In this essay, I argue that the concept of heritage today, as we have come to understand it through the lens of the politics of recognition and through various tourism-oriented national and global programs of public recognition, contains within itself a number of inherent structural logics — logics which suggest that projects labeled heritage will be pulled in directions which might run counter to the hopes and expectations of those invoking the term. We must, therefore, be cognizant of the fact that at the same moment that heritage discourse enables one mode of conceiving of — and potentially celebrating — historical persons and events, it also disables other forms and modes. We must take seriously what these modes are and what are the implications of their being bracketed. This essay, then, is a call for scholars to consider carefully the fundamental political rationalities at the hearts of our central concepts if we are to understand more fully what is at stake in choosing them.

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Poor social support is a contributory factor in development of addictive disorders, but it has rarely been evaluated in pathological gamblers. This study examined social support in pathological gamblers and its relationship with treatment outcomes. Low baseline social support was associated with increased severity of gambling, family, and psychiatric problems and poorer post-treatment outcomes. Further, social support assessed post-treatment was significantly related to severity of gambling problems at the 12-month follow-up. These findings demonstrate that social support plays an important role in moderating outcomes, and enhancing social support may be an important aspect of effective gambling treatments.

Informal urban settlements and trade zones represent an increasingly pressing issue for urban heritage developers. In light of the recent revisitation of the UNESCO Recommendation on the Historic Urban Landscape, this article explores the current challenges faced at the intersection of heritage practice, urban planning, and informal communities. Heritage recommendations operate within the domain of soft law and their implementation relies on the voluntarism of public parties and the private sector. Such heritage recommendations are thus rarely taken up outside of city improvement districts with recognizable property-owning stakeholders, commercial infrastructures for security, maintenance, and investor marketing. In South Africa, the particular circumstances of the post-apartheid landscape render urban planning frameworks prone to reinforcing the marginalization of informal stakeholder engagement, ultimately perpetuating a socio-spatial inequality such programs set out to mitigate. The civic practices of new social movements and historical knowledge that emerges from the context of informal and neglected urban environments illustrate emergent answers to the exclusionary dynamics of urban heritage planning.

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