New spaces,ordinary practices: Circulating and sharing within diverse economies of provisioning

This article draws upon two distinct UK case studies to explore how alternative modes of provisioning employ ordinary practices of sharing and circularity. Speaking to debates about alterity, diverse economies (Gibson-Graham, 2008) and emerging literature on the circular and shared economy, these two small and informal based models, one food based, the other clothing, are put forward as examples of the vast array of contemporary ‘alternative’ forms of consumption and provisioning taking place across the UK. The article illuminates how diverse economies are ‘made material’ through their materials and practices. In doing so I make three key arguments: firstly, and overall, that studying materiality is one way to illuminate these new and emerging spaces of provisioning, highlighting their practices, intimacies and ambiguities. Secondly, this material focus illustrates how the practices of provisioning – in particular, sharing and circulating - are not new, but are instead organised in original and novel ways; and this has wider implications for contemporary debates on circular and shared economy. Thirdly, that the materials of provisioning can be both beneficial and troublesome to provisioning organisations’ practices of circulating and sharing and the extent to which they tackle issues of social exclusion, financial hardship and sustainable resource use.     

Religion and governmentality: Understanding governance in urban Brazil

In this paper I argue that geographies of religion are fundamental to understanding governance and social order in contemporary urban space. More specifically, I show how Foucault’s notion of governmentality characterizes regimes of power beyond the state apparatus, positing that religion and churches also produce and maintain the knowledges, truths, and social order associated with governmentality and self-regulated governance. By considering the geography of religion literature within the context of Foucualt’s work, I illustrate the importance of religious and spiritual practices to contemporary urban space, and the roles they play in producing and maintaining governance and socio-political order. My purpose is not to suggest that governmentality has been misapplied as a theoretical tool for understanding the state and political power, but to show how the term actually describes power more generally, including spiritual moments in addition to political ones. Drawing from my case study in Fortaleza, Brazil, I substantiate my theoretical argument using empirical examples, showing how governmentality is produced through religion and churches and the relationship between spiritual practices and governance in everyday space.     

“You have to engage with life,or life will go away”: An intersectional life course analysis of older women’s social participation in a disadvantaged urban area

Social participation in later life has been studied as part of discourses around ‘active ageing’ but the promotion of participation in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods meets with particular challenges. In this paper I argue that in order to effectively promote social participation in later life researchers and practitioners require an understanding of life-long relational practices which are embedded in social norms and places as they intersect with identities such as gender, class and age.The intersectional life course analysis traces complex relationalities between people and place across the life course of two women living in disadvantaged urban areas. It shows the effects of societal and structural changes on individuals’ opportunities for social participation as well as demonstrating how age-related relational practices may lead to spatial segregation of older people in society.     

Sharing and neoliberal discourse: The economic function of sharing in the digital on-demand economy

In this paper I offer a critical analysis of ‘sharing’ as a discursive formation in the emerging on-demand economy or, as its more commonly known, ‘sharing’ economy. The set of firms and digital platforms that constitute the on-demand economy evade precise definition, though in popular commentary include Uber, Lyft, Airbnb, Taskrabbit, Couchsurfing, and Yelp, among others. I argue that sharing is a discursive formation that is produced through neoliberal economic practices and contributes to their constitution and performance, connoting the embeddedness and inter-determination of the economic with the social. I analyze interview material with software developers and others working for on-demand economy firms in San Francisco to underscore how the sharing discourse is produced, and to examine the possible relationship between the sharing discourse and working practices in the on-demand economy. I explore how sharing, though a fragile and contested discourse, has been used by some proponents of the on-demand economy in an attempt to justify and normalize flexible and precarious work through an ambiguous association between capitalist exchange and altruistic social values. This ambiguity is productive insofar as sharing has become associated variously with transactional platforms, digital peer review via surveillant and punitive ratings systems, and algorithmically mediated, precarious, and ‘entrepreneurial’ contract work, while retaining affective associations with community, inclusion, and participation.     

Urban groundwater quality in sub-Saharan Africa: current status and implications for water security and public health

Groundwater resources are important sources of drinking water in Africa, and they are hugely important in sustaining urban livelihoods and supporting a diverse range of commercial and agricultural activities. Groundwater has an important role in improving health in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). An estimated 250 million people (40% of the total) live in urban centres across SSA. SSA has experienced a rapid expansion in urban populations since the 1950s, with increased population densities as well as expanding geographical coverage. Estimates suggest that the urban population in SSA will double between 2000 and 2030. The quality status of shallow urban groundwater resources is often very poor due to inadequate waste management and source protection, and poses a significant health risk to users, while deeper borehole sources often provide an important source of good quality drinking water. Given the growth in future demand from this finite resource, as well as potential changes in future climate in this region, a detailed understanding of both water quantity and quality is required to use this resource sustainably. This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the water quality status, both microbial and chemical, of urban groundwater in SSA across a range of hydrogeological terrains and different groundwater point types. Lower storage basement terrains, which underlie a significant proportion of urban centres in SSA, are particularly vulnerable to contamination. The relationship between mean nitrate concentration and intrinsic aquifer pollution risk is assessed for urban centres across SSA. Current knowledge gaps are identified and future research needs highlighted.     

Water and the entrepreneurial city: The territorial expansion of public utility companies from Colombia and the Netherlands

Since the mid-1980s, liberalization has motivated numerous water supply reforms. Among these, privatization has received the most attention. Yet, its actual scope has been limited. Beyond privatization, the territorial expansion of municipally owned water corporations into new service areas can be witnessed in countries as diverse as Italy, South Africa, Canada, Colombia and the Netherlands. Generally, the activities of public water corporations are analyzed through the lens of commercialization. This framework is central to understanding recent shifts in water supply. Yet, while it addresses the effects of commercialization on service quality and access, it rarely integrates the influence of shifts in social reproduction and collective consumption in structuring reform. Drawing on theories of urban entrepreneurialism, I attempt to advance a broader analytical framework that is more amenable to integrating the diversity of processes involved, including but not limited to commercialization. At the same time, the territorial expansion of municipally owned water corporations suggests ways to rethink urban entrepreneurialism: it is not only commercial, it is also social, and it is Schumpeterian. To make these points, this article examines the efforts of two public water corporations to go international: EPM of Medellín, Colombia and WMD of Drenthe, the Netherlands.     

‘Pour votre tranquillité’: Ambiance,atmosphere, and surveillance

This is a paper concerned with security, surveillance and notions of atmosphere and ambience. Whilst surveillance and security research has been excellent at examining socio-spatial relations drawn into the production and consumption of surveillance technologies, systems and practices, it has been far less well attuned to the material–affective relations, presences and absences it comes to constitute as the fabric of public space. Research within human geography and a broader ‘new materialism’ within the humanities and social sciences has become increasingly interested in exploring affective atmospheres, yet largely ignorant of a well established school of thought within French urban and social theory of ‘ambiance’. This paper explores the providence of considering atmospheres and ambiances for the examination of surveillance through the case study of two major railway stations in Britain and France. The paper proffers some methods and techniques for the further exploration of atmospheres/ambiances of security.     

Better than text? Critical reflections on the practices of visceral methodologies in human geography

This co-authored intervention discusses themes on the thinking and doing of visceral research. 'Visceral' is taken here as that relating to, and emerging from, bodily, emotional and affective interactions with the material and discursive environment. There has recently been a distinct and necessary turn within the social sciences, particularly in human geography, towards the need for more viscerally-aware research practices. Building on such work, this collective intervention by leading visceral scholars offers two key contributions: first, it critically examines visceral geography approaches by considering their methodological contributions, and suggests improvements and future research pathways; and second, the authors extend recent visceral geography debates by examining how to conduct this type of research, providing reflections from their own experiences on the practicalities and challenges of implementing visceral methods. These observations are taken from a diverse range of research contexts - for example, from gender violence and community spaces, to the politics of 'good eating' in schools and social movements (e.g. Slow Food) - and involve a similarly diverse set of methods, including body-map storytelling, cooking and sharing meals, and using music to 'attune' researchers' bodies to nonhuman objects. In short, this collective intervention makes important and original contributions to the recent visceral turn in human geography, and offers critical insights for researchers across disciplines who are interested in conceptually and/or practically engaging with visceral methods.     

网络信息空间的城市地理学研究：综述与展望

20世纪90年代,互联网飞速发展,不仅深刻地影响了我们的社会系统和经济结构,同时也重构了全球城市的物理和虚拟空间结构形式。近几年,在西方发达国家,网络信息空间的相关研究已经成为多学科研究的热点,有关城市网络信息空间的地理学研究也不断涌现。从技术与经济的角度入手,在已有文献资料基础上,对西方地理学界关于网络信息空间与城市发展的研究进展进行了评述。首先界定网络信息空间的概念及其相对于物理空间的各种特征,然后总结城市学者研究网络信息空间的几种理论方法,并从三个空间层次分别评述现有的实证研究成果。在此基础上,对网络信息空间的测量方法和关于城市地理学的研究内容进行了进一步展望。     

An unsustainable state: Contrasting food practices and state policies in the Czech Republic

This paper brings together consideration of food policies and practices and of post-socialist transition to raise neglected questions about means of nurturing more sustainable food systems in the developed world. The last three decades have been marked by the growing salience of food as a political and scholarly concern. While market-based alternative food systems have been heralded for their potential to promote environmental sustainability, the benefits of non-market practices such as household food self-provisioning and barter have been assumed rather than being the focus of research. In the western context, both types of food consumption have positive connotations. Although food self-provisioning in European post-socialist societies is a more wide-spread practice than in western societies, it has been on the periphery of research. The existing literature has conceptualised them as ‘coping strategies’ or as a legacy of irregular supply of goods in the state socialist era. Drawing on empirical research in the Czech Republic, we are proposing a novel approach to the phenomenon of household food production in post-socialist societies as a practice compliant with principles of sustainability. First, we highlight the large extent and social inclusivity of food self-provisioning in Czech society to demonstrate how post-socialist societies are a repository of a rich set of sustainability-promoting consumption practices in relation to food systems. Second, we show that international and domestic policy actors in these societies have ignored these alternative, socially inclusive and environmentally effective practices in favour of far less effective market-based sustainability oriented food policy initiatives. The paper promotes a more integrated view of non-market and market approaches in the pursuit of more sustainable food systems.     

Toward cyberinfrastructure to facilitate collaboration and reproducibility for marine integrated ecosystem assessments

There is a growing need for cyberinfrastructure to support science-based decision making in management of natural resources. In particular, our motivation was to aid the development of cyberinfrastructure for Integrated Ecosystem Assessments (IEAs) for marine ecosystems. The IEA process involves analysis of natural and socio-economic information based on diverse and disparate sources of data, requiring collaboration among scientists of many disciplines and communication with other stakeholders. Here we describe our bottom-up approach to developing cyberinfrastructure through a collaborative process engaging a small group of domain and computer scientists and software engineers. We report on a use case evaluated for an Ecosystem Status Report, a multi-disciplinary report inclusive of Earth, life, and social sciences, for the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem. Ultimately, we focused on sharing workflows as a component of the cyberinfrastructure to facilitate collaboration and reproducibility. We developed and deployed a software environment to generate a portion of the Report, retaining traceability of derived datasets including indicators of climate forcing, physical pressures, and ecosystem states. Our solution for sharing workflows and delivering reproducible documents includes IPython (now Jupyter) Notebooks. We describe technical and social challenges that we encountered in the use case and the importance of training to aid the adoption of best practices and new technologies by domain scientists. We consider the larger challenges for developing end-to-end cyberinfrastructure that engages other participants and stakeholders in the IEA process.     

Whiteness, space and alternative food practice

The paper demonstrates how whiteness is produced in progressive non-profit efforts to promote sustainable farming and food security in the US. I explore whiteness by addressing the spatial dimensions of this food politics. I draw on feminist and materialist theories of nature, space and difference as well as research conducted between 2003 and the present. Whiteness emerges spatially in efforts to increase food access, support farmers and provide organic food to consumers. It clusters and expands through resource allocation to particular organizations and programs and through participation in non-profit conferences. Community food’s discourse builds on a late-modern and, in practice, ‘white’ combination of science and ideology concerning healthful food and healthy bodies. Whiteness in alternative food efforts rests, as well, on inequalities of wealth that serve both to enable different food economies and to separate people by their ability to consume. It is latent in the support of romanticized notions of community, but also in the more active support for coalition-building across social differences. These well-intentioned food practices reveal both the transformative potential of progressive whiteness and its capacity to become exclusionary in spite of itself. Whiteness coheres precisely, therefore, in the act of ‘doing good’.     

Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-human

The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.     

Articulating an Indian diaspora in South Africa: The Consulate General of India,diaspora associations and practices of collaboration

Engagements between sending states and their diasporas have come under increasing critical scrutiny. Whilst political geographers have driven critical analysis of national level policies, debates have largely overlooked the broader range of actors, transactions and practices involved in implementing national policies in a geohistorically diverse array of diasporic contexts and settings. Over the last decade, the Indian government has invested significant resources in overseas diplomatic missions, consulates and high commissions to administer its diaspora outreach strategies. This paper examines the role of the Consulate General of India (CGI) in Durban, South Africa, focusing in particular on the networks of agents, associations, groups and political actors involved in collaborating with the CGI Durban in diaspora outreach practices. This paper draws on two periods of fieldwork in Durban between 2004 and 2005 and was supplemented by ongoing visual and textual analysis of news articles, promotional material, reports and websites. Using the concept of articulation, the paper highlights the discursive and performative practices involved in bringing together the agendas of the GOI with those of South African Indian diaspora associations through the outreach practices of the CGI in Durban. It argues that articulatory practices are essential to resolving some of the subjective and embodied dilemmas and contestations of belonging inherent in South African Indians’ participation in diaspora outreach initiatives. Investigating how articulation contributes to drawing diverse and even competing agendas together makes room for further understanding the ways in which diaspora outreach practices can travel across a wide network, and the diverse agencies that can become catalysed in the process.     

Migration and urban survival strategies in Windhoek, Namibia

Based on recent research in Windhoek, this paper demonstrates that it is the well established and widespread social linkages that persist between rural and urban households that are central to the ability of poor urban households to survive. Whereas informal coping mechanisms that include borrowing, piecework and credit are pervasive in rural areas of Namibia, intra-urban sources of food are poorly developed, and outside of kinship circles, social networks within Windhoek are used sparingly, even in times of greatest need. In addition, urban agriculture plays a very limited role at present in urban food supply. The research demonstrates that urban households that are most vulnerable to hunger are those that have limited social connections to the rural areas, and must rely on intra-urban opportunities to get food (including borrowing, begging, piecework and crime). The most vulnerable are female- and male-headed households with no access to farm income and limited/irregular urban incomes. In contrast, those with active rural-urban linkages enjoy significant transfers of food from rural areas that offset hunger and vulnerability in the urban context. Urban-rural reciprocity is therefore not only a one-way movement of people and resources from the urban to the rural areas, but also a transfer of food from rural to urban households.     

Proximity and power within investment relationships: The case of the UK private equity industry

The role of power in economic activity has been researched across the social sciences but there has been little engagement with the spatialities of power relations. This paper thus draws on a recent reinvigorated interest in power within economic geography to develop an approach for understanding how the spatiality of power relations in economic practices are constituted through different forms of proximity. It argues that proximity needs to be conceptualised as multi-dimensional including physical, cultural, virtual and organizational proximity between firms and actors. It further contends that the development of different forms of proximity shape the agency of empowered actors in industry clusters and regional economies. This general proposition is explored by presenting research into a case study: the UK-based private equity industry. The research focuses on the nature, role and development of different forms of proximity between private equity firms and the investee firms that are the subject of investments.     

Size does matter: City scale and the asymmetries of climate change adaptation in three coastal towns

Globally, it is smaller urban settlements that are growing most rapidly, are most constrained in terms of adaptive capacity but increasingly looked to for delivering local urban resilience. Data from three smaller coastal cities and their wider regional governance systems in Florida, US; West Sussex, UK and São Paulo, Brazil are used to compare the influence of scale and sector on city adaptive capacity. These tensions are described through the lens of the Adaptive Capacity Index (ACI) approach. The ACI is built from structuration theory and presents an alternative to social-ecological systems framing of analysis on adaptation. Structuration articulates the interaction of agency and structure and the intervening role played by institutions on information flow, in shaping adaptive capacity and outcomes. The ACI approach reveals inequalities in adaptive capacity to be greater across scale than across government, private and civil society sector capacity in each study area. This has implications for adaptation research both by reinforcing the importance of scale and demonstrating the utility of structuration theory as a framework for understanding the social dynamics underpinning adaptive capacity; and policy relevance, in particular considering the redistribution of decision-making power across scale and/or compensatory mechanisms, especially for lower scale actors, who increasingly carry the costs for enacting resilience planning in cities.     

Urban sprawl and infrastructural lands: Revamping internal spaces in Santiago de Chile

Urban sprawl in South America has for many decades been driven by the housing debate, with major impact on overall urban development. The impact of uncontrolled expansion has been social, economic and environmental degradation to high rates of poverty, poor services and transport. The presence of undeveloped areas within suburban landscapes, such as former infrastructural facilities, obsolete airports, and abandoned train stations, contribute to the impetus to reclaimed and revamped land. These spaces also trigger political aspirations for implementing better practices on “smart” growth, sustainable development and urban regeneration principles. A case in point is the former airport ‘Aeropuerto Cerrillos’ in Santiago, Chile, which closed in 2001 after years of decay; it intended to replace and host a large-scale urban project called ‘Ciudad Parque Bicentenario’. This development is still incomplete and describes a series of pressures on a planning system traditionally adjusted to promote expansion confirming that urban sprawl is still an open agenda triggered by the presence of diverse unexpected urban gaps.     

From feeding the locals to selling the locale: Adapting local sustainable food projects in Niagara to neocommunitarianism and neoliberalism

This paper traces attempts to foster local, sustainable food projects in Niagara, Canada as part of community economic development (CED) projects during two distinct periods of provincial governance. In the first period (1990-1995), social democratic government support for local sustainable food projects through CED can be understood as neocommunitarian in nature. During this time there was a concerted attempt to link local people with access to local food and also to support a relationship between local food projects and agri-tourism. I argue that this neocommunitarian policy was an accommodation to a wider and more global neoliberal hegemony and was underlain by a romanticism of petty commodity production and a tenuous link to social and ecological sustainability. In the second period of governance (beginning in 1995) the progressive conservative government led by Mike Harris pursued particularly virulent, revanchist forms of neoliberal governance. With many of their state supports slashed, Niagara NGOs and activists turned, and were pushed, to more market-led, elitist forms of local food projects and agri-tourism. In these latter food projects, the practices of ecological and social sustainability were significantly hollowed out and their local and light green nature was harnessed as accumulation strategies. The paper is based on interviews conducted in the year 2003 with people involved in various urban and rural food projects (including community gardening, community supported agriculture, local/seasonal cuisine, organic/ecological farming and food box programs).     

Geographies of citizenship and everyday (im)mobility

This introduction and the collection of papers it introduces seek to progress debates on the intersections between citizenship, practice, materiality, and mobility. In contrast to more static framings of formal citizenship where subjects are considered equal in terms of enjoying the same safeties and freedoms, in this introduction citizenship is conceived of as a set of processual, performative and everyday relations between spaces, objects, citizens and non-citizens that ebbs and flows. Through the papers that comprise this collection we see the process of citizenship becoming fragmented in both urban and rural mobility spaces. We also see it as being shaped by particular technologies and artefacts which construct and relate mobile subjects to each other and the state in particular ways. Our key contribution lies in outlining three related areas where work informed by the mobilities turn could focus: Firstly we seek to demonstrate that far from being a product of citizenship status, mobility must be seen as actively constituting citizenship relations. Secondly we seek to demonstrate the roles that styles of movement and the ‘stuff’ of mobility play in shaping the extent of citizenship for particular mobile publics. Thirdly we illustrate the ways in which cross-border flows relating to concepts such as cosmopolitan and ecological citizenship can act through mobility practices to challenge locally held notions of appropriate mobility and inevitably citizenship. Ultimately what we argue and intend to demonstrate is that mobility is such an important, pervasive and politicised element of late modernity that the ways in which we move and confer meanings on movement, cut across and even over-ride more established relationships between social and cultural identity, citizenship and the state.