Stella Lowder

Globalisation of the Footwear Industry: A Simple Case of Labour?

The usual explanation for the globalisation of the footwear industry is the ceaseless search for cheap and amenable labour. The performance of this industry in a range of exporting countries suggests that labour costs alone are insufficient. Attention is focused on the role of labour and the additional factors that have enabled particular countries to penetrate global markets at particular times. Macroeconomic factors, culture and the structure of society at national level are significant, but intermediaries are often crucial in articulating the global commodity chain. Non‐productive global factors, such as exchange rates, trade barriers that enforce change within the targeted suppliers industry, commodification, and particular markets must also be taken into account.

The context of urban planning in secondary cities: Examples from Andean Ecuador☆

Abstract Even relatively small cities not experiencing explosive growth through migration are not easy to plan from scratch in underdeveloped contexts. As part of an underresourced, fledgeling profession, urban planners have tended to tread warily in the contentious sociopolitical context, concentrating on the technicalities surrounding the legalization of land subdivision for urban use, building standards and rational development. Detailed analysis of three cities reveals that speculation still thrives and that the drawbacks of this concentration affect both the state and urban society as a whole.

Teaching economic geography: a JGHE symposium part ii — teaching methods

Abstract Economic geography should not be taught in isolation from the political and the social if contemporary issues are to be understood. Agents are embedded in broader structures and their decisions are affected by stimuli and constraints which are not purely economic, at whatever scale they operate. This argument is developed with reference to teaching the geography of consumption. Health and retailing are chosen to illustrate consumption because of their contrasting delivery chains and patient/customer expectations, and because of their divergent/convergent trends between the UK and LDC experience. These enhance awareness of the economic, and its relationship to the social and the political, and of value judgements, which is necessary for critical understanding.

Dancing to Different Tunes: Conveying Latin American realities to composite classes

Students are often attracted to courses about Latin America by media images of the region with their aura of danger and unpredictability. Such stereotypes must be addressed in teaching, but the means is far from clear when the participants stem from different disciplinary backgrounds and academic traditions. The method adopted here was to tackle development through discourse construction through an appreciation of positionality. This approach enabled students to draw on their respective backgrounds and experience critically; it also ensured that students appreciated the core concepts embedded in the discipline, while engaging in a challenging way with the issues raised by Latin American development.

Book reviews : Marcussen, L. 1990: Third world housing in social and spatial development. Aldershot: Avebury. 208 pp. £28.50 cloth. ISBN: 1 85628 085 3

dwelling, while neo-Marxists such as Burgess who see little development potential in self-help housing refer strictly to autoconstruction with waste material. For Turner, housing was ’a verb’, a process, not the Marxist’s product, nor the neoMarxist’s potential commodity. Nevertheless the bimodal housing systems conceived by both sides of the debate have proved unsatisfactory. Marcussen distinguishes five housing systems: ’preformal’, which predates capitalism: ’formal’, which meets all statutory demands; ’ad hoc projects’ and ’normas minimas’ with special circum-