MAKING THE GOOD EASY: THE SMART CODE ALTERNATIVE

This article advocates for a new, fundamentally different plan for how cities should be coded, the Smart Code. It links urbanism and environmentalism and is strongly aligned with smart growth and sustainability. The Smart Code is offered as an alternative to the current anti-urban, conventional codes which are rigid and focus on single-use zones that separate human living space from the natural environment, as illustrated by the sprawl

"He was in no place and no place was in him": Edward Dahlberg's autobiographical fictions as an epistemology of sites

Edward Dahlberg‘s childhood, adolescence and youth, narratively fictionalized in two early autobiographical novels, Bottom Dogs (1930) and Flushing to Calvary (1932) is markedly and recurrently informed by the influence of urban sites and institutional spaces. As the article discusses, a number of these spaces are pivotal to the development of Dahlberg‘s autobiographical character Lorry, and can be productively read in terms of the Foucaldian heterotopia, while other sites, explicitly identified as metropolitan, are marginal to Lorry‘s autobiographical narrative, and yet serve to foreground the protagonist‘s absence from them in relevant ways. Finally, other spaces may epitomize a predominantly artificial nature, functioning as simulacra of experiences that Lorry undergoes but needs to cast out. Drawing on theoretical tenets related to space, site and place, as set out by Foucault, Baudrillard, Lefebvre, and others, in this article I will contend that a situated epistemological approach is essential in fruitfully reading Dahlberg‘s early fictions, and, ultimately, in understanding his quest for space in both biographical and artistic terms.La infancia, adolescencia y juventud de Edward Dahlberg, ficcionalizada a través de sus dos tempranas novelas autobiográficas, Bottom Dogs (1930) y Flushing to Calvary (1932), está muy determinada por la influencia de entornos urbanos y espacios institucionales. Algunos de estos espacios son esenciales para el desarrollo de Lorry, el protagonista autobiográfico de Dahlberg, y pueden ser interpretados en clave de heterotopia Foucaldiana. Otros lugares, expresamente identificados como espacios metropolitanos, marginales a la narrativa autobiográfica centrada en Lorry, resultan, sin embargo, extremadamente significativos para subrayar la ausencia del protagonista de los mismos. Además, otros entornos sirven para encarnar condiciones artificiales, proporcionando simulacros de vivencias que Lorry experimenta pero necesita luego desechar. Partiendo de nociones teóricas relativas a los conceptos de sitio y de espacialidad, desarrolladas por Foucault, Baudrillard y Lefebvre, entre otros, el presente artículo propone un análisis basado en una epistemología de ―situacionalidad‖ que permita una interpretación crítica fructífera de la obra iniciática de Dahlberg, y, en concreto, ilumine su obsesiva búsqueda de espacio(s), tanto en términos biográficos como literarios.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (España) FFI 2015-66767-PXunta de Galicia (Galicia, España) ED431D2017/1

Powerful-synergies: Gender Equality, Economic Development and Environmental Sustainability

This is a collection of evidence-based papers by scholars and practitioners that explore the interconnections between gender equality and sustainable development across a range of sectors and global development issues such as energy, health, education, food security, climate change, human rights, consumption and production patterns, and urbanization. The publication provides evidence from various sectors and regions on how women's equal access and control over resources not only improves the lives of individuals, families and nations, but also helps ensure the sustainability of the environment

The offshoring of financial services : a reassessment

Operating in increasingly competitive market environment, financial services companies are engaged in international re-engineering of business processes mirroring developments in manufacturing over the past four decades. Drawing upon interviews conducted with senior managers and partners from two leading international banks, a multinational 'consumables' provider and a leading finance consultancy, as well as extensive published surveys, we examine the distinctive 'anatomy' of offshoring in financial services, and industry which also manifests a high degree of geographical concentration for 'higher order' functions. We conclude that the reality of process re-engineering in the sector has frequently failed to meet business objectives, and has run the risk of creating 'backlash' from employees in both home and host environments

Co-governance or meta-bureaucracy? Perspectives of local governance 'partnership' in England and Scotland

This article assesses the nature of partnerships through the research site of local governance in England and Scotland, engaging a range of debates and literature around governance and meta-governance. The research used secondary data of local authority partnership working in England and Scotland as well as primary qualitative data from participant observation and interviews with senior officials of local authorities and partner organisations. There is little to suggest that English and Scottish practices are significantly at variance and the article advances an argument of meta-bureaucracy to describe partnerships' activities: that is to say, partnerships do not represent a growth of autonomous networks and governance arrangements but rather an extension of bureaucratic controls. State actors remain pre-eminent within increasingly formalised systems of 'partnership'

Sensory marketing and tourist experiences

Marketing has been increasing its focus on the role of the five human senses in consumer behaviour, since research under the experiential paradigm has pointed to multisensory stimuli as intensifiers of consumers’ experiences, such as tourist experiences. Whereas previous studies in tourism touted vision, current research claims a holistic approach to sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch in order to develop effective communication and branding strategies, as well to boost the performance of destinations and tourist organizations by designing and creating conditions to enhance tourist experiences. This study aims to present the main contributions of the literature on a sensory marketing approach to the tourist experience, and to discuss some preliminary results of an empirical study on the role of human senses in tourist experiences in rural areas. Data analysis from a questionnaire presented to tourists supports the multisensory nature of tourist experiences and the importance of the five senses to the intensity of the experience

Intensifying or transforming sustainable cities? Fragmented logics of urban environmentalism

This paper analyses recent shifts in urban sustainability discourse and practice through a critical review of the historical development of the concept from the 1970s through to the global economic crisis in the 2007 and its fragmentation into the 2010s. Using this periodisation, the paper shows how the content of urban sustainability discourse has changed. First, it illustrates that the dominant assumption of sustainable cities’ discourse was to utilise economic growth to ecologically modernise urban environments. Second, it examines how the global economic crisis has intensified this fix and led to a new, even narrower emphasis on the techno-economic value of those aspects of urban environment that have economic and market potential. Third, it analyses the fragmenting of sustainable cities’ discourse into a set of competing logics that reflect this narrower agenda. This paper argues that the sustainable city has been absorbed into these new logics that are much more narrowly techno-economically focused and are squeezing out traditional concerns with social justice and equity

Climate Change and Highland Malaria: Fresh Air for a Hot Debate

In recent decades, malaria has become established in zones at the margin of its previous distribution, especially in the highlands of East Africa. Studies in this region have sparked a heated debate over the importance of climate change in the territorial expansion of malaria, where positions range from its neglect to the reification of correlations as causes. Here, we review studies supporting and rebutting the role of climatic change as a driving force for highland invasion by malaria. We assessed the conclusions from both sides of the argument and found that evidence for the role of climate in these dynamics is robust. However, we also argue that over-emphasizing the importance of climate is misleading for setting a research agenda, even one which attempts to understand climate change impacts on emerging malaria patterns. We review alternative drivers for the emergence of this disease and highlight the problems still calling for research if the multidimensional nature of malaria is to be adequately tackled. We also contextualize highland malaria as an ongoing evolutionary process. Finally, we present Schmalhausen's law, which explains the lack of resilience in stressed systems, as a biological principle that unifies the importance of climatic and other environmental factors in driving malaria patterns across different spatio-temporal scales