Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

One consequence of the economic downturn and pressure for public sector reform is a renewed focus upon private sector engagement (PSE) within subnational economic governance. Yet past attempts to promote PSE within urban and regional development policy and governance have been routinely characterised by the partial and uneven involvement of business interests. Adopting a strategic—relational approach, and building upon insights from the developing literature on business—society relations, this paper critically examines how PSE unfolded in a specific spatial and temporal context, through empirical investigation of the evolution of the City Growth Strategy as realised within two areas in London. This analysis explores the difference between policy script and business performance and identifies key dimensions of material self-interest, nonmarket-based rationales, and divergent private/public discourses as critical to the selective nature of emergent PSE strategies and tactics. Critically, these issues remain largely unaddressed within current moves to put in place a private sector led subnational agenda, with clear consequences for understanding its likely impact across differentially constituted urban and regional contexts.

This paper engages key social theories of transnational mobilities in order to forge the concept of urban ‘green’ cosmopolitization, posited as a social scientific contribution to epochal conversations on climate change. Bringing Ulrich Beck's notion of ‘cosmopolitization’ to bear on recent work around ‘urban policy mobilities’, I analyze professional planning practices in large-scale world cities as privileged sites for contemporary imaginings and material implementations of low-carbon sociotechnical change. Focusing on the regions of Europe and Asia, I show how specific policies and technologies of urban greening circulate in intercity sustainability networks. These networks, I suggest, serve to organize processes of professional engagement with climate change around notions of innovation, learning, and ‘best practice’ policy transfer among urban professionals—thereby also excluding more ‘radically’ alternative futures. The paper then turns to explore how such green cosmopolitization works as a social force within specific urban localities, employing two ethnographic case studies into ‘ambitious’ low-carbon planning projects in Copenhagen and Kyoto, respectively. In particular, my analysis explores how place-based notions of ‘culture’ are mobilized in the urban visions of architects and engineers as resources for addressing global environmental risks. These spaces of urban green cosmopolitization, I conclude, emerge at the intersection of professional and vernacular ethico-political attachments, thereby reworking—in often contentious ways—how particular urban materials and spaces can be understood in reference to an emerging moral geography of shared climatic risks.

By 2009 four in every five job seekers in Great Britain were making use of the Internet in job search, generally alongside other methods. While the Internet has created new opportunities for job seekers, there are concerns that inequalities in use of and access to the Internet will intensify difficulties experienced by disadvantaged groups in finding work. This paper analyses the incidence and determinants of online job search in Great Britain, using Labour Force Survey data for 2006 to 2009. Use of the Internet increased over this period, with employed job seekers most likely to undertake online job search. A probit model reveals that age and highest qualification are key factors affecting individuals' use of the Internet for job search, with older job seekers and those with lower education levels most likely to ‘lose out’ in terms of accessing employment opportunities via the Internet. Some significant urban and regional differences are revealed, indicating that job seekers from less prosperous regions and those outside major metropolitan areas are least likely to make use of the Internet for job search.

Flood maps play an increasingly prominent role in government strategies for flood-risk management. Maps are instruments not just for defining and communicating flood risks, but also for regulating them and for rationalizing the inevitable limits and failures of those controls. Drawing on policy document analysis, official statistics, and 66 key-informant interviews, this paper explores the institutional conflicts over the use of the Environment Agency (EA) Flood Map to support decision making by English local planning authorities (LPAs), whose local political mandate, statutory obligations, and professionalized planning culture put them at odds with the narrower bureaucratic imperative of the Agency to restrict developments at risk of flooding. The paper shows how the Flood Map was designed to standardize and script the planning process and ensure that LPA decisions were aligned with EA views about avoiding development in zones at risk of flooding without actually banning such development outright. But technologies are also shaped by their users, and so the paper documents how planners accommodated and resisted this technology of indirect rule. Their concerns about sterilizing areas depicted as being at risk of flooding and about the difficulties of actually using the Flood Map for speedy and defensible development-control decisions were crucial in its eventual replacement by a new decision-support technology, Strategic Flood Risk Assessments, which then led to the descripting of the Flood Map to influence a new set of users: the public. The paper closes with some wider reflections on the significance of the case for risk-based governance.

Despite an increase in attention to ‘geography’ in civil war research, local dynamics in violence remain poorly understood. To address this gap, we analyze disaggregated violent event data for the North Caucasus of Russia from the start of the second Chechen war, in August 1999, to July 2010. We employ a diffusion perspective to examine the spread of the conflict from its Chechen nucleus and we identify the tit-for-tat nature of the conflict between the rebels and the military/police forces as especially significant in understanding the conflict's dynamics and spread to neighboring republics. A space—time analysis shows that violence is concentrated at short temporal intervals and geographic distances. As the insurgents in the violence have changed from dominantly nationalist to Islamist, the geography of the war has become more diffuse across the Muslim republics of the region, rendering the Russian counterinsurgency efforts more challenging.

There is common understanding that gentrifiers and new middle classes more generally share an urban orientation and may share a ‘metropolitan habitus’. The urban geography of Western metropolises and the formation and reproduction of specific middle-class groups are intrinsically connected. The specific urban habitus of these new middle classes, however, is challenged by events in the life course. When urban middle classes settle down and have children, many suburbanise. Using two waves of longitudinal data from a representative sample of middle-class couples expecting their first child, this study investigates the residential practices of middle classes that live in the central areas of Amsterdam when they become first-time parents. Building on prior work on urban middle classes, inspired by the theoretical concepts of Bourdieu, through a multilevel analysis, this study seeks to understand how various orientations of capital influence the decision whether to stay in the city or move to suburban areas. Controlling for a range of individual and neighbourhood variables, this study demonstrates that couples with high economic capital and relatively low cultural capital have a higher propensity to move out of the central city, whereas couples with high cultural capital and low economic capital have a smaller chance of suburbanising. Furthermore, this study confirms that the degree of social and economic connectedness through social networks and work in the city also play an important part in determining the propensity to move out of the city.

Municipal solid waste is a central concern for environmental policy, and the sociomateriality of waste—the ways in which waste is socially defined and dealt with—is an important issue for sustainability. We show how applying the European Union's waste policy through the European Waste Hierarchy (EWH) affects the sociomateriality of waste. The EWH ranks the desirability of different waste-management approaches according to their environmental impact. We investigate how the EWH has been acknowledged and interpreted in five different organizational contexts with relevance for Swedish waste management: EU environmental policy, the Swedish EPA, two municipal waste-management companies, and the trade organization Swedish Waste Management which represents the interests of municipal bodies involved with waste. In addition to preventing the production of waste, the EWH aims to disassemble, circulate, and reintroduce as much material as possible into production processes. We show how these aims shape paradoxical relationships between economy and society on the one hand, and environment and nature on the other, and open the way for a discussion of a politics of consumption through material management.

Within debates about the emergence and nature of governance, it has become commonplace to debate the whereabouts and possibilities of authority. Traditionally, authority is conceived as a property of some actor or institution and is regarded as divisible over time and space. Drawing on theories of power, in which it is regarded as constitutive of social relations, this paper proposes an alternative account of authority in which it is seen as one form of power that can be enacted towards three distinct purposes—instrumental (as consent), associational (as consensus), and governmental (as concord)—involving particular forms of recognition and compliance, and mediated through distinct sociospatial relations. The paper examines the potential of such an approach through exploring the workings of authority in transnational climate-change governance. Given the sustained debates within this field concerning the shifting geographies of authority between public/private actors and across different political spaces, this provides an important test of the explanatory value of this approach. The analysis suggests that, while these modes are not mutually exclusive, they orchestrate the ‘will to govern’ in significantly different ways, with important implications both for how governing is accomplished and for the geographies of global environmental governance.

This paper examines the political implications of the practice of framing mega urban development projects with the language of ‘utopia’ or ‘Disney’. Through a case study of Kazakhstan's new capital, Astana, I argue that the stigmatizing language of ‘utopia’ is a highly political bordering practice, defining the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real.’ Coupled with ethnographic data from fieldwork in Kazakhstan between 2009 and 2011, I perform a textual analysis of English and German language press coverage of Astana, and demonstrate how narratives of ‘false modernity’ and ‘utopia’ have become the dominant way of reading and writing about the city. Although often critical of the project as a sign of the President Nursultan Nazarbayev's ‘megalomania,’ this coverage obscures more complex geographies of power and state—society relations in the independent state. Symptomatic of liberal (ie, top-down, one-dimensional) understandings of power, the hegemonic discourse simultaneously reinscribes the state's ‘coherence’ and erases the lived realities and agencies of ordinary citizens, while obscuring the more complicated political—economic relations that condition and give rise to ‘spectacular’ urban development projects.

This paper focuses on the (now ‘unfashionable’) figure of the liberal political philosopher Isaiah Berlin. It argues the ways in which Berlin's distinctive understanding of liberal pluralism carries a hidden spatial and therapeutic premise that bears upon the displaced life of the émigré/assimilated subject as upon the negotiations of internal dividedness and ‘nonviolent’ conflict effectuated by it. Set in the context of the meeting between Isaiah Berlin and the dissident Soviet poet, Anna Akhmatova, in St Petersburg in 1941, and reading Berlin via certain key concepts of another émigré subject, Sigmund Freud, I suggest that political pluralism and the therapeutic ‘cure’ share profound structural similarities. From this interpretative angle, I then draw a series of analogies which correlate the condition of exile to the state of melancholia and, conversely, the process of assimilation to the work of mourning. So understood, it becomes possible to translate Berlin's political liberalism into psychoanalytic terms, viewing liberal identity as enabled by the subject's release from the ‘monism’ of territorial attachment and thus by its enlivened embrace of psychic loss and dislocation.

Recent years have seen increasing academic interest in transport and the concept of travel time. In particular, scholars have tried to open up travel time to alternative modes of understanding, taking it beyond its usual productivist associations with waste and useless idleness. The author, however, seeks to understand travel time in a different way. Rather than filling it up with activities, it is argued that travel time must first be recognized as constituted by, and constitutive of, society and its rhythms. As such, the author seeks to unpack its value in context, by thinking through its productions, structuring, and potential effects. With Singapore's urban transport system taken as a case study, the inequitable ways in which travel time is refracted and experienced by different groups of commuters in this fast-paced city are considered. Specifically, how this time has been hastened for some, rescheduled for others, and rendered especially unpredictable for public transit users through various policies and constraints are put into relations. By attending to the unevenness of these differentiated processes, the author argues that a close contextual reading of transport and its manifold rhythms is indispensable if questions surrounding social equity and sustainability are to be adequately addressed.

In the first decade of this millennium China has demonstrated a stronger commitment to environmental protection. Yet, there remains a significant gap between environmental laws and regulations and the quality of the environment. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework for analysis that we apply to investigate the factors that account for this gap in implementation. We analyse the results of surveys conducted in 2000 and 2006 and interviews carried out in 2006 and 2007 in eleven jurisdictions of Guangzhou municipality on three factors: pro-environment orientation, institutional capacity, and external political support for environmental units. The results show that, after several decades of environmental protection regulations, the pro-environment orientation of environmental officials in Guangzhou has been strengthened, whereas the institutional capacity of environmental agencies, although often beefed up in real terms, remains inadequate due to the heightened expectations of state and society actors. It is the external political support received by environmental agencies that drives the success or failure of environmental protection enforcement. More often than not, the strength or weakness of political support is embedded in the policy design and implementation structure and is associated with the policy orientation of political leaders.

New materialist theory has destabilized the figure of the sovereign subject by exploring matter's capacity to pose questions on its own terms. Such critique engages a growing concern for embodied modes of agency that exceed the intentions of human subjects. Exploring nonhuman agency through material capacities, ‘affect’ is a concept that poses new questions to the everyday circulations and assemblages of well-known sites. Viewed through an affectual lens, contemporary sites of consumption exceed their economic conditions of emergence, requiring approaches that acknowledge the ontological import of material reorganisation. By revisiting the work of Felix Guattari, this paper enacts a ‘machinic’ engagement with IKEA, situating a fundamentally engineered assemblage within virtual ecologies of nonhuman relation. Framed by a sustained ethnographic encounter with IKEA Bristol, I explore machinic assemblages of vibrations, molecules, and things. Through these material configurations, the IKEA assemblage makes uncertain interventions upon a ‘nonorganic life’, continually experimenting with a body's capacity to affect and to be affected. Guattari's project displaces the emergence of the new away from the interiority of a subject, such that change takes place through a diversity of machinic connections. To address the fundamental political question of change, politics must look beyond the molar semiotics of subjects and objects, to engage with more subtle recompositions of affective capacities.