基于后人类思想的国际城市研究：理论溯源与概念辨析

进入二十一世纪以来,以赛博格城市、混合城市、城市政治生态学、集合城市主义为代表的后人类城市研究思想成为揭示当代城市中人类与非人类复杂交织关系的前沿性理论视角。本文在深入探讨上述概念的理论渊源、主要思想观点及其应用进展的基础上,指出后人类城市思想在我国城市研究中的可能方法论意义,即城市分析不能将人类与非人类绝对割裂地看待,而需要将城市中的主体或客体重新定义为人类与非人类的“混杂体”,整合以往分散在自然、工程、社科与人文等不同领域中的观察与分析,拓展人们对城市过程的认知,开创更多的城市研究可能性。     

Unwritten Factors Affecting Structural Funds: The Influence of Regional Political Behaviours on the Implementation of EU Cohesion Policy

While EU regional policy has the ambitious objective of supporting lagging regions and promoting inter-regional convergence, its impact is dependent on the ability of regional policymakers to secure and use EU funding to meet the region's needs. This paper aims to show under which conditions politics has a defining influence on the distribution, allocation and utilization of structural funds (SF), specifically in Objective 1 regions. The empirical analysis focuses on the 2000–2006 programming cycle in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The results show that regions politically aligned with national governing coalitions tend to perform better in terms of received SF support and enjoy more flexibility in implementing SF. However, the influence of regional political behaviours on economic performances is very limited. The findings confirm the importance of politics in influencing SF implementation, but its limited influence on economic outcomes.     

Europe exposed: mapping the impacts of EU policies on spatial planning in the Netherlands

National laws, local traditions and practices largely define which spatial planning policies are pursued and how they are carried out. Still, like many other policy areas, an unmistakeable process of Europeanization is underway in planning. On the one hand, informal bottom-up Europeanization is occurring through the increasing interaction between scholars and practitioners and by the growing body of spatial information and analyses available at the European Union (EU) level. On the other hand, formal top-down Europeanization occurs when EU policies – competition, economic development, agriculture, nature protection, air quality, etc. – impact domestic spatial planning systems, policy and practice. In this study, we investigate this second kind of Europeanization, using the case of the Netherlands as an example. Specifically, we construct a map revealing the location of EU sectoral policy using six distinct impact types. We observed that many policies overlap and various inter-sectoral tensions (horizontal coordination) are present. The empirical analysis moreover revealed, in line with recent theoretical literature on multilevel governance, that domestic policies and practices, particularly at the national level, determine the way European policies affect planning. This finding has implications for all member states, but particularly those whose national planning is undergoing fundamental reform.     

Building a cross-border territorial strategy between four countries: wishful thinking?

Since 2010 and the launch of the METROBORDER project, funded by ESPON, Luxembourg and the neighbouring regions in Belgium, France and Germany have pursued the objective of creating a cross-border polycentric metropolitan region. In order to achieve this goal, the political actors have decided to elaborate a cross-border territorial strategy to bring more coherence and cohesion to a cross-border region characterized by its strong functional integration, due to the very high number of cross-border commuters. This paper reflects the approach that we have followed, as external advisors, to animate the debate between the stakeholders and to provide evidence for the decision-making process. Its objective is to examine the content of this cross-border territorial strategy and to question whether such a strategy between four countries is at all possible, efficient and able to answer to challenges of cross-border integration. An analytical framework has been designed, taking into consideration different approaches of cross-border integration, in order to examine, in a critical way, the content of the cross-border strategy.     

Testing the waters of coastal urbanization: contested projects on Corsica’s protected lands

In the wake of the decentralization reforms implemented in France in the early 1980s, the Coast Protection Act (‘loi littoral’) was enacted in 1986 to counterbalance the significant regulatory powers devolved through those reforms to local municipalities in matters of urban planning. The act’s purpose was to contain urban sprawl, especially in heretofore undeveloped and protected areas such as those found on the Corsican coastline. Many local officials protested that the act would freeze any development on vast tracts of land and become a hindrance to carrying out potentially lucrative tourism projects on the most attractive coastal frontage parcels. The inquiry draws on a statistical sample of 252 legal arguments put forward in 180 claims, which were filed in the Corsican Administrative Court during the 2004–2011 period. From a sociological perspective, we examine in this article the strategies behind litigation and the use of the administrative courts as a means to resolve conflicts that have arisen over the attempted development of protected coastal areas. Special attention is paid to disputes over proposed development projects against which claims have been filed by local inhabitants and state administrators with the intention of containing urban sprawl.     

Urbanization and mortality decline

We investigate the relationship between mortality decline and urbanization, which has hitherto been proposed by demographers but has yet to be tested rigorously in a global context. Using cross‐national panel data, we find evidence of a robust negative correlation between crude death rates and urbanization. The use of instrumental variables suggest that this relationship is causal, while historical data from the early 20th century suggest that this relationship holds in earlier periods as well. Finally, we find robust evidence that mortality decline is correlated with urbanization through the creation of new cities rather than promoting urban growth in already‐extant cities.     

Youth,Temporality, and Territorial Stigma: Finding Good in Camden,New Jersey

The concept of “territorial stigmatisation” identifies the role of symbolic denigration in the production of marginalised places. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic research with a food justice organisation in Camden, New Jersey, to examine youth's responses to territorial stigma. The analysis demonstrates how Black and Latinx youth rewrite the story of Camden in a way that locates the “good” within it, using narratives of the city's prosperous history and possible futures to recuperate value within a stigmatised place. I argue that the perspectives of youth illuminate the temporal dimensions of territorial stigma, situating the blemish of place in relation to conceptions of individual and social change. The article contributes to a growing literature examining the strategic responses of those who dwell in pathologised places. Because youth are uniquely situated within the production of place, their perspectives offer important insights in this process.     

Communicative and participatory paradigm in the European territorial policies. A discourse analysis

Communicative planning has been widely criticized for having little to do with the official legal procedures and for low-quality spatial solutions. It has also been blamed to be an empty concept, referring to an action that in itself has no content. This critique gives ground to the question: what is actually the role of the communicative and participatory paradigm in contemporary territorial policies? In this paper, we adopt discourse analysis methods to study the European documents on spatial planning in their three characteristic strands: smart city, integrated planning and multilevel governance. By extracting eight core principles (governance, sustainability, communication, participation, resilience, innovation, cooperation and coordination), we measure the importance of the communicative and participatory paradigm in the current planning discourse in Europe. We find that despite critique it remains one of the fundamental building-blocks of the European territorial policy. Communicative planning principles are visibly present in all the analysed strands of spatial planning in Europe.     

Devolution and Parliamentary Representation: The Case of the Scotland and Wales Bill, 1976–7

For as long as devolution has been debated in the UK, there has been fierce discussion as to the representation of the would‐be affected areas at Westminster. That this has been the case is a consequence of Westminster's dual remit as both a state‐wide and a sub‐state legislature. While this dual remit was relatively straightforward when applied to all nations of the UK, it does, however, raise serious questions about the equality of MPs at Westminster in the face of asymmetric devolution that would carve out parliament's remit in some, but not all, parts of the UK. These questions bedevilled Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bills in the late 19th century and have been a recurrent feature of debate following New Labour's devolution programme in the late 1990s, culminating in the adoption of a system of ‘English Votes for English Laws’ by the house of commons in October 2015. This article looks at this issue through the lens of the ill‐fated Scotland and Wales Bill introduced by the Callaghan government in 1976. It explores the roots of the bill and how, and why, the idea of referring the question of territorial representation, post‐devolution, to a Speaker's conference, came to secure the initial support of cabinet as the best answer to this problem, and why the government swiftly changed its mind. Parliamentary statecraft considerations served to push a Speaker's conference onto the institutional agenda, before ultimately dooming it to failure.     

TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE,NETWORKS AND POWER: CROSS‐SECTORAL PARTNERSHIPS IN RURAL POLAND

Research on the operation of territorial governance and rural development programmes is dominated by qualitative methodologies, paying little attention heretofore to the characteristics and structures of new horizontal and vertical relationship formations that are the explicit objective of the governance and rural development model. Seeking to address this deficit in the literature, this article adds to a small number of existing contributions that use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the role of inter‐organizational networks in shaping geographic functional regions in the context of governance. Rooted in the methodological perspective of SNA, the analysis focuses on relations between local actors participating in three area‐based rural partnerships in Poland, which are conceptualized as territorially embedded institutional network clusters. The structure of inter‐sectoral relations, understood as interactions (competition, conflict, coordination, cooperation, and control) and flows (information, financial, human, or tangible resources), between the institutional partners of these partnerships is examined. Analysing in detail attributes of network relations, the article identifies structural characteristics of the area‐based partnerships, such as manifestations of how diverse local resources are engaged and how dominance by traditional powerful stakeholders can be overcome by network structures. Structural dynamics and transformations that represent expressions and manifestations of how territorially embedded governance networks are expected to operate are important areas of inquiry in political geography. In this context, the particular empirical and theoretical capacity of SNA is illuminated in this article as part of a broader presentation of primary field data on how network governance and rural development is taking shape in Central and Eastern Europe.