scholarly journals Dereliction, decay and the problem of de-industrialization in Britain, c. 1968–1977

Urban History ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-256
Author(s):  
Aaron Andrews

AbstractDe-industrialization and the rise of the service sector have formed the basis of recent attempts to develop a new metanarrative of economic change in twentieth-century Britain. Their effects have been taken as writ through labour market statistics or aggregate measures of gross domestic product. However, by focusing on particular micro-economic spaces, a different story emerges. Using the inner areas of Liverpool as a case-study, this article shows how the city's social and economic problems were underwritten by the decline of the service sector, located around the port. By reading the effects of social and economic change through accounts of the physical environment, it demonstrates how urban decay and dereliction provided material resonance to Liverpool's economic decline. The city's landscape of urban decay and dereliction encompassed the infrastructure of everyday life – housing, roads and even trees – as well as that of economic activity, including the docks and warehouses. Taken together, this article shows how this landscape of urban decay and dereliction came to be constituted as an agent within Liverpool's continued economic decline in the 1970s rather than simply being a reflection of it.

Africa ◽  
1995 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Francis

A case study from western Kenya is used to explore the links between labour migration, rural economic decline and changes in key domestic relationships. Twentieth-century transformations in the regional political economy, together with processes of differentiation, have been closely bound up with changes, and continuities, in relationships within households, and in the ideologies which justify them. A central concept in the analysis is that of divisions of labour, which covers the division of tasks, divisions of spheres of responsibility and authority and contributions to the reproduction of the household. Changes in all these have shaped, and have been shaped, by the trajectory of economic decline in the region. Changing divisions of labour have been slow, piecemeal, non-uniform and non-linear. They have been the subject of intense conflicts within households which have centred on questions of access to and control over resources and in which, as well as power relations, ideas about rights and responsibilities have been crucially important.


Author(s):  
Doina Pacurari ◽  
Mircea Muntean

Important indicator, used in performance analysis, value added expresses enterprise’s contribution to national gross domestic product. The value added through economic activity developed by enterprise should assure the remuneration of all its life  participants: employees, investors, state and enterprise itself. Information referring to enterprise capacity of generating<br />value added should be based on decisions concerning future enterprise decisions. The present article presents, by means of a case study, value added calculation (by subtractive and additive<br />method) and their analysis.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Alys Moody

Beckett's famous claim that his writing seeks to ‘work on the nerves of the audience, not the intellect’ points to the centrality of affect in his work. But while his writing's affective quality is widely acknowledged by readers of his work, its refusal of intellect has made it difficult to take fully into account in scholarly work on Beckett. Taking Beckett's 1967 short prose text Ping as a case study, this essay is an attempt to take the affective qualities of Beckett's writing seriously and to consider the implications of his affectively dense writing for his texts’ relationship to history. I argue that Ping's affect emerges from the rhythms of its prose, producing a highly ‘speakable’ text in which affect precedes interpretation. In Ping, however, this affective rhythmic patterning is portrayed as mechanical, the product of the machinic ‘ping’ that punctuates the text and the text's own mechanical rhythms, demanding the active involvement of the reader. The essay concludes by arguing that Ping's mechanised affect is a specifically historical feeling. Arising from a specifically twentieth-century anxiety about technology's tendency to evacuate ‘natural’ emotion in favour of inhuman affect, it participates in a tradition of affectively resonant but curiously blank or indifferent performances of cyborg embodiment. Read in this historical light, Ping's implication of the reader in the production of its mechanised affect grants it, from our contemporary perspective, an archival quality. At the same time, it asks us to broaden the way in which we understand the Beckettian text's relationship to history, pointing to the existence of a more complex and recursive relationship between literature, its historical moment, and our contemporary moment of reading. Such a post-archival historicism sees texts as generated by but not bound to their historical moments of composition, and understands the moment of reception as an integral, if shifting, part of the text's history.


Author(s):  
Emron Esplin

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8399
Author(s):  
Sally Adofowaa Mireku ◽  
Zaid Abubakari ◽  
Javier Martinez

Urban blight functions inversely to city development and often leads to cities’ deterioration in terms of physical beauty and functionality. While the underlying causes of urban blight in the context of the global north are mainly known in the literature to be population loss, economic decline, deindustrialisation and suburbanisation, there is a research gap regarding the root causes of urban blight in the global south, specifically in prime areas. Given the differences in the property rights regimes and economic growth trajectories between the global north and south, the underlying reasons for urban blight cannot be assumed to be the same. This study, thus, employed a qualitative method and case study approach to ascertain in-depth contextual reasons and effects for urban blight in a prime area, East Legon, Accra-Ghana. Beyond economic reasons, the study found that socio-cultural practices of landholding and land transfer in Ghana play an essential role in how blighted properties emerge. In the quest to preserve cultural heritage/identity, successors of old family houses (the ancestral roots) do their best to stay in them without selling or redeveloping them. The findings highlight the less obvious but relevant functions that blighted properties play in the city core at the micro level of individual families in fostering social cohesion and alleviating the need to pay higher rents. Thus, in the global south, we conclude that there is a need to pay attention to the less obvious roles that so-called blighted properties perform and to move beyond the default negative perception that blighted properties are entirely problematic.


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