Care-full commoning at the Old Church on the Hill,Bendigo

ABSTRACT

Increasingly, the notion of the commons has been mobilised as a way to articulate the possibility of other ways of doing/being/thinking life which are at odds with the logics of enclosure. Whilst practices of care have been identified as central in sustaining commons, there remains a need for more detailed conceptualisations of how commons are maintained through everyday practices of care. In this paper we draw on research conducted at The Old Church on the Hill in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia, to provide an account of the role, complexities and constraints of care in constituting a commons. Throughout the paper we develop the concept of care-full commoning which encapsulates the phases of care identified by Tronto (1993. Moral Boundaries, A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care. New York and London: Routledge, 2013. Caring Democracy: Markets, Equality, and Justice. New York: NYU Press) and is a term we use to describe the multiple ways that care is practiced through, in, and by human and non-human others that comprise commoning collectives. We discuss the everyday practices of care that have sustained this commons over time, arguing that paying attention to the work of care in maintaining commons is an important political task.     

Unbundling property in Boston’s urban food commons

ABSTRACT

Households and community organizations are involved in the creation, use, care, and management of urban spaces, including through food practices such as planting, foraging, harvesting, weeding and pruning at the ambiguous edges of public and private property. Drawing on case studies in Boston, Massachusetts, we examine how commons are articulated through these practices, particularly in relation to multiple dimensions of property rights. Specifically, we ask how food practices can open urban spaces to negotiations around access, responsibility, care, and ownership, especially when (property) ownership is not an end-goal, but a circumstance shaping other practices. Using interviews and participant observation of individuals and organizations involved in urban food provisioning, we explore how households and community organizations are interrupting fixed notions of property ownership, by practicing urban commons. These practices and negotiations demonstrate ongoing shifts in the meanings of urban space with flexible understandings of property and ownership.     

Political Ecology and Cultural Change: Impacts on Swidden-fallow Agroforestry Practices among the Mopan Maya in Southern Belize

Little agroecological research examines indigenous agroforestry practices that appear to be unsustainable, and how such practices devolved from more environmentally sound land use strategies that have been documented by geographers and others. This paper discusses the political ecological factors that led the Mopan Maya to reject a diverse swidden-fallow management strategy for a system where an abandoned milpa provides few forest products. In doing so, this paper explains the process whereby cultural change, in this case rejection of certain agricultural traditions, leads to a less diverse agricultural landscape and ultimately a less diverse biological landscape.     

Challenging emotions

This paper contributes to work on emotional geographies by engaging with Liz Bondi's focus on relationality and the challenge to geographers to explore how their emotion might connect with the feelings of their subjects. Through the lens of a focus group meeting that created confusing feelings, it shows the hurdles that geographers face when they engage with practices developed in a psychotherapeutic setting. The paper is not so much a critique, more a desire to continue the conversation regarding how to approach and adopt psychotherapy's theory of practice in a research context .     

Yanama budyari gumada: reframing the urban to care as Darug Country in western Sydney

ABSTRACT

In non-urban places of Australia, caring-as-Country frames natural resource management (NRM) as a practice of reciprocal, more-than-human care-giving (S. Suchet-Pearson, S. Wright, K. Lloyd, and L. Burarrwanga. 2013. ‘Caring as Country: towards and ontology of co-becoming in natural resource management.’ Asia Pacific Viewpoint 54 (2): 185–197). Caring-as-Country is an idea that encapsulates the entangled, reciprocal relationships that people have with, and as part of, agentic more-than-human worlds. In more urbanised places, however, practices of caring-as-Country are often unrecognised, undervalued and undocumented. In this paper we make explicit practices of caring, healing and rejuvenation at Yellomundee Regional Park, Darug Country in western Sydney. Our discussion of care, entanglement and reciprocity at Yellomundee focuses on two specific activities that embody caring-as-Country: the return of cultural burns and sustained presence on Country in the form of Darug-led culture camps. The Darug principle of yanama budyari gumada, to ‘walk with good spirit’, embodies and invites new ways of thinking and practising intercultural caring-as-Country in heavily colonised, urban places like Yellomundee. As we document the practices arising from this invitation, we consider its far-reaching implications for NRM and planning, and we expand on the importance of geographies of care for unceded urban places.     

Green infrastructure,green space,and sustainable urbanism: geography’s important role

ABSTRACT

This paper is a broad review of green infrastructure theory and practice relative to urban sustainability and the space for geographers in these discussions. We use examples from various urban sustainability plans to highlight ways in which green infrastructure is being conceptualized and implemented. We explore how geography contributes research on green infrastructure as well as the emerging practices as seen within sustainability plans. We identify four areas in which geographers can influence both green infrastructure theory and practice: 1) scale; 2) mapping distribution; 3) sensitivity to place and locale; and 4) equity and access. We conclude that in these areas geographers have tremendous opportunity contribute more deliberately to sustainable urbanism.     

Re-placing soil and its mattering in more-than-human cities

ABSTRACT

What role does soil play in sustainable design interventions and can it help to reconfigure human place experiences and human-nature relations in cities? Cities are home to a host of nonhuman actors that are overlooked or under-acknowledged in design and planning practices and in everyday dwelling. Soil is one such under-acknowledged urban inhabitant. In a period where cities and their inhabitants must adapt to the challenges of a changing climate, the paper draws together theory in design, planning and geography and empirical research with designers and residents in Australian cities to re-place soil as mattering in place(making) practices, everyday urban dwelling and urban sustainability transitions. The research contributes to recent work in (post)human geography to discuss ‘soil-planty mattering’, or the active role of soils and their intra-actions with other urban matter in shaping place. Soil-planty mattering is shown to disrupt human place(making), extending cities in material, temporal and spatial ways. In these extensions, the research suggests that soils have particular potential to re-orient human relationships with nonhumans in urban realms.     

People’s strategies for perceived surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we investigate people’s perception of datafication and surveillance in Amsterdam Smart City. Based on a series of focus groups, we show how people understand new forms of hypervisbility, what strategies they use to navigate these experiences, and what the limitations of these strategies are. We show how people tried to discern between public and private sector actors, to differentiate who they trusted by building on the existing social contract. People also trusted the objectivity of data in relation to prior experiences of social contexts and discrimination. Lastly, we show how the experiences of some of the inhabitants in our study who were most vulnerable to hypervisibility highlight the limits to strategies based on the neutrality of data. By asking about perceived surveillance rather than emphasising actual practices of surveilling, we show differentiated contexts and strategies, providing empirical grounds to question the dominant technical framing of smart cities.     

“Belonging” in the gentrified Golden Horn/Halic neighbourhoods of Istanbul

Mainstream gentrification research predominantly examines experiences and motivations of the middle-class gentrifier groups, while overlooking experiences of non-gentrifying groups including the impact of in situ local processes on gentrification itself. In this paper, I discuss gentrification, neighbourhood belonging and spatial distribution of class in Istanbul by examining patterns of belonging both of gentrifiers and non-gentrifying groups in historic neighbourhoods of the Golden Horn/Halic. I use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA), a methodology rarely used in gentrification research, to explore social and symbolic borders between these two groups. I show how gentrification leads to spatial clustering by creating exclusionary practices and eroding social cohesion, and illuminate divisions that are inscribed into the physical space of the neighbourhood.     

“Turn your brand into a destination”: toponymic commodification and the branding of place in Dubai and Winnipeg

ABSTRACT

The selling of naming rights to corporate sponsors has led urban policymakers to increasingly view the identities of public places as rent-generating assets to fund urban infrastructure. Yet few scholars have critically analyzed this emerging global trend of toponymic commodification and the seeking of “naming rent.” Through a combination of archival research, on-site field observations, and semi-structured interviews, this study examines how the practice of toponymic commodification is transforming the cultural landscapes of contemporary cities by considering two naming rights programs: Dubai’s Metro Naming Rights Initiative and the Sponsor Winnipeg Program. In each case, we explore the implications of commodifying public place names as well as the conflicting perceptions of such sponsorship programs. In doing so, the present study illustrates how the selling of naming rights is reshaping the built environment into a space of symbolic/economic capital transformations as brands become destinations and public places are reconceived as marketing opportunities.     

The politics of greening unceded lands in the settler city

ABSTRACT

Urban greening is a buzz term in urban policy and research settings in Australia and elsewhere. In a context of settler colonial urbanism, like Australia, a first fact becomes clear: urban greening is always being practiced on unceded Indigenous lands. Recognising this requires some honest reckoning with how this latest urban policy response perpetuates dispossessory settler-colonial structures. In this paper, we listen to the place-based ontologies of the peoples and lands from where we write to inform understanding the city as an always already Indigenous place – a sovereign Aboriginal City. In so doing, the paper tries to practice a way of creating more truthful and response-able urban knowledge practices. We analyse three distinct areas of scholarly research that are present in the contemporary literature: urban greening and green infrastructure; urban political ecology; and more-than-human cities. When placed in relationship of learning with the sovereign Aboriginal City, our analysis finds that these scholarly domains of urban greening work to re-organise colonial power relations. The paper considers what work the practice and scholarship of ‘urban greening’ might need to do in order to become response-able and learn to learn with Indigenous sovereignties and ontologies.     

Remapping heritage and the garden suburb: Haberfield's civic ecologies

ABSTRACT

Gardens in Australia are considered an important site of heritage maintenance and negotiation for their capacity to materialise transformations in everyday life, design, lifestyles, demographics, environment, as well as social and cultural practices. In the case of conservation areas, gardens tend to be valued in terms of their closeness and potential to preserve specific historical elements. Plants in these gardens are cultivated to evoke period designs, such as Federation (c.1890–1915) and cottage gardens. In this article we turn to gardens and gardening to make sense of entanglements between cultural, historical and environmental elements, and we ask: what role do plants play in shaping our understanding of suburban heritage? To answer this question, we draw on oral histories, archival research and ethnography in Haberfield, the first model garden suburb in Australia. We show how plants channel and mediate multiple concerns that contest and extend ideas of heritage circulating in public discourse. Foregrounding the centrality of plants, this article contributes a dynamic definition of heritage that includes the entanglement of environmental stewardship and individual and collective heritage.     

(What Geographers Should Know About) The State of U.S. and Canadian Academic Professional Associations’ Engagement with Mental Health Practices and Policies

The professional organizations to which geographers belong and by which they are represented have a civic duty and ethical responsibility to educate their members about mental health issues in their professions and, by default, their work environments. And yet national-level professional associations in North America are lagging behind universities in adopting initiatives, commissioning reports, and looking into best practices around the mental health of their members. A survey of the Web sites of sixty-six professional associations in the social sciences, geographical sciences, and humanities in the United States and Canada reveals an uneven presence of attention to mental health issues in terms of their members’ research on mental health issues, awareness of mental health as a professional development issue, and engagement in mental health advocacy and public outreach. In this article, we explore how geography’s professional organizations compare to others with respect to these issues and suggest ways in which they can develop their own mental health protocols to address the crisis of mental health in the academy. Key Words: Academic professional associations, American Association of Geographers, Canadian Association of Geographers, mental health, mental health practices and policies.     

Mapping urban fingerprints of odonyms automatically extracted from French novels

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose and discuss a methodology to map the spatial fingerprints of novels and authors based on all of the named urban roads (i.e., odonyms) extracted from novels. We present several ways to explore Parisian space and fictional landscapes by interactively and simultaneously browsing geographical space and literary text. Our project involves building a platform capable of retrieving, mapping and analyzing the occurrences of named urban roads in novels in which the action occurs wholly or partly in Paris. This platform will be used in several areas, such as cultural tourism, urban research, and literary analysis. The paper focuses on extracting named urban roads and mapping the results for a sample of 31 novels published between 1800 and 1914. Two approaches to the annotation of odonyms are compared. First, we describe a proof of concept using queries made via the TXM textual analysis platform. Then, we describe an automatic process using a natural language processing (NLP) method. Additionally, we mention how the geosemantic information annotated from the text (e.g., a structure combining verbs, spatial relations, named entities, adjectives and adverbs) can be used to automatically characterize the semantic content associated with named urban roads.     

Forthcoming events

Abstract

This is the second of two papers which elaborates a framework for embedding urban models within GIS. In the first paper (Batty and Xie 1994), we outlined how the display functions of a proprietary GIS could be used to organize a series of external software modules which contained the central elements of the modelling process, namely dataset selection and analysis, and model specification, calibration, and prediction. In that paper, we dwelt on display and data analysis functions whereas here we outline the model-based functions of the system. We begin by reviewing residential location models based on population density theory, stating continuous and discrete model forms, and calibration methods. We then illustrate a pass through the software using data for the Buffalo urban region, showing how observed data and model estimates can be evaluated through graphic display. We present ways in which the system can be used to explore and fit a variety of models to different zoning systems and in so doing, show how subset selection and aggregation can be used to find models with good fit. Finally we draw conclusions and outline an agenda for further research.     

The Utility of In-Depth Interviews for Studying the Meaning of Environmental Risk

This paper explores the utility of in-depth interviews for understanding how individuals and communities socially construct the risks (degree of threat) from environmental hazards (phenomena which threaten), and describes some challenges for guarding against threats to trustworthiness (qualitative rigor). The paper involves the interface between a case study of the social construction of environmental risk (Baxter 1997), and a critical appraisal of criteria for establishing trustworthiness in qualitative research (Baxter and Eyles 1997). The review highlights challenges for the application of the criteria and the use of popular design and analysis strategies such as member checking and researcher triangulation. While such practices are problematic, this need not undermine the utility of these practices and the criteria they are meant to address. A critical appraisal of qualitative work must go beyond the mere mention of various strategies that are used to guard against threats to rigor.     

Evolving geographies of innovation: existing paradigms,critiques and possible alternatives

ABSTRACT

Theory development on the geographies of innovation has been very successful in incorporating the changing patterns of knowledge dynamics due to globalization, lifting the gaze beyond processes of localized learning and increasingly acknowledging the multilevel, multiscalar governance of innovation. Arguably less attention has been directed to the changing qualities and impacts of innovation as a result of globalization, notably in view of social polarization and climate change. The aim of the article is to provide suggestions for how research on the geography of innovation can be improved by engaging with a more capacious understanding of innovation and territorial development. The authors explore how socio-ecological innovation can be introduced in contemporary discussions and practices of place-based smart specialization policy. They conclude by suggesting that future research should address and interrogate (1) the rise of the foundational economy as an expression of place-based innovation, which entails new forms of co-governance, and (2) the challenge of experimentalism in the public sector, a sector that looms large in lagging regions and the places that were deemed not to matter until they took their revenge on the mainstream political system.     

Mortgage Foreclosures,Race, and Postrecession Lending

This article examines the effect of high foreclosure rates on postrecession lending. Our hypothesis is that high neighborhood foreclosure rates will have a significant and positive effect on the likelihood of mortgage loan denial. In a case study on Toledo, Ohio, we explore the role of foreclosure activity, race, and racial disparities in lending practices and how they differ across neighborhoods. Our results suggest that applicants in high-foreclosure neighborhoods have a greater likelihood of loan denial (ceteris paribus). We also find that minority applicants face a higher probability of loan denial in high-foreclosure minority neighborhoods. Overall, the results depict highly variable lending practices where race seems to make a difference albeit in a small subset of neighborhoods deeply affected by the foreclosure crisis. There is also some indication of a chilling effect on minority loan applicants in Toledo during the postrecession period. Key Words: foreclosure, logistic regression, mortgage lending, neighborhood contingency, race discrimination.     

Race,culture, and practice: segregation and local food in Birmingham,Alabama

In this study, we use a combination of geographic information systems and Bourdieuan social theory to analyze the development of a food policy council in Birmingham, Alabama. The questions we investigate are: What is the relationship between race and culture? How is this relationship manifest in practice within the alternative food and agriculture movement? In our work, we show how the racially segregated conditions of metropolitan Birmingham forge divergent habitus among Blacks and Whites in the region. Consequently, Whites have difficulty producing practices and interpretations of those practices that Blacks can recognize as legitimate, and vice versa. As a result, the food policy council emerges from and remains trapped within a space of Whiteness, and few Blacks serve on the council or participate in its production.     

Thinking with images in non-representational cities: vignettes from Berlin

Thinking about and with images has long been central to the practice of geographical fieldwork. This paper considers how the participation of images in urban-based fieldwork might be understood in the wake of non-representational theories. Drawing upon our experience of co-teaching an urban-based field course in Berlin, we discuss three ways in which such theories allow us to make more of the participation of images in the thinking-spaces of urban fieldwork. Specifically, we consider how images afford opportunities for attending to everyday ecologies of materials and things; for thinking through the rhythms of urban environments; and for producing affective archives. In concluding we suggest that thinking with images in urban fieldwork can be understood as part of the elaboration of ecologies of non-representational ethico-aesthetic practices.