Uneven Geographies Research Articles

Mapping an invisible population: the uneven geography of second-home tourism

ABSTRACTSecond-home tourism is a very popular form of tourism in many countries, particularly in the Nordic countries. More than half of the Swedish population have access to second homes. Previous studies have revealed that there is great variation between different second homes. Examples range from rustic Australian shacks, lonely cabins in the Norwegian mountains, spacious Swedish archipelago villas and palatial Russian dachas. Still, second homes are often seen and analysed as a unitary category – a perspective that obscures the considerable heterogeneity within the category as well as spatial differences in the impact of second-home tourism. Using a second-home typology from previous research and data on about 660,000 second homes, we analyse the heterogeneity of second homes by mapping the composition of the Swedish second-home stock. Results show the uneven geography of second-home tourism, revealing significant and sometimes steep differences between peripheral areas and urban hinterlands, tourism hot-spots, and areas in decline. Based on these results, we assert that there is good cause to move away from using second homes as a unitary category. Instead, we argue for viewing second homes as an umbrella concept with dwelling use in focus. This enables a greater sensibility to place and more accurate analyses of the uneven impacts of second-home tourism. The results also give greater insights into the impact of the ‘invisible population’ of second-home owners from a public planning perspective.

A nemzetközi hallgatók tanulmányi célú mobilitásának jellegzetességei Pécs és Debrecen példáján

A felsőoktatás nemzetköziesedése és a nemzetközi hallgatói mobilitás a globális trendekhez hasonlóan Magyarországon is évről évre erősödik, ennek eredményeként ma már több mint 26 ezerre tehető a hazánkban tanuló külföldi hallgatók száma. Az egyes intézmények az elmúlt évtizedekben eltérő nemzetközi vonzáskörzeteket építettek ki, a tanulmányi célú mobilitás személyes motivációi pedig országonként különbözőek: a hallgatók más szempontok alapján választanak egyetemet, továbbá a diplomaszerzés utáni terveik is eltérőek. Jelen tanulmány ezeket a különbségeket tárja fel két hazai intézmény, a Pécsi Tudományegyetem és a Debreceni Egyetem példáján egy kérdőíves felmérés alapján. Az eredmények igazolják a feltevést, hogy a világ különböző térségeiből a két egyetemre érkező hallgatókat más és más motivációk befolyásolják, amikor a nemzetközi hallgatói mobilitásról döntenek.

Geographies of African corruption

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the uneven geographies of corruption on the African continent. Corruption is an entrenched part of African political culture. However, the degree and impacts of corruption vary widely across the continent, ranging from failed states such as Somalia to the region’s bright spot Botswana. This paper first defines corruption and discusses its causes and effects. It then delves into the specifics of African corruption, including its causes and effects such as patrimonial political cultures, clientelism and the role of natural resource exports. Design/methodology/approach The study uses data from Transparency International to assess African corruption empirically and geographically, and links its levels of severity using correlations to gross domestic product per capita, literacy, income inequality and freedom of the media. Findings The major findings are that while the vast majority of the continent’s one billion people live under very corrupt regimes, the impacts of corruption on economic growth are questionable. Few geographic studies of corruption exist. Originality/value The paper’s novelty stems in part from being the first to explore African corruption from a spatial perspective, illustrating its widely varying contexts and consequences.

Spatializing Populism: Taking Politics to the People in Italy

Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are “going to the people” directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the people are to whom populism refers has not received much, if any, empirical examination. After surveying usage of the term populism, three facets behind the rise of Italian populism since 1990 are examined using a geographic perspective. First, the geography of voter turnout and rising abstention is considered to be emblematic of dissatisfaction with existing parties and the expanding pool of nonvoters available for mobilization by populist movements and candidates. Second, the role of the leader as an alternative focal point to the party is shown to be central to such populist movements. Silvio Berlusconi is the primary actor in this account, although other similar figures are identified. Third and finally, the rise of the Internet-based 5 Star Movement and the promise of going to the people without any institutional or geographical mediation is assessed. The Movement's dual identity as having strong roots in some places as a civic organization and a remarkably uneven geography as a protest movement shows how much even it cannot engage with a singular people. When examined closely, the promise of politics without mediation made by populist movements proves beyond realization.

At the roots of urban disasters: Planning and uneven geographies of risk in Kolkata, India

ABSTRACTCities in India are increasingly at risk from natural hazards and the effects of climate change. In Kolkata, urban development on the low-lying periphery has produced uneven geographies of risk, with well-protected suburban settlements surrounded by overcrowded slums with poor infrastructure and a lack of basic services. This article connects proximate conditions of vulnerability in peri-urban Kolkata to their root causes based on a mixed-method case study of the satellite township Salt Lake. I locate roots of risk in four trends in the political economy of urban development—the commodification of hazardous land, inadequate provision of affordable housing and amenities, exclusion of the poor, and interdependence of spatially separated groups. Together these trends constitute a key social dynamic that is shaping development and risk in peri-urban Kolkata, the desire of urban elites to live separately from the poor while depending on their labor. I conclude with a discussion of how these trends are shaping disaster geographies elsewhere in Kolkata and urban India and argue that we must go beyond proximate understandings of urban disaster risk if we are to address its production and proliferation.

Investors and the Geography of the Subprime Housing Crisis

In this article we investigate the connections between home purchases by individual investors and urban space by exploring the spatial dimension of investor lending in Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, during the first decade of the 2000s. Previous research on investors (nonoccupant homebuyers) links them to foreclosures and the wave of real-estate owned purchases following the crisis, but leaves relatively unexamined their connection to subprime lending and the housing bubble, particularly the way that the crisis occurred unevenly in cities. We find that investor lending in Chicago increased during the housing boom and that subprime mortgages played a sizable role in overall levels of investor lending. We also show that there were geographically distinct submarkets for prime and subprime investor loans, with subprime investor loans significantly clustered in low-income, majority Black neighborhoods. Our analysis reveals that racial segmentation in the housing market and different types of credit helped produce an uneven geography of investor lending in the years before the housing crisis.

Theorizing Mobility Transitions

Despite a surge of multidisciplinary interest in transition studies on low-carbon mobilities, there has been little evaluation of the current state of the field, and the contributions of different approaches such as the multi-level perspective (MLP), theories of practice, or the new mobilities paradigm. As a step in this direction, this contribution brings together scholars representing different theoretical perspectives and disciplinary fields in order to discuss processes and uneven geographies of mobility transitions as they are currently theorized. First, we reflect upon the role of geographers and other social scientists in envisioning, enabling, and criticizing mobility transitions. Second, we discuss how different theoretical approaches can develop mobility transitions scholarship. Finally, we highlight emerging issues in mobility transitions research.

“Playing the away game”: AFRICOM in the Sahara-Sahel

This article presents evidence to revise hypotheses of how biopolitical strategies are deployed in contemporary global security regimes, and with what effects. It is based on research into the US military's Africa Command (AFRICOM). Elaborating on two concepts that Michel Foucault hypothesized in his Security, Territory, Population lectures –the “people” and the “milieu” –I argue that AFRICOM's strategy is informed by biopolitical rationalities, but that this does not necessarily situate African populations as either part of a population to secure or as a threat to that population. Instead, I suggest that (unlike in the urban and national contexts that Foucault analyzed) biopolitical security strategies at the global scale are characterized by varying degrees of distance between the way(s) of life they aim to defend and what Foucault termed the “field of intervention” or “milieu” that they target. This hypothesis, and its elaboration through the case of AFRICOM, contributes to efforts to historicize and spatialize accounts of contemporary biopolitics. Specifically, it suggests that we can better understand the production of very uneven geographies of security and insecurity by attending to the relationships between the ways of life being secured and the (potentially distant) material contexts situated as relevant “fields of intervention”.

‘Three raindrops and some dust’: combining archival and GIS analysis to map the spatial distribution of the impact of the Federation Drought of 1895–1903 in rural New South Wales

Stories abound about the devastating effects of Australia's Federation Drought during the early years of the twentieth century. The aim of this paper is to enhance understanding of what is widely regarded as one of the worst droughts on record in Australia by analysing its differentiated spatial impacts across rural New South Wales (NSW). Newspaper articles from the period are first used to provide a spatial disaggregation that suggests varying impacts of the drought by region. In many instances these articles also present a more human narrative of the challenges for those on the land. The paper then investigates the spatial differences further using archival and quantitative methods. First, county-level data on wheat production from the NSW Statistical Register have been assembled. These data facilitated the assessment of the spatial impact of the drought by generating a drought index for each of the forty-three counties, from which a contour map has been produced. Second, statistical information has been collected from the Annual Reports of the NSW Railway Commissioners which recorded wheat cargoes across the state's inland regional rail network. This in turn enabled assessment of the spatial impact of the drought by means of a second contour map based on ninety-one railway stations. In combination, these methods provide a richer picture, and a more detailed and precise understanding of the uneven geography of the Federation Drought of 1895–1903.

Naturalist Smellscapes and Environmental Justice

AbstractThis essay considers naturalist and neonaturalist deployments of smell as a means of mapping uneven and potentially toxic atmospheres in the contexts of Progressive Era urbanization and twentieth-century environmental “slow violence.” After showing how the description of noxious “smellscapes” structures Norris’s Vandover and the Brute (1914), I move on to consider the use of smell in key scenes in the writings of Ann Petry and Helena Viramontes. While environmental justice novels extend Norris’s interest in connections between smell, health, and stratified air, they also explore how these issues intersect with racially uneven geographies in the twentieth century.

Economic renewal through devolution? Tax reform and the uneven geographies of the economic dividend

The economic governance of the UK is currently in flux with various devolution agreements being negotiated across the country. This article examines the changing political economy of the UK enforced by Wave 1 City Deals, to analyse the claims made by devolution proponents that there is an ‘economic dividend’ to devolution. The argument is made that scant evidence exists to suggest that these reforms respond to the pathologies of the UK economy. Instead, the Northern Powerhouse discourse serves to disguise the implementation of a tax and investment settlement which regressively concentrates taxation revenue in the more affluent parts of the country. These reforms though are a political expression of a certain understanding of wealth creation which privileges low tax taxation, inter-territorial competition to promote it and a belief in the major UK cities to drive the economic recovery. It is a strategy likely to produce very uneven geographies of growth which will exacerbate uneven development; ironically so given the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ rhetoric through which it was reasoned.

The Eurozone Crisis and Emerging‐Market Expansion: Capital Switching and the Uneven Geographies of Spanish Urbanization

AbstractThe theory of capitalist urbanization posits that the built form serves as a crucial sink through which overaccumulated capital is ‘switched' from industrial production into long‐term investment in urban infrastructure. Since Harvey's (1978) deployment of the theory, researchers have attempted to empirically substantiate the switching thesis with limited success. Christophers (2011) revisited the debate with new data and methods to support the claim that significant investment had switched into the built environment at the onset of the 2007/08 financial crisis. However, Christophers' study overlooks how crises are also geographically displaced. This article analyses Spanish trade data for the years 1993 to 2013, the years prior and subsequent to the housing‐induced economic crisis (1997 to 2006). Two studies are undertaken. The first replicates Christophers' methodology to assess how and to what extent a sectoral switch into property investment occurred in Spain between 1997 and 2006. The second modifies the methodology to investigate the extent to which overaccumulated capital in Spain has been geographically displaced through investment in the Moroccan building industry since 2006. These approaches situate uneven development (geographical switching) and turnover time (sectoral switching) as the twin dynamics through which capitalist urbanization is spatio‐temporally fixed.

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

AbstractThis paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.

Postcode Lottery for Europe’s Undocumented Children

This article explores the competing policy imperatives within and between tiers of government and policy makers’ perceptions of the relative “deservingness” of undocumented children, which contribute to an uneven geography of entitlements to public services across the European Union. While scholars have contrasted the formal exclusion of undocumented migrants with their informal inclusion, the article explores the tension between formal exclusion and formal inclusion: where the state, through granting legal entitlements to services, contradicts the logic of its own enforcement paradigm. The analysis presents the findings of a comprehensive mapping of entitlements to health care and education for undocumented children across the European Union’s 28 member states and draws on interviews with policy makers across 14 member states to explore the justification for entitlements granted at national and substate levels. It finds that competing policy imperatives are most acute in relation to children where the logic of immigration control faces competing social and humanitarian imperatives within the national administration and in regional and municipal tiers of government. That tension reflects the social construction of undocumented children as both “illegal” and vulnerable, negative perceptions among policy makers of the deservingness of undocumented migrants countered, to a degree, by positive perceptions of the deservingness of children.

Rationalising and resisting neoliberalism: The uneven geography of costs

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between public policy, geography and accounting in the context of an ongoing program of neoliberal restructuring. We present a case study of the proposed privatisation of two prisons in New South Wales, Australia, including the subsequent public debate and the finalisation of the policy, which together covers the period 2008–2010. The privatisations were justified by the New South Wales government through the use of accounting technologies and discourses which purported to demonstrate that a model of private delivery would be more cost effective than continued reliance on public ownership. Yet, despite the identical accounting rationales given by the government and the Department of Corrective Services for the privatisation of each prison, the policy outcome was to privatise only one of the prisons. We examine the resistance strategies employed by the various union and community groups opposed to the privatisations and find that they differed markedly for each prison. Quite different discourses of costs were mobilised to counter the proposed neoliberal reforms: one was based in orthodox accounting discourse, and the other in a spatially grounded discourse of costs to the community. We therefore argue that spatial factors played a crucial role in the discussion. This contributes to a potentially rich, but as yet under-examined, area of research on the relationship between geography and accounting, and of accounting’s contribution to the distinct spatiality of neoliberalism.

The landscape of cultural geography: ideologies lost

This piece reflects on the contemporary resonances, value and legacy of Cosgrove and Jackson's () Area paper entitled ‘New directions in cultural geography’ (Area, 19, 95–101). It argues that much scholarship in today's cultural geography (its innovations and interventions), were inspired by Cosgrove and Jackson's call. These myriad collaborations and experimentation in formats include research outputs engaged in forms of poetry, art, theatre, dance, music performances, exhibitions, curating and film‐making (to name just a few) to be included as tools for the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge. There has been an exponential expansion in cultural geography's vocabularies, dimensions of ‘fields of vision’ and the grammars through which these are narrated. Often, however, the values that underpin these new trajectories are also borne out of an academy ideologically tethered to neo‐liberal values. The university thus risks becoming a space where a moral commitment to principles that challenge injustice and uneven geographies within and outside the academy are thwarted; and thus becomes the absolute antithesis of Cosgrove and Jackson's vision for truly good scholarship.

Conveyor-Belt Justice: Precarity, Access to Justice, and Uneven Geographies of Legal Aid in UK Asylum Appeals

Ongoing government funding cuts to British legal aid have resulted in the formation of legal deserts and uneven geographies of access to advice and legal representation. Asylum seekers, particularly those subjected to no-choice dispersal throughout the UK for housing, are enduring the impact of these cuts directly. This paper explores the spatial and legal marginalisation of asylum seekers, drawing upon the findings of a three-year study of the asylum appeals process. Already precarious, we analyse the manifold spatial marginalisation of dispersed asylum seekers from sources of legal advice and representation. We identify the frames of luck, uncertainty and dislocation as ways to further a spatially cognisant understanding of precarity, alongside identifying strategies employed to counter precarious positionalities.

Using Location-Based Social Media to Chart the Patterns of People Moving between Cities: The Case of Weibo-Users in the Yangtze River Delta

Urban-geographical research using location-based social media (LBSM) has itself been characterized by uneven geographies in that most studies deal with Europe and North America. This implies a relative dearth of studies focusing on countries such as China, and this in spite of the country having the largest number of Internet users in the world. This paper proposes to address this lacuna by showing the research potential of LBSM services associated with Weibo, by far the most popular online social microblogging and networking service in China. To this end, we map inter-city connections within the Yangtze River Delta based on three million individuals’ space-time footprints derived from Weibo. Empirical results reveal that the inter-city connections derived from Weibo present both common and specific spatial patterns associated with inter-city travel. We find that a small percentage of cities and city-dyads constitute the backbone of this inter-city network. The dominant direction of individual flows tends to be from primary cities to sub-primary cities, and from peripheral cities to primary cities. In addition, city-dyad connectivities do not strictly follow cities’ positions in terms of their centralities in the hierarchical distribution. Furthermore, the effects of administrative boundaries and cities’ administrative level are significant. We benchmark these insights by re-examining our findings against the backdrop of polycentric developments in the Yangtze River Delta, which confirms the potential usefulness of LBSM data for analyzing urban-geographical patterns.

The neo-liberalization of strategic spatial planning and the overproduction of development in Celtic Tiger Ireland

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that the role of the planning system in the overproduction of development during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger needs to be analysed as instructive of contemporary neo-liberal transformations of strategic spatial planning. Leaning on a Foucauldian governmentality perspective, the genealogy of modern Irish planning practice is explored to elucidate how neo-liberal rationalities became embedded in institutional norms through consensus-driven partnership governance. The central premise is that the turn to ‘strategic spatial planning’, particularly with the publication of the National Spatial Strategy in 2002, was usefully exploited to mask the spatial politics of the ever-increasing need for the state to facilitate capital switching into built environment formation in order to maintain conditions of high economic growth. Using the empirical case study of housing development in the ‘Upper Shannon’ region and large-scale commercial development in County Meath, it is argued that this contributed to a destabilization of the planning system and an abandonment of basic planning principles. The paper concludes that, in the context of the new and deeply uneven economic geography of post-crisis Ireland, there is an urgent need for a repoliticized critique of normative interpretations of strategic spatial planning practice in order for more progressive practices to emerge.

The gallery as therapeutic venue: Exploring visitor perceptions in a contemporary art space

Abstract This prospective qualitative study explored the social and psychological impact of an exhibition at a contemporary art gallery. Three focus groups, including eight people aged 45–69, were held following a guided tour of an exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary gallery. The exhibition ‘Uneven Geographies’ featured the work of a variety of international artists focusing upon the politics of globalization through different media including film, installation and photography. Focus group transcripts were analysed using Braun and Clarke’s six-phase model of thematic analysis. Three themes were identified: (1) ‘It’s almost like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle’, (2) Interpreting the message and (3) Dissolving social barriers. Results indicated that the exhibition facilitated sense-making, that art interpretation was used as an educational tool, and attending the gallery promoted social inclusion. These findings confirm the potential of cultural institutions, to promote education, health and wellbeing at individual and societal levels.