Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper critically engages the uneven distribution of infrastructure provision, connectivity and mobility in contemporary neoliberal urban landscapes by uncovering the path-dependent trajectories and politics of transportation in post-suburbia. Departing from contemporary debates on the evolving geography of urban peripheries, I utilise a relational theorisation of the ‘in-between city’ to empirically unpack the urbanisation processes internalised in the evolution of the ‘Zwischenstadt’ in a North American context. Through a longue durée case study of transportation planning, politics and spatial practice in Chicago’s ‘Crosstown Corridor’, in-between urbanisation is demonstrated to express an on-going multiscalar mediation of co-habiting modes of urbanism and strategic state actions that challenge generalised (sub)urbanisation narratives. Despite continued interest from planners, politicians and business groups, proposals for both a major urban expressway and rapid transit line have proved political lightning rods. Consequently, neighbourhood protests, personal political battles and macro-economic trends have locked-in a neglected development pathway for Chicago’s inner suburbs. I argue that through disclosing key contradictory political-economic imperatives and conflicting scales of mobility, it is possible to identify space for political and planning interventions that can adapt to, and develop, polycentric urban practice in and through in-between urban space.

A pivotal innovation in the production of urban space has been the rise of privately governed neighborhoods overseen by homeowners associations (HOAs). One in every five American households resides in an HOA neighborhood regulated by conditions, covenants, and restrictions amounting to what has been referred to as a “quiet revolution” of urban politics. Their proliferation across cities warrants greater attention as they signify the transformation of state–civil society relations whereby nonstate entities are increasingly important actors in shaping the terrain of citizenship. HOAs are granted broad powers by the state and have profound effects on homeowners’ experiences of everyday life through regulations that generate neighborhood space. This article examines the different modalities of governance deployed by HOAs to shape homeowner participation in producing a certain yard aesthetic, namely the lawn. While the lawn is a dominant cultural landscape in the United States, we find that homeowners in privately governed neighborhoods report a greater commitment to producing a lush, green, well-manicured lawn and apply higher rates of fertilizer to their yards than households in nonprivately governed neighborhoods. Although HOAs exercise power by directly regulating homeowners’ spatial practices, they also govern indirectly by holding out the possibility of a sense of place and belonging that is connected to the production of aestheticized and commoditized landscapes. The deployment of both disciplinary and governmental forms of power supplement each other in the ongoing process of building neighborhood citizens that actively shape circuits of global capitalist investment in cities through the imaginary of neighborhood community.

Devolution to the subnational state and local level has increased reliance on locally raised revenue to provide basic social, infrastructural, and economic development services. We conduct multilevel regression models of local government fiscal effort (locally raised revenue normalized by population and income) of all county areas in the continental United States for the period 2002–2007. Spatial regression and geographically weighted regression are used to understand differential spatial effects of subnational state policies on local fiscal effort across counties. In contrast to conventional fiscal federalism theory, which argues local government is the developmental state, we find increased spatial inequality as expenditures driven by local need may crowd out expenditures related to growth and development. Nonmetropolitan counties and older suburbs exhibit higher local effort, while suburban outlying areas have lower effort. State rescaling requires more attention to policies of the subnational state, particularly state aid and state centralization of fiscal responsibility to ensure that both redistributive and developmental expenditures can be maintained under devolution.

This article challenges the longstanding trend of much empirical material on ethical consumption originating from the global North, offering instead rich data on ethical consumption and practices in Chile and Brazil. Drawing on data generated from 32 in-depth focus groups (179 participants in total) in both countries, the article identifies similarities and differences between these two countries and with the global North. We identify how ethical consumption in Chile and Brazil is conceptualized mainly at two different scales, namely first, the everyday ethics of consumption at household scale and, second, a more global scale of discourse on environmental problems and the negative effects of globalisation. At the household scale, narrative themes include those of prudence, of avoiding overconsumption, family health, and focus on quality. At a more national and international scale, respondents from all classes in both countries discussed labour conditions associated with Chinese imports. Further, particularly university-educated and well-travelled respondents had adopted international environmentalist discourses. Employing a relational geography to discourses, the article calls for research to both include and transcend cross-country comparisons, and binaries of global North and South.

This article opens up debates about the deepening uneven geographies of higher education through a critical analysis of transregional university alliances. Focusing on the formation of research consortia and Doctoral Training Centres, we reveal the emergence of over 50 transregional alliances between United Kingdom universities. Despite each consortium operating at a variously defined regional scale there has been no explicit attempt to account for their geographical basis. Providing the first-ever analysis of this unfolding phenomenon, we demonstrate how the rise of transregional alliances is indicative of, and a response to, universities operating in an intensely neoliberalised political economy. Bringing together emergent theories of regionalism with emerging worlds of (neoliberal) higher education, our article reveals how, why and where universities are engaging in more intensively targeted, exclusive approaches to regional development. We argue that higher education is conducive to the weakening of fixed regional territories, and propose the metaphor of ‘regional constellations’ for interpreting transregional geographies. Finally, our analysis suggests that while high-performing research institutions may compete better by forming consortia, transregional alliances lead to a more unequal and divided university sector.

This article investigates how distinct tiers of firms contribute to value creation and value capture in the automotive industry. We employ firm-level indicators to evaluate the value creation and capture of distinct supplier tiers in the Czech automotive industry, while considering differences between foreign-owned and domestic firms. Our analysis suggests that the economic effects of the automotive industry largely depend on its capital intensity and that mostly foreign-owned higher tier firms generate and capture greater value than lower tier firms, which include the vast majority of domestic suppliers.

This article explores ‘integrative encounters’ between immigrants and Polish people in Warsaw. Rather than focus on new arrivals we pay attention to the integration experiences of the host population in recognition that this is a group who have been relatively neglected in the literature. Post-socialist European countries where population mobility was circumscribed during the communist era and as a consequence became perceived as relatively homogenous white societies but which are now seeing a rise in immigration, have been largely neglected by non-domestic scholars. In Poland organised group activity is an important means to provide the established population with an opportunity to encounter migrants because such encounters are less likely to occur in everyday spaces. Drawing on research with a Warsaw based NGO which runs a football league to bring Polish people and immigrants together, we argue that attention needs to be paid to the issue of ‘motivation' to participate in integration projects and to the significance of sociality. In doing so, we suggest that creating the conditions for spontaneous connections to develop, even in contrived projects, is a way to overcome indifference to difference. Here, we highlight the qualities of football as a bridging activity to facilitate integrative encounters.

The rhino-poaching crisis in South Africa, according to many concerned citizens, conservation organisations and governments, is ‘out of control’. With over 1000 rhinos poached in each of 2013, 2014 and 2015, the crisis has triggered a massive response, much of which heavily depends on online tools to raise funds and awareness. The paper analyses emotive discourses and imaginaries as part of dominant online responses to the rhino-poaching crisis and found that these are predominantly espoused by whites and show a worrying penchant towards (extreme) violence. Building on a theorisation of the links between race, nature, affect and control, the paper hypothesises that these responses reflect a ‘politics of hysteria’. This politics captures the employment of affective and emotive expressions as a way to demand control over a situation ‘out of control’ in the context of historical and contemporary South African political economies of racial inequality. And as these expressions often tend towards exaggerated or extreme violence, they become potent forms of political mobilisation and intervention. New media are a crucial ingredient of this potency, and the paper concludes that this opens up important new questions about the relations between race, nature and violence.