The binational cities of Dover and Calais and their region

This paper analyses the question of cities that are localised at each part of an international border. We take as an example the two cities of Dover and Calais and look at if they can be considered as binational cities, because they have been recently connected by a tunnel, the ‘fixed link’, and because since 1993, the inner state borders of the European Union have disappeared. It determines firstly if these two towns have been brought closer by the construction of the Channel tunnel and if specific ties are linking these two towns. The article scrutinizes actions taken under INTERREG funds under the general framework of the creation of the ‘Transmanche Region’ and its extension towards a Euroregion to sort out these two cities joint involvement. Finally, it checks if this new area could lead to cross-border activity either for work or tourism and leisure purposes that could conduct the cities of Dover and Calais toward a new type of relationship, premises of a binational city. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Antagonistic structures in border areas: Local milieux and local politics in the Polish-German twin city Gubin/Guben

Cross-border communication and co-operation at the Eastern fringe of the European Union seems so far to have been a matter of political initiative and a lot of good will at the levels of national, regional and local governance. This article maintains that everyday culture must be given more notice when cross-border activities are regarded at the local level, especially in twin cities. The case of the German-Polish twin city Guben/Gubin reveals a strong tendency towards a new divergence of thought and action between formal and informal levels of action, namely the level of local politics and governance and the level of local everyday milieux. While the politics of Euroregions, local administrations and local governments is very often directed towards establishing symbolic gestures of border-crossing and mutual understanding, social milieux at the ‘base’ of local societies are rather driven by a paradoxical mixture of hope, anxiety, resentments and prejudice, thus producing contradictions and even conflict with official political initiative. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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.     

Local co-operation, ethnic diversity and state territoriality – The case of Haparanda and Tornio on the Sweden – Finland border

The neighbouring towns of Haparanda and Tornio, separated only by a narrow strip of grass and wetland, are divided by the only inhabited land boundary between Finland and Sweden in the southern part of the Torne River. The population represents four different groups in relation to linguistic and cultural backgrounds. In the daily lives of the inhabitants, the state boundary is probably of less significance than linguistic, social and ‘ethnic’ differences. On the local government level there is a strong will to unite forces to make the total area a viable region in spite of its peripheral location, but state legislation makes co-ordination difficult. This may be seen as a necessity, but in the daily lives of the populations, the state boundary defines an area of unequal access, sometimes working in favour of and sometimes barring contacts and co-operation. The media consumption reflects a clear ‘national’ interest with a strong local bias. In their attitudes, Finnish speakers and bilinguals show a greater appreciation of ‘the other’ than unilingual Swedes. This may reflect the actual possibility space (reach) in the local area. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Cultural industries, information technology and the regeneration of post-industrial urban landscapes. Poblenou in Barcelona - a virtual city?

In a former industrial part of Barcelona, as in the de-industrialising neighbourhoods of many big cities, the ‘new’ economy and the ‘cultural’ economy have started to replace the ‘old’ economy, bringing new life into a declining district but also causing conflicts of land use, housing or the preservation of architectural heritage. The latter is an important part of regeneration and marketing policies of city governments, whereby the ‘new’ economy not only emerges from the old but the physical space of the old industrial quarter becomes the tool and setting in which the city can re-present itself and its success story of transformation and regeneration. Through the increasing use of information and communication technologies, which are at the same time driving this transformation - an industry as such as well as business-aid in various sectors, cultural industries in particular - the city has acquired a second, virtual presence. The city exists and ‘lives’ on numerous websites. Those by city government and city organisations often have the express purpose of marketing and presenting the city, while those by (cultural) businesses and other organisations in the district add to the mosaic of the virtual city. As a result, the old industrial space continues to live and be productive, its economic value having changed largely into a cultural value. This coexistence of the real and the virtual, old and new, also meets with a conflict at certain junctures. There is the positive representation of plans and events on the city's websites on the one hand, and the undercurrent of protest and disenchantment among the local population who find themselves marginalised from the profits and success of development, on the other. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Imagining the border and Southern spaces: Cinematic explorations of race and gender

For some time the US-Mexico border has been a symbol – and site – of conflict, collaboration, and transnational mobility. Related to the border, the topic of undocumented immigration, and Mexican migrants in particular, has received considerable attention in US mainstream media. Cinema in particular, provides a context for producing and interrogating discourses of nationalism, nativism, and fear. The cinematic examples I draw on illustrate an ongoing fear (and terror) about borders and border crossing of various forms. In this paper I explore how narratives of borders and nationhood are mapped onto immigrant bodies and border spaces through specific filmic representations. In order to undertake this study I focus on three cinematic examples exploring immigration at the US-Mexico border – Touch of Evil, The Border and Lone Star. I examine how concepts of borders, race, and gender, and tropes of ‘The South’ are reterritorialized around immigrant bodies and specific locales. I argue that an inability to control and ‘fix’ boundaries around possible ‘threats’ to specific US spaces and identities is counteracted by displacing this fear onto more easily marked targets that are viewed as posing challenges to US national (and personal) security, i.e., undocumented immigrants. At the same time, cinematic images illustrate that the threats and spaces for immigrants themselves become increasingly marginalized, blurred, and frequently erased. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Identifying China’s leading world city: a network approach

This paper reports our research on China’s world cities. Formal network analysis of air passenger linkages for recent years among China’s most populous cities and among many of the world’s largest cities allows us to identify the country’s leading world city from among the leading Mainland candidates, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. We theorize our findings about China’s world cities in relation to both global forces (and China’s increasing entanglement with them) and the policies and actions of the national state. We examine the national and global urban network through a longitudinal, two-level analysis of airline passenger travel for four time points between about 1990 and 2005. We show that Beijing was China’s leading world city at the beginning of the time period, a status it lost nationally in as early as 1995, and then globally 10 years later. On the other hand Shanghai became China’s leading world city, and it acquired this status first nationally in 2000, and then globally in 2005. The changing status of the Chinese capital corresponds to the country’s increasing involvement with the capitalist world economy. Shanghai’s ascendance as the leading world city in China may indicate that global forces have come to play an increasingly important role relative to that of the developmental state.

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.     

‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Conspiratorial thought has been highly visible in post-September 11th America, manifest through the continued growth of a public ‘9/11 Truth Movement’ as well as at the state-level, through the Bush administration’s conspiracy rhetoric of Islamic terrorists intent on infiltrating the US homeland. In this paper, I demonstrate how conspiracy can be understood as a ‘knowledge-producing discourse’; dialectically engaged across multiple subject positions and through which geopolitical narratives are performatively produced and contested at interconnected scales of bodies, homes, city streets and national ‘homelands’. Through drawing on, and challenging, the conceptual and methodological approaches of a burgeoning feminist geopolitics, I ground my analysis in the embodied performances of ‘patriotic dissent’ by members of the 9/11 Truth Movement in New York City, as well as through my own situated and ethical engagement with positions of political difference.     

Post-disaster assessment of hazard mitigation for small and medium-magnitude debris flow disasters in Bali,Indonesia and Jimani,Dominican Republic

This article explores whether past exposure to debris flow disasters with a human dimension (e.g. caused in part by deforestation) results in adaptive hazard mitigation and improved environmental and resource management practices in affected areas. When guiding hazard mitigation practice, the ‘adaptive hazard mitigation’ approach views mitigation as a multi-dimensional experiment, with the associated need for post-experiment monitoring, evaluation, learning and adjustment, and attention paid to multiple scales (Bogardi 2004). This article explores how the concept of ‘adaptive hazard mitigation’ has emerged, linking this ‘adaptive management’ used increasingly in resource and environmental management. Two case studies of disasters linked to human-induced environmental change are examined, and the mitigation responses of local communities, NGOs and Government agencies are documented. Data sources include secondary data (journal articles, web-based disaster reports and grey literature) on each disaster, key informant interviews (n = 8) and direct observation over the 2005–2006 period of post-disaster mitigation actions implemented after each disaster. The research indicates that in both case studies, a limited range of hazard mitigation actions was employed, including both structural and non-structural approaches. However, the research also found that causal factors involving human-induced environmental change (e.g. deforestation) were not addressed, and overall, the hazard mitigation strategies adopted lacked monitoring, learning and adjustment. In both case studies, responses to disaster were judged to be examples of ‘trial and error’ adaptation, rather than either ‘passive’ or ‘active’ adaptation.

Geospatial contour mapping of shear wave velocity for Mumbai city

Shear wave velocity is one of the most important input parameter in the analysis of geotechnical earthquake engineering problems, particularly to estimate site-specific amplification factor and ground response study. Dynamic in situ tests such as spectral analysis of surface waves (SASW) or multichannel analysis of surface waves (MASW) are very expensive. Also due to lack of specialized personnel, these tests are generally avoided in many soil investigation programs. Worldwide, several researchers have developed correlations between the SPT ‘N’ value and shear wave velocity ‘V _s’, which are useful for determining the dynamic soil properties. In the present study, more than 400 numbers of soil borehole data were collected from various geotechnical investigation agencies, government engineering institutes and geotechnical laboratories from different parts of Mumbai city, which is financial capital of India with highest population density. In this paper, an attempt has been made to develop the correlation between the SPT ‘N’ value and shear wave velocity ‘V _s’ for various soil profile of Mumbai city and compared with other existing correlations for different cities in India. Using Geographical Information System (GIS), a geospatial contour map of shear wave velocity profile for Mumbai city is prepared with contour intervals of 25 and 50 m/s. The scarcity of database or maps of shear wave velocity profile for Mumbai city will make the present geospatial contour maps extremely useful and beneficial to the designer, practitioners for seismic hazard study involved in geotechnical earthquake engineering.     

New political violence in Africa – Secular sectarianism in Sierra Leone

Mary Douglas (1993) has indicated some of the shared concerns that keep voluntary enclaves together as ‘social movements’. The present paper describes a rather different kind of enclave politics, being concerned with the ‘new violence’ of groups enclaved by social exclusion and force. The paper focuses on the emergence and subsequent development of dissidents in the civil war in Sierra Leone. The RUF was at the outset a tiny but conventional guerrilla force, modelled on one of the militias in the Liberian civil war, and seeking to overthrow a decayed neo-patrimonial ‘one-party’ regime. Gaining little popular support, its members became marooned in forested isolation on the Liberia-Sierra Leone border. Recruits were mainly school children seized by force and ‘converted’ through having to take part in atrocities against rural civilians. Unable to return to the larger society on pain of summary execution, captives have had little option but to adjust to the political fantasies of a violent and unstable leadership. They were enclaved by force. Indicating the predictive strength of Douglas' arguments about the cultural dynamics of the enclave, the subsequent atrocity-drenched story of the RUF suggests that it is not the content of belief that determines institutional culture but vice versa. To survive, the enforced enclave develops the concerns of the classic ‘sect’ - a doctrinaire ‘rationality’ (expressed in crude acts of ‘subtractive’ violence), rejection of magic, decision making by lots, preoccupation with defection, otiose leadership style. If the rest of the world is to come to terms with violent enclave organizations such as the RUF and Algerian GIA it may have to pay more careful attention to the way enclave institutions think. They may not respond ‘rationally’ to the kinds of incentives offered by mainstream groups organised around hierarchical and/or individualist systems of social accountability. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Church–state relations in Spain: Variations on a National-Catholic theme?

Contrary to the absence of a uniform Spanish identity (a phenomenon that is often referred to as Spain being a ‘nation of nations’), Spain’s confessional map is remarkably homogeneous. From the beginning of its existence as a political conglomeration, Spain has been a mono-confessional Catholic territory. Even at present, Catholicism is an intrinsic feature of Spanish society and – though officially a secular state – of state policy. A closer look at Spain’s religious situation and its corresponding pattern of church–state relations reveals, however, some recent cracks in the century’s old bond between Spain and Catholicism. Particularly secularization and religious pluralism challenge Spain’s mono-confessional Catholic nature, a development that fits well into Spain’s post-Francoist focus on Europe and European (secular) values. This paper discusses Spanish church–state relations from the beginning of its political existence until present times. Special attention will be paid to more recent societal developments and their impact on religious Spain and church–state relations.

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.     

Just a train-ride away, but still worlds apart: Prospects for the Øresund region as a binational city

This article considers whether the cities of Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden, recently joined by the Øresund bridge, ought to be considered as one binational city. Working from the assumption that the project of constructing this binational city is a top-down endeavor whose success ultimately rests on the degree of support it receives from regional inhabitants, I focus on public opinion survey data collected one year after the opening of the bridge. Analysis shows that there are sharp national differences in the amount of support for the construction of a binational greater metropolitan region. I discuss how these differences may lead to an asymmetrical development for the emerging binational city, with Malmö eclipsed by the Danish capital Copenhagen, as well as how the heavily multi-cultural population of Malmö can impact Danish-Swedish cooperation on the Øresund.     

The political geography of religion: historical state-church relations in Europe and recent challenges

Historical processes of state formation and nation building are crucial for an understanding of the geography of religions and churches in Europe. Each country has developed its own model of state-church relations, giving rise to a ‘bewildering variety’ as Grace Davie aptly remarks. The aim of this paper is to bring some order to this variety by developing a framework for the comparative study of church-state relations based on Stein Rokkan’s famous conceptual map and recent extensions of it to Central and Eastern Europe by John Madeley. According to that framework Europe has been divided into three mono-confessional (Roman Catholic, Lutheran, and Eastern Orthodox) blocs and two multi-confessional culture belts from Northwest to Southeast, and from Northeast to Southeast. This historical pattern has been challenged by secularisation, which started with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution (Western Europe) and the Russian Revolution (Eastern Europe until the velvet revolutions of 1989/1991) and then became widespread after the ‘cultural revolutions’ of the 1960s. A second challenge has to do with globalisation and its consequences, such as massive immigration and the rise of immigrant religions, and in general deterritorialisation, which means the disembeddedness of religion from its national territory. A third challenge concerns reterritorialisation at other (supranational, regional, transnational, and local) scales, of which the new territorial order of the European Union seems to be the most important. Finally, this paper serves as an introduction to the case studies on church-state relations in this special issue.     

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.     

Facing the challenge of shrinking cities in East Germany: The case of Leipzig

In the early 20^th century, the East German city of Leipzig seemed well on its way to become a metropolis of international importance. The city was expected to grow towards over one million inhabitants in 2000. Seventy years later, Leipzigs population has shrunk to less than 500,000 inhabitants instead. The German partition after World War II took away most of its national administrative and economic functions and much of its hinterland. The socialist GDR regime worsened the long-term development perspectives and living circumstances of the city. The German reunification brought new development chances, but like most East German cities, Leipzigs hopes soon became disappointed. The local politicians faced a difficult redevelopment task: apart from the question how to revive the local and regional economy, they also had to deal with a housing vacancy rate of 20%, a huge need for renovation in the older neighbourhoods as well as in the socialist high-rise areas, the negative effects of urban sprawl on the city core, and various environmental pollution problems. After briefly describing the development path of Leipzig until the 1990s, the paper will discuss the current attempts of the city government to give Leipzig a more positive post-industrial future. On the one hand, Leipzig is developing a strategy to downsize the citys built environment and infrastructure to adapt to a probably lastingly smaller population. On the other hand, many growth instruments well known from the international scientific and political debate are tried to put Leipzig back on the (inter)national map. The paper will discuss these development strategies in the light of the international debate on the question how to fight the shrinking city, with specific attention for post-socialist cities.     

Facing the challenge of shrinking cities in East Germany: The case of Leipzig

In the early 20^th century, the East German city of Leipzig seemed well on its way to become a metropolis of international importance. The city was expected to grow towards over one million inhabitants in 2000. Seventy years later, Leipzigs population has shrunk to less than 500,000 inhabitants instead. The German partition after World War II took away most of its national administrative and economic functions and much of its hinterland. The socialist GDR regime worsened the long-term development perspectives and living circumstances of the city. The German reunification brought new development chances, but like most East German cities, Leipzigs hopes soon became disappointed. The local politicians faced a difficult redevelopment task: apart from the question how to revive the local and regional economy, they also had to deal with a housing vacancy rate of 20%, a huge need for renovation in the older neighbourhoods as well as in the socialist high-rise areas, the negative effects of urban sprawl on the city core, and various environmental pollution problems. After briefly describing the development path of Leipzig until the 1990s, the paper will discuss the current attempts of the city government to give Leipzig a more positive post-industrial future. On the one hand, Leipzig is developing a strategy to downsize the citys built environment and infrastructure to adapt to a probably lastingly smaller population. On the other hand, many growth instruments well known from the international scientific and political debate are tried to put Leipzig back on the (inter)national map. The paper will discuss these development strategies in the light of the international debate on the question how to fight the shrinking city, with specific attention for post-socialist cities.     

Deformation of an elastic layer coupling in different ways to a base due to a very long vertical strike-slip dislocation

The closed-form analytic expressions for the displacement and stresses at any point of an elastic layer lying over a base due to a very long vertical strike-slip dislocation are obtained. The interface between the layer and the base is assumed to be either ‘smooth-rigid’ or ‘rough-rigid’ or ‘welded’. The variations of displacement and stresses with the horizontal distance from the fault for different types of coupling of the layer with the base have been studied. It is found that the displacement for ‘welded interface’ lies between the displacements due to ‘smooth rigid’ and ‘rough-rigid’ interfaces for different positions of the observer and different values of the ratio of rigidities of the layer and half-space.