Pub Date : 2024-10-23DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103231
Kristin Lunz Trujillo
Stricter immigration attitudes are associated with rurality. I argue that rural consciousness can help explain this tendency; those Americans higher in rural consciousness should theoretically see undocumented immigrants as a lower-status out-group unduly favored by decision-makers. Using ANES data, I find that colder feelings toward undocumented/illegal immigrants and harsher immigration policy attitudes significantly and positively associate with rural consciousness for rural/small-town residents. This is not moderated by partisanship or racial resentment, though the effect is stronger for non-whites. Further, exposure to an experimental treatment article sympathizing with rural way of life being disrespected – i.e., highlighting rural people being disrespected, which is an element of rural consciousness– results in significantly warmer feelings toward undocumented immigrants for rural/small-town respondents compared to those in the control condition. Conversely, exposure to an article about racial demographic changes in rural areas, or to a lagging rural economic recovery article, did not consistently or significantly affect the outcome variable. This study both confirms links between rural resentment or consciousness in similar contexts, while providing evidence that such a relationship is driven by feelings of in-group disrespect over economic or racial/ethnic threat.
{"title":"Beyond anti-urban sentiment: Rural consciousness and affect toward undocumented immigrants","authors":"Kristin Lunz Trujillo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103231","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103231","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Stricter immigration attitudes are associated with rurality. I argue that rural consciousness can help explain this tendency; those Americans higher in rural consciousness should theoretically see undocumented immigrants as a lower-status out-group unduly favored by decision-makers. Using ANES data, I find that colder feelings toward undocumented/illegal immigrants and harsher immigration policy attitudes significantly and positively associate with rural consciousness for rural/small-town residents. This is not moderated by partisanship or racial resentment, though the effect is stronger for non-whites. Further, exposure to an experimental treatment article sympathizing with rural way of life being disrespected – i.e., highlighting rural people being disrespected, which is an element of rural consciousness– results in significantly warmer feelings toward undocumented immigrants for rural/small-town respondents compared to those in the control condition. Conversely, exposure to an article about racial demographic changes in rural areas, or to a lagging rural economic recovery article, did not consistently or significantly affect the outcome variable. This study both confirms links between rural resentment or consciousness in similar contexts, while providing evidence that such a relationship is driven by feelings of in-group disrespect over economic or racial/ethnic threat.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103231"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142539742","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-23DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103223
Graham Denyer Willis , Angélica Durán-Martínez
How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are produced by ambiguous governance structures, and in turn reproduce them in ways that are unevenly knowable. The characteristics of these spaces that are otherwise shrouded in suspicion and deliberate efforts to make them unknowable reveal patterns and practices of political order while simultaneously creating certainty and fear about the governance they perpetuate. In taking the mass grave as an epistemology, we seek to establish identifiable tenents and patterns for further research and action while recognizing the challenges in asserting a knowledge claim about material spaces that are so intentionally, but unevenly, unknowable.
{"title":"Making sense of clandestine graves: Material epistemology and the political geography of uncertain knowledge","authors":"Graham Denyer Willis , Angélica Durán-Martínez","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103223","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103223","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are produced by ambiguous governance structures, and in turn reproduce them in ways that are unevenly knowable. The characteristics of these spaces that are otherwise shrouded in suspicion and deliberate efforts to make them unknowable reveal patterns and practices of political order while simultaneously creating certainty and fear about the governance they perpetuate. In taking the mass grave as an epistemology, we seek to establish identifiable tenents and patterns for further research and action while recognizing the challenges in asserting a knowledge claim about material spaces that are so intentionally, but unevenly, unknowable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103223"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142539740","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-22DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103232
Michela Bonato
This paper analyses the structural shift of land management and landscape symbolization in urban Chongqing within the political framework of Chinese ecological civilization. It follows the entanglements of Chongqing's public service advertising (PSA) and upscale real estate commercial advertisement and their relationship with the local land renewal process in the 2010s. Based on multimodal discourse analysis, the semiotic deconstruction of visual-ideological allegories highlights institutional tactics aimed at modifying the sense of place perceived through the reconstruction of individual and social identities integrated into a highly politicized and commodified urban landscape. The paper reflects on the epistemological production of spatial knowledge through the instrumental use of representational resources and their historical-mythical code modalities. It also sheds light on how PSA and commercial advertisement may enforce familiar state-driven narratives in authoritarian regimes, questioning diachronic perceptions of nature and dwelling habits in a partially atomized post-socialist society. In so doing, the paper enriches the discussion on the urban ecology-selective (green) gentrification nexus, offering a contextualized perspective of ideological power on environmental protection conveyed through media content technology.
{"title":"Semiotic ideology and mutable sense of place: Chinese ecological urban renewal through the lens of advertising codes","authors":"Michela Bonato","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103232","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103232","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyses the structural shift of land management and landscape symbolization in urban Chongqing within the political framework of Chinese ecological civilization. It follows the entanglements of Chongqing's public service advertising (PSA) and upscale real estate commercial advertisement and their relationship with the local land renewal process in the 2010s. Based on multimodal discourse analysis, the semiotic deconstruction of visual-ideological allegories highlights institutional tactics aimed at modifying the sense of place perceived through the reconstruction of individual and social identities integrated into a highly politicized and commodified urban landscape. The paper reflects on the epistemological production of spatial knowledge through the instrumental use of representational resources and their historical-mythical code modalities. It also sheds light on how PSA and commercial advertisement may enforce familiar state-driven narratives in authoritarian regimes, questioning diachronic perceptions of nature and dwelling habits in a partially atomized post-socialist society. In so doing, the paper enriches the discussion on the urban ecology-selective (green) gentrification nexus, offering a contextualized perspective of ideological power on environmental protection conveyed through media content technology.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103232"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142539741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-21DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103230
Sofia Zaragocin
This paper applies cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) to aquatic space through the bilingual concept of agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory. Based on a 2018 article that I wrote in Spanish and titled “Espacios acuáticos desde una descolonialidad hemisférica feminista” [Aquatic space from a decolonial and feminist hemispheric perspective], I will further develop the concept of water-body-territory that brings together literature on cuerpo-territorio (body-territory) and agua-territorio (water-territory) resulting in a bilingual term agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory. This implies that I will translate parts of the mentioned article from Spanish to English while situating it within hemispheric debates on the individual and collective body autonomy in aquatic space. Agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory will further the conceptual discussions that cuerpo-territorio has garnered across the Americas in feminist academic and activist settings on embodiment and decolonial feminist geography methodologies, in particular the relationship between water and the embodiment of collective death. Moreover, as I will make the case in this paper, this translation process is a praxis of decolonial feminist geopolitics that can engage with debates on collective bodily autonomy for the Americas.
本文通过agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory这一双语概念,将cuerpo-territorio(身体-领地)应用于水生空间。基于我 2018 年用西班牙语撰写的一篇文章,标题为 "Espacios acuáticos desde una descolonialidad hemisférica feminista"[从非殖民化和女权主义半球视角看水生空间]、我将进一步发展 "水--身体--领地 "这一概念,将有关 "身体--领地"(cuerpo-territorio)和 "水--领地"(agua-territorio)的文献结合起来,形成一个双语术语 "水--身体--领地"(agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory)。这意味着,我将把上述文章的部分内容从西班牙语翻译成英语,同时将其置于半球关于水域空间中个人和集体身体自主性的辩论之中。Agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory 将进一步推进 cuerpo-territorio 在美洲女权主义学术界和活动家中引起的关于体现和非殖民地女权主义地理学方法论的概念讨论,特别是水与集体死亡的体现之间的关系。此外,正如我将在本文中论述的那样,这一翻译过程是非殖民化女权主义地缘政治学的一种实践,可以参与有关美洲集体身体自治的辩论。
{"title":"Agua-cuerpo-territorio/Water-body-territory","authors":"Sofia Zaragocin","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103230","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103230","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper applies <em>cuerpo-territorio</em> (body-territory) to aquatic space through the bilingual concept of <em>agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory.</em> Based on a 2018 article that I wrote in Spanish and titled “Espacios acuáticos desde una descolonialidad hemisférica feminista” [Aquatic space from a decolonial and feminist hemispheric perspective], I will further develop the concept of water-body-territory that brings together literature on <em>cuerpo-territorio</em> (body-territory) and <em>agua-territorio</em> (water-territory) resulting in a bilingual term <em>agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory</em>. This implies that I will translate parts of the mentioned article from Spanish to English while situating it within hemispheric debates on the individual and collective body autonomy in aquatic space. Agua-cuerpo-territorio/water-body-territory will further the conceptual discussions that <em>cuerpo-territorio</em> has garnered across the Americas in feminist academic and activist settings on embodiment and decolonial feminist geography methodologies, in particular the relationship between water and the embodiment of collective death. Moreover, as I will make the case in this paper, this translation process is a praxis of decolonial feminist geopolitics that can engage with debates on collective bodily autonomy for the Americas.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103230"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142539746","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-17DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103222
Joe Blakey
This paper makes a conceptual distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation and evaluates what this means for post-foundational political geography and its collective endeavour of achieving a more egalitarian future. Post-foundational political geography is being consolidated as a distinct disciplinary subfield. Within the existing body of literature, significant attention has been directed towards depoliticisation and post-politicisation, but repoliticisation is yet to amass the same critical attention. While literature nonetheless considering repoliticisation treats it as almost synonymous with politicisation, in this paper, I argue repoliticisation is more specifically about enacting, or opening the door to, politicisations. To illustrate the case, I draw upon (auto)ethnographic, scholar-activist work, operating as a carbon accountant for the City of Manchester, UK, as part of a wider project evaluating the role experts (could) play in restricting and enabling political change. Taking post-foundational political geography's insistence that expert, technocratic modes of governance depoliticise seriously, and in mobilising this distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation, I explore what existing subjects like accountants can do to repoliticise. Doing so illustrates how repoliticisations could be triggered from within existing orders of politics and demonstrates how repoliticisation and politicisation are overlapping, related, yet distinct, concepts.
{"title":"What repoliticisation means and requires: Creating the climate for disagreement","authors":"Joe Blakey","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103222","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103222","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper makes a conceptual distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation and evaluates what this means for post-foundational political geography and its collective endeavour of achieving a more egalitarian future. Post-foundational political geography is being consolidated as a distinct disciplinary subfield. Within the existing body of literature, significant attention has been directed towards depoliticisation and post-politicisation, but repoliticisation is yet to amass the same critical attention. While literature nonetheless considering repoliticisation treats it as almost synonymous with politicisation, in this paper, I argue repoliticisation is more specifically about enacting, or opening the door to, politicisations. To illustrate the case, I draw upon (auto)ethnographic, scholar-activist work, operating as a carbon accountant for the City of Manchester, UK, as part of a wider project evaluating the role experts (could) play in restricting and enabling political change. Taking post-foundational political geography's insistence that expert, technocratic modes of governance depoliticise seriously, and in mobilising this distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation, I explore what existing subjects like accountants can do to repoliticise. Doing so illustrates how repoliticisations could be triggered from within existing orders of politics and demonstrates how repoliticisation and politicisation are overlapping, related, yet distinct, concepts.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103222"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142444962","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-16DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103227
Arie Stoffelen , Peter Groote
Municipal amalgamations are widely applied interventions for enhancing policy delivery in a political-economic context of devolution, austerity, and decentralization of welfare states. This paper studies how public stakeholders in the Netherlands walked the tightrope between ‘hard’ political-administrative logic and ‘soft’ cultural-historical discourse to justify, institutionalize, and legitimize municipal amalgamations. It uses a theoretical approach that combines literature on the rescaling of state governance and cultural political economy. Based on a discourse analysis of amalgamation reports, the paper traces the constructed political-economic and cultural imaginaries of the 26 municipal amalgamations that took place in the country between 2018 and 2023. Imaginaries underpinning the Dutch decentralization discourse were purely political-administrative in content, both regarding the necessity to act and the solutions (i.e., municipal amalgamations). Alternative, relational forms of spatial decision-making were covered by an imaginary of inefficiency and limited democratic control. Cultural imaginaries were locally mobilized to retain the top-down political-administrative logic, and to allow the municipalities to position themselves in between the citizens and the state. The amalgamation reports reflected a sometimes-difficult discursive negotiation between administrative efficiency and culture, future and past, vigour and softness, and external and internal visibility of the new municipalities. The paper concludes that the spaces of territorially bounded ways of policymaking, including municipal mergers, are intrinsically relational, jointly material-discursive/symbolic, and fluid (i.e., process-based). The cultural political economy framework provides a useful interpretative framework for debates on politics of scale, state rescaling, and (re)territorialization.
{"title":"Strategic coupling of administrative rationality and cultural imaginaries in municipal amalgamations","authors":"Arie Stoffelen , Peter Groote","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103227","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103227","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Municipal amalgamations are widely applied interventions for enhancing policy delivery in a political-economic context of devolution, austerity, and decentralization of welfare states. This paper studies how public stakeholders in the Netherlands walked the tightrope between ‘hard’ political-administrative logic and ‘soft’ cultural-historical discourse to justify, institutionalize, and legitimize municipal amalgamations. It uses a theoretical approach that combines literature on the rescaling of state governance and cultural political economy. Based on a discourse analysis of amalgamation reports, the paper traces the constructed political-economic and cultural imaginaries of the 26 municipal amalgamations that took place in the country between 2018 and 2023. Imaginaries underpinning the Dutch decentralization discourse were purely political-administrative in content, both regarding the necessity to act and the solutions (i.e., municipal amalgamations). Alternative, relational forms of spatial decision-making were covered by an imaginary of inefficiency and limited democratic control. Cultural imaginaries were locally mobilized to retain the top-down political-administrative logic, and to allow the municipalities to position themselves in between the citizens and the state. The amalgamation reports reflected a sometimes-difficult discursive negotiation between administrative efficiency and culture, future and past, vigour and softness, and external and internal visibility of the new municipalities. The paper concludes that the spaces of territorially bounded ways of policymaking, including municipal mergers, are intrinsically relational, jointly material-discursive/symbolic, and fluid (i.e., process-based). The cultural political economy framework provides a useful interpretative framework for debates on politics of scale, state rescaling, and (re)territorialization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103227"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142442102","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-14DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103221
Alun Jones
This paper explores feelings in diplomatic intimacies in the United Nations in New York. Drawing upon arguments in philosophy on emotional experience and supported by oral testimonies of diplomats, it supplements and complements the rich body of work on practices in diplomacy by exploring how feelings can reach out and be directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body and this is part of the phenomenology of everyday diplomatic lives. I set out three key interconnected goals in order to personify state diplomacy: First, I show how feelings are bound up with cognition and perception and are not the mere effects of these. Secondly, I link feelings with the affective context of the United Nations Security Council in order to expose everyday existential experiences of individual diplomats. Thirdly, I reveal the perceived importance of eliciting events in this geopolitical setting, and the personal meaning of these to diplomats as expressed through their own feelings as state representatives. This is a unique approach to understanding diplomacy in political geography, and also the first of its kind in the study of the intimate geopolitics of the UN.
{"title":"‘I felt’: Intimate geographies of sentient diplomacy","authors":"Alun Jones","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103221","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103221","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper explores feelings in diplomatic intimacies in the United Nations in New York. Drawing upon arguments in philosophy on emotional experience and supported by oral testimonies of diplomats, it supplements and complements the rich body of work on practices in diplomacy by exploring how feelings can reach out and be directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body and this is part of the phenomenology of everyday diplomatic lives. I set out three key interconnected goals in order to personify state diplomacy: First, I show how feelings are bound up with cognition and perception and are not the mere effects of these. Secondly, I link feelings with the affective context of the United Nations Security Council in order to expose everyday existential experiences of individual diplomats. Thirdly, I reveal the perceived importance of eliciting events in this geopolitical setting, and the personal meaning of these to diplomats as expressed through their own feelings as state representatives. This is a unique approach to understanding diplomacy in political geography, and also the first of its kind in the study of the intimate geopolitics of the UN.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103221"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142434106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-10-11DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103219
Jesse Fox, Talia Margalit
In this study, we examine recent actions taken by the Israeli state to naturalize technocratic understandings of land-use plans through the mass media, and assess the implications of this for power-knowledge relations between the state, planners and citizens. Our research focuses on the years 2013–2018, when state planners and officials began working with PR agents to promulgate state-generated, pro-growth representations of plans through mainstream media outlets. We focus on coverage of three types of large-scale plans, all of which involve complex and varied knowledge contents: city master plans, new neighborhood plans, and urban renewal plans. Using critical discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews with key planners and journalists, we examined what kinds of knowledge and information about these plans were conveyed, and how. We found that a significant percentage (some 40%) of the articles published during this period were based directly on state-issued press releases, and exclusively conveyed state-sanctioned perspectives. We interpret this as an attempt by the state to highlight its own role in planning and housing, while taking advantage of journalists' lack of planning knowledge and pressure to publish in order to construct ‘citizen-technocrats’ whose knowledge mirrors that of state-affiliated actors. We situate these findings within the emerging academic discourse on “technocratic populism,” a form of governance in which populist regimes communicate technocratic knowledge directly to citizens, and show how mis/disinformation tactics usually associated with populist discourse now appear in planning communications in Israel. This practice, we argue, has served to entrench a shift toward a centralized form of neoliberalism, while promoting illiberal conceptions of state-citizen relations in the planning context.
{"title":"Knowledge popularization in a technocratic-populist context, or how the Israeli state shaped media coverage of large-scale urban plans","authors":"Jesse Fox, Talia Margalit","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103219","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103219","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this study, we examine recent actions taken by the Israeli state to naturalize technocratic understandings of land-use plans through the mass media, and assess the implications of this for power-knowledge relations between the state, planners and citizens. Our research focuses on the years 2013–2018, when state planners and officials began working with PR agents to promulgate state-generated, pro-growth representations of plans through mainstream media outlets. We focus on coverage of three types of large-scale plans, all of which involve complex and varied knowledge contents: city master plans, new neighborhood plans, and urban renewal plans. Using critical discourse analysis and semi-structured interviews with key planners and journalists, we examined what kinds of knowledge and information about these plans were conveyed, and how. We found that a significant percentage (some 40%) of the articles published during this period were based directly on state-issued press releases, and exclusively conveyed state-sanctioned perspectives. We interpret this as an attempt by the state to highlight its own role in planning and housing, while taking advantage of journalists' lack of planning knowledge and pressure to publish in order to construct ‘citizen-technocrats’ whose knowledge mirrors that of state-affiliated actors. We situate these findings within the emerging academic discourse on “technocratic populism,” a form of governance in which populist regimes communicate technocratic knowledge directly to citizens, and show how mis/disinformation tactics usually associated with populist discourse now appear in planning communications in Israel. This practice, we argue, has served to entrench a shift toward a centralized form of neoliberalism, while promoting illiberal conceptions of state-citizen relations in the planning context.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"115 ","pages":"Article 103219"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142428189","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}