Recent Geographical Scholarship Research Articles

Distant time: The future of urbanisation from ‘there’ and ‘then’

Recent geographical scholarship has mainly focussed on the disjunctures between linear and cyclical time in urban development. This paper proposes a notion of distant time as a metaphor of temporal power that keeps marginal citizens at a governable distance from the state. Taking the case of Shimla, an erstwhile Summer Capital of colonial India and a popular tourist town in the Himalayas, it argues that distant time emerges from the temporal reordering of ‘native’ settlement on a fragile ecological landscape ravaged by the colonial state, that is then repeated in postcolonial imaginaries of smart urban futures. Reading ‘along the grain’ of colonial archives of incremental housebuilding by the ‘natives’, as well as interviews with current working class residents of Shimla living under threat of demolition from proposed smart city projects, this paper suggests that distant time is also a space for marginal citizens to claim temporal justice. Even as the state engages in temporal distancing through post/colonial planning, marginal citizens use waiting, confusing, and circumventing as tools of temporal arbitrage. They highlight that aspirations for smart urban futures are not just produced in the ‘here and now’ of the present, but also from the ‘there and then’ of different pasts and futures.

Global destruction networks and hybrid e-waste economies: Practices and embeddedness in Guiyu, China

Recent geographical scholarship on the illicit e-waste geographies and e-waste processing hubs in the Global South has shed light on the global mobilities, production/destruction networks, and political economy/ecology of e-waste. However, their views about the reactivation of value in waste and the dialectics between waste and value rest predominantly on networks of material linkages shaped by broader political-economic structures at macro scales, but are relatively reticent about how mobilities and networks are coordinated by specific places, and how economic practices conducted by a broad diversity of local actors, often informal, constitute economic relations, transactions and dependencies, mediated by place-sticky social and cultural fabrics and vernacular institutions. Based on a study of Guiyu town in Guangdong Province, China, an (in)famous hub of global e-waste recycling, this study unpacks its cluster evolution through a perspective that works with the concept of embeddedness but by way of an emphasis on practice. By tracing a multiplicity of territorial, sociocultural, and political dynamics that articulate between the local and the global, this study enriches existing scholarships on e-waste geographies, global production/destruction networks, and the economic geographies of the illicit.

Remunicipalisation, Mutating Neoliberalism, and the Conjuncture

AbstractThere is a growing interest in the progressive potential of remunicipalisation, a global trend for towns, cities, and even subnational regions to take formerly privatised assets and services back into public ownership. In this paper, we offer a novel conceptualisation of remunicipalisation, developing a spatialised conjunctural perspective through critical engagement with the work of Stuart Hall, Antonio Gramsci, and recent geographical scholarship on political economy transitions. This draws attention to the open, dynamic, political, and spatially diverse aspects of remunicipalisation as part of a mutating process of neoliberalism. Emphasising the conjunctural insight of neoliberalism’s shifting and variegated terrain on which progressive forces have to mobilise, our theorisation has implications for left political strategy and broader transformative projects against a backdrop of global economic, social, and ecological crisis.

‘We were turned into Jews’: space, subjectivation, and resistance in occupied Paris

ABSTRACT Recent geographical scholarship has shown that the persecution and extermination of European Jews during the Holocaust was associated with profound spatial transformations at every scale, from the body to the continent. Yet, the embodied spatial experience of Jews throughout persecution and the way it affected their subjectivity, particularly as they kept living and surviving in the ordinary city, has been understudied. In this paper, we draw on the diaries of six Parisian Jews written during the Holocaust to explore the process of subject formation, or subjectivation, as antisemitic measures transform their daily life and experience of public space in the city. We focus in particular on two techniques of control that sought to produce particular kinds of subjects by working on the relationship between bodies and their surrounding milieus: signage and body writing. Relying on understandings of subjectivation as contested, contingent, and multiple we show that, first, ‘ideal’ subject formation relied on techniques involving both bodily inscription and differentiation as well as the resignification of urban space; and second, that such efforts were resisted and taken up only partially by both Jewish and non-Jewish Parisians, resulting in incomplete and contested attempts at subjection.

Infrastructural territorialisations: Mega-infrastructures and the (re)making of Kenya

This paper, based on historical and contemporary dynamics of railway infrastructures in Kenya, analyses how mega-infrastructures are central in state practices of infrastructural territorialisation – an infrastructure-based production of territoriality as a historically and geographically specific form of spatio-political order and organisation, imbued with social tensions, stemming from the state-led imposition of a techno-politics onto its territory. Focusing on territorial and political objectives of the state advanced through the Uganda Railway and the Standard Gauge Railway, the paper demonstrates how both of these projects have been central in colonial and contemporary practices of infrastructural territorialisation, albeit in mercurial ways that do not fully represent original techno-political intensions of the state. This discussion, first, highlights how megaprojects – although primarily analysed by recent geographical scholarship as advancing contemporary geographies of global capitalism – also contingently coalesce with state (re)territorialisation practices. Second, undertaking these analyses in the Kenyan context, the paper shows how, despite shared historical dynamics of contingent state territorialisation – and the reconstitution of racial and socio-economic inequalities, advanced through megaprojects that in Kenya are socially interpreted through historical experiences of colonialism – current infrastructural territorialisations are also different; whilst the colonial territorialisation of Kenya emerged as relatively unchallenged, its present state territory-making is undermined by both the global character of megaprojects and the external actors that the state relies on for its practices of infrastructural territorialisation.

Governing the Fix: Energy Regimes, Accumulation Dynamics, and Land Use Changes in Japan’s Solar Photovoltaic Boom

This article examines the role of recent reforms to Japan’s energy governance regime in stimulating fixed capital investments in solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and analyzes the investment trends and land use changes that are emerging as a result. Following the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Japanese government passed a feed-in tariff (FIT) to incentivize renewable energy production, followed by the liberalization of the small-scale retail power market. Although recent geographical scholarship suggests that fixed capital investments in renewable energy might function as a socioecological fix for capital accumulation, analyzing these reforms through the lens of institutional political economy reveals a crucial limitation facing investors seeking renewed accumulation through a socioecological fix: The state, as the extraeconomic agent charged with sustaining accumulation at the national scale, maintains the capacity to shape conditions of profitability in the electric power sector. Additionally, this article offers a typology of investment patterns and land use changes that have resulted from the growing market in renewables. The guaranteed return on investment offered by the FIT has stimulated demand for space to site solar projects. This demand, coupled with Japan’s strict farmland protections, has led investors to pursue projects in novel configurations that challenge established assumptions about power density and the land demands of solar PV. By bringing the insights of Marxian state theory to bear on the political ecology of fixed infrastructure, this article contributes an empirical analysis of the political ecological dimensions of state action in governing renewable energy transitions.

Mobile practices and the production of professionals on the move: Filipino highly skilled migrants in Singapore

Recent geographical scholarship on skilled migration has developed a strand of research on the role of mobility in the constitution and production of the highly skilled migrant. In particular, scholars have forwarded the notion of geographical mobility as a form of capital to explain career development, employability and occupational mobility among skilled migrants and international students. While recognising capital-oriented approaches, this paper shifts the focus to how mobility is appropriated into practice in producing highly skilled and professional migrants across phases of movement and settlement. Through the lens of ‘mobile practices,’ the paper suggests that skilled migrants craft themselves into mobile professionals, through embodied practices that appropriate education, credentials and cosmopolitan attitudes and lifestyles, and the enactment of international geographical mobility across phases of re-location, settlement and re-migration. Drawing from interviews with 33 Filipino highly skilled migrants in Singapore, the paper shows how their aspirations drive their use of mobile practices to fulfil three aims. First, they engage in mobile practices to fashion themselves as skilled migrants qualified for the international labor market. Second, they disengage from mobile practices during their emplacement in the host country to produce themselves as skilled professionals that can adapt and settle in the local environment. Third, mobile practices are re-activated in mapping new routes for re-migration or return, shaped by aspirations of further mobility, family considerations and the life course. Overall, mobile practices as conceptual lens foregrounds how highly skilled migrants produce themselves as mobile professionals across shifts of mobility and immobility.

Thinking space differently: Deleuze's Möbius topology for a theorisation of the encounter

The relation between difference and space has long been and continues to be an animating problem in theoretical and political conversations across the discipline of geography, including in much recent work on encounter. In this paper, we make the case for the value of a less explored angle on space in Deleuze's work, which we call the topologies of space‐as‐difference. We highlight the Möbius strip as a central figure in his ontological system, and we show the significance of this topological structure both for understanding key Deleuzian concepts, such as the virtual and actual, and for understanding space and difference in productive ways. We demonstrate this by showing how Deleuzian topologies of difference enable us to further theorise the encounter – a key theme in recent geographical scholarship – as spatial and embodied, connecting up with material feminism and work on the skin, touch, and breath. We suggest that Deleuze's concept of space‐as‐difference thus contributes to the intensification of relational and topological approaches to space that are currently shaping the discipline.

Vacancy at the edges of the precarious city

In this paper, we examine the relationship between precarity, property and urban vacancy. Our main aim is to develop a conceptual framework that connects recent geographical scholarship on precarity to the production of vacant urban landscapes. The paper extends recent geographical scholarship on urban vacancy as a key site of antagonism for post-crisis forms of urbanisation. In so doing, it highlights the role of urban vacancy as a key feature in the making of the precarious city. Particular attention is paid to the rise of Property Guardianship and its relationship to the production and management of vacant urban land and property in the case of the ongoing financialisation of housing in London. Vacancy, in this context, is best understood as a spatial process that produces a varied geography of insecurity and disposability. This is, moreover, a geography that must be positioned within wider and longer trajectories in the urbanisation of injustice. The paper therefore combines a contemporary analysis of guardians living 'on the city's edge' with a historical look back at the 1970s and the little-known practice of 'short-life co-operative housing'. Taking a longitudinal view on the management of vacant buildings through temporary living arrangements across the last forty years enables us to examine old and new geographies of housing precarity and their relationship to the logics of large scale urban transformation.

“They say it's more aggressive in black women”: Biosociality, breast cancer, and becoming a population “at risk”

Recent geographical scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which the practice of public health constructs particular bodies and populations as “risky.” From a biopolitical perspective, this status of being “at risk” offers the basis for an emergent biosociality, groups brought together by a shared vulnerability to disease, which then forms the basis for both state‐led public health interventions and community‐driven advocacy and support. Critics, however, suggest a focus on biosociality can act to obscure other dimensions of individual and community identity, dimensions that can play a key role in determining both health status and the success of healthcare interventions. This paper draws together insights from geography, anthropology, and sociology with empirical evidence from focus groups collected as part of an evaluation of a breast cancer awareness DVD distributed in the London borough of Hackney. We explore the extent to which the DVD, by defining a specific group (black women aged 25–50) as being at increased risk of developing more severe forms of breast cancer at a younger age, led to the formation of a biosocial community. Themes emerging from the analysis of focus group transcripts present a complex picture. At times our participants clearly aligned themselves with this biosocial collective, drawing on a shared Black political identity, assumptions of a common African genetic heritage, experiences of diaspora, and perceived similarities in lifestyles and bodily norms. At other times, however, this shared sense of belonging fragmented in light of perceived differences in culture, lifestyle, and community which nuanced both participants’ sense of being “at risk” and how they might (or might not) seek to manage that risk. Our findings suggest that biosociality is a fragile and heterogeneous accomplishment, with implications for the way we practise medical and social science research, design community‐targeted public health interventions and conceptualise risk.

Retaining international students in northeast Ohio: Opportunities and challenges in the ‘age of Trump’

Donald Trump’s recent restrictive migration regime – symbolized by border walls, Travel Bans, and Hire American policies – presents new concerns for student migrants, the practitioners who advise them, and the institutions that rely on their tuition fees. But a competing migration regime exists at the subnational scale that frames international students, particularly those who study in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and business fields as ideal future citizens. Recent geographical scholarship on the local as a site of contested immigration politics suggests a need to understand student migrants as also enmeshed in the spatial politics of the states and cities in which they reside, as well as the institutions they attend. This article is concerned with international student mobility in the ‘age of Trump,’ with a focus on the local geographies of exclusion and inclusion this age both instigates and contests. The study findings are based on eighteen in-depth interviews conducted with recent graduates of six northeast-Ohio colleges and universities. Their experiences demonstrate the emergence of new and differentiated everyday landscapes of exclusion, which introduce new obstacles for international students and the local as a scale of inclusionary immigration politics.

Multi-scaled secularization or postsecular present? Christianity and migrant workers in Shenzhen, China

This article provides a multi-scaled, grounded understanding of how secularization and re-sacralization occur simultaneously in a context of rapid modernization. Recent geographical scholarship in the geography of religion have exhibited deficient reflection over the geo-historical contingencies and complexities of secularization and secularity. This article seeks to re-conceptualize secularization as a multi-scaled, grounded and self-reflective process through an empirical study of the hybrid, contradictory processes of secularization and postsecular religious revival in a ‘gospel village’ in Shenzhen, China. In this rapidly urbanizing village, Christian belief inherited from Western missionary work has gradually lost its hold amidst modernization and urbanization. However, the inflow of rural migrant workers has re-invigorated the church. Christianity has created possibilities for postsecular ethics and resistances, enabling migrant workers to materially, symbolically and emotionally settle in a new socio-economic environment. Also, new situated religiosities arise as theological interpretations are used to negotiate and even legitimize social inequalities and alienation. This article therefore argues that the postsecular turn in human geography needs to consider how the postsecular articulates, and co-evolves with, secular conditions of being in the world. It highlights the hybrid and contested nature of the secularization process, which gives rise not only to disengaged belief and immanent consciousness but also to new aspirations for, and formations of, religiosities.

Un‐earthing the Subterranean Anthropocene

In this paper, we argue that the role of the underground has been discursively absent from contemporary debates about the Anthropocene. We build on recent geographical scholarship that has challenged “surface bias” and call for geographical debate to go deeper into the third dimension; to explore the Subterranean Anthropocene; to embrace volume ontologies. We present three core arguments. (1) The Anthropocene is about our future underground, a geological epoch signifier where stratigraphic signatures will be etched in future rocks. This requires us to critically reflect on how our human identity and practice is entangled with rock stratum, both now and in the future. (2) The Anthropocene is about our subterranean past. It involves the emergence of capitalisation and industrialisation – two major driving forces of epochal change – that are predicated on new technologies that redefine the underground as an epistemological space for economic, social and political calculation. (3) We propose that the Anthropocene is about our current sub‐surface relations. That the underground matters in contemporary society as a resource, as a site of urban infrastructure, as a source of soils for agriculture and as a dump for waste, among many other uses. However, this important protagonist role in society, and hence the Anthropocene, is still somewhat obscured. There is therefore a need for new metaphorical tropes to bring the underground into contemporary environmental discourses. As such, we conclude, subterranean spaces should become more prominent epistemic, physical, technical and conceptual locations for geographical exploration and political geo‐ecological framings.

The Work of Community Gardens: Reclaiming Place for Community in the City

The growth of community gardens has become the source of much academic debate regarding their role in community empowerment in the contemporary city. In this article, we focus upon the work being done in community gardens, using gardening in Glasgow as a case study. We argue that while community gardening cannot be divorced from more regressive underlying economic and social processes accompanying neoliberal austerity policies, it does provide space for important forms of work that address social needs and advance community empowerment. In developing this argument we use recent geographical scholarship concerning the generative role of place in bringing together individuals and communities in new collective forms of working. Community gardens are places that facilitate the recovery of individual agency, construction of new forms of knowledge and participation, and renewal of reflexive and proactive communities that provide broader lessons for building more progressive forms of work in cities.

Living precariously: property guardianship and the flexible city

In this paper we examine the precarious everyday geographies of property guardianship in the United Kingdom. Temporary property guardianship is a relatively new form of insecure urban dwelling existing in the grey area between informal occupation, the security industry and housing. Young individuals, usually in precarious employment, apply to intermediary companies to become temporary ‘guardians’ in metropolitan centres, most notably in London. The scheme allows guardians to pay below market rent to live in unusual locations while ‘performing’ live‐in security arrangements that are not considered as a form of ‘work’. The experiences of becoming and living as a property guardian can be ambivalent and contradictory: guardians express economic and social advantages to being temporary, while also exposing underlying anxieties with ‘flexible living’. In this paper we offer a detailed description of the various practices of property guardianship and how they must be understood, on the one hand, in light of recent geographical scholarship on housing insecurity and, on the other hand, as an example of a precarious subjectivity that has become normalised in recent decades in cities of the global North. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with long‐term property guardians in London, we unpack the narratives and rationales of university‐educated and highly skilled individuals for whom the city is a site of intensified insecurity and flexible negotiation. In the end, we conclude that the form of permanent temporariness experienced by property guardians needs to be understood as a symptom of wider dynamics of work and life precarisation in urban centres and argue that it is imperative to extend recent geographical debates around work and life insecurity to include new housing practices and their role in co‐constituting urban precarity.

Social enterprises as spaces of encounter for mental health consumers

Recent geographical scholarship has suggested that disabled people's encounters with non‐disabled others might constitute an important mechanism for community participation and social inclusion. Existing studies recognise the importance of the immediate material and relational character of place in shaping the nature of encounters between disabled and non‐disabled people. Yet there has been little attention – beyond questions of physical access – to the ways in which places might be practically created to facilitate positive interactions. In this paper, we examine the potential of social enterprises to serve as a space of encounter between disabled workers and non‐disabled others. Drawing on interviews and focus groups, we explore how and to what extent social enterprises (coffee shops, catering businesses, cleaning and janitorial companies, courier services) create supportive environments for interaction and encounter between workers with mental health problems, clients and members of the public. Our analysis suggests that specific efforts to accommodate and support mental health consumers in their employment‐based interactions contributes to an enabling relational space for encounters that begin to unsettle prevailing assumptions about mental ill health. At the same time, broader social conditions and enduring assumptions about mental health consumers work to reinforce disabling differences.

Rural mobilities: Connecting movement and fixity in rural places

Recent work within mobilities studies has pointed to the ways in which mobility shapes people's identities and everyday lives. Mobility is also inherently geographical in nature, not only in the sense that movements of people and objects transcend space but that the ubiquity of mobility within society raises important questions about the fixities of place. Much of the recent geographical scholarship on mobilities has focused on the city, with ‘the urban’ constructed as the archetypal space of hyper-mobility. Less attention has been given to mobilities in the context of rural spaces and places. In this paper, we suggest that mobility represents an equally important constituent of rural lifestyles and rural places. Our contention is that the stabilities of rurality, associated with senses of belonging, tradition and stasis, are both reliant on and undermined by rather complex forms of mobility. We draw on empirical materials from a recent community study in rural Wales to reveal the nature of these mobilities, including the diverse range of movements of people to, from and through rural places, the difficulties associated with practising everyday mobilities in rural settings, the increasing significance of virtual forms of mobility associated with the roll-out of digital technologies across rural spaces, and the complicated relationship between rural mobilities, immobilities and fixities.

Planning Histories and Practices of Circulating Urban Knowledge

AbstractThis symposium creates and stimulates new dialogue and cross‐disciplinary exchange between planning theorists and geographers in researching the transfer of urban policy and planning models, ideas and techniques. The symposium challenges a restricted historical focus in much of the emerging geographical literature on urban policy mobilities by drawing on a rich tradition within planning history of exploring and documenting the trans‐urban travel of planning ideas and models over the last 150 years. It is argued that this longer‐term perspective is required to highlight important historical continuities and institutional legacies to contemporary urban policy circuits and pathways and to question what is particularly new, distinct and innovative about an intensification in the travel of urban ideas, plans and policies over the past decade — and the accompanying scholarly interest in them. The symposium also uses the emphasis on particular details and specific experiences within planning histories to foreground and develop approaches, particularly from recent geographical scholarship, that investigate the contingent and embodied practices and wider epistemic contexts that enable — or hinder — contemporary policy transfer.

Mobilising the Child Victim: The Localisation of Human Trafficking in Singapore through Global Activism

In this paper I examine the local mobilisation of the dominant global framing of the problem of human trafficking through ‘the female child victim’ in child sex trafficking advocacy campaigns. The child victim is a symbolic and emotive frame embodied in the Third World female child and enacted through her helplessness and experiences of extreme violence and (sexual) abuse in trafficking situations across diverse contexts globally. I use The Body Shop's (TBS's) 2009–12 global campaign against child sex trafficking as my site for discussion of the way frames in global human rights activism move into local contexts, often coming to define the ways contemporary human rights problems are understood and reproduced locally. I draw on ethnographic research on human trafficking in Singapore to explore the ways in which the child victim frame is mobilised in a specific locale through the involvement of a local nongovernmental organisation and university student actors as part of TBS's campaign strategy. Although recent geographical scholarship on social movements has embraced a networked approach, I argue for heightened attention to the geographies of scaled (re)iteration, or local mobilisation that occurs as transnational activism connects with particular places. The role of framing in embedding global human rights issues locally in transnational activism is central to this process.

With Numbers in Place: Security, Territory, and the Production of Calculable Space

Recent geographical scholarship on the politics of calculation has led to a reevaluation of the role of statistics, census-taking, and mapping as calculative techniques that have been of primary importance to the rise of the modern territorial state. The current study contributes to this literature by examining how the political technologies of street addressing have been employed to reconfigure the territory of the United States as a calculable space of security. Drawing on extensive archival research and thirty semistructured, in-depth interviews, this study provides a genealogy of calculable space, focusing particularly on the extension of city-style street addressing systems into rural communities to aid emergency management, homeland security, and various other governmental measures as part of the general process that Foucault (2007) has referred to as the “urbanization of the territory.” As a case study, I consider the campaign to readdress rural areas in West Virginia to illustrate the social and political processes at work in remaking the territory into a space of calculation by encoding the landscape with a spatial regime of inscriptions. The results presented here show how 911 addressing systems have been central to the reorganization of political space at a time when the apparatuses of security are being “enhanced” by the apparent marvels of geospatial technology. To the extent that such technologies are themselves implicated in reshaping the very spaces that they are designed to represent, this study calls our attention to the pervasive role that spatial calculation plays in the production of a geo-coded world.