EUROPEAN BRIEFING

This article explores alternative interpretations of the meaning and method of urban policy evaluation within the European Union (EU) Structural Funds. Using the EU URBAN Community Initiative Programme 1994-1999 it draws a distinction between 'instrumental' techniques that are primarily concerned with performance and efficiency measures and 'interpretative' approaches that stress the need to explore power relationships in the development and delivery of spending programmes. Empirically, it reflects on the interpretation of EU guidance and the MEANS (Means for Evaluating Actions of a Structural Nature) Collection to evaluate the Derry/Londonderry (UK) URBAN Sub-programme 1994-1999. The analysis concludes by emphasizing the need to ensure that urban policy evaluation is consistent with the broader social turn in the scope and content of regeneration programmes.     

Asia's century and the problem of Japan's centrality

Japan has long been regarded as a central component of America's grand strategy in Asia. Scholars and practitioners assume this situation will persist in the face of China's rise and, indeed, that a more ‘normal’ Japan can and should take on an increasingly central role in US‐led strategies to manage this power transition. This article challenges those assumptions by arguing that they are, paradoxically, being made at a time when Japan's economic and strategic weight in Asian security is gradually diminishing. The article documents Japan's economic and demographic challenges and their strategic ramifications. It considers what role Japan might play in an evolving security order where China and the US emerge as Asia's two dominant powers by a significant margin. Whether the US–China relationship is ultimately one of strategic competition or accommodation, it is argued that Japan's continued centrality in America's Asian grand strategy threatens to become increasingly problematic. It is posited that the best hope for circumventing this problem and its potentially destabilizing consequences lies in the nurturing of a nascent ‘shadow condominium’ comprising the US and China, with Japan as a ‘marginal weight’ on the US side of that arrangement.     

‘Make No Little Plans’: Anatomy of Planning Ambition and Prospect

This review paper applies a critical geographic perspective to analysis of planning ambition and prospect. Its point of departure is that planning, an applied spatial science, has lacked consistent review from critical geography in recent decades. The consequences of this drift for planning conception and practice are considered, focusing on the influential construct, the compact city. The review finds evidence of serious epistemological and methodological flaws in planning thought and ambition; failings that were earlier identified and analysed in the break with positivism in geographical sciences. The consequences of these limitations for planning thought and practice are considered. Broadly they undermine the ability of the compact city ideal to address what is arguably the most critical threat facing humanity, climate change. Specifically, the proposition that urban density has straightforward influences on human behaviour, including resource use, is without scientific foundation. Planning has a critically important part to play in climate response: securing the resilience and well‐being of an increasingly urbanised human species. Urban compaction may not achieve these ends.     

Towards a mighty union: how to create a democratic European superpower

A strong European Union is needed today more than ever: to act as a reliable partner to the United States, Great Britain and the other great democracies; to deal with the growing threats on her southern and eastern periphery; and most pressingly of all, to deal with the euro sovereign debt crisis. In order to do so, Europeans will have to abandon the gradualist fallacy that union will be achieved in small incremental steps and learn the lesson of history that all successful mergers, such as the British and the American, have been carried out in one fell swoop at a time of extreme crisis. They will have to recognize that the road to unity took a fatal turn when the failure of the European Defence Community caused a bifurcation between politico‐military and economic integration. Today, as we face potential fiscal and economic meltdown and as the external threats to Europe mount, we have another opportunity. We can only seize it, however, if we realize that full European union, if there is to be one, will be an event, not a process. It must follow more or less the American example with a directly elected presidency, a house of representatives elected by population and a senate, which represents the former nation‐states and regions. There is no need for the United Kingdom to be part of this project, but it is essential that both unions work together for the common good. Because the existing political elites are incapable of rising to the occasion—and in many cases are actually antipathetic to it—the task must fall to a new pan‐European party: the Party of Democratic Union.     

Being Crypto‐Jewish in Colonial Brazil (1500–1822): Brushing History against the Grain

This paper consists of two parts. In the first, I am going to review and synthesise the history of Jews — or rather various versions of Fuzzy Jews ¹ 1 The term “Fuzzy Jews,” introduced by Charles Meyers and myself in the Preface to our jointly edited Troubled Souls: Conversos, Crypto‐Jews and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries (Hamilton: Outrigger, 2001); it refers to non‐regular sets and categorical anomalies. The term is further developed in my Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang Verlag, 2005).
— who settled in Brazil during the time it was a Portuguese colony, including a brief period when part of the nation passed under Dutch control. This overview probably adds nothing new to the history of this topic, except insofar as it stresses the details necessary to develop the argument in the next section. The second part turns to a more difficult and in many ways speculative kind of history, that of the emotional and psychological experience of being a Jew — again in several versions of nominal Catholicism. Here is where I bring to bear insights from psychohistory and the history of mentalities in order to interrogate the sources in Inquisitional archives and archaeological studies in Brazil and elsewhere in South America.     

Work and life in the clear-cut: communities of practice in the northern Ontario tree planting industry

Based on ethnography, interviews with tree planters and a survey of tree planting contractors, this article focuses on work cultures in northern Ontario tree planting camps. The compressed planting season and the relatively high yearly turnover in the workforce requires that new workers quickly learn how to plant efficiently. These features result in the development of distinctive work cultures and practices that facilitate learning and the sharing of tacit knowledge between planters. Using the concept of communities of practice, we emphasize the social practices that facilitate the integration of planters into their working communities. At one level, tree planters belong to an extensive network of practice and have a shared sense of identity, irrespective of for which contractor, in which region or in which camp, they work. However, at a finer level there are noticeable variations between camps. Both the client for whom planting is done and the operational practices of the tree planting contractor shape the communities of practice in individual camps. However, the most important factor accounting for differences between camps is the process by which communities of practice are socially produced, reproduced and transformed over time and the role, played in this process by worker turnover and retention.