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In the nineteenth century city child rescuers developed 'a taxonomy of space' in which geography determined destiny. The privatised spaces of the middle classes were contrasted with the 'dirt, disease and delinquency' of the slums. Yet at the same time as 'dirt' was viewed as 'destructive' and proof of urban neglect it was also accepted in the form of rural soil to be 'fertile' and central to helping sustain life. This paper explores the emergence of this spatial taxonomy of destiny and its associated vocabulary of descriptors; it documents the visual duality of 'dirt' as a signifier of both 'risk' and of the 'pastoral'; and finally it examines some of the ways in which activists in one city sought in the twentieth century to bridge the divide and bring 'nature' into the city.

Based on key concepts of memory studies, this article investigates how immigration is remembered in two different societies: the United Kingdom and Germany. Starting from the assumption that social remembering has the potential to encourage the integration of migrants, we analyze in several case studies how civil society organizations and government actors remember historical immigration processes and how the immigrant past is reflected in popular culture. Our analysis shows that both countries have several factors in common with regard to the role of immigration in collective memory. A common feature is the marginal status accorded to migration and, when it is remembered, the highly restricted role offered to immigrants. However, our studies also reveal that memory can become an important mode for the integration of migrants if it is used as a form of political activism and if organizations proactively use the past to make demands for the incorporation of immigrants. Keywords: collective memory, Germany, immigration, integration, politics of memory, United Kingdom, The question of the integration of migrants in European societies is a timely one. Large refugee movements from war-torn countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and new patterns of [...]

Organic-rich industrial residues can serve as renewable feedstocks for the generation of useful products by microbial fermentation. We investigated fermenting communities enriched in a mixture of ultra-filtered milk permeate (UFMP) and acid whey from cottage cheese (CAW), two dairy coproducts rich in lactose. To evaluate how operational pH and temperature affect microbial communities and fermentation products, we operated 12 bioreactors for 140 days, each fed a 1:1 mixture of UFMP and CAW at either 35 °C or 50 °C and at either a pH of 4.8 or 5.5. The bioreactors operated at a pH of 4.8 resulted in the incomplete conversion of lactose, while those operated at a pH of 5.5 consistently fermented lactose, primarily into lactic, acetic, and hexanoic acids. The metagenomic analyses revealed that microbial communities obtained at a pH of 5.5 were dominated by lactic acid-producing organisms. Additionally, an inverse relationship was found between the abundance of chain elongating organisms and lactic acid accumulation, with 50 °C reducing the abundance of these organisms and enhancing lactic acid yields. We conclude that the pH and temperature are important determinants of the fermentation of dairy coproducts with a pH of 5.5 and 50 °C yielding the most promising results for lactic acid production. Additional research is required to better understand the factors affecting functional consistency of the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]