Making visible: Interrogating the performance of food sharing across 100 urban areas

Interpersonal sharing of food has been an omnipresent feature of human civilisation from hunter-gatherer societies to the present, both as a mechanism through which sustenance is secured and as a means to cement social relations. While the evolutionary dynamism of this food sharing is relatively well documented, critical scholarship has tended to examine contemporary food sharing practices beyond family and friends through case studies of individual initiatives. A broader view of food sharing practices is absent. In addition, there has been little examination of the role that emerging information and communication technologies (ICT) are having on food sharing, despite claims that such technologies offer transformative potential to achieve more secure, sustainable and just food systems. In response, this paper presents a novel landscape level analysis of more than 4000 ICT-mediated urban food sharing activities operating across 100 cities in six continents. Adopting conceptual insights from the intersection of social and economic practice-oriented approaches, the resulting foodsharing database progresses understanding of, and makes visible, the ways in which food (and food-related skills, stuff and spaces) is being shared across diverse urban settings. To conclude, it is argued that the database plays an important productive and performative role in mapping and comparing diverse food sharing economies. Importantly, it provides a springboard for further explanatory research to fine-tune our understanding of the evolution, governance and sustainability potential of urban food sharing.     

Internet spaces and the (re)making of democratic politics: the case of Singapore’s 2011 General Election

The 2011 Singapore General Election (GE2011) has often been hailed as an ‘Internet Election’, highlighting the role of networked technologies in enabling democratization practices/processes for the unprecedented consolidation of oppositional politics in the city-state. Building on theorizations that broach the interface between social media and digital democracy, this paper critically examines Singaporeans’ myriad engagements with the internet during GE2011 in order to tease out the constructions of social and political debates within these online communities and the extent to which they facilitate democratic discussions. These computer-mediated colliding and emerging of perspectives related to Singapore’s (electoral) politics can in turn set the scene for the (re)production and negotiations of the multifarious meanings of democracy in place. Hence, in addressing these research inquiries, this paper goes beyond GE2011 to reflect on the ways in which web technologies and social media can make a difference to political debates, deliberation and representation in societies where there are limited public avenues for citizenry to articulate their voices/concerns. It also enables documentation of ordinary people’s aspirations and hopes for political change and the sort of democracy they want to see progressively initiated in the Singaporean society.     

Domesticating neo-liberalism: Everyday lives and the geographies of post-socialist transformations

This paper examines the ways in which neo-liberalism is both constructed and made ‘more tolerable’ through everyday practices and livelihoods in post-socialist cities. It argues that existing conceptualisations of neo-liberalism centre too fully on the role of powerful global forces and institutions in constructing marketisation processes, and consequently neglect the ways in which everyday lives are embroiled in the formation of neo-liberal worlds. Through an exploration of the experience of neo-liberalism in the Slovak Republic and drawing upon research with households in one large housing estate in Bratislava, the paper examines the ways in which everyday lives construct neo-liberal possibilities in the attempt to make them ‘more tolerable’. In particular, the paper explores the postponement of the future by some members of the middle-aged generation failing to reap the benefits of economic reform, the role of economic practices ‘outside’ of market-based capitalist relations in constructing engagements with the formal market, and the role of domestic food production in sustaining household networks and social reproduction for some of the most marginal households in the context of low-wage employment and state benefit reductions.     

Mobilising generosity, framing geopolitics: Narrating crisis in the homeland through diasporic media

This paper provides an account of the humanitarian interventions enacted by the Croatian–American diaspora during the secessionist conflicts in Yugoslavia during the 1990s. Whilst undeniably an act of generosity towards ‘distant strangers’, actions such as these also represent a much more complex reality – they are an outcome of a complex set of relations and processes, in which the ethical choices of individuals become bound up with nationalist ideologies, geopolitical questions and, crucially, knowledge and understanding of distant events. In particular, this paper considers the ways in which generosity is mobilised through the framing of Balkan geopolitics through diasporic media. In so doing, it becomes possible to deepen the dialogue between work on geography and ethics on the one hand, and critical geopolitics on the other. In particular, the paper argues that due attention needs to be paid to the ways in which such ‘networks of concern’ are constructed in a variety of banal and mundane ways.     

The cultural politics of local economic development: meaning-making, place-making, and the urban policy process

A major concern of work in urban and political geography in recent decades has been to analyze how and in whose interests local space economies are produced and reproduced. A common focus is on the role local elites play in gathering support for their development agendas. Drawing from these literatures, this paper focuses on how various visions of the future of localities are contested in the local policy process. It argues that this struggle can be usefully understood as a cultural politics in which meanings are defined and struggled over, where social values are naturalized, and by which `common sense' is constructed and contested. The use of the term `cultural politics of local economic development' is, then, intended to indicate that meaning-making and place-making occur simultaneously in struggles over the future of space economies. It is also an attempt to overcome the problematic distinction between `culture' and `economy' that continues to haunt a great deal of work on urban politics. Through a case study of urban politics in Lexington, Kentucky in which discursive strategies are highlighted, it is argued that this approach is useful in that it provides insight into non-elite perspectives on local economic development and that it underscores the role played by everyday life in constituting political action. The paper concludes by suggesting that any problematization of the conceptual distinction between `culture' and `economy' must be carried out in and through detailed analyses of how groups involved in social struggle frequently construct rhetorical strategies in reference to it.     

Embedding the reforms in New Zealand schooling: After neo-liberalism?

Two decades of reforms to the state in New Zealand have altered policy, its making and the ways in which it is realised in micro settings. This paper uses the example of schooling to examine the rationality of these reforms, their spatial logic and what they mean for our understanding of the national state. It examines the development and practices of the Education Review Office (ERO), the body established under the reforms to evaluate and audit the performance of schools in the new national education `system'. The paper interprets neo-liberalism as a governmentality, and argues that the development of new managerial technologies of remote control such as contract and audit constitute a spatial model of control. The paper suggests that this model encourages, and relies for its efficacy upon, the cultivation of neo-liberal subjectivities. It argues that although the political projects working through the reforms have shifted, the altered rationality of the state and the models of control erected to secure it define an enduring and neo-liberalising social transformation. The shift to the `Third Way' in New Zealand's political and social economy is underpinned by neo-liberalising processes, which continue to reorganise social and economic spaces. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

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

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

At what price rice? Food security,livelihood vulnerability,and state interventions in upland northern Vietnam

In the northern uplands of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam the state is taking dramatic steps to (re)configure agricultural production through the introduction and subsidisation of hybrid rice and maize seeds. These require yearly cash investments and access to state supplied inputs, a far cry from earlier upland ethnic minority livelihood strategies. In this paper we develop a conceptual framework that brings together an actor-oriented livelihoods approach with concepts from everyday politics and resistance, to examine the relations now at play as ethnic minorities, namely Hmong and Yao households in Lào Cai province, react to the introduction of these hybrid seeds, negotiate with the state over their use, and contest and subtly resist the wholesale adoption of this programme. Our framework takes us beyond an investigation into financial benefits and yields, to focus upon the social, cultural and political aspects inherent in upland farmer decision-making regarding state interventions. Our findings reveal that such agricultural programmes have resulted in new food insecurities and vulnerabilities overlaying more established concerns. Yet in turn, ethnic minority households evaluate these innovations according to their own terms, and have responded by negotiating, accommodating, and also contesting the state’s initiatives using creative and innovative everyday politics and livelihood strategies. In so doing, they have worked to maintain autonomy over choices and decision-making vis-à-vis the economic, social and cultural reproduction of their household units; a delicate balancing act in a socialist state.     

“You kill the dam,you are killing a part of me”: Dam removal and the environmental politics of river restoration

River restoration through dam removal provides an opportunity to investigate the changing nature of environmental conflicts and politics in long-humanized landscapes. In New England, where over 14,000 dams fragment the region’s rivers, dam removals are often highly contested. This is due, in part, to how the intertwined roles of history, identity, and aesthetics coalesce to create attachment to place and inspire the defense of dammed landscapes. Dam removal provides a useful lens to consider the following: How do the historical and geographical contingencies of this region shape and alter conflicts over dam removal in specific ways? In instances where conflicts emerge, what do the conflicts reveal about the politics of ecological restoration in highly altered landscapes? We use a political ecology approach to reveal how complex cultural dynamics, competing interpretations of science and the environment, micropolitics, and the role of multiple actors generate and shape conflicts over dam removal. We show that the historical geography of New England influence conflicts over removal in important ways, particularly with regard to the roles of aesthetics and identity in landscapes that are characterized largely by consumptive as opposed to productive uses. Our findings also suggest that restoration in long-humanized landscapes will embroil new constellations of human and nonhuman actors, requiring attention to the political and cultural, as well as the ecological, dimensions of restoration. This paper contributes to research on the political and social dimensions of dam removal, as well as to research at the nexus of ecological restoration and environmental politics.     

Politics of technology in the informal governance of destructive fishing in Spermonde,Indonesia

Technology has politics and plays a role in societal governance. This article explores the fishing community of Karanrang island (Spermonde Archipelago, Indonesia) to consider how fishing technologies reinforce existing power structures in the local informal governance system. Informal governance actors deploy the politics of technology in order to manage a socially problematic and environmentally destructive fishing economy. In the punggawa-sawi system of patron-client relationships, fishers are economically dependent on patrons, who supply them with fishing technologies like boats, bombs, and cyanide. The patrons themselves are embedded in a complex governance network, encompassing corrupt police and officials, importers, and live food fish traders. The politics of technology contribute to maintaining the local informal governance system of patron-client relationships. This paper draws upon theories from science and technology studies and network governance to argue that although patron-client relationships are problematic in themselves, the politics of technology further maintain power imbalances.     

Fairtrade bananas in the Caribbean: Towards a moral economy of recognition

Working through a Caribbean case study, this paper examines the networks and associations of Fair Trade bananas as they move both materially and morally from farms in St Vincent and the Grenadines to supermarkets and households in the United Kingdom. In doing so, the paper provides grounded empirical evidence of Fair Trade’s moral economy as experienced by banana producers in the Caribbean. The paper follows Nancy Fraser’s distinction between ways of framing justice to argue that, in order to transcend its complex postcolonial positionalities, the Fair Trade Foundation needs to include recognition in its moral economy as well as representation and redistribution. The paper compares the moral framework of Fair Trade as an ideology and social movement with the lived experience of certified Fairtrade banana farmers in the Windward Islands who work mostly for, rather than within, an idealized moral economy. The paper also contributes to several recent debates in the agri-food literature exploring the interconnections between production and consumption, the role of materiality in contemporary food networks, the historical and (post)colonial nature of food moralities, and links between political and moral economies of food. Following an outline of recent debates about the moral economies of food and its relation to Fair Trade as a movement, the paper dissects the moral economy of the Fairtrade Foundation, highlighting the historical and geographical, material and symbolic, gendered and generational ways that food producers in the Global South (in this case, banana farmers in St Vincent and the Grenadines) may be counterposed to ‘responsible’ consumers in the Global North. Despite the good intentions of those who promote the Fair Trade movement through the Fairtrade Foundation and the Fairtrade Labelling Organisation (FLO), our case study reveals a moral economy of non- (or partial) recognition, which has a range of unintended consequences and paradoxical effects.     

Searching for (un)sustainabilty in pangasius aquaculture: A political economy of quality in European retail

Drawing on a political economy of food quality, this paper investigates the main sources of uncertainty over the environmental sustainability of Vietnamese pangasius catfish in European markets and how retailers subsequently respond to these uncertainties. Based on media survey and interviews with supermarket retailers across Europe between 2008 and 2010, the analysis focuses on the claims and counterclaims over the sustainability of pangasius aquaculture, how retailers have dealt with the uncertainty these claims have engendered about the fish, and what effect this uncertainty has had on the potential of marketing ‘sustainable pangasius’ in European supermarkets. The paper concludes that successful claims around new food qualities like sustainability by retailers are dependent on the ability of regulatory networks to overcome any perceived illegitimacy of imported products in the face of continuing uncertainty and the wider politics of market protectionism.     

Firm finances, weather derivatives and geography

This paper considers some intellectual, practical and political dimensions of collaboration between human and physical geographers exploring how firms are using relatively new financial products - weather derivatives - to displace any costs of weather-related uncertainty and risk. The paper defines weather derivatives and indicates how they differ from weather insurance products before considering the geo-political, cultural and economic context for their creation. The paper concludes by reflecting on the challenges of research collaboration across the human-physical geography divide and suggests that while such initiatives may be undermined by a range of institutional and intellectual factors, conversations between physical and human geographers remain and are likely to become increasingly pertinent. The creation of a market in weather derivatives raises a host of urgent political and regulatory questions and the confluence of natural and social knowledges, co-existing within and through the geography academy, provides a constructive and creative basis from which to engage with this new market and wider discourses of uneven economic development and climate change.     

Science and security expertise: Authority,knowledge, subjectivity

What role does science play in shaping the political? This themed issue brings together scholars from political science, human geography, natural science and related fields with the common aim of exploring links between science/expertise and politics with a specific focus on security implications. The increasing attention to threats and risks related to issues such as climate change, migration, energy security, or emerging technologies creates a demand for new types of experts and expertise relevant for security politics. By looking at the actors who operate at the boundary between science, bureaucracy and security politics, this themed issue seeks to destabilize the notion of an apolitical sphere of science and expertise, while at the same time demonstrating how the politics of expertise shapes the authority and subjectivity of scientists and reconfigures the meanings and roles of scientific knowledge. In this editorial, we connect relevant literatures and introduce the individual articles that compose the themed issue.     

Urban Planning in Hong Kong and Integration with the Pearl River Delta: A Historical Account of Local Development

This paper shows the importance that urban planning plays in the development of Hong Kong. This leads to a reassessment of the role of the government, which is the sole proprietor of the land, in the economy – while it acknowledges the importance of market forces. The first part shows how, since 1945, Hong Kong authorities have been obliged to intervene more in urban planning and local development, despite their liberal ideology. The second part focuses on the interaction between government action and market forces, and their influence in this development. The third part deals with the question of the economic integration between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) after China started its economics reforms in 1978. The deconcentration of Hong Kong industries to China was mainly due to market forces, but provided a new role for the government. This role is analyzed through its transportation policy – the domain with the most visible governmental intervention before and after 1997. It indicates the preference of the government to develop the territory rather than better integration with the PRD, because of the internal economic problems that may emerge from this integration. Nevertheless, for political and economic reasons, this integration is also seen as necessary. The future of Hong Kong’s economy lies in the answers the authorities will give to this dilemma.     

Contested carbon: Carbon forestry as a speculatively virtual,falteringly material and disputed territorial assemblage

Assemblage approaches are increasingly being used to understand new socio-natural formations arising in relation to the multiple crises of capitalism, climate change and environmental degradation. The valuation of nature is key to these new formations, which the creation of new ‘valued entities’, through calculative practices, that can be accounted for, costed and circulated in monetised and financialised forms in order to ostensibly ‘fix’ certain environmental outcomes in relation to contemporary global crisis. This paper uses an assemblage approach in relation to the global’ transnational project of carbon forestry offsetting and REDD+ in a particular place, Uganda, arguing that it has utility in this respect. While Uganda has been named by Lang and Byakola (2005) as a ‘funny place to store carbon’ due to its contested land politics and history of violence its weak governance context paradoxically re-enforces the imperative for intervention. The paper argues that carbon forestry assemblages are inherently ephemeral and fundamentally contested in three ways: exhibiting a speculative virtuality, faltering materiality and disputed territoriality. Such analysis has the ability to go beyond technical and managerial, or solely pollical economic critiques of carbon forestry, to point at openings for alternatives.     

Kill the lake? kill the proposal: accommodating First Nations’ environmental values as a first step on the road to wellness

In recent years, a buoyant global market for minerals has led to renewed interest in the mining sector as a means of generating economic growth in resource producing areas of developed nations. The development of new operations, however, raises concerns around the impacts of mining activities on the environment, health and traditional ways of life of Indigenous peoples. Using the proposed expansion of the Kemess mine in northern British Columbia as a case study, this paper examines two First Nations’ perspectives regarding the regulatory process through which environmental values may be validated and protected, and seeks to understand how these First Nations’ environmental values and perceptions of risk are connected to health and well-being. Sixteen key informant interviews were carried out and thematically analyzed through political ecology and environmental justice frameworks. The paper argues that accommodating First Nations’ environmental values and perceptions of risks is a necessary first step to reclaim health and well-being in politically marginalized settings.     

Urban Planning in Hong Kong and Integration with the Pearl River Delta: A Historical Account of Local Development

This paper shows the importance that urban planning plays in the development of Hong Kong. This leads to a reassessment of the role of the government, which is the sole proprietor of the land, in the economy – while it acknowledges the importance of market forces. The first part shows how, since 1945, Hong Kong authorities have been obliged to intervene more in urban planning and local development, despite their liberal ideology. The second part focuses on the interaction between government action and market forces, and their influence in this development. The third part deals with the question of the economic integration between Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) after China started its economics reforms in 1978. The deconcentration of Hong Kong industries to China was mainly due to market forces, but provided a new role for the government. This role is analyzed through its transportation policy – the domain with the most visible governmental intervention before and after 1997. It indicates the preference of the government to develop the territory rather than better integration with the PRD, because of the internal economic problems that may emerge from this integration. Nevertheless, for political and economic reasons, this integration is also seen as necessary. The future of Hong Kong’s economy lies in the answers the authorities will give to this dilemma.     

Gendered divisions in the new economy: Risks and opportunities

The concept 'new economy' is widely used to characterise the outcomes of contemporary restructuring processes – but in contrasting ways: by globalisation and the increasing use of communication and information technologies as well as by deregulation, polarisation, feminisation of employment and new, more flexible patterns and hours of work. These tendencies are interlinked and partly account for growing social and gender divisions. They pose problems for social sustainability but also develop differently in different economic and social formations. This paper develops a theoretical understanding of widening social divisions and their gendered form, indicates how these tendencies have developed to different degrees within the European Union and illustrates how the divisions are experienced by people in a local labour market in the neo liberal UK, where social and gender divisions are particularly wide. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Learning to think differently: Diversity training and the ‘good encounter’

At a time of ongoing economic and social insecurity the capacity to live with difference is under renewed strain. In this context, community outreach organisations and projects of intervention that deal with diversity-related tensions are essential. This paper provides an empirical account of a diversity workshop run by an international organisation that aims to cultivate more peaceful modes of coexistence through attention to the everyday formation of prejudice. The paper has two key concerns. The first is to attend to the techniques employed to facilitate encounters with difference and to unpack the constructions of prejudiced thought. In the context of growing debates around the possibilities and challenges of coordinated contact, the paper engages with work that has articulated alternative ways of responding to difference through an attention to practices of embodied thought. The second concern focuses upon the conditions that make new ways of thinking possible and argues that in order to understand how such organisations might affect positive change, it is vital to understand how such workshops take-place. The paper therefore attends to the role of memory, habit and the working of particular affects such as shame, to open up a discussion about the ways in which workshop exercises might resonate beyond training events. The paper concludes with some reflections upon the implications for policies concerned with behavioural change in the context of developing relations across difference.