Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

Pivoting toward Asia: Comparing the Canadian and American Policy Shifts

Both Canada and the United States have “pivoted” toward Asia in their foreign policy over the past decade, although emphases in those pivots differed between the two countries. The former focuses on an economic pivot initially, the latter on a security one. What factors explain these shifts? What was the magnitude of policy change by both? Utilizing some important theoretical works by Charles Hermann, we discuss the factors that appear to have brought about this policy change toward Asia, outline the actions and activities that both countries have initiated toward Asia in the past decade to illustrate the type and magnitude of policy change that has occurred, and compare some areas of political, economic, and military similarities between Canada and the United States toward this region. Finally, we assess the likely future of these pivots to Asia in light of the change in political leadership within both nations.     

A toolkit to implement graduate attributes in geography curricula

This article uses findings from a project on engagement with graduate outcomes across higher education institutions in New Zealand to produce a toolkit for implementing graduate attributes in geography curricula. Key facets include strong leadership; academic developers to facilitate conversations about graduate attributes and teaching towards them; ownership of the process by the teachers; the development of a contextualized set of graduate attributes for the geography degree; curriculum mapping to promote alignment between graduate attributes, learning outcomes and assessment tasks; incorporating high-impact educational experiences and signature pedagogies to foster graduate attributes; the use of evaluative data to inform continual enhancements; and allowing at least five years for curriculum renewal to occur.     

When regional innovation policies meet policy rationales and evidence: a plea for policy analysis

In spite of recent advancements regarding regional innovation policy rationales and evidence, there are few analyses about the actual features of existing regional innovation policies. Nevertheless, a policy analysis perspective is important in order to recognize their distinctive patterns across regions, and to understand how rationales and evidence can be translated into policy-making. To this purpose, this paper develops a framework to study the extent to which regional innovation policies have changed during the past few years. Since the mid-2000s, there has been an important development of innovation policy rationales, advocating for more specialization; likewise, greater data availability at the regional level has allowed more sophisticated assessment of innovation performance. Finally, the crisis since 2008 has had ravaging effects in some regions, with job losses and severe economic sluggishness. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect transforming dynamics in regional innovation policies. Against this backdrop, the paper compares the institutional frameworks and budgetary priorities of four Spanish regions during the period 2001–2014: Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia and Andalusia. In so doing, it aims at studying the extent to which regional governments have readily addressed past and new challenges related to their regional innovation system, and if so, how.     

Is Man a “Sabbatical Animal”? Agamben,Rosenzweig, Heschel,Arendt

Giorgio Agamben lists the Jewish Sabbath as an example of “inoperatvity.” This essay explores both how Sabbath fits into and puts pressure on Agamben’s account, by working through readings of the Sabbath given by Agamben, A.J. Heschel, and Rosenzweig, who associate Sabbath, respectively, with Inoperativity, Eternity, and Creation. To these, I add another, called the Sabbath of Equality, building on connections among the weekly Sabbath, the septannual land Sabbatical and the Sabbath of Sabbaths, the Jubilee. The reading of Rosenzweig, in particular, opens the way to a queering of Sabbath, also explored here. The essay concludes with the suggestion that Hannah Arendt’s political thought is “sabbatarian” and asks whether this is an effective way to respond to earlier critiques of her work for promoting an “aestheticized” politics not adequately oriented to use. Is Agamben vulnerable to the same critique now?     

Too few nutrients and too many calories: climate change and the double burden of malnutrition in Asia

About half of children age under five worldwide who are classified as undernourished (84 million out of 151 million) or overweight or obese (17.5 million out of 38 million) live in Asia. Tackling malnutrition in Asia is however fairly complex since the nutritional transition, a consequence of rapid economic development and globalisation, made many Asian nations undergo the simultaneous burdens of under- and over-nutrition. The dual burden of malnutrition is characterised by a concurrence of undernutrition along with overweight and obesity within the same individual, household, community, region and/or country. Providing that household food security is closely linked to malnutrition, this raises questions about the implications of climate change on the dual burden of malnutrition. That climate change affects food availability, access, utilisation and stability is evident. Accordingly, households facing food insecurity due to climatic shocks may allocate food differentially. Adult members may receive low-cost high-calorie food inducing obesity, whilst children receive nutrient-poor foods leading to undernutrition. Little is known about the climate impacts on the double burden of malnutrition and how this affects population subgroups differentially. This Editorial discusses the potential impacts of climate change on the double burden of malnutrition and concludes with the recommendation of strategies to tackle the issue.     

Maritime Culture in the Netherlands: accessing the late medieval maritime cultural landscapes of the north‐eastern Zuiderzee

This paper examines the theory and practice of the maritime cultural landscape in general, and projects the theoretical concepts and aspects involved on the highly dynamic late medieval north‐eastern Zuiderzee region in the Netherlands. The cultivation of land and marine erosion (floods and rising sea level) are considered as the main factors that caused the transformation of the physical landscape of this region from peatlands with freshwater basins into a tidal lagoon. As a consequence, multiple settlements drowned, large areas of land submerged, and culture and the landscape gradually became more maritime, giving the research area a cultural identity and dimension.     

Canadian Philosophy: A Dialectical Exploration

This article inquires into the difference between philosophy as a universal practice and philosophy as a cultural product; its aim is to establish a case for there being Canadian philosophy. Philosophy as a practice can exhibit a dialectical framework. The practice can pursue both universal truths and cultural variations in expressions of those truths. Each philosophical endeavor requires the other to be meaningful. No matter how abstract a “truth” may be, an example always creates cultural relevance. The article introduces the example of an early Canadian philosopher, whose work is documented in the book by Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott, The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950. John Watson (1847–1939) was the most prolific and well-known contributor to philosophy in early Canada, pursuing universal questions and yet responding to the circumstances of his new home in developing Canada and, in doing so, contributing to Canadian cultural interpretations of philosophical questions. This article uses his example to conclude that the study of philosophy in Canada must include Canadian philosophy.     

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.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.