Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space最新文献

Domestic care workers have long been largely invisible in labour statistics and in public and policy debates. The emergence of digital labour intermediaries has exposed domestic care workers to a new, but problematic, individual visibility: to find jobs and customers, they must create digital public profiles with personal information. Accordingly, scholars emphasise that this individualised visibility poses risks to privacy and security of domestic care workers. We argue in this paper that labour market intermediaries create not only an individualised visibility of domestic care workers, but also a new collective visibility that leads to more public debate about their working conditions and societal recognition. Methodologically, our argument is based on qualitative interviews with founders and managing directors of companies who mediate domestic care work in Switzerland. Drawing on the concept and literature on market moralisation, we consider these companies to be moral entrepreneurs. Based on our interest in how they frame the social value of commodified care work, we applied a discourse-analytic perspective. We found that the moral entrepreneurs use four central narratives to highlight their societal contribution. They claim to formalise care work, increase the public recognition of care work, emancipate women and integrate migrants. Based on these findings, we discuss these moralising narratives as ambivalent: although they reify a problematic feminisation, migrantisation and neoliberalisation of domestic care work, they enhance the collective visibility of care workers. Subsequently, the increased visibility might contribute to put working conditions in domestic care on the public agenda and lead to positive change.

Highways are vital to global supply chains, enabling the dominant form of circulating goods inland by truck. Within critical economic geography and related disciplines, however, insufficient attention has been placed on developing a radical highway geography that positions highways within the evolving relationships between global capital, state scales and the labour of moving goods. I fill this silence by applying a historical-geographical materialist lens to Germany's most congested, costly, and controversial highway - Berlin's intercity A100 - to explore the entanglements of highways, labour power and the capitalist state within the socio-spatial and temporal dynamics of global capitalism. By following the A100 from the 1950s to the proposed completion of its contentious 16th extension in 2025, I argue that the 16th construction phase is the outcome of continual attempts by the capitalist state - at various scales of intervention - to annihilate space through time. These time-space compressions, which are incomplete, contradictory and contested, facilitate the circulation of commodities - understood here as urban freight and labour power - across space more rapidly and at lower cost, leading not only to a remaking of city logistics but also in the embodied labour of truck drivers, whose working lives increasingly reflect the pressures of accelerated circulation.

In this paper I examine climate-aligned development finance initiatives (DFIs) that foster private-sector investment in 'sustainable' urban infrastructures. I am concerned with the ways in which they work to create the institutional preconditions for such investment. I develop the notion of Municipal Structural Adjustment (MSA) as a lens for examining the fields of intervention and modes of policy-making through which these initiatives seek to reform municipalities' governance structures, innovate planning tools and introduce financial instruments. Empirically, this paper focuses on initiatives that get implemented in Mexican municipalities. It builds on a historical exploration of the ways in which development interventions have addressed municipal-scale institutions, as well as on expert interviews with development officers, DFI staff, municipal officials, planners and consultants to analyse these actors' efforts to reform urban bureaucracies. I delineate three interrelated modalities of institutional adjustment that I take to characterise MSA: (1) the superimposition of DFIs' planning schemes with government legislation and their gradual institutionalisation; (2) the burial of decisions in the development of infrastructure deals and (3) the infiltration of municipal authorities, coupled with interventions in the organisational architecture of urban bureaucracies. In contrast to earlier Structural Adjustment Programmes in which development actors enforced a clear package of reforms by holding national governments hostage to conditionality-laden policy measures, these modalities highlight how DFIs institutionalise change through subtle, vested and protracted mechanisms. To place them in the lineage of Structural Adjustment Programs indicates that MSA is a deeply political process, embedded in a political economy of structural domination.

Several Coast Salish First Nations are actively involved in land reclamation and redevelopment in the greater Vancouver region (Canada). Through their for-profit development corporations, entities like Nch'ḵay̕ Development Corporation (Squamish Nation) and the joint-venture Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh Development Corporation have become key players in the lucrative Vancouver property market in partnership with other public and private land developers. Situating multibillion-dollar holdings like the Jericho and Sen̕áḵw projects that further highest-and-best-use appraisal within the context of the area's settler colonial history, we argue that land repossession and its associated development was made possible through settler colonial forms like corporate decisions, legal judgements and political frameworks that rendered land ready for disposal. Repossession thus created options for new types of reintegration into capitalist spheres, primarily as residential real estate projects, independent from specific configurations of land tenure as fee simple or reserve land. Advancing the concept of 'accumulation by repossession,' a recursive moment associated with dispossession, we describe how First Nations peoples are regaining land title and political-economic control at the same time as their development corporations are promoting urban capital accumulation through privatized profit-making. Land 'improvement', speculation, and the creation of private real property have driven Indigenous dispossession in Coast Salish territory just as they now shape repossession.

This article examines the links between financialization, rent increases and spatial inequality in Toronto, Canada. By drawing on qualitative data from the grey literature, corporate records and real estate events, we first find that financial landlords (REITs, REOCs, asset managers, private equity and institutions) attest to rent price increases as a strategy core to their financial structure, leading to a systematic undermining of affordability. Drawing on a Toronto-wide database of property rent levels, we then quantitatively demonstrate that financial firms charge higher rents, charge higher premiums to neighbourhood average rents and post the highest same-property quarterly rent increases, compared to other types of landlords. We analyzed the geography of financialization and rent, finding that financial firms charge the highest premiums to average rents in lower-income and racially marginalized 'Neighbourhood Improvement Area', (NIAs), capitalizing on the higher rent gap potential in devalued areas with lower rent levels. We conclude by stressing the importance of reining in on financial landlords, especially as they have become the largest acquirers of suites in Toronto in the past two decades.

In conversation with Quinn Slobodian's Crack-up capitalism, the commentary explores the book's innovative but for the most part implicit methodological and expositional strategy, reflecting on some of the implications for the geographical analysis of ideas and ideation. Ideation certainly matters, but never mechanically or predictably, so the challenging questions concern how to specify, and to assign explanatory weight to, particular ideas in particular situations.

The article introduces a book forum on Isabella Weber's book, "How China Escaped Shock Therapy." The book is notable not only for the way that it reinterprets, substantively and theoretically, the story of China's world-altering economic transformation, but also for the truly original kind of book that it is.

Crises of seniors' care in countries like the UK and Canada, further highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been connected to processes of privatization and financialization. In this paper I argue that rent theory is important for disaggregating mechanisms, including of accumulation by dispossession, the devaluation of labour, and assetization, that underpin the process of financialization in the sector. Work on rents often divides between critical approaches, especially to land rent, and mainstream institutionalist and public choice approaches to rent-seeking. Critical rent theory is evolving beyond this divide to understand a broader range of types of rent. Yet, despite attention to the increasing importance of economic rents and forms of rentierism, labour and social reproduction are often excluded from the analysis of how rent relations arise. This paper demonstrates the problems with these exclusions. The argument is illustrated through an analysis of the restructuring of eldercare in British Columbia, Canada, in the last two decades, and employs a feminist political economy approach to examine the social production of rent relations.