Has the euro sustainably increased home price co‐movement?

A low level of co‐movement between different euro country housing markets creates difficulties for the ECB in setting monetary policy. Such co‐movement across eurozone countries has been the subject of a number of studies, using different methodologies and finding mixed results. In this study, we use endogenous break methods to explicitly test for whether the introduction of the euro has changed home value co‐movement. We also employ informal correlation analysis. Endogenous break results indicate no sustainable increase in co‐movement attributable to the euro, whereas correlation analysis is suggestive of a decrease in synchronization since the currency's introduction.     

The girl with the chariot medallion: a well-furnished,Late Iron Age Durotrigian burial from Langton Herring,Dorset

A well-furnished, Late Iron Age Durotrigian burial was found in 2010 by a metal-detectorist at Langton Herring in Dorset. This report examines all aspects of the discovery, paying particular attention to the skeletal remains, a female aged 19–24, providing the most complete, osteobiographical study of an individual buried with a mirror assemblage from the European Iron Age. A combination of artefacts and radiocarbon dating gives a range for the burial of c.AD 25 – cal AD 53. The grave goods themselves are of exceptional interest, representing an accumulation of artefacts acquired from diverse sources, deposited at a time of major cultural and societal change in southern Britain. The results of a geophysical survey are also presented, together with a discussion of additional well-furnished burials in the Durotrigian tribal tradition, which place the burial deposit within a wider social and landscape framework.     

Design thinking for city dashboard development: Recommendations from a study of smart asset management in Sydney,Australia

The city dashboard has become an integral component of smart city asset management systems. It leverages data collected from multiple sources to monitor performance and enable evidence-based decision making. This article investigates the use of a design thinking framework to develop a functional and easy to understand city dashboard. The Smart Social Spaces project is used as a case study to illustrate how design thinking can be employed to develop an asset management dashboard, enabling efficient management of public space and infrastructure. The article profiles the unique collaboration between a local government, a multi-disciplinary team of university academics, and a street furniture designer and manufacturer, all located in Sydney, Australia. We unpack some of the design practice nuances that led this project to receive national awards and international recognition, and most importantly, created a user-friendly system to track and maintain public micro assets. We conclude with lessons learnt and recommendations for dashboard development through a design thinking process.     

Sex in the digital city: location-based dating apps and queer urban life

It is well established that digital technology and code mediate bodies in space. The collapse of any supposed physical/digital divide has been amply documented to the extent that everyday life is now widely theorised in terms of hybridisation. What is less clear is what comes next for those participating in this hybridisation. This article examines what Kitchin and Dodge term the ‘social contour of software’ via queer male locative media users who collectively negotiate digital hybridisation in their everyday lives. Using qualitative interviews with 36 non-heterosexual men using apps such as Grindr and Tinder in London, UK, I explore how locative media refigures conceptualisations of community, technological efficiency and boundaries between private and public space. The study finds that users express ambivalence about their membership of queer ‘communities’, and are also unconvinced by online sociality. Apps expedite searches for new partners but prove deceptively time-consuming. Public and private space are being hybridised by locative technology, but common codes of conduct are slower to develop, leaving users unsure of how to navigate physical encounter. This article concludes that schema for queer men’s lives are increasingly promulgated digitally but may be uneasily embodied in everyday practice.     

Currents,visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geographies of spaces beyond the local and the national, and can attend to the relationships between the human and natural worlds. Second, through a consideration of the imaginative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies of the sea that contends that maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation. Finally, in a survey of the material and social worlds of the oceans that suggests that new life can thereby be breathed into current concerns with global political economy, material geographies, the relationship between knowledge and located practice, and the intersections of social and spatial difference. The paper also provides an introduction to a special issue on the historical geography of the sea.