Journal articles on the topic 'Revitalization of the water course within the city'

Creation of close-to-nature river beds is one of the results of watercourses revitalization. Watercourses are segments in the country increasing its recreational potential.The recreational potential of watercourses contributes to rich diversity of animal and plant species. They are well-preserved natural environment with a different atmosphere and an interesting psychological effect. The current goal of revitalization measures in the landscape primarily consists of the optimization of landscape water regime, incl. flood control measures and the promotion of biodiversity, but the current philosophy speaks of multifunctional land usage. However, the revitalization is currently underappreciated in the Czech Republic and it is important to increase the recreational potential of the landscape. The subject of this article is evaluation of close to nature watercources from the point of view of recreation potential. The example locality of close to nature watercourse is part of Váh river near Iľava city. In this area some elements of recreational potential by the proposed methodology are discussed. Two river courses make a possible comparison between a technical canal and a modified one, but close-to-nature water course with all parameters of river phenomenon. Properties of nature and close-to-nature watercourses could be an inspiration for repairing(modifying, adjusting) river stretches within urban space.

The revitalization actions carried out in recent years within the urban tissue of Oslo made it possible to generate architectural layouts of a new character known as eco-structures. They are created both in the wharf zones of the city and accompanying natural and artificially formed promontories (Fjordbyen enterprise) as well as in its very centre (Grünerløkke district). These are old closed port and post-industrial areas now transformed into new layouts with residential, service, culture-creating and recreation functions. Frequently shaped on the border of two environments, i.e. urban and water as well as urban and park ones, they create a new quality of architecture making a dialogue with the natural environment and the local ecosystem.

The article presents the course of the evolution of the concept of urban renewal’s emergence into its current, mature, integrated form of sustainable regeneration (sustainable urban regeneration—SUR). We present how the determination of renewal areas and its goals began to be based on particular indicators, and how the importance of these analyses gradually increased in managing the implementation of urban regeneration programs. Analytical techniques using GIS were used in the analyses of the differentiation of crisis phenomena inside cities before they became popular in smart city tools. Despite the wide use of GIS to analyze the diversity of crisis phenomena within the city, the availability of data means that different spheres are characterized with different accuracy. Starting from the significance of individual spheres, the focus has primarily been on the environment, which is underappreciated in Poland. Municipalities (urban, rural, urban–rural) with regeneration programs do not perceive negative environmental phenomena as significant in assessing a crisis in a degraded area. Nevertheless, municipalities that do analyze environmental issues in regeneration programs also see the need for action and implementation of projects in the environmental sphere. In order to verify the hypothesis, the Statistics Poland (formerly known in English as the Central Statistical Office; Polish: Główny Urząd Statystyczny, abbreviated and known as GUS) data on the regeneration process was analyzed, with reference to the relationships between renewal areas and the natural environment. In order to check these dependencies (or the lack thereof), the Yule φ coefficient and Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient were used. As a result, this study showed that analysis of the level and degree of degradation of the environmental sphere is not carried out frequently enough in municipalities. Secondly, the difficulties of municipalities, especially small ones (urban-rural and rural), in their analysis of the environmental sphere are the result of poor data availability. Thirdly, it is noted that there is a relationship between the designation of environmental zones and the type of municipality. This is of particular importance for the enhancement of smart city tools for the regeneration of existing cities, esp. small ones.

Cracow’s area of Zabłocie, covered by the local revitalization programme, was formed during the development of industrial plants in 18 th and 19 th century. The local business activities included the Factory of Nets, Furniture, Ferrum Constructions and Ornament Goods owned by Józef Gorecki, whose products, even today, embellish the interiors of the Old Theater, the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, or the Cracow’s Soap Factory owned by Czesław Śmiechowski (currently Miraculum), which was the largest plant of this type in Krakow. The area of Zabłocie also housed the city’s largest distillery plant, “Cracow Vodkas”, as well as the Polish Healthy Bread Manufacture “Ziarno”. After the Second World War the post-industrial Zabłocie changed its production profile from technically simple to technologically advanced goods. Gorecki’s factory was replaced with “Telpod”, which, following political transitions of the 1990’s, was declared bankrupt. During the political transformation as well as at the end of the nineties, Zabłocie became “the forgotten” area of Kraków. The ongoing deterioration of post-industrial buildings as well as spacial and infrastructural chaos influenced the deepening processes of the area’s functional structure within the territory of the city. It was only the municipality, which objective was to bring the district out of crisis and which based its politics on passing of both local plan of spacial economy and local revitalization programme, that generated investors’ interest in the area. Currently Zabłocie is undergoing revitalization works on post-industrial buildings which, thanks to new functions, can be again incorporated into the area’s spacial structure. With regard to the above, the objective of this essay is to present structural changes which the district has undergone over the course of recent years and which have significantly influenced its functional transition from post-industrial to the one oriented on development of small and medium enterprises sector and housing.

Purpose. The purpose of the article is to identify methods of structural and spatial changes within the existing urban riparian areas. As a result of the research, the need to rethink the attitude to urban planning in general, and within the river space in particular, was formulated. The task is to revitalize the territory within the water area by creating public spaces, restoring the ecological framework through the introduction of ecological clusters and creating green corridors, maintaining economic activity based on industry, with its partial transformation, maintaining the existing system of spaces and structures and their partial redevelopment. Results. The potential of sustainable development of riparian areas in the context of the formation of recreational space in its structure as a result of renovation is revealed. Methods of structural and planning transformations within the water area have been developed. A model of structural transformation of the river space within the city is being built, on the basis of which the identified principles of rehabilitation of the territory are being tested. The significance of the obtained results lies in the development of new approaches to the formation of a holistic recreational river structure; in the formulation of the basic principles underlying the structural and planning transformations and the construction of a model of urban renovation of the riparian zone. The study used grapho-analytical methods, as well as the study and analysis of foreign and domestic experience in the renovation and revitalization of riverside industrial areas. The study analyzed the master plan of the city, identified functional areas within the river space. Conclusion. The expediency of rehabilitation of the territory, introduction of new, actual functions determines the economic, social, cultural, psychological and aesthetic development of the city.

American fascination with the frontier and concern that economic progress might waste the beauty and vast resources of the wilderness has helped environmental history in the United States to thrive for some time. Many publications tended to be conservationist and ‘foundationalist’ in terms of the lofty place ascribed to nature. These traits were shaped by the subject's formative links with political environmentalism, as both phenomena came to life in the 1960s as self-conscious and independent activities. Even after scholars became more interested in the role played by the capitalist system in conditioning the way that cities made demands on the environment, environmental historians’ study of urban growth, including the search for water supplies, tended to focus upon the impacts on the land or its original Indian inhabitants, on how rural harmonies were disrupted by urban greed – in sum to cede to a ‘broader agroecological approach’ as the dominant orthodoxy within the discipline. American environmental historians, of course, are fixated by these issues and have engaged in subtle and profound debates about the proper purpose and methods of their calling.

In Japan, geophysical methods are normally used to estimate the distribution of cultural relics before digging. Objects of archaeological interest are usually located within a few meters of the surface. Therefore, geophysical methods suitable for archaeological exploration are those which provide high resolution at shallow depths. The most commonly used geophysical methods are ground‐probing radar, resistivity, and magnetometry. Of these methods, we used mainly ground‐probing radar and resistivity surveys in archaeological investigations at four sites. Three of the sites were in Gumma Prefecture (Japan); they were covered with volcanic deposits (loam or pumice). Using ground‐probing radar, we were able to locate ancient dwellings, burial mounds, and a distribution of archaeologically significant “culture layers.” At the other site, in Nara Prefecture, we located part of the remains of an ancient city. In this investigation, the resistivity method and ground‐probing radar were combined to determine the location of an underground water course within the ancient city.

The garbage has caused several problems within a city, is the visual pollution, in addition to contamination from the decomposition of organic matter, which generates the effluent called slurry which contaminates the soil and water in addition to the emission of greenhouse gases such as methane, sulfidric acid, ammonia and carbon dioxide gas. Reflecting on the various problems in a city that affect the environment, propose to study the composition of the garbage generated in the home, and the reactions to the formation of the same, the decomposition of organic matter and environmental impacts. Therefore, the mini course can be well used by the students, who did not have a broad view of chemistry and its applications in daily life by increasing their knowledge conceptual, in addition to awakening the motivation through the same methods that interest them.

The study presents the results of water quality evaluation in the Setun River watershed, located entirely within the limits of the Moscow City. Multiple point and non-point sources of pollution cause the nutrient and organic matter content of the river and its tributaries to significantly differ from the natural background. Maximum nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations were observed at the upper reaches of the river during the summer low flow due to the landfill impact. Because of the extreme nutrient pollution at the river’s upper course, subsequent water inflow, even from significantly polluted tributaries, has a diluting effect, and the nutrient concentration decreases downstream. The effect of urbanization on the organic matter content is reflected in elevated COD and BOD values that exceed the national environmental guidelines. Seasonal dynamics of organic matter content includes increased organic matter during snowmelt and its relatively low content during summer.

Accumulation of Cu and Pb by Alisma plantago-aquatica L. plants under laboratory conditions on separate solutions (3 MPC) and changes in the content of heavy metals (HM) when placed on distilled water (control) were studied. The phytoremediation potential of Alisma plantago-aquatica, taken from different stations, is assessed: from conditionally clean habitat located in the middle course of Yagorba river (Cherepovets region) and from conditionally polluted habitat located on the bank of Serovka river within Cherepovets city. It is established that irrespective of what stations are taken plants of Alisma plantago-aquatica, they actively accumulate heavy metals, but plants from conditionally clean habitat accumulate more. More effective in the purification of water from heavy metals is Alisma plantago-aquatica from conditionally clean habitat. Alisma plantago-aquatica specimens from different areas are capable of excretion of Cu and Pb ions, the leaves being the most important in this. Alisma has a good phytoremediation potential and is suitable for inclusion in the composition of bioplato to clean the water of small rivers from Cu and Pb.

The aim of the research was to show the presence of micropollutants contained in the wastewater of Mexico City within the distribution canals of the Mezquital Valley (MV), as well as their retention in agricultural soil and aquifers. This system constitutes the world's oldest and largest example of the use of untreated wastewater for agricultural irrigation. The artificial recharge associated with the MV aquifers, with groundwater extracted for human consumption showing its importance as a water resource for Mexico City. The results of sampling show the presence of 18 compounds, with 10 of these considered as endocrine disruptor compounds (EDCs). The concentration of these pollutants ranged from 2 ng/L for 17 β-estradiol to 99 ng/L for DEHP, with these values decreasing throughout the course of the canals due to the wastewater dilution factor, their retention in agricultural soil, and their accumulation in the local aquifer. The main mechanisms involved in natural attenuation are adsorption, filtration, and biodegradation. Drinking water equivalent levels (DWELs) were estimated for 11 compounds with regard to acceptable daily intakes (ADIs), by assuming local exposure parameters for a rural Mexican population. These were compared with the maximum groundwater concentrations (Cgw) to screen the potential risks. The very low ratios of Cgw to DWELs indicate no appreciable human health risk from the presence of trace concentrations of these compounds in the source of drinking water in the MV. Despite this, far from being exceeded after more than 100 years of irrigation with residual water, the natural soil attenuation seems to remain stable.

Introduction: Acute viral hepatitis (AVH) incidence had suddenly increased at Artillery Centre and School (AC&S) at Halishahore under Chattogram (Ctg) cantonment area from 16 April 2018 to 25 June 2018. Total 1304 cases of AVH got admitted and received treatment from Combined Military Hospital (CMH), Ctg during that period. Aim: To find out the incidence, cause, predisposing factors, clinical course and to prevent such outbreaks in future. Methods: This retrospective observational study was conducted from 16 April 2018 to 25 June 2018. Total 1304 acute viral hepatitis cases were studied for epidemiological analysis to find out the causes, mode of spread, laboratory findings and outcome. Results: Among 1304 AVH cases 90% belonged to age group of 18-45 years and most of them were combatants and the age range was 5 to 60 years with mean age 30.31±11.29 years. HEV was 99% etiological factor and patients’ hospital stay were 10 to 55 days. Thirteen cases developed hepatic encephalopathy, 01 case developed acute pancreatitis and 108 cases had thrombocytopenia. No specific source of contamination was detected within AC&S, although coliform bacteria were identified in drinking water supplied to the area by WASA of Ctg city. Conclusion: We came to the conclusion that the source of infection was contaminated water supplied by WASA of Chattogram city. As we had also found that high incidence of AVH due to HEV were prevailing in Ctg city area during the same period of the outbreak. JAFMC Bangladesh. Vol 15, No 1 (June) 2020: 3-7

With the improvement of the urbanization level, the mixed city water has surged and the traditional denitrogenating cost in the course of wastewater reuse has been unbearable. This experiment used the technology of the constructed rapid infiltration (CRI) and applied the soil column simulation method in the laboratory. The results show that nitrogen removal rates of two soil columns are 73.73% - 75.54%, 66.70% - 77.81% and 79.33% - 73.08% under three wet/ dry (3 h/9 h, 6h/18 h, 8 h/40 h) ratios conditions, individually. The same soil column with the same wet/ dry ratio has a higher ammonia nitrogen removal rate within a shorter operation time. The comparison result of experiments show that the artificial soil mixture ratio in column 2 is better than that of column 1, arriving at the optimum operation conditions of the system.

The city is one of the most specific ecosystems of the modern biosphere. The combination of natural and artificial components and elements of the city have made it a complex system of ecotopes with various levels of anthropogenic transformation. Still the structure of urban ecosystems includes some patches of undisturbed or minimally disturbed landscapes, which may be considered the home for the most abundant part of urban biocenosis – the urban avifauna. Therefore, in this research the concept and features of urban zoocenosis in specific application to avifauna of the Kyiv urban system have been considered. A modern city if found to offer a range of benefits for birds, including food, shelter, and higher temperatures over the year and lower predator pressure and competition. However, the level of food quality as well as the condition of environment components are low and impose real health threats. Physical pollution, in particular noise and electro-magnetic impacts are also serious disturbing factors. Considering these factors, the ecotopes most suitable for birds have been defined among the parks, forests, lakes and cemeteries of the city – total 59 objects. In order to assess their comfort for birds, the specific ranking scale has been developed. The parameters taken into consideration in the course of assessment are as follows: general spatial characteristics (size and fragmentation of the territory), vegetation quality (covered territory, height and age of trees), forage availability and diversity, hydrographic situation (access to water bodies), environment quality (level of water and air pollution, noise pollution, non-organic wastes directly at the site), human pressure (density of people moving, area with artificial covers, level of anthropization), bird supporting elements and activity, and also predation pressure. According to the obtained result the forests around and its residuals inside Kyiv are the least transformed and consequently the most comfortable for the support of birds diversity. They are followed by cultivated semi-natural areas, which comfort declines as the levels of recreational pressure, human presence and proximity to the city center increases. Finally, the last in the list are small parks or cemeteries, cut off from water bodies or water bodies lacking dense vegetation. An important issue, showed by personal visual observations, is that the activity of humans aimed at support of birds communities within area of any status is proved to be more important as compared to obvious disadvantages seen at certain areas.

Since the early 1980s, the Hopi filmmaker and photographer Victor Masayesva Jr. has played an influential role in Native American multimedia production in the United States. This article examines Masayesva's filmPaatuwaqatsi: Water, Land and Life(2007), which documents a 1,650-mile run made by Hopis from their home villages in Northern Arizona to Mexico City in early 2006. The run marked the closure of the Mohave Generating Station in southern Nevada and the Black Mesa coal mine which fuelled the power plant. It also celebrated the shutting down of the controversial coal slurry pipeline between the plant and mine that required for its operation the pumping of 1.2 billion gallons of pristine water annually from the Navajo Aquifer, which lies under the homelands of the Hopi and Navajo nations. The article explains how Hopis' affective relationship with place is put into action through the acts of running, prayer and personal sacrifice. It reviews Masayesva’s filmmaking career to date and considers his core idea of the indigenous aesthetic, a set of principles that has guided the practical decisions and artistic choices he has made in the course of over thirty years' working as an independent media producer. After a close analysis of selected scenes inPaatuwaqatsi, the article concludes by noting, first, how the film negotiates internal divisions within Hopi society over development and environmental issues and, second, how it engages the impact of continuing drought and ongoing climate change on the American Southwest.

Abstract. The main objective of the paper is the application of the KULTURisk Regional Risk Assessment (KR-RRA) methodology, presented in the companion paper (Part 1, Ronco et al., 2014), to the Sihl River valley, in Switzerland. Through a tuning process of the methodology to the site-specific context and features, flood related risks have been assessed for different receptors lying on the Sihl River valley including the city of Zurich, which represents a typical case of river flooding in urban area. After characterizing the peculiarities of the specific case study, risk maps have been developed under a 300 years return period scenario (selected as baseline) for six identified relevant targets, exposed to flood risk in the Sihl valley, namely: people, economic activities (including buildings, infrastructures and agriculture), natural and semi-natural systems and cultural heritage. Finally, the total risk index map, which allows to identify and rank areas and hotspots at risk by means of Multi Criteria Decision Analysis tools, has been produced to visualize the spatial pattern of flood risk within the area of study. By means of a tailored participative approach, the total risk maps supplement the consideration of technical experts with the (essential) point of view of the relevant stakeholders for the appraisal of the specific scores and weights related to the receptor-relative risks. The total risk maps obtained for the Sihl River case study are associated with the lower classes of risk. In general, higher relative risks are concentrated in the deeply urbanized area within and around the Zurich city centre and areas that rely just behind to the Sihl River course. Here, forecasted injuries and potential fatalities are mainly due to high population density and high presence of old (vulnerable) people; inundated buildings are mainly classified as continuous and discontinuous urban fabric; flooded roads, pathways and railways, the majority of them referring to the Zurich main train station (Hauptbahnhof), are at high risk of inundation, causing huge indirect damages. The analysis of flood risk to agriculture, natural and semi-natural systems and cultural heritage have pointed out that these receptors could be relatively less impacted by the selected flood scenario mainly because their scattered presence. Finally, the application of the KR-RRA methodology to the Sihl River case study as well as to several other sites across Europe (not presented here), has demonstrated its flexibility and possible adaptation to different geographical and socio-economic contexts, depending on data availability and peculiarities of the sites, as well as for other hazard scenarios.

The state of the environment is influenced by various spheres of economic activity, including housing and communal services (HCS). The issues of the housing and communal services functioning in Kazakhstan are one of the priority directions in ensuring the environmental safety of the country. The article provides a SWOT analysis of the activities of housing and communal services enterprises in ensuring the environmental safety of Atyrau. The given article has generated information about the enterprises of the housing and communal services of the city of Atyrau, in particular, the activities of enterprises for electricity supply, gas, steam and air conditioning, water supply enterprises, sewage systems, control over the collection and distribution of waste, stationary sources of pollutant emissions and the volume of their emissions. The official statistical information on industry and the environment, published on the website of the Committee on Statistics of the Republic of Kazakhstan, has been studied. In particular, the indicators for 2017-2019 have been analyzed in the context of the regions of Kazakhstan. In the course of the study, a sociological survey was conducted among the population of Atyrau to determine the opinion on the impact of the activities of housing and communal services enterprises on the environment. Based on the results of the study, measures have been proposed to improve the environmental situation in the city of Atyrau, as well directions of activities of housing and communal services enterprises in ensuring environmental safety have been determined. The study was carried out within the framework of scientific project «Economic mechanism for the development of housing and communal services in ensuring environmental safety (on the example of Atyrau)» by intra-university funding.

Łódź is the largest Polish city in the zone of the main watershed of the country. The watershed zone offered a dense network of small streams, mostly belonging to the Ner River catchment. The use of the Ner River as a collector of industrial sewage caused the accumulation of high amounts of heavy metals in the river sediments and arable land, intensively fertilised with the waters of the Ner River for more than 40 years. Due to the continuation of irrigations in the river valley, water with a substantially lower degree of contamination with organic substance and biogens returns to Ner from the grassland complexes. The objective of the study is the determination whether improvement of water quality subject to circulation within the grassland complexes also concerns heavy metals. The study area covers grassland complexes in the middle section of the Ner River valley, between the weir in Charbice Górne and Jeżew. Due to the variability of acidic-alkaline and oxidation-reduction conditions caused by variable moisture of the soil containing high amounts of allochtonic (post-sewage) organic matter, the observed grassland complexes show liability in terms of retention and release of the analysed metals to Ner. In summer 2018 on the analysed grassland complexes, conditions favouring the emission of all studied metals occurred. This evidences what the discontinuation of irrigation of grassland complexes, previously irrigated with sewage from Łódź, can lead to. The comparison of sites located along the course of the Ner River also provides a complex image of changes in concentrations, with evident fluctuations of metal concentrations.

Abstract. The aim of this paper is the application of the KULTURisk regional risk assessment (KR-RRA) methodology, presented in the companion paper (Part 1, Ronco et al., 2014), to the Sihl River basin, in northern Switzerland. Flood-related risks have been assessed for different receptors lying on the Sihl River valley including Zurich, which represents a typical case of river flooding in an urban area, by calibrating the methodology to the site-specific context and features. Risk maps and statistics have been developed using a 300-year return period scenario for six relevant targets exposed to flood risk: people; economic activities: buildings, infrastructure and agriculture; natural and semi-natural systems; and cultural heritage. Finally, the total risk index map has been produced to visualize the spatial pattern of flood risk within the target area and, therefore, to identify and rank areas and hotspots at risk by means of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) tools. Through a tailored participatory approach, risk maps supplement the consideration of technical experts with the (essential) point of view of relevant stakeholders for the appraisal of the specific scores weighting for the different receptor-relative risks. The total risk maps obtained for the Sihl River case study are associated with the lower classes of risk. In general, higher (relative) risk scores are spatially concentrated in the deeply urbanized city centre and areas that lie just above to river course. Here, predicted injuries and potential fatalities are mainly due to high population density and to the presence of vulnerable people; flooded buildings are mainly classified as continuous and discontinuous urban fabric; flooded roads, pathways and railways, most of them in regards to the Zurich central station (Hauptbahnhof) are at high risk of inundation, causing severe indirect damage. Moreover, the risk pattern for agriculture, natural and semi-natural systems and cultural heritage is relatively less important mainly because the scattered presence of these assets. Finally, the application of the KR-RRA methodology to the Sihl River case study, as well as to several other sites across Europe (not presented here), has demonstrated its flexibility and the possible adaptation of it to different geographical and socioeconomic contexts, depending on data availability and particulars of the sites, and for other (hazard) scenarios.

Entikong Region is located in Sanggau Regency, West Kalimantan Province, Indonesia, which is directly adjacent to Malaysia. Land use in the Border Area, which is massive and irregular, results in environmental degradation, deculturization, and lack of living standards of the community. High population growth in the border areas leads to excessive use of natural resources, and used land is not appropriately allocated. The land has limited function, and if the demand for the land is greater than the carrying capacity, there will be an imbalance that results in land degradation and its environment. The purpose of this study is to identify the type and extent of land function switch, analyze provider services as part of the Land Support Capacity Ecosystem services, and identify the Accuracy of Image Interpretation. The results showed that the increasing area of massive land use comes from a mixed plantation in 2017 increased by 60.6% of the total area of Entikong District. Degradation occurs in primary forest land use component which is only 18.6% of Entikong's total area in 2017. This indicates that the use of mixed plantation land acquires the protected forest, with many palm, rubber, and pepper. Similarly, the percentage of accuracy test from the interpretation result reaches 83.33% from 42 sample points in accordance with the real conditions. The Value of Clean Water Ecosystem Service Providers in 2011 was 0.36 and was 0.33 in 2017. Then within the period of almost 7 years, it is decreased by 0.03. Thus, the Ecosystem Service Index of clean water providers has a value less than 1, it means the function of the area as a provider of clean water is very small. Similarly, the Provider Ecosystem Services Index for Foodstuffs, the Value of Food Ecosystem Services Index in 2011 was 0.32 and was 0.31 in 2017, then within the nearly 7-year period, it is decreased by 0.01. The ecosystem services index as a food supply provider for the Entikong border area is very low (less than 1) which means the carrying capacity of the environment is not good enough for supplying food needs in Entikong. This indicates that there is a reduction in the availability of environmental services, and if it continues, then Environmental Assets declines sharply and services derived from nature will be lost or will be expensive in the near future. Thus, optimization and revitalization of land use are necessary by applying various policies related to development in the border area in Entikong District. Keywords: Borders, Land Use, Ecosystem Provider Services. References Admadhani, D. N., Hajil, A. H. S., & Susanawati, L. D. (2013). Analysis of Water Supply and Water Demand for Carrying Capacity Assessment ( Case Study of Malang ). Journal of Natural Resources and Environment. Asdak, C., & Salim, H. (2006). Water Resource Capacity As a Spatial Planning Consideration. Journal of Environmental Engineering P3TL-BPPT. Ernan Rustiadi, Sunsus Saefulhakim, D. R. P. (2011). Planning and Regional Development. Restpent Press. Ghozali. (2013). Referral of Land Use Utilization Through Ecological Footprint in Gresik Regency. Territory and Environment, 1 No.1, 67–78. Hamidy, Z. (2003). Land Cover Change, Composition, and Life Type in Suakaidupan Cikepuh. Faculty of Forestry, IPB. Muta’ali, L. (2015). Regional Analysis Techniques For Regional Planning, Spatial Planning, and Environment (Februari). Yogyakarta: Faculty of Geography UGM. National Standardization Department. (2010). Classification of Land Cover. Purwadhi. (2008). Introduction Remote Sensing Imagery Interpretation. Semarang: LAPAN. Riqqi, A. (2014). Design Concept Techniques Determination of Supporting Capacity and Capacity of the National Environment and Islands / Islands And Provinces. Bali: KLH. Saripin, I. (2003). Identify Land Use Using Landsat TM Imagery. Agricultural Engineering Bulletin. Varika. (2015). Monitoring of Ecosystem Service-Based Ecotourism (Recreation and Ecotourism) Capacity in 2000 and 2015 Using Landsat Image in Badung Regency, Bali. Viska. (2012). Land Use Direction in Batu City Based on Ecological Ecosystem Approach. Pomits Technique, 1 No.1, 1–6.

The article covers the background and course of the invasion by the Czech ruler Přemysl Otakar II against the possession of the Duke of Bavaria Henry XIII Wittelsbach in order to regain his control over certain territories in the country’s west. Besides, Přemysl Otakar II sought to assist indirectly his cousin, the Archbishop of Salzburg, Philip of Spanheim, who was a skilled warrior but a poor spiritual prince. That was why the chapter elected the new Archbishop of Salzburg Ulrich von Kirchberg. However, Philipp Spanheim did not intend to give up his benefit so easily and started a war against Ulrich von Kirchberg and the chapter. Přemysl Otakar II invaded Bavaria with his Czech-Austrian forces in late summer of 1257. He acted extremely cruel there, impoverishing everything around. However Duke Henry XIII Wittelsbach was quickly able to mobilize his armed forces. Resistance of the Bavarians was unexpected for the Czech ruler, so he decided to conclude a truce and retreat. While crossing the river Inn near Mühldorf a wooden bridge under the pressure of Přemysl Otakar II's soldiers broke through and water took the lives of many of them. The Czech ruler himself was lucky enough to get to the thither river bank before the tragic moment. Many Czechs and Austrians had been burned to death while seeking protection in a tower that the Bavarians set on fire. Decimated forces of Přemysl Otakar II have reached up to Mühldorf, where within 9 days they held out, and then lay down their arms and were allowed to leave the city. Military campaign of 1257 had catastrophic consequences, so Přemysl Otakar II had to abandon his plans. He was forced to conclude a peace treaty with the Duke of Bavaria, Henry XIII Wittelsbach, according to which he renounced all disputed territories

AbstractBecause of its extreme darkness, The nocturnal conspiracy of Claudius Civilis by Govert Flinck (16151660) and Jürgen Ovens (1623-1678) holds an isolated position within the decoration program with the Batavian revolt in the galleries of Amsterdam's former Town Hall. Of course the canvas depicts a nocturnal scene with light from only the fire and the moon, but in this painting the darkness dominates virtually everything. The rough, rather sketchy execution, whereby large parts of the canvas are left unpainted is also peculiar. Because of this appearance, some art historians have thought it an outrage that this 'painting with no value' should have replaced Rembrandt's masterpiece with the same subject. However, Flinck and Ovens – both pupils of Rembrandt – were painters of the first rank and there is nothing in the oeuvre of either master that is reminiscent of this rather unbalanced gallery painting. The question is therefore: to what does this piece owe its inaccessible appearance? This, of course, also relates to the manufacture-process and function of the canvas. Archival records and historical texts contain many relevant details on the paintings' genesis but have so far mainly given rise to confusion. The technical investigation, carried out during the 2007-2009 conservation campaign of the Batavian series, now demonstrates that the painting's extreme appearance traces back to both its peculiar genesis that is wholly different from that of the other gallery paintings and to its unfortunate conservation history. It was found that the piece was never intended to be a permanent decoration: the canvas is the one surviving remnant of a series of temporary festive decorations that Flinck had produced in the summer of 1659 in honour of the visit of Amalia van Solms and the Orange family to the Town Hall. Because of the painting's temporary nature, Flinck has modified his usual working procedures. Rather than taking sturdy, durable linen he chose a thin, fine canvas; and instead of applying to his canvas a reliable ground layer he painted on it directly. Flinck elected for fast-drying water-based paint (gum arabic) and worked with an extremely modest palette: he coloured his canvas with a thinned brown paint and on this base modelled his figures with only black contours and beige highlights. The original idea was that Flinck's temporary works would be replaced by permanent decorations from his hand, consisting of twelve paintings. But because of his untimely death in 1660, the commission was divided between Jordaens, Lievens and Rembrandt. Rembrandt's painting, to replace Flinck's work with the nocturnal conspiracy, was almost immediately removed, probably in the summer of 1662. When the Bishop of Cologne visited Amsterdam shortly afterwards, this empty space needed to be filled in a hurry and Flinck's old decoration was retrieved from storage. Jürgen Ovens was commissioned to 'work up [= finish] a sketch by Govert Flinck into a complete ordonnance'. Once again we seem to be dealing with a temporary decoration, for the modest sum of 48 guilders was all that Ovens was paid. The painter only did what was absolutely essential – after applying an isolating glue layer, he just added a few lines and touches of colour in oil paint here and there, all just enough to clarify Flinck's image, which was by then probably somewhat battered. The planned replacement of the Flinck/Ovens' canvas by a permanent painting never materialized; oppressed by a shortage of finance, the city governors decided in 1664 to postpone for five years all commissions or purchases of paintings for the Town Hall. This is why Flinck's canvas, dressed up a little by Ovens, has remained in the gallery to this day. Obviously, this painting, produced for a strictly temporary purpose, was never intended to have such a long 'life'. An ungrounded canvas painted with water-based paint is highly fragile and discolours as the fabric ages. But quite apart from this discolouration the dark and empty impression that the painting conveys today, is mainly due to earlier treatments by those who had no understanding of its unique characteristics. As archival records show, in the eighteenth century the canvas was lined twice using glue; a treatment that involved the use of considerable amounts of water. In addition, over the centuries the painting has been varnished several times and in the 1960's it was given a wax-resin lining. It is because these treatments, each of which is totally unsuitable for a water-based canvas, that the painting has acquired its present patchy and dark orange-brown appearance. Since nothing can be done to remedy the consequences of the lack of understanding of previous centuries - one cannot return to the painting's original appearance - the aim of the recent restoration was to achieve a balance between the aspects of the painting that stem from its unusual manufacture-process and the qualities that are the consequence of its conservation history.

River beds are one of the most dynamic geographical features on the surface of the earth, accompanied by constant movements and displacements. They respond well to the dynamics of temperature and climatic conditions, changes and variability of meteorological conditions, as well as human load. Increasing rainfall during the season, the recurrence of abnormal seasons lead not only to an increase in the water level in the channel, but also to an increase in both the number and width of the river's hoses, contributes to the change of the location of the main channel, accompanied by watering old women and floodplains, the accumulation of sediment and the increase of washouts. Horizontal displacements of the channel significantly affect the cultural and natural landscapes and human economic activity. Conversely, human activity, in particular, mining and large-scale hydrotechnical works in the valleys, also change their course. Insufficient study and research of riverbed issues can lead to the flooding of large areas, which is particularly dangerous for settlements. The current insufficient number of existing hydrological posts, the reduction of field research opportunities, the deterioration of the quality and the inaccessibility of hydrometeorological, mapping information, and for most water bodies simply the lack of data leads to the impossibility of a comprehensive hydrological and morphological study of the river basin and the assessment of intensities. For this reason, in most of the works encountered and related to similar issues, a small local body of water or a section of the main channel or its tributary is selected for research. An important problem is also the comparison of the morphometric characteristics of the river network on topographic maps and plans of different scale series. The river meandering close to reality can only be displayed on large-scale maps. The smaller the scale of the map, the more straightened or generalized the drawing of the rivers. Therefore, it is advisable to carry out such assessments and study of horizontal displacements of the channel on the cartographic material of one scale series. The horizontal displacements of the Prut River bed within the city of Chernivtsi were investigated using topographic maps and plans of different scale, for more than 160 years of observations. About 15 km of the Prut River bed has been digitized. For a better and more detailed analysis of the change in horizontal displacements of the riverbed, the study area was divided into three sections - West, Central, and East. The choice of a place of division is caused by features of the winding channel. The search of maps of different scales in previous years for this territory made it possible to compare the horizontal displacements of the Prut River bed both in time and in space. Topographic maps of 1: 100000 scale in 1982, 1:50000 - 1940 and 1977 and 1:25000 of 1947 and 1957, maps of the Austrian monarchy of 1:75000 - 1855 were found. Analysis of the spatial-temporal changes of horizontal displacements of the Prut River bed by space images and topographic maps during the 161-year observation period showed significant differences in terms of the most meandering channel and its size and shape. Using time analysis, it was found that the highest meandering of the channel was observed in the middle of the twentieth century and amounted to 1.33 and decreased to 1.12 as of 2016. Virtually unchanged, in terms of horizontal displacements, the channel remained in the central part of the study area. In the eastern and western parts, the tortuosity coefficient is increased due to the meandering of the channel and due to the presence of the sleeves, especially in the Kalichanka area. For the western part, the greatest changes are observed in the area of the Prut River near the villages of Lenkivtsi and Streletsky Kut. The highest values of deviations of the channel from the current location are in the range of 300-400 meters.

In this issue of Journal of Disaster Research, we introduce nine papers on societal responses to recent catastrophic disasters with special focus on long-term recovery processes in Japan and the United States. As disaster impacts increase, we also find that recovery times take longer and the processes for recovery become more complicated. On January 17th of 1995, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit the Hanshin and Awaji regions of Japan, resulting in the largest disaster in Japan in 50 years. In this disaster which we call the Kobe earthquake hereafter, over 6,000 people were killed and the damage and losses totaled more than 100 billion US dollars. The long-term recovery from the Kobe earthquake disaster took more than ten years to complete. One of the most important responsibilities of disaster researchers has been to scientifically monitor and record the long-term recovery process following this unprecedented disaster and discern the lessons that can be applied to future disasters. The first seven papers in this issue present some of the key lessons our research team learned from the studying the long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake disaster. We have two additional papers that deal with two recent disasters in the United States – the terrorist attacks on World Trade Center in New York on September 11 of 2001 and the devastation of New Orleans by the 2005 Hurricane Katrina and subsequent levee failures. These disasters have raised a number of new research questions about long-term recovery that US researchers are studying because of the unprecedented size and nature of these disasters’ impacts. Mr. Mammen’s paper reviews the long-term recovery processes observed at and around the World Trade Center site over the last six years. Ms. Johnson’s paper provides a detailed account of the protracted reconstruction planning efforts in the city of New Orleans to illustrate a set of sufficient and necessary conditions for successful recovery. All nine papers in this issue share a theoretical framework for long-term recovery processes which we developed based first upon the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake and later expanded through observations made following other recent disasters in the world. The following sections provide a brief description of each paper as an introduction to this special issue. 1. The Need for Multiple Recovery Goals After the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the long-term recovery process began with the formulation of disaster recovery plans by the City of Kobe – the most severely impacted municipality – and an overarching plan by Hyogo Prefecture which coordinated 20 impacted municipalities; this planning effort took six months. Before the Kobe earthquake, as indicated in Mr. Maki’s paper in this issue, Japanese theories about, and approaches to, recovery focused mainly on physical recovery, particularly: the redevelopment plans for destroyed areas; the location and standards for housing and building reconstruction; and, the repair and rehabilitation of utility systems. But the lingering problems of some of the recent catastrophes in Japan and elsewhere indicate that there are multiple dimensions of recovery that must be considered. We propose that two other key dimensions are economic recovery and life recovery. The goal of economic recovery is the revitalization of the local disaster impacted economy, including both major industries and small businesses. The goal of life recovery is the restoration of the livelihoods of disaster victims. The recovery plans formulated following the 1995 Kobe earthquake, including the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s plans, all stressed these two dimensions in addition to physical recovery. The basic structure of both the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans are summarized in Fig. 1. Each plan has three elements that work simultaneously. The first and most basic element of recovery is the restoration of damaged infrastructure. This helps both physical recovery and economic recovery. Once homes and work places are recovered, Life recovery of the impacted people can be achieved as the final goal of recovery. Figure 2 provides a “recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006 – 11 years into Kobe’s recovery. Infrastructure was restored in two years, which was probably the fastest infrastructure restoration ever, after such a major disaster; it astonished the world. Within five years, more than 140,000 housing units were constructed using a variety of financial means and ownership patterns, and exceeding the number of demolished housing units. Governments at all levels – municipal, prefectural, and national – provided affordable public rental apartments. Private developers, both local and national, also built condominiums and apartments. Disaster victims themselves also invested a lot to reconstruct their homes. Eleven major redevelopment projects were undertaken and all were completed in 10 years. In sum, the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake was extensive and has been viewed as a major success. In contrast, economic recovery and life recovery are still underway more than 13 years later. Before the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s policy approaches to recovery assumed that economic recovery and life recovery would be achieved by infusing ample amounts of public funding for physical recovery into the disaster area. Even though the City of Kobe’s and Hyogo Prefecture’s recovery plans set economic recovery and life recovery as key goals, there was not clear policy guidance to accomplish them. Without a clear articulation of the desired end-state, economic recovery programs for both large and small businesses were ill-timed and ill-matched to the needs of these businesses trying to recover amidst a prolonged slump in the overall Japanese economy that began in 1997. “Life recovery” programs implemented as part of Kobe’s recovery were essentially social welfare programs for low-income and/or senior citizens. 2. Requirements for Successful Physical Recovery Why was the physical recovery following the 1995 Kobe earthquake so successful in terms of infrastructure restoration, the replacement of damaged housing units, and completion of urban redevelopment projects? There are at least three key success factors that can be applied to other disaster recovery efforts: 1) citizen participation in recovery planning efforts, 2) strong local leadership, and 3) the establishment of numerical targets for recovery. Citizen participation As pointed out in the three papers on recovery planning processes by Mr. Maki, Mr. Mammen, and Ms. Johnson, citizen participation is one of the indispensable factors for successful recovery plans. Thousands of citizens participated in planning workshops organized by America Speaks as part of both the World Trade Center and City of New Orleans recovery planning efforts. Although no such workshops were held as part of the City of Kobe’s recovery planning process, citizen participation had been part of the City of Kobe’s general plan update that had occurred shortly before the earthquake. The City of Kobe’s recovery plan is, in large part, an adaptation of the 1995-2005 general plan. On January 13 of 1995, the City of Kobe formally approved its new, 1995-2005 general plan which had been developed over the course of three years with full of citizen participation. City officials, responsible for drafting the City of Kobe’s recovery plan, have later admitted that they were able to prepare the city’s recovery plan in six months because they had the preceding three years of planning for the new general plan with citizen participation. Based on this lesson, Odiya City compiled its recovery plan based on the recommendations obtained from a series of five stakeholder workshops after the 2004 Niigata Chuetsu earthquake. <strong>Fig. 1. </strong> Basic structure of recovery plans from the 1995 Kobe earthquake. <strong>Fig. 2. </strong> “Disaster recovery report card” of the progress made by 2006. Strong leadership In the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake, local leadership had a defining role in the recovery process. Kobe’s former Mayor, Mr. Yukitoshi Sasayama, was hired to work in Kobe City government as an urban planner, rebuilding Kobe following World War II. He knew the city intimately. When he saw damage in one area on his way to the City Hall right after the earthquake, he knew what levels of damage to expect in other parts of the city. It was he who called for the two-month moratorium on rebuilding in Kobe city on the day of the earthquake. The moratorium provided time for the city to formulate a vision and policies to guide the various levels of government, private investors, and residents in rebuilding. It was a quite unpopular policy when Mayor Sasayama announced it. Citizens expected the city to be focusing on shelters and mass care, not a ban on reconstruction. Based on his experience in rebuilding Kobe following WWII, he was determined not to allow haphazard reconstruction in the city. It took several years before Kobe citizens appreciated the moratorium. Numerical targets Former Governor Mr. Toshitami Kaihara provided some key numerical targets for recovery which were announced in the prefecture and municipal recovery plans. They were: 1) Hyogo Prefecture would rebuild all the damaged housing units in three years, 2) all the temporary housing would be removed within five years, and 3) physical recovery would be completed in ten years. All of these numerical targets were achieved. Having numerical targets was critical to directing and motivating all the stakeholders including the national government’s investment, and it proved to be the foundation for Japan’s fundamental approach to recovery following the 1995 earthquake. 3. Economic Recovery as the Prime Goal of Disaster Recovery In Japan, it is the responsibility of the national government to supply the financial support to restore damaged infrastructure and public facilities in the impacted area as soon as possible. The long-term recovery following the Kobe earthquake is the first time, in Japan’s modern history, that a major rebuilding effort occurred during a time when there was not also strong national economic growth. In contrast, between 1945 and 1990, Japan enjoyed a high level of national economic growth which helped facilitate the recoveries following WWII and other large fires. In the first year after the Kobe earthquake, Japan’s national government invested more than US$ 80 billion in recovery. These funds went mainly towards the repair and reconstruction of infrastructure and public facilities. Now, looking back, we can also see that these investments also nearly crushed the local economy. Too much money flowed into the local economy over too short a period of time and it also did not have the “trickle-down” effect that might have been intended. To accomplish numerical targets for physical recovery, the national government awarded contracts to large companies from Osaka and Tokyo. But, these large out-of-town contractors also tended to have their own labor and supply chains already intact, and did not use local resources and labor, as might have been expected. Essentially, ten years of housing supply was completed in less than three years, which led to a significant local economic slump. Large amounts of public investment for recovery are not necessarily a panacea for local businesses, and local economic recovery, as shown in the following two examples from the Kobe earthquake. A significant national investment was made to rebuild the Port of Kobe to a higher seismic standard, but both its foreign export and import trade never recovered to pre-disaster levels. While the Kobe Port was out of business, both the Yokohama Port and the Osaka Port increased their business, even though many economists initially predicted that the Kaohsiung Port in Chinese Taipei or the Pusan Port in Korea would capture this business. Business stayed at all of these ports even after the reopening of the Kobe Port. Similarly, the Hanshin Railway was severely damaged and it took half a year to resume its operation, but it never regained its pre-disaster readership. In this case, two other local railway services, the JR and Hankyu lines, maintained their increased readership even after the Hanshin railway resumed operation. As illustrated by these examples, pre-disaster customers who relied on previous economic output could not necessarily afford to wait for local industries to recover and may have had to take their business elsewhere. Our research suggests that the significant recovery investment made by Japan’s national government may have been a disincentive for new economic development in the impacted area. Government may have been the only significant financial risk-taker in the impacted area during the national economic slow-down. But, its focus was on restoring what had been lost rather than promoting new or emerging economic development. Thus, there may have been a missed opportunity to provide incentives or put pressure on major businesses and industries to develop new businesses and attract new customers in return for the public investment. The significant recovery investment by Japan’s national government may have also created an over-reliance of individuals on public spending and government support. As indicated in Ms. Karatani’s paper, individual savings of Kobe’s residents has continued to rise since the earthquake and the number of individuals on social welfare has also decreased below pre-disaster levels. Based on our research on economic recovery from the Kobe earthquake, at least two lessons emerge: 1) Successful economic recovery requires coordination among all three recovery goals – Economic, Physical and Life Recovery, and 2) “Recovery indices” are needed to better chart recovery progress in real-time and help ensure that the recovery investments are being used effectively. Economic recovery as the prime goal of recovery Physical recovery, especially the restoration of infrastructure and public facilities, may be the most direct and socially accepted provision of outside financial assistance into an impacted area. However, lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake suggest that the sheer amount of such assistance may not be effective as it should be. Thus, as shown in Fig. 3, economic recovery should be the top priority goal for recovery among the three goals and serve as a guiding force for physical recovery and life recovery. Physical recovery can be a powerful facilitator of post-disaster economic development by upgrading social infrastructure and public facilities in compliance with economic recovery plans. In this way, it is possible to turn a disaster into an opportunity for future sustainable development. Life recovery may also be achieved with a healthy economic recovery that increases tax revenue in the impacted area. In order to achieve this coordination among all three recovery goals, municipalities in the impacted areas should have access to flexible forms of post-disaster financing. The community development block grant program that has been used after several large disasters in the United States, provide impacted municipalities with a more flexible form of funding and the ability to better determine what to do and when. The participation of key stakeholders is also an indispensable element of success that enables block grant programs to transform local needs into concrete businesses. In sum, an effective economic recovery combines good coordination of national support to restore infrastructure and public facilities and local initiatives that promote community recovery. Developing Recovery Indices Long-term recovery takes time. As Mr. Tatsuki’s paper explains, periodical social survey data indicates that it took ten years before the initial impacts of the Kobe earthquake were no longer affecting the well-being of disaster victims and the recovery was completed. In order to manage this long-term recovery process effectively, it is important to have some indices to visualize the recovery processes. In this issue, three papers by Mr. Takashima, Ms. Karatani, and Mr. Kimura define three different kinds of recovery indices that can be used to continually monitor the progress of the recovery. Mr. Takashima focuses on electric power consumption in the impacted area as an index for impact and recovery. Chronological change in electric power consumption can be obtained from the monthly reports of power company branches. Daily estimates can also be made by tracking changes in city lights using a satellite called DMSP. Changes in city lights can be a very useful recovery measure especially at the early stages since it can be updated daily for anywhere in the world. Ms. Karatani focuses on the chronological patterns of monthly macro-statistics that prefecture and city governments collect as part of their routine monitoring of services and operations. For researchers, it is extremely costly and virtually impossible to launch post-disaster projects that collect recovery data continuously for ten years. It is more practical for researchers to utilize data that is already being collected by local governments or other agencies and use this data to create disaster impact and recovery indices. Ms. Karatani found three basic patterns of disaster impact and recovery in the local government data that she studied: 1) Some activities increased soon after the disaster event and then slumped, such as housing construction; 2) Some activities reduced sharply for a period of time after the disaster and then rebounded to previous levels, such as grocery consumption; and 3) Some activities reduced sharply for a while and never returned to previous levels, such as the Kobe Port and Hanshin Railway. Mr. Kimura focuses on the psychology of disaster victims. He developed a “recovery and reconstruction calendar” that clarifies the process that disaster victims undergo in rebuilding their shattered lives. His work is based on the results of random surveys. Despite differences in disaster size and locality, survey data from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake indicate that the recovery and reconstruction calendar is highly reliable and stable in clarifying the recovery and reconstruction process. <strong>Fig. 3.</strong> Integrated plan of disaster recovery. 4. Life Recovery as the Ultimate Goal of Disaster Recovery Life recovery starts with the identification of the disaster victims. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area issue a “damage certificate” to disaster victims by household, recording the extent of each victim’s housing damage. After the Kobe earthquake, a total of 500,000 certificates were issued. These certificates, in turn, were used by both public and private organizations to determine victim’s eligibility for individual assistance programs. However, about 30% of those victims who received certificates after the Kobe earthquake were dissatisfied with the results of assessment. This caused long and severe disputes for more than three years. Based on the lessons learned from the Kobe earthquake, Mr. Horie’s paper presents (1) a standardized procedure for building damage assessment and (2) an inspector training system. This system has been adopted as the official building damage assessment system for issuing damage certificates to victims of the 2004 Niigata-ken Chuetsu earthquake, the 2007 Noto-Peninsula earthquake, and the 2007 Niigata-ken Chuetsu Oki earthquake. Personal and family recovery, which we term life recovery, was one of the explicit goals of the recovery plan from the Kobe earthquake, but it was unclear in both recovery theory and practice as to how this would be measured and accomplished. Now, after studying the recovery in Kobe and other regions, Ms. Tamura’s paper proposes that there are seven elements that define the meaning of life recovery for disaster victims. She recently tested this model in a workshop with Kobe disaster victims. The seven elements and victims’ rankings are shown in Fig. 4. Regaining housing and restoring social networks were, by far, the top recovery indicators for victims. Restoration of neighborhood character ranked third. Demographic shifts and redevelopment plans implemented following the Kobe earthquake forced significant neighborhood changes upon many victims. Next in line were: having a sense of being better prepared and reducing their vulnerability to future disasters; regaining their physical and mental health; and restoration of their income, job, and the economy. The provision of government assistance also provided victims with a sense of life recovery. Mr. Tatsuki’s paper summarizes the results of four random-sample surveys of residents within the most severely impacted areas of Hyogo Prefecture. These surveys were conducted biannually since 1999,. Based on the results of survey data from 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005, it is our conclusion that life recovery took ten years for victims in the area impacted significantly by the Kobe earthquake. Fig. 5 shows that by comparing the two structural equation models of disaster recovery (from 2003 and 2005), damage caused by the Kobe earthquake was no longer a determinant of life recovery in the 2005 model. It was still one of the major determinants in the 2003 model as it was in 1999 and 2001. This is the first time in the history of disaster research that the entire recovery process has been scientifically described. It can be utilized as a resource and provide benchmarks for monitoring the recovery from future disasters. <strong>Fig. 4.</strong> Ethnographical meaning of “life recovery” obtained from the 5th year review of the Kobe earthquake by the City of Kobe. <strong>Fig. 5.</strong> Life recovery models of 2003 and 2005. 6. The Need for an Integrated Recovery Plan The recovery lessons from Kobe and other regions suggest that we need more integrated recovery plans that use physical recovery as a tool for economic recovery, which in turn helps disaster victims. Furthermore, we believe that economic recovery should be the top priority for recovery, and physical recovery should be regarded as a tool for stimulating economic recovery and upgrading social infrastructure (as shown in Fig. 6). With this approach, disaster recovery can help build the foundation for a long-lasting and sustainable community. Figure 6 proposes a more detailed model for a more holistic recovery process. The ultimate goal of any recovery process should be achieving life recovery for all disaster victims. We believe that to get there, both direct and indirect approaches must be taken. Direct approaches include: the provision of funds and goods for victims, for physical and mental health care, and for housing reconstruction. Indirect approaches for life recovery are those which facilitate economic recovery, which also has both direct and indirect approaches. Direct approaches to economic recovery include: subsidies, loans, and tax exemptions. Indirect approaches to economic recovery include, most significantly, the direct projects to restore infrastructure and public buildings. More subtle approaches include: setting new regulations or deregulations, providing technical support, and creating new businesses. A holistic recovery process needs to strategically combine all of these approaches, and there must be collaborative implementation by all the key stakeholders, including local governments, non-profit and non-governmental organizations (NPOs and NGOs), community-based organizations (CBOs), and the private sector. Therefore, community and stakeholder participation in the planning process is essential to achieve buy-in for the vision and desired outcomes of the recovery plan. Securing the required financial resources is also critical to successful implementation. In thinking of stakeholders, it is important to differentiate between supporting entities and operating agencies. Supporting entities are those organizations that supply the necessary funding for recovery. Both Japan’s national government and the federal government in the U.S. are the prime supporting entities in the recovery from the 1995 Kobe earthquake and the 2001 World Trade Center recovery. In Taiwan, the Buddhist organization and the national government of Taiwan were major supporting entities in the recovery from the 1999 Chi-Chi earthquake. Operating agencies are those organizations that implement various recovery measures. In Japan, local governments in the impacted area are operating agencies, while the national government is a supporting entity. In the United States, community development block grants provide an opportunity for many operating agencies to implement various recovery measures. As Mr. Mammen’ paper describes, many NPOs, NGOs, and/or CBOs in addition to local governments have had major roles in implementing various kinds programs funded by block grants as part of the World Trade Center recovery. No one, single organization can provide effective help for all kinds of disaster victims individually or collectively. The needs of disaster victims may be conflicting with each other because of their diversity. Their divergent needs can be successfully met by the diversity of operating agencies that have responsibility for implementing recovery measures. In a similar context, block grants made to individual households, such as microfinance, has been a vital recovery mechanism for victims in Thailand who suffered from the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami disaster. Both disaster victims and government officers at all levels strongly supported the microfinance so that disaster victims themselves would become operating agencies for recovery. Empowering individuals in sustainable life recovery is indeed the ultimate goal of recovery. <strong>Fig. 6.</strong> A holistic recovery policy model.

This research of riverside settlement in Kampung Beting extends our understanding of Kapuas riverside as a place to live and make a living. Kampung Beting set on the delta of Kapuas river branching and put it in the history as the part of Pontianak urban city developments. This research explores the phenomenon of the residents that live above the water can adapt and use the Kapuas River as their place to grow and cultivate their domestic productions. The finding shows that there are no specific programs from the residents and also from the government to improve the quality of the domestic output, so the home-based business (hydroculture) are poorly handled. Connected floating corridors, the genuine of water culture, and riverside picturesque are several of the potential factors that can be improved to transform Kampung Beting into an attractive tourist area. The study suggests the landscape design of river aquaculture that can escalate the variation of the venture, increase the resident’s productivity, and create a conducive environment for stability. Designing tourist routes within Kampung Beting, not only introduces cultural and historical values but also aims to increase income for the community.

The text discusses the location factors of “terreiros” of Xangô in the city of Recife, in the context of the decade 1930, in an area adjacent to the city of Olinda, to the margins of Água Fria old river (current Channel Vasco da Gama-Peixinhos), tributary of the Beberibe river. Revisits thus within the North Zone of the city, the historical reasons and the geographical factors of the spatial concentration of centers of afro-religious worship on the banks of these water courses, that decisively influenced in the formation of the suburbs formerly located in the area known as Beberibe de Baixo and adjacencies, in the course of the end 19th century and first half of the 20th century. In light of this period are listed the african-religious leaders and their terreiros, cartographically represented along the river above-mentioned.

Purpose. Development of methodical approaches to the development of water protection zones in cities based on the principles of landscape-ecological planning. Methods. GIS modeling using remote sensing data. ArcGIS 10.0 operational features (in particular, vectorization, buffering, algebra mapping tools) were used as a software for spatial analysis of data. Results. The analysis of modern Ukrainian water protection legislation has allowed to identify a number of problems in the design and development of water protection areas in the rivers within a city. For their solution, initial provisions of the organization of water protection zones in cities, derived from the principles of landscape-ecological planning, have been formulated: 1) unified rules and unequivocal demands for project development; 2) an integrated approach for solutions development; 3) subordination of goals of city-planning to the goals of environmental protection; 4) strategic goals and progressive implementation of the water protection policy. The basic algorithm of landscape-ecological planning of "urban" water protection zones has been substantiated. It consists of the following 4 stages: inventory, estimation, analysis and generalization, development of the concept for development of the water protective zone. A "hybrid" approach to the design of water protection zones is proposed, which allows to adjust the normatively defined territorial configuration in accordance with the value of the water protection potential of the landscape. Approbation of the methodology is carried out for the Udy River within the Kharkiv city borders, as a result of which a set of cartographic models was created, including the design of the boundaries of the territory of the water protection zone and the zoning of its territory in accordance with the integral goals. For a specific territory of the water protection zone, a list of recommended envi ronmental measures has been developed. Conclusions. Application of the landscape and ecological planning principles during development of water protection zones within cities implies the need for changes in existing approaches to their development. As a result of the approbation of the proposed methodology we have developed the GIS project which can be used as the basic model of the territorial configuration of the water protection zone of the Udy River within Kharkiv in the course of its developemt.

Raba Kistner, Inc. (RKI) was contracted by K-Friese + Associates (CLIENT), on behalf of San Antonio Water Systems (SAWS) to conduct archaeological monitoring for emergency repairs to a collapsed sewer lateral within West Houston Street in downtown San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. The project involved the excavation of the area around the collapsed portion of the sewer lateral and the replacement of the damaged line. The project is located within the boundaries of a Catholic Cemetery and is between Milam Square (41BX991), which is a historic cemetery, and an area of the Children’s Hospital of San Antonio where the first City Cemeteries have been documented. As such, the City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation (COSA OHP) required the monitoring of the excavation activities. The proposed project is located on lands controlled by the City of San Antonio and work was conducted by SAWS, both entities of the State of Texas. As such, the project falls under the Antiquities Code of Texas (ACT) (Texas Natural Resource Code, Title 9, Chapter 191). Furthermore, the project was also subject to review under Chapter 35 of the City of San Antonio’s Unified Development Code (UDC) (Article VI, Historic Preservation and Urban Design). All work was conducted in accordance with the Archeological Survey Standards for Texas as set forth by the Council of Texas Archeologists (CTA) and the THC under Texas Antiquities Committee Permit Number 9209. A desktop review was conducted to determine if any previously conducted archaeological investigations or any cultural resources had been documented within the APE. Review of the Texas Archeological Sites Atlas (Atlas), revealed that no previous archaeological surveys have been conducted within the APE and that no previously recorded archaeological sites have been documented within the APE. Cultural resources monitoring investigations for the project were conducted on December 21 and 22, 2019, and January 14, 2020. Antonio Padilla served as Project Manager and Principal Investigator, and all field work was conducted by Lindy Martinez and Susan Sincerbox. The undertaking involved the excavation of an approximately 34-foot-long (10 meter [m]-) north-south, 2.5–to–9-foot-wide east-west (0.5–to–2.74 m-) trench that extended from the sewer main located near the center of West Houston Street to the clean out located under the sidewalk north of West Houston Street. For archaeological purposes the Area of Potential Effects (APE) consisted of approximately 800 square feet or 0.018 acres. The depths of impacts reached a depth of 6 feet (1.8 m) below surface. During the investigations, it was discovered that the entire APE has been heavily impacted by previous construction events and the installation of utilities. Throughout the excavations, construction gravels reaching a depth of 6 feet (1.8 m) below surface were observed within the entire APE, and several utilities were encountered. No intact soils were present within the trench. It appears that previous construction events and installation of utilities have removed all intact soils to the depth reached by the trench. Due to the absence of intact soils, no soils were screened. Additionally, no cultural materials or cultural features were observed during the monitoring of the excavations. RKI has made a reasonable and good faith effort identifying cultural resources within the APE. No significant deposits or features were identified during cultural resource monitoring. As a result, RKI does not recommend further archaeological investigations within the APE. However, should changes be made to the APE, further work may be required. No diagnostic artifacts were collected during the course of the investigations, thus, no artifacts will be curated at the completion of the project. All field records generated during this project will be permanently curated at the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

In India, the concept of smart city has evolved since last few years. Smart city includes smart electricity distributions, smart parking, smart lighting on streets, smart water distribution, smart drainage system, smart pipe gas system, smart traffic control system etc. All smart systems listed need smart use of technical solution so that all systems will play critical role in making city as smart. As far as smart traffic control is concerned, there were few solutions suggested and implanted such as sensor with CCTV, camera with IR sensor and tags etc. The technical solution may include software, hardware, communication models, networking, usage of data and of-course data analytics. As large amount of data may be generated by the objects/components involved in the system, it must be analyzed properly. The data may be in structured or un-structured format. In this paper, smart traffic control system with efficient algorithm has been proposed with data analytics to control traffic, which controls the timing of the signal dynamically. At a junction, there is need to control the traffic and signal timing such that air and noise pollution also will be monitored and controlled. In this model, IoT system has been proposed with ultrasonic sensors to control the traffic. The signal timing will be dynamically monitored and adjusted with traffic density within a region. This will give solution to control, monitor the traffic at every signal in a city

Raba Kistner, Inc. (RKI), was contracted by K Friese + Associates (CLIENT) to conduct cultural resources monitoring investigations for the San Antonio Water Systems (SAWS) Silverhorn Rehabilitation Project in northern San Antonio, Bexar County, Texas. The project involved rehabilitating 3,690 linear feet of existing sewer line within the Silverhorn Golf Club, which is within the Walker Ranch National Register District. The majority of the proposed undertaking was conducted by non-invasive methods (i.e., cured-in-place-pipe (CIPP)); however, point repairs involving excavations were conducted in areas where broken pipe was encountered. Given that the proposed undertaking is located on lands owned by the City of San Antonio (COSA), and because COSA is a political subdivision of the State of Texas, the project falls under the jurisdiction of Chapter 35 of the Unified Development Code (UDC) of the City of San Antonio, as well as the Antiquities Code of Texas (ACT). The UDC is regulated by the COSA Office of Historic Preservation (OHP), while the ACT is administered by the Texas Historical Commission (THC). Cultural resources investigations for the project were conducted on January 11, 12, and 24, 2020. Jason M. Whitaker served as Principal Investigator and Project Manager for the duration of the project, and all fieldwork was completed by Jason M. Whitaker and Christopher Matthews. All work was conducted in accordance with the standards set forth by the Council of Texas Archeologists and adopted by the Texas Historical Commission, under Texas Antiquities Committee Permit Number 9220. The overall undertaking consisted of the rehabilitation of approximately 3,690 linear feet of existing sewer line within the Silverhorn Golf Club. The majority of the project area was rehabilitated through the use of cured-in-place-pipe (CIPP) with no subsurface impacts. However, four areas along the 3,960 sewer line alignment were in need of point repairs which required subsurface excavations. For archaeological purposes, the Area of Potential Effects (APE) was comprised of four areas where subsurface excavations were conducted. Excavation within the APE areas were comprised of a single backhoe trench measuring approximately 22.3 by 13.1 feet (6.8 meters [m] by 4.0 m) and three 5-inch diameter boreholes. The combined area of impact of the APE areas measured approximately 0.007 acres. Depths of impacts reached 10.33 feet below surface within the trench, and a depth of 5.5 feet below surface. Disturbances within the APE included the existing sewer line, golf course construction, and various associated utilities. The APE was located entirely within areas impacted by the installation of the existing sewer line and was evident during the monitoring of the excavations. Evidence of previous disturbances was observed during the monitoring of the point repairs. No cultural deposits or features were documented during monitoring excavations of the SAWS Silverhorn Rehabilitation Project. Additionally, no evidence of unmarked burials or human remains were observed. Given that excavations occurred over a previously excavated areas and no cultural materials were identified, RKI recommends no further archaeological investigations for the current APE. However, should additional point repairs along the existing sewer line be required, it is recommended that additional monitoring be conducted. All field records generated by this project will be permanently curated at the Center for Archaeological Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The Missouri River is a continent-scale river that has thus far escaped a rigorous reporting of valley fill trends within its trunk system. This study summarizes evolution of the lower Missouri River profile from the time of outwash in the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) until establishment of the modern dominantly precipitation-fed river. This work relies on optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) dating, water-well data, and a collection of surficial geological maps of the valley compiled from U.S. Geological Survey EDMAP and National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergrads projects. Mapping reveals five traceable surfaces within valley fill between Yankton, South Dakota, USA, and Columbia, Missouri, USA, that record two cycles of incision and aggradation between ca. 23 ka and ca. 8 ka. The river aggraded during the LGM to form the Malta Bend surface by ca. 26 ka. The Malta Bend surface is buried and fragmented but presumed to record a braided outwash plain. The Malta Bend surface was incised up to 18 m between ca. 23 ka and ca. 16 ka to form the Carrolton surface (ca. 16 ka to ca. 14 ka). The Carrollton surface ghosts a braided outwash morphology locally through overlying mud. Aggradation followed (ca. 14 ka to ca. 13.5 ka) to within 4 m of the modern floodplain surface and generated the Salix surface (ca. 13.5 to ca. 12 ka). By Salix time, the Missouri River was no longer an outwash river and formed a single-thread meandering pattern. Reincision at ca. 12 ka followed Salix deposition to form the short-lived Vermillion surface at approximately the grade of the earlier Carrolton surface. Rapid aggradation from ca. 10 ka to ca. 8 ka followed and formed the modern Omaha surface (ca. 8 ka to Present). The higher Malta Bend and Omaha profiles are at roughly the same grade, as are the lower Carrolton and Vermillion surfaces. The Salix surface is in between. All surfaces converge downstream as they enter the narrow and shallow bedrock valley just before reaching Columbia, Missouri. The maximum departure of the profiles is 18 m near Sioux City, Iowa, USA, at ∼100 km downstream from the James Lobe glacial input near Yankton, South Dakota. Incision and aggradation appear to be driven by relative changes in input of sediment and water related to glacial advance and retreat and then later by climatic changes near the Holocene transition. The incision from the Malta Bend to the Carrolton surface records the initial breakdown of the cryosphere at the end of the LGM, and this same incisional event is found in both the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. This incisional event records a “big wash” that resulted in the evacuation of sediment from each of the major outwash rivers of North America. The direction and magnitude of incision from the LGM to the modern does not fit with modeled glacioisostatic adjustment trends for the Missouri Valley. Glaciotectonics likely influenced the magnitude of incision and aggradation secondarily but does not appear to have controlled the overall timing or magnitude of either. Glaciotectonic valley tilting during the Holocene, however, did likely cause the Holocene channel to consistently migrate away from the glacial front, which argues for a forebulge axis south of the Missouri Valley during the Holocene and, by inference, earlier. This is at least 200 km south of where models predict the Holocene forebulge axis. The Missouri Valley thus appears to reside in the tectonic low between the ice front and the forebulge crest. The buffer valley component of incision caused by profile variation could explain as much as 25 m of the total ∼40 m of valley incision at Sioux City, Iowa. The Missouri Valley also hosted a glacial lobe as far south as Sioux City, Iowa, in pre-Wisconsinan time, which is also a factor in valley excavation.

This piece of writing is part of an exploration of ‘the personal voice’ within a Doctorate of Creative Arts. I come to this degree with a background as a documentary filmmaker and oral historian and with recent experience in the curation of a social history exhibition. My dissertation is entitled "Braided Channels: Reflections on the 'Voice of Documentary' from a cross media and inter disciplinary perspective." The doctorate uses and examines several modes of address and definitions of communicative voice in order to extend our knowledge of how discourses can be delivered in a range of modes and media to engender a sense of veracity in the 'audience'. In this essay I apply the quintessential documentary practice of metonymy to the medium of non- fiction writing, as a way to get to broader issues through individual example and personal experience. This paper then is a personal account of the uses of land and water on the Hawkesbury Sandstone ridge I lived on as a child and a consideration of how and why these patterns are shifting. This remembering has been motivated by current debates about water use, especially as it relates to bottled water coming from underground aquifers, alternatives to dam storage as the source of urban water supplies and the zoning of arable land adjacent to a growing city. I write in the spirit in which Katrina Proust of the ANU’s Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies notes that environmental history can be a valuable tool in planning for the sustainable future use of a resource. This style of ‘personal memoir meets environmental history’ has of course antecedents not only in documentary film but also in print based work. One example of such work is the collection Landscapes of the Heart: Narratives of Nature and Self, edited by Michael Aleksiuk and came out of the University of Alberta in 2002.

Приведены результаты исследований питьевой воды системы централизованного водоснабжения г. Самары. При определении органолептических показателей качества воды было выявлено увеличение цветности исходных проб на 13 град в пределах погрешности метода измерения. Это может быть связано с высоким содержанием железа и его соединений или гуминовых веществ в пробах в дни проведения эксперимента, а также с высоким физическим износом водопроводных сетей (как уличных, так и внутри здания) и общим ростом цветности воды в Саратовском водохранилище в районе г. Самары за последние годы. Установлена зависимость -потенциала от величины окислительно-восстановительного потенциала и ионного состава воды. Определен физико-химический состав изучаемой воды, сделан анализ полученных результатов. В ходе исследований дополнительно определялись такие показатели, как pH, температура, мутность и щелочность для получения полной картины качества воды. Установлено соответствие всех изучаемых показателей воды нормам СанПиН 2.1.4.1074-01 Питьевая вода. Гигиенические требования к качеству воды централизованных систем питьевого водоснабжения. Контроль качества . Приведены математические зависимости между -потенциалом, жесткостью, содержанием анионов и катионов в исследуемой воде с достоверностью аппроксимации R2 не ниже 0,83. Это позволяет рассчитать ионный состав и мутность питьевой воды г. Самары только по величине -потенциала или окислительно-восстановительного потенциала без проведения дорогостоящих трудоемких химических анализов. Предлагаемый метод рекомендуется использовать в качестве экспресс-анализа питьевой воды.The results of studies of drinking water in the public water supply system of the city of Samara are presented. While determining the organoleptic indicators of the water quality, an increase in color of the initial samples by 13 degrees within the procedural error was revealed. This may be due to the high concentration of iron and its compounds or humic substances in the samples on the days of the experiment, as well as to the high physical deterioration of the water distribution networks (both street networks and plumbing in the buildings), and the general increase in water color in the Saratov water reservoir in the city of Samara in recent years. The dependence of the -potential on the redox potential value and ion composition of water is established. The physicochemical composition of the studied water is determined, an analysis of the results is carried out. In the course of the research, such indicators as pH, temperature, turbidity and alkalinity were additionally determined to obtain an aggregate picture of the water quality. The compliance of all studied water indicators with the requirements of SanPiN 2.1.4.1074-01 Drinking water. Hygienic requirements for water quality of centralized drinking water supply systems. Quality control was confirmed. Mathematical dependences between the -potential, hardness, and the concentration of anions and cations in the water under study are given with an approximation authenticity R2 higher than 0.83. This allows calculating the ion composition and turbidity of drinking water in Samara only by the value of the -potential or redox potential without expensive labor-intensive chemical analyzes. The proposed method is recommended to be used as an express analysis of drinking water.

It is considered that Norilsk ranks second in terms of atmospheric contamination. Industrial enterprises annually emit large amounts of sulphur dioxide, phenols, and heavy metal particles. The city is located within the Far North and is distinguished by the harsh climate of the subarctic type. The snow cover can lie from 244 to 277 days. Snow is a good sorbent; therefore, the snow cover accumulates solid and gaseous pollutants that enter it from the atmosphere with precipitation or are absorbed from it. The purpose of this study was to analyse the snow cover in the Norilsk industrial region and assess the state of atmospheric air in the winter. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks: conduct a literature review on a given topic; take samples of snow in various industrial districts of Norilsk; study the dependence of the qualitative characteristics of snow on the sampling site; draw conclusions on the quality of snowpack in different areas of the industrial districts of Norilsk. In the course of the study, the following methods were used: organoleptic, visual, methods for determining water transparency, titrimetric analysis, etc. Heavy metal ions and sulphate ions were not detected in the thawed snow, so no industrial gas pollution was noted in the residential area. Most of the particulate contamination was caused by slagging of roads to improve vehicle traction.

Small urban streams discharging in the proximity of bathing waters may significantly contribute to the deterioration of water quality, yet their impact may be overlooked. This study focuses on the Elm Park stream in the city of Dublin that is subject to faecal contamination by unidentified sources. The aim of the study was to identify a minimum number of “sentinel” sampling stations in an urban catchment that would provide the maximum amount of information regarding faecal pollution in the catchment. Thus, high-resolution sampling within the catchment was carried out over the course of 1 year at 11 stations. Faecal indicator bacteria were enumerated and microbial source tracking (MST) was employed to evaluate human pollution. In addition, ammonium, total oxidised nitrogen, and phosphorus levels were monitored to determine if these correlated with faecal indicator and the HF183 MST marker. In addition, the effect of severe weather events on water quality was assessed using automated sampling at one of the identified “sentinel” stations during baseflow and high flow conditions over a 24-h period. Our results show that this urban stream is at times highly contaminated by point source faecal pollution and that human faecal pollution is pervasive in the catchment. Correlations between ammonium concentrations and faecal indicator bacteria (FIB) as well as the human MST marker were observed during the study. Cluster analysis identified four “sentinel” stations that provide sufficient information on faecal pollution in the stream, thus reducing the geographical complexity of the catchment. Furthermore, ammonium levels strongly correlated with FIB and the human HF183 MST marker under high flow conditions at key “sentinel” stations. This work demonstrates the effectiveness of pairing MST, faecal indicators, and ammonium monitoring to identify “sentinel” stations that could be more rapidly assessed using real-time ammonium readouts to assess remediation efforts.

Purpose. Investigation of the storm surge in Korsakov in the southern part of the Sakhalin Island on November 15, 2019 and comparison of the results of its numerical simulation with the data of in situ measurements constitute the aim of the article. Methods and Results. In situ measurements of the storm surge in Korsakov (the Sakhalin region) were performed and the data on the flooded area dimensions were collected. A storm period on the Sakhalin Island is almost the annual event in an autumn-winter season. The severe storm that happened in the southern Sakhalin region on November 15, 2019 led to flooding of the port territory in Korsakov. Due to the NAMI-DANCE computational complex, the storm surge was numerically simulated within the framework of the system of shallow water equations in the spherical coordinates on the rotating Earth with the regard for the friction force and the atmospheric effect. The calculations included the data on temporal and spatial distribution of the wind speed at the altitude 10 m taken from the Climate Forecast System Reanalysis database. The data on the atmospheric pressure were not applied in simulations since the atmosphere pressure gradient at the area under study was small. The simulation was carried out in the course of three days. The simulations showed that in 20 hours after the wind forcing had started, the water level in the port increased up to its maximum values, and did not fall the whole day. The water level maximum heights were concentrated in the southwestern part of the Aniva Bay. At that the calculated current speeds reached 2 m/s. During the storm, at the wind speed up to 15 m/s, the storm surge height in the Korsakov port area constituted 1.7 m, whereas the width of the flooded zone was up to 200 m. These results are confirmed well by the in situ measurement data. Conclusions. The simulation values of the power characteristics for the above-mentioned storm are represented in the paper. The Froude number square reaches 0.03 in the Korsakov city port area, and spatial distribution of the wave strength moment is up to 1 m3/s2. Field measurements and eyewitness reports confirm the evidence of a powerful impact of a storm surge upon the port constructions.

Formulation of the problem. Studies of bioclimate of a territory are aimed at determining the favorable and adverse impacts of various climatic factors and their combinations on the human body. Complex urban morphology has a significant impact on microclimate and, accordingly, on thermal comfort of a person in such an environment. The height of buildings, street orientation, and distance between buildings alter the solar energy inlet, affect thermal regime, transform the wind speed and direction at the street level. Studies of the bioclimatic conditions of urban areas during the warm season are highly relevant as they provide an opportunity to evaluate human thermal sensations in the city, as well as the potential effectiveness of adaptation measures to heat stress (architectural measures and measures based on the use of green areas and water bodies). The purpose of the article. The aim of this research is to simulate the bioclimate of an urban environment to determine the human thermal load in summer months based on modern bioclimatic indices and software. Methods. For the purpose of this study, a part of the territory of the Osokorky residential area of Kyiv was selected. To get values of the main meteorological parameters of the researched area, a three-dimensional, prognostic, microscale model ENVI-met was used. ENVI-met pertains to the CFD-models (computation fluid dynamics model) and is designed for microscales with a horizontal resolution from 0.5 to 10 m and with a time step of 10 seconds as maximum. The PET calculation was performed using the RayMan model. Results. A clear hot summer day (04 August 2017) was chosen for the simulation. The simulation was performed from 6:00 EEST on 4 August till 6:00 EEST the next day (output interval – 1 hour). The simulation results show that the values of the main meteorological parameters (air temperature and humidity, wind characteristics) and physiologically equivalent temperature differ significantly within urban spaces, even across small areas. The amplitudes of PET value were maximum in the daytime and made 12°–15°C. The decrease in the amplitude of the air temperature within the researched area in the evening and night hours led to a notable decrease in the PET amplitude to 2°–3°C. The analysis of the simulated PET values for the researched area confirmed that the residents of the urban areas experience the most intense heat stress while staying in the open asphalted areas during the daytime. The duration of the period with comfortable conditions during the researched day was very short – from 22:00 EEST through midnight. The range of the daily course of PET values at different points of the researched area varied from 19.4° (at point No. 7) to 37.1°C (at point No. 5 located in the well courtyard). Based on the PET values simulated for the researched area and for CAWS Kyiv was found the significant differences between thermal comfort conditions within the complex urban spaces and at the weather station. Therefore, the values of bioclimatic indices simulated based on the weather station data can not be applied with any approximation to solve scientific and applied tasks that require information on the bioclimate at particular points in the urbanized environment. To solve such tasks, it is recommended to apply modern methods – ENVI-met and RayMan models. Scientific novelty and practical significance. For the first time in Ukraine, microclimate and thermal comfort conditions within the complex urban environment has been simulated using ENVI-met and RayMan models. The results of such simulation can be used to choose heat adaptation measures which would help to increase the comfort of the urban areas. The simulation of microclimate and thermal comfort conditions of some parts of the city territory is important stage of design of the buildings, in order to choose the optimal location for buildings and trees and to create the most comfortable conditions for people.

ObjectiveIn this panel, attendees will learn about how disaster surveillance was conducted in response to Hurricanes Irma and Harvey, as well as the role of CDC at the federal level in supporting local response efforts. By hearing and discussing the challenges faced and solutions identified, attendees will be better able to respond in the event of a low-frequency/high-consequence disaster occurring within their jurisdiction.IntroductionIn this panel, the presenters will discuss their perspective in responding to Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. Hurricane Harvey made landfall on August 25th and over the course of 4 days dropped approximately 27 trillion gallons of water on Texas and Louisiana.1 The flooding that ensued was unprecedented and forced over 13,000 people into shelters.2 These individuals needed to have their basic needs -food, shelter, clothing, sanitation- met as well as their physical and mental health needs. The George R Brown Conference Center (GRB) and NRG Stadium Center were set up as mega-shelters to house shelterees. Hurricane Irma made landfall on September 10th in the Florida Keys as a Category 4 Hurricane. The Hurricane caused 72 deaths3 and forced thousands of people into shelters.4 These weather events created novel challenges for local response efforts. Decision makers needed timely and actionable data, including surveillance data.DescriptionAt the federal level, Aaron Kite-Powell will discuss his experiences in supporting local efforts to acquire timely and actionable data collected by on-site federally deployed disaster medical assistance teams (DMAT). DMAT provided clinical services to residents who were staying in a mega-shelter. Data collected from DMAT was electronically sent to CDC through the National Syndromic Surveillance Program (NSSP) where it could be accessed in CDC's instance of ESSENCE. Additionally, in Houston, 3 area hospitals submitted their data to NSSP. The City of Houston Health Department (HHD) was given access to DMAT and hospital syndromic data through ESSENCE. Once access was established, just in time training was conducted for HHD.David Atrubin will discuss how Florida’s syndromic surveillance system was utilized during Hurricane Irma in September 2017. ESSENCE-FL provided critical near real-time surveillance data before, during, and after the storm. Multiple data sources, within the ESSENCE-FL, were utilized including emergency department, poison control, death record, and DMAT data. In addition to the anticipated increases in animal bites, injuries, medication refills, dialysis visits, and carbon monoxide exposures, some unexpected increases were observed as well.Eric Bakota will describe his experience in coordinating the remote shelter surveillance team for the City of Houston Health Department. In the immediate aftermath of the flooding, several organizations opened shelters for people who were forced to leave their homes. Many of these facilities were not officially connected to the City. An ad hoc process was used to identify and connect with these facilities. Once identified as a shelter, a team of 6 epidemiologists conducted daily check-ins to determine the census and status of shelterees. Several tools to coordinate activities and record the data collected were used, including Dropbox, Googlesheets, and MAVEN. Each tool had its own strengths and limitations that will be discussed.How the Moderator Intends to Engage the Audience in Discussions on the TopicThe moderator should engage the panelists by asking questions the following questions:● How did each panelist work with their Federal/State/Local partners● How did each panelist integrate into the larger response framework (e.g., ICS)● How did each panelist use technology to address any novel surveillance barriers during the disasterReferences1. Sanchez R, Yan H, Simon D. Harvey aftermath: Houston 'open for business'; other cities suffering. CNN. 2017 Sep 1.2. Sullivan K, Hernandez A, Fahrenthold D. Harvey leaving record rainfall, at least 22 deaths behind in Houston. Chicago Tribune. 2017 Aug 29.3. Impact of Hurricane Irma. Boston Globe. Accessed 2017 Oct 10. https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/bigpicture/2017/09/11/impact-hurricane-irma/W6WBN9K2lXd4gPmtu26auN/story.html4. Smith A. After Hurricane Irma, Many Ask: How Safe Are Shelters? Tampa Bay Times. 2017 September 21.

In The City Submerged the striking narratives of Cattapan's earlier Melbourne paintings are fragmented and set adrift, becoming tiny shards of archaeological evidence with no clear solution, no beginning, middle or end. Luminous blue green surfaces dissolve into pools of submarine light in these paintings; here there is no grounding in shadows, or alley-ways, only the flickering distortions of looking into water, whose depth is unknowable. The movement in the painting is continuous as a work in a state of flux, and within and across its shiny surfaces. Deborah Clarke "The Lost World a Tale of Two Cities" Dauber: As you are aware the theme for this edition of M/C reviews is COLOUR. When this theme was chosen your name and your paintings immediately sprang to mind. With regard to Australian painting today one could equate the name Cattapan with two things colour and the modern city or perhaps the city as a text for modernity? Whilst suggesting that your use of colour, and your conception of the city are dualities, there is a paradoxical quality about your use of colour. Would it be fair to say that the luxurious quality of the colour; "the luminous blue green surfaces, these pools of submarine light" invest your paintings with a quality of the magical or phantasmagorical? Cattapan: From about 1986 I became increasingly interested in nocturnal light and how to represent it. My cities are always places that occupy that nocturnal space. I see the quality of those blue -green works of mine as being very fugitive. The colouration is meant to evoke a kind of drifting. I've always been interested in Surrealism and in my own works there was for a time a kind of dream - tableau that the actions unfolded upon, but in particular it was the writings of louis Aragon that struck a chord for me. In his book 'The Paris Peasant' he speaks of drifting around Paris by night and coming across its urban markers as though they were magical hallucinations. I guess in part I tried to transpose those sentiments into a colour sense. Those deep blues and greens offer a sense of that drifting - of the fugitive - of the twilight - of being there but not there. Dauber: In 1989 you are quoted as saying that your work was about two things "a search for your own artistic identity" and " making a statement on the "human urban condition". However in these depictions of the city you seemed more concerned to elucidate the destructive elements of urban dwelling, alienation, isolation and impotence. As "notes" or as a "visual diary" were these works perhaps more intensely personal? Cattapan: During the late eighties and early nineties I made a lot of my work on paper. Almost all of it is diaristic in the sense that each drawing marks an impression of a place or time or mood - they are strongly autobiographical and yet they also mark the mood of the times and of course of urban situations. Dauber: You have lived and worked in some of the great cities of the world. In light of the recent catastrophic events in New York to figure the city as lost, or drowned, would now seem to be prophetic. In the City Submerged series of paintings you have created a great sense of ambiguity through a sense of play with the term "submerged". Like the lost city of Atlantis, your metaphorical blue-green city is at once covered, submerged and unknowable. Yet, your paintings simultaneously uncover the spectacle of the modern city. This seems to signify a re-enchantment with the city, which could perhaps be falsely interpreted as being opposed to your earlier paintings? Cattapan: You see the thing that's interesting about painting is that paradoxes over a longer period of time become part of the continuity of process. There has always been this love-hate representation in my work. So at times these cities of mine have looked almost apocalyptic and at other times they figure largely as spectacles of competing information (I'm thinking here of the 'datascapes' from '92 onwards). For the last couple of years I've moved back into narrative mode as a counterpoint - demonstrations, protest, sundry calamities - these too are part of our cities. They are weird barometers for our times. Jon Cattapan, detail from Veil (Big Economy Hype) 1994 Collection: Wollongong City Gallery Dauber: Could you tell us something of the way in which you create these paintings? You have utilized both the technology of the computer, and the more artistic concepts of the "brush" and "a la main". Cattapan: The large cityscape/datascape paintings are created by scanning photographs of various places to create a generic city. This is an important point - my cities are like electronic collages and these become my working drawings. The paintings always start as an abstract space where the main thing is colour and light. Over the top of this expressive underlay I paint carefully reproduced marks that from a distance give the impression of a city by night - always from a panoptic view. There is something curious in the translation, in that the hand made mark becomes highly subjective as an interpretive tool, and therefore much as I might try to simply replicate the collage, what results is a painterly colouration and discrete mark-making process of overlays that speaks about painting itself. Dauber: Your paintings are full of light - the winking lights of the city at night and the auratic light which comes from some underground source. It has been suggested that your paintings create a virtual reality and that the light which is shed is that of the pixel. Does this somehow situate the metropolis and within a global context, or does it elaborate the complexities of the interconnectedness of cities and the people within them? Could you elaborate this point? Cattapan: There is no doubt in my mind that the urban condition is at once local and global. The works are a response to an information saturated world and they seek to represent that, but they also tell stories of local environment, albeit in a sometimes very abstract way. Over the last couple of years the more narratively inclined works of city gatherings demonstrate again after a long absence my need to tell local stories - but they become global. These groupings of figures set against dissolving cityscapes now have a sad ring to them. Jon Cattapan, detail from Dissolve (there but not there) 1991 Dauber: Yes, the blue-green paintings are soft and seductive, but they also have an unavoidable edge of pathos which seems inherent in the colour blue, could you tell us something of the red paintings which seem to signal a change in mood or experience? Cattapan: Those deeply saturated works came directly out of the experience of going to India in 1996. Whereas blue is deeply reflective, red for me is about life energy. The 'red' works actually began whilst I was in India as a group of watercolours that I made in collaboration with the Indian artist, Surendran Nair. Dauber: This is very interesting because most people would associate energy and life with the concept of the city yet in many ways your blue paintings convey a sense of stillness, which I believe gives them their amazing reflective quality. Your work has often been compared with that of Whistler. Like you, Whistler had a fascination with the city which conveyed its mythic qualities. Many artists have endeavored to convey a lived experience of the city and its relationship with modernity. As "watchers" or spectators they have been concerned to transmit their experience of the city, its colour, and its diversity as a counterpoint to the rationality of the "concept city" which was supposedly ultimately manageable. The flanneur combined the passionate wonder of childhood with the analytic sophistication of the man of the world as he read the signs and impressions of "the outward show of life" of the city. Whilst you too, could be considered to be the 'flanneur", your work seems to lack this "outward show of life", the hustle and bustle of the city, the crowded plaza's, the presence of people, the "colour of the city"? Cattapan: You've ended on an interesting note and I think the best way to respond is to speak of a specific experience. When I went to live in New York at the end of 1989 I was convinced that by moving to a much larger urban environment I would be able to invest my work with some of those outward signs of a super metropolis. In fact the reverse occurred - a kind of numbness set in from the overactive lifestyle and overload of information. At the street level the 'narrative' conveyed a clear poetry and rationale which I felt was far bigger than my work. It was not as easy to mythologise the events on those streets as it was to mythologise St.Kilda. So instinctively, I began to 'bury' the narrative and focused instead on a more reflective psychological space through colour. I wanted to in effect hose down the babble - maybe I was a little melancholy. Walking around those oily dark deserted streets of Williamsburg by night reinforced all that. It led me bit by bit towards this idea of 'The City Submerged', which in turn gave way to the spectacle of shifting layers of light/data in the cityscapes from 92 onwards. I never thought of my works as simply celebrating the city, there is always a darker side to them, an ambiguity. Maybe that's why there's no hustle bustle, what you get instead is a kind of crackling uncertainty. I've painted the nocturnal city and its attendant information gathering connections as a metaphor for how our society is unfolding. References Clarke, Deborah. 'The Lost World A Tale of Two Cities. Jon Cattapan'. Art and Australia 33 (1996): 512-517. Friedburg, Anne. Window Shopping : Cinema and the Postmodern. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1993. Mazzoleni, Donatella. 'The City and the Imaginary" New Formations 11(1990): 91-104. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dauber, Christine. "An Interview With Jon Cattapan" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/cattapaninterview.php>. Chicago Style Dauber, Christine, "An Interview With Jon Cattapan" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/cattapaninterview.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Dauber, Christine. (2002) An Interview With Jon Cattapan. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/cattapaninterview.php> ([your date of access]).

Find your black holes and white walls, know them … it is the only way you will be able to dismantle them and draw your lines of flight.—Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus Defined by originator David Belle as “an art to help you pass any obstacle”, the practice of “parkour” or “free running” constitutes both a mode of movement and a new way of interacting with the urban environment. Parkour was created by Belle (partly in collaboration with his childhood friend Sébastien Foucan) in France in the late 1980s. As seen in the following short video “Rush Hour”, a trailer for BBC One featuring Belle, parkour practitioners (known as “traceurs”), leap, spring, and vault from objects in the urban milieu that are intended to limit movement (walls, curbs, railings, fences) or that unintentionally hamper passage (lampposts, street signs, benches) through the space. “Rush Hour” was among the first media representations of parkour, and it had a significant role in introducing and popularizing the practice in Britain. Parkour has subsequently been widely disseminated via news reports, Nike and Toyota ads, the documentaries Jump London (2003) and Jump Britain (2005), and feature films, including Luc Besson’s Yamakasi – Les Samouraïs des Temps Modernes (2001) and Banlieu 13 (2004; just released in the U.S. as District B13), starring David Belle as Leto and Cyril Raffaelli as Damien. Sébastien Foucan will appear in the upcoming James Bond film Casino Royale as Mollaka, a terrorist who is chased (parkour-style) and then killed by Bond. (Foucan can also be seen in the film’s trailer, currently available at both SonyPictures.com and AOL.com; the film itself is scheduled for release in November 2006). Madonna’s current “Confessions” tour features an extended parkour sequence (accompanying the song “Jump”), albeit one limited to the confines of a scaffold erected over the stage. Perhaps most important in the rapid development of parkour into a world-wide youth movement, however, has been the proliferation of parkour websites featuring amateur videos, photos, tutorials, and blogs. The word “parkour” is derived from the French “parcours” (as the sport is known in France): a line, course, circuit, road, way or route, and the verb “parcourir”: to travel through, to run over or through, to traverse. As a physical discipline, parkour might be said to have a “poetics” — first, in general, in the Aristotelian sense of constructing through its various techniques (tekhnē) the drama of each parkour event. Secondly, one can consider parkour following Aristotle’s model of four-cause analysis as regards its specific materials (the body and the city), form or “vocabulary” of movements (drawn primarily from gymnastics, the martial arts, and modern dance), genre (as against, say, gymnastics), and purpose, including its effects upon its audience and the traceurs themselves. The existing literature on parkour (at this point, mostly news reports or websites) tends to emphasize the elements of form or movement, such as parkour’s various climbs, leaps, vaults, and drops, and the question of genre, particularly the ongoing, heated disputes among traceurs as to what is or is not true parkour. By contrast, my argument in this essay will focus principally on the materials and purpose of parkour: on the nature of the city and the body as they relate to parkour, and on the ways in which parkour can be seen to “remap” urban space and to demonstrate a resistance to its disciplinary functions, particularly as manifest in the urban street “grid.” The institution of the street “grid” (or variations upon it such as Haussmann’s Parisian star-configuration) facilitates both the intelligibility — in terms of both navigation and surveillance — and control of space in the city. It situates people in urban spaces in determinate ways and channels the flow of pedestrian and vehicular traffic. The “grid” thus carries a number of normalizing and disciplinary functions, creating in effect what the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari refer to as a “striation” of urban space. This striation constitutes “a process of capture of flows of all kinds, populations, commodities or commerce, money or capital, etc.” within a field of determinate spatial coordinates (Deleuze and Guattari 386). It establishes “fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects” (Deleuze and Guattari 386). Many of these aspects of striation can be seen in the ways urban space is depicted in the “Rush Hour” video: in the gridlocked traffic, the flashing tail-lights, the “STOP” light and “WAIT” sign, the sign indicating the proper directional flow of traffic, and the grim, bundled-up pedestrians trudging home en masse along the congested streets. Against these images of conformity, regulation, and confinement, the video presents the parkour ethos of originality, “reach,” escape, and freedom. Belle’s (shirtless) aerial traversal of the urban space between his office and his flat — a swift, improvisational flow across the open rooftops (and the voids between them), off walls, and finally down the sloping roof into his apartment window — cuts across the striated space of the streets below and positions him, for that time, beyond the constrictions of the social realm and its “concrete” manifestations. Though parkour necessarily involves obstacles that must be “overcome,” the goal of parkour is to do this as smoothly and efficiently as possible, or, in the language of its practitioners, for the movement to be “fluid like water.” The experience of parkour might, then, be said to transform the urban landscape into “smooth space,” in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense of “a field without conduits or channels” (371), and thus into a space of uninhibited movement, at least in certain ideal moments. Parkour seems to trace a path of desire (even if the desire is simply to avoid the crowds and get home in time to watch BBC One) that moves along a Deleuzean “line of flight,” a potential avenue of escape from the forces of striation and repression. Here the body is propelled over or through (most parkour movement actually takes place at ground level) the strata of urban space, perhaps with the hope that, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “one will bolster oneself directly on a line of flight enabling one to blow apart strata, cut roots, and make new connections” (15). In the process, parkour becomes “an art of displacement,” appropriating urban space in ways that temporarily disrupt their controlling logics and even imply the possibility of a smooth space of desire. One might see parkour as an overcoming of social space (and its various constrictions and inhibitions of desire, its “stop” and “wait” signs) through the interplay of body and material barriers. The body becomes an instrument of freedom. This, again, is graphically conveyed in “Rush Hour” through the opening scene in which Belle strips off his business suit and through the subsequent repeated contrasts of his limber, revealed body to the rigid, swathed figures of the pedestrians below. In part an effect of the various camera angles from which it is shot, there is also an element of the “heroic” in this depiction of the body. This aspect of the representation appears to be knowingly acknowledged in the video’s opening sequence. The first frame is a close-up, tightly focused on a model of a ninja-like figure with a Japanese sword who first appears to be contemplating a building (with an out-of-focus Belle in the background contemplating it from the opposite direction), but then, in the next, full shot, is revealed to be scaling it — in the manner of superheroes and King Kong. The model remains in the frame as Belle undresses (inevitably evoking images of Clark Kent stripping down to his Superman costume) and, in the final shot of that sequence, the figure mirrors Belle’s as he climbs through the window and ascends the building wall outside. In the next sequence, Belle executes a breath-taking handstand on a guard railing on the edge of the roof with the panorama of the city behind him, his upper body spanning the space from the street to the edge of the city skyline, his lower body set against the darkening sky. Through the practice of parkour, the relation between body and space is made dynamic, two reality principles in concert, interacting amid a suspension of the social strata. One might even say that the urban space is re-embodied — its rigid strata effectively “liquified.” In Jump London, the traceur Jerome Ben Aoues speaks of a Zen-like “harmony between you and the obstacle,” an idealization of what is sometimes described as a state of “flow,” a seemingly effortless immersion in an activity with a concomitant loss of self-consciousness. It suggests a different way of knowing the city, a knowledge of experience as opposed to abstract knowledge: parkour is, Jaclyn Law argues, “about curiosity and seeing possibilities — looking at a lamppost or bus shelter as an extension of the sidewalk” (np.). “You just have to look,” Sébastien Foucan insists in Jump London, “you just have to think like children….” Parkour effectively remaps urban space, creating a parallel, “ludic” city, a city of movement and free play within and against the city of obstacles and inhibitions. It reminds us that, in the words of the philosopher of urban space Henri Lefebvre, “the space of play has coexisted and still coexists with spaces of exchange and circulation, political space and cultural space” (172). Parkour tells us that in order to enter this space of play, we only need to make the leap. References Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Jump London (2003). Mike Christie, director. Mike Smith, producer. Featuring Jerome Ben Aoues, Sébastien Foucan, and Johann Vigroux. Law, Jaclyn. “PK and Fly.” This Magazine May/June 2005 http://www.thismagazine.ca/issues/2005/05/>. Lefebvre, Henri. “Perspective or Prospective?” Writings on Cities. Trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Rush Hour (2002). BBC One promotion trailer. Tom Carty, dir. Edel Erickson, pro. Produced by BBC Broadcast. See also: Wikipedia on parkour: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkour> Parkour Worldwide Association: http://www.pawa.fr/> Parkour Net (multilingual): http://parkour.net/> NYParkour: http://www.nyparkour.com/> PKLondon.com: http://www.pklondon.com/> Nike’s “The Angry Chicken” (featuring Sébastien Foucan): http://video.google.com/videoplay? docid=-6571575392378784144&q=nike+chicken> There is an extensive collection of parkour videos available at YouTube A rehearsal clip featuring Sébastien Foucan coaching the dancers for Madonna’s Confessions tour can be seen at YouTube Citation reference for this article MLA Style Geyh, Paula. "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>. APA Style Geyh, P. (Jul. 2006) "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php>.

Despite the now-traditional tendency of noir scholarship to call attention to the retrospective and constructed nature of this genre— James Naremore argues that film noir is best regarded as a “mythology”— one feature that has rarely come under question is its association with the city (2). Despite the existence of numerous rural noirs, the depiction of urban space is associated with this genre more consistently than any other element. Even in critical accounts that attempt to deconstruct the solidity of the noir genre, the city is left as an implicit inclusion, and the country, an implict exclusion. Naremore, for example, does not include the urban environment in a list of the central tenets of film noir that he calls into question: “nothing links together all the things described as noir—not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings” (10). Elizabeth Cowie identifies film noir a “fantasy,” whose “tenuous critical status” has been compensated for “by a tenacity of critical use” (121). As part of Cowie’s project, to revise the assumption that noirs are almost exclusively male-centered, she cites character types, visual style, and narrative tendencies, but never urban spaces, as familiar elements of noir that ought to be reconsidered. If the city is rarely tackled as an unnecessary or part-time element of film noir in discursive studies, it is often the first trait identified by critics in the kind of formative, characteristic-compiling studies that Cowie and Naremore work against.Andrew Dickos opens Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir with a list of noir’s key attributes. The first item is “an urban setting or at least an urban influence” (6). Nicholas Christopher maintains that “the city is the seedbed of film noir. […] However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable” (37). Though the tendencies of noir scholars— both constructive and deconstructive— might lead readers to believe otherwise, rural locations figure prominently in a number of noir films. I will show that the noir genre is, indeed, flexible enough to encompass many films set predominantly or partly in rural locations. Steve Neale, who encourages scholars to work with genre terms familiar to original audiences, would point out that the rural noir is an academic discovery not an industry term, or one with much popular currency (166). Still, this does not lessen the critical usefulness of this subgenre, or its implications for noir scholarship.While structuralist and post-structuralist modes of criticism dominated film genre criticism in the 1970s and 80s, as Thomas Schatz has pointed out, these approaches often sacrifice close attention to film texts, for more abstract, high-stakes observations: “while there is certainly a degree to which virtually every mass-mediated cultural artifact can be examined from [a mythical or ideological] perspective, there appears to be a point at which we tend to lose sight of the initial object of inquiry” (100). Though my reading of these films sidesteps attention to social and political concerns, this article performs the no-less-important task of clarifying the textual features of this sub-genre. To this end, I will survey the tendencies of the rural noir more generally, mentioning more than ten films that fit this subgenre, before narrowing my analysis to a reading of Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948), Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949), They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) and On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). Robert Mitchum tries to escape his criminal life by settling in a small, mountain-side town in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947). A foggy marsh provides a dramatic setting for the Bonnie and Clyde-like demise of lovers on the run in Gun Crazy (Joseph Lewis, 1950). In The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950), Sterling Hayden longs to return home after he is forced to abandon his childhood horse farm for a life of organised crime in the city. Rob Ryan plays a cop unable to control his violent impulses in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952). He is re-assigned from New York City to a rural community up-state in hopes that a less chaotic environment will have a curative effect. The apple orchards of Thieves’ Highway are no refuge from networks of criminal corruption. In They Live By Night, a pair of young lovers, try to leave their criminal lives behind, hiding out in farmhouses, cabins, and other pastoral locations in the American South. Finally, the location of prisons explains a number of sequences set in spare, road-side locations such as those in The Killer is Loose (Budd Boetticher, 1956), The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953), and Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948). What are some common tendencies of the rural noir? First, they usually feature both rural and urban settings, which allows the portrayal of one to be measured against the other. What we see of the city structures the definition of the country, and vice versa. Second, the lead character moves between these two locations by driving. For criminals, the car is more essential for survival in the country than in the city, so nearly all rural noirs are also road movies. Third, nature often figures as a redemptive force for urbanites steeped in lives of crime. Fourth, the curative quality of the country is usually tied to a love interest in this location: the “nurturing woman” as defined by Janey Place, who encourages the protagonist to forsake his criminal life (60). Fifth, the country is never fully crime-free. In The Killer is Loose, for example, an escaped convict’s first victim is a farmer, whom he clubs before stealing his truck. The convict (Wendell Corey), then, easily slips through a motorcade with the farmer’s identification. Here, the sprawling countryside provides an effective cover for the killer. This farmland is not an innocent locale, but the criminal’s safety-net. In films where a well-intentioned lead attempts to put his criminal life behind him by moving to a remote location, urban associates have little trouble tracking him down. While the country often appears, to protagonists like Jeff in Out of the Past or Bowie in They Live By Night, as an ideal place to escape from crime, as these films unfold, violence reaches the countryside. If these are similar points, what are some differences among rural noirs? First, there are many differences by degree among the common elements listed above. For instance, some rural noirs present their location with unabashed romanticism, while others critique the idealisation of these locations; some “nurturing women” are complicit with criminal activity, while others are entirely innocent. Second, while noir films are commonly known for treating similar urban locations, Los Angeles in particular, these films feature a wide variety of locations: Out of the Past and Thieves’ Highway take place in California, the most common setting for rural noirs, but On Dangerous Ground is set in northern New England, They Live by Night takes place in the Depression-era South, Moonrise in Southern swampland, and the most dynamic scene of The Asphalt Jungle is in rural Kentucky. Third, these films also vary considerably in the balance of settings. If the three typical locations of the rural noir are the country, the city, and the road, the distribution of these three locations varies widely across these films. The location of The Asphalt Jungle matches the title until its dramatic conclusion. The Hitch-hiker, arguably a rural noir, is set in travelling cars, with just brief stops in the barren landscape outside. Two of the films I analyse, They Live By Night and Moonrise are set entirely in the country; a remarkable exception to the majority of films in this subgenre. There are only two other critical essays on the rural noir. In “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir,” Jonathan F. Bell contextualises the rural noir in terms of post-war transformations of the American landscape. He argues that these films express a forlorn faith in the agrarian myth while the U.S. was becoming increasingly developed and suburbanised. That is to say, the rural noir simultaneously reflects anxiety over the loss of rural land, but also the stubborn belief that the countryside will always exist, if the urbanite needs it as a refuge. Garry Morris suggests the following equation as the shortest way to state the thematic interest of this genre: “Noir = industrialisation + (thwarted) spirituality.” He attributes much of the malaise of noir protagonists to the inhospitable urban environment, “far from [society’s] pastoral and romantic and spiritual origins.” Where Bell focuses on nine films— Detour (1945), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), Key Largo (1948), Gun Crazy (1949), On Dangerous Ground (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Split Second (1953), and Killer’s Kiss (1955)— Morris’s much shorter article includes just The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Gun Crazy. Of the four films I discuss, only On Dangerous Ground has previously been treated as part of this subgenre, though it has never been discussed alongside Nicholas Ray’s other rural noir. To further the development of the project that these authors have started— the formation of a rural noir corpus— I propose the inclusion of three additional films in this subgenre: Moonrise (1948), They Live by Night (1949), and Thieves’ Highway (1949). With both On Dangerous Ground and They Live by Night to his credit, Nicholas Ray has the distinction of being the most prolific director of rural noirs. In They Live by Night, two young lovers, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), attempt to escape from their established criminal lives. Twenty-three year old Bowie has just been released from juvenile prison and finds rural Texas refreshing: “Out here, the air smells different,” he says. He meets Keechie through her father, a small time criminal organiser who would be happy to keep her secluded for life. When one of Bowie’s accomplices, Chicamaw (Howard DaSilva), shoots a policeman after a robbing a bank with Bowie, the young couple is forced to run. Foster Hirsch calls They Live by Night “a genre rarity, a sentimental noir” (34). The naïve blissfulness of their affection is associated with the primitive settings they navigate. Though Bowie and Keechie are the most sympathetic protagonists of any rural noir, this is no safeguard against an inevitable, characteristically noir demise. Janey Place writes, “the young lovers are doomed, but the possibility of their love transcends and redeems them both, and its failure criticises the urbanised world that will not let them live” (63). As indicated here, the country offers the young lovers refuge for some time, and their bond is depicted as wonderfully strong, but it is doomed by the stronger force of the law.Raymond Williams discusses how different characteristics are associated with urban and rural spaces:On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence, and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved center: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. (1) They Live By Night breaks down these dichotomies, showing the persistence of crime rooted in rural areas.Bowie desires to “get squared around” and live a more natural life with Keechie. Williams’ country adjectives— “peace, innocence, and simple virtue”— describe the nature of this relationship perfectly. Yet, criminal activity, usually associated with the city, has an overwhelmingly strong presence in this region and their lives. Bowie, following the doomed logic of many a crime film character, plans to launch a new, more honest life with cash raised in a heist. Keechie recognises the contradictions in this plan: “Fine way to get squared around, teaming with them. Stealing money and robbing banks. You’ll get in so deep trying to get squared, they’ll have enough to keep you in for two life times.” For Bowie, crime and the pursuit of love are inseparably bound, refuting the illusion of the pure and innocent countryside personified by characters like Mary Malden in On Dangerous Ground and Ann Miller in Out of the Past.In Ray’s other rural noir, On Dangerous Ground, a lonely, angry, and otherwise burned out cop, Wilson (Rob Ryan), finds both love and peace in his time away from the city. While on his up-state assignment, Wilson meets Mary Walden (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who lives a secluded life miles away from this already desolate, rural community. Mary has a calming influence on Wilson, and fits well within Janey Place’s notion of the archetypal nurturing woman in film noir: “The redemptive woman often represents or is part of a primal connection with nature and/or with the past, which are safe, static states rather than active, exciting ones, but she can sometimes offer the only transcendence possible in film noir” (63).If, as Colin McArthur observes, Ray’s characters frequently seek redemption in rural locales— “[protagonists] may reject progress and modernity; they may choose to go or are sent into primitive areas. […] The journeys which bring them closer to nature may also offer them hope of salvation” (124) — the conclusions of On Dangerous Ground versus They Live By Night offer two markedly different resolutions to this narrative. Where Bowie and Keechie’s life on the lam cannot be sustained, On Dangerous Ground, against the wishes of its director, portrays a much more romanticised version of pastoral life. According to Andrew Dickos, “Ray wanted to end the film on the ambivalent image of Jim Wilson returning to the bleak city,” after he had restored order up-state (132). The actual ending is more sentimental. Jim rushes back north to be with Mary. They passionately kiss in close-up, cueing an exuberant orchestral score as The End appears over a slow tracking shot of the majestic, snow covered landscape. In this way, On Dangerous Ground overturns the usual temporal associations of rural versus urban spaces. As Raymond Williams identifies, “The common image of the country is now an image of the past, and the common image of the city an image of the future” (297). For Wilson, by contrast, city life was no longer sustainable and rurality offers his best means for a future. Leo Marx noted in a variety of American pop culture, from Mark Twain to TV westerns and magazine advertising, a “yearning for a simpler, more harmonious style of life, and existence ‘closer to nature,’ that is the psychic root of all pastoralism— genuine and spurious” (Marx 6). Where most rural noirs expose the agrarian myth as a fantasy and a sham, On Dangerous Ground, exceptionally, perpetuates it as actual and effectual. Here, a bad cop is made good with a few days spent in a sparsely populated area and with a woman shaped by her rural upbringing.As opposed to On Dangerous Ground, where the protagonist’s movement from city to country matches his split identity as a formerly corrupt man wishing to be pure, Frank Borzage’s B-film Moonrise (1948) is located entirely in rural or small-town locations. Set in the fictional Southern town of Woodville, which spans swamps, lushly wooded streets and aging Antebellum mansions, the lead character finds good and bad within the same rural location and himself. Dan (Dane Clark) struggles to escape his legacy as the son of a murderer. This conflict is irreparably heightened when Dan kills a man (who had repeatedly teased and bullied him) in self-defence. The instability of Dan’s moral compass is expressed in the way he treats innocent elements of the natural world: flies, dogs, and, recalling Out of the Past, a local deaf boy. He is alternately cruel and kind. Dan is finally redeemed after seeking the advice of a black hermit, Mose (Rex Ingram), who lives in a ramshackle cabin by the swamp. He counsels Dan with the advice that men turn evil from “being lonesome,” not for having “bad blood.” When Dan, eventually, decides to confess to his crime, the sheriff finds him tenderly holding a search hound against a bucolic, rural backdrop. His complete comfortability with the landscape and its creatures finally allows Dan to reconcile the film’s opening opposition. He is no longer torturously in between good and evil, but openly recognises his wrongs and commits to do good in the future. If I had to select just a single shot to illustrate that noirs are set in rural locations more often than most scholarship would have us believe, it would be the opening sequence of Moonrise. From the first shot, this film associates rural locations with criminal elements. The credit sequence juxtaposes pooling water with an ominous brass score. In this disorienting opening, the camera travels from an image of water, to a group of men framed from the knees down. The camera dollies out and pans left, showing that these men, trudging solemnly, are another’s legal executioners. The frame tilts upward and we see a man hung in silhouette. This dense shot is followed by an image of a baby in a crib, also shadowed, the water again, and finally the execution scene. If this sequence is a thematic montage, it can also be discussed, more simply, as a series of establishing shots: a series of images that, seemingly, could not be more opposed— a baby, a universal symbol of innocence, set against the ominous execution, cruel experience— are paired together by virtue of their common location. The montage continues, showing that the baby is the son of the condemned man. As Dan struggles with the legacy of his father throughout the film, this opening shot continues to inform our reading of this character, split between the potential for good or evil.What a baby is to Moonrise, or, to cite a more familiar reference, what the insurance business is to many a James M. Cain roman noir, produce distribution is to Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway (1949). The apple, often a part of wholesome American myths, is at the centre of this story about corruption. Here, a distribution network that brings Americans this hearty, simple product is connected with criminal activity and violent abuses of power more commonly portrayed in connection with cinematic staples of organised crime such as bootlegging or robbery. This film portrays bad apples in the apple business, showing that no profit driven enterprise— no matter how traditional or rural— is beyond the reach of corruption.Fitting the nature of this subject, numerous scenes in the Dassin film take place in the daylight (in addition to darkness), and in the countryside (in addition to the city) as we move between wine and apple country to the market districts of San Francisco. But if the subject and setting of Thieves’ Highway are unusual for a noir, the behaviour of its characters is not. Spare, bright country landscapes form the backdrop for prototypical noir behaviour: predatory competition for money and power.As one would expect of a film noir, the subject of apple distribution is portrayed with dynamic violence. In the most exciting scene of the film, a truck careens off the road after a long pursuit from rival sellers. Apples scatter across a hillside as the truck bursts into flames. This scene is held in a long-shot, as unscrupulous thugs gather the produce for sale while the unfortunate driver burns to death. Here, the reputedly innocent American apple is subject to cold-blooded, profit-maximizing calculations as much as the more typical topics of noir such as blackmail, fraud, or murder. Passages on desolate roads and at apple orchards qualify Thieves’ Highway as a rural noir; the dark, cynical manner in which capitalist enterprise is treated is resonant with nearly all film noirs. Thieves’ Highway follows a common narrative pattern amongst rural noirs to gradually reveal rural spaces as connected to criminality in urban locations. Typically, this disillusioning fact is narrated from the perspective of a lead character who first has a greater sense of safety in rural settings but learns, over the course of the story, to be more wary in all locations. In Thieves’, Nick’s hope that apple-delivery might earn an honest dollar (he is the only driver to treat the orchard owners fairly) gradually gives way to an awareness of the inevitable corruption that has taken over this enterprise at all levels of production, from farmer, to trucker, to wholesaler, and thus, at all locations, the country, the road, and the city.Between this essay, and the previous work of Morris and Bell on the subject, we are developing a more complete survey of the rural noir. Where Bell’s and Morris’s essays focus more resolutely on rural noirs that relied on the contrast of the city versus the country— which, significantly, was the first tendency of this subgenre that I observed— Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate that this genre can work entirely apart from the city. From start to finish, these films take place in small towns and rural locations. As opposed to Out of the Past, On Dangerous Ground, or The Asphalt Jungle, characters are never pulled back to, nor flee from, an urban life of crime. Instead, vices that are commonly associated with the city have a free-standing life in the rural locations that are often thought of as a refuge from these harsh elements. If both Bell and Morris study the way that rural noirs draw differences between the city and country, two of the three films I add to the subgenre constitute more complete rural noirs, films that work wholly outside urban locations, not just in contrast with it. Bell, like me, notes considerable variety in rural noirs locations, “desert landscapes, farms, mountains, and forests all qualify as settings for consideration,” but he also notes that “Diverse as these landscapes are, this set of films uses them in surprisingly like-minded fashion to achieve a counterpoint to the ubiquitous noir city” (219). In Bell’s analysis, all nine films he studies, feature significant urban segments. He is, in fact, so inclusive as to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss as a rural noir even though it does not contain a single frame shot or set outside of New York City. Rurality is evoked only as a possibility, as alienated urbanite Davy (Jamie Smith) receives letters from his horse-farm-running relatives. Reading these letters offers Davy brief moments of respite from drudgerous city spaces such as the subway and his cramped apartment. In its emphasis on the centrality of rural locations, my project is more similar to David Bell’s work on the rural in horror films than to Jonathan F. Bell’s work on the rural noir. David Bell analyses the way that contemporary horror films work against a “long tradition” of the “idyllic rural” in many Western texts (95). As opposed to works “from Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to contemporary television shows like Northern Exposure and films such as A River Runs Through It or Grand Canyon” in which the rural is positioned as “a restorative to urban anomie,” David Bell analyses films such as Deliverance and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre that depict “a series of anti-idyllic visions of the rural” (95). Moonrise and They Live By Night, like these horror films, portray the crime and the country as coexistent spheres at the same time that the majority of other popular culture, including noirs like Killer’s Kiss or On Dangerous Ground, portray them as mutually exclusive.To use a mode of generic analysis developed by Rick Altman, the rural noir, while preserving the dominant syntax of other noirs, presents a remarkably different semantic element (31). Consider the following description of the genre, from the introduction to Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide: “The darkness that fills the mirror of the past, which lurks in a dark corner or obscures a dark passage out of the oppressively dark city, is not merely the key adjective of so many film noir titles but the obvious metaphor for the condition of the protagonist’s mind” (Silver and Ward, 4). In this instance, the narrative elements, or syntax, of film noir outlined by Silver and Ward do not require revision, but the urban location, a semantic element, does. Moonrise and They Live By Night demonstrate the sustainability of the aforementioned syntactic elements— the dark, psychological experience of the leads and their inescapable criminal past— apart from the familiar semantic element of the city.The rural noir must also cause us to reconsider— beyond rural representations or film noir— more generally pitched genre theories. Consider the importance of place to film genre, the majority of which are defined by a typical setting: for melodramas, it is the family home, for Westerns, the American west, and for musicals, the stage. Thomas Schatz separates American genres according to their setting, between genres which deal with “determinate” versus “indeterminate” space:There is a vital distinction between kinds of generic settings and conflicts. Certain genres […] have conflicts that, indigenous to the environment, reflect the physical and ideological struggle for its control. […] Other genres have conflicts that are not indigenous to the locale but are the results of the conflict between the values, attitudes, and actions of its principal characters and the ‘civilised’ setting they inhabit. (26) Schatz discusses noirs, along with detective films, as films which trade in “determinate” settings, limited to the space of the city. The rural noir slips between Schatz’s dichotomy, moving past the space of the city, but not into the civilised, tame settings of the genres of “indeterminate spaces.” It is only fitting that a genre whose very definition lies in its disruption of Hollywood norms— trading high- for low-key lighting, effectual male protagonists for helpless ones, and a confident, coherent worldview for a more paranoid, unstable one would, finally, be able to accommodate a variation— the rural noir— that would seem to upset one of its central tenets, an urban locale. Considering the long list of Hollywood standards that film noirs violated, according to two of its original explicators, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton— “a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest”— it should, perhaps, not be so surprising that the genre is flexible enough to accommodate the existence of the rural noir after all (14). AcknowledgmentsIn addition to M/C Journal's anonymous readers, the author would like to thank Corey Creekmur, Mike Slowik, Barbara Steinson, and Andrew Gorman-Murray for their helpful suggestions. ReferencesAltman, Rick. “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 27-41.The Asphalt Jungle. Dir. John Huston. MGM/UA, 1950.Bell, David. “Anti-Idyll: Rural Horror.” Contested Countryside Cultures. Eds. Paul Cloke and Jo Little. London, Routledge, 1997. 94-108.Bell, Jonathan F. “Shadows in the Hinterland: Rural Noir.” Architecture and Film. Ed. Mark Lamster. New York: Princeton Architectural P, 2000. 217-230.Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. A Panorama of American Film Noir. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002.Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993. 121-166.Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2002.Hirsch, Foster. Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir. New York: Limelight Editions, 1999.Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1964.McArthur, Colin. Underworld U.S.A. London: BFI, 1972.Moonrise. Dir. Frank Borzage. Republic, 1948.Morris, Gary. “Noir Country: Alien Nation.” Bright Lights Film Journal Nov. 2006. 13. Jun. 2008 http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/54/noircountry.htm Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1998.Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Berkeley, C.A.: U of California P, 2008.Neale, Steve. “Questions of Genre.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 160-184.On Dangerous Ground. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1951.Out of the Past. Dir. Jacques Tourneur. RKO, 1947.Place, Janey. “Women in Film Noir.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI, 1999. 47-68.Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres. New York: Random House, 1981.Schatz, Thomas. “The Structural Influence: New Directions in Film Genre Study.” Film Genre Reader III. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin: U of Texas P, 2003. 92-102.Silver, Alain and Elizabeth Ward. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference Guide. London: Bloomsbury, 1980.They Live by Night. Dir. Nicholas Ray. RKO, 1949.Thieves’ Highway. Dir. Jules Dassin. Fox, 1949.Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford UP, 1973.

Introduction Food has always been an essential component of daily life. Today, thinking about food is a much more complicated pursuit than planning the next meal, with food studies scholars devoting their efforts to researching “anything pertaining to food and eating, from how food is grown to when and how it is eaten, to who eats it and with whom, and the nutritional quality” (Duran and MacDonald 234). This is in addition to the work undertaken by an increasingly wide variety of popular culture researchers who explore all aspects of food (Risson and Brien 3): including food advertising, food packaging, food on television, and food in popular fiction. In creating stories, from those works that quickly disappear from bookstore shelves to those that become entrenched in the literary canon, writers use food to communicate the everyday and to explore a vast range of ideas from cultural background to social standing, and also use food to provide perspectives “into the cultural and historical uniqueness of a given social group” (Piatti-Farnell 80). For example in Oliver Twist (1838) by Charles Dickens, the central character challenges the class system when: “Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery. He rose from the table, and advancing basin and spoon in hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own temerity–‘Please, sir, I want some more’” (11). Scarlett O’Hara in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) makes a similar point, a little more dramatically, when she declares: “As God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (419). Food can also take us into the depths of another culture: places that many of us will only ever read about. Food is also used to provide insight into a character’s state of mind. In Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983) an item as simple as boiled bread tells a reader so much more about Rachel Samstat than her preferred bakery items: “So we got married and I got pregnant and I gave up my New York apartment and moved to Washington. Talk about mistakes [...] there I was, trying to hold up my end in a city where you can’t even buy a decent bagel” (34). There are three ways in which writers can deal with food within their work. Firstly, food can be totally ignored. This approach is sometimes taken despite food being such a standard feature of storytelling that its absence, be it a lonely meal at home, elegant canapés at an impressively catered cocktail party, or a cheap sandwich collected from a local café, is an obvious omission. Food can also add realism to a story, with many authors putting as much effort into conjuring the smell, taste, and texture of food as they do into providing a backstory and a purpose for their characters. In recent years, a third way has emerged with some writers placing such importance upon food in fiction that the line that divides the cookbook and the novel has become distorted. This article looks at cookbooks and cookery in popular fiction with a particular focus on crime novels. Recipes: Ingredients and Preparation Food in fiction has been employed, with great success, to help characters cope with grief; giving them the reassurance that only comes through the familiarity of the kitchen and the concentration required to fulfil routine tasks: to chop and dice, to mix, to sift and roll, to bake, broil, grill, steam, and fry. Such grief can come from the breakdown of a relationship as seen in Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (1983). An autobiography under the guise of fiction, this novel is the first-person story of a cookbook author, a description that irritates the narrator as she feels her works “aren’t merely cookbooks” (95). She is, however, grateful she was not described as “a distraught, rejected, pregnant cookbook author whose husband was in love with a giantess” (95). As the collapse of the marriage is described, her favourite recipes are shared: Bacon Hash; Four Minute Eggs; Toasted Almonds; Lima Beans with Pears; Linguine Alla Cecca; Pot Roast; three types of Potatoes; Sorrel Soup; desserts including Bread Pudding, Cheesecake, Key Lime Pie and Peach Pie; and a Vinaigrette, all in an effort to reassert her personal skills and thus personal value. Grief can also result from loss of hope and the realisation that a life long dreamed of will never be realised. Like Water for Chocolate (1989), by Laura Esquivel, is the magical realist tale of Tita De La Garza who, as the youngest daughter, is forbidden to marry as she must take care of her mother, a woman who: “Unquestionably, when it came to dividing, dismantling, dismembering, desolating, detaching, dispossessing, destroying or dominating […] was a pro” (87). Tita’s life lurches from one painful, unjust episode to the next; the only emotional stability she has comes from the kitchen, and from her cooking of a series of dishes: Christmas Rolls; Chabela Wedding Cake; Quail in Rose Petal Sauce; Turkey Mole; Northern-style Chorizo; Oxtail Soup; Champandongo; Chocolate and Three Kings’s Day Bread; Cream Fritters; and Beans with Chilli Tezcucana-style. This is a series of culinary-based activities that attempts to superimpose normalcy on a life that is far from the everyday. Grief is most commonly associated with death. Undertaking the selection, preparation and presentation of meals in novels dealing with bereavement is both a functional and symbolic act: life must go on for those left behind but it must go on in a very different way. Thus, novels that use food to deal with loss are particularly important because they can “make non-cooks believe they can cook, and for frequent cooks, affirm what they already know: that cooking heals” (Baltazar online). In Angelina’s Bachelors (2011) by Brian O’Reilly, Angelina D’Angelo believes “cooking was not just about food. It was about character” (2). By the end of the first chapter the young woman’s husband is dead and she is in the kitchen looking for solace, and survival, in cookery. In The Kitchen Daughter (2011) by Jael McHenry, Ginny Selvaggio is struggling to cope with the death of her parents and the friends and relations who crowd her home after the funeral. Like Angelina, Ginny retreats to the kitchen. There are, of course, exceptions. In Ntozake Shange’s Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), cooking celebrates, comforts, and seduces (Calta). This story of three sisters from South Carolina is told through diary entries, narrative, letters, poetry, songs, and spells. Recipes are also found throughout the text: Turkey; Marmalade; Rice; Spinach; Crabmeat; Fish; Sweetbread; Duck; Lamb; and, Asparagus. Anthony Capella’s The Food of Love (2004), a modern retelling of the classic tale of Cyrano de Bergerac, is about the beautiful Laura, a waiter masquerading as a top chef Tommaso, and the talented Bruno who, “thick-set, heavy, and slightly awkward” (21), covers for Tommaso’s incompetency in the kitchen as he, too, falls for Laura. The novel contains recipes and contains considerable information about food: Take fusilli […] People say this pasta was designed by Leonardo da Vinci himself. The spiral fins carry the biggest amount of sauce relative to the surface area, you see? But it only works with a thick, heavy sauce that can cling to the grooves. Conchiglie, on the other hand, is like a shell, so it holds a thin, liquid sauce inside it perfectly (17). Recipes: Dishing Up Death Crime fiction is a genre with a long history of focusing on food; from the theft of food in the novels of the nineteenth century to the utilisation of many different types of food such as chocolate, marmalade, and sweet omelettes to administer poison (Berkeley, Christie, Sayers), the latter vehicle for arsenic receiving much attention in Harriet Vane’s trial in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Strong Poison (1930). The Judge, in summing up the case, states to the members of the jury: “Four eggs were brought to the table in their shells, and Mr Urquhart broke them one by one into a bowl, adding sugar from a sifter [...he then] cooked the omelette in a chafing dish, filled it with hot jam” (14). Prior to what Timothy Taylor has described as the “pre-foodie era” the crime fiction genre was “littered with corpses whose last breaths smelled oddly sweet, or bitter, or of almonds” (online). Of course not all murders are committed in such a subtle fashion. In Roald Dahl’s Lamb to the Slaughter (1953), Mary Maloney murders her policeman husband, clubbing him over the head with a frozen leg of lamb. The meat is roasting nicely when her husband’s colleagues arrive to investigate his death, the lamb is offered and consumed: the murder weapon now beyond the recovery of investigators. Recent years have also seen more and more crime fiction writers present a central protagonist working within the food industry, drawing connections between the skills required for food preparation and those needed to catch a murderer. Working with cooks or crooks, or both, requires planning and people skills in addition to creative thinking, dedication, reliability, stamina, and a willingness to take risks. Kent Carroll insists that “food and mysteries just go together” (Carroll in Calta), with crime fiction website Stop, You’re Killing Me! listing, at the time of writing, over 85 culinary-based crime fiction series, there is certainly sufficient evidence to support his claim. Of the numerous works available that focus on food there are many series that go beyond featuring food and beverages, to present recipes as well as the solving of crimes. These include: the Candy Holliday Murder Mysteries by B. B. Haywood; the Coffeehouse Mysteries by Cleo Coyle; the Hannah Swensen Mysteries by Joanne Fluke; the Hemlock Falls Mysteries by Claudia Bishop; the Memphis BBQ Mysteries by Riley Adams; the Piece of Cake Mysteries by Jacklyn Brady; the Tea Shop Mysteries by Laura Childs; and, the White House Chef Mysteries by Julie Hyzy. The vast majority of offerings within this female dominated sub-genre that has been labelled “Crime and Dine” (Collins online) are American, both in origin and setting. A significant contribution to this increasingly popular formula is, however, from an Australian author Kerry Greenwood. Food features within her famed Phryne Fisher Series with recipes included in A Question of Death (2007). Recipes also form part of Greenwood’s food-themed collection of short crime stories Recipes for Crime (1995), written with Jenny Pausacker. These nine stories, each one imitating the style of one of crime fiction’s greatest contributors (from Agatha Christie to Raymond Chandler), allow readers to simultaneously access mysteries and recipes. 2004 saw the first publication of Earthly Delights and the introduction of her character, Corinna Chapman. This series follows the adventures of a woman who gave up a career as an accountant to open her own bakery in Melbourne. Corinna also investigates the occasional murder. Recipes can be found at the end of each of these books with the Corinna Chapman Recipe Book (nd), filled with instructions for baking bread, muffins and tea cakes in addition to recipes for main courses such as risotto, goulash, and “Chicken with Pineapple 1971 Style”, available from the publisher’s website. Recipes: Integration and Segregation In Heartburn (1983), Rachel acknowledges that presenting a work of fiction and a collection of recipes within a single volume can present challenges, observing: “I see that I haven’t managed to work in any recipes for a while. It’s hard to work in recipes when you’re moving the plot forward” (99). How Rachel tells her story is, however, a reflection of how she undertakes her work, with her own cookbooks being, she admits, more narration than instruction: “The cookbooks I write do well. They’re very personal and chatty–they’re cookbooks in an almost incidental way. I write chapters about friends or relatives or trips or experiences, and work in the recipes peripherally” (17). Some authors integrate detailed recipes into their narratives through description and dialogue. An excellent example of this approach can be found in the Coffeehouse Mystery Series by Cleo Coyle, in the novel On What Grounds (2003). When the central protagonist is being questioned by police, Clare Cosi’s answers are interrupted by a flashback scene and instructions on how to make Greek coffee: Three ounces of water and one very heaped teaspoon of dark roast coffee per serving. (I used half Italian roast, and half Maracaibo––a lovely Venezuelan coffee, named after the country’s major port; rich in flavour, with delicate wine overtones.) / Water and finely ground beans both go into the ibrik together. The water is then brought to a boil over medium heat (37). This provides insight into Clare’s character; that, when under pressure, she focuses her mind on what she firmly believes to be true – not the information that she is doubtful of or a situation that she is struggling to understand. Yet breaking up the action within a novel in this way–particularly within crime fiction, a genre that is predominantly dependant upon generating tension and building the pacing of the plotting to the climax–is an unusual but ultimately successful style of writing. Inquiry and instruction are comfortable bedfellows; as the central protagonists within these works discover whodunit, the readers discover who committed murder as well as a little bit more about one of the world’s most popular beverages, thus highlighting how cookbooks and novels both serve to entertain and to educate. Many authors will save their recipes, serving them up at the end of a story. This can be seen in Julie Hyzy’s White House Chef Mystery novels, the cover of each volume in the series boasts that it “includes Recipes for a Complete Presidential Menu!” These menus, with detailed ingredients lists, instructions for cooking and options for serving, are segregated from the stories and appear at the end of each work. Yet other writers will deploy a hybrid approach such as the one seen in Like Water for Chocolate (1989), where the ingredients are listed at the commencement of each chapter and the preparation for the recipes form part of the narrative. This method of integration is also deployed in The Kitchen Daughter (2011), which sees most of the chapters introduced with a recipe card, those chapters then going on to deal with action in the kitchen. Using recipes as chapter breaks is a structure that has, very recently, been adopted by Australian celebrity chef, food writer, and, now fiction author, Ed Halmagyi, in his new work, which is both cookbook and novel, The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally (2012). As people exchange recipes in reality, so too do fictional characters. The Recipe Club (2009), by Andrea Israel and Nancy Garfinkel, is the story of two friends, Lilly Stone and Valerie Rudman, which is structured as an epistolary novel. As they exchange feelings, ideas and news in their correspondence, they also exchange recipes: over eighty of them throughout the novel in e-mails and letters. In The Food of Love (2004), written messages between two of the main characters are also used to share recipes. In addition, readers are able to post their own recipes, inspired by this book and other works by Anthony Capella, on the author’s website. From Page to Plate Some readers are contributing to the burgeoning food tourism market by seeking out the meals from the pages of their favourite novels in bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world, expanding the idea of “map as menu” (Spang 79). In Shannon McKenna Schmidt’s and Joni Rendon’s guide to literary tourism, Novel Destinations (2009), there is an entire section, “Eat Your Words: Literary Places to Sip and Sup”, dedicated to beverages and food. The listings include details for John’s Grill, in San Francisco, which still has on the menu Sam Spade’s Lamb Chops, served with baked potato and sliced tomatoes: a meal enjoyed by author Dashiell Hammett and subsequently consumed by his well-known protagonist in The Maltese Falcon (193), and the Café de la Paix, in Paris, frequented by Ian Fleming’s James Bond because “the food was good enough and it amused him to watch the people” (197). Those wanting to follow in the footsteps of writers can go to Harry’s Bar, in Venice, where the likes of Marcel Proust, Sinclair Lewis, Somerset Maugham, Ernest Hemingway, and Truman Capote have all enjoyed a drink (195) or The Eagle and Child, in Oxford, which hosted the regular meetings of the Inklings––a group which included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien––in the wood-panelled Rabbit Room (203). A number of eateries have developed their own literary themes such as the Peacocks Tearooms, in Cambridgeshire, which blends their own teas. Readers who are also tea drinkers can indulge in the Sherlock Holmes (Earl Grey with Lapsang Souchong) and the Doctor Watson (Keemun and Darjeeling with Lapsang Souchong). Alternatively, readers may prefer to side with the criminal mind and indulge in the Moriarty (Black Chai with Star Anise, Pepper, Cinnamon, and Fennel) (Peacocks). The Moat Bar and Café, in Melbourne, situated in the basement of the State Library of Victoria, caters “to the whimsy and fantasy of the fiction housed above” and even runs a book exchange program (The Moat). For those readers who are unable, or unwilling, to travel the globe in search of such savoury and sweet treats there is a wide variety of locally-based literary lunches and other meals, that bring together popular authors and wonderful food, routinely organised by book sellers, literature societies, and publishing houses. There are also many cookbooks now easily obtainable that make it possible to re-create fictional food at home. One of the many examples available is The Book Lover’s Cookbook (2003) by Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen, a work containing over three hundred pages of: Breakfasts; Main & Side Dishes; Soups; Salads; Appetizers, Breads & Other Finger Foods; Desserts; and Cookies & Other Sweets based on the pages of children’s books, literary classics, popular fiction, plays, poetry, and proverbs. If crime fiction is your preferred genre then you can turn to Jean Evans’s The Crime Lover’s Cookbook (2007), which features short stories in between the pages of recipes. There is also Estérelle Payany’s Recipe for Murder (2010) a beautifully illustrated volume that presents detailed instructions for Pigs in a Blanket based on the Big Bad Wolf’s appearance in The Three Little Pigs (44–7), and Roast Beef with Truffled Mashed Potatoes, which acknowledges Patrick Bateman’s fondness for fine dining in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (124–7). Conclusion Cookbooks and many popular fiction novels are reflections of each other in terms of creativity, function, and structure. In some instances the two forms are so closely entwined that a single volume will concurrently share a narrative while providing information about, and instruction, on cookery. Indeed, cooking in books is becoming so popular that the line that traditionally separated cookbooks from other types of books, such as romance or crime novels, is becoming increasingly distorted. The separation between food and fiction is further blurred by food tourism and how people strive to experience some of the foods found within fictional works at bars, cafés, and restaurants around the world or, create such experiences in their own homes using fiction-themed recipe books. Food has always been acknowledged as essential for life; books have long been acknowledged as food for thought and food for the soul. Thus food in both the real world and in the imagined world serves to nourish and sustain us in these ways. References Adams, Riley. Delicious and Suspicious. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Finger Lickin’ Dead. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Hickory Smoked Homicide. New York: Berkley, 2011. Baltazar, Lori. “A Novel About Food, Recipes Included [Book review].” Dessert Comes First. 28 Feb. 2012. 20 Aug. 2012 ‹http://dessertcomesfirst.com/archives/8644›. Berkeley, Anthony. The Poisoned Chocolates Case. London: Collins, 1929. Bishop, Claudia. Toast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Dread on Arrival. New York: Berkley, 2012. Brady, Jacklyn. A Sheetcake Named Desire. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Cake on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Berkley, 2012. Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Capella, Anthony. The Food of Love. London: Time Warner, 2004/2005. Carroll, Kent in Calta, Marialisa. “The Art of the Novel as Cookbook.” The New York Times. 17 Feb. 1993. 23 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/17/style/the-art-of-the-novel-as-cookbook.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm›. Childs, Laura. Death by Darjeeling. New York: Berkley, 2001. –– Shades of Earl Grey. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Blood Orange Brewing. New York: Berkley, 2006/2007. –– The Teaberry Strangler. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Collins, Glenn. “Your Favourite Fictional Crime Moments Involving Food.” The New York Times Diner’s Journal: Notes on Eating, Drinking and Cooking. 16 Jul. 2012. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://dinersjournal.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/16/your-favorite-fictional-crime-moments-involving-food›. Coyle, Cleo. On What Grounds. New York: Berkley, 2003. –– Murder Most Frothy. New York: Berkley, 2006. –– Holiday Grind. New York: Berkley, 2009/2010. –– Roast Mortem. New York: Berkley, 2010/2011. Christie, Agatha. A Pocket Full of Rye. London: Collins, 1953. Dahl, Roald. Lamb to the Slaughter: A Roald Dahl Short Story. New York: Penguin, 1953/2012. eBook. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist, or, the Parish Boy’s Progress. In Collection of Ancient and Modern British Authors, Vol. CCXXIX. Paris: Baudry’s European Library, 1838/1839. Duran, Nancy, and Karen MacDonald. “Information Sources for Food Studies Research.” Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research 2.9 (2006): 233–43. Ephron, Nora. Heartburn. New York: Vintage, 1983/1996. Esquivel, Laura. Trans. Christensen, Carol, and Thomas Christensen. Like Water for Chocolate: A Novel in Monthly Instalments with Recipes, romances and home remedies. London: Black Swan, 1989/1993. Evans, Jeanne M. The Crime Lovers’s Cookbook. City: Happy Trails, 2007. Fluke, Joanne. Fudge Cupcake Murder. New York: Kensington, 2004. –– Key Lime Pie Murder. New York: Kensington, 2007. –– Cream Puff Murder. New York: Kensington, 2009. –– Apple Turnover Murder. New York: Kensington, 2010. Greenwood, Kerry, and Jenny Pausacker. Recipes for Crime. Carlton: McPhee Gribble, 1995. Greenwood, Kerry. The Corinna Chapman Recipe Book: Mouth-Watering Morsels to Make Your Man Melt, Recipes from Corinna Chapman, Baker and Reluctant Investigator. nd. 25 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.allenandunwin.com/_uploads/documents/minisites/Corinna_recipebook.pdf›. –– A Question of Death: An Illustrated Phryne Fisher Treasury. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2007. Halmagyi, Ed. The Food Clock: A Year of Cooking Seasonally. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2012. Haywood, B. B. Town in a Blueberry Jam. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Town in a Lobster Stew. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Town in a Wild Moose Chase. New York: Berkley, 2012. Hyzy, Julie. State of the Onion. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Hail to the Chef. New York: Berkley, 2008. –– Eggsecutive Orders. New York: Berkley, 2010. –– Buffalo West Wing. New York: Berkley, 2011. –– Affairs of Steak. New York: Berkley, 2012. Israel, Andrea, and Nancy Garfinkel, with Melissa Clark. The Recipe Club: A Novel About Food And Friendship. New York: HarperCollins, 2009. McHenry, Jael. The Kitchen Daughter: A Novel. New York: Gallery, 2011. Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. London: Pan, 1936/1974 O’Reilly, Brian, with Virginia O’Reilly. Angelina’s Bachelors: A Novel, with Food. New York: Gallery, 2011. Payany, Estérelle. Recipe for Murder: Frightfully Good Food Inspired by Fiction. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. Peacocks Tearooms. Peacocks Tearooms: Our Unique Selection of Teas. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://www.peacockstearoom.co.uk/teas/page1.asp›. Piatti-Farnell, Lorna. “A Taste of Conflict: Food, History and Popular Culture In Katherine Mansfield’s Fiction.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 79–91. Risson, Toni, and Donna Lee Brien. “Editors’ Letter: That Takes the Cake: A Slice Of Australasian Food Studies Scholarship.” Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2.1 (2012): 3–7. Sayers, Dorothy L. Strong Poison. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930/2003. Schmidt, Shannon McKenna, and Joni Rendon. Novel Destinations: Literary Landmarks from Jane Austen’s Bath to Ernest Hemingway’s Key West. Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2009. Shange, Ntozake. Sassafrass, Cypress and Indigo: A Novel. New York: St Martin’s, 1982. Spang, Rebecca L. “All the World’s A Restaurant: On The Global Gastronomics Of Tourism and Travel.” In Raymond Grew (Ed). Food in Global History. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1999. 79–91. Taylor, Timothy. “Food/Crime Fiction.” Timothy Taylor. 2010. 17 Jul. 2012 ‹http://www.timothytaylor.ca/10/08/20/foodcrime-fiction›. The Moat Bar and Café. The Moat Bar and Café: Welcome. nd. 23 Aug. 2012 ‹http://themoat.com.au/Welcome.html›. Wenger, Shaunda Kennedy, and Janet Kay Jensen. The Book Lover’s Cookbook: Recipes Inspired by Celebrated Works of Literature, and the Passages that Feature Them. New York: Ballantine, 2003/2005.

This article investigates the possibilities for understanding waste as a resource, with a particular focus on understanding food waste as a food resource. It considers the popular yeast spread Vegemite within this frame. The spread’s origins in waste product, and how it has achieved and sustained its status as a popular symbol of Australia despite half a century of Australian gastro-multiculturalism and a marked public resistance to other recycling and reuse of food products, have not yet been a focus of study. The process of producing Vegemite from waste would seem to align with contemporary moves towards recycling food waste, and ensuring environmental sustainability and food security, yet even during times of austerity and environmental concern this has not provided the company with a viable marketing strategy. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of product memorialisation have created a superbrand through focusing on Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value.John Scanlan notes that producing waste is a core feature of modern life, and what we dispose of as surplus to our requirements—whether this comprises material objects or more abstract products such as knowledge—reveals much about our society. In observing this, Scanlan asks us to consider the quite radical idea that waste is central to everything of significance to us: the “possibility that the surprising core of all we value results from (and creates even more) garbage (both the material and the metaphorical)” (9). Others have noted the ambivalent relationship we have with the waste we produce. C. T. Anderson notes that we are both creator and agent of its disposal. It is our ambivalence towards waste, coupled with its ubiquity, that allows waste materials to be described so variously: negatively as garbage, trash and rubbish, or more positively as by-products, leftovers, offcuts, trimmings, and recycled.This ambivalence is also crucial to understanding the affectionate relationship the Australian public have with Vegemite, a relationship that appears to exist in spite of the product’s unpalatable origins in waste. A study of Vegemite reveals that consumers can be comfortable with waste, even to the point of eating recycled waste, as long as that fact remains hidden and unmentioned. In Vegemite’s case not only has the product’s connection to waste been rendered invisible, it has been largely kept out of sight despite considerable media and other attention focusing on the product. Recycling Food Waste into Food ProductRecent work such as Elizabeth Royte’s Garbage Land and Tristram Stuart’s Waste make waste uncomfortably visible, outlining how much waste, and food waste in particular, the Western world generates and how profligately this is disposed of. Their aim is clear: a call to less extravagant and more sustainable practices. The relatively recent interest in reducing our food waste has, of course, introduced more complexity into a simple linear movement from the creation of a food product, to its acquisition or purchase, and then to its consumption and/or its disposal. Moreover, the recycling, reuse and repurposing of what has previously been discarded as waste is reconfiguring the whole idea of what waste is, as well as what value it has. The initiatives that seem to offer the most promise are those that reconfigure the way waste is understood. However, it is not only the process of transforming waste from an abject nuisance into a valued product that is central here. It is also necessary to reconfigure people’s acculturated perceptions of, and reactions to waste. Food waste is generated during all stages of the food cycle: while the raw materials are being grown; while these are being processed; when the resulting food products are being sold; when they are prepared in the home or other kitchen; and when they are only partly consumed. Until recently, the food industry in the West almost universally produced large volumes of solid and liquid waste that not only posed problems of disposal and pollution for the companies involved, but also represented a reckless squandering of total food resources in terms of both nutrient content and valuable biomass for society at large. While this is currently changing, albeit slowly, the by-products of food processing were, and often are, dumped (Stuart). In best-case scenarios, various gardening, farming and industrial processes gather household and commercial food waste for use as animal feed or as components in fertilisers (Delgado et al; Wang et al). This might, on the surface, appear a responsible application of waste, yet the reality is that such food waste often includes perfectly good fruit and vegetables that are not quite the required size, shape or colour, meat trimmings and products (such as offal) that are completely edible but extraneous to processing need, and other high grade product that does not meet certain specifications—such as the mountains of bread crusts sandwich producers discard (Hickman), or food that is still edible but past its ‘sell by date.’ In the last few years, however, mounting public awareness over the issues of world hunger, resource conservation, and the environmental and economic costs associated with food waste has accelerated efforts to make sustainable use of available food supplies and to more efficiently recycle, recover and utilise such needlessly wasted food product. This has fed into and led to multiple new policies, instances of research into, and resultant methods for waste handling and treatment (Laufenberg et al). Most straightforwardly, this involves the use or sale of offcuts, trimmings and unwanted ingredients that are “often of prime quality and are only rejected from the production line as a result of standardisation requirements or retailer specification” from one process for use in another, in such processed foods as soups, baby food or fast food products (Henningsson et al. 505). At a higher level, such recycling seeks to reclaim any reusable substances of significant food value from what could otherwise be thought of as a non-usable waste product. Enacting this is largely dependent on two elements: an available technology and being able to obtain a price or other value for the resultant product that makes the process worthwhile for the recycler to engage in it (Laufenberg et al). An example of the latter is the use of dehydrated restaurant food waste as a feedstuff for finishing pigs, a reuse process with added value for all involved as this process produces both a nutritious food substance as well as a viable way of disposing of restaurant waste (Myer et al). In Japan, laws regarding food waste recycling, which are separate from those governing other organic waste, are ensuring that at least some of food waste is being converted into animal feed, especially for the pigs who are destined for human tables (Stuart). Other recycling/reuse is more complex and involves more lateral thinking, with the by-products from some food processing able to be utilised, for instance, in the production of dyes, toiletries and cosmetics (Henningsson et al), although many argue for the privileging of food production in the recycling of foodstuffs.Brewing is one such process that has been in the reuse spotlight recently as large companies seek to minimise their waste product so as to be able to market their processes as sustainable. In 2009, for example, the giant Foster’s Group (with over 150 brands of beer, wine, spirits and ciders) proudly claimed that it recycled or reused some 91.23% of 171,000 tonnes of operational waste, with only 8.77% of this going to landfill (Foster’s Group). The treatment and recycling of the massive amounts of water used for brewing, rinsing and cooling purposes (Braeken et al.; Fillaudeaua et al.) is of significant interest, and is leading to research into areas as diverse as the development microbial fuel cells—where added bacteria consume the water-soluble brewing wastes, thereby cleaning the water as well as releasing chemical energy that is then converted into electricity (Lagan)—to using nutrient-rich wastewater as the carbon source for creating bioplastics (Yu et al.).In order for the waste-recycling-reuse loop to be closed in the best way for securing food supplies, any new product salvaged and created from food waste has to be both usable, and used, as food (Stuart)—and preferably as a food source for people to consume. There is, however, considerable consumer resistance to such reuse. Resistance to reusing recycled water in Australia has been documented by the CSIRO, which identified negative consumer perception as one of the two primary impediments to water reuse, the other being the fundamental economics of the process (MacDonald & Dyack). This consumer aversion operates even in times of severe water shortages, and despite proof of the cleanliness and safety of the resulting treated water. There was higher consumer acceptance levels for using stormwater rather than recycled water, despite the treated stormwater being shown to have higher concentrations of contaminants (MacDonald & Dyack). This reveals the extent of public resistance to the potential consumption of recycled waste product when it is labelled as such, even when this consumption appears to benefit that public. Vegemite: From Waste Product to Australian IconIn this context, the savoury yeast spread Vegemite provides an example of how food processing waste can be repurposed into a new food product that can gain a high level of consumer acceptability. It has been able to retain this status despite half a century of Australian gastronomic multiculturalism and the wide embrace of a much broader range of foodstuffs. Indeed, Vegemite is so ubiquitous in Australian foodways that it is recognised as an international superbrand, a standing it has been able to maintain despite most consumers from outside Australasia finding it unpalatable (Rozin & Siegal). However, Vegemite’s long product history is one in which its origin as recycled waste has been omitted, or at the very least, consistently marginalised.Vegemite’s history as a consumer product is narrated in a number of accounts, including one on the Kraft website, where the apocryphal and actual blend. What all these narratives agree on is that in the early 1920s Fred Walker—of Fred Walker and Company, Melbourne, canners of meat for export and Australian manufacturers of Bonox branded beef stock beverage—asked his company chemist to emulate Marmite yeast extract (Farrer). The imitation product was based, as was Marmite, on the residue from spent brewer’s yeast. This waste was initially sourced from Melbourne-based Carlton & United Breweries, and flavoured with vegetables, spices and salt (Creswell & Trenoweth). Today, the yeast left after Foster Group’s Australian commercial beer making processes is collected, put through a sieve to remove hop resins, washed to remove any bitterness, then mixed with warm water. The yeast dies from the lack of nutrients in this environment, and enzymes then break down the yeast proteins with the effect that vitamins and minerals are released into the resulting solution. Using centrifugal force, the yeast cell walls are removed, leaving behind a nutrient-rich brown liquid, which is then concentrated into a dark, thick paste using a vacuum process. This is seasoned with significant amounts of salt—although less today than before—and flavoured with vegetable extracts (Richardson).Given its popularity—Vegemite was found in 2009 to be the third most popular brand in Australia (Brand Asset Consulting)—it is unsurprising to find that the product has a significant history as an object of study in popular culture (Fiske et al; White), as a marker of national identity (Ivory; Renne; Rozin & Siegal; Richardson; Harper & White) and as an iconic Australian food, brand and product (Cozzolino; Luck; Khamis; Symons). Jars, packaging and product advertising are collected by Australian institutions such as Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum and the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, and are regularly included in permanent and travelling exhibitions profiling Australian brands and investigating how a sense of national identity is expressed through identification with these brands. All of this significant study largely focuses on how, when and by whom the product has been taken up, and how it has been consumed, rather than its links to waste, and what this circumstance could add to current thinking about recycling of food waste into other food products.It is worth noting that Vegemite was not an initial success in the Australian marketplace, but this does not seem due to an adverse public perception to waste. Indeed, when it was first produced it was in imitation of an already popular product well-known to be made from brewery by-products, hence this origin was not an issue. It was also introduced during a time when consumer relationships to waste were quite unlike today, and thrifty re-use of was a common feature of household behaviour. Despite a national competition mounted to name the product (Richardson), Marmite continued to attract more purchasers after Vegemite’s launch in 1923, so much so that in 1928, in an attempt to differentiate itself from Marmite, Vegemite was renamed “Parwill—the all Australian product” (punning on the idea that “Ma-might” but “Pa-will”) (White 16). When this campaign was unsuccessful, the original, consumer-suggested name was reinstated, but sales still lagged behind its UK-owned prototype. It was only after remaining in production for more than a decade, and after two successful marketing campaigns in the second half of the 1930s that the Vegemite brand gained some market traction. The first of these was in 1935 and 1936, when a free jar of Vegemite was offered with every sale of an item from the relatively extensive Kraft-Walker product list (after Walker’s company merged with Kraft) (White). The second was an attention-grabbing contest held in 1937, which invited consumers to compose Vegemite-inspired limericks. However, it was not the nature of the product itself or even the task set by the competition which captured mass attention, but the prize of a desirable, exotic and valuable imported Pontiac car (Richardson 61; Superbrands).Since that time, multinational media company, J Walter Thompson (now rebranded as JWT) has continued to manage Vegemite’s marketing. JWT’s marketing has never looked to Vegemite’s status as a thrifty recycler of waste as a viable marketing strategy, even in periods of austerity (such as the Depression years and the Second World War) or in more recent times of environmental concern. Instead, advertising copywriting and a recurrent cycle of cultural/media memorialisation have created a superbrand by focusing on two factors: its nutrient value and, as the brand became more established, its status as national icon. Throughout the regular noting and celebration of anniversaries of its initial invention and launch, with various commemorative events and products marking each of these product ‘birthdays,’ Vegemite’s status as recycled waste product has never been more than mentioned. Even when its 60th anniversary was marked in 1983 with the laying of a permanent plaque in Kerferd Road, South Melbourne, opposite Walker’s original factory, there was only the most passing reference to how, and from what, the product manufactured at the site was made. This remained the case when the site itself was prioritised for heritage listing almost twenty years later in 2001 (City of Port Phillip).Shying away from the reality of this successful example of recycling food waste into food was still the case in 1990, when Kraft Foods held a nationwide public campaign to recover past styles of Vegemite containers and packaging, and then donated their collection to Powerhouse Museum. The Powerhouse then held an exhibition of the receptacles and the historical promotional material in 1991, tracing the development of the product’s presentation (Powerhouse Museum), an occasion that dovetailed with other nostalgic commemorative activities around the product’s 70th birthday. Although the production process was noted in the exhibition, it is noteworthy that the possibilities for recycling a number of the styles of jars, as either containers with reusable lids or as drinking glasses, were given considerably more notice than the product’s origins as a recycled product. By this time, it seems, Vegemite had become so incorporated into Australian popular memory as a product in its own right, and with such a rich nostalgic history, that its origins were no longer of any significant interest or relevance.This disregard continued in the commemorative volume, The Vegemite Cookbook. With some ninety recipes and recipe ideas, the collection contains an almost unimaginably wide range of ways to use Vegemite as an ingredient. There are recipes on how to make the definitive Vegemite toast soldiers and Vegemite crumpets, as well as adaptations of foreign cuisines including pastas and risottos, stroganoffs, tacos, chilli con carne, frijole dip, marinated beef “souvlaki style,” “Indian-style” chicken wings, curries, Asian stir-fries, Indonesian gado-gado and a number of Chinese inspired dishes. Although the cookbook includes a timeline of product history illustrated with images from the major advertising campaigns that runs across 30 pages of the book, this timeline history emphasises the technological achievement of Vegemite’s creation, as opposed to the matter from which it orginated: “In a Spartan room in Albert Park Melbourne, 20 year-old food technologist Cyril P. Callister employed by Fred Walker, conducted initial experiments with yeast. His workplace was neither kitchen nor laboratory. … It was not long before this rather ordinary room yielded an extra-ordinary substance” (2). The Big Vegemite Party Book, described on its cover as “a great book for the Vegemite fan … with lots of old advertisements from magazines and newspapers,” is even more openly nostalgic, but similarly includes very little regarding Vegemite’s obviously potentially unpalatable genesis in waste.Such commemorations have continued into the new century, each one becoming more self-referential and more obviously a marketing strategy. In 2003, Vegemite celebrated its 80th birthday with the launch of the “Spread the Smile” campaign, seeking to record the childhood reminisces of adults who loved Vegemite. After this, the commemorative anniversaries broke free from even the date of its original invention and launch, and began to celebrate other major dates in the product’s life. In this way, Kraft made major news headlines when it announced that it was trying to locate the children who featured in the 1954 “Happy little Vegemites” campaign as part of the company’s celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the television advertisement. In October 2006, these once child actors joined a number of past and current Kraft employees to celebrate the supposed production of the one-billionth jar of Vegemite (Rood, "Vegemite Spreads" & "Vegemite Toasts") but, once again, little about the actual production process was discussed. In 2007, the then iconic marching band image was resituated into a contemporary setting—presumably to mobilise both the original messages (nutritious wholesomeness in an Australian domestic context) as well as its heritage appeal. Despite the real interest at this time in recycling and waste reduction, the silence over Vegemite’s status as recycled, repurposed food waste product continued.Concluding Remarks: Towards Considering Waste as a ResourceIn most parts of the Western world, including Australia, food waste is formally (in policy) and informally (by consumers) classified, disposed of, or otherwise treated alongside garden waste and other organic materials. Disposal by individuals, industry or local governments includes a range of options, from dumping to composting or breaking down in anaerobic digestion systems into materials for fertiliser, with food waste given no special status or priority. Despite current concerns regarding the security of food supplies in the West and decades of recognising that there are sections of all societies where people do not have enough to eat, it seems that recycling food waste into food that people can consume remains one of the last and least palatable solutions to these problems. This brief study of Vegemite has attempted to show how, despite the growing interest in recycling and sustainability, the focus in both the marketing of, and public interest in, this iconic and popular product appears to remain rooted in Vegemite’s nutrient and nostalgic value and its status as a brand, and firmly away from any suggestion of innovative and prudent reuse of waste product. 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Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neologism, the result of a contraction of ‘permanent’ and ‘agriculture’. In accordance with David Holmgren and Richard Telford definition quoted above, we intend permaculture as a design process based on a set of ethical and design principles. Rather than describing the history of permaculture, we choose two moments as paradigmatic of its evolution in relation to counterculture.The first moment is permaculture’s beginnings steeped in the same late 1960s turbulence that saw some people pursue an alternative lifestyle in Northern NSW and a rural idyll in Tasmania (Grayson and Payne). Ideas of a return to the land circulating in this first moment coalesced around the publication in 1978 of the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, which functioned as “a disruptive technology, an idea that threatened to disrupt business as usual, to change the way we thought and did things”, as Russ Grayson writes in his contextual history of permaculture. The second moment is best exemplified by the definitions of permaculture as “a holistic system of design … most often applied to basic human needs such as water, food and shelter … also used to design more abstract systems such as community and economic structures” (Milkwood) and as “also a world wide network and movement of individuals and groups working in both rich and poor countries on all continents” (Holmgren).We argue that the shift in understanding of permaculture from the “back to the land movement” (Grayson) as a more wholesome alternative to consumer society to the contemporary conceptualisation of permaculture as an assemblage and global network of practices, is representative of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture from the 1970s to the present. While counterculture was a useful way to understand the agency of subcultures (i.e. by countering mainstream culture and society) contemporary forms of globalised capitalism demand different models and vocabularies within which the idea of “counter” as clear cut alternative becomes an awkward fit.On the contrary we see the emergence of a repertoire of practices aimed at small-scale, localised solutions connected in transnational networks (Pink 105). These practices operate contrapuntally, a concept we borrow from Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1993), to define how divergent practices play off each other while remaining at the edge, but still in a relation of interdependence with a dominant paradigm. In Said’s terms “contrapuntal reading” reveals what is left at the periphery of a mainstream narrative, but is at the same time instrumental to the development of events in the narrative itself. To illustrate this concept Said makes the case of novels where colonial plantations at the edge of the Empire make possible a certain lifestyle in England, but don’t appear in the narrative of that lifestyle itself (66-67).In keeping with permaculture design ecological principles, we argue that today permaculture is best understood as part of an assemblage of design objects, bacteria, economies, humans, plants, technologies, actions, theories, mushrooms, policies, affects, desires, animals, business, material and immaterial labour and politics and that it can be read as contrapuntal rather than as oppositional practice. Contrapuntal insofar as it is not directly oppositional preferring to reframe and reorientate everyday practices. The paper is structured in three parts: in the first one we frame our argument by providing a background to our understanding of counterculture and assemblage; in the second we introduce the beginning of permaculture in its historical context, and in third we propose to consider permaculture as an assemblage.Background: Counterculture and Assemblage We do not have the scope in this article to engage with contested definitions of counterculture in the Australian context, or their relation to contraculture or subculture. There is an emerging literature (Stickells, Robinson) touched on elsewhere in this issue. In this paper we view counterculture as social movements that “undermine societal hierarchies which structure urban life and create, instead a city organised on the basis of values such as action, local cultures, and decentred, participatory democracy” (Castells 19-20). Our focus on cities demonstrates the ways counterculture has shifted away from oppositional protest and towards ways of living sustainably in an increasingly urbanised world.Permaculture resonates with Castells’s definition and with other forms of protest, or what Musgrove calls “the dialectics of utopia” (16), a dynamic tension of political activism (resistance) and personal growth (aesthetics and play) that characterised ‘counterculture’ in the 1970s. McKay offers a similar view when he says such acts of counterculture are capable of “both a utopian gesture and a practical display of resistance” (27). But as a design practice, permaculture goes beyond the spectacle of protest.In this sense permaculture can be understood as an everyday act of resistance: “The design act is not a boycott, strike, protest, demonstration, or some other political act, but lends its power of resistance from being precisely a designerly way of intervening into people’s lives” (Markussen 38). We view permaculture design as a form of design activism that is embedded in everyday life. It is a process that aims to reorient a practice not by disrupting it but by becoming part of it.Guy Julier cites permaculture, along with the appropriate technology movement and community architecture, as one of many examples of radical thinking in design that emerged in the 1970s (225). This alignment of permaculture as a design practice that is connected to counterculture in an assemblage, but not entirely defined by it, is important in understanding the endurance of permaculture as a form of activism.In refuting the common and generalized narrative of failure that is used to describe the sixties (and can be extended to the seventies), Julie Stephens raises the many ways that the dominant ethos of the time was “revolutionised by the radicalism of the period, but in ways that bore little resemblance to the announced intentions of activists and participants themselves” (121). Further, she argues that the “extraordinary and paradoxical aspects of the anti-disciplinary protest of the period were that while it worked to collapse the division between opposition and complicity and problematised received understandings of the political, at the same time it reaffirmed its commitment to political involvement as an emancipatory, collective endeavour” (126).Many foresaw the political challenge of counterculture. From the belly of the beast, in 1975, Craig McGregor wrote that countercultures are “a crucial part of conventional society; and eventually they will be judged on how successful they transform it” (43). In arguing that permaculture is an assemblage and global network of practices, we contribute to a description of the shifting dynamic between dominant paradigms and counterculture that was identified by McGregor at the time and Stephens retrospectively, and we open up possibilities for reexamining an important moment in the history of Australian protest movements.Permaculture: Historical Context Together with practical manuals and theoretical texts permaculture has produced its foundation myths, centred around two father figures, Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. The pair, we read in accounts on the history of permaculture, met in the 1970s in Hobart at the University of Tasmania, where Mollison, after a polymath career, was a senior lecturer in Environmental Psychology, and Holmgren a student. Together they wrote the first article on permaculture in 1976 for the Organic Farmer and Gardener magazine (Grayson and Payne), which together with the dissemination of ideas via radio, captured the social imagination of the time. Two years later Holmgren and Mollison published the book Permaculture One: A Perennial Agricultural System for Human Settlements (Mollison and Holmgren).These texts and Mollison’s talks articulated ideas and desires and most importantly proposed solutions about living on the land, and led to the creation of the first ecovillage in Australia, Max Lindegger’s Crystal Waters in South East Queensland, the first permaculture magazine (titled Permaculture), and the beginning of the permaculture network (Grayson and Payne). In 1979 Mollison taught the first permaculture course, and published the second book. Grayson and Payne stress how permaculture media practices, such as the radio interview mentioned above and publications like Permaculture Magazine and Permaculture International Journal were key factors in the spreading of the design system and building a global network.The ideas developed around the concept of permaculture were shaped by, and in turned contributed to shape, the social climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s that captured the discontent with both capitalism and the Cold War, and that coalesced in “alternative lifestyles groups” (Metcalf). In 1973, for instance, the Aquarius Festival in Nimbin was not only a countercultural landmark, but also the site of emergence of alternative experiments in living that found their embodiment in experimental housing design (Stickells). The same interest in technological innovation mixed with rural skills animated one of permaculture’s precursors, the “back to the land movement” and its attempt “to blend rural traditionalism and technological and ideological modernity” (Grayson).This character of remix remains one of the characteristics of permaculture. Unlike movements based mostly on escape from the mainstream, permaculture offered a repertoire, and a system of adaptable solutions to live both in the country and the city. Like many aspects of the “alternative lifestyle” counterculture, permaculture was and is intensely biopolitical in the sense that it is concerned with the management of life itself “from below”: one’s own, people’s life and life on planet earth more generally. This understanding of biopolitics as power of life rather than over life is translated in permaculture into malleable design processes across a range of diversified practices. These are at the basis of the endurance of permaculture beyond the experiments in alternative lifestyles.In distinguishing it from sustainability (a contested concept among permaculture practitioners, some of whom prefer the notion of “planning for abundance”), Barry sees permaculture as:locally based and robustly contextualized implementations of sustainability, based on the notion that there is no ‘one size fits all’ model of sustainability. Permaculture, though rightly wary of more mainstream, reformist, and ‘business as usual’ accounts of sustainability can be viewed as a particular localized, and resilience-based conceptualization of sustainable living and the creation of ‘sustainable communities’. (83)The adaptability of permaculture to diverse solutions is stressed by Molly Scott-Cato, who, following David Holmgren, defines it as follows: “Permaculture is not a set of rules; it is a process of design based around principles found in the natural world, of cooperation and mutually beneficial relationships, and translating these principles into actions” (176).Permaculture Practice as Assemblage Scott Cato’s definition of permaculture helps us to understand both its conceptual framework as it is set out in permaculture manuals and textbooks, and the way it operates in practice at an individual, local, regional, national and global level, as an assemblage. Using the idea of assemblage, as defined by Jane Bennett, we are able to understand permaculture as part of an “ad hoc grouping”, a “collectivity” made up of many types of actors, humans, non humans, nature and culture, whose “coherence co-exists with energies and countercultures that exceed and confound it” (445-6). Put slightly differently, permaculture is part of “living” assemblage whose existence is not dependent on or governed by a “central power”. Nor can it be influenced by any single entity or member (445-6). Rather, permaculture is a “complex, gigantic whole” that is “made up variously, of somatic, technological, cultural, and atmospheric elements” (447).In considering permaculture as an assemblage that includes countercultural elements, we specifically adhere to John Law’s description of Actor Network Theory as an approach that relies on an empirical foundation rather than a theoretical one in order to “tell stories about ‘how’ relationships assemble or don’t” (141). The hybrid nature of permaculture design involving both human and non human stakeholders and their social and material dependencies can be understood as an “assembly” or “thing,” where everything not only plays its part relationally but where “matters of fact” are combined with “matters of concern” (Latour, "Critique"). As Barry explains, permaculture is a “holistic and systems-based approach to understanding and designing human-nature relations” (82). Permaculture principles are based on the enactment of interconnections, continuous feedback and reshuffling among plants, humans, animals, chemistry, social life, things, energy, built and natural environment, and tools.Bruno Latour calls this kind of relationality a “sphere” or a “network” that comprises of many interconnected nodes (Latour, "Actor-Network" 31). The connections between the nodes are not arbitrary, they are based on “associations” that dissolve the “micro-macro distinctions” of near and far, emphasizing the “global entity” of networks (361-381). Not everything is globalised but the global networks that structure the planet affect everything and everyone. In the context of permaculture, we argue that despite being highly connected through a network of digital and analogue platforms, the movement remains localised. In other words, permaculture is both local and global articulating global matters of concern such as food production, renewable energy sources, and ecological wellbeing in deeply localised variants.These address how the matters of concerns engendered by global networks in specific places interact with local elements. A community based permaculture practice in a desert area, for instance, will engage with storing renewable energy, or growing food crops and maintaining a stable ecology using the same twelve design principles and ethics as an educational business doing rooftop permaculture in a major urban centre. The localised applications, however, will result in a very different permaculture assemblage of animals, plants, technologies, people, affects, discourses, pedagogies, media, images, and resources.Similarly, if we consider permaculture as a network of interconnected nodes on a larger scale, such as in the case of national organisations, we can see how each node provides a counterpoint that models ecological best practices with respect to ingrained everyday ways of doing things, corporate and conventional agriculture, and so on. This adaptability and ability to effect practices has meant that permaculture’s sphere of influence has grown to include public institutions, such as city councils, public and private spaces, and schools.A short description of some of the nodes in the evolving permaculture assemblage in Sydney, where we live, is an example of the way permaculture has advanced from its alternative lifestyle beginnings to become part of the repertoire of contemporary activism. These practices, in turn, make room for accepted ways of doing things to move in new directions. In this assemblage each constellation operates within well established sites: local councils, public spaces, community groups, and businesses, while changing the conventional way these sites operate.The permaculture assemblage in Sydney includes individuals and communities in local groups coordinated in a city-wide network, Permaculture Sydney, connected to similar regional networks along the NSW seaboard; local government initiatives, such as in Randwick, Sydney, and Pittwater and policies like Sustainable City Living; community gardens like the inner city food forest at Angel Street or the hybrid public open park and educational space at the Permaculture Interpretive Garden; private permaculture gardens; experiments in grassroot urban permaculture and in urban agriculture; gardening, education and landscape business specialising in permaculture design, like Milkwood and Sydney Organic Gardens; loose groups of permaculturalists gathering around projects, such as Permablitz Sydney; media personalities and programs, as in the case of the hugely successful garden show Gardening Australia hosted by Costa Georgiadis; germane organisations dedicated to food sovereignty or seed saving, the Transition Towns movement; farmers’ markets and food coops; and multifarious private/public sustainability initiatives.Permaculture is a set of practices that, in themselves are not inherently “against” anything, yet empower people to form their own lifestyles and communities. After all, permaculture is a design system, a way to analyse space, and body of knowledge based on set principles and ethics. The identification of permaculture as a form of activism, or indeed as countercultural, is externally imposed, and therefore contingent on the ways conventional forms of housing and food production are understood as being in opposition.As we have shown elsewhere (2014) thinking through design practices as assemblages can describe hybrid forms of participation based on relationships to broader political movements, disciplines and organisations.Use Edges and Value the Marginal The eleventh permaculture design principle calls for an appreciation of the marginal and the edge: “The interface between things is where the most interesting events take place. These are often the most valuable, diverse and productive elements in the system” (permacultureprinciples.com). In other words the edge is understood as the site where things come together generating new possible paths and interactions. In this paper we have taken this metaphor to think through the relations between permaculture and counterculture. We argued that permaculture emerged from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s and 1970s and intersected with other fringe alternative lifestyle experiments. In its contemporary form the “counter” value needs to be understood as counterpoint rather than as a position of pure oppositionality to the mainstream.The edge in permaculture is not a boundary on the periphery of a design, but a site of interconnection, hybridity and exchange, that produces adaptable and different possibilities. Similarly permaculture shares with forms of contemporary activism “flexible action repertoires” (Mayer 203) able to interconnect and traverse diverse contexts, including mainstream institutions. Permaculture deploys an action repertoire that integrates not segregates and that is aimed at inviting a shift in everyday practices and at doing things differently: differently from the mainstream and from the way global capital operates, without claiming to be in a position outside global capital flows. In brief, the assemblages of practices, ideas, and people generated by permaculture, like the ones described in this paper, as a counterpoint bring together discordant elements on equal terms.ReferencesBarry, John. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability: Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon Constrained World. 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Culture is a mercurial concept -- volatile, contested, and somehow, less than the sum of its parts. Its anthropology, it can be argued, was rooted in an exoticising scholarship typical of the late 19th-century colonialist ruminations on all things "other"; in contemporary terms of course, this exoticising tendency would be termed, as it should, "Orientalist". Still, there is something more than merely residual in the persistence of a notion of culture as a summary, as a package of knowledge and practice, as a name for identity, or even politics, all of which draw clearly from the well of Edward B. Tylor's bold attempt to terminologically and conceptually capture "the most complex whole", a people's entire way of life (albeit non-white, non-literate, non-western people) from what we can trust were the considerable comforts of his armchair. This Tylorean notion of culture, as Clifford Geertz once suggested, leads to a "conceptual morass" that "obscures a great deal more than it reveals" (4). Another definitional foundation of culture for consideration is the philosophical tradition of German Idealism. Culture as a process of aesthetic education was for Friedrich Schiller a means of progressing from a state of nature to a state of reason without the destruction of nature. Schiller offered a critique of Kant's account of the development of reason (the achievement of the state of rationality as key to the education and progress of humanity) as necessarily predicated on the containment and ultimately, the destruction of nature (against the chaos and moral abyss that is nature). Schiller argued for the capacity of art to infuse nature with morality, to serve as an intermediary of sorts, between chaotic nature and the structures of pure reason. It is the cultivation of moral character -- Bildung -- that is the foundation of this capacity, and that defines the nature and purpose of "culture" as a process of aesthetic education. There were two influential trajectories that seem inspired by this philosophical source. First, there was an important sense from the German Idealists that culture was a determining principle of nation (the nation-state is achieved through Bildung, through cultivation), and accordingly, culture was understood as the source of nationhood. Second, culture took on the sense of moral authority, an Arnoldian equation of culture with high culture and a concomitant mistrust of all things democratic and popular, which debase and ultimately threaten the authority of high culture. Raymond Williams's reinterpretation of culture merits attention because of its departure from previous traditions of defining culture, and because it is a useful foundation for the view of culture proposed later in this discussion. Williams offered a detailed historical analysis of the reasons for the under-theorisation of the British labour movement, and the glaring dislocation of the English proletariat from the ideas, the concepts, the political theory of capitalism. Actual working classes in Britain, the "lived culture" of workers, fit neither into broad political theoretical currents, nor into an examination of workers as elements in a historical process -- this lived culture defied the embrace of political analysis. Williams argued for a more anthropological view of culture, and decisively shifted the concept away from the British literary-cultural tradition, away from Arnold's "high culture", to a view of culture as a whole way of life, and open to the vision and the possibilities of social integration, popular classes, and popular struggles in ordinary, everyday life. Williams argued compellingly for the "ordinariness" of culture. As Bill Readings notes, "Williams's insistence that culture is ordinary was a refusal to ignore the actual working classes in favor of the liberated proletarians who were to be their successors after the revolution" (92). In this sense, culture confounds political theory -- or to stretch the point, culture confounds systematic theorising. In a similar vein, and in a classic of anthropological inquiry, Clifford Geertz argued that the analysis of culture was "not an experimental science in search of law, but an interpretive one in search of meaning" (4). Such an "interpretive" project demands above all, that that the analyst is also a participant in a dimension of the culture she/he is describing. I want to consider two of Geertz's assertions in his interpretive theory of culture to frame my proposal for a concept of culture-as-action. Geertz maintained that cultural analysis is guesswork rather than systematic theorising, which he regarded as a manipulation or reconstruction of reality through analytical practices in search of elegant schemata. Cultural analysis is "guessing at meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions from the better guesses, not discovering the Continent of Meaning and mapping out its bodiless landscape" (20). Clearly, Geertz trained his critical sights on anthropological trends to extrapolate from material data singularly coherent, even symmetrical systems, orders, properties, and universals in a method that wants to imitate, but is not science. Interpretation resists scientism. In a second assertion, Geertz argued that any sustained symbolic action -- the stuff of culture -- is "saying something of something" (448-53). While this assertion appears disarmingly simple, it is profound in its implications. It points to the possibility that cultural analysis, if it is to grasp and interpret layered, textured, and often thoroughly complex significations, must attend to "semantics" rather than "mechanics"; the representation of the substance of culture, its symbolic expressive forms and its unfolding action, rather than the insinuation, or even the bold declaration of systems and formulas, however elegant, of cultural patterns and process. The concern in interpretation -- a form of representation -- is that "a good interpretation of anything -- a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society -- takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation" (18). To describe culture is to attend to action -- actual and resonant -- and such descriptions representations have responsibility; specifically, they must seek to grasp and portray social discourse and its possible meanings in ways that allow symbolic action -- the vocabulary of culture -- to speak on its own behalf. We arrived back in Lahore after a day's journey by jeep over the bone-dry and dusty roads of rural Punjab. The air was a toxic soup, and the heat was crushing, as it always is in Pakistan in monsoon season. The interior of the vehicle was an oven, and I was feeling sealed and cooked, even with all the windows open. My friend and driver, Ashicksahib and I were soaked with sweat from the journey, and we were eager to finally get out of the jeep as we pulled into the city in the late afternoon. I had been through a half dozen bottles of water, but I still felt dizzy with dehydration. I knew that this day was the celebration of Mohammed's birthday, and while I expected many people on the streets, I was unprepared for the magnitude of the event that was taking place. The crowds consumed us. We crawled along until we couldn't continue. The jeep had to stop as the sea of celebrants became denser and denser inside the city, and Ashicksahib shrugged his massive shoulders, smiled at me from under his thick white moustache, wiped his neck with a sodden cloth, and said in Urdu, "That's it, we cannot move, there's nowhere for us to go. We must be patient." I had never seen this much humanity gathered in a single place before. There were only boys and men of course, thousands and thousands of them moving along in joyous procession -- on foot, piled on platforms of flatbed trucks, stuffed into rickshaws, two or three sharing scooters and bicycles. The usual animal multitudes -- herds of water buffalo, goats, some camels, the ubiquitous miserable and thread- bare donkeys with their carts -- all stood passively in the midst of the chaos, too exhausted or too confused to register any instinctive response. Blasting loudspeakers competed from a hundred different directions, chants and patriotic music, prayers and devotional declarations, the staccato delivery of fundamentalist pedagogy and the improvised reveries of individuals with small bullhorns. The soft drink vendors shouted to the crowds to make way as they spun their carts around over and over again, and darted off into fray. I brought out my camera, and because the noise was deafening, I mimed to Ashicksahib my intention to take some photos from the roof of the jeep. He motioned with an affirmative sweep of his hand and the typical and essential south Asian head roll, and I pried open the door and squeezed out against the celebrants pressed up to the side of the jeep. I hoisted myself onto the roof and sat cross-legged to steady myself for some wide- angle shots of the celebrations. I had some concern over my obviousness -- white and western -- but everyone who saw me shouted greetings in Urdu or Punjabi, waved and smiled, and young boys ran up very close to the jeep to see what I was up to. I heard Ashicksahib laughing, and all seemed safe -- until the squadrons of Sunni fundamentalists caught sight of me as their trucks crawled by in a formation that seemed remarkably disciplined and militaristic in the direct contrast to the emotionalism and formlessness of the event. Like the wave in a sports stadium, the young men stood up one by one on the back of the trucks, their green turbans cut into the indefinite wash of a grey, polluted sky, their eyes searching until they fixed on me, now exposed and vulnerable on the roof of the jeep. And quickly they leapt from their trucks like a SWAT team responding crisply to a crisis, precise and efficient, jaws clenched, cocked for action. I saw them first through the lens of my camera, and uttered an expletive or two appropriate to the situation. I knew I was in trouble, and clearly, I had nowhere to go. The turbans formed a green ribbon winding through the mass. As they approached, the eyes of the militants were trained on me with the focus of a predator about to take down its prey. I slipped back into the jeep through the window, and motioned for Ashicksahib to look over the crowd and see the slow and steady movement of the green turbans toward us. His smile vanished instantly, and he readied himself for confrontation. When the first militant reached the jeep's window, Ashicksahib's entire body was taut and urgent, like a finger twitching on the trigger of a pistol. "American! American! No photo! No photo!" The leader of the group shouted at me in English and began to bang the side of the jeep. Ten or twelve young men, eyes flaring under their turbans, screamed at me and joined in the assault on the jeep. Ashicksahib had waited for a particular moment, it occurred to me later, a certain point in the rising arc of tension and emotion. He opened his door, but did not leave the jeep. Instead he stood on the step on the driver's side, half in and half out, slowly unfurled his considerable frame to its full height, and began his verbal assault. He stood on his perch above the action and in a play of passions, he shouted his opponents into submission. There were a few physical sorties by the militants, attempts to kick the door of the jeep into Ashicksahib, but these were displays, and Ashicksahib kicked back only once. And suddenly they wavered, an erosion of spirit evidenced in their eyes, a bending to the force roaring above them. They gave up their attempts to grab my camera, to gain entry to the jeep, and with a swift gesture of his hand, the leader called his small army into retreat. This same festival that mobilised great masses of people in celebration, that enacted the inextricableness of nationalist and Pakistani Muslim commitment and identity, that on the surface appeared to articulate and demonstrate a collective belief and purpose, also dramatised conflictive divisions and the diverse interpretations of what it means to be a Pakistani, a Muslim, a Punjabi, an Indus person, a Lahori, a poor person, a person of means, and numerous other identities at stake. As an obvious westerner in the midst of the event, I was variously ignored, warmly greeted as a friendly foreigner, or accosted as an unwelcome interloper, each interaction unfolding within a broader and deeper passionate ritual which for some meant play and celebration, and for others meant a serious and forceful demonstration of affiliation, faith, and nationalism. I had been working in both village and urban contexts on issues and strategies around communication/education and advocacy with South Asia Partnership-Pakistan, a non-government organisation based in Lahore that was engaged in front-line work for social change. The organisation was driven by the pursuit of the principles of civil society, and on a daily basis, it contended with the brutal contradictions to those principles. Its work was carried out against a bulwark of poverty and fundamentalism that seemed impenetrable, and this moment of imminent confrontation resonated with the complex historical, cultural, and political dynamics of identity, religion, nationalism, colonialism, and a seething cauldron of south Asian geopolitics. As Paulo Freire argued that world views are manifested in actions that offer insight into broader and prevailing social and political conditions, so Geertz maintained that societies "contain their own interpretations". This was not essentialism -- there were none of the conceits or romanticism of essentialist readings of the commonplace as encapsulated social and political axioms. Rather, these views were a call for analytical honesty, a participatory and political dimension to cultural analysis that works to gain some access to these "interpretations" by encountering and apprehending culture in forms of action. Cultural analysis becomes a kind of trial-by-fire, a description from a viewpoint of participatory engagement. By "participatory", I mean everything that the bloodlessness and obfuscation of so much of Cultural Studies is not -- an actual stake in action and consequence in a real world of politics. The interpretation of culture is valuable when it attends to action rather than theoretical insinuation; to cultural volatility and contingency, and the broad determinants of social discourse rather than schemata and structure as critical ends. Interpretation has a participatory dimension -- an involvement, an engagement with culture described and interpreted -- which eschews the privilege of theory unimpeded by empirical evidence. References Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Harmondsworth. Penguin, 1972. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996. Schiller, Friedrich. Notes on the Aesthetic Education of Man. Trans. E.M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Customes. 2 vol. New York: Henry Holt, 1877. Williams, Raymond. "Culture is Ordinary". Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism. Ed. Robin Gable. London: Verso, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Martin Laba. "Culture as Action." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.2 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api- network.com/mc/0005/action.php>. Chicago style: Martin Laba, "Culture as Action," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 2 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/action.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Martin Laba. (2000) Culture as action. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(2). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0005/action.php> ([your date of access]).

The German anatomist and artist Gunther von Hagens’s exhibition Body Worlds has toured Europe, Asia and the US several times, provoking both interest and dismay, fascination and disgust. This “original exhibition of real human bodies” features whole cadavers as well as specific body parts and it is organized thematically around specific bodily functions such as the respiratory system, blood circulation, skeletal materials and brain and nervous system. In each segment of the exhibition these themes are illustrated using parts of the body, presented in glass cases that are associated with each function. Next to these cases are the full body cadavers—the so-called “plastinates”. The Body Worlds exhibition is all about perception-in-motion: it is about circumnavigating bodies, stopping in front of a plastinate and in-corporating it, leaning over an arm or reaching towards a face, pointing towards a discrete blood vessel, drawing an abstract line between two organs. Experiencing here is above all a matter of reaching-towards and incorporeally touching bodies (Manning, Politics of Touch). These bodies are dead, still, motionless, “frozen in time between death and decay” (von Hagens, Body Worlds). Dead and still eerily animate, just as the surface of a freeze-frame photograph would seem to capture spatially a movement in its unfolding becoming, plastinates do not simply appear as dead matter used to represent vitality, but rather [...] as persons who managed to survive together with their bodies. What “inner quality” makes them appear alive? In what way is someone present, when what is conserved is not opinions (in writing), actions (in stories) or voice (on tape) but the body? (Hirschauer 41—42) Through the corporeal transformation—the plastination process—that these bodies have gone through, and the designed space of the exhibition—a space that makes possible both innovative and restrictive movements—these seemingly dead bodies come alive. There is a movement within these bodies, a movement that resonates with-in the exhibition space and mobilises visitors.Two ways of thinking movement in relation to stillness come out of this. The first one is concerned with the ordering and designing of space by means of visual cues, things or texts. This relates to stillness and slowness as suggestive, imposed and enforced upon bodies so that the possibilities of movement are reduced due to the way an environment is designed. Think for example of the way that an escalator moulds movements and speeds, or how signs such as “No walking on the grass” suggest a given pattern of walking. The second one is concerned with how movement is linked up with and implies continuous change. If a body’s movement and exaltation is reduced or slowed down, does the body then become immobile and still? Take ice, water and steam: these states give expression to three different attributes or conditions of what is considered to be one and the same chemical body. But in the transformation from one to the other, there is also an incorporeal transformation related to the possibilities of movement and change—between motion and rest—of what a body can do (Deleuze, Spinoza).Slowing Down Ever since the first exhibition Body Worlds has been under attack from critics, ethicists, journalists and religious groups, who claim that the public exhibition of dead bodies should, for various reasons, be banned. In 2004, in response to such criticism, the Californian Science Centre commissioned an ethical review of the exhibition before taking the decision on whether and how to host Body Worlds. One of the more interesting points in this review was the proposition that “the exhibition is powerful, and guests need time to acclimate themselves” (6). As a consequence, it was suggested that the Science Center arrange an entrance that would “slow people down and foster a reverential and respectful mood” (5). The exhibition space was to be organized in such a way that skeletons, historical contexts and images would be placed in the beginning of the exhibition, the whole body plastinates should only be introduced later in the exhibition. Before my first visit to the exhibition, I wasn’t sure how I would react when confronted with these dead bodies. To be perfectly honest, the moments before entering, I panicked. Crossing the asphalt between the Manchester Museum of Science and the exhibition hall, I felt dizzy; heart pounding in my chest and a sensation of nausea spreading throughout my body. Ascending a staircase that would take me to the entrance, located on the third floor in the exhibition hall, I thought I had detected an odour—rotten flesh or foul meat mixed with chemicals. Upon entering I was greeted by a young man to whom I presented my ticket. Without knowing in advance that this first room had been structured in such a way as to “slow people down”, I immediately felt relieved as I realized that the previously detected smell must have been psychosomatic: the room was perfectly odourless and the atmosphere was calm and tempered. Dimmed lights and pointed spotlights filled the space with an inviting and warm ambience. Images and texts on death and anatomical art were spread over the walls and in the back corners of the room two skeletons had been placed. Two glass cases containing bones and tendons had been placed in the middle of the room and next to these a case with a whole body, positioned upright in ‘anatomically correct’ position with arms, hands and legs down. There was nothing gruesome or spectacular about this room; I had visited anatomical collections, such as that of the Hunterian Museum in London or Medical Museion in Copenhagen, which in comparison far surpassed the alleged gruesomeness and voyeurism. And so I realized that the room had effectively slowed me down as my initial state of exaltation had been altered and stalled by the relative familiarity of images, texts and bare bones, all presented in a tempered and respectful way.Visitors are slowed down, but they are not still. There is no degree zero of movement, only different relations of speeds and slowness. Here I think it is useful to think of movement and change as it is expressed in Henri Bergson’s writings on temporality. Bergson frequently argued that the problem of Western metaphysics had been to spatialise movement, as in the famous example with Zeno’s arrow that—given that we think of movement as spatial—never reaches the tree towards which it has been shot. Bergson however did not refute the importance and practical dimensions of thinking through immobility; rather, immobility is the “prerequisite for our action” (Creative Mind 120). The problem occurs when we think away movement on behalf of that which we think of as still or immobile.We need immobility, and the more we succeed in imagining movement as coinciding with the immobilities of the points of space through which it passes, the better we think we understand it. To tell the truth, there never is real immobility, if we understand by that an absence of movement. Movement is reality itself (Bergson, Creative Mind 119).This notion of movement as primary, and immobility as secondary, gives expression to the proposition that immobility, solids and stillness are not given but have to be achieved. This can be done in several ways: external forces that act upon a body and transform it, as when water crystallizes into ice; certain therapeutic practices—yoga or relaxation exercises—that focus and concentrate attention and perception; spatial and architectural designs such as museums, art galleries or churches that induce and invoke certain moods and slow people down. Obviously there are other kinds of situations when bodies become excited and start moving more rapidly. Such situations could be, to name a few, when water starts to boil; when people use drugs like nicotine or caffeine in order to heighten alertness; or when bodies occupy spaces where movement is amplified by means of increased sensual stimuli, for example in the extreme conditions that characterize a natural catastrophe or a war.Speeding Up After the Body Worlds visitor had been slowed down and acclimatised in and through the first room, the full body plastinates were introduced. These bodies laid bare muscles, tissues, nerves, brain, heart, kidneys, and lungs. Some of these were “exploded views” of the body—in these, the body and its parts have been separated and drawn out from the position that they occupy in the living body, in some cases resulting in two discrete plastinates—e.g. one skeleton and one muscle-plastinate—that come from the same anatomical body. Congruent with the renaissance anatomical art of Vesalius, all plastinates are positioned in lifelike poses (Benthien, Skin). Some are placed inside a protective glass case while others are either standing, lying on the ground or hanging from the ceiling.As the exhibition unfolds, the plastinates themselves wipe away the calmness and stillness intended with the spatial design. Whereas a skeleton seems mute and dumb these plastinates come alive as visitors circle and navigate between them. Most visitors would merely point and whisper, some would reach towards and lean over a plastinate. Others however noticed that jumping up and down created a resonating effect in the plastinates so that a plastinate’s hand, leg or arm moved. At times the rooms were literally filled with hordes of excited and energized school children. Then the exhibition space was overtaken with laughter, loud voices, running feet, comments about the gruesome von Hagens and repeated remarks on the plastinates’ genitalia. The former mood of respectfulness and reverence has been replaced by the fascinating and idiosyncratic presence of animated and still, plastinated bodies. Animated and still? So what is a plastinate?Movement and Form Through plastination, the body undergoes a radical and irreversible transformation which turns the organic body into an “inorganic organism”, a hybrid of plastic and flesh (Hirschauer 36). Before this happens however the living body has to face another phase of transition by which it turns into a dead cadaver. From the point of view of an individual body that lives, breathes and evolves, this transformation implies turning into a decomposing and rotting piece of flesh, tissue and bones. Any corpse will sooner or later turn into something else, ashes, dust or earth. This process can be slowed down using various techniques and chemicals such as mummification or formaldehyde, but this will merely slow down the process of decomposition, and not terminate it.The plastination technique is rather different in several respects. Firstly the specimen is soaked in acetone and the liquids in the corpse—water and fat—are displaced. This displacement prepares the specimen for the next step in the process which is the forced vacuum impregnation. Here the specimen is placed in a polymer mixture with silicone rubber or epoxy resin. This process is undertaken in vacuum which allows for the plastic to enter each and every cell of the specimen, thus replacing the acetone (von Hagens, Body Worlds). Later on, when this transformation has finished, the specimen is modelled according to a concept, a “gestalt plastinate”, such as “the runner”, “the badminton player” or “the skin man”. The concept expresses a dynamic and life-like pose—referred to as the gestalt—that exceeds the individual parts of which it is formed. This would suggest that form is in itself immobility and that perception is what is needed to make form mobile; as gestalt the plastinated body is spatially immobilised, yet it gives birth to a body that comes alive in perception-movement. Once again I think that Bergson could help us to think through this relation, a relation that is conceived here as a difference between form-as-stillness and formation-as-movement:Life is an evolution. We concentrate a period of this evolution in a stable view which we call a form, and, when the change has become considerable enough to overcome the fortunate inertia of our perception, we say that the body has changed its form. But in reality the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form; form is only a snapshot view of a transition (Bergson, Creative Evolution 328, emphasis in original).In other words there is a form that is relative to human perception, but there is “underneath” this form nothing but a continuous formation or becoming as Bergson would have it. For our purposes the formation of the gestalt plastinate is an achievement that makes perceptible the possibility of divergent or co-existent durations; the plastinate belongs to a temporal rhythm that even though it coincides with ours is not identical to it.Movement and Trans-formation So what kind of a strange entity is it that emerges out of this transformation, through which organic materials are partly replaced with plastic? Compared with a living body or a mourned cadaver, it is first and foremost an entity that no longer is subject to the continuous evolution of time. In this sense the plastinate is similar to cryogenetical bodies (Doyle, Wetwares), or to Ötzi the ice man (Spindler, Man in the ice)—bodies that resist the temporal logic according to which things are in constant motion. The processes of composition and decomposition that every living organism undergoes at every instant have been radically interrupted.However, plastinates are not forever fixed, motionless and eternally enduring objects. As Walter points out, plastinated cadavers are expected to “remain stable” for approximately 4000 years (606). Thus, the plastinate has become solidified and stabilized according to a different pattern of duration than that of the decaying human body. There is a tension here between permanence and change, between bodies that endure and a body that decomposes. Maybe as when summer, which is full of life and energy, turns into winter, which is still and seemingly without life. It reminds us of Nietzsche's Zarathustra and the winter doctrine: When the water is spanned by planks, when bridges and railings leap over the river, verily those are believed who say, “everything is in flux. . .” But when the winter comes . . . , then verily, not only the blockheads say, “Does not everything stand still?” “At bottom everything stands still.”—that is truly a winter doctrine (Bennett and Connolly 150). So we encounter the paradox of how to accommodate motion within stillness and stillness within motion: if everything is in continuous movement, how can there be stillness and regularity (and vice versa)? An interesting example of such temporal interruption is described by Giorgio Agamben who invokes an example with a tick that was kept alive, in a state of hibernation, for 18 years without nourishment (47). During those years this tick had ceased to exist in time, it existed only in extended space. There are of course differences between the tick and von Hagens’s plastinates—one difference being that the plastinates are not only dead but also plastic and inorganic—but the analogy points us to the idea of producing the conditions of possibility for eternal, timeless (and, by implication, motionless) bodies. If movement and change are thought of as spatial, as in Zeno’s paradox, here they have become temporal: movement happens in and because of time and not in space. The technique of plastination and the plastinates themselves emerge as processes of a-temporalisation and re-spatialisation of the body. The body is displaced—pulled out of time and history—and becomes a Cartesian body located entirely in the coordinates of extended space. As Ian Hacking suggests, plastinates are “Cartesian, extended, occupying space. Plastinated organs and corpses are odourless: like the Cartesian body, they can be seen but not smelt” (15).Interestingly, Body Worlds purports to show the inner workings of the human body. However, what visitors experience is not the working but the being. They do not see what the body does, its activities over time; rather, they see what it is, in space. Conversely, von Hagens wishes to “make us aware of our physical nature, our nature within us” (Kuppers 127), but the nature that we become aware of is not the messy, smelly and fluid nature of bodily interiors. Rather we encounter the still nature of Zarathustra’s winter landscape, a landscape in which the passage of time has come to a halt. As Walter concludes “the Body Worlds experience is primarily visual, spatial, static and odourless” (619).Still in Constant MotionAnd yet...Body Worlds moves us. If not for the fact that these plastinates and their creator strike us as gruesome, horrific and controversial, then because these bodies that we encounter touch us and we them. The sensation of movement, in and through the exhibition, is about this tension between being struck, touched or moved by a body that is radically foreign and yet strangely familiar to us. The resonant and reverberating movement that connects us with it is expressed through that (in)ability to accommodate motion in stillness, and stillness in motion. For whereas the plastinates are immobilised in space, they move in time and in experience. As Nigel Thrift puts it The body is in constant motion. Even at rest, the body is never still. As bodies move they trace out a path from one location to another. These paths constantly intersect with those of others in a complex web of biographies. These others are not just human bodies but also all other objects that can be described as trajectories in time-space: animals, machines, trees, dwellings, and so on (Thrift 8).This understanding of the body as being in constant motion stretches beyond the idea of a body that literally moves in physical space; it stresses the processual intertwining of subjects and objects through space-times that are enduring and evolving. The paradoxical nature of the relation between bodies in motion and bodies at rest is obviously far from exhausted through the brief exemplification that I have tried to provide here. Therefore I must end here and let someone else, better suited for this task, explain what it is that I wish to have said. We are hardly conscious of anything metaphorical when we say of one picture or of a story that it is dead, and of another that it has life. To explain just what we mean when we say this, is not easy. Yet the consciousness that one thing is limp, that another one has the heavy inertness of inanimate things, while another seems to move from within arises spontaneously. There must be something in the object that instigates it (Dewey 182). References Agamben, Giorgio. The Open. Trans. Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2004.Bennett, Jane, and William Connolly. “Contesting Nature/Culture.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 24 (2002) 148-163.Benthien, Claudia. Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World. Trans. Thomas Dunlap. New York: Columbia U P, 2002. California Science Center. “Summary of Ethical Review.” 10 Jan. 2009.Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind. Trans. Mabelle Andison. Mineola: Dover, 2007. –––. Creative Evolution. Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Cosimo Classics, 2005Deleuze, Gilles. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.Doyle, Richard. Wetwares. Minnesota: Minnesota U P, 2003.Hacking, Ian. “The Cartesian Body.” Biosocieties 1 (2006) 13-15.Hirschauer, Stefan. “Animated Corpses: Communicating with Post Mortals in an Anatomical Exhibition.” Body & Society 12.4 (2006) 25-52.Kuppers, Petra. “Visions of Anatomy: Exhibitions and Dense Bodies.” differences 15.3 (2004) 123-156.Manning, Erin. Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minnesota: Minnesota UP, 2007. Spindler, Konrad. The Man in the Ice. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994.Thrift, Nigel. Spatial Formations. London: Sage, 1996.Von Hagens, Gunther, and Angelina Whalley. Body Worlds: The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies. Heidelberg: Institute for Plastination, 2008.Walter, Tony. “Plastination for Display: A New Way to Dispose of the Dead.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 10.3 (2004) 603-627.

On Wednesday 21 April the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts introduced a piece of legislation into the Australian Senate to regulate the way Australians use the Internet. This legislation is presented within Australia's existing system of content regulation, a scheme that the Minister describes is not censorship, but merely regulation (Alston 55). Underlying Senator Alston's rhetoric about the protection of children from snuff film makers, paedophiles, drug pushers and other criminals, this long anticipated bill is aimed at reducing the amount of pornographic materials available via computer networks, a censorship regime in an age when regulation and classification are the words we prefer to use when society draws the line under material we want to see, but dare not allow ourselves access to. Regardless of any noble aspirations expressed by free-speech organisations such as Electronic Frontiers Australia relating to the defence of personal liberty and freedom of expression, this legislation is about porn. Under the Bill, Australia would proscribe our citizens from accessing: explicit depictions of sexual acts between consenting adults; mild non-violent fetishes; depictions of sexual violence, coercion or non-consent of any kind; depictions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, sexual acts accompanied by offensive fetishes, or exploitative incest fantasies; unduly detailed and/or relished acts of extreme violence or cruelty; explicit or unjustifiable depictions of sexual violence against non-consenting persons; and detailed instruction or encouragement in matters of crime or violence or the abuse of proscribed drugs. (OFLC) The Australian public, as a whole, favour the availability of sexually explicit materials in some form, with OFLC data indicating a relatively high degree of public support for X rated videos, the "high end" of the porn market (Paterson et al.). In Australia strict regulation of X rated materials in conventional media has resulted in a larger illegal market for these materials than the legalised sex industries of the ACT and Northern Territory (while 1.2 million X rated videos are legally sold out of the territories, 2 million are sold illegally in other jurisdictions, according to Patten). In Australia, censorship of media content has traditionally been based on the principles of the protection of society from moral harm and individual degradation, with specific emphasis on the protection of innocents from material they are not old enough for, or mentally capable of dealing with (Joint Select Committee on Video Material). Even when governments distanced themselves from direct personal censorship (such as Don Chipp's approach to the censorship of films and books in the late 1960s and early 1970s) and shifted the rationale behind censorship from prohibition to classification, the publicly stated aims of these decisions have been the support of existing community standards, rather than the imposition of strict legalistic moral values upon an unwilling society. In the debates surrounding censorship, and especially the level of censorship applied (rather than censorship as a whole), the question "what is the community we are talking about here?" has been a recurring theme. The standards that are applied to the regulation of media content, both online and off, are often the focus of community debate (a pluralistic community that obviously lacks "standards" by definition of the word). In essence the problem of maintaining a single set of moral and ethical values for the treatment of media content is a true political dilemma: a problem that lacks any form of solution acceptable to all participants. Since the introduction of the Internet as a "mass" medium (or more appropriately, a "popular" one), government indecision about how best to treat this new technology has precluded any form or content regulation other than the ad hoc use of existing non-technologically specific law to deal with areas of criminal or legally sanctionable intent (such as the use of copyright law, or the powers under the Crimes Act relating to the improper use of telecommunications services). However, indecision in political life is often associated with political weakness, and in the face of pressure to act decisively (motivated again by "community concern"), the Federal government has decided to extend the role of the Australian Broadcasting Authority to regulate and impose a censorship regime on Australian access of morally harmful materials. It is important to note the government's intention to censor access, rather than content of the Internet. While material hosted in Australia (ignoring, of course, the "cyberspace" definitions of non-territorial existence of information stored in networks) will be censored (removed from Australia computers), the government, lacking extraterritorial powers to compel the owners of machines located offshore, intends to introduce of some form of refused access list to materials located in other nations. What is interesting to consider in this context is the way that slight shifts of definitional paradigm alter the way this legislation can be considered. If information flows (upon which late capitalism is becoming more dependent) were to be located within the context of international law governing the flow of waterways, does the decision to prevent travel of morally dubious material through Australia's informational waterways impinge upon the riparian rights of other nations (the doctrine of fair usage without impeding flow; Godana 50)? Similarly, if we take Smith's extended definition of community within electronic transactional spaces (the maintenance of members' commitment to the group, monitoring and sanctioning behaviour and the production and distribution of resources), then the current Bill proposes the regulation of the activities of one community by another (granted, a larger community that incorporates the former). Seen in this context, this legislation is the direct intervention in an established social order by a larger and less homogeneous group. It may be trite to quote the Prime Minister's view of community in this context, where he states ...It is free individuals, strong communities and the rule of law which are the best defence against the intrusive power of the state and against those who think they know what is best for everyone else. (Howard 21) possibly because the paradigm in which this new legislation is situated does not classify those Australians online (who number up to 3 million) as a community in their own right. In a way the Internet users of Australia have never identified themselves as a community, nor been asked to act in a communitarian manner. While discussions about the value of community models when applied to the Internet are still divided, there are those who argue that their use of networked services can be seen in this light (Worthington). What this new legislation does, however, is preclude the establishment of public communities in order to meet the desires of government for some limits to be placed on Internet content. The Bill does allow for the development of "restricted access systems" that would allow pluralistic communities to develop and engage in a limited amount of self-regulation. These systems include privately accessible Intranets, or sites that restrict access through passwords or some other form of age verification technique. Thus, ignoring the minimum standards that will be required for these communities to qualify for some measure of self-regulatory freedom, what is unspoken here is that specific subsections of the Internet population may exist, provided they keep well away from the public gaze. A ghetto without physical walls. Under the Bill, a co-regulatory approach is endorsed by the government, favouring the establishment of industry codes of practice by ISPs and (or) the establishment of a single code of practice by the content hosting industry (content developers are relegated to yet undetermined complementary state legislation). However, this section of the Bill, in mandating a range of minimum requirements for these codes of practice, and denying plurality to the content providers, places an administrative imperative above any communitarian spirit. That is, that the Internet should have no more than one community, it should be an entity bound by a single guiding set of principles and be therefore easier to administer by Australian censors. This administrative imperative re-encapsulates the dilemma faced by governments dealing with the Internet: that at heart, the broadcast and print press paradigms of existing censorship regimes face massive administrative problems when presented with a communications technology that allows for wholesale publication of materials by individuals. Whereas the limited numbers of broadcasters and publishers have allowed the development of Australia's system of classification of materials (on a sliding scale from G to RC classifications or the equivalent print press version), the new legislation introduced into the Senate uses the classification scheme simply as a censorship mechanism: Internet content is either "ok" or "not ok". From a public administration perspective, this allows government to drastically reduce the amount of work required by regulators and eases the burden of compliance costs by ISPs, by directing clear and unambiguous statements about the acceptability of existing materials placed online. However, as we have seen in other areas of social policy (such as the rationalisation of Social Security services or Health), administrative expedience is often antipathetic to small communities that have special needs, or cultural sensitivities outside of mainstream society. While it is not appropriate to argue that public administration creates negative social impacts through expedience, what can be presented is that, where expedience is a core aim of legislation, poor administration may result. For many Australian purveyors of pornography, my comments will be entirely unhelpful as they endeavour to find effective ways to spoof offshore hosts or bone up (no pun intended) on tunnelling techniques. Given the easy way in which material can be reconstituted and relocated on the Internet, it seems likely that some form of regulatory avoidance will occur by users determined not to have their content removed or blocked. For those regulators given the unenviable task of censoring Internet access it may be worthwhile quoting from Sexing the Cherry, in which Jeanette Winterson describes the town: whose inhabitants are so cunning that to escape the insistence of creditors they knock down their houses in a single night and rebuild them elsewhere. So the number of buildings in the city is always constant but they are never in the same place from one day to the next. (43) Thus, while Winterson saw this game as a "most fulfilling pastime", it is likely to present real administrative headaches to ABA regulators when attempting to enforce the Bill's anti-avoidance clauses. The Australian government, in adapting existing regulatory paradigms to the Internet, has overlooked the informal communities who live, work and play within the virtual world of cyberspace. In attempting to meet a perceived social need for regulation with political and administrative expedience, it has ignored the potentially cohesive role of government in developing self-regulating communities who need little government intervention to produce socially beneficial outcomes. In proscribing activity externally to the realm in which these communities reside, what we may see is a new type of community, one whose desire for a feast of flesh leads them to evade the activities of regulators who operate in the "meat" world. What this may show us is that in a virtual environment, the regulators' net is no match for a world wide web. References Alston, Richard. "Regulation is Not Censorship." The Australian 13 April 1999: 55. Paterson, K., et. al. Classification Issues: Film, Video and Television. Sydney: The Office of Film and Literature Classification, 1993. Patten, F. Personal interview. 9 Feb. 1999. Godana, B.A. Africa's Shared Water Resources: Legal and Institutional Aspects of the Nile, Niger and Senegal River Systems. London: Frances Pinter, 1985. Howard, John. The Australia I Believe In: The Values, Directions and Policy Priorities of a Coalition Government Outlined in 1995. Canberra: Liberal Party, 1995. Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Report of the Joint Select Committee On Video Material. Canberra: APGS, 1988. Office of Film and Literature Classification. Cinema & Video Ratings Guide. 1999. 1 May 1999 <http://www.oflc.gov.au/classinfo.php>. Smith, Marc A. "Voices from the WELL: The Logic of the Virtual Commons." 1998. 2 Mar. 1999 <http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/csoc/papers/voices/Voices.htm>. Winterson, Jeanette. Sexing the Cherry. New York: Vintage Books. 1991. Worthington, T. Testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Information Technologies. Unpublished, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Peter Chen. "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php>. Chicago style: Peter Chen, "Community without Flesh: First Thoughts on the New Broadcasting Services Amendment (Online Services) Bill 1999," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) Community without flesh: first thoughts on the new broadcasting services amendment (online services) bill 1999. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/bill.php> ([your date of access]).

Historians of Modern Architecture have cultivated the image of the architect as a temperamental genius, unconcerned by issues of politeness or pragmatics—a reading reinforced in cultural representations of Modern Architects, such as Howard Roark, the protagonist in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead (a character widely believed to be based on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright). The perception of the Modern Architect as an artistic hero or genius has also influenced the reception of their work. Despite their indisputable place within the architectural canon, many important works of Modern Architecture were contested on pragmatic grounds, such as cost, brief and particularly concerning issues of suitability and effectiveness in relation to climate and weather. A number of famed cases resulted in legal action between clients and architects, and in many more examples historians have critically framed these accounts to highlight alternate issues and agendas. “Complaints about the weather,” in relation to architecture, inevitably raise issues regarding a work’s “success,” particularly in view of the tensions between artistry and functionality inherent in the discipline of architecture. While in more recent decades these ideas have been framed around ideas of sustainability—particularly in relation to contemporary buildings—more traditionally they have been engaged through discussions of an architect’s ethical responsibility to deliver a habitable building that meets the client’s needs. This paper suggests these complaints often raise a broader range of issues and are used to highlight tensions inherent in the discipline. In the history of Modern Architecture, these complaints are often framed through gender studies, ethics and, more recently, artistic asceticism. Accounts of complaints and disputes are often invoked in the social construction (or deconstruction) of artistic genius – whether in a positive or negative light. Through its discussion of a number of famed examples, this paper will discuss the framing of climate in relation to the figure of the Modern Architect and the reception of the architectural “masterpiece.” Dear Monsieur Le Corbusier … In June 1930 Mme Savoye, the patron of the famed Villa Savoye on the outskirts of Paris, wrote to her architect, Le Corbusier, stating: “it is still raining in our garage” (Sbriglio 144)—a persistent theme in their correspondence. This letter followed another sent in March after discovering leaks in the garage and several bedrooms following a visit during inclement weather. While sent prior to the building’s completion, she also noted that rainfall on the bathroom skylight “makes a terrible noise […] which prevents us from sleeping in bad weather” (Sbriglio 142). Claiming to have warned Le Corbusier about the concern, the contractor refused to accept responsibility, prompting some rather fiery correspondence between the two. This problem, compounded by issues with the heating system, resulted in the house feeling, as Sbriglio notes, “cold and damp” and subject to “substantial heat loss due to the large glazing”—a cause for particular concern given the health problems of the clients’ only child, Roger Savoye, that saw him spend time in a French Sanatorium (Sbriglio 145). While the cause of Roger’s illness is not clear, at least one writer (albeit with a noticeable lack of footnotes or supporting evidence) has linked this directly to the villa (de Botton 65). Mme Savoye’s complaints about dampness, humidity, condensation and leaking in her home persisted in subsequent years, prompting Benton to summarise in 1987, “every autumn […] there were cries of distress from the Savoye family with the first rains” (Villas 204). These also extended to discussion of the heating system, which while proving insufficient was also causing flooding (Benton, "Villa" 93). In 1935 Savoye again wrote to Le Corbusier, wearily stating: It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight. The gardener’s walls are also wet through. (Sbriglio 146-7) Savoye’s understandable vexation with waterproofing problems in her home continued to escalate. With a mixture of gratitude and frustration, a letter sent two years later stated: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 in uninhabitable…. Please render it inhabitable immediately. I sincerely hope that I will not have to take recourse to legal action” (Sbriglio 147). Paradoxically, Le Corbusier was interested in the potential of architecture and urban planning to facilitate health and well-being, as well as the effects that climate may play in this. Early twentieth century medical thought advocated heliotherary (therapeutic exposure to sunlight) for a diverse range of medical conditions, ranging from rickets to tuberculosis. Similarly the health benefits of climate, such as the dryness of mountain air, had been recognised for much longer, and had led to burgeoning industries associated with health, travel and climate. The dangers of damp environments had also long been medically recognised. Le Corbusier’s awareness of the health benefits of sunshine led to the inclusion of a solarium in the villa that afforded both framed and unframed views of the surrounding countryside, such as those that were advocated in the seventeenth century as an antidote to melancholy (Burton 65-66). Both Benton and Sbriglio present Mme Savoye’s complaints as part of their comprehensive histories of an important and influential work of Modern Architecture. Each reproduce excerpts from archival letters that are not widely translated or accessible, and Benton’s 1984 essay is the source other authors generally cite in discussing these matters. In contrast, for example, Murphy’s 2002 account of the villa’s conversion from “house” to “historical monument” cites the same letters (via Benton) as part of a broader argument that highlights the “undomestic” or “unhomely” nature of the work by cataloguing such accounts of the client’s experience of discomfort while residing in the space – thus revisiting a number of common criticisms of Modern Architecture. Le Corbusier’s reputation for designing buildings that responded poorly to climate is often referenced in popular accounts of his work. For example, a 1935 article published in Time states: Though the great expanses of glass that he favors may occasionally turn his rooms into hothouses, his flat roofs may leak and his plans may be wasteful of space, it was Architect Le Corbusier who in 1923 put the entire philosophy of modern architecture into a single sentence: “A house is a machine to live in.” Reference to these issues are usually made rather minimally in academic accounts of his work, and few would agree with this article’s assertion that Le Corbusier’s influence as a phrasemaker would rival the impact of his architecture. In contrast, such issues, in relation to other architects, are often invoked more rhetorically as part of a variety of historical agendas, particularly in constructing feminist histories of architecture. While Corbusier and his work have often been the source of intellectual contention from feminist scholars—for example in regard to authorial disputes and fractious relationships with the likes of Eileen Gray or Charlotte Perriand – discussion of the functional failures in the Villa Savoye are rarely addressed from this perspective. Rather, feminist scholars have focussed their attention on a number of other projects, most notably the case of the Farnsworth House, another canonical work of Modernism. Dear Herr Mies van der Rohe … Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, completed in 1951 in Plano Illinois, was commissioned as a country weekend residence by an unmarried female doctor, a brief credited with freeing the architect from many of the usual pragmatic requirements of a permanent city residence. In response Mies designed a rectilinear steel and glass pavilion, which hovered (to avoid the flood levels) above the landscape, sheltered by maple trees, in close proximity to the Fox River. The refined architectural detail, elegant formal properties, and poetic relationship with the surrounding landscape – whether in its autumnal splendour or covered in a thick blanket of snow – captivated architects seeing it become, like the Villa Savoye, one of the most revered architectural works of the twentieth century. Prior to construction a model was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and, upon completion the building became a pilgrimage site for architects and admirers. The exhibition of the design later fuelled debate about whether Dr Farnsworth constituted a patron or a client (Friedman 134); a distinction generating very different expectations for the responsibilities of the architect, particularly regarding the production of a habitable home that met the client’s brief versus producing a design of architectural merit. The house was intended as a frame for viewing and contemplating nature, thus seeing nature and climate aligned with the transcendental qualities of the design. Following a visit during construction, Farnsworth described the building’s relationship to the elements, writing: “the two horizontal planes of the unfinished building, floating over the meadows, were unearthly beautiful under a sun which glowed like a wild rose” (5). Similarly, in 1951, Arthur Drexler described the building as “a quantity of air caught between a floor and a roof” (Vandenberg 6). Seven years later the architect himself asserted that nature “gained a more profound significance” when viewed from within the house (Friedman 139). While the transparency of the house was “forgiven” by its isolated location and the lack of visibility from neighbouring properties, the issues a glass and steel box might pose for the thermal comfort of its occupant are not difficult to imagine. Following the house’s completion, Farnsworth fitted windows with insect screens and blinds (although Mies intended for curtains to be installed) that clumsily undermined the refined and minimalistic architectural details. Controversy surrounding the house was, in part, the result of its bold new architectural language. However, it was also due to the architect-client relationship, which turned acrimonious in a very public manner. A dispute between Mies and Farnsworth regarding unpaid fees was fought both in the courtroom and the media, becoming a forum for broader debate as various journals (for example, House Beautiful), publicly took sides. The professional female client versus the male architect and the framing of their dispute by historians and the media has seen this project become a seminal case-study in feminist architectural histories, such as Friedman’s Women and the Making of the Modern House of 1998. Beyond the conflict and speculation about the individuals involved, at the core of these discussions were the inadequacies of the project in relation to comfort and climate. For example, Farnsworth describes in her journal finding the house awash with several inches of water, leading to a court session being convened on the rooftop in order to properly ascertain the defects (14). Written retrospectively, after their relationship soured, Farnsworth’s journal delights in recounting any errors or misjudgements made by Mies during construction. For example, she described testing the fireplace to find “the house was sealed so hermetically that the attempt of a flame to go up the chimney caused an interior negative pressure” (2). Further, her growing disenchantment was reflected in bleak descriptions aligning the building with the weather. Describing her first night camping in her home, she wrote: “the expanses of the glass walls and the sills were covered with ice. The silent meadows outside white with old and hardened snow reflected the bleak [light] bulb within, as if the glass house itself were an unshaded bulb of uncalculated watts lighting the winter plains” (9). In an April 1953 article in House Beautiful, Elizabeth Gordon publicly sided with Farnsworth as part of a broader campaign against the International Style. She condemned the home, and its ‘type’ as “unlivable”, writing: “You burn up in the summer and freeze in the winter, because nothing must interfere with the ‘pure’ form of their rectangles” (250). Gordon included the lack of “overhanging roofs to shade you from the sun” among a catalogue of “human qualities” she believed architects sacrificed for the expression of composition—a list that also included possessions, children, pets and adequate kitchen facilities (250). In 1998 excerpts from this article were reproduced by Friedman, in her seminal work of feminist architectural history, and were central in her discussion of the way that debates surrounding this house were framed through notions of gender. Responding to this conflict, and its media coverage, in 1960 Peter Blake wrote: All great houses by great architects tend to be somewhat impractical; many of Corbu’s and Wright’s house clients find that they are living in too expensive and too inefficient buildings. Yet many of these clients would never exchange their houses for the most workable piece of mediocrity. (88) Far from complaining about the weather, the writings of its second owner, Peter Palumbo, poetically meditate the building’s relationship to the seasons and the elements. In his foreword to a 2003 monograph, he wrote: life inside the house is very much a balance with nature, and an extension of nature. A change in the season or an alteration of the landscape creates a marked change in the mood inside the house. With an electric storm of Wagnerian proportions illuminating the night sky and shaking the foundations of the house to their very core, it is possible to remain quite dry! When, with the melting snows of spring, the Fox River becomes a roaring torrent that bursts its banks, the house assumes a character of a house-boat, the water level sometimes rising perilously close to the front door. On such occasions, the approach to the house is by canoe, which is tied to the steps of the upper terrace. (Vandenberg 5) Palumbo purchased the house from Farnsworth and commissioned Mies’s grandson to restore it to its original condition, removing the blinds and insect screens, and installing an air-conditioning system. The critical positioning of Palumbo has been quite different from that of Farnsworth. His restoration and writings on the project have in some ways seen him positioned as the “real” architectural patron. Furthermore, his willingness to tolerate some discomfort in his inhabitation has seen him in some ways prefigure the type of resident that will be next be discussed in reference to recent owners of Wright properties. Dear Mr Wright … Accounts of weatherproofing problems in buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright have become the basis of mythology in the architectural discipline. For example, in 1936 Herbert Johnson and J. Vernon Steinle visited Wright’s Richard Lloyd Jones house in Oklahoma. As Jonathan Lipman wrote, “Steinle’s most prominent recollection of the house was that there were scores of tubs and canning jars in the house catching water leaking through the roof” (45). While Lipman notes the irony that both the house and office Wright designed for Johnson would suffer the same problem, it is the anecdotal accounts of the former that have perhaps attracted the most interest. An oft-recounted story tells of Johnson telephoning Wright, during a dinner party, with regard to water dripping from the ceiling into his guest-of-honour’s soup; the complaint was reportedly rebuffed unsympathetically by Wright who suggested the lady should move her chair (Farr 272). Wright himself addressed his reputation for designing buildings that leaked in his Autobiography. In reference to La Miniatura in Pasadena, of 1923, he contextualised difficulties with the local climate, which he suggested was prone to causing leaks, writing: “The sun bakes the roof for eleven months, two weeks and five days, shrinking it to a shrivel. Then giving the roof no warning whatever to get back to normal if it could, the clouds burst. Unsuspecting roof surfaces are deluged by a three inch downpour.” He continued, stating: I knew all this. And I know there are more leaking roofs in Southern California than in all the rest of the world put together. I knew that the citizens come to look upon water thus in a singularly ungrateful mood. I knew that water is all that enables them to have their being there, but let any of it through on them from above, unexpectedly, in their houses and they go mad. It is a kind of phobia. I knew all this and I have taken seriously precautions in the details of this little house to avoid such scenes as a result of negligible roofs. This is the truth. (250) Wright was quick to attribute blame—directed squarely at the builder. Never one for quiet diplomacy, he complained that the “builder had lied to [him] about the flashing under and within the coping walls” (250) and he was ignorant of the incident because the client had not informed him of the leak. He suggested the client’s silence was undoubtedly due to her “not wishing to hurt [his] feelings”. Although given earlier statements it might be speculated that she did not wish to be accused of pandering to a phobia of leaks. Wright was dismissive of the client’s inconvenience, suggesting she would be able to continue as normal until the next rains the following year and claiming he “fixed the house” once he “found out about it” (250). Implicit in this justification was the idea that it was not unreasonable to expect the client to bear a few days of “discomfort” each year in tolerance of the local climate. In true Wright style, discussions of these problems in his autobiography were self-constructive concessions. While Wright refused to take responsibility for climate-related issues in La Minatura, he was more forthcoming in appreciating the triumphs of his Imperial Hotel in Japan—one of the only buildings in the vicinity to survive the 1923 earthquake. In a chapter of his autobiography titled “Building against Doomsday (Why the Great Earthquake did not destroy the Imperial Hotel),” Wright reproduced a telegram sent by Okura Impeho stating: “Hotel stands undamaged as monument of your genius hundreds of homeless provided perfectly maintained service. Congratulations” (222). Far from unconcerned by nature or climate, Wright’s works celebrated and often went to great effort to accommodate the poetic qualities of these. In reference to his own home, Taliesin, Wright wrote: I wanted a home where icicles by invitation might beautify the eaves. So there were no gutters. And when the snow piled deep on the roofs […] icicles came to hang staccato from the eaves. Prismatic crystal pendants sometimes six feet long, glittered between the landscape and the eyes inside. Taliesin in winter was a frosted palace roofed and walled with snow, hung with iridescent fringes. (173) This description was, in part, included as a demonstration of his “superior” understanding and appreciation of nature and its poetic possibilities; an understanding not always mirrored by his clients. Discussing the Lloyd Lewis House in Libertyville, Illinois of 1939, Wright described his endeavours to keep the house comfortable (and avoid flooding) in Spring, Autumn and Summer months which, he conceded, left the house more vulnerable to winter conditions. Utilising an underfloor heating system, which he argued created a more healthful natural climate rather than an “artificial condition,” he conceded this may feel inadequate upon first entering the space (495). Following the client’s complaints that this system and the fireplace were insufficient, particularly in comparison with the temperature levels he was accustomed to in his workplace (at The Daily News), Wright playfully wrote: I thought of various ways of keeping the writer warm, I thought of wiring him to an electric pad inside his vest, allowing lots of lead wire so he could get around. But he waved the idea aside with contempt. […] Then I suggested we appeal to Secretary Knox to turn down the heat at the daily news […] so he could become acclimated. (497) Due to the client’s disinclination to bear this discomfort or use any such alternate schemes, Wright reluctantly refit the house with double-glazing (at the clients expense). In such cases, discussion of leaks or thermal discomfort were not always negative, but were cited rhetorically implying that perfunctory building techniques were not yet advanced enough to meet the architect’s expectations, or that their creative abilities were suppressed by conservative or difficult clients. Thus discussions of building failures have often been invoked in the social construction of the “architect-genius.” Interestingly accounts of the permeability of Wright’s buildings are more often included in biographical rather that architectural writings. In recent years, these accounts of weatherproofing problems have transformed from accusing letters or statements implying failure to a “badge of honour” among occupants who endure discomfort for the sake of art. This changing perspective is usually more pronounced in second generation owners, like Peter Palumbo (who has also owned Corbusier and Wright designed homes), who are either more aware of the potential problems in owning such a house or are more tolerant given an understanding of the historical worth of these projects. This is nowhere more evident than in a profile published in the real estate section of the New York Times. Rather than concealing these issues to preserve the resale value of the property, weatherproofing problems are presented as an endearing quirk. The new owners of Wright’s Prefab No. 1 of 1959, on Staten Island declared they initially did not have enough pots to place under the fifty separate leaks in their home, but in December 2005 proudly boasted they were ‘down to only one leak’ (Bernstein, "Living"). Similarly, in 2003 the resident of a Long Island Wright-designed property, optimistically claimed that while his children often complained their bedrooms were uncomfortably cold, this encouraged the family to spend more time in the warmer communal spaces (Bernstein, "In a House"). This client, more than simply optimistic, (perhaps unwittingly) implies an awareness of the importance of “the hearth” in Wright’s architecture. In such cases complaints about the weather are re-framed. The leaking roof is no longer representative of gender or power relationships between the client and the uncompromising artistic genius. Rather, it actually empowers the inhabitant who rises above their circumstances for the sake of art, invoking a kind of artistic asceticism. While “enlightened” clients of famed architects may be willing to suffer the effects of climate in the interiors of their homes, their neighbours are less tolerant as suggested in a more recent example. Complaints about the alteration of the micro-climate surrounding Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles prompted the sandblasting of part of the exterior cladding to reduce glare. In 2004, USA Today reported that reflections from the stainless steel cladding were responsible for raising the temperature in neighbouring buildings by more than 9° Celsius, forcing neighbours to close their blinds and operate their air-conditioners. There were also fears that the glare might inadvertently cause traffic problems. Further, one report found that average ground temperatures adjacent to the building peaked at approximately 58° Celsius (Schiler and Valmont). Unlike the Modernist examples, this more recent project has not yet been framed in aid of a critical agenda, and has seemingly been reported simply for being “newsworthy.” Benign Conversation Discussion of the suitability of Modern Architecture in relation to climate has proven a perennial topic of conversation, invoked in the course of recurring debates and criticisms. The fascination with accounts of climate-related problems—particularly in discussing the work of the great Modernist Architects like Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright—is in part due to a certain Schadenfreude in debunking the esteem and authority of a canonical figure. This is particularly the case with one, such as Wright, who was characterised by significant self-confidence and an acerbic wit often applied at the expense of others. Yet these accounts have been invoked as much in the construction of the figure of the architect as a creative genius as they have been in the deconstruction of this figure—as well as the historical construction of the client and the historians involved. In view of the growing awareness of the threats and realities of climate change, complaints about the weather are destined to adopt a new significance and be invoked in support of a different range of agendas. While it may be somewhat anachronistic to interpret the designs of Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe in terms of current discussions about sustainability in architecture, these topics are often broached when restoring, renovating or adapting the designs of such architects for new or contemporary usage. In contrast, the climatic problems caused by Gehry’s concert hall are destined to be framed according to a different set of values—such as the relationship of his work to the time, or perhaps in relation to contemporary technology. While discussion of the weather is, in the conversational arts, credited as benign topic, this is rarely the case in architectural history. References Benton, Tim. The Villas of Le Corbusier 1920-1930. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. ———. “Villa Savoye and the Architects’ Practice (1984).” Le Corbusier: The Garland Essays. Ed. H. Allen Brooks. New York: Garland, 1987. 83-105. Bernstein, Fred A. “In a House That Wright Built.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2003. 3 Aug. 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/nyregion/in-a-house-that-wright-built.html >. ———. “Living with Frank Lloyd Wright.” New York Times 18 Dec. 2005. 30 July 2009 < http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/18/realestate/18habi.html >. Blake, Peter. Mies van der Rohe: Architecture and Structure. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963 (1960). Burton, Robert. The Anatomy of Melancholy, vol. II. Eds. Nicolas K. Kiessling, Thomas C. Faulkner and Rhonda L. Blair. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995 (1610). Campbell, Margaret. “What Tuberculosis Did for Modernism: The Influence of a Curative Environment on Modernist Design and Architecture.” Medical History 49 (2005): 463–488. “Corbusierismus”. Art. Time 4 Nov. 1935. 18 Aug. 2009 < http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,755279,00.html >. De Botton, Alain. The Architecture of Happiness. London: Penguin, 2006. Farnsworth, Edith. ‘Chapter 13’, Memoirs. Unpublished journals in three notebooks, Farnsworth Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, unpaginated (17pp). 29 Jan. 2009 < http://www.farnsworthhouse.org/pdf/edith_journal.pdf >. Farr, Finis. Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961. Friedman, Alice T. Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998. Gordon, Elizabeth. “The Threat to the Next America.” House Beautiful 95.4 (1953): 126-30, 250-51. Excerpts reproduced in Friedman. Women and the Making of the Modern House. 140-141. Hardarson, Ævar. “All Good Architecture Leaks—Witticism or Word of Wisdom?” Proceedings of the CIB Joint Symposium 13-16 June 2005, Helsinki < http://www.metamorfose.ntnu.no/Artikler/Hardarson_all_good_architecture_leaks.pdf >. Huck, Peter. “Gehry’s Hall Feels Heat.” The Age 1 March 2004. 22 Aug. 2009 < http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02 /27/1077676955090.html >. Lipman, Jonathan. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Johnson Wax Buildings. Introduction by Kenneth Frampton. London: Architectural Press, 1984. Murphy, Kevin D. “The Villa Savoye and the Modernist Historic Monument.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 61.1 (2002): 68-89. “New L.A. Concert Hall Raises Temperatures of Neighbours.” USA Today 24 Feb. 2004. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-02-24-concert-hall_x.htm >. Owens, Mitchell. “A Wright House, Not a Shrine.” New York Times 25 July 1996. 30 July 2009 . Sbriglio, Jacques. Le Corbusier: La Villa Savoye, The Villa Savoye. Paris: Fondation Le Corbusier; Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999. Schiler, Marc, and Elizabeth Valmont. “Microclimatic Impact: Glare around the Walt Disney Concert Hall.” 2005. 24 Aug. 2009 < http://www.sbse.org/awards/docs/2005/1187.pdf >. Vandenberg, Maritz. Farnsworth House. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Foreword by Lord Peter Palumbo. London: Phaidon Press, 2003. Wright, Frank Lloyd. An Autobiography. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Introduction There is much to be said about house and home and about our media’s role in defining, enabling, as well as undermining it. […] For we can no longer think about home, any longer than we can live at home, without our media. (Silverstone, “Why Study the Media” 88) For lesbians, inhabiting the queer slant may be a matter of everyday negotiation. This is not about the romance of being off line or the joy of radical politics (though it can be), but rather the everyday work of dealing with the perception of others, with the “straightening devices” and the violence that might follow when such perceptions congeal into social forms. (Ahmed 107) Picture this. Once or twice a week a small, black, portable TV set goes on a journey; down from the lofty heights of the top shelf of the built in storage cupboard into the far corner of the living room. A few hours later, it is being stuffed back into the closet. Not far away across town, another small TV set sits firmly in the corner of a living room. Yet, it remains inanimate for days on end. What do you see? The techno-stories conveyed in this paper are presented through – and anchored to – the idea of the cultural biography of things (Kopytoff 1986), revealing how objects (more specifically media technologies) produce and become part of an articulation of particular and conflicting moral economies of households (Silverstone, “Domesticating Domestication”; Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Information and Communication”; Green). In this context, the concept of the domestication of ICTs has been widely applied in Media Studies during the 1990s and, more recently, been updated to account for the changes in technology, household composition, media regulation, and in fact the dislocation of domesticity itself (Berker, Hartmann, Punie and Ward). Remarkable as these mainstream techno-stories are in their elucidation of contemporary techno-practices, what is still absent is the consideration of how gender and sexuality intersect and are being done through ICT consumption at home, work and during leisure practices in alternative or queer households and families. Do lesbians ‘make’ house and home and in what ways are media and ICTs implicated in the everyday work of queer home-making strategies? As writings on queer subjects and cyberspace have proliferated in recent years, we can now follow a move to contextualize queer virtualities across on and offline experiences, mapping ‘complex geographies of un/belonging’ (Bryson, MacIntosh, Jordan and Lin) and a return to consider online media as part of a bigger ICT package that constitutes our queer everyday life-worlds (Karl). At the same time, fresh perspectives are now being developed with regards to the reconfiguration of domestic values by gay men and lesbians, demonstrating the ongoing processes of probing and negotiation of ‘home’ and the questioning of domesticity itself (Gorman-Murray). By aligning ideas and concepts developed by media theorists in the field of media domestication and consumption as well as (sexual) geographers, this paper makes a contribution towards our understanding of a queer sense of home and domesticity through the technological and more specifically television. It is based on two case studies, part of a larger longitudinal ethnographic study of women-centred households in Brighton, UK. Gill Valentine has identified the home and workplaces as spaces, which are encoded as heterosexual. Sexual identities are being constrained by ‘regulatory regimes’, promoting the normalcy of heterosexuality (4). By recounting the techno-stories of lesbian women, we can re-examine notions of the home as a stable, safe, given entity; the home as a particular feminine sphere as well as the leaky boundaries between public and private. As media and ICTs are also part of a (hetero)sexual economy where they, in their materiality as well as textual significance become markers of sexual difference, we can to a certain extent perceive them as ‘straightening devices’, to borrow a phrase from Sara Ahmed. Here, we will find the articulation of a host of struggles to ‘fight the norms’, but not necessarily ‘step outside the system completely, full-time’ (Ben, personal interview [all the names of the interviewees have been changed to protect their anonymity]). In this sense, the struggle is not only to counter perceived heterosexual home-making and techno-practices, but also to question what kinds of practices to adopt and repeat as ‘fitting in’ mechanism. Significantly, these practices leave neither ‘homonormative’ nor ‘heteronormative’ imaginaries untouched and remind us that: In the case of sexual orientation, it is not simply that we have it. To become straight means that we not only have to turn towards the objects that are given to us by heterosexual culture, but also that we must “turn away” from objects that take us off this line. (Ahmed 21) In this sense then, we are all part of drawing and re-drawing the lines of belonging and un-belonging within the confines of a less than equal power-economy. Locating Dys-Location – Is There a Lesbian in the Home? In his effort to re-situate the perspective of media domestication in the 21st century, David Morley points us to ‘the process of the technologically mediated dislocation of domesticity itself’ (“What’s ‘home’” 22). He argues that ‘under the impact of new technologies and global cultural flows, the home nowadays is not so much a local, particular “self-enclosed” space, but rather, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, more and more a “phantasmagoric” place, as electronic means of communication allow the radical intrusion of what he calls the “realm of the far” (traditionally, the realm of the strange and potentially troubling) into the “realm of the near” (the traditional “safe space” of ontological security) (23). The juxtaposition of home as a safe, ‘given’ place of ontological security vis a vis the more virtual and mediated realm of the far and potentially intrusive is itself called into question, if we re-consider the concepts of home and (dis)location in the light of lesbian geographies and ‘the production and regulation of heterosexual space’ (Valentine 1). The dislocation of home and domesticity experienced through consumption of (mobile) media technologies has always already been under-written by the potential feeling of dys-location and ‘trouble’ by lesbians on the grounds of sexual orientation. The lesbian experience disrupts the traditionally modern and notably western ideal of home as a safe haven and refuge by making visible the leaky boundaries between private seclusion and public surveillance, as much as it may (re)invest in the production of ideas and ideals of home-making and domesticity. This is illustrated for example by the way in which the heterosexuality of a parental home ‘can inscribe the lesbian body by restricting the performative aspects of a lesbian identity’, which may be subverted by covert acts of resistance (Johnston and Valentine 111; Elwood) as well as by the potentially greater freedoms of lesbian identity within a ‘lesbian home’, which may nevertheless come under scrutiny and ‘surveillance of others, especially close family, friends and neighbours’ (112). Nevertheless, more recently it has also been demonstrated how even overarching structures of familial heteronormativity are opportune to fissures and thereby queered, as Andrew Gorman-Murray illustrates in his study of Australian gay, lesbian and bisexual youth in supportive family homes. So what is, or rather, what can constitute a ‘lesbian home’ and how is it negotiated through everyday techno-practices? In and Out of the Closet – The Straight-Speaking ‘Telly’ As places go, the city of Brighton and Hove in the south-east of England fetches the prize for the highest ratio of LGBT people amongst its population in the UK, sitting at about 15%. In this sense, the home-making stories to which I will refer, of a white, lesbian single mother in her early 40s from a working-class background and a white lesbian/dyke couple in their 30s (from middle-/working-class backgrounds), are already engendered in the sense that Brighton (to them) represented in part a kind of ‘home-coming’ in itself. Helen and Ben, a lesbian butch-femme couple (‘when it takes our fancy’, Helen), had recently bought a terraced 1930s three-bedroom house with a sizeable garden in a soon to be up and coming residential area of Brighton. The neighbours are a mix of elderly, long-standing residents and ‘hetero’ families, or ‘breeders’, as Ben sometimes referred to them. Although they had lived together before, the new house constituted their first purchase together. This was significant especially for Helen, as it made their lives more ‘equal’ in terms of what goes where and the input on the overall interior decoration. Ben had shifted from London to Brighton a few years previously for a ‘quieter life’, but wished to remain connected to a queer community. Helen had made the move to Brighton from Germany – to study and enjoy the queer feel, and never left. Both full-time professionals, Helen worked in the publishing industry and Ben as a social worker. Already considering Brighton their ‘home’ town, the house purchase itself constituted another home-making challenge: as a lesbian/dyke couple on equal footing they were prepared to accept to live in a pre-dominantly straight neighbourhood, as it afforded them more space for money compared to the more visibly gay male living areas in the centre of town. The relative invisibility of queer women (and their neighbourhoods) compared to queer men in Brighton may, as it does elsewhere, be connected to issues of safety (Elwood) as well as the comparative lack of financial capacity (Bell and Valentine). Walking up to this house on the first night of my stay with them, I am struck by just how inconspicuous it appears – one of many in a long street, up a steep hill: ‘Most housing in contemporary western societies is “designed, built, financed and intended for nuclear families”’ (Bell in Bell and Valentine 7). I cannot help but think – more as a reflection on myself than of what I am about to experience – is this it? Is this the ‘domesticated lesbian’? What I see appears ‘familiar’, ‘tamed’, re-tracing the straight lines of heterosexual culture. Helen opens the door and orders me directly into the kitchen. She says ‘Ben is in the living room, watching television… Ben takes great pleasure in watching “You’ve been Framed”’. (Fieldnotes) In this context, it is appropriate to focus on the television and its place within their home-making strategies. Television, in its historical and symbolic significance, could be deemed the technological co-terminus to the ideal nuclear family home. Lynn Spigel has shown through her examination of the cultural history of TV’s formative years in post World War America how television became central to providing representations of family life, but also how the technology itself, as an object, informed material and symbolic transformations within the domestic sphere and beyond. Over the past fifty years as Morley points out, the TV has moved from its fixed place in the living room to become more personalised and encroach on other spaces in house and home and has now, in fact, re-entered the public realm (see airports and shopping malls) where it originated. At present, ‘the home itself can seen as having become … the “last vehicle”, where comfort, safety and stability can happily coexist with the possibility of instantaneous digitalised “flight” to elsewhere – and the instantaneous importation of desired elements of the “elsewhere” into the home’ (Morley, “Media, Modernity” 200). Importantly, as Morley confirms, today’s high-tech discourse is often still framed by a nostalgic vision of ‘family values’. There was only one TV set in Helen and Ben’s house: a black plastic cube with a 16” screen. It was decidedly ‘unglamorous’ as Helen pointed out. During the first round of ‘home-making’ efforts, it had found its way into a corner in the front room, with the sofa and armchair arranged in viewing distance. It was a very ‘traditional’ living room set-up. During my weeklong stay and for some weeks after, it was mostly Ben on her own ‘watching the telly’ in the early evenings ‘vegging out’ after work. Helen, meanwhile, was in the kitchen with the radio on or a CD playing, or in her ‘ICT free’ bedroom, reading. Then, suddenly, the TV had disappeared. During one of our ‘long conversations’ (Silverstone, Hirsch and Morley, “Listening”, 204) it transpired that it was now housed for most of the time on the top shelf of a storage cupboard and only ‘allowed out’ ever so often. As a material object, it had easily found its place as a small, but nevertheless quite central feature in the living room. Imbued with the cultural memory of their parents’ and that of many other living rooms, it was ‘tempting’ and easy for them to ‘accept’ it as part of a setting up home as a couple. Ben explained that they both fell into a habit, an everyday routine, to sit around it. However, settling into their new home with too much ‘ease’, they began to question their techno-practice around the TV. For Helen in particular, the aesthetics of the TV set did not fit in with her plans to re-decorate the house loosely in art deco style, tethered to her femme identity. They did not envisage creating a home that would potentially signal that a family with 2.4 children lives here. ‘The “normality” of [working] 9-5’ (Ben), was sufficient. Establishing a perceived visual difference in their living room, partly by removing the TV set, Helen and Ben aimed to ‘draw a line’ around their home and private sphere vis a vis the rest of the street and, metaphorically speaking, the straight world. The boundaries between the public and private are nevertheless porous, as it is exactly that the public perceptions of a mostly private, domesticated media technology prevent Helen and Ben from feeling entirely comfortable in its presence. It was not only the TV set’s symbolic function as a material object that made them restrict and consciously control the presence of the TV in their home space. One of Helen and Ben’s concerns in this context was that TV, as a broadcast medium, is utterly ‘conservative’ in its content and as such, very much ‘straight speaking’. To paraphrase Helen – you can only read so much between the lines and shout at the telly, it can get tiring. ‘I like watching nature programmes, but they somehow manage even here to make it sound like a hetero narrative’. Ben: ‘yeah – mind the lesbian swans’. The employment of the VCR and renting movies helps them to partly re-dress this perceived imbalance. At the same time, TV’s ‘water-cooler’ effect helps them to stay in tune with what is going on around them and enables them, for example, to participate and intervene in conversations at work. In this sense, watching TV can turn into home-work, which affords a kind of entry ticket to shared life-worlds outside the home and as such can be controlled, but not necessarily abandoned altogether. TV as a ‘straightening device’ may afford the (dis)comfort of a sense of participation in mainstream discourses and the (dis)comfort of serving as a reminder of difference at the same time. ‘It just sits there … apart from Sundays’ – and when the girls come round… Single-parent households are on the rise in the US (Russo Lemor) as well as in the UK. However, the attention given to single-parent families so far focuses pre-dominantly on single mothers and fathers after separation or divorce from a heterosexual marriage (Russo Lemor; Silverstone, “Beneath the Bottom Line”). As (queer) sociologists have began to map the field of ‘families of choice and other life experiments’ (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan), a more concerted effort to bring together the literatures and to shed more light on the queer techno-practices of alternative families seems necessary. Liz and her young son Tim had moved to Brighton from London. As a lesbian working single mother, she raises Tim pre-dominantly on her own: ‘we are a small family, and that’s fine’. Liz’s home-making narrative is very much driven by her awareness of what she sees as her responsibilities as a mother, a lesbian mother. The move to Brighton was assessed by being able to keep her clients in London (she worked as a self-employed communication and PR person for various London councils) – ‘this is what feeds us’, and the fact that she did not want Tim to go to a ‘badly performing’ school in London. The terraced three-bedroom house she found was in a residential area, not too far from the station and in need of updating and re-decorating. The result of the combined efforts of builders, her dad (‘for some of the DIY’) and herself produced a ‘conventional’ set-up with a living room, a kitchen-diner, a small home-office (for tele-working) and Tim’s and her bedroom. Inconspicuous in its appearance, it was clearly child-oriented with a ‘real jelly bean arch’ in the hallway. The living room is relatively bare, with a big sofa, table and chairs, ‘an ancient stereo-system’ and a ‘battered TV and Video-recorder’ in the corner. ‘We hardly use it’, Liz exclaims. ‘We much rather spend time out and about if there is a chance … quality time, rather than watching TV … or I read him stories in bed. I hate the idea of TV as a baby sitter … I have very deliberately chosen to have Tim and I want to make the most of it’. For Liz, the living room with the TV set in it appears as a kind of gesture to what family homes ‘look like’. As such, the TV and furniture set-up function as a signal and symbol of ‘normality’ in a queer household – perhaps a form of ‘passing’ for visitors and guests. The concern for the welfare of her son in this context is a sign and reflection of a constant negotiation process within a pre-dominantly heterosexual system of cultural symbols and values, which he, of course, is already able to ‘compare’ and evaluate when he is out and about at school or visiting friends in their homes. Unlike in Helen and Ben’s home, the TV is therefore allowed to stay out of the closet. Still, Liz rarely watches TV at all, for reasons not dissimilar to those of Helen and Ben. Apart from this, she shares a lack of spare time with many other single parents. Significantly, the living room and TV do receive a queer ‘make-over’ now and then, when Tim is in bed or with his father on a weekend and ‘the girls’ come over for a drink, chat and video viewing (noticeably, the living room furniture and TV get pushed around and re-arranged to accommodate the crowd). In this sense, Liz, in her home-making practices, carefully manages and performs ‘object relationships’ that allow her and her son to ‘fit in’ as much as to advocate ‘difference’ within the construction of ‘normalcy’. The pressures of this negotiation process are clearly visible. Conclusion – Re-Engendering Home and Techno-Practices As women as much as lesbians, Helen, Ben and Liz are, like so many others, part of a historical and much wider struggle regarding visibility, equality and justice. If this article had been dedicated to gay/queer men and their techno- and home-making sensibilities, it would have read somewhat differently to be sure. Of course, questions of gender and sexual identities would have remained equally paramount, as they always should, enfolding questions of class, race and ethnicity (Pink 2004). The concept and practice of home have a deeply engendered history. Queer practices ‘at home’ are always already tied up with knowledges of gendered practices and spaces. As Morley has observed, ‘space is gendered on a variety of scales … the local is often associated with femininity and seen as the natural basis of home and community, into which an implicitly masculine realm intrudes’ (“Home Territories” 59). As the public and private realms have been gendered masculine and feminine respectively, so have media and ICTs. Although traditional ideas of home and gender relations are beginning to break down and the increasing personalization and mobilization of ICTs blur perceptions of the public and private, certain (idealized, heterosexualized and gendered) images of home, domesticity and family life seem to be recurring in popular discourse as well as mainstream academic writing. As feminist theorists have illustrated the ways in which gender needs to be seen as performative, feminist and queer theorists also ought to work further on finding vocabularies and discourses that capture and highlight diversity, without re-invoking the spectre of the nuclear family (home) itself (Weeks, Heaphy and Donovan). What I found was not the ‘domesticated’ lesbian ‘at home’ in a traditional feminine sphere. Rather, I experienced a complex set of re-negotiations and re-inscriptions of the domestic, of gender and sexual values and identities as well as techno-practices, leaving a trace, a mark on the system no matter how small (Helen: ‘I do wonder what the neighbours make of us’). The pressure and indeed desire to ‘fit in’ is often enormous and therefore affords the re-tracing of certain trodden paths of domesticity and ICT consumption. Nevertheless, I am looking forward to the day when even Liz can put that old telly into the closet as it has lost its meaning as a cultural signifier of a particular kind. References Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology – Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2006. Bell, David, and Gill Valentine. “Introduction: Orientations.” mapping desire. Eds. David Bell and Gill Valentine. London: Routledge, 1995. 1-27. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward, eds. Domestication of Media and Technology. Maidenhead: Open UP, 2006. Bryson, Mary, Lori MacIntosh, Sharalyn Jordan, Hui-Ling Lin. “Virtually Queer?: Homing Devices, Mobility, and Un/Belongings.” Canadian Journal of Communication 31.3 (2006). Elwood, Sarah A.. “Lesbian Living Spaces: Multiple Meanings of Home.” From Nowhere to Everywhere – Lesbian Geographies. Ed. Gill Valentine. New York and London: Harrington Park Press, 2000. 11-27. 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Citation reference for this article MLA Style Karl, Irmi. "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>. APA Style Karl, I. (Aug. 2007) "Domesticating the Lesbian?: Queer Strategies and Technologies of Home-Making," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/06-karl.php>.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. 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Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.