Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This study computes the Discomfort Index, also known as the Misery Index, for 276 European Union NUTS2 regions to determine how “suffering” a region is or not before and after the global crisis. The geographical distribution of European Union regions according to their discomfort has deeply changed in the post-financial crisis years.

One of the main motivations given for the proposed new expansion of grammar schools in England is to improve social mobility. We assess the role of existing grammar schools in promoting social mobility by examining access to grammar schools, differentiating among the 85% non-poor pupils using the National Pupil Database. We find stark differences in grammar school attendance within selective areas by socio-economic status, even when comparing pupils with the same Key Stage 2 attainment. High attaining children from the most deprived backgrounds are significantly less likely to attend a grammar school compared to similarly high attaining children from the least deprived backgrounds. Given these large inequalities in attendance to grammar schools, conditional on achievement, it is hard to see how such a system would promote the aim of improving social mobility.

From Victorian England and its colonies, to cities in South Asia today, “improvement” has long infused the language of urban planning. Through the case of Bangalore, India, this article argues that urban improvement should be understood as a project of liberal government forged in the crucible of empire and harnessed in the service of the state’s capital and spatial accumulation strategies. Once practiced by colonial planners, urban improvement fundamentally entails enhancing the value of urban space and its circulatory infrastructures through the mobilization of corrective behaviors related to property and propriety. In the process, improvement grafts race, class, caste, and other forms of social difference onto urban space, which in turn provides the justification for further improvement. Ultimately, improvement begets cycles of inequality and exclusion, even while it promises betterment and inclusion. Three improvement regimes are identified here: racialized improvement in the colonial city (1890s–1920s), classed improvement in the industrial city (1930s–1970s), and marketized improvement in the world-class city (1980s–2010s). The article further shows that with each wave of urban improvement came vernacular and nationalist responses that sought to extend housing and services to unserved constituents. These indigenous calibrations are as important to the genealogy of improvement as its original European form.

Waste picking is an old practice, whereby profit is gained by recovering recyclable materials from discarded objects and reintroducing them into the formal and informal economic circuits. Recycling and recovery of waste in urban centres in the Global South has been the subject of a number of studies. However, this activity also exists in more affluent cities. Based on research carried out in Turin (Italy) and Marseille (France), in this paper we analyse waste picking by Roma communities, showing that this activity not only provides them with an income from the sale of recycled objects and materials but also allows them to assemble their access to the city and its multiple resources –people, objects, spaces. Only the recognition of the Roma as workers and citizens beyond any imposed normalisation can bring about a change in the way their being-in-the-city is considered both at a social, economic and political level.

This paper contributes to an expanding concern with the urban geographies of advertising. The paper outlines the need to investigate the difference the material logics of advertising technology (hardware, software and code) make to the bodies and spaces of urban life. Through an intensified capacity to selectively open up to and interact with urban space, I argue, technological advancements in outdoor advertising launch the advertising object into a more compatible relation with urban space. I exemplify this by pulling out and detailing the recent development of image-recognition technology, anti-hacking features and thermal management systems, each of which are becoming central to the contemporary material conditions of outdoor advertising. Through the lens of Gilbert Simondon's notion of ‘concretisation', these technological advancements are conceptualised as resolving particular commercial incompatibilities in the relation between advertising object and excessive environments. Taken together, they leverage the outdoor advertising object’s control over its capacities to affect and be affected, that is, over its affective affordance. I suggest this has significant implications for how we engage and intervene into the politics of advertising geographies.

A growing number of studies have concluded that the European economic and monetary union has exacerbated inequalities in income, wealth and society. Furthermore, the endogeneity of income inequality is now becoming recognised as an important part of the cost–benefit analysis of euro currency adoption. Yet the nature, significance and scale of different monetary (and market) integration channels in operation remain uncertain. In this contribution, we employ static and dynamic panel data methodologies to investigate the intra-national household inequality implications, both realised and expected over coming years. Our analysis reveals that the within-country inequality outcomes differ significantly for core and non-core country-groups in the European economic and monetary union, which have so far realised very different distributional costs and benefits from the integration process. These are crucial issues for policy-makers, not just for the European economic and monetary union member states, but for other countries as well, especially the European Union countries that are expected to adopt the euro currency in the future. This is so in terms of their attempts to look for, design and implement policies, which alleviate rather than exacerbate within-country inequality.

A spatial reorganization of agriculture has been underway throughout the 20th century, and this reorganization has accelerated in the context of neoliberal trade arrangements such as NAFTA and the European Union. Global production networks now characterize today’s agricultural industry resulting in devalorized rural production spaces in specific locales. At the same time, surplus capital accumulated in contemporary global cities and regional urban centers continuously seeks out new spaces for investment in potentially profitable rent gaps. These parallel forces stimulate the re-purposing of rural industrial spaces from agricultural to residential uses in much the same way as occurred in former manufacturing neighborhoods in many urban centers. Using Jackson, Wyoming as a case study, this paper illustrates these processes through a framework based largely on theorizations of gentrification in urban contexts. In doing so, the case study brings supply side explanations of gentrification more explicitly into the United States’ rural gentrification literature and further highlights how contemporary processes of rural gentrification represent new geographies of capital accumulation. The Jackson case study further demonstrates the ways in which these flows of capital produce rural space in a relational sense by linking the local rural to the national and global through complex networks of capital investment operating at multiple scales.

In this brief note on the movement (or should it be defection?) of UK economic geographers from geography departments into business schools, I argue that this movement is in fact part of a wider de-prioritization and emasculation of economic geography within many geography departments across the country. Yet this rundown of British economic geography has occurred precisely at a time when the importance and relevance of the subdiscipline have become increasingly recognized within national and local policy circles. Reversing the institutional decline of economic geography across the British university system is therefore imperative.

The decline of economic geography in British geography departments and schools is a cause for concern, given its historic importance as a seedbed for critical and alternative thinking. While there are attractions and opportunities for economic geographers such as myself in working in management departments and business schools, particularly those that have a critical social science culture, it is vital that geography itself, as a discipline, retains a commitment to heterodox economic enquiry and understanding. At a time of multiplying global political, economic and ecological crises, the disappearance of economic geography from the mainstream teaching curriculum and research agenda would be a regrettable loss for the broader academic project.

This short commentary responds to James et al.’s report on the employment of economic geographers within in departments of business and management in UK universities. An initial ambivalence about the numbers of economic geographers working outside the sub-discipline has been replaced by growing concerns over the supply of early career economic geographers, the immediate pressures of the Research Excellence Framework and the growth and financial significance of business schools within the UK university sector. Collective action and collaboration by the remaining economic geographers is encouraged to stem the tide.