New identities for district centres
Many district centres in inner urban areas are in decline because their poor shopping environment cannot compete effectively with superstores, retail parks and modernised town centres. Their inexpensive premises, however, allow opportunities for innovative businesses as well as non-profit-making community and arts facilities. This paper examines whether Clifton Street, one of Cardiff's oldest district centres, can be successfully ‘branded’ as a specialist shopping, service and entertainment destination, while retaining its ‘basket shopping’ function for local residents and workers. Evidence is derived from surveys of traders and landowners, a planning consultants’ study, and interviews with local community interests and potential funders of environmental improvements to the centre. The conclusions are that public sector intervention and finance are essential for the centre's revival, but that there is little case at present for developing a marketing strategy and ‘brand’ for the centre.
Small retailers in an inner city community: a case study of Adamsdown, Cardiff
Many retail and business areas in Britain’s inner cities find difficulties in competing with modern retail developments in town centre and off‐centre locations, and are in decline as a result. This paper examines one such area, in Cardiff, Wales, and reviews the steps which could be taken to halt decline and revive the area’s economic and social role in the community. The views of traders and local residents concerning possible improvements to the area are explored, through consultations carried out through the local Community Forum and a survey carried out by students from Cardiff University. The paper concludes with a discussion of the main “agents for change”, in particular the crucial role of the local authority in facilitating environmental and economic change.
On Fascist Ideology
Fascism is a political ideology that encompassed totalitarianism, state terrorism, imperialism, racism and, in the German case, the most radical genocide of the last century: the Holocaust. Fascism, in its many forms did not hesitate to kill its own citizens as well as its colonial subjects in its search for ideological and political closure. Millions of civilians perished on a global scale during the apogee of fascist ideologies in Europe and beyond. In historical terms, fascism can be defined as a movement and a regime. Emilio Gentile – who, with Zeev Sternhell and George Mosse,2 is the most insightful historian of fascism – presents fascism as a modern revolutionary phenomenon that was nationalist and revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist. Gentile also presents fascism as being typically organized in a militaristic party that had a totalitarian conception of state politics, an activist and antitheoretical ideology as well as a focus on virility and anti-hedonistic mythical foundations. For Gentile a defining feature of fascism was its character as a secular religion which affirms the primacy of the nation understood as an organic and ethnically homogenous community. Moreover, this nation was to be hierarchically organized in a corporativist state endowed with a war-mongering vocation that searches for a politics of national expansion, potency and conquest. Fascism, in short, was not a mere reactionary ideology. Rather, fascism aimed at creating a new order and a new civilization.3 The word fascism derives from the Italian word fascio and refers to a political group (such as the political group lead by Giuseppe Garibaldi during the time of Italian unification.) Fascism also refers visually and historically to a Roman imperial symbol of authority. Its place of birth as a modern political ideology was northern Italy, the year was 1919, and its founder was Benito Mussolini. Thus, fascism as a term as well as a political movement was born on the Italian peninsula. Its ideological origins, however, predated its name. The fact that fascism was born as a concept before its explicit birth as a movement is central to any understanding of fascism. The ideology of radical nationalism that made it possible was part of a larger intellectual reaction to the Enlightenment.4 This tradition was both European and, in the Latin American case, “non-European” as well. To be sure, the original ideology behind fascism was born as a reaction to the progressive European revolutions of the long nineteenth century (from the French revolution of 1789 to the American and Latin American revolutions of 1776 and the 1810s). Fascism represented a post-revolutionary attack against equality. The ideology of the anti-Enlightenment is the major root of the longstanding ideological tradition that created fascism. Its branches constituted a reaction against liberal politics and a rejection of democracy. And yet fascism did not oppose the market economy and put forward a corporatist organization that aimed to be functional to capitalist accumulation. Equally important, fascism is a philosophy of political action that ascribes value to absolute violence in the political realm. This ascription was boosted by one radical outcome of the