Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The rural access index is beneficial to monitor accessibility in rural areas. However, the rural access index cannot indicate how many rural people have not been served (called not served rural population or NSRP), and it has only been mapped at a national and/or regional scale. This study visualises both the rural access index and not served rural population in Africa, and also visualises the not served rural population at a fine scale (i.e. 10 km × 10 km grid). The results show that: First, the spatial pattern of the not served rural population is quite different with that of the rural access index, and thus we suggest to use the not served rural population indicator as a supplement of the rural access index. Second, the not served rural population varies within a country, and the fine-scale mapping can be helpful for policy makers and planners to decide where there is a priority need to improve rural road accessibility.

The rapid spread of COVID-19 has damaged the economy in the United States. To understand the resilience capacities of local businesses, we visualized the spatiotemporal patterns of permanently closed Points of Interest (POIs) after the outbreak of the pandemic. The results show that the counties with more business closures are also the counties with a larger population. The permanent closures of most local businesses occurred immediately after the lift of stay-at-home order. We also found that those business owners, who permanently shut down their businesses, may not open new ones elsewhere. In addition, the permanent closures of entertainment and recreation businesses are significantly less than that of retail and trade businesses and food services.

The evaluation of the arable land ecosystem services capacity and arable land use intensity is important for recognizing regional key factors that impact the change of arable land attributes. A chronic lack of cooperation persists between these two fields of study, which makes providing sufficient information to support developing arable land use management and control policies difficult. In this study, the clustering characteristics of four arable land quality indexes have been assessed using the K-means algorithm to indicate the regional coordination between arable land resource protection and arable land use. The clustering results have been visualized using circular cartogram. This study can contribute to the identification of key regional challenges in China's arable land use and help to build the framework of other countries’ arable land protection policies.

Contemporary large-scale real estate developments often have an explicit transnational character. Particularly in late development contexts, they are frequently financed and developed by foreign stakeholders. United Arab Emirates (UAE)-based transnational developers have been the largest global providers of greenfield real estate foreign direct investment (GREFDI) between 2003 and 2014. A closer look at these activities, however, reveals that only a limited percentage of the announced projects eventually materialized. Based on a thorough study of several academic articles, online media coverage, and interviews conducted with real estate experts in Dubai and Abu Dhabi in 2018, this paper critically evaluates the current status of transnational real estate development projects (TREDs) announced by the UAE companies in the early 21st century, as well as the most common implementation strategies and rationales behind them. It illustrates how closely geopolitics, geo-economics, and real estate can be intertwined, especially when transnational developers are closely related to their home governments. Against this backdrop, TREDs are often a part of broader bilateral business deals, and can simultaneously be driven by the desire of acquiring symbolic capital on behalf of the political actors involved. Furthermore, it is concluded that TREDs that are facilitated by UAE-based developers are fairly similar to contemporary TREDS on behalf of government-related developers from other emerging economies.

This paper uncovers the local state's complex intersections with the market and its multifaceted relations with the public through an in-depth qualitative case study of municipal housing privatization and urban renewal in one of the heartlands of the Swedish welfare state project, Rosengård in Malmö, Sweden. Drawing on the political-economic literature, I argue that housing privatization is entangled with complex interrelations among the (municipal) local state, the market, and the public and that an exploration of these relations reveals contemporary features of the local state. Hence, this investigation highlights the local state's motivation for privatization, the remaking of a market in a place where the market is believed to have failed, and the powers the local state retains. Additionally, the paper elucidates how the function of public assets changes due to privatization and considers tenants’ and residents’ worries, criticism, and concerns about municipal interventions. Subsequently, by grounding these findings in the historical function of municipalities in Sweden, the study contributes new knowledge on the local state in a deepened neoliberalized and financialized urban landscape.

The present study examines holistic neighborhood change in Los Angeles County across three decades between 1980 and 2010. Using Census tract data, we conduct a latent class analysis to identify classes of neighborhood change for each decade according to housing dynamics, age structure, racial-ethnic composition and churning, and socioeconomic characteristics, and describe latent classes indicative of gentrification. Further, we assess the degree to which tracts experience sustained or repeated gentrification over the 30 year period. In line with more recent conceptualizations of gentrification as a broad urban process, we find that gentrification occurs in a wide range of neighborhoods, and manifests itself differently according to shifts in population characteristics, with many tracts experiencing more than one successive period of gentrification over the 30 year period.

In recent years, credit rating agencies have begun to incorporate a municipality's resilience and vulnerability to climate change into their US municipal bond rating methods. Drawing on the case of Greater Miami resilience planning and Science and Technology Studies-inspired work on inscriptive devices, I investigate how this incorporation practically happens, and how it shapes the ways that Greater Miami governments attempt to govern climate risk through resilience investments. What “counts” as resilience there, I suggest, is increasingly an effect of the observational practices of rating agencies. However, the still-emergent status of resilience as an object of knowledge among rating agencies and Greater Miami governments means that resilience retains a degree of plasticity, allowing government officials and residents alike to mobilize the term for different purposes and toward different ends. In tracing the emergent relations between rating agency practice on climate risk and local government resilience investments, the paper makes two contributions to scholarship in economic and urban geography. First, it illuminates the ways that extra-local practices of expert valuation shape the local construction of environmental fixes. Second, it offers insights into how one of the key actors of the 2007–2008 financial crisis is beginning to lay the epistemic groundwork for future economic crises and inequalities in and between cities, this time as they relate to climate change impacts and a city's supposed resilience and vulnerability to them.

Since the onset of the Great Recession, austerity has become more common at the national and local levels throughout the OECD. As states pass expenditure responsibilities down to the local level, this causes a shift toward mandatory spending at the local level which may undermine discretionary spending for social and physical infrastructure. We use Census of Government Finance data from 2012 for all county areas in the continental US to model the expenditure gap between current operations and capital investment, and show how this crowd out affects growth. Our structural equation models find fiscal decentralization has direct negative effects on local growth and indirect negative effects on growth by increasing the local current-capital expenditure gap. This local expenditure gap is larger where decentralization of spending responsibility is higher and state aid is lower, especially in places with greater need (poverty, older infrastructure, and rural areas). In contrast to the theoretical claims of fiscal efficiency, we find fiscal decentralization may be undermining local economic growth by increasing the gap between local current and capital expenditure. We argue that fiscal federalism (decentralization) is “broken” in the US because states have structural incentives to shift fiscal responsibility downward to local government, and local governments face increased social and economic need, especially since the Great Recession.

This paper examines the role and function of science as a vocation in contemporary higher education. In recent decades, universities have expanded and reorganized their resources and expertise around commercially viable research avenues. All the signs point towards the creep of new public management coupled with neoliberal economic policy that starting in the 1980s had introduced accountability, standardization and internal competitiveness into public sector institutions. In this paper, I examine how the idea of the vocation is produced in higher education institutes using the example of an internal research audit that was carried out in a major research-led university between 2002 and 2005. I examine its impacts on biomedical scientists who lost access to laboratory space, a move that effectively ended their research careers. These scientists were redeployed to teaching-only positions and shortly thereafter, resurrected as ghostly reminders of the effects of audit. While teaching-only staff echoed Foucauldian critique in exposing the power/knowledge matrices of institutional management, it was their spatialization as spectres stalking the edges of research that revealed how the moral economies of science are valorized not in resistance to neoliberalization but as constitutive of it.

This paper presents a novel approach to capture ‘buzz’, the vibrancy and knowledge exchange propensity of localised informal communication flows. Building on a conceptual framework based on relational economic geography, we argue the content of buzz may allow to probe into the character of places and investigate what is ‘in the air’ within regional entrepreneurial milieux. In particular, we analyse big data to listen for the presence of buzz about innovation – defined by discursive practices that reflect an innovative atmosphere – and explore how this may influence regional firm creation. Using information from 180 million geolocated Tweets comprising almost two billion words across NUTS3 regions in the UK for the year 2014, our results offer novel evidence, robust to different model specifications, that regions characterised by a relatively higher intensity of discussion and vibrancy around topics related to innovation may provide a more effective set of informal resources for sharing and recombination of ideas, defining regional capabilities to support and facilitate entrepreneurial processes. The findings contribute to the literature on the intangible dimensions in the geography of innovation and offer new insights on the potential of natural language processing for economic geography research.

Our introduction to the Exchanges section unpacks the two terms, writing economies and economies of writing, as well as previewing the subsequent nine papers included within the section. We contend first, that the economy cannot exist until it is first written about – ‘writing economies’. Here a variety of dates have been suggested as to its first written representation, from roughly 2500 hundred years ago to a mere hundred years. Second, we argue that the pressures on academics to write – ‘economies of writing’ – have never been more acute than now and bound up with the neoliberalization of the university.

In this article, and based on the theme of economies of writing, I explore writing as a more-than-human or posthuman practice. In particular, I consider the way in which academics curate writing places and spaces and the role of matter (things, natures and technologies) in these assemblages of writing by drawing on a Baradian take on posthumanism. The article utilises empirical data from a qualitative, photovoice study with doctoral students. The aim of the article is to encourage reflection on the way we, as academics, experience and teach writing practice in a more-than-human world, and how these experiences relate to productivity and wellbeing.

This commentary explores the politics of writing about the economy in a culture, society, and discipline that tends to prioritize masculinist (and white) theories and definitions of economy over embodied experiences of people living their everyday lives. Inspired by Timothy Mitchell's problematization of the economy as an object of analysis, we press further on the seemingly singular unit of “the” economy and who is allowed to define it as such. We are animated by questions of who is considered an expert on the economy and how, or by whom, crises in the economy are recognized. Drawing from our own writing experiences during the pandemic and from social movements we research, we argue for alternate ways of thinking about experiences of and expertise on the economy. In reckoning with how social movements speak to power in a bid to transform economies, we consider the role of economic geography in the economy of writing and knowledge production surrounding “the economy” itself. We make the case for a more public economic geography grounded in the social and economic embeddedness of knowledge production, the material consequences of who gets to define what is economically “important,” and the potential for this expertise to be located anywhere.

This Commentary outlines four conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing, and suggests an approach to navigating them. Academic writing, as feminist economic geographers argue, is underpinned by difference: emerging from and produced through different positionalities, differing access to stable employment and material, temporal and spatial resources, all set within structures of power and inequity—significant among them the neoliberal university. At the same time, for academics writing demands space in our lives: temporally, locationally, conceptually, and emotionally. Because these spatialities are potentially different for each writer each time we write and because they engage us spatially at a personal level, I term them writing's intimate spatialities, and suggest that care-fully navigating these conceptual-spatial challenges of academic writing stakes out a political position, one that may now be more important than ever: In an academic environment of neoliberalism and increasing precarity, I suggest that writing's prevalent emotional apprehensions may be able to be affirmatively conceptualized as a labor of self-care we come to with love.

In this commentary, we call upon critical labour scholars, including labour geographers, to feature what sociologist Palmer called the ‘thrust of efficiency’ more centrally in their work. We put forth that the push for efficiency, as made possible by digital technology, needs to be analysed in terms of its historical lineage as well as in terms of its geographical scope. Centreing efficiency in critical labour studies, necessitates three scholarly moves. These are particularly relevant for labour geography, a field that has so far tended to circumvent questions of coloniality/labour, digital Taylorism, and the politics of (re-)writing economic geographies, in by-passing the literatures that deal with them. The plantation, an analytical category and ontic reality that stretches across several yet often unconnected bodies of literature – literary studies, Black Geographies, Caribbean studies, and the Black Radical Tradition, as well as in Global History – is central to our effort. Eventually, writing the plantation into the technological present-future can be the starting point for a larger and historico-geographically informed critique, in economic geography and beyond, of efficiency, a mode of thinking-cum-praxis based on input–output calculations, objectifying practices, violent value extraction and the removal of undesired ‘social frictions’ for the sake of capital accumulation.

In recent years, we have seen an increasing number of publications that offer the term of rentierism to define the current economic system in the Global North. More recently, Brettt Christophers has produced a series of work that aims to account for the ascendancy of rentierism from a political-economy perspective, in which Marx is mostly neglected. This exchange article aims to bring the Marx and Marxist thought back into discussion to read rentierism politically. In particular, it inquiries into how rentierism relates to the nature of class relations by addressing an “open secret”, namely that rentierism rests essentially on the enclosure and expropriation of commons. It analyses rentierism as capital's counter-movement, enforcing its priorities and drives on spaces where alternative social systems emerge and develop. In the final part, a provocative conclusive remark is offered on Christophers’ “what is to be done?”.