Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city

Following recent scholarship on place and place-making, we identify key challenges for contemporary empirical research using the “Right to the City” as an analytic. We seek to distinguish between the aspirational “right” articulated as a political and conceptual call to arms on one hand, and the “actually existing rights” that are carved out through both formal and informal mechanisms (including political protest) in the everyday city on the other. Actually existing rights are defined not through fiat or via momentary revolutionary acts, but through the durability of relationships between multiple actors, including residents, citizens, states, and corporate agents. We re-articulate urban rights as actually contingent and agonistic properties of the relationships that citizens have with places. This paper uses the historic conflict over community gardens in New York as an illustration of how thinking of rights regimes as multiple, overlapping, and placed helps better illuminate potential political interventions. Thinking of rights and places as plural, overlapping, and contingent is analytically productive because it highlights (rather than overwriting) conflicts between competing articulations of rights and privileges in cities.     

The multifunctionality of heritage food: The example of pinole,a Mexican sweet

Pinole is a heritage foodstuff whose analysis provides the lens to understand the plight of Mexican farmers and the role translocal actors play in the articulation of global food heritage. To preserve and sell pinole, the pinole project was created from two groups of Mexicans born in Ozolco - a small rural village - and who now reside on either side of the Mexican and US border. By analysing members’ discourses, this article demonstrates how pinole is essentialised or commodified, and how it provides the platform for actors to formulate a variety of identities according to their socio-economic and geographical contexts. Bridging the literatures on food-studies and place-making, the multifunctionality of pinole transpires as inherently linked to the emergence of differing notions of place embedded in Ozolco. Exploring members’ varying priorities, from perpetuating rural lifestyles to preserving their hometown and its native blue corn, the project epitomises the struggle of farmers with Mexico’s migration drain and their efforts to economically engage with global markets of corn by circulating an added-value corn product within translocal networks as well as re-appropriate corn’s socio-cultural meaning.     

From matters of fact to places of concern? Energy,environmental movements and place-making in Chile and Thailand

As demand for energy is growing and resources become scarcer, energy increasingly becomes the site of heated controversies. In Latour’s terms, energy turns from a “matter of fact” into a “matter of concern”. In these energy controversies, environmental movements frequently play a central role, highlighting what is at stake in these developments. While these movements have often been studied, these studies rarely focus on the interaction between controversies, environmental movements, and place-making. In this article, we not only argue that energy is frequently turned from matter of fact into a matter of concern, but that this argument also extends to the notion of place. As such, energy controversies turn villages, cities, or regions themselves into “places of concern”. The article delves deeper into the production of places of concern through two case studies of energy controversies around power plants: a proposed coal plant in Bo Nok, Thailand, and HidroAysen, a hydropower project in Chilean Patagonia. We specifically focus on the issues that were opened up for debate in both countries, and on the role of environmental movements in the production of these places. Our examples are based on fieldwork and interviews in these two areas, as well as media and document analysis. While the two cases are from two different countries, we nonetheless find surprising parallels between them. These insights are instrumental to link theoretical debates on controversies and place-making. Moreover, they provide empirical insights into the transformative and lasting effects of energy controversies on people and places.     

Text, talk, things, and the subpolitics of performing place

This article tells the story of how a group of Dutch and Belgian citizens organized themselves to promote an area that they valued, to put it on the map, to raise awareness about its qualities, and to protect it from urban and industrial development. Our theoretical perspective focuses on the performative and political aspects of this place-making process and the discursive and material practices involved. We connect this to Beck’s concept of subpolitics.Our findings show how the group performed this place not only through text and talk - giving the area a name, using their knowledge and expertise to raise awareness about its values, lobbying and cooperating with decision-makers -, but also through things - installing art objects and information signs that articulate certain characteristics and values of the area. Our findings demonstrate the struggles involved in these performances. The group involved multiple perspectives on what the important values and characteristics of the area are and on what strategies would work best in trying to influence decision-making and protect the area. However, the use of expertise as the main strategy to gain influence excluded the more critical and activist strategies and privileging archaeological and historical values and characteristics came at the expense of attention on agricultural and natural values.Our findings make clear that performing place cannot be taken to be homogeneous and that it inevitably involves multiple perspectives and demands. The struggles, power relations and dynamics of inclusion and exclusion that this multiplicity implicates reveal a form of sub-politics that involves both politicization and depoliticization. Also, it is a form of subpolitics that is more diverse and ambiguous than Beck’s conceptualization presupposes by its emphasis on the role of outsiders as a homogeneous group.     

Cattle-based livelihoods,changes in the taskscape,and human–bear conflict in the Ecuadorian Andes

Cattle-raising, especially for dairy, has expanded in the Ecuadorian Andes since the late 1990s as smallholding farmers have shifted their livelihood activities away from crop-based agriculture due to changes in climate, market conditions, and rural out-migration. Non-migrants constructing cattle-based livelihoods are turning to cattle as the basis for “viable” livelihoods in order to remain in depopulating rural parishes. Non-migrant farmers express ideals such as autonomy and tranquility as reasons for their attachment to rural places. In turn, their livelihood activities remake these places materially. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s conceptualization of taskscape and landscape, I argue that cattle-based livelihoods create a taskscape prone to human–wildlife conflict. Since 2009, residents have reported dozens of Andean bear attacks on cattle. Cattle are vulnerable capital assets. They represent both an investment with daily and weekly dividends over many years, in the form of milk, and a long-term form of wealth storage. The turn to cattle-based livelihoods in this region has thus heightened human–bear conflict. The phenomenon of the human–bear conflict is therefore a product of shifting livelihoods and accompanying changes in the taskscape. This analysis demonstrates the importance of listening to narratives of place attachment and accounting for the cultural logics of livelihood choices when considering interventions to address human–wildlife conflict.