Urban annexation of the rural: kebun culture in Malaysia

‘Kebun culture’ is a distinctive, emergent form of rural sensibility and social-economic relations in Malaysia. As a contribution to theories of ‘planetary’ or thoroughgoing urbanization, the ethnographic evidence presented in the article illustrate a case of urban annexation of rurality, in which kebun (orchards) are detached from the social organization of rural villages and incorporated into urban-centered Malay society. Kebun, as productive land with non-rice crops, have traditionally been associated with rural kampung (village). In the late twentieth century, thoroughgoing urbanization, driven by both rural-to-urban migration and in situ urbanization of rural kampung, simultaneously produced a social disintegration of Malay kampung and increasingly urban-oriented Malay society. The kebun, which previously was an ancillary part of kampung social ecology has become dissociated from kampung and instead operates as an annex of urban-centered social lives. Kebun are also distinctively individuated rather than communal socio-economic projects. In both reserve lands and kampung areas, urban-based Malays and rural-to-urban return migrants are involved in kebun projects, through which they engage with nostalgic notions of rurality, but without the social entanglements of kampung social relations. At the same time, through kebun projects, urban Malay subjects enter into new social relations, albeit ones marked by commodification.     

‘Locationally disadvantaged’: planning governmentalities and peri-urban agricultural futures

ABSTRACT

Peri-urban areas are the interface between urban and rural regions, with these regions traditionally acting as foodbowls for adjacent urban areas. This peri-urban agriculture provides a diverse suite of benefits to urban areas. Increasingly, however, peri-urban areas are being converted to residential uses, driven in part by higher land values secured for land converted for residential development. In Sydney, planning and development has tended to treat peri-urban areas as ‘suburbs in waiting’. Using a Foucauldian governmentality approach, this paper investigates the prevailing rationalities in metropolitan-level strategic planning documents—in particular A Plan for Growing Sydney and the Draft South West District Plan—and how these rationalities relate to peri-urban agriculture. Our analysis shows that the three overarching rationalities—the global city, the compact city and the sustainability agenda—frame the urbanisation of peri-urban agricultural lands as necessary and inevitable, and only integrate agriculture as part of the future of the city of Sydney when it can be rationalised within the ‘global city’ narrative. As a result, peri-urban areas are not considered to have unique planning needs, but are imagined as latent spaces that will enable Sydney to meet its housing and job targets through their future development.     

Enacting immanent potentialities: Tcheb‐tchib strategies at the centre of the urban fringe in Nouakchott,Mauritania

The urban fringe areas of Nouakchott, the capital city of the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, have become virtual epicentres of informal property speculation, as the state‐owned land that people illegally inhabit becomes an increasingly valuable commodity in the wake of urban redevelopment plans and vast infrastructural development projects. By applying ingenious ‘poaching’ strategies based on anticipation, the marginalized, impoverished people inhabiting these areas appropriate and manipulate space in order to survive. In their attempt to counter the state's technologies of governance through what is commonly known as tcheb‐tchib, a form of creative improvisation, they become a driving force in the dynamic and contested reconfigurations of the urban landscape. Based on extended ethnographic fieldwork focusing on the strategies of former nomads who are now sedentarized on the urban fringe, this article conceives large‐scale urban renewal as a dynamic process that generates an emergent space of immanent potentiality that the urban poor attempt to strategically appropriate and enact to make the most of a potentially destructive process.     

Land grabs and labour: Vietnamese workers on rubber plantations in southern Laos

Since the early 2000s the Lao government has dramatically increased the number of large‐scale land concessions issued for agribusinesses. While studies have documented the social and environmental impacts of land dispossession, the role of Vietnamese labour on these Vietnamese‐owned rubber plantations has not previously been investigated. Taking a political ecology approach, we situate this study at the intersection between ‘land grabbing’ studies and work on ‘labour geographies’. Most of the remittances generated from Vietnamese working in Laos are used for non‐agricultural purposes, with people purposely choosing to not invest in agriculture in Vietnam. Vietnamese labour on Lao plantations still has significant spatial implications, both in Laos and in Vietnam, including through the norms, formal rules and practices introduced at rubber plantations by Vietnamese workers and management, but also through labour regime changes in Vietnam. In Laos, one of the most significant results has been to make certain spaces less welcoming to Lao labour. This study particularly points to the importance of geopolitics, as the close political relationship between Laos and Vietnam, and the fact that Vietnamese companies and managers are involved, is crucial for understanding the particular nature of the labour geographies associated with Vietnamese rubber plantations in Laos.     

City of the Spectacle: White Night Melbourne and the politics of public space

Public policy frequently is utilised as a medium to facilitate or restrict access to public space, and to privilege economic priorities. In this context urban arts festivals are used as a means to generate dominant narratives of place and use of public space. Urban arts festivals generate spaces of spectacle and wonder, and are often used as marketing strategies to revitalise urban economies and differentiate cities one from another on the global stage, engendering a commodification of place. The present paper explores this tension through an examination of the role of urban arts festivals in spatial politics. White Night Melbourne is the first Australian iteration of the Nuit Blanche International, an international network of all-night arts festivals. It is used as a case study to explore the impact of an urban arts festival on the spatial politics of Melbourne. A theoretical basis is established using the frame of Guy Debord's ([1967] 1994) The Society of the Spectacle, as well as the concepts of ‘assemblage’ and ‘expressivity’.     

Degraded forest,degraded land and the development of industrial tree plantations in Laos

The concepts of degraded forest (pa mai xout xom) and degraded land (din seuam xom) have been variously applied in official Lao government policy narratives and law over the last couple of decades. In this article I focus on the concepts of degraded forest and land, and the relationship with industrial tree plantations, using two examples from southern Laos. I argue that the concepts have been significant in both facilitating and obstructing the development of large‐scale industrial tree plantations in different times and spaces, thus significantly influencing access and exclusion, as well as the spatialization of tree plantations. I provide a tentative genealogy regarding the emergence of these concepts in land and forestry policy in Laos, and briefly explain the links between degradation and ‘the land rush’ presently affecting Laos.     

Simulating land-use dynamics under planning policies by integrating artificial immune systems with cellular automata

Cellular automata (CA) have been increasingly used in simulating urban expansion and land-use dynamics. However, most urban CA models rely on empirical data for deriving transition rules, assuming that the historical trend will continue into the future. Such inertia CA models do not take into account possible external interventions, particularly planning policies, and thus have rarely been used in urban and land-use planning. This paper proposes to use artificial immune systems (AIS) as a technique for incorporating external interventions and generating alternatives in urban simulation. Inspired by biological immune systems, the primary process of AIS is the evolution of a set of ‘antibodies’ that are capable of learning through interactions with a set of sample ‘antigens’. These ‘antibodies’ finally get ‘matured’ and can be used to identify/classify other ‘antigens’. An AIS-based CA model incorporates planning policies by altering the evolution mechanism of the ‘antibodies’. Such a model is capable of generating different scenarios of urban development under different land-use policies, with which the planners will be able to answer ‘what if’ questions and to evaluate different options. We applied an AIS-based CA model to the simulation of urban agglomeration development in the Pearl River Delta in southern China. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model can be very useful in exploring various planning scenarios of urban development.     

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.     

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.     

Automated (post)positivism

With a mantra that ‘nobody is as smart as everybody,’ Google maintains giant databases that enable unprecedented quantitative analysis of a social world that is now majority urban. A Wall Street web-based broker offers an App that promises to turn ‘thoughts into trades.’ Economists and marketers now use evolutionary theory in ‘neuroimaging’ brain scans of consumer behavior. The United States Air Force now trains more joystick-maestro drone pilots than old-fashioned Do-the-Right-Stuff human fighters and bombers. In this article, I suggest that these trends signal a troubling reincarnation of an aggressive Right-wing (post)positivist zombie reanimated by global, digitized neoliberalism. The long-forgotten revolutionary project launched by Auguste Comte in 1822 was hijacked and corrupted after his death, and now we confront a hybrid cyborg zombie, a dehumanized, automated adaptation to the post-structuralist situated knowledges of consumer sovereignty. #Comtebot: The positivist era is right now; the question is what kinds of politics it will have.     

Developing open space networks in shrinking cities

Urban green spaces provide essential ecosystem services and improve resident quality of life, but open space networks are often fragmented by urban development, and it is difficult to reclaim natural lands after they have been built up. Shrinking cities (i.e., cities experiencing population decline) typically contain an abundance of vacant and abandoned residential buildings that are demolished for safety and maintenance reasons. The resulting empty lots can potentially be reclaimed as natural areas to defragment the green network and increase open space connectivity. To date however, planning efforts have largely ignored post-demolition land uses for these lots, allowing many to become empty wastelands. This research approaches this gap by presenting an alternative plan for residential demolition sites using landscape ecology principles and methods to incorporate them into the open space network. Using Buffalo, NY – a typical rustbelt shrinking city – as a case study, areas most at risk for experiencing demolitions are identified using a clustering technique, and each building within the cluster is assigned a likelihood it will be demolished using a logit model. Properties with the highest risk for demolition are then prioritized based on their ability to contribute to and connect the open space network using landscape connectivity metrics. Results indicate the approach can foster large increases in green network connectivity using small parcels (a 356% increase in total open space area was observed in this study after three years of purposeful selection), allowing cities to reclaim unused urban areas and defragment the open space network.     

Visualising 30 Years of Population Density Change in Australia’s Major Capital Cities

ABSTRACT

This study uses a novel spatial approach to compare population density change across cities and over time. It examines spatio-temporal change in Australia’s five most populated capital cities from 1981 to 2011, and documents the established and emerging patterns of population distribution. The settlement patterns of Australian cities have changed substantially in the last 30 years. From the doughnut cities of the 1980s, programs of consolidation, renewal and densification have changed and concentrated population in our cities. Australian cities in the 1980s were characterised by sparsely populated, low density centres with growth concentrated to the suburban fringes. ‘Smart Growth’ and the ‘New Urbanism’ movements in the 1990s advocated higher dwelling density living and the inner cities re-emerged, inner areas were redeveloped, and the population distribution shifted towards increased inner city population densities. Policies aimed at re-populating the inner city dominated and the resultant changes are now visible in Australia’s five most populated capital cities. While this pattern has been reported in a number of studies, questions remain regarding the extent of these changes and how to analyse and visualise them across urban space. This paper reports on a spatial method which addresses the limitations of changing statistical boundaries to identify the changing patterns in Australian cities over time and space.     

The Politics of Eminent Domain: From False Choices to Community Benefits

Large-scale urban redevelopment projects catalyze moments of peril and opportunity. In the wake of the United States Supreme Court's Kelo v. New London decision affirming economic development as a public use under the takings clause of the Constitution, these perils and opportunities have again become a site of major contestation. An unusual alliance of libertarian property-rights ideologues and civil-rights organizations has joined forces to challenge the use of eminent domain in urban economic development. In this article, I analyze the history of these alliances and their implicit reinforcement of deeply reactionary constructions of property. I conclude with an evaluation of two emergent models—community benefit agreements and community equity shares—that provide promising community tools for alternatives to homeowner rule and neoliberal urban renewal.     

‘I want to take risks,like my mother’: Memory,affect, and Vietnamese masculinities – the legacy of gendered variations in socio-economic mobility during Ðổi mới

Young Vietnamese men who witnessed their mother's changing economic and labour market situations through the early years of Ð?i m?i (the policy of economic liberalization in Vietnam after 1986) have developed conceptions of masculinity that are ambivalent to notions of male power and authority within what is often termed the ‘traditional’ neo-Confucian family. On the basis of the life narratives of a small group of men in their early twenties, the author suggests that the value young men place on their mother's work and familial influence during Ð?i m?i contrasts with the findings of much gender scholarship on women's social and economic (im) mobility in the 1990s in Vietnam and on young men's own masculinist narratives. Most gender-sensitive research in this area has suggested that Vietnamese women remained curtailed in the early 1990s by a resurgence of male-oriented kinship systems and patriarchal structures at household level. However, the author discusses the young men as being equivocal. While invoking broad Confucian tropes, these men remember their mothers as economically dynamic relative to their fathers. This led to the informants citing their mother's histories of economic risk-taking as exemplifying free-market capability. Further, the finding suggests that Vietnamese women's social and economic mobility in the 1990s strongly affected young men's contemporary ideas and practices related to masculinity.     

Simulating urban growth in a metropolitan area based on weighted urban flows by using web search engine

As a consequence of rapid and immoderate urbanization, simulating urban growth in metropolitan areas effectively becomes a crucial and yet difficult task. Cellular automata (CA) model is an attractive tool for understanding complex geographical phenomena. Although intercity urban flows, the key factors in metropolitan development, have already been taken into consideration in CA models, there is still room for improvement because the influences of urban flows may not necessarily follow the distance decay relationship and may change over time. A feasible solution is to define the weights of intercity urban flows. Therefore, this study presents a novel method based on weighted urban flows (CA_WeightedFlow) with the support of web search engine. The relatedness measured by the co-occurrences of the cities’ names (toponyms) on massive web pages can be deemed as the weights of intercity urban flows. After applying the weights, the gravitational field model is integrated with Logistic-CA to fulfill the modeling task. This method is employed to the urban growth simulation in the Pearl River Delta, one of the most urbanized metropolitan areas in China, from 2005 to 2008. The results indicate that our method outperforms traditional methods with respect to two measures of calibration goodness-of-fit. For example, CA_WeightedFlow can yield the best value of ‘figure of merit’. Moreover, the proposed method can be further used to explore various development possibilities by simply changing the weights.     

Forestry and agriculture: options for resource allocation in choosing lands for transmigration development

The Indonesian Transmigration program aims to resettle people from heavily populated areas of Java, Madura and Bali in the less developed Outer Islands. The development of a successful program poses problems for the resource planner in balancing three major variables: the economic activity which forms the basis of individual projects, the choice of sites to suit those economic activities, and the background and skills of the potential migrants. This paper concentrates on questions of resource allocation in choosing sites for transmigration development. It is based on the hypothesis that ample land resources are available and that of the three main ecosystems used—tidal swamp forests, mature upland forests, and alang-alang (Imperata cylindrica) grasslands—the economic opportunity costs of using forested lands can be considerable.The biophysical characteristics of the three resource systems are examined and the options for the development of new agricultural sites or sustained-yield forestry are explored through the use of a Net Present Value Analysis. The analysis suggests that the choice is not one of forestry versus agriculture but that, with proper consideration of site selection and use of inputs and cultural practices, both forestry and agriculture can be developed. The main conclusion is that alang-alang grasslands provide potential sites for sustained agricultural production which avoid the loss of long-term benefits that can be derived from well-managed forests.     

Cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos: Regionalization by Akha and Tai rubber farmers

This paper is a multi‐sited ethnography of cross‐border rubber cultivation between China and Laos. Smallholder minority rubber farmers from Xishuangbanna (China) have forged successful informal share‐cropping arrangements to grow rubber trees on the land of relatives and friends in neighbouring Laos. By becoming rich and entrepreneurial rural citizens, Akha and Tai farmers have also, in their own eyes, raised their own ‘quality’ (suzhi) and see themselves as ‘modern’. By examining various meanings of ‘modern’ in China, and contrasting the rubber farmers' experience with Jacob Eyferth's notion of rural ‘deskilling’, this paper shows how through learning to plant, cultivate and tap rubber, these farmers have taken on the discipline and technical knowledge of ‘modern’ workers and become ‘skilled’. By rising in ‘quality’, minority farmers on China's periphery challenge the entrenched binaries of urban/rural, modern/backward, prosperous/poor and Han/minority nationality. Xishuangbanna minority farmers acknowledge that they are also ‘backward’ in the Chinese social hierarchy, but their extension of rubber cultivation to kin and others in Laos has confirmed their modernity as dispensers of development, technical know‐how and ‘superior’ Chinese culture to Lao farmers who are ‘backward and poor’. In contrast to large state rubber farms that have failed to establish rubber plantations in northern Laos, minority farmers have created regionalization.     

Hydroelectric Infrastructure and Potential Groundwater Contamination in the Brazilian Amazon: Altamira and the Belo Monte Dam

Heavy investments in hydroelectric development are occurring throughout the Amazon Basin, which holds 42.2 percent of Brazil’s hydroelectric potential. The Belo Monte dam is the most recent and largest project in this region. The prevalence of septic systems in the Amazon, coupled with the widespread use of water wells and rising water table from filling the reservoir, create sanitation and health concerns for upstream communities. Using spatial analytical data and terrain analyses, we identify high-risk locations within the most densely populated neighborhoods in Altamira, Belo Monte’s host city. The purpose of this research is to develop a heuristic for identifying areas susceptible to groundwater and well contamination in relation to existing and proposed hydroelectric projects. Altamira’s city center persists as a high-risk location for contamination of wells because of its population density and relatively low elevation compared to other parts of the city. The methods, tools, and analyses presented in this article provide a framework that can be used to identify vulnerability to groundwater and drinking well contamination. The results presented here can guide implementation of public health and sanitation efforts in areas affected by large hydroelectric projects to avoid future water quality crises. Key Words: Belo Monte, groundwater contamination, hydroelectric infrastructure, risk assessment, spatial and terrain analyses.     

Māori women: Bodies, spaces, sacredness and mana

Abstract: This article examines Māori women and the ways in which their bodies are constituted within particular cultural spaces, namely at urupā and sites where food is gathered. Māori bodily rituals, and the impacts of colonization on these bodily rituals, are explored to reveal a ‘nonwestern’ perspective on exclusion. Kaupapa Māori research and postcolonial theory have been combined to produce research that respects and nurtures Māori practices. Colonial notions of blood and menstruation, which inscribe women as ‘dirty’ and ‘unclean’, are critiqued. What is advocated is a Māori perspective that constructs Māori women as connected to Atua, and as powerful, sacred and life‐giving.     

The Travels of Critiques of Neoliberalism: Urban Experiences from the “Borderlands”

This article contributes to the ongoing scrutiny of the travels of critiques of neoliberalism in urban studies. Using the case of a state-led urban regeneration program implemented in Portugal since 2000, the Polis Program, the article weighs in on meta-analytical discussions about the hegemonic status of neoliberalism as a theoretical concept and as an analytical framework and on discussions about the travels of dominant critiques of neoliberalism beyond the sites of epistemological production. The article argues that the current analytical overinvestment in neoliberalism may obscure important drivers of contemporary urbanization and that recourse to a diversity of concepts may be a more profitable line of inquiry. The article suggests that current efforts at epistemological renewal within urban studies benefit from taking up cities in the “borderlands” of urban theory as relevant cases in their own right. The article offers further considerations on the purchase of neoliberalism in contemporary urban literature.[Key words: neoliberalism, critiques, urban theory, urban planning and policy, Portugal, Polis Program]