RACIALIZED TOPOGRAPHIES: ALTITUDE AND RACE IN SOUTHERN CITIES*

ABSTRACT. This study examines altitudinal residential segregation by race in 146 cities in the U.S. South. It begins by embedding the topic in recent theorizations of the social construction of nature, the geography of race, and environmental justice. Second, it focuses on how housing markets, particularly in the South, tend to segregate minorities in low‐lying, flood‐prone, and amenity‐poor segments of urban areas. It tests empirically the hypothesis that blacks are disproportionately concentrated in lower‐altitude areas using gis to correlate race and elevation by digital elevation‐model block group within each city in 1990 and 2000. The statistical results confirm the suspected trend. A map of coefficients indicates strong positive associations in cities in the interior South‐where the hypothesis is confirmed‐and an inverse relationship near the coast, where whites dominate higher‐valued coastal properties. Selected city case studies demonstrate these relationships connecting the broad dynamics of racial segregation to the particularities of individual places.     

COUNTERHEGEMONIC DISCOURSES AND THE INTERNET

ABSTRACT. Contrary to much of the hype that posits cyberspace as the uncontested domain of rugged individualists, computer networks and traffic exhibit deeply social and political roots. The Internet is neither inherently oppressive nor automatically emancipatory; it is a terrain of contested philosophies and politics. After a brief review of the politics of electronic knowledge, we discuss the ways in which the Internet can be harnessed for counterhegemonic (antiestablishment) political ends. We focus on progressive uses, including the confrontation of nomadic power and rhizomic power structures, in which the local becomes the global. We also offer an encapsulation of right-wing uses. Throughout, we see cyberactivism as a necessary, but not sufficient, complement to real-world struggles on behalf of the disempowered.     

NATIONALISM,COSMOPOLITANISM, AND GEOGRAPHICAL IMAGINATIONS

In this article I set nationalism and cosmopolitanism into sharp contrast with one another as inherently incompatible geographical imaginations. I begin by briefly denaturalizing nationalism and the nation‐state. I then turn to the philosophy and political agenda of cosmopolitanism, an ideology simultaneously very old and new, which offers a more inclusive and empathetic alternative to nationalist xenophobia. In the third section I argue that contemporary globalization has laid the ontological foundations of a cosmopolitan world order. Next, I explicate nationalism's and cosmopolitanism's competing visions of the definition and meaning of “community.” I summarize major objections to cosmopolitanism and offer a defense of it. In the following section I focus on the implications of cosmopolitanism for contemporary geography, including relational spatialities of empathy and caring. Finally, I suggest that contemporary globalization is gradually putting into place the legal and institutional apparatus for cosmopolitan global governance and democracy.     

Laos and the making of a 'relational' resource frontier

This paper seeks to reconsider the contemporary relevance of the resource frontier, drawing on examples of nature's commodification and enclosure under way in the peripheral Southeast Asian country of Laos. Frontiers are conceived as relational zones of economy, nature and society; spaces of capitalist transition, where new forms of social property relations and systems of legality are rapidly established in response to market imperatives. Customary property rights on the resource frontier can be seized by powerful actors in crucial political moments, preparing the territorial stage for more intensive phases of resource commodity production and accumulation. Relational frontier space is understood through the work of geographers such as Doreen Massey, who views the production of space as 'constituted though the practices of engagement and the power-geometries of relations'. In Laos, a twenty-first century resource frontier is being driven by new corporate investments in natural resources, and a supporting array of land reform programmes. The paper focuses on both the material and representational aspects of the production of the resource frontier, through policy and discourse analysis, and village level research in Laos' Khammouane province. By rethinking a dualist and hierarchical-scaled imaginary of frontier places, both rural people and local ecologies are shown to be key actors, in a complex, relational reproduction of frontier zones. An emerging Lao spatial and political assemblage – a form of 'frontier-neoliberalism'– is shown as producing dramatic changes in socio-natural landscapes, as well as new patterns of marginalisation and livelihood insecurity for a vulnerable rural population.