Public environmental information: understanding requirements and patterns of likely public use

Public access to environmental information received much attention in the last decade. Recent developments promote access to this information through public telecommunication networks. This paper describes a Web-based survey that explored the requirements and needs of likely users of public environmental information systems for London: educated middle-class members of the public, with high interest in environmental issues and computer literacy. The survey demonstrated current information consumption patterns and the reasons to gather and use such information.     

London and Frankfurt in Europe's evolving financial centre network

The launch of the Euro and the location of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt initially was seen as a threat to London's pre-eminent position in European financial geographies. This paper explains why in fact this was not the case. To do this, the paper is divided in two. Firstly, it reviews the literatures that help to explain financial geographies. It is argued that we need to move away from investigating attribute properties such as financial turnover and instead examine the role of networks and interdependencies in producing financial geographies. Secondly, it identifies London's dominance and Frankfurt's growth as a complementary centre through quantitative analysis and then explains how European networks and interdependencies produce this, based on insights from interviews with investment bankers and insurance institution workers in the two cities.     

The terrestrial fauna of the Late Triassic Pant-y-ffynnon Quarry fissures,South Wales,UK and a new species of Clevosaurus (Lepidosauria: Rhynchocephalia)

Pant-y-ffynnon Quarry in South Wales yielded a rich cache of fossils in the early 1950s, including articulated specimens of new species (the small sauropodomorph dinosaur Pantydraco caducus and the crocodylomorph Terrestrisuchus gracilis), but no substantial study of the wider fauna of the Pant-y-ffynnon fissure systems has been published. Here, our overview of existing specimens, a few described but mostly undescribed, as well as freshly processed material, provides a comprehensive picture of the Pant-y-ffynnon palaeo-island of the Late Triassic. This was an island with a relatively impoverished fauna dominated by small clevosaurs (rhynchocephalians), including a new species, Clevosaurus cambrica, described here from a partially articulated specimen and isolated bones. The new species has a dental morphology that is intermediate between the Late Triassic Clevosaurus hudsoni, from Cromhall Quarry to the east, and the younger C. convallis from Pant Quarry to the west, suggesting adaptive radiation of clevosaurs in the palaeo-archipelago. The larger reptiles on the palaeo-island do not exceed 1.5?m in length, including a small carnivorous crocodylomorph, Terrestrisuchus, and a possible example of insular dwarfism in the basal dinosaur Pantydraco.     

后工业化时期伦敦创意产业的发展

英国是世界上较早重视创意产业的国家，也是最早提出创意产业内容和定义的国家。伦敦作为英国政治、经济、文化中心，世界著名的国际经济中心城市，在工业化进程中、世界经济结构由“工业型经济”向“服务型经济”转化过程中，善于吸收历次产业革命成果，善于在产业经济、城市管理等方面不断创新，使其在一定时期内，始终处于大城市发展的前列，并被称为世界创意之都。因此，研究伦敦创意产业对探讨上海发展创意产业具有较大的现实意义。     

London: a sustainable city?

Observations include:
Ian Livingstone, London: a sustainable city?, p.77
Michael Parkinson, Key challenges for European cities: achieving competitiveness, cohesion and sustainability, p.78
Chris Hamnett, London's housing, p.80
Sarah Curtis, Health in London, p.84
Martin Frost, London's transport—investing for sustainability, p.92
Chris Birks, Mike Owen and Brian Arkell, London's water resources: threat or opportunity, p.92
Sean D Beevers, David C Carslaw and Gary W Fuller, London's air quality: nitrogen dioxide and particles (PM10) in London's air—present and future, p.97
Adam D Read, Where there's muck there's brass—the 'cost' of London'swaste?, p.103     

Relict sand wedges in soliflucted London Clay at Wimbledon, London, UK

Exposures on Wimbledon Hill, SW London, in the Palaeogene London Clay Formation, are described. The 3° slopes are mantled by clayey solifluction (head) deposits, comprising two superimposed sheets, each around 1.2 m thick. The lower sheet exhibits relict sand wedges forming polygons 1.0-1.5 m across, up to 50 mm wide and 1.25 m deep. These have no surface expression. The wedges are sand-filled and modify significantly the hydrogeology and properties of the solifluction mantle. There are no sand wedges in the upper solifluction sheet.The mechanics of emplacement of the lower solifluction sheet are explored and the high initial water content estimated. Subsequent desiccation and consolidation have reduced the thickness of this sheet by at least 35%, thus distorting contained features such as the wedges. An active layer about 0.4 m thick is inferred to have formed in the top of the lower solifluction sheet. No direct dating was undertaken but, by analogy with relevant dated sites in southern Britain and the Netherlands it is inferred that the lower solifluction sheet was emplaced during the first part of the Loch Lomond Stadial and frost-cracked during a subsequent, colder and more arid part. On this basis, following filling of the cracks by sand, emplacement of the upper solifluction sheet would have occurred in the later part of the Loch Lomond Stadial.     

A Tripartite Conceptualisation of Urban Public Space as a Site for Play: Evidence from South Bank,London

Public space is a feature of the urban built environment that has received increasing attention in recent years. Discussion has focused on the theoretical decline of public space, as private and institutional forces take on increasing influence. At the same time, many such “in-between spaces,” even privately owned ones, are used and experienced as public on a daily basis. Few studies, however, have explored how spaces understood as public are used and practised as such. To address this gap in the literature this paper draws upon ethnographic data collected on the “South Bank” in London (United Kingdom) to argue that “play” is a recurrent trait of sociospatial practices enacted in public space. Three interrelated typologies of playful practices in public space are discussed: child's play, plays on meaning, and play as simulation.     

Urban spatial development and land use in Beijing: Implications from London’s experiences

Beijing is facing a huge challenge to manage the growth of its built-up area whilst also retaining both productive arable land and land for conservation purposes in order to simultaneously realize the three aims of economic development, protecting arable land and generating environmental improvements. Meanwhile, London, as a world city with more than 200 years of industrialization and urbanization, has accumulated rich theoretical and practical experiences for land use planning in a major urban area, such as the creation of Garden Cities, a designated Green Belt and New Towns. This paper firstly analyzes the main characteristics of the spatial distribution of the built-up area, arable land and conservation land in Beijing. Then, some of the key aspects of urban fringe planning in the London region are examined. Lastly, several implications from the experience of London are provided with respect to land-use planning for Beijing, concentrating on a re-appraisal of land-use functions around Beijing, measures to improve the green belt, the development of small towns to house rural-urban migrants and urban overspill, and effective implementation of land-use planning.     

The Thames Embankment and the disciplining of nature in modernity

The embanking of the Thames was an emblematic stage in the construction of modernity's discourse of 'the natural', re-engineering the river as a concrete framing of nature between the embankment walls and a representational framing of the natural within an engineering ideology. The legitimacy of embanking's control was, therefore, about both physical mechanisms and a particular discourse of the natural, but the Thames embankments did not merely reflect modernity's discourse - they actively helped mould it. The creation of a discourse of embanking was slow and hesitant, the product of the interplay between the subsidiary discourses of urban improvement and sanitarianism, and an opposing discourse of tradition. When built, the embankments acted as a fixed, ordered boundary between the cultured nature of the drained, commodified land, and the regulated liveliness of the river. They acted literally and figuratively to sever culture from a nature that was enclosed and tamed by embankment walls.     

Social change, social polarisation and income inequality in London, 1979–1993

This paper analyses General Household Survey data for London and Great Britain from 1979 to 1993 to examine the changes in household income distribution over this period. In particular it looks at the implications of this data for theoretical claims made by Pahl and Sassen regarding social polarisation. It is argued that London has not experienced greater social polarisation, in the sense that the size of both the top and bottom income groups have not grown at the expense of the middle. Instead, what has happened is that the higher income group has grown considerably at the expense of the middle. This has, however, been accompanied by the growth of income inequality in London. Incomes at the top end have increased much faster than at the bottom. Two earner professional/managerial households have been the biggest gainers in financial terms although the proportion of households with no earner has grown most rapidly. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.