Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The paper contributes to literature on the geographies of corporate philanthropy through a case study of the origins, growth and decline of the Northern Rock bank's charitable foundation. Analysis reveals the complex, geographically-embedded nature of philanthropic motivations and impacts. It demonstrates that investment in home and community by philanthropists was part of a regionally-inscribed business-model of excessive risk taking that brought them considerable personal financial rewards. It highlights tensions and conflicts between corporate philanthropists and professional grant-makers over the scale and regional focus of giving. The paper concludes that the positive outcomes of corporate philanthropy are difficult to sustain in disadvantaged regions where shifts in corporate strategy and fragilities in the local economy undermine charitable giving.

This paper critically assesses international policy advocacy on how to resolve massive shelter needs in the developing world. It does so by focusing on the World Bank as a leader in development. It argues that the Bank’s housing policy remains thoroughly limited by its persistent commitment to neoliberal and financialised policy practices. These put housing finance at the centre of attempts to relieve shelter needs in the developing world despite the dramatic failures of such an approach as laid bare through the global financial crisis. The paper takes a historical approach to examine the trajectory of World Bank housing policy and is based on close scrutiny of a combination of quantitative and qualitative data. It concludes that an urgent need persists for a decoupling of finance from housing in international policy advocacy.

Government officials, city planners and elites frequently position young people, especially street children and youth, as detrimental to revitalization, contributing to urban blight and needing removal. Through an examination of urban change in Lima, Peru, this article challenges the assumption that street children and youth exclusively detract from urban revitalization. Although many young people have been negatively affected by Lima’s revitalization, I argue that conflict does not tell the whole story. Street children and youths’ reactions are often more ambiguous than many assume, and young people may even be central to some efforts to improve urban space. Further, an examination of street children and youths’ informal and formal efforts to negotiate public space reveals the importance of relationships to perceptions of urban change and the success of various urban revitalization efforts. Such relationships are often overlooked in binaries that represent street children and youth as either a problem or, less typically, the solution. Instead, this research indicates the need for a more nuanced understanding of young peoples’ relationship with the uneven production of urban space.

This paper draws on assemblage thinking—especially Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of territorialization—to analyze urban redevelopment processes in Oklahoma City, a mid-sized city in the central United States that has pursued a culturally led, “entrepreneurial” approach to redevelopment. Focusing on the linkages between architecture, sport, and local food in the city, I demonstrate some of the ways in which these realms were woven together in support of the territorial expansion of redevelopment. Following recent research on affect in human geography, I argue that the interweaving of these realms involved careful attention to the material capacities of buildings, athletic bodies, and foods to generate a sense of excitement, pride in place, self-worth, and above all movement in the city. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the implications of this analysis for the politics of redevelopment and some suggestions for future research.

In 2015, West Virginia’s flagship food bank confronted a financial crisis that threatened to cut off the supply of emergency food to some 600 agencies serving 300,000 people a month. Focusing on this crisis, we explore the evolution of charitable food networks across the United States with a particular focus on the role of food banking within agro-industrial supply chains. Drawing on a three year institutional ethnography of West Virginia’s food banking economy, we analyze the transition from producer to buyer driven supply chains in a network that is dependent on charitable giving and affective labor to process surplus foods and revalue obsolete corporate inventories. We argue that food banks and their affiliate agencies have become key institutions within a vast food destruction network increasingly serving the needs of large food firms. While food banks and their affiliate agencies provide tax relief for food corporations and offer a highly efficient vent for state subsidized and corporate food waste, they are primarily funded by community-based organizations who are themselves stretched thin by economic crises within their own locales. The entrenchment and evolution of the food waste qua hunger relief circuit is producing new tensions in a network that is conflicted over whom they are ultimately working for, and sheds light on the paradox of hunger relief in the 21st-century.

Previous research on gentrification almost exclusively focussed on either the gentrifiers or those who are displaced. Those who manage to avoid displacement remain understudied. To shed new light on these original inhabitants, we link upward change in low-income neighbourhoods, measured by the changing socio-economic composition of the neighbourhood, to the propensity to move based on dissatisfaction with the neighbourhood or the home of both lower- or middle-educated people and higher-educated people living in these neighbourhoods. We perform binary logistic multi-level analyses on the Liveability Monitor of Ghent (N = 1037), a midsized city in Belgium. We find that upward neighbourhood change is associated with a higher propensity to move based on dissatisfaction with the home for both the lower- and higher-educated original inhabitants. Focusing on dissatisfaction with the neighbourhood, we find no association between moving propensities and the neighbourhood someone lives in. We therefore conclude that it is not the evaluation of the neighbourhood but the evaluation of one's own house in an improving neighbourhood that is associated with higher moving propensities, for both higher and lower educated respondents. Displacement pressures based on rising housing prices might lead to these moving propensities, but it seems likely that there are other factors at play too, like, e.g. life cycle mobility. We therefore also conclude that both lower- and higher-educated inhabitants of improving neighbourhoods deserve academic attention.

Urban park designers have long championed the social underpinnings of their work. Of late, however, certain landscape practitioners have articulated a more explicit connection between park design and social objectives, arguing that the fundamental role of urban parks is to foster equity and justice. Drawing on Marxian geographer David Harvey’s notion of the geographical imagination, this paper interrogates the relationship between parks and social processes by exploring the role that social issues have historically played in urban park design and by unpacking the prevailing imaginaries of social justice landscape architects and designers have employed in contemporary urban park projects. In doing so, it juxtaposes the lofty rhetoric of designing for social justice against the material reality of development-driven urban regeneration. In this way, the geographic imaginary provides a framework for understanding the limited capacity of urban park design to address broader social issues, even as it offers a mechanism for conceiving and articulating alternatives that more completely address the conditions through which social injustice occurs.

The term geopolitical economy has been used in a variety of ways within geography and other disciplines. This introduction to the special issue on geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia discusses two of the major ways in which the term has been used—as “geographical political economy” and as “geopolitics plus political economy”—outlining an approach to articulation of these two forms of geopolitical economy.

Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and geopolitics. This paper examines the contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires unraveling multiple—sometimes competing—levels of geopolitical and geoeconomic power relations. It follows that geopolitical economy requires historicizing the practices of territorialization. The second point is that the practice of territorialization is today everywhere bound up with the project of producing and reproducing capitalist (i.e. class) social relations, including the capitalist form of the state as a social relation. To support this claim, we examine recent US–China hegemonic competition in regional, geoeconomic strategies—US’s “Trans-Pacific Partnership” and China’s “One Belt, One Road” Initiative.

Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested accumulations through displacement.

Much scholarship on East Asian development has sidelined the crucial role of geopolitics by insisting that wars such as the Vietnam War had limited effects on industrial development and economic growth patterns. We find such arguments unpersuasive, and also unduly reductionist. The Vietnam War, in particular, had unambiguously powerful effects on industrial development in South Korea; but even in cases where the direct effects of war were somewhat less spectacular, such as Taiwan, the reasons for the differences were themselves deeply geopolitical and expressive of decision-making processes centered on the Vietnam War. In this paper, we explore the differential effects of such geopolitical decision-making by contrasting the development trajectories of the Ulsan and Kaohsiung industrial zones during the war period. We show, in addition, that the subsequent development of industrial projects in South Korea and Taiwan has continued to bear some of the marks of Vietnam War-era geopolitical economy.

This comment explores the relation between geoeconomics and geopolitics from a critical realist, strategic-relational, and cultural political economy perspective. We disambiguate the ‘geo-’ family of concepts; introduce a more complex view of sociospatiality that enables a taxonomy of approaches to geopolitical analytical objects and inquiries; and illustrate this from China’s Belt and Road Initiative seen as a complex geopolitical imaginary and linked modes of multi-spatial metagovernance.