Human Geography

This paper frames a perspective on the history of Western humanism, its role in shaping geographical inquiry through the centuries, and its essential message for the future practice of the discipline. Humanism is defined as the liberation cry of humanity, voiced at times and places where t h e integrity of life or thought was threatened or compromised, or when fresh horizons beckoned. The wodes whereby the humanist spirit has been negotiated within t h e changing contexts of Western history reveal a cyclically-recurring drama which is here captured in t h e mythopoetic characters of Phoenix, Faust, and Narcissus. It is for its potentially emancipatory role that humanism merits attention today as Western scholars seek better communication with colleagues from other cultures in a common concern about global environmental problems.

"Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos opens the book with his latest contribution to his comprehensive project of re-theorising spatial justice with a piece titled ‘Spatial Justice in a World of Violence’. Through a close reading
of the photographic series Fortunes of War, Life Day by artist Eric Lesdema,
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is interested in how these images reveal peripheral
spaces at the edge of violence which impose an ethic of spatial responsibility on the
viewer in the act of turning away and looking elsewhere. While no acts of explicit
violence are shown in the images, we are left with no doubt that violence is ubiquitous
along the spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum of violence between
bodies raises questions of complicity and responsibility. Do we submit to a state
of affairs in which space is saturated with the everyday and immobilised violence
of the ‘engineered atmosphere’ – or is it also possible for bodies to withdraw from
the atmosphere, through ruptures and folds within the continuum? Such a notion
raises the ethical possibility of the ‘emergence of spatial justice’." Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir (eds)

Geostatistics is a distinctive methodology within the field of spatial statistics. In the past, it has been linked to particular problems (e.g., spatial interpolation by kriging) and types of spatial data (attributes defined on continuous space). It has been used more by physical than human geographers because of the nature of their types of data. The approach taken by geostatisticians has several features that distinguish it from the methods typically used by human geographers for analyzing spatial variation associated with regional data, and we discuss these. Geostatisticians attach much importance to estimating and modeling the variogram to explore and analyze spatial variation because of the insight it provides. This article identifies the benefits of geostatistics, reviews its uses, and examines some of the recent developments that make it valuable for the analysis of data on areal supports across a wide range of problems.

The urban history of the People's Republic of China can be divided into two main periods: 1949-1976, and 1976 to the present. The first period was dominated by the philosophy of Mao Tse-tung, who articulated an antiurban perspective based on traditional Chinese antipathy toward cities, China's political and social experiences with port cities, and the Chinese Communist Party's lack of success in fomenting revolutionary change from an urban base. The resulting policies were fraught with what Mao called "contradictions." Mao realized that to achieve his goal of developing China, the large coastal cities would be the natural places for industrialization, since their locations, based on least-cost formulations, could ensure a rapid increase in GDP. Yet Mao restricted further investment in these cities, favoring instead a Soviet-based model that featured construction of new industrial cities in the interior. All cities, regardless of location and age were kept as small as possible and basic services, including housing and transportation, were rudimentary at best. The only exception to restrictions on the physical expansion of cities was the deliberate overbounding of large population centers to ensure control over rural food supplies. Industrialization thus developed in a variety of both rural and urban locations and places and investment was spread among a variety of technologies, termed "walking on two legs," instead of favoring the most modern technology available. The net results included a stagnating economy, little improvement in per capita income, and a grim urban landscape. The second period was, and remains, dominated by the ascension, three years after Mao's death in 1976, of Deng Xiao-ping as the leading personality among a group of reform-minded members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Deng realized that if China were ever to achieve Mao's goals of industrialization and higher per capita income, radically new policies would be necessary. These new policies were the foundation of a reform program entitled "The Four Modernizations," which called for systematic upgrading of agriculture, education, industry, and the military. The locus and engine of these changes was to be the very cities Mao had rejected. The main mechanism for achieving upgrading and growth was to be the attraction of direct foreign investment to an increasing number of coastal cities. Two major results of these reforms were a rapid rise in per capita income and a doubling of the level of Chinese urbanization. China's Emerging Cities, a collection of revised versions of 13 essays originally presented at the 2005 Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers, describes and explains the consequences of the Four Modernizations for the cities of China. Structurally, the book begins with an introductory essay by the editor. He points out the "contradictions" that have accompanied the Dengist reforms. These include the emergence of Chinese megacities, large-scale urban redevelopment schemes, the linking of central cities and suburbs by multilane highways, and the reemergence of the classical Third World city including components such as quasi-slum areas and deteriorating neighborhoods. These contradictions are linked to the

Abstract Shrimp are grown in coastal areas of the tropics primarily for export and have become significant sources of foreign exchange. Japan is the world's single most important importer of seafood products, including shrimp. We examine the nature of linkages ...

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the concept of place in anthropology, geography, and political ecology. "Place" -or, more accurately, the defense of constructions of place -has also become an important object of struggle in the strategies of social movements. This paper is situated at the intersection of conversations in the disciplines about globalization and place, on the one hand, and conversation in social movements about place and political strategy, on the other. By arguing against a certain globalocentrism in the disciplines that tends to effect an erasure of place, the paper suggests ways in which the defense of place by social movements might be constituted as a rallying point for both theory construction and political action. The paper proposes that place-based struggles might be seen as multi-scale, network-oriented subaltern strategies of localization. The argument is illustrated with the case of the social movement of black communities of the Pacific rainforest region of Colombia.

Not-guilty verdicts, mistrials, and impunity for the Bundy family and many of their supporters in the armed confrontations over public land use in Nevada and Oregon. Expanded access for private oil, gas, mining, and logging industries and the downsizing of national monuments such as Bears Ears lead by Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke. A number of highly contentious debates and sensationalized events have again focused attention on land held in the public domain by the United States. This essay argues that federal land policy as a form of colonial administration has been constitutive for the logic of expectation as property in what is now the United States. From the state land cessions negotiated on behalf of the Articles of Confederation to the preemption acts (1830–1841) to the homestead acts (1862–1916) to present-day demands for land transfer, the acquisition and disposal of the so-called public domain have been central to westward colonization, the consolidation of the nation-state, and the promise of land ownership as the ostensible foundation of individual liberty. These dynamics are evident in contemporary conflicts over public lands and arguments for the transfer of public lands to either state or private ownership. Approaching the Bundy occupations as flashpoints that illuminate competing interpretations and claims to land within the history of westward colonization, this essay seeks to demonstrate the ways in which expectation emerges from particular economies of dispossession of indigenous peoples that have historically worked through and across the division of public and private property.

This paper addresses the role of quality, difference and differentiation in the value both producers and consumers attach to products and firms. It is argued that analysis of urban and regional competitiveness needs to be complemented by a renewed focus on the vital role that quality plays in competitiveness as well as an understanding of geographies of product difference and differentiation. Debates on economic development and resilience need to focus on innovation but also on how through making and providing quality goods and services -that may be based on the latest technologies or equally on age-old craft traditions -firms secure and develop competitive strengths. But since quality is always a value co-constructed in a negotiation between the consumer and producer, processes of identification and differentiation are formative. A case study of two developments in winter sport equipment is used to exemplify an industry in which quality is both an entry condition as well as a major factor in differentiation and valuation. The case illustrates the roles of producer-led innovation and user-led innovation in equipment innovation; and that the appreciation of products' quality, value and differentiation rests in interactions between producers, intermediaries and led-users in localized and regional settings. Focusing on the geographies of quality and differentiation is suggested to be important not only for firms but also for urban and regional policy. Regional advantage may partly rest upon how actors come together to coconstruct notions of quality and difference: notions that can have lasting effects on regional competitiveness.

approaches it as a magisterial work that is also a 'classic' text. Even though Harvey recently described it, with justified regret, as the least discussed and used of his books , it is a work of massive theoretical ambition and solid accomplishment.

Domesticated animals spread from their ancestral heartland in northern Africa and southwestern Asia into eastern and southern Africa after 4000 BP. Three theories account for the relatively slow spread of domesticated animals into the southern latitudes between 4000 and 3000 BP. The first theory posits that arid climates hindered the dispersal of domesticated animals beyond the Lake Turkana basin until pluvial conditions set in after 3000 BP. The second theory argues that epizootic diseases were the inhibiting factors. Finally, indigenous cultural reticence to alter their primary modes of subsistence in favor of animal husbandry accords with the archaeological data from sites that date to this period. A single normative paradigm explaining the shift from a primarily foraging subsistence economy to one that relied heavily on domesticates is unlikely. This review of the current archaeological and paleoenvironmental state of knowledge finds the “static frontier” likely resulted from a combination of all of these factors.

In recent years, converting office buildings to residential use became a high-profile issue in the UK and in the Netherlands. There has, however, been differentiation in the policy response between England and Scotland (planning policy being devolved within the UK), and the Netherlands. We conceptualize this differentiation through the lens of variegated neoliberalism in the forms of hard, soft and thin governance spaces. England, where planning deregulation is more strongly adopted, represents a thin governance space. Scotland, where there has been little policy change, illustrates a hard governance space. The Netherlands represents a soft governance space, where proactive partnerships between government and developers predominate. This paper characterizes these distinct governance spaces and explores their impact on housing delivery and place-making, and the impact of underlying ideologies and planning culture(s) in governing officeto-residential conversions in the three countries. Drawing on national government assessments and statistics, interviews with stakeholders, and case study data from three cities: Leeds, Glasgow and Rotterdam, we conclude that while both hard and soft governance spaces, to different degrees and with different merits, are environments that enable planning, thin governance spacesbeing driven more by ideology than notions of good governanceimply weak planning and place-making.

In this chapter, we contribute to the decolonial feminisms that are expanding our understanding of extractive geographies and political ecologies of the subsoil. In this, we take extractivism to denote both the material processes of removal as well as a particular logic (not only of economic accumulation but of being) that renders materials, territories and bodies extractible (and necessarily so). We critically examine the ways in which these extractive logics and processes frequently initiate and condone racialised sexualised violence. In this, we argue that intersectional violence is at the heart of extractivism. Extraction settles within internal ecologies (including ecologies of health and disease) in ways that reaffirm colonial logics of race and sexuality. This broadening of the meaning of extractivism is important in understanding (a) how extraction operates through multiple forms and scales of power and (b) its intersectional and pluriform impacts. Sexual violence, we conclude, is at the centre of racialised extractivism; this is illustrated in corporate language and the more informal logics of residential tourism, both of which are united by colonial logics that would render black life disposable. We conclude with reflections on the value of decolonial feminist dialogue-as-critique that attends to the resonances across and between black women’s experiences of extractivism.

This paper seeks to elucidate the geographies of brands and branding through interpreting their geographical entanglements. Focusing upon goods and services, it argues, first, that the object of the brand and the process of branding are geographical because they are entangled in inescapable spatial associations. Second, these spatial associations matter because they are geographically differentiated and uneven. Third, geographically entangled brands and branding are closely related to spatially uneven development through the articulation and reinforcement of economic and social inequalities and unequal and competitive socio-spatial relations and divisions of labour. Despite their apparent pervasiveness and significance for geographical enquiry, the geographical entanglements of brands and branding have been under-investigated in Geography and hardly recognised and poorly specified in other social science research. A critical account is provided that demonstrates the entangled geographies of brands and branding in their: i) geographical origins, provenance and socio-spatial histories; ii) spatial circuits of value and meaning and uneven development; and, iii) territorial and relational spaces and places. Reading the changing forms, extent and nature of the geographical entanglements of brands and branding provides a novel but relatively overlooked window to consider and illustrate the vital spaces at the intersections of economic, social, cultural and political geographies, the tensions between relational and territorial notions of space and place and the politics and limits of brands and branding. Learning from wider social science, the paper demonstrates the importance of geography by projecting more clearly specified and sophisticated treatments of space and place into accounts of brands and branding.

This artistic endeavor wanders from the observation that missionaries and philanthropists share a stream of ontological continuity that leads both to use vulnerabilities to draw victims into genocidal relationships that transmit Artificial-Domineering Worldview(s) (A.D. Worldview[s]) and an associated sickness of consciousness that causes people who contract the sickness to become de-spirited prey that loses its sovereignty. This wandering then explores contemporary religious and secular educational philosophies that symbolize the missionary and philanthropist archetypes/stories/characters. This wandering concludes that, while both the missionary and the philanthropist claim to be helping people towards virtue, the genocidal relationships missionaries and philanthropists form with beings who they relate to as prey (as it rather than who) cause the death of our goodly human nature and the potentials for social and environmental justice therein.

Abstract:  This paper presents an argument for considering issues of class in analyses of communicative planning projects. In these projects, class interests tend to be obscured by the contemporary preoccupation with the class-ambiguous category of “community”. Through a case study of a project of urban redevelopment at King's Cross in London, we conceptualize and map class interests in an urban redevelopment project. Three aspects of the planning process that contain clear class effects are looked at: the amount of office space, the flexibility of plans, and the appropriation of the urban environment as exchange or use value. These aspects structure the urban redevelopment but are external to the communicative planning process. The opposition to the redevelopment has in the planning discourse been articulated as “community”-based rather than in class-sensitive terms. We finally present three strategies for reinserting issues of class into planning theory and practice.

This article examines the ways in which Black lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) members of the Ballroom community create black queer space to contend with their spatial exclusion from and marginalization within public and private space in urban Detroit, Michigan. Existing in most urban centers throughout North America, Ballroom culture is a community and network of Black and Latina/o LGBT people. In this ethnography, I delineate the multiple functions of two mutually constitutive domains of Ballroom culture, kinship (the houses) and ritualized performance (the ball events). I use queer theories of geography and draw from Sonjah Stanley Niaah's notion of performance geography to examine the generative socio-spatial practices that Ballroom members deploy to forge alternative possibilities for Black LGBT life in Detroit. In many ways, members of the Ballroom community work to challenge and undo the alienating and oppressive realities of built environments in urban centers by undertaking the necessary social and performance labor that allow its members to revise and reconfigure exclusionary and oppressive spatial forms.

In this introduction to the special section on 'Assemblage and geography' , we reflect on the different routes and uses through which 'assemblage' is being put to work in contemporary geographical scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.

This descriptive-analytical study attempted to investigate the quality of life in urban areas of Iran. Sonqor City of Kermanshah Province was selected as a case. Field and documentary data collection methods were used. To collect the field data, researcher-designed questionnaires were used, of which the validity was confirmed by expert judgment and the reliability was confirmed using Cronbach’s alpha (0.893). The population comprised all the residents of Sonqor City (n=46181). Using Cochran formula, 382 individuals were selected as sample and questionnaires were randomly distributed among them. Results demonstrated that among the 9 aspects of quality of life investigated in Sonqor City, satisfaction with the three aspects of housing, transportation and education, which have coefficients of variation of 0.319, 0.331, and 0.412 respectively, are the most important aspects. Moreover, general results of quality of life of Sonqor residents revealed that 75 percent of the respondents had ...

Brown to the fields of public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS), natural resource management and spatial planning. We synthesise his work into four theses that underpinned his three decades of research: 1) The mapping of place values provides place-specific information about sense of place which can aid in the assessment of the risks associated with landscape modification; 2) PPGIS analysis techniques can support socially acceptable and scientifically defensible land-use decisions in multiple planning contexts; 3) Issues of representation and data quality can be systematically investigated and managed; and 4) While PPGIS is increasingly being applied by cities and other organisations globally, there remains multiple challenges regarding the use of PPGIS findings in land-use decision making. We then briefly summarise his future visions for PPGIS research into: improving participation, and identifying and controlling threats to spatial data quality; turning PPGIS from a participation tool to a political force that can engage with the politics of place and, related to the previous vision; building capacity and champions for those who see the value in participatory mapping methods and are willing to articulate publicly how participatory contributions will be used. The co-authors and all signatories to this commentary are deeply grateful for the many ways that Greg has touched our lives over the years. He will be sadly missed.

Gérald Billard, Université de Rouen Arnaud Brennetot, Université de Rouen Les processus d'identification sociale contiennent une forte composante territoriale. Aux États-Unis, l'imaginaire collectif continue à s'imprégner de mythes géographiques hérités : le Nouveau Monde, la Wilderness, la Frontière ou le Far West.

This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the sociocultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the "settler problem", and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric, and is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.

This paper focuses on the specific role of mid-range universities in knowledge transfer and explores the knowledge flows from these mid-range universities which face a number of additional constraints in transitional Central Eastern European (CEE) regions. The first part focuses on the theoretical framework of knowledge transfers and on the types of university–industry linkages involving knowledge transfer in the case of mid-range universities. The next section examines the development path and specific trajectories of universities in post-communist countries. The following sections draw on the findings of the ERAWATCH research and focus on cases from the non-metropolitan regions of Hungary and the Czech Republic in order to examine the specific barriers to knowledge transfer and explain the reasons behind the traditionally weaker role of mid-range universities. The paper argues that ambitious university-based developmental models have to be revised in CEE regions and the future development role of universities has to be reconsidered from a more realistic perspective.

This paper discusses two economic functions of the University of Wales Cardiff (Cardiff University) in relation to local and regional economic development. The first concerns its direct and indirect impact as an economic force in its own rights in the locality and the wider city-region of South East Wales. Through the application of impact analysis it shown that the University is responsible for generating a gross local output of approximately £100 million a year and sustaining over 3,000 jobs. The second aspect of the paper concerns the knowledge impact of the University and its contribution to the development of regional industrial clusters in the automotive and electronics industries, and enhancing the 'learning capacity' of the locality.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

The purpose of this special issue is to advance heterodox
reconstructions of agrarian Marxism on the occasion of Marx’s
200th birth anniversary. Scholarship on the origins of agrarian
capitalism and the contrasts between agrarian and industrial
capitalism have been a vital part of debates over and within
Marxism for more than a century and have been central to the
social scientific and historical understandings of the modern world
system. At the same time, since the seminal debates associated
with the ‘classical agrarian question,’ agrarian studies is marked by
durable tensions and polarities in theoretical approach. While
Marxists have long criticized ‘populists’ for ignoring capitalism and
class, populists have charged Marxists with historical determinism.
It is the premise of this special issue that much of this debate has
reached something of an impasse. This is in part because new
empirical work addressing the complex contemporary patterns
and conjunctures of global agrarian capitalism, and because new
and generative theoretical reconstructions of Marxism itself, offer
exciting new horizons. Contributions to this special issue help
point the way beyond this impasse, and illustrate that agrarian
Marxism remains a dynamic theoretical program that offers
powerful insights into agrarian change and politics in the twentyfirst
century.

Rent control, which still can be found in many countries, is hampering construction of new housing and the maintenance of old housing units. Although the information about home-based economic activities is not so comprehensive, it is clear that a large number of households use their home for some form of economic activity. This activity is essential for many, especially the poor, and should therefore be encouraged. Thus, mixed residential and economic uses of housing should be accepted, and pilot projects carried out to find the prospects of establishing 'mixed-use areas' more generally. The economic multipliers and backward and forward linkages are particularly high for low-cost housing construction. And such construction uses little or no imported material. Thus, there is a good economic argument for the allocation of far more funds to this sector, particularly during a period of economic recession or depression, than is presently being done in most countries in the developing world.

In this chapter, I draw on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy to explore environmental embodiment—the various lived ways, sensorily and motility-wise, that the body in its pre-reflective perceptual presence engages and synchronizes with the world at hand, especially its architectural and environmental aspects. First, I consider Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of perception, giving particular attention to his claim that perception involves a lived dynamic between perceptual body and world such that aspects of the world—for example, the heavy hardness of a granite block or the cool smoothness of a chrome railing—are known because they immediately evoke in the lived body their experienced qualities.

Second, I consider the architectural and environmental significance of what Merleau-Ponty calls body-subject—pre-reflective corporeal awareness expressed through action and typically in sync with and enmeshed in the physical world in which the action unfolds. I focus on the taken-for-granted sensibility of body-subject to manifest in extended ways over time and space. I ask how routine actions and behaviors of individuals coming together regularly in an environment can transform that environment into a place with a unique dynamic and character—a lived situation I term place ballet. For both perception and body-subject, I consider how qualities of the physical and designable world—for example, materiality, form, and spatiality—contribute to the lived body’s engagement with and actions in the world.

Note: This chapter was written in 2014 for a proposed edited collection on Merleau-Ponty and architecture. Unfortunately, the editors did not find a publisher(though I was never officially informed of this fact). The chapter has been rewritten, revised, and updated; see the above entry: "Merleau-Ponty, Environmental Embodiment, and Place" (2022)
"

Urban housing markets have been described as ‘increasingly significant’ in shaping a nation’s economic and social wellbeing (Straszheim, 1975) with econometric studies showing ties to both a wealth and income effect (Case & Quigley, 2008). ibbons and Machin (2008) explain that London exhibits highly localised variation that goes beyond the models and to understand this an analysis of structural and spatial determinants is required. In this paper, we conduct a regression analysis of four structural variables and three spatial variables.

Over the past two decades capitalism and globalization have gradually changed skin. Both have undergone an acceleration that has radically changed their nature and their rules, resulting in a new scenario of the economic geography at the global and the local scale. The crisis started in 2007, first financial and then economic, has inserted in the context of these changes, even producing the emergence of new actors on the international scene and the relative decline of the traditional areas of development. This scenario is the product of a complex web of ideas, actors, networks, technologies and agreements that the volume attempts to analyze in the most significant components.

In recent years, New Zealand has undergone fundamental economic, institutional and administrative restructuring. One outcome of this has been the implementation of the Resource Management Act 1991 (RMA). Fundamental to the RMA is sustainable management of natural resources at a regional scale. However, there are no prescriptive definitions for sustainable management in the act; rather the act allows regional and local government flexibility in developing policy and plans for economic development and environmental preservation. Recognizing the importance of biculturalism in New Zealand society, a further requirement of the Act grants Maori a significant role in the management of natural resources. Within this institutional context, Waitakere City, located on the western margin of the Auckland region, has adopted the principles of Agenda 21. The City Council has designated itself as an eco-city with a "greenprint" for future development and growth. A significant component of Agenda 21 is the explicit recognition of indigenous rights. Within its development plans, Waitakere City has adopted Maori concepts for resource management specifically for environmental preservation, water quality and sustainable management. This paper discusses the cross-cultural dynamics of natural resource management in Waitakere City. The first section describes the role of Agenda 21 and RMA in creating the eco-city and its relationship to the greater Auckland region. The second part examines the influence of biculturalism in implementing the goals of the eco-city. The final part considers the arenas in which the principles for sustainability with regard to Maori will be tested in the future.