Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I will draw upon ANT to consider how political associations are generated within a global network of grassroots peasant movements. ANT has failed to fully consider the ways of generating such associations, especially the processes through which such associations are made. In so doing, the causes of and accountability for differential power relations have been precluded, as have the productive dimensions of that power. Through a consideration of the moments and strategies of network translation, I will show that power inequalities and intentionality act to determine the contours of network association.

In recent years in the UK there has been a great expansion in the number of young people travelling to Third World countries between school and university in order to participate as volunteers on structured gap year projects. Travel to such places is commonly perceived as ‘risky’, and takes young people outside the protective cocoon of UK health and safety legislation. One of the functions played by the providers of gap year projects is to mediate risk. On the basis of analysis of promotional literature, interviews with organisers of gap year projects, and focus groups of returned volunteers, in this paper I argue that the various strategies of risk mediation undertaken by gap year providers serve to reconcile modernising tendencies in UK society toward risk control and structure with postmodern inclinations towards individualisation and uncertainty.

In this paper we discuss some of the ‘strange maps’ of city life performed by homeless people. Current models of urban homelessness emphasise both the strategies by which spaces of homelessness are disciplined and contained, and the tactics deployed by homeless people to negotiate this containment. Whilst recognising the value of such work, we argue that there is a need to move beyond this ‘rationalist’ reading of the homeless city to recognise the importance of emotion and affect in the lives of homeless people, and the traces such emotions leave on the homeless city. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we chart the journeys and pauses made by homeless people in the city of Bristol, UK. We show how the geography of homelessness thus described moves beyond current accounts of the homeless city rooted in an understanding of the strategic or tactical use of space and allows for a more nuanced reading of urban space able to take proper account of the less visible, more ‘transient’ reinscriptions of place that mark the presence of homeless people in the city.

This paper explores the relevance of Bourdieu's 1980 spatial theorisation in Le Sens Pratique (The Logic of Practice 1990, Polity Press, Cambridge) for understanding intercity relations in contemporary globalisation—specifically, interdependencies between Castells's ‘space of flows’ and ‘places’ in advanced business services. Bourdieu's relational concepts are reviewed with reference to evidence from in-depth interviews with business actors in London and Frankfurt at the time of European Economic Monetary Union. The intention is to deepen understanding of emergent relations between the cities and, in so doing, to contribute to the reinterpretation of Bourdieu's input to geographical thinking.

Since the early 1990s there has been a proliferation of calls for integrated water resource management as a strategy for sustainable water management. While literatures have examined the extent to which institutions can adapt to management defined by hydrological zones, the significance of other sociotechnical spaces to sustainable water management has been overlooked in these debates. In this paper, having demonstrated the hybridity of the hydrological cycle, we argue that more attention needs to be given to the interaction between regional, network, and fluid spatialities in sustainable water management. More specifically, we examine the fluid work of intermediaries in between regional and network spaces in the translation of regional strategies into local practice. We conclude by looking at the implications of understanding the relationship between regions, networks, and fluids for water governance specifically and environmental governance more generally.

This paper highlights the role played by the specious present or moment, what some call the present of the now, in geographical discussions of social change. Its most explicit treatment as a temporal framing for such change has been in performative approaches, with their stress on the capacity of immersive body practices to produce difference through the ongoing repetition of such practices, a difference that plays on what is habitually or instinctively accessed through each specious present. However, we can also find debates focused on large-scale social practices that have combined various forms of structural or institutional contingency (ie customary practices, past investment cycles, etc) with becoming and which see becoming as rooted in the everyday reiteration of such practices, an interpretation that also privileges the moment as the point when becoming is actualised. Brought together, these different approaches provide the basis for a more broadly based interpretation of change focused on the specious present. This paper explores the case for this broader interpretation. It is divided into four sections. The first reviews those philosophical discussions of the specious present that have attracted most attention from human geographers. The second reviews the ways in which the geographical debate has used the specious present as a framing for change. The third examines how these different geographical treatments fill or extend the specious present, whilst the fourth and final section considers the implications of such thinking for how we interpret change.

This is an essay on the ‘conditions of possibility’ (Kant) for thinking about the seemingly bizarre spaces of a grandly chaotic city. It is concerned with the possibility of distinctively different, contradictory (therefore incompatible) yet coexisting general modes of thinking—epistemes or discursive formations (Foucault)—and with the possible processes of their production. I begin with those spaces themselves and with their contested social production (Lefebvre), what they appear to show and what they seem to mask. Then, in the second part of the paper, the task is to explore the conditions that might underlie the remembering of many things and the forgetting of many things (Anderson), in the myriad decisions and actions that account for the production of such spaces. The third part is concerned with what these spaces might themselves tell us about deeper origins, the society itself, and its possible trajectory. A brief final part addresses the most problematic of issues: how is self-aware, self-critical discourse to arise in (against?) an episteme that eschews the articulation of criticism?

Although Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) publicly and consistently eschewed the philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), his writings in effect made great use of the latter's key ideas and method. Like Bergson's philosophy, Lefebvre's urban criticism denounced the spatialization of time and gave priority to lived experience over the abstractions employed by static intellectual or traditionally analytical models of experience. Throughout The Urban Revolution, The Production of Space, The Critique of Everyday Life, Volumes 1–3, and the writings posthumously collected in Rhythmanalysis, Lefebvre's urban philosophical project appropriated the ideas Bergson advanced in his three major works, Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, and Creative Evolution, through their application to the problems of social life—a de facto collaboration that Bergson never lived to appreciate and that Lefebvre would never recognize. This connection is important not only as a corrective to the scant attention paid to Lefebvre's work by philosophers, but also because it reinforces both thinkers' own emphases on interdisciplinarity and on reconciling theories of knowledge with theories of life. The combined work of the two philosophers suggests a philosophical basis for the current emphasis of theory in both cultural studies and human geography in that it stresses the importance of acknowledging movement, process, and mobilities in approaches to the problems of urban life. The composite of Bergson–Lefebvre provides the basis for articulating a philosophy of the urban.

The paper aims at a rewriting of the concept of meaning as a connection between the social and the material, a multiple connection, perhaps the only possible intrinsic connection between things as different as ‘practice’ and ‘space’, and a major condition of what has been recently addressed as ‘inherent relatedness’. Drawing mainly on Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referentiality, I propose a reinterpretation of relatedness as a property of meaning. That property is defined as a duality of meaning—ie meaning as an event in our experience, yet in itself an experience of reference to acts, places, and other meanings. It implies that the very definition of meaning is referential—it is never self-contained or centred; it, rather, alludes always already to other meanings, acts, and spaces, referentially crossing boundaries while reasserting sensual and perceptive qualities. This renewed concept of meaning is proposed as a way to unveil relationality while actively keeping the subject's experience of identities and different materialities at work in the relation between practice and space. The paper places this key ontological problem and the quest for a relation between the social and the material into a particular, overlooked aspect of the society–space relation: the moment of sociation of practice and its informational, linguistic, and material conditions—a turn to communication and a ‘referential approach’ to the materiality of the social world.