Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper we review recent social science work on the issue of biosecurity and suggest ways in which geographers and social scientists can approach and intervene in current biosecurity practices. Our argument is that it is both useful and necessary to locate and intervene at sites where the ordering of biomatters is open to doubt and/or contestation. We pitch discourses of biological immanence and emergence against forms of social science thinking which tend to trace overarching logics or seemingly unstoppable forces in matters of power and politics. While acknowledging the import of both literatures, our aim is to engage with the fraught empirical practicalities of making biomatters secure in order to bring to the fore the ways in which life matters are patterned by any number of processes and the ways in which these patterns are always conditional on sociomaterial contingencies.

This paper examines the politics of agricultural biosecurity in the UK, following the 2001 epidemic of foot and mouth disease. Biosecurity politics epitomise the ‘risk politics’ of animal disease, which acts antipolitically by focusing on problem-solving mechanisms and shutting down spaces for debate and dissent. By following biosecurity through three sites, various inconsistencies of this politics are described. On farms, biosecurity is seen as a routine and regulated practice that is more novel discursively than it is materially. In parliamentary and policy discourse, biosecurity is caught between a prescriptive regulatory logic tied to on-farm practices and a more open rhetorical construction which links it to a wider range of affairs of state (such as security, the national border, the public interest). At the science–policy interface, biosecurity politics enacts divisions not only between the roles of science and politics, but also between types of science. An event-based appreciation of risk and contingency highlights the need to unlock the problem-making potential inherent in these various inconsistencies and connections, a role which should be undertaken by social scientists working with others. The aim of this problem making should be a better constructed biosecurity through good biosecurity science.

Using the example of bovine tuberculosis, this paper explores the emergence, understanding, and rejection of new forms of biosecurity. The paper argues that debates over biosecurity can be conceptualised as arguments over the ability to regulate flows of disease and the constructions of space they adopt. Data from parliamentary inquiries and interviews are used to show how attempts to institutionalise forms of biosecurity emerge from a delicate balance of prescribed and negotiated spaces configured by a host of social, natural, and material agents. The interaction between these spaces provides a way of regulating the flows of disease and purifying agricultural space. This balance is resisted by farmers, whose practical knowledges of the constant struggle of managing the contingencies of agriculture lead them to suggest that only uniform versions of space can effectively regulate flows of disease. The author concludes by discussing the importance of recognising these differences for future biosecurity and animal health policy.

By using the example of the reintroduction of wolves to the southern French Alps, this paper explores the competing ‘philosophies of nature’ that are revealed when agendas of biodiversity enhancement and protection conflict with notions of biosecurity. Tracing the shifting status of wolves as threat and hazard to emblems of reconstituted naturality, I argue that the reintroduction of wolves disturbs notions of both biodiversity and biosecurity, making unified strategies of management increasingly difficult and problematic. More significantly, the reintroduction of these classically ‘wild’ predators into seminatural and domesticated spaces challenges otherwise simplistic classifications not only of wild and domestic but also of human and nonhuman.

The context of biosecurity has been theorised through attention to borders, boundaries, and expert processes of categorisation. This emergent literature represents biosecurity governance as brittle, unreflexive, and unresponsive. In contrast, biosecurity practices in New Zealand produce a complexity of semipermeable boundaries of control that are beginning to incorporate flexibility and sensitivity to the spatiotemporal geographies of indeterminate entities, and to changing and competing human values. Gorse (Ulex spp), a woody, perennial shrub, was imported to New Zealand during the early stages of European settlement, and has been the subject of shifting biosecurity-related management practices for close to 150 years. Classified as a ‘pest plant’, gorse is currently subject to the biosecurity rationalities of internal pest management. Cost–benefit analysis and the ‘infestation-curve model’ are drawn on in the placement of gorse in a hierarchy of control categories within regional pest management strategies. This classification and control is negotiated between institutional and public values and rationalities within a formalised consultation process, and through the diffuse impact of public opinion. Gorse also plays an active role in the decision-making process, as its extensive distribution informs the allocation of control responses, and through its controversial role as a ‘nurse plant’ for native species. This paper therefore presents a challenge to emergent critical social scientific approaches to biosecurity, suggesting that we can learn something from the socionatural subtlety of policy making and implementation practices in New Zealand.

This paper follows the development of a novel biosecurity technology known as ‘syndromic surveillance’. By monitoring new sources of nondiagnostic health information (911 calls, ER triage logs, pharmaceutical sales), syndromic surveillance produces new ‘territories of intelligibility’. But the implemention of syndromic systems—and the opening up of these new territories—poses a problem of interpretation. What is significant in nondiagnostic data flows? In fact, the development of a national syndromic system in the United States attracted criticism from local public health experts, who complained about the costs of ‘false positive’ or insignificant detections. This exposes a disjuncture between two interpretative frameworks, two styles of governing biosecurity: public health (a responsibility for maximal population health) and preparedness (a concern for disaster-scale events). At stake are new norms and forms of securing life.

The movement of viruses is, in part, enabled when frontline workers straddle the sites of where illness meets health or where mobile bodies meet those that are fixed. Using the 2003 SARS outbreak in Toronto as a lens, this paper explores the neoliberalisms and managerialism that render nurses and hotel housekeepers vulnerable, then turns attention to how their affective immaterial labour was simultaneously demanded and dismissed during the outbreak. I argue the affective labour of both nurses and hotel housekeepers is mobilized to perform unquantifiable but essential life-management and that they function as a frontline of the barrier in thwarting the mobility of SARS as an infectious disease. Thus, nurses and hotel housekeepers are precarious gatekeepers, in vulnerable positions as they perform tasks of biosecurity as they monitor borders of transmission.

The experience of the 2003 Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in Toronto, Canada provides an important example for understanding how the relationship between national security and public health is being defined in the contemporary context of emerging infectious diseases and the globalization of public health. This paper argues that Canada's public health legal framework is a critical part of Canada's practice of ‘biosecurity’ through which an unpredictable and continually emergent ‘new reality’, is mobilized to justify an ongoing state of emergency. Norms about state power and human rights are suspended in the interest of global capitalism and at the expense of those most vulnerable to the short-term and long-term effects of infectious disease.

In recent years there has been significant debate regarding the potential of participatory forms of governance to engage with diverse groups and the ‘politics of difference’. This paper explores these debates in the context of disabled people's engagement in urban policy processes, as an arena in which participative imperatives have become manifest under the UK's New Labour government. Drawing on a case study of a Single Regeneration Budget partnership, I argue that there are significant limits to disabled people's engagement in urban policy, ranging from their perceived legitimacy and constitution as a ‘relevant public’, through to the processes of partnership in which managerialist objectives clash with participative agendas. The paper therefore raises issues about the rationale for participation and the extent to which notions of deliberative democracy are equipped to deal with issues of ‘difference’.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the possible long-term consequences of deregulation on financial exclusion in a European context. Although this is an issue frequently treated by US researchers, it has traditionally received much less attention in Europe. The deregulation that took place mainly during the 1980s may have contributed to an increase in the importance of this phenomenon. Therefore, our aim in this paper is to assess the effect of deregulation on the availability of banking services, especially in low-income municipalities in Spain. Our results show that, although the level of service is lower in low-income towns, the differences in the level of service between the high-income and low-income towns have decreased in the last decade. Interestingly, we provide evidence on the ability of the different types of financial intermediaries to avoid financial exclusion. Our results show that the Savings Banks appear as the main contributors to financial inclusion.

Whilst to be comfortable is often equated with conservatism and complacency, this paper considers the various and often complex configurations of comfort as a desirable corporeal sensibility. Subsequently, this paper considers what corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility is and can do to theorisations of the sedentary body. The sensibility of corporeal comfort induced through the relationality between bodies and proximate objects is explored to trace through some of the affectual circulations that flow through the sedentary body. With this in mind, forms of subjectivity engendered through the fragility of comfort are at once both active and performed, and folded through the inactive susceptibilities that are beyond activity. Drawing on such an immanent materialism enables us to take more seriously these susceptibilities of the sedentary body and the new moments and spatialities that emerge.

In this paper we test the importance of the regional restructuring hypothesis by investigating whether the internal migration flows in western Germany can be explained by employment changes, on the basis of data of out-migration of employed workers and employment in seventy-five regions over the period 1982–97 for each year separately. Starting from a conditional probability model for the unobserved individual migration decisions, we derive mathematically a dynamic version of the Poisson gravity model for the total out-migration per region per year. Estimating this model for each year separately, we find partial confirmation of the regional restructuring hypothesis.

Over the past thirty years, recreation communities in many parts of the globe have gone through cycles of diversification and integration into complex recreation regions. As resort communities mature, they face increasing pressures on scarce recreational resources, demands for economic diversification, and changing attitudes toward tourism on the part of local residents. A variety of land-use management practices and economic development initiatives has emerged in resort towns in response to resource congestion and other growth issues. In this paper we explore alternative growth strategies through a simulation of housing decisions by primary actors in resort land markets. We use a multiagent system to model the dynamics of growth regimes, assess the influence of recreational and town amenities, and evaluate the effect of alternative growth processes on long-term development patterns. Our case study area is Steamboat Springs and surrounding parts of Routt County, a four-season recreational region in northwestern Colorado.

This paper explores the effect of three intelligent transport systems (ITS)-related transport concepts on location preferences of office-keeping organisations in urbanised areas. To measure these effects, a hierarchical information integration experiment was conducted in the Netherlands. Representatives of office-keeping organisations in selected city regions were questioned about the attractiveness of hypothetical ITS-based accessibility profiles of office locations. A general preference model was estimated to test the hypothesis that the introduction of ITS-based transport concepts will significantly influence the preferences of office-keeping organisations regarding office locations. It appears that all the included ITS attributes have a significant impact on the accessibility preferences of office-keeping organisations in urban regions. Moreover, location preferences change slightly after the introduction of the three ITS-related transport concepts.

This paper aims to understand the interplay between the neighborhood (spatial) effects of poverty, ethnicity, kin, and patriarchy, and women's agency in the context of an inner-city slum in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. It is based on a field study that focuses on the experiences of women residents—that is, rural migrants known for their dependency on neighborhood spaces—and their grown-up daughters who were raised in the city. The neighborhood context—namely, the social and physical isolation of the site, the limited access to urban institutions, and the growing risk of crime—has a negative impact on women's lives, restraining but not determining women's agency. Women's struggle for agency in this context is contingent on other factors, including whether they live in ethnic clusters and whether their husbands are working, as well as urban experience and individual biography.