Reconsidering neoliberal urban planning in times of crisis: urban regeneration policy in a “dense” space in Lisbon

In this article, I contribute to recent debates about the concept of neoliberalism and its use as an explanatory concept, through the analysis of urban planning and regeneration policy in Lisbon amidst crisis and austerity. Suggesting a look at neoliberalization from a threefold perspective—the project, governmentalities, and policymaking—I analyze how current austerity-policy responses to the European economic crisis can be understood as a renewed and coherent deployment of neoliberal stances. The article presents implications for urban planning in Lisbon and thus suggests an exploration of the negotiations and clashes of hegemonic neoliberal governmentalities and policies with the local social and spatial fabric. For this exploration, I select a “deviant” case—the Mouraria neighborhood, a “dense” space in which the consequences of policies diverge sharply from expectations. In conclusion, I suggest that neoliberalization (in times of crisis) should be understood as a coherent project compromised by a set of highly ambiguous governmentalities, which bring about contradictory policymaking at the local level.     

The whiteness of gay urban belonging: criminalizing LGBTQ youth of color in queer spaces of care

Chicago’s gay village of Boystown has long been linked with whiteness, and in the past decade, tensions have flared between neighborhood residents and queer and transgender (trans) youth of color, often homeless, who come to Boystown for the many services provided by its lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) nonprofit organizations, or queer spaces of care. While scholars have attended to community policing in Boystown through the Take Back Boystown movement, the role of LGBTQ nonprofits has yet to be examined in their role of criminalizing queer and trans youth of color in the neighborhood. Through an autoethnographic approach, this paper explores how several nonprofit organizations in Boystown have adopted policing strategies toward the queer and trans youth of color they serve. I argue that community policing has infiltrated these organizations to further defend and maintain an exclusive gay urban space informed by whiteness, which marks and regulates young, Black masculinities and trans femininities as deviant, untrustworthy, and criminal. Racism diminishes the ability for queer spaces of care to fulfill their mandates of supporting queer and trans youth of color, rendering the neighborhood a space of surveillance and furthering a White gay urban belonging that alienates and criminalizes these youth.     

The Permeable City: Toronto's Spatial Shift at the Turn of the Millennium

This article presents an analysis of the relationship between urban governance restructuring, and global, national, and local action through a case study of the Toronto city‐region. The Toronto city‐region recently underwent a massive reorganization of its governance structures, functions, and jurisdictional boundaries. This restructuring raises questions about why these changes occurred at this particular juncture in the region's history. Why did the city that had always been known in the academic and political discourse as the “city that works” stop “working”? What global and national forces might have accounted for such a radical restructuring? And what did local action contribute? These questions are explored in both historical and contemporary contexts by drawing on insights from regulation theory, urban regime theory, and an analysis of Canada's changing fiscal federalism. This approach informs the role that institutions — regardless of their origin or territorial scope — play in sustaining a local accumulation system, and how this “local” accumulation grounds a national regulatory mode and regime of accumulation. The approach also explores the relationship between regime and regulation theories in the context of policy formation and institution building. The study concludes that the current policy set is incapable of resolving the region's crisis tendencies. Notwithstanding external forces, the current policy set is not inevitable. Globalization does not predetermine all spatial‐economic outcomes.     

GEO/GRAPHIC DESIGN: THE LIMINAL SPACE OF THE PAGE

For many geographers, the printed page is no longer a productive tool to engage contemporary definitions of place or debates surrounding the nonrepresentational. There is a discernible shift within the discipline toward creative research methods, including using media such as film or sound, with a perception that they are less “fixed” in nature. In this article, however, I suggest that, by developing “geo/graphic” work that draws on theories and practices from both cultural geography and graphic design, the page can be recast as a liminal space, a threshold between readers and their understanding and imagination. I propose that a book has the potential to offer a multisensory, interactive space of exploration for readers and that the construction of such geo/graphic work also offers researchers an additional creative method with which to understand place.     

Place ontologies and a new mobilities paradigm for understanding awareness of vulnerability to terrorism in American cities

There is increasing evidence that people interpret their risk from environmental hazards through places—such as urban neighborhoods. At the same time, heightened levels of mobility are theorized to be leading to a so-called “placeless society” and possibly nullifying theories of locality-based risk perception. The purpose of this study is to combine environmental risk-hazards scholarship with work in urban geography to explore the following question: is perception of vulnerability to terrorism influenced by place and mobility, and if it is, what is the relationship? Drawing on interviews with 93 householders in Boston, Massachusetts, I demonstrate that people perceive vulnerability via understanding the transportation environment as a place—not simply a conduit—and that these perceptions reflect larger societal structures, such as wealth and gender disparities, that combine with (im)mobility and human subjectivity to amplify or attenuate a person’s sense of vulnerability. These findings bring an understanding of subjective experience to the geography of transportation systems, which has not yet been theorized within the urban disaster literature.     

Relational Agriculture: Gender,Sexuality, and Sustainability in U.S. Farming

Although 97% of U.S. farms are “family-owned,” little research examines how gender and sexual relationships – inherent in familial dynamics – influence farmers’ practices and livelihoods. Gender and sexual dynamics – shaped by race and class – affect who is considered a farmer, land management decisions, and access to resources like land, subsidies, and knowledge. We use feminist and queer lenses to illuminate how today’s agricultural gender and sexual relations are not “natural,” but when left uninterrogated are constructed in ways that harm women and queer farmers while limiting potential to develop sustainable practices. Women and queer farmers also resist, “re-orienting” gender and sexual relations in ways that expand possibilities for achieving food justice and ecological sustainability. We offer “relational agriculture” as a tool for making visible and re-orienting gender and sexual relations on farms. Relational agriculture brings sexuality into food justice and demonstrates the centrality of gender and sexuality to agricultural sustainability.     

The Matter of Matter: Making Property in the Holland Marsh

This paper explores how characteristics of biophysical nature—specifically the unique properties of the Organic Order of soil—have shaped the conditions of property in what is currently protected agricultural land, in the Holland Marsh, Ontario. Drawing on political ecology and critical property scholarship, I investigate how “nature” conjoins, complicates, and structures property in the Marsh. I start from the premise, as others have, that “things” matter to the dynamics of property, and add to this by demonstrating that matter matters as well. Property in the Holland Marsh—and elsewhere—is a socionatural arrangement. I develop this argument by highlighting three periods in the history of the Marsh; (1) the preagricultural period, (2) the agricultural intensification period, and (3) the conservationist period. I demonstrate how biophysical conditions codetermine parameters of property in the Marsh and show how the dynamics of property change along with the biophysical character of landscapes.     

CREATING NARRATIVES OF PLACE AND IDENTITY IN “LITTLE SWEDEN,U.S.A.”*

ABSTRACT. In Lindsborg, Kansas—“Little Sweden, U.S.A.”—the streets are lined with shops offering “An Adventure in Swedish Tradition,” and residents put on numerous festivals throughout the year highlighting Swedish folk customs. Such ethnic tourist towns have become increasingly widespread in the United States over the past thirty years. Tourists tend to perceive these places as towns where folk culture has been passed down unchanged for generations, while academics tend to dismiss residents' ethnicity as crass commercialism. Neither view is correct. Ethnicity and tradition are not static but constantly invented and reinvented. Modern folk ethnicity, among European Americans in particular, is simply the most recent incarnation of this process, one that attempts to recover ties to a specific, small‐scale landscape and history. This article explores the changing nature of the narratives of ethnicity and place‐based identity that the residents of Lindsborg have used to create a place for themselves in American society.     

新时代面向美好生活的日常生活地理与城乡休闲——“生活地理与城乡休闲”专栏解读

随着西方学界“日常生活”的兴起与转向,“回归生活世界”与生活本体论成为人文地理学研究的新视角。新时代背景下,中国社会主要矛盾的转化催生地理学人地关系的转变,由静止的、同质的人地关系转变为动态的、异质的人地互动关系,“人”与“地”被赋予日常生活的内涵与外延,“闲暇处才是生活”。在追求美好生活的新时代,地理学需要回答日常生活地理以及休闲具有哪些地理特征,不同主体如何通过日常生活及休闲展演人与地、人与人、人与自我的动态关系,从而建构不同空间尺度的生活实践与地方意义等问题。本专栏主要探讨日常生活及休闲中所展演的主体能动性、空间异质性以及人地互动的复杂性,涉及城市居民的生活休闲与主观幸福感、城市公共空间活力评价以及休闲方式、日常生活中的地方情感与定居意愿等内容,以期尝试用中国本土的实证来回应西方日常生活地理学的研究。期待未来的相关研究能够更加关注边缘群体的日常生活及其休闲,能够弥补城乡休闲中“乡”尺度的不足,能够全面系统地阐述日常生活与休闲在时间演变过程中的变化规律及其机制。专栏旨在推动中国情境的日常生活地理学的理论建构,在实践上以期为新时代美好生活的具体践行贡献地理智慧。     

Conceptualizing Sanctuary as a Process in the United States

While contentious national debates persist about the promise or peril of so‐called “sanctuary cities,” this article draws on an archive of U.S. subfederal policies that focused on local responses to immigration and enforcement from 2001–2014 to argue that sanctuary constitutes a process rather than a binary state of being. Such a conceptualization underscores the broad spectrum of policy endeavors that comprise sanctuary and shifts the focus away from a reductionist question of whether or not a place is a sanctuary to inquiries into how sanctuary functions as a process in both policy creation and application. I focus on sanctuary as a process to demonstrate its socio‐spatial heterogeneity and to highlight how the assertion of local values within sanctuary policies advances internal bordering. Textually analyzing sanctuary policies in this way illustrates how the process of sanctuary can simultaneously resist the bordering efforts of federal immigration enforcement and reborder local practices to cultivate belonging for citizens and noncitizens alike.     

未来城市研究范式探讨 ——数据驱动亦或人本驱动

回顾传统城市研究范式,指出其“重宏观社会经济发展研究、而轻微观居民个体需求分析”这一问题,在此基础上,综述了城市研究领域的大数据热潮,进而抛出“数据亦或人本驱动?”的争论;从大数据自身的缺陷、智慧社会的到来及未来城市发展维度3个方面分析未来城市研究数据和人本之间的关系,提出应遵循“人本驱动、数据支撑”的研究范式,扩展了“人本驱动”的内涵。最后,从城市居民生活（生活圈打造、社会网络构建、满足生命周期需求）、企业生产（人才流动网络构建、产业链打造、营销模式转变）、政府管治（数据共享与融合、社会服务供应、公众参与机制创新）3个方面提出了未来城市研究的新框架。     

SEA PEOPLE OF THE WEST*

ABSTRACT. Two thousand years ago, or thereabouts, a double canoe sailed on a northeast tack (or maybe a southeast tack) from a Homeland (Hawaiki) among the islands of Samoa, Tonga, and Fiji. After a voyage of 7,000 kilometers, which bypassed the many as yet uninhabited islands of the central Pacific (such as Tahiti) and the stretch of the seventy atolls of the Tuamotu that spread umbrellalike across the eastern entry of the Pacific, the canoe landed on islands that the Spaniards in 1595 were to call “the Marquesas.” The descendants of these first settlers call their islands “Fenua'enata” (Land of the People). Here I tell the story of this first beach crossing after what I consider to be the most remarkable voyage of discovery and settlement in all of human history. These first settlers (shall we say a dozen adults?) brought the animals and food plants that would make their island inhabitable. More mysteriously, these voyagers were—in body, mind, and spirit—all that we have come to call “Polynesian” in the great triangle of Hawai'i, Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Rapa Nui (Easter Island). “Sea of Islands” is the name the descendants of this first voyage prefer to call that great triangle. I here celebrate a Sea People's mastery of their Sea of Islands.     

Who Is “Forest‐Dependent”? Capturing Local Variation in Forest‐Product Sale,Eastern Honduras

How researchers describe groups living within or near the world's tropical rain forests has important implications for how and why these groups are targeted for assistance by conservation and development organizations. This article explores how data about market behavior can be used to assess one aspect of forest peoples’ livelihoods: their “dependence” on forest resources as a source of market income. With the intent of revealing the importance of methodology to how we describe forest peoples’ livelihoods, I draw from a multiyear survey of market activity among the Tawahka Sumu of Honduras and distinguish nested measures of the Tawahkas’ engagement in forest‐product sale. Results indicate that whether or not the Tawahka —or any forest group — can be considered financially “dependent” on forest resources depends on the spatial and temporal scales at which data are aggregated. As a group, the Tawahka earned 18 percent of total market income from forest‐product sale, but their group profile masked a high degree of heterogeneity at the village and household level. Similarly, multiyear data indicated that while group‐level generalizations adhere from year to year, they belie considerable change in households’ market behavior across years. I discuss three ways in which the findings are relevant to the theory and practice of conservation and development in the humid tropics. I emphasize the importance of spatial scale in interventions, how market‐oriented conservation schemes can benefit from a broader conceptualization of the economic context in which forest‐product sale occurs, and how longitudinal analysis can reveal the dynamism of forest peoples’ livelihoods.     

HYPHENATED GEOGRAPHIES: THE DEINDUSTRIALIZATION OF NATURE‐SOCIETY GEOGRAPHY*

As visions of ecological crisis mark the daily headlines, industrial spaces of intensive energy and material consumption become a more intense object of political and social concern. In this article, I attempt to situate geography's relative neglect of the ecological underpinnings of industrial capitalism within the context of the history of geographical thought. I argue that the ways in which geographers read the hyphen in the phrase “nature‐society” reveals epistemological limits to their object of study. I then offer three dramatically different readings of the hyphen and discuss how they have affected the lineages and trajectories of geographical research—Barrows's human ecology, Sauer's cultural landscape, and critical theories of social nature. I conclude by suggesting that geography needs to let go of its empirical and conceptual fixation on “nature”.     

“Clusters” or “communities”? Analysing the spatial agglomeration of video game companies in Australia

In this paper, I question whether agglomerations of video game companies in Australia function as clusters (spatially bound) or rather as communities (not spatially bound). The two case studies included in the analysis are the main agglomerations of video companies in Australia—Brisbane and Melbourne. The data have been collected through 21 semi-structured interviews performed between 2012 and 2014. The main findings are as follows: (1) the primary reason that video game companies come together is to share tacit knowledge and skilled labour; (2) these agglomerations do not have the attributes of “creative clusters”; and (3) new technologies enable experienced game developers to operate at the geographic periphery of the main agglomeration of developers. Therefore, to paint a more accurate picture of why some video game companies are successful—beyond simply positive externalities associated with co-localization—I propose the term “networked communities.” This recognizes that social networks at varying scales (local, national, international) are being developed by video game firms in order to thrive and reach a global audience.     

THE DATA,THE READER,AND THE INNOCENT BYSTANDER—A PARABLE FOR MAP USERS*

In 1977, I published a set of coarse-resolution dot maps that showed the general distributions of soil orders in the 48 states. Through a sequence of copies made by various people, one of those maps eventually appeared in a planning document as a shaded-area map with the title “Principal Peatlands of the United States.” Along the way a saline desert muck of conjectural extent and location was “transformed” into a documented energy resource for the nation. The history of this map offers a clear lesson for mapmakers: we have a three-fold duty, to the data, to the map reader, and to any third party who might be affected by a foreseeable misinterpretation of our maps.     

PRODUCTIVITY RATINGS BASED ON SOIL SERIES: A METHODOLOGICAL CRITIQUE

How researchers describe groups living within or near the world's tropical rain forests has important implications for how and why these groups are targeted for assistance by conservation and development organizations. This article explores how data about market behavior can be used to assess one aspect of forest peoples’ livelihoods: their “dependence” on forest resources as a source of market income. With the intent of revealing the importance of methodology to how we describe forest peoples’ livelihoods, I draw from a multiyear survey of market activity among the Tawahka Sumu of Honduras and distinguish nested measures of the Tawahkas’ engagement in forest-product sale. Results indicate that whether or not the Tawahka —or any forest group — can be considered financially “dependent” on forest resources depends on the spatial and temporal scales at which data are aggregated. As a group, the Tawahka earned 18 percent of total market income from forest-product sale, but their group profile masked a high degree of heterogeneity at the village and household level. Similarly, multiyear data indicated that while group-level generalizations adhere from year to year, they belie considerable change in households’ market behavior across years. I discuss three ways in which the findings are relevant to the theory and practice of conservation and development in the humid tropics. I emphasize the importance of spatial scale in interventions, how market-oriented conservation schemes can benefit from a broader conceptualization of the economic context in which forest-product sale occurs, and how longitudinal analysis can reveal the dynamism of forest peoples’ livelihoods.     

Bio-gentrification: vulnerability bio-value chains in gentrifying neighbourhoods†

In this paper, I develop the concept of “bio-gentrification” as a way to broaden critical theoretical debates on the relationship between gentrification and “social mixing” policies. Bio-gentrification weds urban Marxist political economic insights to the neo-Foucauldian notion of biopower. The former stresses spatial tactics of removal and displacement and value generated through land and property. The latter assesses a wider terrain of spatial tactics, their relationship to knowledge produced about humans as living beings, and their alignment with capitalist urbanization. The Vancouver example illuminates how social mixing “truths” and practices to which they are tied generate value by naturalizing human insecurity in situ and transforming the biological existence of disadvantaged peoples into raw material for profit through a process that can be conceptualized as a “vulnerability bio-value chain.” Bio-gentrification refers to the tension between removal and embedding of disadvantaged peoples and points to the need for a bio-gentrification politics to confront this dynamic.     

Pernicious assimilation: reframing the integration of the urban informal economy in Southern Africa

This paper argues that many of the official attempts to “integrate” the urban informal economy into the mainstream economy are fundamentally flawed. An unpacking of the “integrative” agenda as pursued by planning and other governmental practices reveals that “integration”, as currently practiced, does not herald the mainstreaming of the informal economy. Drawing on research in Zimbabwe and evidence from other countries in Southern Africa, I argue that what we witness is a sinister stripping away of the lifeblood of informality. This malicious form of integration entails crippling Faustian bargains. In the end, this pernicious assimilation insidiously does away with that which makes informality a livelihood haven for the majority of urbanites. I conclude that the duplicitous integration is unworkable and leaves the big questions of inclusion untouched, hence the persistence of the “problem” of informality.     

“The city is an apartment house”: property,improvement and dispossession in early twentieth-century Halifax,Nova Scotia

In early twentieth-century Halifax, municipal policies of property taxation and assessment became an important object of political discussion and contestation. Central to these political contests was a particular, theoretically informed distinction between “land” and “improvements.” This distinction would ultimately ground a set of changes in municipal taxation and assessment (introduced between 1914 and 1918) and would help to constitute a new and consequential logic of state action within property relations. Drawing on the literature on property “enactment,” this article examines how early twentieth-century struggles over municipal taxation and assessment reshaped the prevailing understanding of real property in the city of Halifax. Consistent with existing research, I demonstrate how a new perspective on property—including a new distinction between land and improvements—gradually came into being through a series of performances, practices and material devices. Embedded within this new perspective, crucially, was a specific logic of dispossession, a new and calculative rationale for the expropriation and redevelopment of the city’s “underimproved” land. While the literature on property enactment has quite often investigated practices of dispossession, I point out that its analysis of dispossession’s logic or rationale has tended to be confined to a single property theorist, John Locke, and his justifiably famous distinction between land and improvements. Emphasizing the rather different, post-Lockean conception of property that emerged in early twentieth-century Halifax, I suggest that more attention ought to be paid to the multiple and varying logics of dispossession that are liable to be contained within prevailing property enactments.