The evolution of national level historic district registration and conservation in China: the Beijing Yandaixiejie and Beijing Guozijian districts in Beijing, China

From the 1980s, Chinese experts from some mainland universities, such as Tongji Universtiy in Shanghai and Tsinghua University in Beijing, commenced research into heritage management and historic architectural conservation in China. With the announcement of the First and Second Lists of 10 Chinese Historic and Cultural Districts in 2009 and 2010, the conservation of historic districts was generally received and elevated in agreements from state-level government to local level governments. This paper considers literature about international and Chinese regulations and presents the evolution of historic district conservation in China. The paper explores the effective and ineffective results of the “Selection Contest of Chinese Top 10 Historic and Cultural Districts” in two cases selected from the First and Second Lists of 10 Chinese Historical and Cultural Districts during upon recent research and investigations. In each example, the paper provides a detailed examination of public awareness and their evaluation of conservation effectiveness through questionnaires.

The silicon ceiling : women managers and leaders in ICT in Australia

When I was in high school, it was always talked up that women could do science, engineering and technical [work] too. While we are just as capable as men, when we get into these industries, we face other challenges. There have been brave women who have done their bit to overcome these challenges, but it also requires brave men to challenge the attitudes of these industries to women participating in their workplaces. (APESMA, 2010) Silicon: Elemental silicon has a large impact on the modern world economy ... Because of wide use of silicon in integrated circuits, the basis of most computers, a great deal of modern technology depends on it. (Wikipedia, 2011) The chapter begins with a historical and current analysis of female participation in the workforce, in education and in leadership. The second section focuses on the information and communication technology (ICT) workforce in particular. The third section presents findings from a recent case study that gathered both quantitative and qualitative data from a diverse group of professional women in ICT. The case study provides a view into the ICT profession from the female perspective and identifies a selection of factors that would make a significant difference to female participation and longevity in the profession. The conclusion reached after this investigation is that the silicon ceiling is certainly not visible, yet remains fixed due to nonessential job characteristics that persist in the industry. The future looks bleak unless more female managers and male champions ensure that these nonessential employment characteristics are removed from ICT positions.

Minahasan indigenous perspectives on place planning and management : tracing the indigenous culture through the lens of local wisdom

Indigenous cultures draw upon many thousands of years of residency and environmental adaptation offering unique knowledge resources to better understand our landscapes and environment. The Minahasan society, on the island of Sulawesi in the Indonesian archipelago, is one such Indigenous community. The Minahasan are the Indigenous community of northern Sulawesi, before the Portuguese and Dutch 1500-1900 colonization of this island, and the later nationalist cultural assimilation following post Indonesian independence. Thus, some 500 years of post-European contact and management can be contrasted against over I 00,000 years of Minahasan society. Further, the majority of this colonisation has been focused upon the coastal fringes resulting in a relatively intact Minahasan cultural landscape within the interior of northern Sulawesi focused upon the Tondano Lake catchment. This paper considers the importance of the Minahasan-formed cultural landscape, its importance to this culture, and the role and influence it continues to have in settlement formation and planning in northern Sulawesi despite conventional Indonesian and Western-informed sustainable urban and regional planning traditions and knowledge. It draws upon intensive qualitative research using 14 different villages, to analyse and compare local knowledge and land-relationships developed by the respective communities to manage and curate their unique characteristics as well as ensuring adaption without compromising their cultural, social and economic values. The research embodies this ethnoecological information in seeking to analyse historical and contemporary land use planning systems, and to offer a future planning perspective that will respect and endure this relationship and environmental management regime.

National identity in fragile states: insights from tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste

The challenges of nation building in Melanesia and Timor-Leste have often been neglected in the regional focus on state-building challenges. High levels of ethno-linguistic diversity, combined with an array of regional, historical and cultural divisions, continue to present obstacles to the creation of a cohesive sense of national political community leading these nations to be labelled ‘fragile’. This paper presents the findings of a comparative study on the attitudes of tertiary students in Melanesia and Timor-Leste to national identity and nation building. A strong pan-Melanesian pattern of group identification was identified, common to Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The ongoing importance of traditional authority and custom in informing conceptions of political community and identity was evident in all four case study sites, but was in each case matched by indicators of respect for modern state authority. The survey also reveals some significant gender differences in key attitudes towards national identity, including the role of traditional authorities. Most importantly, the study reveals high degrees of national pride, and faith in democratic principles and citizenship; but conversely, low levels of pride in contemporary democratic performance and inter-group tolerance.

Cross-artform creative practice as still-life recovery: Chinese-Western materialisms of time, writing and death

As argued by Norman Bryson, the still-life genre is sorely neglected by theorists and critics, largely because its concern with ‘low-plane reality’ (everyday items and acts) has obscured its genuine relevance to material thinking. By reappraising rather than abandoning the genre’s traditional themes of death and time—using a cross-cultural, Chinese-Western approach—it is possible to re-energise materialisms of time, writing and death within still life. Such a move depends above all on a re-evaluation of still life as ‘Vanitas’—the term which to date has unified, and more to the point limited, traditional still-life understandings of death and time. This article tracks a more explosive and creative materialism of still life simultaneously through the specifically Chinese approach to death (which includes the ‘Yin Yang’ 阴阳 as a sort of author of time) and via Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy of the time-image; what connects these is the very Deleuzean notion of time that subtends Chinese engagements with death. In this way, the still-life genre may be recovered from its current critical and theoretical malaise. Reconnecting with practice is a crucial aspect of this recovery, and so in its early stages this article analyses an example of still-life, creative non-fiction (authored by Cher Coad), and it concludes by establishing the value of this potentially ‘new chapter of the “still life” genre’ (in Matilde Marcolli’s terms) for the cross-artform analysis of the short story ‘Nhill’ (authored by Patrick West). Analysis, though, is only half the picture: a fully recovered still-life genre would see theory and practice endlessly circulating through each other, spurring on practice and impelling theory. Coad’s and West’s literary examples are introduced in the hope that they might trigger fresh theoretical and practice-based, still-life discoveries in prose and also in poetry.

Incorporating indigenous Australian knowledge and perspectives into planning practice : past, present and future

The history and contemporary practice of land-use planning and place-making by Indigenous Australians is poorly understood by academics, students and practitioners in the field of urban and regional planning in Australia. This is despite recent high-profile events which have increased the profile of Indigenous peoples’ rights, such as the recognition of native title by the High Court in Mabo v the State of Queensland [No. 2] (1992) 175 CLR 1 and The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007), and Commonwealth policy and reconciliation discourses. Further, little impact has been discernible arising from the adoption of reconciliation policies by government bodies, planning authorities and the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA). This paper reviews this lack of progress and discusses why this is a problem for Australian planners which needs to be addressed. The paper reviews the present Australian historical and socio-cultural context in terms of collaboration with traditional land owners as it relates to contemporary planning practice. It considers ontological, epistemological and axiological differences between the dominant western model of planning and Indigenous models, and the challenges this presents. A case-study documenting past, present and future planning practices at Lake Condah in South West Victoria which is the Country of the Gunditjmara and Budj Bim will bring to life these topics through the documentation of Indigenous planning practices prior to and post European arrival. It offers a vision for the future of planning with Indigenous communities. The paper envisages a future which values and incorporates Indigenous place-making and planning, which goes far beyond the tacit acknowledgement of traditional owners commonly observed around Australia today.

Aristotle and the authoritativeness of politikē

This paper explores the normative implications of Aristotle's concept of politikē and demonstrates its relevance to contemporary debates on legitimate political authority. Section one of the paper provides historical and interpretative background on Aristotle's conception of politikē. The second section examines the central normative role that the common good plays in Aristotle's account of politikē and claims that its capacity to play this role points in the direction of a less exclusionary politics than is suggested by Book 1 of the Politics. Finally, in the third section, with reference to work by Andres Rosler and David Estlund, I consider what Aristotle's account can tell us about contemporary debates on the relationship between political authority, legitimacy and expertise.

Domesticating cosmopolitanism: Charmian Clift’s women’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Herald in the 1960s

When novelist Charmian Clift returned to Australia in 1964 after 14 years in England and Greece, she was commissioned to write a women’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne Herald. Her topics ranged widely, from food and drink, migrants and hospitality, famine and peace, children and religion, pop music and Aborigines to travel and housewives. By all accounts Clift struck a chord with her readers, her feel for connecting the vagaries of everyday life with historical and global events and social shifts made hers a distinctive voice in the daily press. This article explores the cosmopolitan outlook of Clift’s newspaper column: a world of hospitality and travel based on a common humanity, a perspective that neither feared nor favoured class, caste and colour, all the while not shying away from criticisms of the moral ambiguities of a sophisticated worldliness. It argues that Clift’s cosmopolitan perspective offered women a moral space that circumscribed local conditions. The article adds to an emerging body of knowledge on the gendered dimensions of cosmopolitanism and seeks to understand what kind of cosmopolitan world for women existed in 1960s
Australia.

Bushfire catastrophe in Victoria, Australia : public record, accountability, commemoration, memorialization and heritage protection

In Australia, 7 February 2009 has become known as ‘Black Saturday’ because of the bushfire catastrophe that took 173 lives and devastated communities in the central parts of the State of Victoria. The paper considers how the 2009 fires have been recorded, how the issue of accountability has been dealt with, particularly in relation to the State and its agencies but also individual residents in the fire-devastated areas, and how bushfire deaths and other losses have been commemorated through remembrance events and museum collection projects and memorialized through the creation of new monuments and the protection of remaining physical structures as official heritage. Despite the major impact of bushfires on the State, to date few bushfire-related places have been protected. The former Cockatoo Kindergarten, which acted as a community refuge during an earlier catastrophic Victorian bushfire on Ash Wednesday, 16 February 1983, is an exception. Inscribed in 2012, the former kindergarten is the only bushfire-related place inscribed on the Victorian Heritage Register, in this case for its historical and social value as a place resonating with other communities affected by other bushfires and helping the broader Victorian public to come to terms with bushfire catastrophe. But, while bushfire commemoration activities and physical memorials, like those relating to war, help many societies remember individual and community pain and suffering, they can divert attention from the more fundamental questions of why they were there in the first place and what must be done to ensure the same catastrophe does not recur in the future. In this regard, the paper questions the oft-cited claim that bushfires are embedded in the Australian psyche, seeing links between the rhetoric around bushfire survival and Australian myth-making and nation-building.

Religion, heritage and the sustainable city : Hinduism and urbanisation in Jaipur

The speed and scale of urbanisation in India is unprecedented almost anywhere in the world and has tremendous global implications. The religious influence on the urban experience has resonances for all aspects of urban sustainability in India and yet it remains a blind spot while articulating sustainable urban policy.This book explores the historical and on-going influence of religion on urban planning, design, space utilisation, urban identities and communities. It argues that the conceptual and empirical approaches to planning sustainable cities in India need to be developed out of analytical concepts that define local sense of place and identity. Examining how Hindu religious heritage, beliefs and religiously influenced planning practices have impacted on sustainable urbanisation development in Jaipur and Indian cities in general, the book identifies the challenges and opportunities that ritualistic and belief resources pose for sustainability. It focuses on three key aspects: spatial segregation and ghettoisation; gender-inclusive urban development; and the nexus between religion, nature and urban development. This cutting-edge book is one of the first case studies linking Hindu religion, heritage, urban development, women and the environment in a way that responds to the realities of Indian cities. It opens up discussion on the nexus of religion and development, drawing out insightful policy implications for the sustainable urban planning of many cities in India and elsewhere in South Asia and the developing world.

Gilles Deleuze and the space of education: poststructuralism, critical psychology, and schooled bodies

The editor and contributors to this volume are concerned that these thinkers have been misappropriated on occasions. That is why this volume concentrates on the historical and intellectual background of these philosophers.

Legal systemology and the geopolitics of Roman law: a response to Stuart Elden’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s spatial ontology

This paper explores the production, destruction, and reproduction of the geopolitical spaces of Roman law in order to offer an analysis of Schmitt’s (selective) notion of Jus Publicum Europaeum and its relevance to the current “depoliticization” and “dejuridification” of the world. By adopting a historical and geopolitical approach that reaches the boundaries of legal systemology and political theology, the present contribution investigates the manipulative and instrumentalist use of the material object of Rome’s (universalist) competence, namely the “territory” as dominium of its political intervention, which was ultimately (and idealistically) aimed at avoiding the natural destiny of any living being: birth, maturity, and death. Attention is therefore paid to the Roman strategy of (ontological?) contamination of its mythical identity through the legal and sociopolitical administration and regulation of its geographical spaces in terms of (non-)cultural signification. Through the analysis of such concepts as “nomos,” “Großraum,” “Ortung,” and “Ordnung,” it is claimed that Schmitt voluntarily chose to identify the Jus Publicum Europaeum with the geopolitical order produced during the Age of Discovery and not with the “comprehensive” Roman spatial order. The reason for this choice may be identified in the distortive use of Rome’s social relations and political allegiances that lay at the core of its genealogical expansionism (and subsequent inevitable dissolution) since the conquest of Veius in 396 BC and the historical compromise between patrician nobility and plebeians in 367 BC.

Australia’s Colombo plans, old and new: international students as foreign relations

This article draws on recent research and policy developments to make a case for considering international students as an important component of Australian foreign relations. It links historical and contemporary Australian experiences of international students, especially in the Colombo Plan and New Colombo Plan, to the field of public diplomacy, and sets an agenda for further research in this direction. It highlights the need to recover student voices and to be sensitive to the emergence of everyday or ‘vernacular’ internationalism, as a phenomenon of international students visiting, traveling and otherwise encountering different groups of Australians. It suggests a need to take up anew this form of inquiry for both earlier postwar student experiences and the post-1980s period, in which international students’ voices are frequently silenced by debates over commodification, funding needs, and neo-liberal economics.

Imagined terrain: literary nomadism in Venice and the Veneto

Many poets and writers have used Venice and, to a lesser extent, the Veneto as a creative topos. There is both the writing that might be said to belong to the Italian/Venetian literary tradition, as well as the non-Italian tradition of writing Venice, a phenomenon that spans English literature, in particular, from William Shakespeare’s time, to the Romantic period and into the present day. This paper explores my relationship to this creative topos and the writers and writing that are associated with it. In particular, it focuses on the notion of literary nomadism: a method for interacting with the literature of Venice and the Veneto that allows me to find intersections between my own work and that which already exists in a broad historical and literary terrain. Moving between and across the literatures of this region, I argue that it is possible to find multiple points of reference that guide and inform my own poetic responses to it, and which reflect my own subjective nomadism and in-between-ness. By taking such an approach I am able to map my hybrid, transnational and transcultural identity into this space, in order to locate myself—and my writing—in the ‘imagined terrain’ I have chosen as a creative topos.