What difference do cities make? How the urban – and place more generally – have contributed to historical processes is one of the questions that continually confront urban historians. Should towns and cities be regarded as no more than the backdrop against which events and developments – industrialization, social conflict, war – are played out? Or do cities and urbanism more widely possess agency? Do they (as many urbanists claim) have an active part to play in shaping how historical processes eventuate, why things happened in this way here and that way there? If so, what precisely is the urban variable; how can we define and estimate it?

This note studies the addendum to the Arctic Council (AC)'s 2013 Observer Manual adopted at the Senior Arctic Officials’ (SAO) meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, in October 2015. The amendment means another essential step to systematise further and improve the council's working relations with currently 32 entities that hold observer status in the forum. Compared to the initial manual that sketched out the role observers should play in the council's subsidiary bodies, the latest revisions delineate a framework for enhancing observer participation and commitment in working group, task force and expert group meetings. After reviewing the content and practical implications of the addendum in the context of larger reform efforts to adapt the council to the age of a global(ising) Arctic, the article further discusses a number of signals the Anchorage decision sends to observers. These comprise the council's willingness and ability to quick, unified and purposeful action towards institutional adaptation and procedural reform as considered necessary to address organisational deficiencies, strengthened top-down steering of the reform processes by SAOs as related to the work conducted in subsidiary bodies and the overall functioning of the council, and higher expectations on observers to contribute to the AC system and deliver on the new provisions.

For urban historians and urban historical geographers, the relevance and meaning of the city as a driver of human history is central to what we do, both theoretically and empirically. For some, the question of how to define what a city does is a pressing one. For many of us, though, the question is rarely raised; it resides in that murky place behind our writing and thinking, and has little direct or conscious play over how we go about doing our daily work. Historical geographers, with their greater emphasis on theory and spatial relations, are more likely than historians, trained as they are to think through narrative, empirical evidence and temporality, to explore the city's role in explaining social change. Despite this difference, the fact remains that only a handful of urban historical scholars of whatever stripe are actively interested in thinking through the scope and significance of urban agency. The fact that few openly grapple with the question of urban agency, of course, does not mean that we do not work with some understanding of the city's ontological status. All of us do, for better or worse.

In recent years, urban history has witnessed an expansion of actors. Historians have substantially and continuously extended their perspectives when it comes to examining the forces that drive urban developments. This expansion to an ever-broader range of human and increasingly also non-human actors (e.g. animals, technological systems and resources such as water) has opened up many new venues for investigations. It has also raised new questions about the role of cities in the history of social change. One of the most provocative ideas involves the claim that cities themselves should be considered agents and proprietors of change. Such notions of urban agency are premised on the assumption that, on the whole, cities are more than the sum of their parts. In this context, urbanization is not just viewed as the outcome of other determining societal forces, most notably capitalism. Instead, cities themselves are understood as determining entities and powerful enablers or preventers of material transformations. The investigative potential of such a perspective is tremendous, but the possible pitfalls should also not be underestimated. Exploring the explanatory prospects of urban agency requires, first of all, a critical engagement with both of the terms ‘agency’ and ‘the urban’. In my brief contribution to this roundtable, I would like to offer two points to the discussion: the first centres on the relationship between agency and intentionality/responsibilities, which is ultimately a political concern; the second aims to differentiate between the city as an entity and the urban as a process. Such a distinction, in turn, poses conceptual as well as methodological questions regarding the efficacy of agency as an urban concept.

Readers of Polar Record with an extremely long memory or who possess a complete run of the journal, might refer to a paper published as long ago as 1932 on the topic of von Gronau's flight from Germany and over Greenland to the USA in the preceding year.

According to the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, ‘cities are responsible for 67% of the total global energy consumption and more than 70% of greenhouse gas emissions and these trends significantly intensify the severity of some of the two great challenges of our time; climate change and energy security’. Moreover, if cities are driving anthropogenic climate change, the effects are felt everywhere on earth, from glaciers to atolls, from oceans to the troposphere. It is no longer simply society that has been, to cite Henri Lefebvre, ‘completely urbanized’. The entire planet and its atmosphere have been subordinated to the metabolic demands of extremely large human settlements.

The importance of energy, in particular coal, is the subject of ongoing debate amongst economic historians who examine its relationship to the timing and nature of British industrialization. Yet attention to the case of London during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that heavy coal consumption did not require industrial production, nor was heavy industrial coal demand dependent on steam engines. Rather, through the first sustained attempt to quantify industry's proportion of London's demand for mined coal, this article argues that the early modern world's leading coal market was driven primarily by domestic rather than industrial consumption, but that many industrial facilities nevertheless consumed fuel on scales often associated with later industrialization.

During his lifetime and beyond, Brian Roberts was often thought to be the éminence grise of the UK's Antarctic policy and also of the founding of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. Documentary evidence of his influence has, however, been conspicuously absent, due in part to the closure of relevant files in the UK's National Archives. Using Roberts’ personal files in the archives of the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, files in the UK National Archives that remained closed for 50 years but have recently been released, and the recollections of surviving contemporaries of Roberts, it has been possible to establish the extent of his involvement in the evolution of the treaty and to add new elements that may contribute towards a reconstruction of its complex history. From 1956 Roberts developed a productive relationship with the UK Foreign Office's Head of American Department Henry Hankey that enabled them to influence the UK policy on Antarctica and to make a significant contribution towards the political settlement represented by the treaty. For Roberts and his colleagues in the Foreign Office the main purpose of the treaty was not primarily the promotion of international scientific collaboration but was essentially a means of addressing a political situation that had become otherwise intractable.

I am what Chinese would call a waihang (outsider to the guild) in this discussion, neither a specialist in European urban history nor up-to-date on the body of critical social theory that informs much of the discussion in the roundtable. Therefore, I see my role here as primarily presenting a comparative case – China – and only incidentally engaging with the theoretical aspects of the discussion.

Freedom is often analysed in terms of the absence of intentionally imposed constraints. I defend the alternative view on which the relevant constraints are those for which some agent can be held morally responsible. I argue that this best captures the relation between freedom and respect. Berlin (1969) correctly points out that intentional restrictions exhibit ill will and hence are disrespectful. However, the same holds, I argue, for restrictions that are due to indifference. Berlin also observed that it would be counterintuitive if an agent could increase her freedom by changing her preferences. I criticize the argument that Dowding and Van Hees (2007, 2008) present according to which this observation counts in favour of explicating freedom in terms of intentionality.

In the last several decades a diverse movement has emerged that seeks to extend the accountability for human rights beyond governments and states, to businesses. Though the view that business has human rights responsibilities has attracted a great deal of positive attention, this view continues to face many reservations and unresolved questions.

Business ethicists have responded in a twofold manner. First, they have tried to formulate the general terms or frameworks within which the discussion might best proceed. Second, they have sought to answer several questions that these different frameworks pose: A. What are human rights and how justify one’s defence of them?; B. Who is responsible for human rights? What justifies their extension to business?; and C. What are the general features of business’s human rights responsibilities? Are they mandatory or voluntary? How are the specific human rights responsibilities of business to be determined?

Within the limited space of this article, this article seeks to critically examine where the discussion of these issues presently stands and what has been the contribution of business ethicists.

Few theories have left their mark on urban studies to the extent that Actor-Network Theory (ANT) has in the last few decades. Its background in Science and Technology Studies (STS), its critique of the explanatory value of such abstractions as ‘class’ and ‘society’ and its efforts to transcend society/nature and local/global binarisms inevitably challenged conventional views on cities, urbanization and urban phenomena. Economic and Marxist approaches to the city in particular have been challenged, at least to the extent that they invoke the explanatory force of the economy or capitalism as a global social system and, thus, fall back upon the binarisms under attack from ANT. The network approach questioned architectonic explanatory models (substructure vs. superstructure) and deepened our understanding of actors and agency (both emerging from networks of humans and non-humans). However, ANT has always been subject to criticism too.

Since the Admiralty's instructions to Captain Sir John Franklin for his attempt at a transit of the northwest passage in HMS Erebus and Terror in 1845 specified that he should proceed to Cape Walker at the northeastern tip of Russell Island, and head southwest from there to the waterways already explored along the mainland coast of North America, as far as ice conditions and any intervening land permitted, it was natural that the first search expedition to come within striking distance of Cape Walker, should make this one of the starting points of its detailed search. This was the squadron of Captain Horatio Austin that wintered off the northeast coast of Griffith Island in 1850–1851. Following his orders, in the spring of 1851 Captain Erasmus Ommanney of HMS Assistance set off with an impressive cavalcade of seven man-hauled sledges, most of them support sledges. From Cape Walker Lt. William Browne searched the east coast of Prince of Wales Island, that is the western shores of Peel Sound while Ommanney himself and Lt. Sherard Osborn searched the west coast of Prince of Wales Island, that is the east shore of McClintock Channel. No traces of Franklin's expedition were found. Their conclusions were that both McClintock Channel and Peel Sound were permanently blocked with ice, and that Franklin's ships could not have travelled south by either route. While the conclusion as regards McClintock Channel was absolutely correct, that with regard to Peel Sound was incorrect. This must have been the route whereby Erebus and Terror had reached the vicinity of King William Island, and the conclusion that Peel Sound never cleared of ice was very unfortunate in that the next search expedition dispatched by the Admiralty, that of Captain Sir Edward Belcher in 1852–1854 made no attempt to penetrate south, when it is possible that Peel Sound was clear of ice.

Discourses on ‘climate migration’ have played an instrumental role in initiating negotiations on loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Yet, to date, the framing of climate migration has not been clear: it has been considered as a tool for reducing loss and damage (hence essentially a form of adaptation) or, alternatively, as a source of loss and damage for the migrants or for other concerned communities. Moreover, proposed approaches to address climate migration as a form of loss and damage have extended beyond compensation, and remain controversial among developed nations. In the highly politicized field of migration governance, however, this article submits that policy support and guidance in addressing loss and damage could prompt dangerous forms of political interference, such as the imposition of a Western objective of containing migrants to the Global South. It is thus suggested that top-down migration policies may not help vulnerable nations who face loss and damage in the context of climate migration.

Medical factors including tuberculosis, scurvy, lead poisoning and botulism have been proposed to explain the high death rate prior to desertion of the ships on Sir John Franklin's expedition of 1845–1848 but their role remains unclear because the surgeons’ Sick books which recorded illness on board have eluded discovery. In their absence, this study examines the Sick books of Royal Naval search squadrons sent in search of Franklin, and which encountered similar conditions to his ships, to consider whether their morbidity and mortality might reflect that of the missing expedition. The Sick books of HMS Assistance, Enterprise, Intrepid, Investigator, Pioneer and Resolute yielded 1,480 cases that were coded for statistical analysis. On the basis of the squadrons’ patterns of illness it was concluded that Franklin's crews would have suffered common respiratory and gastro-intestinal disorders, injuries and exposure and that deaths might have occurred from respiratory, cardiovascular and tubercular conditions. Scurvy occurred commonly and it was shown that the method of preparing ‘antiscorbutic’ lemon juice for the search squadrons and Franklin's ships would have reduced its capacity to prevent the disease but there were no grounds to conclude that scurvy was significant at the time of deserting the ships. There was no clear evidence of lead poisoning despite the relatively high level of lead exposure that was inevitable on ships at that time. There was no significant difference between the deaths of non-officer ranks on Franklin's ships and several of the search ships. The greater number of deaths of Franklin's officers was proposed to be more probably a result of non-medical factors such as accidents and injuries sustained while hunting and during exploration.

A number of healthcare professionals assert a right to be exempt from performing some actions currently designated as part of their standard professional responsibilities. Most advocates claim that they should be excused from these duties simply by averring that they are conscientiously opposed to performing them. They believe that they need not explain or justify their decisions to anyone, nor should they suffer any undesirable consequences of such refusal.

Those who claim this right err by blurring or conflating three issues about the nature and role of conscience, and its significance in determining what other people should permit them to do (or not do). Many who criticize those asserting an exemption conflate the same questions and blur the same distinctions, if not expressly, by failing to acknowledge that sometimes a morally serious agent should not do what she might otherwise be expected to do. Neither side seems to acknowledge that in some cases both claims are true. I identify these conflations and specify conditions in which a professional might reasonably refuse to do what she is required to do. Then I identify conditions in which the public should exempt a professional from some of her responsibilities. I argue that professionals should refuse far less often than most advocates do . . . and that they should be even less frequently exempt. Finally, there are compelling reasons why we could not implement a consistent policy giving advocates what they want, likely not even in qualified form.

Schubert is famous for his remote modulations, especially his third relations. He therefore has a reputation for harbouring an aversion to the dominant, both in terms of its function as a harmonic preparation for new keys and as a structural pole to the tonic home key. I turn to the history of theory to reveal a more nuanced history of Schubert’s attitude towards the dominant. In a revision of ‘Geistes-Gruß’ (D. 142), a song he sent to Goethe in 1816, Schubert added a brief dominant-seventh chord to soften an abrupt modulation to a remote key. Such an insertion between remote keys was coined an ‘intermediate dominant’ by Schubert’s contemporary Anton Reicha and was understood to be a sufficient preparation for a new remote key. In four subsequent versions of ‘Geistes-Gruß’, Schubert strengthened, rather than weakened, this intermediate dominant – only to remove it altogether in the final published version. I scrutinize Schubert’s use of intermediate dominants that, together with other techniques such as the use of silence, act as a harmonic cushion between abrupt third relations in a range of early multi-sectional songs and in the medial caesura-fill in the Unfinished and Great Symphonies. I compare Schubert’s compositional strategies with the theories of modulation and harmonic juxtaposition by his contemporary music theorists Anton Reicha and Gottfried Weber, and I argue that they share a strikingly similar aesthetic of the power of the intermediate dominant.