De-democratising the Irish planning system

This paper examines the practices deployed to de-democratise elements of the Irish planning system. It does so through scrutinizing the processes by which a new streamlined planning procedure for large scale residential developments was institutionalized. The paper investigates how a development lobby group successfully prompted the institutionalization of this streamlined procedure by momentarily capturing the policy formulation agenda surrounding a housing crisis. It demonstrates how this was achieved by defining problems regarding the democratic character of the planning system and accruing agency through solution specification and resonance with the ideologies and rationalities of pertinent political and senior civil servant decision makers. The paper undertakes this analysis by situating a discourse analytical approach within the Multiple Streams Framework. In doing so, the paper provides an original contribution to academic scholarship through novelty of theoretical application on a disquieting aspect of neoliberalism in a planning context that as yet has received limited attention.     

Critical Masses: Augmented Virtual Experiences and the Xenoplastic at Australia’s Cold War and Nuclear Heritage Sites

Critical Masses is a multidisciplinary pilot project that aims to graphically represent and mediate the histories, spaces and narratives concerning former nuclear installations within central Australia. These include the abandoned British atomic test sites at Emu Field and Maralinga, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)/Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) rocket launchers at Woomera, and the decommissioned US National Security Agency early warning satellite base at Nurrungar. Significantly, each of these Cold War sites are situated in either hazardous, remote, secure and/or culturally sensitive areas and require sophisticated analysis and negotiation in order to best render their complexity for both online access and on-site tourism. In association with the Maralinga-Pilling Trust and traditional indigenous landowners a multi-tiered approach (re)creating these locations is being modelled across platforms for diverse audiences. Digital materials are being authored and designed for stand-alone DVD, online interactive sites and archives, an immersive/simulated space for interpretation centres, and augmented/enhanced reality interfaces via GPS and mobile/handheld devices used in situ at key sites.     

New Zealand’s “arc of influence”: the “clean,blue, green” country

Over the last 50 years, the area of New Zealand has been expanded to include territorial seas, an Exclusive Economic Zone, marine protected areas, an extended continental shelf, the Ross Sea, and a wedge of the Antarctic continent. While New Zealand’s territory is now significantly more marine rather than terrestrial, the country is often imagined as a series of isolated islands floating adrift in the Pacific. In this paper, we consider how the space of the nation-state can be reimagined to create a more relevant sense of place and identity. We argue that the perception of New Zealand as “100% pure” and “clean green” can be developed into a “clean, blue, green” image that better reflects the country’s expansive and diverse “arc of influence” through conservation values. We focus on the role of mapping within this issue; critiquing existing maps of New Zealand’s marine territory while also presenting our own speculative maps.     

Tomorrow’s Country: Practice-oriented principles for Indigenous cultural fire research in south-east Australia

First Nations peoples are revitalising diverse cultural fire practices and knowledge. Institutional and societal recognition of these practices is growing. Yet there has been little academic research on these fire practices in south-east Australia, let alone research led by Aboriginal people. We are a group of Indigenous and settler academics, practitioners, and experts focused on cultural fire management in the Victorian Loddon Mallee region. Using interviews and workshops, we facilitated knowledge sharing and discussion. In this paper, we describe three practice-oriented principles to develop and maintain collaborations across Aboriginal groups, researchers, and government in the Indigenous-led revitalisation of fire on Country: relationships (creating reciprocity and trust), Country (working with place and people), and power (acknowledging structures and values). Collaborations based on these principles will be unique to each temporal, social, cultural, and geographic context. Considering our findings, we acknowledge the challenges that exist and the opportunities that emerge to constructively hold space to grow genuinely collaborative research that creates change. We suggest that the principles we identify can be applied by anyone wanting to form genuine collaborations around the world as the need for social–ecological justice grows.     

Fieldwork and disabled students: discourses of exclusion and inclusion

Disabled students form a significant but under represented minority in higher education in the UK. Participation appears to be particularly low in disciplines that contain a fieldwork component. Fieldwork has been recognized as a barrier to the participation of disabled students. This paper emphasizes a critical perspective on fieldwork, highlighting the way in which fieldcourses as currently conceived, enacted and experienced, can exclude disabled students. It discusses a survey of the experiences of providing learning support to disabled students undertaking fieldwork in geography, earth and environmental science departments in the UK. It also considers the various ways in which the images, spaces, practices and cultures of fieldwork may exclude or marginalize disabled students and the different ways in which fieldwork may be made more inclusive.     

The Identity of Capitalists and the Legitimacy of Capitalism: Sri Lanka since Independence

In many Asian countries, the early decades of independence after World War II were marked by tension between ‘indigenous’ political elites and business elites that were in large part alien, or from minority ethnic groups. This tension was one reason for the preference that most governments showed for statist and nationalist economic policies. It has abated in most cases; political and business elites now tend to pursue more co-operative strategies. Much of the explanation for this lies in changes in the international political economy that made market-oriented economic policies more attractive to political elites. There are in addition internal political reasons for this rapprochement. These vary from case to case, and have been explored in most detail by scholars in relation to the Southeast Asian countries where Overseas Chinese have dominated larger scale business. This article extends this literature by examining the causes of the gradual rapprochement between ‘majority’ politics and ‘minority’ business in Sri Lanka.     

The ‘natures’ of planning: evolving conceptualizations of nature as expressed in urban planning theory and practice

Over the course of the past century, the idea of nature in the city has become increasingly intricate, evolving from being viewed as a refuge separate from the city to being understood as an essential component of dynamic urban systems. As such, attempts are currently being made to ‘re-nature’ cities to support local and global ecosystems, increase human well-being and address environmental issues such as climate change. While the literature has examined changing assumptions about society–nature relationships in planning, a dearth of knowledge exists relating to the changing conceptualization of nature’s relationship with the ‘city’ and how this has influenced how urban planning with respect to ‘nature’ has evolved in both theory ‘and’ practice. In this paper, we address this lacuna by tracing the history of the entwined relationship between nature and city planning. The conceptual framework developed from this review is subsequently employed as an analytical lens through which to investigate an illustrative case study of planning for nature in Dublin City, Ireland. The paper concludes by reflecting on how exploring the natures of planning provides scope for greater critical attention to what we do as planners when we seek to address the challenge of safeguarding nature through policy.     

Legislating nature for biodiversity offsets in New South Wales,Australia

In the contemporary environmental management landscape, legislation is a principal means through which sustainable outcomes are negotiated. Yet the relations between legislation (as a social practice), nature and justice have been subjected to limited scrutiny. This paper explores these relations through consideration of a system of biodiversity offsets currently being implemented in New South Wales, Australia, following the enactment of the Threatened Species Conservation Amendment (Biodiversity Banking) Act 2006 (NSW). In this paper we investigate the work this legislation does in enacting the materiality of nature in order to explore the interrelations of materiality, law and concerns for environmental and ecological justice. We argue that the act of ‘legislating nature’ is simultaneously a ‘mode of matter-ing’ (Law 2004) that in the case of biodiversity banking (BioBanking), resituates biodiversity within new meanings, spatialities, human–nature relations, and which accounts for biodiversity at a state, rather than local, scale. Utilising the work of Latour, we examine the processes of ‘translation’ required to generate abstracted ‘biodiversity values’ that can be traded and moved between locations. Examination of these processes leads to a consideration of the broad requirements of environmental and ecological justice as a theoretical and political response to BioBanking.