Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper we address the ways in which global processes of imperialism helped to constitute the cultural geography of the capital cities of Europe. London is our focus, not least because its representation as an imperial city during the modern period was particularly fraught with difficulty. In the first section of the paper we consider the value and limitations of a ‘post-colonial’ perspective, and specifically the extent to which the discourse of imperial cities was European rather than national in character. In the second section we turn to London, widening the conventional focus on the ceremonial core at Westminster to consider a number of alternative ‘hearts of empire’, sites which were also claimed as central places in the landscape of the imperial city. Here we question the assumption that London ‘became’ imperial in a circumscribed area and only for a brief moment in the late-Victorian and Edwardian era. In order to develop the argument that the ‘imperial’ was not merely the preserve of policymakers in Whitehall, we then consider the role of imperial culture in shaping a variety of other urban landscapes, especially the swelling London suburbs. Last, we address the contradictions and tensions in the idea of ‘imperial London’ as it developed around the turn of the 19th century.

The authors focus upon the changing nature of production and consumption within the retail financial services industry. The perennial problem which faces all producers of financial services is information asymmetry; that is, providers and consumers of financial products have unequal amounts of information about whether or not customers have the wherewithal to make them ‘capable’ purchasers. Thus, the problem of information asymmetry is usually manifested in a priori decisionmaking about the suitability of customers. This problem has traditionally been overcome by forging interpersonal relationships of trust with consumers through copresence. Increasingly, however, trust in consumers is being forged through technologically mediated means of information collection functioning ‘at a distance’ so that financial services producers are coming to ‘read’ consumers as ‘texts’, through the medium of databases. These developments have had a number of effects, such as increased competition in retail financial markets, while branch networks, which acted as durable barriers to entry to the market, have become less important as sites of market intelligence and knowledge. Consumers have also been forced to forge new relations of trust with retail financial service providers. This is increasingly being achieved through the use of various media and through identification with brands. Such developments have served to create social and spatial divisions of financial inclusion and exclusion, as producers use at-a-distance information to discriminate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customers. Those ‘inside’ the financial system are able to use their financial knowledge to take advantage of increased levels of competition between financial service providers. However, those excluded from the financial system are doubly handicapped as they live in both a financial and an information shadow. Such individuals are likely to pay an increasingly heavy price for their exclusion, particularly given the collapse of universal welfare provision and the allied growth of private welfare-related financial products. In recognition of this, in the final part of the paper we consider ways of countering problems of financial exclusion and low levels of financial literacy.

In this paper I explore the iconographies on 19th-century Canadian paper money. Drawing upon the recent debates regarding the intersection of culture, society, and economy, it is argued that the form of paper money conveys not only economic but social and cultural values. The paper is divided into three parts. The first section situates Canadian paper currency in terms of the consolidation of paper monies more generally in the 18th and 19th centuries, but with particular reference to Britain and the United States. I then turn to a more specific analysis of the design and production of paper money, illustrating how monetary images were transferred among artistic media. A third section focuses on some of the spatial aspects of paper money by exploring national and imperial monetary narratives which are in turn related to specific monetary practices. In a brief conclusion the importance of an historical analysis to our contemporary understanding of paper and other kinds of monies is outlined and points to our complicity in economic, social, and cultural networks.

School texts on geography are an important but neglected repository of geographical knowledge and representations within the historiography of geography. During the period 1830–1918 geography school texts were influenced by European exploration, church sponsors of education, the mediation of religious and scientific explanation of the natural world, popular images of empire, and state education codes, grants, and inspections. These factors combined in differing degrees over the period studied to reflect hegemonic views of gender, race, and class. The comparative method, popularised as a means of transmitting geographical knowledge in this period, frequently resulted in methodological Eurocentrism, or specifically Anglo-centrism, and memory exercises instilled necessarily simplistic messages about geographical and political relations. Pupil-centred approaches, such as the use of adventure stories and family life as ciphers for geographical understanding, often served to masculinise the content of texts. State legislation for grant-related examinations served to homogenise the content of texts.

In this essay I analyse the role of space in key texts belonging to the tradition of phenomenology. Starting from the assumption that phenomenology is uniquely positioned to answer the epistemological challenges posed by today's theoretical discourses, works by Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer are examined in light of their respective treatments of space. I assert that much of what passes as phenomenological knowledge is constructed around an unfounded idealisation of the written text and the spatial stability it embodies. In the subsequent development of a spatially open alternative I draw on Heidegger's elaboration of the ‘event’ and attempt to place such thinking within contemporary debates in the human sciences.