‘Tropical’ cosmopolitanism? The untoward legacy of the American style in postindependence Ceylon/Sri Lanka

Using Homi Bhabha's discussion of vernacular cosmopolitanism as a starting point this paper attempts to reinterpret its thesis through an architectural reading of postindependence social transformations in Ceylon that coincided with the emergence of a new middle class. Inspired by American examples, suburban domestic architecture that was modest and repetitive and employed systematized construction methods made a break from a long history of labour intensive processes. This created channels through which American influences entered the local industry and were disseminated within it as an alternative ‘tropical’ modernism. This paper studies the location and marginalization of these influences within architectural discourse.     

Religion on the Fringe: the representation of space and minority religious facilities in the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan Sydney,Australia

This article examines land-use development applications for minority religious facilities in two local government areas on the rural–urban fringe of metropolitan Sydney, Australia. Using critical discourse analysis and underpinned by Lefebvre's (1991) conceptual triad of space, the work interrogates the way in which place identity is generated and codified both by land-use planners and local residents through spatial representation. This representation is revealed in discourses around the compatibility of minority religious facilities for particular zones, lack of a sufficient minority population and social disruption. These discourses reveal a construction of peri-urban space that is aligned with particular elite Anglo-Australian activities (horse riding and gentleman farms) and land uses (rural residential, small-scale agriculture and the ‘bush-church’). These case studies illustrate the potential for the creation of exclusionary, abstract space by urban planners but also the ways in which local residents use discoursive strategies to ensure the stability of their position as elites in rapidly changing spatial situations.     

Landscapes of Predation,Landscapes of Neglect: A Location Analysis of Payday Lenders and Banks*

Since the period of bank deregulation in the 1980s, deferred deposit loan operations, better known as payday lenders, have become commonplace in the landscapes of many American cities. At the same time, traditional banking facilities have become less common, especially in the inner city. Growing disparities in the type of and accessibility to credit in the inner city has generated calls for greater regulation to curb practices by payday lenders that critics claim disproportionately affect poor and minority consumers. Payday lenders argue that they serve communities neglected by traditional banks. This article analyzes the site‐location strategies of banks and payday lenders in metropolitan Louisiana, and in Cook County, Illinois, and finds that disenfranchised neighborhoods are simultaneously targeted by payday lenders and neglected by traditional banks. The implications these findings have for public policy and for ongoing discourses on the urban condition, race, and class are briefly discussed.     

Encountering The Night with Mobile Methods

Nightlife settings both facilitate urban sociality and act as sites of social conflict, however little research has focused on experience and encounter in these places. This paper addresses this gap in the context of night‐time economic planning and recent research on encounter. The use of mobile methods in nightlife spaces is shown to garner a more nuanced understanding of how forays into planned night‐time spaces are experienced and understood by people using those spaces. I argue that emplaced, mobile methods unveil complex narratives of place, revealing prejudices and discourses at play in place. These narratives begin to erode privileged images of the city shaped by increasingly neoliberal governance and other cultural intermediaries, and draw out the potential of these methods to improve the lived inclusivity of place.     

A Place for Buddha in Wollongong,New South Wales? Territorial rules in the place-making of sacred spaces

A Buddhist temple in Berkeley, Wollongong, may at first appear puzzling given that few Buddhists lived there. Indeed, the suburb was home to predominantly those Anglo-Celtic Australians most marginalised by the structural changes to the city's economic base. This problem is explored within the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion operating within the local politics of place-making. Drawing upon the concept of a progressive sense to place revealed that discourses of support for the temple drew heavily on imagining Australia and Wollongong as multicultural and the temple as an exotic object of the Orient, worthy of tourist visitation. A Buddhist temple provided the city with a source of cultural vitality and enrichment. Imagined as a tourist attraction, a place to visit, rather than as sacred space, a place to worship, a Buddhism sect was perhaps in this way made less threatening to local Christian residents. These results further support arguments that suggest a redundancy to the fixed notions of place as bounded territory and how territorial rules that define whether something, or someone, is appropriately placed requires interrogating the connectedness between social powers and the powers of place.     

Reading Agricultural Power

Many forms of rural geography include investigations of power. Lately some researchers have achieved this through studies of discourse. This paper presents a reading of agricultural power as it occurs in several examples of Australian and New Zealand print-media. Initially, I review the importance of discourse in the study of power - arguing that a ‘geography of discourse’ enables key questions and objects of analysis (spaces and processes) to be investigated. I then analyse coverage of agriculture in selected rural print-media forms. I argue that hegemonic discourses of masculinity and agriculture are used in the construction of reports, reinforcing the power of certain knowledges and truths. Finally, I propose more study is needed of the sites and processes through which meaning is constructed. Using the case of a farm women's conference I argue that the media involves a number of sites and processes which must be negotiated if discursive change is to occur in our understanding of agricuture.     

Introduction: Geographic Contributions to Agrobiodiversity Conservation

Abstract

Since the period of bank deregulation in the 1980s, deferred deposit loan operations, better known as payday lenders, have become commonplace in the landscapes of many American cities. At the same time, traditional banking facilities have become less common, especially in the inner city. Growing disparities in the type of and accessibility to credit in the inner city has generated calls for greater regulation to curb practices by payday lenders that critics claim disproportionately affect poor and minority consumers. Payday lenders argue that they serve communities neglected by traditional banks. This article analyzes the site-location strategies of banks and payday lenders in metropolitan Louisiana, and in Cook County, Illinois, and finds that disenfranchised neighborhoods are simultaneously targeted by payday lenders and neglected by traditional banks. The implications these findings have for public policy and for ongoing discourses on the urban condition, race, and class are briefly discussed.

     

CONSTRUCTING PLACE: CULTURAL HEGEMONIES AND MEDIA IMAGES OF AN INNER-CITY NEIGHBORHOOD

This paper examines place portrayals of an inner-city neighborhood by investigating the interrelationships among the representations of the neighborhood in major mainstream newspapers, the alternative neighborhood press, and local institutions. I argue that the everyday, lived experiences of neighborhood residents are represented through a series of discourses and counter-discourses between the mainstream and local newspapers. Using newspaper articles about vice in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota, I demonstrate that the negative imagery of Frogtown in the mainstream press is contested and challenged in the local neighborhood newspaper, and by activists in the neighborhood. I conclude that while the major press has a dominant role in defining the neighborhood, locally based contestations over the place identity undermine and offer challenges to the hegemony of the popular media. Both local and dominant media discourses contribute to a neighborhood place identity. [Key words: media hegemony, newspapers, neighborhood, place representation.]     

South Central Farmers and Shadow Hills Homeowners: Land Use Policy and Relational Racialization in Los Angeles∗

This article draws from the recent relational turn in geography to develop a model of relational racialization. It argues that racism functions through the legal and discursive production of linked, interdependent, and unequal places. By comparing two social movements in Los Angeles, the South Central Farmers and the Shadow Hills homeowners, I examine two spatial discourses through which race is relationally reproduced: unequal abilities to mobilize the entitlements of “property rights” and unequal claims to represent hegemonic forms of local heritage. When materialized and naturalized in land use policy, these discourses re-create racial disparities in wealth and poverty and reproduce the qualitative nature of the physical places on which racism depends.     

Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

To study the complexities of race and geography, research and analysis should center on the fatally dynamic coupling of power and difference signified by racism. The author considers briefly the theoretical and methodological implications of key frameworks geographers used during the past century to account for racialized power differentials. To illustrate the political, economic, and cultural capacities that historical materialist geographical inquiry ought to consider, the author outlines the background for a new project—a case study of the U.S. during a period of unusually intense state‐building in the mid‐twentieth century. The article concludes that the political geography of race consists of space, place, and location as shaped simultaneously by gender, class, and scale.     

Community and Nostalgia in Urban Revitalisation: a critique of urban village and creative class strategies as remedies for social ‘problems’

We examine how normative constructions of ‘the creative city’ have entered into Australian planning discourses. Although welcoming a place-based approach, critical consideration is given to how the misappropriation of ‘place making’ in creative city revitalisation plans may enhance rather than address processes of social marginalisation. A Foucauldian framework is employed, exploring the notion of the social production of power through discourse. We draw on a case study of Wentworth Street, a key urban space in Port Kembla, the industrialised district of Wollongong, New South Wales. The study focuses on various ideas of a common place-making theme of the ‘urban village’ evoked by planners, the media and a targeted local resident group (here elderly Macedonians) for a street positioned in ‘crisis’ because of declining infrastructure, services and its association with crime, drugs and prostitution. The case study demonstrates that marginalisation and exclusions are products of creative city strategies and wider, more oppressive urban discourses. But we also demonstrate that despite becoming normative in the texts of planning policies, discourses of place and identity always remain multiple, negotiated, and contradictory.     

Competing Perceptions of the Rural Idyll: responses to threats from coal seam gas development in Gloucester,NSW, Australia

Threats to rural livelihoods and rural landscapes have increased over time as developed nations in particular look for cheaper and more locally based alternatives to traditional energy sources to drive national economies. In New South Wales, through the expansion of coal mines and coal seam gas (CSG), small towns such as Gloucester on the edge of the Upper Hunter are faced with competing visions which seek to redefine their future. Powerful and competing discourses over land use threaten not only the sustainability of the region but the integrity of its sense of place, centred on community, rurality, agricultural production and confrontation of risk from mining. The different discourses of local groups such as ‘tree-changers’, established residents and farmers conflict with those of external organisations such as the State government and mining/CSG companies which envisage Gloucester as a ‘balanced’ space of co-existence and position it as a new node in the carbon supply chain.     

REVISITING THE AUSTRALIAN EXPERIENCE: TRANSMILLENNIAL CONJURINGS*

ABSTRACT. Ever anxious about real and apparent “identity” crises, Australians have in recent years been increasingly better served by interdisciplinary academic writings. A common theme is the clarification and resolution of recurrent national uncertainty. Others, intimately related, include the divide between indigenous and imported conceptualizations, especially notions of sacredness, together with broadly targeted historical interpretations of environmentalism, environmental management, and violent social clashes on settlement frontiers. Although these academic writings represent welcome additions to civic scholarship, they are also variously influenced, and their purchase on the public imagination limited, by the effects of current intellectual trends. While it might be expected that fictional exemplars would address place‐making and place‐securing in rather more comfortable fashion, they have not been immune to similar destabilizations. Nonetheless, one intriguing, problematical work makes a useful civic point in dealing creatively with Australia's epidemic of premillennial doubt.     

Geography,Race, and Quantification

This article reviews how race, quantification, and raced quantification have been used and written about in geography. Its two primary arguments are that race should be more central in the discipline and that a reluctance to address ontological and epistemological issues has left quantitative geography methodologically impoverished. These two issues merge in an examination of two cases where race is employed as a variable in quantitative models. The critique of these cases is not meant as a condemnation of quantitative geography but as an instructive example on which to construct a critical quantitative geography. The article ends by stressing the importance of quantification in geography and by presenting exemplars of race-critical quantification.     

Social Mix and the Problematisation of Social Housing

Social housing in Australia is at a significant juncture. High levels of housing stress, increasing levels of socio-spatial polarisation and reduced government funding are posing complex policy challenges. Social mix policies are one response to these challenges, arising from the problematisation of social housing estates as socially excluded. This problematisation is examined through case studies of two Sydney social housing renewal projects: Telopea and Riverwood North. Drawing on interviews with government, private-sector and not-for-profit housing practitioners, the paper identifies two distinct discourses of social exclusion within this problematisation—culture of poverty discourse and equity discourse—that shape the implementation of social mix. These discourses reveal that implementing social mix is more complex than simply managing the cohabitation of residents in different tenures. Rather, the practice of social mix is embedded within discourses about the nature and causes of social exclusion. These discourses, in their turn, inform the multiple and sometimes conflicting aspirations pursued through social mix policies.     

从“熟人社会”到“生人社会”:广场舞与中国城市公共性

公共空间是城市社会互动与文化实践的最重要载体之一。改革开放之后的中国城市正在经历着从“熟人社会”到“生人社会”的深刻转型。这一背景下,本文以广场舞休闲活动作为切入点,探讨中国城市空间公共性的理论内涵。利用基于Python的数据挖掘及文本内容分析技术,本研究获取了2011—2015年五年间中国社会有关广场舞的公共话语,并通过自然语言处理提取出关键的语义要素进行相关分析。本文认为,社会群体通过广场舞这一空间实践来抵抗人与人之间的疏离,试图恢复正在瓦解的集体归属感。广场舞是在“生人社会”转型的宏观背景下,一次微观尺度上的“再熟人化”实践,是对宏观社会变迁的响应和调适。另一方面,什么是公共生活的规则,对于中国都市居民来说没有现成的模板,当代中国城市公共性的建构是一个不断学习、不断协商的过程。     

Paleochemistry and paleohydrology of Ceylon Lake,a salt-dominated playa basin in the northern Great Plains,Canada

In the western part of the Canadian Prairies, there are thousands of small, closed-basin saline lakes. Most of these lakes are ephemeral, filling with water during the spring and drying completely by late summer. Ceylon Lake, located in southern Saskatchewan, is typical of many of these shallow ephemeral lacustrine basins. The stratigraphic sequence recovered from this salt playa can be subdivided into six distinct facies types: (a) icelaid gravelly clay loam diamicton; (b) fluvial massive bedded to laminated sand; (c) lacustrine laminated calcareous clay and silt; (d) lacustrine laminated gypsiferous clay and silt; (e) lacustrine black, anoxic, nonlaminated, organic-rich mud; and (f) lacustrine salt. The crystalline salt facies, which can be up to 9 meters thick, is comprised mainly of sodium and sodium + magnesium sulfates, with smaller and more variable proportions of other sulfates, halides, carbonates, and insoluble clastic detritus.Although a variety of postdepositional processes have significantly altered the nature and stratigraphic relationships in the basin, the sediment fill does record, in a general way, the fluctuating depositional, hydrological, and geochemical conditions that existed in the basin since deglaciation. The Ceylon Lake basin originated about 15 000 years ago as meltwater from the retreating glacial ice cut a major spillway system in the drift and bedrock. The initial (early Holocene) phases of lacustrine sedimentation in Ceylon Lake occurred in a relatively deep freshwater lake. By about 6000 years B.P., the lake had become much shallower with numerous episodes of complete drying and subaerial exposure. The most recent 5000 years of deposition in the basin have been dominated by evaporite sedimentation. The composition of the soluble salts deposited during this time indicates some degree of cyclic sedimentation superimposed on an overall gradual shift from a sodium dominated brine to one of mixed sodium and magnesium.     

Emerging Memorial Landscapes of Labor Conflict in the Cotton Textile South

While research into the formation of memorial landscapes in the American South has focused on those resulting from racial conflicts, a new landscape memorializing labor conflict and class consciousness is also emerging in the region's textile-producing Piedmont. This memorialization poses significant challenges to dominant regional discourses of economic development and class mutuality in a region in which labor organizing and radical politics remain anathema. This paper examines this emerging landscape for what it can tell us about class relations in the region and the process by which memorial landscapes are formed.     

Population and environment in Australia: issues in the next half century

This paper considers the likely future population in Australia to 2050 and is cast within the context of environmental limitations, to which Griffith Taylor alerted the nation in the 1920s and 1930s, and for which he was vilified in several quarters. While acknowledging the relative accuracy of his long-range forecasts, the arguments here depart from environmental determinism, although varying sets of environmental ethics and values are considered in relation to Australia's global responsibilities and international commitments. It is argued that an increase in population to 26 million by 2050 will not place severe stresses on the physical environment, provided environmental and resource management strategies are put firmly in place, and if consumption and resource use practices are significantly modified. An ideological linkage exists between a resurgent Australian nationalism and a number of environmental perspectives, but one which rejects growth and biological diversity among humans while embracing environmentalism. This inward-looking nationalism–environmentalism is seen as harmful both to Australia's moral integrity as a nation, and in local and world citizenship.