Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

What's this got to do with social geography?

Narrating a world of flux entails moving away from equilibrium-oriented thinking toward considerations of emergence, uncertain futures, and unintended consequences. This is not the exclusive domain of the qualitative theory construction and analysis that has dominated such thinking in sociospatial theory: it is also involved in mathematical theory construction. It requires a relational approach to mathematical theory, however, that moves beyond unidirectional claims of cause and effect, avoids deterministic and teleological thinking, and recognizes the incompleteness and openness of any such theoretical construction. These arguments are explored through an example that employs mathematical techniques often associated with complexity theory to examine unevenly shifting economic landscapes where the best guesses of capitalist entrepreneurs are interrelated with the emergent multiregional economy in which capitalists participate. This highlights the unexpectedly heightened dynamical importance of regions in a globally connected world; how cherished theoretical principles become renegotiated, as relationality leads to emergence; and that there is space for human agency, through modeling praxis appropriate to ‘incomplete systems’. We open modest cracks in the supposed wall between quantitative and qualitative approaches, oriented toward a methodological reinterpretation of what employing mathematical arguments could mean within larger, postpositivist theoretical projects in critical human geography.

This paper is a methodological and epistemological reflection on the power of numbers to contribute to the debate over the potential and limitations of market politics as a regulatory force in the global economy. Informal regulatory networks, including transnational corporate campaigns, form a new sphere of politics which leap-frogs the state and targets corporations directly concerning their social and environmental impacts. I describe my statistical analysis of corporate campaigns targeting US multinationals to argue in favor of analytical generosity when evaluating these new political forms. I argue that a reflexive and critical quantification can provide new insights into stakeholder power and contemporary political processes.

Research in behavioural economics, as in economic geography, seeks to address fundamental questions about cognition, the status of human rationality, and social-cum-spatial structure in economic decision making. Critiques of the ‘strong’ model of economic rationality that underpins models of behaviour in orthodox economics by those working under the rubric of the former, such as Thaler and Sunstein, are gaining the attention of politicians and policy makers. Yet the ‘limits to rationality’ thesis nevertheless lacks a credible appreciation of the diversity of social life and the significance of context in framing behaviour. Economic geography, while taking seriously the issues of the coconstitution of culture and economy and the relational nature of economic decision making, has moved away from behaviouralism at a time when critical approaches are arguably more salient than ever. I put forward the argument for an engagement with behavioural economic approaches to decision making while critically examining the need for multimethod approach that can accommodate quantitative, statistical, and experimental approaches and qualitative work that takes seriously social identity and attributes including gender, age, social class, and aspirations. The challenge of theorising the social context in which choices are made is discussed with reference to Bourdieu's notion of habitus, and three exemplars are used to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of different methodological approaches. Herbert Simon's metaphor, which conceptualises the decision-making moment as a pair of scissors, is suggested as a way of thinking about the intersection between cognition and the decision-making environment.

In the context of human geography's encounter with the problematics that surround matter and materiality, this paper offers a principle that works towards a distinctive material imagination. This principle states that our image of matter should be multiplied, so that it can be attended to as taking place with the properties and capacities of any element or state. We elaborate this principle through three substantive discussions of materiality as turbulent, as interrogative, and as excessive. In doing so we draw upon, in turn, forms of relational materialism associated with actor-network theory, the postphenomenologies of Lingis, the animate or enchanted materialism developed by Bennett, and the figurative and affective (im)materialities of Deleuze. The conclusion clarifies why we do not call for geography to be ‘rematerialised’.

Recent interest in the material and discursive construction of built environments has largely focused on the iconic skyscraper as a symbol of ‘modern’ global and corporate power. Within this theoretical frame, industrial landscapes are given short shrift. I seek to redress this by taking the example of Victorian and Edwardian Dundee and exploring the construction of a specific manufacturing space by the city's industrial elite. Moreover, this paper moves beyond traditional analyses to take a specifically gendered look at this process. I argue that, while women numerically dominated Dundee's jute industry, it was men as jute-company directors who laid claim to place through their role in image making. The paper starts by looking at the processes of building and elaborating industrial space and power through an investigation of the fabric of the city. It then explores how such materiality was accompanied by and represented in a range of industrial imagery. Unpacking this landscape—pointing to the construction and subversion of gendered binaries and the recursive relationship between the material and immaterial—helps us see how industrial elites fashioned and reaffirmed their identity and power through the mobilisation of a set of representational tactics, creating a particularly gendered manufacturing (of) space.

I illustrate how cosmopolitanisms among East European construction workers in London are shaped by the localised spatial contexts in which encounters with difference take place. Their cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviours arise from both survival strategies and a taste for cultural goods, thus challenging the elite–working-class divide in current cosmopolitanism literature. Through semistructured interviews and participant photographs of twenty-four East European construction workers who have arrived in London since the European Union expansion in May 2004, I illustrate how these ‘new’ European citizens develop varying degrees and multitudes of cosmopolitanisms in everyday places such as building sites and shared houses. These cosmopolitanisms are shaped by their transnational histories, nationalistic sentiments, and access to social and cultural capital in specific localised contexts. Thus subjective perceptions of gendered, ethnic, and racial notions of ‘others’ that are carried across national boundaries are reinforced or challenged as their encounters with ‘others’ produce perceptions of marginalisation or empowerment in these places. Finally, I suggest that cosmopolitanism should be understood not simply through class but rather also through access to power and capital in everyday localised contexts.

In this paper, we seek to demonstrate the continued utility of research into the social production of scale in relation to the politics of natural-resource distribution, ownership, and control. While traditionally oriented toward sociospatial theory and urban governance, research has begun to convey the importance of scale as a discursive framing device at the center of multiple kinds of environmental politics. Our approach draws from recent literature to show the material-discursive ‘difference that nature makes’ in constituting the grounds of scalar struggle in mineral development. We argue that the fixity of certain natural-resource deposits and the concomitant local socioecological impact of extraction stands in stark contradiction to the multiscalar forces that vie over their development. Our central argument is that this contradiction ensures that struggles over natural-resource development are necessarily struggles over scale—the scale of ownership and the scale of distributional benefits and costs. The politics of natural resources must be couched in scalar terms and those who gain access to resources must build stable institutional–scalar platforms for the production of resource wealth. We illustrate this through an analysis of US Congressional debate over reform of the infamous ‘1872 Mining Law’ in 1993 as an exemplary moment of scalar politics. In this case, we not only attempt to show how the concept of scale frames these debates, but also how the failure to reform the 19th-century law allowed for the institutional materialization of particular scalar conduits for capital accumulation in the mining sector.

Social capital has been discussed widely as networks based in trust and reciprocity that can facilitate economic development, democratic governance, and sustainable natural-resource management. The concept has not been examined thoroughly as an analytical lens for understanding power relations. Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice I develop a relational and contextual view of social capital in order to explore the everyday political exchanges tied to a long-standing community forestry association in Quintana Roo, Mexico. I present a case study that recounts the emergence and decline of a timber-marketing fund to illustrate how elite actors from member communities (ejidos) maintain relative dominance within social networks over time. This Bourdieusian perspective on elite persistence exemplifies the downside of social capital but also reveals a cultural view of everyday politics that highlights tensions among long-standing practices (habitus) and formal and informal spheres of social interaction (fields).

The field of development studies has produced a number of institutional ethnographies in recent years that evaluate the internal workings of development agencies such as the World Bank or grassroots social organizations. Although within the social sciences research on conservation often emphasizes the power of international conservation institutions, there have been few comparable studies assessing the internal workings of these organizations. In addition, less is known about the specific activities of national and provincial conservation agencies operating in the Global South. Ethnographies of these institutions are also needed in order to examine how conservation is variously understood and executed by organizations within different contexts. This paper presents an institutional ethnography of the Mpumalanga Parks Board, which is the chief conservation agency operating in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. Following the 1994 democratic elections, the Mpumalanga Parks Board pursued a neoliberal commercialized conservation mandate that reflected the position of natural resource management in relation to other national priorities. This paper traces out the construction of the commercialization discourse in order to understand the internal and external factors that produced it while assessing its implications for nature preservation. Although the commercialization drive emulated a general trend towards neoliberal decentralization in the Global South, I argue that its particular manifestations were deeply embedded in South Africa's particular spatial economy and history of racial segregation. In tracing out the commercialization discourse from within the conservation agency itself, this paper assists in an understanding of how neoliberalism shapes natural resource management and can become hegemonic at the expense of other possibilities.

In the last decade the concept of quality has been widely used to describe the dynamics that have been shaping the agrifood system. Despite differences in research focus and approach, scholars agree that quality is the outcome of a contingent and so far underresearched process of negotiation that entails and determines relations of power in the food chain. To understand the nature and implications of the relationship between quality and power in the food sector, this paper focuses on the recent ‘quality revolution’ implemented in the school meals system in Rome. Based on the analysis of documentary material and qualitative data collected through formal and informal interviews, the paper examines the process through which city authorities have integrated different (and at times contrasting) quality conventions. The analysis shows that procurement policies such as those implemented in Rome have the power to create an ‘economy of quality’ that can deliver the economic, environmental, and social benefits of sustainable development.

The most appropriate way to measure the social benefits of conserving built cultural heritage sites is to ask the beneficiaries of conservation interventions how much they would be willing to pay for them. We use contingent valuation—a survey-based approach that elicits willingness to pay (WTP) directly from individuals—to estimate the benefits of a nationwide conservation of built cultural heritage sites in Armenia. The survey was administered to Armenian nationals living in Armenia, and obtained extensive information about the respondents' perceptions of the current state of conservation of monuments in Armenia, described the current situation, presented a hypothetical conservation program, elicited WTP for it, and queried individuals about what they thought would happen to monument sites in the absence of the government conservation program. We posit that respondents combined the information about the fate of monuments provided by the questionnaire with their prior beliefs, and that WTP for the good, or program, is likely to be affected by these updated beliefs. We propose a Bayesian updating model of prior beliefs, and empirically implement it with the data from our survey. We found that uncertainty about what would happen to monuments in the absence of the program results in lower WTP amounts.

In this paper we investigate the functional form of distance decay for commuting flows between municipalities in Denmark. Our inference is based on a single equation that includes variables to capture the effect of spatial structure. Special attention is given to a proper estimation method: we estimate the distance-decay parameters by nonlinear weighted least-squares with balancing factors. It appears that neither an exponential nor a power distance-decay function fits the data well. Using a spline regression we find a cost elasticity of – 4 for distances around 20 km and a much smaller value for shorter and longer distances. It appears that the logarithm of distance decay can be described adequately as a (downward) logistic function of log cost.

The aim of the paper is to tackle the question of what the European territory will look like over the next fifteen years by providing quali–quantitative territorial scenarios for an enlarged Europe, under different assumptions about the future direction in which the driving forces affecting development will move. Based on an econometric model, called MASST, two scenarios are built on the bases of alternative strategies put in place by the EU 15, the New 12, and the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) countries, on which alternative behavioural patterns in the driving forces of change depend. The scenarios presented are not policy scenarios: a more general approach is chosen, and more general issues of external competitiveness and global confrontation are emphasised and placed in the forefront of reflection, in an endeavour to define, through the use of the MASST simulation model, their likely impact on territorial trends, regional convergence, and general economic performance. Major determinants of territorial trends are attributed to the competitive game between the three above-mentioned blocks of countries. The model is able to provide the simulations for twenty-seven countries (the ‘Old 15’ EU members and the ‘New 12’ Eastern EU members) and for their 259 regions of GDP and population in 2015 in the two scenarios.