Crossing Borders: Changing Contexts of This Book

Culture and History in the Pacific was first published in 1990 by a small scholarly society in a remote European country. The original edition of the book was not particularly accessible elsewhere, least of all in the region it discusses, Oceania. The volume has now been republished digitally and in open access to ensure with the hope that it will reach a wider audience. The aim of this preface is to place this book into perspective – or rather, some perspectives – in the hope that by contextualizing the book, it is possible for the reader to separate that which has withstood time or is of value to him or her. It will be doing so particularly with reference to the borders and divisions referred to in the original preface but also going beyond them. Firstly, the preface briefly describes one context in which the original papers were presented: the era approaching the end of the Cold War, and its effect on academia in general and anthropology in particular. Secondly, it will comment on a scholarly context within Pacific anthropology which is explicitly present in the book. This is the context of areal discussions, and the division of the Pacific into the culture areas of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. Thirdly, it looks at a further framework which is only partly visible in the book, namely the division between an outsider researcher and his or her topic and how this has been challenged and transformed in the decades following the original publication.

Analysis of the Development of the Transport System of Saint Petersburg

St. Petersburg is the fourth most populous city in Europe (after Moscow, Greater London and Greater Paris). Hundreds of thousands of people move daily within the urban agglomeration. Under these conditions, the effective functioning of the urban economy is impossible without a modern transport system capable of providing a solution to current and future problems of the urban economy. The work aims to analyse the effectiveness of the development of the transport system of St. Petersburg. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the main provisions of the most critical regulatory legal acts regulating the city's transport system's development, identify their advantages and disadvantages, and determine how effectively the activities outlined in them are being implemented in dynamics. The author's analysis of the two editions of the St. Petersburg transport system development program (the original edition of 2014 and the current edition of 2020) revealed negative trends, consisting of the deviation of the program indicators' actual value their planned values. Based on the results of the study, the author draws the following conclusions: when implementing the program for the development of the transport system of St. Petersburg, general principles of strategic management are not used, particularly, the effectiveness of program measures is not analysed, the reasons and factors that led to the deviation of planned indicators from the actual ones are not extended for a new period without any assessment of the results achieved; indicators of the transport system development program are constantly being adjusted downward; There is no unified management system for the development of transport infrastructure in the city, the program activities themselves are distributed among separate committees of the city administration, which harms the results of socio-economic development of the transport complex.