Rethinking mobility at the urban-transportation-geography nexus

Building on the main sections of the book, this concluding chapter identifies four thematic areas for future research into the urban-transportation-geography nexus as follows: (1) the everyday experience of transport and mobility in the “ordinary city”; (2) the environment and the urban politics of mobility; (3) connected cities and competitive states; and (4) transportation mobility and new imaginaries of city-regional development

Institutionalising future geographies of financial inclusion: national legitimacy versus local autonomy in the British credit union movement.

This paper provides a critical overview of recent developments in British credit union development, and contributed to the broader analysis of alternative financial/economic spaces and (the geographies of) alterity. The paper was underpinned by a wide range of local, national and international conference presentations including the National Association of Credit Union Workers, Birmingham, 2001; Combating Financial Exclusion, Salford, 2001; Association of American Geographers, New York, 2001, New Orleans, 2003; Alternative Economic Spaces, Hull, 2005; and discussions with local user communities throughout the UK (including through non-academic publishing, such as SCCD news and New Start articles)

Capacity-building and community control of local economic assets

This paper explores the major changes and challenges confronting British credit unions, and highlights some of their implications in relation to notions of capacity-building. The paper’s key themes were presented at a wide range of local, national and international conference presentations including the National Association of Credit Union Workers, Birmingham, 2001; ESRC ‘Capacity building: learning for community economic development’ seminar series, ‘Seminar Three: Capacity-building and community control of local economic assets’, Salford University, 2001; Alternative Economic Spaces, Hull, 2005; and via discussions with local user communities throughout the UK (including through non-academic publishing, including SCCD news and New Start articles)

City-regionalism as a politics of collective provision : regional transport infrastructure in Denver, USA

The rise of the city-region concept has focused attention on the nature of territorial politics underpinning city-regionalism. This paper investigates the relationship between territorial politics, city-regionalism and the collective provision of mass transport infrastructure in the USA. It deploys a case study of the Denver region, examining the state and governance structures driving forward FasTracks, a long-term project to expand the Denver Regional Transportation District’s light and commuter rail system. FasTracks represents a programme to retrofit the Denver city-region for integrated mass transit but its funding has fostered tensions around new regionalist governance arrangements. The paper uses the findings of the case study to reflect upon the balance of bottom–up versus top–down geopolitical forces shaping the landscape of city-regionalism in the USA. It emphasises the variety of ways in which struggles around infrastructure provision shape the emergence of new city-regionalist structures inside the competition state

Urban fiscal austerity, infrastructure provision and the struggle for regional transit in 'Motor City'

Studies suggest that urban fiscal crises trigger the institutional separation of strategic services from general purpose municipal functions. Traditional reformists have highlighted the economic benefits of regional approaches. Global austerity has created fiscal problems for central cities and suburbs alike, transforming the motives for regional solutions. This paper examines how the City of Detroit engineered a new regional arrangement with the surrounding suburbs to raise debt for the delivery of mass transit infrastructure. It represents a dual 'spatial fix' in the form of (i) a 'state territorial fix' providing fiscally stressed municipalities access to municipal bond markets and (ii) a 'speculative spatial fix' that benefits the Detroit growth coalition by linking regional mass transit to the prospect of land-use intensification. © The Author 2014

A control and monitoring oriented model of a film manufacturing process

This paper describes the development of a control and monitoring oriented model of a plastic film manufacturing process. The model is mainly derived from first-principles and has been implemented in the Matlab/Simulink dynamic simulation environment. The development of the model forms the first phase of a project that aims to develop a nonlinear sub-space based monitoring, fault detection and trouble shooting system for the film manufacturing process

A Dynamic 'Double Slit' Experiment in a Single Atom

A single-atom 'double-slit' experiment is realized by photo-ionizing Rubidium atoms using two independent low power lasers. The photoelectron wave of well-defined energy recedes to the continuum either from the 5P or 6P states in the same atom, resulting in two-path interference imaged in the far field using a photoelectron detector. Even though the lasers are independent and not phase locked, the transitions within the atom impart the phase relationship necessary for interference. The experiment is designed so that either 5P or 6P states are excited by one laser, before ionization by the second beam. The measurement cannot determine which excitation path is taken, resulting in interference in wave-vector space analogous to Young's double-slit studies. As the lasers are tunable in both frequency and intensity, the individual excitation-ionization pathways can be varied, allowing dynamic control of the interference term. Since the electron wave recedes in the Coulomb potential of the residual ion, a quantum model is used to capture the dynamics. Excellent agreement is found between theory and experiment.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev. Let

Magnetic phase diagram of a spin-1 condensate in two dimensions with dipole interaction

Several new features arise in the ground-state phase diagram of a spin-1 condensate trapped in an optical trap when the magnetic dipole interaction between the atoms is taken into account along with confinement and spin precession. The boundaries between the regions of ferromagnetic and polar phases move as the dipole strength is varied and the ferromagnetic phases can be modulated. The magnetization of the ferromagnetic phase perpendicular to the field becomes modulated as a helix winding around the magnetic field direction, with a wavelength inversely proportional to the dipole strength. This modulation should be observable for current experimental parameters in $^{87}$Rb. Hence the much-sought supersolid state, with broken continuous translation invariance in one direction and broken global U(1) invariance, occurs generically as a metastable state in this system as a result of dipole interaction. The ferromagnetic state parallel to the applied magnetic field becomes striped in a finite system at strong dipolar coupling.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures;published versio

Climate change, the green economy and reimagining the city: the case of structurally disadvantaged European maritime port cities

The concept of the New Environmental Politics of Urban Development (NEPUD) examines the impact of international and national environmental regulation on the politics of urban development. The NEPUD concept emerged from case studies of environmental governance in entrepreneurial cities. However, little is known about the concept’s relevance for less competitive cities, especially urban centres facing profound problems associated with economic decline, social deprivation and negative external images or ‘structurally disadvantaged cities.’ This paper examines how the NEPUD has played out within two structurally disadvantaged maritime port cities in Northern Europe, Hull (UK) and Bremerhaven (Germany). Both cities face serious social and economic challenges associated with long-term industrial decline, such as high unemployment rates, low skill levels, economic peripherality, and poor external images. Nevertheless, new opportunities opened up by climate change and the green economy have prompted political actors in Hull and Bremerhaven to build new alliances between local government, business and civil society and enhance governance capacities on climate change and green urban development. Highlighting similarities and differences between these two places, the paper reveals how climate change regulations provide opportunities for certain structurally disadvantaged cities to attract ‘green jobs’ and transform their external image

Environmental policy evaluation in the EU: between learning, accountability, and political opportunities?

Policy evaluation has grown significantly in the EU environmental sector since the 1990s. In identifying and exploring the putative drivers behind its rise – a desire to learn, a quest for greater accountability, and a wish to manipulate political opportunity structures – new ground is broken by examining how and why the existing literatures on these drivers have largely studied them in isolation. The complementarities and potential tensions between the three drivers are then addressed in order to advance existing research, drawing on emerging empirical examples in climate policy, a very dynamic area of evaluation activity in the EU. The conclusions suggest that future studies should explore the interactions between the three drivers to open up new and exciting research opportunities in order to comprehend contemporary environmental policy and politics in the EU