Regeneration processes in Northern Ireland: The public sector and partnership structures

The peripheral location of Northern Ireland as an Objective 1 region in the EU and consequences in terms of competitiveness and economic disadvantage are discussed. The need for high levels of public expenditure to at least partly offset these effects is argued; this is particularly apparent in the mechanisms which have been adopted to promote urban regeneration. The dominance of central government in the planning and development process is highlighted together with recent policy initiatives that place increasing emphasis upon partnerships as a delivery mechanism. The paper examines various forms of partnership arrangements highlighting how structures and actors differ depending upon local circumstances and objectives.     

Globalization of real estate markets in Central Europe

The process of globalization is increasing competition between urban areas for the attraction of investment. Within this context the paper initially highlights the impact of global change on city economies linking this to international investment within the real estate market. Factors influencing diversification strategies and international investment activity within property markets in central Europe are considered relative to a range of performance criteria. Office markets in Prague, Budapest and Warsaw are forwarded as case study examples to assess the degree of maturity that is occurring in these former socialist cities based on the activity of investors and end‐users including the extent to which there are dual markets operating for local and international actors.     

Troubling Naturalism: Shirana Shahbazi's The Curve

This article performs a reading of Shirana Shahbazi's photo-based mural The Curve (2007), an artwork that interrogates the production of knowledge based on various ideas of truth in representation. The Curve meditates on knowledge production in relation to three sites: contemporary documentary photography, the history of northern European still-life painting, and the murals of religious leaders and martyrs that adorn Tehran. The effect of these multiple citations is the creation of an artwork that cannot be comfortably contextualized either in Western art history or in contemporary Iranian visual culture. The Curve thereby anticipates and attempts to block its own assimilation into art historical and critical discourses that reduce the work of Iranian artists to static reflections of a particular geographical and political reality. The artwork thus demands a consideration of the ways in which context, as a term in contemporary global art history, is ideologically constructed within a certain network of power relationships.     

Modeling Kansas City Hopewell Developments and Regional Social Interactions: A Multisite Ceramic Analysis and New AMS Radiocarbon Ages

In the 1950s, the Kansas City Hopewell (KCH) was modeled as a phenomenon originating from a migration of people or diffusion of ideas from Middle Woodland Hopewell communities in Illinois, a model that greatly influenced subsequent research. Two lines of evidence were instrumental in the formation of this model: ceramics and chronology. This study presents the results of 24 newly obtained accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) dates associated with a typological analysis of ceramics from three KCH sites, plus Early Woodland sherds from several regional sites. The results indicate that the KCH developed in part from local Early Woodland populations (ca. 500–1 BC) and was chronologically equivalent to Havana Hopewell in Illinois (ca. 100 BC–AD 400). Early and Middle Woodland ceramics also share affinities with types in regions to the north, south, and east of Kansas City, indicating that KCH origins and interactions were more multiregional and complex than the traditional model suggests.