Exploring the associations between cooling centre accessibility and marginalization in Montreal,Toronto, and Vancouver,Canada

Cooling centres provide respite, safety, and social support during extreme heat events for populations that do not have the resources to own or operate in-home air conditioning. The objective of this study was to measure the spatial accessibility of cooling centres and analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, Canada. The potential spatial accessibility of cooling centres within a 15-minute walk was measured at the dissemination area scale using the two-step floating catchment area method. A two-stage modelling approach was used to analyze the associations between cooling centre access and marginalization. Approximately 62%, 58%, and 54% of the populations in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver had access to at least one cooling centre. In Montreal and Vancouver, high marginalization areas were more likely to have cooling centre access than low marginalization areas. Of the areas with cooling centre access, smaller access scores were observed in areas with high residential instability. Approximately one-fifth of the areas in each city had no cooling centre access and high marginalization, and may be considered for future cooling centres or programs that improve accessibility to existing centres.     

Film distribution as policy: current standards and alternatives

Much recent scholarship has identified an urgent need to address distribution opportunities for Australian cinema in a digital age. In trying to understand why Australian film policy has been beleaguered by complacency for distribution, this paper looks abroad to see what precedents and attitudes exist in distribution-related cultural policy. Why hasn’t support for distribution and exhibition been the touchstone of cultural policy for national cinemas? Why has policy support for the production sector prevailed, when distribution is the film industry’s key zone for profit? This paper surveys international policy examples of what governments are doing beyond the production realm. It examines legal interventions into the distribution realm, including direct state measures such as subsidies, levies, quotas and import restrictions, indirect state aid, and cultural initiatives by film funding bodies that stimulate audience engagement in the distribution and exhibition sectors. The paper combines these primary sources of film policy information with film historians’ accounts to provide a comparative analysis of national film distribution policies. It then examines the politics underlying the various policy frameworks, before mapping out an alternative strategy for the future of policy in Australia that is equipped to deal with the huge changes in digitalisation.     

Start-up factories,transnational entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystems: unpacking the lure of start-up accelerator programmes

This paper examines the role of accelerator programmes in promoting transnational entrepreneurship. Designed to assist the growth of start-ups by providing seed finance and structured entrepreneurship support, these programmes are now a prominent feature in many entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. Drawing on in-depth qualitative evidence focused on one particular programme, the paper shows accelerators play an important intermediary or ‘brokerage mechanism’ providing start-ups with enhanced relational connections and networks. Transnational entrepreneurs attracted to these programmes are highly focused on exploiting these networks whilst maintaining multiple levels of embeddedness in various contexts to maximize the opportunities afforded by accelerators. While many governments are attempting to replicate accelerators programmes within the public sector, the paper concludes that such attempts may prove problematic within weaker entrepreneurial ecosystems.     

Doubts about How the Middle Horizon Collapsed (ca. A.D. 1000) and Other Insights from the Looted Cemeteries of the Lower Ica Valley,South Coast of Peru

This paper presents new information from funerary contexts in the lower Ica Valley, on the south coast of Peru, spanning two millennia from the end of the Early Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period. Although severely looted, these sites can still yield valuable information. We discuss their architecture and material culture in the context of radiocarbon dates. Among other findings, these cast new light on the poorly understood transition from the Middle Horizon to the Late Intermediate Period, for which a paucity of archaeological data from ca. a.d. 1000–1250 has long been taken as evidence of an environmentally- or socially-induced demographic collapse. Yet the data we present here suggest that the basins of the lower Ica Valley were likely occupied continuously over this period, and that the echoes of Wari influence here may have lasted longer than previously thought.     

Island Despotism: Trinidad,the British Imperial Constitution and Global Legal Order

Narratives of the history of international law in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century have emphasised the role of global humanitarian movements in establishing international norms and institutions. The abolition of the slave trade and the amelioration of slavery feature prominently in this account as reform movements that supposedly laid the groundwork for human rights law. Using controversy about the constitution of the island of Trinidad and the excesses of its first governor, Thomas Picton, as a case study, we argue instead that attempts to reform slavery formed part of a wider British effort to construct a coherent imperial legal system, a project that corresponded to a different, and at the time more powerful vision of global order. As experiment and anti-model, Trinidad’s troubles provided critics with an advertisement for the necessity of robust imperial legal power in new and old colonies. Such a call for imperial oversight of colonial legal orders formed the basis of an empire-wide push to reorder the British world.