Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Recent work by geographers has highlighted attempts by local groups to ‘jump scales’ in their efforts to contest the power of global capital. Sometimes such ‘scale jumping’ is also seen as part of an effort to bypass the nation-state. This paper explores a particular case of scale jumping, which illustrates some of the complexities of the process. Building on the anticorporate globalization momentum generated during the ‘battle in Seattle’ and the demonstrations during the February 2000 United Nations Commission on Trade and Development meetings in Bangkok, local antidam activists from Ubon Ratchathani province in Thailand scaled up their activities during 2000, utilizing various international connections to improve their visibility and strengthen their prospects for success. Rather than simply bypassing the nation-state, however, they have had to use both local and international resources to try to combat the policies of the nation-state, a project in which they have had real but still contested success. The case of antidam activism in Ubon Ratchathani illustrates some of the nuances of ‘globalization from below’, as well as the continuing power and relevance of the nation-state as a site of struggle.

In this paper I explore the metaphorical and material significance of the Millennium Forest at Borgie in the context of an emerging movement for the collective purchase of private estates in the crofting areas of Scotland. My argument focuses, first, on the means whereby the Forest, as visual art, is constituted as a site through which what Edward Said calls a ‘culture of resistance’ is mobilised and through which an inclusive sense of belonging to place is imagined. Second, I connect the poetics of resistance of the Forest with the politics of territorial land claims of the North Sutherland Community Forestry Trust, whose objective is to reverse ongoing processes of dispossession through the collective ownership and management of the 3000–hectare Borgie Forest which the one-hectare Millennium Forest borders.

In this paper I examine the reorganization of border controls associated with the Schengen process in the European Union and some of its close neighbours. Rather than asking the political science question of why states are committed to Schengen (or not, in the case of the United Kingdom and Ireland), I interpret Schengen as a political moment for genealogical reflection and analysis. The purpose is to contribute to a more historicized understanding of borders. Schengen is analyzed in terms of three trajectories, each of which allows us to denaturalize certain key aspects of the border, such as its identity, function, rationality, and contingency. Schengen is theorized in relation to the geopolitical border, the national border, and the biopolitical border. Other possibilities for genealogies of the border are also canvassed.

During the 1990s, local and federal urban policymakers, neoliberal politicians, and advocates for the poor came to a broad consensus: the geographic concentration of low-income, minority residents in public housing projects located in the inner city constitutes the fundamental problem facing US cities. Accordingly, to solve the problems allegedly associated with the spatial concentration of poverty, public housing, which concentrates low-income people in the inner city, must be demolished and the residents relocated. In this paper I argue that such federal public housing policies are based on a conceptually inadequate understanding of the role of space and of spatial influences on poverty and on the behavior of poor people. The use of spatial metaphors such as the ‘concentration of poverty’ or the ‘deconcentration of the poor’ disguises the social and political processes behind poverty and helps to provide the justification for simplistic spatial solutions to complex social, economic, and political problems.

In this paper we address questions of ‘shopping as practised’ and its relation to shopping space. We argue that modes of shopping, which comprise distinctive sets of shopping practices involving relations to goods (purchases), relations of looking (and seeing), the place of shopping in the rhythms of everyday life, and the socialities of shopping, are used to invest meaning in particular types of shopping space and to produce individual, accumulated, personalised shopping geographies that weave together particular locations and generic spaces. Furthermore, modes of shopping are shown to require specific sets of knowledge to practise and to relate to specific subject positions, namely necessity and choice. These arguments are developed in relation to charity shops and charity shopping. However, they are shown to have broader implications: specifically they show the relationality of modes of shopping and shopping spaces, and the distinctions between shopping geographies and retail geographies. Theoretically, they suggest that accounts of shopping need to locate meaning in practice; that the meanings of shopping (and the meanings invested in particular shopping spaces) are therefore potentially unstable; and that accounts of the constituting subjects of shopping need to take seriously the spatialities of subjectivities.

Census counts are used in the United States as the basis for a derived ‘apportionment count’, which is employed by the President to allocate seats in the House of Representatives across the 50 States. This apportionment count includes not only those individuals recorded by the census (either by direct count or by imputation) as usually resident in each State but in addition federal employees, including military personnel, and their dependents. This practice has been challenged on several occasions in the courts, most recently by the State of Utah, which claimed that it was denied a fourth seat in the House for the period 2002 – 12 as a consequence. Its claim was denied, for reasons which are discussed here and which throw further light (following Hannah, 2001 Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 515 – 534) on the social constructions involved in the conduct and use of censuses.