Pub Date : 2023-11-10DOI: 10.1177/23996544231213180
Maria Carolina Olarte-Olarte
The subsoil is a strange (legal) object. This article is interested in the legal forms and imaginaries that shape the subsoil as a container of commodities-to-be, and the different regimes of exclusion of use necessary for it to be turned into an exploitable property under a public property scheme. In particular, it examines the spatial assumptions underlying the legal and judicial constructions of the soil-subsoil divide, focusing on a relatively recent debate in Colombia on the reach of peoples’ opposition to mining extraction through a constitutional participation mechanism, popular consultations ( consultas populares). It shows a property regime of use that removes the public content from subsoil public property under an illusion of people’s ownership over a, nevertheless, emptied container. I first focus on the threefold subsoil proprietor and the latent assumption in the Colombian legal system of the subsoil as a set of fragmentable resources contained underground, instead of an intermingled net of relations. In the context of an increasing use of local public consultations to stop subsoil mining throughout the country between 2014 and 2018, I show how mobilization brought to light the limits of a legal fragmentarian lens and how use makes the title of public owners an illusion. I follow with a critical examination of the spatial assumptions underpinning a controversial Constitutional Court decision to ban local popular consultations as a mechanism to decide on the exploitation of the subsoil and ultimately oppose it. From a legal geography perspective, and bringing in elements from other disciplines, this article seeks to unsettle this type of legal spatial production of the subsoil from a more relational understanding of it.
{"title":"‘Never mind extraction, ownership still belongs to ‘us’’: A spatial critique to subsoil public property in Colombia","authors":"Maria Carolina Olarte-Olarte","doi":"10.1177/23996544231213180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231213180","url":null,"abstract":"The subsoil is a strange (legal) object. This article is interested in the legal forms and imaginaries that shape the subsoil as a container of commodities-to-be, and the different regimes of exclusion of use necessary for it to be turned into an exploitable property under a public property scheme. In particular, it examines the spatial assumptions underlying the legal and judicial constructions of the soil-subsoil divide, focusing on a relatively recent debate in Colombia on the reach of peoples’ opposition to mining extraction through a constitutional participation mechanism, popular consultations ( consultas populares). It shows a property regime of use that removes the public content from subsoil public property under an illusion of people’s ownership over a, nevertheless, emptied container. I first focus on the threefold subsoil proprietor and the latent assumption in the Colombian legal system of the subsoil as a set of fragmentable resources contained underground, instead of an intermingled net of relations. In the context of an increasing use of local public consultations to stop subsoil mining throughout the country between 2014 and 2018, I show how mobilization brought to light the limits of a legal fragmentarian lens and how use makes the title of public owners an illusion. I follow with a critical examination of the spatial assumptions underpinning a controversial Constitutional Court decision to ban local popular consultations as a mechanism to decide on the exploitation of the subsoil and ultimately oppose it. From a legal geography perspective, and bringing in elements from other disciplines, this article seeks to unsettle this type of legal spatial production of the subsoil from a more relational understanding of it.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"118 38","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135137054","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 : 2023-11-09DOI: 10.1177/23996544231212208
Louise Waite, Hannah Lewis, Rebecca Murray, Emma Tomalin
In this paper we consider the imbrication of UK immigration and border controls into support environments of the anti-modern slavery sphere. We draw on the findings of a 3.5 years ESRC-funded study to explore how the increasingly strident government anti-migrant agenda - broadly seen in the ‘hostile environment’, a culture of disbelief and an overarching preeminence of border controls over human rights protections - is percolating into care providers in the modern slavery sector. Bordering in this sector has not had the same level of scrutiny as within the asylum sector, yet is a particularly interesting site to explore due to the confluence of caring and control impulses. The fresh insight we bring to this context is a focus on the notable presence of faith-based organisations in this sphere. We consider the implications of the relationships between faith, support and bordering - both for those subjected to immigration controls, and those working inextricably within them to support individuals exiting exploitation.
{"title":"Faith, bordering and modern slavery: A UK case study","authors":"Louise Waite, Hannah Lewis, Rebecca Murray, Emma Tomalin","doi":"10.1177/23996544231212208","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231212208","url":null,"abstract":"In this paper we consider the imbrication of UK immigration and border controls into support environments of the anti-modern slavery sphere. We draw on the findings of a 3.5 years ESRC-funded study to explore how the increasingly strident government anti-migrant agenda - broadly seen in the ‘hostile environment’, a culture of disbelief and an overarching preeminence of border controls over human rights protections - is percolating into care providers in the modern slavery sector. Bordering in this sector has not had the same level of scrutiny as within the asylum sector, yet is a particularly interesting site to explore due to the confluence of caring and control impulses. The fresh insight we bring to this context is a focus on the notable presence of faith-based organisations in this sphere. We consider the implications of the relationships between faith, support and bordering - both for those subjected to immigration controls, and those working inextricably within them to support individuals exiting exploitation.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":" 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135192208","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 : 2023-11-08DOI: 10.1177/23996544231208546
Giovanni Esposito, Andrea Terlizzi, François Pichault
This article examines Performance Management Systems (PMSs) as socio-technical policy instruments for shaping power relations in megaprojects. Employing an abductive approach, it innovatively applies Foucault's Panopticon theory to the case of the Lyon-Turin railway, a megaproject funded by the European Union's Trans-European Transport Network policy. Our research reveals that PMSs operate as intellectual technologies that enable megaproject promoters to establish control over participants and align their collective behavior with planned policy objectives. We find that this process follows three Foucauldian panoptic principles: hierarchical observation, where participants are organized under nested managerial tiers, establishing vertical lines of command; examination, which uncovers performance flaws; and normalization, which standardizes behavior across the megaproject field. We argue that: PMSs can be employed by policy-makers as instruments to instil governability and shape the collective behavior of megaproject participants consistently with planned policy goals; no matter how effective the panoptic scheme is, there are always avenues of resistance available among those perceiving the megaproject as a threat; and, the configuration and constitution of power relations in megaprojects involve a complex interplay of discipline, sovereignty, and security mechanisms.
{"title":"The <i>Panopticon</i> reloaded: A critical analysis of performance management systems in the trans-European transport network policy","authors":"Giovanni Esposito, Andrea Terlizzi, François Pichault","doi":"10.1177/23996544231208546","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208546","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines Performance Management Systems (PMSs) as socio-technical policy instruments for shaping power relations in megaprojects. Employing an abductive approach, it innovatively applies Foucault's Panopticon theory to the case of the Lyon-Turin railway, a megaproject funded by the European Union's Trans-European Transport Network policy. Our research reveals that PMSs operate as intellectual technologies that enable megaproject promoters to establish control over participants and align their collective behavior with planned policy objectives. We find that this process follows three Foucauldian panoptic principles: hierarchical observation, where participants are organized under nested managerial tiers, establishing vertical lines of command; examination, which uncovers performance flaws; and normalization, which standardizes behavior across the megaproject field. We argue that: PMSs can be employed by policy-makers as instruments to instil governability and shape the collective behavior of megaproject participants consistently with planned policy goals; no matter how effective the panoptic scheme is, there are always avenues of resistance available among those perceiving the megaproject as a threat; and, the configuration and constitution of power relations in megaprojects involve a complex interplay of discipline, sovereignty, and security mechanisms.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"89 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135393168","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 : 2023-11-03DOI: 10.1177/23996544231212294
Alejandro Armas-Díaz, Ivan Murray, Fernando Sabaté-Bel, Macià Blázquez-Salom
Islands worldwide experience commodification of land and natural resources that is closely related to touristic activity and urbanization. Islands represent the epitome of commodified represented spaces, power, and territorialization, and in this regard, focusing on islands may shed light on how the production of socio-natures shapes the dynamics of capital accumulation, dispossession, and resistance. We explore the contestation of urban-tourist development in Majorca and Tenerife. Both have experienced an intense expansion of artificial land uses since the touristic boom in the mid-20th century, which has intensified with neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of everyday life elements. Environmental struggles in both islands have facilitated greater mobilization than other claims. An empirical survey of the spatio-temporal evolution of these two islands illustrates and helps to deepen the conceptual development of the right to the island and nature. The idea of the right to nature consists of the right to influence and rule the processes by which nature–society relationships are (re)shaped by urbanization and capitalism. The notion of the right to the island relies on the political action to foster a sustainable island future.
{"title":"Environmental struggles and insularity: The right to nature in Mallorca and Tenerife","authors":"Alejandro Armas-Díaz, Ivan Murray, Fernando Sabaté-Bel, Macià Blázquez-Salom","doi":"10.1177/23996544231212294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231212294","url":null,"abstract":"Islands worldwide experience commodification of land and natural resources that is closely related to touristic activity and urbanization. Islands represent the epitome of commodified represented spaces, power, and territorialization, and in this regard, focusing on islands may shed light on how the production of socio-natures shapes the dynamics of capital accumulation, dispossession, and resistance. We explore the contestation of urban-tourist development in Majorca and Tenerife. Both have experienced an intense expansion of artificial land uses since the touristic boom in the mid-20th century, which has intensified with neoliberal capitalism and the commodification of everyday life elements. Environmental struggles in both islands have facilitated greater mobilization than other claims. An empirical survey of the spatio-temporal evolution of these two islands illustrates and helps to deepen the conceptual development of the right to the island and nature. The idea of the right to nature consists of the right to influence and rule the processes by which nature–society relationships are (re)shaped by urbanization and capitalism. The notion of the right to the island relies on the political action to foster a sustainable island future.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"5 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135872997","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 : 2023-11-01DOI: 10.1177/23996544231211243
Aída R Guhlincozzi
This paper analyzes how nonprofit organizations targeting Latine communities in the Chicago suburbs played a role in healthcare access during the COVID-19 pandemic through both political and material actions. Using mixed methods, this research explores the organizational and political infrastructural differences between Chicago and Chicago suburban nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) as they responded to the COVID-19 crisis. Data was collected through both interviews with CBO organizers, and spatial analysis of a database of nonprofit organizations in the Chicagoland area. The findings advance the concept of the infrastructure of civic institutions through finding that distance and differences in funding and collaboration amongst CBOs significantly impact the access of CBOs to structural supports to then provide for their communities. This analysis also includes the comparison of two CBOs to illustrate these geographic differences in funding and collaboration. These findings help demonstrate the need for a more collaborative and versatile design of community-based work, which moves away from the traditional nonprofit funding structure.
{"title":"The political economy of healthcare access and Chicagoland health-oriented non-profit organizations","authors":"Aída R Guhlincozzi","doi":"10.1177/23996544231211243","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231211243","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyzes how nonprofit organizations targeting Latine communities in the Chicago suburbs played a role in healthcare access during the COVID-19 pandemic through both political and material actions. Using mixed methods, this research explores the organizational and political infrastructural differences between Chicago and Chicago suburban nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) as they responded to the COVID-19 crisis. Data was collected through both interviews with CBO organizers, and spatial analysis of a database of nonprofit organizations in the Chicagoland area. The findings advance the concept of the infrastructure of civic institutions through finding that distance and differences in funding and collaboration amongst CBOs significantly impact the access of CBOs to structural supports to then provide for their communities. This analysis also includes the comparison of two CBOs to illustrate these geographic differences in funding and collaboration. These findings help demonstrate the need for a more collaborative and versatile design of community-based work, which moves away from the traditional nonprofit funding structure.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"5 4","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135326017","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 : 2023-10-31DOI: 10.1177/23996544231209149
Andreas Dimmelmeier
The integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into investment processes, often termed “sustainable finance,” has gained significant traction in the global financial system. Yet, despite its growing significance there remains widespread ambiguity about what sustainable finance refers to. Macro-political oriented studies from different disciplines have traced the evolution of sustainable finance and related it to broader financial and political dynamics like financialization or the rise of private environmental governance. By foregrounding these elements, they have, however, tended to paint a too monolithic picture of sustainable finance and related it to abstract discussions such as whether it is controlled by public or private actors. Micro-political accounts, inspired by Science and Technology Studies, have, by contrast, focused on the nuances and contingencies of amongst other metrics, accounting standards or green bond classification frameworks that make the connection of finance and sustainability possible. While these treatments have provided rich accounts of these technical devices, they de-emphasize the connections and evolutionary dynamics of their objects of study. This article aims to bridge macro- and micro-political treatments of sustainable finance by (re-)conceptualizing the evolution of the field in terms of an emerging and expanding infrastructure of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information. Drawing from secondary literature, interviews, and participant observation data, it provides a three-staged history of sustainable finance from the perspective of the technical devices making up ESG information. It, thereby, offers a comprehensive view that goes beyond attributing sustainable finance to macro-level trends or isolated micro-level occurrences.
{"title":"Expanding the politics of measurement in sustainable finance: Reconceptualizing environmental, social and governance information as infrastructure","authors":"Andreas Dimmelmeier","doi":"10.1177/23996544231209149","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231209149","url":null,"abstract":"The integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into investment processes, often termed “sustainable finance,” has gained significant traction in the global financial system. Yet, despite its growing significance there remains widespread ambiguity about what sustainable finance refers to. Macro-political oriented studies from different disciplines have traced the evolution of sustainable finance and related it to broader financial and political dynamics like financialization or the rise of private environmental governance. By foregrounding these elements, they have, however, tended to paint a too monolithic picture of sustainable finance and related it to abstract discussions such as whether it is controlled by public or private actors. Micro-political accounts, inspired by Science and Technology Studies, have, by contrast, focused on the nuances and contingencies of amongst other metrics, accounting standards or green bond classification frameworks that make the connection of finance and sustainability possible. While these treatments have provided rich accounts of these technical devices, they de-emphasize the connections and evolutionary dynamics of their objects of study. This article aims to bridge macro- and micro-political treatments of sustainable finance by (re-)conceptualizing the evolution of the field in terms of an emerging and expanding infrastructure of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) information. Drawing from secondary literature, interviews, and participant observation data, it provides a three-staged history of sustainable finance from the perspective of the technical devices making up ESG information. It, thereby, offers a comprehensive view that goes beyond attributing sustainable finance to macro-level trends or isolated micro-level occurrences.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"38 5","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135870198","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 : 2023-10-30DOI: 10.1177/23996544231194828
Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto, Joseph M Cheer, Maartje Roelofsen
This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.
{"title":"Coercive geographies: Biopower, spatial politics, and the tourist","authors":"Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto, Joseph M Cheer, Maartje Roelofsen","doi":"10.1177/23996544231194828","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231194828","url":null,"abstract":"This symposium examines the relations between biopower, destination governance and tourism. Biopower, a Foucauldian concept, refers to political strategies based on humanity’s biological features. In the simplest of terms, it is applied via biopolitical mandates that govern life of a given population. Contemporary tourism exemplifies the exertion of biopower over the mobility of travellers, as was evidenced during the COVID-19 pandemic, and to a lesser degree, continues to do so. The role that tourism plays in enabling authorities to enact spatial transformations reinforcing state power, while also indicating potential means of resistance, is foregrounded in this symposium. The four empirical contributions extend biopolitical thought by demonstrating that biopower is instrumental in the practices and regimes of mobility, security, in/exclusion of tourism. In Europe, the Dutch government experimented with enclosed “COVID-safe” tourist spaces. In Macao, China’s border regime screened tourists based on their viral threat capacities. On Naoshima Island in Japan, museums have transformed into infrastructures of bodily control. In Taiwan, flight attendants are grappling with newly emerging forms of biopower shaping the sociality of air travel and their own practices of hospitality. These empirically informed contributions interrogate how tourism figures in attempts to govern bodies at the population level, while uncovering the modes of coercion applied to govern tourists and the spaces they inhabit.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136068612","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 : 2023-10-25DOI: 10.1177/23996544231208196
Annie Isabel Fukushima, Marie Sarita Gaytán, Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez
As COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths ravaged US meat-processing facilities, companies and officials supported production instead of people. Analyzing the content of newspaper articles, court records, press releases, and company websites, we argue that (1) despite their “essential” status, meat factory workers are a disposable labor force; and (2) factory worker dispensability is the result of a racialized historical process. The expendability of primarily immigrant and people of color laborers takes place in what we call a “death world economy”—a system through which corporations, together with the state, normalize the relegation of bodies to disease, injury, and death across time and space. Responding to the intensification of this violence during COVID-19, plant employees and their families advocate for their communities’ safety needs, highlight industry inaction, and demand accountability from companies and state officials.
{"title":"Death world economy: Race, meat-processing plants, and COVID-19","authors":"Annie Isabel Fukushima, Marie Sarita Gaytán, Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1177/23996544231208196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208196","url":null,"abstract":"As COVID-19 outbreaks and deaths ravaged US meat-processing facilities, companies and officials supported production instead of people. Analyzing the content of newspaper articles, court records, press releases, and company websites, we argue that (1) despite their “essential” status, meat factory workers are a disposable labor force; and (2) factory worker dispensability is the result of a racialized historical process. The expendability of primarily immigrant and people of color laborers takes place in what we call a “death world economy”—a system through which corporations, together with the state, normalize the relegation of bodies to disease, injury, and death across time and space. Responding to the intensification of this violence during COVID-19, plant employees and their families advocate for their communities’ safety needs, highlight industry inaction, and demand accountability from companies and state officials.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"69 10","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135216603","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 : 2023-10-25DOI: 10.1177/23996544231206821
Jacob Salder, John Bryson, Julian Clark
The regional scale continues to be considered critical to UK economic governance. Successive iterations have however seen limited impact in addressing enduring issues of uneven development despite significant reform. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of the region and regional geographies through application of an assemblage reading. Building on existing work in economic geography, it argues regional economic governance should be considered as an assemblage process involving overlaying territorialisations of place, policy, and stakeholders, and related dynamic capacities involving the multiplicity of components and interactions, legacies of prior arrangements, and agency of actors. Regional governance therefore occurs through a process of continual becoming. Similarly important here however is decoupling. Decoupling has significant spatial and sectoral implications as changed arrangements shift the dynamics integrating actors and groups of actors locally and regionally. Using analysis from Southern Staffordshire, part of the Greater Birmingham city-region, the article argues the shifting nature of regional assemblages and distinct forms of territorialisation are material in decoupling key local sectors from local economy and place. We conclude the application of an assemblage reading, and its enhancement through application of decoupling, has scope to illustrate key causes of uneven development within regions.
{"title":"The decoupling effect and shifting assemblages of English regionalism: Economic governance, politics and firm-state relations","authors":"Jacob Salder, John Bryson, Julian Clark","doi":"10.1177/23996544231206821","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231206821","url":null,"abstract":"The regional scale continues to be considered critical to UK economic governance. Successive iterations have however seen limited impact in addressing enduring issues of uneven development despite significant reform. This paper argues for a reconceptualization of the region and regional geographies through application of an assemblage reading. Building on existing work in economic geography, it argues regional economic governance should be considered as an assemblage process involving overlaying territorialisations of place, policy, and stakeholders, and related dynamic capacities involving the multiplicity of components and interactions, legacies of prior arrangements, and agency of actors. Regional governance therefore occurs through a process of continual becoming. Similarly important here however is decoupling. Decoupling has significant spatial and sectoral implications as changed arrangements shift the dynamics integrating actors and groups of actors locally and regionally. Using analysis from Southern Staffordshire, part of the Greater Birmingham city-region, the article argues the shifting nature of regional assemblages and distinct forms of territorialisation are material in decoupling key local sectors from local economy and place. We conclude the application of an assemblage reading, and its enhancement through application of decoupling, has scope to illustrate key causes of uneven development within regions.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135218210","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 : 2023-10-19DOI: 10.1177/23996544231208198
Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi
Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new forms of neoliberal exclusion.
{"title":"Decolonisation, gentrification, and the settler-colonial city: Reappropriation and new forms of urban exclusion in Israel","authors":"Gabriel Schwake, Haim Yacobi","doi":"10.1177/23996544231208198","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/23996544231208198","url":null,"abstract":"Focusing on the immigration of upper-middle-class Palestinian families to the Israeli town of Upper-Nazareth, originally built by the state to enhance Jewish presence in the area, this paper frames the concept of decolonising gentrification. Accordingly, it studies a unique inconsistency between economic class and ethnonational hegemony, which enables upwardly Arab minority families to overcome ethnic barriers and to exercise social and spatial mobility. Therefore, this paper explains how these socio-political dynamics challenge the local settler-colonial aspects of urban development and enable the reappropriation of colonised urban space. Focusing on the case of Upper-Nazareth and its former ‘Officers’ Neighbourhood’, we examine a distinctive contradiction between political power and economic abilities that triggers a unique case of gentrification, where the colonised minority gentrifies the colonising hegemony. At the same time, this decolonising gentrification, as we argue, takes place in restricted urban enclaves, and relies on an ethno-class price gap as it is only the minority upper-class who is willing to pay the increasing prices, due to their limited options. Therefore, as this paper shows, decolonising gentrification simultaneously challenges and recreates urban settler-colonialism, enabling limited market-oriented reappropriation while triggering ethnic-based accumulation and new forms of neoliberal exclusion.","PeriodicalId":48108,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning C-Politics and Space","volume":"159 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135730711","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}