Socio-spatial Contexts Research Articles

Congested spaces, contested scales – A review of spatial planning for wind energy in Ireland

The achievement of Ireland's renewable energy targets requires an approximate doubling of installed onshore wind capacity by 2020. However, the growing accumulation of new wind energy networks in the landscape is encountering increasingly trenchant social and political resistance. This dilemma suggests an enhanced role for national scale strategic spatial planning to tighten centralised spatial control in order to more precisely steer developments to selected locations. However, to date the Irish government has avoided greater centralised coordination, preferring instead to devolve planning responsibilities to the local scale, which has resulted in highly disjointed and heterogeneous policy settings. Drawing on recent academic interest in the depoliticisation of strategic spatial planning, this paper seeks to interrogate why Ireland has adopted this particular scale of governance for wind energy planning. It is argued that the approach is a deliberate scalar strategy designed to disavow and displace a contentious public policy issue as part of a wider post-political management of dissent. In order to explore the opportunities for more repoliticised and reflexive scalar deliberation in framing national renewable energy technology and strategic policy choices, a structured review of local wind energy strategies is presented. It is concluded that by bringing a focus on the differentiated socio-spatial contexts of particular places, it could serve to trigger much wider political debate around the spatial challenges associated with the roll-out of onshore wind energy networks in highly congested and contested spaces, and the possibilities for alternative energy pathways.

Herding by Mobile Phone: Technology, Social Networks and the “Transformation” of Pastoral Herding in East Africa

Over the last decade, the number of people who rely on mobile phones in sub-Saharan Africa has grown rapidly. The ubiquity of mobile phones in rural livestock communities is thought to “transform” or “revolutionize” the way different social groups interact as they manage social, political and environmental challenges to their livelihood strategies. This research among pastoralists in Kenya examines the political, economic, ecological and socio-spatial contexts in which mobile phones are used and places these contexts within pre-existing resource struggles in order to understand the prevalence of mobile phone use among pastoralists. Results indicate that, while the use of mobile phones for herding is widespread, the extent and efficacy of information sharing is strongly influenced by pre-existing social struggles to gain access to prohibited grazing locations.

Après le deluge: the UK winter storms of 2013–14

Après le deluge: the <scp>UK</scp> winter storms of 2013–14

A framework for ‘City Prosperity Index’: Linking indicators, analysis and policy

This paper argues for a more robust and flexible framework to develop the ‘City Prosperity Index’ (CPI), one which is able to connect indicators and analytical intelligence with the policy needs of urban planners and government strategists. The adoption of a more progressive and balanced agenda of ‘people-centred’ urban prosperity in the UN-Habitat's newly developed CPI has already led to a more holistic approach to integrating productivity, infrastructure, quality of life, equity and social inclusion, and environmental sustainability into a coherent framework. Building on this international agenda, there is still scope to critically revise and improve the conceptual and methodological framework of the CPI, probably in an incremental manner, to make it a more tailored policy instrument that can truly address the different sets of challenges faced by cities in different regions under different socio-spatial contexts to achieve sustainable prosperity.

The Mobility and/or Fixity of Urban and Planning Policies – The Role of Divergent Urban Planning Cultures

Cities and regions are increasingly interconnected on a global scale. In the process of the making of cities and regions policy actors increasingly rely on globally flowing and very mobile urban policy models, which have been originally developed in different socio-spatial contexts. Simultaneously the search for these policies and their implementation is refracted by local/regional factors, which are relatively fixed as they are rooted in historically produced planning cultures. In this conceptual paper governance change is discussed through looking at the interplay between fixity and motion in urban development. For this purpose approaches to planning cultures and policy mobilities are related to each other theoretically.

“Crack Ends it all?” A Study of the Interrelations between Crack Cocaine, Social Environments, Social Relations, Crime, and Homicide among Poor, Young Men in Urban Brazil

In this article, actor network theory is used to explore the consumption of crack cocaine in street settings. The article is based on multiple periods of fieldwork over several years among young men in Salvador, Brazil. The contribution of the article is three-fold. First, it explores how two different socio-spatial contexts — the poor favela communities and the street settings located in a middle-class neighborhood — mediate and are mediated by crack use. Second, it examines how social relations are reconfigured, in the eyes of the users, after the arrival of the drug. Third, based on the users' accounts, it examines the causality between crack use, street crime, and homicide often emphasized in public discourse and medical research. By focusing on the complex processes in which crack use, street crime and homicides are embedded, the article problematizes such causalities and demonstrates the numerous actants involved, such as legal income-generating possibilities and public safety for crack consumers in the favelas and on the streets.

“Any Advice is Welcome Isn't it?”: Neoliberal Parenting Education, Local Mothering Cultures, and Social Class

Geographers have shown considerable interest in neoliberal educational restructuring as states across the Global North have sought to respond to the challenges of economic change through the development of a skilled population. Existing research provides a wide-ranging analysis of the ways neoliberal states seek to shape individual citizens through their own learning. Greater attention now needs to be paid to new and developing ways in which they seek to influence the context in which future citizen-workers are raised. This paper focuses on parenting education which is growing across OECD countries. Social science critiques suggest that parenting classes are part of a professionalisation of parenting which has sought to impose middle-class mores on working-class parents, at the same time as parenting has been unwarrantedly cast as a context-free skill. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative data to explore the attitudes of parents of different social class positions to parenting education, tracing the ways these emerge in and through particular sociospatial contexts. The paper reveals the importance of local class-based cultures of mothering in influencing both the attitudes of individual mothers to parenting classes, and the success of neoliberal policy implementation in diverse socioeconomic neighbourhoods. In conclusion the paper emphasises: The importance of geographical research into newly emerging forms of education; the value of engaging with the subjects of neoliberal education policy because their attitudes influence its implementation in practice; and the need to set educational provision in its wider geographical context, as this can shape the success of policies delivered in and through educational institutions.

Using indicators to assess sustainable tourism development: a review

The aim of this paper is to examine the role of indicators in the transition to sustainability in tourism development and planning, identifying their main characteristics and summarising the challenges posed by their use in tourism development and in the research field. Indicators today constitute significant elements in sustainability programmes, but their use has been hampered by technical and conceptual difficulties. Furthermore, given that specific socio-spatial contexts and scales are highly influential in their application in the field, there is a need to identify the nature and characteristics of these indicators of sustainable tourism. After the in-depth development of a theoretical and phenomenological framework for indicators in tourism sector based on literature review, some interesting findings were identified. Indicators of sustainability have been widely adopted in tourism planning and management, and the indicator type (set or index) is selected depending on the situation under analysis and the purpose underpinning the study. In general, a set of indicators may prove more useful and accurate for assessing sustainability in one tourism destination, while an index may be better suited for comparing different spatial units. However, indicator effectiveness to achieve the ideals of sustainable tourism development is affected by the ambiguity in the definition of the concept of sustainable tourism and problems associated with data availability and baseline knowledge. The main challenge is to overcome strategic guidelines and political and theoretical proposals of indicators and achieve practical applications for the sustainable development of tourism. It is in this regard that innovations and knowledge transfer have been stressed, albeit that the nature of this knowledge remains the key.

Geographical narratives of social capital

This paper calls for a re-engagement by geographers with the concept of social capital as a vehicle for framing narratives about socio-economic processes in context. Social capital theory is reviewed to illustrate how the desire for simplicity and parsimony in economics results in abstract theories of the social that erase context and reduce space to a static form. Going beyond this critique, a geographical framework is proposed for a revised social capital research agenda to produce social capital narratives grounded in the everyday practices of power, played out in real-world, sociospatial contexts.

Governing Islamic Finance: Territory, Agency, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Financial Geographies

This article examines the governance of Islamic finance in two non-Muslim-majority sites of its expansion, the United States and the United Kingdom. An alternative form of economic rationality is being constructed and practiced across diverse sociospatial contexts to produce what we term cosmopolitan financial geographies. Building from recent debates about territoriality, embeddedness, and relationality in economic geography, we respond to calls for a more complex treatment of agency, developing the concept of cosmopolitan legalities to capture the dynamic multiterritorial, relational governance of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) that melds Western and Islamic financial rules and practices through the embodied religious authority of Shari'a scholars. These complex legalities demonstrate the significance of postcolonial and religious sociospatial contexts in the formation of financial markets suggestive of an evolving postcolonial political economy of “south-driven” alliances in a financial landscape dominated by neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities. The development of IBF has at the same time prompted regulatory shifts in the United States and United Kingdom, demonstrating the ongoing coconstitution of Islamic and interest-based financial markets.

Drugs, Violence, Fear, and Death: The Necro- and Narco-Geographies of Contemporary Urban Space

This study considers the ways that narcotics, violence, and death affect contemporary urban space. Though geographers have long investigated patterns of drug use and death in cities, few have analyzed how drugs and homicide-with the capabilities to alter both bodies and space—produce change and profoundly influence urban sociospatial contexts. By unpacking multiple narratives of daily violence and drug use from the favela community of Pirambu in Fortaleza, Brazil, the need is shown for nuanced spatial analytics that treat the relationships between narcotics, homicide, and fear, and account for their roles in shaping everyday urban landscapes. Important for understanding the interconnected spatial relationships between past and present (and future) events, necro- and narco-geographies also shed light on the ways that people encounter and experience space in a growing number of urban contexts worldwide.

Challenges for spatially oriented entrepreneurship research

During the past two decades, interdisciplinary oriented entrepreneurship research focused increasingly on spatial aspects of entrepreneurial activities and support policies. This paper takes stock of central themes in entrepreneurship research at and across different geographic scales, the preferred sources of data and information as well as methodological approaches. It sets out to discuss the shifting interest of research over time and to sketch out theoretical and methodological challenges for further research. This paper is based on a review of 18 international journals in small business and entrepreneurship research, economic geography, regional economics and neighbouring sciences for the period 1990–2007. Altogether, 348 relevant articles were identified, read and classified. The analysis reveals that the entrepreneur's socio-spatial contexts in which they operate on a daily basis are still absent from much of the entrepreneurship debate. We suggest intensifying research efforts on the linkage between entrepreneurial activities and localities in order to reach a better understanding of the everydayness of entrepreneurship.

Urban Policy Mobilities and Global Circuits of Knowledge: Toward a Research Agenda

This article proposes an agenda for research into the spatial, social, and relational character of globally circulating urban policies, policy models, and policy knowledge. It draws on geographical political economy literatures that analyze particular social processes in terms of wider sociospatial contexts, in part by maintaining a focus on the dialectics of fixity and flow. The article combines this perspective with poststructuralist arguments about the analytical benefits of close studies of the embodied practices, representations, and expertise through which policy knowledge is mobilized. I suggest that the notion of mobilities offers a useful rubric under which to operationalize this approach to the “local globalness” of urban policy transfer. The utility of this research approach is illustrated by the example of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a city that is frequently referenced by policymakers elsewhere as they look for “hot” policy ideas. The case also indicates that there is much research yet to be done on the character and implications of interurban policy transfer. Specifically, I argue that, while maintaining a focus on wider forces, studies of urban policy mobilities must take seriously the role that apparently banal activities of individual policy transfer agents play in the travels of policy models and must also engage in fine-grained qualitative studies of how policies are carried from place to place, learned in specific settings, and changed as they move. The final section offers theoretical and methodological questions and considerations that can frame future research into how, why, and with what consequences urban policies are mobilized globally.

Trust and local knowledge production: Inter-organisational collaborations in the Sønderborg region, Denmark

Geografisk Tidsskrift Danish Journal of Geography 111(1):27–41, 2011 In the knowledge based economy, knowledge production has become increasingly important for the competitiveness of firms, cities and regions and as an explanatory factor of spatial economic dynamics. In an immense amount of literature in economic geography, sociology and economics it has been argued that knowledge production often takes place in inter-organisational collaborations, and that trust is an important prerequisite for such collaboration to succeed. The concept of trust, however, remains often blurred and vaguely defined in much of the literature: it often only appears as an asset, an instrument or an input in economic relations. The paper broaden the understanding of trust in local knowledge production by suggesting an approach to trust as an inter-persona/feeling to be analysed on three different but interrelated scales depending on the socio-spatial contexts of the actors. The approach avoids a reification of inter-organisational relations as the place for knowledge production but allows an analysis of trust to move between micro-, meso- and macro scales seeing trust as an inter-personal feeling. The conclusion is that trust in diverse socio-spatial contexts takes on different forms at different scales. This is illustrated by a case study of knowledge production in inter-organisational collaborations in the Sønderborg region. Denmark.

Globalization, Frontier Masculinities and Violence: Booze, Blokes and Brawls

Over the last two decades, two new trajectories have taken hold in criminology—the study of masculinity and crime, after a century of neglect, and the geography of crime. This article brings both those fields together to analyse the impact of globalization in the resources sector on frontier cultures of violence. This paper approaches this issue through a case study of frontier masculinities and violence in communities at the forefront of generating resource extraction for global economies. This paper argues that the high rates of violence among men living in work camps in these socio-spatial contexts cannot simply be understood as individualized expressions of psycho-pathological deficit or social disorganization. Explanations for these patterns of violence must also consider a number of key subterranean convergences between globalizing processes and the social dynamics of male-on-male violence in such settings.

An Auto-Ethnographic Perspective on Academic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities.

Executive Overview This paper employs a qualitative method to analyze a successful spin-off from a university's humanities department. We offer insight into (a) how sociospatial contexts may be structured to better evaluate the entrepreneurial facilitation process and (b) why academic entrepreneurship in the social sciences and humanities may differ from that in the hard sciences. Our findings illustrate the importance of bridging innovation using twin skills to balance research and commercial goals, and the need for codifying knowledge capacities and creating new or changing existing institutional structures to legitimize and facilitate entrepreneurial activity. The research also demonstrates the great value of auto-ethnographic techniques to bring fresh insight to the study of entrepreneurship. Directions for future research are offered.

An Auto-Ethnographic Perspective on Academic Entrepreneurship: Implications for Research in the Social Sciences and Humanities

This paper employs a qualitative method to analyze a successful spin-off from a university's humanities department. We offer insight into (a) how sociospatial contexts may be structured to better evaluate the entrepreneurial facilitation process and (b) why academic entrepreneurship in the social sciences and humanities may differ from that in the hard sciences. Our findings illustrate the importance of bridging innovation using twin skills to balance research and commercial goals, and the need for codifying knowledge capacities and creating new or changing existing institutional structures to legitimize and facilitate entrepreneurial activity. The research also demonstrates the great value of auto-ethnographic techniques to bring fresh insight to the study of entrepreneurship. Directions for future research are offered.

Los tipos de iniciativas empresariales de los inmigrantes en las ciudades de Barcelona, Madrid y Valencia

The principal aim of this article is to present a qualitative typology of the profiles of immigrant entrepreneurs from non-European Union countries living in Spain, as well as the characteristics of their businesses. The intention is to illustrate typologically the characteristics and the potential of businesses run by immigrants. This analysis is based on a study called «El empresariado inmigrante en Espana» (Immigrant Businesses in Spain) (Sole, Parella y Cavalcanti, 2007), financed by the La Caixa Foundation. It looks at three specific sociospatial contexts where there is a higher concentration of foreign people: Barcelona, Madrid and Valencia.

Embodied social capital and geographic perspectives: performing the habitus

This paper reopens debates of geographic theorizations and conceptualizations of social capital. I argue that human geographers have tended to underplay the analytic value of social capital, by equating the concept with dominant policy interpretations. It is contended that geographers could more explicitly contribute to pervasive critical social science accounts. With this in mind, an embodied perspective of social capital is constructed. This synthesizes Bourdieu's capitals and performative theorizations of identity, to progress the concept of social capital in four key ways. First, this theorization more fully reconnects embodied differences to broader socio-economic processes. Second, an exploration of how embodied social differences can emerge directly from the political-economy and/or via broader operations of power is facilitated. Third, a path is charted through the endurance of embodied inequalities and the potential for social transformation. Finally, embodied social capital can advance social science conceptualizations of the spatiality of social capital, by illuminating the importance of broader sociospatial contexts and relations to the embodiment of social capital within individuals.

Personal and environmental correlates of active travel and physical activity in a deprived urban population

BackgroundEnvironmental characteristics may be associated with patterns of physical activity in general or with particular types of physical activity such as active travel (walking or cycling for transport). However, most studies in this field have been conducted in North America and Australia, and hypotheses about putative correlates should be tested in a wider range of sociospatial contexts. We therefore examined the contribution of putative personal and environmental correlates of active travel and overall physical activity in deprived urban neighbourhoods in Glasgow, Scotland as part of the baseline for a longitudinal study of the effects of opening a new urban motorway (freeway).MethodsWe conducted a postal survey of a random sample of residents (n = 1322), collecting data on socioeconomic status, perceptions of the local environment, travel behaviour, physical activity and general health and wellbeing using a new 14-item neighbourhood rating scale, a travel diary, the short form of the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and the SF-8. We analysed the correlates of active travel and overall physical activity using multivariate logistic regression, first building models using personal (individual and household) explanatory variables and then adding environmental variables.ResultsActive travel was associated with being younger, living in owner-occupied accommodation, not having to travel a long distance to work and not having access to a car, whereas overall physical activity was associated with living in social rented accommodation and not being overweight. After adjusting for personal characteristics, neither perceptions of the local environment nor the objective proximity of respondents' homes to motorway or major road infrastructure explained much of the variance in active travel or overall physical activity, although we did identify a significant positive association between active travel and perceived proximity to shops.ConclusionApart from access to local amenities, environmental characteristics may have limited influence on active travel in deprived urban populations characterised by a low level of car ownership, in which people may have less capacity for making discretionary travel choices than the populations studied in most published research on the environmental correlates of physical activity.