Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Scholars have shown that technical standards play an important role in building global transportation and communication infrastructures, but the environmental standardization efforts associated with infrastructures have received far less attention. Combining scholarship from transportation geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies, we show how global connection is made, maintained, and contested through environmental management practices pegged to infrastructure standards. The Panama Canal expansion, completed in 2016, is a revealing illustration. The expansion has established the New Panamax shipping standard: the maximum allowable dimensions for vessels passing through the canal’s massive new locks. The standard has become a benchmark for port modernization and channel deepening projects along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States and beyond. Because the maximum underwater depth, or draft, of ships transiting the new locks is much deeper than before (50 rather than 39.5 feet), geographically dispersed governments, firms, and port authorities have scrambled to reach that standard in hopes of attracting New Panamax ships and associated revenue streams. As this case shows, global transportation depends on the expensive, ecologically destabilizing, and often-contested practices of dredging and disposing of large volumes of sediment and organic matter. By showing how shipping networks and situated politics converge around infrastructure standards, we foreground the uneven environmental burdens and benefits of transportation.

In this article we use a case study of opencast coal mining in the southern valleys of Wales to explore the ordinary and everyday spatialities of environmental injustice. Responding to recent geographical critiques of environmental justice research and engaging with post-colonial studies of landscape and environment, we provide an account of environmental injustice that emphasises competing geographical imaginaries of landscape and ‘ordinary political injustices’ within everyday spaces. We begin with a discussion of how historical environmental injustices in Wales have been framed within nationalist politics as a form of colonial exploitation of the country’s natural resources. We then make use of materials from recent research on opencast mining in South Wales to examine local understandings of and everyday encounters with mining, highlighting contradictory discourses of opencast mining, landscape and place, and the injustices associated with mining developments in this region.

The growth of community-based Transition Town initiatives in countries like the UK, USA and Canada is popularly perceived to represent a broad, socially inclusive and grounded approach to tackling environmental problems in place-based communities. In focusing on resilience as a core theme, so-called re-localisation initiatives attempt to adopt consensus based approaches to decision making and to highlight the need for an ‘inner transition’ of the self that encourages closer connections between individuals and nature. In this way, Transition has been framed as a new form of social and environmental movement that is re-casting community and political relations for a low carbon and post ‘Peak oil’ future. Yet despite these emergent philosophies of Transition and the considerable scholarship being generated on the role and success of such initiatives, there is an urgent need to situate and analyse Transition within broader understandings of environmental activism. Using data from a two year research project on ‘Values in Transition’, this paper argues that the praxis and spatial complexity of Transition can be understood more deeply through a narrative lens. In mobilising critical scholarship on environmental activism, the paper calls for a ‘Transition Geographies’ that views re-localisation as a dynamic and complex coalescence of competing narratives that sit between traditional forms of environmental activism and directive initiatives for individual behaviour change. As such, the paper highlights the ways in which this new form of environmental activism is shaping praxis across space, and the implications this has for those advocating re-localisation as a strategy for tackling climate change and resource scarcity.

This paper examines a historic preservation controversy that surrounded redevelopment efforts in Coney Island during the late 2000s. This longstanding amusement district in Brooklyn, New York inspired widespread agreement about its importance as a heritage destination. The apparent agreement, however, belied profound differences over the aspects of the neighborhood that contributed to its iconic stature and about how they should relate to plans for the area's redevelopment. Because heritage value is not an inherent attribute of the built environment, these divergent cultural claims raise questions about how this value comes about. The literature on heritage finds answers to these questions in processes of community formation. This explanation, however, offers limited insight into the classification of Coney Island features as objects of heritage. I make sense of the valorization of these features in terms of experiential qualities that cast an anachronistic glow over Coney Island and that inspired in preservation advocates a sense of the neighborhood's heritage. By looking beyond community dynamics and examining alternative ways in which heritage value arises, my research contributes to our understanding of the contentiousness that surrounds the redevelopment of historic places. It also poses a challenge to preservation efforts that assume the centrality of communities to heritage value claims, bypassing the anterior question of how people experience and understand places of heritage in the first place.

Often referred to as “tent cities”, tent encampments have, in the last 10 years, proliferated within and around US cities on a scale unprecedented since the Great Depression. Accounts of these informal dwellings tend to focus on the symbolism of the camp, the function of the camp as safe zone, or the camp as a site of apolitical or prepolitical identity formation. This article attempts to broaden and deepen the conversation on informal dwellings in the US by focusing on the tent encampment as a site of creative political agency and experimentation. Drawing upon a body of work referred to by some as “subaltern urbanism”, I examine how everyday practices of camp management produce localized forms of citizenship and governmentality through which “homeless” residents resist stereotypes of pathology and dependence, reclaim their rational autonomy, and recast deviance as negotiable difference in the production of governmental knowledge. Consideration of these practices, I argue, opens up the possibility of a of a view of encampments that foregrounds the agency of the homeless in the production of new political spaces and subjectivities.

Following recent calls for the development of a more embedded sense of labour agency, this paper focuses on the scale of the workplace which is largely absent from recent labour geography debates. Drawing on studies in the labour process tradition, the paper presents empirical research on call centre work in Glasgow, utilising this to revisit the concept of local Labour Control Regimes. We argue that rather than being simply imposed by capital and the state ‘from above’, workplace control should be seen as the product of a dialectical process of interaction and negotiation between management and labour. Labour's indeterminacy can influence capital in case specific ways as firms adapt to labour agency and selectively tolerate and collude with certain practices and behaviours. Workers’ learned behaviours and identities are shown to affect not only recruitment patterns in unexpected ways, but also modes of accepted conduct in call centres. Accordingly, the case is made for the influence of subtle – yet pervasive – worker agency expressed at the micro-scale of the labour process itself. This, it is argued, exerts a degree of ‘bottom-up’ pressure on key fractions of capital within the local Labour Control Regime.

Automated high-frequency trading has grown tremendously in the past 20 years and is responsible for about half of all trading activities at stock exchanges worldwide. Geography is central to the rise of high-frequency trading due to a market design of “continuous trading” that allows traders to engage in arbitrage based upon informational advantages built into the socio-technical assemblages that make up current capital markets. Enormous investments have been made in creating transmission technologies and optimizing computer architectures, all in an effort to shave milliseconds of order travel time (or latency) within and between markets. We show that as a result of the built spatial configuration of capital markets, “public” is no longer synonymous with “equal” information. High-frequency trading increases information inequalities between market participants.

The term ‘financialisation’ has now entered the lexicon of academics and policy makers, though there is still no agreement on its meaning and significance. One of the earlier definitions was in relation to the growing weight of financial motives, financial actors and markets in the operation of modern economies, both at the national and international level, from the early 1980s until today. Building on this definition, this paper sheds further light on the implications of spatial financialisation, which has been associated with the over and under-extension of credit across and within countries and evolving financial instability. The paper’s primary contribution is to extend in a robust manner a powerful panel data convergence testing methodology to analyse the spatial scale and temporal evolution of Italian regional lending conditions. The paper concludes that financial divergence has broadly increased in Italian regions. Furthermore, we are able to link regional financialisation to the growing north–south divide in a significant and meaningful way. As a result, the ability of southern regions in Italy to absorb adverse macroeconomic and financial shocks has been weakened. Relevant regional financial policies have thereby become very important.

With its corresponding concepts of societal, territorial, and network embeddedness, firm embeddedness offers a theoretical framework for analyzing how retailers develop strategies and business models determined by their home country context, but also adapted to new places, consumers, and networks. This paper uses firm embeddedness to examine food retailer adaptation within a changing home market, focusing on Wal-Mart’s efforts to implement local produce sourcing in the U.S. Growing consumer interest in local food has sufficiently shifted the competitive landscape within the U.S. market that Wal-Mart and other food retailers have sought to incorporate local produce into their operations. This paper asks whether Wal-Mart’s core lean retailing strategy facilitates or impedes such efforts to localize its U.S. produce supply chains. Qualitative field research conducted in 2011–2012 in one U.S. region centered on semi-structured interviews with 27 fresh fruit and vegetable producers involved in Wal-Mart’s local produce supply chains and 20 representatives of organizations facilitating commercial relationships between local growers and Wal-Mart. We find that the lean retailing model developed by Wal-Mart in response to historical circumstances in U.S. retailing and central to its present global retail dominance also limits Wal-Mart’s ability to engage in the bottom-up learning and adaptation to local contexts necessary for adjusting to the new competitive environment of local food. Wal-Mart’s centralized management and distribution systems, practices of cutting out intermediaries, and emphasis on standardization all presented some barriers to establishing the territorial and network embeddedness that could facilitate adaptation. However, we conclude that rather than simply failing to adapt to the challenges of localization, Wal-Mart applied a hybrid strategy in its local produce sourcing program. This hybrid strategy combined lean retailing—Wal-Mart’s traditional basis of competition—with selected, rather than comprehensive aspects of localization.

Extant research has increasingly recognized that local reputation determines creative firms’ competitiveness. However, current research over-emphasizes that the spatial cluster facilitates the innovation dynamic of creative industries rather than investigating whether the trans-local dynamic of trade fairs and competitions underpins the reputation-building process of local creative industries. This paper contributes to exploring the reputation-building process and spatial strategy of creative industries through a case study of product design firms in Taipei. Drawing on a qualitative methodology, this paper analyses 35 in-depth interviews with product design company executives, concluding that the spatial strategy of product design firms situated in the Taipei city context must acknowledge local strategic advantage and increasingly build a reputation through connections to trans-local design fairs and competitions. Meanwhile, the reputation-building process reflects that product design firms must capture and negotiate symbolic value through a strategic co-presence in local, regional, and global temporary event spaces. Finally, the process and strategies imply that the design industry needs a new form of intervention in latecomer cities to respond to the uneven development of the global design economy.

Contractual agreements are becoming increasingly important for city governments seeking to manage urban development. Contractual governance involves direct relations between the local state and different public and private actors and citizens. Although abundant literature exists on public–private partnerships related to urban development projects, agreements made between citizens, interest organizations and market parties, such as Community Benefits Agreements remain under-explored and under-theorized. While it may seem that the state is absent from contemporary forms of contractual governance, such agreements remain highly intertwined with government policies. The central aim of this paper is to better conceptualize Community Benefits Agreement practices in order to build understanding of how contractual governance caters for direct end-user involvement in urban development, and to yield insights into its potential as to render development processes more inclusive. Based on academic literature in planning and law, expert interviews and several case studies in New York City, this paper conceptualizes end-user involvement in urban development projects and innovates within urban planning and governance theory through the use of two new concepts—project collectivity and the image of a fourth chair.

Reducing carbon emissions from the transport sector has become a critical imperative for public policy as our understanding of the impacts of the mobility system on the environment has developed. This paper contrasts policy development in three cities (Aberdeen, Bremen and Malmö) that collaborated as part of a European Union knowledge exchange programme designed to share innovative approaches to carbon reduction in the transport sector. We identify a number of critical aspects of governance, including the approach to policy formulation and implementation, and the status of consensus and cohesion, as key determinants of transport outcomes. We conclude that the degree of institutional alignment evident in each city’s governance network is crucial in explaining their appetite for the pursuit of low carbon policies, and in turn the real potential for policy transfer to occur as envisaged by European Union collaboration frameworks.