Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
M. Steiner (ed.), Clusters and Regional Specialisation. On Geography,Technology, and Networks
Denis J.B. Shaw, Russia in the Modern World. A New Geography
Ron Martin, Money and the Space Economy     

BEYOND THE GPN–NEW REGIONALISM DIVIDE IN CHINA: RESTRUCTURING THE CLOTHING INDUSTRY,REMAKING THE WENZHOU MODEL

This article attempts to advance the research on industrial districts and regional development through a study of the restructuring of the clothing industry in Wenzhou Municipality, a regional driver of the Chinese economy. Wenzhou is known for the Wenzhou model of development traditionally centred on family‐owned small businesses embedded in local institutions. The clothing industry is one of the leading industries in Wenzhou, and a cluster with national significance has emerged, where most of the production components can be purchased locally. However, the industry has been scaled up nationally and internationally, with the expansion of sales networks and production facilities across China, and to a lesser extent, abroad. This restructuring has changed the endogenous nature of industrial clusters/districts. The restructuring challenges the orthodox notion of the Wenzhou model and the New Regionalism literature, particularly the orthodox notion of Marshallian industrial districts that overly emphasizes small firms and local assets, and the global production network perspective that highlights coupling with global lead firms in regional development.     

Inns,innkeepers and the society of later medieval England, 1350–1600

The inns and innkeepers of medieval England form a poorly documented and neglected group of institutions and individuals. Yet at a time of growing specialism, they were a crucial part of the economic infrastructure of the country. This study is focused on the documentation for central southern England but seeks to place this in a wider perspective. There was now a regular provision of inns in accordance with the size and importance of the towns. Inns generated substantial rent and were evidently felt to be worth considerable investment. Innkeepers were among the rich and influential members of the town. Inns played a vital role in the evolving and prospering economic, social and political life of the nation in this period.     

我国沿海港口港城关系协同发展与驱动机制研究

近年来,随着我国港口资源整合、港区功能调整和港口城市的转型升级,沿海港口与所在城市的关系发展面临新的变化和挑战。本文以我国沿海港口为例,结合定量分析与定性讨论,聚焦我国沿海港口港城关系问题,剖析港城关系的演变及驱动机制。研究发现：我国大部分沿海港口已进入极度协调发展阶段,但发展趋势逐渐放缓,区域分化特征显著,港城协同度差距呈现再扩大的发展趋势。在研究期间,我国城市驱动型港口城市数量显著增加,港口驱动型和港城互驱型港口城市数量减少。建议通过政府政策引导、港产城融合发展和港口转型升级等方式,不断提升我国沿海地区港城关系整体协调发展水平,为新时期我国沿海港口与所在城市的高质量发展提供重要支撑。     

As Basket and Papu: Making Manus Social Fabric

Between 2012 and 2019, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, hosted Australia's offshore detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, known as the Regional Processing Centre (RPC). This paper analyses some of the social impacts of the RPC on Lorengau town, the urban centre of Manus, through the analytical lens of the Manus idiom, as basket (Tok Pisin). Materially this refers to the everyday Manus basket whilst metaphorically, it refers to an individual's or community's social, cultural, political and economic base. First, I examine asylum seekers and refugees as a social category that emerged during this period when they were referred to as papu by locals. Papu is an honorific kinship term for grandfather or elder man; for men who are symbols for family identity, social belonging, and rights to land. Second, I examine the changing materiality of Lorengau's markets as indicative of wider societal transformations and dissonance brought about by the RPC. My ethnographic data are based on long term involvement in Manus, including three recent visits to Lorengau in 2017, 2018, and 2019 where I studied the social impacts and the changing social practices of Manus people in response to the RPC.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

Cultural Resource Management and American Archaeology

Cultural resource management (CRM) work accounts for most of the archaeology conducted in the United States. A diverse and somewhat fragmented field, CRM has nonetheless achieved a degree of institutional and organizational maturity. CRM archaeology has produced important contributions to archaeological methodology and has established and refined knowledge of regional cultural-historical sequences and settlement and subsistence patterns. The current florescence of historical archaeology is attributable to CRM. Yet the maintenance of high quality in CRM is a pervasive and enduring problem. Academic institutions need to reestablish alliances with the CRM community. The future viability of CRM archaeology depends on factors both internal and external to the discipline: regulatory and statutory “reform,” agency funding levels, looting and other destructive forces, and Native American and other public involvement.     

The Making of a Regulatory Crisis: Restructuring New York City's Water Supply

Much practically orientated environmental research is marked by a polarity between functionalist abstraction and ahistorical normative discourse. This paper seeks to bridge the divide between theoretical and empirical research through a case study of New York City's water supply. Current processes of socio-economic restructuring are leading to negative environmental consequences obscured by a failure to extend analysis beyond limited temporal, spatial or sectoral scales. Insights from regulationist theory show that a combination of fiscal, political and other developments are bringing about a wide-ranging reformulation of existing patterns of environmental regulation and service provision in the city. The power of the state is being radically diminished in relation to the power of capital and a plethora of different interest groups. A relatively simple centralized model of environmental regulation is being transformed into a complex decentralized pattern involving the emergence of new approaches to urban governance. Further research is needed on the contradictions between capitalist accumulation and environmental regulation at different spatial scales in order to link New York's changing role within the global economy to the declining political legitimacy and fiscal capability of the state to play an extensive role in environmental management.     

Return to Sangamo Town: Research-Based Investigations at the Charles Broadwell Home Site, 1825–1845

This article discusses the results of research-based excavations at the Charles Broadwell site, located in the extinct town of Sangamo Town in central Illinois. A large cellar feature produced a robust sample of consumer goods dating to circa 1825–1845. Of interest is the archaeological signature of a well-appointed home in this frontier community; the character of mass-produced goods and the visibility of consumer patterning; the visibility of folk goods and their affiliated practices; and the view of abandonment and reclamation processes visible in the fill of the cellar feature.     

Rembrandt’s faceless faces

This article examines Rembrandt’s investigation of his own face in tandem with his studies of outcast populations in and around Amsterdam. While historians have titled these latter studies as “beggars,” I contextualize these figures within a history of migration, early modern Dutch globalization and shifting concepts of poverty and charity. Understanding these figures in a larger historical framework illustrates how Rembrandt used his own face to visualize the increasingly faceless populations passing through Amsterdam.