Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The local media have recently carried a number of stories suggesting that Muslim ghettoes are developing in British cities – a claim also made about European cities more generally. Analysis of data from the 2001 and 2011 Censuses of England and Wales suggests that these representations are journalistic hyperbole: most British Muslims live in small city blocks where they form only a minority of the local population.

In this paper, I examine the convergence of big data and urban governance beyond the discursive and material contexts of the smart city. I argue that in addition to understanding the intensifying relationship between data, cities, and governance in terms of regimes of automated management and coordination in ‘actually existing’ smart cities, we should further engage with urban algorithmic governance and governmentality as material-discursive projects of future-ing, i.e., of anticipating particular kinds of cities-to-come. As urban big data looks to the future, it does so through the lens of an anticipatory security calculus fixated on identifying and diverting risks of urban anarchy and personal harm against which life in cities must be securitized. I suggest that such modes of algorithmic speculation are discernible at two scales of urban big data praxis: the scale of the body, and that of the city itself. At the level of the urbanite body, I use the selective example of mobile neighborhood safety apps to demonstrate how algorithmic governmentality enacts digital mediations of individual mobilities by routing individuals around ‘unsafe’ parts of the city in the interests of technologically ameliorating the risks of urban encounter. At the scale of the city, amongst other empirical examples, sentiment analytics approaches prefigure ephemeral spatialities of civic strife by aggregating and mapping individual emotions distilled from unstructured real-time content flows (such as Tweets). In both of these instances, the urban futures anticipated by the urban ‘big data security assemblage’ are highly uneven, as data and algorithms cannot divest themselves of urban inequalities and the persistence of their geographies.

In a growing debate about the smart city, considerations of the ways in which urban infrastructures and their materialities are being reconfigured and contested remain in the shadows of analyses which have been primarily concerned with the management and flow of digitalisation and big data in pursuit of new logics for economic growth. In this paper, we examine the ways in which the ‘smart city’ is being put to work for different ends and through different means. We argue that the co-constitution of the urban as a site for carbon governance and a place where smart energy systems are developed is leading to novel forms of governmental intervention operating at the conjunction of the grid and the city. We seek to move beyond examining the rationales and discourses of such interventions to engage with the ways in which they are actualised in and through particular urban conditions in order to draw attention to their material politics. In so doing, we argue that the urban is not a mere backdrop to transitions in electricity provision and use but central to its politics, while electricity is also critical to the ways in which we should understand the politics of urbanism.

Green entrepreneurs have been seen as key drivers for a transition to a green economy. However, there has been limited in-depth qualitative empirical research with green entrepreneurs to date, focusing instead on typologies categorising certain ‘types’ of green entrepreneur. Moreover, the literature rarely situates such individual activities within broader concepts such as the green economy. In contrast, we suggest that current discourses of the green economy are important in contextualising the ways that green entrepreneurs make sense of themselves and their businesses. Green entrepreneurs are thus negotiating varying tensions between their business activities, environmental philosophies and wider contexts at the intersection between the green economy and the mainstream economy. Drawing on evidence from 55 interviews, we explore the narratives employed by green entrepreneurs to situate themselves within/outwith the wider green economy – the recursive framing of mainstream and niche ‘green’ activities provides a sense of the tensions and politics at play in the development of the green economy. We thus offer a new and more dynamic view of the evolving nature of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ a green entrepreneur, rather than relying on the fixed categories espoused in previous typologies. We conclude that it is important that policy makers recognise the complex and contentious nature of green entrepreneurship, and that it is essential to view the green economy as a diverse constellation of myriad actors rather than corporate reinventions of business as usual.

The ‘under-management’ of forests is a long-standing challenge for forest policy in Europe and North America. In policy and research arenas it is most frequently explained via reference to individual land-managers’ decisions made on the basis of calculations of economic cost and benefit: a manifestation of the ‘attitudes’, ‘behaviour’, ‘choice’ paradigm. This paper seeks to challenge this analytic perspective by considering ‘under-management’ through the theoretical lens of social practice theory. Drawing on extensive qualitative data from the UK, it describes a deep-rooted practice of woodland neglect that is apparent in the ways land-managers understand woodlands, interact mentally and physically with them, and in the technology associated with them. The emergence of the UK’s woodfuel sector is used as an opportunity to consider management change from the perspective of practice. The paper finishes by considering the implications of a practice of woodland neglect for theory and forest policy, noting the importance of social and technical innovation for practice change.

This article examines the role of manual work in bridging the distance between production and consumption in alternative food networks, particularly in urban farming. Scholars and public commentators often draw on Marxian theories of alienation to suggest that manual work constitutes a key strategy for reconnecting production and consumption, and overcoming the ecological rift between natural processes and modern, agro-industrial production. Focusing on urban farming, this article complicates the picture of unalienated, decommodified labor and points to continuous negotiations between experiences of re-embedding in the community and the environment, and the on-going commodification of the farming experience. We argue that urban farms function as sites of “experiential production” where farm managers stage work experiences for the volunteers and where visitors build new socialities, reconnect to nature, and accrue social and cultural capital in the context of a global economy that offers limited work opportunities for a generation of highly educated college graduates. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork and 40 semi-structured interviews with employed urban farmers and regular volunteers in metropolitan areas of the Northeastern United States as well as the examination of online and print materials, our analysis highlights the contradictory ways in which manual work in alternative food networks indeed counters alienation, while also reproducing consumer society institutions and reinforcing the core values defining neoliberalism such as productivity and self-improvement.

Although the “mobility turn” has captured the critical imaginations of researchers studying an array of topics, its possible contributions to analyses of the spectrum of employment-related geographical mobility have only begun to be defined. Studies of work have engaged with the growing body of mobility theory in limited ways; by the same token, mobilities studies have taken a somewhat narrow and sometimes uncritical view of work, labor, and employment. This article draws on a major interdisciplinary research project into the socio-historical patterns, contexts, and impacts of employment-related geographical mobility in Canada to build a conceptual bridge between these two literatures. We re-visit established bodies of work on migration, work, and political economy and look at new avenues for conceptualizing employment-related geographical mobility. We then examine a case study from the Alberta Oil Sands and suggest an agenda for future research on mobility and work.

This paper builds on post-Keynesian macroeconomics, the French Regulation Theory and a Neo-Gramscian International Political Economy approach to class analysis to propose an International post-Keynesian Political Economy approach that is used to offer an empirical analysis of European growth models and working class restructuring in Europe between 2000 and 2008. We will distinguish between the ‘East’, the ‘North’ and the ‘South’ and structure our analysis around industrial upgrading, financialisation and working class coherence. We find an export-driven growth model in the North, which came with wage suppression and outsourcing to the East. In the East, the growth model can be characterised as dependent upgrading, which allowed for high real wage growth despite declining working class coherence. The South experienced a debt-driven growth model with a real estate bubble and high inflation rates resulting in large current account deficits. Our analysis shows that class restructuring forms an integral part in the economic process that resulted in European imbalances and the Euro crisis.

This paper demonstrates the impact the actions of developers during the design and build phases of multi-unit residential developments can have on the quality and effectiveness of the on-going management of developments. The findings presented are drawn from a large research project that included interviews and surveys with property owners, executive committee (body corporate) members, strata (property) managers, and peak body representatives about the management of strata schemes in the state of New South Wales in Australia. A total of 1550 people were consulted. The actions of developers in the set-up of multi-unit developments (including build quality, design, allocation of unit entitlements, and levy setting) can have an important impact on the quality of buildings, the financial viability of schemes in the short-to-medium term, the balance of power between owners, the effectiveness of management and the nature and incidence of disputes. The paper concludes with a discussion of opportunities for integrating long-term management considerations into decision-making in the design and build phase to ensure management costs and costs to those using the property are minimized. The research will be of interest to those involved with property developments in international jurisdictions that have similar multi-unit ownership and management structures and in jurisdictions considering the introduction of similar forms of multi-unit ownership.

This article uses a relational lens to explore the conflict between the regulatory state and a leading food retailer seeking store expansion within one catchment in south-east England over an eight-year period. The research highlights the relational power geometries which play out in context between regulators and a regulated corporate firm to emphasise the role of power, resources, and scale. The research teases out how the power of the state to uphold an interpretation of market rules is compromised by a lack of responsiveness compared to both the proactive and reactive tactics of the well-resourced corporate retailer. It recognises how multiple regulatory agents of the state with divergent goals, sometimes situated across different spatial scales of governance, can produce markedly different judgements resulting in outcomes that are not in the public interest. Such situations require swift and coherent regulatory responses and can reveal the need for changes to the organisation of the regulatory infrastructure itself.

How are scientific communication and knowledge-production possible even in a politicized atmosphere pervaded by distrust and animosity? This essay takes the Soviet–Japanese Fisheries Convention of the Northwest Pacific Ocean of 1956 as a case study to consider the nature and characteristics of scientific disputes in highly politically-charged contexts outside frameworks of nation-states or international bodies. It shows that disagreements in this atmosphere were both scientific and political. What counted as evidence, reliable data, responsible resource management, and risk were contingent and deeply conditioned by geopolitics, political economies, and epistemological traditions. No purely scientific solution to the debate was possible. Methods to enable fruitful dialogue despite disagreement had to be both social and epistemic. Mathematical models of population dynamics proved particularly useful in this regard.