On poetry,pragmatism and the urban possibility of creative democracy

Democracy everywhere is under siege, overwhelmed by oligarchy, apathy, bureaucracy, and spectacle, at best an ideal that has never been achieved. Yet against the dystopian vision of post-democracy and the post-political is what John Dewey, more than a half-century ago, called “creative democracy,” a moral practice of radical equality in the pragmatic, collective project of hammering out answers to the question of how we should live. This article explores Dewey’s concept of creative democracy as a moral idea, a personal ethic, a collective commitment, and a precondition for political practice. Establishing the conditions for creative democracy requires a significant reconsideration of the education of democratically competent citizens and of the democratic practice of research and knowledge production. Creative democracy is a poetic project, an imaginative opening, an ethical possibility, a shared responsibility, and a practice of hope that opens a path to achieving a better kind of life to be lived.     

From impacts to embodied experiences: tracing political ecology in climate change research

Political ecology has long moved on from its initial skepticism of big science engagements and cursory critiques of simplistic vulnerability approaches. Its core strengths lie in understanding the contestation of inequalities, marginalization, and injustices in access to and control over resources, neoliberal politics of environmental change, and dominant environmental narratives, while incorporating new insights from development ethics, feminist social theory, and resilience thinking. Today’s theoretical lenses allow for an understanding of causal relations in climate debates that exceed narrowly defined impact studies. I focus on four areas that exemplify shifts in engagement with adaptation, stretch themes of inquiry, and delineate zones for analysis and action: (1) reconnecting scale: multiscalar interactions, scalar dimensions of practice, and traversing scales from embodied experiences to the global intimate; (2) destabilizing gender: from gendered vulnerability and adaptive capacity to fragmented identities and intersectionality; (3) repositioning persistent inequalities: from rights to responsibilities, mutual fragility, and human security; and (4) reframing certainty: from climate proofing to limits, traps, and transformative change. Methodologically, I advocate for opening space for collective and anticipatory learning, creative envisioning, rehearsing for reality, and dynamic planning in the context of multiple and synergistic stressors, all powerful countervoices to hegemonic integrated modeling and numeric vulnerability indices.     

Service-Learning: Critical Traditions and Geographic Pedagogy

Abstract

The rise of service-learning in higher education has been critiqued as little more than community service that encourages students to “do good,” but fails to generate original scholarship or social change. In this article, we argue that service-learning gives geographers the opportunity to challenge these critiques, by demonstrating the practical and political implications of collaborative research methodologies, while conveying powerful conceptual understandings of inequality. We begin by interrogating the philosophical overlap between experiential and service-based learning in the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Using this foundational approach, several theoretical and methodological debates in geography are examined, celebrating and drawing lessons from classic and current service-learning programs. We conclude with a discussion and reflection on experiences with implementing similar pedagogical projects.     

Powers of engagement: on being engaged, being indifferent; and urban life

Summary This paper explores the dynamics of engagement and disengagement within urban space. It argues that a certain capacity to encounter the world around the self in an active, creative way is central to the self's ability to recognize and care about the places it inhabits and the people encountered within those places. Drawing on the work of Donald Winnicott and Jessica Benjamin, it outlines a framework of self-other psycho-dynamics through which this active, creative encountering may be understood, and examines the violence of indifference that occurs when this everyday creativity is absent.     

Narratives of Safety on Social Media: The Case of #mysafetyselfie

This article draws on the case of #mysafetyselfie as an example of how social media can be used to highlight the social and spatial factors affecting women's experience with safety. In particular, I consider the ways in which media technology mediates embodied practice through an examination of the selfie as a form of relational place making. In the first section, I situate #mysafetyselfie as a node along a continuum of sociospatial work by Jay Pitter—the project's initiator—stemming from her personal and professional engagement with safety. I then draw from mobile interface theory to argue for the selfie as a practice of embodied implacement, which situates experience as contextually informed. In the next section, I conduct a close reading of three safety selfies from the project, in which safety is framed by the subject in intelligent and creative ways. I conclude by reflecting on the outcomes of #mysafetyselfie and the ethical responsibility of curating stories both offline and online.     

GIS,Cartography, and the “Third Culture”: Geographic Imaginations in the Computer Age*

Geographic information systems (GIS) and cartography have traditionally been regarded as fields for the study of techniques. Yet the past ten years have witnessed geographers' increasing intellectual engagement with GIS and cartography. This essay recaps the recent intellectual discourses on GIS and cartography and speculates on possible development in the near future. Geocomputation, spatially integrated social sciences, social informatics, information ecology, and humanistic GIScience are identified as five areas of intensive new research, and it is argued that creative imaginations under the milieu of the “third culture” are urgently needed to address the challenging issues in this new technological era. Whether geography will become an intellectually more vibrant discipline hinges on the extent to which we can rekindle geographic imaginations in this computer age via GIScience to address issues of great societal concern.     

Coffeehouses And The Art Of Social Engagement: An Analysis Of Portland Coffeehouses

Coffeehouses have been a part of America's cultural landscape since the seventeenth century. Their fortunes have risen and fallen with the changing demand for coffee and consumer preferences. This paper examines their historic function of promoting social engagement as so‐called third places among independently owned coffeehouses in the city of Portland, Oregon. Individual coffeehouses were evaluated to determine the extent to which they provided a supportive physical environment for social engagement in which a space is transformed into a place and detailed patron behavior was recorded over a three‐week period. Few coffeehouses provided a supportive physical environment. The majority of coffeehouse patrons during the weekday and weekend ordered drinks ‘to go.’ Among those who stayed during the weekday most sat alone and worked. Coffeehouse are spaces to ‘be alone together.’ It was only on lunchtime weekends that coffeehouses were full of the sound of conversations. Further study should consider the effect of eliminating free Wi Fi and banning laptops on social engagement and whether other place attributes need to be incorporated to promote social engagement.     

儿童地理学视角下的留守儿童研究述评

文章通过梳理在WOS（Web Of Science）核心数据集、谷歌学术、中国知网（CNKI）等平台筛选出的较高引用率、方法比较规范、与留守儿童主题相关性强的国内外文献159篇,从理论层面总结了儿童地理学研究的新转向：关注儿童与空间的关系,强调儿童在空间使用中的主体性,重视不同情境下儿童地理体验的差异性。并梳理了跨国迁移背景下留守儿童的3个研究主题：从空间视角探讨留守儿童的日常生活实践;从主体性出发探讨儿童在迁移链中的体验;在童年的差异性基础上讨论本土儿童的问题。同时从问题视角和积极视角分析了国内城乡迁移背景下留守儿童的研究主题,指出因现有研究范式中的经验主义和成人中心主义而存在的局限性。尝试勾勒出符合中国情境的留守儿童研究新范式,提出留守儿童的日常生活空间,留守儿童的能动性、异质性和多样性是国内留守儿童研究亟需关注的内容。呼吁学者采用历时和动态的研究设计,充分展现儿童如何理解、体验和应对复杂的流动背景下的日常生活。     

A look inside the struggle for housing in Buenos Aires,Argentina

Set in the broader context of increasing urban precarity and displacement of the urban poor and working classes, this paper examines the social and collective significance of housing precarity and eviction as it is experienced by Latin American, immigrant families living in informal hotels in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I analyze the internal dynamics, interactions and relationships between residents of informal hotels, the housing organization CIBA (Coordinadora de Inquilinos de Buenos Aires), which fights for housing rights for the poor in the city, and the city government sponsored housing subsidy. I argue that urban precarity severely limits opportunities for collective organization around better housing and political and social change. I show that despite CIBA’s objectives to transform social and political conditions for the poor in Buenos Aires, residents often operate under other assumptions and goals, in part because of the temporal and spatial restraints under which they live. Instead, residents of informal hotels work with CIBA in order to secure access to basic, urgent needs. These different expectations and understandings produce contentious relationships of dependence and subordination that are exacerbated by the eviction process and the city government housing subsidy.     

旅游对古镇地方性的影响研究——基于周庄的多案例考察

综合运用倾听、照相、参与式观察、访谈、笔记等多种调研方法,选择能代表周庄旅游发展不同阶段、不同类型的游憩场所,收集田野调查数据,游客、居民、旅游从业者、旅游管理者的访谈数据,分析周庄古镇地方性多样化建构的过程。研究发现资本权力是空间生产的主要动力,是地方性形成的物质基础;文化知识影响社会空间的氛围,通过对社会秩序和关系的再生产影响地方性,文化中的艺术扮演了营造氛围的重要角色,间接培育地方性;民俗生活属于社会文化层面的软实力,发自内心的民俗活动促进了睦邻友好和相互交流,当地居民日常生活对权力和资本规训进行诗意的抵制,增加了地方的日常生活性。     

Part of the action, or 'going native'? Learning to cope with the 'politics of integration'

Summary Despite continuing work within feminist research on issues of political commitment and critical forms of engagement, and an increasing desire within geography to effect social change through our privileged positions as academics, active collaboration with groups involved in social action continues to be fraught with ambiguity and anxiety. In this paper, I consider the potential role of the 'researcher as activist' through documentation of my interaction and repositioning of identities while becoming involved in credit union development in Kingston upon Hull. I hope to illustrate how the maintenance of a critical, multi-positioned (and repositioned) identity can be seen as a beneficial, reflexive learning experience for researchers operating within ethnography, and for the research itself.     

Pathways for Participatory Water Governance in Ashaiman,Ghana: Learning from Institutional Bricolage and Hydrosocial Perspectives

Coupling a hydrosocial perspective with institutional bricolage, this research considers possibilities for participatory water governance in Ashaiman, a peri-urban settlement of Accra, Ghana. We explore three questions: (1) How do people in Ashaiman evoke ideas or experiences of water in general and water governance in particular? (2) What possibilities currently exist for engaging the community in key water-related decisions? (3) What possibilities exist for enhanced participatory water governance in this context, including potential for and interest in new institutions and engagement processes? Results of qualitative interviews and semistructured observation suggest that a siloed, water-centric approach inadequately captures everyday realities of water as hydrosocial and of existing institutions in Ashaiman. In contrast to “modern water,” we propose that water issues may be more meaningfully addressed as bundled with social welfare. Potential implications and alternative ways of understanding socio-institutional arrangements for participatory water governance are explored.     

Where rights begin and end in Puerto Rico's gated communities

In 1992, Puerto Rico's governor and police superintendent incorporated the National Guard with local police in a militarized battle against crime. Mano dura contra el crimen (strong arm/iron fist against crime) policies led to the gating of 82 public housing communities in the island. Simultaneously, privileged private communities organized and petitioned municipalities to retrofit their neighbourhoods with gates in the name of safety. These enclosures followed the privatized management of all public housing communities in the island only a few years before. Based on ethnographic research, I examine the sociospatial outcomes of these policies, how they reframe community participation and deploy a discourse of self‐responsibility that distributes power unequally across private and public housing communities. While in the privileged communities these policies have cultivated community leaders and invigorated social life as residents take control over public space, the gates in the communities of the poor reflect a skeletal structure of democracy. Private management companies impose increasingly restrictive regulations in attempts to organize the community and the only recourse to participation is to engage in small acts of everyday resistance, from apathy to subversion. As part of larger neoliberal tendencies to retrench the ‘public’ in favour of the ‘private’, the mano dura policies curtail democracy as the voices of the poor are silenced and the scope of efficacy of the rich expands.     

Doing groups: Situating knowledge and creating stories

This paper presents group research as a potentially powerful research tool for cultural geographers interested in the ways knowledge is produced at the interpersonal level. I argue that groups can create unique research spaces that incorporate 'sociality', the everyday social norms, logics and languages that guide ordinary conversations, into the research agenda. By concentrating on these discursive norms, insights can be obtained into the ways that knowledge is negotiated, produced and constrained in different places. To demonstrate the value of group research, a case study involving Australian environmentalists is analysed, to show how forests are constructed, contested and naturalised within this particular subculture. The article concludes by emphasising the importance of group research to critical geographers interested in social empowerment and change.     

Beyond Gentrification: Mobilizing Communities and Claiming Space

During the 20th century, neighborhood change and the displacement of low-income residents from their homes has occurred in a variety of ways from the demolition of entire areas to more recent revitalization efforts emphasizing the building of community and new governance structures. In this paper, I argue two interrelated points. First, whereas economic displacement of low-income people from their homes and neighborhoods is one effect of neighborhood revitalization initiatives, there is a wider set of factors that constitutes the marginalization, displacement, and exclusion of certain population groups from effectively making claims on neighborhood space. Second, in an era of neoliberalization, whereby civil society is expected to play a larger role in neighborhood governance and the provision of social welfare, the formation and activities of neighborhood-based communities, and their relation to state and market forces, have become increasingly important factors to examine. In this article, I address these areas of inquiry through a case study of a neighborhood revitalization initiative in Chattanooga, Tennessee that has been under way since 1998.     

Voluntary resettlement in land grab contexts: examining consent on the Ecuadorian oil frontier

Forced resettlement, central to state-led development throughout the twentieth century, still paves the way for agroindustrial, hydroelectric, urban, and other forms of development in much of the global South today. In response to pressures from social movements challenging human displacement, states, firms, and multinational institutions increasingly seek the consent of impacted communities, often offering monetary compensation and resettlement, along with development assistance. Some states obtain consent by offering resettlements with urban infrastructures and public services. In Ecuador, the state has planned 200 urban-like resettlements called “Millennium Cities” for communities on the Amazonian oil and mining frontiers. Although resettlement in this context transforms human–environment relations and generates new social ills by isolating residents from food supplies and market networks, many communities do consent to resettlement. In this paper, I call attention to voluntary rural–urban resettlement in land grab governance and I explore why communities might consent to their own displacement. This paper suggests the need to account for the material and social conditions that structure consent.     

'This is like my comfort zone': Senses of place and belonging within Oruāmo/Beachhaven, New Zealand

Abstract:  This paper examines the culturally specific experiences of belonging within Oruāmo/Beachhaven, a suburb in North Shore City. In-depth interviews with 32 caregivers of young children expose the fact that the ethnic groups represented – Māori, Samoan and Pākehā– vary in their uses and understandings of, as well as feelings for, residential neighbourhood. Examination of the themes of natural environment, social relations, continuity of residence, facilities, organisations and place transformation reveal that, while representatives of all groups had views on these matters, there was a variable degree of engagement with and priority afforded to these concerns.     

权力-空间视角下城市文创旅游空间的生产与演化——以上海田子坊为例

近年来,旧城更新形成的文化创意产业园向旅游目的地转型已成为普遍趋势。既有研究对文创园区和旅游地形成的空间生产机制有所挖掘,但对文创产业园旅游转向的内生性动力的认识有待深入。本文结合列斐伏尔的三元空间理论和福柯的权力空间思想,采用实地调研、深度访谈与半沉浸式观察相结合的综合方法,从宏观-微观互动的角度对田子坊文创旅游空间的生产和演化机制进行研究。结果表明：① 各行动主体基于社会关系和空间主权形成权力-空间关系;② 为实现增长的集体目标,城市政府引导了具有生产性逻辑的空间制度设计,并与微观行动者进行权力的分配与互动,形成空间规训和生产机制;③ 在表征的空间中,商户的日常生活实践通过多样化的服从与抵抗的能动性策略,形成差异化的微观空间生产,推动文创旅游的空间实践与演化。研究还针对文创园区旅游化进程中存在的问题提供了治理启示。     

非表征理论视角下的城市再生方式——广州创新创业空间案例

以非表征理论为切入点，本文以广州创新创业空间为案例，探讨情感空间和身体等要素在促进城市再生进程中的作用。研究发现：各主体在孵化器/众创空间的建设发展过程中邂逅，通过身体实践作用于物质空间构成创新创意空间关系网络和城市再生体系，重构创新创业空间的文化内涵并培育创新情感和创造行为，为创意产业的发展和地方感的重构提供物质基础以及赋予其多元的地方意义。而后，创意阶层的日常生活实践重塑了社区环境促进微空间的再生产，实现资本积累以完成第一轮时空修复，并随着其社会影响范围的扩大成为新城市文化，促进第二轮时空修复的完成。上述结论回应了非表征理论看待世界的方式和填补了非表征理论在宏观尺度研究上的空缺，为城市再生提供了新的实践切入点。