Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This essay seeks to reframe recent debates on sociospatial theory through the introduction of an approach that can grasp the inherently polymorphic, multidimensional character of sociospatial relations. As previous advocates of a scalar turn, we now question the privileging, in any form, of a single dimension of sociospatial processes, scalar or otherwise. We consider several recent sophisticated ‘turns’ within critical social science; explore their methodological limitations; and highlight several important strands of sociospatial theory that seek to transcend the latter. On this basis, we argue for a more systematic recognition of polymorphy—the organization of sociospatial relations in multiple forms—within sociospatial theory. Specifically, we suggest that territories (T), places (P), scales (S), and networks (N) must be viewed as mutually constitutive and relationally intertwined dimensions of sociospatial relations. We present this proposition as an extension of recent contributions to the spatialization of the strategic-relational approach (SRA), and we explore some of its methodological implications. We conclude by briefly illustrating the applicability of the ‘TPSN framework’ to several realms of inquiry into sociospatial processes under contemporary capitalism.

This paper explores what is meant by ‘being European’ in contemporary Bosnia. Over the past two decades, Western politicians have justified interventions in Bosnia through recourse to an Orientalist binary between a rational and progressive ‘Europe’, and an irrational and retrogressive ‘Balkans’. Current efforts to incorporate Bosnia into European structures reproduce this imaginary, in this instance though replacing space with time, suggesting that Bosnia needs to move from a ‘Balkan’ past to a ‘European’ future. In this paper I explore the political effects of such imaginaries through two levels of analysis. In the first, I critically examine the ongoing implications of the geopolitical framing of Bosnia as Europe's ‘Other’. In the second, I explore how nationalist politicians have deployed European rhetoric in order to stake claims to resources and establish respect. I conclude by arguing that a sovereignty paradox underpins both ‘geopolitical’ and ‘nationalist’ European rubrics in Bosnia: while idealising forms of solidarity based on broad social and cultural affiliations, such discourses simultaneously seek to promote the state as the primary territorialisation of political life.

In this paper I seek to contribute to the burgeoning literature on cosmopolitanism by drawing on Ulrich Beck's work on the cosmopolitan implications of globalisation. In doing so, I argue that insights gained from Beckian understandings of risk and cosmopolitanism can be ‘ab-used’ to reclaim their potential for scholarship in postcolonial contexts. Drawing on the work of Bob Jessop, I critique Beck's argument via its extension and explore the production of ‘cosmopolitan communities’ which are far from neutrally cosmopolitan. The paper examines how ‘cosmopolitan communities’ can be usefully envisaged not solely as a necessary response to world risks, but also as the contingent outcome of state strategies designed to manage forms of political and economic uncertainty by reconfiguring geopolitical space. The state strategies explored here are ones which have sought to reconfigure social forces by rearticulating discourse on the identity of overseas populations, to harness their boundary crossing, or cosmopolitan, material and representational resources. Rethinking the emergence of ‘cosmopolitan communities’ and identities in this manner allows them to be defined by, and anchored in, different geopolitical orders and geohistorical contexts. The empirical context which substantiates this argument is offered by exploring four key moments in the Indian state's strategic-relational approach to its overseas populations from 1900 to 2003. In this paper, the terms ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘cosmopolitan communities’ are, therefore, deployed to refer to a geohistorically deep experience of cultivating geopolitical relations across borders. The paper maintains that ‘cosmopolitan communities’ exist alongside, go beyond, and also existed before political arenas defined by nation-centred accounts of history and geography.

For impoverished African states the attraction of inward flows of capital is vital and migrants are one such source of finance. Some governments actively encourage this, which brings out tensions between national affiliation and more particularistic forms of identification. This paper examines this in the context of Ghana. Between the mid-1970s and the late 1990s there was largescale out-migration from Ghana, creating what has been termed a ‘neo-diaspora’. The migrants have mainly settled in cities in Western Europe and North America where they have developed institutional networks linking them to other diasporic locations and to Ghana. These migrants have complex identities forged from multiple meetings in numerous places. Some of these are rooted in hometown, clan, and family attachments and the obligations this brings. The current government (in line with many developing countries) is making a major play to ‘harness’ the diaspora for political support and inward investment. Tensions are being played out about dual citizenship and whether the migrants’ economic commitments to Ghana are matched by rights as full citizens. The Ghana government has to tread a careful path between attracting investment and garnering the right sort of political support, since people in the diaspora often have an ambivalent relationship to domestic politics. One of the vehicles through which the Ghanaian state seeks to square this is through encouraging hometown associations in various cities in the global North to fund development at the local level through various local–local partnerships. Hence, the nation, the national good, and development are being promoted through particularistic ethnic and locality-based organisations, which brings to light multiple and overlapping political communities.

Discussions of cosmopolitanism in Bombay often focus on the rubrics of communal tension, tolerance, and violence, and frequently report the decline of a once cosmopolitan city, especially as a result of the communal riots and bombings that occurred in the early 1990s. However, claims that the city has undergone a general social transformation since the 1990s need to be tempered by the multiple forms of cosmopolitan imaginations and practices that exist in the city. There is a wide variety of alternative cosmopolitan formations—not all of them progressive—reflected in civil society organizations and lifestyle changes for different groups, and often vividly reflected in film. This paper will chart two examples of contemporary cosmopolitanism. The first part of the paper explores the cautious optimism of film in the promise of cosmopolitan Bombay during the early years of Independence, before briefly discussing how cinema later attempted to reflect the destabilizing of the postcolonial vision of urban national development. The second part of the paper begins with discussion of the contemporary cinematic portrayal of elite-oriented global cosmopolitan modernity, and then contrasts this with a different form of global cosmopolitan modernity articulated through the work of the Slum/Shack Dwellers International network. This discussion conceives of cosmopolitanism as social, marking a counterpoint to the tendency in discourses of liberal cosmopolitanism that emphasizes the agency of the globally aware individual. Methodologically, the paper seeks to demonstrate that relating often analytically separate realms such as film and civil society can provide a wider politicocultural lens through which to examine urban change.

This paper is based on the experiences of street traders from South Asia and West Africa who currently live and work in Barcelona. I argue that in the ‘informal’ and marginal spaces inhabited, utilised, and created by these traders, they produce forms of nonelite cosmopolitanism through which livelihoods are sustained, social bonds are strengthened, and fluid, diasporic identities are produced. These are enabled by the development and maintenance of globalised networks and allegiances that are negotiated in highly localised ways and are often based on religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Thus, mobile and abiding cultural characteristics coexist as peddlers’ experiences of travelling and their encounters in place challenge conventional notions of cosmopolitanism and parochialism, and their apparent dualism. The paper introduces the notion of a strategic cosmopolitanism that emerges out of the need for vulnerable individuals and groups to make a living in an environment characterised by insecurity, and concludes by enquiring whether there are temporal dimensions to their cosmopolitanism.

In many poorer countries, middle classes are reshaping economic and political life, and nowhere is this process more evident than in postcolonial India. This paper uses ethnographic research on student politicians from rich farming backgrounds to reflect on class ‘in the making’. Building on a critical reading of the work of Bourdieu, I document the ability of young men from rich farming families in western Uttar Pradesh to entrench their middle-class standing in the space of university politics. I pay particular attention to the local-level political networks through which upwardly mobile young men from rural middle-caste backgrounds seek to express, legitimate, and secure their power. The paper points to the imaginative and energetic manner in which middle classes in poorer countries may defend their interests within local politics. I stress the importance of studying middle-class formation relationally and with reference to the spatiality of power.

In their recent critique of the politics of scale literature, Marston, Jones, and Woodward (2005, “Human geography without scale” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 30 416–432) argue against the continued use of scale in human geography. While acknowledging that there are significant problems with scale as it has been conceptualized and operationalized in human geography, we argue that more, rather than less, attention needs to be paid to the political genealogy of scale ontologies, defined here as the historically contextualized analysis of the social production of scaled knowledge. As a first step in this direction, we develop a poststructural reframing using performativity, as an approach that explores the reiterative and citational practices through which scale effects are socially produced. We are especially concerned in this paper to examine the ways in which scale effects are produced and deployed as discursive devices that create timespace conjunctures and ruptures between place and identity. Using sites of memory as our analytical lens, we trace the citational practices that have naturalized and sedimented a series of scale effects in Narva, Estonia, and explore the consequences of these discursive rescalings for the articulation of place and identity.