Uneven Geographies Research Articles

Towards a study of information geographies: (im)mutable augmentations and a mapping of the geographies of information

Information has always had geography. It is from somewhere; about somewhere; it evolves and is transformed somewhere; it is mediated by networks, infrastructures, and technologies: all of which exist in physical, material places. These geographies of information about places matter because they shape how we are able to find and understand different parts of the world. Places invisible or discounted in representations are invisible in practice to many people. In other words, geographic augmentations are much more than just representations of places: they are part of the place itself; they shape it rather than simply reflect it. This fusing of the spatial and informational augmentations that are immutable means that annotations of place emerge as sites of political contestation: with different groups of people trying to impose different narratives on informational augmentations. This paper therefore explores how information geographies have their own geographic distributions: geographies of access, of participation, and of representation. The paper offers a deliberately broad survey of a range of key platforms that mediate, host, and deliver different types of geographic information. It does so using a combination of existing statistics and bespoke data not previously mapped or analysed. Through this effort, the paper demonstrates that in addition to the geographies of uneven access to contemporary modes of communication, uneven geographies of participation and representation are also evident and in some cases are being amplified rather than alleviated. In other words, the paper comprehensively shows one important facet of contemporary information geographies: that geographic information itself is characterised by a host of uneven geographies. The paper concludes that there are few signs that global informational peripheries are achieving comparable levels of participation or representation with traditional information cores, despite the hopes that the fast‐paced spread of the internet to three billion people might change this pattern.

The Race for Education: Class, White Tone, and Desegregated Schooling in South Africa

AbstractIn the early 1990s, privileged “white” South African public schools began to admit “black” pupils. Drawing on interviews, ethnography, and archival sources related to formerly‐white schools in Durban, this article addresses two main questions: first, why did white parents so enthusiastically vote for schooling desegregation when apartheid was still in place?; and second, why, over time, did intense competition emerge between schools, and become so focused on improving sports results? In addressing these questions this study takes an historical‐geographical approach, paying particular attention to two areas of Durban: the middle‐class central Berea area and the more working‐class areas in Durban's south. This story begins in the 1950s, a period of major schooling expansion and urban segregation, tracing how a hierarchy of white schools developed in relation to the city's uneven geographies of race and class. It is this schooling hierarchy and the way it became contested in the 1990s that is key to understanding the schools' shift from “cooperative desegregation” to “aggressive competition.” More broadly, the article argues that education provides a window into key post‐apartheid tensions – namely between the deracialization of privilege, the continued dividend of whiteness, and efforts to redistribute resources to the poor. Finally, in an age of mass education, it argues that the actions of schools play an important role in shaping raced and classed divisions in society.

Reimagining e-waste circuits: calculation, mobile policies, and the move to urban mining in Global South cities

In this article, I describe how calculative practices of enumeration and visualization mobilized by policy actors to govern the multiple mobilities of e-waste and its re-materialization as value in the informal-recycling economies of Global South cities have resulted in e-waste being recalibrated as an “urban mine.” To properly govern and fully exploit e-waste qua urban mines, policy actors have developed the Best-of-2-Worlds (Bo2W) model. I show that the antecedent of the Bo2W model is the Clean e-Waste Channel implemented in Bangalore, India’s “Cyber City,” which has retroactively been recast as the first successful implementation of the Bo2W model. While policy actors mobilize Bangalore’s success to boost this model and facilitate its mobility to other Global South cities, I conclude by offering a critical assessment of the Bo2W model for the prospects of informal recyclers in Global South cities and the creation of uneven geographies of e-waste toxicity.

The uneven geography of business tourism in South Africa

Business tourism is a vital element of the global tourism economy. Its importance has not, however, been matched by research attention by tourism scholars, including geographers. Against a review of international debates in business tourism scholarship, this paper analyses the changing geography of business tourism in South Africa, one of Africa's most significant destinations for international and domestic business travel. The changing geographical landscape of business tourism is unpacked through a demand-side analysis which is an important gap in existing tourism geographical work, mainly dominated by supply-side studies about the provision of convention centres or conference venues. The results reinforce the special significance of business tourism for tourism development in certain of the country's major urban centres.

The formalization fix? Land titling, land concessions and the politics of spatial transparency in Cambodia

In a widely read paper, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and others propose systematic property rights formalization as a key step in addressing the problems of irresponsible agricultural investment. This paper examines the case of Cambodia, one of a number of countries where systematic land titling and large-scale land concessions have proceeded in parallel in recent years. Cambodia's experience exemplifies the challenges of the ‘formalization fix’ – the proposition that property formalization constitutes a preferable front-line defense against land grabbing – and highlights formalization's uneven geography as an issue that has yet to generate adequate discussion internationally. Three dimensions of Cambodia's less-than-successful formalization fix efforts stand out: (1) the spatial separation of systematic land titling and agribusiness concessions that emerged during the 2000s and has only recently begun to be addressed; (2) the deployment of property formalization as a means of land grabbing, especially when applied selectively and unevenly; and (3) the political arena of efforts to legitimize ‘state land’. The paper questions the formalization fix as a policy solution, and argues for both greater spatial transparency in property formalization efforts throughout the global South, and greater attention to the problem of unmapped state land in general.

The Accuracy of the Core Files for Studying Nonprofit Location

Studies show that the distribution of nonprofits varies considerably across communities. Affluent communities tend to have ample nonprofit resources and highly diverse nonprofit landscapes, whereas low-income communities often lack the variety of nonprofits found within wealthier areas. As a result of these differences, scholars have suggested that geographic unevenness in the presence of nonprofits may lead to extreme inequities and inefficiencies in how nonprofit services are accessed and administered. Although these concerns certainly warrant serious attention, several limitations have been acknowledged with the National Center for Charitable Statistic’s (NCCS) Core Financial Files—which have been the primary data source used to generate findings on geographic dimensions of the nonprofit sector in the United States. This research note examines the accuracy of the information in the Core Files after adjustments for each of these limitations.

1.5°C or 2°C: a conduit’s view from the science-policy interface at COP20 in Lima, Peru

An average global 2°C warming compared to pre-industrial times is commonly understood as the most important target in climate policy negotiations. It is a temperature target indicative of a fiercely debated threshold between what some consider acceptable warming and warming that implies dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system and hence to be avoided. Although this 2°C target has been officially endorsed as scientifically sound and justified in the Copenhagen Report issued by the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009, the large majority of countries (over two-thirds) that have signed and ratified the UNFCCC strongly object to this target as the core of the long-term goal of keeping temperatures below a certain danger level. Instead, they promote a 1.5°C target as a more adequate limit for dangerous interference. At COP16 in Cancun, parties to the convention recognized the need to consider strengthening the long-term global goal in the so-called 2013–2015 Review, given improved scientific knowledge, including the possible adoption of the 1.5°C target. In this perspective piece, I examine the discussions of a structured expert dialogue (SED) between selected Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) authors, myself included, and parties to the convention to assess the adequacy of the long-term goal. I pay particular attention to the uneven geographies and power differentials that lay behind the ongoing political debate regarding an adequate target for protecting ecosystems, food security, and sustainable development.

Disarticulating distribution: Labor segmentation and subcontracting in global logistics

An enduring focus of scholarly work on global production networks (GPNs) is the process of insertion into production networks and the capacity of places to shape their manner of inclusion. Sometimes overlooked are ways in which these insertions are based on an evolving set of exclusions. A disarticulations perspective trains our attention on the mutual interplay between moments of inclusion and exclusion that produce uneven geographies and histories of development, foregrounding place-specific factors and offering a framework for understanding local experimentation. Firms continue to restructure under relentless pressure to improve performance and the concomitant need to experiment, causing firm strategy to shape-shift and re-making relations of inclusion and exclusion. In the distribution function of global supply chains, the prevailing value-creation strategy is downward pressure on the cost of labor, but this perhaps suggests a false sense of stability. Using data gathered in the distribution hub just outside of Chicago, I examine the role of labor market intermediaries in re-negotiating the boundaries of inclusion. This article explores processes of linking and delinking subsets of workers and the differential implications for worker segments and their attachment to the supply chain. Inscribed in the absorption of places and workers into GPNs are ongoing processes of disarticulation, evident in this case through the labor market strategies pursued by local firms and temporary staffing agencies. These processes lay bare the mechanisms that reproduce capital-labor relationships in global supply chains.

Featured Graphic. Mushrooming Jiedaos, Growing Cities: An Alternative Perspective on Urbanizing China

With more than 15 million new urban residents entering its cities every year, China is witnessing one of the greatest socioeconomic and environmental transformations in human history. In addition to these ongoing changes, urbanization in China often involves a significant political dimension, as the government would purposely accord city status to settlements, regardless of their developmental level: Largely rural settlements (eg, Zhen) could be accorded with the city status (eg, Jiedao) overnight by administrative power. Such redesignation is nontrivial as city status often translates into real socioeconomic changes; city status is closely linked to the land-use quota, provision of public services, local governments’ legislature power, as well as residents’ hukou. While socioeconomic and environmental aspects of Chinese cities have been analyzed extensively with aggregated statistics and/or remote sensing data (Deng et al, 2012), little is known about the shifting political geography of Chinese cities: that is, where new city status is being granted. It is this lacuna that our project aims to fill. We focus on the basic building block of a city proper in China: Jiedao (subdistricts). China has three township-level administrative units: Jiedao in the urban area and its counterparts in the rural side (Xiang, townships; and Zhen, towns). The re-designation of city status often involves Zhen and Jiedao: Zhens are considered as ‘next in the pipeline’ for city status and turned into Jiedaos when there is a political and/or economic need. We geocoded the 41 871 township-level units based on the Population Census of China, and estimated the spatial extent of individual units with Voronoi diagrams for the years of 2000 and 2010. The end product is a first map of ‘mushrooming’ Jiedaos in China. The total number of Jiedaos has grown from 5510 to 6923—a 25% increase—during the period 2000–10. Most new cities-proper have been created around major urban regions along the economically more developed eastern coast [eg, Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Shandong Peninsula, and Beijing–Tianjin–Hebei (BTH)]. Other regions with noticeable growth are Central Henan in Central China, as well as the Chengdu–Chongqing corridor in West China. We also mapped out the distribution of Zhens: regions in East and Central China (eg, Shandong and Henan) feature predominantly, revealing the potential for future urban expansion. As city status often translates into real urban growth, we conjecture that the uneven geography of mushrooming Jiedaos would entrench the already huge East–West divide in China.

African Extraction, Indian Ocean Critique

A moral frenzy surrounds Chinese and Indian capital in Africa, particularly in resource and mineral extraction. There are some good reasons for this fear and loathing about “African extraction”—the plundering of Africa and its resources—as the related processes all too often offer few benefits to the peoples and environs involved. In fact, we know little about the uneven processes of extractive accumulation on the ground and their potential for something we might defensibly call “development.” Asian circuits of capital allow us to pry open some verities about African states and processes of social change. As Indian and Chinese circuits of capital, labor, and expertise work through enclaves of extractive accumulation, postcolonial archetypes, like the gatekeeper state, are reconfigured into new forms of secured enclaves. This article considers the possibilities of progressive development in this brave new world of enclaved capitalisms by exploring how Indian and Chinese capital draws from very different Asian legacies in its passage to Africa’s diverse extractive economies. This Asian critique of African extraction fundamentally questions the efficacy of the trinity of extraction, logistics, and finance harnessed to a fantasy of logistical biopower in service of capital. Rather, Asian circuits of capital in Africa call attention to new, uneven geographies of accumulation, accountability, and struggle.

Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam By Bowen Paulle

Toxic Schools: High-Poverty Education in New York and Amsterdam By Bowen Paulle University of Chicago Press, 2013 Reviewed by Ariel H. Bierbaum Bowen Paulle’s Toxic Schools is an often-riveting transatlantic comparative ethnography that focuses on the psychosocial dynamics of high-poverty high schools in New York City and Amsterdam. Paulle, a native New Yorker and US-trained sociologist, is a professor of social and behavioral sciences at the University of Amsterdam. His work builds not only on sociological theory, but also on public health and epidemiological research. Paulle argues that the heightened levels of violence and stress in high- poverty schools and neighborhoods are toxic to the health, well-being, and life trajectory of both students and teachers. His novel approach to toxicity offers rich material and insights for planning scholars and practitioners who work at the intersection of public health, education, and poverty studies. Planning scholars and practitioners understand that access to high-quality education, adequate health care, well-paying jobs, and affordable housing and transportation are the key components of people’s “geographies of opportunity.” While volumes of urban scholarship and policy today aim to build more equitable geographies of opportunity, this work’s focus on the metropolitan or regional scale does not allow for careful interrogation of the everyday reality of living in high-poverty neighborhoods and attending high-poverty schools. Toxic Schools helps fill this gap, bringing to life the uneven geographies of opportunity and raising important questions for our methodological approaches as planning scholars and practitioners that shape the contexts and built environments in which these high-poverty schools persist. Paulle’s narrative is based on six years of ethnographic fieldwork as a full- time high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York City and as a part- time high school teacher in southeast Amsterdam. Both neighborhoods and schools had high concentrations of poor and minority students. According to Paulle, in both locations students and teachers described their schools similarly as “the ghetto” and invoked metaphors of “dumping grounds” and “garbage cans.” Paulle uses his introductory chapter to situate the reader theoretically as well as geographically. For those not already familiar with scholarship in

Regional development and the impact of the public sector in Denmark: employment growth and human capital

This paper analyses the relationships between employment growth, human capital and regional development. To understand the spatial development of employment growth, we distinguish between the public and the private sector. The public sector has a major role in Denmark in the form of a large share of total employment and employment growth across space. We examine in particular the uneven geography of human capital and the relationships between the growth of human capital and total employment growth by Danish municipalities. It is moreover analysed, whether there is a concentration of human capital in the largest city-regions, and how such concentrations contribute to the uneven geography of employment growth. The paper concludes that both the public and private sectors are important regarding employment growth in Danish municipalities. Further, public and private human capital contributes to employment growth, and the public sector contributes, over time, to diminishing the uneven spatial distribution of human capital while the private sector increases the spatial inequality. Moreover, urbanisation has a significant effect on employment growth and human capital formation, both when it comes to the large city regions, and, in general, the distance to city centres.

“Protecting” street children? Urban revitalization and regulation in Lima, Peru

In this article, I develop a critical analysis of the relationship between urban “revitalization” campaigns and the regulation of street children in Lima, Peru. Scholars writing mostly in the Global North have drawn attention to increasingly punitive policies regarding public space. While in many regards Lima’s urban policy is reflective of such larger trends, I consider whether the regulation of street children is as punitive as might be assumed. I am particularly concerned with the role that children’s rights play as another logic structuring urban regulation. I first show how a language of children’s rights has been manipulated to justify the removal of street children from public space, as is most evident through Peru’s Law to Protect Minors from Situations of Begging. However, there is also something more ambiguous occurring. In the second part of this article, I examine the uneven implementation of policy: street children themselves resist and rework policies “on the ground,” and children’s rights frameworks may offer possibilities for rupture of formal regulation. I suggest that these overlapping and competing dynamics sustain an uneven and contingent geography of urban regulation.

Reflexive governance for food security: The example of school feeding in Brazil

In the last decade, the unfolding of a “new food equation” has raised the need to address food security more structurally and systemically. This paper aims to progress this debate through a focus on Brazil, where food security policies are embedded into a “reflexive governance” framework that facilitates learning, adaptation and collaboration between actors at different scales and stages of the food system. Based on key legislation and policy documents, the analysis of school feeding as an example of food security intervention context provides two insights. First, it highlights the importance of broadening participation in the governance system to actors who have been neglected by discourses on food security, with their narrow focus on the two ends of the food system. Second, it emphasizes the need to foster social learning not just across governance scales (vertically) but also between communities (horizontally) to ensure that alternative practices coalesce into a more coherent platform that can address an increasingly uneven geography of food security.

Securitisation and the mega‐event: an editorial introduction

I n August 2011 organisers of the London 2012 Olympics staged rehearsals for the Opening Ceremony due to commence exactly one year hence. Meanwhile, other parts of the city were experiencing rioting and looting on a scale not seen for 30 years. Whilst these two events were largely distinct, their simultaneous occurrence underscored an important point. For all the attention to the enclosure, artificial urbanism and contrived spaces that hosting sporting mega events create, they are accommodated in complex and often contested urban settings. Two years later, the links between the politics of the street and the sporting mega-event spectacle became cemented elsewhere. Echoing protests against Mexico City’s profligate Olympic spending at a time of austerity in 1968, June 2013 saw more than a million people take to the streets across 100 Brazilian cities. Although activist causes were manifold they unmistakably coalesced around the social and pecuniary impacts of Brazil’s staging of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. As mega-event spectacles, replete with promises of ‘regeneration’ and ‘legacy’, continue to encroach further into the urban realm, so different levels of action, activism, governance and policy necessarily become drawn together. For sporting mega-events, it is in the realm of security practice where the heat generated by internationally focused agendas abrading with local practices, processes and priorities is greatest. Here, the promise of stringent security guarantees is a precondition for hosts who operate under a constant risk of catastrophic reputational damage should they not be met. Of course, it is rare that, in such a broad sense, ‘security’ can ever be guaranteed and, for planners, its pursuit results in dwindling levels of acceptable risk. When applied to the complex, dynamic and unpredictable realm of the global city, the contemporary stage for sporting mega events, such promises are even harder to keep. The result is uneasy coalitions of international, national, regional and local security practice; a merger of civil, military and criminal justice techniques and technologies of social control; and a proliferation of security priorities. Yet whilst some of these measures may be exceptional for the cities that host them, they often represent very familiar elements of mega-event security programmes.

Uneven Geographies of User-Generated Information: Patterns of Increasing Informational Poverty

Geographies of codified knowledge have always been characterized by stark core–periphery patterns, with some parts of the world at the center of global voice and representation and many others invisible or unheard. Many have pointed to the potential for radical change, however, as digital divides are bridged and 2.5 billion people are now online. With a focus on Wikipedia, which is one of the world's most visible, most used, and most powerful repositories of user-generated content, we investigate whether we are now seeing fundamentally different patterns of knowledge production. Even though Wikipedia consists of a massive cloud of geographic information about millions of events and places around the globe put together by millions of hours of human labor, the encyclopedia remains characterized by uneven and clustered geographies: There is simply not a lot of content about much of the world. The article then moves to describe the factors that explain these patterns, showing that although just a few conditions can explain much of the variance in geographies of information, some parts of the world remain well below their expected values. These findings indicate that better connectivity is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the presence of volunteered geographic information about a place. We conclude by discussing the remaining social, economic, political, regulatory, and infrastructural barriers that continue to disadvantage many of the world's informational peripheries. The article ultimately shows that, despite many hopes that a democratization of connectivity will spur a concomitant democratization of information production, Internet connectivity is not a panacea and can only ever be one part of a broader strategy to deepen the informational layers of places.

The uneven geographies of the Olympic carceral: from exceptionalism to normalisation

In recent years a vast academic literature has developed around the concept of ‘militarising’ or ‘securitising’ cities and in particular the policy responses to the occurrence of crime, fear of crime and the evaluation of cities as strategic sites for a spectrum of large‐scale increasingly destructive perturbations in everyday urban life, such as riots, protest and acts of terrorism. Increasingly policy interventions in response to such threats have embodied characteristics of the ‘carceral archipelago’ where incarceration techniques and strategies are punitively deployed within public places of the city and embedded within the design of urban space. Such attempts at creating increasingly hyper‐carceral spaces have often been supported by an array of legislation and regulation targeting the control of particular activities deemed unacceptable or inappropriate. This paper draws conceptually from the urban security literature noted above and emerging studies within the nascent sub‐discipline of carceral geography, and examines their convergence on the issue of Olympic security planning. This highlights the various spatial strategies and imprints that emerge from new conceptualisations and practices of securitisation, and how these might be seen to characterise an increasingly punitive state. Here Agamben's studies of exceptionality are deployed to highlight how ‘lockdown’ security often becomes the ‘normal’ option for Olympic cities, seen as being on the frontline in the war on terror, and how a range of uneven geographies emerge and are sustained in such locations before, during and after the event. Empirically the paper uses data from ethnographic research focusing on the experiences of security preparation for, and post‐event legacy of, the London 2012 Olympics. The paper also seeks to highlight how lessons from the military‐carceral security strategies deployed in London have been transferred to subsequent host cities of Sochi (2014) and Rio de Janeiro (2016).

Enclaves of Rights: Workplace Enforcement, Union Contracts, and the Uneven Regulatory Geography of Immigration Policy

Recent geographic research on U.S. immigration policy highlights the devolution of policy formulation and implementation to local state actors. This study extends this research by analyzing how labor unions shape the implementation of state immigration policy and innovate institutional practices that affect regulatory spaces for immigrants at the local level. Using a case study of the hotel union in Chicago and Los Angeles, this article examines the origin, content, and implementation of immigration provisions recently negotiated in the union's contracts. These contract provisions mediate the implementation of state immigration policies by specifying rules that govern employer actions in response to immigration enforcement activities by the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies, including admittance to the workplace, inspection of I-9 forms, and Social Security no-match letters. The contracts also establish nondiscrimination protections for immigrant workers, such as guaranteed leave to attend immigration proceedings. The legal codification of these protections and the robust practices of union enforcement yield “enclaves of rights” at the local level, further contributing to the highly uneven space of security for immigrant residents in the United States The article concludes by examining the possibility that unions—given their influence in local labor markets, their federated (or national) structures, and their role in the broader moral economy—could extend these rights beyond the confines of the enclave.

Relational distance, neoliberalism and the regulation of animal health

Using quantitative and qualitative data, this paper contributes to debates on the uneven geographies of neoliberal animal disease regulation. Specifically, the paper analyses the impacts of neoliberal reforms to animal disease regulation in Great Britain. Focussing on the case of bovine tuberculosis (bTB), the paper analyses how changes to ‘relational distance’ in animal disease regulation have led to closer relationships between regulators (veterinarians) and regulatees (farmers) which in turn has led to a departure from standardised disease regulation to approaches that emphasise greater flexibility and judgement. The paper presents quantitative analysis of bTB testing data revealing the gradual erosion of government control of bTB regulation and significant variations in disease diagnosis between vets in the private and public sectors. Drawing on interviews with senior veterinarians in Government and veterinary organisations, the paper shows how these regulatory structures evolved and came to be accepted despite their limitations. The paper concludes by considering how relational distance contributes to an understanding of the nature of disease and its implications for the wider regulation of animal disease.

Reprint of “The production of urban vacant land: Relational placemaking in Boston, MA neighborhoods”

The persistence of vacant land in urban areas exhibits geographic unevenness. While central cities have experienced waves of reinvestment over the past decades, vacant lands often persist in adjacent low-income neighborhoods. Thus a networked local-scale perspective is integral for understanding metropolitan areas. Local scale analyses require an understanding of informal decision-makers and institutions and the ways that they connect more broadly with other actors. Drawing on focus groups with civil society organizations (CSOs) and a neighborhood design/build case study, this paper characterizes “on the ground” perceptions of and responses to vacant lots in urban neighborhoods in order to provide insight into their analysis and management. The fieldwork extends insights from studies of community gardens to suggest that access to and potential ownership of vacant parcels, in addition to the political economic forces driving land-use change, are critical factors that drive vacant land governance at the neighborhood-scale. Public–civic partnerships in weak market areas have the potential to strengthen this access and ownership in a way that improves vacant lot management.