A ferry making waves: A demonstration project ‘doing’ institutional work in a greening maritime industry

ABSTRACT

The objective of the article is to show how the demonstration project and battery ferry Ampere has contributed to a greening of public ferry procurement in Norway. Building on theories on demonstration projects in transition studies and institutional work, the author argues for a more integrated focus than hitherto on the dynamic interplay of materiality, organization, and discourse in demonstration projects, and how the agency of actor networks and the materiality connected to demonstration projects can affect institutional change accompanying transition processes. This is done by conceptualizing Ampere as a ‘performing project’: a complex of discursive and organizational strategies of framing and lobbying deployed by the actor networks connected to it and its materiality. Methodically, the author draws on semi-structured interviews and document analysis. The results suggest that Ampere’s ‘performance’ has contributed to changes in national and regional ferry procurement practices and been vital for an emerging maritime battery niche.     

Configurations of community in flood risk management

ABSTRACT

Despite a notable increase in the literature on community resilience, the notion of ‘community’ remains underproblematised. This is evident within flood risk management (FRM) literature, in which the understanding and roles of communities may be acknowledged but seldom discussed in any detail. The purpose of the article is to demonstrate how community networks are configured by different actors, whose roles and responsibilities span spatial scales within the context of FRM. Accordingly, the authors analyse findings from semi-structured interviews, policy documents, and household surveys from two flood prone areas in Finnish Lapland. The analysis reveals that the ways in which authorities, civil society, and informal actors take on multiple roles are intertwined and form different types of networks. By implication, the configuration of community is fuzzy, elusive and situated, and not confined to a fixed spatiality. The authors discuss the implications of the complex nature of community for FRM specifically, and for community resilience more broadly. They conclude that an analysis of different actors across scales contributes to an understanding of the configuration of community, including community resilience, and how the meaning of community takes shape according to the differing aims of FRM in combination with differing geographical settings.     

The micromechanisms of power in local content requirements and their constraints on Ghanaian SMEs in the oil and gas sector

Local content laws have the potential to promote positive synergies between the extractive sectors and African economies. However, their success is a negotiated outcome of interaction between actors. The objective of the article is to emphasize the mechanisms by which local content requirements are negotiated between actors in Ghana’s oil and gas industry, by drawing on Foucault’s concept of power. Data for the study were obtained through interviews, observations and secondary sources. The author found that complex registration systems, administrative details, and financial and technological requirements constituted the micromechanisms of power at play in determining how the local content law was applied in practice. The article demonstrates how these factors limit the activities of small and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) in the oil and gas sector. The author concludes that the institutional context, the capacity of local SMEs, and the techniques and practices of multinational corporations (MNCs) shape the extent of local participation in Ghana’s oil and gas industry.     

Grounding mobile policies: Ad hoc networks and the creative city in Bandung,Indonesia

This paper explores the ad hoc networks that form to move policies to new sites by examining the process through which the city of Bandung, Indonesia adopted a creative city policy. As revealed through the Bandung case, attention to the formation of these networks highlights the way that power operates within them, privileging certain ideas and structuring the ways in which information flows through their channels. This insight suggests that the concept of policy mobilities would be enriched by a closer attention to the way power is used to construct networks that promote specific policies and places as sites of ‘best practice’. Furthermore, this paper extends the concept of policy mobilities to a city ‘off the map’. In contrast to most existing policy mobilities research that tends to focus on the stable, large‐scale networks through which policies travel and on the high‐profile cities constructed as policy models, the case of Bandung provides a study of how policy mobilities may occur differently outside of its well‐established locations.     

中国电子信息产业创新的集群网络模式与演化路径

流空间背景下,多空间尺度网络耦合对创新至关重要已达成学界共识。综合运用区位熵与社会网络分析,识别32个电子信息产业集群,进而基于1985—2015年合作申请发明专利数据,运用卡方检验和Infomap社区发现算法,借助Pajek和ArcGIS等软件,揭示中国电子信息产业创新合作空间模式,探讨创新网络空间组织演化规律。结果表明：① 中国电子信息产业创新合作呈现集群互联的模式,集群区域的创新主体更倾向于同本地和其他集群区域的创新主体合作,这与非集群区域的创新主体结网方式明显不同,印证了关系经济地理学者提出的全球集群网络论断。② 集群创新网络社区的空间组织从位于集群地理边界内,本地化特征显著,演化为超越集群地理边界,呈现等级差异明显的核心-边缘层级式特征,反映出地理邻近对集群主体创新结网影响程度的动态变化。     

Challenging sub terra nullius: a critical underground urbanism project

ABSTRACT

Underground urban development is rapidly expanding. Like all forms of ‘development’, utilising the underneath of cities can present a range of possibilities and problems. Much underground urban development, however, has been conceptualised through a technical rather than a broader social lens. This is problematic, not least as these developments are usually financed with public money, while their governance is often realised through complicated and opaque public–private partnerships. In this context, the urban underground is often present as sub terra nullius: an epistemologically blank slate waiting to be exploited with the necessary technology and funding. In this paper, the author presents four analytical strata to help us to rethink how urban undergrounds are conceptualised and developed. Drawing on examples from Australia, she presents how we need to appreciate the more-than-human geographies of the underground (stratum 1); critically understand the dynamics of volumetric dispossession (stratum 2); question who owns the underground and how (stratum 3); and rethink how the underground is accessed (stratum 4). By engaging with these themes, we can explore ways to move subterranean urban development away from a technoscientific tunnelling decision-making process to one that engages with the social, political and economic implications of urban infrastructural projects.     

Community resources for small city creativity? Rethinking creative economy narratives at the Blue Mountains Music Festival

ABSTRACT

Limitations in scale, infrastructure and business opportunities in combination with a greater sense of community in small centres require a more diverse understanding of the small city creative economy. Entrepreneurship and business development builds on non-capitalist resources, creative community initiatives, volunteers and community networks. Fostering the creative economy in small cities requires a rethinking of creative narratives that iterate the key role of non-capitalist community resources. I illustrate this argument via a case study of the Blue Mountains Music Festival, in New South Wales, Australia. It examines the gap between creative economy aspirations of a small city government and the reality of creativity ‘on the ground’. The City of the Blue Mountains is a small urban centre on the fringes of metropolitan Sydney and regional New South Wales. Its council has recently adopted a creative industries approach to enhance local employment in line with national and metropolitan creative agendas. The Blue Mountains Music Festival was launched in response to creative economy policy more than 20 years ago, but has now lost this connection as it fails to fit current policy aspirations. The festival is, however, an effective example of how creativity in a small city unfolds, demonstrating that beyond jobs and growth are key matters of non-capitalist community networks and resources.     

Local traditions as a means for commercial production of historical beers: The case of Vossaøl,Norway

The aim of the article is to analyse challenges facing the commercial production of historical beers, which are ‘extinct’ beers. The concept of ‘fictive terroir’ is introduced to emphasize these challenges. The author addresses the following questions: What kind of knowledge is needed to produce historical beers? How can this knowledge be acquired? How can it be used commercially in craft breweries? The studied case is Vossaøl, a craft beer imitation of a beer produced in the early 19th century. The data were obtained from written sources and interviews with local home brewers and brewers at Voss Brewery in Norway. The study revealed the need to reconstruct the terroir in the early 19th century. Additionally, Voss Brewery had to acquire knowledge about how to process and combine the ingredients, which included the traditional yeast (kveik). Involving traditional home brewers was crucial to determine how ingredients could be combined to produce Vossaøl. The author concludes that a synthetic knowledge base was a useful point of departure in this respect. Participation in the traditional culture of brewing proved an important means when working with this knowledge base. The results are interesting in the broader context of the reconstruction of beverages and food.     

Engaging Communities for Success: social impact assessment and social licence to operate at Northparkes Mines,NSW

Social issues are critical to the mining industry. This study investigates how social issues have been, and are being, assessed and managed within this industry through a case study of Northparkes Mines in central west New South Wales (NSW). The research involved 29 interviews with mining executives, environmental consultants and citizens of Parkes, plus a document analysis of four environmental impact statements prepared between 1990 and 2012. Where appropriate, findings were extrapolated to the wider mining industry. The standard for social impact assessment in NSW and emerging industry guidelines on social responsibility were analysed against internationally accepted good practice. Interviews indicated greater potential to recognise the social impacts of mining in NSW and identified good practice impact assessment as only one component of a successful community engagement strategy. Complementary strategies are essential to extend the benefits of development to local communities and for companies to establish a ‘social licence to operate’. The successful approach taken by Northparkes Mines combined good practice impact assessment with a localised workforce, an integrated management team and context-specific community engagement practices. This study highlights that local communities can be empowered through development, that benefits can extend to both the community and the business and that the ongoing management of social issues will increasingly be critical to the success of the mining industry.     

The geometry of space-time prisms with uncertain anchors

Space-time prisms envelop all spatio-temporal locations that moving objects may have visited between two of their known spatio-temporal locations, given a bound on their travel speed. In this context, the known locations are often the result of observations or measurements, and they are called ‘anchor points’. The classic space-time prism, in isotropic two-dimensional space, as well as in transportation networks, assumes that the measurements of these anchor points are exact. Whereas, in many applications, we can assume that time can be measured fairly precisely, this assumption is unrealistic for the spatial components of measured locations (we think of Global Positioning System (GPS) errors, for instance). In this paper, we extend the classical prism from anchor points to circular ‘anchor regions’ that capture the uncertainty or error on their measurement. We define the notion of a space-time prism with uncertain anchor points, called uncertain prism, for short. We study the geometry of uncertain prisms in an arbitrary metric space to make this concept as widely applicable as possible. We also focus on the rims of uncertain space-time prisms, which demarcate the area that a moving object can have visited between two anchor regions (given some local speed limitations).     

空间认同:城市空间研究转向中的知识前沿、趋势与启发

中国城市化进程的快速发展,促使人们不断解构、调整和重构对城市空间的认同,这是城市化发展中不容忽视的新问题。以Web of Science（WoS）为数据源,对国外城市空间认同研究进行了分析和知识再现。研究发现：① 城市空间认同是人们对城市发展中社会经济认同、文化认同、集体认同、身份认同与情感认同的集合。作为重要的国民意识,城市空间认同主题是国外学者关注的重要领域,对该领域研究的本质上是对城市空间实践中人文主义空间诉求的知识表征;② 在2008~2017年的国外城市空间认同研究中,美国、英国、澳大利亚等国家具有明显优势,国际合作研究网络主要在美洲-欧洲、欧洲-澳洲,以及澳洲-欧美之间;国外城市空间认同研究高被引文献注重对“空间多中心性”“地方与连续性”“城市社区”“城市公民身份”“空间绅士化”“地方主义”等方面的讨论。③ 未来研究更加倾向在“认同”“空间”“城市”“地理”“政治”“地方”,以及“社区”等新主题方面。相比较而言,国内对城市空间认同的研究较为欠缺,随着中国城市空间实践不断推向纵深阶段,需要强化城市空间认同研究的“理论自觉”。     

Modelling the network component of geographical information systems

Abstract

This paper presents a data model to manage networks with a Geographical Information System with some consideration of the path operator. The data model is based on the merge of graph theory concepts and the object-oriented paradigm. The introduction of the Master_nodes (with respect to Master_edges) allows definition of a node (with respect to an edge) as an abstraction of a sub-network. A network can be defined using several levels of definition (detail) following the importance of the nodes (with respect to the edges) within an application. The object-oriented concepts are applied to both the alphanumerical data part and to the modelling part of the topology of the graph. The data manipulation operators are basic operators. These operators are the union, an intersection and a difference. More elaborated operators, such as under constraints paths, are obtained by combining these basic operators. We present some considerations of the path operator in a GIS context and introduce the concept of the ‘Open Graph Assumption’ and the notion of direction. These notions take full advantage of the data model and represent an alternative way of defining the path operator. This modelling is well adapted to take account of multi-level networks (i.e., the definition of a view in the context of a multi-user configuration or cartographic generalization).     

Doing NGO Work: the politics of being ‘civil society’ and promoting ‘good governance’ in Cambodia

Two fundamental pillars of what it is to be a contemporary NGO and ‘do’ development work are being a part of and promoting civil society, and extending ‘good governance’. This article will provide insights into how supposedly universally applicable concepts and models for NGOs to ‘improve’ post-conflict ‘developing countries’ are incorporated into different social and cultural landscapes. Ethnographic fieldwork highlights some of the particularities of governance, as well as everyday challenges of doing NGO work in a remote province of north-eastern Cambodia. In the context of an authoritarian government, where kinship relations cross-cut all aspects of society, NGOs can be understood as embedded in neo-patrimonial networks rather than as a separate and autonomous realm of society as classic liberal theory understands ‘civil society’. Fear also plays a significant role in configuring peoples’ attitude towards authority and is rarely acknowledged in the project of ‘good governance’ which simplistically tends to see post-colonial governments situated on a linear trajectory which will eventually, with significant NGO interventions, reach advanced liberal democracy status.     

The adoption of a local food concept in post-communist context: Farm shops in Czechia

The article examines an alternative food network evolution in the post-communist context in Czechia in general and farm shop developments in particular. The study is based on semi-structured interviews with farm shopkeepers operating in Czechia. The results revealed that the development of the farm shop network was significantly shaped by the communist past of the country. While consumers’ demand for quality food contributed to the initiation of developments in local food movements such as farm shops in Czechia, the inconvenient structure of the farming sector, comprising a limited number of small-scale farmers, hindered the development. Although the farm shops usually operate as middlemen by reselling goods produced by a range of farmers, farm shopkeepers expressed significant awareness of the sustainability principles of the local food concept and dissociated themselves from unethical practices of large retailers. Nevertheless, the author finds that the local concept is used in a flexible manner to meet customers’ demands. Despite obstacles faced by farmers when developing their own farm shops, there is significant potential in ‘Czech-type’ farm shops operating solely as retailers. However, the author concludes that the threat of the diversion from the sustainability principles of the local food concept should not be neglected.     

"Power Geometries

Feminist contributions to the geographical literature on capitalist restructuring have tended to emphasize the importance of examining women's experiences vis-a-vis those of men. This research in progress report on the telecommunications service industry in New Zealand suggests that assuming the relative homogeneity of ‘women’ as an analytical category, then assessing the experience of women against those of men using national data, may no longer be satisfactory in a context in which production, finance and labour markets have been internationalised.     

A Post-Cold War Geography of Forced Migration in Kenya and Somalia

Drawing on recent research in the Horn of Africa, emerging patterns of managing forced migration in the post-Cold War landscape are identified and analyzed. While camps continue to house refugees, the meaning and value of ‘refugee’ have changed dramatically since the Cold War. Efforts to prevent people from crossing political borders to seek safety are increasing, giving rise to a new set of safe spaces. These new spaces are expressions of a distinct geopolitical discourse and take the names ‘UN protectedarea’, ‘preventive zone’, and ‘safe haven’. Their significance as a challenge to state-centric geopolitics both within conflict zones and as refugee camps is explored in the Kenya-Somalia context.     

Constructing Risk: multi-scale change,livelihoods and vulnerability in the Mekong Delta,Vietnam

ABSTRACT

Change has been at the heart of the livelihoods concept since its inception, allowing for a clear focus on how people perceive, respond to and experience risk. The ardent focus on ‘the local’ within livelihoods work, both in research and programmatic terms, has to some extent overshadowed attention on the role of wider-scale political economic and environmental processes in generating change and determining responses to change. Livelihoods in the Mekong Delta have never been ‘local’, having long been historically embedded in international, regional and national economic, political and environmental transformations. Drivers of change at these wider scales have intensified, complicating local responses to change, whether through economic, social or political means. A more nuanced appreciation of how scaled relations can be supported is required to better anticipate and respond to the political ecology of risk.     

Servicing a world elsewhere? Examining everyday work practices in the emerging economic spaces of Malaysia's business process outsourcing industry

The paper seeks to illuminate everyday work practices in the economic spaces of Malaysia's business process outsourcing (BPO) industry. It draws upon empirical evidence from call centre staff and promotes analytical sensitivity to the experience of labour and spatiotemporal relations within the offshore back offices of multinational corporations located in Cyberjaya, Malaysia. The analysis provides an empirical snapshot of how IT‐facilitated work practices in the global information economy are embedded and socially reproduced in everyday settings. To this end, the paper engages anthropologically with BPO labour, and critiques ‘globalist’ representations of economic and social transformation frequently articulated through an abstract, dehumanized space of networks and flows often seen to wash over local places, culture and people.     

Exploring social creativity in place-making: A case study from a coastal town in Northern Norway

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to explore the relationship between place-making and social creativity. It is grounded in a single case study and an analytical generalization approach to the study of two projects in the town of Vardø, Norway: Vardø Restored and Biotope. Empirical data are presented as thematic stories in becoming, which are discussed using actor–network theory (ANT) and meshwork-inspired analysis. Social creativity is understood as inhabitants’ ability to meet new challenges with creativity. Place-making is understood in terms of place-specific creative and regenerative processes, with a focus on the role of community entrepreneurs and creative community arenas outside the formal planning system. Important findings suggest that social creativity emerges from community activities, in which multiple individuals and actors play important roles. Through these processes, entrepreneurs become community entrepreneurs when their collective orientations are activated. Individual community entrepreneurs can take active roles in stimulating social creativity based on their place-specific commitments, broad value-creation perspectives, and sensitivity to place-specific complexities, as well as by gaining credibility. The author concludes that creative community arenas for direct encounters between many different lifelines and actors, future motives, and collective actions are fundamental for the emergence of social creativity and place-making dynamics.     

The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.