Deliberative Equality and the Transgovernmental Politics of the Global Financial Architecture

Revisiting the concept of transgovernmentalism, originally developed by Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, can shed considerable light on the nature of interstate cooperation in contemporary global financial governance. Transgovernmentalism highlights how certain technocratic policy communities, composed of finance ministries, central banks, and regulators, dominate the global financial architecture. It also provides insights into the political and social basis of these actors' interactions and deliberations. Most importantly, renovating the concept of transgovernmentalism brings the participatory deficits in the current global financial architecture into sharp focus and points us in the direction of a workable reform agenda that would expand inclusion and participation. This article advocates basing future reform on efforts to achieve a closer realization of the principle of “deliberative equality.” Unfortunately, “transgovernmentalism” is incompatible with deliberative equality, meaning that it is precisely the transgovernmental characteristics of the current global financial architecture that have to be challenged and overturned if we are to arrive at anything approximating deliberative equality.

Architecture, memory and historical continuity in Old Cairo

The hawari (local communities) of Old Cairo resemble a unique societal context whose history is actively involved in the contemporary everyday production of local habits, traditions and social practice. By the virtue of its durability and ability to survive, Architecture brings events and traditions of the past alive into the present through the spatial transformation, social practice and the value of the historical-fabric. The presence of buildings and houses from different historical periods has helped the local community’s memory to carry social practices over from one generation to another. This article explores the relationship between architecture, memory and everyday social practices through determining the way architecture moderates community experiences and communicates narratives among generations in haret al-Darb al-Asfar in old Cairo. Architecture emerges as a moderator of cross-time communication and as physical elements that help visualize history, situate values and materialize local traditions in old Cairo. Architecture, as process and product this article reports, works as agent of continuity, which in conjunction with the narrators, brings the full experience of the past alive in the present and helps guide future generations.

The Architecture of Home in Cairo: Socio-Spatial Practice of the Hawari's Everyday Life

The hawari of Cairo - narrow non-straight alleyways - are the basic urban units that have formed the medieval city since its foundation back in 969 AD. Until early in the C20th, they made up the primary urban divisions of the city and were residential in nature. Contemporary hawari, by contrast, are increasingly dominated by commercial and industrial activity. This medieval urban maze of extremely short, broken, zigzag streets and dead ends are defensible territories, powerful institutions, and important social systems. While the hawari have been studied as an exemplar for urban structure of medieval Islamic urbanism, and as individual building typologies, this book is the first to examine in detail the socio-spatial practice of the architecture of home in the city. It investigates how people live, communicate and relate to each other within their houses or shared spaces of the alleys, and in doing so, to uncover several new socio-spatial dimensions and meanings in this architectural form.

In an attempt to re-establish the link between architecture past and present, and to understand the changing social needs of communities, this book uncovers the notion of home as central to understand architecture in such a city with long history as Cairo. It firstly describes the historical development of the domestic spaces (indoor and outdoor), and provides an inclusive analysis of spaces of everyday activities in the hawari of old Cairo. It then broadens its analysis to other parts of the city, highlighting different customs and representations of home in the city at large. Cairo, in the context of this book, is represented as the most sophisticated urban centre in the Middle East with different and sometimes contrasting approaches to the architecture of home, as a practice and spatial system.

In order to analyse the complexity and interconnectedness of the components and elements of the hawari as a 'collective home', it layers its narratives of architectural and social developments as a domestic environment over the past two hundred years, and in doing so, explores the in-depth social meaning and performance of spaces, both private and public.

House at Bogwest - Best House 2012 RIAI Architecture Awards:A House Loved into Existence

Full length critical peer review article about House at Bogwest, which was the winner of the 2012 RIAI Best House award, by architect Emmett Scanlon. Photographs by Alice Clancy. Photographs and plans describing House at Bogwest.

Differences in cancer awareness and beliefs between Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK (the International Cancer Benchmarking Partnership):Do they contribute to differences in cancer survival?

Background:There are wide international differences in 1-year cancer survival. The UK and Denmark perform poorly compared with other high-income countries with similar health care systems: Australia, Canada and Sweden have good cancer survival rates, Norway intermediate survival rates. The objective of this study was to examine the pattern of differences in cancer awareness and beliefs across these countries to identify where these might contribute to the pattern of survival.Methods:We carried out a population-based telephone interview survey of 19 079 men and women aged =50 years in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and the UK using the Awareness and Beliefs about Cancer measure.Results:Awareness that the risk of cancer increased with age was lower in the UK (14%), Canada (13%) and Australia (16%) but was higher in Denmark (25%), Norway (29%) and Sweden (38%). Symptom awareness was no lower in the UK and Denmark than other countries. Perceived barriers to symptomatic presentation were highest in the UK, in particular being worried about wasting the doctor's time (UK 34%; Canada 21%; Australia 14%; Denmark 12%; Norway 11%; Sweden 9%).Conclusion:The UK had low awareness of age-related risk and the highest perceived barriers to symptomatic presentation, but symptom awareness in the UK did not differ from other countries. Denmark had higher awareness of age-related risk and few perceived barriers to symptomatic presentation. This suggests that other factors must be involved in explaining Denmark's poor survival rates. In the UK, interventions that address barriers to prompt presentation in primary care should be developed and evaluated. © 2013 Cancer Research UK. All rights reserved.