Suchergebnisse

This book is a highly readable introduction to the transport debate from two experts in the field. The book follows members of the Smith family as they uncover a wide array of transport issues. This lively and engaging approach will make the book ideal for a wide readership.

The conceptual persona of the idiot recurs and evolves over the decades between Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and his final book with Guattari, What is Philosophy?, shifting from a philosophical question to a nonphilosophical one that allies thought with literature and life. The great figure of this shock of literature is Antonin Artaud who, Deleuze argues, refinds thought's creative capacity by putting it back in touch with its immanent outside – with a machinic and pre-personal 'unthought'. This essay will argue that by turning to works from later in Artaud's œuvre, especially the 1946 poem-cycle Artaud le Mômo, the problem of idiocy meets a correlative problem concerning life and death. Artaud establishes a four-fold of thought-unthought-life-unlife which is problematically resolved in what he calls a 'body', a figure which I will argue requires that we rethink the relationship Artaud experiences between idiocy and suffering.

In 1999 Goodwin announced 'the transformation of transport policy in Great Britain'. His central point was that consensus was emerging among policy makers and academics, based on earlier work, including "Transport: the new realism", which rejected previous orthodoxy that the supply of road space could and should be continually expanded to match demand. Instead, a combination of investment in public transport, walking and cycling opportunities, and—crucially—demand management, should form the basis of transport policy to address rising vehicle use and associated increases in congestion and pollution/carbon emissions. This thinking formed the basis of the 1997 Labour government's 'sustainable transport' policy, but after thirteen years in power ministers had neither transformed policy nor tackled longstanding transport trends. Our main aim in this paper is to revisit the concept of New Realism and reexamine its potential utility as an agent of change in British transport policy. Notwithstanding the outcome of Labour's approach to transport policy, we find that the central tenets of the New Realism remain robust and that the main barriers to change are related to broader political and governance issues which suppress radical policy innovation.

In 1998 the UK government introduced a new, integrated transport policy signalling a move away from the principles of 'predict and provide' towards 'new realism'. Labour's approach involved promoting a reduction in car use through (among other things) seeking to improve public transport provision and, in line with the trend which had begun in 1994, scaling down the national trunk-road building programme. But despite claiming that building new roads to resolve traffic problems would generally be a measure of the last resort, Labour's most recent statement of transport policy, Transport 2010: The 10-Year Plan, makes provisions for a large programme of trunk-road construction against a background of continued traffic growth. In this paper we compare the scale of trunk-road completions achieved by the generally pro-road Conservative governments of 1979–97 against those anticipated in Labour's 2000–10 plans. We suggest that the annual level of trunk-road completions in England over the next decade will in fact be little different from that achieved by the Conservatives. At a broader scale, we identify the emergence of a new paradigm in transport policy which we call 'pragmatic multimodalism'.

Researchers are becoming more alert to the importance of geography to union renewal in counteracting the strategies of corporate and state actors. In this article the example of the UK's rail industry is used to show how privatisation created a new geography of employment relations. Unions responded to the destruction of national collective bargaining and a new fragmented geography of employment relations through organisational restructuring, which, in different ways, was marked by a continuing commitment to a politics of production in connecting grassroots workers to national leaderships. Engaging with the new labour geography, however, the article argues that a further critical element in renewal has been the unions' ability to rethink their internal geographies and scalar relations to contest change at the level of the workplace.