Spatial Fixes Research Articles

Illuminating radical spatial imaginaries: Counter-mapping urban environmental justice struggles for the city yet to come

Urban greening is not a neutral intervention on the social fabric. Critical analyses of the green city often concentrate on greening's top-down, hegemonic, and large-scale manifestations while neglecting the role of social movements. Aiming to address this gap, we ground discussions of “urbanized nature” within discussions of radical spatial imaginaries, concentrating on their performativity. We propose “counter-mapping” as an engaged methodology, developed with local activists, to illuminate radical green imaginaries. Examining 13 environmental justice struggles in Barcelona, we find place imaginaries to be tied to preserving unique sites, linking historical trauma to fears of future spatial fixes, and projecting inclusive, liveable neighborhoods as ideal futures. This study underscores the importance of comprehending how resistance to the prevailing “green-paradox” manifests in local contexts. Through this exercise, we might help make clearer the axes of common/divergent imaginaries and forge alliances, dialogues, and reflection among local movements and decision makers in Barcelona and beyond.

The platform fix: analyzing mechanisms and contradictions of how digital platforms tackle pending urban-economic challenges

Abstract Digital platforms, such as Google, Amazon, or Instagram, provide a promising spatial fix to urban-economic problems by leveraging technology and data while connecting stakeholders and overcoming spatial barriers to make urban life, consumption, sales, and production more efficient. This article contributes to the debate on digital platforms in economic geography by advancing the emerging lens of the platform fix, adopting a critical standpoint concerning the solutionist viewpoint that presents platforms as a fix for various challenges. The article develops its perspective against the background of 57 semi-structured interviews, 200 conducted standardized questionnaires, and long-term on/offline observations. We aim to provide a platform fix perspective revealing how digital platforms redefine spatial interactions, addressing economic challenges through spatial fixes while becoming established as indispensable infrastructures; however, platform fixes often fail to address underlying issues, leading to platform dependencies and the instrumentalization of actors. Therefore, we suggest a cautious application of urban platforms as solutions and critically evaluate the formation of public–private platform partnerships.

The suburbanization of California’s deserts

ABSTRACT California’s deserts have been a frontier for Los Angeles for well over a century. Their exploitation by the “suburban metropolis” for resources, spatial fixes (externalities, such as undesirable land uses, waste and pollution, and unwanted residents), and investment of surplus capital has resulted in their dramatic growth and change. I argue that the most recent process of the deserts’ colonization is best understood as their suburbanization, a historical and contemporary process of exploitation and assimilation into the suburban metropolis. My goal is to analyze the process of suburbanization of the deserts, focusing both on their changing role as the frontier and spatial fix, and their shifting internal/local processes. I reviewed academic literature on U.S. and LA suburbs to understand the historical, social, and political contexts that produced desert suburbanization. I conducted primary and secondary source research, including interviews with desert residents, and descriptive statistical analysis of the desert suburbanization processes. I found that there are specific suburban processes and characteristics that have been exported to the deserts from LA, including balancing growth and quality of life, spatial and social segregation, and technocratic governance. I conclude that suburbanization of California’s deserts reproduces the same economic, political, social, and environmental inequalities plaguing LA and other U.S. cities.

Smart cities as spatial manifestations of 21st century capitalism

Globally, smart cities attract billions of dollars in investment annually, with related market opportunities forecast to grow year-on-year. The enormous resources poured into their development consist of financial capital, but also natural, human and social resources converted into infrastructure and real estate. The latter act as physical capital storage and sites for the creation of digital products and services expected to generate the highest value added. Smart cities serve as temporary spatial fixes until new and better investments opportunities emerge. Drawing from a comprehensive range of publications on capitalism, this article analyzes smart city developments as typifier of 21st century capital accumulation where the financialization of various capitals is the overarching driver and ecological overshoot and socio-economic undershoot are the main negative consequences. It closely examines six spatial manifestations of the smart city – science parks and smart campuses; innovation districts; smart neighborhoods; city-wide and city-regional smart initiatives; urban platforms; and alternative smart city spaces – as receptacles for the conversion of various capitals. It also considers the influence of different national regimes and institutional contexts on smart city developments. This is used, in the final part, to open a discussion about opportunities to temper the excesses of 21st century capitalism.

Externalisation of Domestic Economic Constraints: China’s Spatial Fix in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan

Growing capital over-accumulation and excessive industrial production have forced policymakers in Beijing to search for profitable outlets overseas. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which focuses on infrastructure connectivity projects across Eurasia, reflects these efforts. This paper theorises BRI as a spatial fix aimed at overcoming the recurring problem of over-accumulation of capital. This paper focuses on BRI-led projects in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. By conducting unstructured interviews with experts and examining projects, this paper found that BRI-led projects in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan not only provided a new geographical space and under-saturated market for Chinese surpluses but also created the demand for Chinese State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) which were facing a decline in returns. This paper also found that through elements such as non-competitive bidding, embedded conditionality, and double preferential loans, China has successfully stimulated overseas demand for its surpluses. The study, therefore, concludes that BRI-led projects in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan serve as a spatial fix for China.

How well does Indian fisheries policy engage with fisheries biology? Exploring the science-policy interface of coastal capture fisheries along the west coast of India.

India ranks among the highest producers of marine capture fisheries globally. Post-independence, India’s marine capture fisheries has transformed from an artisanal to a highly mechanised-motorised enterprise. The last two decades have witnessed a gathering overfishing crisis in Indian marine fisheries. The continued sustainability of existing stocks ideally requires an enabling evidence-based policy that integrates biological knowledge from conventional as well as traditional knowledge systems. We conducted a detailed textual analysis of the last 75 years of Indian fisheries policy, focussing on the west coast, to determine how meaningfully it has been informed by available fish biology. We show that both central and regional policy documents have made occasional attempts to invoke biological and ecological understanding in policy formulation. However, its application has been ad-hoc. For instance, mesh size restrictions vary dramatically between neighbouring states. Also, an annual fishing ban overlaps with the breeding periods of less than 40% of commercially fished species. More worryingly, fisheries policy maintains an unchanging narrative of increasing production despite acknowledging coastal overcapacity. Production potential estimates are regularly upwardly revised to justify further intensification, and the response to overcapacity is to promote spatial fixes while continuing to incentivise coastal fisheries. We conclude that to address overfishing, Indian fisheries policy needs to reimagine fish as elements of interacting biology, with complex life histories, and with functional roles in communities and ecosystems. A scientifically informed fisheries policy is a necessary although not sufficient step towards sustainability, which additionally requires a bridging of knowledge gaps and effective on-ground implementation. Data availability statementNo new empirical data was generated in this study. All policy documents referred to in this study have been listed in supplementary material (Appendix 1).

Searching for a Spatial Fix: Patterns of Inter-metropolitan Collaboration in Transportation Planning and Policy-making

We analyze rationales for inter-metropolitan collaboration and barriers to systematic planning at larger spatial scales. To understand whether multiple planning challenges are generating meaningful forms of collaboration across metro areas, we detail findings from a survey of U.S. Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs). Our results suggest that inter-MPO joint planning activities are widespread and substantive in light of potential barriers to such collaborations. A majority of MPO leaders see inter-metro planning activities as an important priority and effective in the context of their overall mission. However, the survey results suggest that transportation planning at the megaregional scale is at a nascent stage.

Accommodation for profit, not for refugees: Racial capitalism and the logics of Berlin’s refugee accommodation market

In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees. Notably, I reveal the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way in order to revitalize their own fiscal budgets, as well as to put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations. Expounding the ways the building of accommodation as substandard urban housing leads to race-based pursuit of profit, I argue that refugee housing serves as an urban migration fix and is developed within the logic of racial capitalism. This article contributes to attempts to use racial capitalism as a framework to scrutinize urban and migration processes, helping us comprehend the distinctly racial logics of urban and migration governance, and housing precarity.

Capitalist crisis and the geography of the clothing industry

This article aims to analyse how the map of clothing manufacturing has changed since the 2008 financial crash. In doing so I look at global and intra-regional trade statistics before and after 2008. Here, I challenge the long-standing dominance of Global Commodity Chains and Global Value Chains approaches in debates about the geography of the clothing industry. These approaches fail to explain processes beyond regions and firms directly linked to global production networks, like the rise of ‘local sweatshops’ in large cities in core economies and the deindustrialisation caused by the globalisation of production in peripheral countries not linked to these networks. Here, global production networks are considered as one particular way of organising production, or, in Harvey’s terms, a ‘spatial fix’ coexisting with other spatial fixes developed by capital in response to the economic crisis of the 1970s. Rather inspired by recently reanimated debates on uneven development, I address changes in the map of clothing manufacturing by emphasising broader processes of capital accumulation and circulation. More specifically, I look at the effects of the capitalist crisis, the eastward shift in globalisation – evidenced primarily by the rise of Chinese economy – trade tensions, declining labour supply and rising labour costs across Southern and SE Asia on corporate spatial strategies. The emphasis on meso-level processes and connections, therefore, helps address politically important questions about possible future trajectories of garment manufacturing and supply in and beyond global production networks.

Mobilizing ‘impermaculture’: Temporary urban agriculture and the sustainability fix

This paper addresses the alliance between some urban agriculturalists, developers, and the local state in promoting a certain type of ‘green urbanism’ through what we call ‘impermaculture’. Impermaculture is a model of urban agriculture whereby some urban farmers approach their impermanence – the possibility of their operations being replaced by higher value developments – less as a threat to be avoided, as traditionally understood in the literature, and more as an intended modus operandi to which they are committed. We discuss how they use lightweight and portable growing containers, planter beds, greenhouses, and livestock pens to operate within and enhance contemporary regimes of development in global North cities. We identify a spatio-temporal impermanence that stands in contrast to classic understandings of sustainability fixes as either a form of greenwashing or as spatial fixes involving the sinking of capital into construction of a ‘greener’ built environment. In what follows, we develop a conceptual framework that will facilitate these contributions and provide a language for discussing cases of impermaculture in Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, British Columbia. We discuss how urban agriculture is mobilized as part of the sustainability fix in the two cities. We first demonstrate how impermaculture emerges as a means of stabilizing the fix which is always prone to coming apart, or fracturing. We then draw on two examples – goat husbandry in Portland and temporary gardens in Vancouver – to demonstrate how urban agriculturalists are embracing and leveraging impermanence. This ‘impermaculture by design’ not only marks a new form of urban agriculture in the neoliberal city but shores up and temporally rescales the sustainability fix while providing urban agriculture initiatives stability.

From brick-and-mortar to location-less restaurant: The spatial fixing of on-demand food delivery platformization

Location has historically been vital to a restaurant's success. However, in the past decade, on-demand food delivery (ODFD) platforms like Meituan, Deliveroo, and Uber Eats have progressively increased their market shares, recently facilitated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the new circumstances, are restaurants still constrained by conventional locational factors, such as transport accessibility, customer proximity, and industrial agglomeration? How do ODFD platforms impact the geography of restaurants?This paper innovatively offers a comparative analysis of the different spatial distributions of brick-and-mortar and platform-dependent restaurants. Based on the case of Nanjing, China, robust empirical evidence demonstrates how platformization has spatially affected the catering sector. Using data from the most popular Chinese ODFD platform, Meituan, we analyze the following spatial characteristics of the catering sector in the urban core of Nanjing: transport accessibility, density pattern, agglomeration degree, and horizontal and vertical locational patterns. The findings suggest that platform-dependent restaurants have reduced dependence on transport accessibility. Compared with traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants, platform-dependent restaurants are more dispersed spatially, not only horizontally but also vertically. The digital turn in the catering sector is also noticeably associated with the rise of informal restaurants, such as ghost kitchens in vacant high-rise office spaces.

It’s about time: temporal and spatial fixes find vertical farms and local food in the shadow of COVID-19

ABSTRACT This paper investigates what investments in shorter supply chains, especially post-outbreak (COVID), mean in relation to broader agrifood corporatization trends. The paper draws from 25 interviews with individuals connected to large-scale vertical farming operations in the US and Canada, from investors and executives of vertical agriculture firms to managers of restaurants and grocery stores that sourced from capital-intensive indoor farms. The spatial fix literature is used to interrogate this push to pursue local food in COVID’s shadow through capital-intensive vertical agriculture, noting these farms are as much about a time as they are about a place.

Geographical Imagination and Experiences of Violence and Violence Prevention in Post-Soviet Space

Institutional actors in urban areas in Latvia are increasingly concerned about reducing violence on multiple scales and temporalities. Imagining such achievements, however, often too easily focuses on the aesthetics of security and infrastructure in public space that obscure the social causes of violence and effects this has on unequal development and social marginalization. Drawing on fieldwork on practices of domestic violence prevention in three Latvian urban areas during the autumn and winter of 2019, this paper examines how the geographical imagination of where violence resides connects violence prevention and spatial development as projects of European modernisation in post-Soviet space. We identify four spatial fields most often associated with violence: (1) neighbourhoods and infrastructural elements, (2) dark and isolated spaces, (3) spaces associated with intoxication, and (4) private spaces. We analyse the most common individual and institutional strategies for violence prevention in each of these fields, noting the logics of dispossession, surveillance, and connectivity behind them. We show how gendered practices and disciplining are emphasised on an individual level, while spatial fixes to violence in public space often focus on men’s violence against men. All in all, we show how violence prevention figures in imagining living in ‘European’ spatial and institutional infrastructural regimes.

Celebrations, Exaltations and Alpha Lands: Everyday geographies of the far-right

There is a gap in research that considers, and spatializes, the everyday geographies of far-right encounters, socialization, recreation and leisure. While much research considers the end-stages of right-wing radicalisation and focuses on the extreme right (e.g., hate groups, fringe political parties, despotic leaders, specific eruptions and episodes of violence or terror, online rhetoric), the daily processes, moments and spatial configurations in-between the mainstream and extreme are sometimes overlooked. These are crucial to understand, in order to develop a more nuanced and effective language in recognizing, responding to, and combatting right-wing radicalisation.This paper thus addresses the geographical blind spot by spatializing the everyday life of the far-right, through a three-pronged taxonomy. Drawing from ethnographic observations and social media and socio-demographic analyses, the paper argues that three geographies in particular emerge as nodes of far-right formation (attached to specific sites and online/offline): a) spaces of recreation and leisure (“Celebrations”); b) spaces of faith and spirituality (“Exaltations”); and c) spaces of the corporeal (“Alpha Lands”). These spaces intersect, extend across urban, peri-urban and rural terrains, and do not necessarily adhere to established political or territorial borders and boundaries, but rather, can be envisioned as multi-scalar spatial fixes, laden with political possibilities.

Capitalizing on Green Debt

Green bonds represent an increasingly popular way to match “environmental sustainability,” growth, and the aspirations of global financial capital. In this article, we leverage a world-ecology approach to unpack and make sense of green bonds as public/private constructions that shape and subordinate the complex ecologies of territories to the needs of finance and reproduce the global patterns of uneven development and capitalist accumulation. Through the study of recent green bond issuances realized by private companies active in the forestry sector in Brazil, we discuss how green bonds as a “new” form of “green” debt put nature at work and transform the territories and natural elements in the global south into “temporal and spatial fixes” for the needs of global financial capital.

The politics of public–private partnerships: state–capital relations and spatial fixes in Indonesia and the Philippines

ABSTRACT The literature on public–private partnerships (PPPs) often portrays infrastructure construction as a depoliticized and technocratic exercise about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In contrast to these works, we contend the political and economic elites along with their transnational allies – the congruence of state–capital – recycle PPPs in constructing their spatial fixes, guaranteeing profits and passing risks from the private sector bidder onto the public as a whole. We suggest that PPPs lie within the intertwining processes of ‘Development’ and ‘development’, which are articulations of neoliberalism in its latest and most sophisticated iteration. Across different regimes, PPPs’ processes and mechanisms reflect various governance structures and hybrid forms of state–capital relations. Examining Indonesia and the Philippines, we empirically demonstrate how state–capital forces reproduced PPPs to simultaneously accommodate degrees of state intervention and the private sector’s desire for a spatial fix. We illustrate that administrations withinboth countries have sought to rebuild the PPPs as institutions of technocratic fixation while obscuring the political underpinnings of the risk appropriation – transforming the state’s responsibility in infrastructure and foregrounding spatial fixes for capital. The article concludes with a call to unpack the variegated character of PPPs.

On Spatial Fixes and Urban Disease from the Perspective of Modern Marxism

On Spatial Fixes and Urban Disease from the Perspective of Modern Marxism

Labour’s Spatial Fix: State Socialist Hungary in the 1970s

AbstractLabour’s spatial fix has become a key term in labour geography scholarship in recent decades. The concept has been widely used to understand labour’s agency in its own social reproduction in different historical and geographical capitalist social formations. Departing from the position that state socialism was part of global capitalism, this paper applies the concept of labour’s spatial fix to the context of state socialist Hungary. The analysis differentiates between three dimensions of labour’s spatial fix in social reproduction: wage work (with particular attention given to female employment), income from the “second economy” and housing. The interrelatedness of these dimensions of labour’s spatial fix, as well as their different geographies, are shown in an analysis covering Hungary of the 1970s. It is argued that there is a need for more extensive research on how conditions for social reproduction are established in the concept of labour’s spatial fix.

Spatial fixes and switching crises in the times of COVID-19: implications for commodity-producing economies in Latin America

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic is exposing the vulnerabilities of Latin America’s commodity-producing countries and is exacerbating their structurally weak position in global financial capitalism. Due to a high dependency on incomes from commodity exports, a reliance on external finance, and the volatility of exchange rates, the economies of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru are hit particularly hard by the COVID-19 crisis with projections for 2020 predicting economic contractions of up to 14 per cent. By looking through the theoretical prism of critical economic geography, this article argues that in addition to the health and direct economic consequences of the pandemic, these countries will experience so-called switching crises as a result of the constant geographical restructuring of capitalism. As capital had moved into Latin America’s commodity-producing economies to provide spatial fixes to global capitalism’s previous crises by displacing them geographically and temporarily, the fall in commodity prices and the sudden stop to and reversal of capital flows has caused additional burdens in the current crisis. With the resulting debt expansion, the remaining dependency on external finance, and the structural deficiencies in achieving economic diversification, the territorialisation of capitalism’s crisis tendencies in the COVID-19 crisis will disproportionately affect Latin America’s commodity-producing economies.

Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City

According to an increasingly prevalent set of discourses and practices within environmental and development finance, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanization and climate change that threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In this article, we chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. We call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, we examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for overaccumulated Northern capital in the Global South.