Non-metropolitan City Research Articles

Young lesbians negotiating public space: an intersectional approach through places

In this paper I analyze how different aspects of identity combine to shape the experiences of seven young lesbians in public space in Manresa, a non-metropolitan city in Catalonia. I argue that their experiences need to be understood intersectionally and spatially, as complex processes that involve the mutually constituted identities that shift in space. I focus on interviews and Relief Maps to show how these dynamics work and how they are related to larger social processes such as the heteronormalization and adultification of public space.

Networks and Fields: Corporate Business Leader Involvement in Voluntary Organizations of a Large Nonmetropolitan City

This paper examines the network structure of overlapping leadership between the corporate business sector and voluntary sector of a growing, non-metropolitan city in the Midwest. The data are from a study initially conducted in the early 1970s, and the analysis uncovers a pattern of selective, possibly strategic, involvement by corporate business leaders in the community's voluntary sector. An interactional field perspective is utilized to anticipate and interpret the findings. There are a number of community development implications of the findings and analytical approach, including support for expanded utilization of network analysis as a diagnostic tool for identifying strengths and limitations of community structures related to local capacity for community improvement activity.

'Provincial Paradise'[1]: Urban Tourism and City Imaging Outside the Metropolis

The current emphasis on tourism as an economic saviour has increased attention to the activities of city imaging, competitive place-making and the urban redevelopment of redundant inner city land, often into 'festival marketplaces'. This paper will analyse such economic and cultural activity in Australia with particular emphasis on the control of planning discourses by fractions of the state and capital. It will question the processes and projected outcomes of non-metropolitan city imaging and place-marketing by contending that the festival marketplace concept is outmoded and, in Australia, there is a lack of the requisite synchronisation of tiers of government. A case study of Newcastle, New South Wales will be employed to illustrate the relationship between the local and global dimensions of urban tourism.