Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

The neo-liberalization of strategic spatial planning and the overproduction of development in Celtic Tiger Ireland

This paper argues that the role of the planning system in the overproduction of development during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger needs to be analysed as instructive of contemporary neo-liberal transformations of strategic spatial planning. Leaning on a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the genealogy of modern Irish planning practice is explored to elucidate how neo-liberal rationalities became embedded in institutional norms through consensus-driven partnership governance. The central premise is that the turn to ‘strategic spatial planning’, particularly with the publication of the National Spatial Strategy in 2002, was usefully exploited to mask the spatial politics of the ever-increasing need for the state to facilitate capital switching into built environment formation in order to maintain conditions of high economic growth. Using the empirical case study of housing development in the ‘Upper Shannon’ region and large-scale commercial development in County Meath, it is argued that this contributed to a destabilization of the planning system and an abandonment of basic planning principles. The paper concludes that, in the context of the new and deeply uneven economic geography of post-crisis Ireland, there is an urgent need for a repoliticized critique of normative interpretations of strategic spatial planning practice in order for more progressive practices to emerge.     

江西省区域经济发展空间差异研究

区域差异历来是政府关注的重要问题,也是区域发展理论研究的主要课题。江西省受周边强经济中心的影响,经济区位边缘化趋势明显。近年来江西省突破原来农业大省的发展思路,致力引进发达地区和国外的技术和资金,工业化水平明显提高。目前江西省内部地区差异较1990年明显扩大,而且表现出各地区相对波动较大的特征。本文采用偏离一份额模型,对江西1990-2001年间11年来的发展状况分两个阶段进行分析,探讨江西省区域经济发展差异的空间结构特征,将江西划分为4种发展类型。江西省各地区区位条件的变化是其经济发展空间差异的驱动因素。     

Intra-site Spatial Analysis in Ethnoarchaeology

ABSTRACT

The interpretative power of quantitative intra-site spatial analysis has long been recognised by archaeologists. On the contrary, very few ethnoarchaeological works have engaged with the statistical analysis of intra-site pattern of artefacts and ecofacts. Nonetheless, ethnoarchaeology is uniquely placed to guide and assist in the identification of sound techniques and in the development of the methodology of analysis. The possibility to directly connect the distribution of the proxies under study with the activity that generated such distribution, provide the means of fine-tuning the tools we use for identifying these patterns in the archaeological record. As a consequence, archaeological methodology and interpretation both benefit from the application of improved methodologies. In this paper we review some of the most common techniques used to analyse activity areas and we provide examples of the application of such techniques to ethnoarchaeological contexts. The aim is to assess how archaeology can benefit from the intra-site spatial analysis of ethnoarchaeological contexts.     

Migration and the built environment: a spatial analysis of resettlement in Çeşme,Turkey

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the retreat of the Ottoman Empire caused a massive scale migration in the Aegean regions. This process was furthered by the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) between the Turkish Republic and Greece. Gradually, more than one million people were formally exchanged under the control of the respective national authorities. This study shows that the predictions made by political authorities regarding the expected adaptation and homogenization based on religious affiliations failed to materialize; instead, the process of migration generated its own unique and autonomous processes derived primarily from cultural aspects and social origins. This research examines the materialization of the migrants’ adaptation practices and the spatial transformations in the built environment at both urban and domestic level, in order to indentify spatial and related social conflicts that arose as a result of socio-cultural mixing through a case study of the Çe?me Peninsula, Turkey. The study concludes that the relationship between social space and the physical environment is intertwined, with spatial transformations based on residents’ home of origin, professions and economic prosperity positioned in a clearly defined hierarchy of meaning.     

考古地层的三维建模方法在秦始皇帝陵考古勘探中应用尝试

为了更清楚地展示秦始皇帝陵地区考古地层的三维空间关系,并为后期考古工作中空间数据挖掘做准备,借鉴三维地质建模技术,提出了考古地层三维建模方法。基于探孔数据构建了考古地层三维模型。该模型清楚地展示了秦始皇帝陵地区考古地层的三维空间关系,为田野考古数字化工作提供一种新思路、新方法。     

Interpreting pachyderm single carcass sites in the African Lower and Early Middle Pleistocene record: A multidisciplinary approach to the site of Nadung’a 4 (Kenya)

Nadung’a 4 is one of the single carcass pachyderm sites recorded in East Africa during the Lower and Early Middle Pleistocene. The site has yielded an abundant lithic assemblage in close association with the partial carcass of an elephant. Conjoined pedological, geoarchaeological, spatial, technological, and taphonomical analyses have been carried out to address the relationship between hominids and elephant. The resulting data are consistent with a non-fortuitous association between both categories of remains. The lithic artefacts do not match a classical Acheulean tool-kit, as would be expected for the time period ascribed to the site, and the functional patterns inferred from their analysis make this site radically different from other purported butchery sites. The implications of these original features are discussed.     

Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries

Although the dichotomization of space and place has spawned a lively archaeological discussion, it threatens to devolve into a troublesome binary like sex/gender. Local place-making and universalizing spatial science are not so neatly segregated. Rather than dividing and bounding the notion of an investment of locations with meaning, it can be extended to describe the intricate topologies of bodies and things, as well as landscapes. Places emerge as sites of the hybrid articulation of representations, practices, and things, as spatialized imaginaries. The notion of imaginaries and the rethinking of place are illustrated with Inuit archaeological and ethnographic examples.     

The Archaeology of Regions: From Discrete Analytical Toolkit to Ubiquitous Spatial Perspective

In the 1970s and 1980s, regional analysis was an influential part of archaeological research, providing a discrete set of geographical tools inspired by a processual epistemological and interpretive perspective. With the advent of new technologies, new methods, and new paradigms, archaeological research on regional space has undergone significant changes. This article reviews the state of regional archaeology, beginning with a consideration of its history and a discussion of the fundamental issues facing regional investigations before focusing on developments over the last several years. On one hand, the diversification of archaeological theory has created new paradigms for thinking about human relationships with one another and with the physical environment across regional space; in this regard, historical ecology, landscape archaeology, and evolutionary theory have been particularly influential in recent years. This has led to a corresponding diversification of the traditional methods of regional analysis. Most notably, the advent of powerful digital technologies has introduced new tools, especially those from the geographic information sciences, that build on the quantitative methods of past approaches. The investigation of regional data is no longer based on a discrete toolkit of simple mathematical and graphical procedures for representing spatial relationships. Instead, regional archaeology has matured into a diversity of multiscalar spatial and geostatistical techniques that inform many areas of archaeological inquiry.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.