Journal articles on the topic 'Open-market rent'

AbstractThis paper studies the role of middlemen in open-access fisheries and how the organization of the supply chains affects resource exploitation and the level and distribution of economic rent. Imperfect competition among middlemen can help ensure that fish stocks are not depleted, which is typically the case in open-access fisheries with competitive markets. Middlemen with market power can also induce higher economic rent for the supply chain in total, but these rents mainly benefit the middlemen. The supply chains of inshore anchovy and offshore skipjack tuna fisheries in Vietnam are used as empirical examples. The analysis shows that in the anchovy supply chain, the middlemen have insignificant market power and the stock is being overexploited. In the skipjack tuna supply chain, the middlemen have oligopsony power and the stock is higher than the level that produces maximum sustainable yield.

The present text focuses on perceiving real estate property as an investment asset that generates a certain amount of revenue to its owner, assuming expected risk and the expected level of liquidity. The first step is to determine the open market value of the selected property, which represent the expected expenses of the investment costs incurred (taking into account other acquisition costs), then we determine the open market rent value, which is the expected return on the selected property, then identify possible business risk associated with the commercial use of real estate and finally, the liquidity of the entire investment is estimated. In conclusion, methods for evaluating investments are applied to assess the realization of the investment – acquisition of the selected real estate for commercial purposes, the estimated return time and the percentage of the return on investment is calculated of the paper.

Boosted by the growing logistics industry and digital transformation, the sharing warehouse market is undergoing a rapid development. Both supply and demand sides in the warehouse rental business are faced with market perturbations brought by unprecedented peer competitions and information transparency. A key question faced by the participants is how to price warehouses in the open market. To understand the pricing mechanism, we built a real world warehouse dataset using data collected from the classified advertisements websites. Based on the dataset, we applied machine learning techniques to relate warehouse price with its relevant features, such as warehouse size, location and nearby real estate price. Four candidate models are used here: Linear Regression, Regression Tree, Random Forest Regression and Gradient Boosting Regression Trees. The case study in the Beijing area shows that warehouse rent is closely related to its location and land price. Models considering multiple factors have better skill in estimating warehouse rent, compared to singlefactor estimation. Additionally, tree models have better performance than the linear model, with the best model (Random Forest) achieving correlation coefficient of 0.57 in the test set. Deeper investigation of feature importance illustrates that distance from the city center plays the most important role in determining warehouse price in Beijing, followed by nearby real estate price and warehouse size.

This paper examines in light of the Coase Theorem how delineation of a degree of enforceable rights for a previously open-access dumpsite in the Philippines would affect market transactions of waste pickers. It shows that a simplistic exclusion solution was not enough to constrain rent dissipation of recyclables in the primeval land fill. Some intervention of non-government organisations backed by some initial government assistance were found helpful in reducing transaction costs to sustain operations and promote innovations and initiatives from the scavengers themselves despite obvious external economic difficulties.

The effect of money multiplier is determined by credit activities of the banking system and depends upon the value of the difference between average profitability in the economy and interest rate. The modification of payment systems may lead to decreasing central banks possibilities of money regulation. Seigniorage which is obtained by the banking system is a kind of economic rent. The effect of money multiplier reveals itself in the world credit market and influences exchange rate dynamics of reserve currencies. Using government securities as the main asset of central banks and as an instrument of open market operations leads to appreciation of interest rate and to decreasing of credit activities in the economy. A perspective instrument of money regulation is allocation of central banks deposits with commercial banks.

Background Although the risk factors associated with young people entering and becoming entrenched in street life have been thoroughly investigated, peer-reviewed evidence is scarce to nonexistent for rigorous interventions targeting social integration outcomes for young people who have experienced homelessness. From the limited research that has been done, emerging evidence signals that, although structural supports such as subsidized housing and social service providers are important, these resources alone are insufficient to help young people integrate into the mainstream society. Objective The overarching aim of this study is to assess whether and how rent subsidies and mentorship influence social integration outcomes for formerly homeless young people living in market rent housing in 3 Canadian cities. The primary outcome measures for this study are community integration (psychological and physical) and self-esteem at 18 months. Secondary outcomes include social connectedness, hope, and academic and vocational participation at 18 months. Exploratory outcomes include income, perceived housing quality, engulfment, psychiatric symptoms, and participant perspectives of intervention barriers and facilitators. Methods This is a convergent mixed methods, open-label, 2-arm parallel randomized controlled trial (RCT) with 1:1 allocation embedded within a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) framework. The intervention will provide 24 young people (aged 16-26 years), who have transitioned out of homelessness and into market rent housing within the past year, with rent subsidies for 24 months. Half of the young people will also be randomly assigned an adult mentor who has been recruited and screened by 1 of our 3 community partners. Data collection will occur every 6 months, and participants will be followed for 30 months. Results Ethical approval for this study has been obtained from the Providence, St Joseph’s, and St Michael’s Healthcare Research Ethics Board (number 18-251). Enrollment took place from April 2019 to September 2019. Preliminary analysis of the baseline quantitative and qualitative data is underway. Conclusions This pilot RCT will be the first to test the impact of economic and social support on meaningful social integration for formerly homeless young people living in market rent housing. We believe that the mixed methods design will illuminate important contextual factors that must be considered if the intervention is to be scaled up and replicated elsewhere. Importantly, the CBPAR framework will incorporate the perspectives of the community, including formerly homeless young people, who are in the best position to determine what might work best in the context of their lives. Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT03779204; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03779204. International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/15557

This paper contributes to the literature on corporate governance by providing evidence on the importance of owner identity on technology transfer from foreign firms. To this end we use a panel of Estonian firms for 1993-2002 and employ panel data techniques to avoid endogeneity and sample selection bias. We find that across different ownership groups only domestic outsiders benefit from spillovers of technology transfer. However, a large technology gap with foreign firms motivates all local firms to use their existing technology more efficiently and as such successfully cope with the increased open market competition. Furthermore, because of rent seeking and/or asset striping behavior insider owned firms, face financial constraints, and as such cannot invest in new technology as much as domestic outsider owned firms.

This conceptual paper discusses the phenomenon of differentiation made possible through branding or innovation or a combination of the two. Differentiation is eventually the driving force for the development of its own negation, commoditization. When customers have endured a commoditized market long enough the opportunities open up for creative destruction, this concept of Schumpeter (1942), means that an entrepreneur invents a completely new way of satisfying the customers’ unsatisfied needs, making the industry that no longer bothered about their customers. Many researchers have tried to re/brand destructive innovation as their own, with concepts, such as of ”transilience”, and “blue ocean strategy’, as opposed to ‘red ocean strategy’. The paper focuses on innovation as a differentiation strategy and on temporary monopoly rent as a driver of innovation. Increased competition and shortening and life cycles makes capitalism more volatile and the strategies to reduce the risks involved are discussed. These strategies lead to the real-world implementation of the concentration of capital forecasted by Marx and feared by Schumpeter. The paper identifies the need to continuously monitor the concentration of capital and to understand individual markets by studying the firm’s profit.

Urban growth is one of the indicators that reflects human interaction with the environment and has a direct effect on land use change. Continuous demand for space in Nigeria’s urban markets to accommodate shops and other retail outlets used for informal economic activities is accompanied by a change of use. This study examined the impact of informal economic activities on change of use in Bola Ige International Market, Ibadan. The concept of informal economy and the bid rent theory provided the conceptual/theoretical framework for this study. Geographical Information System was used to capture the change of use between 2006 and 2016. Land used for informal economic activities increased from 39.45% in 2006 to 55.35% in 2016, signifying a 15.9% increase. This implies that other land uses have been illegally converted and encroached. Transportation land use decreased from 31.47% in 2006 to 30.28% in 2011 and to 28.73% in 2016. Land used for open space (including parking space, and open trading area) which was 26.7% in 2006 reduced to 20.24% and 11.05% in 2011 and 2016, respectively. Most of the green areas (62.1%) have been converted to informal trading spaces between 2006 and 2016. Illegal change of use was credited to harsh economic condition in the country, and the engagement of the unemployed and retirees in informal sector economic activities. It was suggested that urban managers in conjunction with informed activists, researchers and citizens need to formulate and implement planning regulations that will integrate informal economic activities.

For much of the discipline of economics, a closed economy is seen as the result of efforts of distributional coalitions and rent seekers to maintain sector-specific protections. Accordingly, economic liberalization is explained by the policy consistency of uncompromising reform elites. Students of the politics of economic adjustment in the developing world, in turn, have argued that reform programs concentrate costs in the present and disperse benefits in the future. Hence, losers are prepared to engage in collective action, whereas prospective winners, facing uncertainty about payoffs, remain disorganized. They thus posit the cohesiveness and insularity of policymakers as the main variable for explaining successful reform. Both economists and political scientists, therefore, adopt a collective action approach that overlooks how groups organizein supportof liberalization.In the recent Latin American experience, however, these reforms have preserved market reserves for firms that provided vital political support to, and often colluded with, policymaking elites. This setting has thus reproduced incentives for rent-seeking behavior, even in the presence of comprehensive liberalization. This evidence supports two interrelated theoretical claims. First, distributional coalitions may proliferate when the state withdraws from the economy, not only when it intervenes. Second, interest-based variables retain explanatory power in political economy—which state autonomy arguments disregard—irrespective of whether the economy is closed or open—which neoclassical perspectives overlook. To highlight the centrality of interest groups favoring marketization, therefore, the article suggests modifications to the dominant theories of collective action and the literature on the politics of economic adjustment.

Research in the late 1980s showed that in many corporate real estates users were not fully aware of the full extent of their property holdings. In many cases, not only was the value of the holdings unknown, but there was uncertainty over the actual extent of ownership within the portfolio. This resulted in a large number of corporate occupiers reviewing their property holdings during the 1990s, initially to create a definitive asset register, but also to benefit from more efficient use of space. Good management of corporately owned property assets is of equal importance to the management of other principal resources within the company. A comprehensive asset register can be seen as the first step towards a rational property audit. For the effective, efficient and economic delivery of services, it is vital that all property holdings are utilised to the best advantage. This requires that the property provider and the property user are both fully conversant with the value of the property holding and that an asset/internal rent/charge is made accordingly. The advantages of internal rent charging are twofold. First, it requires the occupying department to ‘contribute’ an amount to the business equivalent to the open market rental value of the space that it occupies. This prevents the treating of space as a free good and, as an individual profit centre, each department will then rationalise its holdings to minimise its costs. The second advantage is from a strategic viewpoint: by charging an asset rent, the holding department can identify the performance of its real estate holdings. This can then be compared to an internal or external benchmark to help determine whether the company has adopted the most efficient tenure pattern for its properties. rents by UK‐based corporate businesses and explains internal rents as a form of transfer pricing in the context of management and responsibility accounting. The research finds that the majority of charging organisations introduced internal rents primarily to help calculate true profits at the business unit level. However, less than 10 per cent of the charging organisations introduced internal rents primarily to capture the return on assets within the business. There was also a sizeable element of the market who had no plans to introduce internal rents. Here, it appears that, despite academic and professional views that internal rents are beneficial in improving the efficient use of property, opinion at the business and operational level has not universally accepted this proposition. This paper investigates the use of internal

Air transportation is a major facilitator of international trade in terms of the value of goods and services involved, and is important to specific industries, such as tourism, that are being developed by many lower income countries. High air transportation costs can pose a major impediment to the economic growth of countries, or to regions within them. But international air transportation is also an industry in its own right that can earn profits and foreign exchange for the parenting country. The newer international trade models treat transportation as a transactions cost, reductions of which confer in most cases, a gain to trading partners. Reducing air transportation costs, if resulting from rent seeking activities in protected markets, can, however reduce income for the air transportation-providing country and may impact on its foreign exchange earnings. This can reduce the incentive for a country to participate in Open Skies type situations where international air services are offered in a competitive market. Furthermore liberal trade in air transportation services can, in some cases lead to potentially less efficient provision of these services.

Although not new to capitalism, Brazil experienced a dizzying increase in the Initial Public Offering (IPO) between 2004 and 2008. In the case of agribusiness, 18 companies made IPOs in this short period. Who are these companies? What were the objectives with the IPO? What are their drivers? What is the relationship between these companies and global land grabbing? These are some of the questions that this article seeks to answer by analyzing, more specifically, two companies that are pioneers in open stock capital in their respective areas: one linked to agricultural grain production and the other specialized in the land real estate market. These examples allow us to analyze the transformation of land into a financial asset, with the unprecedented integration between financial capital and land ownership, a sine qua non characteristic of the land grabbing process. Instead of a barrier to capital inflows, as the classic theory of ground rent points out, the examples demonstrate how land can be used as fictitious capital, with serious social and environmental impacts in areas of modern agricultural expansion in Brazil.

Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh is extremely populated, unhygienic and environmentally degraded city. The growing number of population and environmental degradation are due to natural disaster and economic depression. As a result, the rate of urban poor is and producing huge pressure on urban lands, housing and infrastructure. Due to limited resources these poor people encroached open spaces, wetlands, vacant plots or even footpath for shelter. They don’t have any access to proper job market, healthcare facilities, education and sanitation either. These constraints are mostly resulted from the failures of the government in initiation proper policies and measures. Past policies of slum clearance, modernist apartment projects, housing provision, self-help, sites and services, and in-situ upgrading have not been effective at solving the crisis. This is now prime time to established planning and environmental management policy and sustainable development of the city area. Urban land management, rehabilitation and socio-economic development of the slum dwellers are also very important issues. The key focus of this paper is to find out sustainable development process for urban slum dwellers and build sustainable living place for them which are free from eviction, criminals, rent seekers and other miscreants.

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The primary issues related the spatial organization of urban settlements are based on the development of density and land use decisions leading due to the market mechanisms. The current spatial land use pattern of cities have emerged depending various factors such as the migration movements increased rapidly from the 1950s, the rapid and uncontrolled urbanization, the pressures of rent directing the market mechanisms, etc. This urbanization process also has accompanied many problems as the insecure construction for disasters, dense and solid urban texture, various weaknesses or deficiencies of urban infrastructure. As a consequence of the evaluation for social facility areas (gaps in urban area, open and green areas, etc.) as “potential investment areas”, the loss of solid &amp;ndash; void ratio and dense built-environment have been experienced in urban centres and also urban development directions. The main aim of this study is to examine the spatial effects of land use decisions between the years of 2002 &amp;ndash; 2017 under the influence of the Law 6360 in terms of urban planning discipline. These spatial variations related land use pattern are determined using Google Earth and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). According to the results, it is clearly understood that current land use patterns in Guzelbahce district have changed significantly in 15-years period. The results of analyses related the case area which the urban sprawl has seen are discussed and a variety of policies have been developed.</p>

Since the beginning of the financial crisis of 2008, authors and politicians have regularly reminded us of the duality of crisis and opportunity. For policymakers, administrations, and candidates, crises represent opportunities to implement long-desired reforms, seize the public stage, and reframe old arguments in the light of today's urgency. As the books under review here suggest, crises also represent opportunities for scholars. Arguments that failed to gain traction in the past may now deserve new attention as they help us understand the roots of crisis or how to recover from it. New audiences may be receptive to established arguments, now that other policies have caused us grief and are failing to promote recovery. The public and decision makers could be open to listening to these arguments and their implications, now that crisis has revealed deep vulnerabilities.The three books that form the basis of this review essay represent trenchant critiques of neoliberal economic theory and policies, including such foundational policy assumptions as globalization, deregulation, and reliance on sophisticated financial tools. Their authors, three prominent economists, draw our attention to problems of market failure, such as rampant rent-seeking behavior and externalities. By focusing on entrenched dilemmas that include widening inequality and the compatibility of democracy and globalization, they remind us of the ways in which markets are embedded in social institutions, and how such institutions both respond to markets and shape market outcomes. All bring with them a deep commitment to understanding the functioning of society and how to maintain the benefits of global capitalism while reining in its most destructive implications.

Much of the focus of research on creative industries’ influence upon urban land use has been around the investment in specific regeneration projects or flagship developments rather than addressing the nature and location of the infrastructure, networks and agents engaged. In other words, the complexity of the institutional/temporal and spatial interaction among the involved elements is overlooked or not well understood. This paper presents an agent-based model named CID-USST (Creative Industries Development-Urban Spatial Structure Transformation) that examines the dynamics of the interaction between the development of creative industries and urban spatial structure by outputting a set of adaptive scenarios through time and space. It reveals that the spatial distribution of both the creative firms and the creative workers evolves in a repeating up-and-down pattern even when the exogenous urban economic condition is set to be steady. Moreover, the analysis also points to the policy implication that more open job/rent market information will lead to more rapid geographical clustering of the creative firms and the creative workers, which possibly may reduce the time cost in their spatial evolvement, and perhaps accelerate innovation if we accept that geographical proximity can enhance knowledge and information spill-over.

Launched in April 2016, the Family 500 Plus program significantly reduces the scale of poverty in large families, contributes to the growth of consumption and perhaps also to the increase in fertility in Poland. The second key program of social family policy in Poland launched in December 2016 is the Flat Plus program. This program, through the improvement of the housing situation, should fulfill important functions of housing policy in the scope of reducing the social stratification of families in Poland. The main objective of the Flat Plus program is to significantly increase the availability of flats, especially low-cost rental apartments, with the option of purchasing property after 20-30 years of use. The consequence of developing this program on a larger scale in the coming years will be offering such housing primarily for families who have not been able to rent and buy flats on the open market due to low incomes and lack of creditworthiness. If the plan adopted by the government to develop the Flat Plus program in the coming years will be implemented by 2030, the level of housing availability for citizens in Poland will reach a level close to the average in the European Union.

Housing markets play a decisive role in the spatial distribution of populations and the integration of immigrants. Looking specifically at Germany, shortages of low-rent housing in many cities are proving to be an open door for discrimination. This article looks at the influence institutional housing providers have on migrants’ access to housing. Based on 76 qualitative interviews with housing experts, politicians, local government officials, civil society and academics, the internal routines of housing companies are examined for the first time in a German context, looking at what effect they have on producing socio-spatial inequality. Using Lipsky’s (1980) ‘street-level bureaucracy’ as our conceptual framework, we argue that the barriers denying migrants access to the rental housing market are attributable to two factors: the organisational culture, whether in the form of official guidelines (‘policy as written’) or of day-to-day activities in the front-line context (‘policy as performed’), and the huge gap between the two. Corporate policies, the resultant allocation policies, staff training and housing company involvement in local governance structures play a decisive role in determining migrants’ access to housing. The goal of achieving the right social mix and the lack of guidelines for housing company staff in deciding who gets an apartment—turning their discretionary power into a certain kind of ‘forced discretion’—in many cases arbitrarily restrict access to housing in Germany. Theoretically embedding these findings in organisational sociology, the article adds to urban geographical and sociological research into the drivers and backgrounds of residential segregation.

Land in Ukraine can be in private, communal and state ownership. The lands of Ukraine include all lands within its territory, including islands and lands occupied by water bodies, which are divided into categories according to their main purpose. Legal entities may acquire land mainly for use on the rights of lease, sublease, emphyteusis and permanent use, may have agricultural land on the right of lifelong inherited land tenure, the legal regulation of which is currently absent. In Ukraine at this stage, models of organization of relations between business partners are effectively and justifiably used through the creation of a joint holding company in a foreign jurisdiction, which further establishes the company in Ukraine. As a result of the anti-terrorist operation and the occupation of Crimea on the territory of Ukraine, the rights of thousands of people to housing, land and property, including the rights of agricultural land use, were violated. Today, land lease is the main way of doing agribusiness, lease agreements have become an important tool for absorbing weaker competitors or seizing their land. In conditions of slow growth in the cost of rent, agricultural holdings can afford a slightly higher fee, which gives them a significant advantage over farmers. However, the moratorium on land has been lifted in 2020 and the land market in Ukraine will be introduced on July 1, 2021. From this date, agricultural land will be available to individuals, ie the moratorium on the sale of agricultural land will be lifted. As for legal entities, the land market will be open for them only from January 1, 2024.

Art markets are not homogeneous, the difference being especially between the art products that can be technically reproduced and the unique products. As for the former, regulations of the copyright type introduce certain specificities (the author retains some rights over the object in circulation— for example, she or he can withdraw it). In case of unique goods, the demand is determined by the buyers’ tastes and does not result from some generally valid presupposition: thus, these goods have a price, but they have no value. Since the aesthetic nature of the reproducible works of art is subject to the same laws as the unique artworks, the economy of unique artworks can serve as a paradigm for the economy of artworks in general. According to a theory developed by Rade Pantić, the price of unique artworks is a monopoly rent. As any other rent, it is determined by non-economic mechanisms. These mechanisms should allow for the freedom of individual tastes and at the same time provide a unique field within which these idiosyncratic attitudes can interact. The mechanisms determining the rent (price) of artworks are therefore ideological apparatuses that present themselves and their elements (individual taste judgments) as non-ideological, and moreover formulate the judgments as individual receptions open to “interpretation,” i.e. as cognitive-affective material to be processed in specific symbolic formations (in curatorial practices, art criticism, philosophical interventions, and alike). In contemporary art, the structure of ideological apparatuses reproduces domination-through-fragmentation, typical of contemporary capitalism.

Abstract The U.S. Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) sector, since its inception in the 1960s, has been witness to continuous evolution. The numerous events that have characterized its growth and its actual structure over time have made this sector an object of interest many researchers and authors, who tried to give answers to several financial questions that are still open to debate. We contend that a global review of financial literature on this specific industry could give good suggestions for further research themes for all those who are interested in studying the U.S. REIT market and its characteristics and for investors at large.

In this article, we present a historical analysis on how Sardinian pastoralism has become an integrated activity in global capitalism, oriented to the production of cheap milk, through the extraction of ecological surplus from the exploitation of nature and labour. Pastoralism has often been looked at as a marginal and traditional activity. On the contrary, our objective is to stress the central role played by pastoralism in the capitalist world-ecology. Since there is currently little work analysing the historical development of pastoralism in a concrete agro-ecological setting from a world-ecology perspective, we want to contribute to the development of the literature by analysing the concrete case of Sardinian pastoralism. To do so, we will use the analytical framework of world-ecology to analyse the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and the production of nature through which pastoralism -understood as a socio-cultural system that organises nature-society relations for the reproduction of local rural societies- became an activity trapped in the production of market commodities and cheap food exploiting human (labour) and extra-human factors (e.g. land, water, environment, animals etc.). Looking at the exploitation of extra-human factors, the concept of ecological surplus allows us to understand how capital accumulation and surplus was possible thanks to the exploitation of nature, or rather the creation of cheap nature and chap inputs for the production of cheap commodities. We analyse historical pastoralism to understand how geopolitical configurations of global capitalism interact with the national and local scales to change pastoral production, nature and labour relations. We will pay particular attention to the role of land and the relationship between pastoralists and animals. The article is based on secondary data, historical material and primary data collected from 2012 to 2020 through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research. We identify four main cycles of agro-ecological transformation to explore the interactions between waves of historical capitalist expansion and changes in the exploitation of agroecological factors. The first two phases will be explored in the first section of the paper: the mercantilist phase during the modern era and the commodification of pastoralist products, which extend from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the mercantilist phase, the expansion of pastoralism finds its external limits in the trend of international demand (influenced by international trade policies that may favour or hinder exports) and its internal limits in the competition/complementarity with agriculture for the available land that results in a transhumant model of pastoralism. In this phase, the ecological surplus needed for capitalist accumulation is produced by nature as a gift, or nature for free, which results in the possibility of producing milk at a very low cost by exploiting the natural pasture of the open fields. The second cycle, “the commodification of pastoralist products”, started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction on the island of the industrial processing of Pecorino Romano cheese, and which was increasingly in demand in the North American market. This pushed pastoralism towards a strong commodification. Shepherds stopped processing cheese on-farm and became producers of cheap milk for the Pecorino Romano processing industry. Industrialists control the distribution channels and therefore the price of milk. Moreover, following the partial privatisation of land and high rent prices, shepherds progressively lose the ecological surplus that was guaranteed by free land and natural grazing, key to lower production costs and to counterbalance the unequal distribution of wealth within the chain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, although the market for Pecorino Romano was growing, these contradictions emerged and the unfair redistribution of profits within the chain (which benefited industrialists, middlemen and landowners to the detriment of shepherds) led to numerous protests and the birth of shepherds' cooperatives. The second section of the paper will explore the third agro-ecological phase: the rise of the “monoculture of sheep-raising” through the modernisation policies (from the fifties until 1990s). The protests that affected the inland areas of Sardinia, as well as the increase in banditry, signal the impossibility of continuing to guarantee cheap nature and cheap labour, which are at the basis of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. On the basis of these pressures, the 1970s witnessed a profound transformation that opened a new cycle of accumulation: laws favouring the purchase of land led to the sedenterization of pastoralism, while agricultural modernisation policies pushed towards the rationalisation of the farm. Land improvements and technological innovations (such as the milking machine and the purchase of agricultural machinery) led to the beginning of the “monoculture of sheep raising”: a phase of intensification in the exploitation of nature and the extraction of ecological surplus. This includes a great increase of the number of sheep per unit of agricultural area, thanks to the cultivated pasture replacing natural grazing and the production and purchase of stock and feed. Subsidised agricultural modernisation and sedentarisation can once again "sustain" the cost of cheap milk that is the basis of the industrial dairy chain. However, agricultural modernisation results in the further commodification of pastoralism, which becomes increasingly dependent on the upstream and downstream market, making pastoralists less autonomous. Moreover, given the impossibility of further expanding the herd, the productivity need of keeping low milk production costs has to be achieved through an increase in the average production per head. Therefore, there are higher investments in genetic selection to increase breed productivity, higher investments to improve animal feeding and a more intensive animal exploitation to increase productivity. These production strategies imply higher farm costs. In this context, the fourth phase, the neoliberal phase (analysed in the third section of the paper) broke out in Sardinia in the mid-1990s. With the end of export subsidies and the opening of the new large-scale retail channel in which producers are completely subordinate, it starts a period of increased volatility in the price of milk. In order to counter income erosion and achieve the productivity gains needed to continue producing cheap milk, pastoralists have intensified the exploitation of both human (labour) and non-human (nature) factors, with contradictory effects. In the case of nature, the intensive exploitation of land through monocultural crops has reduced biodiversity and impoverished the soil. In the case of labour, pastoralists have intensified the levels of self-exploitation and free family labour to extreme levels and have also resorted to cheaply paid foreign labourers. Throughout the paper, we reconstruct the path towards the production of "cheap milk" in Sardinia, processed mainly into pecorino romano for international export. We argue that the production of ecological surplus through the exploitation of nature and labour has been central to capital accumulation and to the unfolding of the capitalist world ecology. However, we have reached a point of crisis where pastoralists are trapped between rising costs and eroding revenues. Further exploitation of human (cheap labour) and extra-human (nature and animals) factors is becoming unsustainable for the great majority, leading to a polarization between pastoralists who push towards further intensification and mechanisation and pastoralists who increasingly de-commodify to build greater autonomy.

Purpose German real estate investment trusts (REITs) are a small but important property investment vehicle in the European REIT landscape, offering German commercial property investment exposure in a liquid format, compared to the more property development-focused German listed property companies and the popular German open-ended property funds. The purpose of this paper is to assess the emergence of the German REIT market and the risk-adjusted performance and portfolio diversification benefits of German REITs in a mixed-asset portfolio over 2007-2015. The post-global financial crisis (GFC) recovery of German REITs is highlighted. Enabling strategies for the ongoing development of the German REIT market are also identified. Design/methodology/approach Using monthly total returns, the risk-adjusted performance and portfolio diversification benefits of German REITs over 2007-2015 are assessed. Efficient frontier and asset allocation diagrams are used to assess the role of German REITs (and German property companies) in a mixed-asset portfolio. Sub-period analysis is used to assess the post-GFC recovery of German REITs. Findings German REITs delivered lesser risk-adjusted returns compared to German stocks over 2007-2015, with limited portfolio diversification benefits. However, since the GFC, German REITs have delivered strong risk-adjusted returns, but with continued limited portfolio diversification benefits with German stocks. German REITs also out-performed German property companies. Importantly, this sees German REITs as strongly contributing to the German mixed-asset portfolio across the portfolio risk spectrum in the post-GFC environment. Practical implications German REITs are a small but important market at a local, European and global REIT level. The results highlight the major role of German REITs in a German mixed-asset portfolio in the post-GFC context. The strong risk-adjusted performance of German REITs compared to German stocks sees German REITs contributing to the mixed-asset portfolio across the portfolio risk spectrum. This is particularly important, as many investors (e.g. small pension funds) use German REITs (and German listed property companies) to obtain their German property exposure in a liquid format, as well as the increased importance of blended property portfolios of listed property and direct property. Originality/value This paper is the first published empirical research analysis of the risk-adjusted performance of German REITs, and the role of German REITs as a listed property vehicle in a mixed-asset portfolio. This research enables empirically validated, more informed and practical property investment decision making regarding the strategic role of German REITs in a portfolio.

The old debate amongst historians as to whether the testimony of the sixteenth century really bears out Adam Smith's claim that the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope constitutes ‘one of the two and most important events in the recorded history of mankind’ was, it seems, put to sleep with Niels Steensgaard's thesis of 1973. Steensgaard argued that ‘a structural revolution’ and which truly sounded the death-knell of the old overland caravan trades competing with the sea borne routes, was not effected by the Portuguese from 1498 but awaited the Dutch. The debate, however, was couched very much on the theory of the operation run by the Portuguese, and which was typologised as reactionary in that it relied upon the threat of force rather than commercial competitivity. Whilst price movements between Portuguese and Red Sea pepper on the European market have been analysed by historians such as Herman Van Der Wee and Rene Gascon, nobody has really stopped to consider the complex of factors intervening on the demand side. Pepper, like ginger, was not a unitary good as misleadingly assumed by Douglas Irwin in his attempt to analyse the Anglo-Dutch rivalry for the East India trade with the Brander-Spence analysis of duopolistic export competition. Price lists suggest that pepper came in manifold shapes, sizes and qualities, let alone competing species, all of which rendered the market remarkably heterogeneous with up to seven-fold price divergences between, for example, the different products that would pass as ‘pepper’. This article discusses some of the factors that made for market variegation, and focuses on the market consequences of a Portuguese policy of transportation in the open ship's hold. It suggests that quality was one of the demand factors that shaped the competition between the Adantic and Mediterranean spice trade.

AbstractTaking into account that the transparency is a quality of communication of sustainability information, as well as the role of digitalisation in ensuring the transparency, we proposed to study the perception of real estate entities related to promoting transparency in the relationship with stakeholders and the integration of information and communication technology in their business models. Applying a qualitative approach, we critically analysed the sustainability reports published by real estate companies from the EU, which represent important non-financial information sources for stakeholders. Transparency is mainly reflected in corporate governance, as real estate entities are increasingly concerned with maintaining open relationships with stakeholders and knowing their expectations to integrate them into the business strategy. We have noticed a broader approach of transparency in REIT entities and in reports that include an assurance statement. New digital technologies serve the purpose of improving transparency, which, although still poorly explored in real estate, offer new solutions to increase the efficiency and productivity of real estate activities. Property technology can improve real estate market transparency and liquidity, bringing lower transaction costs, which should positively impact the value of investment assets.

Private sector is one of the important element in the economic system driven by mar­ ket mechanism. It means that development process needs the entrepreneur group which is characterized as competitive and independent. However in Indonesia, this faction never grew yet since Indonesia took independence. What happened in Indonesia is the rise of group named “ client entrepreneur “ ( client businessmen) which their existence is highly dependent on the “patronage” and protection given by the state. While economic globaliza­ tion which recently wide spreads over the world demands governments to reduce their in­ volvement in many economic activity in order to increase the role of private sector. This last phenomenon happened since too large involvement of government bureaucracies have resulted failure and un-efficiency. That’s why numerous countries, including to Indonesia, conducted economic reforms to open the greater room to market mechanism. Keywords : businessmen, bureaucracy, economics

AbstractStarting point for the present analysis is the finding, that a market economy represents an interactive complex and open system. A discussion of these properties emphasised by systems theory leads to the result, that attempts to steer such a system by means of economic policy have to face narrow boundaries, which can only be surpassed by initiating unpredictable reactions of the system. As a consequence the steering knowledge is considered to be unsatisfactory from the point of view of an economic policy guided by the rationality principle. This leads to the question, how interventions should look like, which comply with the steering properties of the system. It requires a reformulation of the criterion of systems conformity by drawing on two processes, which govern the economic performance of the system. According to this criterion, interventions should neither interfere with the self-coordination of the actors nor with their self control by competitive action. Considering typical examples of interventions leads to the unpleasant result that there are good reasons to accept the hypothesis of rent-seeking as a salient feature of economic policy-making. Interventions emerge from the interaction between a rent-seeking lobby and rent-creating political actors. Finally considering scientific policy advice, a conflict between the advisor who himself has committed to systems conformity, and the advised political actor, who is involved in rent-creating, is bound to emerge. This conflict can only be solved by engaging in constitutional reforms, which change the incentive situation of political actors completely. However, such reforms are difficult to bring about, because they manifestly go against the interests of political actors who have to set their own constitutional rules.

Purpose Coworking space had been a trajectory in the commercial space operation and management globally. Commercial coworking/tenancy space is confronted with an unexpected shift. This paper aims to examine the peculiarity and investment characteristics of flexible office space and the post-COVID implications on coworking office space practice and investment. This is with a view toward providing investors with an understanding of the dynamics underpinning flexible office space investment in the Nigerian emerging property market. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted a qualitative research approach. Open-ended interview questions were used to solicit information from nine coworking space operators in the urban property market of Ibadan, Nigeria. The structured interview data were analyzed using Atlas.ti – a computer-aided qualitative data analysis software. Findings The findings show that the factors influencing demand for flexible office space in the study area include flexibility, affordability, cost-effectiveness, entrepreneurship motivations and opportunity for risk sharing. The results also revealed that coworkers are predominantly mobile individuals who require a workstation away from their homes or a traditional office setup. Management challenges include deficient infrastructure, low level of awareness, stealing and high cost of operations. The impact of COVID-19 includes a drop in patronage, rent refunds, changes in working pattern and job loss, restriction to online and remote operation, the extra cost of putting prevention measures in place, changes in tenancy contract and drops in return on investment. Practical implications This study has implications for investors in commercial space occupation and leases in comparable developing economies. Originality/value The novelty of this paper lies in its relevance with the emergent behavioral changes, orchestrated from the novel COVID-19, which compels reevaluation of workplace practices and investment for economic improvement, especially as it relates to commercial real estate investment.

AbstractThe Development of property business investment is entering new era. This can be seen with the new investment, Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT), which can be offered to investor in capital market. The emergence of new investment cause capital needs closely inter-link between property industry and capital market, whereby traditionally, banking industry dominated before. Property market will be more efficient, fair, accountable. It is not only dominated by only some participants/exclusives but also opened investment opportunities for middle or small investor. A part from that, the tendency of banking industries is very selective to lend fund and high interest, open to grow up this investment opportunity. Also, Indonesia is judged as one of high potential countries to grow up this property trust because of high property grow up. Regard that condition, this paper demonstrates law relation between parties in REIT and how rules of Law of Republic Indonesia Number 8 Year 1995 concerning Capital Market can accomodate the REIT implementation all at once as ‘Law Umbrella’ in Indonesia Law.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of conversion to REIT status by former listed property companies in the United Kingdom on the level of institutional ownership during the period of 2007–2016.Design/methodology/approachThis paper uses an event study framework to track the change in institutional ownership three years before and after a REIT conversion event. This event study approach circumvents the sample selection bias issue associated with the conversion event wherein the decision to convert to REIT is likely to be endogenous.FindingsPanel regression analysis reveals that changing to REIT status led to a 12.8 and 15.2% increase in institutional ownership and number of institutional investors, respectively. The first order of priority in institutional investors' investment in REIT shares is their preference for liquidity. Further analysis shows that institutional investors changed their preferences towards characteristics associated with systematic risk, firm age and liquidity after the conversion event by becoming less averse to firm-specific risk, placing more emphasis on firm age and less emphasis on systematic risk and liquidity.Practical implicationsOverall, conversion to REIT status helps increase former property companies' investor base, which is in line with the regulator's aim to open up the property market to a wide range of investors through the introduction of a REIT regime. Findings from this paper also have policy implications for countries that are considering a REIT regime for their capital market and existing REIT regimes without a formal conversion mechanism.Originality/valueThis paper offers, for the first time, evidence on 1) how conversion to REITs influences firms' institutional ownership and 2) the determinants of converted REITs' institutional ownership.

Introduction: Artist Villages in Beijing Many of the most renowned sites of Beijing are found in the inner-city districts of Dongcheng and Xicheng: for instance, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Lama Temple, the National Theatre, the Central Opera Academy, the Bell Tower, the Drum Tower, the Imperial College, and the Confucius Temple. However, in the past decade a new attraction has been added to the visitor “must-see” list in Beijing. The 798 Art District originated as an artist village within abandoned factory buildings at Dashanzi, right between the city’s Central Business District and the open outer rural space on Beijing’s north-east. It is arguably the most striking symbol of China’s contemporary art scene. The history of the 798 Art District is by now well known (Keane), so this paper will provide a short summary of its evolution. Of more concern is the relationship between the urban fringe and what Howard Becker has called “art worlds.” By art worlds, Becker refers to the multitude of agents that contribute to a final work of art: for instance, people who provide canvasses, frames, and art supplies; critics and intermediaries; and the people who run exhibition services. To the art-world list in Beijing we need to add government officials and developers. To date there are more than 100 artist communities or villages in Beijing; almost all are located in the city’s outskirts. In particular, a high-powered art centre outside the city of Beijing has recently established a global reputation. Songzhuang is situated in outer Tongzhou District, some 30 kilometres east of Tiananmen Square. The Beijing Municipal Government officially classifies Songzhuang as the Capital Art District (CAD) or “the Songzhuang Original Art Cluster.” The important difference between 798 and Songzhuang is that, whereas the former has become a centre for retail and art galleries, Songzhuang operates as an arts production centre for experimental art, with less focus on commercial art. The destiny of the artistic communities is closely related to urban planning policies that either try to shut them down or protect them. In this paper I will take a close look at three artist villages: Yuanmingyuan, 798, and Songzhuang. In tracing the evolution of the three artist villages, I will shed some light on artists’ lives in city fringes. I argue that these outer districts provide creative industries with a new opportunity for development. This is counter to the conventional wisdom that central urban areas are the ideal locality for creative industries. Accordingly, this argument needs to be qualified: some types of creative work are more suitable to rural and undeveloped areas. The visual art “industry” is one of these. Inner and Outer Worlds Urban historians contend that innovation is more likely to happen in inner urban areas because of intensive interactions between people (Jacobs). City life has been associated with the development of creative industries and economic benefits brought about by the interaction of creative classes. In short, the argument is that cities, or, more specifically, urban areas are primary economic entities (Montgomery) whereas outer suburbs are uncreative and dull (Florida, "Cities"). The conventional wisdom is that talented creative people are attracted to the creative milieu in cities: universities, book shops, cafes, museums, theatres etc. These are both the hard and the soft infrastructure of modern cities. They illustrate diversified built forms, lifestyles and experiences (Lorenzen and Frederiksen; Florida, Rise; Landry; Montgomery; Leadbeater and Oakley). The assumption that inner-city density is the cradle of creative industries has encountered critique. Empirical studies in Australia have shown that creative occupations are found in relatively high densities in urban fringes. The point made in several studies is that suburbia has been neglected by scholars and policy makers and may have potential for future development (Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Commission; Collis, Felton, and Graham). Moreover, some have argued that the practice of constructing inner city enclaves may be leading to homogenized and prescriptive geographies (Collis, Felton, and Graham; Kotkin). As Jane Jacobs has indicated, it is not only density of interactions but diversity that attracts and accommodates economic growth in cities. However, the spatiality of creative industries varies across different sectors. For example, media companies and advertising agencies are more likely to be found in the inner city, whereas most visual artists prefer working in the comparatively quiet and loosely-structured outskirts. Nevertheless, the logic embodied in thinking around the distinctions between “urbanism” and “suburbanism” pays little attention to this issue, although both schools acknowledge the causal relationship between locality and creativity. According to Drake, empirical evidence shows that the function of locality is not only about encouraging interactions between SMEs (small to medium enterprises) within clusters which can generate creativity, but also a catalyst for individual creativity (Drake). Therefore for policy makers in China, the question here is how to plan or prepare a better space to accommodate creative professionals’ needs in different sectors while making the master plan. This question is particularly urgent to the Chinese government, which is undertaking a massive urbanization transition throughout the country. In placing a lens on Beijing, it is important to note the distinctive features of its politics, forms of social structure, and climate. As Zhu has described it, Beijing has spread in a symmetrical structure. The reasons have much to do with ancient history. According to Zhu, the city which was planned in the era of Genghis Khan was constituted by four layers or enclosures, with the emperor at the centre, surrounded by the gentry and other populations distributed outwards according to wealth, status, and occupation. The outer layer accommodated many lower social classes, including itinerant artists, musicians, and merchants. This ”outer city” combined with open rural space. The system of enclosures is carried on in today’s city planning of Beijing. Nowadays Beijing is most commonly described by its ring roads (Mars and Hornsby). However, despite the existing structure, new approaches to urban policy have resulted in a great deal of flux. The emergence of new landscapes such as semi-urbanized villages, rural urban syndicates (chengxiang jiehebu), and villages-within-cities (Mars and Hornsby 290) illustrate this flux. These new types of landscapes, which don’t correspond to the suburban concept that we find in the US or Australia, serve to represent and mediate the urban-rural relationship in China. The outer villages also reflect an old tradition of “recluse” (yin shi), which since the Wei and Jin Dynasties allowed intellectuals to withdraw themselves from the temporal world of the city and live freely in the mountains. The Lost Artistic Utopia: Yuanmingyuan Artist Village Yuanmingyuan, also known as the Ming Dynasty summer palace, is located in Haidian District in the north-west of Beijing. Haidian has transformed from an outer district of Beijing into one of its flourishing urban districts since the mid-1980s. Haidian’s success is largely due to the electronics industry which developed from spin-offs from Peking University, Tsinghua University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in the 1980s. This led to the rapid emergence of Zhongguancun, sometimes referred to as China’s Silicon Valley. However there is another side of Haidian’s transformation. As the first graduates came out of Chinese Academies of the Arts following the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), creative lifestyles became available. Some people quit jobs at state-owned institutions and chose to go freelance, which was unimaginable in China under the former regime of Mao Zedong. By 1990, the earliest “artist village” emerged around the Yuanmingyuan accommodating artists from around China. The first site was Fuyuanmen village. Artists living and working there proudly called their village “West Village” in China, comparing it to the Greenwich Village in New York. At that time they were labelled as “vagabonds” (mangliu) since they had no family in Beijing, and no stable job or income. Despite financial difficulties, the Yuanmingyuan artist village was a haven for artists. They were able to enjoy a liberating and vigorous environment by being close to the top universities in Beijing[1]. Access to ideas was limited in China at that time so this proximity was a key ingredient. According to an interview by He Lu, the Yuanmingyuan artist village gave artists a sense of belonging which went far beyond geographic identification as a marginal group unwelcomed by conservative urban society. Many issues arose along with the growth of the artist village. The non-traditional lifestyle and look of these artists were deemed abnormal by many of the general public; the way of their expression and behaviour was too extreme to be accepted by the mainstream in what was ultimately a political district; they were a headache for local police who saw them as troublemakers; moreover, their contact with the western world was a sensitive issue for the government at that time. Suddenly, the village was closed by the government in 1993. Although the Yuanmingyuan artist village existed for only a few years, it is of significance in China’s contemporary art history. It is the birth place of the cynical realism movement as well as the genesis of Fang Lijun, Zhang Xiaogang and Yue Mingjun, now among the most successful Chinese contemporary artists in global art market. The Starting Point of Art Industry: 798 and Songzhuang After the Yuanmingyuan artist village was shut down in 1993, artists moved to two locations in the east of Beijing to escape from the government and embrace the free space they longed for. One was 798, an abandoned electronic switching factory in Beijing’s north-east urban fringe area; the other was Songzhuang in Tongzhou District, a further twenty kilometres east. Both of these sites would be included in the first ten official creative clusters by Beijing municipal government in 2006. But instead of simply being substitutes for the Yuanmingyuan artist village, both have developed their own cultures, functioning and influencing artists’ lives in different ways. Songzhuang is located in Tongzhou which is an outer district in Beijing’s east. Songzhuang was initially a rural location; its livelihood was agriculture and industry. Just before the closing down of the Yuanmingyuan village, several artists including Fang Lijun moved to this remote quiet village. Through word of mouth, more artists followed their steps. There are about four thousand registered artists currently living in Songzhuang now; it is already the biggest visual art community in Beijing. An artistic milieu and a local sense of place have grown with the increasing number of artists. The local district government invests in building impressive exhibition spaces and promoting art in order to bring in more tourists, investors and artists. Compared with Songzhuang, 798 enjoys a favourable location along the airport expressway, between the capital airport and the CBD of Beijing. The unused electronics plant was initially rented as classrooms by the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in the 1990s. Then several artists moved their studios and workshops to the area upon eviction from the Yuanmingyuan village. Until 2002 the site was just a space to rent cheap work space, a factor that has stimulated many art districts globally (Zukin). From that time the resident artists began to plan how to establish a contemporary art district in China. Led by Huang Rui, a leading visual artist, the “798 collective” launched arts events and festivals, notably a “rebuilding 798” project of 2003. More galleries, cafés, bars, and restaurants began to set up, culminating in a management takeover by the Chaoyang District government with the Seven Stars Group[2] prior to the Beijing Olympics. The area now provides massive tax revenue to the local and national government. Nonetheless, both 798 and Songzhuang face problems which reflect the conflict between artists’ attachment to fringe areas and the government’s urbanization approach. 798 can hardly be called an artist production village now due to the local government’s determination to exploit cultural tourism. Over 50 percent of enterprises and people working in 798 now identify 798 as a tourism area rather than an art or “creative” cluster (Liu). Heavy commercialization has greatly disappointed many leading artists. The price for renting space has gone beyond the affordability of artists, and many have chosen to leave. In Songzhuang, the story is similar. In addition to rising prices, a legal dispute between artists and local residents regarding land property rights in 2008 drove some artists out of Songzhuang because they didn’t feel it was stable anymore (Smith). The district’s future as a centre of original art runs up against the aspirations of local officials for more tax revenue and tourist dollars. In the Songzhuang Cultural Creative Industries Cluster Design Plan (cited in Yang), which was developed by J.A.O Design International Architects and Planners Limited and sponsored by the Songzhuang local government in 2007, Songzhuang is designed as an “arts capital incorporated with culture, commerce and tourism.” The down side of this aspiration is that more museums, galleries, shopping centres, hotels, and recreation infrastructure will inevitably be developed in order to capitalise on Songzhuang’s global reputation. Concluding Reflections In reflecting on the recent history of artist villages in Beijing, we might conclude that rural locations are not only a cheap place for artists to live but also a space to showcase their works. More importantly, the relation of artists and outlying district has evolved into a symbiotic relationship. They interact and grow together. The existence of artists transforms the locale and the locale in turn reinforces the identity of artists. In Yuanmingyuan the artists appreciated the old “recluse” tradition and therefore sought spiritual liberation after decades of suppression. The outlying location symbolized freedom to them and provided distance from the world of noisy interaction. But isolation of artists from the local community and the associated constant conflict with local villagers deepened estrangement; these events brought about the end of the dream. In contrast, at 798 and Songzhuang, artists not only regarded the place as their worksite but also engaged with the local community. They communicated with local people and co-developed projects to transform the local landscape. Local communities changed; they started to learn about the artistic world while gaining economic benefits in many ways, such as house renting, running small grocery stores, providing art supplies and even modelling. Their participation into the “art worlds” (Becker) contributed to a changing cultural environment, in turn strengthening the brand of these artist villages. In many regards there were positive externalities for both artists and the district, although as I mentioned in relation to Songzhuang, tensions about land use have never completely been resolved. Today, the fine arts in China have gone far beyond the traditional modes of classics, aesthetics, liberation or rebellion. Art is also a business which requires the access to the material world in order to produce incomes and make profits. It appears that many contemporary artists are not part of a movement of rebellion (except several artists, such as Ai Weiwei), adopting the pure spirit of art as their life-time mission, as in the Yuanmingyuan artist village. They still long for recognition, but they are also concerned with success and producing a livelihood. The boundary between inner urban and outer urban areas is not as significant to them as it once was for artists from a former period. While many artists enjoy the quiet and space of the fringe and rural areas to work; they also require urban space to exhibit their works and earn money. This factor explains the recent emergence of Caochangdi and other artist villages in the neighbouring area around the 798. These latest artist villages in the urban fringe still have open and peaceful spaces and can be accessed easily due to convenient transportation. Unfortunately, the coalition of business and government leads to rapid commercialization of place which is not aligned with the basic need of artists, which is not only a free or affordable place but also a space for creativity. As mentioned above, 798 is now so commercialized that it is too crowded and expensive for artists due to the government’s overdevelopment; whereas the government’s original intention was to facilitate the development of 798. Furthermore, although artists are a key stakeholder in the government’s agenda for visual art industry, it is always the government’s call when artists’ attachment to rural space comes into conflict with Beijing government’s urbanization plan. Hence the government decides which artist villages should be sacrificed to give way to urban development and which direction the reserved artist villages or art clusters should be developed. The logic of government policy causes an absolute distinction between cities and outlying districts. And the government’s enthusiasm for “urbanization” leads to urbanized artist villages, such as the 798. A vicious circle is formed: the government continuously attempts to have selected artist villages commercialized and transformed into urbanized or quasi-urbanized area and closes other artist villages. One of the outcomes of this policy is that in the government created creative clusters, many artists do not stay, and move away into rural and outlying areas because they prefer to work in non-urban spaces. To resolve this dilemma, greater attention is required to understand artists needs and ways to combine urban convenience and rural tranquillity into their development plans. This may be a bridge too far, however. Reference Becker, Howard Saul. Art Worlds. 25th anniversary, updated and expanded ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2008. Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. "Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice." The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12. Commission, Outer London. The Mayor's Outer London Commission: Report. London: Great London Authority, 2010. Drake, Graham. "'This Place Gives Me Space': Place and Creativity in the Creative Industries." Geoforum 34.4 (2003): 511–24. Florida, Richard. "Cities and the Creative Class." The Urban Sociology Reader. Eds. Jan Lin and Christopher Mele. London: Routledge, 2005. 290–301. ———. The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. "Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research." Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Jacobs, Jane. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House, 1969. Keane, Michael. "The Capital Complex: Beijing's New Creative Clusters." Creative Economies, Creative Cities: Asian-European Perspectives. Ed. Lily Kong and Justin O'Connor. London: Springer, 2009. 77–95. Kotkin, Joel. "The Protean Future of American Cities." New Geographer 7 Mar. 2011. 27 Mar. 2011 ‹http://blogs.forbes.com/joelkotkin/2011/03/07/the-protean-future-of-american-cities/›. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan Publications, 2000. Leadbeater, Charles, and Kate Oakley. The Independents: Britain's New Cultural Entrepreneurs. London: Demos, 1999. Liu, Mingliang. "Beijing 798 Art Zone: Field Study and Follow-Up Study in the Context of Market." Chinese National Academy of Arts, 2010. Lorenzen, Mark, and Lars Frederiksen. "Why Do Cultural Industries Cluster? Localization, Urbanization, Products and Projects." Creative Cities, Cultural Clusters and Local Economic Development. Ed. Philip Cooke and Luciana Lazzeretti. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008. 155-79. Mars, Neville, and Adrian Hornsby. The Chinese Dream: A Society under Construction. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008. Montgomery, John. The New Wealth of Cities: City Dynamics and the Fifth Wave. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Smith, Karen. "Heart of the Art." Beijing: Portrait of a City. Ed. Alexandra Pearson and Lucy Cavender. Hong Kong: The Middle Kingdom Bookworm, 2008. 106–19. Yang, Wei, ed. Songzhuang Arts 2006. Beijing: Hunan Fine Arts Press, 2007. Zhu, Jianfei. Chinese Spatial Strategies Imperial Beijing, 1420-1911. Routledge Curzon, 2004. Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. [1] Most prestigious Chinese universities are located in the Haidian District of Beijing, such as Peking University, Tsinghua University, etc. [2] Seven Star Group is the landholder of the area where 798 is based.

Economics of Cute There are many ways to study cute: for example, neuro-biology (cute as adaptation); anthropology (cute in culture); political economy (cute industries, how cute exploits consumers); cultural studies (social construction of cute); media theory and politics (representation and identity of cute), and so on. What about economics? At first sight, this might point to a money-capitalism nexus (“the cute economy”), but I want to argue here that the economics of cute actually works through choice interacting with fixed costs and what economists call ”the substitution effect”. Cute, in conjunction with the Internet, affects the trade-offs involved in choices people make. Let me put that more starkly: cute shapes the economy. This can be illustrated with internet animals, which at the time of writing means Grumpy Cat. I want to explain how that mechanism works – but to do so I will need some abstraction. This is not difficult – a simple application of a well-known economics model, namely the Allen-Alchian theorem, or the “third law of demand”. But I am going to take some liberties in order to represent that model clearly in this short paper. Specifically, I will model just two extremes of quality (“opera” and “cat videos”) to represent end-points of a spectrum. I will also assume that the entire effect of the internet is to lower the cost of cat videos. Now obviously these are just simplifying assumptions “for the purpose of the model”. And the purpose of the model is to illuminate a further aspect of how we might understand cute, by using an economic model of choice and its consequences. This is a standard technique in economics, but not so in cultural studies, so I will endeavour to explain these moments as we go, so as to avoid any confusion about analytic intent. The purpose of this paper is to suggest a way that a simple economic model might be applied to augment the cultural study of cute by seeking to unpack its economic aspect. This can be elucidated by considering the rise of internet animals as a media-cultural force, as epitomized by “cat videos”. We can explain this through an application of price theory and the theory of demand that was first proposed by Armen Alchian and William Allen. They showed how an equal fixed cost that was imposed to both high-quality and low-quality goods alike caused a shift in consumption toward the higher-quality good, because it is now relatively cheaper. Alchian and Allen had in mind something like transport costs on agricultural goods (such as apples). But it is also true that the same effect works in reverse (Cowen), and the purpose of this paper is to develop that logic to contribute to explaining how certain structural shifts in production and consumption in digital media, particularly the rise of blog formats such as Tumblr, a primary supplier of kittens on the Internet, can be in part understood as a consequence of this economic mechanism. There are three key assumptions to build this argument. The first is that the cost of the internet is independent of what it carries. This is certainly true at the level of machine code, and largely true at higher levels. What might be judged aesthetically high quality or low quality content – say of a Bach cantata or a funny cat video – are treated the same way if they both have the same file size. This is a physical and computational aspect of net-neutrality. The internet – or digitization – functions as a fixed cost imposed regardless of what cultural quality is moving across it. Second, while there are costs to using the internet (for example, in hardware or concerning digital literacy) these costs are lower than previous analog forms of information and cultural production and dissemination. This is not an empirical claim, but a logical one (revealed preference): if it were not so, people would not have chosen it. The first two points – net neutrality and lowered cost – I want to take as working assumptions, although they can obviously be debated. But that is not the purpose of the paper, which is instead the third point – the “Alchian-Allen theorem”, or the third fundamental law of demand. The Alchian-Allen Theorem The Alchian-Allen theorem is an extension of the law of demand (Razzolini et al) to consider how the distribution of high quality and low quality substitutes of the same good (such as apples) is affected by the imposition of a fixed cost (such as transportation). It is also known as the “shipping the good apples out” theorem, after Borcherding and Silberberg explained why places that produce a lot of apples – such as Seattle in the US – often also have low supplies of high quality apples compared to places that do not produce apples, such as New York. The puzzle of “why can’t you get good apples in Seattle?” is a simple but clever application of price theory. When a place produces high quality and low quality items, it will be rational for those in faraway places to consume the high quality items, and it will be rational for the producers to ship them, leaving only the low quality items locally.Why? Assume preferences and incomes are the same everywhere and that transport cost is the same regardless of whether the item shipped is high or low quality. Both high quality and low quality apples are more expensive in New York compared to Seattle, but because the fixed transport cost applies to both the high quality apples are relatively less expensive. Rational consumers in New York will consume more high quality apples. This makes fewer available in Seattle.Figure 1: Change in consumption ratio after the imposition of a fixed cost to all apples Another example: Australians drink higher quality Californian wine than Californians, and vice versa, because it is only worth shipping the high quality wine out. A counter-argument is that learning effects dominate: with high quality local product, local consumers learn to appreciate quality, and have different preferences (Cowen and Tabarrok).The Alchian-Allen theorem applies to any fixed cost that applies generally. For example, consider illegal drugs (such as alcohol during the US prohibition, or marijuana or cocaine presently) and the implication of a fixed penalty – such as a fine, or prison sentence, which is like a cost – applied to trafficking or consumption. Alchian-Allen predicts a shift toward higher quality (or stronger) drugs, because with a fixed penalty and probability of getting caught, the relatively stronger substance is now relatively cheaper. Empirical work finds that this effect did occur during alcohol prohibition, and is currently occurring in narcotics (Thornton Economics of Prohibition, "Potency of illegal drugs").Another application proposed by Steven Cuellar uses Alchian-Allen to explain a well-known statistical phenomenon why women taking the contraceptive pill on average prefer “more masculine” men. This is once again a shift toward quality predicted on falling relative price based on a common ‘fixed price’ (taking the pill) of sexual activity. Jean Eid et al show that the result also applies to racehorses (the good horses get shipped out), and Staten and Umbeck show it applies to students – the good students go to faraway universities, and the good student in those places do the same. So that’s apples, drugs, sex and racehorses. What about the Internet and kittens?Allen-Alchian Explains Why the Internet Is Made of CatsIn analog days, before digitization and Internet, the transactions costs involved with various consumption items, whether commodities or media, meant that the Alchian-Allen effect pushed in the direction of higher quality, bundled product. Any additional fixed costs, such as higher transport costs, or taxes or duties, or transactions costs associated with search and coordination and payment, i.e. costs that affected all substitutes in the same way, would tend to make the higher quality item relatively less expensive, increasing its consumption.But digitisation and the Internet reverse the direction of these transactions costs. Rather than adding a fixed cost, such as transport costs, the various aspects of the digital revolution are equivalent to a fall in fixed costs, particularly access.These factors are not just one thing, but a suite of changes that add up to lowered transaction costs in the production, distribution and consumption of media, culture and games. These include: The internet and world-wide-web, and its unencumbered operation The growth and increasing efficacy of search technology Growth of universal broadband for fast, wide band-width access Growth of mobile access (through smartphones and other appliances) Growth of social media networks (Facebook, Twitter; Metcalfe’s law) Growth of developer and distribution platforms (iPhone, android, iTunes) Globally falling hardware and network access costs (Moore’s law) Growth of e-commerce (Ebay, Amazon, Etsy) and e-payments (paypal, bitcoin) Expansions of digital literacy and competence Creative commons These effects do not simply shift us down a demand curve for each given consumption item. This effect alone simply predicts that we consume more. But the Alchian-Allen effect makes a different prediction, namely that we consume not just more, but also different.These effects function to reduce the overall fixed costs or transactions costs associated with any consumption, sharing, or production of media, culture or games over the internet (or in digital form). With this overall fixed cost component now reduced, it represents a relatively larger decline in cost at the lower-quality, more bite-sized or unbundled end of the media goods spectrum. As such, this predicts a change in the composition of the overall consumption basket to reflect the changed relative prices that these above effects give rise to. See Figure 2 below (based on a blog post by James Oswald). The key to the economics of cute, in consequence of digitisation, is to follow through the qualitative change that, because of the Alchian-Allen effect, moves away from the high-quality, highly-bundled, high-value end of the media goods spectrum. The “pattern prediction” here is toward more, different, and lower quality: toward five minutes of “Internet animals”, rather than a full day at the zoo. Figure 2: Reducing transaction costs lowers the relative price of cat videos Consider five dimensions in which this more and different tendency plays out. Consumption These effects make digital and Internet-based consumption cheaper, shifting us down a demand curve, so we consume more. That’s the first law of demand in action: i.e. demand curves slope downwards. But a further effect – brilliantly set out in Cowen – is that we also consume lower-quality media. This is not a value judgment. These lower-quality media may well have much higher aesthetic value. They may be funnier, or more tragic and sublime; or faster, or not. This is not about absolute value; only about relative value. Digitization operating through Allen-Alchian skews consumption toward the lower quality ends in some dimensions: whether this is time, as in shorter – or cost, as in cheaper – or size, as in smaller – or transmission quality, as in gifs. This can also be seen as a form of unbundling, of dropping of dimensions that are not valued to create a simplified product.So we consume different, with higher variance. We sample more than we used to. This means that we explore a larger information world. Consumption is bite-sized and assorted. This tendency is evident in the rise of apps and in the proliferation of media forms and devices and the value of interoperability.ProductionAs consumption shifts (lower quality, greater variety), so must production. The production process has two phases: (1) figuring out what to do, or development; and (2) doing it, or making. The world of trade and globalization describes the latter part: namely efficient production. The main challenge is the world of innovation: the entrepreneurial and experimental world of figuring out what to do, and how. It is this second world that is radically transformed by implications of lowered transaction costs.One implication is growth of user-communities based around collaborative media projects (such as open source software) and community-based platforms or common pool resources for sharing knowledge, such as the “Maker movement” (Anderson 2012). This phenomenon of user-co-creation, or produsers, has been widely recognized as an important new phenomenon in the innovation and production process, particularly those processes associated with new digital technologies. There are numerous explanations for this, particularly around preferences for cooperation, community-building, social learning and reputational capital, and entrepreneurial expectations (Quiggin and Potts, Banks and Potts). Business Models The Alchian-Allen effect on consumption and production follows through to business models. A business model is a way of extracting value that represents some strategic equilibrium between market forms, organizational structures, technological possibilities and institutional framework and environmental conditions that manifests in entrepreneurial patterns of business strategy and particular patterns of investment and organization. The discovery of effective business models is a key process of market capitalist development and competition. The Alchian-Allen effect impacts on the space of effective viable business models. Business models that used to work will work less well, or not at all. And new business models will be required. It is a significant challenge to develop these “economic technologies”. Perhaps no less so than development of the physical technologies, new business models are produced through experimental trial and error. They cannot be known in advance or planned. But business models will change, which will affect not only the constellation of existing companies and the value propositions that underlie them, but also the broader specializations based on these in terms of skill sets held and developed by people, locations of businesses and people, and so on. New business models will emerge from a process of Schumpeterian creative destruction as it unfolds (Beinhocker). The large production, high development cost, proprietary intellectual property and systems based business model is not likely to survive, other than as niche areas. More experimental, discovery-focused, fast-development-then-scale-up based business models are more likely to fit the new ecology. Social Network Markets & Novelty Bundling MarketsThe growth of variety and diversity of choice that comes with this change in the way media is consumed to reflect a reallocation of consumption toward smaller more bite-sized, lower valued chunks (the Alchian-Allen effect) presents consumers with a problem, namely that they have to make more choices over novelty. Choice over novelty is difficult for consumers because it is experimental and potentially costly due to risk of mistakes (Earl), but it also presents entrepreneurs with an opportunity to seek to help solve that problem. The problem is a simple consequence of bounded rationality and time scarcity. It is equivalent to saying that the cost of choice rises monotonically with the number of choices, and that because there is no way to make a complete rational choice, agents will use decision or choice heuristics. These heuristics can be developed independently by the agents themselves through experience, or they can be copied or adopted from others (Earl and Potts). What Potts et al call “social network markets” and what Potts calls “novelty bundling markets” are both instances of the latter process of copying and adoption of decision rules. Social network markets occur when agents use a “copy the most common” or “copy the highest rank” meta-level decision rule (Bentley et al) to deal with uncertainty. Social network markets can be efficient aggregators of distributed information, but they can also be path-dependent, and usually lead to winner-take all situations and dynamics. These can result in huge pay-offs differentials between first and second or fifth place, even when the initial quality differentials are slight or random. Diversity, rapid experimentation, and “fast-failure” are likely to be effective strategies. It also points to the role of trust and reputation in using adopted decision rules and the information economics that underlies that: namely that specialization and trade applies to the production and consumption of information as well as commodities. Novelty bundling markets are an entrepreneurial response to this problem, and observable in a range of new media and creative industries contexts. These include arts, music or food festivals or fairs where entertainment and sociality is combined with low opportunity cost situations in which to try bundles of novelty and connect with experts. These are by agents who developed expert preferences through investment and experience in consumption of the particular segment or domain. They are expert consumers and are selling their “decision rules” and not just the product. The more production and consumption of media and digital information goods and services experiences the Alchian-Allen effect, the greater the importance of novelty bundling markets. Intellectual Property & Regulation A further implication is that rent-seeking solutions may also emerge. This can be seen in two dimensions; pursuit of intellectual property (Boldrin and Levine); and demand for regulations (Stigler). The Alchian-Allen induced shift will affect markets and business models (and firms), and because this will induce strategic defensive and aggressive responses from different organizations. Some organizations will seek to fight and adapt to this new world through innovative competition. Other firms will fight through political connections. Most incumbent firms will have substantial investments in IP or in the business model it supports. Yet the intellectual property model is optimized for high-quality large volume centralized production and global sales of undifferentiated product. Much industrial and labour regulation is built on that model. How governments support such industries is predicated on the stability of this model. The Alchian-Allen effect threatens to upset that model. Political pushback will invariably take the form of opposing most new business models and the new entrants they carry. Conclusion I have presented here a lesser-known but important theorem in applied microeconomics – the Alchian-Allen effect – and explain why its inverse is central to understanding the evolution of new media industries, and also why cute animals proliferate on the Internet. The theorem states that when a fixed cost is added to substitute goods, consumers will shift to the higher quality item (now relatively less expensive). The theorem also holds in reverse, when a fixed cost is removed from substitute items we expect a shift to lower quality consumption. The Internet has dramatically lowered fixed costs of access to media consumption, and various development platforms have similarly lowered the costs of production. Alchian-Allen predicts a shift to lower-quality, ”bittier” cuter consumption (Cowen). References Alchian, Arman, and William Allen. Exchange and Production. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1967. Anderson, Chris. Makers. New York: Crown Business, 2012. Banks, John, and Jason Potts. "Consumer Co-Creation in Online Games." New Media and Society 12.2 (2010): 253-70. Beinhocker, Eric. Origin of Wealth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Bentley, R., et al. "Regular Rates of Popular Culture Change Reflect Random Copying." Evolution and Human Behavior 28 (2007): 151-158. Borcherding, Thomas, and Eugene Silberberg. "Shipping the Good Apples Out: The Alchian and Allen Theorem Reconsidered." Journal of Political Economy 86.1 (1978): 131-6. Cowen, Tyler. Create Your Own Economy. New York: Dutton, 2009. (Also published as The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy. Penguin, 2010.) Cowen, Tyler, and Alexander Tabarrok. "Good Grapes and Bad Lobsters: The Alchian and Allen Theorem Revisited." Journal of Economic Inquiry 33.2 (1995): 253-6. Cuellar, Steven. "Sex, Drugs and the Alchian-Allen Theorem." Unpublished paper, 2005. 29 Apr. 2014 ‹http://www.sonoma.edu/users/c/cuellar/research/Sex-Drugs.pdf›.Earl, Peter. The Economic Imagination. Cheltenham: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986. Earl, Peter, and Jason Potts. "The Market for Preferences." Cambridge Journal of Economics 28 (2004): 619–33. Eid, Jean, Travis Ng, and Terence Tai-Leung Chong. "Shipping the Good Horses Out." Wworking paper, 2012. http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~ngkaho/Research/shippinghorses.pdf Potts, Jason, et al. "Social Network Markets: A New Definition of Creative Industries." Journal of Cultural Economics 32.3 (2008): 166-185. Quiggin, John, and Jason Potts. "Economics of Non-Market Innovation & Digital Literacy." Media International Australia 128 (2008): 144-50. Razzolini, Laura, William Shughart, and Robert Tollison. "On the Third Law of Demand." Economic Inquiry 41.2 (2003): 292–298. Staten, Michael, and John Umbeck. “Shipping the Good Students Out: The Effect of a Fixed Charge on Student Enrollments.” Journal of Economic Education 20.2 (1989): 165-171. Stigler, George. "The Theory of Economic Regulation." Bell Journal of Economics 2.1 (1971): 3-22. Thornton, Mark. The Economics of Prohibition. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991.Thornton, Mark. "The Potency of Illegal Drugs." Journal of Drug Issues 28.3 (1998): 525-40.

Introduction: At the Crossroad Well, I’ve been an important pawn [in regeneration], for instance, changing doors and windows, enlarging them, eliminating shutters and thus having big open windows, light […] Then came the florist, through a common friend, who was the second huge pawn who trusted in this […] then came the pastry shop. (Alberto, 54, shop owner). Alberto is the owner of Pleasure Factory, one of two upmarket restaurants in a gentrifying crossroads area in northern Milan. He started buying apartments and empty stores in the 1980s, later becoming property manager of the building where he still lives. He also opened two restaurants, and then set up a neighbourhood commercial organisation. Alberto’s activities, and those of people like him, have been able to reverse the image and the usage of this public crossroad. This is something of which all of the involved actors are well aware. They have “bet,” as they say, and somehow “won” by changing people’s common understanding of, and approach to, this zone. This paper argues for the necessity of a closer look at the ways that place is produced through the multiple activities of small entrepreneurs and social actors, such as Alberto. This is because these activities represent the softer side of gentrification, and can create zones of pleasure and authenticity. Whilst market forces and multiple public interventions of gentrification’s “hard” side can lead to the displacement of people and uneven development, these softer zones of authenticity and pleasure have the power to shape the general neighbourhood brand (Atkinson 1830). Speaking rhetorically, these zones act as synecdoche for the surrounding environment. Places are in part built through the “atmosphere” that consumers seek throughout their daily routines. Following Gernot Böhme’s approach to spatial aesthetics, atmosphere can be viewed as the “relation between environmental qualities and human states” (114) and this relation is worked out daily in gentrified neighbourhoods. Not only do the passer-bys, local entrepreneurs, and sociologists contribute to the local making of atmosphere, but so does the production of the environmental qualities. These are the private and public interventions aimed at refurbishing, and somehow sanitising, specific zones of central neighbourhoods in order to make them suitable for middle class tastes (Julier 875). Not all gentrification processes are similar however, because of the unique influence of each city’s scalar rearrangements. The following section therefore briefly describes the changes in Milan in recent times. The paper will then describe the making of a zone of authentic pleasure at the Isola crossroads. I will show that soft gentrification happens through the making of specific zones where supply and demand match in ways that make for pleasant living. Milan, from Global to Local and Back Milan has a peculiar role in both the Italian and European contexts. Its metropolitan area, of 7.4 million inhabitants on a 12 000 km² surface, makes it the largest in Italy and the fifth in Europe (following Ruhr, Moscow, Paris and London). The municipal power has been pushing for a long-term strategy of population growth that would make Milan the “downtown” of the overall metropolitan area (Bricocoli and Savoldi 19), and take advantage of scalar rearrangements, such as State reconfigurations and setbacks. The overall goal of the government of Milan has been to increase the tax base and the local government’s political power. Milan also demonstrates the entrepreneurial turn adopted by many global cities, evident in the amount of project-based interventions, the involvement of international architecture studios (“La città della Moda” by Cesar Pelli; “Santa Giulia” by Norman Foster; “City-Life” and “the Fair” by Zaha Hadid and David Libeskind), and the hosting of mega-events, such as the Expo 2015. The Milan growth machine works then at different scales (global, national, city-region, neighbourhood) with several organisational actors involved, enormous investments and heavy political struggles to decide which coalition of winning actors will ride the tiger of uneven development. However, when we look at those transformations through the lens of the neighbourhood what we see is the making of zones within the larger texture of its streets and squares. This zone-making is similar to leopard’s spots within a contained urban space, it works for some time in specific streets and crossroads, then moves throughout the neighbourhood, as the process of gentrification goes on. The neighbourhood, which the zone of authentic pleasure I’m describing occurs, is called Isola (Island) because of its clustered shape between a railroad on the southern border and three major roads on the others. Isola was, until the 1980s, a working-class residential space with a strong tradition of left-wing political activism, with some small manufacturing businesses and minor commercial activities. This area remained quite removed from the overall urban development that radically shifted Milan towards a service economy in the 1960s and 1970s. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, the land price impacts of private activities and public policies in surrounding neighbourhoods increasingly pushed people and activities in the direction of Isola. Alberto explains this drift through the example of his first apartment: Just look at the evolution of my apartment. I bought it [in the 1980s] for 57 million lira, I remember, then sold it in 1992 for 160, then it was sold again for 200 000 euros, then four years ago for 250 000 and you have to understand that we’re talking about 47 square metres. If you consider the last price, 250 000, I’ll tell you that when I first came to the neighbourhood you could easily buy an entire building with that money. The building at number five in this street was entirely sold for 550 millions lira—you understand now why Isola is a huge real estate investment, people like it, its central, well served by the underground—well it still has to grow from a commercial standpoint… This evolution in land prices is clear when translated into the price for square metre: 2.4 euros for square meter in 1985, 3.4 in 1992, 4.2 in 2000 and 5.3 in 2006. The ratio increase is 120% in 20 years, demonstrating both the general boost in the economy of the area and also what is at stake within uneven development. What this paper argues is that parallel to this political economy dimension, which may be called the “hard side” of gentrification, there is also a “soft side” that deserves a closer attention. Pastry shops, cafés, bars, restaurants are as strategic as real estate investments (Zukin, Landscapes 195). The spatial concept that best captures the rationale of these activities is the zone, meaning a small and localised cluster of activities. I chose to add the features of pleasure and authenticity because of the role they play in ordinary consumption practices. In order to illustrate the specific relevance of soft gentrification I will now turn to the description of the Isola crossroad, a place that has been re-created through the interventions of several actors, such as Alberto above, and also Franca and her pastry shop. A Zone of Authentic Pleasure: Franca’s Pleasure Corner We’re walking through a small residential street and arrive at a crossroad. We turn to look to the four corners, one is occupied by a public school building, the second and the third by upmarket restaurants, and the last by a “typical” Sicilian pastry shop and café. We decide to enter here, find a seat and order a coffee together with a small cassata, a cake made with sweet cheese, almonds, pistachios and candied fruit. While we are experiencing this southern Italian breakfast at some thousand miles of spatial distance from its original site, a short man enters. He’s a well renowned TV comedian, best known for his would-be-magician gags. Everybody in the café recognises him but pretends to ignore his presence, he buys some pastries and leaves. Other customers come and go. The shop owner, an Italian lady in her forties called Franca, approaches to me and declares: “as you can see for yourself, we see elegant people here.” In this kind of neighbourhood it is common to see and share space with such “elegant” and well-known people, and to feel that a pleasant atmosphere is created through this public display. Franca opened the pastry shop three years ago, a short time after the upmarket restaurants on the other corners. However, when we interviewed her she wasn’t yet satisfied with the atmosphere: “when I go downtown and come back, I feel depressed … it’s developing but still has not grown enough … Isn’t one of the classic rich places in Milan—it’s kind of a weird place.” Through these and other similar statements she expressed a feeling of delusion toward the neighbourhood—a feeling on which she’s building her tale—that emerged in contrast to the kind of environment Franca would consider more apt for her shop. Franca’s a newcomer, but knows that the neighbourhood has been “sanitised.” “It really was a criminal area” she states, using overtly derogatory terms just like they were neutral: “riffraff” for the customers of ordinary bars, “dull” for the northern part of the neighbourhood where “there even are kebab shops.” In contrast she lists her beloved customers: journalists, architects, two tenors, people working at the theatre nearby, and the local TV celebrity described earlier. When she refers to the crossroad she speaks of it as, “maybe the gem of the neighbourhood.” At some point she declares what makes her proud: A place like this regenerates the neighbourhood—to be sure, if I ever open a harbour bar I’d attract riffraff who would discredit the place. In short it’s not, to make an example, a club where you play cards, that bring in the underworld, noise, nuisance—here the customer is the typical middle class, all right people. The term “all right people” reoccurs in several of Franca’s statements. Her initial economic sacrifices, relative though if, as she says, she’s able to open another shop in a more central place (“we would like to become a chain-store”), are now compensated by the recognition she gets from her more polished clients. She also expresses a personal satisfaction in the role she has played in the changes in Isola: “until now it’s just a matter of personal satisfaction—of seeing, I’ve built this stuff.” Franca’s story demonstrates that the soft side of gentrification is also produced by individuals that have little in common with the huge capital investment that is at stake in real estate development, or the chain stores that are also opening in the neighbourhood. In one way, Franca is alone in her quest for regeneration, as most entrepreneurs are. In another way, though, she is not. Not only is she participating in the “upgrading” together with other small business owners and consumers who all agree on the direction to follow, thus building together a zone of authentic pleasure, but she can also rely on a “critical infrastructure” of architects, designers and consultants (Zukin, Landscapes 202) that knows perfectly how to do the job. With much pride in her interior design choices, Franca pointed out how her café mixes chic with classic and opposing them to a flashy and folk décor. She showed us the black-and-white pictures at the wall depicting Paris in the 1960s, the unique design coffee machine model she owns, and the flower vases conceived by a famous designer and filled by her neighbour florist. The colours chosen for the interior are orange, tied to oranges—a typical product of Sicily, whereas the brown colour relates to the land, and the gold is linked to elegance. The mixing of warm colours, Franca explained, makes the atmosphere cosy. Where did this owner get all these idea(l)s? Franca relied on an Italian interior design studio, which works at a global scale furnishing hotels, restaurants, bars, shops, bathing establishments, and airports in New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Milan. The architect with whom she dealt with let her “work together” in order to have an autonomous set of choices that match the brand’s offer. Authenticity thus becomes part of the décor in a systematic way, and the feeling of a pleasant atmosphere is constantly reproduced through the daily routines of consumption. Again, not alone in the regeneration process but feeling as if she is “on her own,” Franca struggles daily to protect the atmosphere she’s building: “My point is avoiding having kids or tramps as customers—I don’t want an indiscriminate presence, like people coming here for a glass of wine and maybe getting drunk. I mean, this is not the place to come and have a bianchino [cheap white wine]. People coming here have a spumante, and behave in a completely different fashion.” The opposition between a bianchino, the cheap white wine, and the spumante is one that clarifies the moral boundary between the targets of soft gentrification. In Italian popular culture, and especially in the past, it was a common male habit to have bianchino from late morning onwards. Bars therefore served as gendered public spaces where common people would rest from working activities and the family sphere. Franca, together with many new bars and cafes that construct zones of authentic pleasure in gentrifying neighbourhoods, is trying to update this cultural practice. The spumante adds a sparkling element to consumption and is branded as a trendy aperitif wine, which appeals to younger tastes and lifestyles. By utilising a global design studio, Franca connects to global patterns of urban development and the homogenising of local atmospheres. Furthermore, by preferencing different consumption behaviours she contributes to the social transformation of the neighbourhood by selecting customers. This tendency towards segregation, rather than mixing, is a relevant feature here, since the Franca’s favourite clientele are clearly “people like us” (Butler 2469). Zones like the one described above are thus places where uneven development shows its social, interactive and public façade. Pleasure and Authenticity in Soft Gentrification The production of “atmosphere” in a gentrifying neighbourhood goes together with customers’ taste and preferences. The supply-side of building the environmental landscape for a “pleasant” zone needs a demand-side, consumers buying, supporting, and appreciating the outcome of the activities of business people like Franca. The two are one, most of the time, because tastes and preferences are linked to class, gender, and ethnicity, which makes a sort of mutual redundancy. To put it abruptly: similar people, spending their time in the same places and in a similar way. As I have shown above, the pastry shop owner Franca went for mixing chic and classic in her interior design. That is distinctiveness and familiarity, individualisation and commonality in one unique environment. Seen from the consumer’s perspective, this leads to what has been depicted by Sharon Zukin in her account of the crisis of authenticity in New York. People, she says, are yearning for authenticity because this: reflects the separation between our experience of space and our sense of self that is so much a part of modern mentalities. Though we think authenticity refers to a neighbourhood’s innate qualities, it really expresses our own anxieties about how places change. The idea of authenticity is important because it connects our individual yearning to root ourselves in a singular time and place to a cosmic grasp or larger social forces that remake our world from many small and often invisible actions. (220) Among the “many small and invisible actions” are the ones made by Franca and the global interior design firm she hired, but also those done daily by her customers. For instance, Christian a young advertising executive who lives two blocks away from the pastry shop. He defines himself an “executive creative director” [in English, while the interview was in Italian]. Asked on cooking practices and the presentation he makes to his guests, he declares that the main effort is on: The mise en place—the mise en place with no doubt. The mise en place must be appropriate to what you’re doing. Sometimes you get the mise en place simply serving a plateau, when you correctly couple cheese and salami, even better when you couple fresh cheese with vegetables or you give a slightly creative touch with some fruit salad, like seitan with avocado, no? They become beautiful to see and the mise en place saves it, the aesthetics does its job …Do you feel there are foods, beverages or consumption occasions you consider not worth giving up at all? The only thing I wouldn’t give up is going out in the morning, and having a cappuccino down there in the tiny pastry shop and having some brioches while I’m at the bar. Those that are not frozen beforehand but cooked just in time and have a breakfast, for just two euros, two euros and ten […] cappuccino and fresh brioche, baked just then, otherwise I cannot even think—if I’m in Milan I hardly think correctly—I mean I can’t wake up really without a good cappuccino and a good brioche. Christian is one of the new residents that was attracted to this neighbourhood because of the benefits of its uneven development: relatively affordable rent prices, services, and atmosphere. Commonality is among them, but also distinctiveness. Each morning he can have his “good cappuccino and good brioche” freshly baked to suit his taste and that allows him to differentiate between other brioches, namely the industrialised ones, those “frozen beforehand.” More importantly, he can do this by simply crossing the street and entering one of the pleasure zones that are making Isola, there and now, the new gentrified Milanese neighbourhood. Zones of Authentic Pleasure In this paper I have argued that a closer attention to the softer side of gentrification can help to understand how taste and uneven development mesh together, to produce the common shape we find in gentrified neighbourhoods. These typical urban spaces are made of streets, sidewalks, squares, and walls, but also shop windows and signs, pavement cafés, planters, and the street-life that turns around all of this. Both built environment and interaction produces the atmosphere of authentic pleasure, which is offered by local entrepreneurs and sought by the people who go there. Pleasure is a central feature because of the increasing role of consumption activities in the city and the role of individual consumption practices. I f we observe closely the local scale where all of these practices take place, we can clearly distinguish one zone from another because of their localised effervescence. Neighbourhoods are not equally affected by gentrification. Internally specific zones emerge as those having the capacity to subsume the entire process. These are the ones I have described in this paper—zones of authentic pleasure, where the supply and demand for an authentic distinctive and communal atmosphere takes place. Ephemeral spaces; if one looks at the political economy of place through a macro lens. But if the aim is to understand why certain zones prove to be successful and others not, then exploring how soft gentrification is daily produced and consumed is fundamental.Acknowledgments This article draws on data produced by the research team for the CSS project ‘Middle Class and Consumption: Boundaries, Standards and Discourses’. The team comprised Marco Santoro, Roberta Sassatelli and Giovanni Semi (Coordinators), Davide Caselli, Federica Davolio, Paolo Magaudda, Chiara Marchetti, Federico Montanari and Francesca Pozzi (Research Fellows). The ethnographic data on Milan were mainly produced by Davide Caselli and by the Author. The author wishes to thank the anonymous referees for wise and kind remarks and Michelle Hall for editing and suggestions. References Atkinson, Rowland. “Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces.” Urban Studies 40.9 (2003): 1829–1843. Böhme, Gernot. “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics.” Thesis Eleven 36 (1993): 113–126. Bricocoli, Massimo, and Savoldi Paola. Milano Downtown: Azione Pubblica e Luoghi dell’Abitare. Milano: et al./Edizioni, 2010. Butler, Tim. “Living in the Bubble: Gentrification and Its ‘Others’ in North London.” Urban Studies 40.12 (2003): 2469–2486. Julier, Guy. “Urban Designscapes and the Production of Aesthetic Consent.” Urban Studies 42.5/6 (2005): 869–887. Zukin, Sharon. Landscapes of Power. From Detroit to Disney World. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. ———. Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York: Oxford UP, 2010.

IntroductionWe are increasingly being told to make ethical food choices, often by high-profile chefs advocating what they view as ethical consumption habits. Some actively promote vegetarian or vegan diets, with a growing number of high-profile restaurants featuring only or mainly plant-based meals. However, what makes food or restaurant menus ethical is not assessed by most of us using one standardised definition. Our food values differ based on our outlooks, past experiences, and perhaps most importantly, how we balance various trade-offs inherent in making food choices under different circumstances and in diverse contexts.Restaurants can face difficulties when trying to balance ethical considerations. For instance, is it inconsistent to promote foraging, seasonality, local products, and plant-based eating, yet also serve meat and other animal-derived protein products on the same menu? For example, Danish chef Rene Redzepi, co-owner of the Michelin-starred restaurant Noma in Copenhagen who recently had an extended stay in Australia (Redzepi), recently offered a purely vegetarian menu featuring foraged native ingredients. However, Redzepi followed this with a meat-based menu including teal, moose leg, reindeer tongue, and wild duck brain. These changes make clear that although Redzepi was still conflicted about serving animal products (Ankeny and Bray), he thinks that options for ethical eating are not limited to plants and that it is important to utilise available, and especially neglected, resources in novel ways.In this article, we argue that celebrity and other high-profile chefs have roles to play in conversations about the emerging range of new meat consumption norms, which might include humanely produced meat, wild meat, or other considerations. However, we contend that restaurants and popular media may be limited spaces in which to engage consumers in these conversations. Ultimately, celebrity and high-profile chefs can help us not only to reflect on our eating habits, but also to engage us in ways that help us to ask the right questions rather than encouraging reliance on set answers from them or other supposed experts.Chefs and New Meat NormsChefs are now key voices in the politics of lifestyle, shaping both the grammars and the practices of ethical consumption, which is further reinforced by the increasing mediatisation of food and food politics (Phillipov, Media). Contemporary trends toward ethical consumption have been much critiqued; nevertheless, ethical consumption has become a dominant means through which individuals within contemporary marketised, neoliberal economies are able to invest lifestyle choices with ethical, social, and civic meanings (Barnett et al.; Lewis and Potter). While vegetarianism was once considered a central pillar of ethical diets, the rise of individualized and diverse approaches to food and food politics has seen meat (at least in its “ethical” form) not only remain firmly on the menu, but also become a powerful symbol of “good” politics, taste, and desirable lifestyles (Pilgrim 112).Chefs’ involvement in promoting ethical meat initially began within restaurants catering for an elite foodie clientele. The details provided about meat producers and production methods on the menu of Alice Waters’ Californian restaurant Chez Panisse and her cookbooks (Waters), or the focus by Fergus Henderson on “nose to tail” eating at his London restaurant St. John (Henderson) has led many to cite them as among the originators of the ethical meat movement. But the increasing mediatisation of food and the emergence of chefs as celebrity brands with their own TV shows, cookbooks, YouTube channels, websites, sponsorship deals, and myriad other media appearances has allowed ethical meat to move out of elite restaurants and into more quotidian domestic spaces. High profile UK and US exposés including “campaigning culinary documentaries” fronted by celebrity chefs (Bell, Hollows, and Jones 179), along with the work of popular food writers such as Michael Pollan, have been instrumental in the mainstreaming of diverse new meat norms.The horrifying depictions of intensive chicken, beef, and pork farming in these exposés have contributed to greater public awareness of, and concern about, industrialised meat production. However, the poor welfare conditions of animals raised in battery cages and concentrated animal feeding operations often are presented not as motivations to eschew meat entirely, but instead as reasons to opt for more ethical alternatives. For instance, Hugh’s Chicken Run, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s 2008 television campaign for chicken welfare, resulted in making more free-range products available in British supermarkets (Johnston). More recently, there have been significant expansions in markets for variously defined categories such as grass-fed, free-range, organic, welfare-certified, humane, and/or environmentally friendly meat products in Australia and elsewhere, thanks in part to increased media attention to animal welfare issues (Arcari 169).As media has emerged as a “fundamental component of contemporary foodscapes, how they ‘perform’ and function, and the socio-material means by which they are produced” (Johnston and Goodman 205), ethical meat has increasingly been employed as a strategic resource in mainstream media and marketing. Ethical meat, for example, has been a key pillar in the contemporary rebranding of both of Australia’s major supermarkets (Lewis and Huber 289). Through partnerships that draw upon the “ethical capital” (290) of celebrity chefs including Jamie Oliver and Curtis Stone, and collaborations with animal welfare organisations such as the RSPCA, ethical meat has become central to supermarket advertising campaigns in recent years. Such campaigns have been especially successful for Coles supermarkets, which controls almost 30% of Australia’s highly concentrated grocery market (Roy Morgan). The retailer’s long-term sponsorship of MasterChef Australia (Network 10, 2009–)—a show that presents meat (or, as they term it, “protein”) as an essential component of most dishes and which regularly rates in the top 10 of Australian television programs (OzTAM)—further helps to emphasise that the solution to ethical problems is not to avoid meat, but to choose (Coles’) “better” meat (see fig. 1). This is promoted on the basis of a combination of ethics, price, and taste, and, remarkably, is able to deliver “better welfare at no extra cost to you” (Parker, Carey, and Scrinis 209). In short, chefs are making major contributions to awareness of ethical norms relating to meat consumption in a variety of settings. Figure 1: An example of a current meat product on the shelf at a major Australian retailer with packaging that makes a range of claims relating to production practices and quality, among other attributes. (Emily Buddle)“The Good Life”Lifestyle media has been a key site through which meat eating is normalised and recuperated into “ethical” frameworks (Arcari 169). Utopian visions of small-scale animal agriculture are a key feature of popular texts from the River Cottage Australia (Foxtel Networks, 2013–) series to Gourmet Farmer (SBS, 2010–) and Paddock to Plate (Foxtel Networks, 2013–). These programs are typically set in bucolic rural surrounds and centre on the host’s “escape” from the city to a more fulfilling, happier existence in the country (Phillipov, “Escaping”). Rural self-sufficiency is frequently framed as the solution to urban consumers’ alienation from the sources of their food, and a means of taking responsibility for the food they eat. The opening credits of Gourmet Farmer, for instance, outline host Matthew Evans’s quest to “know and trust what [he] eat[s]”, either by growing the food himself or being “no more than one degree of separation from the person who does”.This sense of connection to one’s food is central to how these programs make meat consumption ethical. Indeed, the production of animals for food reinforces particular notions of “the good life” in which the happiness of the animal is closely aligned with the happiness of its human producer. While texts sometimes show food animals’ full lifecycle from birth to slaughter, lifestyle media focuses mainly on their happy existence while still alive. Evans gives his pigs names that foreground their destiny as food (e.g., Prosciutto and Cassoulet), but he also pampers them as though they are pets, feeding them cherries and apples, and scratching them behind the ears much like he would his dog. These bucolic televisual images serve to anchor the programs’ many “spin-off” media texts, including blog posts, cookbooks (e.g. Evans), and endorsements, that instruct urban audiences who do not have the luxury of raising their own meat on how to source ethical alternatives. They also emphasise the deliciousness of meat raised and killed in humane, “natural” conditions, as opposed to those subjected to more intensive, industrialised production systems.Some argue that the notion of “ethical meat” merely masks the realities of humans’ domination over animals (Arcari). However the transition from “happy animals” to “happy meat” (Pilgrim 123) has been key to lifestyle media’s recuperation of (certain kinds of) meat production as a “humane, benevolent and wholly ‘natural’ process” (Parry 381), which helps to morally absolve the chefs who promote it, and by extension, their audiences.The Good DeathMeat consumption has been theorised to be based on the invisibility of the lives and deaths of animals—what has been termed the “absent referent” by feminist philosopher Carol J. Adams (14; see also Fiddes). This line of argument holds that slaughter and other practices that may raise moral concerns are actively hidden from view, and that animals are “made absent” within food consumption practices (Evans and Miele 298). Few meat consumers, at least those in Western countries, have seen animal slaughter first hand, and a disconnect between meat and animal is actively maintained through current retail practices (such as pre-packaged meat with few identifying cues), as well as in our language use, at least in English where most of the names of the meat are different to those of the animal (Plous; Croney) and where euphemisms such as “harvesting” abound (Abrams, Zimbres, and Carr). In many locales, including Australia, there is squeamishness about talking about slaughter and the processes by which “animal” becomes “meat” which in turn prevents open discussion about the origins of meat (Bray et al., “Conversation”).Campaigning culinary documentaries by chefs, including Matthew Evans’s recent For the Love of Meat (SBS, 2016), aim to reconnect animal and meat in order to critique modern meat production methods. In addition, Gourmet Farmer and River Cottage Australia both feature depictions of hunting (skinning and butchering of the animals is shown but viewers are rarely exposed to the kill itself) and emphasise the use of highly skilled hunters in order to bring about a quick death. By highlighting not only a good life but also what constitutes a “good death”, celebrity chefs and others are arguably generating discussion about what makes meat ethical by emphasizing that the quality of death is as important as the quality of life. In many of these programs, the emphasis is on more boutique or small-scale production systems which typically produce meat products that are higher priced and more difficult to source.Given that such products are likely out of reach for many potential consumers because of price point, convenience, or both, perhaps unsurprisingly the emphasis in many of these programs is on the consumer rather than the consumed. Hence these programs tend to be more about constructing an “ethical meat consumer”, defined implicitly as someone who acknowledges the meat/animal connection through conscious exposure to the realities of animal slaughter (for example, by watching a documentary), by “meeting your meat” such as in the BBC series Kill It, Cook It, Eat It (BBC, 2007; Evans and Miele), or by actively participating in the slaughter process as Evans did with his own chickens on Gourmet Farmer. As anthropologist Catie Gressier notes in her study of wild meat consumers in Australia, “hunting meat is seen as more noble than purchasing it, while wild meat is seen as preferable to farmed” (Gressier 58). Gressier also describes how one of her participants viewed hunting (and eating locally) as preferable to veganism because of the “animal violence that is the inevitable outcome of mass-crop agriculture” (58). However some scholars have argued that highly graphic depictions of slaughter in the popular media are becoming more commonplace as a masculinised type of “gastro-snuff” (a term referring to food-related visual depictions of brutal killings) (Parry 382). These types of efforts thus may fail to create dialogue about what constitutes ethical meat or even an ethical meat consumer, and may well reinforce more traditional ideas about human/non-human hierarchies.In contrast to coverage in popular media, detailed descriptions of commercial slaughter, in particular pre-slaughter (lairage) conditions, are yet to make it on to restaurant menus, despite the connections between meat quality and pre-slaughter conditions being well recognised even by consumers (Evans and Miele). Commercial slaughter conditions are one of the reasons that hunting is framed as more ethical than “ethically farmed” animals. As an Internet post, quoted in Adams (“Redneck” 50), puts it: “Hunting? A creature is peacefully in its own domain, it is shot. How is that worse than being carried for hours in a truck, being forced into a crush, hearing the bellows of other creatures, being physically restrained at the peak of terror, then culled?” Although determining precise rates of consumption of wild meat is methodologically difficult (Conservation Visions 28), available rates of hunting together with limited consumption data indicate that Australians currently eat less game or wild-caught meat per capita than those in Europe or North America. However, there is a sector of the community in Australia who pursue hunting as part of their ethical food habits (Bray et al., “Ferals”) with the largest proportion of wild-meat consumers being those who hunted it themselves (Gressier).In many cases, descriptions of animal lives (using descriptors such as “free range” or “grass fed”) serve implicitly as proxies for assurances that the animals’ deaths also have been good. One exception is the increasing awareness of the use of halal slaughter methods in part due to more transparent labelling, despite limited public awareness about the nature of these methods, particularly in the Australian context where they in fact comply with standard animal welfare requirements such as pre-slaughter stunning (Bergeauld-Blackler). Detailed descriptions of post-mortem conditions (e.g., aging conditions and time) are more common on restaurant menus, although arguably these no longer draw attention to the connections between the animal and the meat, and instead focus on the meat itself, its flavour and other physical qualities, rather than on ethical attributes.Thus, although it would seem obvious that ethical meat consumption should involve considerations about slaughter conditions or what makes a “good death”, most efforts have focused on encouraging people to make better and more reflexive consumer choices, rather than promoting deeper engagement with slaughter processes, perhaps underscoring that this domain may still represent one of the final food taboos. Although it might seem to be counterintuitive that wild or hunted meat could be viewed as an ethical food choice, particularly if vegetarianism or veganism is taken as the main point of comparison, these trends point toward the complexities inherent in food choice and the inevitable trade-offs in values that occur in these processes.Problems with Promoting Ethical Meat Norms: Ways ForwardIt is undeniable that many people are reflecting on their consumption habits in order to pursue decisions that better reflect their values. Attempting to be an “ethical meat consumer” clearly fits within these broader trends. However there are a number of problems associated with current approaches to ethical meat consumption, and these raise questions as to whether such efforts are likely to result in broader changes. First, it is not clear that restaurants are the most appropriate spaces for people to engage with ethical considerations, including those relating to meat consumption. Many people seek to try something new, or to treat themselves when dining out, but these behaviours do not necessarily translate into changes in everyday eating habits. Reasons are varied but include that people cannot reproduce the same types of dishes or concepts at home as what they get at restaurants (or see on TV shows for that matter), and that many products may be out of an acceptable price range or inconvenient for daily consumption. Others want to escape from ethical decisions when dining out by relying on those preparing the food to do the work for them, and thus sometimes simply consume without necessarily investigating every detail relating to its production, preparation, and so on.Perhaps more importantly, many are sceptical about the promotion of various meat-related values by high-profile or celebrity chefs, raising questions about whether ethical categories are merely packaging or window dressing designed to sell products, or if they are truly tied to deeper values and better products. Such concerns are reinforced by tendencies to emphasize one type of meat product—say free-range, grass-fed, or humanely-raised—as better than all others, or even as the only right choice, and thus can at times seem to be elitist in their approaches, since they emphasize that only certain (often extremely expensive boutique products) count as ethical. As scholars have noted about the classed nature of many of these consumption practices (see, for example, Bell and Hollows; Naccarato and LeBesco), these types of value judgments are likely to be alienating to many people, and most importantly will not foster deeper reflections on our consumption habits.However it is clear that celebrity and other high-profile chefs do get the public’s attention, and thus can play important roles in shaping conversations about fostering more ethical ways of eating, including meat consumption. We contend that it is important not to emphasize only one right way of eating, but to actively consider the various trade-offs that we make when choosing what to buy, prepare, and consume. Promoting answers by nominating certain meat products or production methods as always better in all circumstances, no matter how these might be in conflict with other values, such as preferences for local, organic, alignment with cultural or religious values, sustainable, fair trade, and so on, is not likely to result in meaningful public engagement. Critiques of Pollan and other food activists make similar points about the potential elitism and hence limited value of promoting narrow forms of ethical eating (e.g., Guthman et al.; Zimmerman).In addition, such food categories often serve as proxies for deeper values, but not necessarily for the same values for all of us. Simply relying on categories or types of products thus fails to allow engagement with the underlying rationale for various choices. More generally, promoting individual consumer decision-making and market demand as the keys to ethical consumption overlooks the broader systemic issues that limit our choices, and in turn limits attention to changes that might be made in that system (e.g., Lavin; Guthman et al.; DeLind; Ankeny).Thus instead of promoting one right way of eating meat, or a narrow number of acceptable choices, celebrities, chefs, and restauranteurs should consider how they can help to promote dialogue and the posing of the right types of questions to consumers and diners, including about trade-offs inherent in meat consumption and choices of other products, ethical and otherwise. They also should use their roles as change-makers to consider how they might influence the broader food system, but without promoting a single right way of eating. Parallel to recent calls from scientists for a new planetary health diet which promotes increased vegetable consumption and reduced meat consumption for environmental, health, and other reasons, by providing a range of trade-offs to support a diet that that allows individuals to make personalised choices (Willett et al.), hybrid approaches to ethical eating are more likely to have influence on consumers and in turn on changing eating habits.ReferencesAbrams, Katie M., Thais Zimbres, and Chad Carr. “Communicating Sensitive Scientific Issues: The Interplay between Values, Attitudes, and Euphemisms in Communicating Livestock Slaughter.” Science Communication 37 (2015): 485–505.Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Critical Theory. London: Continuum, 2000.Adams, Michael. “‘Redneck, Barbaric, Cashed Up Bogan? 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Film directors in American cinema have used the artist (painter, singer, thespian, writer, etc.) as a vehicle for auteurist identification in feature bio-pics for decades. The portrayal of the protagonists in these films usually falls victim to the "Van Gogh" syndrome, that is, the insistance on the creative inner turmoil, the solitary, misunderstood genius, and brave rebellion of its central character. This approach, however, breaks down completely when confronted with the void that is the historical figure known as "Andy Warhol." The popular image of Warhol, his studied superficiality, unapologetic commercialism, and outright catatonic demeanour, is completely disruptive to the traditional humanist artist biography. It is unsurprising, then, that recent film protagonists within the more traditional bio-pic framework found Warhol a figure that needed to be contained, neutralised, discredited, and even shot. Mainstream cinematic narrative has added little to the conventions of the artist biography since the Renaissance. Renaissance painter and biographer Giorgio Vasari appropriated the Petrarchian edifying "Great Lives" model to ennoble and sanitise the often problematic and distasteful personalities who populated the Italian art world. This approach prevailed over the next several hundred years, and was expanded upon by the intellectual figures of the Romantic period (who were very aware of Vasari's work). The Romantics contributed to the profile of a proper artist the following traits: misunderstood intellectual fury, dark psychological depths, and flouting of social convention. The bio-pic genre, especially as it relates to biographies of artists, also lauds humanistic "greatness" as its standard of significance. The bio-pic absolutely relies on a strong central figure, who can be shown in about two hours to have some substantial educational value, worthy of the expense of the film-makers and the attention of the viewer. In the mid-1990s, not long after his unexpected death in 1987, a character called "Andy Warhol" appeared in supporting roles in a number of feature films. The Doors (1991), Basquiat (1996), and I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) all feature an Andy Warhol character grounded squarely in various popular myths. All of the three 90s feature films which include Warhol in a substantial speaking role explicitly contrast him against another artist-figure. This other artist is presented as somehow preferable to Warhol, whether in conviction, authenticity, or validity of vision. The artist in question, Basquiat/Morrison/Solanas, predictably serves as the film-makers' lens through which the past is refracted (though more problematically in the case of Solanas). Warhol is outward sign of Basquiat's slide, the danger of fame-mongering for Morrison, and Valerie Solanas's misogynist nemesis. In each case, the more valorised figure is at first twinned with Warhol when drawn into his orbit. Eventually, the film's narrative contrasts the main subject against what the diegetic Warhol represents. In each case, Warhol becomes a metonymic representation of a larger organising factor: the economic/personality-driven entertainment industry, phallocentric hegemony, art's dead end, etc. The demonisation of Warhol in recent bio-pics is a good starting point for examining how his image is being interpreted by the mainstream media. It is clear that in this particular forum, Warhol's impact is understood only negatively. The purpose of this study will be to demonstrate how uncomfortable the creative arts world in general, and narrative film-making in particular, is with the "empty" legacy of Warhol and his Factory, and how the reactions against it illustrate a fear of Warhol's anti-humanist, subject-less project. It is fascinating that in the feature films, Warhol appears solely as a character in other people's stories rather than as the focus of biographical treatment. Warhol's very conscious emptying-out project has made nearly impossible any effort to deal with him and his legacy in any traditional narrative manner. Warhol's public persona -- simple, boring, derivative, and unheroic -- is directly at odds with the conventional "artist-hero" subjects necessary to the bio pic genre. This type is seen most typically in the old potboilers The Agony and the Extasy, about Michelangelo, and Lust for Life, about Van Gogh, as well as the more recent Artemisia about Artemisia Gentileschi. The very fact of Andy's posthumous film career fits neatly into his performative œuvre as a whole, and is easily interpreted as an extension of his life-long project. Warhol's entire self-imaging stratagem steadfastly affirmed that there is no center to illuminate -- no "real" Andy Warhol behind the persona. Warhol constantly disavowed any "meaning" beyond the surface of his art works, and ascribed it no value beyond market price. He preferred methods and forms (advertising, silk-screening, and film-making) that were easy for his Factory workers to execute and endlessly duplicate after his vague orders. Further, he ascribed no importance to his own bodily shell as "artist Andy Warhol". In an act of supreme self-branding, Warhol sent actors to impersonate him at lectures (most famously at University of Utah, who demanded he return the lecture fee), since he was only a packaged, reproducible product himself. In Warhol's art, there is no hand-made integrity, no originality, no agonised genius in a garret. He displays none of the traits that traditionally have allowed artists to be called geniuses. Warhol's studio's automation, the laying bare of the cheapest and slickest aspects of the culture industry, has long been the most feared facet of Warhol's artistic legacy. It is beside the point to argue that Warhol's meaninglessness is thematised to the degree that it has meaning. Warhol's erasure of all humanistic "aura" clearly remains threatening to a great number of artists, who rely heavily on such artistic stereotypes. Basquiat In 1996's Basquiat, painter/director Julian Schnabel used the dead painter as a proxy for telling his "I was there" version of the 80s New York art scene. In Schnabel's rather heavy-handed morality tale, young African-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat's meteoric burn-out career is treated as a metaphor for the 80s art world as a whole. Schnabel clearly knows his Vasari. His film's scenario is a barely modified adaptation of humanist/romantic artist mythology. Traces of Vasari's tale of Cimabue's discovery of Giotto, as well as Van Gogh's various misunderstood artist scenarios are laboriously played out. In fact, the first words in the film invoke the Van Gogh cliché, foregrounding Schnabel's myth-making impulse. They are art critic Rene Ricard's, speaking over Basquiat waking up in a cardboard box in Central Park: "everyone wants to get on the Van Gogh boat. ... No one wants to be part of a generation that ignores another Van Gogh, ... When you first see a new picture, you have to be very careful. You might be staring at Van Gogh's ear." This quote sets the tone for Basquiat's art world experience narrative, trotting out every single Van Gogh-inspired legend (with heroin abuse standing in for the cut-off ear) to apply to Basquiat. In fact, the film veritably thematises Romantic cliché. The film's main project is the mythologisation of Jean-Michel and by extension Schnabel. However, by foregrounding the Van Gogh/Basquiat connection in such self-conscious terms, it seems the viewer is supposed to find it "ironic". (The irony is really that this po-mo window dressing is otherwise deeply at odds with the rest of the film's message.) The film suggests that Basquiat is both worthy of the allusion to the great humanistic tradition, and that his special case ("the first great black painter") changes all the rules and makes all clichés inapplicable. Schnabel's art, which is usually described as "Neo-Abstract Expressionist", and particularly his market value, relies heavily on the aura created by previous artists in the macho heroic mold. His paintings take up Pollock's "all over" effect but with de Kooning's jauntier color. He also fastens found objects, most famously broken plates, in a pastiche of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Like Warhol, Schnabel often borrows recognisable motifs. However, instead of advertising and popular culture, Schnabel's come from a more elevated tradition; Old Master paintings appropriated from "legitimate" art history. Needless to say, Julian Schnabel himself has much invested in reaffirming the artist-genius myth that is threatening to be deconstructed by a good number of art critics and historians. Schnabel's agenda is specifically art historical, though no less political. Schnabel, through Basquiat, restores the artist to his proper place as individual creator challenging the outmoded conventions of established art. Warhol, portrayed as the quintessential post-modern artist, represents all that has gone wrong in the art world: superficiality, mass production, commodification, popular culture influence, and the erasure of art history and deep significance. In spite of the film's self-consciousness about the phoniness of the gallery scene, Basquiat's lionisation by it validates a retrograde concept of "pure" artist's vision. Schnabel is attacking what he sees as the deadening effect of post-modernism that threatens Schnabel's own place in art history. Basquiat's escalating drug problem and alliance late in the film with Warhol signals that he has followed the wrong direction, that he is hitting a dead end. The character Milo (Gary Oldman), the Schnabel manqué, sets up the contrast to illustrate Basquiat's slide. Milo is aligned with all that is exemplary in establishment virtues of hearth and home (doting fatherhood, settled domesticity, good living). The wholesome hand-made integrity of Milo/Schnabel's art, in line with traditional definitions of artistic greatness, is deeply at odds with the affected commercialism of Warhol's work. Schnabel's artistic influences show up clearly in his very marked progressive view of art history and clearly named privileged pantheon. In the film, Schnabel is at pains to insert Basquiat and himself into this tradition. The very first scene of the film sees Jean-Michel as a child with his mother at the MOMA, where she is in tears in front of Picasso's Guernica. In the narrative, this is quickly followed by Ricard's Van Gogh quote above. As an adult, Jean-Michel enacts Rauschenberg's edict, to "narrow the gap between art and life". This is illustrated by Jean-Michel not restricting his artistic output to work on canvas in a studio. He graffitis walls, signs table tops à la Rauschenberg, and makes designs on a diner countertop in maple syrup. Later, Jean-Michel is shown painting in his studio walking around the canvas on the floor, in an all-over technique, mirroring the familiar Hans Namuth film of Jackson Pollock. Aligning Jean-Michel with the pre-Warhol, and especially Abstract Expressionist artists, positions Basquiat and Schnabel together against the "dead end" of Warhol's version of Pop. Basquiat and the director have inherited the "right" kind of art, and will be the progenitors of the next generation. Warhol as a "dead end" leads to a discussion of the relationship between artists' procreative sexuality and their art. In the film, Warhol is assumed to be asexual (rather than homosexual), and this lack of virility is clearly linked to the sterility, transitoriness, and barrenness of his art. Schnabel/Milo and Basquiat, in their marked heterosexuality, are the "fathers" of the next generation. In Basquiat's collaboration with Warhol, even Andy understands his own impotence. Warhol says, "I can't teach you anything, you're a natural, are you kidding me?", and most importantly, "you paint out everything I do, Jean-Michel". By privileging Jean-Michel's art (and his own) over Warhol's, Schnabel is clearly trying to paint out the mutation of the Warholisation of art, and paint in his own art historical eugenics. The Doors In a less substantial role but in a similar vein, Warhol also appears briefly in Oliver Stone's 1991 The Doors, as part of a brief "rising fame" montage of New York incidents. Like Schnabel, Stone has a lot to lose from investment in Warhol's spiritual and aesthetic emptiness. Though brief, Warhol's appearance in the film, like in Basquiat, serves as a cautionary tale for its hero. The contrast made between the vacuous Factory crowd and the "authentic" Doors presages the dominant trope for the Warhol character that Schnabel would expand upon later. The Factory sequence dramatises the glamour and seductiveness of the hollow side of fame that may lead Morrison off his spiritual-quest path. The Native American shaman who Jim sees at pivotal points in his life appears at the Factory, warning him not to take the wrong path represented by Warhol. The Doors are at a pivotal moment, the onset of fame, and must act carefully or risk ending up as meaningless as Warhol. Stone's chronicling of the 60s relies heavily on what could be called the humanist ideal of the power of the individual to effect change, raise consciousness, and open minds. Via Stone's simple reductiveness, Warhol represents here the wrong kind of counter-culture, the anti-hippie. By emulating Warhol, the Doors follow the wrong shaman. To Stone, Warhol's superficiality represents all that is dangerous about celebrity and entertainment: the empty, mind-destroying cocaine high of the masses. I Shot Andy Warhol The film I Shot Andy Warhol (1996) problematises the idea put forth in the other films of Warhol as artistic anti-Christ, simply because the film's subject is much more difficult to heroise, and like Warhol does not fit snugly into bio-pic conventions. Like Basquiat, the film also takes the point of view of a protagonist at the edge of Warhol's sphere of influence, here radical feminist and S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto scribe Valerie Solanas, in order to criticise what Warhol represents. Unlike the previous films, here Warhol's character is central to the narrative. Although Warhol clearly represents something very negative to the Solanas character, the film never fully endorses its subject's point of view. That Warhol deserved and needed to be shot for any reason beyond Solanas's personal demons is never established. Perhaps this ambivalence is a flaw of the film, but it is also telling about the problematic legacies of feminism and Pop, two movements that have led to challenges of the hero-artist ideal. In this film, the relationship between Warhol and the main protagonist is extremely complex. Andy and his crowd are presented as clearly odious. Though Valerie comes off as more interesting and sympathetic, she is also still clearly an unhinged oddball spewing specious ideology. Within the film, Valerie's attraction to the Factory scene seems to stem from something her friend, transvestite Candy Darling, says: "if anyone can make you a star, Andy Warhol can". Valerie desperately wants attention for her radicalism (and likely for other psychological reasons, which make radicalism attractive to her, as well), and sees Andy's power for "star-making", especially among the more marginal of society, as something from which she can profit. Valerie's mistake seems to be in confusing the artistic avant-garde with the politically radical. Valerie finds kinship in Warhol's androgyny and lack of enthusiasm for sex, but does not realise immediately that Andy is interested in her play Up Your Ass primarily for its titillation and shock value, and is entirely uninterested in it from a content standpoint. The content/emptiness conflict in Valerie and Andy's "artistic visions" becomes one of the major thematics in the film. Though like Solanas, he finds community with margin-dwellers, Andy is portrayed as far too implicated in and dependent on the so-called culture industry in order to be "Andy Warhol -- Superstar". Andy's interest in the low-life that Valerie represents is, of course, wholly superficial, which enrages her. She sees no worthy theoretical position in the banal contentlessness of Andy's circle. Valerie's manifesto and dramatic works have almost an excess of content. They work to kick people in the balls to get them to open their eyes and see the appalling conditions around them. The Warhol here, like in The Doors, wants people to see empty banality, but has no interest in effecting change. Valerie's play, as read simultaneously in the lesbian coffee shop and at Andy's studio, dramatises this divergence. When Warhol and crowd read the script with dull inflection, inert on the couch, one can imagine the very words being put to use in a Warhol film. When Valerie and friends perform those same words, the passionate engagement and deep meaningfulness -- at least to Valerie -- capture her urgent commitment to her ideas. As Valerie gets more desperate to disseminate her ideas, and thus begins to further alienate the Factory crowd, she starts to see Andy as in fact the bodily symbol of the "man" she wants cut up. Not only does he represent the patriarch of the art world who has dismissed her and has invalidated her vision, but also more broadly the hierarchy and deep structure of Andy's world parallels the consumeristic and image-driven society at large. If Valerie wants to live with integrity within her own code, the "man" must be deposed. On top of the personal gratification she would receive in this act, Solanas would also finally find a world-wide audience for her views. Now we can understand why, when asked by the press why she shot Andy, Valerie tells them "he had too much control over my life." Unhappily, instead of women rising up against their male oppressors to take up their rightful place of superiority, Solanas gets labeled a "lunatic" by the same media and larger establishment which (in this film) proclaim Warhol a genius. Solanas dissolves into a bit-player in the Andy Warhol story. One of the major interests of this film is that it excerpts a player from the limits of that "master narrative" story and allows them their own subjecthood. I Shot Andy Warhol, with its assertive quotational title, seems to want to reinscribe subjecthood to one of the most truly radical of Andy's superstars, reclaiming the value of Valerie's polemics from the emptiness of her anecdotal role in Warhol's biography. Though Valerie clearly sees Andy as her nemesis, the film constructs him as a boring, ineffectual, self-absorbed effete. The great weakness of the film is that their conflict begins to look like a midget wrestling contest. Since both are competing for higher freakdom, the broader implications of either of their projects are only rarely glimpsed. It should be clear by now that for so many, fictional Warhol is not just a problematic figure, but nearly a monstrous one. The film-makers clearly show what elements of Warhol's representative strategy they find so threatening. Schnabel and Stone have the most to lose in the replacement of their value systems (genius investment and 60s macho spirituality) by what they perceive as postmodern de-centredness, and therefore need to attack that threat the most forcefully. Less conservatively, for Harron, Warhol's Pop objectification of everyone, including women, seems to threaten women's hard-won subjectivity through feminism. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Perhaps the character Andy Warhol is put to most appropriate use when he is only glimpsed, such as in the films Death Becomes Her, where he appears as one of the party guests for people who have taken the magic potion to live forever, and as part of the 70s glam wallpaper in 54. This kind of "product placement" use of Warhol most succinctly encapsulates the vacant banality he espoused. In these films, Warhol is unburdened by other artists' attempts to fill him up with meaning. Warhol is taken at his word. His easily recognisable and reproducible bodily shell is hollow and superficial, just as he said it was. Warhol, Morrison, Basquiat and Solanas were all artists who played heavily on their roles as outsiders to mainstream society. These films build the film-makers' soapbox on the "right" way to be alienated, bourgeois-hating, and rebellious, and the films assume a sympathetic viewing audience. Even though the interest in Warhol and his flashy milieu probably got at least two of these films made in the first place, it seems clear that even the more independently-minded film establishment would rather align themselves with the romanticised artist bio-pic subject than the black hole they fear Warhol personifies. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Julie Turnock. "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.4 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php>. Chicago style: Julie Turnock, "Painting Out Pop: "Andy Warhol" as a Character in 90s Films," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 4 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Julie Turnock. (1999) Painting out pop: "Andy Warhol" as a character in 90s films. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9906/warhol.php> ([your date of access]).