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This chapter deals with the development of banking in the Crown of Aragon from the end of the thirteenth century through the establishment of money changers, which followed similar patterns as in other Western European territories. It starts with a review of existing literature and follows with an explanation on the different banking services provided by money changers and the specific legal framework that supported such activities. It then examines the geographical distribution of private banks in cities and towns within the domains of the kings of Aragon, as well as their evolution throughout the fourteenth century. After that, it offers an analysis of the most common professional profiles among these bankers and financers. Finally, drawing on a heterogeneous pool of unpublished data, it seeks to shed light on the diversity of investors and clients of these establishments, a crucial proof of their role in integrated financial markets.

This chapter discusses the main research interests and outputs in the various branches of geography that have influenced the study of tourism from a geographical perspective. It argues that the idiographic tradition has been transversal throughout, leading to the growing interest for tourism within the geography academic community in the last 10 years. There is a focus on the birth of specific research groups, mainly related to a constellation of new university curricula on tourism and—with few exceptions of territorial tradition—to an intermittent availability of public research funds. The chapter concludes with a more general picture of the place of tourism within the geography discipline in Italy and of evolving trends in terms of research results, dissemination, and evaluation.

The landscape of European cities is by no means homogeneous. Nonetheless, the same type of conflict has repeatedly occurred in different places in the last few years: From Seville to Vienna, from Cologne to St. Petersburg, planned high-rise buildings for inner city districts have provoked fervent arguments and debates. Whether and how European cities should integrate more high-rise buildings is a highly controversial question. This chapter focuses on strategies of vertical construction and related debates about the cityscape in both Paris and Vienna. By studying the urban constellations of Paris and Vienna, it can be shown that what may look comparable at first glance is the outcome of highly different strategies and histories.

Although both cities define themselves to a wide degree with reference to historic structures, the image of tall buildings varies drastically in these cities, which correlates with these cities’ diverse histories and hence experiences with high-rise buildings. Path dependencies and the ways individual cities receive international trends are crucial to understanding processes of urbanization. Based on in-depth interviews with various urban actors and other relevant qualitative data, this chapter aims to demonstrate that a city’s high-rise strategy cannot be attributed to any single factor; rather, it is the result of a complex interplay between various aspects and actors, which crucially includes present and past struggles over cityscapes and therefore over urban spaces.

Outdoor arts festivals have been proposed as a means of rehearsing democratic practices and of placemaking interventions in the space time of contemporary capitalism. I consider whether they are really able to repurpose civic and pseudo public space and challenge the production and reproduction of that space as a colonial and neoliberal territory, or are they merely examples of the ‘pseudo-fête’ prolonging such structures by other means?

This chapter uses case studies of two outdoor arts festivals in the United Kingdom, at which I have performed rhythmanalyses, to explore festivalised spaces and the extent to which they might empower people. Empowerment here relates not only to individual agency, autonomy and self-determination but also to the development of shared, social identity within crowds. The role of festival management, the arrangement of festival space/times and the codification of behaviour are of particular relevance to these effects. I use time-lapse videography to capture data around flows and accretions of audiences, combined with my embodied presence in the lived space of the festival, sensing its rhythms and atmospheres.

Using the concept of polyrhythmia to comprehend and unpick complex durational patterns, I focus on how public spaces are transformed when animated by performances and how public space can redefine both performance and audience dynamics. The adaptation and application of rhythmanalysis in this project has revealed patterns of behaviour and evidenced characteristic qualities of outdoor arts which were previously ignored or only assumed.

Purpose: This chapter describes the main features of the financing of health care expenditure in the French health care system.

Methodology/Approach: This chapter presents key reforms that have been implemented to make the health care system more sustainable in the main dimensions of care: ambulatory, hospital, pharmaceuticals and insurance coverage.

Findings: Overall, French public authorities have followed three paths to improve the sustainability of the health care system: reducing public expenses, generalising access to complementary health insurance and streamlining care toward the most disadvantaged individuals. Looking in the future, the sustainability of the French health care system will mainly rely on two areas of recommendations. The first area is to respect the national annual target for health insurance spending, with a focus on responsible prescriptions, optimised care pathways and increased use of primary and ambulatory care where possible. The second area is to increase efficiency on the short to medium terms. This includes an increased quality of the care toward patients with a disability or special needs, a clearer engagement of patients within their care pathways to increase treatment compliance, and more generally a search for coordinated care that is fair and appropriate.

This contribution deals with the effects of atmospheres. It considers the interest in atmospheres as part of a fundamental change in the mode of individual reasoning which is characterised in contemporary post-industrial societies by an ‘experience orientation’. Atmospheres, which highlight the fact that the subjective state of a person can change in relation to the sensory qualities of the environment, become an interesting concept within this development. The chapter starts from the observation that – in spite of the importance that atmospheres have for spaces of leisure and tourism – there is little research on atmospheres in leisure and tourism studies. It presents three dimensions of effects of atmospheres (emotions and affective tonalities, attention, gesture) that allow us to understand why and how atmospheres matter. The second part links the effects of atmospheres to leisure and tourism, where it proposes distinguishing the corporeal and the sociocultural dimensions of atmospheres. Finally, it discusses the possibilities of designing atmospheres and stresses the necessity for further empirical research.