The social relations of catfish production in Vietnam

The growth of intensive export-oriented Pangasius catfish production in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta is unparalleled in terms of rapidity and scale by any other agricultural sector, with production climbing from a low base to more than 1 million tons in a single decade. This paper examines the effects of this remarkable change on the rural class structure in locations where catfish farming has boomed, and analyses the role of local state-society relations in mediating outcomes resulting from the integration of local actors into the global value chain. We conclude that private economic activity is deeply embedded in informal relations with the state bureaucracy in Vietnam, with the result that the expansion of catfish aquaculture has generally acted to reproduce and entrench existing class relations rather leading to a radical reconfiguration of the rural class structure.     

The international developmental state: The Japanese intellectual property system in Vietnam

This article explores the international implications of the developmental state model of Japanese capitalism. It does so by investigating the extension of Japanese intellectual property (IP) policy and practice in Vietnam. The escalating role of intellectual property within Japanese industrial policy is first framed according to Johnson’s developmental state thesis and extended in reference to the ‘flying geese’ model of regional development in East Asia. This latter approach anticipates Vietnam’s growing importance as a site for Japanese foreign direct investment and technology transfer. Interviews with key informants from both countries and analysis of policy documents provide evidence of the extra-territorial practices employed by Japanese companies, government agencies, and IP intermediaries in Vietnam. These accounts bring to light key developmental mechanisms, such as the packaging of IP internationalization within Japan’s official development assistance (ODA) and the overseas pro-bono work performed by IP intermediary associations in which the line between benevolence and self-interest is blurred. The paper concludes by interpreting these practices in accordance with the broader strategic imperatives of Japan in the region.     

Violent morphologies: Landscape, border and scale in Ahmedabad conflict

Conflicts produce violence through death, confinement, torture, and control of spaces of everyday life. This paper investigates how spatial morphologies, like landscapes, borders and scales, are re-ordered and re-imagined to materialize violence. A Hindu–Muslim conflict in the globalizing city of Ahmedabad, India in 2002 is used as a case study. The conflict unfolded in a dying industrial city, now being re-envisioned through neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism into a ‘global city’. During and after the riots, the majority Hindu community, and the local Hindu fundamentalist government, annihilated the life spaces of the minority Muslim community. Through a combination of Hindu rioting and urban renewal, landscapes were destroyed, new spaces produced, borders re-imagined, and new ones imprinted on the landscape, to segregate previously co-existing communities. Local government and Hindu ideologues creatively juxtaposed neoliberal economic polices, global discourses of Islamophobia, local ethnocentrism to alter the spatial morphologies of Ahmedabad. Justice entails the democratization of space by altering the violent morphologies of Ahmedabad.     

Living it up: Super-rich enclave and transnational elite urbanism in Singapore

Notwithstanding the burgeoning scholarship on enclave urbanism, urban gating has often been pigeonholed as an intra-urban development that is somewhat ‘epiphenomenal’ to wider global processes. Overlooked in the literature is how gated communities as globally-oriented spaces are intertwined with the transnational lifeworlds of its elite inhabitants. As key sites where transnational super-rich elites organize their consumption and reproduce their purportedly global lifestyle, gated communities are now emerging as a new ‘meta-geographical form’ that circulates in and around rapidly globalizing cities. Drawing on the case study of Sentosa Cove, an exclusive waterfront gated community in Singapore catering to ‘high net-worth’ residents, this paper critically examines how elite localities and transnationalism are being socially and spatially reproduced in the city-state. To this end, the paper makes a distinct contribution by bringing to bear critical transnationalism perspectives in the understanding of urban gating and the privileged geographies of the global super-rich.     

Producing abjection: E-waste improvement schemes and informal recyclers of Bangalore

This article focuses upon informal e-waste recyclers who subsidise the environmental costs of Bangalore’s information technology boom. It illustrates how improvement schemes devised by development agencies, to make Bangalore’s e-waste disposal practices more sustainable, reproduced the effects of bourgeois environmentalism and effectively cast off informal recyclers from having a substantial role in the city’s emerging regime of e-waste management. Being cast out and rendered superfluous has been a deeply degrading experience for Bangalore’s informal recyclers. In order to foreground this experience I draw upon the notion of abjection and show how informal recyclers are constituted as abject residents who must be confined to collecting and processing waste from the most marginal frontiers of the city’s e-waste circuits.     

The impact of residential desegregation on social integration: Evidence from a South African neighbourhood

This paper analyses the potential for social integration in post-apartheid urban South Africa by examining the lives of those already living in desegregated spaces. The case study is a low-cost state-assisted housing project situated in the wealthy southern suburbs of Cape Town. In this social housing project, named Westlake village, coloured and Black African (alongside a handful of white and Indian) residents were awarded state housing in 1999 as replacement for their previous homes (informal and formal), which were demolished to make way for a mixed land-use development, of which their new homes form a small component. Westlake’s desegregation is found to extend beyond mere residential abode, affecting resident’s everyday lives to the extent that apartheid’s history and geography are superseded by other factors (such as proximity and affordability) in decision-making. Furthermore, integration at the everyday level of informal neighbourly mixing is prevalent. Although more formal cross-race friendships are rare, discussion reveals this as a consequence of Westlake’s specific socio-historic identity rather than racial divisions per se. Empirical evidence is used to propose a continuum of social integration experience. This continuum addresses the form of integration, for example greeting in the street, visiting homes, inter-marriage; and also the spaces of integration, for example physical space (shared neighbourhood), economic space (common employment-type), social space (cross-race friendship), political space (common involvement in civic organisations) and cultural space (shared sense of belonging).     

The feeling of participation: Everyday spaces and urban change

Initiatives around ‘public participation’ and ‘community involvement’ have become increasingly central to UK government policy programmes, particularly within interventions aimed at disadvantaged neighbourhoods. These initiatives have been the subject of extensive critical comment, essentially focusing on the ways in which power is often maintained by state agencies, whatever the surrounding rhetoric. This article attempts to consider what more productive forms of participation might feel like, through drawing on fieldwork with two small community groups on housing estates in Stoke-on-Trent, UK, to look at how and why they were able to generate successful participation in their activities. The importance of the small-scale interactions and feelings that made up their spaces of participation is explored. These can be characterised through ideas such as ‘feeling comfortable’, ‘feeling at home’, ‘helping out’ and ‘keeping going’, and involve everyday sociability and informal forms of volunteering. If government is serious about supporting political participation in such contexts it needs to consider how official projects might learn from these kinds of spaces.     

A no-camp policy: Interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon

As fewer refugees move into formal camps, what kinds of non-camp spaces are emerging and how does that challenge the ways in which we understand the management and politics of refuge? This paper seeks to shed light on this question through an analysis of informal settlements in Lebanon. The Syrian crisis has displaced millions of people, most of whom have moved into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The Lebanese government, faced with a longer history of Palestinian camps and their militarization has refused to allow the establishment of official refugee camps for Syrians. As a result of this ‘no camp’ policy, Syrians are forced to either live in private rented accommodation in towns and cities throughout the country, or in informal settlements (ISes) built on private, often agricultural land. These informal settlements are built and developed through a complex assemblage of humanitarianism, hospitality, security, economic and political considerations. In this paper, I look at the physical and social spaces of informal settlements in the Bekaa Valley, Eastern Lebanon, examining how differential access to aid, support, security and tacit recognition by the state has led to variations amongst them. In doing so, I expose how an informalized response to the crisis through a system of deregulation is enabling refugee spaces to emerge that are visible, yet unrecognized, flexible, yet precarious. These spaces destabilize the city/camp dichotomy by drawing together elements of both. In engaging with debates on informality, the paper contributes to a growing critical literature on refugee geographies and seeks to expand beyond the reductive narratives of refugee camps, thereby offering insights into refugee futures in increasingly uncertain times.     

Ordinary ethics and craft consumption: A Southern perspective

Geography has recently experienced something of an ‘ethical turn’, and much attention has been focused on consumption as a site of ethical practice. Studies of ethical consumption tend to focus on explicitly socially or environmentally responsible purchasing decisions, but a growing body of research on ‘ordinary ethics’, starting from the premise that most consumption has a moral dimension, has opened up the notion of what counts as ethical to include everyday habits, considerations and desires. There remains, however, relatively little appreciation of the ethical agency of consumers within the global South, and little consideration of how enactments of ordinary ethics within Southern contexts may deepen understandings of the practices and meanings of diverse forms of consumption. Addressing this gap, this paper explores accounts of producers and consumers of craft in informal trading spaces in Cape Town, a city that 20 years after apartheid’s end remains deeply racially segregated and has seen numerous incidents of xenophobic violence. It is in this context that I unpack the ethical dimensions of a seemingly trivial form of consumption, arguing that sites of informal trade may provide spaces for the expression and enactment of care for the other. While not always entirely positive, these interactions reveal a complex moral landscape where shared identities and mutual recognition underpin mundane economic transactions. The paper concludes that ordinary ethics of care for the other go beyond explicit, rational responsibility, and that informal spaces of trade should be considered as key sites for the exploration of consumer ethics.     

Manufacturing rural finance in Asia: Institutional assemblages, market societies, entrepreneurial subjects

This paper takes up the proposition that institutions mediate market formation, through a comparative study of rural finance in Nepal and Vietnam. It explores how microfinance, as an iconic institution of ‘roll-out neoliberalism’, articulates political-economic and cultural-political milieux—with particular emphasis given to the ways in which the Vietnamese Party-state has engaged rural finance to further the socialist transition even as it has undergone significant ‘economic renovation’. In so doing, the paper adopts a processual interpretation of institutions not as bounded structures, but as arenas of ongoing debate over culturally constructed meanings and ‘practices of assemblage’ [Li, T.M., 2007a. Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society 36 (2), 263–293] that are inextricably linked with wider-scale political-economic and cultural-political formations. A comparative approach is pursued here to emphasize spatio-temporal contingencies in the articulation of a market-led development institution with specific national regulatory frameworks and political cultures. A critical-geographical orientation helps to deepen Polanyi’s proposition that the economy is an instituted process, to challenge the prevailing binary opposition between state- and market-led development, account for the multiple scales at which power and interest reside in the formation of markets, and highlight the variable ways in which markets are embodied and enacted in particular places.     

‘White cranes fly over black cranes’: The longue durée of rural–urban migration in Vietnam

The changing nature of rural–urban migration, in the context of transition economies of East and Southeast Asia, is usually interpreted as an outcome of structural transformation, while the longue durée of these migration flows tends to be neglected. Adopting a historical perspective, supported by the ’migration as resistance’ approach, this paper examines the changes in rural–urban migration dynamics in Vietnam from the 1950s to 2010 in relation to the country’s political and economic reforms (Ð?i M?i). Drawing on a case study of female migration between Phu Khe and Hanoi, it analyses how migrants resist and undermine state control over population mobility in order to pursue their movement and migration, and how they develop their migration networks over time. By doing so, the paper highlights a gradual process of the changing nature of rural–urban migration in which migrants themselves, through their resistance to governance of mobility and their establishment of migration networks prior to Ð?i M?i, play an important role.     

Geology ‘far from the madding crowd’, along the northern border of Vietnam

To the north of Hanoi, about a day's drive by car, lies Ha Giang Province, the northernmost region of Vietnam. Ha Giang is remote from the hustle and bustle of daily life, and beyond its eponymous provincial capital towards the border with China, mountains rise quickly to Quan Ba, ‘Heaven's Gate’. The mountains form an uneven landscape of steep‐sided karst rising from deep river‐cut gorges and form a formidable barrier on the northern frontier of Vietnam. Beyond ‘Heaven's Gate’ lies the little travelled region of Dong Van, with its majestic mountains of Palaeozoic strata rising precipitously to the sky. Here, a century ago, the French geologists Henri Mansuy and Jacques Deprat documented early finds of fossils from lower Palaeozoic strata on the border with China.     

Manila’s metropolitan landscape of gentrification: Global urban development,accumulation by dispossession & neoliberal warfare against informality

A new regime of gentrification is dramatically restructuring Manila’s metropolitan landscape. Grounded upon an on-going neoliberal warfare of accumulation by dispossession, this gentrification serves as the fulfillment of postcolonial visions of a world class and modern metropolis through public–private arrangements and market-oriented developments but necessitates the systematic demolition of informal settlements, the home of the Manila’s urban poor and working class population. Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines gentrification’s spatial forms and trajectories and exposes context specific dynamics facilitating accumulation by dispossession. Using barangay (village)-level data on changes in population of informal households and median zonal values, I calculate for local measures of spatial autocorrelation and locate significant clusters of spatial shifts. Using the quantitative results plus field narratives and community histories, I triangulate local dynamics of accumulation by dispossession. What emerges is a sprawling gentrification process that, in producing a market-oriented metropolis, displaces and asphyxiates informal spaces. These accounts illustrate the contingencies of violence, neoliberal urbanism, colonial legacies of land regimes, and elite power in the production of a globally-competitive Manila. With other Global South megacities similarly competing in the global market, gentrification in Manila, with its expanding landscape of property accumulation and ’legitimized’ dispossession, is instructive of the emerging form of gentrification in the 21st century.     

Enacting things through numbers: Taking nature into account/ing

In this article I make use of a combination of actor-network-theory, governmentality studies and feminist studies of science to show how nature is done or enacted within politics and administration. In particular I show how it relates to the theories and practices of economics and accounting. I explore the process by which the ‘critical limits’ of nature under the impact of acidification was created as a part of the politics and negotiations about acid rain. I demonstrate that even though the outcome was not ‘Nature’ as such, understood as a form of moral high-ground, the effect of this process was to produce ‘a nature as a whole’, in a process of unification. This I argue can only be understood relationally: ‘Nature’ is taken into account by way of accounting. In doing this I engage with Latour’s work on the politics of Nature and argue that nature is not necessarily such a deadly tool to politics as is sometimes taken for granted. Before we throw Nature out with our empirical studies of sciences, natures and politics, in the plural, we need to look first at how Nature-wholes emerge, are enacted, and take part in politics.     

(Re-)Conceptualizing water inequality in Delhi, India through a feminist political ecology framework

This article demonstrates how a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework can be utilized to expand scholarly conceptualizations of water inequality in Delhi, India. I argue that FPE is well positioned to complement and deepen urban political ecology work through attending to everyday practices and micropolitics within communities. Specifically, I examine the embodied consequences of sanitation and ‘water compensation’ practices and how patterns of criminality are tied to the experience of water inequality. An FPE framework helps illuminate water inequalities forged on the body and within particular urban spaces, such as households, communities, streets, open spaces and places of work. Applying FPE approaches to the study of urban water is particularly useful in analyzing inequalities associated with processes of social differentiation and their consequences for everyday life and rights in the city. An examination of the ways in which water practices are productive of particular urban subjectivities and spaces complicates approaches that find differences in distribution and access to be the primary lens for viewing how water is tied to power and inequality.     

Groundwater flow modelling in the central zone of Hanoi, Vietnam

On the basis of a review of the Quaternary sedimentary architecture in the area of Hanoi city (Vietnam), a numerical, deterministic and three-dimensional groundwater flow model has been built for a simulation between 1995 and 2004. The sedimentary architecture has been constructed on the basis of the data from 32 drillings covering the entire Quaternary sequence (but with little sedimentological detail), as well as hydrographical and hydrogeological data. Both steady- and transient-state conditions were tested. Results calculated by the model seem to indicate that the conceptual hypotheses adopted are reasonable for the modelled domain and period. The simulation allows for calculation of the regional groundwater flow trends. It is also used for assessing the relative importance of the various recharge sources of the shallow aquifer system in Hanoi, and for estimating the interactions between groundwater and the Red River.     

An archaeology of fear and environmental change in Philadelphia

This paper examines how mechanisms of social control function to mediate human-environment relations and processes of environmental change in the city. Using the Fairmount Park System of Philadelphia as a case study, I argue that a history of social control mechanisms, both formal and informal, maintained viable socio-environmental urban relationships. Their decline over the last several decades has produced a legacy of fear towards the city’s natural environment that has had, and continues to have, profound socio-spatial and ecological implications. I argue that these changes have their origin in a set of racially motivated decisions made during the volatile years of the late 1960s and early 1970s and that African American women, in particular, have been impacted disproportionately by their consequences. Fear of crime in the natural environment and suspicion of environmental change have resulted in the exclusion of local women and children from what was, historically, a politically and socially viable public space. In this context, urban ecological change is locally understood as more an issue of social control than one of environmental concern.     

Knowledge makes the money go round: Conflicts of interest and corporate finance in London’s financial district

This paper argues that the conflicts of interest cases brought against Wall Street investment banks in the early 2000s were neither geographically nor institutionally isolated events. Rather, by combining recent work on financial knowledges in both economic geography and the social studies of finance with the growing interest in topological spatial imaginaries, I explore how London’s corporate finance industry was unable to distance itself from both the conflicts of interest allegations and the ensuing regulatory changes of the ‘Global Settlement’ in the US. Analysis of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted in London in the early 2000s is used to explore how a range of individual interests, institutional demands and structural changes within London’s financial district affected analysts’ ability to produce ‘objective’ research. As well as pointing to the problematic nature of certain aspects of knowledge rich ‘communities of practice’ [Wenger, E., 1998. Communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge], I explore how the resulting contingent and situated nature of research practice is at odds with a weakly defined notion of ‘objective’ research that underpins the Financial Services Authority’s regulatory response.     

John Dewey’s metaphysical ground-map and its implications for geographical inquiry

John Dewey was the most significant and influential thinker associated with the American philosophy commonly known as pragmatism. Drawing on Dewey’s writings as well as the work of Deweyan scholars, I endeavor to explain Dewey’s unique contribution to philosophical discourse and how his overlooked scholarship can inform geographical inquiry. After an introduction, I provide a background understanding of Dewey and his context as well as the use of his philosophy in geography and sociology. I then turn to an exposition of Dewey’s metaphysics which are the heart of his philosophy. My discussion breaks his metaphysics into four parts: nature and continuity, contingency and change, situated sociality, and transaction. The subsequent section argues for Dewey’s distinction and value by arguing a particular implication of Dewey’s work for geography—a reconceptualization of place—and more general propositions about what a Dewey-informed geography would, at minimum, entail. A brief conclusion summarizes the Deweyan vision in the context of geographical inquiry.