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Contemporary development policy portrays enhanced connectivity as the key to fostering economic growth in lagging regions. This global policy consensus and consequent infrastructure scramble have resulted in a proliferation of new urban spaces. These are dispersed, fragmentary and often unrecognised as urban by projects and plans centred on large-scale connective infrastructures to integrate remote regions into circuits of capital. Whilst our understanding of infrastructure-led development is informed by critical engagements with planetary urbanisation, global infrastructure and logistics, this position paper seeks to reconcile political economy analyses with situated studies closer to lived forms of heterogeneous precariousness in emerging urban worlds. Addressing recent debates that frame these bodies of scholarship as antagonistic, we emphasise the supplementarity of perspectives from within and beyond urban studies. This pluralism can be practised through comparisons that will (i) trace the geo-economic relationality of mega-infrastructures, which conditions directly and indirectly their planning, financing, construction and management, and (simultaneously or independently) (ii) examine difference in the diverse experiences of and responses to emergent infrastructural urbanisms of precarity. The article shows that genetic and generative comparisons can inform a research agenda on (peri-)urban precariousness, engaging policies with unmistakable global moorings but complex multi-scalar politics, diverging outcomes and situated resistances and appropriations.

This paper offers an interpretive framework linking polycentric urban expansion in emerging/frontier economies to the global extension of infrastructure networks. Drawing from scholarship on state restructuring, we theorize an infrastructure scramble whereby numerous state actors and agencies make massive investments in infrastructure connectivity to secure effective integration to transnational value chains as economic and geopolitical competition intensify. This has manifold territorial implications, and matters for debates on planetary urbanization. Novel urbanization processes include the proliferation of peri-urban nodes. Built in cheaply-available land, these respond to (or anticipate economic gains from) enhanced connective infrastructure. In contrast to city-regional exemplars, project-led polycentrism does not arise from territorially-decentralized governance arrangements, and may deepen peri-urban exclusion. The paper includes an experimental comparison of two peri-urban nodal projects: the Iranduba University City, located in a riparian rainforest of the Brazilian Amazon 17 miles from bustling Manaus, and the Bagamoyo Port and Special Economic Zone, located 35 miles north of the congested port of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania's expansive capital. Our findings suggest that: i) techno-entrepreneurial capacity requirements underpin the centralist scalar politics governing the development of peri-urban nodes; as ii) state-led projects rely on ambitious physical planning, with masterplans evincing elite, globalization-oriented objectives that neglect local needs and trigger displacement; and iii) even failing projects spearhead varying trajectories of territorial transformation in erstwhile-stagnant peri-urban peripheries. Concluding, we call for further research on multiple drivers and modalities of polycentrism in the global South, and the infrastructure scramble's broad implications for hyper-connected and bypassed territories.

The hot gas that fills the space between galaxies in clusters is rich in metals. Due to their large potential well, galaxy clusters accumulate metals over the whole history of the cluster, and retain important information on cluster formation and evolution.We derive detailed metallicity maps for a sample of 5 clusters, observed with XMM-Newton, to study the distribution of metals in the Intra-Cluster Medium (ICM). We show that even in relaxed clusters the distribution of metals shows many inhomogeneities with several maxima separated by low metallicity regions. We also found a deviation from the expected temperature-metallicity relation.

In an open study design, 50 opioid-dependent subjects (DSM-IV: 304.0) were investigated in a gradual detoxification treatment with buprenorphine. The study was performed at the drug addiction outpatient clinic of the Department of General Psychiatry at the University of Vienna. Subjects had to contact the outpatient clinic on a daily basis and buprenorphine was administered according to their clinical status. Withdrawal symptoms were evaluated by applying the WANG scale. Urine samples were screened for drug toxicology to exclude additional consumption. In this investigation buprenorphine was applied sublingually in a free dosage scheme aimed at completing detoxification treatment within 10 days by reducing buprenorphine on a daily basis. A mean daily dosage of 2.3 mg buprenorphine was required by patients on day 1 of the treatment period. The highest mean daily buprenorphine dosage was given on day 2, followed by a daily reduction over the study period. The result of this open study design revealed that a gradual daily reduction of buprenorphine might be a successful alternative outpatient detoxification treatment in opioid-dependent subjects. Compliance was 70%, the reported and evaluated withdrawal symptoms during the study period were moderate.

The European Union (EU) has recently published its first list of invasive alien species (IAS) of EU concern to which current legislation must apply. The list comprises species known to pose great threats to biodiversity and needs to be maintained and updated. Horizon scanning is seen as critical to identify the most threatening potential IAS that do not yet occur in Europe to be subsequently risk assessed for future listing. Accordingly, we present a systematic consensus horizon scanning procedure to derive a ranked list of potential IAS likely to arrive, establish, spread and have an impact on biodiversity in the region over the next decade. The approach is unique in the continental scale examined, the breadth of taxonomic groups and environments considered, and the methods and data sources used. International experts were brought together to address five broad thematic groups of potential IAS. For each thematic group the experts first independently assembled lists of potential IAS not yet established in the EU but potentially threatening biodiversity if introduced. Experts were asked to score the species within their thematic group for their separate likelihoods of i) arrival, ii) establishment, iii) spread, and iv) magnitude of the potential negative impact on biodiversity within the EU. Experts then convened for a 2-day workshop applying consensus methods to compile a ranked list of potential IAS. From an initial working list of 329 species, a list of 66 species not yet established in the EU that were considered to be very high (8 species), high (40 species) or medium (18 species) risk species was derived. Here, we present these species highlighting the potential negative impacts and the most likely biogeographic regions to be affected by these potential IAS.

The European Union (EU) has recently published its first list of invasive alien species (IAS) of EU concern to which current legislation must apply. The list comprises species known to pose great threats to biodiversity and needs to be maintained and updated. Horizon scanning is seen as critical to identify the most threatening potential IAS that do not yet occur in Europe to be subsequently risk assessed for future listing. Accordingly, we present a systematic consensus horizon scanning procedure to derive a ranked list of potential IAS likely to arrive, establish, spread and have an impact on biodiversity in the region over the next decade. The approach is unique in the continental scale examined, the breadth of taxonomic groups and environments considered, and the methods and data sources used. International experts were brought together to address five broad thematic groups of potential IAS. For each thematic group the experts first independently assembled lists of potential IAS not yet established in the EU but potentially threatening biodiversity if introduced. Experts were asked to score the species within their thematic group for their separate likelihoods of i) arrival, ii) establishment, iii) spread, and iv) magnitude of the potential negative impact on biodiversity within the EU. Experts then convened for a 2‐day workshop applying consensus methods to compile a ranked list of potential IAS. From an initial working list of 329 species, a list of 66 species not yet established in the EU that were considered to be very high (8 species), high (40 species) or medium (18 species) risk species was derived. Here, we present these species highlighting the potential negative impacts and the most likely biogeographic regions to be affected by these potential IAS.

The European Union (EU) has recently published its first list of invasive alien species (IAS) of EU concern to which current legislation must apply. The list comprises species known to pose great threats to biodiversity and needs to be maintained and updated. Horizon scanning is seen as critical to identify the most threatening potential IAS that do not yet occur in Europe to be subsequently risk assessed for future listing. Accordingly, we present a systematic consensus horizon scanning procedure to derive a ranked list of potential IAS likely to arrive, establish, spread and have an impact on biodiversity in the region over the next decade. The approach is unique in the continental scale examined, the breadth of taxonomic groups and environments considered, and the methods and data sources used. International experts were brought together to address five broad thematic groups of potential IAS. For each thematic group the experts first independently assembled lists of potential IAS not yet established in the EU but potentially threatening biodiversity if introduced. Experts were asked to score the species within their thematic group for their separate likelihoods of i) arrival, ii) establishment, iii) spread, and iv) magnitude of the potential negative impact on biodiversity within the EU. Experts then convened for a 2-day workshop applying consensus methods to compile a ranked list of potential IAS. From an initial working list of 329 species, a list of 66 species not yet established in the EU that were considered to be very high (8 species), high (40 species) or medium (18 species) risk species was derived. Here, we present these species highlighting the potential negative impacts and the most likely biogeographic regions to be affected by these potential IAS.