The binational reality of border-crossing cities

In a time of changing border functions city pairs on either side of national state borders have increasingly become objects of attention, because of border crossing contacts and co-operation at the local level. This paper focuses on conceptual aspects of such city pairs, owing their existence to either duplication of an already existing city or to partitioning of a once united city. In search of a proper name that expresses the relations between such partner cities without metaphorical exaggeration, the current vocabulary is reviewed. Especially the notion of the ‘binational city’ receives critical attention. A discussion of selected cases of paired cities in Europe and North-America has been included to underline the importance of local conditions and historical backgrounds with regard to the mutual relations and conditions of co-operation. In conclusion the author states that for the time being ‘border–crossing’ cities seems to be the best name for city pairs of different national backgrounds, the emergence of true ‘binational cities’ being a rather exceptional outcome in a far future. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The changing distribution of incomes in Dutch cities: myth and reality

Segregation is a central concept in the debate on urban issues, both in scientific literature and in society in general. The process of globalisation is particularly expected to increase polarisation and segregation in cities, resulting in the emergence of ‘ghettos’ or – as they are called in the Netherlands – ‘income neighbourhoods’. This paper tries to judge the situation in Dutch cities by studying changes over time; by looking at segregation within cities as well as between cities and the wider metropolitan area; and by comparing socio-economic differences with socio-cultural and socio-demographic characteristics. The analysis shows that the empirical facts are quite different from the ongoing debate. It establishes that socio-economic segregation is more moderate than segregation with respect to the other two dimensions. Contrary to suggestions from the vernacular debate, segregation within cities is scarcely increasing, but between cities and the surrounding area it is rising with respect to all three dimensions. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

San Diego–Tijuana: Not quite a binational city or region

The cities of San Diego and Tijuana have faced each other across the international boundary for over 100 years. The question raised by this article is whether they comprise a binational city or region. After a brief comparison of their histories, economies and political systems, a review of some indications of cross border attitudes and a discussion of binational regionalism as it is impacted by continentalism, it is concluded that the relationship between these cities is driven by factors of economics not friendship or trust. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The geology and micropalaeontology of the Channel Tunnel

Micropalaeontology and biostratigraphy have been, and still are, a vital part of the Channel Tunnel Project. The use of foraminiferal assemblages and the determination of an accurate biozonation have given the tunnel builders a comprehensive view of the geological succession below the English Channel between Dover and Calais. This work, which was begun in 1958, has continued intermittently to the present day.     

The neighborhood council: Where ‘top-down’ engages with ‘bottom-up’

The paper examines the neighborhood council from the perspective of its contribution to town planning. Within the context of planning in Israel, two distinct models of neighborhood council and their relationship to the municipal planning administration in two different towns are considered. Their potential as a new arena of planning at the neighborhood level is evaluated, including the ability to mediate between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ planning processes, and to offer a planning framework that combines local with professional knowledge.     

Nomospace and genospace: A spatial matrix

We are concerned here with the notion of space as a primary condition for building social relations. From this stand, we have created two analytical matrixes that can help us characterize two modes: that of ‘being-there-in-space’ and that of ‘being-of-the-space’; the nomospace and the genospace. While the nomospace is characterized by ‘cold’ connotations, which are ideally defined as a result of a logical option, the genospace is mainly characterized by emotional or ‘warm’ connotations, which originate from a feeling of shared nature and common destiny. We believe that these matrixes could help us to identify the meanings of some behaviours and, therefore, make us more capable of interpreting many dynamics that occur in modern societies. The importance of geography is justified by the existing relationship between these behaviours and their proper spatial form. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Rip current escape strategies: lessons for swimmers and coastal rescue authorities

Lagrangian flow of two rip currents was measured using human drifters to understand how variations in surf zone circulation affect exit positions of floating swimmers. Based on these results, two escape strategies were assessed, ‘do nothing’ and ‘swim parallel to the beach’. The drifter paths and exit positions were analysed to determine the best escape strategy for passive swimmers in each scenario. Of the two methods, doing nothing to allow the rip current to take a swimmer is the most effective strategy. More than 75% of rip current flow scenarios could hinder chances of escape of swimmers if the wrong direction was chosen to swim parallel to the beach to safety. This is because in many situations a swimmer encounters not only a rip current flowing offshore but also a longshore current flowing parallel to the beach. The best education campaign for the public, in addition to only swimming on a patrolled beach, would be to promote the ‘do nothing’ rip current escape strategy, as it covers all flow scenarios without reducing a swimmer’s chance of survival.     

Re-viewing the Entrapment controversy: Megaprojection, (mis)representation and postcolonial performance

Becoming the tallest building in the world in the mid-1990s, the Petronas Towers was the centre piece of an image of national progress and development that Malaysian authorities sought to project internationally. The release of Fox Movies' Entrapment in Malaysia in May 1999 provoked political outrage and popular disappointment at the way in which the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur had been spliced alongside riverside ‘slums’ filmed in the town of Malacca some 150 km away. This paper provides a critical reading of the spliced scene in the movie. At one level, the angry response of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad, to the scene diagnoses a geopolitics of asymmetrical representational power. However, I show how Mahathir's criticism of Entrapment in Malaysia was as much a defence of domestic political legitimacy (and national economic investibility) as it was ‘opposition’ or ‘resistance’ to hegemonic ‘Western’ (mis)representation. In addition, while the material and symbolic work of reimaging Kuala Lumpur had sought to negate (neo)orientalist imaginings of ‘Asian’ cities, the controversial scene rendered visible environmental ‘underdevelopment’ that has no place in a modern (vision of) Malaysia. Entrapment thus performed something in inducing Malaysian cities and citizens to ‘clean up’ their act, to practice ‘fully developed’ ways of seeing, being and being seen. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A rural development strategy for the Apuseni Mountains, Romania

The Apuseni Mountains, part of the Western Carpathians, are distinctive in cultural terms because of the highly dispersed settlement patterns that have developed on the high erosion surfaces where the Moti people cleared the forests to allow for an expansion of family farming in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These small ‘crang’ settlements remain, but the population is declining in the face of limited employment opportunities and poor services. The question arises as to the most appropriate rural development strategy for the region, following the communist period which encouraged centralisation through the provision of housing and industry in key villages and new towns. The emphasis on private farming and the expansion of tourism could protect the inherited cultural landscape but money must be found to improve rural services. There is also a strong conservation movement which supports the establishment of a national park, but this could constrain development through controls on grazing and woodcutting. Hence the dialogue continues to find the best compromise and the concept of a ‘natural park’ is being discussed with such a reconciliation in mind. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Socio-geographical transition in the rural areas of the Carpathian Euroregion

Cross-border cooperation is starting to overcome the isolation of frontier regions where interaction under the socialist system was minimal. Change has been particularly apparent in areas where trans-frontier organisations on the ‘Euroregion’ model have emerged. The Carpathian Euroregion is the first exclusively East European example of this approach and it has already made a positive impact in overcoming backwardness in an area where four East European countries were in contact with the Former Soviet Union. The paper outlines the challenge facing the Euroregion – and the national and local governments in the five countries concerned – in providing non-agricultural employment for a large rural population augmented by return-migration from the towns since 1989. Many small farming businesses have been started as a survival strategy but they cannot be economically viable in a market situation. Although most people are satisified with their rural lifestyle, the inevitability of radical consolidation in a future EU context could be politically destabilising if more jobs are not generated in manufacturing and in an expanding tertiary sector. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Contesting Chinatown: Place-making and the Emergence of ‘Ethnoburbia’ in Brisbane,Australia

This paper juxtaposes the actual areas of settlement and settlement activities of Chinese migrants in Brisbane’s southern suburbs since the mid-1980s, with the concomitant, ‘government planned’ construction of the city’s Chinatown as an ‘exotic,’ ‘ethnic,’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ landmark. It argues that while the latter, as with Chinatowns in other Australian and world cities, has continued to appropriate the symbols of so-called ‘Chineseness’ to sell the locale to non-Chinese, the former, in recalling the notion of ‘ethnoburbia,’ significantly evinces actual Chinese migrants’ agency and role in place-making. In the process, these migrants have not only established a local, ethnically meaningful environment, but also challenged the still current metonymic Western image of the Chinese as preferring life in ‘ethnic’ urban enclaves that had its origin from early Chinese settlement and fundamentally detached from the lives of other ethnic groups per se. Indeed greater recognition and comprehension of such locales may go a long way to illustrate that many Chinese living in Australia today do not fit the territorial, place-based identity often associated with them in the imagination of mainstream society.     

Creating sustainable communities through tenure-mix: the responsibilisation of marginal homeowners in Scotland

The idea that the deprived communities of the UK’s towns and cities are ‘unsustainable’ has been a central theme of government housing policy since New Labour came into power in 1997. The creation of ‘mixed-tenure communities’ has been heralded by some policy makers as a key component of creating sustainable communities by overcoming concentrations of deprivation as well as creating responsible citizens who make few demands on the state. Since devolution, support for owner-occupation has been promoted by both Scottish Labour and SNP regimes as a regeneration tool, and has been included in the Local Housing Strategy of many local authorities in Scotland. Drawing on research in Glasgow, this paper achieves three things. First, it highlights the ethopolitics associated with the identities of owner-occupiers and social rented tenants as skilled or flawed consumers; second, it explores the tools used in recent years to create mixed communities through encouraging owner-occupation; and third, it questions the continued uncritical support of the insertion of owner-occupiers into deprived areas as a regeneration and responsiblisation tool.     

Structural geometry of the early Precambrian terrane south of Coimbatore in the “Palghat Gap”, southern India

The ENE-plunging macroscopic folds, traced by calc gneiss interbanded with marble and sillimanite schist within the Peninsular Gneiss around Suganapuram in the ‘Palghat gap’ in southern India, represent structures of the second generation (D₂). They have folded the axial planes of a set of D₁ isoclinal folds on stratification coaxially, so that the mesoscopic D₁ folds range from reclined in the hinge zones, through inclined to upright in the limb zones of the D₂ folds. Orthogonal relation between stratification and axial planar cleavage, and ‘M’ shaped folds on layering locate the hinge zones of the D₁ folds, whereas folds on axial planar cleavage with ‘M’ shaped folds are the sites of the D₂ fold hinges. Extreme variation in the shapes of the isoclinal D₁ folds from class 1B through class 1C to nearly class 2 of Ramsay is a consequence of buckling followed by flattening on layers of widely varying viscosity contrast. The large ENE-trending structures in this supracrustal belt within the Peninsular Gneiss in the ‘Palghat gap’ could not have evolved by reorientation of NS-trending structures of the Dharwar tectonic province to the north by movement along the Moyar-Bhavani shear zone which marks the boundary between the two provinces. This is because the Moyar and Bhavani faults are steep dipping reverse faults with dominant dip-slip component. Deceased     

City size distributions and metropolisation

Many controversial questions about the shape and evolution of city size distributions can be solved if reliable, large and comparable set of data are used for several countries. We provide new empirical evidence by using the large data base Geopolis, which has strictly comparable figures for all towns and cities of the world over 10,000 inhabitants between 1950 and 1990. A Pareto model is used for identifying as metropolises one or a few large cities for each national urban system. From those data, two empirical power laws are established, linking the size of the metropolises to the size of their national urban system. The first is a transversal law: for a set of countries at a given date, the share of population concentrated in metropolises tends to decrease when larger countries are considered. The second law, which is longitudinal, shows that metropolises in the past have grown in a systematic way more rapidly than the rest of their urban system, invalidating Gibrat's urban growth model. Such empirical regularities could help for predicting the future of nowadays observed metropolisation trends.     

The changing relationship between state and church/religion in the Netherlands

The Netherlands is part of the historic Northwest-Southeast multi-confessional culture belt according to the comparative framework of church-state relations in Europe as recently developed by Madeley on the basis of Rokkan’s conceptual map. The aim of this paper is to describe the development of the church-state relations in the Netherlands within this historic framework of state-formation and nation-building, and to interpret recent challenges of its historic state-church model, such as secularisation, the rise of immigrant religions, and general ‘de- and re-territorialisation’ tendencies. The Netherlands developed from a relatively very tolerant polity dominated by the Calvinist Church to a ‘pillarised’ society, in which the Rome-Reformation divide (which also had a strong geographical dimension) was institutionalised in the political system. After the 1960s, very strong secularisation put this ‘pillarised’ system under severe pressure, but the remnants of this system offered a favourable opportunity structure for religious newcomers (Muslims in particular), who could establish their mosques and Muslim schools relatively easily. However, while the main Protestant churches, and even Catholic and Protestant political parties have merged, failing integration of these newcomers in Dutch society and terrorist attacks at the global level as well as in the Netherlands encouraged a new divide between Muslims and non-Muslims. The metropolitan areas in particular became the scene of this new divide.     

The Asia-Pacific Rim's transport and telecommunications systems: spatial structure and corporate control since the mid-1980s

There is a need to move from discussing the Asia-Pacific Rim's leading port cities as shipping centres measured by container throughput. This shift in focus involves examining how different transport and telecommunications systems are interacting with each other at an international scale under the power and control of major world operators. Using a three-level network framework an attempt is made to illustrate and explain the formation of multilayered trade/communications corridors and hubs/headquarters in the Asia-Pacific Rim since the mid-1980s and to identify the factors affecting them. From this examination of spatial structure and corporate control three levels of cities in the Asia-Pacific Rim are recognised: first level cities with strong corporate representation in container shipping, air cargo, air passenger and telecommunications; second level cities with marked corporate representation in one but not all four modes; and third level cities with no marked corporate representation in any mode but with strong throughput. The third level includes the Asia-Pacific Rim's ‘true’ port cities. Perhaps the ambiguous category ‘port city’ should be reserved for them. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Landscapes of flexibility or landscapes of marginality? spaces of livelihood formation in a changing South African city

This article examines the idea of ‘flexibility’ within the context of a city. It uses the idea of livelihoods to contribute to the debates on flexibility, particularly on the role that ordinary people play in the transformative potential of cities. A closer examination of ordinary people’s activities show that although livelihoods are crucial to how they adapt to the changing social and economic conditions, such activities largely constitute survival strategies. Importantly, and without subscribing to a paradigm that promotes a city as a closed space, the continuing socio-spatial divisions in the city of Rustenburg, South Africa underscore the fact that ordinary people’s remarkable resourcefulness occurs under circumstances of marginality.     

The evolving narrative of the Darfur conflict as represented in <Emphasis Type="Italic">The New York Times</Emphasis> and <Emphasis Type="Italic">The Washington Post</Emphasis>, 2003–2009

News media influence local to global interactions between people, societies, and governments by producing place images. Representations of Africa in Western news media are heavily imbued with colonialist notions of cultural geography. In particular, Western news media have represented conflicts in Africa as ‘tribal’, a trope that erases geographic and historical context, and discourages actions that could prevent or reduce violent conflict. To determine if ‘tribalism’ remains important in coverage of African conflict, we use framing analysis to evaluate news on Sudan’s Darfur region in The New York Times and The Washington Post during 2003–2009. We find that these newspapers predictably relied on stereotypes related to tribalism to simplify Darfur’s geography and make the conflict meaningful to intended readers. Tribal portrayal of African war is inherently political, and, problematically, neither newspaper recognized that their use of the tribal narrative was parallel to the views of both the Sudanese government and external observers that challenged the actions of the Sudanese government. However, we also found that stereotypical representations became less prominent over time, apparently because reporters found that the initial, simplistic framing of the conflict did not match their encounters with geographic reality. We emphasize the decline in stereotypical tropes, because this suggests behind-the-scenes negotiation about representations in these news organizations. Recognizing voices that challenge stereotypical portrayals is necessary to developing place images that are geographically more accurate.     

Changing poverty distribution in Bolivia: the role of rural–urban migration and urban services

Bolivia is a country with high levels of poverty and inequality among its peoples and regions. For the nation and its urban and rural areas, trends in the social and spatial distribution of poverty (and extreme poverty) are identified from 1976 to 2003 using UBN data with minor support where appropriate from poverty lines. The main survey between 1992 and 2001 uses composite and selected UBN to track detailed poverty change for the country’s nine departments, its ten largest cities and a selection of other smaller urban and rural municipalities. Because of rising background increases in population in the various surveyed administrative units, many instances of relative reductions in poverty are accompanied by rising absolute increases. Marked spatial variations in poverty and development in the country over the last several decades are identified as the main driver for the country’s quickening pace of rural–urban migration. As a result, the paper concludes by assessing two different but closely related views. One investigation tests the notion that because more poor people have been living in Bolivia’s cities than in its rural areas since the mid to late 1990s, rapid rural–urban migration has simply shifted the locus of poverty from the countryside to the cities in a process called, the ‘urbanisation of poverty.’ A second, more challenging, investigation assesses the view that the flow of poor rural people to the better serviced urban areas of Bolivia has actually acted to alleviate national poverty levels.     

Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and metaphors

Over the past two decades, geographers have probed the intersection of collective memory and urban space. Their sustained interest in the subject reflects an understanding of the social condition of commemoration and the important role that space plays in the process and politics of collective memory. Along with other critical social scientists, geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that reflect and legitimate the normative social order. A review of the extant literature indicates that geographers scrutinize memorial landscapes through three conceptual lenses that may be understood via the metaphors of ‘text,’ ‘arena,’ and ‘performance.’ These metaphors are in turn mobilized through a series of analytic questions that serve to identify the interests served and denied by landscape ‘texts,’ the ‘arenas’ in which they are produced, and the ways in which they are enacted via ‘performance.’ This article’s synopsis of the subfield’s predominant metaphors and its attendant questions contributes to the ongoing cultural geographic project of articulating and implementing methods for interpreting landscapes as open-ended symbolic systems.