Can medium-sized cities become Creative Cities? Discussing the cases of three Central and Western European cities

This paper aims to explore the concept of Creative City from the points of view of three medium-sized cities in Central and Western Europe: Birmingham (UK), Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland). The concept of Creative City has risen in popularity in the last 15 years but its meanings and its policy application display important variations. In an attempt to clarify conceptual issues and policy approaches around the term of Creative City, Scott (2006) states that policy makers should focus on specific key variables when attempting to build viable Creative Cities: the presence of inter-firm networks of producers combined with a flexible local labour market. Infrastructural facilities and social capital are also crucial in this process. Even though these variables may be mostly found in largescale metropolitan areas such as New York, Los Angeles etc., Scott (2006, p. 9) argues that “there are also many small and specialised creative agglomerations all over the world” due to the process of increased differentiation. In addition, Hall (2004) argues that building a truly Creative City is possible but is a long-term process, and historical favourable preconditions are important

Visual geographies : an editorial

The use of image-processing procedures and techniques and their products – photographs, aerial photographs, satellite images, maps – and the application of GIS and GPS, so-called "geomatics" (Thornes, 2004:787), are taken for granted in academic geographical practice today..

Annulment proceedings and multilevel judicial conflict

This open access book provides an exhaustive picture of the role that annulment conflicts play in the EU multilevel system. Based on a rich dataset of annulment actions since the 1960s and a number of in-depth case studies, it explores the political dimension of annulment litigation, which has become an increasingly relevant judicial tool in the struggle over policy content and decision-making competences. The book covers the motivations of actors to turn policy conflicts into annulment actions, the emergence of multilevel actors’ litigant configurations, the impact of actors’ constellations on success in court, as well as the impact of annulment actions on the multilevel policy conflicts they originate from

Local and Urban Development in the European Union

Starting from the definition of local development as a process of cooperation and change managed by local actors whose main goal is producing collective goods for the local community I would like to consider the factors which favour the possibility of making the process start. In the first part it will be presented the several programs for a sustainable urban development by the European Commission (Urban I, Urban II, Leipzig Charter) from Nineties up to now. Moreover, passing through the concept of territorial capital it will be design the linkages between local and urban development in the EU in order to arrange effective policies to improve the local and urban development. Therefore, politics of local development must intervene to increase cities territorial capital; this could seem to be obvious but it is less evident than quantifying territorial capital, in particular the cities one. The second part of the paper has just been finalized to find out seven essential components of territorial capital: productive, cognitive, social, relational, environmental, settlement, infrastructural components. Selecting one or more variables for each one of these components (with the exception of the relational one which we can't quantify) they can represent the territorial capital for European cities. The used variables are taken from Eurostat Urban Audit database about European cities, they refer to 2006/2007 biennium and they regard 118 cities of Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, Esthonia, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Holland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Finland and United Kingdom. Synthesizing the information given by the chosen variables (through the statistical analysis of the Principal Components) it will be specify six groups of cities which are as homogeneous as possible for presence of territorial capital, this is very useful to better addressed the policies to the local and, more specifically, urban development.

Interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception

Fluctuations in the heart's activity can modulate the access of external stimuli to consciousness. The link between perceptual awareness and cardiac signals has been investigated mainly in the visual and auditory domain. Here, we investigated whether the phase of the cardiac cycle and the prestimulus heart rate influence conscious somatosensory perception. We also tested how conscious detection of somatosensory stimuli affects the heart rate. Electrocardiograms (ECG) of 33 healthy volunteers were recorded while applying near‐threshold electrical pulses at a fixed intensity to the left index finger. Conscious detection was not uniformly distributed across the cardiac cycle but significantly higher in diastole than in systole. We found no evidence that the heart rate before a stimulus influenced its detection, but hits (correctly detected somatosensory stimuli) led to a more pronounced cardiac deceleration than misses. Our findings demonstrate interactions between cardiac activity and conscious somatosensory perception, which highlights the importance of internal bodily states for sensory processing beyond the auditory and visual domain

Print culture and visual interpretation in eighteenth-century German editions of Thomson's the seasons

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