This diverse new collection of essays, written by scholars, practitioners, and public-land managers, considers the history of public park design, as well as the parks themselves as repositories of cultural values. In exploring the role design has played in these public spaces, the contributors look not only at noticeably planned, often urban, landscapes such as Central Park or Boston's Back Bay Fens but also at parks such as Yosemite with naturally occurring scenic qualities, which require less development. The essays present design as encompassing not simply a park's appearance--its buildings and landscape features--but also its functions, how it delivers a culturally significant experience to visitors. Much park design has been fed into or organized by systems promoting preservation (the National Park Service being only the most obvious example), and many of this book's contributors stress park design's relationship to preservation, as Americans have become aware of a natural heritage they identify with strongly and want to experience. Other essays treat such engaging topics as European influences on early American parks, the peculiar nature of U.S. regional parks, the effect of the automobile on the outdoor recreational experience, and--in an international context--parks and national identity. ContributorsTal Alon-Mozes, Israel Institute of Technology * Catherin Bull, University of Melbourne * Theodore Catton, University of Montana * Esther da Costa Meyer, Princeton University * Timothy Davis, U.S. National Park Service * Elizabeth Flint Engle, Western Center for Historic Preservation, Grand Teton National Park * Christine Madrid French, independent scholar * Heidi Hohmann, Iowa State University * John Dixon Hunt, University of Pennsylvania * Brian Katen, Virginia Tech * Richard Longstreth, George Washington University * Neil M. Maher, New Jersey Institute of Technology * Catharina Nolin, Stockholm University * Nicole Porter, University of Nottingham * Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, Foundation for Landscape Studies * Katherine Solomonson, University of Minnesota * Lucienne Thys-Şenocak, Koç University, Istanbul

First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

What, exactly, is private property? Or, to ask the question another way, what rights to intrude does the public have in what is generally accepted as private property? The answer, perhaps surprisingly to some, is that the public has not only a significant interest in regulating the use of private property but also in defining it, and establishing its contour and texture. In The Public Nature of Private Property, therefore, scholars from the United States and the United Kingdom challenge traditional conceptions of private property while presenting a range of views on both the meaning of private property, and on the ability, some might say the requirement, of the state to regulate it.

Science has development from a self-evident public good to being highly valued in other contexts for different reasons: strengthening the economic competitiveness and, especially in high-tech fields, as a financial investment for future gains. This has been accompanied by a shift from public to private funding with intellectual property rights gaining importance. But in contemporary democracies citizens have also begun to voice their concerns about science and technology related risks, demanding greater participation in decision-making and in the setting of research priorities. The book examines the legal issues and responses vis-à-vis these transformations of the nature of public science. It discusses their normative content as well as the inherent limitations of the law in meeting these challenges.

Explores diverse feminist and legal responses to domestic violence across cultures. Argues that domestic violence must be viewed in its social and cultural context and offers suggestions for those dealing with incidents of abuse.

Bioprospecting--the exchange of plants for corporate promises of royalties or community development assistance--has been lauded as a way to develop new medicines while offering southern nations and indigenous communities an incentive to preserve their rich biodiversity. But can pharmaceutical profits really advance conservation and indigenous rights? How much should companies pay and to whom? Who stands to gain and lose? The first anthropological study of the practices mobilized in the name and in the shadow of bioprospecting, this book takes us into the unexpected sites where Mexican scientists and American companies venture looking for medicinal plants and local knowledge. Cori Hayden tracks bioprospecting's contentious new promise--and the contradictory activities generated in its name. Focusing on a contract involving Mexico's National Autonomous University, Hayden examines the practices through which researchers, plant vendors, rural collectors, indigenous cooperatives, and other actors put prospecting to work. By paying unique attention to scientific research, she provides a key to understanding which people and plants are included in the promise of "selling biodiversity to save it"--and which are not. And she considers the consequences of linking scientific research and rural "enfranchisement" to the logics of intellectual property. Roving across UN protocols, botanical collecting histories, Mexican nationalist agendas, neoliberal property regimes, and North-South relations, When Nature Goes Public charts the myriad, emergent publics that drive and contest the global market in biodiversity and its futures.