Geographical Research最新文献

This paper explores the nuanced dynamics of displacement under state-led gentrification through the concept of displaceability, using Shenzhen’s urban villages as empirical cases. Whereas earlier gentrification involved large-scale demolition and immediate physical eviction, current urban renewal strategies employ incremental, policy-driven redevelopment aimed at formalising informal settlements into quasi-public housing. Through detailed analyses of Dachong, Shuiwei and Yuanfen villages, we demonstrate how state interventions, despite appearing inclusive, systematically marginalise low-income migrants. We find that talent-oriented redevelopment highlights subtle exclusionary displacement through selective eligibility criteria and rent policies, while centralised leasing schemes institutionalise prolonged vulnerability and persistent uncertainty for original tenants, intensifying socio-psychological stress. By foregrounding these empirical insights, the paper refines understandings of displacement, emphasising temporal and socio-institutional dimensions. Crucially, the paper expands geographic scholarship by demonstrating how state-driven urban strategies actively generate conditions of chronic precarity, embedding socio-economic exclusion within seemingly progressive urban renewal policies. We argue that recognising displaceability is essential for developing more inclusive housing policies globally, particularly in rapidly urbanising contexts of the Global South, where similar state-driven redevelopment practices increasingly prevail.

Geography is undergoing significant change in response to widespread higher education reforms. In this commentary, I reflect on how the discipline’s visibility and geographers’ security and sense of purpose are being reshaped by the likes of programme closures, organisational restructures, or pressures to mould academic priorities to others’ imperatives. These dynamics constitute a background condition that invites deep reflection about where and how geography might be reimagined—and for what ends. I argue that geographers must more actively position the discipline beyond academia by boldly asserting its relevance across public, private, and non-government sectors. I highlight the discipline’s distinctive capacities and consequence—not least among them spatial reasoning, relational thinking, civic engagement, and ethical responsiveness. These qualities make geography crucial for any who seek to deal with complex social, environmental, and political challenges. Ultimately, I call for a (geo)politics of care and radical collegiality among geographers as we navigate uncertain terrains, and stress that we have the ability and responsibility to shape those same terrains. Reinvention is challenging, energising, and purposeful, and this moment offers the possibility to safeguard geography’s enduring civic and intellectual values.

China has committed to providing equitable, available, improved, and safe water in its cities, and has worked to achieve ecological civilisation and the Sustainable Development Goals. Geographical research about water governance in China has largely focused on the state, market, and large-scale water infrastructure projects. There is still a limited pool of empirical evidence and theorising about how everyday infrastructures and practices shape uneven urban waterscapes in urban China. To address this gap, this paper mobilises the theoretical and empirical potential of everydayness as a lens to bridge urban political ecology (UPE) and social practice theory (SPT). Specifically, we interrogate urban water provision in Chinese cities and regions and draw on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in Changsha, China. We examine how centralised water provision crystallises and exacerbates uneven water distributions and insecurity challenges at the material, discursive, institutional, and practical levels. We explain how heterogeneous configurations of water infrastructures and practices fill the gaps of everyday water demand, but can amplify unequal allocations of water resources at the community and domestic levels. Finally, we explore how these water arrangements are closely intertwined with socio-spatial differences and co-produce dynamics of power and authority in urban waterscapes. These uneven hydrosocial relationships are internalised and normalised by excluding the urban poor and marginalised groups, pointing to the need to deepen understandings of the everydayness of hydrosocial geographies in China.

To tackle the ecological damage caused by overfishing in the Yangtze River basin, the Chinese government has implemented a ten-year fishing ban on the Yangtze River since 2021. Underpinned by overarching national narratives about ecological civilisation, the ten-year fishing ban strives to gain economic, social, and ecological sustainability in the Yangtze River basin. In terms of green governmentality, this article explores how regional practices of ecological civilisation have constructed water politics, livelihood transition, and power relations in Poyang Lake—the largest freshwater lake in China that flows into the Yangtze River. Based on document analysis of fishing ban policies and fieldwork in Poyang Lake, the study uncovers unevenly distributed risks among vulnerable groups, including women and the elderly. It considers the strategic and compromised participation of non-state actors under the framework of ecological civilisation by analysing how local communities and environmental NGOs align with governmental goals. It contributes to research on green governmentality by highlighting gaps between state narratives and local implementation of fishing ban policies. It also enriches critical scholarship on hydro-social relations by foregrounding the micro-politics of ecological protection in the Yangtze River basin.

Proposed “nature positive” revisions to the Australian Government’s environmental legislation would further entrench an anthropocentric conception of nature as a commodity able to be metricised, traded, and/or replaced. The proposed legislation also manifests a form of speciesism, focusing on threatened species at the expense of other animals whose habitat would continue to be destroyed, and fails to account for future likely changes in the survivability of various species. Moreover, it takes little account of the suffering of individual animals nor the agential role of animals, plants, rocks, and mountains in more-than-human world-making, thus placing those nonhumans in abjection—that is, accorded no moral considerability. Using the Australian case to anchor our discussion, we conclude that truly “nature positive” approaches to the environment require a shift in emphasis from principally enabling “sustainable” exploitation of resources by humans, toward a focus on sustaining the multitude of context-specific, intensely relational networks of humans-other-than-humans. These relations engender a responsibility on the part of humans, when intervening through legislation, policy or practice, to pay deep attention to the specifics of nonhuman standpoints, subjectivities and relations with place—ground truthing—so that greater knowledge and critical, less anthropocentric thinking can underpin more ethical regulatory frameworks.

Lifestyle migration and existential threats of the climate crisis are unified through the need for escape. Geographical imaginaries of distant, pristine refuges not only define contemporary relationships with these phenomena, but these imaginaries have their inception in colonialism. Research into how geography and colonial history influence imaginaries of escape is underdeveloped. This article uses the Australian island state of Tasmania to address this gap through a critical discourse analysis of online news articles, travel blogs, and history texts. These texts sample the Tasmanian archive and popular cultural discourses about Tasmania’s identity. Martin Polin’s bunker, the Earth’s Black Box project, and tourism and tree-change emerge as key sites for showing how Western geographical imaginaries of Tasmania are reciprocally related to escapism. Analysing the archive through these texts reveals what place identities are deemed desirable in Tasmania, why and by whom, and illustrates how they are unequally distributed. Investigating escapism in Tasmania offers opportunities for similar analyses in other setter colonies and wilderness places, begins conversations about the relationships between apocalypticism, tourism, and migration, and asks how we may decolonise them.