Pernicious assimilation: reframing the integration of the urban informal economy in Southern Africa

This paper argues that many of the official attempts to “integrate” the urban informal economy into the mainstream economy are fundamentally flawed. An unpacking of the “integrative” agenda as pursued by planning and other governmental practices reveals that “integration”, as currently practiced, does not herald the mainstreaming of the informal economy. Drawing on research in Zimbabwe and evidence from other countries in Southern Africa, I argue that what we witness is a sinister stripping away of the lifeblood of informality. This malicious form of integration entails crippling Faustian bargains. In the end, this pernicious assimilation insidiously does away with that which makes informality a livelihood haven for the majority of urbanites. I conclude that the duplicitous integration is unworkable and leaves the big questions of inclusion untouched, hence the persistence of the “problem” of informality.     

Digitizing the Dragon Head,Geo-Coding the Urban Landscape: GIS and the Transformation of China's Urban Governance

While local governments have been one of the major user groups of GIS, there is still little research on how GIS development in local government might be intertwined with urban governance, particularly in non-Western contexts. Drawing upon insights from GIS implementation, critical GIS, and governmentality studies, this article seeks to bridge this gap by examining the implications of Chinese urban government GIS practices amidst China's changing urban governance. Through an in-depth case study of Shenzhen, this article analyzes how urban GIS has been transformed from a practice involving internal organizational workflow automation, into a more active dimension of the governance of urban spaces—reflected in the expanding practice of “geo-coding” the urban landscape. “Geo-coding” here refers to a broadly defined spatial practice of carving and reconstructing a rational urban space. GIS practices have constituted a particular form of geographic rationality that seeks to govern at a distance while simultaneously regulating the urban environment, intersecting with the broader transformations of China's urban governance. These GIS developments have been largely government-centric rather than citizen-centric, yet they provide possibilities for new forms of spatial knowledge production for citizen participation in urban governance.     

Governing cities through participation—a Foucauldian analysis of CityPlan Vancouver

In 1995 Vancouver City Council approved new policy guidelines for future urban development that departed from the traditional model of suburban growth, instead prioritizing urban intensification. Theoretically guided by the Foucauldian governmentality approach, I argue in this paper that this shift towards intensification can be understood through an analysis of Vancouver’s extensive participatory planning process known as CityPlan. Created as an answer to conflicts around the intensification of historically evolved urban neighbourhoods, CityPlan Vancouver exemplifies a specific form of urban governance that has been understudied in geography and participation research: a governance consisting of conducting the conduct of citizens through participatory processes. The paper examines this “governing through participation” by carrying out a microanalysis of the problematizations, rationalities, and technologies of CityPlan. Such an analysis differs significantly from an evaluation of participatory planning processes against normative ideals, and thus enriches critical research on participation in urban governance.     

Edge city or bust: dismantling a regime of aesthetic governmentality in Oak Brook,Illinois

This article examines the construction and dismantling of a regime of “aesthetic governmentality” in Oak Brook, Illinois. This regime consists not only of policy and law, but more importantly of a way of seeing and evaluating Oak Brook’s idyllic suburban landscape. Drawing on interview and archival data, the case is made that the power of this longstanding regime has begun to decline in recent years, making space for new ways of understanding life in Oak Brook and for new social and political priorities. These changes have shifted the balance of power away from the small, affluent residential population and toward the demands of local business interests (including several multinational corporations). The article concludes with the cautionary argument that the dismantling of this regime may simply displace one kind of exclusion in favor of another.     

State territorialization,neoliberal governmentality: the remaking of Dafen oil painting village,Shenzhen, China

ABSTRACT

After being showcased during Shanghai EXPO2010, Dafen village has been put forward as an example of “best practice” governance that has transformed a backward urban village into an art cluster. Behind this glorified image is a continuously re-constructed social landscape. In this study, we adopt the approach of state territorialization, drawing insights from the Foucauldian concept of governmentality as disposition of things—in particular people and their relations to land. At issue here is how the dynamic process of territorialization, combined with the Chinese version of moral citizenship, serves the remaking of subjects, landscape, and their relations. In Dafen village, the experiment of fabricating conditioned welfare within China’s welfare system conjures up a new hukou arrangement and new forms of inclusion and exclusion. By exercising the technology of self-regulation, the state seeks temporal and fragile alignments with selected social groups. The outcomes are contingent and frequently take the form of new configurations of power.     

Thinking inside the neoliberal box: The micro-politics of agro-food philanthropy

This paper examines a philanthropy-led initiative which has as its objective to jump start the transition to a more sustainable and just food system in California. The first major project funded was a “vivid picture” of California’s food system twenty-five years in the future. The outcome of the project is a report that is glossed with the tropes of neoliberalism in all of its key organizing frameworks, analytics, cognitive maps, and idioms and argues for “opportunities-based approaches” as the engine of change. Yet, as described in the paper, this outcome was initially under-determined, and, in fact, the funders had originally intended to leverage their resources for large scale transformation. By examining four moments in the development of the Vivid Picture project, the grantee selection, the modeling exercise, the stakeholder meetings, and the qualitative interviews, this paper will show how existing techniques of neoliberal governance such as modeling, audit, best-practices, and stakeholder participation, as well as current norms of philanthropy, shaped what is thinkable and hence actable. It will also show how “stakeholders” played a constitutive role in producing the outcomes of the project, in part because their input reflected already-developed notions of the possible within the current climate of neoliberalism. In the end it will argue that the failure of the Vivid Picture to look beyond the neoliberal present is itself evidence of the proliferation of neoliberal governmentalities. Still, the entire process galvanized many of the movement actors who were left out of the funding process and, in that way, produced political openings.     

Embedding the reforms in New Zealand schooling: After neo-liberalism?

Two decades of reforms to the state in New Zealand have altered policy, its making and the ways in which it is realised in micro settings. This paper uses the example of schooling to examine the rationality of these reforms, their spatial logic and what they mean for our understanding of the national state. It examines the development and practices of the Education Review Office (ERO), the body established under the reforms to evaluate and audit the performance of schools in the new national education `system'. The paper interprets neo-liberalism as a governmentality, and argues that the development of new managerial technologies of remote control such as contract and audit constitute a spatial model of control. The paper suggests that this model encourages, and relies for its efficacy upon, the cultivation of neo-liberal subjectivities. It argues that although the political projects working through the reforms have shifted, the altered rationality of the state and the models of control erected to secure it define an enduring and neo-liberalising social transformation. The shift to the `Third Way' in New Zealand's political and social economy is underpinned by neo-liberalising processes, which continue to reorganise social and economic spaces. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Making New Zealanders through commemoration: Assembling Anzac Day in Auckland, 1916–1939

Abstract:  Anzac Day in New Zealand has been traditionally framed within a nationalist discourse, in which the events of the day have provided the medium for the remembrance of a singular national event. Moving beyond this interpretative tradition the paper examines Anzac Day as a moment in the exercise of an ongoing governmental power concerned with issues of contemporary conduct. Focusing on interwar Auckland the paper traces the assemblage of time, space and rhetoric, which enabled the production of a commemorative, governmental landscape.     

The green governmentality in an Indonesian metropolis

The current interest in the ‘clean and green’ that has become part of urban governmentality in Indonesia's metropolis is illustrative of the practice of becoming a citizen of Jakarta today. The ongoing demand to reclaim and produce green space, however, entails the displacement of those who are considered to be blocking the success of urban green initiatives. This paper points to ways in which contemporary forms of power are built on the premise that a green environment requires individuals to reconfigure themselves to gain social legitimacy. It shows how the greening of Jakarta can be understood as part of the evolving technology of governance associated with postauthoritarian Indonesia.     

Mothering urban space,governing migrant women: the construction of intersectional positions in area-based interventions in Berlin

In this paper, we investigate new ways of governing migrant populations in Germany brought forth by social policies on the local level of inner-city neighborhoods. In recent years, numerous initiatives on the local level have constituted the ‘migrant neighborhood’ as a site of governmental attention. One initiative that policymakers consider particularly innovative is the neighborhood mothers program in Berlin, a program that instructs migrant women as agents of neighborhood improvement and encourages them to establish peer-to-peer relations to other migrant women in order to pass on social norms. In the paper, we combine governmentality and intersectionality theory to critically examine the modes of behavior change promoted by the neighborhood mothers program and the political rationalities that are used to justify the governing of (and through) migrant women. We draw particular attention to the spatial dimensions of the neighborhood mothers program, to the ways in which it targets domestic and intimate spaces as sites of inspection and intervention and appoints migrant women as ‘door openers’ for entry of the state into the regulation of families and communities.