Green Infrastructure,Grey Epistemologies,and the Urban Political Ecology of Pittsburgh's Water Governance

This paper explores Pittsburgh's water governance to consider the way divergent approaches to urban stormwater management reproduce existing urban metabolisms and belie more radical possibilities for the urban hydro‐social cycle. Federal action has forced municipalities in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region to make changes to its urban water systems and develop a plan to comply with water quality regulations. Within Pittsburgh's water governance debates, compliance centers on various sets of technological strategies for defining and solving purportedly wicked urban environmental problems. Urban political ecology, here, is used to deconstruct the tensions and convergences between these different stormwater governance strategies. I argue that green infrastructure approaches (whose intentions are to expand practice and participation) are framed by dominant grey epistemological approaches. In this view, alternative and creative forms of greening the city may not necessarily represent a more democratic process, but instead reproduce uneven urban landscapes under greener cover.     

Organic–inorganic rock–fluid interactions in stylolitic micro‐environments of carbonate rocks: a FIB‐TEM study combined with a hydrogeochemical modelling approach

Stylolites and the interfaces to the host limestone have been investigated by means of a multidisciplinary analytical approach (thin section microscopy, FIB‐TEM, organic geochemistry and petrography). Carbonate dissolution assuming different boundary conditions was simulated by applying a generic hydrogeochemical modelling approach. It is the conceptual approach to characterize and quantify traceable organic–inorganic interactions in stylolites dependent on organic matter type and its thermal maturity, and to follow stylolite formation in carbonates as result of organic matter reactivity rather than pressure solution as a main control. The investigated stylolite samples are of Upper Permian (Lopingian, Zechstein), Middle Triassic (Muschelkalk) and Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian) age and always contain marine organic matter. The thermal maturity of the organic matter ranges from the pre‐oil generation zone (0.4–0.5% R_r) to the stage of dry gas generation (>1.3% R_r). The results of the generic hydrogeochemical modelling indicate a sharp increase of calcite dissolution and the beginning of stylolite formation at approximately 40°C, which is equivalent to a depth of less than 800 m under hydrostatic conditions considering a geothermal gradient of 30°C and a surface mean temperature of 20°C. This temperature corresponds to the pre‐oil window when kerogens release an aqueous fluid enriched in carbon dioxide and organic acids. This aqueous fluid may change the existing pore water pH or alkalinity and causes dissolution of carbonate, feldspar and quartz, and clay mineral precipitation along the stylolite. Dissolution of limestone and dolostone leads to reprecipitation of calcite or dolomite opposite of the dissolution side, which indicates only localized mass redistribution. All these integrated hydrogeochemical processes are coupled to the generation of water during organic matter maturation. In all of the calculated hydrogeochemical scenarios, H₂O is a reaction product and its formation supports the suggested hypothesis.     

A Methodology for the Evaluation of Hygrometric and Mechanical Properties of Consolidated Stones

Several authors agree that stone surface consolidation works should not significantly alter original mechanical and hygrometric properties of the stones in order to avoid differential stress between the consolidated and non-consolidated parts. Specific limitedly destructive methodologies have been developed for assessing the variation in both mechanical and hygrometric properties, but they require preliminary calibration procedures that are very costly to adopt in terms of both time and money. This research study describes an analytical and experimental procedure aimed at obtaining the necessary hygrometric and mechanical characterization of natural and/or artificial stone, before and after consolidation works, by simply assessing the variation in the distribution of the porous structure.     

Servicing Customers in Revolutionary Times: The Experience of the Collectivized Barcelona Water Company during the Spanish Civil War

Debates on the total or partial privatization of water usually follow the rationale that efficient and rational management is best left to the private sphere. In this paper and using a historical example, we attempt to assess critically this assumption arguing that efficiency and rationality in resource management are and have been an asset of collective management as well. We present the case of the Barcelona Water Company, run by its workers during the Spanish Civil War, to illustrate how in certain cases, gains in economic efficiency and rational management that had been impossible to accomplish under standard private management, were achieved by collective action. Workers management during this period not only improved efficiency and rationality but to a large extent did so also procuring equity and fairness in the provision of water to the citizens of Barcelona despite the harsh conditions brought about by the war.     

Participation and Passive Revolution: The Reproduction of Neoliberal Water Governance Mechanisms in Durban,South Africa

Abstract: This article demonstrates that Gramsci's concept of passive revolution can be utilised to help unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South. I argue that some approaches to “participation” within neoliberal governance systems can, in part, be understood as moments within a protracted process of passive revolution. The argument is traced through eThekwini municipality's Community Participation Programme and the related extension of Free Basic Water (FBW). This article contributes to existing scholarship by demonstrating how a Gramscian analysis is indispensable to understanding the way in which state–civil society relations are conceived in participatory development strategies and the implications this might have for radical social change. I argue that a Gramscian approach compels us to reconsider current understandings of state–civil society relations so that we might overcome the impasse of passive revolution and move towards a more progressive form of politics.     

Reasoned use of chemical parameters for the diagnostic evaluation of the state of preservation of waterlogged archaeological wood

Waterlogged archaeological wood undergoes decay processes that depend on both the burial conditions and the constituting species, and which cause the depletion of the structural components of wood cells. To quantitatively assess the state of preservation of the decayed material, specific parameters are usually measured by means of both chemical and physical analyses. In this paper an innovative approach in the use of the data obtained from these kinds of measurements is developed. A series of 132 archaeological wood samples of different wood species, burial times and states of preservation, and coming from different sites in Italy, was analysed. Their residual chemical composition, maximum water content and basic density were measured, and a reasoned use of these parameters was carried out through their elaboration, with the aim of both evaluating eventual incongruence or anomalies in the raw physical and chemical data (which has never been accomplished so far) and directly comparing in a reliable way the analytical results obtained from archaeological samples with very different states of preservation. This approach allowed defining the effective values of chemical parameters related to wood decay according to a same reference basis of calculation among the various data. By this way, it was possible to state that lignin can be also attacked by the agents causing biotic decay, and that in hardwoods its decay is more related to the burial conditions than to the wood species. Instead, the mechanism of polysaccharide depletion is diversified: conifers showed a uniform behaviour whereas hardwoods were more species-dependent. Moreover, in addition to the chemical composition, also anatomical factors influence the carbohydrate rate of decay in waterlogged wood.     

‘The Ghost Ship’. An Intact Fluyt from c.1650 in the Middle of the Baltic Sea

We report an exceptionally well preserved 17th‐century shipwreck in the Baltic Sea. The investigation of the intact 3‐dimensional hull at 130 m depth in the cold dark water has demanded new methods of documentation. Field investigation of ‘The Ghost Ship’ has been done in co‐operation with a nautical survey company, combining archaeological skills with advanced technology and filming for a television documentary. The discovery offers detailed knowledge about Dutch shipbuilding and the construction of fluyts. We also believe that study of the social organisation aboard this small trading ship can give insights into the mentality and ideology of the period. © 2012 The Authors     

Agnes of Burgundy: an eleventh-century woman as monastic patron

As an eleventh-century monastic patron, Agnes of Burgundy was generous, thoughtful, and involved; she galvanized others into endowing monasteries and won the respect of the houses she supported. The association with grateful abbeys helped her and her husband, Geoffrey Martel, to establish the legitimacy of their rule. In this symbiosis, Agnes used the system for all it was worth, even eventually retiring as an old lady into one of her foundations, while religious life in west-central France flourished, aided by her support. Yet, although enormously wealthy and powerful, she did not act with full autonomy. Her life was shaped by the biological determinants of menarche and menopause; by involvement in familial strategies to advance her spouse's and children's careers; by limitations on her use of feudal power; and by gender roles that patterned behavior. She, and every other woman like her, functioned within a web of gender, class, and family constraints and expectations.     

Changes in human bones boiled in seawater

The differences between boiled or unboiled bones are not often studied. However, they are crucial to understand postmortem rituals and to establish defleshing procedures and mortuary practices. In this work, human bones boiled in sea or fresh water are characterized. The bone composition, as well as the compounds present in the resulting materials, shows that salt alters the boiling process mechanism. Hence, from structural and morphological criteria, it is possible to distinguish if a bone has been boiled in salt or fresh water. In both sets of samples, the smoothness of the bone surface depends on boiling time, but only in bones boiled in seawater, filaments are observed apparently pouring out of the pores.Those differences which are mainly morphological (smoothness of the surface) are explained in terms of a collagen diffusional mechanism favored by sodium and chloride ions. For a boiling time of 6 h, the surface is covered by a thick layer or crusts of degraded collagen. Experiments with seawater may be used as model experiments to simulate taphonomical alterations in bones exposed to salt water.     

The countryside (Scotland) act of 1967 revisited

The recent opening‐up of the policy and precedent files relating to the promotion of the Countryside (Scotland) Act of 1967 provides opportunity for re‐assessing the significance and character of the debates leading up to the first explicit provision for what the Preamble to the Act described as ‘the better enjoyment of the Scottish countryside’. More generally, insight may be gained into the procedures and preoccupations of the ‘core executive’ of government, as they effect the ‘networking’ required for securing the support of the relevant user‐interests during the consultative and drafting stages of such legislation.