Rent,Real Estate,and Flood Mitigation in New Orleans East

This paper presents results from a study of environmental harm created in the collision of real estate speculation and the political process that governed extension of the urban frontier of New Orleans into its eastern wetlands. Near term concerns of rent‐seeking real estate capital and the contested politics of urban infrastructure expansion challenged a fragmented state charged with regulatory oversight and protection of investments in land and citizens. The paper engages theoretically the relative inattention of urban political ecology theory to rent as a way to theorize how capital flows through land, and argues for increased attention to the problem of land rent and the multiple scales of political engagement that manage ecological crisis immanent in the metabolism of nature and society under capitalism.     

Washing urban water: diplomacy in environmental art in the Bronx,New York City

Lillian Ball's art project WATERWASH creates a new ecological imaginary in the South Bronx. Building on a tradition of ‘maintenance art’, the work exhibits the power of soil, plants and microorganisms to clean water – in effect maintaining urban water. An overarching goal of WATERWASH is to educate local people about the metabolism of urban water, causes of river pollution, and to familiarize them with the capacity of soil and plants to respond to that problem. As part of its creation, the project provided diverse groups of people with opportunities to participate, including a group of Bronx youth who assisted in planting the wetland. Several of these apprentices will be involved in future monitoring of the effectiveness of the wetland in mitigating parking lot runoff. I use Isabelle Stengers' notion of ‘diplomacy’ to interrogate the efforts of the artist in negotiating and creating an occasion in which people with divergent interests can both recognize and maintain the relationships of care that sustain them. In effect, this effort extends the feminist discourse of maintenance work to include that undertaken by the ‘other-than-human’.     

Living with patriarchy and poverty: women's agency and the spatialities of gender relations in Afghanistan

This article examines the spatialities of gender relations and women's oppression in urban Afghanistan under conditions of poverty and strict patriarchy. Using empirical data from biographical interviews with Afghan women from urban households in Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, the article questions how gender as social relation and gender as difference is lived and experienced among the urban poor in Afghanistan. Looking at urban livelihoods through the lens of feminist geography helps to better understand the gendered spaces of home and the outside world, of households as sites of security and violence, and of urban contexts and ethnic affiliations. The approach allows for reflection on women's subjectivities and their own understandings of gender inequality and injustice. Examining the gendered geographies in urban Afghanistan shows how social difference is lived under conditions of patriarchy and poverty and how women's agency contributes to the livelihoods of their households.     

The Street Corps of Changsha around 1920

The Changsha Street Corps originated in the local militia during the period of the Taiping Rebellion, and it played an important part in Changsha’s urban social management at the grassroots level. However, the role and influence of the street corps underwent changes during the process of modernization and the building of the modern nation–state. By 1920, although the street corps of Changsha still worked as the agent of the state at the grassroots level, its autonomy had been curtailed, and its social influence weakened. In the new social environment, even the maintenance of neighborhood interests became a challenge for the street corps. This article illustrates the readjustments in geopolitical and industrial relations during the process of urban modernization. It also illustrates how a new form of state power, namely the police, infiltrated the social management system, affected the traditional social structure, and complicated the interaction between modern state and society.     

The Urban “Cultural Nexus of Power”： Intellectual Elites in Shanghai and Beijing, 1900-1937

In the decades before the full-scale war with Japan in 1937, a robust series of institutions connected the bourgeois with intellectuals （which included professionals and journalists, as well as academics） in Shanghai. Collectively, these institutions can be understood as forming an urban ＂cultural nexus of power＂ that allowed non-state actors to effectively control aspects of Shanghai＇s political life. This bourgeois-intellectual alliance was not inevitable; no similar bonds existed between these same two groups in Beijing. It was forged in Shanghai due to the city＇s unique historical position as a Treaty Port and its dynamic economy, which included an extensive structure of private higher education and a market-based publishing industry. Unlike the rural ＂cultural nexus of power＂ originally described by Prasenjit Duara, this urban nexus grew stronger during the political and economic changes of the early twentieth century. War and revolution in the 1930s and 1940s, however, destroyed the connections between the bourgeoisie and the intellectuals, ending the vibrant urban environment they had created.     

《姚孝经砖文》性质简说

1990年出土于河南省偃师县的《姚孝经砖文》所记为冢地买卖之事, 当归入买地券类。但学界未能审查,而以其为“目前所发现的最早的东汉墓志”, 以至以讹传讹, 误人视听。本文则对《姚孝经砖文》的内容重新进行简释,并对学界的误说予以订正。     

Miscellaneous Artifacts From Casselden Place, Melbourne

The miscellaneous artifacts from Casselden Place derive from an urban working-class community in nineteenth-century Melbourne, Australia. They include a broad range of items associated with work, recreation, education, fashion, food consumption, health, and other facets of everyday life. In this paper the miscellaneous assemblage is examined in light of research questions relating to health and hygiene, leisure and work, and access to luxury items amongst the working-class of the mid to late nineteenth century.     

The Local Drivers of Land Degradation in South‐East Asia

Economic globalisation has led to a huge increase in demand for food, goods and services by expanding urban middle class populations. These demands cause environmental changes that in turn feed back upon the urban environment and human population. While the global changes are well researched, the cumulative significance of local environmental changes is less well known. Yet, the local changes may have greater impact on the decisions which individuals make that affect soil erosion and land degradation. People respond to family circumstances and to local economic opportunities in ways that most suit the needs of their families and households. Several demonstration projects that were not adopted offer lessons in understanding how people make their land‐use decisions. An understanding of people's past experiences, present needs and views of the future helps those seeking to improve environmental management to promote policies and actions that are likely to succeed by being acceptable to those involved.     

Emerging Chinese Role in Shaping St. Petersburg's Urban Landscape: Interscalar Investment Strategies in the Development of a Residential Megaproject

The paper, by an American geographer, discusses the origin and development of a Chinese-financed residential megaproject (Baltic Pearl) located southwest of St. Petersburg's historical district. Viewing Baltic Pearl as reportedly the largest investment project undertaken outside China by a government-sponsored Chinese consortium, the author places it in the context of state-level Sino-Russian relations and Russian unease over the influx of Chinese migrants and culture. Reflecting the author's extensive field work in St. Petersburg and Shanghai, the focus of the paper is on the way the consortium was forced to adopt interscalar (i.e., both state and municipal/urban) strategies responsive to local conditions, providing a potentially useful precedent and model for Chinese and other investors seeking to penetrate Russia's urban markets.