Mags Adams

The precautionary principle and the rhetoric behind it

This paper is about understanding the rhetoric of precaution and the practice of decision-making in areas of environmental controversy. It untangles the rhetoric, as established in documented agreements referring to precaution, from the constituent ideas that embody it, as characterized by those who deliberate on its application. By analysing the ways in which the rhetoric of precaution is framed within these documents it is possible to identify different elements that make up the principle in theory. By focussing on the constituent ideas behind the precautionary principle it is possible to move forward from the stalemate of rhetoric that could become the focus of attention itself.

The Impact of New Transport Technologies on Intraurban Mobility: A View from the Past

In this paper the authors reappraise the ways in which travellers in urban areas have interacted with new transport technologies and argue that mobility change over the past century or so may be less than is sometimes assumed. Attention is focused on changes in the journey to work over the 20th century, on the experience of new travel technologies by an adolescent female in the late 19th century, on perceptions of competing forms of urban transport in Manchester and Glasgow in the interwar period, and on changes in the everyday mobility of children aged 10–11 years since the 1940s. It is argued that, although the material experience of everyday transport has changed significantly over the past century with the advent of new transport technologies, these did not necessarily change the aspirations and decisions of people with regard to everyday mobility. Moreover, such changes did not always bring benefits to all travellers.

Editorial: Senses and the City

The papers in this special issue of Senses and Society consider, in their respective ways, the role of the senses in forming and shaping experience of the city. They provide a unique range of insights into urban experience, exploring as they do, issues of regeneration, decay, temporality and mobility within and through the city. Debate about the role of the senses in shaping our urban experience is developing rapidly across disciplines. Challenging an ocular-centricity that arguably underpins much scholarship across the arts, humanities and social sciences, a new multisensory research agenda on cities is being critically explored. This debate is particularly resonant within studies of “the city” where, as Phyllis Lambert (curator of a recent Canadian exhibition on senses and the city) puts it, the “whole gamut of ‘sensorial’ phenomena that figure prominently in daily experience, and largely determine the design of buildings, are strikingly absent from urban studies” (Lambert 2005: 15). There have long been calls from within architectural studies for an “architecture of the senses” that challenges the “dominance of the eye” and “recognises the realms of hearing, smell and taste,” the “haptic architecture of the muscle and the skin” (Pallasmaa 1996: 48). Such sensory studies would go beyond “reading or visualizing” +

...everywhere she went I had to tag along beside her: Family, life course and everyday mobility in England since the 1940s.

Mobility is one of the most important constituents of everyday life, yet it is rarely studied historically and we know little of how it relates to changing family and life course constraints. Using data drawn from oral life histories, this article examines changes in everyday mobility over the past 60 years focusing both on changes over the life course and on the constraints imposed by family structures. We argue that, like residential migration, daily mobility has been closely related to the life course, with women especially affected by the constraints of motherhood and marriage. However, there is evidence that such constraints have changed over time, and that some older people today enjoy more mobility than they did at earlier life stages. We also argue that the independent mobility of children was closely related to the family structure in which they were situated, but that these constraints have changed much less over the past 60 years. The oral testimonies examined also highlight the variability of mobility experiences and the role of the individual in fashioning mobility behavior.

Urban Environmental Quality: Perceptions and Measures in Three UK cities

The recent promotion of city center living within United Kingdom (UK) policy has led to commensurate interest in the quality of the urban environment, particularly in the impact and influence that environmental quality has on quality of life and urban sustainability. This paper presents an overview of a study into environmental quality, looking at the environmental conditions and the opinions and experiences of people who live in three of the UK’s major cities; London, Sheffield and Manchester. Environmental quality is both subjective and objective in its nature, and it is this combination that is of particular interest to this study. An innovative multi-method approach, combining qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques, has been developed and employed. Environmental monitoring (indoor and outdoor air quality and noise levels) was undertaken alongside participant lead photo-surveys, sound-walks and semistructured interviews with city center residents. The case studies provide a detailed insight into the components that influence environmental quality; both perceived and measured. The collection and analysis of data has led to the production of ‘local environmental quality maps’ - spatial representations of local and expert knowledge on urban environmental factors. These maps offer a way to feed different perspectives on environmental issues to decision makers for future policy development. The findings of this study help to understand the influence environmental quality has on quality of life, this in turn can aid urban policy, planning and design. The wider implications of this study to the concept of urban sustainability are also discussed.

The Effect of Fluctuations on the Perception of Low Frequency Sound

Results of laboratory tests are presented in which 18 subjects, including some low frequency noise sufferers, were presented with low frequency sounds with varying degrees of fluctuation. Thresholds of acceptability were obtained for each sound and each subject, using the method of adjustment. These thresholds were then normalised to individual low frequency hearing threshold. It was found that sufferers tend to set thresholds of acceptability closer to their hearing threshold than other subject groups. Also, acceptability thresholds were set on average 5dB lower for fluctuating sounds. It is proposed that a sound should be considered fluctuating when the difference between L10 and L90 exceeds 5dB, and when the rate of change of the ‘Fast’ response sound pressure level exceeds 10dB/s

Field Measurements in the Development of Methods for the Assessment of Low Frequency Noise

A procedure for the assessment of Low Frequency Noise (LFN) by Environmental Health officers has recently been developed in the UK. The development of the assessment method included laboratory test, interview-based questionnaires and field measurements. The results of the field measurements are presented in the form of frequency analyses and time histories. The examples are likely to be of particular interest to Environmental Health officers involved in the assessment of low frequency noise complaints.

Research into the human response to vibration from railways in residential environments.

This paper describes progress in research being carried out at the University of Salford to develop a method by which human annoyance to vibration in residential environments can be assessed. The objective of this study is to yield a robust relationship between vibration exposure and human response, therefore providing a reliable basis for the development of standards and guidance for the assessment of vibration in residential buildings. The vibration sources to be considered are those affecting residents that are outside their control, such as construction, road, and rail activities. Noise is also a consideration. The protocol involves the measurement of vibration outside and inside individual residences and a social study questionnaire based on face‐to‐face interviews with householders. Work so far has concentrated on the response of people in their own homes to railway noise and vibration. Approximately 1000 case studies have been obtained, and examples of early field measurements and results are prese...

Chapter 8 Environmental quality, housing and city residents: a sensory urbanism approach

This chapter considers the role and potential of sensory urbanism as an approach to exploring peoples sensorial experiences and understandings of their local environments. Such an approach is warranted given the influential role of the senses in developing and affecting experience of the urban environment. Debate about the role of the senses in shaping urban experience has progressed in recent years and increasingly is taking place across disciplines (Adams & Guy, 2007). Pallasmaa (2005, p. 40) describes this sensory urban engagement when he says:I confront the city with my body … I experience myself in the city, and the city exists through my embodied experience. The city and my body supplement and define each other. I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.

Food Waste: Home Consumption, Material Culture and Everyday Life David Evans, London: Bloomsbury, 2014, £17.99, 160pp.

produced by witch hunts, arguing instead that prosecutors had good reason to investigate and bring charges. Finally, Part Three tracks the legacy of the witch hunt narrative to recent developments including the sexual abuse scandal within the Catholic Church. The book is a work of significant scope and depth. It demonstrates empirical finesse and an obsessive attention to detail. Yet, this is also the Achilles heel of the work. The detail which so grips the book, does not provide in and of itself much light for the reader other than to defend the book’s overarching assertions. The book struggles to situate these meticulous findings within a broader critical context which could allow all the effort to be still more illuminatory. There is, for example, little exploration as to how and why this collation of abuse stories came to be constructed as they did. For example, Cheit does not place the witch hunt narrative within works of critical childhood scholars who consider the rise of risk anxiety about children and childhood during this period as indicative of broader social malaise about the collapse of family, gender norms, and cultural ties (Jackson and Scott, 1999). Indeed, reading the book now, at a time where child sexual abuses cases have a very high media profile, where the reporting is indicative of fears of the foreigner, the groomer, and the stranger (Cockbain, 2006) such an oversight is striking. Nor does the book explore how the witch hunt narrative works – who is complicit in the production of this phenomenon, how does information become sensation and how have child abuse stories shifted from the ‘crime story’ genre into one of their own (Hall et al, 2002). This is the main weakness of the book; the detailed empirical work is somewhat sublimated by a lack of interrogation about the emergence and power of the ‘witch hunt narrative’ as a specific and contextualised social phenomenon.