Motorway development and the conservation of traditional third world cities
Abstract Many Third World countries with pre-colonial backgrounds have traditional residential communities at the core of cities which differ from rings of modern development towards the outskirts. Some of the cities also have unique traditional social set-ups and suburbs of colonial and post-Independence development. The ideology of contemporary planning, founded on rational, impersonal layouts of districts and borrowed largely from the West, demonstrates little sensitivity to such traditional city communities, many of which are in danger of complete destruction. This article examines problems faced by such cities and the global prospects for conservation.
Regional Devolution and Democratic Renewal: Developing a Radical Approach to Stakeholder Involvement in the English Regions
In this paper we aim to assess critically the relationship between devolved government and democratic renewal through a focus on the potential for stakeholder involvement within elected regional assemblies. Drawing particularly upon evidence from North East England, we will consider how the creation of elected assemblies could reinvigorate democracy, given the constraints imposed (in regions such as the North East) by the unreformed and unrepresentative political terrain upon which any new assembly is likely to be superimposed. We conclude that existing arrangements and practices are a useful development but fall far short of the radical measures needed to overcome the exclusionary nature of traditional models of governance and government.
Reid on Hypotheses and the Ether; A Reassessment
In recent years historians of science have come to see that Thomas Reid’s Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man had a profound impact on the development of British methodological thought in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Larry Laudan has argued that Reid was “the first major British philosopher to take Newton’s opinions on induction, causality, and hypotheses seriously”; and that Reid was thereby instrumental in changing the character of British methodological discourse in the Enlightenment.(1) Geoffrey Cantor has examined in detail the influence of Reid’s critique of ether theories and hypotheses in the Essays on leading protagonists in the nineteenth-century debates surrounding the wave theory of light,(2) and Richard Olson has traced the origins of the scientific style of British physics in the Victorian period to the writings of Reid and other Common Sense philosophers. (3) As well as delineating Reid’s influence, Laudan, Cantor, and Olson have attempted to identify the problems to which he addressed himself in articulating his methodology, and they have analysed with some care the internal structure of his methodological views. Thanks to the work of these historians, therefore, we have a fairly comprehensive picture of Reid’s methodology and its fortunes in the nineteenth century.