Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The widespread concern in recent South African poetry with landscape and the question of what place the poet occupies in that landscape arises less as a response to the turn of the millennium than to the historical end of formal apartheid, but nonetheless marks an epochal shift in sensibility. Whereas much poetry of the 1980s evoked a sense of extreme dislocation in recent time and local space (marked by references to a precarious present of forced removal and migrancy, and unspecified, unsettled futures), some significant recent work has been marked by a desire to relocate the human presence in South Africa in terms of geological time and continental space. This generalization needs to be qualified by reference to racial and political positioning within South Africa, and in this paper I distinguish between the work of committed white writers such as ex-political-prisoner Jeremy Cronin (now Secretary of the South African Communist Party) and Barry Feinberg (now curator of the Mayibuye Centre), and the work of black writers such as Don Mattera, Seitlhamo Motsapi, Lesego Rampolokeng, and Daniel P Kunene. The regrounding of the human presence in South Africa by white writers such as Cronin and Feinberg attempts a radical remapping of South African cultural identity in utopianly unraced terms, while the reclamation of continental African and local South African place names by black writers such as Mattera, Motsapi, Rampolokeng, and Kunene draws attention to the material reality of a postapartheid heterotopia in which South Africa's postmodern landscape is being divided up and sold off in ways that combine a very old-fashioned rhetoric of class and space with a new/old racial coding.

In “Brentwood Notebook” the Canadian author Douglas Coupland depicts Brentwood, an affluent community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as a place that in many ways hardly deserves our attention, but that for some of its characteristics may nevertheless serve as a symbol of our hypermodern Western society at the close of the 20th century. Coupland's essay can be interpreted as a challenging experiment with time and space. His Brentwood has various faces and they are evoked in a text that relies on a number of creative and disciplinary traditions, including cultural philosophy, social and cultural geography, new journalism, and literature. His representation of Brentwood is not only based on his personal observations, but it is also informed by three powerful cultural myths, involving notions generally associated with utopia, dystopia, and the ideal of upper class suburban life. If we are to grasp the meaning of the “Brentwood Notebook” properly, we should focus on what the text reveals about this California community and especially on how it conveys the author's understanding of that place. A close reading suggests that the tension between presence and absence, between the visible and the hidden, as well as between progress, stasis, and decay characterizes Brentwood in particular.

This paper uses the work of the Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis, to reflect on the nature of resource economies and the single-industry towns that form their backbone. For Innis resource or staple economies are subject to extreme spatial and temporal disruptions that are both creative and destructive. Single-industry towns are on the front line of both that creativity and that destructiveness. They enjoy rapid growth when a new resource is found, but are equally hastily abandoned when resources run out, or prices fall. Innis used the metaphor of the cyclone to depict this pattern of staples accumulation and consequent crisis. This paper will, first, elaborate on Innis's general cyclonic scheme that joins space, time, and staples production, and second, provide a case study of the forest-industry town of Port Alberni, British Columbia, to exemplify his argument.

It is now commonplace to assert that the contemporary discursive landscape is strewn with an abundance of environmental narratives. Yet these stories about nature seldom speak of the material geographies that link practices of postindustrial consumption to often-distant spaces of commodity supply. A postscarcity narrative in which the availability of natural resources no longer poses a limiting factor on economic growth, therefore, characterizes the current period. In this paper I examine how these narratives of ‘resource triumphalism’ construct the nature of commodities and the places that supply them. Using a range of sources, I illustrate how extractive spaces are constructed through a discursive dialectic which simultaneously erases socioecological histories and reinscribes space in the image of the commodity. The paper advances the claim that, despite their apparent marginality in narratives of postindustrialism, primary commodity-supply zones play a key role within broader narratives about modernity and social life. I draw on Hetherington's reworking of the concept of heterotopia to argue that commodity-supply zones be considered contemporary ‘badlands’, marginal spaces in and through which broader processes of sociospatial ordering are worked out. By examining the geographical imaginaries associated with mineral extraction, I demonstrate how contemporary discourses of commodity-supply space facilitate the material practices through which such ordering occurs.

How do strategists' decisions regarding the organization of corporate resources reflect the interplay of power and identity within the firm? And what is at stake for the production of value? These are the questions I address through the presentation of an ethnographic study I conducted in the Asian and Mexican facilities of a multinational firm that produces outboard motors and boats. I draw attention to a particular moment in this corporation's history when a group of US – American engineers try to prohibit corporate support for a new product designed by the company's Hong Kong Chinese engineers. When the Asian engineers defy their American colleagues' directives, they are referred to as ‘Asian spies’ and are threatened with dismissal. In this case, I demonstrate how these nationalist turf-battles inside a corporation are struggles over the form of value itself. They are battles over how the materials of value are recognized as such across a corporation's employees and within the commodities it manufactures.

This paper outlines certain benefits that spatial analysis offers to anthropological research, and shows how anthropology and related linguistic research may in turn contribute to the understanding of the social determinants of spatial order. It presents a case study of spatial order in a rural West African society. Although the examples are from a particular setting, the theoretical frame is a general one: the analysis will focus on the connections between social order, language, and the perception of space.

In this paper I examine how notions of the surface are being reconstituted in architectural theory and practice. Specifically, I contrast how modernist-influenced theory treated surfaces with how some architectural theorists today are beginning to think about them. Whereas modernist theory saw surfaces as dedicated to the expression of interior volume, recent interactive technologies such as ‘smart walls’ mean that surfaces no longer are fixed but can, instead, be changed in ways that are beyond the control of the architects who designed the structures of which they are a part. This means that surfaces are much less predictable and much more subject to transformation by individual users than in the past. Such a technological revolution, I argue, is ‘de-authorizing’ architecture as it is understood in conventional, professional, and disciplinary terms, and is bringing about new conceptions of time and space in architectural practice.

The contingent valuation method is often used for valuing environmental goods which have nonuse as well as direct-use values. However, it is often not clear how respondents to a contingent valuation survey allocate values when asked for willingness-to-pay amounts. In this paper, we investigate use and nonuse values for the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus), an endangered species, by using a survey conducted in Mytilene, on the island of Lesvos, Greece. Using factor analysis of the survey we found five factors which described respondents' attitudes towards conserving the monk seal, which were labelled protection, moral responsibility, ambivalence, limited resources, and tourist potential. Multilevel modelling was then used to compare willingness-to-pay responses with attitudinal and sociodemographic variables. The results suggest that willingness to pay for use, option, and existence values are predicted by different attitudinal variables.

Although it is widely accepted that urban housing markets are too complex to be described by unitary market, equilibrium models, the role of submarkets has not been embraced in applied research. In this paper it is argued that this is unsurprising and can be traced to the failure to establish a theoretical or empirical basis for submarket modeling. I note that, throughout the housing economics literature, the term ‘submarket’ is subject to a range of definitions; the means of identifying submarkets has varied; empirical analyses have employed differing tests; and case studies have focused on a range of different cities and different time periods. This inconsistency has prevented the development of a coherent analytical approach. By using data from the Glasgow housing market a range of alternative definition and identification schemes are compared. The evidence suggests that submarkets are important and that, rather than being based exclusively on the similarity of property characteristics or geographical contiguity, the dimensions of housing submarkets are determined by both spatial and structural factors simultaneously.