Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper explores the contribution that geographers can make to debates about the nature and utility of participatory approaches. It argues for a constructive reconciliation between these approaches and the growing poststructural critique of participation. Through an examination of the similarities and entanglements between power and empowerment it highlights the centrality of geographical issues to understanding how participation works and how its resources might be distanciated beyond the arenas of participatory projects to produce empowering effects elsewhere.

A growing number of reflective and critical voices around participatory research practices have questioned the extent to which power can be transferred to participants through such methods. In this paper I begin by reflecting on everyday difficulties using participatory methods with a group of young people who belonged to a youth forum in Stoke-on-Trent, England. These difficulties point to the way that research spaces constitute contexts which can enable the production of certain kinds of knowledge, and to the way that such contexts are influenced by other spaces where people might be asked to participate and self-represent. For my fieldwork participants, official or government-led initiatives around participation in decision making were often seen as problematic. However, I also argue that the young people drew on more embodied or experiential forms of knowledge in their activities, generated through participation in everyday collective practices and sociability. Such knowledge may not have been articulated but was nonetheless powerful. This suggests new ways of thinking about participation and empowerment, both for research projects and for other kinds of intervention.

Participatory action research has increasing attention in geography in recent years, with numerous discussions about how best to proceed and lessons learned from past efforts. There has been less interest, though, in critically probing the circumstances under which participatory research takes place: in other words, the sociospatial contexts within which such research approaches are chosen. One explanation may be that participatory action researchers sometimes infer that the reasons for their choices are primarily ethical and political. In this paper, I consider this and other assumptions about participatory action research, drawing upon my own involvement in two action research projects in Ottawa, Canada. I argue that reflecting on this question is a particularly timely undertaking, given the ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ in which professionalization and partnerships are becoming more prominent. I begin by reviewing what has been said about participatory action research and the circumstances under which this approach is likely to be selected, and reflect on how these discussions might be enhanced by linking their circumstances specifically to emerging analyses about spaces of neoliberalism. Using these insights, I then examine the sociospatial context for the two studies and how their characteristics had specific effects on their methodological choices. All of these elements provide the scaffolding for consideration of the rationalities that supported the usage of participatory research in one study and the lack of engagement with this approach in the other.

The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), a citizen panel charged with the job of recommending to the US Secretary of Agriculture guidelines for certified organic agriculture, can be analyzed as a ‘boundary organization’. By linking organic farmers' knowledge with peer-reviewed science, the board builds the base of organic agriculture for legitimacy and also develops a new product: federally certified organic agriculture. Examination of organic standards on composting, with a focus on characterizations of composting microbes, reveals the very compromised ability of the NOSB to effect change, however, despite its efforts to build common ground between institutions with very different cultures and historical interests. A focus on discourses of microbes provides insights into the accomplishments of and limits to the influence of the NOSB as well as the larger organic movement. Organizational tactics of the NOSB are best understood within the larger context of institutional commitments to specific forms of agriculture.

Central heating, insulation, and double glazing, such as you might find in many countries with colder climates in the northern hemisphere, are virtually lacking in Christchurch, in New Zealand's South Island. In this city, houses tend to be inadequately heated and rely primarily on a combination of open fires, log burners, and electrical heaters. This form of home heating, combined with local climatic and topographical factors, results in high levels of wintertime air pollution. While much research has been conducted into the air-pollution problem in Christchurch to date, this research has focused on physical contaminants and their effects on health, rather than on the ways in which air pollution is socially and culturally mediated and on the sense-making practices of those who create pollution and suffer its effects. Based on information drawn from focus groups, we argue that reluctance to change behaviour results partly from investments in particular cultural identities which are tied into hegemonic masculinities and understandings of national identity, such as the masculine pioneer heritage established during the colonial period. We also explore the spatial relationships that air pollution plays out within and on the ‘body’ and how it transcends and weakens the bounded body. We believe that analyses which draw on theories of hybridisation, embodiment, identity, and discourse, and which highlight the links between modes of behaviour, identity and sense of place, and the interactions between humans and nonhumans, are able to shed new light on our understandings of public perceptions and responses to air pollution in Christchurch.

In this paper we draw strong parallels between Sign Language Peoples (SLPs) and First Nation peoples. We argue that SLPs (communities defining themselves by shared membership in physical and metaphysical aspects of language, culture, epistemology, and ontology) can be considered indigenous groups in need of legal protection in respect of educational, linguistic, and cultural rights accorded to other First Nation indigenous communities. We challenge the assumption that SLPs should be primarily categorised within concepts of disability. The disability label denies the unique spatial culturolinguistic phenomenon of SLP collectivist identity by replicating traditional colonialist perspectives, and actively contributing to their ongoing oppression. Rather, SLPs are defined spatially as a locus for performing, building, and reproducing a collective topography expressed through a common language and a shared culture and history.

Drawing on ninety-three in-depth interviews conducted with informal workers in Buenos Aires in 2002, this paper examines how the everyday activity of informal work can be understood as a ‘hidden’ space of power and resistance in contemporary urban Argentina. Moving away from an economistic view of informal work, I argue that, while there is no single power relationship experienced by all informal workers, informal work more generally can be understood as a space in which multiple actors struggle over meaning and control through the deployment of diverse forms of power. The results presented here suggest that, while Argentines view informal work as a place of exploitation by employers and subjugation by the state, in some circumstances it can also be understood as a space of resistance, as workers attempt, through informal work, to create spaces hidden from control, to redefine the norms and rules which govern this space, and to transform the conditions of existence established by other actors. In focusing on the political function of informal work, this paper attempts to bring to light the complex relationships of power between the economy, the state, employers, and workers within the context of Argentina's economic and political crisis.

Are contemporary metropolitan regions becoming more dispersed? There are theoretical arguments for both concentration and dispersal. The purpose of our research is to establish an empirical base that can help us to understand the evolution of metropolitan spatial structure. Using data for the Los Angeles region from 1980, 1990, and 2000, we identify employment centers and describe spatial trends in the pattern of employment inside and outside these centers. We find: (1) a remarkable degree of stability in the system of centers; (2) an increase in the average distance of jobs from the traditional core; (3) the emergence and growth of employment centers; (4) the rapid growth of dispersed employment in outer suburbs. These trends appear to defy simple models of urban evolution and call for a more nuanced portrayal of contemporary regions and the dynamics underlying spatial organization.

The dissolution of the old mechanisms of state welfare has not yet led to the generation of a new welfare settlement, although the rise of neoliberalism and of what Jessop has called the Schumpeterian Competition State have highlighted some key directions of change. The importance of geographical inequality and unevenness to the process of reshaping welfare has been widely recognised, and the fragmentation and decentralisation of employment and social policies are giving rise to the production of new welfare spaces, which institutionalise the new arrangements, helping to make up neoliberalism in practice. These issues are discussed with the help of case studies of two contrasting areas: Sheffield, a city recently experiencing economic restructuring and high levels of labour-market adjustment and employment deprivation; and Milton Keynes, a city which has been a growth area within the South East since the 1960s and which is earmarked for further employment and the location of planned population and employment growth. The ways in which new welfare spaces are being produced is explored through a consideration of the configuration of partnerships around the governance of workfare, welfare, and competitiveness within these cities.

Responding to a recent special issue of Environment and Planning A on decline in mature industrial regions, the paper summarises and presents recent historical work on English industrial districts and regions. The paper argues that historical methods, informed by cognate social sciences, allow us to place the concepts of contingency and lock-in on a firmer footing. The paper presents a nondeterministic life-cycle model of industrial districts.

Our understanding of the ‘golden age’ of British retailing, during the period from the mid-1970s through to the mid-1990s, has centred around a discussion of the impact that rising retail concentration and a perceived increase in retailers' economic power have had on social welfare and competition policy. This increase in concentration and economic power is itself understood to have evolved from the defining feature of the golden age: a rapid increase in capital investment by large-scale retailers. The author examines the role played by capital investment in the golden age, and demonstrates that whilst capital investment is negatively correlated with turnover it is positively correlated both with margins and with market share. It is suggested that this relationship is significant as it provides evidence that the golden age of retailing did indeed lead to the rise in retailers' economic power which many authors feared was taking place.

The Barnett formula is the official basis upon which increments to public funds are allocated to the devolved regions of the UK for those parts of the budget that are administered locally. There is considerable controversy surrounding the implications of its strict application for the relevant regions. The existing literature focuses primarily on the equity of the spatial changes to government per capita expenditure that would accompany such a change. In contrast, in this paper we attempt to quantify the system-wide economic consequences—the real, relative resource squeeze that accompanies the financial relative squeeze—on one devolved region, Scotland. The analysis uses a multisectoral regional computable general equilibrium modelling approach. We highlight the importance of population endogeneity, particularly since the population proportions used in the formula are now regularly updated.