Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The concept of hybridity has been discussed chiefly in relation to cultural issues and interpreted as a challenge to dominant power. It is equally relevant to the interpretation of economic and social change (for example, in the field of international development), while its political significance is properly a subject of investigation. Hybridity was common under colonialism: in domestic and work settings (mines, plantations), in the organisation of urban areas, and in the organisation of colonial administration. It became more common in the British territories once Britain began to promote colonial development in the late 19th century. The evolution of colonial housing and urban housing policy after 1929 indicates that colonisers tolerated and then endorsed hybridity. Usually, it was accepted as a step towards modernity; occasionally, it was viewed as a local adaptation that embodied local practices that had intrinsic merit. In any event, the concept of hybridity has broad application to our understanding of colonialism and development.

This paper explores the ambivalent feelings towards the Government of India produced in one of the government's own employees. In establishing the Delhi Improvement Trust in the 1930s, Arthur Parke Hume had to battle against governmental cost cutting in an attempt to secure the rehousing of slum evictees. The refusal of the government to accept this welfarist commitment to investment led to the stalling of the improvement projects and great emotional disquiet for Hume. This is traced through his personal correspondence with his parents. In interweaving these insights with the imperial archive, three biographical approaches are adopted. A traditional chronology is used to order the events, an analytical approach is used to outline the discursive regularities of Hume's observations, and a genealogical approach is used to suggest the influences on Hume's writings and the broader governmental rationalities that he had to negotiate.

The cities that administrators administer, planners plan, and scholars examine are perceptions that represent the absolute city ‘that is out there’. This paper narrates how a new perception of the city based on British town planning, modified within the Empire, was established in Colombo, the former capital of Sri Lanka. It focuses on the interpretation and representation of physical realities in Colombo using the norms imported through the Housing Ordinance of 1915 and later the town planning discourse. The ordinance problematic the living environments of the poor residents, requiring solutions that were not available in Colombo. Instead of solving these, the colonial/imperial planner Patrick Geddes, and the others who followed him, carried town planning to Colombo and kept rewriting its history. The new perception of the city focused the attention of the authorities on a capitalist city, which was lain over the colonial city, marginalizing the poor. In this way the colonial planners taught the Ceylonese urban authorities and planners how to perceive and act on the city from a town planning vantage point. The discourse was not directly imposed or imported, but negotiated between many agencies including the (British) municipal authorities of Colombo, the colonial government, colonial/imperial planners, the newspapers, and other stakeholders. Many changes to this perception were introduced in Sri Lanka after independence, but they do not represent any substantial cultural questioning of this discourse. This is the contribution of this study.

This paper adopts a perspective which views all cities as unique combinations of social, political, and economic configurations-which sees all cities as ‘ordinary’, and which resists attempts to determine hierarchical relations amongst cities as potentially damaging to rich and poor cities alike. While current urban theories tend to draw attention to the dynamism of globalising economic sectors, much urban policy directed at poorer countries is preoccupied with the delivery of basic services. Both urban theory and urban policy need to be reframed to address the diversity of activities and interests in cities, and to support a more inclusive and hopefully redistributive form of urban development. In the process of formulating citywide visions, urban managers in the two cities discussed here, although drawn to compete with other cities in a global arena, have also had to find ways to address diverse economies and unequal societies. This paper draws on the examples of city visioning processes in Johannesburg and Durban in South Africa to illustrate how developmental and growth-oriented urban policy agendas have been brought together in the complex political environments of these cities. These case studies suggest that the process of formulating a citywide strategy, and of thinking about the future of the city as a whole, required that policy makers attend to the many different and often competing demands in the locality. For urban theorists, this generates new kinds of research agendas-for example, considering how urban improvements can be spread across the different areas and constituencies of a city without sacrificing economic growth. Here, the benefits of supporting the generalised agglomerations economies of a city as opposed to specialised globalising clusters emerge as important. This paper suggests that urban theory can learn from the process of city visioning, despite the various problems associated with these exercises. In turn, theories which approach all cities as ordinary could reinforce policies which address both economic growth and inequality.

This paper examines an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) is premised upon ‘partnership’, ‘participation’, and ‘cost recovery’ in the delivery of large toilet blocks as a practical solution to the stark lack and inadequacy of sanitation, and offers an opportunity to interrogate a growing consensus on sanitation provision among mainstream development agencies. In the paper, I argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions. I also consider whether the SSP, as the largest city project of its nature in Indian history, marks a shift in the relationship between the state and the ‘slum’ in Mumbai. I suggest that, despite constituting a change from ad hoc sanitation provision to a more sustained and universal policy, informal settlements in the SSP remain populations outside the sphere of citizenship and notions of the clean, ordered modern city.

The city of Mumbai is undergoing a complex social, economic, and political transition into an increasingly fragmentary and polarized metropolitan space. The tortuous flow of water through contemporary Mumbai presents one of the most striking indicators of persistent social inequalities within the postcolonial metropolis. We find that the city's dysfunctional water infrastructure has its roots within the colonial era but these incipient weaknesses have been exacerbated in recent years by rapid urban growth, authoritarian forms of political mobilization, and the dominance of middle-class interests within a denuded public realm. It is argued that the water and sanitation crisis facing Mumbai needs to be understood in relation to the particularities of capitalist urbanization and state formation in an Indian context.

This and a companion paper examine a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about neoliberal approaches to governing human interactions with the physical environment. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. They are written for the benefit of readers trying to make some sense of this growing literature and for future researchers of the topic. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical studies of nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? what are the effects of nature's neoliberalisation? and how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically informed case studies unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). Though all four questions posed are answerable in principle, in practice the existing research literature makes questions two, three, and four difficult to address substantively and coherently between case studies. While the first question can, from one well-established theoretical perspective, be answered with reference to four ‘logics’ at work in diverse contexts (the focus of this paper), the issues of process, effects, and evaluations are currently less tractable (and are the focus of the next paper). Together, the two pieces conclude that critical geographers interrogating nature's neoliberalisation will, in future, need to define their objects of analysis more rigorously and/or explicitly, as well as their evaluative Schemas. If the new research into neoliberalism and the nonhuman world is to realise its full potential in the years to come, then some fundamental cognitive and normative issues must be addressed. These issues are not exclusive to the literature surveyed and speak to the ‘wider’ lessons that can be drawn from any body of case study research that focuses on an ostensibly ‘general’ phenomena like neoliberalism.

This and a previous paper review systematically a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about ‘neoliberalising nature’. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical literature on nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions: (1) what are the reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? (2) what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? (3) what are the effects of nature's neoliberalisation? and (4) how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could remain a collection of substantively disparate, theoretically informed case studies unified only in name (by virtue of their common focus on ‘neoliberal’ policies). This paper addresses questions 2, 3, and 4, while the previous paper concentrated on the first. It is argued that some unresolved issues in the published literature make it very difficult for readers and future researchers in this area to draw ‘wider’ lessons about process, effects, and evaluations. This is not so much a ‘failing’ of the literature as a reflection of its newness and the way its constituent parts have evolved. It is argued that these issues require careful attention in future so that the ‘general’ lessons of the literature published to date on nature's neoliberalisation can be made clear. Where the previous paper detected some ‘signals in the noise’ viz question 1, this paper suggests that more work needs to be done viz questions 2 to 4 for any signals to be detected.

This paper critically examines migration forecasts: numerical guesstimates of future patterns of migration flows. In the enlarging European Union, migration forecasts are often carried out upon requests from mass-migration-fearing policy makers. Most forecasts are based on key principles and working practices adhered to in neoclassical economics and spatial science—notably, equilibrium and place. Offering apparent numerical certainty, migration forecasts speak to a latent desire for aesthetic sociospatial order. Migration is considered a disequilibrium phenomenon, and linear movements and final destinations are presupposed. However, it is argued that these ‘orderly’ aesthetic assumptions do not correspond with ‘messy’ real East–West migration dynamics in the EU, which are foremost temporary and circulatory in nature. Drawing on evidence from the Netherlands, the paper concludes by suggesting that migration forecasts may indirectly strengthen claims for restrictive migration policy.

Air transport has become a vital component of the global economy. However, greenhouse-gas emissions from this sector have a significant impact on global climate, being responsible for over 3.5% of all anthropogenic radiative forcing. Also, the accrued visibility of aircraft emissions greatly affects the public image of the industry. In this context, incentive-based regulations, in the form of price or quantity controls, can be envisaged as alternatives to mitigate these emissions. The use of environmental charges in air transport, and the inclusion of the sector in the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS), are considered under a range of scenarios. The impacts of these measures on demand are estimated, and results suggest that they are likely to be minimal—mainly due to the high willingness to pay for air transport. In particular, in the EU ETS scenario currently favoured by the EU, demand reductions are less than 2%. This may not be true in the longer run, for short trips, or if future caps become more stringent. Furthermore, given current estimates of the social cost of CO₂ as well as typical EU ETS prices, supply-side abatement would be too costly to be encouraged by these policies in the short term. The magnitude of aviation CO₂ emissions in the EU is estimated, both in physical and monetary terms; the results are consistent with Eurocontrol estimates and, for the EU-25, the total social cost of these emissions represents only 0.03% of the region's GDP. It is concluded that the use of multisector policies, such as the EU ETS, is unsuitable for curbing emissions from air transport, and that stringent emission charges or an isolated ETS would be better instruments. However, the inclusion of aviation in the EU ETS has advantages under target-oriented post-2012 scenarios, such as policy-costs dilution, certainty in reductions, and flexibility in abatement allocation. This solution is also attractive to airlines, as it would improve their public image but require virtually no reduction of their own emissions, as they would be fully capable of passing on policy costs to their customers.

This paper uses the exemplar of global headhunting firms to provide new insights into the intricacies of internationalization and related ‘spatial economies’ of producer services in the world economy. In particular, we unpack the complex relationships between the organizational rationale for, the selected mode of, and future benefits gained by internationalization, as headhunting firms seek and create new geographical markets. We achieve this through an analysis of headhunting firm-specific case study data that detail the evolving way such firms organize their differential strategic growth (organic, merger and acquisition, and alliances/network) and forms (wholly owned, networked, or hybrid). We also highlight how, as elite labour market intermediaries, headhunted are important, yet understudied, actors within the (re)production of a ‘softer’, ‘knowledgeable’ capitalism. Our argument, exemplified through detailed mapping of the changing geographies of headhunting firms between 1992 and 2005, demonstrates the need for complex and blurred typologies of internationalization and similarly complex internationalization theory.

This paper sets out to examine the integration of a region (Transcarpathia), undergoing a process of postsocialist transformation, in the global marketplace. In doing so, it deploys a microlevel approach in deciphering the findings of extensive fieldwork investigation. The argument advanced here is that the phenomenon reported does not fit well within the confines of the global commodity chain literature. The pursuit of patterns and regularities, as well as the overwhelming economic development focus of this approach tend to obscure differences, and restrict our understanding of globalisation and industrial dynamics, especially in the case of areas undergoing a process of postsocialist transformation.