Contesting racialization in a neoliberal city: cross-cultural collective formation as a strategy among alternative social planning organizations in Toronto

Many cities in the twenty-first century are increasingly culturally diverse and neoliberal due to processes of political, economic, and cultural globalization. While the need to examine the disjuncture between neoliberal ideology and practice remains paramount (Brenner and Theodore in Antipode 34(3):349–379, 2002), the implications of neoliberal policy on the actual experiences and activities of diverse groups in the city require further study (Hackworth in The neoliberal city: governance, ideology, and development in American urbanism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2007). This article contributes to urban studies engaging discourses about the practical rather than purely ideological aspects of neoliberalism, and discourses about the experiences of racialization in North American cities. Through a case study of social planning practices in contemporary Toronto, the author shows how neoliberal policies have shaped social planning in Toronto since 1998, and how several cross-cultural organizations representing Chinese, continental-African, Latino-Hispanic and South Asian communities were compelled to develop a collective to jointly contest the racialization of their communities. The cross-cultural collective’s work forces a reconsideration of what constitutes mainstream Toronto and offers an alternative approach to the dominant social planning in the city; however, it is not sufficient to replace the pervasive neoliberal hegemony as long as it remains caught up within its structures.     

中国岩溶地区石漠化贫困问题研究进展

岩溶地区是实施乡村振兴战略的坚中之坚,是极易出现返贫的地区之一,有必要梳理总结岩溶地区消除石漠化贫困的历程、成果和存在的问题,巩固脱贫攻坚成果,夯实乡村振兴的理论基础。本研究以岩溶地区实施重大生态工程的时间节点为主线,参考各阶段前人取得的阶段性和标志性成果,系统梳理了石漠化贫困的相关概念和研究历程;然后对各阶段的研究热点进行整理,归纳总结了石漠化与农村贫困的关系、石漠化致贫机制、消除石漠化贫困的策略、防治工程减贫效益评价等4个方面的前人研究成果。研究表明:石漠化贫困与石漠化区贫困的界限不清,是造成石漠化防治工程和精准扶贫衔接脱节的原因之一,应突出石漠化区生态脆弱的特性,将生态建设有机融入巩固脱贫攻坚成果同乡村振兴有效衔接之中,实现生态、资源、人口和经济各要素的耦合协调发展;工作超前,理论基础研究落后的现实依然存在,应加强石漠化区乡村人地关系及相对贫困的研究,探究石漠化阻碍乡村振兴的制约机制;此外,在岩溶地区生态质量不断提升的背景下,应优化石漠化防治工程后评价体系,凸显社会效益和经济效益评价的重要性,总结经验、汲取教训,巩固岩溶地区脱贫攻坚成果,实现脱贫攻坚与乡村振兴有效衔接。      

Virtual moralities: The mainstreaming of Fairtrade in Kenyan tea fields

Fairtrade was founded to alleviate poverty and economic injustice through a market-based form of solidarity exchange. Yet with the increasing participation of transnational food corporations in Fairtrade sourcing, new questions are emerging on the extent to which the model offers an alternative to the inimical tendencies of neoliberalism. Drawing on a qualitative research project of Kenyan Fairtrade tea, this paper examines how the process of corporate mainstreaming influences the structure and outcomes of Fairtrade, and specifically the challenges it poses for the realization of Fairtrade’s development aspirations. It argues firstly that whilst tea producers have experienced tangible benefits from Fairtrade’s social premium, these development ‘gifts’ have been conferred through processes marked less by collaboration and consent than by patronage and exclusion. These contradictions are often glossed by the symbolic force of Fairtrade’s key tenets - empowerment, participation, and justice - which simultaneously serve to neutralize critique and mystify the functions that Fairtrade performs for the political economy of development and neoliberalism. Second, building on recent critiques of corporate social responsibility, the paper explores how certain neoliberal rationalities are emboldened through Fairtrade, as a process of mainstreaming installs new metrics of governance (standards, certification, participation) that are at once moral and technocratic, voluntary and coercive, and inclusionary and marginalizing. The paper concludes that these technologies have divested exchange of mutuality, as the totemic features of neoliberal regulation - standards, procedures and protocols - increasingly render north south partnerships ever more virtual and depoliticized.     

Unpacking race,party and class from below: Surveying citizenship in the Msunduzi municipality

On the basis of a 2008 survey conducted in the Msunduzi municipality in the KwaZulu-Natal province, the paper begins an exploration of the character of popular politics and citizenship in South Africa. Embracing a ‘citizen-centred’ methodology informed by participation literatures, and sensibilities to the ‘work in progress’ character of African cities from urban studies debates, the paper interrogates the mainstream liberal-participatory model of citizenship in South Africa, and the critiques of current South African politics informed by these notions, specifically the ‘racial census’ and ‘dominant party syndrome’ analyses. Taken together these views can be read as characterising South African politics as a game for individual citizens governed by liberal rules, but played by racial and/or partisan groups in exclusionary ways, thus distorting liberal democratic mechanisms of representation and accountability. The paper also examines evidence for an alternative class-based analysis of one aspect of citizenship, namely, protest against poor local governance.The paper looks to unpack this ‘liberal model versus racialised communitarian practice’ imaginary by, on the one hand, demonstrating the ways in which citizenship is not racialised, or is asymmetrically racialised. Indeed, other than party allegiances and trust in key offices, very little by way of what citizens do, believe or think of themselves follows discrete racial lines. Similar points hold for partisanship too. On the other hand, the paper does not redeem the liberal-democratic model as there is also evidence of trust in government when it is not deserved based on performance, but more importantly, evidence that citizens embrace ‘informal’ means to secure their rights. A good example of this is protestors who are also more likely to vote than non-protestors. Taken together, these findings affirm both the way in which the racial and partisan legacy of the past is being undone by new institutions and practices, and suggest the complex intersection of these with networks of personal relations which characterise the local politics of most African cities.     

Neoliberalism and privatisation in South Africa

Perhaps the defining characteristic of development as a global discourse is its neoliberal character. Even recently liberated nations such as South Africa have not escaped its reach. In South Africa, there has been a movement from a development policy with a socialist resonance – the Reconstruction and Development Program (RDP) – to one decidedly neoliberal in form and substance – the Growth Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) policy. The articulation of neoliberalism through development policy is being facilitated through a series of measures among which are fiscal austerity, export oriented production and the privatisation of public sector services. While the GEAR policy, as a macroeconomic framework, is being contested by labour unions it is privatisation which is facing widespread opposition among communities. My intention is twofold, firstly, to investigate how neoliberalism as a global hegemonic discourse has succeeded in capturing, colonising and repackaging the development imaginary of the African National Congress (ANC). Secondly, I wish to examine how privatisation as a sub-discourse of neoliberalism is being articulated in the historically black township of Chatsworth, in Durban. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Dislocating modernity: Identity, space and representations of street trade in Durban, South Africa

South Africa’s cities have experienced dramatic changes over the past decade. Cities are now home to a multiracial population, and have been transformed by new forms of economic and social interaction. For some, these changes have become a significant source of fear and anxiety. In this paper, we examine reactions to urban spatial change in the city of Durban, as expressed in local newspapers and interviews with suburban residents. We describe how the discourses of urban change in Durban have centred on the increased presence of street traders within the city’s public spaces, and the various ways in which the activity of street trade has disrupted long-established modernist norms governing the occupation and use of the urban space. Specifically, we offer a detailed reading of three prominent narratives within the discussion of street traders in Durban--chaos, congestion and pollution. We argue that street traders have come to embody a wide range of more deeply seated cultural anxieties, which have been brought to the fore in the context of South Africa’s transition. These anxieties arise from the ways in which modern understandings of order, agency and subjectivity have been called into question by material changes in the city, and have implications for the nature of citizenship and civic engagement in post-apartheid South Africa.     

The murky waters of the second wave of neoliberalism: corporatization as a service delivery model in Cape Town

This article reviews how the process of corporatization transforms public sector management by adopting private sector principles. It argues that corporatization, as an institutional form emerging from a second wave of neoliberalism, threatens to undermine the democratic accountability of local authorities by virtue of restructuring the state in ways that are invisible to the public yet with highly negative outcomes for low-income communities. The article provides a case study on the water sector in Cape Town, South Africa by tracing the local authority's adoption of three cost-recovery policies and their impacts on low-income households over a five year period (1997-2001). Engineers are the key agents in the promotion of cost-recovery policies in the efforts to deliver services more `efficiently'. While these officials are highly skilled professionals in dealing with the technical side of the production process, they lack the social training necessary to deal with the politics of distribution. The prominence of the neoliberal agenda in urban management can be in part be attributed to the power of the technical over the political as engineers displace politicians in the deliberations over how to deliver services to poor areas of the city.     

The nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation: Linking geographies of poverty, inequality, and violence

This paper steps into recent debates concerning the (f)utility of neoliberalism as an ‘actually existing’ concept by reminding the reader that without a Marxian political economy approach, one that specifically includes neoliberalisation as part of its theoretical edifice, we run the risk of obfuscating the reality of capitalism’s festering poverty, rising inequality, and ongoing geographies of violence as something unknowable and ‘out there’. By failing to acknowledge such nonillusory effects of neoliberalisation and refusing the explanatory power neoliberalism holds in relating similar constellations of experiences across space as a potential basis for emancipation, we precipitously ensure the prospect of a violent future.     

Changing poverty distribution in Bolivia: the role of rural–urban migration and urban services

Bolivia is a country with high levels of poverty and inequality among its peoples and regions. For the nation and its urban and rural areas, trends in the social and spatial distribution of poverty (and extreme poverty) are identified from 1976 to 2003 using UBN data with minor support where appropriate from poverty lines. The main survey between 1992 and 2001 uses composite and selected UBN to track detailed poverty change for the country’s nine departments, its ten largest cities and a selection of other smaller urban and rural municipalities. Because of rising background increases in population in the various surveyed administrative units, many instances of relative reductions in poverty are accompanied by rising absolute increases. Marked spatial variations in poverty and development in the country over the last several decades are identified as the main driver for the country’s quickening pace of rural–urban migration. As a result, the paper concludes by assessing two different but closely related views. One investigation tests the notion that because more poor people have been living in Bolivia’s cities than in its rural areas since the mid to late 1990s, rapid rural–urban migration has simply shifted the locus of poverty from the countryside to the cities in a process called, the ‘urbanisation of poverty.’ A second, more challenging, investigation assesses the view that the flow of poor rural people to the better serviced urban areas of Bolivia has actually acted to alleviate national poverty levels.     

It takes a garden: Cultivating citizen-subjects in organized garden projects

Since the 1980’s organized garden projects have proliferated in a institutional settings associated with the “roll-out” neoliberal state and the sad consequences of neoliberalism more generally: jails, schools, hospitals and other clinical settings for “at-risk” populations. This article advances the concept “organized garden project” over the richly connotative, but inchoate term “community garden,” and links the long episodic history of garden projects with changing discourses about the supposedly transformative power of gardening practice for individual and social transformation. The article highlights two organized garden projects within the San Francisco Bay area, a chief locus in the movement to using organized garden projects to produce new individual and collective subjectivities. The case studies assess, from the typically unambiguous standpoint of the garden organizers, the nature of the subjectivity that gardening practice is supposed to produce, the need for such alternative subjectivity and the “difference” such alternatives are believed to make for the individual and in the wider social, political and economic milieu.     

Environmental policy as a factor in a new security policy

Environmental policy is increasingly becoming an indispensable part of modern policy to maintain peace and security. After the end of the East-West conflict, a new cold war between North and South is looming on the horizon. It is caused by a steadily widening gap between the poverty of the South and the wealth of the North, which has been gained not least at the expense of the environment worldwide, and thus also of the South.There is a need for a parallel development between the disarmament process in the classical sense and a disarmament process in a material sense to promote an economic, social and ecological development which is consistent in itself and coordinated with regard to its effects.Appropriate instruments to achieve this, besides international conventions, include the opening up of markets, ecologically honest prices, technical cooperation and not least the enforcement of environmentally compatible and resource-saving forms of industry and ways of life in the industrialised countries.     

The politics of defining and alleviating poverty: State strategies and their impacts in rural Kerala

This paper presents a relational approach to the study of poverty (Mosse, 2010), and uses this to critically evaluate state strategies for identifying and alleviating poverty in Kerala, India. It traces these from national planning documents through to their point of implementation, drawing on qualitative research in two of Kerala’s poorest Districts. Ideas of participatory poverty classification, economic self-reliance and political empowerment are laudable national policy goals, and Kerala has shown innovation in its adaptation of these within the State’s devolved structures of local governance. However, both the framing of policy and its implementation reproduce ideas of individual transitions out of poverty which indicate that the state pays insufficient attention to the highly unequal social and economic relationships reproducing poverty in contemporary Kerala – in short, to poverty’s inherently political nature.     

Anthropization of groundwater resources in the Mediterranean region: processes and challenges

A comprehensive overview is provided of processes and challenges related to Mediterranean groundwater resources and associated changes in recent decades. While most studies are focused thematically and/or geographically, this paper addresses different stages of groundwater exploitation in the region and their consequences. Examples emphasize the complex interactions between the physical and social dimensions of uses and evolution of groundwater. In natural conditions, Mediterranean groundwater resources represent a wide range of hydrogeological contexts, recharge conditions and rates of exploitation. They have been actively exploited for millennia but their pseudo-natural regimes have been considerably modified in the last 50 years, especially to satisfy agricultural demand (80% of total water consumption in North Africa), as well as for tourism and coastal cities. Climate variability affects groundwater dynamics but the various forms of anthropization are more important drivers of hydrological change, including changes in land use and vegetation, hydraulic works, and intense pumpings. These changes affect both the quantity and quality of groundwater at different scales, and modify the nature of hydrogeological processes, their location, timing, and intensity. The frequent cases of drastic overexploitation illustrate the fragility of Mediterranean groundwater resources and the limits of present forms of management. There is no easy way to maintain or recover sustainability, which is often threatened by short-term interests. To achieve this goal, a significant improvement in hydrogeological knowledge and closer collaboration between the various disciplines of water sciences are indispensable.     

Fair Trade market creation and marketing in the Global South

Fair Trade emerged to commercialise Southern products in the Global North on terms overtly beneficial to Southern producers. However, a contemporary phenomenon is the development of Fair Trade consumer markets within the Global South itself: and the paper explores this as a contribution to the evolving geographies of ethical consumerism. Data was captured from secondary sources and field visits that included in-depth interviews and participant observation. Analysis is informed by theories of market creation developed in economic geography and economic sociology. As such we focus on understanding (1) the architecture, or networks and institutions, of commercialisation, governance and certification and (2) the marketing practices and strategies, designed to resonate with and develop cognitive association amongst consumers. Given the alternative geographies of South–South vis-à-vis South–North Fair Trade, we deepen the geographical focus by applying frameworks emerging from the concept of ‘geographical entanglement’. Findings identify the similarities and differences of both Southern Fair Trade market creation and marketing compared to the European experience. In some cases, the place-based ‘othering’, often used to develop sympathetic cognitive frames in Northern marketing, is identified, but this time operates around alternative geographical binaries. In other cases, we highlight instances that avoid such divisive place-making, and which instead draw on inclusive, rather than divisive, imagined geographies, overlaid with the collective aspiration for development, pride and dignity. These findings therefore inform the nature of geographical entanglement followed by ethical market creation, as well as contributing to the wider theoretical understanding of moral geographies endogenous to the Global South.     

Britons abroad or European citizens? The negotiation of (trans)national space and citizenship by British migrants in France

This paper uses the concept of ‘ordinary citizenship’ (Staeheli et al., 2012) to explore the relationship between mobility, citizenship and political space in the European Union. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Britons living in South West France, the paper examines the ways in which citizenship is meaningful to migrants as a complexity of legal frameworks, normative structures and everyday activities. While EU citizenship has been advanced to underpin the formation of a closer Union, we demonstrate that contemporary forms of citizenship among these lifestyle migrants are shaped to a large extent by performances of national belonging, and individual interactions with other people at the local or community level. We argue that a bi-national structure of citizenship, or one based on domicile better accounts for the experiences of these migrants than supranational EU citizenship.     

基于遥感和GIS的新疆绿洲城市扩展时空动态变化分析

以新疆16座城市为研究对象, 运用多时相卫星遥感资料, 利用遥感和GIS技术提取城市的空间特征信息, 并通过城市扩展强度、扩展速率以及城市空间形态紧凑度和分形维数等指标定量分析了1990-2010年以来新疆城市扩展时空动态变化的过程和特征. 结果表明: 新疆城市的空间分布由其独特的自然环境和绿洲经济所决定, 许多城市的发展依托于绿洲, 城镇的形成具有"亲水性"的特点, 由于新疆地域辽阔, 交通干线附近往往形成城镇相对集中的城市带或城市群. 南北疆城市之间在扩展速度及强度上存在较明显的差异, 位于北疆天山北坡经济带上的城市大多属于扩展速度相对较快、扩展强度相对较大的扩张类型, 而南疆城市的扩展速度则相对较慢、扩展强度也相对较小.通过对城市紧凑度和分维数变化的分析发现, 新疆城市平均紧凑度呈下降趋势, 而分形维数呈增长的趋势, 说明整体上新疆城市空间结构有趋于松散化的趋势, 城市的空间结构不够合理, 有待改善.     

Local state restructuring and urban transformation in post-apartheid Cape Town

This paper analyzes processes of state restructuring at the scale of the local state and the city, exploring the social and political relationships generated through processes of reconstruction specifically in Elsies River, a formerly segregated `coloured' neighborhood in Cape Town. While the relationship between Elsies River residents and the local state has been characterized by an obsessive focus on housing debt, I examine the ways in which antagonism over housing problems overlie a broader relational disjuncture between neighborhood and state political and social networks. The specificity of this case provides a lens onto the ways in which processes of state restructuring both contest and reinforce racial, economic, and place-based inequalities in South African cities. The paper concludes by using the complexities of local state-neighborhood relationships in the South African case to reflect on geographical theories of state-society relations on a conceptual level. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Juxtaposing Pakistani diaspora policy with migrants’ transnational citizenship practices

Through a juxtaposition of diaspora policy with migrants’ transnational citizenship practices, this article explores how peoplehood, nationhood and citizenship are articulated, justified and enacted. The article draws on the politico-spatial context of Norwegian-Pakistani transnational social space, analyzing the Pakistani Origin Card (POC), remittances and return mobilities as transnational citizenship practices. The elusiveness of residency becomes apparent, underscoring the salience of territoriality, for both diaspora strategies and transnational citizenship practices, involving the co-constitution of formal membership and everyday citizenship practices. Through this overlaps, frictions and disruptions in conceptions of citizenship and of nationhood are revealed, underscoring their non-static nature. Whilst questions of who is included within the people are more commonly approached from the vantage point of immigration contexts, they share key tenets of struggles over conceptualizations of citizenship, and more plural ideologies of nationhood, in emigration contexts, exposed by a juxtaposition of diaspora policies and migrants’ transnational citizenship practices.     

Poverty tourism: theoretical reflections and empirical findings regarding an extraordinary form of tourism

During the mid-1990s, a new form of tourism was established in metropolises of several developing countries or emerging nations. This type of tourism consists in visits to the most disadvantaged parts of the respective city. Poverty tours or slum tours are offered on a relatively large scale in the South African cities of Johannesburg and Cape Town, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, as well as in Indian metropolises, to name some important examples. The target group of these tours consists primarily of international tourists. It is estimated that 40,000 such tourists visit favelas in Rio de Janeiro each year, around 300,000 the townships in Cape Town. This contribution refers to and comments on these developments and insights regarding poverty tourism or slumming, based on empirical research and experiences in South Africa, Brazil, and India. It will be shed light on the phenomenon from an observational-theoretical perspective. It is aimed to open a discussion on the ways poverty tours or slumming observes and simultaneously programmatically charges poverty. And, it will be considered in which way poverty tourism is observed.     

Recent waves of water governance: Constitutional reform and resistance to neoliberalization in Latin America (1990–2012)

This article critically investigates recent water governance shifts, particularly constitutional changes implemented in several Latin American countries that highlight a ‘right to water’ as well as recent efforts that invoke such a right in conjunction with bans on private water provision (e.g. Uruguay, Ecuador, and Bolivia). Drawing on legal research, document review, and interviews, the article investigates the historical, political and discursive scaffolding of these constitutional changes in several case study contexts, including attention to implementation issues and ongoing challenges following the reforms. Placing these shifts within the broader context of neoliberalization of water governance of the past several decades, the analysis attends to both the specific historical–contextual formations that are important to understand the constitutional reforms, as well as the ways these changes might be usefully understood as connected to broader political and discursive shifts and movements. Highlighting similarities and differences across the cases allows us to make conceptual contributions to debates on variegation of neoliberalized natures, as well as to discussions of alternatives to neoliberalism and postneoliberalism. We argue that although many of these reforms are partial, and not wholly resistant to neoliberalism, they are nonetheless significant for politics and debates related to ‘alternatives.’ Apart from resisting particular aspects of earlier neoliberal reforms, they are also important to stake new discursive and policy terrain on alternative priorities and uses of water. Further, the reforms also offer points of resistance to the influence of international financial institutions, or of transnational corporations.