Uneven Geographies Research Articles

The Uneven Geography of Racial and Ethnic Wage Inequality: Specifying Local Labor Market Effects

This article extends research on intermetropolitan and regional wage inequality through an investigation of the uneven geography of racial and ethnic wage inequality across metropolitan labor markets. Prior geographic studies largely restricted analysis of the source of intermetropolitan wage disparities to differences in industrial structure. The study described in this article further expands the analysis of labor market effects by conceptually describing and empirically analyzing the effects of three significant racial labor market institutions: public employment, unionization, and the penal system. I investigate these effects as part of a more extensive analysis of how local labor market structure—comprised of industrial mix, demographic composition, and institutional and regulatory arrangements—matters in mediating racial wage inequality. I use data from the 2000 U.S. Census and multilevel methods to analyze the wage differentials of African American and native- and foreign-born Latino men relative to whites across 186 U.S. metropolitan areas. Local labor market structure mediates different types of racial wage inequality in distinct ways: Regulatory context matters most for the relative wages of African Americans; both regulatory context and industrial mix influence the relative wages of native-born Latinos; and industrial composition matters most for the relative wages of foreign-born Latinos. Against these broad patterns of difference, not all effects—especially regulatory and institutional effects—are singularly group specific. Unionization shores up wages for both white and black high school–educated workers and mitigates racial wage inequality. Higher minimum wage rates boost the relative wages of high school–educated whites and native-born Latinos.

Toward a spatial perspective on sustainability transitions

In the past decade, the literature on transitions toward sustainable socio-technical systems has made a considerable contribution in understanding the complex and multi-dimensional shifts considered necessary to adapt societies and economies to sustainable modes of production and consumption. However, transition analyses have often neglected where transitions take place, and the spatial configurations and dynamics of the networks within which transitions evolve. A more explicit spatial perspective on sustainability transitions contributes to the extant transitions literature in three ways. Firstly it provides a contextualization on the limited territorial sensitivity of existing literature. Secondly, it explicitly acknowledges and investigates diversity in transition processes, which follows from a ‘natural’ variety in institutional conditions, networks, actor strategies and resources across space. Thirdly, it encompasses not only greater emphasis but also an opportunity to connect to a body of literature geared to understanding the international, trans-local nature of transition dynamics. Concerned with the prevalent lack of attention for the spatial dimensions of sustainability transitions in most studies, this paper seeks to unpick and make explicit sustainability transition geographies from the vantage point of economic geography. The paper argues that there are two interrelated problems requiring attention: the institutional embeddedness of socio-technical development processes within specific territorial spaces, and an explicit multi-scalar conception of socio-technical trajectories. Following these arguments, the paper concludes that transitions research would do well to take a closer look at the geographical unevenness of transition processes from the perspective of global networks and local nodes.

The Local Sources of Market Formation: Explaining Regional Growth Differentials in German Photovoltaic Markets

Sustainable transitions in the energy sector have gained only insufficient attention in economic geography so far. Conversely, transition scholars do not pay sufficient attention to the spatial dimension of these dynamics. This paper introduces a conceptual framework for analysing the spatial characteristics of market formation processes in emerging technological innovation systems, thus proposing a shared field of research for economic geographers and transition scholars. Drawing on a social constructivist analysis of market formation processes, we propose to differentiate “market formation” into three sub-processes for which we additionally specify spatial characteristics: (1) the formation of market segments, (2) market transactions and (3) end-user profiles. We apply this conceptual and explanatory framework to explain the uneven geography of photovoltaic market formation in Germany, the current world market leader in this field. By analysing the role of local solar initiatives in shaping and supporting local market formation processes, we are able to provide a more encompassing explanation of the German PV success story than alternative accounts that merely focus on strong incentive structures and favourable geophysical conditions.

Re-creating the Rural, Reconstructing Nature: An International Literature Review of the Environmental Implications of Amenity Migration

The term 'amenity migration' describes a broad diversity of patterns of human movement to rural places in search of particular lifestyle attributes. This review of international literature, drawn from the authors' own prior research and searches on relevant databases, synthesises findings on the implications of amenity migration for the creation and distribution of environmental harms and benefits. Further, we critique common framings of amenity migration-related environmental transformations and offer suggestions for future research. Analysis is positioned within a review of five common themes reflected in the cases we consider: land subdivision and residential development; changes in private land use; cross-boundary effects; effects on local governance institutions; and displacement of impacts. Within each of these themes, we discuss the uneven geographies of environmental transformation formed by diverse conceptions of 'nature', patterns of local management of amenity-driven transformations, and ecological contexts. We conclude that, through both intended and unintended environmental consequences of dominant activities and land uses, amenity migration results in a redistribution of environmental harms and benefits at multiple scales, as rural landscapes are (partially and incompletely) re-created in line with the ideals and expectations of amenity migrant populations.

Stay, Leave or Return? Patterns of Welsh Graduate Mobility

This paper presents the initial findings of a study into Welsh graduate mobility within the UK, which has a highly uneven geography of graduate labour. After surveying recent debates, the paper explores the extent to which Wales retains its graduate labour by examining the scale of graduate mobility and its nature in terms of qualifications. It does this by augmenting the data produced by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) with detailed analysis of Labour Force Survey (LFS) data to consider the location of successive ‘young’ graduate cohorts since the 1992 expansion of Higher Education. The research finds that Wales is a net exporter of graduates and that those who migrate have higher educational attainment. However, the notion of a clear, unequivocal brain drain has to be qualified. Wales manages to retain high numbers of graduates relative to many English regions. The paper highlights that inter-regional flows of graduates are sensitive to the path dependencies of mobile graduates themselves as well as the structures of regional economies. This has implications for both Higher Education and regional development policies.

The Economic Geography of the UK * Neil M. Coe and Andrew Jones (eds.)

The current economic crisis casts a shadow over this engaging edited volume, which provides a multi-dimensional set of accounts of the contemporary economic geography of the UK. Through the 16 chapters and two contributions by the editors, which introduce and conclude the collection, readers are offered a series of thematic windows that can be read in order or alternatively treated as discrete papers. The book is written in an accessible form both organizationally and stylistically. Individual chapters, while offering the intellectual depth of an academic journal article, are careful to explain terminology and benefit from bulleted aims at the start of each contribution allowing readers to gain a quick grasp of its focus. Such thoughtful presentation eases undergraduate students into serious academic engagement and potentially provides a springboard for further exploration into the recommended reading at the end of each chapter. The editors opt for a division of the volume into four sections. The first part—Setting the Scene: Uneven Economic Geographies—starts with a thoughtful and reflective introduction to the volume by Neil Coe and Andrew Jones who set the book within a historical context and identify thematic foci for the volume including globalization; financialization; tertiarization; flexibilization; immigration and neoliberalization. There then follows two chapters likely to be extensively used in introducing undergraduate students to the uneven geography of UK economic wealth and activity. First, Danny Dorling explores the north–south divide in terms of life expectancy, poverty, education, wealth and employment in a highly graphical and digestible manner. Such findings obviously have considerable implications for social justice and government policy and should therefore engage readers across the social sciences. Second, Ron Martin's analysis of the unevenness of regional growth under New Labour complements Dorling's contribution, noting that despite suggestions to the contrary, there has been ‘no marked closing of the growth gaps between the regions’ (p. 44) as the nature of the so-called ‘long boom’ over the lifetime of the Labour administration has been manifestly spatially uneven.

E-Government Tools, Claimed Potentials/Unnamed Limitations

Contemporary cities are characterized by the inequality reflected in uneven geographies of quality-of-life conditions. When these inequalities are a matter of concern, local governments usually assert their intention to respond to citizen’s needs and deprivations. It is in this context that information and communication technology (ICT) tools are being incorporated in Indian cities to promote local governance by improving quality of life and increasing efficiency and transparency in the response to citizen’s demands and needs. Depending on the institutional environment and how information is created, processed and disseminated, these ‘e-government’ tools can exacerbate existing exclusionary practices. The objectives of this article are twofold. First, we want to explore how a local e-grievance redressal system reflects self-expressed needs. Second, we want to investigate whether there is a (mis)match between self-expressed needs and deprived areas. This helps to answer the question how these systems capture the requirements of the most deprived. The main methods used are geocoding and spatial visualization of the processed information. Results show that the self-expressed needs do not necessarily concentrate in the most deprived areas. This suggests that the e-grievances redressal system does not guarantee a narrowing of the gap between the different sections of the city, nor does it necessarily capture the requirements of those in the most need.

The Place of Disarticulations: Global Commodity Production in La Laguna, Mexico

Studies of the shifting social organization and geography of global garment production have been critical to the development of the commodity chains framework as an important field of study for scholars of political economy in various disciplines. Our paper intervenes in this literature by proposing what we call a ‘disarticulations’ perspective, an approach attentive to historical and spatial processes of accumulation, disinvestment and dispossession that produce the uneven geographies generative of transnational production networks. We make the case for disarticulations as an approach to commodity chains via a case study of a region in north-central Mexico called La Laguna—a celebrated center of export dynamism in the 1990s, following the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and of rapid decline in the 2000s. Rather than offer a conventional commodity chain analysis of the boom to bust cycle in La Laguna, which would look to the dynamics of the contemporary apparel chain to explain the causes and consequences of La Laguna's NAFTA-era trajectory, we instead follow La Laguna's ‘travels’ through the cotton, textile, and garment industries over 150 years. We show how the recent NAFTA-era boom was premised on this layered history of engagements with the cotton–textile–apparel commodity chain. The disarticulations approach to commodity chains that we develop here foregrounds the processes of dispossession, accumulation and disinvestment through which not only commodity chains, but the uneven geographies that are their conditions of possibility, are reproduced.

Geographies of war and the putative peace

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.

The Uneven Geography of Participation at the Global Level: Ethiopian Women Activists at the Global Periphery

This article explores the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA) and its attempts to translate international women's rights norms into national law, examining the problematic geographies of women's networks from local to global levels and showing how Ethiopia remains on the periphery of global human rights networks. In their campaign for legal reform to protect women against violence, activists had to show how the proposed reforms were ‘African’, as invoking international human rights risked dismissal as evidence of ‘Westernisation’. Activists face practical difficulties, including lack of funding and technology, limiting networking beyond the national level. The article shows how the state shapes local activists’ ability to form global connections. Legislation banning civil society organisations such as EWLA from conducting work around rights threatens to marginalise Ethiopia further from global human rights networks and norms. Local connectivity to the global is only partial, mediated by the power relations in which activists and the state are embedded. Este artículo explora a la Asociación de mujeres abogadas etíopes (EWLA, por sus siglas en inglés) y sus intentos de traducir las normas del derecho internacional de mujeres a una nueva ley nacional, examinando las geografías problemáticas de redes de mujeres de niveles locales a globales, y demostrando cómo Etiopía se mantiene fuera de las redes de los derechos humanos globales. En su campaña por una reforma legal para proteger a la mujer contra la violencia, las activistas tuvieron que demostrar cómo las reformas propuestas eran ‘africanas’, como si al invocar a los derechos humanos se arriesgasen a un rechazo por evidencia de una ‘occidentalización’. Las activistas se enfrentan a dificultades prácticas, que incluyen la falta de fondos y tecnología, que las limita para conectarse con redes por fuera del nivel nacional. El artículo muestra cómo el estado forja a las activistas locales, la habilidad para establecer conexiones globales. La legislación que prohíbe a las organizaciones sociales, tales como la EWLA, conducir un trabajo alrededor de los derechos, amenazan con marginar a Etiopía más allá de las redes de derechos humanos y normas globales. La conectividad local hacia lo global es tan sólo parcial, intervenida por las relaciones del poder, en las cuales las activistas y el estado están integrados. 本文探讨了埃塞俄比亚女律师协会(EWLA)及其将国际妇女权利规范植入国家法的努力，考察了从地方到全球各层次妇女网络颇成问题的地理分布，表明了埃塞俄比亚是如何仍处在全球人权网络边缘的。在他们发起保护妇女免受暴力侵犯的法律改革运动中，活动家们不得不表明倡议中的改革如何地“非洲化”，因为求助于国际人权有被指为“西方化”的危险。活动家们面临着一些实际困难，包括缺乏资金和技术，还将建立网络限制在国家层次上。本文表明了国家如何塑造当地活动家建立全球联系的能力。禁止市民社会组织如EWLA围绕权利开展工作的立法，威胁着埃塞俄比亚从全球人权网络和规范中进一步边缘化。地方与全球的联系只是部分的，它被有活动家们和国家深嵌其中的权力关系调解着。

Geography, nature, and the question of development

During the last decade, geography has gained new salience as a development factor in the public imagination and policy realms, through the work of scholars located outside the discipline. Jared Diamond and Jeffrey Sachs have popularized the idea that a physical geographic backcloth, first nature, profoundly shapes the conditions of possibility for global economic prosperity or poverty, and sustainability. Geographical economists have built microfoundational accounts of second nature: how uneven geographies emerge on a uniform biophysical backcloth. ‘New’ development economists, now profoundly critical of neoliberal globalization, argue for both Keynesian and Hayekian alternatives. Notwithstanding their differences, these communities of scholarship share a sociospatial ontology that underwrites a stageist, teleological conception of economic development, to be made possible by globalizing capitalism. A geographical, relational/dialectical conception of the relationship between the economy, space/time and socionature, within a broadly political economic conception of societal change, creates space for multiple development trajectories and livelihood assemblages, deconstructing the global North as the natural locus of definitions of the good life and expertise about what constitutes development.

Faith, Welfare, and the City: The Mobilization of Religious Organizations for Neoliberal Ends

Studies of neoliberalism have focused on the rollback/rollout nature of the process as it manifests in different urban geographies. According to this narrative, neoliberalism and its proponents mobilize to roll back Keynesian or socialist institutions, while simultaneously or subsequently mobilizing a rollout of institutions that might reproduce a neoliberal social order in the future. Somewhat lost in this narrative, with its emphasis on the creation of new neoliberal institutions, is the role of existing institutions as vehicles of neoliberalism. This study focuses on the way that gospel rescue missions function as vehicles of neoliberalism within the present context in the United States. Gospel rescue missions, most of which predate the neoliberal turn, provide a form of care for America's urban homeless that emphasizes personal responsibility (and failure), and de-emphasizes the structural causes of homelessness. Many require their clientele to attend chapel before receiving services, and most shun government funding whenever possible. Although this approach is not explicitly motivated by neoliberalism, such organizations are willing vehicles of the neoliberally inspired individualization of poverty and homelessness. But importantly, this relationship has an incredibly uneven geography, as three case studies show. The unevenness of this geography complicates the picture considerably, belying any simple description of (or dismissal of) faith-based agencies as vehicles of neoliberalism.

An historical geography of liberty: Lancashire and the Inebriates Acts

This paper examines the Inebriates Acts of 1879 and 1898 which facilitated the formal provision of institutional care for inebriates. The Acts' permissive character produced an uneven geography of provision of institutions that meant that inebriate treatment varied markedly across the counties and county boroughs of England and Wales. The vast majority of those committed under the Acts were women. Using two exemplary case studies from Lancashire, a private retreat created under the 1879 Act and a council run reformatory created under the 1898 Act, the paper considers how debates about liberty and control shaped the regulation of problem drunkards. It shows that geography was as important as class, religion, and gender in determining who was subjected to regulation. The paper argues that the failure to reform inebriates helped the recoding of inebriety within a broader discourse of mental deficiency that encouraged the permanent segregation of problem populations.

Local differences, perceptions and Incapacity Benefit claimants: implications for policy delivery

Geographical unevenness in labour market and social conditions is one reason why the ‘local’ has been emphasised increasingly in the delivery of labour market policy in the UK. This article explores the extent to which there are local differences in labour market conditions using the characteristics and experiences of Incapacity Benefit (IB) claimants in Northern Ireland as an example. It then offers some comments on the potential for policy initiatives to cope with these spatial variations. Evidence from a survey of 803 IB claimants is used, supplemented by focus group material derived from discussions with Personal Advisers (PAs). The article shows that whilst there are important variations between areas, largely in the quantity and quality of jobs, and the perceptions that IB claimants hold of their local labour markets, there are also similarities in the general types of labour market barriers they face across areas. There is some evidence, however, to conclude that these barriers in urban areas are particularly pronounced and that some IB claimants in these places face severer obstacles to re-integration in the labour market than those in rural areas. The article also suggests that policy delivery to cope with these geographical differences faces two problems. First, capacity to respond to local differences is limited by strong systemic impulses towards centralisation. Secondly, and paradoxically, local differences erode capacity to respond to severer urban problems because social/institutional capacity within providers and policy-deliverers in these places is limited by high staff turnover and a crowded institutional landscape.

Beyond the male-migrant: South Africa's long history of health geography and the contemporary AIDS pandemic

This article begins by noting the contribution that past South African writings on health can make to the field of health geography—especially writings on male migration and syphilis from the 1940s that conceptualized space as relational. However, the second part of the article notes that the rapid rise of AIDS in the post-apartheid period influenced the problematic projecting forward of the male-migrancy model. Ethnographic and secondary data show how AIDS is embedded in under-researched social and spatial structures after apartheid. In tracing these processes the article combines anthropology, geography, and political economy to chart an interdisciplinary analysis of the uneven geographies of health.

The Geography of the Experience Economy in Denmark: Employment Change and Location Dynamics in Attendance-based Experience Industries

Recently the “experience economy” has been promoted as a vehicle for urban and regional growth, also in peripheral cities and regions. Little evidence is, however, provided to sustain this claim. To inform the discussion of the experience economy as a potential for urban and regional growth, the article provides an analysis of location dynamics and employment growth of a specific segment of the experience economy, the attendance-based experience industries, in Danish municipalities from 1993 to 2006. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the emerging experience economy in the Danish context produces new forms of uneven geographies: first, employment growth is significantly higher in large cities compared with that in small- and medium-sized cities, and second, the level of education for persons employed in the experience economy is higher in the largest cities compared with that in small- and medium-sized cities. Hence, the potential of the experience economy as a vehicle for growth even in peripheral cities and regions has in many cases (not yet) been fulfilled. Thus, using the experience economy as a lever to obtain future prosperity may be a very fragile strategy for the majority of cities and municipalities outside the main growth centres and classic tourist destinations.

GROUNDING GEOGRAPHIES OF ECONOMIC GLOBALISATION: GLOBALISED SPACES IN CHILE'S NON‐TRADITIONAL EXPORT SECTOR, 1980–2005

ABSTRACTThe debate around neoliberal globalisation and its impacts on economically peripheral countries has been waged by partisan forces to the right and left since the early 1990s. Much of this debate focuses at the scale of the nation‐state, or of the whole globe, and, while often sophisticated in an ideological sense, is scant in terms of consideration of the ‘grounded’ outcomes of the processes and discourses of globalisation. This paper argues that an appreciation of the contingent economic geography and political economy of any given local and regional transformation is essential for understanding the outcomes of economic globalisation. In order to illustrate this, the paper analyses two regional non‐traditional agricultural export (NTAX) complexes in the highly globalised Chilean economy. By focusing on ‘hotspots’ or ‘globalised spaces’ at the regional and local scales we are able to cut through the rhetoric associated with generalised arguments for and against economic globalisation and illustrate that both the roots and impacts of the insertion into global commodity complexes are highly geographically contingent. Our analysis concludes that NTAX development in Chile over the past 25 years has radically restructured local and regional economies, has concentrated wealth ‘extra‐regionally’, has exacerbated social differentiation, and threatens environmental sustainability. We argue that policy that seeks to address these trends requires more grounded consideration of the complex and uneven geography of economic globalisation that does not privilege analysis at any one scale and that seeks to elucidate the links between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’.

Brand and Branding Geographies

AbstractBrands and branding can sometimes seem pervasive. Yet, the geographies of brands and branding have been relatively neglected and under‐researched, especially in economic geography. The focus here is the historically longstanding and well‐established brands and branding of goods and services. Drawing on empirical examples to ground its claims, the argument seeks to establish the entangled geographies of branded objects and branding processes, advocates reading their socio‐spatial histories, explains their uneven geographies and relationships to uneven development and explores their potential and pitfalls for territorial development locally and regionally. The conclusion is that brands and branding geographies have the potential to stimulate a novel approach to addressing spatial questions at the intersections of economic, social, cultural, political and ecological geographies that can transcend the more ‘traditional’ and longstanding foci of firms and industries for ‘new economic geographies’. Ideas to contribute to future research on brand and branding geographies are then sketched out.

The uneven geographies of transnational advocacy: The case of the Talo Dam

The Talo Dam was built in 2006 on the Bani River, a tributary of the Niger River in Mali. The path towards the completion of the project has been complex and controversial. This paper offers a case-study of the advocacy efforts initially opposed to, and later in support of the building of the Talo Dam. Several international institutions have been key decision-makers regarding the building of the Talo Dam, but the geographical and culture distance of the decision-making institutions to on-the-ground reality presents a serious obstacle to goals of participatory development and illustrates some inherent challenges of transnational environmental advocacy and management. Several typologies of transnational campaigns are analyzed to demonstrate the range of participation and accountability that a transnational campaign can pursue. Finally, I encourage the use of qualitative research methods by advocacy organizations as a useful methodological approach to counter otherwise inherent challenges to local inclusion and participation.

Cities Destroyed (Again) For Cash: Forum on the U.S. Foreclosure Crisis

In 2008, there will be at least 2.5 million new foreclosures in the United States. Record levels of mortgage delinquency, default, and foreclosure are causing widespread hardship in cities and suburbs across America, and causing repeated destabilization of global credit and investment markets. In this Forum, six housing specialists unravel the complex connections between urban geography, subprime lending, and foreclosure. Although a wide variety of view-points are represented, three common threads are evident. First, foreclosures are tightly linked to the lax underwriting standards and aggressive business practices of the subprime mortgage market. Second, the subprime-foreclosure linkage is a reflection of the steady deregulation of U.S. financial markets and the promotion of homeownership as the cornerstone of national housing policy. Third, deregulated mortgage market segmentation has created uneven new geographies of debt, risk, and default—superimposed atop existing landscapes of old-fashioned exclusionary discrimination. Low-income and racially marginalized neighborhoods, once redlined and excluded from mainstream credit markets, were at the center of the profitable wave of subprime abuse and equity extraction during the long housing boom, and are now at the center of the long, slowly unfolding catastrophe of the U.S. foreclosure crisis.