Spatial Fixes Research Articles

Recovering from Crisis: The Case of Thailand’s Spatial Fix

Although the Asian economic crisis has been the subject of numerous analyses, the varied and uneven processes by which different Asian countries have recovered from the crisis have received comparatively less attention. This article focuses on the process of recovery in Thailand. While the crisis and recovery both have international dimensions that go beyond individual nation-states, the case of Thailand can be used to analyze some of the forces that are at work in both the national and international contexts. Thailand’s process of recovery can be analyzed by noting tensions and overlaps among different forms of spatial fix—those involving investment in Bangkok’ built environment, those involving the geographic decentralization of investment to lower-cost production sites, and those involving the effort to expand exports. Each of these spatial fixes involves different accumulation strategies and, therefore, political coalitions. This situation suggests the centrality of social struggles over the appropriation of surplus to both crisis and recovery.

David Harvey: A Critical Reader

Notes on Contributors. 1. Troubling Geographies: Derek Gregory (University of British Columbia). 2. Between Deduction and Dialectics: David Harvey on Knowledge: Trevor Barnes (University of British Columbia). 3. David Harvey and Marxism: Alex Callinicos (University of York). 4. Dialectical Materialism: Stranger than Friction: Marcus Doel (University of Wales Swansea). 5. Differences that Matter: Melissa Wright (The Pennsylvania State University). 6. David Harvey on Cities: Sharon Zukin (Brooklyn College, NY). 7. Dialectical Space-Time: Harvey on Space: Eric Sheppard (University of Minnesota). 8. Spatial Fixes, Temporal Fixes, and Spatio-Temporal Fixes: Bob Jessop (Lancaster University). 9. Globalization and Primitive Accumulation: The Contributions of David Harvey's Dialectical Marxism: Nancy Hartsock (University of University of Washington). 10. Towards a New Earth and a New Humanity: Nature, Ontology, Politics: Bruce Braun (University of Minnesota). 11. David Harvey: A Rock In A Hard Place: Nigel Thrift (University of Oxford). 12. Messing with 'the Project': Cindi Katz (Graduate Center of the City University of New York). 13. The Detour of Critical Theory: Noel Castree (University of Manchester). 14. Space as a Key Word: David Harvey (Graduate Center of the City University of New York). David Harvey: List of Publications. Bibliography. Index

Affirmation of territorial identity: A development policy issue

The quests for the (re)affirmation of the identity of places and regions in the era of globalised economy and culture gained momentum on local and regional development research and policy agendas since the early nineties. However, there has been a gap between the pro-identity/development discourse and reality, especially in some rural areas of the peripheral and lagging European regions and countries, such as Portugal, marked by land use anarchy, environmental degradation, loss of cultural authenticity, etc., as well as by the asymmetrical interests and power-relations between local and global development stakeholders. The gap between the pro-identity discourse and reality could be overcome if “territorial identity”, basically an ambiguous and inoperative concept, would be transformed into an analytical category, susceptible to measurement, monitoring and evaluation. It is argued in this paper that territorial identity features can be studied empirically if conceptualised as sets of spatially anchored contents of natural and cultural landscape features (“spatial fixes”) that are associated with activities, relations and meanings within horizontal and vertical networks and systems that determine lifestyle features (“spatial flows”) in a given geographical area. To this end, a new conceptual-methodological framework, the IDENTERRA Model, is proposed. Its application, based on macroscopically established evidence and fieldwork records of the changing identity features, could lay grounds for a greater synergy between the pro-identity quests and their operationalisation in development policies and instruments.

Triangulating the borderless world: geographies of power in the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle

This paper argues that the Indonesia–Malaysia–Singapore Growth Triangle makes manifest the complex geographies of power that subvert efforts to read cross‐border regionalization as a straightforward geographical corollary of ‘globalization’. As such, the region needs to be examined not simply as a complementary transborder assemblage of land, labour and capital, but rather as a palimpsest in which the imagined geographies of cross‐border development and the economic geographies of their uneven spatial fixing on the ground are mediated by complex cultural and political geographies. We seek to unpack these by triangulating how the geographies of capital (including its uneven development and its links to the geo‐economics of intra‐regional competition), land (including post‐colonial relations across the region, the geopolitics of land reclamation and the enclaved landscapes of tourism) and labour (including the divergent itineraries of migrant workers) overlay and complicate one another in the region. By charting these complex triangulations of space and place, we seek to problematize narratives of the Growth Triangle as an exemplary embodiment of the ‘borderless world’.

The Spatial Fix Revisited

AntipodeVolume 36, Issue 3 p. 427-433 The Spatial Fix Revisited Erica Schoenberger, Erica Schoenberger Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USASearch for more papers by this author Erica Schoenberger, Erica Schoenberger Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USASearch for more papers by this author First published: 26 May 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2004.00422.xCitations: 34AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Citing Literature Volume36, Issue3June 2004Pages 427-433 RelatedInformation

Spatial Fix and Spatial Substitutability Practices Among Canada's Largest Office Development Firms

Among agents that reflect and shape urban space, prominent property developers are powerful players. This paper examines the spatial practices of Canada's largest office development firms. These firms constantly explore new frontiers for investment, but at the same time well-established nodes are rigorously maintained and protected. Larger urban areas are preferred locations for investment; yet among them only a few cities attract the vast majority of investment. Once an investment channel is initiated and a threshold is reached, existing assets act as magnets, attracting more investment and strengthening the allure of particular places. Within a particular place (a city or a metropolitan area) the mix of properties held by a firm is likely to change over time. Core properties are considered strategic assets and therefore are retained as long-standing investments; peripheral assets have to meet corporate requirements and are thus subject to trade and replacement. Findings confirm the key position of Toronto within the Canadian urban system but also indicate that the scale of property investment does not fully correlate with urban hierarchy. On the intraurban scale, the framework of core-periphery properties helps to explain the spatial patterns of office development and the primary role of traditional nodes.

Reimagining the Scalar Topologies of Cross-border Governance: Eu(ro)regions in the Post-colonial Present

Much recent writing on the restructuring of the nation-state presupposes a functionalist and unidirectional logic defined by capital-centric 'jumping of scales' and 'spatial fixes'. This is the guiding trope underlying much work on emergent forms of supra- as well as sub-national regional governance within the European Union. In this paper, the author takes issue with such formulations as they apply to Europe's cross-border regions, arguing that their territorial dynamics must be embedded within a larger geo-historical framework which takes into account another period of attempted capital-centred transcendence--namely, European overseas imperialism. Drawing on early 20th-century Marxist theories of imperialism, the author juxtaposes the period of state scale restructuring within the Dutch colonial context in Indonesia with contemporary efforts at cross-border institution-building in the Dutch-German-Belgian euregios. In so doing, he sketches the conditions for new forms of post-scalar, trans-sovereign political agency that may be emerging at the interstices of the European interstate system. European state theory is thereby invited to engage with broader post-colonial debates.

Building ‘Euro-Regions’

Against the background of recent debates on state spatial restructuring in the European Union (EU), this article elaborates a critical geographical interpretation of the contemporary debate on locational competitiveness ( Standortdebatte) in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). On the one hand, the current debate on Standort Deutschland (Germany as an investment location) represents the growing instability of the ‘Rhine model’ of capitalism under conditions of accelerating globalization and European integration. In this aspect, the contemporary locational debate has served to justify various forms of deregulation and institutional erosion at each level within the German political system. On the other hand, the contemporary locational debate has also entailed the delineation of new subnational geographical targets for major socio-economic policies. The protection and enhancement of nationally specific competitive advantages within an integrated European economy is increasingly seen to hinge upon the construction of ‘Euro-regions’ associated with territorially specific conditions of production, socio-economic assets and institutional forms at subnational scales.The politics of deregulation in post-unification Germany have therefore been closely intertwined with a broader reterritorialization and re-scaling of state power in which new subnational institutional spaces are being mobilized as the geographical spearheads for renewed economic growth. These arguments are illustrated with reference to two major realms of debate on locational competitiveness in the post-unification era, each of which has entailed a distinctive scalar articulation of neoliberal political agendas: the regionalization of national spatial planning policies ( Raumordnungspolitik); and the debate on ‘competition federalism’ ( Wettbewerbs-föderalismus) and fiscal equalization ( Finanzausgleich) among the German Länder. However, against essentializing interpretations of subnational regions as privileged geographical loci for neocorporatist social compromises or for post-Fordist spatial fixes, contemporary regionalization processes in the FRG are conceptualized here as an institutional medium through which the German state is engaging in strategies of crisis-management.

Organizing the Scale of Labor Regulation in the United States: Service-Sector Activism in the City

Geographical scholarship on the localization of labor regulation, militant particularism in class struggle, and labor-union activity has highlighted the need for workers to contest the scales over which their working lives are produced. Because these analyses have focused on the role of spatial competition and capital mobility in defeating labor struggle, and on the production of scale by manufacturing firms and workers, prescriptions for activism have tended to privilege interregional and international labor solidarity and regulatory mechanisms that might allow labor to operate at the same scale as capital. With a case study of service-sector activism in the US city of Baltimore, I argue for attention to the metropolitan scale of pro-worker labor-market regulation and organizing. By removing local labor activism from a juxtaposition against mobile capital, I add to existing geographies of labor regulation and resistance a theoretical and empirical focus on the importance of ‘spatial fixes' for workers at the local scale, and highlight the processes through which local struggles can be articulated both with each other and with overarching regulation.

Geographic Scale and Grass-Roots Internationalism: The Liverpool Dock Dispute, 1995–1998

In the context of ongoing debates over the effects of “globalization” on organized labor and, specifically, recent experiments in labor internationalism, this paper examines the geography of the Liverpool dock dispute, 1995–98. The dispute has rarely been subject to a serious analysis of its causes and trajectory. This is surprising since it was not only the most protracted industrial dispute in recent British history but also the hub of a relatively novel form of transnational labor organizing: namely, a form of grass-roots internationalism organized largely outside the formal apparatuses of national and international unionism. In the paper I focus on the nature and dynamics of this “grass-roots internationalis” with a view to making two claims that have a wider thematic and theoretical relevance to the study of labor geographies. First, contrary to an emerging new orthodoxy in labor geography (and labor studies more generally), the Liverpool case in fact suggests that the necessity for labor to “up-scale” solidarity and struggle in the 1990s is much overstated. Second, the Liverpool case suggests that international labor organizing is only efficacious when considered in relation to two scales of struggle often thought increasingly irrelevant or ineffectual in a globalizing world: the local and the national. Thus, while those few analysts who have cited the Liverpool dispute, basing their assessments on secondhand knowledge, have held the dockers up as exemplars of a new form of labor internationalism, in this paper I suggest the need for a more complex and contingent appreciation of the multiscalar dynamics of labor struggles. In short, we have not yet reached the stage, even in a globalizing world, where labor’s “spatial fixes” must be preeminently supranational.

Measuring system for in vivo recording of force systems in orthodontic treatment–concept and analysis of accuracy

The aim of our developments is three-dimensional in vivo recording of those orthodontic force systems inducing tooth movements during treatment with fixed appliances. The concept presented here is the first to permit the forces and torques of these statically multiply undetermined systems to be recorded in vivo. For this purpose the force systems transmitted to the teeth from the archwire are isolated from the respective tooth by means of divisible special-design brackets and introduced into a 3D force–torque sensor via a gripping appliance. The sensor is fixed with a purpose-developed device relative to the patient’s dental arch. The patient’s head is positioned relative to the system by means of a bite fork as well as a forehead and chin support. Electrical measurement of the mechanical quantities is carried out by a six-axis force–torque sensor with semiconductor strain gauge elements, an electronical evaluator and a mobile measuring computer (PC). Extensive calibration of the sensor system has shown that the measuring uncertainty of the electrical measuring is less than 2%. Precise spatial fixing of bracket slot and archwire in the therapeutic position is crucial to the measuring accuracy of the system, as even minimum displacements affect the force system to be measured. Movements of the measuring system up to 0.04 mm result from a therapeutic force of 1.5 N. The results of extensive in vitro studies have already demonstrated that the system developed by us is suitable for the specified in vivo measuring function.

From a Geography of Labor to a Labor Geography: Labor's Spatial Fix and theGeography of Capitalism

Mainstream neoclassical economic geography and its Marxist critique have largely failed to incorporate active conceptions of working class people in their explanations of the location of economic activities. Neoclassical approaches tend to conceive of workers simply as factors of location, whereas Marxist approaches primarily focus on how capital structures the economic landscape in its search for profit and frequently relegate labor to the status of “variable capital.” Both approaches present Geographies of Labor. They have not really examined how workers try to make industrial landscapes. In contrast, I argue that workers have an interest in how the economic geography of capitalism is made; consequently, they seek to impose what we might call “labor's spatial fix” and so play an active role in the unevenly developed geography of capitalism. Examining how workers try to develop their own spatial fixes allows us to incorporate a more active sense of workers as geographical agents into understandings of the production of space under capitalism. Recognizing that workers' efforts to create “labor's spatial fix” are significant allows us to theorize how workers attempt to make space as an integral part of their social existence (a Labor Geography) and so to write less capital‐oriented economic geographies.