Geography Compass最新文献

This paper is concerned with the role that urban cultural festivals play in enhancing the quality and vitality of social life. It acknowledges that their reputation has become tarnished in recent years and that festivals now frequently feature in debates because they are charged with inciting tensions, exclusions and contestations. However, of note here is that cities tend to narrowly conceive of festivals as temporarily bounded moments of commodifiable spectacle. The fact that festivals function, on an ongoing manner, as embedded, sustained practices capable of supporting urban social living in numerous ordinary ways is rarely acknowledged, much less prioritised. This paper tries to shift prevailing thinking by advocating an understanding of festivals as embedded socio-cultural practices. Specifically, it argues that festivals can be conceived as social infrastructure that comprise distinct but entirely inter-connected components: material/built forms, socio-cultural materialities and immaterialities constructed through year-round practices and, social spaces constructed and enhanced in the moment of their staging. As well as underscoring the societal importance of festivals, using infrastructure as a framing idea helps develop a better understanding of how festivals function to support the socio-cultural well-being, vitality and engagement of urban dwellers.

In recent years, archiving and countermapping have emerged as popular and powerful instruments to represent unauthorized migrations and criticize contemporary border regimes. This resulted in a variety of political projects involving academics, migrants, and advocacy groups, using archiving and mapmaking as vectors of dissensus and affirming politics. This parallel between maps and archives is not just a contemporary trend; it speaks to their longstanding relationship throughout political modernity, as well as the overlap between the archival and cartographic critiques over the past century. This article reviews contemporary projects that mobilize this nexus to challenge contemporary border regimes. In doing so, I direct attention to how their goals, methods, and designs align with different conceptual approaches to archives and maps. The analysis explores the contributions of geographic thought to this conceptual framework, and it encourages further reflection and participation from geographers in projects making political interventions through archival and countermapping methods.

Over the last 20 years, geographies of sexualities have increasingly challenged imaginations of “metronormativity” and “heterosuburbia” by merging queer and suburban interventions into the field. Yet, these interventions have largely focused on the specific suburban formations of the Anglophone Global North, raising questions about their applicability to the analysis of queerness in the heterogeneous, transforming, and fragmented urban margins of continental Europe. In this article, I explore the theoretical and analytical innovations possible by thinking the “queer suburban” through the lens of the post-suburban which stresses relational modes of thinking, unsettles binary conceptualizations of center and periphery, and outlines new modes of suburban and regional governance. I apply this approach to three key sites of queer suburban intervention: suburban diversification, the governance of suburbanization, and suburbanisms as “ways of life”. First, I argue that adopting a post-suburban perspective allows us to more adeptly grasp the increasingly superdiverse European urban margins by foregrounding an analysis of queerness in relation to other dimensions of heterogeneity. Second, I argue that post-suburbanization processes reshuffle the modes and scales of the governance of queerness. This leads to new neoliberal governance logics such as multi-scalar “diversity politics” aimed at the inclusion of depoliticized queerness in the urban margins. Third, I argue that the post-suburban draws our attention to the possibilities of queer resistance, coalitional claims-making and intersectional organizing in urban peripheries. I conclude by outlining the need for a relational and comparative research agenda on the queer peripheries of Europe.

Rapid urbanization in China in the last 4 decades was fuelled by a huge out-migration of people from the countryside, contributing to rural decline in many areas. Recognition of ongoing rural poverty and the need to modernize the rural economy has given rise to a myriad of policies in the last quarter century supporting rural development, notably in two key initiatives: Creating the New Socialist Countryside (2005) and a Rural Revitalization Strategy (2017). The former focussed on creating improvements to the welfare system, health services and education in rural areas, and was subsequently accompanied by concerted efforts to eliminate rural poverty. Rural revitalization has emphasized the need for agricultural modernization and reducing the income gap between the countryside and the cities. Based on an assessment of the implementation and outcomes of the two initiatives, this paper explores the policies and key events in the process of rural improvement and revitalization in China. It summarizes the development stages of the relevant policies over time and examines the key facets of revitalization. It focuses on increased provision of services in rural areas as part of significant reductions in rural poverty, the reorganisation of agriculture via land consolidation, and the growth of new investment in rural-based industry.

Many governments in Asia have recently started formulating policies for urban agriculture (UA), despite challenges regarding food safety, land access, and equity. In this paper, we systematically review the literature on the health, economic, social, and political dimensions of UA in South, East, and Southeast Asia. Our review reveals that key motivations and attitudes framing UA initiatives are distinct to this region, with food safety concerns being a stronger motivating force than ecological benefits or social justice. Heightened skepticism of dominant food systems in this region is contributing to new cultural agricultural geographies. An ideological shift is also occurring whereby agriculture is beginning to be perceived of as a more-than-rural activity. Nonetheless, we reveal that narrow and often negative perceptions of agriculture in Asia limits the types and extent to which UA occurs. Land access and tenure security are among the greatest barriers to participation in UA. Our review demonstrates that government support for UA has not always been effective, and we outline how capacity building and leveraging local knowledges have been more effective strategies for achieving socio-ecological benefits through UA than technological innovation. Overall, UA's benefits are context dependent and vary across lines of difference related to ethnicity, gender, class, and age. This review will serve as a guidepost for future research and policies aiming to support sustainable and equitable UA in the region, and possibly beyond.

This paper surveys geographical research on ports, and traces three emerging directions: materiality, maritime labour, and statecraft. Amidst the rescaling of global value chains, the fragmentation of production, the rise of cargo-mobilities and accompanying labour regimes, researchers have emphasised containerisation, the rise of logistical systems, and the power of lead shipping firms in driving port interchangeability. Yet, multiple crises and challenges—climate change, pandemic disruptions, decarbonisation, geopolitical conflict, trade wars—impact both global shipping and the ports that sustain global capitalism. Furthermore, such crises widen the scope of research beyond the archetypal container port: to heterogeneous, mixed commodity ‘dirty’ ports of varying sizes and degrees of specialisation. In surveying the literature on maritime ports facilitating circulations of diverse materials and commodities, themes of materiality, maritime labour, and statecraft highlight the different, evolving roles played by ports in a crisis-ridden context. Not merely interchangeable nodes in speeded-up flows, ports are variously environmentally risky places; strategic sites for distributing the heterogeneous materials needed for decarbonisation and globalised production; spaces of regulation, enforcement and conflict; and infrastructural projections of state power—bargaining chips in geopolitical deal-making. Geographers are well-positioned to contribute distinctive insights into how diverse commodities, capital, and people are made to circulate through maritime ports to places beyond, and with what effects.

Loneliness increasingly features in public discourse as a pressing health issue. Loneliness manifests as a feeling of being separate, distanced or isolated, and it is therefore a profoundly spatial phenomenon. Yet, engagement with experiences of loneliness has been sporadic in the discipline of geography. This paper develops the concept of loneliness geographically as a way to research the places, relationships, routines, infrastructures and mobilities that deepen or soften experiences of loneliness. In pulling together isolated strands of inquiry within and beyond human geography, it highlights three avenues of spatial inquiry into loneliness that will strengthen research efforts in this field: the structural and political causes of emotions; the spatial and temporal dimensions of social infrastructures; and the affordances of differently situated social relationships. A geographical approach to the study of loneliness as a feeling of connection that is situated in place offers social scientists new avenues for understanding how loneliness is enabled and experienced, and how it might be prevented and abated.

With this paper we directly address critiques made of mainstream, self-defined Economic Geography as a ‘male, pale and stale’ subdiscipline, proposing that more constructive conversations require open-mindedness, diversity and curiosity. To develop this argument, we draw on scholarship across feminist economic geographies and feminist studies more broadly, presenting new directions and possibilities for overlap. More specifically, inspired by McDowell (2016), we outline three areas offering exciting possibilities for further exploration of the who, what and how of economic geographical research: (i) intersectionality, (ii) diverse economies, and (iii) embodied and sensory geographies. While having already piqued the interest of some economic geographers, these research areas hold great potential for exciting intra- and interdisciplinary conversations. With our conclusions we note the timeliness of this agenda for the real-world application of economic geographies.