Local Bordering Practices,Refugees, and Civil Society: The Case of Berlin

Using the case of Berlin, this article examines civil society actors in relation to local bordering practices following the large number of refugee arrivals in 2015. Combining critical border, migration, and urban studies and adopting a Foucauldian lens, the article aims to illustrate to what extent civil society actors have challenged and transformed local bordering practices vis‐à‐vis refugees within a specific urban space. The analysis illustrates that civil society actors have created new spaces of inclusion for refugees and brought new political and normative challenges to the established notions of belonging. On the other hand, they have also reproduced bordering practices either by their integration into formal state structures or by reinforcing hierarchical categorizations and unequal power relations embedded in the notion of humanitarianism. Finally, the article argues that these de/re‐bordering practices of civil society actors should be understood in line with the constraints that established bordering processes and the existing political and structural dynamics placed on them.     

Urban agricultural activities and women's strategies in sustaining family livelihoods in Harare,Zimbabwe

This article examines the interplay of changes in urban environments, economic reforms and women's strategies in sustaining family livelihood through a case study based on the survey of off-plot urban cultivators in Harare, Zimbabwe. It also exemplifies the nature of gender-based conflicts arising from varying perceptions of the uses of open urban spaces. This article is organized into four sections. The first section briefly discusses some contemporary issues regarding urban agriculture in eastern and southern Africa. Specifically, it examines the role of women and the conflicts that arise over the use of urban spaces for agricultural activities from the perspective of women's struggle and strategies for sustaining family livelihood. The second section gives some background to urban agriculture in Harare, emphasizing the contribution of urban agriculture to women's strategies for maintaining household food and cash income security as a response to economic reforms and how this comes into conflict with Harare City Council's view. The third and fourth section discusses the results of the survey of urban agriculturists, illuminating how female participation in the activity has distinctive motivations and contributions to the household and the urban economy. Finally, the conclusion outlines the challenges to city planning in a tropical country faced with demand for agricultural use within the urban environment.     

Spatial order through the family: the regulation of urban space in Singapore

This article examines the regulation of urban public space through a study of the role of the family unit in past and present urban development in Singapore. Since the founding of modern Singapore 50 years ago, the nuclear family has remained the preferred social institution for state policies and subsequent regulation of education, housing, employment, health, leisure, social welfare and even neighborhood development. Drawing on primary government documents and field work and interviews with current and displaced small business owners on a commercial street in Chinatown, the article demonstrates how a “softer” version of spatial regulation emerged from an intersection of state commercial development policies that favored small, family-owned businesses and the extension of a family-based moral social order applied to the surrounding public spaces. The result is the regulation of Chinatown’s streets and sidewalks became inextricably bound up with the everyday operations of family-run businesses. More recently, state interest in creating an entertainment-based global Singapore has jeopardized this arrangement, as corporate gentrification threatens to displace family ownership of small businesses.     

The Distribution and Enforcement of Air Polluting Facilities in New Jersey

This study examines the spatial distribution and enforcement of air polluting facilities in the state of New Jersey, as listed in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Aerometric Information Retrieval System. Results show that air‐polluting facilities tend to concentrate near minority neighborhoods, although this relationship is partially explained by factors of population density, manufacturing employment, and land use. Other results suggest that facilities in areas with a relatively high percentage of minority population tend to have a weaker record of environmental enforcement as compared to other facilities. Of the socioeconomic variables considered, employment in manufacturing appears to be the most strongly related to environmental enforcement.     

AFRICAN,RUSSIAN, AND UKRAINIAN REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT IN PORTLAND,OREGON

ABSTRACT. The residential patterns, adaptation experiences, and impacts of immigrants on North American cities have been well documented in the geographical literature. In this article, we build on prior work by testing the theories of Gaim Kibreab, who identified three factors that shape the experiences of recent refugees: attitudes of the receiving society; current policy environments; and employment opportunities in local communities. We analyze some of the ways in which these factors operate as interrelated systems for two comparative groups of foreign‐born migrants in Portland, Oregon: sub‐Saharan Africans; and Russians and Ukrainians. Using a mixed‐methods approach, we triangulate data from a blend of in‐depth interviews, participant observation in the community and at refugee and immigrant social service agencies, census and other statistical records, and cartographic analyses to report on the findings of our work. Data suggest that the residential, economic, and social spaces of new refugees are constructed as a complex multiplicity of networks and relationships that link time and place     

Mining History: Mobilizing The Past In Struggles Over Mineral Extraction In Peru

This paper examines how the past is constructed and mobilized within contemporary Peruvian mining politics. Beginning with an exploration of tensions existing within the mining industry's relationship to its history, I analyze how mining proponents have sought to both naturalize today's mining expansion by locating it within a national history of extraction, while also working to break free from certain negative aspects of the industry's past. The paper then examines how the past is remembered and invoked within the context of on‐the‐ground struggles at a large‐scale gold mine in the region of Ancash. I address the contradictory ways in which local history is constructed in these struggles and document how memories of past experiences with mining inform how area residents understand and critique the “new” mining economy. This paper underscores the need to understand the complicated, selective, and often‐contradictory ways in which the past is made present in extractive industry conflicts.     

Māori women: Bodies, spaces, sacredness and mana

Abstract: This article examines Māori women and the ways in which their bodies are constituted within particular cultural spaces, namely at urupā and sites where food is gathered. Māori bodily rituals, and the impacts of colonization on these bodily rituals, are explored to reveal a ‘nonwestern’ perspective on exclusion. Kaupapa Māori research and postcolonial theory have been combined to produce research that respects and nurtures Māori practices. Colonial notions of blood and menstruation, which inscribe women as ‘dirty’ and ‘unclean’, are critiqued. What is advocated is a Māori perspective that constructs Māori women as connected to Atua, and as powerful, sacred and life‐giving.     

Urban encounters and sexual health among gay and bisexual immigrant men: perspectives from the settlement and aids service sectors

Gay men's health researchers in North America have recently attended to sexual and mental health issues affecting ethnic minority men, many of whom are also immigrants. Most of this work is grounded in epidemiological models that focus on relationships between individual HIV risk and sexual behaviors. Consequently, they the frame the sexual health of gay and bisexual immigrants as the product of cultural issues (for example, family and religious homophobia, lack of health education) or gay community issues (prevalence of drug use and casual sex) that lead to self‐devaluation, depression, and unprotected sex with multiple partners. Few studies, however, examine these phenomena through the lens of migration and resettlement. Using the narratives from twelve in‐depth interviews with settlement and AIDS Service Organization (ASO) workers in Toronto, Ottawa, and London, Ontario, Canada, this article examines four types of post‐migration urban encounters that influence sexual health: negotiations of resettlement‐related stress, encounters with the urban gay community, encounters with the online gay community, and encounters with sexual health promotion itself. The findings suggest that these encounters are important intervening events that mediate the relationship between the attributes of the immigrant and his sexual health behaviors and outcomes.     

Havana: From local experiment to national reform

In April 2011 the Cuban government announced a suite of national reforms with deeper socioeconomic ramifications than the limited liberalizations it permitted in the 1990s. Although unprecedented in revolutionary Cuba, the proposed changes draw on previous efforts to manage decentralization, employment and the informal sector. The paper examines two case studies of prior experimentation with liberalization since 2000 in the municipality of Old Havana and the neighbouring district, Barrio Chino (Chinatown). We argue that the 2011 reforms are informed by specific lessons and insights from these two experiences and also by general development principles advocated by China.     

THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE TO BRITISH HEGEMONY, 1861–1947*

ABSTRACT. In The Shaping of America Donald Meinig describes a United States averse to challenging Britain geostrategically but emerging as a powerhouse economy by the late 1890s. But America embarked on a sustained economic struggle with Britain in 1861 by embracing protectionism; America's Civil War ironclads were as much to resist Britain as fight the Confederacy; and in 1866 uss Miantonomoh helped persuade Britain to reconsider, then pay, the Alabama Claims. Britain never retaliated in the economic struggle by moving to protectionism and in the late 1800s began to appease America in geostrategic terms. This struggle intensified in the 1920s and 1930s as America and Britain competed for control of international transportation, international communication, and the global oil supply, but by the mid‐1940s American hegemony was clear. This article traces the course of the complex economic and political struggle for hegemony in the light of recent models of transitions in the world economy.     

Landscape Frontiers,Geography Frontiers: Lessons to Be Learned

Advancing ecotones, such as treelines and frontiers of human settlement, may share some characteristic dynamics because both include feedbacks between spatial pattern and process. Both might be examined as complex, self‐organizing systems in terms of complexity theory and thus be usefully compared. A cellular automaton of advancing alpine treeline in Montana shows attractors in power‐law frequency distributions of spatial and temporal pattern. Frontiers of study areas in the Amazonian region of Ecuador, analyzed using change detection of Landsat Thematic Mapper imagery, have power‐law distributions of advancing deforestation. Alternative approaches in self‐organized complexity, including self‐organized percolation, and the inverse cascade model, and an approach to complexity involving optimization, highly optimized tolerance, are considered. Some combination of these, based on their common ancestry in percolation theory (with its ties to geocomputation), might provide insights into population‐environment interactions at settlement frontiers and ecotones together, given comparisons drawn between the spatial feedbacks at alpine treeline and in Ecuador. GIScience and landscape ecology can develop synergies by building on this area of geocomputation and complexity theory, as in analysis of attractors in state spaces of spatial metrics from spatially explicit simulations and representing their uncertainty.     

URBAN SPACES OF AMERICAN INDIANS IN THE EXILES

Released in 1961, The Exiles is a low‐budget docudrama that chronicles the lives of three American Indians over a period of twelve hours in a downtown Los Angeles neighborhood in the late 1950s. Contemporary neorealist filmmaking appears to have influenced the film, whereas itsg narrative is ethnographic in form. An examination of the film and its dialogue reveals the ways in which American Indians who recently migrated from their reservation to the city have socially constructed the urban spaces within the framework of the physical setting provided to them. The nature of the engagements of the male and female protagonists with the sites and with other American Indians in this small urban sphere provides substantive clues to the nature and level of their respective transitions into the realm of the white‐dominated society of Los Angeles and beyond.     

(ANTI)SOCIAL CAPITAL IN THE PRODUCTION OF AN (UN)CIVIL SOCIETY IN PAKISTAN*

ABSTRACT. Pakistan is home to some of the most widely admired examples of civil‐society‐based service‐delivery and advocacy groups. Pakistan has also spawned some much‐maligned nongovernmental actors with violent agendas. This article uses the social capital / civil society conceptual lens to view the modes of (anti)social capital mobilization that contribute to the civil and uncivil spaces of Pakistani society. The case examples of Jamaat‐e‐Islami, an Islamic revivalist organization, and the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan are used to understand the geography of social and antisocial forces in Pakistan. It is argued that the processes that mobilize social capital‐whether positive or perverse‐are multiscalar and that, in the Pakistani context, no compelling cultural or religious reason exists for the ascendance of one type of social capital over the other. Positive social capital can be mobilized to contribute to a more civil social discourse in Pakistan, given the right policy choices.     

THE SPACES OF COPING: WOMEN AND "POVERTY" IN SINGAPORE

This paper investigates the relationship between space, gender and poverty in the dynamic Pacific Asian economy of Singapore. It argues for the use of coping strategies as an analytical tool for investigating these relationships, highlighting how women construct strategies from confined spaces. Drawing on spatial stories and real life accounts, it examines the ways in which women use the labour market, the family and community services as strategies against poverty. The paper concludes that women struggle to negotiate the constraints of inadequate childcare provision and traditional attitudes, choosing instead to remain in the home or enter “liminal” spaces in the form of Family Service Centres.     

Employment change in Tasmanian manufacturing, 1980–1985: an enterprise‐based approach

Regionally‐based employment studies must place greater emphasis upon the specific processes taking place within and between firms which lead to employment change. The present study, using an enterprise‐based approach, examines employment change within Tasmania's manufacturing sector between 1980 and 1985. Restructuring taking place within the state's larger resource‐based firms is compared with the role of small indigenous firms in terms of their employment implications. Analysis suggests that future employment growth is least likely to come from the large resource‐based industries which, nevertheless, will continue to employ a major share of Tasmania's manufacturing workforce. Most employment growth since 1980 has come from the state's small indigenous firms which sell their products primarily within the local region. Given the limited Tasmanian market, the potential for continued employment growth within the indigenous firm sector largely depends on these firms’ improved export performances in mainland and overseas markets.     

Another political ecology of civil society reflexiveness against urban industrial risks for environmental justice: The case of the Bisasar landfill,Durban, South Africa

The concerns of political ecology since its beginnings as a field have been predominantly set in rural areas with limited focus on urban industrial risks. Further, debates on the global South (often from Anglo‐American perspectives) have not fully appreciated the divergent and differentiated perceptions of urban risks and, therefore, everyday forms of resistance within civil society. Instead, work has mainly focused on civil society power relations against the state and industry that are driven by coherent populist political agendas. Against this setting, this paper's contribution aims to better contextualize ‘other’ third world localities in political ecology through a case study of urban industrial risks in the upper/middle income (as opposed to rural, low/lower middle income) country, South Africa. In doing so, the paper sheds light on the derelict aspect of civil society contestation, especially along class and ethnic lines, over urban landfill infrastructure as a livelihood resource or a health hazard. The paper draws upon frameworks of self‐reflexivity and reflexive localism as complementary to the mainstream political ecology to illuminate differentiated civil society reflexiveness and therefore, aims to advance the discussion of other political ecologies. The case study of the largest formal landfill site in Africa, the Bisasar landfill situated in Durban, highlights differences underlying power relations and constraints within civil society (in leadership, social networking, resources and mistrust) that have implications for mainstream political ecology notions of civil society coherence.