Geoforum最新文献

This paper conceptualises the industrial and institutional co-evolution of the Chinese import cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) industry, led by digital platform firms, over the decade 2012–2022. By drawing on empirical interview data and extensive secondary material from industry and government sources, and applying Gong and Hassink’s (2019a) framework of industrial-institutional co-evolution, we develop a three-phase conceptualisation to assess how industrial and institutional dynamics have developed in tandem, leading to significant regional development through CBEC pilot zones. Contrasting with research that has implied limited agency of industrial actors in a Chinese state-led institutional environment, our analysis explores how leading platform firms have successfully legitimised their role in the sector through government engagement and lobbying activities. Further, and in contrast with recent regulatory tightening with respect to the wider activities of platform firms, the technological infrastructure and associated data transparency offered by the platforms has led the Chinese state to set aside oligopolistic antitrust concerns in its regulation of this industry.

This article explores how landscapes and their traits evoke a certain kind of world and how it then provides people a warrant to rectify or remove any trait that they detect as deviant or undesirable. This process is exemplified by an event that took place in Turku, Finland, in 2021. It elaborates a rarely utilized landscape theory drawn from the works of Deleuze and Guattari to address a controversy surrounding a landscape trait, a rainbow crossing, that was removed shortly after its implementation. The findings highlight how landscapes are highly effective in detecting supposed social deviance and in providing a warrant to correct any supposed abnormalities to maintain normality. The implementation encapsulated the social changes related to sexuality that occurred in Finland at the turn of the millennium, whereas the removal can be understood as typifying conservative sentiments and, more specifically, the political backlash against these changes that took place in the following decades. The heteronormative social order was quickly reinstated as the rainbow crossing was able to visibly challenge the dominance of the Oedipalized form of sexuality.

Using location theory as a starting point, this paper aims to understand how coworking spaces (CSs) locate within the city and how they reacted to the stress of COVID-19. Through a case study of the city of Montreal (Canada), we show that most CSs locate in areas of high transit accessibility and in central districts, but there is a trend – possibly accelerated by COVID – towards more suburban locations. These location strategies follow logics similar to those of Knowledge intensive services (KIS), including the tendency of some to agglomerate and of others to disperse. For some CSs, there is also heightened sensitivity to interactions with, and contributions to, the local community. Hence, faced with COVID, CSs in transit-accessible places combine an inward strategy, centralizing their activities around members, with a networking strategy, pooling some services and developing partnerships with local or other nearby CSs. Furthermore, CSs in peri-central neighbourhoods are the most vulnerable and have adopted retraction strategies. In contrast, CSs located in low accessibility districts outside the agglomeration adopt an expansion strategy, opening new branches near suburban residential areas to attract nearby workers. As hybrid work evolves, these results can help urban planners better understand the location rationales of CSs, how they adapt, and to what extent they bring added value to local urban development.

One of the most visible infrastructural legacies of the 20th century is the urban highway, which underpinned the massive transformations of cities and regions in the postwar period. As concerns grow about the climate impacts of car travel and urban sprawl, however, cities across the world have begun to remove or repurpose sections of urban highways to try and heal the social, economic, and ecological scars of their construction and promote sustainable urban development. These processes speak to key scholarly debates in geography and cognate fields on the relationship between transport infrastructure and processes of urban change. In this paper we explore two cases of what we call the “de-infrastructuring” of automobility: the piecemeal pedestrian appropriation of the Minhocão elevated highway in São Paulo and the ongoing political conflicts over the burial of the A-5 highway in Madrid. In each case, the peopling of highway infrastructure—whether by temporary occupation or permanent removal—is both a popular demand and a potential component of urban redevelopment strategies designed to channel investment back into the spaces that these infrastructures devalued. At the same time, these projects are ongoing, contested, and uncertain, and constitute broadly piecemeal and somewhat ephemeral attempts at repair, rather than more systemic approaches to undoing automobility and its socioecological impacts. Highway restructuring in São Paulo and Madrid therefore raises crucial questions about urban socioecological restructuring and the prospects for a just post-automobile city.

In 2017, the UK’s Industrial Strategy was thought to have marked an unconventional moment in British politics, as the state began to explicitly ‘pick the winners’ necessary to both grow and decarbonise the economy. This article demonstrates that a more conventional view of this moment can be found in the pages of the Green Finance Strategies where, contrary to the assumption that a green transformation requires developing domestic capacity in emergent technologies, the UK has instead chosen to be the financier of them. It draws on a novel dataset to find another instance of ‘Treasury Control’, in which large scale investments in low carbon sectors was eschewed to instead 'green' the financial expertise located in the City of London, thereby making green finance British industrial policy. Instead of any industrial transformation of the UK political economy, the pursuit of green finance belies the fact that any such transition, and by extension Net Zero, is shaped by the City-Bank-Treasury nexus' desire to preserve the prevailing economic model with as few adjustments as possible.

This paper provides further understanding of how social sustainability functions as a discursive boundary object, by exploring how it is artefactually anchored during the planning process, and how this anchoring affects the discourse of social sustainability. This is explored in a Swedish strategic planning project – the RiverCity in Gothenburg – where social sustainability is the desired policy objective. This paper traces how the discourse of social sustainability shifted during the planning process (2012–2019) and shows how social sustainability contains two levels of meaning, substantives aspects of what a socially sustainable city is and procedural of how to achieve it. The substantive level functions as a boundary object between policy areas, however, the procedural level leads to goal conflicts when it is translated and artefactually anchored by different municipal departments. The findings show how the conflicts between different translations of social sustainability change the discourse over time without changing the phrasing of the first level of meaning. This finding shows that 1) while the core idea persists different translations lead to different artefactual anchoring, 2) which shows a mismatch between long-term socioeconomic goals and short-term financial goals for social sustainability, and 3) risks the concept being hijacked.

This themed issue showcases contributions that study how processes of digitization and platformization are reshaping the intermediary role and operations of advanced producer services (APS). It places these alterations against the backdrop of earlier rounds of APS ‘shapeshifting’ amid globalization and financialization. This introduction to the themed issue outlines the main dimensions of these shifts affecting APS: geographical changes, sectoral and functional changes, organizational changes, and strategic-institutional changes. Reflecting on the themed issue contributions, we posit that digitization and platformization are rapidly altering APS as organizations, but there is little evidence for a wholesale loss of their intermediary function. In geographical terms, we observe that the platformization of APS is generating networked dependence of world cities on tech centres, further entangling APS intermediation with wider geopolitical concerns about technological sovereignty.

Although densification is generally seen to contribute to more sustainable urban development, it is often linked to market-oriented and for-profit development, contributing to the enclosure of urban space. We analyse how densification can take a different path through processes of commoning. We particularly aim to understand how commoning initiatives can contribute to new institutional arrangements that counteract enclosure and commodification in densification. We furthermore aim to contribute to conceptual clarity in the debate on urban commons by emphasizing the different roles of so-called ‘old’ and ‘new’ commons in urban development. Our analytical framework builds on a new institutionalist approach which stresses the analysis of localized and temporary institutional arrangements negotiated among actors in a given situation. We rely on a detailed case-study of a densification project in the city of Bern (Switzerland), where publicly-owned land was redeveloped into cooperative housing and urban green space. Our findings show how densification leads to a transition phase in which institutional arrangements defining land uses and allocating access and use rights are renegotiated. These are crucial moments where processes of commoning can shape the outcome of densification, although not independently from the supportive action of the public actor. We underline the potential of new commons, even when typically transitional, unstable, and temporary. Contrary to old commons, their potential lies not so much in the ability for long-lasting resource management, but rather in the capacity to change the conditions of governance during the transition between land uses, advancing more socially-sustainable outcomes in a key moment of the urban redevelopment process.

This article uses the term ‘entangled territorialization’ to assess the active role of mining cooperatives in manipulating the access to natural resources in a context of limited state authority. The case study at hand, which concerns the ‘discovery’ of gold deposits in Luhihi, Democratic Republic of Congo in 2020, discusses the contrasting capabilities of two mining cooperatives, COOMIUKI, and COMILU, to position themselves as ‘quasi-state actors’ in a fragmented landscape of artisanal and small-scale gold mining formalization. The paper’s main contributions are twofold. First, it shows how mining cooperatives actively teritorialize the access to gold desposits due to their central role in the social relations of production. Second, it demonstrates that mining cooperatives are important players who, in specific circumstances, are able to influence the spatial organization of natural resource extraction and marketization in important ways.

A broad body of scholarship has examined how states and intergovernmental organizations like UNHCR and the IOM mobilize discourses of humanitarianism and political neutrality to legitimize and depoliticize “migration management,” which is imagined as an orderly, economically productive, and humane endeavor that is in line with state security interests, prevailing growth and development objectives, and human rights norms. The article contributes to more recent work that has tended to frame smaller grassroots humanitarian organizations as either subversive or subordinated to migration management. We engage with long-standing conversations in economic geography and related social science disciplines to consider embeddedness as a conceptual framework that highlights the spatial and temporal nuances of how migrant-serving NGOs negotiate intersecting moral, legal, and political interests. We suggest that conceptualizing embeddedness as a spatio-temporal process nuances recent conversations regarding the ambiguous role of NGOs as either subordinated or subversive relative to migration management. Approaching (dis)embeddeding as a dynamic relational process, we argue, provides a framework for understanding how NGOs simultaneously align with and contest the interests of migration management amid shifting social, economic, and political conditions.