Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The central streets of mid-19th-century Toronto, the principal public open spaces of the city, were the preferred place for enacting a wide variety of demonstrations which ranged from well-organized official processions to informal and even violent crowd scenes, Their use for these rituals of collective behaviour followed a tradition, still honoured at mid-century, of almost unhindered public accessibility to the streets. The claims which groups asserted for the use and enjoyment of this symbolic space, and the responses of the inhabitants and city government to the exercise of these rights, reveal the process by which the community adjudicated social conflict and built consensus through the manipulation and control of a valuable collective asset: the streets.

There are good reasons for assuming that places symbolic for and valued by black people exist in Britain, One such locale is London's Notting Hill, which was, with Brixton, one of the two earliest zones of Afro-Caribbean settlement in the metropolis from the mid-1950s onwards. Notting Hill was also, in 1958, the locus of riots by young white people against black immigrants; the site of the Mangrove Restaurant, associated with the Black Power movement, and harassed continually by the police from its establishment in 1969 until its demise in 1991, Also, most notably, this area is the venue for the vast, annual, black-accented Notting Hill street carnival. These attributes did not, however, seem to engender strong responses in interviews with a set of twelve families of Barbadian origin. The interviewees, now materially successful, no longer inhabited the neighborhood, nor did their London-raised adult children. For the thirty-four interviewees, Notting Hill was a place that might once have been important for black people, but was no longer greatly valued for any such symbolisms; its looming gentrification by whites, for example, was not viewed with regret. This weak attachment to the place Notting Hill—or indeed to any other purportedly ‘black’ locales in London or Britain—has multiple sources in the particularity of this set of respondents: middle-class, respectable, generally conservative, homeowners, many of whom exhibit marked Barbadian island chauvinism. Most strikingly, some of the households still, after over thirty years in London, view themselves only as sojourners in Britain, who will before long return home to Barbados. Indeed, at least one household already has.

A new direction for medical geographic study is suggested, the analysis of places which have attained an enduring reputation for achieving physical, mental, and spiritual healing. The reasons for the efficacy of these therapeutic landscapes can he examined by using themes derived from the traditional landscape ideas of cultural geography, humanistic geography, structuralist geography, and the principles of holistic health. These themes are categorized as inner/meaning (including the natural setting, the built environment, sense of place, symbolic landscapes, and everyday activities) and outer/societal context (including beliefs and philosophies, social relations and/or inequalities, and territoriality). By using a methodology termed an ‘archaeology of discourse’ in which written and oral documents are examined, the themes are used to investigate the healing reputation of the Asclepian sanctuary at Epidauros, Greece. Study findings have policy implications for health-care practice today.

Soft images of pubescent women scaling the dizzy heights of a massive phallic rock in turn-of-the-century rural Victoria, and young men matching physical prowess in the indomitable Western Australian desert as World War I rages in Europe, provide foci for two of Peter Weir's most successful early films, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Gallipoli (1981). In both these films the physical landscape is simultaneously integrated with and contrasted to the passions of young men and women. The result is an aesthetic that takes the viewer beyond the immediate narrative to a place where masculinity and femininity find expression. In this paper, transactional and psychoanalytic perspectives are used to interrogate the gender images which are portrayed in both these movies, linking them to some concepts which find currency in ecofeminism. The concern is with the individual struggle between the powerful, complex, and yet less-than-rational forces that are integral to the nature of our individual beings and the rational nature of prevailing societal values that supposedly provide us with guidance. A dynamic theory of contemporary film is implicit in our discussion of “images in motion over time through space with sequence”. These elements—along with an overlay of shape, size, scale, color, sound, and light—arc the cues that provide meaning for Weir's portrayal of wo/man-in-environmcnt relations. Suggested in this paper is a broader narrative which speaks to a postmodern sexual order and its representations in social theory and contemporary cinema. Crucial questions are raised regarding the ways that cultural identity is grounded in class and gender.

The fashion system, as a powerful cultural signifier, offers some important clues into the links between production and consumption change. In this paper, the workings of the fashion system are explored, with a focus on changing consumption patterns and new market trends, which may have the potential to even out the profoundly unequal relationship which exists between high-street multiples and small independent retailers. The suggestion is made that the fashion system is polarising at present, that design-led boutiques are enjoying renewed popularity. Not only is this benefiting local design talent, it is also a means of affording greater autonomy to local manufacturers. The emergence of one particular fashion agglomeration, the Nottingham Lace Market, is traced, with local linkage structures looked at through the interplay of manufacturers, designers, retailers, and local policymakers. In this way, an attempt is made to offer a more expansive investigation of flexible production systems, one which is not grounded exclusively in economic-centred narratives but which recognises that the factors which shape the development of local agglomerations are rooted in production and consumption shifts, and are dependent on multiple political, cultural, and economic discourses.

By the end of 1987, Cleveland in northern England had been attributed with a new and disturbing meaning. It was the centre of a ‘crisis' about the sexual abuse of children. Although no one yet knows the ‘truth’ about the situation, popular and strongly held perceptions of what really happened remain widespread and entrenched. In this paper, the way in which a place came to be associated with a particular set of meanings is examined; the reasons why some readings are ‘silenced’ whereas others enter the dominant public discourse are investigated. In ‘Cleveland’, feminist perspectives were suppressed. The debate around child sexual abuse successfully avoided the question of who was doing the abusing, and there was a deafening silence on how to prevent that abuse. The issue of sexuality appeared to be edited out of the agenda. An examination of the symbolic geographies of a particular place such as Cleveland allows an analysis of power and the nature of society. It is now difficult to mention the name ‘Cleveland’ without triggering an array of images associated with child sexual abuse. What these images arc is important for any understanding of the situation whereby ‘Cleveland’ became a metaphor for child sexual abuse.