Marginal land and the global land rush: A spatial exploration of contested lands and state-directed development in contemporary Ethiopia

The ‘global land rush’ or ‘global land grabbing’ phenomena has prompted concerns over the potential of large-scale land acquisitions to displace rural populations and impact food security in lesser-developed countries. State actors often assert that lands being leased to investors are ‘marginal’, ‘wasteland’, ‘barren’, or ‘unused’ without explicitly stating the criteria that are used to classify those spaces. Using Ethiopia as a case study, this paper synthesizes semi-structured interviews and geospatial land-use data to unpack the federal government’s notion of ‘marginal land’ to investigate how land qualifies for deposition into a federal land bank set aside for future investment and the agro-ecological characteristics and human-environment interactions endemic to these areas. We find that government officials conceive land bank areas to be generally fertile but currently ‘unused’. In reality, we find land bank areas: (1) are used by pastoralists or rural people practicing land extensive forms of cultivation that are only loosely integrated into the Ethiopian state, (2) overlap with protected areas such as National Parks, and (3) are located in places that have surface water resources the government intends to use for large-scale development such as irrigation or hydropower projects. We argue that the intended land uses of banked lands serve not only to fulfill larger development objectives but also increase state-accessible product produced in these areas strengthening the link between ‘othering’ labels, development, and state-making in the context of the global land rush.     

The evolution of the electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia): Strategic coupling,adaptiveness, adaptation,and the role of agency

Bringing together concepts from the global production networks and evolutionary economic geography literature, this article empirically examines the trajectory of the electrical and electronics industry in Johor (Malaysia). Based on trends in firm entries and exit as well as interviews with companies, we find limited robustness in the industry’s trajectory. While there is evidence of the role of ‘structure’ in this outcome, we argue that human agency – particularly the actions of subnational policy-makers – is key. This is manifest in a preference for fostering regional ‘adaptiveness’ through the often uncritical promotion of a diversity of economic sectors. This compromises the meaningful pursuit of regional ‘adaptation’ in the form of new and more complex branches emerging from existing industries. This arrested development, in turn, hinders an effective strategic coupling between the regional economy and multinational corporations, thus undermining regional resilience.     

Curbing the power of developers? Law and power in Chinese and English gated urban enclaves

This article contributes to the legal geography literature through exploration of the contested concepts of power and law and their interconnected processes. Research findings from studies of urban gated enclaves in China and in England are used as a starting point to analyse the spatialisation of power in the creation of gated urban enclaves, with a particular focus on the role of law. Four categories of law are identified. The article suggests an analytical framework for understanding how particular modalities of power intersect with these different types of law. This framework is then applied to temporal stages in the creation of gated enclaves, in the context of the different legal geographies of China and England. In the final analysis, the manipulative power of neoliberalism outweighs law’s authority, for example when developers form alliances with municipal government to circumvent ‘policy’ and ‘regulatory’ law. Property rights as conceptualised through ‘high’ law are shown to be ineffective in resolving problems experienced by residents of specific enclaves, particularly those relating to common property rights. Developers were found to use ‘facilitative’ law to gain control of the juridical field, materialised through property rights allocation and resolution of disputes within urban enclaves.     

The real-time city? Big data and smart urbanism

‘Smart cities’ is a term that has gained traction in academia, business and government to describe cities that, on the one hand, are increasingly composed of and monitored by pervasive and ubiquitous computing and, on the other, whose economy and governance is being driven by innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, enacted by smart people. This paper focuses on the former and, drawing on a number of examples, details how cities are being instrumented with digital devices and infrastructure that produce ‘big data’. Such data, smart city advocates argue enables real-time analysis of city life, new modes of urban governance, and provides the raw material for envisioning and enacting more efficient, sustainable, competitive, productive, open and transparent cities. The final section of the paper provides a critical reflection on the implications of big data and smart urbanism, examining five emerging concerns: the politics of big urban data, technocratic governance and city development, corporatisation of city governance and technological lock-ins, buggy, brittle and hackable cities, and the panoptic city.     

What local people? Examining the Gállok mining conflict and the rights of the Sámi population in terms of justice and power

The global extraction of minerals is commonly located in areas populated by indigenous people; and while conflicts between multinational corporations and local activists and indigenous people are widespread today, the understanding of their dynamics are lacking. The Swedish government’s encouragement to an expanding mining industry has caused resistance due to environmental and social implications, particularly its effect on Sámi reindeer husbandry. The resistance to a mine in Gállok is based on the belief that the right to decide about land use historically falls on the Sámi people, and the right to affect land use is detrimental for the survival of Sámi culture and reindeer husbandry. Although the conflict may be perceived as concerning access to natural resources, we argue that the perceived environmental conflict can be viewed as part of a larger struggle over social status and recognition. Data have been collected using qualitative methods such as observations, interviews and documents. The subsequent analysis relies on a meta-theoretical framework of justice as recognition using a typology of relations of power. Our findings suggest that relations of power constitute different categories of social actors. Stakeholders like the Sámi population are subordinated to more dominant stakeholders such as the government, the company and media, who have ‘more’ power or ‘different’ kinds of power ‘over’ others. Through these asymmetric power relations, historical state-Sámi relations are continuously reproduced within prevailing institutions, and also in this mining conflict. Interviewees from business and the municipality testified to the discourses driven by a neoliberal and profit-focused worldview. Challenging the neoliberal discourse, other stakeholders, namely civil society and Sámi, expressed an alternative discourse based on a local, traditional, cultural, environmental and anti-neoliberal worldview.     

Redacted in Nebraska: the noises of conspiracy around nuclear power problems

This paper investigates a ‘small story’, the problems around the Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant (Nebraska) in the wet summer of 2011. Relying on materials from digital media, it presents the official and an alternative version of events. Utilizing a constructionist approach, it identifies the search for moral certainty, as well as the importance of blame and conspiracy theories, from which emerges the ‘big story’. Highlighting the important role of on-line media and digital communication, we document not only the official story but also an opposing version based on a coherent worldview emphasising the problems of big government, liberal views and denial of American individual rights—all framed as a conspiracy covering-up a threatening, human-made technology failure. We suggest why this worldview occurs, stressing a widespread emphasis on American values and history, ‘failed journalism’, public uncertainty, the complexity of nuclear technology, and the specific uses of digital communication.     

Location-based services,conspicuous mobility,and the location-aware future

The production and consumption of geographic information is becoming a more mobile practice, with more corporate actors challenging the traditional stronghold of Esri- and government-based geospatial developments. What can be considered a geographic information system has expanded to include web-based technologies like Google Earth/Maps, as well as more recent developments of Microsoft’s Bing Maps and the mobile version of ArcGIS available for the iPhone. In addition to these developments, a discursive shift toward ‘location’ is occurring across the Internet industry. Location has become the new buzzword for social-spatial strategies to target consumers. As reported in 2010, venture capitalists have, since 2009, invested $115 million into ‘location start-ups’ – software companies that provide location-based services to mobile computing consumers (Miller and Wortham, 2010). Applications like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, and most recently, Facebook Places allow users to ‘check-in’ at restaurants, bars, gyms, retail outlets, and offices, thereby sharing their location within their social network. These developments enable consumers to (re)discover their proximities to products, while feeding a desire for making known one’s everyday movements. Here, I discuss the development of location-based services as the proliferation of a peculiar form of geographic information: conspicuous mobility. Through discussion of a recent gathering of location-aware software professionals and through analysis of discourses that emerge over a battle between ‘check in’ companies, I sketch an area of study that explores the implications of these emerging geographic information ‘systems’, and new everyday cartographers.     

New local state power through administrative restructuring – A case study of post-Mao China county-level urban entrepreneurialism in Kunshan

By focusing on Kunshan, an economically advanced county-level city in the Yangtze River Delta, this paper aims to answer how, why, and under what circumstances the territorial power of Chinese urban entrepreneurial states is created in response to the dynamics of spatial economic development in the context of market transition and globalization. Although Kunshan is merely a county-level authority administratively, its economic performance in 2011 was better than that of several poor provinces, such as Hainan, Tibet, Qinghai, and Ningxia. Kunshan’s successful urban entrepreneurialism presents a unique ‘mismatch’ between ‘low’ administrative rank and ‘great’ economic performance (a big foot in a small shoe, dajiao chuan xiaoxie). I argue that Kunshan has developed several new local state powers through flexible administrative restructuring that explains the ‘mismatch’ puzzle and includes the following characteristics: (1) reclassification of Kunshan from county to county-level city, (2) relational adjustment by officially or informally raising Kunshan’s place rank and the cadre rank, and (3) boundary revision by virtual enclave enlargement. I conclude that the Chinese party-state system plays a role in Chinese county-level urban entrepreneurialism.     

Becoming a young migrant or stayer seen through the lens of ‘householding’: Households ‘in flux’ and the intersection of relations of gender and seniority

This paper conceptualises migration and staying by young rural Lao in the empirical context of above replacement level fertility as manifestations of ‘householding’ that interacts with other dimensions of householding. Drawing on the framework of the inter-generational contract and by juxtaposing qualitative and quantitative data I show that becoming a young migrant and becoming or remaining a young stayer is shaped by young migrants’ situated agency.The second part of the paper departs from conventional household-based analyses and introduces the notion of ‘households in flux’. This highlights the dynamic interaction between changing external dynamics affecting rural households, and internal dynamics that constantly reconfigure the field of the household. These conceptual readjustments require going beyond inflexible notions of the household, the analytical disconnection between a focus on migrants and stayers in migration research, and static readings of relations of gender and generation. Furthermore, the paper argues that intra-household relations need to be appreciated as gendered relations of relative seniority which are in the process of householding constantly made and remade, among other things, by young dependents through ‘staying’ and ‘leaving’. These conceptual moves help explain the empirical puzzle of why in rural Lao households young women are both the ones most inclined to become a young migrant as well as most inclined to become or remain a young stayer.     

Regional growth nuclei

This article analyses, both theoretically and empirically, the process of agglomeration associated with the most basic components of regional development. The growth of these basic components, denoted as ‘condensation nuclei’ and ‘growth nuclei’, are evidence of the power of forces of ‘planning from below’, working for development through local initiative or by attracting private investors and public institutions to a previously undeveloped region. The formation of the growth nuclei is likened to the formation of crystals in a saturated solution. Opportunities for growth of any new activity in a virgin region is tied to the accumulation of entrepreneurial and financial resources. Only when these reach the point of saturation will the developmental effort be crowned with success, and will new institutions and factories be established in the region. Resources then must be earmarked to ensure that the new initiatives are firmly established, and thus their presence lowers the ‘concentration’ of the solution. Therefore, the creation of additional initiatives slows down, or is halted altogether. According to this model, the growth rate will increase only after developmental pressures have accumulated sufficiently to push the region once again to the point of saturation. In contrast, however, to the chemical mechanism which usually operates in a closed system, the mechanism of growth nuclei formation operates in an open system, thus permitting leakages of human and financial resources. The development of growth nuclei were studied in four locations in the Israeli Negev region. In each of these locations, an incubation period for the idea, a certain resource which had reached the point of saturation and varying rates in the establishment of additional enterprises were found to exist.     

大数据开创地学研究新途径:查明相关关系,增强研究可行性

人类已经进入大数据时代,大数据研究的思想、方法在地学领域也备受关注。笔者认为,大数据研究的对象是数据,研究的工具是计算机,研究的方法、手段是查明数据间相关关系,研究的特点是取向高概率做出决策。大数据是通过对大量数据的挖掘,查明数据间的相关关系,研究问题并做出正确决策的思想、方法。本文提出大数据是应用“归纳法”开展科学研究的思想、方法,以及高性能计算机和大数据计算技术使“归纳法”得以升华的观点。文章通过对统计学、机器学习算法的深入探讨,得出大数据将改变人们对自然的理解和认知方式,改变科学研究的思想和方法,改变长期以来人们通过查找因果关系开展科学研究的习惯。大数据必将开创一条跨越复杂的因果关系、直接获得研究结果的全新的科学研究途径。随着数据爆发式增长,随着高性能计算机的普及和计算技术的迅猛发展,统计分析方法将很大程度地突破数据体量的限制,统计分析预测模型以其真实可靠的处理结果、对条件和结果良好的解释能力、结合机器学习算法对半结构化与非结构化数据的处理优势,将推动地质科学进入定量化研究的新高度。     

大数据科学从信息化、模式化到智能化:现代地球化学应用研究的新范式

地球科学领域处在信息科学与信息化社会时代,基于大数据战略驱动的现代地球科学正在蓬勃兴起.诞生于近代的地球化学具有天然的结构化信息科学属性.提出建立从信息化、模式化到智能化的地球化学大数据信息科学应用研究总体思路,即基于地球化学大数据首先建立信息化系统,运用地球系统科学方法理论建立成矿地球化学分带富集模式与生态地球化学累...     

Evidence against the core/cover interpretation of the southern sector of the Menderes Massif,west Turkey

The Menderes Massif, in western Anatolia, has been described as a lithological succession comprising a basal ‘Precambrian gneissic core of sedimentary origin’ overlain in sequence by ‘Palaeozoic schist’ and ‘Mesozoic-Cenozoic marble’ forming the envelope. The boundary between core and schist envelope was interpreted as a major unconformity, the ‘Supra-Pan-African unconformity’. By contrast, our field observations and geochemical data show that around the southern side of Besparmak Mountain, north of Selimiye (Milas), the protoliths of highly deformed, mylonitized augen gneisses are granitoid rocks intrusive into the adjacent Palaeozoic metasedimentary schists. The field relationships indicate the age of intrusion to be younger than late Permian and there is no evidence for the existence of either an exposed Precambrian basement or the ‘Supra-Pan-African unconformity’ in this sector of the Menderes Massif.     

Rethinking rewilding: A response to Jørgensen

In this article we respond to and challenge Jørgensen’s criticisms of the concept of rewilding in her paper ‘Rethinking rewilding’, published this year in Geoforum. Jørgensen argues that ‘rewilding’ has become a ‘plastic word’, one that has been stretched to the point where it lacks definitional precision, at risk of becoming ‘the go-to blanket solution to environmental problems’. She also argues that the practice of rewilding is premised upon the dissociation of humans from the rest of nature and reproduces anti-human Nature–Culture binaries, rightly lambasted by critics of wilderness narratives in conservation practice. In response to these criticisms we challenge Jørgensen on two points. Firstly we argue that the problems of ‘plasticity’ and definitional imprecision can be rectified by highlighting and foregrounding the quality that we believe is at the core of all rewilding definitions and efforts: non-human autonomy. Secondly, we challenge Jørgensen’s broad claim that sees the collapse of ‘rewilding’ into anti-human wilderness management. We do so by reflecting on two points; the dynamic human–non-human entanglements embedded within rewilding practice(s) and by arguing for rewilding as a ‘wild experiment’. We make these points through the examination of two actually existing examples of rewilding.     

Nonhumans in the practice of development: Material agency and friction in a small-scale energy program in Indonesia

We develop the outlines of a new approach to study the role of nonhumans in constituting ‘implementation’ and calculative–discursive practices in development projects and programs. Developing a framework around the concept of friction (material resistance or recalcitrance encountered in processes of transformation), we analyze an Energy Self-sufficient Village program in Indonesia. Focusing on specific projects and episodes within this program, we identify multiple distinctive instances of friction. These were driven by nonhumans’ (and humans’) resistance, as remolding of development beneficiaries’ practices was attempted by project administrators, government officials, entrepreneurs and by the (scientific) calculations embedded in their policies, strategies and models. In concluding, we distill four ways in which nonhumans relationally shape development practices: (a) by resisting representations and calculations produced by human actors, (b) by re-directing planned/expected courses of action, (c) through biophysical change to their weight or textures as they move in space and time, and (d) by mediating competition for resources. Overall, nonhumans play a central role in making and unmaking asymmetric relations of power in practice and by constituting practices that diverge from prior expectations, problematize linear understandings of ‘policy implementation’. Their material and discursive agency is multiple, manifesting differently in different relational settings, which highlights the importance of broadening the range of spokespersons who speak on behalf of nonhumans and whose voices can be considered reliable and true. Our study thus provides support to calls for pluralizing and democratizing development ‘expertise’ beyond the usual suspects in science, government and civil society.     

Seeing the Copperbelt: Science,mining and colonial power in Northern Rhodesia

This article explores the relationship between science and the extension of colonial power through an examination of the rise of the Northern Rhodesian (later, Zambian) Copperbelt in the 1930s. The rise of the Copperbelt rested in part on scientific prospecting operations perhaps unparalleled in size and scope in the world at the time. These operations brought new ‘scientific’ prospecting techniques to the area which enabled the Northern Rhodesian subsurface to be ‘seen’ in new ways. The seemingly universal and fixed knowledge scientists produced served both political and commercial aims, animating the ‘civilising’ project of imperial power and transforming a newly acquired territory into a profitable annex to empire. Two prospecting operations are explored in detail: (1) the first large concession floated as the Rhodesian Congo Border Concession and (2) the first attempt to use geological science to generate a complete geological map of mineral resources on the Copperbelt in the Nkana Concession. Examining the efforts of these two prospecting operations reveals the methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges of producing a viable mineral investment and practicing science in the periphery. Finally, the disconnects between the logics and goals of science and those of colonial extraction in Africa are explored. Here it is argued that it was the very malleability of the knowledge produced by European scientists, rather than its abstract fixity or placeless universality, that enabled it to become part of wider political and economic flows.     

Conservation and development 2.0: Intensifications and disjunctures in the politics of online ‘do-good’ platforms

An increasing amount of interactive ‘2.0’ crowdsourcing platforms raise awareness and funds for conservation and development projects worldwide. By enabling two-way online collaboration and communication, these ‘conservation and development 2.0’ platforms hoped to provide new impetus and popular legitimacy for conservation and development initiatives in the face of budget cuts and general criticism of the ‘formal’ aid sector after the financial crisis. This paper presents the case of the flagship ‘elephant corridor’ project on the Dutch pifworld.com platform to investigate whether and how the ‘2.0’ element has changed conservation and development in line with these expectations. The paper describes and analyses online and offline dynamics of the project and shows that while online excitement about the project remained high, the concomitant conservation and development promises and imaginations ill related to offline local realities. This rather ‘traditional’ conservation and development disjuncture, however, needs to be understood against the system peculiarities of the politics of online ‘do-good’ 2.0 platforms. The paper concludes that as these peculiarities are significantly intensifying and changing conservation and development dynamics, they do not elude familiar (1.0) disjunctures and might even obscure these further from sight.     

大数据正在引发地球科学领域一场深刻的革命——《地质科学》2017年大数据专题代序

本文针对目前国内大数据研究的现状,着重分析了在地球科学领域大数据研究落后的原因,指出大数据正在引发地球科学领域一场深刻的革命,大数据的关键不在于数据的大,而且在于思维的新;从数据出发,让数据说话,依靠人工智能方法,让机器学习、深度学习、可视分析等大数据技术逐步成为必需。利用大数据方法研究玄武岩构造环境判别图以及中新世岩浆事件的意义所取得的成果即是极佳的研究范例。文中指出,面向未来,大数据对于地球科学界来说,决不是可有可无的,它将创造奇迹。大数据作为第四科学范式的研究领域十分宽广,它将改变地球科学家的思维方式,从逻辑思维方式转变为由数据驱动的关联思维方式,文中呼吁科学界对大数据给予更多的关注和支持。     

Lithofacies and stratigraphy of the Ordovician Guniutan Formation in its type area,China

The Lower to Middle Ordovician Guniutan (Kuniutan) Formation in the eastern Yangtze Gorges, China has been demonstrated to be similar to the ‘Orthoceratite Limestone’ in Baltoscandia with respect to facies, stratigraphic development and conodont biostratigraphy. Thus the ‘Orthoceratite Limestone’ appears to be a much more widely distributed and characteristically Ordovician facies than has hitherto been assumed. Five lithostratigraphic subdivisions of the Guniutan Formation are here defined in ascending order as the Nanya, Puxi, Wuguixi, Daping and Niangjiafang members. It is shown that these members, which represent considerable spans of time as indicated by their conodont stratigraphy, may be fairly thin but nevertheless regionally extensive. A new conodont zone, with Eoplacognathus crassus as the zonal fossil, is established to accommodate the precise dating of the Wuguixi and Puxi members. Microfacies data from the Guniutan Formation, available for the first time, show that its dominant component particles are sand-sized echinoderm and arthropod debris, as in the Baltoscandian ‘Orthoceratite Limestone’.     

The realm of freedom in new rural governance: Micro-politics of democracy in Sweden

Voluntary associations are at the heart of Swedish rural policy and strategies for governance as partners in bringing about ‘development from below.’ Examining the implications of this new responsibility being placed on the civil society in new modes of multilevel governance, I ask: do these changes presage greater political space for individuals vis à vis the state or is Swedish rural policy premised on ideas about an institutional context that might be disappearing? In comparative research in rural Sweden, I discuss state and civil-society relations at the macro level in light of the gendered micro-politics of associational life on the ground. Through ethnographic research with people involved in development work of different kinds, I examine how ideas about community associations are used to mobilize rural policy. I analyze its’ political implications and argue for the importance of analyzing macro in relation to the micropolitics on the ground for a better theoretical understanding of democracy and power in rural governance, in particular its gendered implications. I argue that past collaborative relations between the civil society and the state’s administrative apparatuses as well as the current focus of rural policy have enabled the state to hand over service functions to the civil society and diluted their ‘voice,’ incongrously endangering the institutional basis of rural policy itself. Further, attention to the gendered micropolitics of associational life makes apparent cleavages within civil society and its underlying relations of gender and power that challenge current conceptualizations on the neoliberalization of rural policy.