International Sales of UK Television Content: Change and Continuity in ‘the space in between’ Production and Consumption

Focusing on the UK, this article addresses key issues facing the international distribution industry arising from over-the-top digital distribution and the fragmentation of audiences and revenues. Building on the identification of these issues, it investigates the extent to which UK distribution has altered over a ten-year period, pinpointing continuities in the destination and type of sales alongside changes in the role and structure of the industry as UK-based distributors adapt to a changing UK broadcasting landscape and global production environment. At one level increasing US ownership of UK-based distributors and the arrival of OTT players like Netflix, highlight the tensions between the national orientations of UK broadcasters and the global aspirations of independent producers and distributors. At another level VOD has boosted international sales of UK drama. Although the full impact of SVOD on content and rights has yet to materialise, significant changes in the industry predate the arrival of SVOD.

A Global Review on Peri-Urban Development and Planning

Urban regions worldwide are increasingly facing the challenge of dealing with highly dynamic metropolitan growth and, at the same time, institutional changes like decentralisation and globalisation. These kinds of changes express themselves most evidently in peri-urban areas, where urban and rural life meets. These peri-urban areas in particular have been the stage for rapid physical, social and economic transformations, both in developed and developing countries. Peri-urbanization takes place here. Based on literature review, this paper presents an effort to identify generic attributes of peri-urbanisation and the way in which development planning tends to reply. Three major attributes are identified: peri-urban space (the spatial expression of peri-urban development), peri-urban life (the functional appearance of land uses, activities and peri-urban innovation), and peri-urban change (a causal and temporal perspective featuring flows and drivers of change). It is also shown that prevalent institutional replies in planning and development generally fail to acknowledge the dynamic and increasingly fragmented attributes of global peri-urbanisation.

Post-Political Ontologies and the Problems of Anti-Anthropocentrism: Reply to Tsouvalis

Judith Tsouvalis mounts a lively and interesting critique of the post-foundational Left’s theorisations through the marshalling of Latourian insights into the possibilities for a more grounded, pragmatic and concrete approach to political action. Tsouvalis takes Latour’s appropriation of John Dewey’s philosophical pragmatism (classically stated in the 1927 [1954] work, The Public and Its Problems) to argue that problems enable Dingpolitik – object or problem-orientated politics – through assembling concrete plural publics around matters of shared concern and contestation. She counter positions this pragmatic politics of concern, through which new communities of understanding are formed, to the abstract and ‘anthropomorphic’ critiques of the ‘post-political condition’ which offer little in the way of a constructive engagement in the collective making of a better world.