Pub Date : 2017-08-13DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17724443
G. Aiken
This article excavates the role, function and practices of community within Transition, a grassroots environmentalist movement. It does so to pursue a quest for understanding if, how, and in what ways, community-based environmental movements are ‘political’. When community-based low carbon initiatives are discussed academically, they can be critiqued; this critique is in turn often based on the perception that the crucial community aspect tends to be a settled, static and reified condition of (human) togetherness. However community—both in theory and practice—is not destined to be so. This article collects and evaluates data from two large research projects on the Transition movement. It takes this ethnographic evidence together with lessons from post-political theory, to outline the capacious, diverse and progressive forms of community that exists within the movement. Doing so, it argues against a blanket post-political diagnosis of community transitions, and opens up, yet again, the consequences of the perceptions and prejudices one has about community are more than mere theoretical posturing.
{"title":"The politics of community: Togetherness, transition and post-politics","authors":"G. Aiken","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17724443","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17724443","url":null,"abstract":"This article excavates the role, function and practices of community within Transition, a grassroots environmentalist movement. It does so to pursue a quest for understanding if, how, and in what ways, community-based environmental movements are ‘political’. When community-based low carbon initiatives are discussed academically, they can be critiqued; this critique is in turn often based on the perception that the crucial community aspect tends to be a settled, static and reified condition of (human) togetherness. However community—both in theory and practice—is not destined to be so. This article collects and evaluates data from two large research projects on the Transition movement. It takes this ethnographic evidence together with lessons from post-political theory, to outline the capacious, diverse and progressive forms of community that exists within the movement. Doing so, it argues against a blanket post-political diagnosis of community transitions, and opens up, yet again, the consequences of the perceptions and prejudices one has about community are more than mere theoretical posturing.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"26 1","pages":"2383 - 2401"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82859680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-04DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17722167
Filka Sekulova, Isabelle Anguelovski, L. Argüelles, J. Conill
One of the unique and emerging responses to the current ecological, social, political and economic crises has been the emergence of community initiatives in a range of formulas and geographical contexts. We explore their emergence and evolution beyond the analysis of a single fixed set of factors that are expected to contribute to their initiation and growth. Upon reviewing the trajectories of various initiatives in the region of Barcelona (Spain), we argue that the metaphor of the fertile soil provides a useful framework to describe or explain the messy process of emergence and evolution of grassroots and community projects. Fertile soil is understood here as a particular quality of the social texture, characterized by richness, diversity, unknowns but also – by multiple tensions and contradictions. Yet it is not only the diversity of factors but the quality of their mutual relatedness that ‘makes’ the soil fertile for the emergence of new groups and the continuation of existing ones. Importantly, the seemingly messy social base in which community initiatives emerge is nourished by their inner and outer contradictions. Likewise, the space opened by dealing with conflicting rationalities creates the conditions for new and more resilient strategies and structures to emerge. As community initiatives get established, the ‘fertile dilemmas’ they frequently face become a key driver of their evolutionary context, contributing to the emergence of new social imaginaries and ways of producing social change.
{"title":"A ‘fertile soil’ for sustainability-related community initiatives: A new analytical framework","authors":"Filka Sekulova, Isabelle Anguelovski, L. Argüelles, J. Conill","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17722167","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17722167","url":null,"abstract":"One of the unique and emerging responses to the current ecological, social, political and economic crises has been the emergence of community initiatives in a range of formulas and geographical contexts. We explore their emergence and evolution beyond the analysis of a single fixed set of factors that are expected to contribute to their initiation and growth. Upon reviewing the trajectories of various initiatives in the region of Barcelona (Spain), we argue that the metaphor of the fertile soil provides a useful framework to describe or explain the messy process of emergence and evolution of grassroots and community projects. Fertile soil is understood here as a particular quality of the social texture, characterized by richness, diversity, unknowns but also – by multiple tensions and contradictions. Yet it is not only the diversity of factors but the quality of their mutual relatedness that ‘makes’ the soil fertile for the emergence of new groups and the continuation of existing ones. Importantly, the seemingly messy social base in which community initiatives emerge is nourished by their inner and outer contradictions. Likewise, the space opened by dealing with conflicting rationalities creates the conditions for new and more resilient strategies and structures to emerge. As community initiatives get established, the ‘fertile dilemmas’ they frequently face become a key driver of their evolutionary context, contributing to the emergence of new social imaginaries and ways of producing social change.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"51 1","pages":"2362 - 2382"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76049992","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-01DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17722786
Amelia Sharman, Richard Perkins
Contestation over knowledge claims, including their legitimacy as an input to policy decision-making, does not end at the moment of policy creation. Policies continue to be made and unmade during the implementation phase. Drawing from work on knowledge controversies, and building on the concept of post-decisional politics, we investigate the implementation of climate change policy in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We identify politically salient post-decisional logics of inaction which have been used to justify delaying or diluting climate policy implementation in both countries. In New Zealand, knowledge controversy has had little or no influence over decision-making, with political rationales in the form of the current national economic interest and cost-based logics prevailing. Conversely, arguments emphasising scientific uncertainty have achieved political traction in the United Kingdom, creating a “fog of distrust” instrumental in draining political capital from the active implementation of climate policy. Explanatory factors such as structural economic considerations and different values placed on science as an input to policy-making are discussed, highlighting the importance of being attentive to the fluidity of knowledge controversies as they achieve salience and legitimacy according to the specificities of time and place.
{"title":"Post-decisional logics of inaction: The influence of knowledge controversy in climate policy decision-making","authors":"Amelia Sharman, Richard Perkins","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17722786","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17722786","url":null,"abstract":"Contestation over knowledge claims, including their legitimacy as an input to policy decision-making, does not end at the moment of policy creation. Policies continue to be made and unmade during the implementation phase. Drawing from work on knowledge controversies, and building on the concept of post-decisional politics, we investigate the implementation of climate change policy in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We identify politically salient post-decisional logics of inaction which have been used to justify delaying or diluting climate policy implementation in both countries. In New Zealand, knowledge controversy has had little or no influence over decision-making, with political rationales in the form of the current national economic interest and cost-based logics prevailing. Conversely, arguments emphasising scientific uncertainty have achieved political traction in the United Kingdom, creating a “fog of distrust” instrumental in draining political capital from the active implementation of climate policy. Explanatory factors such as structural economic considerations and different values placed on science as an input to policy-making are discussed, highlighting the importance of being attentive to the fluidity of knowledge controversies as they achieve salience and legitimacy according to the specificities of time and place.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"23 1","pages":"2281 - 2299"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81373553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-01DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16686353
P. North, A. Nurse, T. Barker
While the urban is identified as a productive site for addressing climate change, the ‘post-political’ critique dismisses climate policy as a vacuous discourse that obscures power relations and exclusion, defends the established neoliberal order, and silences challenges. This paper argues that rather than consensus, there is a conflict between urban climate policy and the need to reignite economic growth in the context of austerity urbanism, but also that we should not assume that challenges to neoliberal understandings of the ‘sensible’ will always be disregarded. Rather, urban climate policy can be progressed through partnership processes utilising ‘co-production’ techniques which entail significant agonistic, if not antagonistic, contestation. The argument is illustrated with a case study of climate policy making in the context of austerity urbanism in Liverpool, UK. While ‘low carbon’ is conceptualised by elite actors in Liverpool in neoliberal terms as a source of new low carbon jobs and businesses, with an emphasis on energy security and fuel poverty, this view is not unchallenged. The paper recounts how an ad hoc group of actors in the city came together to form a partnership advocating for more strategic decarbonisation, which should be progressed through a bid for the city to be European Green Capital. The disputes that emerged around this agenda suggest that in the context of austerity urbanism the need for cities to act to mitigate against dangerous climate change is not as uncontested as conceptions of the post-political suggest.
{"title":"The neoliberalisation of climate? Progressing climate policy under austerity urbanism","authors":"P. North, A. Nurse, T. Barker","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16686353","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16686353","url":null,"abstract":"While the urban is identified as a productive site for addressing climate change, the ‘post-political’ critique dismisses climate policy as a vacuous discourse that obscures power relations and exclusion, defends the established neoliberal order, and silences challenges. This paper argues that rather than consensus, there is a conflict between urban climate policy and the need to reignite economic growth in the context of austerity urbanism, but also that we should not assume that challenges to neoliberal understandings of the ‘sensible’ will always be disregarded. Rather, urban climate policy can be progressed through partnership processes utilising ‘co-production’ techniques which entail significant agonistic, if not antagonistic, contestation. The argument is illustrated with a case study of climate policy making in the context of austerity urbanism in Liverpool, UK. While ‘low carbon’ is conceptualised by elite actors in Liverpool in neoliberal terms as a source of new low carbon jobs and businesses, with an emphasis on energy security and fuel poverty, this view is not unchallenged. The paper recounts how an ad hoc group of actors in the city came together to form a partnership advocating for more strategic decarbonisation, which should be progressed through a bid for the city to be European Green Capital. The disputes that emerged around this agenda suggest that in the context of austerity urbanism the need for cities to act to mitigate against dangerous climate change is not as uncontested as conceptions of the post-political suggest.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"9 1","pages":"1797 - 1815"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86336979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-01DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16680617
A. Kenis, M. Lievens
Putting climate neutrality on the urban agenda inevitably requires a re-imagination and delineation of the boundaries of the city, both at the geographical level, with regard to its inscription in history and concerning the social groups it is composed of. Such an exercise of (re-)imagination or representation is a profoundly political act. It is on the level of this symbolic representation that the (de)politicised nature of sustainability projects must be assessed. Leuven Klimaatneutraal 2030 (LKN2030), a project which aims to make the city of Leuven (Belgium) carbon neutral by 2030, is a case in point. The way it delineates its spatial boundaries, inscribes itself in time and conceives of the main actors representing the city generates profound forms of depoliticisation. Our contention is that these can explain some of the obstacles the project currently faces, whereas it initially triggered a lot of enthusiasm. Though mechanisms of in- and exclusion and agenda-setting inevitably take place in every sustainability project, in LKN2030 these choices tend to be neutralised behind a technical, managerial and scientific discourse. As a result, the project risks to translate potentially interesting dynamics into a consensual project for urban renewal and city marketing, whereby sustainability goals are reframed into marketing objectives and economic opportunities. Drawing on post-foundational political theory, this paper assesses this evolution, but also explores the potential forms of repoliticisation that are emerging in its wake.
{"title":"Imagining the carbon neutral city: The (post)politics of time and space","authors":"A. Kenis, M. Lievens","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16680617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16680617","url":null,"abstract":"Putting climate neutrality on the urban agenda inevitably requires a re-imagination and delineation of the boundaries of the city, both at the geographical level, with regard to its inscription in history and concerning the social groups it is composed of. Such an exercise of (re-)imagination or representation is a profoundly political act. It is on the level of this symbolic representation that the (de)politicised nature of sustainability projects must be assessed. Leuven Klimaatneutraal 2030 (LKN2030), a project which aims to make the city of Leuven (Belgium) carbon neutral by 2030, is a case in point. The way it delineates its spatial boundaries, inscribes itself in time and conceives of the main actors representing the city generates profound forms of depoliticisation. Our contention is that these can explain some of the obstacles the project currently faces, whereas it initially triggered a lot of enthusiasm. Though mechanisms of in- and exclusion and agenda-setting inevitably take place in every sustainability project, in LKN2030 these choices tend to be neutralised behind a technical, managerial and scientific discourse. As a result, the project risks to translate potentially interesting dynamics into a consensual project for urban renewal and city marketing, whereby sustainability goals are reframed into marketing objectives and economic opportunities. Drawing on post-foundational political theory, this paper assesses this evolution, but also explores the potential forms of repoliticisation that are emerging in its wake.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"24 1","pages":"1762 - 1778"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76159514","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-01DOI: 10.1177/0308518X16677969
Steve Lang, J. Rothenberg
In post-industrial cities throughout the world abandoned railroads, demolished freeways, disused canals, and other derelict industrial ruins are being transformed into ecologically inspired and aesthetically designed leisure, consumption, and tourist spaces based upon the principles of Landscape Urbanism and ideas about sustainable park design. New York City’s High Line is one example of this growing trend. Sustainable parks like the High Line claim to provide economic, ecological, and equity benefits associated with the 3 Es of sustainability. Our research on the development of New York City’s High Line suggests that while the High Line meets the economic piece of the sustainability triad with its promise of generating growth, its success in terms of the ecological dimension of sustainability is unclear. More troubling is the High Line’s neglect of the social equity component of the discourse of sustainability. Our work brings together several key arguments in the critical literature on urban sustainability to examine how structural constraints associated with creating post-industrial ecological spaces in a climate of neoliberal urbanization play out in the paradigmatic case of the High Line.
{"title":"Neoliberal urbanism, public space, and the greening of the growth machine: New York City’s High Line park","authors":"Steve Lang, J. Rothenberg","doi":"10.1177/0308518X16677969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X16677969","url":null,"abstract":"In post-industrial cities throughout the world abandoned railroads, demolished freeways, disused canals, and other derelict industrial ruins are being transformed into ecologically inspired and aesthetically designed leisure, consumption, and tourist spaces based upon the principles of Landscape Urbanism and ideas about sustainable park design. New York City’s High Line is one example of this growing trend. Sustainable parks like the High Line claim to provide economic, ecological, and equity benefits associated with the 3 Es of sustainability. Our research on the development of New York City’s High Line suggests that while the High Line meets the economic piece of the sustainability triad with its promise of generating growth, its success in terms of the ecological dimension of sustainability is unclear. More troubling is the High Line’s neglect of the social equity component of the discourse of sustainability. Our work brings together several key arguments in the critical literature on urban sustainability to examine how structural constraints associated with creating post-industrial ecological spaces in a climate of neoliberal urbanization play out in the paradigmatic case of the High Line.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"72 1","pages":"1743 - 1761"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74104332","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-08-01DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17722564
E. Delmelle
Rapid transformations sweeping the United States over the past 50 years have necessitated a reassessment of longstanding theories on how the neighborhood change process has unfolded. This article builds upon recent methodological advancements aimed at understanding longitudinal dynamics by developing a workflow that blends the self-organizing map and a sequential alignment method to visualize pathways of change in a multivariate context. It identifies the predominant pathways in which neighborhoods have changed according to their racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and housing characteristics in the largest US metropolitan statistical areas from 1980 to 2010. The distribution of these pathways is subsequently examined between metropolitan statistical areas and the spatial clustering of these trajectories within cities is analyzed. Results reveal a white-flight type process, the establishment of a multiethnic neighborhood, densification of single-family neighborhoods, gentrification in relatively diverse neighborhoods, upgrading of white single family neighborhoods, and the most frequent pathway of all: no change. High-poverty minority and wealthy white neighborhoods are most spatially compact and expanding in a contiguous manner, while multiethnic neighborhoods are relatively dispersed. Six groups of metropolitan statistical areas are identified based upon the similarity of their neighborhood composition. Parallels are drawn between the formation of enduring high-poverty black neighborhoods in Northern and Midwestern cities and the emergence of clusters high-poverty Hispanic neighborhoods in Hispanic destination cities.
{"title":"Differentiating pathways of neighborhood change in 50 U.S. metropolitan areas","authors":"E. Delmelle","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17722564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17722564","url":null,"abstract":"Rapid transformations sweeping the United States over the past 50 years have necessitated a reassessment of longstanding theories on how the neighborhood change process has unfolded. This article builds upon recent methodological advancements aimed at understanding longitudinal dynamics by developing a workflow that blends the self-organizing map and a sequential alignment method to visualize pathways of change in a multivariate context. It identifies the predominant pathways in which neighborhoods have changed according to their racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and housing characteristics in the largest US metropolitan statistical areas from 1980 to 2010. The distribution of these pathways is subsequently examined between metropolitan statistical areas and the spatial clustering of these trajectories within cities is analyzed. Results reveal a white-flight type process, the establishment of a multiethnic neighborhood, densification of single-family neighborhoods, gentrification in relatively diverse neighborhoods, upgrading of white single family neighborhoods, and the most frequent pathway of all: no change. High-poverty minority and wealthy white neighborhoods are most spatially compact and expanding in a contiguous manner, while multiethnic neighborhoods are relatively dispersed. Six groups of metropolitan statistical areas are identified based upon the similarity of their neighborhood composition. Parallels are drawn between the formation of enduring high-poverty black neighborhoods in Northern and Midwestern cities and the emergence of clusters high-poverty Hispanic neighborhoods in Hispanic destination cities.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"38 1","pages":"2402 - 2424"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87002089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-26DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17722369
Naizhuo Zhao, G. Cao
The wide penetration of location-aware mobile devices and location-based services renders the location-based social media as a reliable proxy to study the real-world geographic space. Language diversity is an important indicator of a city's internationalization level. People communicate using different languages in the cyberspace of social media as they do in the geographic space. The location-based social media therefore provides an innovative set of lens to map the language diversity and study the internationalization of cities. In the enclosed graphics, based on a collection of geo-tagged Twitter posts, we generated a fine resolution map of language diversity index in the area of Hong Kong to illustrate the potential of location-based social media in city research.
{"title":"Quantifying and visualizing language diversity of Hong Kong using Twitter","authors":"Naizhuo Zhao, G. Cao","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17722369","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17722369","url":null,"abstract":"The wide penetration of location-aware mobile devices and location-based services renders the location-based social media as a reliable proxy to study the real-world geographic space. Language diversity is an important indicator of a city's internationalization level. People communicate using different languages in the cyberspace of social media as they do in the geographic space. The location-based social media therefore provides an innovative set of lens to map the language diversity and study the internationalization of cities. In the enclosed graphics, based on a collection of geo-tagged Twitter posts, we generated a fine resolution map of language diversity index in the area of Hong Kong to illustrate the potential of location-based social media in city research.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"1 1","pages":"2698 - 2701"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88220385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-17DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17719884
Kenneth Bo Nielsen, H. P. Bedi
India has over the recent decade witnessed a spate of land transfers as Special Economic Zones, extractive industries, or real estate dispossess farmers, land owners, and indigenous groups of their land. As a result, struggles over land have emerged with force in many locations, almost across India. Yet while the political economy and legal aspects of India’s new ‘land wars’ are well documented, the discourses and identities mobilised against large-scale forcible land transfers receive less scholarly attention. We suggest ‘the regional identity politics’ of India’s current land wars to explain the important role of place-based identities in garnering broad, public support for popular anti-dispossession movements. We explore how land, and its produce, are mobilised by anti-dispossession movements in the Indian states of Goa and West Bengal. The movements mobilised land and food not as emblematic of structural changes in the political economy, but first and foremost within a symbolic field in which they came to stand metaphorically for regional forms of belonging and identity under threat. While reinforcing regional solidarity, these identities also contributed to the fragmented and often highly localised nature of India’s current land wars, while also potentially disrupting efforts to sustain organising in the long term.
{"title":"The regional identity politics of India’s new land wars: Land, food, and popular mobilisation in Goa and West Bengal","authors":"Kenneth Bo Nielsen, H. P. Bedi","doi":"10.1177/0308518X17719884","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X17719884","url":null,"abstract":"India has over the recent decade witnessed a spate of land transfers as Special Economic Zones, extractive industries, or real estate dispossess farmers, land owners, and indigenous groups of their land. As a result, struggles over land have emerged with force in many locations, almost across India. Yet while the political economy and legal aspects of India’s new ‘land wars’ are well documented, the discourses and identities mobilised against large-scale forcible land transfers receive less scholarly attention. We suggest ‘the regional identity politics’ of India’s current land wars to explain the important role of place-based identities in garnering broad, public support for popular anti-dispossession movements. We explore how land, and its produce, are mobilised by anti-dispossession movements in the Indian states of Goa and West Bengal. The movements mobilised land and food not as emblematic of structural changes in the political economy, but first and foremost within a symbolic field in which they came to stand metaphorically for regional forms of belonging and identity under threat. While reinforcing regional solidarity, these identities also contributed to the fragmented and often highly localised nature of India’s current land wars, while also potentially disrupting efforts to sustain organising in the long term.","PeriodicalId":11906,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A","volume":"24 1","pages":"2324 - 2341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90232456","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2017-07-17DOI: 10.1177/0308518X17714843
M. Rosol, Vincent Béal, Samuel Mössner
Urban areas are increasingly recognized as strategic sites to address climate change and environmental issues. Specific urban projects are marketed as innovative solutions and best-practice examples, and so-called green cities, eco-cities and sustainable cities have emerged worldwide as leading paradigms in urban planning and policy discourse. The transformation of cities into eco-cities (Kenworthy, 2006; Roseland, 1997) is often based on big data and – widely varying – indicators that should proof the success of urban climate governance (Bulkeley, 2010). The European Commission with its ‘Green Capital’ program, Britain’s ‘Sustainable City Index’, France’s ‘EcoCité’ scheme, the US-American’s ‘Greenest City’ ranking developed by WalletHub’s, the US and Canada ‘Green City Index’ sponsored by Siemens – these programs are all examples of public and private initiatives aimed at identifying and ranking the ‘greenest’ city or cities according to a competitive rationality. They are mostly quantitative approaches, based on ‘hard’ and ‘scientific’ indicators that allow cities to be compared according to their efforts in sustainable urban development. Using these indicators, cities worldwide have increasingly promoted sustainability initiatives in order to position themselves advantageously on the global scene (Chang and Sheppard, 2013; Cugurullo, 2013; Swyngedouw and Kaika, 2014; While et al., 2004). These urban ranking efforts tie into the fact that sustainability has become a metaconsensual policy term (Gill et al., 2012), resting upon broad support from diverse sectors of society. Promoted at first as a way of bringing forward an ecological urban agenda connected to social development, sustainability has lost much of its transformative potential. By now, even car manufacturing in Germany, oil pipelines in Alberta, Canada and nuclear power plants worldwide are being politically justified with reference to sustainability and climate change prevention. Despite controversial national positions regarding the processes, pace and extend of implementing environmental policies – a divergence that became very evident, for example, during the 2009 United Nations
城市地区越来越被认为是应对气候变化和环境问题的战略场所。具体的城市项目被宣传为创新的解决方案和最佳实践的例子，而所谓的绿色城市、生态城市和可持续城市已经成为世界范围内城市规划和政策讨论的主要范例。城市向生态城市的转变(Kenworthy, 2006;Roseland, 1997)通常基于大数据和(差异很大的)指标，这些指标应该证明城市气候治理的成功(bulkley, 2010)。欧盟委员会的“绿色资本”计划、英国的“可持续城市指数”、法国的“生态城市”计划、WalletHub开发的美国“最绿色城市”排名、西门子赞助的美国和加拿大“绿色城市指数”——这些项目都是公共和私人倡议的例子，旨在根据竞争理性确定和排名“最绿色”城市。它们大多是基于“硬”和“科学”指标的定量方法，使城市能够根据其在可持续城市发展方面的努力进行比较。利用这些指标，世界各地的城市越来越多地推动可持续发展举措，以使自己在全球舞台上处于有利地位(Chang和Sheppard, 2013;Cugurullo, 2013;swyngedown and Kaika, 2014;而et al.， 2004)。这些城市排名的努力与可持续性已经成为一个元共识的政策术语(Gill et al.， 2012)这一事实联系在一起，它依赖于社会不同部门的广泛支持。可持续性最初是作为一种与社会发展相联系的生态城市议程的一种方式而推广的，但它已经失去了很大的变革潜力。到目前为止，就连德国的汽车制造业、加拿大阿尔伯塔省的石油管道和世界各地的核电站，都在可持续性和预防气候变化方面得到了政治上的辩护。尽管各国在执行环境政策的过程、速度和范围上的立场存在争议，但这种分歧在2009年联合国大会期间变得非常明显
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