Renting with pets: a pathway to housing insecurity?

Companion animals are rarely considered in rental policy or research. This absence belies their prevalence and growing centrality within practices of family and home, and persists despite evidence of links between companion animals and rental insecurity. This paper begins to address this gap. Through an online survey and in-depth interviews with people who rented with companion animals in Sydney, Australia, over the 10 years to 2013, the paper identifies connections between pet ownership and rental insecurity, including perceptions about the low availability and poor quality of advertised ‘pet-friendly’ properties. The paper argues that pet ownership can trigger feelings of rental insecurity, and advocates for inclusion of pet ownership as a variable impacting secure occupancy. It suggests companion animals are an escalating rental risk, their significance to their owners causing some to accept accelerating levels of rental insecurity by keeping pets without landlord knowledge. These experience impact on the ability of renters to feel ‘at home’ in rental properties.     

Planning for the Disposal of the Dead

Problem: Concurrent with the dramatic increase in the nation's elderly population expected in coming decades will be a need to dispose of larger numbers of our dead. This issue has religious, cultural, and economic salience, but is not typically considered a planning problem. Although cremation rates are rising, burial is projected to remain the preferred alternative for the majority of the U.S. population, and urban space for cemeteries is limited in many communities.

Purpose: We outline issues related to cemeteries and burial, describe a number of alternatives to traditional cemeteries, and explain how planners might usefully contribute.

Methods: This work is based on a literature review.

Results and conclusions: Alternatives to the cemetery are emerging, but remain limited. Some require changes to laws or public perceptions. Planning practice could be advanced by case studies showing how to integrate burial grounds into existing communities and how to alter public policy to permit alternatives to burial.

Takeaway for practice: As population demographics change, environmental concerns intensify, and demand for urban space grows, future land use decisions will have to balance a diverse set of social, cultural, and environmental expectations, including taking into account burial practices. There are only a handful of alternatives to traditional burial in a cemetery: burial in a multiple-use cemetery; natural burial; entombment in a mausoleum; cremation, with the ashes preserved in a columbarium or scattered elsewhere; and burial in a grave that will be reused in the future. This article provides planners with information about each of these alternatives, examples of how the planning process can address disposal of the dead, suggestions for avoiding environmental externalities, and ideas for better integrating the landscapes of death into community life.

Research support: None     

Wearing Memories: Clothing and the Global Lives of Mourning in Swaziland

Abstract

This article situates a cultural phenomenon of women’s memory work through clothing in Swaziland. It explores clothing as both action and object of everyday, personalized practice that constitutes psychosocial well-being and material proximities between the living and the dead, namely, in how clothing of the deceased is privately possessed and ritually manipulated by the bereaved. While human and spiritual self-other relations are produced through clothing and its material efficacy, current global ideologies of immaterial mortuary ritual associated with Pentecostalism have emerged as contraries to this local, intersubjective grief work. This article describes how such contrarian ideologies paper over existing global aspects of people’s entangled relations with the dead – in three biographies of women and their objects – thus showing that memory work is not limited to people, goods, or ideas that flow between nations and expanding notions of the global and gendered practices of personhood.     

“反纪念碑”纪念性空间考辨

“反纪念碑”纪念性空间理论及实践是西方近十余年对纪念性空间的反思及改造,它反对传统纪念碑的一些特定特征,是纪念性精神活动物质化的创新与发展,也是对风景园林设计理论实践的充实.通过梳理“反纪念碑”纪念性空间的起源、演变和发展,尝试阐释这一术语的概念及其内涵,激发中国对“反纪念碑”纪念性空间的研究兴趣和对当代纪念性空间设计...     

Pets Indoors – A Risk Factor For or Protection Against Sensitisation/Allergy

Abstract Ten researchers from the Nordic countries have reviewed the literature on early exposure in childhood, to pets and the risk of sensitisation/allergy. A search of the literature resulted in identification of about 1200 articles, of which 89 were selected for further examination. The group concluded that all exposure to pets involves a risk of sensitisation. Exposure in infancy involves an increased risk (normally RR = 1–1,5) of sensitisation and to a lesser degree of the development of symptoms. The group also concluded that pet allergens are present “everywhere”, as a result of people bringing allergens in their clothing, etc. The group concluded as a recommendation, that families with atopic individuals should wait until the child is at least two years old before getting a pet.     

Pre‐natal and post‐natal exposure to pet ownership and lung function in children: The Seven Northeastern Cities Study

To evaluate the association between pre‐natal and post‐natal exposure to pet ownership and lung function in children, a cross‐sectional study named Seven Northeastern Cities (SNEC) study was conducted. In this study, children's lung function including the forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV₁), forced vital capacity (FVC), maximal mid‐expiratory flow (MMEF), and peak expiratory flow (PEF) were measured by spirometers, and pet ownership situations were collected by questionnaire. Analyzed by multiple logistic regression and generalized linear modeling, we found that for all subjects, pet exposure in the first 2 years of life was significantly associated with lung function impairment of FVC<85% predicted (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]=1.28; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.01, 1.63). For current pet exposure, the increased odds of lung function impairment ranged from 35% (aOR=1.35; 95%CI: 1.12, 1.62) for FVC<85% predicted to 57% (aOR=1.57; 95%CI: 1.29, 1.93) for FEV₁<85% predicted. The in utero exposure was not related to lung function impairment. Compared with other pets, higher odds were observed among children with dogs. When stratified by gender, girls with current pet exposure were more likely to have lung function impairment than boys. It implies self‐reported exposures to pets were negatively associated with lung function among the children under study.     

Integrated landscape management and the complicating issue of temporality

Abstract

Landscape has become widely accepted as a concept for embracing the natural sphere as well as human society. There are, however, challenges in implementing the somewhat overarching rhetoric. This article takes a conceptual and deconstructive approach and elucidates complications in integrated landscape management, with a certain focus on landscape and time. Cases from some European areas, where integrative planning instruments are applied, serve as examples. The drawing of borders and the categorisation of areas are central aspects in understanding what constitutes integration, implying that negotiations and the weighing of different values are vital elements in integrated landscape management. Landscape management is inevitably an activity in the present, which is why landscape management needs to be based on good knowledge about the present conditions. In order to retain landscape qualities it is necessary to continuously reveal contemporary processes and reconsider and elaborate on functions and contexts that connect humans and their physical environment.     

In touch with the deceased: animate objects and human ashes

ABSTRACT

Despite increasing secularization in the Netherlands, beliefs in an afterlife have not disappeared. Instead, new death rituals have emerged, among which is the practice of enclosing human ashes in objects such as paintings, candleholders, jewelry, and tattoos. Because human matter can now be incorporated into paint, glass, metal, and human skin, the dead become part of daily life and the living become carriers of the deceased. As a consequence, the boundaries between persons and things, and the living and the dead blur. In fact, people's practices with ash objects suggest that these objects are regarded as animate. Though people are not religiously affiliated, their practices suggest beliefs in an afterlife, which we will explore in this article.     

Overseas military cemeteries as american sacred space: mine eyes have seen la gloire

ABSTRACT

The American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC) maintains twenty-three cemeteries worldwide for American soldiers and war workers killed in the Great War and World War II. This article examines ABMC cemeteries as American sacred space, foregrounding their fusion of Christian and American symbol and text and the barely submerged theologies and mythologies to which they point. ABMC cemeteries have given families of fallen soldiers places to mourn and remember. They have also served as spaces for the United States to tell all comers of the righteousness of the American soldier and the saving power of dying while fighting for the United States. Compelling as these memorial landscapes are, the sacred narratives they construct are often in subtle but real tension with the histories they contain and conceal.     

Wearable Technologies,Portable Architectures and the Vicissitudes of the Space Between

The omnipresence of the iPod and mobile phone has ensured portable and wearable technologies' highly privileged position in contemporary society. They are at the top of the pile where conspicuous consumption is concerned - you only have to visit an Apple store on a Saturday afternoon to witness the degree to which this highly sought-after gadgetry has become subject to consumer frenzy and speculation. Here, Despina Papadopoulos reviews the particular social and cultural impact of wearable devices. She also welcomes in a new generation of interactive designers who are investigating the human and emotional potential of emergent technologies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conceptualization of Art and Architecture

Western modern and contemporary architecture and art is a conceptual architecture and art, change in human concept promotes the development of modern and contemporary architecture and art, presents us a new look. Evolvement of concept is the core force that pushes forward the unceasing development of art and architecture, art and architecture as concept always influence and interact with each other and create a new dimension. Both architects and artists try to express their opinions using the individualized works and practices in the context of changing values in social transformation, which has become the significance of contemporary architectural design and artistic creation.     

Long-term reliability in reporting of childhood pets by adults interviewed twice, 9 years apart. Results from the European Community Respiratory Health Survey I and II

Investigation of long-term effects of childhood pet exposure is usually based on retrospective information provided by adults, while there is little knowledge about the reliability in adult reporting of childhood events. We analyzed 8287 adults interviewed about childhood pets twice, on average nine years apart, in the European Community Respiratory Health Survey. Agreement between the surveys in reporting of childhood cats, dogs and birds were investigated with kappa statistics, and potential effects of disease status on agreement were analyzed with kappa statistics and multiple logistic regressions. Cats, dogs and birds in childhood were reported by 44, 41 and 38%, respectively. Cohen's kappa for agreement in adult reporting of childhood pets was 0.714 (95% CI=0.698-0.729) for cat, 0.709 (0.691-0.722) for dog, and 0.606 (0.591-0.626) for bird. Thus, agreement was significantly higher for reporting of cat and dog than for bird. Adult wheeze, asthma or atopy did not influence agreement. Neither did adult cat sensitization influence agreement in adult reporting of childhood cat. Childhood factors such as moving house <5 years, or growing up as a single child, in a large family or in a rural area, were associated with poorer agreement, while adult factors were unrelated to agreement. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS: Long-term reliability in adult reporting of childhood pets was substantial, and not influenced by disease status. Thus, collection of information about childhood pets from adults appears to be reliable for the purpose of studying adult allergic disease. Future studies should consider that the reliability was higher for a more important childhood event and influenced by childhood rather than adult characteristics. Imperfect reliability contributed to underestimation of the effects of pets on adult allergy; i.e. with a kappa of 0.71, a true odds ratio (OR) of 0.80 would be attenuated to 0.86. Future studies should account for non-differential misclassification error.     

Book reviews

Abstract

Landscapes are complex outplays of intersecting flows of agency in which humans and non-humans combine in a series of registers, and in cycles of comings and goings to make meshworks of life in place. The presence of animals in some landscapes can be particularly culturally, politically, ecologically, and economically significant but are often overlooked or only partially acknowledged. Here I focus on UK rural landscapes which are rich in animal presences both historically and today. I show how animal presences, and human engagements with them, form key elements of individual and collective practices and imaginings of identity. These presences come in many interrelating, messy, and contesting forms, such as companion animals, wildlife, agricultural livestock, and animals bound up with conservation and field sports. In the shifting meshworks of social, cultural, economic, political and ecological forces at work in rural landscapes, the composition of these animal presences, and the natures of these encounters, will be ever-changing but also retain familiar themes and iconographies. I argue that the animality of rurality is far more strongly represented in popular culture (television, film, literature) than it has been in academic readings of the rural. I also suggest that much of the exchange that makes up animality–rurality meshworks is articulated in affective/emotional registers. Landscape and rural studies need to develop awareness of these registers, and means by which they can be more sensitively investigated. This will be an important step in developing our understandings of all landscapes and the practices of relational, affective, everyday life, both of humans and non-humans, within them.     

Changing use and performance of industrial estates from 1965 onward: the case of the Parkstad conurbation,the Netherlands

In the wake of deindustrialization and economic shifts, industrial estates in the Western world have faced strong changes in programmatic demands. While strategically situated urban brownfields have held a central position in contemporary urban design practice and discourses in the past, industrial estates, developed since the 1960s in suburban peripheries, have become central to these practices and discourses only recently. Drawing on a case study of the productive landscape of the Dutch Parkstad conurbation, this paper offers a novel research agenda for urban design in relation to industrial estates that developed under conditions of dispersal.     

Green urban cemeteries: more than just parks

Inspired of Lefebvre’s and De Certau’s perspectives on social production of space, this study aims to explore cemeteries’ functions in urban life nowadays. Our starting point is that green urban cemeteries have two main functions: their primary purpose is as a burial ground, while their secondary function is as public spaces for reflections, recreation, and cultural encounters. We ask for whom the cemeteries are designed and managed, and in what ways they are actually used. To explore these questions, qualitative data from two cemeteries in Oslo is analyzed. Both visitors and people passing through the sites were interviewed during the summer of 2014 about their intention to be at the cemetery and their views about the place. We point to a series of positive measures rather than forbidden signs that should be instigated to help promoting the great potential green urban cemeteries have for citizens and a future sustainable city.     

基于视觉暗示的战争纪念建筑设计手法探究

当代建筑中，视觉暗示的设计手法对纪念建筑的营造有着至关重要的作用。现试图从建筑学的视角出发，以当代战争纪念建筑实际案例为研究对象，对战争纪念建筑的设计方法展开讨论。首先着重分析视觉暗示与格式塔心理学的关系，其次阐述视觉暗示给参观者心理带来的微妙变化，之后探讨视觉暗示对空间纪念效果造成的影响，最终归纳为可操作的设计策略：图形暗示、内容暗示、秩序暗示，并明确其如何相互影响。立足于格式塔心理学及心理暗示的理论基础，是对纪念建筑设计方法的补充，亦可为今后的战争纪念馆设计提供启示。     

Allergens in indoor air: environmental assessment and health effects

It has been suggested that the increase in morbidity and mortality for asthma and allergies, may also be due to an increase in exposure to allergens in the modern indoor environment. Indoor allergen exposure is recognised as the most important risk factor for asthma in children. House dust mites, pets, insects, plants, moulds and chemical agents in the indoor environment are important causes of allergic diseases. House dust mites and their debris and excrements that contain the allergens are normally found in the home in beds, mattresses, pillows, carpets and furniture stuffing, but they have also been found in office environments. Domestic animals such as cats, dogs, birds and rodents may cause allergic asthma and rhinoconjunctivitis. The exposure usually occurs in homes, but also in schools and kindergartens where domestic animals are kept as pets or for education; moreover, cat and dog owners can bring allergens to public areas in their clothes. Allergy to natural rubber latex has become an important occupational health concern in recent years, particularly among healthcare workers; when powdered gloves are worn or changed, latex particles get into the air and workers are exposed to latex aerosolised antigens. To assess the environmental risk to allergen exposure or to verify if there is a causal relationship between the immunologic findings in a patient and his/her environmental exposure, sampling from the suspected environment may be necessary.     

Hillsong and “megachurch” practice: semiotics,spatial logic and the embodiment of contemporary evangelical protestantism

ABSTRACT

“Megachurches” are congregations with a weekly attendance of at least 2000, by one definition and that have been established recently—many of them since the 1980s—in a variety of countries including the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand. They are often distinguished and distinguish themselves, from older (including other large) churches by a number of characteristics: a contemporary worship style prominently featuring electronic musical instruments and media, dynamic and charismatic speakers, services geared towards “seekers” rather than mature believers, international links and networks, informality in dress and atmosphere. Megachurches are also commonly congregations dominated by relatively young and well-educated members. Beyond these similarities, the term “megachurch” really covers a wide range of denominational, doctrinal, socioeconomic, linguistic-cultural, branding/image and organizational differences. Scholarly and public opinion has accordingly been strongly divided on the position, values and practices of megachurches. Referring closely to the internationally renowned Australian megachurch, Hillsong, this paper attempts to arrive at an analytical framework for megachurches based on a pragmatic and cognitive approach to megachurch semiotics and spatial practice, in the process defining the megachurch as one which seeks to materialize some of the intangibles of the Christian experience, while foregrounding practices of size and presence.     

Neoliberalism as entrepreneurial governmentality: contradictions and dissonance within contemporary English housing associations

Abstract

This paper has two aims: to provide a critical commentary on the value of neoliberalism in explaining contemporary housing policy and to critically examine recent practices that have been shaped by ideas most commonly associated with neoliberalism. It begins by distinguishing different interpretative variants of neoliberalism and some of the criticisms regarding its explanatory capability. Taking the example of housing associations in England, the paper makes use of Dardot and Laval’s notion of ‘entrepreneurial governmentality’ to interpret how contemporary welfare professionals attempt to reconcile the competing tensions of individualism and egalitarianism in practice. Amongst the arguments put forward is that the extension of commercialism, commodification and competition have generated new fissures and dissonance within the sector. The conclusion suggests that contemporary variants of neoliberalism are best understood as a rationality that establishes entrepreneurial governmentality across sectors of government, the economy and social life.     

当代纪念性建筑中形式原型的创新表达研究

形式原型是人类共同存在方式和集体实践经验在其深层心理的历史积淀。形式原型本身就是共同心理内容、形式结构及意象的统一体,具有形式的含义。形式原型既以精神的方式存在,也渗透到了具体的物质事物中。通过对形式原型的创新表达来实现精神与物质、个人和集体、历史与现实之间的沟通是提高当代纪念性建筑设计质量、体现其普遍人文关怀的重要途径。通过解析形式原型含义、建构其层次模型的方法、进一步分析各层次上形式原型在当代纪念性建筑中的创新表达,对提高纪念性建筑设计质量和理论水平具有重要的意义。