Contested Space,Contested Livelihoods: A Review of Mongolia's Pastureland Management and Land‐Tenure Reform

In the early 2000s, the discovery of significant minerals wealth in the Gobi Desert marked the beginning of Mongolia's economic boom. Rapid GDP growth however challenges long‐held assumptions about place and land rights, leading to contested and sometimes contradictory outcomes, which are embedded in evolving perceptions and realities of land‐tenure rights, development rights, and local livelihood sustainability. Framed within the debates surrounding natural resources development and the contradictions in scale and user rights, this essay identifies three distinct periods of land‐tenure debate in Mongolia. In each period, pastureland management debates are influenced by different narratives, including those of development economists, scholars, NGOs, and local voices. This essay draws on an extensive review of policy documents and contemporary literature to consider the multiscalar implications of rapid national growth on internal population redistribution, land‐use rights, and the underlying importance of place.     

Changing Rural Spaces: Deregulation and the decline of tobacco farming in the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area,Far North Queensland

The growing of tobacco was one of the most tightly regulated industries in Australia, until deregulation in 1995. Commonwealth regulations controlled the area cultivated with tobacco, the number of growers (i.e. quota holders) and marketing arrangements for tobacco leaf. This paper begins by outlining the nature and historical development of controls in the tobacco-growing industry, and discusses how the Commonwealth government removed the industry's regulatory and protective framework in 1995. The third part of the paper examines how deregulation has impacted upon the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, Far North Queensland, where small farmers produced 60 per cent of Australia's tobacco in 1995. The discussion will show that the agricultural landscape once dominated by tobacco has been transformed, as local farmers abandoned growing tobacco in favour of sugar cane, avocadoes, mangoes, macadamia nuts and other small vegetable crops (e.g. navy beans, pumpkins). Tobacco, once promoted by the Queensland government as a crop to facilitate closer settlement in the Mareeba-Dimbulah Irrigation Area, will have almost vanished from the landscape by 2002.     

Regulation, Land Development and the Contested Countryside

This paper attempts to reorientate locality specific studies of counterurbanisation within the wider processes of global and national socio-economic change. It draws on concepts of Regulation Theory and begins with an explanation of the global and national influences associated with rural restructuring. These influences, together with the emergence of a reconstituted rurality, are traced through to the local level using Bridgetown in the south-west of Western Australia as a vehicle for conceptual analysis.     

Contested identities of indigenous people: Indigenization or integration of the Veddas in Sri Lanka

Traditionally, the identity of indigenous people was defined in relation to closeness to nature and use of wildlife resources. Such an identity has been put under pressure due to development programmes, neo‐liberal policies and increasing market economy, forcing these people to redefine their identity within new socio‐economic and geopolitical contexts. Based on ethnographic research, the situation of the Vedda people in Sri Lanka is analysed. First, we unravel how they define their identity through a ‘meaningful relationship’ with the place in which they used to live prior to their displacement because of a large scale development project. Second, we analyse how the Veddas (re‐)negotiate their identity in a context of limited access to land, lack of education, unemployment, and an increasing demand for indigenous tourism. It is found that the Veddas redefine their identity by pursuing two survival strategies: tourist development and re‐indigenization, and integration into mainstream Sinhalese society. Both strategies pose challenges and opportunities.     

Contested and congested spaces: Exploring authenticity in New Zealand farmers' markets

This paper considers issues of authenticity as they apply to the evolution of farmers' markets in New Zealand. Following a discussion of the nature of authenticity and its deployment by farmers' market organisations in several jurisdictions, a two‐part case study is presented. An analysis of the strategies adopted by Farmers' Markets New Zealand to ‘protect its brand’ nationally and an examination of the disputation of authenticity in the Marlborough Farmers' Market reveals the potential of the ‘authenticity project’ to be a lightning rod for heightened tension and the fracturing of the relationship between competing interests in New Zealand farmers' markets.     

Fluid Borders: Rethinking Historical Geography and Fixed Map Boundaries in Contested Regions

This article introduces a quantitative methodology for analyzing contested map borders. The article applies the new analytical technique to a data set of thirty maps showing Bulgaria in ca. 800 CE, a disputed state and period in medieval historiography with relevance to modern national politics and territorial claims. Based on the data set, we generate a series of new maps that make explicit the fluid medieval boundaries and general disagreement among geographers and historiographers. Our analysis begins with a simple point-in-polygon procedure to create a majority map that depicts the points included within the borders of the Bulgarian polity in sixteen or more of the maps (>50 percent). The majority map is then combined with percentage maps, confidence interval map boundaries, and cluster maps. The confidence interval maps are created via a spatial bootstrapping procedure and measure the uncertainty in the majority map. The cluster maps are developed via a radial basis function and provide insight into the potential affectivity based on the cartographers' countries of origin. The final map reflects the general modern consensus of the borders of the Bulgarian polity around 800 CE. Besides its quantitative contribution to medieval and modern cartographic, historiographical, and political debates, this article has developed a widely applicable methodology for synthesizing map borders and territories in cases of cartographic disagreement.     

Legacies of a Contested Campus: Urban Renewal,Community Resistance,and the Origins of Gentrification in Denver

The postwar urban renewal experience varied among US cities according to the result of local social contests pitting those imposing their power to transform urban space against those resisting it. In this paper, we examine the role of one such contest in shaping urban renewal outcomes in Denver, using the case of the late 1960s Auraria project. The project sought to remove a poor, Hispanic neighborhood in order to build a new downtown college campus, generating community opposition from the inner city neighborhood residents, leaders of the city’s Chicano Movement, and historic preservation activists. We demonstrate how resistance actively shaped the ultimate form and character of the project, and how the legacies of this urban renewal contest extended—in unforeseen ways—beyond the immediate struggles of the time. We argue that these legacies provide the essential context for understanding planning practice, redevelopment strategies, and gentrification dynamics in the city today.     

Natural regions for national parks: the Canadian experience

This article examines the history and characteristics of the system of natural regions devised by the Canadian federal government as a basis for selecting new national parks and in use since 1971. It begins with an examination of the political and scientific problems faced by those who devised the regional system and of how the system they devised solved these problems. It then examines the system's strengths and weaknesses as an instrument of public policy and evaluates its success as a guide to the selection of new national parks. It concludes by observing that the system's lack of those characteristics commonly considered the hallmarks of a logically satisfying regional system, distinct regions and unambiguous boundaries delineated by an objective process, was unimportant. Far more important to its success as an instrument of policy were other, less formal characteristics such as its overall appearance of reasonableness and the way it led to the selection of sites which were aesthetically, and therefore politically, appealing.     

Contested geographical imaginings of reunification: A case study of urban change in Leipzig

Geopolitics and city restructuring are typically regarded as separate scales and processes: the international and national versus the local. The local politics of urban change in an east German city in the period after reunification question this divide. The ‘pathways’ approach to post-socialist transitions is utilized to illustrate how reunification is contested as much in neighbourhood restructuring and actions in response to incoming capital and the dominance of western legalpolitical norms as it is in national or international discourses and practices. Assumed divisions between East and West, professional and lay, and local and national are questioned.     

Spaces of uncertainty: A model of mobile space in the Sahel

This paper presents a model of mobile space in the Sahel based on the two logics of circulation and production. An overview of the epistemological origins of the model shows how spatial structuring in (and of) the Sahel has been progressively transformed by the territorial action of economic actors, colonial powers, states and development programmes. The particular focus is on nomadic and cross‐border spaces – configurations that offer an ideal perspective on the mobility of space. The model confirms the hypothesis that economic actors, states and development agencies all aim to improve the way uncertainty is managed, but remain profoundly divided over what strategies to adopt. Whereas free flows allow economic actors to obtain products wherever these may be available, states and development agencies conceive of territory as a resource that must drive the specialization of production. The proposed model also suggests that mobile space is not peculiar to the Sahel and that the spatial logics of circulation and production in the Sahel are also present in the process of globalization. It provides conceptual resources that could lead to other models potentially applicable to understanding uncertainty in a highly mobile, globalized world.