Contextualizing public art production in China: The urban sculpture planning system in Shanghai

This research examines urban sculpture production to understand how a public art (called “urban sculpture” in China) scene is produced in the country, using Shanghai as a case study. Theories of Chinese urban planning are innovatively applied. The findings generate theoretical implications for “contextualizing” public art production in geographical studies. All the chief officials in charge of urban sculpture planning in Shanghai were interviewed, and documentary analyses were conducted. The article argues that urban sculptures are conceived of as both symbolic capitals and didactic tools in the cultural policies of Shanghai. Urban sculpture planning plays an important role in coordinating and manipulating development of symbolic resources to advance urban entrepreneurialism within the ideological framework of the Communist Party’s leadership. The main features of the urban sculpture planning system of China are twofold: (1) The two-tier planning structure combines a master plan at the municipal level and detailed plans for site analysis and design guidance at the district level, all collaboratively working to create an attractive city image for urban entrepreneurialism. (2) An authoritarian style of planning system controls the contents and expression of urban sculpture within the ideological framework of urban sculpture planning.     

A geography of men’s fear

Men are at significantly greater risk than women to violent crime victimization in the US, especially in the public sphere. Despite this, their fears and vulnerabilities have received considerably less attention in recent social discourse than have women. Men’s risk in, and fear of, public space is overshadowed by their apparent fearlessness in public space. This paper begins to address this apparent paradox using the conceptual lenses of masculinity and control. I explore fear and fearlessness among men as objects and subjects of masculinity. Stated fearlessness among men is counterbalanced by a chronic fear of violent crime victimization. Conditioned fearlessness combines with actual risk and chronic fear to shape men’s experiences in the public sphere. I study the dynamics of men’s fear using data gathered from a group of young men and women in Philadelphia. Gendered differences in fear and how environments are perceived and judged as to their relative safety are demonstrated and explored. Compared to women’s fears and perceived geographical vulnerabilities, the men of this study demonstrate a persistent and chronic wariness of their environmental context that precedes any judgment of perceived safety. Violence and fear among both men and women in this study is further explained as a function of racism and economic marginalization.     

Conspicuous redemption? Reflections on the promises and perils of the ‘Celebritization’ of climate change

With rising public awareness of climate change, celebrities have become an increasingly important community of non nation-state ‘actors’ influencing discourse and action, thereby comprising an emergent climate science-policy-celebrity complex. Some feel that these amplified and prominent voices contribute to greater public understanding of climate change science, as well as potentially catalyze climate policy cooperation. However, critics posit that increased involvement from the entertainment industry has not served to influence substantive long-term advancements in these arenas; rather, it has instead reduced the politics of climate change to the domain of fashion and fad, devoid of political and public saliency. Through tracking media coverage in Australia, Canada, the United States, and United Kingdom, we map out the terrain of a ‘Politicized Celebrity System’ in attempts to cut through dualistic characterizations of celebrity involvement in politics. We develop a classification system of the various types of climate change celebrity activities, and situate movements in contemporary consumer- and spectacle-driven carbon-based society. Through these analyses, we place dynamic and contested interactions in a spatially and temporally-sensitive ‘Cultural Circuits of Climate Change Celebrities’ model. In so doing, first we explore how these newly ‘authorized’ speakers and ‘experts’ might open up spaces in the public sphere and the science/policy nexus through ‘celebritization’ effects. Second, we examine how the celebrity as the ‘heroic individual’ seeking ‘conspicuous redemption’ may focus climate change actions through individualist frames. Overall, this paper explores potential promises, pitfalls and contradictions of this increasingly entrenched set of ‘agents’ in the cultural politics of climate change. Thus, as a form of climate change action, we consider whether it is more effective to ‘plant’ celebrities instead of trees.     

Putting principles of linguistic rights into practice: Geographical perspectives on a contemporary European problem

The political salience of demands from minority and regional groups for greater language rights increases across Europe. To draw more geographical attention to a particular aspect of these developments, this article identifies the main generic problems of converting demands for ‘linguistic rights’ into applied language policies. It does this by first outlining how the historic process of nation-state building in Europe reduced linguistic diversity, but has not eliminated language demands emanating from regional minorities. It then analyses how the concept of ‘linguistic rights’, as a part of human rights in general, has been developing within the United Nations and bodies including the Council of Europe and the European Union. Having outlined the political-legal frameworks within which minority language rights are pursued, the article then discusses the major difficulties of putting them into practice in particular places and spaces. They can be summarised as: the weakness of relevant international agreements; the dominance of state sovereignty in determining language policies; the limited public support for minority language rights; the difficulties of defining minority languages and delimiting the geographical spaces they occupy; the challenges posed by the growing geographical mobility of populations; and the problem of balancing collective and individual rights. Two fundamental issues linking these different problems are identified. First, there are problems of definition: what constitutes a ‘minority’ or ‘regional’ language and within what geographical space(s) is such a language spoken? This spatial dimension underlies a second fundamental problem, namely that of resolving conflicts between individual personality rights and collective territorial rights in increasing hybrid geolinguistic situations created by the growing geographical mobility of populations. Sociolinguists study these issues, but usually treat these essential spatial dimensions in a superficial fashion. Thus, there is an opportunity for geographers to develop more sophisticated geolinguistic analyses as a contribution to this interdisciplinary field.     

The impact of decentralised forest management on charcoal production practices in Eastern Senegal

In accordance with Senegal’s decentralisation policy, important forest management tasks, including the right to allocate charcoal production rights, have been transferred to rural councils. This paper investigates the impact of these institutional reforms on charcoal production practices using the environmental entitlement framework developed by Leach et al. [Environmental entitlements: dynamics and institutions in community-based natural resource management. World Development 27 (2) (1999) 225]. The councils have not been able to turn their new endowments into entitlements because they lack sufficient strength and legitimacy. Informal institutions, notably the coalition between merchants, state agents and village chiefs, continue to run the charcoal business and are hardly affected by decentralisation efforts. Most rural people, especially those relying solely on agriculture for sustenance, do not benefit at all from the charcoal trade. They do suffer from the environmental costs it brings with it, however. Although tensions between pro-exploitation actors and pro-conservation actors are evident, the pro-exploitation actors’ firm grip on the informal institutions will probably lead to a prolonged subversion of the laws that seek to enhance local control and to sustain the forest.     

Food with a visible face: Traceability and the public promotion of private governance in the Japanese food system

The years since 2000 have seen a constant stream of high-profile scandals relating to food safety and food labeling in Japan. One response of Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF) has been to promote food traceability as a mechanism to improve food safety and to provide reliable information to consumers about their food. MAFF’s main approach to traceability promotion, however, has not involved making traceability mandatory (as has been done in the EU) but encouraging private companies to adopt it. These actions constitute, I argue, an example of the public promotion of private governance. When viewed against the literature on the private governance of food safety and quality, MAFF’s traceability activities are surprising for three reasons: their forms and extent, the relative lack of interest the Ministry has shown in third-party certification, and the way MAFF has responded to concerns about the safety of imported food by focusing almost entirely on domestic traceability. I also argue, however, that looking at the literature from a Japanese perspective suggests that public encouragement is more central to the rise of private governance in the global agri-food system than is usually appreciated.     

Angels of memory: photography and haunting in Guatemala City

This article explores the relationship between historical memory, urban space, and photography by way of a case study: the place-specific public art of the Guatemalan photographer and human rights activist, Daniel Hernández-Salazar. As one of a growing number of Latin American artists committed to combating the “institutionalized forgetfulness” of human rights violations throughout the hemisphere, Hernández-Salazar deploys geographically-rich photographic installations to help his society remember its difficult past. The installations, known as Street Angel, are like ghosts haunting the graves of the murdered, fortresses of the powerful, bastions of the complicit. By shedding light on these ghostly angels, this article reveals the important role of photography, as a crucial vehicle of memory, in bearing witness to the unimaginable horrors that consumed much of the twentieth century, as well as that technology’s limitations. It also shows how remembrances of those atrocities depend on urban space for their grounding, articulation, and maintenance. Finally, by probing the artistic impulse and political sensibility that created Guatemala City’s angels of memory, it makes the case that, in the combustible political climate of post-war Central America, the work of remembering the past is not an antiquarian exercise: the labor of memory is a fundamental component of building a just society.

Risky bodies: Public health, social marketing and the governance of obesity

The inclusion of obesity within public health rests on a proven and accepted biomedical link between body weight and health status. Drawing on the 2005 controversy over annual death rates attributable to obesity in the US, this paper contends that uncertainty as to the causal mechanisms linking body weight and health are undermining the development of effective obesity prevention policies. Consequently, this also weakens the justification of the inclusion of such policies within public health. This work draws on recent interest in ‘critical geographies of public health’ and the continued attention to the recursive relations between people and places in the context of health which may offer a useful theoretical viewpoint from which unpack such aetiological uncertainty. Without an agreed or universal risk from obesity, the paper argues that public health obesity prevention through social marketing should be geographical in outlook. The three examples of 5 a day, Jamie’s School Dinners and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster are discussed to illustrate the effectiveness of communicating risk in a manner that allows intention to be effectively translated into risk-minimising behaviour within the dictates of locale.     

Public-space planning in four Nordic cities: Symbolic values in tension

This article takes its point of departure in the assumption that values shape planning practices and that alternatively one can reconstruct such values from the way planning interventions are argued and evaluated. We contend that planners’ discourses involve implicit value commitments that are observable in their representations of public space and implicated in the results of public-space planning. The paper builds an empirical case from representations of public space elaborated in planning documents developed by planners in four medium-sized Nordic cities. We show how these planning representations form four thematic value clusters concerning urban public space, namely leisure-play, identity-unity, power-organization and unruliness-change. Together these clusters constitute a value framework which reveals a number of central tensions relating to the way that planners seek to balance order and spontaneity in public space. The paper concludes by outlining and discussing these values and the tensions they represent.     

Competitiveness versus ‘clean and green’? The regulation and governance of GMOs in Australia and the UK

It is increasingly argued that we are entering into a “biotech century”, in which biotechnology promises major advances in agricultural productivity. The development of biotechnology is not a straightforward affair, however, and the advent of GMOs has led to public protest and consumer resistance. This paper draws upon a comparative Australian-UK project concerned with the role of regulation and governance in mediating the debates and managing the associated risks. Regulatory responses and the mediation of conflicts by the Australian and UK governments have been shaped by the institutional and policy environments in these two countries. The implications of these public debates and regulatory responses for the capture of competitive opportunities are considered. The fact that the two countries have broadly similar systems of governance and regulation reveals how alike the circumstances are in many respects. But at the same time there are important differences in both the style and the content of the policy debates. In both the UK and Australia, the respective central governments remain committed to a ‘biotechnology future’. Against this background, there is little doubt that the choices about biotechnology will play a defining role in shaping the future of rural places.     

Participation in payments for ecosystem services: Case studies from the Lacandon rainforest, Mexico

Understanding people’s willingness to participate in projects and programmes of payments for ecosystem services (PES) has not been a key analytical concern of the scholarly literature around this new field of environmental policy and practice. This paper analyses participation in four communities benefiting from payments for biodiversity and carbon fixation in Mexico, and contrasts the results for each case with neighbouring communities that do not receive payments. We take a holistic approach that accounts for procedural rules, actors’ interactions, institutions and values, and individuals’ characteristics. We show that the nature of PES rules and the effectiveness of communication with government officers and NGOs influence resource managers’ ability and willingness to participate. We highlight community size, resource managers’ ability to diversify livelihood activities and local perspectives on the conservation of common forests, particularly sacred values and intergenerational concerns on forest conservation, as critical participation drivers. This analysis provides insights on why and how these new institutions may be attractive for some resource managers and permits to draw some recommendations for the future design of PES projects and programmes.     

Geographies of peak oil: The other carbon problem

This extended editorial introduction to a themed issue of Geoforum on geographies of peak oil has three objectives. First, it provides a concise account of the ’peak oil’ claim, identifying the key protagonists in the debate, and outlining different stances with regard to the timing, shape and composition (conventional vs. non-conventional hydrocarbons) of the peak. Second, after briefly characterising the limited engagement with peak oil by human geographers, it offers a provisional set of claims about what a geographical analysis of peak oil might yield. Finally, it introduces each of the papers and, in doing so, makes the case for a fuller and more sustained engagement by geography with this ’other carbon problem.’     

“I…don’t want to see you flashing your bits around”: Exhibitionism,othering and good motherhood in perceptions of public breastfeeding

Stigma and concern about public breastfeeding have been identified as contributing towards low breastfeeding rates in high-income countries. Despite this, very little research has examined public perceptions of breastfeeding. Among existing studies, lack of familiarity with breastfeeding, sexist views and hyper-sexualisation of the breast were identified alongside discomfort at viewing breastfeeding by strangers. During 2014, in the United Kingdom (UK), several cases of women being criticised for breastfeeding in public appeared in national newspapers. A Critical Discourse Analysis approach was used to theoretically frame analysis of 884 naturally occurring comments relating to a protest supporting women’s right to breastfeed in public from the UK’s most popular online news site, Mail Online. Findings are discussed in relation to mothers’ roles as citizens and sexual beings, with a particular focus on the visibility of breasts in public space. Women who breastfeed in public were viewed as unattractive, lazy, bad parents and lacking in self-respect. More specifically, women who breastfed in public were viewed as exhibitionist. This was contrasted with the desirability of breastfeeding within the home, which was seen as an appropriate way to feed an infant. The undesirability of public breastfeeding was inherently linked to sexuality, with breastfeeding women viewed as sexual aggressors (“flashers”) or inviting sexual contact from men. It is argued that these views originate in unequal gender relationships in society and the framing of breasts as sexual rather than nurturing. These discourses are played out in public space in which mothers are marginalised in a patriarchal society.     

Intellectuals and geopolitics: The ‘cultural politicians’ of Central Europe

This paper investigates the role of intellectuals in the production of geopolitical discourses. It analyzes how the cultural capital of humanist credentials and artistic aura functions to authenticate and legitimate geopolitical claims. Drawing empirically from Central Europe and especially Estonia, I argue that intellectuals are central to the production of a particular ‘cultural’ concept of geopolitics - the notion that foreign policy expresses the state’s and the nation’s identity. As cultural capital gives intellectuals a special license to speak about culture, it constitutes an essential component in geopolitical discourses in Central Europe.The paper contributes to Europeanist geography by clarifying the mechanisms through which Central Europe is cast externally and internally as a place particularly imbued with culture and identity - a place whose integration with the EU and NATO represents its cultural ‘return’ to Europe. It takes us beyond the romanticized notion of intellectuals - especially the formerly dissident ones - as ‘speaking truth to power’, and offers a more subtle account of their role as producers of power discourses.Beyond Central Europe, the paper underscores the political and cultural milieu of geopolitical claims and the specific structures of legitimacy through which these claims are justified and normalized. A nuanced understanding of the role of ‘culture’ in geopolitical discourses requires that we closely examine the cultural and moral capital of intellectuals. This would also enable us to better delineate human agency in the production of geopolitics.     

The complex mobilities of homeless people in rural England

This paper explores the interconnected issues of mobility, power and meaning in the context of rural homelessness. It explores two common assumptions relating to these interconnections: that rural homeless people move to cities thereby transposing homelessness into an urban problem; and that mobility is deeply implicated in the mapping of moral codes in rural areas. Drawing on a range of interviews with homeless people, and workers with homelessness agencies in the rural areas of Gloucestershire and Somerset, the paper discusses four types of movement: ‘local’ homeless people moving out of rural areas; ‘local’ homeless people moving within rural areas; homeless ‘incomers’ moving to rural areas; and itinerant/transient homeless people moving through rural areas. The complex mobilities of rural homeless people influence common ideas about where homelessness occurs and how it is experienced. These mobilities also affect how homelessness is ‘made known’ in rural areas, as different elements of the mobility of homeless people are discursively scattered amongst identity labels and policy arenas other than homelessness. Finally, homeless mobilities problematise the adequacy and nature of policy responses to homelessness in rural areas.     

From free good to commodity: Universalizing the provision of water in Paris (1830–1930)

This article focuses on the water distribution network in Paris, from the 1830s, when most Parisians got their water from public fountains and private wells, to the 1930s, by which time almost all of the capital’s inhabitants had been connected to the same network and enjoyed a standard service. It contributes, by a detailed analysis of the entire chain of mediators and mediation, to specify how the modern infrastructure ideal actually took form. In that aim, we analyze the manner in which each actor (public as well as private), in accordance with his/her constraints and resources, which depend on his/her position in the social space, was able to conceive of his/her environment, define objectives, confront problems, make choices and deploy a whole range of frequently innovative practices. In order to understand the underlying factors, our task consists in identifying the actors, modi operandi, progress and phases involved in universalizing water services. Spatially analyzing the extension of the water network, this article demonstrates that the process of universalization, far from being the inexorable and linear outcome of the action of a small number of “major historical forces”, was the upshot of the actions of a whole range of actors acting in specific different geographical, social, economic and technical contexts. The achievement of the “modern infrastructural ideal” as a macro-social phenomenon was ultimately down to a long accumulation process of a multitude of actions, interactions, conflicts and learning processes.     

City senses: On the radical possibilities of pragmatism in geography

This paper explores the radical possibilities of pragmatism for geography using the illustration of arguments concerning a renewed (urban) public realm through the exchange of validity claims in communication. Pressing further the pragmatist possibilities of Habermas’s idea of communicative action it draws on John Dewey’s work, and a range of contemporary pragmatist philosophers, to consider human communicability in its widest sense. This is then explored using an example of the spatiality and performativity of body-minds in a range of communicative spaces of the city. Then the paper moves on to consider the radical implications of pragmatism for geography in general in terms of body-mind/environment relations; a transactional view of space; experience, rationality and radical democracy.     

Recombinant workfare, across the Americas: Transnationalizing “fast” social policy

The paper presents a genealogy of the Bloomberg administration’s Opportunity NYC program, launched in 2007 as part of New York City’s explicitly experimental anti-poverty strategy. Opportunity NYC was modeled on “conditional cash transfer” programs, currently operating in more than thirty countries across the Global South, drawing direct inspiration from Mexico’s widely touted Oportunidades program. This striking case of South-North policy emulation calls attention to some distinctive features of what is characterized here as a transnationalizing “fast-policy” regime, based on technocratic forms of program evaluation and development, dense expert networks, and orchestrated communities of practice, within which a range of policy intermediaries—particularly those connected with multilateral agencies—are assuming significant new roles. What appears to be a pragmatic form of policy learning in fact operates in the context of narrow ideological parameters, within which there is a concerted technocratic “push” toward favored solutions.     

Food commodities, geographical knowledges and the reconnection of production and consumption: The case of naturally embedded food products

This paper focuses on a particular group of food commodities, associated with the wider turn to ‘alternative food networks’, that are described as ‘naturally embedded food products’ (NEFPs). These are commodities (specifically meats and cheeses) that utilise grassland biodiversity as an input into production to positively influence, in various ways, the final qualities of the commodity. Building on the geographical literature on commodity circuits and analysing data derived from NEFP promotional materials and focus groups with urban and rural residents in the UK, the paper interrogates the geographical knowledges that are deployed by producers in the promotion of NEFPs and how these knowledges are accommodated and contested by consumers as they bring their own geographical knowledges to the interpretation of these commodities. The paper undertakes this task in order to problematise the extent to which alternative food networks in general and NEFPs in particular are bringing about a reconnection of producers and consumers and, concomitantly, a defetishisation of food, as is claimed for them by many of their policy and academic proponents. In the process the paper reveals how the food commodities associated with alternative food networks entail the creation of new and rival fetishes paradoxically as a result of efforts to ‘thicken connections’ between the production and consumption of food.     

State visions, landscape, and disease: Discovering malaria in Argentina, 1890-1920

Recently, geographers and other scholars have reappraised the state’s spatial properties, roles, and strategies. According to these interpretations, modern states seek to control their subjects and coordinate economic development through various “rational” and “scientific” strategies that involve the standardization, transformation, and bureaucratization of space, territory, and landscape. Through this process social relations are increasingly configured through state discourses and institutions. The role of public health institutions in the development of state spatialities has been relatively underappreciated. This paper explores the establishment and early action of a malaria control campaign in Northwest Argentina, in the early twentieth century. I make three arguments: first, in creating a malaria control program, the Argentine state did not merely respond to a given “social fact” but rather was the key participant in constructing the “malaria problem”. Second, in response to this problem the Argentine state created a new technical-administrative territory, “the malarious zone”, which encompassed several provinces and defined the federal government’s jurisdiction for public health action. Finally, state actors came to understand the malaria problem, and potential solutions to it, through specific “rational” practices of the modern state: surveying, mapping, measurement, and statistical compilation. In its early years, the malaria campaign did not so much control the disease itself, as much as establish control over the “malaria question”, making it indisputably a state project.