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This article discusses the effects of cultural globalization on urban identities, and concentrates on a case study of Amsterdam. The theoretical part of the paper defines cultural globalization and outlines its effects on localities, including the ways in which the images of localities are transformed in the process of global information exchange. It emphasizes the importance of rapidly growing flows of people, in particular in the form of mass tourism, in the deliberate and spontaneous re-identification and changing meaning of places. The empirical part of the paper juxtaposes the historically grown urban identity of Amsterdam since the sixteenth century with the city’s re-created identity of recent decades. It is argued that Amsterdam’s present-day image as a city with very liberal attitudes towards sex and drugs emerged under the influence of global mass tourism, and that it is not as authentic as is often suggested or believed. The discussion concentrates on past and present cultural traits of Amsterdam in the form of Calvinism, commercialism, morality and tolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the fall of the Wall and the reunification of Germany in 1990, the landscape of Berlin’s cultural institutions has been transformed into an unstable and still-shifting geographical structure in which both the reassertion of early twentieth-century patterns and the active construction of new cultural centres may be observed. The paper traces the evolution of Berlin’s cultural landscape over the past decade and questions the future of Germany’s capital city as a European cultural metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that indigenous people of the New World were children of nature - or in darker imaginings, unevolved beasts - has a long ancestry of critique in the human sciences. A tradition of psychologically based research into white attitudes in the settler societies of British empire has chronicled the diverse forms of prejudice against indigenous people, including those who, in moving to cities, were seen as detribalized misfits, dislocated from their natural habitats in the open spaces of country. More recently, concepts of ‘the primitive’ have been critically deconstructed to reveal the discursive practices out of which social relations were configured in colonial societies. In that critique, the contribution made by various legitimizing agents to the racialized representation of indigenous peoples has been carefully documented, including that by scientists who, in their various ‘mismeasures of man’ in the nineteenth century, left an indelible stamp on public beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent debates concerning the relationship between communication, democracy and justice have implications for the analysis of local government land use decision-making. This is particularly true where local government decisions impact on people with a range of racial and cultural identities, especially marginalised indigenous people. The authors explore Young's theory of democracy and difference and develop a model of communication and democracy in which all discussions and exchanges between people are inter-related in a spiralling process of decision-making. This model is used to analyse the impact of local government land use decision-making in Broome, Western Australia on local indigenous people. Theoretical concerns with difference can offer insights into the ways in which relations between indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia are structured. These theoretical arguments, however, need to be carefully related to indigenous concerns and, in this instance, local government relationships with indigenous people over meanings of land and debates about its use. In the case of Broome, only through new ways of thinking about equality and difference, society and justice1 can there be a reconciliation in local government areas between indigenous and settler Australians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]