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If a city based its planning decisions on the needs of an international bureaucracy rather than on the traditional needs of local residents and businesses, how would that city change? Alex G. Papadopoulos addresses this question with a detailed study of how the nineteenth-century quartiers of Leopold and Nord-Est in Brussels have been transformed materially and functionally since the European Communities decided to locate their administrative headquarters there in 1957. Drawing on game and rational-choice theories, spatial analysis, and urban morphology studies, Papadopoulos analyzes how the landscape of Brussels's center has evolved over the last three decades under the influence of successive coalitions of local and foreign elites. He describes how international real-estate developers form ephemeral, flexible, and specialized regimes of cooperation with governmental organizations at all levels and with special-interest lobbies to carry out major urban projects, while local neighborhood groups, conservationists, and political factions such as the Green Party oppose them with qualitatively similar regimes of resistance.
Passamaquoddy Bay lies between Maine and New Brunswick at the mouth of the St. Croix River. Most of it (including Campobello Island) is within Canada, but the Maine town of Lubec lies at the bay's entrance. Rich in beaver pelts, fish, and timber, the area was a famous smuggling center after the American Revolution. Joshua Smith examines the reasons for smuggling in this area and how three conflicts in early republic history--the 1809 Flour War, the War of 1812, and the 1820 Plaster War--reveal smuggling's relationship to crime, borderlands, and the transition from mercantilism to capitalism. Smith astutely interprets smuggling as created and provoked by government efforts to maintain and reg...