Development plans: New approaches to making frameworks for land use regulation

This paper explores approaches to managing environmental change in urban regions, particularly with respect to land use and property development. Specifically, it examines the role and forms of development plans, as frameworks within regulatory regimes for managing development. It emphasizes the importance of the ideology and discourses underlying conceptions of plan content and function, and of the power relations of executive action. It draws on British experience and past traditions of development plan‐making, to argue that there are three possibilities for the future evolution of a regulatory form for the planning system: neo‐liberal forms of management by performance criteria and output targets; élite‐pluralist forms of management by partnership; and participatory forms of management by argumentation. The paper concludes that the contemporary challenge for the regulatory form of land use planning systems is between forms of technicist management and forms of pluralist democratic management.     

Developing ethical geography students? The impact and effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach

This paper explores the effectiveness of a tutorial-based approach in supporting the development of geography undergraduates’ ethical thinking. It was found that overall the intervention had a statistically significant impact on students’ ethical thinking scores as assessed using a Meta-Ethical Questionnaire. The initiative led to a convergence of scores, having a bigger impact on those who had a relatively low score prior to the intervention. Interestingly, the approach had the biggest impact on students who self-identified as physical geographers. Unlike some previous research, there was little evidence of difference between male and female students.     

Inclusive partnership: enhancing student engagement in geography

Partnership is currently the focus of much work within higher education and advocated as an important process to address a range of higher education goals. In this paper, we propose the term inclusive partnership to conceptualise a non-selective staff–student relationship. While recognising the challenges of inclusive partnership working for institutions, staff and students, this paper outlines the opportunities it offers and provides detailed case studies of inclusive partnerships within the geography curriculum. We conclude with some guiding principles to inform the development of inclusive partnerships in a range of settings.     

(Homo)sex in the City Only? Finding Continuity and Change in the Gay Past

Books reviewed in this article: Glenn Burger and Steven F. Kruger (eds), Queering the Middle Ages John Howard, Men Like That: A Southern Queer History Stephen O. Murray, Homosexualities     

‘By the charitie of good people’: poverty and neighbourly support in seventeenth century Lancashire

Historians of early-modern poverty have emphasized the ways in which the poor ‘made shift’, reducing or even preventing their dependence on formal poor relief. This article looks at one aspect of that ‘economy of makeshifts’: the casual support of the poor by their neighbours. It uses evidence from a uniquely extensive archive of pauper petitions from Lancashire (1626–1710), many of which contain incidental information about strategies of making shift. The petitions suggest that neighbourly support for the needy was common in Lancashire, both through localized begging and in more stable supportive relationships. Nonetheless, the charity of neighbours could easily be exhausted, leaving those in poverty forced to call upon the more formalized support of the Poor Law.     

European developments in strategic spatial planning

Strategic spatial planning which takes an integrated approach to the development of a territory seemed to go out of fashion, but now there are signs that it is being re‐established. This paper explores these developments using case studies from 10 European countries. The analysis uses an ‘institutionalist’ approach, which examines how the ‘agency’ of spatial planning practices responds to the ‘structure’ of contextual forces, at the same time influencing that structure. The ‘driving forces’ which are influencing strategic spatial planning are investigated, as are two aspects of the changes in spatial planning: institutional relations and policy agendas. The conclusions are that—at least in the case studies—there is a movement in the institutional relations towards horizontal articulation, territorial logic, and negotiative forms. Policy agendas too are changing, becoming more selective and using new conceptions of space and place. Those institutional developments, however, are not necessarily being translated into territorially‐integrated policy (as distinct from functional/sectoral policy). That translation appears to require simultaneous re‐framing of relational resources (trust, social capital), knowledge resources (intellectual capital), linked to strong mobilization efforts (political capital). The cases considered varied significantly in how far that had been done. Where it had, strategic spatial plan‐making practices were playing a key role in developing institutional territorial integration and re‐invigorating territorial identities.     

Evgeniia/Evgenii: Queer Case Histories in the First Years of Soviet Power

Citing examples of ‘queer’ (gender- and sexually-transgressive) behaviour taken from psychiatric, criminological and forensic literature, the essay explores the formation of Soviet Russian masculinities and femininities during the two decades following 1917. After surveying the legal tradition regarding same-sex eroticism, it discusses expert views of the ‘mannish lesbian’ and the effeminate male homosexual. Compulsory heterosexuality was a central, unproblematized tool used in the construction of a revolutionary socialist respectability during the 1920s. During the Stalinist Five Year Plans of the 1930s, the male ‘homosexual’ was explicitly outlawed while family obligations became more difficult for women to avoid.     

Relational complexity and the imaginative power of strategic spatial planning1

This paper explores the imaginations of place and spatial organization and of governance mobilized in recent experiences of strategic spatial planning for urban regions in Europe. Drawing on examples of such experiences, it examines how far these imaginations reflect a relational understanding of spatial dynamics and of governance processes. Spatial imaginations are assessed in terms of the nature of the spatial consciousness expressed in a strategy, the way the multiple scales of the social relations of a place are conceived, and the extent to which relational complexity is understood and reflected in a strategy. Governance imaginations are assessed in terms of how the relation between government and society is imagined, how the tensions between functional/sectoral and territorial principles of policy organization are addressed, and what assumptions are made about the nature and trajectory of transformative processes in governance dynamics. The paper concludes that signs of a recognition of the “relational complexity” of urban and regional dynamics and of territorially-focused governance processes can be found in these experiences, but a relational understanding is weakly-developed and often displaced by more traditional ways of seeing place/space and governance process. The paper concludes with some comments on the challenge of developing a stronger understanding of “relational complexity” within strategic spatial planning endeavours.     

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.