Progress in Human Geography

An international development framing is increasingly ill-fitting to a 21st century characterized by interconnected globalized capitalism, the challenge of sustainable development, as well as the blurring of North–South boundaries. While the term global development is increasingly employed, and appears more suited, it is used with different implicit meanings and is often conflated with international development. This article explores the potential of an emerging paradigm of global development as applicable to the whole world. A relational global development approach is advocated here, acknowledging the need for critical attention to the enduring tensions between universalization and geographic variation.

In this paper, we develop a novel interpretation of the internal relationship between value, rent and finance, thereby enabling a new reading of the process of financialisation. As we argue, responding to the important question of how best to conceptualise the relationship between value and finance necessitates an understanding of the internal relations with a third moment, that of rent. We therefore develop a triadic understanding of these three interrelated moments. Crucially, we demonstrate that fictitious capital now actively pursues forms of rent, deepening the interrelationship between value, rent and finance. We conclude with a critical review of the literature on the financialisation of water, showing how the conceptual framework we develop sheds light upon the relations out of which water infrastructure has been financialised, as well as suggesting strategic entry points for its contestation.

Assemblage thinking has been increasingly engaged by geographers to theoretically and empirically challenge philosophical categories and spatial imaginaries that have long been dominant in the field. Assemblage thinking presents exciting theoretical and methodological opportunities for geographers, yet its shortcomings are becoming increasingly clear. This article examines one such shortcoming: assemblage geographies’ lack of engagement with feminist thought. I approach assemblage’s uses in geography – assemblage as descriptor, concept, and ethos – as an entry point for a feminist critique, examining the potential of assemblage thinking to critically address issues of social difference, power, and the maintenance of inequality.

Transboundary environmental commons are usually conceived in terms of the spatial arrangements that govern transboundary resources and coordinate responses to cross-border environmental threats and crises. Borders in this context tend to be viewed as relatively stable institutions in the administration of geographically dispersed resources with well-defined properties by a jurisdictionally divided collective of users. In practice, however, the transboundary commons defy such clear spatial resolution. This paper contributes to emerging scholarship on the transboundary commons by showing how processes of commoning and b/ordering are continually changing in relation to each other to generate flexible new geographies of conservation practice.

Displacement has become one of the most prominent themes in contemporary geographical debates, used to describe processes of dispossession and forced eviction at a diverse range of scales. Given its frequent deployment in studies describing the consequences of gentrification, this paper seeks to better define and conceptualise displacement as a process of un-homing, noting that while gentrification can prompt processes of eviction, expulsion and exclusion operating at different scales and speeds, it always ruptures the connection between people and place. On this basis – and recognising displacement as a form of violence – this paper concludes that the diverse scales and temporalities of displacement need to be better elucidated so that their negative emotional, psychosocial and material impacts can be more fully documented, and resisted.

Within geography writ large, and economic geography in particular, there has been increasing interest in ‘engaged pluralism’ – defined by its proponents as lively and respectful engagement across theoretical, methodological, and topical lines – to increase diversity and build mutual respect among scholars. Drawing on feminist and postcolonial scholarship, we offer a sympathetic critique of engaged pluralism, grounded in a review of publishing trends in economic geography. Our findings reveal theoretical inertia around particular topics and paradigms, as well as low rates of publishing participation from women. We close with a discussion of engagement, reciprocity, and meaningful contact.

The management of poverty is undergoing significant changes with the rise of social investment states. In this context, we examine how governmental concern about the long-term public cost of poverty is increasingly modulating the selection, sequencing and targeting of interventions that seek to manage poverty. Using examples drawn from the management of homelessness in Anglo-American cities, we outline a research agenda related to the objectification, economisation, and subjectification of ‘investable poverty’. These emergent developments at the intersection of social investment and poverty management invite geographers and others to rethink where, when and how poverty management occurs.

This paper extends discussions of the geographies of the body by examining hair as a geographical lens that reimagines the body’s borders. Hair is a key agent in producing and representing the body, specifically through the presences and absences of hair that influence, disturb, transform and transcend its margins. By examining the materialities, performances and discourses associated with how and where hair is situated (or not) on the body, this paper situates hair as a geographical prism that explores new frontiers of the bordered body, shapes corporeal understandings of appearance and projects identities and power well beyond its physical limits.

This progress report explores economies of infrastructure, concentrating on questions of financialization. Interest in infrastructure financialization has grown with concern about financialization more broadly, coming to dominate discussions on economies of infrastructure. Below, I engage with research that explores what infrastructure financialization entails, its scope, as well as the mathematical infrastructures that support it. Questioning the common presentation of financialization as a complete break with past economies of infrastructure, I bookend this report with its links to – and continuities with – debt-led infrastructure development, which prevailed in the post-war period and remains of great importance in contemporary economies of infrastructure.

Different forms of discrimination, marginalisation and exclusion have been central concerns for social geography for over 50 years now. Some forms of prejudice are historically resistant, long-lasting and have featured in social geography for many decades (such as racism and sexism); others have emerged more recently within social geography debates as well as in the wider society and are less well understood. In this second progress report on social geography, I explore recent research about Islamophobia, transphobia and sizism that demonstrates that each of these forms of prejudice is worthy of further study and analysis in their own right by social geographers and scholars in related fields. I argue that it would be productive to investigate areas of connection and solidarity across and within these different prejudices and others in order to be able to resist multiple forms of discrimination, intolerance and hate.

This report discusses the financialization of urban governance and the built environment as an explicit state strategy, focusing on municipal finance and the use of financial products by the local state and (semi-)public sector. A number of lessons can be drawn regarding the temporality and spatiality of financializing ‘the urban’. Firstly, the financial crisis that started in 2007 has not resulted in a definancialization of the city. Secondly, despite a number of common trends, the literature also highlights the diversity of experiences. Yet it would be too easy to conclude that the financialization of the land, housing and real estate is exclusively a Global North phenomenon, as it extends into the Global South. Finally, the literature notes an emerging gentrification-touristification-financialization nexus. The role of the state in all of this is variegated and often ambiguous.

In my third report I argue that three versions of the concept of culture coexist in cultural geography in the wake of an interest in life and living: culture as assembled effect, culture as mediated experience, and culture as forms-of-life. All three break with one of the versions of culture in the ‘new’ cultural geography – culture as ‘signifying system’ – whilst retaining its focus on processes of mediation. By expanding what counts as ‘life’ and the forms relations take, each version reworks a second concept of culture present in the ‘new cultural geography’ – culture as ‘whole way of life’.