Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

As Mumbai globalizes, the city’s aesthetic, aspirational, and imaginative transformations draw from other commercial centers in Asia. Mumbai’s owner-operated and hereditary kaalipeeli (black and yellow) taxi-trade is being modeled along the lines of Singapore’s fleet-taxi industry. This paper focuses on the political and cultural transformations that accompany this ‘Singapore model’ as manifest in contemporary Mumbai’s taxi-trade. Through a discussion of taxi-modernization in Mumbai it highlights four dimensions of an “Asian mobilities” approach, namely an examination of: the movement of ideas and people; how ideas about moving people around spaces of Asian cities themselves move between different cities; how in turn imaginaries transform the lives of those who labor to move people about; and finally how new kinds of mobilities are constituted through frictions.

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that airspace is not a singular, finished interface for aeromobile activities to take place in. Striated by lines that connect some points rather than others, it is a contested network of vectors that sometimes require additional human inputs for traffic to flow in desired ways. Assuming the view of a globalising city-state in Asia, this paper refers to two sets of empirical evidence to build its case: first, over 100 airline newsletters on the ‘Singapore Girl’ published between 1982 and 2000, and, second, fifteen sets of interviews with air hub development officers working for Singapore. Particular attention is paid to the emotional labours that have been invested by these aviation workers to induce particular, favourable business environments for air traffic to grow in the city-state. In so doing, this paper emphasises the uneven way aerial vectors are distributed across the globe, and highlights how these air-lines have a tendency to bypass (small) states not at the forefront of global aviation. Even for a successful overcomer like Singapore, the reordering of airspace does not come with the latitude of manufacturing a brand new air-scape, but involves the development of innovative counter regimes, people-performed technologies, and tactical solutions in an unequal air world.

This article’s central concern is to consider the geographic ‘margins’ in relationship to state governance in Pakistan. In doing so, it gestures toward wider theoretical lessons that can be drawn through ethnographic explorations of Karachi’s periphery and of Pak–Iran border towns such as Taftan located in the province of Baluchistan. Central to the discussion is the idea of mobility. The article considers three different types of mobility across Pakistan set in the broader context of Central-South Asian historical connectivities. First is the movement of ‘illicit’ commodities such as diesel across Pakistan’s border with Iran, forced migrations across Pakistan’s northwest region in relationship to the war on terror, and finally, the role of road networks in mediating mobilities: in short, mobility is considered across commodities, displacement, and infrastructure. How do these Asian mobilities shed light on the state? The idea of the margins is particularly helpful in theorizing the role of the state. These are liminal zones of creativity where money can be made but are also fraught with risk and conflict because they are beyond the reach of formal governance. The article opens with a history of Karachi and its surrounding regions, including its colonial past and the making of the Indus River which has always been of geopolitical importance. It then moves to a discussion of the diesel trade in the region. The flow of Iranian diesel into Karachi via towns like Taftan in Baluchistan represents a mingling of actors—mercenaries, drug traffickers, and diesel merchants—and the Pakistani state’s failure to sufficiently control this flow, which has become a lucrative business for some and a lifeline for others across Baluchistan and in Karachi’s periphery. The article then prefaces the role of infrastructure and its relationship with modernity and the Pakistani state. In conclusion, the article argues the margins should not be seen as being ‘outside’ of the nation-state or as some kind of ‘exceptional’ space. Rather they should be understood as constitutive of the state’s very ‘inside’ precisely because they are beyond its reach.

Using Singapore’s newly opened mega casino resorts as an example, this article illustrates how the expanding casino economy in Asia shapes, and is shaped by, an emerging mobility regime that works through the politics of exception. The coupling of mobility and exception creates a particular governing technology of tracking credibility through which mobile subjects and citizen subjects become manageable. Credibility demands that individuals must demonstrate their own rationality and capability in the exceptional space of global circulation. Exception is harnessed when logics of economic optimization and ethicalization are maintained to legitimize different processes of channeling, sorting, and bordering. They create new articulations of mobile identities and exclusion.

In Anglo-Saxon societies, homeowners expect to create synergies between the owned house seen as a space of shelter, a place of home, a store of wealth and increasingly, an investment vehicle (and an object of debt). Drawing on interviews with owner-occupiers and on historic house value and mortgage data in Great Britain, we examine the way in which homes’ meanings are negotiated through the subjective calculation of the financial costs and gains of homebuying. We explore homebuyers’ miscalculation of gains, their disregard of inflation and more generally, the inconspicuousness of debt in relation to gains within their accounts, which we term ‘debt amnesia’. We show that the phenomenon of debt amnesia is socially constructed by congruent socio-linguistic, cultural, institutional and ideological devices besides being supported by historic growth in house values. Informed by the ideas of ‘tacit knowledge’ and ‘metaphoric understanding’, we reflect on how the occurrence of the unspoken and the partiality of metaphor reinforce the internalisation of homeownership.

This paper examines the impact of brownfield redevelopments on neighboring housing prices in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. We examine the levels and trends in housing prices before and after the remediation of brownfields in neighborhoods based on parcel-level housing sales data from 1996 to 2007. We use the Adjusted Interrupted Time Series-Difference in Differences model to explain the causal direction of impacts of brownfield redevelopments. We explore impacts on nearby property values from the remediation of brownfield sites countywide and in neighborhoods stratified by family income. This paper also specifies how the impact of brownfield redevelopments varies under different land use upon completion of remediation. Our countywide model shows that brownfield sites have a negative impact on surrounding housing prices. However, after brownfields are redeveloped, the negative impacts of contaminated sites on neighboring housing prices are removed. It is notable that brownfield redevelopment in commercial and recreational land use has positive impacts on nearby property values. Our findings also show that there are significant positive impacts on surrounding housing prices in low- and middle-income neighborhoods. These results will help policymakers better understand how the remediation of brownfields affects neighborhoods and develop policies to reap the maximum economic benefit from brownfield redevelopments.

Harmonisation of disease management practices across global space and the devolution of responsibility to a broader range of actors are two increasingly important approaches for ordering biosecurity governance. While these forms of ordering have been examined individually, the social science biosecurity literature provides limited insights into how they interact and interfere with one another, and the consequences for biosecurity implementation. This paper draws upon an institutional logics approach to examine the different and competing logics through which government agencies, industry bodies and farming enterprises engage in biosecurity. It focuses specifically on the ways in which these logics pose challenges for harmonisation of biosecurity as well as create alternative spaces of negotiation for making life safe. Through the analysis of policy documents and semi-structured interviews with government and industry stakeholders, as well as with beef producers, we identify three institutional logics being the neoliberal, productivist and agrarian logics. We argue that the existence of multiple logics poses significant challenges for efforts to achieve improved harmonisation of biosecurity in an environment of devolved responsibility to industry, farming bodies and producers. In this context, greater emphasis by stakeholders on the productivist logic holds the most potential for improving biosecurity implementation in that it works with existing agricultural circulations and flows, and with producers' herd health practices.

The concept of “communities of practice” enjoys great popularity in economic geography dealing with the question of how novelty comes into the world. However, while the role of communities in innovation processes is increasingly recognized, their function in terms of commercialization of generated new ideas remains a kind of blind spot in most existing studies. The article focuses on the transformation of “affects” into “interests” and “demands” and traces how meanings and values are produced out of affective situations experienced by geographically widely dispersed community participants. The paper connects empirical findings from three case studies of enthusiast-driven “communities of interest” (case modding, fingerboarding and geocaching) with a theoretically grounded perspective on practices of collective value creation. By following pragmatic approaches, the article presents three intertwining dimensions of valuation practices—sensemaking, sacralization and commodification—and illustrates how “markets” emerge out of communities' activities.

Research on digital inclusion increasingly focuses on vulnerable groups, with the prevailing idea that social exclusion leads to digital exclusion. The role of the socio-spatial context is often faded into the background due to user-centric (individual) approaches. This article explores how a vulnerable group, Gypsy-Travelers in the Netherlands, deals with digital developments within their socio-spatial context. Contrary to prevailing theories, the analysis shows that Gypsy-Travelers are digitally engaged, despite their social exclusion. An advantage of the Gypsy-Traveler culture is that extended families on the sites provide a large potential of proxy users for support. Many of the Gypsy-Travelers are digitally engaged, but they engage and participate on their own terms. Furthermore, the digital engagement of Gypsy-Travelers is not a panacea for their social exclusion. In fact, their problematic relation with the settled society is mirrored in online activities. This research shows that digitalization has added a new layer to the interaction between Gypsy-Travelers and settled society. It also demonstrates that more socially and spatially contextualized research approaches can add insights to the debate on social and digital exclusion.

Comparing innovation across regions is challenging. Innovation processes and outcomes are shaped by different actors, interactions, and institutions. Regional contingencies complicate the comparison as evident from the existing approaches to explaining innovation across regions. Quantitative innovation measurement approaches may quantify differences between regions, but disregard regional contingencies. Qualitative, heuristic approaches may understand an individual region’s innovation history and culture, but cannot quantify differences between regions. This paper introduces an adapted version of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to fill this methodological void. It shows that the AHP allows us both to consider regional contingency and to quantify differences between regions. This paper applies the AHP to compare innovation of the equipment manufacturing industries of Shanghai and Xiamen, China. It thus exemplifies how this method might be used for research and application in human geography, planning, regional science, and related fields.