Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

The discussion in this paper moves through three stages. In the first the relation of political spaces and borders to citizenship is interrogated; in the second, notions of deterritorialization and reterritorialization are examined in relation to ideas of the material constitution of Europe; and, in the third section it returns to the issue of citizenship and its relation to cosmopolitanism. Rather than being a solution or a prospect, Europe currently exists as a ‘borderland’, and this raises a number of issues that need to be confronted.

Protest movements offer a rich vernacular for investigating how the connections between social justice and creating political subjects always involve spatial transformations. In this paper, I put Jacques Derrida's contemplations regarding justice as incalculable in conversation with critiques of public witnessing and the role of empathy for catalyzing political action, and I do so to present some speculations over why a social justice movement in northern Mexico has weakened domestically as it has gained steam internationally. The movement has grown since 1993 in response to the violence against women and girls and the surrounding impunity that has made northern Mexico famous as a place of ‘femicide’. By examining these events in relation to the debates on calculating justice and on the politics of witnessing, I hope to add to the growing literature within and beyond geography on the interplay of emotion and social justice politics while illustrating what is at stake in these dynamics for Mexico's democracy and for women's participation in it.

Drawing on empirical research with young refugees and asylum seekers (aged 11–18) now living in Sheffield, UK, and Aarhus, Denmark, respectively, this paper explores some of the relationships between identity, belonging, and place. We begin by reflecting on the young people's sense of identity as Somali in the context of periods of forced and voluntary mobility. We then consider what it means to be Muslim in the context of the different communities of practice in Aarhus and Sheffield. Finally, we consider the extent to which the interviewees self-identify as Danish or British. In reflecting on these different dimensions of identification and belonging, we conclude by highlighting the importance of being ‘in place’ for attachment and security, and identify implications of the findings for integration and cohesion policies.

This paper critically engages with the concepts of ‘feelings of safety’ and ‘fear of crime’ as they have been deployed in recent politics of community safety. While the first part of the paper discusses the staging of what is referred to as a dispositif of safety, which discursively frames subjective–spatial relations in powerful ways, the second part moves towards an understanding of lived experiences of spaces and places that unfold within, but also beyond, the dispositif of safety. For this purpose, the German concept of Geborgenheit is introduced. For a theoretical elaboration of this concept, Walter Benjamin's work around experience and temporality is referred to and articulated with Deleuzian theory. An analysis of Geborgenheit, it is argued, displaces hegemonic notions of ‘safety’ by addressing the dynamics that enable subjects to open up to and nest within a place. The paper concludes with a discussion of vignettes from a qualitative study in Berlin in order to exemplify the constitution of geographies of Geborgenheit in the context of recent safety politics.

This paper explores how the mobile body and, specifically, the face have become a site of observation, calculation, prediction, and action in the process of moving across borders. The paper explores how in the circulatory space of the airport/border, the body's circulatory systems, biological rhythms, and affective expressions have become objects of suspicion—mobile surfaces from which inner thoughts and potentially hostile intentions are scrunitized, read, and given threatening meaning by the newest modes of airport security and surveillance. Examined according to the vectoral modes of historicity and virtual possibility, as well as the internal and external play of intention and feeling, the paper uncovers an increased attention to differential axes of mobility—of past and future, surface and interior. The paper situates these techniques within the preemptive biopolitical securitisation of mobility across borders which, it is argued, has found its referent object in the primal realm of affective capacities.

This paper discusses the social history, attitudes, and understanding of approaches to the utilisation of wetlands, their drainage, preservation, management, and research. The analysis is in two phases; the manifestation of wetlands in map making in Iceland; and the social history of wetlands. Both phases focus on the 20th century until the present. Maps and the history of mapmaking are used as a heuristic devise to gauge and set the scene for the perception and experience of wetlands in the thinking of people. In order to illustrate this development, examples are taken from literature and travel accounts. Current endeavour in the utilisation of land and biotopic classification, best demonstrated in maps today, foregrounds the nature of the striations, making maps, and drainage ditches. Thus wetlands are viewed differently today, but nonetheless lingering traces of the modernist logic of progress remain, as we aim to demonstrate. The lines that form the tufts on the Icelandic maps are thus never stable, the striation never an end but constantly motile.

The public nature of a high-rise building can be understood in two ways. Visually, it is an expression of architectural imagery. Physically, it is a layout of attached public spaces in which people can interact. Recently, high-rise buildings in Taiwan have grown in terms of their aesthetics as well as their height. With the aid of a survey of the aesthetics and layouts of high-rise buildings in Taiwan, the symbolic representation and public nature of high-rise buildings are examined. In addition, the Taipei 101 International Financial Centre is illustrated to show that high-rise building in Asia is moving away from a focus on construction technology and building style toward concern with architectural imagery and cultural identification which emphasise autonomous cultural representation.

In this paper I seek to move beyond understandings of Colombia as a failed state or qualified democracy by exploring how the state continues to govern despite widespread shortcomings. I argue that two technologies of governance are central to contemporary rule in Colombia: state fragmentation and citizen education. These technologies are exemplified by the recovery of public space from street vendors in order to preserve it as a privileged site for citizenship. This process is made possible by the proliferation of state agencies, policies, and plans which define the problem of public space as one of its invasion by ambulant vendors, and the solution to this invasion as the relocation of vendors to spatially marginalized and state-regulated markets where they are taught to overcome their ‘culture of informality’ by participating in political and economic transactions in state-prescribed ways. I argue that the recovery of public space and relocation of street vendors is a spatial technology of governance that codes structural inequalities as a question of culture while producing new forms of segregation in which citizens and street vendors have differentiated places and rights to mobility. This study analyzes the relationship between state and citizen construction while considering the pedagogical work implicated in the resilience of both democracy and neoliberal economic policies.

The lack of solid footing in political space is what makes the human rights claims of refugees most vulnerable in the contemporary international order. However, modern international human rights law and protection are predicated on a spatialised sense of the subject of rights that is formed in opposition to and in exclusion of the refugee. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) seeks to locate refugees as part of the universe of human rights through refugee registration exercises; it attempts to map their displacement within the geography of emplaced citizenry. Its conventional efforts in this regard fail, though, and, rather, serve to illustrate how the informal international movement of refugees still exceeds and, thus, undermines the universalism of the UN vision of human rights and freedoms. Consequently, the UNHCR has recently resorted to the highly sophisticated computerised registration technology, called proGres, under its Project Profile system. While the detail and complexity of Project Profile allow for a mapping no more capable of accurately tracing the movements of refugees within the global geography of universal human rights, the complex of digitalised mapping systems brought together within Project Profile permit the production and performance of an international space in which humanitarians may expect refugees to fit. The force of the UNHCR's new registration system is to produce a manner of spatialising refugees that can legitimate and moralise their constraint within orders of international politics and security which allow little room for response to the rights claims of refugees. Rather, their claims to human rights become foreclosed within a virtual understanding of human displacement with respect to emplacement in the state.