Geo-information tools for participatory spatial planning: Fulfilling the criteria for ‘good’ governance?

The last few decades have seen increasing attempts to foster ‘collaborative’ and ‘participatory’ approaches to spatial planning and decision-making, with a more sophisticated conceptualisation of the contested term, participation. Participatory, ‘bottom-up’ geo-information technologies have been concurrently developing and these are expected to strengthen participatory spatial planning; important among these has been the transformation of conventional mapping and GIS tools into Participatory GIS (PGIS). In this paper we explore the potential contributions of participatory geo-information tools towards participatory spatial planning, in terms of the principles and criteria of good governance. We discuss five fundamental principles of ‘good’ governance: accountability, legitimacy, respect, equity, and competence, and the potential of geo-information tools to contribute to, and detract from, such principles; although we focus especially on participation and the recognition and validation of local knowledge. We derive criteria for the five principles, and we identify a range of evaluation questions which can be operationalised so as to interrogate the criteria for judging the contribution of participatory tools and participatory spatial planning activities. We conclude by summarily assessing the potentials of participatory geo-information tools, particularly participatory mobile GIS, participatory 3-dimensional modelling, and visualisation features in PGIS.     

Empowering the empowered? Slum tourism and the depoliticization of poverty

Mumbai’s Dharavi slum occupies a plot half the size of Central Park. It is home to one million people, with almost half of residents living in spaces under 10 m², making it over six times as dense as daytime Manhattan. Using ethnographic fieldwork and online analysis, this article examines slum tourism and the perceptions and experiences of western visitors. Local tour operators emphasize the productivity of the slum, with its annual turnover of $665 million generated from its hutment industries. Its poor sanitation, lack of clean water, squalid conditions and overcrowding are ignored and replaced by a vision of resourcefulness, hard work and diligence. This presentation of the slum as a hive of industry is so successful that visitors overlook, or even deny, its obvious poverty. Dharavi is instead perceived as a manufacturing hub and retail experience; and in some cases even romanticized as a model of contentment and neighbourliness, with western visitors transformed by ‘life-changing’, ‘eye-opening’ and ‘mind-blowing’ experiences. This article concludes that the potential of slum tours as a form of international development is limited, as they enable wealthy middle-class westerners to feel ‘inspired’, ‘uplifted’ and ‘enriched’, but with little understanding of the need for change.     

Between outside and inside? Prison visiting rooms as liminal carceral spaces

This paper suggests that although carceral space seems to be sharply demarcated from the outside world, the prison wall is in fact more porous than might be assumed. The paper critiques Goffman’s theory of the ‘total institution’ by deploying a geographical engagement with liminality to theorise prison visiting rooms as spaces in which prisoners come face-to-face with persons and objects which come from and represent their lives on the ‘outside’. Drawing on a specific empirical example from recent research into imprisonment in the contemporary Russian prison system, it uses the example of visiting suites designed for long term ‘residential’ visits to explore the ways in which visiting spaces act as a space of betweenness where a metaphorical threshold-crossing takes place between outside and inside. The paper specifically explores the expression of that betweenness in the materiality of visiting, and in the destabilisation of rules and identities in visiting space. It contests the sense of linear transformation with which liminal spaces have previously been associated, suggesting that rather than spaces of linear transition from one state to another, liminal spaces can constitute a frustratingly repetitive, static or equilibriating form of transformation which is cumulative rather than immediate, and relates this suggestion to the wider study of prison visitation.     

Public participation in policy making: the state-of-the-art in Canada

This paper critically reviews the current status of public participation in Canada. Postulating that public participation implies an open, democratic form of planning and policy making, the paper examines factors which have influenced the attainment of meaningful public input in practice. Public participation in Canada has evolved greatly in the past 15 years but several key issues remain unresolved: provisions for participation remain, in large part, discretionary; procedures for the funding of intervenors require further development; and the emphasis in many jurisdictions remains upon the operational level involvement of the lay public, with a public hearing as the final arbiter of public opinion. More attention to the formal evaluation of participatory exercises is essential to the resolution of these concerns. In particular, more attention should be given to the context within which participation occurs. Moreover, greater consideration should be given to public involvement at the normative and strategic levels of planning. The paper concludes by briefly exploring the implications for practice that the concept of ‘normative participation’ might have in Canada.     

Urban sprawl and infrastructural lands: Revamping internal spaces in Santiago de Chile

Urban sprawl in South America has for many decades been driven by the housing debate, with major impact on overall urban development. The impact of uncontrolled expansion has been social, economic and environmental degradation to high rates of poverty, poor services and transport. The presence of undeveloped areas within suburban landscapes, such as former infrastructural facilities, obsolete airports, and abandoned train stations, contribute to the impetus to reclaimed and revamped land. These spaces also trigger political aspirations for implementing better practices on “smart” growth, sustainable development and urban regeneration principles. A case in point is the former airport ‘Aeropuerto Cerrillos’ in Santiago, Chile, which closed in 2001 after years of decay; it intended to replace and host a large-scale urban project called ‘Ciudad Parque Bicentenario’. This development is still incomplete and describes a series of pressures on a planning system traditionally adjusted to promote expansion confirming that urban sprawl is still an open agenda triggered by the presence of diverse unexpected urban gaps.     

Imaginative geographies of gender and HIV/AIDS: moving beyond neoliberalism

This paper examines how neoliberal development discourse contributes to the production and maintenance of problematic gendered hierarchies and spaces. By interrogating the basic assumptions undergirding this discourse, this paper explores how neoliberalism produces spaces which normalise certain identities—especially those associated with individualism and economic rationality, and makes errant values such as communalism and altruism. Drawing on perspectives from feminist geographies, we argue that by normalising and privileging certain masculine identities, neoliberalism reinscribes and legitimizes gendered power relations that are counterproductive to addressing HIV/AIDS. The ‘ideal’ person fighting HIV/AIDS in the neoliberal framework is rational, competitive and self-interested, but these characteristics are complicit in worsening HIV prevalence and mobilize problematic gender roles and identities. Given the pervasiveness of this ideology in Malawi, we propose ways in which families, communities and institutions can challenge and reshape gender identities and potential solutions to HIV within this context.     

Tactical ethics: How the discourses of Fairtrade and Black Economic Empowerment change and interact in wine networks from South Africa to the UK

This paper explores the spaces and power relations of ethical foodscapes. Ethics can offer a commodity a valuable unique selling point in a competitive marketplace but managing the changeable and multiple motivations for stakeholder participation throughout the commodity chain in order to utilise this opportunity is a complex negotiation. Through exploring the spaces and relations within three South African–UK ethical wine networks, the discursive tactics used to sustain these are uncovered. The discourses of Fairtrade, Black Economic Empowerment and organics are highly adaptive, interacting with each other in such a way as to always be contextually appealing. This ‘tactical mutability’ is combined with ‘scales of knowing’, which, this paper argues, are essential for network durability. ‘Scales of knowing’ refers to the recognition by stakeholders of the potential for different articulations of a discourse within the network, which combines with ‘tactical mutability’ to allow for a scalar, contextual and ’knowing’ (im)mutability to ensure the discourse’s continued appeal. However, even when one discourse is the ‘lead’ it always folds within it linkages to other ethical discourses at work, suggesting that ethical practice is mutually supportive discursively. This means that at the producer end ethical interactions may offer more capacity to enact genuine transformation than the solo operations of a discourse.     

Beyond passive consumption: Dis/ordering water supply and sanitation at Hanoi’s urban edge

In Hanoi people access, expand and create water and sanitation infrastructures in multiple ways that include, but are not restricted to, external provision of networked services. Urban master planning and the construction of large technological networks aim at integrating the urban region based on circulating ‘modern ideals’ of ubiquity and standardization of infrastructures. However, centralized infrastructure provision has remained unstable and spatially uneven. We examine differently networked spaces that have emerged at the edge of Hanoi along with rapid urban change and new financing mechanisms in the past thirty years, and the ways in which urban residents engage with the various water and sanitation systems. This engagement is shaped by circulating ideals, place-specific processes of urban re-production, sector-specific dynamics, and individuals. Not only in periurban villages, but also in modern housing estates, people rebut a role as passive receptors of external services. In some instances, they create relatively stable collectives through which they provide, negotiate and complement networked infrastructure connection. Thus, people living at Hanoi’s urban edge actively re-produce water and sanitation systems beyond passive consumption of externally provided services.     

How effective is inclusive innovation without participation?

The last few years have seen an upsurge in the field of innovation studies especially ‘inclusive innovation’, aiming not only at economic but social development. In developing countries, like India, inclusive innovation must incorporate governance and for governance to be inclusive, it should encompass participation by all, especially the marginalized, to make public policies efficacious and deliverable. I argue that any model of inclusive innovation needs to take cognizance of participation by all stakeholders. The objective of innovation must be to enable and empower people at the periphery through awareness, accessibility and democratic deliberations rather than solely aiming at economic outcomes. There is a need to debate on the ‘inclusiveness’ of innovation and make it more participative. Such an endeavour may help promote United Nation’s sustainable development goals by making governance participatory and expediting the process of social justice.     

Everyday human (in)securities in protected urban nature – Collaborative conservation at Macassar/Wolfgat dunes nature reserves,Cape Town,South Africa

The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.     

Doing space relationally: Exploring the meaningful geographies of local government in Wales

Recent years have seen significant advancements in the theorising of relational space through conceptual frameworks which recognise the polymorphic organisation of sociospatial relations (e.g. Territory, Place, Scale and Network). Less understood, however, are the methodological challenges inherent in ‘thinking space relationally’. In particular, how can such conceptual vocabularies be sustained through the contingent practices of doing research? In this article, we address these concerns empirically through an analysis of the sociospatial responsibilities of local government actors across Wales, as new modes of spatial planning require them to think and act across administrative boundaries and policy areas. We introduce the notion of ‘patch’ as a means for eliciting conceptually open and grounded accounts of relational space as situated within personal/professional interests, cultures and ideologies. We identify different ways in which patch is relationally located, and how understandings of its boundaries and coherences relate to public policy remits. Yet while invoking different kinds of material and imagined spatiality, patch remains largely defined by the responsibilities and resources tied to local government boundaries. Institutional configurations continue to inform the way different spaces are discursively organised and practised. We conclude by reflecting on the need for accounts of relational space to be open to its everyday material groundings in relations of fixity and flow. Gesturing towards recent studies which display complementary concerns, we consider where attentiveness to patch and other ‘meaningful’ spatial frames has the potential to develop geographical analyses in new directions.     

Racial coastal formation: The environmental injustice of colorblind adaptation planning for sea-level rise

The United States’ deeply racialized history currently operates below the surface of contemporary apolitical narratives on vulnerability mitigation and adaptation to sea-level rise. As communities, regulatory agencies, and policy-makers plan for rising seas, it is important to recognize the landscapes of race and deep histories of racism that have shaped the socio-ecological formations of coastal regions. If this history goes unrecognized, what we label colorblind adaptation planning is likely to perpetuate what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of environmental racism, characterized by policies that benefit some populations while abandoning others. By colorblind adaptation planning, we refer to vulnerability mitigation and adaptation planning projects that altogether overlook racial inequality—or worse dismiss its systemic causes and explain away racial inequality by attributing racial disparities to non-racial causes. We contend that responses to sea-level rise must be attuned to racial difference and structures of racial inequality. In this article, we combine the theory of racial formation with the geographical study of environmental justice and point to the ways racial formations are also environmental. We examine vulnerability to sea-level rise through the process of racial coastal formation on Sapelo Island, Georgia, specifically analyzing its deep history, the uneven racial development of land ownership and employment, and barriers to African American participation and inclusion in adaptation planning. Racial coastal formation’s potential makes way for radical transformation in climate change science not only in coastal areas, but other spaces as situated territorial racial formations.     

Public participation in China’s green communities: Mobilizing memories and structuring incentives

In recent years, there has been heightened interest in creating more environmentally sustainable forms of urban development in China. Central in these greening initiatives has been increased attention on promoting public participation in community-based environmental activities. Focusing on China’s green community initiatives, we examine the production and effects of participation in a state-led development program. Our analysis considers how incentives for program organizers and participants are structured by broader political and economic imperatives facing Chinese cities. We also consider what influence China’s history of neighborhood-based mobilization campaigns had on the meanings and methods of participation in green communities. To understand how urban development processes and memories of mobilization influence participation at the local level, we present two examples of the community greening process from the city of Guangzhou, comparing policy outcomes between a new and older neighborhood. This article seeks to demonstrate that the participatory processes associated with such an urban environmental initiative cannot be adequately understood without reference to earlier participatory practices and broader policy priorities guiding development in Chinese cities.     

Policy responses to informality in urban Africa: the example of Maputo,Mozambique

In the global South informality constitutes one of the leading issues for urban policy makers. The planning challenges around informality are particularly relevant in urban Africa as most Africans make their livelihoods in the informal economy. This paper examines issues of state policy responses to informality through the lens of street traders. Under scrutiny are policy responses towards street trading in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, a city that has experienced the advance of informalization. It is argued that the dominant approach towards informal trading across urban Africa is of a ‘sanitising’ policy response by the local state which is rooted upon traditions of modernist urban planning in search of ‘ordered development’. The research discloses that in Maputo national and municipal authorities have adopted a more tolerant approach to the informal economy, mainly because it provides a livelihood to so many of the city’s poor and because of potential social unrest likely to be triggered by a repressive approach. In Maputo the core narrative is of an urban informal economy viewed by officials as an important livelihood for the city’s poor, albeit one which is subject both to periodic harassment and encouragement to ‘formalize’. The analysis represents a contribution to the expanding corpus of writings on Africa’s informalising cities and specifically concerning policy responses towards street trading.     

Spectacle and Suffering: The Mumbai slum as a worlded space

This paper examines the relationship between spectacle and worlding. Using Dharavi as the site (cite) of analysis, the paper considers how slum tours, art and television documentaries produce particular narratives and imaginaries of the slum. We move beyond the discussions of voyeurism and the aestheticisation of poverty and suggest that the knowledge of the slum is entangled with the motives, preconceptions and experiences of multiple actors, giving the slum a relation with the “world” that holds opportunities to disrupt hegemonic views of urbanism, while centering its own position as a locus of knowledge on urban poverty. The paper suggests that analysing the spectacle of the slum through the lens of worlding offers ways to think critically of how urban space is reordered and urban knowledge is produced and circulated.     

Locational analysis of slums and the effects of slum dweller’s activities on the social,economic and ecological facets of the city: insights from Kumasi in Ghana

GeoJournal - Slum development has become a major urban planning and management problem due to the challenges they pose to the larger urban environment. Activities of slum dwellers are...     

Making the landscape “home”: Narratives of bushfire and place in Australia

This study investigated how the meaning of ‘home’ influences the social construction of bushfire in two Australian communities at high risk. An increasing number of Australians are living in proximity to areas of high bushfire risk due to climate, vegetation and demographic changes. Land and Fire Management Agencies recognise an urgent need to understand what motivates residents to take action to mitigate bushfire risk, and individual decisions whether or not to evacuate when bushfire is imminent. In bushfire policy and management, the home is considered to be synonymous with the house and associated built structures. Using a combination of visual and ethnographic research methods, we ‘mapped’ residents’ understanding of ‘home’. The findings suggest that the concept of ‘home’ embraces more than the private spaces of house and garden. Landscape practices such as gardening with indigenous plant species, ecological restoration, and habitual walking extend the home territory beyond the house and garden and into public landscapes. Physical elements of the landscape such as mountains and locally significant species of trees form part of the ‘imaginary’ of home. These findings are important to the on-going study of the meaning of home. The implications are also significant for land and bushfire managers as they suggest that community education programs that focus solely on the house may fail to connect with people’s wider sense of home in the landscape.     

Mediating good food and moments of possibility with Jamie Oliver: Problematising celebrity chefs as talking labels

This paper explores the powerful and mediating role of celebrity chefs over audience relationships with food through analysis of Jamie Oliver and his recent series Save with Jamie. The paper firstly situates the role of celebrity chefs theoretically, defining them as ‘talking labels’ who may act both as knowledge intermediaries and boundary objects to connect audiences with food in multiple ways. Here chefs actively construct and mediate discourses around ‘good food’. As trusted, credible, well-liked public figures, chefs step into out private home spaces through our televisions to convey food information in a charismatic, entertaining and accessible way. Like traditional food labels, chef’s words can be ‘sticky’ and take hold in public imaginations in a way that goes far beyond the capacity of food products labels. Yet the relationship between chefs and audiences is far from straightforward and so the paper secondly aims to explore how these talking labels are understood and ‘used’ by audiences in their everyday food practices. Drawing selectively from a large scale audience survey (n = 600) as well as the series, Save with Jamie, this paper reveals the different ways that audiences ‘talk back’ to chefs both positively and negatively to create moments of simultaneous possibility and resistance for audience relations with food. This revealed complex relationships between audiences, chefs and food. It also suggests that the powerful work on celebrity chefs functions as part of a new mediated mechanism within today’s food governance.