Pub Date : 2026-01-13DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104500
Stephen Healy , Ruth Lane , Melisa Duque Hurtado
Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation. These cases show how reuse reconfigures relations between people, materials, and places, generating social and ecological benefits that exceed conventional CE framings. We argue that recognising reuse value reveals postcapitalist possibilities within circular-degrowth trajectories.
{"title":"Reuse Value: The potential of community based organisations to reframe and transform the circular economy","authors":"Stephen Healy , Ruth Lane , Melisa Duque Hurtado","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104500","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104500","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Circular economy initiatives in Australia increasingly reference reuse, yet dominant recycling-led approaches continue to reproduce business-as-usual. This paper asks what kinds of worlds are made through reuse by examining Substation 33 and St Kilda Mums (now Our Village). Drawing on Karatani’s reading of surplus value, we develop “reuse value” as a parallax concept that captures both the embodied potential of discarded materials and the relational forms of care through which they re-enter circulation. These cases show how reuse reconfigures relations between people, materials, and places, generating social and ecological benefits that exceed conventional CE framings. We argue that recognising reuse value reveals postcapitalist possibilities within circular-degrowth trajectories.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104500"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145973223","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-12DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104524
Melissa Heil, Shannon Corray
Much of the research on strategies to address water insecurity in the United States has focused on government policy and community activism. Our research project investigates an overlooked set of actors: philanthropic foundations. Philanthropic foundations have helped to meet social welfare needs throughout much of U.S. history, intervening in areas like housing, community development, education, health. Philanthropic foundations not only meet people’s basic needs through grant-making, but they also frame how the public conceives of social problems and inform policy responses. In this paper, we document how philanthropic foundations are intervening in the issue of American water insecurity through their grant-making. Drawing on a dataset of 296 grants, we identify the number and monetary value of grants made by American foundations related to water insecurity in the U.S. and analyze which communities receive these grant funds, revealing geographies where the philanthropic sector is especially involved in facilitating water access. Beyond these quantitative and locational questions, our research examines how these philanthropic foundations frame the problem of household water insecurity (i.e., how do they explain its causes, how does it relate to other social challenges) and documents what kinds of change-making strategies they support (e.g., funding policy research, advocacy, direct resource provision, etc.).
{"title":"Philanthropic foundations and water insecurity in the United States: Problem framing, interventions, and geographies","authors":"Melissa Heil, Shannon Corray","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104524","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104524","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Much of the research on strategies to address water insecurity in the United States has focused on government policy and community activism. Our research project investigates an overlooked set of actors: philanthropic foundations. Philanthropic foundations have helped to meet social welfare needs throughout much of U.S. history, intervening in areas like housing, community development, education, health. Philanthropic foundations not only meet people’s basic needs through grant-making, but they also frame how the public conceives of social problems and inform policy responses. In this paper, we document how philanthropic foundations are intervening in the issue of American water insecurity through their grant-making. Drawing on a dataset of 296 grants, we identify the number and monetary value of grants made by American foundations related to water insecurity in the U.S. and analyze which communities receive these grant funds, revealing geographies where the philanthropic sector is especially involved in facilitating water access. Beyond these quantitative and locational questions, our research examines how these philanthropic foundations frame the problem of household water insecurity (i.e., how do they explain its causes, how does it relate to other social challenges) and documents what kinds of change-making strategies they support (e.g., funding policy research, advocacy, direct resource provision, etc.).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104524"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145973226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-12DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104531
Salene Schloffel-Armstrong
This paper examines the public library as a space of competing conceptions of infrastructural value. It engages with the contested futures of a library building in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand to explore how the value of library services are understood, set and maintained by urban publics. In the wake of the sudden closure of Wellington’s central library in 2019, debate over the building’s future illustrated the continually shifting place of library services in imagined hierarchies of urban infrastructure. This paper illustrates that this library’s value was constructed over the next years in directly opposing ways: firstly, as a private, individualised expense or cost, and secondly, as a potential alternative conception of social value (such as a commons). Despite attempts to subsume this social infrastructure within normative narratives of fiscal cost, and privatise the library building, broader debate around the Wellington library illustrated significant resistance to these pressures from large portions of the public. I argue that the atmospheres of political feeling around urban infrastructures and public services are always in flux and being re-made, leaving open the possibility for new conceptions of value to emerge.
{"title":"A minor frivolity or an essential service? Assembling library value and hierarchies of infrastructure in Aotearoa New Zealand","authors":"Salene Schloffel-Armstrong","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104531","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104531","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the public library as a space of competing conceptions of infrastructural value. It engages with the contested futures of a library building in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand to explore how the value of library services are understood, set and maintained by urban publics. In the wake of the sudden closure of Wellington’s central library in 2019, debate over the building’s future illustrated the continually shifting place of library services in imagined hierarchies of urban infrastructure. This paper illustrates that this library’s value was constructed over the next years in directly opposing ways: firstly, as a private, individualised expense or cost, and secondly, as a potential alternative conception of social value (such as a commons). Despite attempts to subsume this social infrastructure within normative narratives of fiscal cost, and privatise the library building, broader debate around the Wellington library illustrated significant resistance to these pressures from large portions of the public. I argue that the atmospheres of political feeling around urban infrastructures and public services are always in flux and being re-made, leaving open the possibility for new conceptions of value to emerge.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104531"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145973224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-11DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104533
Si Jie Ivin Yeo
This paper explores the geographies of futurity surrounding the emergence and enactment of a specific ‘smart’ urban intervention, the E-Payments initiative, in Singapore. I employ two metaphors – emergence and enactment – to trace, firstly, how imaginings of the future are mobilised by state authorities in Singapore to rationalise the E-Payments initiative and, secondly, how the initiative and its accompanying digital urban futures play out in and through space. Based on an analysis of official publications and newspaper articles, I show that digital urban futures are not only relationally programmed and organised through spatial frames but also through temporal terms. Just as visions of the future projected by smart city programmes and policies are constituted by inter-urban referencing and legitimised by uneven urban geographies of development, so too are they shaped by past visions of the future as well as the spectre of a backward past. Evaluating how digital urban futures emerge and are enacted is significant for revealing the spatiotemporal dimensions of smart urbanisation and, in so doing, troubling the abstract causality and determinism present in prevailing discourses of digital urban development.
{"title":"Programming digital urban futures: The emergence and enactment of Singapore’s E-Payments initiative","authors":"Si Jie Ivin Yeo","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104533","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2026.104533","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores the geographies of futurity surrounding the emergence and enactment of a specific ‘smart’ urban intervention, the E-Payments initiative, in Singapore. I employ two metaphors – emergence and enactment – to trace, firstly, how imaginings of the future are mobilised by state authorities in Singapore to rationalise the E-Payments initiative and, secondly, how the initiative and its accompanying digital urban futures play out in and through space. Based on an analysis of official publications and newspaper articles, I show that digital urban futures are not only relationally programmed and organised through spatial frames but also through temporal terms. Just as visions of the future projected by smart city programmes and policies are constituted by inter-urban referencing and legitimised by uneven urban geographies of development, so too are they shaped by past visions of the future as well as the spectre of a backward past. Evaluating how digital urban futures emerge and are enacted is significant for revealing the spatiotemporal dimensions of smart urbanisation and, in so doing, troubling the abstract causality and determinism present in prevailing discourses of digital urban development.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104533"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145973225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-10DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104532
Martin J. Murray, María Arquero de Alarcón, Olaia Chivite Amigo
A strong current in recent scholarship on post-bankruptcy Detroit has endorsed an uplifting narrative of resilience leading to spatial stability and eventual city-wide recovery. Yet this constructed tale of rebirth has conveniently overlooked entrenched zones of deprivation that remain virtually untouched by the “Comeback fever.” Looking at what has happened in the neighborhood east of Gratiot Avenue and south of 7 Mile Road reveals a different story of enduring distress that unsettles singular narratives of anticipatory recuperation. Mapleridge (as the neighborhood is officially known) is part of a larger mosaic of stubborn precarity across the urban landscape. While housing vacancy and an aggressive demolition campaign have figured prominently in shaping the physical contours of leftover spaces in Mapleridge, three less visible currents have embedded themselves in the already depleted landscape, turning the neighborhood literally “inside out.” The suburban lifeline that sustains Assumption Grotto Church, an underground economy tied to regional drug trafficking, and commercial businesses operated by immigrant entrepreneurs all can trace their existence to social forces originating outside Mapleridge and Detroit. In seeking to understand how and why abandonment and vacancy have persisted in the neighborhood, it is necessary to recognize that Mapleridge cannot be treated as a cocooned island-like enclave insulated from outside pressures. Instead, the neighborhood must be seen as an outward-looking zone of engagement with porous boundaries shaped more by powerful external forces than by internal dynamics. As a result, Mapleridge has come to function as a conduit, or passageway, linking extractive practices to multiple “elsewheres.”
{"title":"The making and unmaking of place: the extroversion of the Mapleridge neighborhood in post-bankruptcy Detroit","authors":"Martin J. Murray, María Arquero de Alarcón, Olaia Chivite Amigo","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104532","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104532","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A strong current in recent scholarship on post-bankruptcy Detroit has endorsed an uplifting narrative of resilience leading to spatial stability and eventual city-wide recovery. Yet this constructed tale of rebirth has conveniently overlooked entrenched zones of deprivation that remain virtually untouched by the “Comeback fever.” Looking at what has happened in the neighborhood east of Gratiot Avenue and south of 7 Mile Road reveals a different story of enduring distress that unsettles singular narratives of anticipatory recuperation. Mapleridge (as the neighborhood is officially known) is part of a larger mosaic of stubborn precarity across the urban landscape. While housing vacancy and an aggressive demolition campaign have figured prominently in shaping the physical contours of leftover spaces in Mapleridge, three less visible currents have embedded themselves in the already depleted landscape, turning the neighborhood literally “inside out.” The suburban lifeline that sustains Assumption Grotto Church, an underground economy tied to regional drug trafficking, and commercial businesses operated by immigrant entrepreneurs all can trace their existence to social forces originating outside Mapleridge and Detroit. In seeking to understand how and why abandonment and vacancy have persisted in the neighborhood, it is necessary to recognize that Mapleridge cannot be treated as a cocooned island-like enclave insulated from outside pressures. Instead, the neighborhood must be seen as an outward-looking zone of engagement with porous boundaries shaped more by powerful external forces than by internal dynamics. As a result, Mapleridge has come to function as a conduit, or passageway, linking extractive practices to multiple “elsewheres.”</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104532"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145921385","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2026-01-07DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104514
Siobhan McDonnell, Brianna Gordon
{"title":"Indigenous participation in the Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples’ Platform: The need to decolonize UN climate governance","authors":"Siobhan McDonnell, Brianna Gordon","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104514","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104514","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104514"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2026-01-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145921384","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-31DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104529
Lisa Palmer , Sue Jackson , Lesley Head , Leopoldina Guterres , Emilio Guterres , Juliao Luis
In this paper we trace the cultural movement of an expanding carbon forestry program in Timor-Leste and investigate the priority given by participants to sustaining relatedness through Indigenous Timorese practices of kinship, ritual and everyday resource negotiations. We argue that this critical and usually invisible political-economy work is embedded in the participants’ own deeply embodied socio-ecological knowledges and ethics of care. We investigate how these principles and practices are both enabling and reformulating ways of imagining carbon commodification and associated environmental governance. We argue that the agential power of people’s socio-ecological norms and practices is a critical driver of the wider benefits that these programs are generating, including the strengthening of local Indigenous house-based authority. At the same time, we note a contrasting level of disregard shown by proponents of international carbon projects for the political and cultural implications of these foundational Indigenous governance processes. We note a range of circumstances in which the potential for this carbon-forestry program to support and be supported by customary governance institutions may be at risk.
{"title":"Lisan Matters: Carbon forestry, embodied care and Indigenous governance norms in Timor-Leste","authors":"Lisa Palmer , Sue Jackson , Lesley Head , Leopoldina Guterres , Emilio Guterres , Juliao Luis","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104529","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104529","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this paper we trace the cultural movement of an expanding carbon forestry program in Timor-Leste and investigate the priority given by participants to sustaining relatedness through Indigenous Timorese practices of kinship, ritual and everyday resource negotiations. We argue that this critical and usually invisible political-economy work is embedded in the participants’ own deeply embodied socio-ecological knowledges and ethics of care. We investigate how these principles and practices are both enabling and reformulating ways of imagining carbon commodification and associated environmental governance. We argue that the agential power of people’s socio-ecological norms and practices is a critical driver of the wider benefits that these programs are generating, including the strengthening of local Indigenous house-based authority. At the same time, we note a contrasting level of disregard shown by proponents of international carbon projects for the political and cultural implications of these foundational Indigenous governance processes. We note a range of circumstances in which the potential for this carbon-forestry program to support and be supported by customary governance institutions may be at risk.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104529"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145880735","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104525
Ningning Chen , Orlando Woods
Faith in the Chinese diaspora has become increasingly vibrant in the context of China’s rise as a global power. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research exploring the temple networks of the Guangze Zunwang cult, this paper advances an assemblage approach to understanding diasporic faith and investigating its multi-scalar becoming by exploring three areas of inquiry. The first investigates the evolving development of the Guangze Zunwang cult and its formation into a faith assemblage based on temple alliances, which bring people, deities, institutions, places and material objects together across (national) borders. The second explores the multi-scalar becoming in which faith assemblages are (de)territorialized by the Chinese state for diaspora engagement and at the same time by diasporic devotees who leverage their affective potential for root-seeking and networking. The third considers how the scalar interaction of top-down and bottom-up visions eventually leads to the emergence of liminal faith assemblages that are characterized by ambiguous temple activities and subjectivities, producing ambivalent tensions. In all, by foregrounding an assemblage perspective, this paper highlights the multi-faceted, non-linear and liminal ways multiple actors, flows and sites are weaved together to shape the emergence of Chinese diasporic faith across borders. It also contributes to existing understandings of diaspora engagement by bringing hitherto overlooked religious and spiritual dimensions into one analytical schema, offering insight into the agency of the Chinese diaspora amidst China’s rise.
{"title":"Assembling diasporic faith amidst China’s rise: (de)territorialization and the multi-scalar production of the Guangze Zunwang cult in the Chinese diaspora","authors":"Ningning Chen , Orlando Woods","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104525","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104525","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Faith in the Chinese diaspora has become increasingly vibrant in the context of China’s rise as a global power. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research exploring the temple networks of the Guangze Zunwang cult, this paper advances an assemblage approach to understanding diasporic faith and investigating its multi-scalar becoming by exploring three areas of inquiry. The first investigates the evolving development of the Guangze Zunwang cult and its formation into a faith assemblage based on temple alliances, which bring people, deities, institutions, places and material objects together across (national) borders<em>.</em> The second explores the multi-scalar becoming in which faith assemblages are (de)territorialized by the Chinese state for diaspora engagement and at the same time by diasporic devotees who leverage their affective potential for root-seeking and networking. The third considers how the scalar interaction of top-down and bottom-up visions eventually leads to the emergence of liminal faith assemblages that are characterized by ambiguous temple activities and subjectivities, producing ambivalent tensions. In all, by foregrounding an assemblage perspective, this paper highlights the multi-faceted, non-linear and liminal ways multiple actors, flows and sites are weaved together to shape the emergence of Chinese diasporic faith across borders. It also contributes to existing understandings of diaspora engagement by bringing hitherto overlooked religious and spiritual dimensions into one analytical schema, offering insight into the agency of the Chinese diaspora amidst China’s rise.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104525"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145837122","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-27DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104528
Zikang Ji , Niamh Moore-Cherry , Dieter F. Kogler
{"title":"Corrigendum to “Challenging narratives of homogeneity: Using PCA and Cluster Analysis to develop a typology of key towns in Ireland”. [Geoforum 169 (2025) 104510]","authors":"Zikang Ji , Niamh Moore-Cherry , Dieter F. Kogler","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104528","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104528","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104528"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146022811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2025-12-23DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104527
Elmond Bandauko
This paper develops the concept of necrospatial containment (NSC) to illuminate the conditions shaping everyday life in Hopley and Hatcliffe Extension, Harare’s largest informal settlements. Building on Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics and Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence, I develop necrospatial containment as an analytical framework structured around four interrelated pillars: (i) geographies of spatial constriction, (ii) infrastructure as deathscape, (iii) perpetual threat of erasure, and (iv) toxic ecologies. Collectively, these pillars reveal how urban governance, infrastructural abandonment, and everyday struggles intersect to produce spaces of prolonged disposability. I then empirically ground necrospatial containment using evidence from focus group discussions and institutional discourses, demonstrating how informal settlement residents are confined in precarious conditions that limit mobility, constrain opportunities, and normalize risk. The paper contributes to critical urban studies by advancing a conceptual vocabulary that frames informality as a spatialized mode of governance that structures who gets to live and under what conditions. The findings underscore the urgent need for policy interventions that recognize informal settlements as legitimate urban spaces requiring investment, rights, and infrastructural justice.
{"title":"Necrospatial containment and slow violence in Harare’s informal settlements","authors":"Elmond Bandauko","doi":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104527","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104527","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper develops the concept of necrospatial containment (NSC) to illuminate the conditions shaping everyday life in Hopley and Hatcliffe Extension, Harare’s largest informal settlements. Building on Mbembe’s (2003) necropolitics and Nixon’s (2011) theory of slow violence, I develop necrospatial containment as an analytical framework structured around four interrelated pillars: (i) geographies of spatial constriction, (ii) infrastructure as deathscape, (iii) perpetual threat of erasure, and (iv) toxic ecologies. Collectively, these pillars reveal how urban governance, infrastructural abandonment, and everyday struggles intersect to produce spaces of prolonged disposability. I then empirically ground necrospatial containment using evidence from focus group discussions and institutional discourses, demonstrating how informal settlement residents are confined in precarious conditions that limit mobility, constrain opportunities, and normalize risk. The paper contributes to critical urban studies by advancing a conceptual vocabulary that frames informality as a spatialized mode of governance that structures who gets to live and under what conditions. The findings underscore the urgent need for policy interventions that recognize informal settlements as legitimate urban spaces requiring investment, rights, and infrastructural justice.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":12497,"journal":{"name":"Geoforum","volume":"169 ","pages":"Article 104527"},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2025-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145837060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号