Production Of New Spaces Research Articles

DIVISÃO SOCIAL DO ESPAÇO E FRAGMENTAÇÃO SOCIOESPACIAL EM MOSSORÓ/RN/BRASIL

This paper addresses the production of urban space in Mossoró, in Rio Grande do Norte State, through an analysis that articulates the social division of space and socio-spatial fragmentation. The hypothesis is that, in the context of contemporary urbanization, the fragmentary urban logic plays a significant role in structuring and restructuring urban spaces. The center-periphery contradiction is redefined, associated with the production of new spaces for consumption and the profusion of popular housing forms and closed residential spaces. For this, the mapping and cross-referencing data from these same spaces, the forms of habitation and, consequently, interviews with inhabitants, were fundamental for the analysis So, this article highlights the study of socio-spatial fragmentation as an expressive possibility to understand contemporary Brazilian urbanization. It concludes on spatial practices and the appropriation of space as a fundamental element to understand the fragmentation process in Brazilian medium-sized cities. Keywords: Sociospatial Fragmentation, Urban Centrality, Social and Territorial Division of Labour, Mossoró, Brazil.

The Resilience Fix to Climate Disasters: Recursive and Contested Relations with Equity and Justice-Based Transformations in the Global South

This article engages with the taken-for-granted separation between resilience as stability and resilience as transformation after disasters. It examines whether strategies adopted after climate disasters are transforming cities in ways that foster egalitarian urbanism or reinforce capitalist urbanization. To address this question, I develop the notion of a resilience fix, returning to Harvey’s influential thesis on spatial fix that captures how capitalism overcomes its crises of overaccumulation by deepening its spread through the production of new spaces and the built environment. I combine this thesis with an interrogation of urban metabolism and the governance of urban life and spaces to show the recursive relations between resilience fixes and transformative resilience strategies. Focusing on a ten-year postdisaster development in Metro Manila, this study shows how resilience fixes act within and through political economy systems, land use planning, technology adoption, and risk management regimes to decenter those who experience the double violence of capitalist urbanization and disaster capitalism while naturalizing utopian development, citizen surveillance, and a class-based retreat from the city. By offering false solutions and translocating disasters, these fixes inextricably reproduced social inequalities that would stimulate resistance politics and counterhegemonic strategies aimed at partial transformation.

L’ecologia politica come campo di riconcettualizzazione socio-ambientale: governance, conflitto e produzione di spazi politici

Relations between human society, nature and the environment have long played a key role in the geographical debate. In this framework, political ecology has become a critical research field integrating heterogeneous theoretical and epistemological perspectives with socio-political and territorial knowledge, practices and experiences. While for a couple of decades this field has played a considerable role in international geographical literature, in the Italian debate it is still marginal. This contribution therefore aims to provide a framework for reflection and synthesis on how political ecology, through concepts and interpretative keys, contributes to re-discussing socio-environmental relations, highlighting their metabolic, political and conflictual nature, and proposing alternative future scenarios. Specifically, in the framework of global environmental governance and the contemporary ecological crisis, the focus is on socio-environmental conflict, in dialogue with post-politics theory, as a process of production of new spaces oriented to the repoliticization of environmental issues, the reconfiguration of socio-ecological relations and the claim of socio-environmental justice.

Locality and globality: The production of new space in maintaining the identity of urban areas

Globalization has brought modernity to big cities but this led to a contradiction between abstract spaces (quantity) and social spaces (quality). The modern environment tends to disrupt the daily life of local communities with its cultural diversity and eliminates social relations. Moreover, modernity which offers uniformity does not consider local identity and cities are planned similar everywhere. This paper uses Lefebvre’s trialectics of spatiality comprising ‘spatial practice’, ‘representation of space’ (abstract space), and ‘space of representations’ (lived space) to study the spatial phenomena in Medan city. The research used qualitative methodology via in-depth interviews with respondents from various societal groups. The study focused on the phenomenon of space according to each group. The findings show that there are unique dynamic relationships between the local community and the newcomer communitythat brings modernity. The Tamil communitylives in the periphery area while their presence in the modern commercial center strengthens the identity of the area as a “home town” for the local community in the modern city.

Proyectando sobre el pasado industrial. La experiencia del taller de intervención sostenible en el patrimonio cultural

This article summarizes the main aspects of the Workshop on Sustainable Intervention of Cultural Heritage, which is a course developed at UNIACC University, in Santiago de Chile, since 2016. Its relevance consists, on the one hand, of contributing to the achievement of the content standards defined in international agreements on the teaching of architecture, such as the UNESCO / UIA Charter of architecture training. On the other hand, of thinking about the production of new spaces in relation to existing buildings with and without patrimony character, through the academic formation of undergraduate students, based upon the heritage values that make them an important part of the history of the city and its neighborhoods. Keywords: teaching, architecture, sustainability, UNIACC, industrial heritage.

Digital state spaces: state rescaling and advanced digitalization

ABSTRACTOver the past decades, advanced capitalist states have increasingly used digital technologies to deliver state services and restructure public sector institutions. This practice has had profound institutional as well as political consequences. So far, however, little research has been conducted that examines the forms of statehood and governance to which the use of digital technologies gives rise. To fill this research gap, this paper examines governmental digitalization through the lens of political economies of state rescaling. In doing so, it engages with the production of state spatiality, ultimately advancing the concept of digital state spaces, which links scholarship on state restructuring with work in digital geography. Drawing on several years of empirical research, the paper demonstrates the connection between these fields with an in-depth case study of digitalization efforts in Denmark, a country that is often cited as an example of a highly digitalized European state. It traces how national policy efforts have created new digital state spaces in Denmark and examines the local consequences these state interventions have had. Taken together, these conceptual and empirical insights contribute to a more nuanced understanding of governmental digitalization as a regulatory instrument implicated in the production of new spaces of governance.

Native Hostelries in New Zealand's Colonial Cities

Historians have argued that while Māori were important players in founding and sustaining New Zealand’s colonial cities, the rapid growth of the settler population saw them excluded from city space and return to tribal homelands. This article examines the marginalisation process and how the perceived threat of Māori economic power and changes in European racial theory informed it. It then argues that marginalisation was only ever partial, with Māori continuing to engage with city life in innovative ways. In doing so they not only claimed city spaces but contributed to the production of new spaces as well.
 

Strategic planning, the real estate economy, and the production of new spaces of centrality. The case of Mexico City

Taking Mexico City as a case study, this paper deals with the production of new economic centralities caused by global city formation. After sketching out the emergence of delimitable global city zones as the new downtown in Mexico City, the role the massive influx of foreign direct investment into the real estate economy and the growth of Mexico City’s producer service sector have played in the making of the new downtown is analysed. In the fourth section, I will argue that for the production of these new spaces of centrality urban policies and, in particular, planning mechanisms have been changed, in order to permit a faster, more flexible and site-specific handling of building projects. In that respect, strategic urban planning with its focus on key economic areas within the city and with its commitment to large urban projects has been critical. Finally, the paper shows that global circuits of knowledge and local pressures by the real estate economy have been the main mechanisms which have induced the changes in urban politics in Mexico City.

Re-articulating social justice as equity in schooling policy: the effects of testing and data infrastructures

This paper examines the re-articulation of social justice as equity in schooling policy through national and global testing and data infrastructures. It focuses on the Australian National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) and the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). We analyse the discursive reconstitution of social justice as equity in Australian and OECD policy, and analyse NAPLAN and PISA as technologies of governance that re-articulate equity as a measure of performance. These re-articulations are set against the extension of neo-social economistic rationalities to all domains of life and the topological production of new spaces of policy and power.

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn

AbstractIn response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.

Mapping community viral load and social boundaries

Recently, Castel et al.[1] sought to measure and map community viral load (CVL) in Washington, DC. The authors included the most recent viral load data in the city and two indicators of socioeconomic status, namely poverty rates and the percentage of high school diplomas, as part of their analysis [1]. Findings were distributed by geopolitical regions and were presented on various maps of the city. They show an overrepresentation of racialized and poor neighbourhoods as where individuals are most likely to have a detectable viral load and suffer from HIV-related disparities. In many ways, the findings presented by Castel et al.[1] are not new or surprising. We have known for decades that the HIV epidemic concentrates in geographical areas where individuals are most vulnerable to HIV infection, areas marked by high levels of marginalization, poverty, oppression, and social exclusion. This is clearly evident in the District of Columbia where the HIV epidemic is generalized in geographical areas where target populations are most likely to present with high viral loads and live in socioeconomic conditions that make them disproportionally affected by HIV. What is innovative is the ways that CVL allows for a new form of surveillance that can then be used to draw boundaries geographically and identify specific areas for the deployment of high impact interventions, areas that are then identified as ‘risky’ and in need of attention. Despite its sophistication, CVL draws a rather partial and incomplete portrait of the HIV epidemic. We would go as far as to say that it decontextualizes HIV transmission [2]. CVL fails to consider the personal circumstances of people who are rendered visible by mapping exercises and the implications for people living with HIV who reside in areas that are being targeted by public health authorities. Not surprisingly, CVL has led to the intensification of prevention efforts and the deployment of more aggressive interventions to drive down CVL, with little further consideration of the realities of people living with HIV on the ground. The techniques of CVL allow us to measure and map concentrations of the virus, as if they might occur at random. This belies the reality that target populations we are most interested in are often forced into particular geographic areas, economic and ethnic ‘ghettos’. We are concerned that CVL and its ‘geographic’ distribution have become a proxy for naming target populations, but with new levels of sophistication. In particular, we are concerned with the potential to increase stigma directed at populations who occupy what we term ‘viral spaces’. This phenomenon has important implications for the health and safety of people living with HIV [3], and may have broader implications for everyone living in these spaces. This is especially true of geographical areas where higher CVL overlap with concentrations of racialized people as reported by Castel et al.[1]. This could result in the combining of HIV-related stigma with racism, classism and other discriminatory practices. What will it mean to know that a particular neighbourhood is where people have HIV and where people get HIV? What are the implications for those living there and for those living outside the well defined boundaries of this particular neighbourhood? We noticed Castel et al.[1] reporting measurements of CVL alongside ‘ward of residence’ and insurance status. The study is able to represent pockets of higher CVL in neighbourhoods that we imagine might be recognizable to those living in the District of Columbia, and surely recognizable to those for whom mapping risk is their trade. We appreciate the ways CVL is useful for epidemiological surveillance, but are concerned over the implications for actuarial surveillance and the possibility of decreased insurance options for individuals because of where they live. Additionally, we call for more discussions on the use of surveillance data and the ethics of CVL as a mapping exercise. Do the individuals whose viral load is calculated know that these data will be used to draw boundaries between ‘sick’ and ‘healthy’? Are they given an option over how their medical data will be used, including when used in aggregate, for such purposes? These issues have yet to be addressed in the literature on CVL. In our view, it is imperative that researchers engage in discussions and debates around the use of this new biomarker because it may very well contribute to the production of new spaces of exclusion for people living with HIV and others living in areas where the highest viral loads are found. For this reason, we argue that CVL merit closer examination. Acknowledgements Conflicts of interest There are no conflicts of interest.

Geographical Imaginations and Spaces of Political Engagement: Examples from the Indian Alliance

This paper is concerned with the various ways in which geographical imaginations are inflected in politics. It draws on examples from a three‐way partnership of civil society organisations based in Mumbai, India. This movement seeks to reconfigure the governance of anti‐poverty strategies by placing “poor people” at the centre of its activities. The partnership, which refers to itself as the Alliance, is involved in the mobilisation and creation of a range of alternative geographical imaginations that are inflected in the production of new spaces of political engagement. By exploring two of the Alliance's strategies—enumerations and exhibitions—I will illustrate some of the ways in which these alternative geographical imaginations feature in the creation of spaces of political engagement. These strategies involve the practical demonstration of the capacities of the poor to donors and states, and reflect a particular conception of the poor and social change.The spaces of political engagement formed in part through the Alliance's work depend significantly on a commitment to non‐party alignment, an approach that has received criticism from NGOs and commentators involved with urban poverty. I will argue that the Alliance represents a broad development alternative—rather than a form of alternative development—which nonetheless is making substantial progress in the politics of citizenship in Mumbai.