Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper picks up from extensive literatures that have addressed the relationship of heritage to national identity. Much work focuses upon the symbolic construction of the past through heritage institutions, but in so doing it tends to underplay the affective experience of heritage sites. In this paper we argue that it is the felt experience and the organisation of sensibilities towards heritage which are often as important, and that these have racialised modalities. We thus look at attempts to foster civic inclusion and argue that they need to work through not just civic openness but felt exclusions and fears. We take two canonical heritage sites to exemplify these issues. First, the British Museum was chosen as an urban national institution that is conventionally seen speaking in an unemotive, pedagogical register. The history of the museum as collecting artefacts from around the world and bringing them to London is related to diasporic communities' feelings about the collections, focusing on the Oceanic gallery. The second exemplar is the English Lake District, chosen as a rural national park that is seen to mobilise more visceral affective responses, which is deeply bound up with national sensibilities but has attracted attention for racial exclusivity.

This paper examines how race might be understood differently when social interaction is taken as the starting point of analysis. I argue that dominant modes of theorising race as a biological construct or epistemological marker remain insufficient for understanding the multiple, contingent, and devious ways in which race takes form in, and gives shape to, encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley—a former mill town in northern England—the paper assembles narrative fragments that reconstruct encounters with difference (that vary in intensity from the mundane to terror alerts). In each of these encounters I return to the question: what does race do? The paper offers a reconsideration of race and racism. I theorise race as a technology of differentiation that sorts human difference in ways that acknowledge the malleability of race and the more-than-human composition of social relations. I go on to outline an understanding of racism—a racism of assemblages—that recognises that the sorting of human difference is also accompanied by judgments that prefigure encounters. The racism of assemblages offers an opportunity to address the operation of race at the level of nonconscious thinking and the affective intensities through which the sorting and judging of human differences are performed. The work of gathering fragments to reconstruct encounters also generates insights into the microsociality of multicultural life in Keighley, disrupting narratives that argue that white and Asian communities lead ‘parallel lives’ in northern mill towns.

Drawing on the example of British antiracism, I argue that nostalgia is an integral and constitutive force within the radical imagination. The first section of the paper is historical and contextual. It shows how attachments to the past and associated feelings of loss and regret (attachments and emotions which combine to form nostalgia) became marginalised and repressed within modern radicalism. The second section looks at how antinostalgia and nostalgia were mapped onto radical antiracism in Britain in the 1980s. It is suggested that the stereotype of the ‘black rebel’ concealed and cohered the tensions between a declining socialist movement and the politics of loss. The third part of the paper explores the issue of nostalgia in the company of Gilroy's After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? My critique of After Empire is in two parts. First I look at the stereotyping and repression of themes of loss that sustain Gilroy's account. Second, I address After Empire as a nostalgic text, burdened with a yearning for lost political potency. The essay concludes with a call for radicals and antiracists to move beyond the a priori suspicion of nostalgia.

The majority of studies on young people, race, and racism have focused upon multiethnic inner-city areas. This can have the unintended effect of locating the ‘problem’ of race within the sites where ethnic minorities reside and upon their racially marked bodies. To disrupt this way of looking I attempt to turn the geography of racism ‘inside out’ by recognising the predominantly white English suburbs as a complex site of emotion where racist graffiti, violence, and social deprivation may preside. Here, it is suggested that a ‘global sense of place’ can be evoked through a postcolonial reading of the suburbs and used to unsettle the familiar emotional-laden landscapes of whiteness. Secondly, through ethnography with young people who self-identify as a Skinhead gang, I seek to provide a meaningful geography of racism that engages with emotion, bodily encounters, and events as they become charged with feeling and affect. Thirdly, the ethnography considers the practice of whiteness and white territoriality. In these encounters race and racism are approached as an event or happening that may be given material weight through inscriptions of racist graffiti, emotional sentiments regarding ideas of white suburban belonging, and physical manifestations of popular racism. I conclude that studies of race and racism need to better engage with the visceral way in which affect and emotion seep into the lives of young people and enable the idea of race to pass from immanence to emergence in daily encounters.

In this paper, I attempt to rethink race and ethnicity through Deleuzo–Guattarian conceptions of affect and machinism. Considered in the context of a theorisation of machinism, affect might be thought of as not only underwriting difference and contingency, but as simultaneously affording the potential for bodies to be organised into proper relations. I suggest an understanding of the virtual as impure, full of bundles of potential functions, an understanding that allows us to envisage race and ethnicity in terms of virtual memory and the incipient organisation of affect. I also argue that thinking of race and ethnicity in terms of affect requires a theorisation of machinism. Race and ethnicity thus have to be considered in terms of historically specific sociomaterial assemblages that are at once practised and productive. Building upon these insights, and taking inspiration from the writings of Elizabeth Grosz, I propose a vision of an antiracist politics that pursues justice by other means than a politics of recognition or resistance. Instead, I suggest that antiracist struggles need to harness the subliminal and superliminal forces that produce the conditions for affect, subjectivity, and action. This is a politics that seeks to free desire from its historically specific organisation, but which attends to its own reinvestment in racialising and ethnicising tendencies.

Geography has turned to phenomenology, poststructuralism, and psychoanalysis to understand human bodies in non-Cartesian terms as always-already positioned within social formations. But how exactly do we conceive of the constitution of many bodies at once? Specifically, how do bodies ‘aggregate’ into racial formations? ‘The body’ is not a target of socialization—racializing, gendering, disciplining—as if it sits alone until its senses and viscera are stirred by the environment. Bodies never come alone. Racial formations are from the start phenomena of collective embodiment, not ideological structures that secondarily have corporeal effects. In this paper I will argue that racial difference (like all social relations) is a reality involving the interactions, imaginations, and biologies of human bodies. First, Frantz Fanon's influential theory of racialization and racial difference is recast in an embodied framework through one of his own examples. This framework will be construed through the concept of affect in Baruch Spinoza, the phenomenology of Michel Henry, and the ‘machinic’ approach to psychoanalysis suggested by Félix Guattari. Aggregation is thereafter explained through the contemporary Spinozism of Antonio Negri and population biology. Finally, the political implications of a machinic theory of race are explored using another concrete example from Fanon.

The paper discusses parental choice of secondary schooling, drawing on a recent study of east London. It is argued that the New Labour agenda of promoting choice of secondary school can, in practice, constrain choice as parents ‘play safe’. The paper reviews the working of educational choice across seven boroughs in east London, and then focuses on how it is working in one outer London borough. It is argued that when education and housing markets are considered together it is possible to identify several of what Ball et al have termed ‘circuits of schooling’. The paper concludes by suggesting that the ‘choice agenda’ may be creating a perception of failure and a sense of resentment amongst parents who do not succeed in getting their children into all but the most popular schools.

Since the early 1990s global migration flows have become larger in scale and more varied in form. In the UK, controversy has surrounded this new phase of migration and it has often been assumed to be having a detrimental affect on the well-being of settled residents. Yet, there is dearth of information about the impacts of new immigration and what evidence does exist is curiously place-less, making it difficult to say anything about local effects. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap in understanding by outlining a framework to support the exploration of neighbourhood effects of new immigration. At its heart lies a commitment to three types of explanation for geographical variations in local experiences of new immigration: the individuals living in a place; the opportunity structures apparent in the local environment; and the sociocultural features of local communities.

A key issue in the development of China's growing megacities in the transport-related environmental costs due to rapid urban expansion. In light of this issue, the authors examine the impact of urban form on commuting patterns on the city fringe of Beijing. Based on household-survey data, the results of the analysis suggest that the forms of land use adopted in the suburbs have a significant impact on commuting distance when a worker's socioeconomic characteristics and the level of transport accessibility are taken into account. Sprawling expansion, characterized by a low degree of self-contained development and low-density land use, tends to increase the need for long-distance commuting to the central urban area. In contrast, compact urban development in the suburbs, particularly in the peripheral constellations of Beijing, would reduce the probability of long-distance commuting. The current trend in improving transport accessibility on the city fringe is likely to lead to further long-distance commuting. In particular, huge road projects could cause more traffic congestion in the centre. The findings suggest that land-development management on the city fringe could have significant implications with respect to containing the dramatic costs to the environment entailed by transportation in the context of the rapid process of motorization. Reducing travel needs through the integration of land use and transport-infrastructure provision is likely to be the key to sustainable urban expansion.

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s–early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West.

It is well known that the intermediate deliveries in (regional) input–output tables are estimated more accurately if nonsurvey techniques are complemented by superior data, obtained via surveys, experts, or other reliable sources. Collecting superior data is costly and it is therefore crucial that the cells for which to collect superior data are well chosen. Several methods have been proposed in the literature. Some of these select a set of individual cells, others identify entire sectors. In the present paper we evaluate six of these methods by simulating the estimation of the regional intermediate deliveries matrices for each of twenty-seven Chinese provinces in 2002, on the basis of their matrices for 1997. Data from the true 2002 matrices are used to mimic superior data collection.

The authors study the seasonal variability of population in Estonia, and develop a methodology for the monitoring of the short-term mobility of population with mobile-positioning data. The locations of calculated home anchor points of telephone users were analysed by use of the dataset of EMT, Estonia's biggest mobile operator, over a period of 2 years. The results showed that approximately 5% of the population of Estonia change their place of residence seasonally. The number of residents rises during the summer months in coastal areas, the surroundings of cities, and in specific ‘dacha’ areas. Most of these seasonal migrants originated from cities and towns. The timing and geography of the seasonal migration patterns studied showed the different directions and causes of seasonal moves. The methodology developed for the monitoring of short-term migration is suitable for the monitoring of movements over more extensive territory. In order to determine the causes and composition of these migrations, however, one must use additional survey studies or observations.