People and Planning:

The Skeffington Committee was appointed in 1968 to look at ways of involving the wider public in the formative stages of local development plans. It was the first concerted effort to encourage a systematic approach to resident participation in planning and the decision-making process, in contrast to the entirely top-down process created by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. The origins of the Skeffington Report lay in the 1965 publication by the Planning Advisory Group of The Future of Development Plans, which recommended changes to the planning system to include much greater public participation. It called for all plans to be publicly debated in full, with the opportunity for representations to be made throughout the entire preparation process. There was also a growing realisation of the impact of the American planning experience and a growth of interest in the concept of participatory democracy as opposed to representative democracy. However, the immediate impact of the Skeffington Committee was limited. It was criticized as being too ambiguous and as encouraging nothing more than greater publicity and as ‘educating’ residents from the planners’ perspective. ‘Participation’ was inadequately defined and the Report was seen to simply promote a more efficient system by convincing people of the virtues of planning. Local authorities used and undermined the idea of participation to simply speed up the planning process by giving their decisions a seal of legitimacy. Technocrats and local authorities simply subverted the ambiguities of the Report for their own purposes. Yet this is to underestimate the long-term impact of the underlying principles first expressed in the Skeffington Report. It has been a long and tortuous process and in many respects it remains a difficult ideal to implement in an entirely satisfactory and systematic way. Nevertheless, the concept of participation established by the Report has continued to be a central consideration in planning

Choosing Secretary: Alasan, Keuntungan, Tantangan dan Prospek menjadi Sekretaris

Sekretaris bukanlah hanya pajangan atau penyedap kantor namun kompetensi serta keberadaannya diperlukan untuk meningkatkan produktivitas organisasi di era globalisasi ini. Penelitian ini bertujuan mengeksplorasi alasan, keuntungan, tantangan dan prospek menjadi sekretaris dengan metode kualitatif fenomenologi deskriptif dengan landasan filosofis Husserlian dan dengan analisis tematik. 18 partisipan setuju untuk menjadi partisipan dan ditemukan bahwa ada motivasi internal dan eksternal yang menjadi alasan para sekretaris mengambil profesi ini. Kemudian, keuntungan menjadi sekretaris juga ditemukan mencakup pengembangan wawasan, pengembangan karakter, keuntungan finansial, keuntungan sosial, keuntungan emosi, walaupun ada juga yang belum tahu keuntungannya apa. Berikutnya, tantangan yang dihadapi sekretaris adalah tantangan kompetensi dan tantangan keluarga. Terakhir adalah prospek menjadi sekretaris adalah sangat baik walaupun ditengah perkembangan teknologi yang sangat cepat. Penelitian selanjutnya dapat mengeksplorasi faktor-faktor yang meningkatkan atau menghalangi performa kerja sekretaris. Bagi para akademisi sekretaris dapat memberikan praktikum dan bimbingan karir yang diusahakan semirip mungkin dengan keadaan kantor yang nyata, sehingga para mahasiswa sekretaris sudah memprediksi apa yang akan mereka hadapi

‘A nation of town criers’: civic publicity and historical pageantry in inter-war Britain

Historical pageantry emerged in 1905 as the brainchild of the theatrical impresario Louis Napoleon Parker. Large casts of volunteers re-enacted successive scenes of local history, as crowds of thousands watched on, in large outdoor arenas. As the press put it, Britain had caught ‘pageant fever’. Towards the end of the 1920s, there was another outburst of historical pageantry. Yet, in contrast to the Edwardian period, when pageants took place in small towns, this revival was particularly vibrant in large industrial towns and cities. This article traces the popularity of urban pageantry to an inter-war ‘civic publicity’ movement. In doing so, it reassesses questions of local cultural decline; the role of local government; and the relationship of civic responsibility to popular theatre

Reinventing the rattling tin: How UK charities use Facebook in fundraising

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Using a multicase study approach, this paper explores how the three biggest UK cancer charities by donations use Facebook in their fundraising campaigns, in order to facilitate understanding of the dynamics of philanthropic asking in a social networking site-mediated environment. The analysis reveals that Facebook is primarily used to strengthen relationships with supporters, mainly via humanising the brand, fostering obligations, and encouraging social interaction. The mobilization of these relationships in fundraising is facilitated by persuasive strategies, including public recognition, authority, and the fostering of a sense of efficacy among fans, and the most common outcome of this mobilization is public endorsement of charities' fundraising campaigns via sharing. At a time when harsh public spending cuts have left gaps in charity funding that need to be filled by philanthropy, this study aims to make a practical contribution to knowledge by examining what works and how in Facebook fundraising

The evolution of energy demand: politics, daily life and public housing, Britain 1920s-70s

This article offers a fresh perspective on the historical evolution of energy consumption in Britain from the 1920s-70s. The twentieth century witnessed a series of energy transitions – from wood and coal to gas, electricity and oil – that have transformed modern lives. The literature has primarily charted this transformation by following supply, networks and technologies. We need to know more about people and their homes in this story, because it was here where energy was used. The article investigates the forces that shaped domestic demand by focusing on working class households in public housing. It examines the interaction between political frameworks, public housing infrastructures and the changing norms and practices of people’s daily lives. It does so by connecting social and political history with material culture. A set of case studies compares the different paths taken in three urban areas (London; Stocksbridge, an old industrial town; and Stevenage, a “new town”) in the provision of new infrastructures of gas, electricity and heating. Evidence collected at the time by the London County Council and other local authorities is used to analyse the uptake, use and resistance to changes in domestic infrastructure and new technologies, such as gas-lit coke ovens, underfloor heating and central heating. The case studies make a more general pitch for a new historical study of energy that places people’s lifestyles, their ideas of comfort and political attempts to change them more squarely at the centre of inquir

GRB 051008: A long, spectrally hard dust-obscured GRB in a lyman-break galaxy at z ≈ 2.8*

We present observations of the dark gamma-ray burst GRB 051008 provided by Swift/BAT, Swift/XRT, Konus-WIND, INTEGRAL/SPI-ACS in the high-energy domain and the Shajn, Swift/UVOT, Tautenburg, NOT, Gemini and Keck I telescopes in the optical and near-infrared bands. The burst was detected only in gamma- and X-rays and neither a prompt optical nor a radio afterglow was detected down to deep limits. We identified the host galaxy of the burst, which is a typical Lyman-break galaxy (LBG) with R-magnitude of 24.06 ± 0.10 mag. A redshift of the galaxy of z = 2.77+0.15-0.20 is measured photometrically due to the presence of a clear, strong Lyman-break feature. The host galaxy is a small starburst galaxy with moderate intrinsic extinction (AV = 0.3) and has a star formation rate of ~60M( yr-1 typical for LBGs. It is one of the few cases where a GRB host has been found to be a classical LBG. Using the redshift we estimate the isotropic-equivalent radiated energy of the burst to be Eiso = (1.15 ± 0.20) × 1054 erg.We also provide evidence in favour of the hypothesis that the darkness ofGRB051008 is due to local absorption resulting from a dense circumburst medium © 2014 The Authors

Urban warfare ecology: A study of water supply in Basrah

This article assesses the impact of armed conflict on the drinking water service of Basrah from 1978 to 2013 through an ‘urban warfare ecology’ lens in order to draw out the implications for relief programming and relevance to urban studies. It interprets an extensive range of unpublished literature through a frame that incorporates the accumulation of direct and indirect impacts upon the hardware, consumables and people upon which urban services rely. The analysis attributes a step-wise decline in service quality to the lack of water treatment chemicals, lack of spare parts, and, primarily, an extended ‘brain-drain’ of qualified water service staff. The service is found to have been vulnerable to dependence upon foreign parts and people, ‘vicious cycles’ of impact, and the politics of aid and of reconstruction. It follows that practitioners and donors eschew ideas of relief–rehabilitation–development (RRD) for an appreciation of the needs particular to complex urban warfare biospheres, where armed conflict and sanctions permeate all aspects of service provision through altered biological and social processes. The urban warfare ecology lens is found to be a useful complement to ‘infrastructural warfare’ research, suggesting the study of protracted armed conflict upon all aspects of urban life be both deepened technically and broadened to other cases

Charitable Giving and Lay Morality: Understanding Sympathy, Moral Evaluations and Social Positions

This paper examines how charitable giving offers an example of lay morality, reflecting people’s capacity for fellow-feeling, moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. Lay morality refers to how people should treat others and be treated by them, matters that are important for their subjective and objective well-being. It is a first person evaluative relation to the world (about things that matter to people). While the paper is sympathetic to the ‘moral boundaries’ approach, which seeks to address the neglect of moral evaluations in sociology, it reveals this approach to have some shortcomings. The paper argues that although morality is always mediated by cultural discourses and shaped by structural factors, it also has a universalising character because people have fellow-feelings, shared human conditions, and have reason to value