Global TransPark: New Competitiveness for Hong Kong and South China Based on Air Logistics

Economic globalization in the past two decades has led to a fast pace of growth of many economies in Asia Pacific, and impacted on the region's growth in air cargo. This paper discusses the future of airport infrastructure and its effect on regional competitiveness in the form of a new type of airport — Global TransPark (GTP). It identifies China's need to forge such a critical infrastructure in the New Economy, and that South China is its best location. The Hong Kong Extended Metropolitan Region (EMR) in South China stands out among competitive regions in Asia in terms of geopolitical and institutional setting under ‘One Country, Two Systems’ as the best general location for Asia's first and potentially largest GTP. Forging a GTP will promote the EMR's overall competitiveness and hastens its economic restructuring. The paper then discusses the advantages of Zhuhai Airport as the site of the potential GTP which will also incorporate the other four nearby airports within the EMR. The GTP is also a new challenge for intra-EMR cooperation in terms of customs and tariff, air rights, ground handling, and land and water transport coordination between its airports and respective local governments.     

From conflict archaeology to archaeologies of conflict: remote survey in Kandahar,Afghanistan

ABSTRACT

Emerging from research with the Afghan Heritage Mapping Partnership, a multi-year project using satellite imagery to detect, record and manage archaeological heritage, this paper examines the potentials of remote-sensing to not only monitor archaeological material culture, but also contemporary materiality as it is violently (re)assembled through conflict. Through systematic remote-sensed archaeological survey using diachronic imagery in Kandahar, Afghanistan, this work expands archaeological understanding of an under-surveyed region while exploring the impact of the region’s expansive military infrastructural footprint on cultural heritage. Further, this research considers the long history of landscapes of control and successive military occupations. Remote survey allows for continued generation of archaeological data during conflict, thereby enabling more thorough heritage management. Finally, this survey demonstrates that, although remote aerial technologies have been criticized as tools of violence, surveillance and control, satellite imagery can be used analytically to generate new understandings of and challenges to military infrastructural reach.     

“绩效”二元视角下高速交通对旅游发展的影响及空间效应研究——以长三角地区为例

以长三角地区为研究对象,采用改进TOPSIS法和Super-SBM DEA模型分别测算高速交通优势度和旅游绩效,综合运用双变量LISA方法和空间面板杜宾模型,实证研究2005—2018年长三角高速交通对旅游绩效影响的空间效应及机理。结果表明:(1)2005—2018年,长三角高速交通优势度呈现“东高西低,中间高、南北两翼低”空间格局,且趋向相对均衡化态势。(2)旅游规模高值区集中于省会城市及高速交通干线附近;旅游效率高、较高值区沿“沪宁合—沪杭—杭甬”交通干线分布明显。(3)长三角高速交通对本地和邻近地区旅游规模、旅游效率均存在显著正向驱动效应;高速交通对旅游规模正向影响的直接和间接边际效应系数均大于旅游效率,这与高速交通的“双刃性”、“虹吸效应”及“错配效应”相关。(4)经济实力、旅游资源、产业机构高级化等对本地旅游绩效具有正向促进作用,而旅游资源、人力资本对邻近地区旅游绩效呈现负向外部性。     

On not being Dubai: infrastructures of urban cultural policy in Istanbul & Beirut

ABSTRACT

This paper compares how Istanbul and Beirut both attempt to underline their cultural and developmental uniqueness today in contrast to a metonymic menace – Dubai, standing in for spectacular yet supposedly cultureless Gulf cities. Even amid their own speculative construction frenzies that threaten local heritage, Turkish and Lebanese city-shapers assert theirs are ‘real’ cities because they have ‘civilization’ and ‘history.’ By addressing their own efforts to build, defend, or oppose physical infrastructures related to local urban culture, Istanbullus and Beirutis rely on and reassert strategic, phatic discourses that frequently reference Gulf cities as counterpoint. Analysis focuses on how each city crafts a distinctive urban profile via civilizational appeals to historic senses of culture, inflecting infrastructural developments related to bridging (Istanbul) and bordering (Beirut). Historical truisms are deployed with marked flexibility to showcase these cities as ‘not Dubai.’ This study offers lessons on the particular worlding of Middle Eastern cities and the role of discourses in the material-symbolic infrastructure of implicit urban cultural policy.     

The Roads of Andalusia and Valencia. A Spanish Transport Legacy of the 18th and 19th Centuries

Roads designed by civil or military engineers for animal-drawn vehicles before the arrival of the railways constituted an essential factor for the movement of goods and people and for the economy and trade in different countries. The improvement in road construction techniques over the 18th and 19th centuries, following the creation of the first civil engineering colleges and institutions, allowed greater transportation at diminishing cost. Despite its significance, this heritage has received comparatively little attention from industrial archaeologists. As such, the object of the present article is to provide an overview of the development in road planning and construction in Spain over the 18th and 19th centuries, in order to demonstrate the historical and technological value of these roads. The article also presents two sections of Spanish roads corresponding to the start and end of the study period, and identifies some of the main archaeological elements dating to their time of construction that prove the evolution in road technology. This process has made it possible to create an inventory which incorporates the main elements that characterise this type of infrastructure.