how learners engage and negotiate with peers and perspectives from other disciplines. In this paper, I focus on my own efforts in designing and teaching a second year undergraduate course on health, biomedicine, and society, to illuminate the opportunities and challenges facing teaching staff who seek to provide opportunities for interdisciplinary learning in the classroom. Drawing upon theories of communication, I demonstrate the significance of developing “communicative competence” as a pathway to successful interdisciplinary learning. Unless learners from one discipline can understand, and be understood by, peers from other disciplines, the accomplishment of interdisciplinary learning is undermined. Interdisciplinary modules should include learning outcomes that facilitate student development in this area. Approaching interdisciplinary learning through the lens of communicative competence casts critical attention upon the central abilities and cultural sensitivities that are the hallmarks of interdisciplinary collaboration – from negotiating meaning to critical disciplinary awareness – and highlights the lessons that interdisciplinarity poses for disciplines, such as geography, tasked with preparing students for interdisciplinary learning.     

从壁画砖看南京西善桥宫山墓的年代

从南京西善桥宫山南朝"竹林七贤与荣启期"大型拼镶砖印壁画墓出土壁画砖的砖面标记文字、砖的拼装方法以及砖的尺寸规格等方面来看,该墓的年代应该在丹阳金家村墓和吴家村墓之前。一向被认为是陈朝墓的西善桥罐子山墓也应该与此墓年代相仿。