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"The City Implant is an urban design project that can be used to strengthen an existing center or create a new one. It is a spatial and programmatic upgrade that gives an area the status of a center or increases the density of an existing center. Rather than intervening in undeveloped land, a City Implant should be a transformer of empty land and even under-exploited traffic junctions. A City Implant should describe the quality of centrality itself." Alex Wall "Boomtown v. Regiocity: Thinking and designing or the Networked City Region." (Almy, 286) Transportation infrastructures across the United States create issues with urban planning and design and the general operations of life that occur around them. As much as they sponsor movement and transport, they impede the ability to perceive cohesive identities of urban landscape. Rusted, decaying, impassable walls of infrastructure are imbedded all across the nation's landscape. The availability and necessity of transportation and increased mobility in the times of planners such as Robert Moses, gave transportation infrastructure the title of progress and innovation. In the wake of this progress, the impact that the infrastructure has on the landscape that supports it has often been ignored. This gives rise to divided and undesirable landscapes that too often are inhabited by un-mediating programs and wastelands of uninhabitable space. Communities outside thriving civic centers are often divided into regions of un-integrated commercial, residential and industrial land that has developed haphazardly around the large systems of infrastructure as opposed to around a thriving city center. Areas of "frozen-space" arise in "in-between" places, and it is the crucial role of architecture to re-connect and give value to these places through the creation of vital paths and public spaces. Architecture has the potential to intervene (to be "implanted") within pre-existing infrastructural elements in such a way as to create valuable space. In doing so, it can regenerate and strengthen an otherwise derelict urban environment by providing scalar mediation and new programming. The resulting condition could support the creation of public space while allowing for future growth and development in creating vital links between public spaces and programs otherwise divided by the infrastructure. In 1893, a railroad network was put in place in Massachusetts, stemming from the center of Boston and radiating to major metropolitan areas to the South and to the West. The Massachusetts government wanted to be at the forefront of those trying to take hold of the power and potential of the steam locomotive, harnessing it to allow for maximum travel and importation of goods. In 1950, the SouthEast Expressway was built. These two elements have had limitless impact upon the communities which they invade (Kennedy, 34). Setting up a framework that mediates the edge where the city meets transportation fabric, creates possibilities of new opportunities, where once there was a barrier. The site of Dorchester, Massachusetts is a place that is a manifestation of the divide that has been created by the infrastructure. On the one side of the train tracks and highway infrastructure is a dense neighborhood void of green space and significant identity. On the other, is a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic called Harbor Point. Located on Harbor Point are the UMASS, Boston campus, the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library, a mixed use housing development with walkable amenities and a diverse coastline. As is typical with much of the Boston terrain, Harbor point was added as infill in 1930. Though physically connected to the mainland of the Dorchester neighborhood, it maintains this identity of separate part and piece. I want to attach onto that which has divided the area, the infrastructure. I want to use the idea of the train, the way in which it facilitates accessibility and mobility and use it to spur future growth of the area. The nature of the infrastructure that has created an environment for the train and automobile that is out of scale with the human body that utilizes it on a regular basis. I want to use this infrastructure to create an intervention that reclaims areas divided by impassable barriers.

THIS PAPER SHOWS THAT ONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES OF ELECTORAL CAMPAIGNS IS ACTIVATION. MUCH RESEARCH IN THE LAST DECADE HAS SHOWN THAT CAMPAIGN SPENDING IS RELATED TO ELECTORAL OUTCOMES, BUT NEARLY ALL OF THIS RESEARCH HAS BEEN CONDUCTED ON DISTRICT-LEVEL DATA, SO WE DO NOT KNOW HOW CAMPAIGNS INFLUENCE INDIVIDUAL VOTERS. THIS RESEARCH RETURNS TO THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OFFERED IN THE PEOPLE'S CHOICE AND SHOW THAT AT LEAST PART OF THE EFFECT OF CAMPAIGNS IS DUE TO THE INCREASED LIKELIHOOD OF PEOPLE VOTING WHEN CAMPAIGNS ARE MORE INTENSE.

With the passing of the National Rural Employment Act (NREGA) in 2005, the Government of India established a landmark provision that enables communities to act as watchdogs on local level implementation of the Government's flagship anti-poverty program. While the concept of 'social audits' builds on a great deal of experience in the country, the provisions in the Act have not been translated into clear guidelines. As a result, social audits of NREGA have tended to be driven through 'high impact' approaches led by civil society organizations and have been focused on exposing malpractice rather than improving implementation. This paper discusses an initiative by the centre for youth and social development which sought to explore options to activate the social audit process in Orissa. The design draws on the provisions of the Act with a view to developing a sustainable model for the state. The pilot was conducted in six gram panchayats where the various stages of preparation, committee formation, auditing and reporting were developed. The paper highlights the importance of social audits as an instrument to support implementation, and in particular of raising awareness and ensuring clarity regarding the roles of various stakeholders. Taking this process forward demands a long term perspective, based on collaboration between the government and civil society that can develop the capacities of beneficiaries to ensure effective implementation at the local level.

This contribution arises from my doctoral thesis about the rise of self-organized groups for women, black people, disabled people and lesbians and gay men within trade unions in Britain. My reflexivity as a researcher hinged upon my capacity to recognize my new position as an insider-outsider in relation to the university, the union and each of the self-organized groups, whilst the fertility of the project hinged upon my capacity to activate the hyphen by journeying between different life-worlds. This article explores the personal, professional and political dilemmas in becoming an insider-outsider with a view to assisting future generations of action researchers.