Timescapes beyond the Metropolises

The past decades have witnessed a rise of culture-led urban regeneration. The successful cultural models have travelled throughout the world, and applied to cities and urban areas regardless of their size and location. Culture, ranging between high culture and contemporary creative economies, acquires potential to contribute to physical, social and economic aspects of urban regeneration. Successful examples of culture-led urban regeneration have tempted small cities to invest in traveling global cultural policies. Academic community has criticized these travelling policies for over-simplifying the abstract notion of culture, overrating the benefits of culture-led urban regeneration and ignoring local temporal specifics. This paper argues that a temporal analysis framework would enable a holistic approach to culture-led urban regeneration, and embrace the temporal uniqueness of urban contexts. This article discusses the temporal characteristics of culture-led regeneration in a provincial city context within an empirical case study analysis of Myllytulli in Oulu, Northern Finland. Myllytulli represents a district of regional cultural relevance where cultural amenities range from museums and educational facilities to creative bottom-up initiatives. This study reframes Myllytulli’s urban regeneration process using temporal conceptions of recent interdisciplinary academic discourse. The empirical data set consists of expert interviews, observation material and municipal planning documents. The results analyse the urban regeneration process within the linear temporal ideals of rational-comprehensive planning, reactive experiential urbanism and relational dimensions of time. The paper suggests time-sensitive approaches for future research and practice of urban regeneration.

The Smell of Factionalism: Left Opposition in the Vyatka Provincial Organization of the Bolshevik Party in 1923-1924

The activity of the Vyatka left opposition that arose during the internal party discussion in the fall of 1923 and the spring of 1924 is studied. The work is based on archival documents from the Central State Archive of Kirov Region, as well as on materials from the Vyatka Pravda party newspaper. The platform of the local opposition opposed the formation of factions but insisted on clarifying what factionalism is supposed to mean. The Left Opposition united the party community of the provincial city and adjacent working areas. Most party members initially expressed full confidence in the partys Central Committee. An analysis of archival material shows that the Vyatka opposition tried to establish a broad discussion of problems in internal party life. In the provincial center there was a party discussion club that organized heated discussions. The focus on clarifying the concepts of factions and groups reflected the desire of opposition supporters to avoid being accused of betraying the party and the cause of the revolution. Remarkably, until early January 1924 the left opposition had absolute support among party members in Vyatka. The article analyzes the Central Committees suppression of the local opposition in January - February 1924, and in particular the skillful techniques of Aron Solts and his supporters. At the final stage of the struggle, a group of conciliators arose among the members of the opposition, and contributed to the victory of the Central Committee line. The article clarifies reasons and circumstances of the defeat of the opposition, none of whose representatives openly stood in opposition to the majority of the Central Committee or called on ordinary members to protest. The authors demonstrate that the local left opposition was a situational unification of diverse forces, dissatisfied with the bureaucratization of the party, the growing dictatorship of the Central Committee, the newcomers, as well as the dominance of appointees from the Party and the Soviets. During the discussion in the organizations of the Party, the need for developing internal party democracy and a free discussion of the problems emerged, showing that there was a potential alternative to Stalinism. The main feature of the left opposition was that it formed and temporarily won the predominantly non-proletarian Vyatka, where before the 1917 revolution the zemstvo and city democratic self-government has gained roots; this is interpreted as a preservation of the demand for freedom and democracy in local society.

Worker of public education and spiritual enlightenment: A.P. Cheruvimov in Samara (XIX – early XX centuries)

The article is devoted to the study of social and cultural factors in the development of public education, the formation of a professional group of its workers and organizers in Russia in the last quarter of the XX early XX centuries. The particular attention is paid to the relationship between school, society and church. The methodological basis of the research was the theory of modernization and the techniques of the biographical method. In the article on a large source base the administrative-pedagogical and public-educational activities of A.P. Cheruvimov in the Samara Region, aimed at developing new forms of the school organization while preserving national spiritual traditions, were investigated. As a result of his efforts the successful secondary educational institution in the form of the Samara Real School was created in the provincial city and an effective channel was created to support needy students through the Society for the Promotion of Education was created too. Cheruvimov's contribution to the works of the Aleksievsky Orthodox brotherhood, aimed at supporting parish schools and at the religious and moral education of residents, has become significant and fruitful. For two decades on a voluntary basis he served in the brotherhood in the responsible position of the Chairman of the Council with a wide range of the real responsibilities. His example shows a figure of Russian modernization, whose personal desire for his own social mobility and the promotion of the progressive cultural trends was combined with the traditional religious foundations and the conservative political views. This example demonstrates that the social movement in imperial Russia took place in more complex forms than the paradigm of opposition between the progressive and reactionary forces, which was established in historiography and often was reduced to the social origin or position of persons belonging to one political camp or another.

Exploration on the Successful Experience of Disaster Avoidance from Mountain Torrents Disaster in Xiaodianwu, Kecheng District

Mountain torrents disasters have become one of the main types of natural disasters in the world and causes a large number of casualties and economic losses. The construction of mountain torrents disaster mass monitoring and prevention system is an important part of mountain torrents disaster prevention and control construction in China. This paper introduces the main contents of the mass monitoring and prevention system, investigates the causes of mountain torrents disasters in Xiaodianwu, Kecheng District , analyzes the function of the forecasting and early warning measures, explores the successful experience of disaster avoidance, and provides reference for the improvement of mountain torrents disaster defense capabilities. In the process of defensing the mountain torrents disasters in Xiaodianwu, the village-level inspectors carried out on-site inspections in the rain and immediately organized door-to-door warnings and personnel transfers after discovering the danger, gaining valuable time for the successful avoidance of danger. The effective connection and close cooperation of the work chain at the provincial, city, county, and village levels were the key to the successful avoidance of this mountain torrent disaster.

Cultural identity in the Roman Near East: An historiographical exercise

<p>The central premise of this thesis is that the concepts of hellenisation and romanisation are no longer useful as interpretive models of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Through most of the twentieth century they did good service generating research questions and providing innovative explanations of both existing and new data. On the one hand the notion of hellenisation focused attention on the historical importance of cultural change in the Hellenistic period, while the concept of romanisation focused scholarly attention on life in the provinces rather than on the court life of the imperial city and highlighted the importance of epigraphy and archaeology as against the philological study of literary texts. But the underlying assumptions of both concepts — the superiority of Graeco-Roman culture, the 'civilising' role of the intrusive powers, the passivity of the indigenous peoples of the region, the notion that Greek, Roman and Semitic cultures are bounded entities — are now dated. In the first part of the thesis I deconstruct the concepts of hellenisation and romanisation in detail and then develop an alternative framework which is avowedly postmodern and interdisciplinary, eschews eurocentrism, and uses postcolonial concepts as well as insights from modern social theory. In the second part of the thesis I use the alternative framework to review the evidence relating to the provincial city of Gerasa in the Roman province of Arabia. Looked at through this alternative prism it has been possible to offer some different readings of the evidence not apparent in earlier interpretations. In particular, in using the concepts of resistant strategy and cultural imperialism to discuss the emergence of the Antonine period city plan, I challenge the traditional view of Hadrian's urbanisation policy.</p>

Cultural identity in the Roman Near East: An historiographical exercise

<p>The central premise of this thesis is that the concepts of hellenisation and romanisation are no longer useful as interpretive models of the Graeco-Roman Near East. Through most of the twentieth century they did good service generating research questions and providing innovative explanations of both existing and new data. On the one hand the notion of hellenisation focused attention on the historical importance of cultural change in the Hellenistic period, while the concept of romanisation focused scholarly attention on life in the provinces rather than on the court life of the imperial city and highlighted the importance of epigraphy and archaeology as against the philological study of literary texts. But the underlying assumptions of both concepts — the superiority of Graeco-Roman culture, the 'civilising' role of the intrusive powers, the passivity of the indigenous peoples of the region, the notion that Greek, Roman and Semitic cultures are bounded entities — are now dated. In the first part of the thesis I deconstruct the concepts of hellenisation and romanisation in detail and then develop an alternative framework which is avowedly postmodern and interdisciplinary, eschews eurocentrism, and uses postcolonial concepts as well as insights from modern social theory. In the second part of the thesis I use the alternative framework to review the evidence relating to the provincial city of Gerasa in the Roman province of Arabia. Looked at through this alternative prism it has been possible to offer some different readings of the evidence not apparent in earlier interpretations. In particular, in using the concepts of resistant strategy and cultural imperialism to discuss the emergence of the Antonine period city plan, I challenge the traditional view of Hadrian's urbanisation policy.</p>

A Roman provincial city and its contamination legacy from artisanal and daily-life activities

Roman metal use and related extraction activities resulted in heavy metal pollution and contamination, in particular of Pb near ancient mines and harbors, as well as producing a global atmospheric impact. New evidence from ancient Gerasa (Jerash), Jordan, suggests that small-scale but intense Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad period urban, artisanal, and everyday site activities contributed to substantial heavy metal contamination of the city and its hinterland wadi, even though no metal mining took place and hardly any lead water pipes were used. Distribution of heavy metal contaminants, especially Pb, observed in the urban soils and sediments within this ancient city and its hinterland wadi resulted from aeolian, fluvial, cultural and post-depositional processes. These represent the contamination pathways of an ancient city-hinterland setting and reflect long-term anthropogenic legacies at local and regional scales beginning in the Roman period. Thus, urban use and re-use of heavy metal sources should be factored into understanding historical global-scale contaminant distributions.

THE CAUSES OF WATER RESOURCES DEGRADATION IN THE RUSSIAN PROVINCE AT THE BEGINNING OF THE XXth CENTURY

The article studies the causes of water resources degradation in a provincial city at the beginning of the twentieth century, the status of water bodies in the town of Ivanovo-Voznesensk, Vladimir province is taken as an example. The data on the high degree of pollution of the Uvod river by industrial wastes are given. The author comes to the conclusion that the degradation of the city’s water resources resulted from the urban textile enterprises operation that discharged wastewater directly into public water bodies along with the reluctance of the city authorities to solve the issue of wastewater purification. All these factors seriously threatened the residents’ life and health.