bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
State and Capital as the Agents of Spatial Integration in the World Economy
Authors: Kafkalas G
Published: October 2006

The concept of spatial integration refers to the various forms of institutional control over the social and technical aspects of the division of labour in respect to the corresponding geographical or spatial patterns of production. It is a specific feature of late capitalism that the process of integration acquires a nonterritorial character as the evolution of functional (corporate and sectoral) integration leads towards the disarticulation of territorial productive systems. As the various local, regional, or national interests realise the negative effects of their dependence upon international branch circuits, they demand greater autonomy and strive towards the achievement of greater territorial self-reliance. In this way, the social, political, and economic conflicts and contradictions about the location of productive activities (that is, the spatial aspects of ownership and control of the means of production) become the major force behind the transformation of the international division of labour.
Reconsidering Social Theory: A Debate
Authors: Harvey D
Published: October 2006

A recent editorial in this journal addressed the role and significance of social theory in an era of “new conservatism”. The editorial prompted a specific defence of Marxian social theory and its relevance for contemporary analysis, which in turn led to a series of commentaries which amount to nothing less than a wide-reaching reconsideration of the whole realm of social theory in urban and regional analysis.
The Location of Marginalised Groups in the Inner City
Authors: Winchester H P M , White P E
Published: October 2006

In this paper certain sociospatial processes currently affecting the evolution of the inner city are considered, namely the processes of gentrification, polarisation and marginalisation. It is argued that these processes are increasing in importance as a result of deindustrialisation, demographic trends, the activities of the state, and changes in ideology; these forces then being reflected in the operation of the housing market. Marginalised groups in urban society can be categorised through their relationships to three elements of capitalist-patriarchal control, namely economic standards, social norms, and legal codes. Constraints on the residential location and activity spaces of marginal groups are examined by means of case studies of the impoverished elderly, the lesbian community, and down-and-out groups in Paris in the 1980s.
“Life on the Upslope”: The Postmodern Landscape of Gentrification
Authors: Mills C A
Published: October 2006

The significance of the changing meaning of the inner city to the process of gentrification is explored. Recent researchers taking a ‘production of gentrifiers' perspective have focused on how restructuring of production and reproduction has generated a growth in the number of households which are most likely to benefit from inner-city living. That argument is extended with reference to cultural change, interweaving theoretical issues with an account of the postmodern landscape of a redeveloped neighbourhood in Vancouver, Canada. Connections are made between a number of practices, including planning and architectural design, advertising and marketing strategy, and the life-style of ‘New Class' gentrifiers. Dynamic relations between emergent and dominant cultures are traced in terms of their impact on the transformation of this landscape. Postmodern landscapes are ambiguous in their meaning; they have come to represent both a reaction against corporate visions of the city, and a confirmation of the vigour of the commodity form. This tension is examined in terms of the interplay between the construction of the postmodern landscape and the constitution of gentrifiers as a social group.
Flexible Integration, Scope Economies, and Strategic Alliances: Social and Spatial Mediations
Authors: Cooke P
Published: October 2006

An outline of international productivity, competitiveness, and profitability indicators is given in support of the contention that capital has been reorganizing more or less successfully, albeit unevenly of late. There follows a discussion of the relative merits of two theories which seek to address what some have called the transition from Fordism to post-Fordism. It is argued that the notion of ‘flexible accumulation’, although superior in principle to that of ‘disorganized capitalism’ as a general orienting device, is too loosely specified at present. In particular, attention is drawn to the growth of social and spatial integration as a key element of interfirm relations in a context of growing flexibility. Empirical evidence is adduced in support of the argument that flexibility involves internal changes in work practices and external changes in relations with competitors which are likely to have far-reaching spatial resonances.
Labour Relations in Disorganized Capitalism: A Five-Nation Comparison
Authors: Lash S , Bagguley P
Published: October 2006

A critique of the ‘Regulation School's' account of the development of ‘post-Fordist’ patterns of industrial relations is presented. An alternative account of the ‘disorganization’ of capitalist social relations is presented with particular emphasis on the role of agents of disorganization of labour relations, It is shown through a comparative analysis of recent developments in industrial relations in Sweden, West Germany, France, Great Britain, and the United States of America that the particular patterns of disorganization will vary depending on whether capital, labour, or the state has most influence over the process of restructuring.
Postmodernism, Post-Fordism, and Critical Social Theory
Authors: Albertsen N
Published: October 2006

The relationship between the transformation of advanced capitalist societies from Fordism to post-Fordism and the simultaneous rise within these societies of postmodern culture is investigated. In art and architecture the exhaustion of high-modernist aesthetic progressivism resulted in a postmodern ‘condition’ of ‘free disposability’ of aesthetic materials which was furthered by societal developments such as the dissolution of the Fordist model of standardized consumption into diversified and aesthetizised consumption, the rise of an experimenting culture industry after the youth revolt of the 1960s, the growth of the service class, and the advent of ‘disposability’ in regard to ways and styles of living. In social philosophy a general delegitimation of the grand narratives of progress and emancipation occurred as ‘high-Fordism’ gave way to stagnating ‘late-Fordism’ and fragmented ‘post-Fordism’. In this process the technocratic–statist narrative of Fordism itself and the labor utopia of the industrial working class lost credibility, without any emergence of convincing utopian or grand reformist alternatives. The spatial (global–local) aspects of these transformations are emphasized and the paper concludes with some left-critical considerations which stress the democratic potential of postmodernism and its openness towards local alliances protective against the powers of global capitals and centralized states.
The Geographical Organization of Production-Systems
Authors: Walker R
Published: October 2006

In this paper it is argued that a radical reorientation of organization theory and of industrial geography is needed, one that overcomes the limitations of studies that consider plant locations, agglomeration economies, geographies of enterprise, systems of cities, linkage analysis, and the like, separately. I call for a unified approach to industrial location and organization, or, rather, to the spatial division of labor and modes of organization. To do this one must first reopen the question of the division of labor and its obverse, the integration of complex production-systems. One must also go beyond the important inquiry by Scott and others, as to vertical integration/disintegration, to consider a wide range of possible means and modes of organization available, including variations on market exchange, several forms of workplaces, a wide range of firm size and scope, territorial complexes from the industrial district to the nation-state, and differing industry alignments. Last, one must treat geography as integral to the matter of organization, rather than as an outcome of preexisting organizational units that make location decisions. The puzzle of geographical organization is presented as a whole, but without yet trying to put it together for any particular sector, place, or time.
Survey 13: Purification of Space
Authors: Sibley D
Published: October 2006

The purification of social space involves the rejection of difference and the securing of boundaries to maintain homogeneity. Evidence of this process is examined with reference to social collectivities widely separated in time and space. A systematic approach to the analysis of purification is suggested, drawing on Douglas and Bernstein. An account of the process in industrialized societies focuses on consumption and the interaction of social groups and the built environment, within a structurationist framework. It is argued that the spatial sciences have generally failed to recognize the problematic nature of purification. Rather, they are implicated in the purification process where theory is translated into practice.
Urban Design in Capitalist Society
Authors: King R J
Published: October 2006

Urban design is concerned with the purposive production of urban meaning, through the coordinating design of conjunctures or relationships between spatial elements. It is argued that, in capitalist society, this production of meaning has typically supported shifts in capital accumulation, social reproduction, and legitimation in ways crucial to the reinforcing of dominant interests. Its effect has been to help counteract instability, system ‘degeneration’ (from the standpoint of such interests), and any fundamental transformation of the social system, This effect is termed ‘counteraction 1’. From considerations of urban design as production of values and as a body of practice, it is concluded that an urban design practice that is counteractive to dominant interests is, however, possible (‘counteraction 2’), Such a practice will be characterised by three ‘rules’, relating to the aesthetic program, the discursive penetration of the social context of urban design, and the breaking down of the present autonomisation and obfuscation of design as a domain of social interaction or discourse.
Forgotten Obstacles, Neglected Forces: Explaining the Origins of Hong Kong Public Housing
Authors: Smart A
Published: October 2006

There are three explanations in the literature for Hong Kong embarking upon the state provision of housing in 1954. One explanation sees this provision as an inevitable response to the inability of the private sector to provide affordable housing for the influx of immigrants after 1945. The second interprets it as support for the property development industry, rather than for public welfare. The third explanation traces the intervention to the need to reproduce labour power, All three explanations may be criticized for faulty reasoning and for misinterpreting the historical background of the involvement. An argument is made for more attention to the autonomy, although limited, of the state and to the actual and potential resistance of squatters in producing the outcome of squatter resettlement and not just squatter clearance.
Gender Restructuring; Five Labour-Markets Compared
Authors: Walby S , Bagguley P
Published: October 2006

Restructuring theory, which has made some radical changes to the understanding of the relations between the social and the spatial, has had relatively little to say about the restructuring of gender relations across time and space. In this paper restructuring theory is built on, applying it to the analysis of the changing gender composition and structuring of the work force. First, the implicit assumptions about gender in existing theory are examined so that they can be explicitly addressed using empirical evidence. Three hidden hypotheses about the spatial restructuring of gender relations in employment are pulled through and tested against comparative data from five local labour-markets. There follows a discussion of the extent to which women can be theorised as a spatial reserve army of labour, as a deskilled proletariat in the peripheral regions, or sex-typed sectoral composition taken as explanatory of future changes, After each of these is found wanting in relation to the data, a fourth thesis involving a theorisation of patriarchal as well as capitalist relations is introduced.
The Impact of Homeownership and Capital Gains upon Class and Consumption Sectors
Authors: Thorns D C
Published: October 2006

The debate about the impact of homeownership and capital gains upon class and consumption-sector formation is reviewed, from the work of Rex and Moore in 1967 to that of Saunders and Harris in 1988. A theme noted is that homeownership is seen as a base for class membership in the earlier work but by the most recent work this has shifted to a base for the formation of consumption sectors. Much of the debate has been centred upon the English case and the rise in homeownership over the postwar years. A wider comparative perspective is required for further elaboration within this debate. The main critique attempted within this paper is one developed around the empirical debate regarding returns to homeowners and whether these result in a redistribution or a concentration of wealth, and consequently whether homeownership serves to create a base for political and social action or whether it contributes to the present fragmenting tendencies within capitalist societies. Evidence is reviewed from Britain and New Zealand on the questions of whether real gains are made through property ownership and the author assesses the extent of variability created by such factors as the time period when the property was acquired, regional variations, the links between the property and the labour markets, household structures, and gender divisions within wealth generation and dispersal. It is concluded that homeownership constitutes a base for real accumulation but the rate and extent of this process is not an even one. The ability to gain wealth varies considerably by time, location, level of individual and family income, employment level, and household type. Consequently, the wealth generated through homeownership is a factor fragmenting rather than uniting social groups and, therefore, is unlikely in itself to be a basis of political mobilisation.
Survey 15. A Regulation Approach to the Geography of Flexible Production Systems
Authors: Moulaert F , Swyngedouw E A
Published: October 2006

In recent years the Regulation School has shown its merits in the analysis of the regional and urban geography of economic restructuring under contemporary capitalism. This restructuring has left many industrial regions in the midst of a profound socioeconomic crisis. At the same time, new territorial production complexes accomplish or promise economic prosperity in certain regions or subregions. In this way, new spatial networks of economic and social agency are shaped, and movements toward spatial concentration or deconcentration of economic activities, accompanied by particular forms of industrial relations, are promoted. The intention in this paper is to focus on the determinants of the socioeconomic and spatial processes at work in the construction and dissolution of regimes of accumulation and their corresponding modes of regulation as they characterize historical epochs in long-term economic development. More precisely, the intention is to explore the sociospatial dynamics of technological change and innovation during the transition from Fordist to flexible (or post-Fordist) accumulation and regulation. In the first part of the paper, the ‘regulation approach’ (the approach used by the French Regulation School) is proposed as a theoretical–methodological scheme for the analysis of concrete changes in spatial organization during a given historical epoch. In the second part, this approach is illustrated in terms of the current global (rc)organization of capitalist production in social space. In the third part new directions are proposed in which the regulation approach might be further explored.
The Re-Emergence of Regional Economies? The Mythical Geography of Flexible Accumulation
Authors: Amin A , Robins K
Published: October 2006

A critique of the potential of industrial districts for local and regional development in the present period is developed. It focuses particularly on the influential arguments being put forward by Piore and Sabel and by Scott and Storper. The authors argue against a simple and totalising theory of localised agglomerations, and suggest that contemporary processes of structural change are in fact more complex and contradictory. The new industrial spaces of economic development are in reality quite heterogeneous and are of limited significance in the face of powerful tendencies towards accelerating economic concentration and integration at a global, rather than local, level.
The Virtues of Location; Do Property Rights ‘Trump’ Workers' Rights to Self-Organization?
Authors: Clark G L
Published: October 2006

By statute and custom, labor–management conflict occurs in particular places. In their search for dominance, management often attempt to deny unions access to the site of conflict by invoking their putative property rights. Courts and the US National Labor Relations Board have at times recognized the legitimacy of unions' claims for access to private property. But the relationship between private properly rights and unions' rights to access under Section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act is ambiguous; some courts believe property rights should be protected whatever the virtues of a location for effective labor–management relations. The tensions between these sets of rights are considered in the light of contests of interpretation over Section 7 rights and its relative powers with respect to property rights.
The Contemporary Transition
Authors: Webber M J
Published: October 2006

In this paper six attempts to periodise economic life are distinguished—those due to Gibson and Horvath, Kleinknecht, Lash and Urry, Lipietz, Mandel, and Piore and Sabel. The aspects of the economy that they analyse, the type of period they describe, the spaces associated with the periods, and the processes of transition are contrasted. The theories differently explain the economic slowdown of the 1970s and 1980s, and crucial distinctions are: whether the productivity slowdown is a cause or a consequence, what factors determine changes in profitability, and the role of newly industrialising countries. It is argued that recent phases in economic life can more accurately be interpreted as waves or cycles than as periods. The paper concludes with an assessment of the capacities of the theories to incorporate a role for space and to interpret the contemporary transition.
Tourism, Capital, and Place: Towards a Critical Geography of Tourism
Authors: Britton S
Published: October 2006

Travel and tourism has become one of the largest industrial complexes and item of consumption in modern Western economies. It is argued here that, to date, geographers studying tourism have done so without fully grasping the fact that tourism is an important avenue of capitalist accumulation. I contend that if this weakness is rectified the geographic analysis of tourism could provide important contributions to contemporary debates in geography. In an attempt to integrate critical theory and political economy into the study of tourism, two themes are developed: the capitalistic nature of most travel and tourism production and consumption; and the contribution of tourism to the analysis of territorial competition and economic restructuring. The core of the argument presented is that the study of tourism assists us to recognise how the social meaning and materiality of space and place is created, and how these representations of place are explicitly incorporated into the accumulation process. To understand how tourism is involved in this, we need a thcorisation that recognises, and unveils, tourism as a capitalistically organised activity driven by the inherent and defining social dynamics of that system, with its attendant production, social, and ideological relations.
Geography's Empire: Histories of Geographical Knowledge
Authors: Driver F
Published: October 2006

In this paper the possibilities and hazards of a critical perspective on the history of geographical knowledge are considered. The focus is on the relations between modern geography and European colonialism during the ‘age of empire’ (circa 1870–1914). For writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad and Halford Mackinder, this was a moment of decisive importance for the making of the modern world. Although the interplay between geography, modernity, and colonialism has recently attracted attention from the historians of geography, it is argued in this paper that they have often conceived the role of geographical knowledge in somewhat narrow terms. The work of Edward Said is discussed at some length, as it highlights some of the key issues and dilemmas facing those who would rewrite critical histories of geographical discourse. A totalising view of ‘imaginative geographies’ (such as those of Orientalism) is argued against, and instead the heterogeneity of geographical knowledges is emphasised. The paper concludes with a more general question: Why have histories of geography at all, in these (post)modern times?
Foucault's Geography
Authors: Philo C
Published: October 2006

In this paper I examine the character of what might be termed ‘Foucault's geography’, and in so doing I wish to respect the ‘otherness' of how Michel Foucault treats space and place rather than coopting his insights into a broader conceptualisation of the society-space nexus. In the first part of the paper I discuss the more theoretical dimensions to his geography, explaining how his vision of social life necessarily calls forth an alertness to ‘spaces of dispersion’, and here I draw upon both his ‘archaeological’ approach to history and his reading of Raymond Roussel. In the second part of the paper I discuss the more substantive dimensions of his geography, considering the way in which space and place enter centrally into his various historical studies. My account here is quite critical, highlighting a geometric turn that both overplays abstract spatial relations and underplays concrete place associations, but I still conclude that Foucault provides an evocative flavour of ‘substantive geographies' which squares with his claimed sensitivity to spaces of dispersion. My overall argument is that Foucault's geography emerges directly from his own suspicion of the certainties (the order, coherence, truth, reason) supposed by most historians and social scientists to lie at the heart of social life, and as such I think that it can be adjudged a ‘truly’ postmodern human geography in a manner that, say, Edward Soja's postmodern geographies cannot. We might not like this Foucauldian version of a postmodern human geography, but I think that there is much that we can learn from it, even if we then choose to retain our faith in a more obviously modernist conceptual, practical, and political geographical project.
In Stalling Deconstruction: Striking out the Postmodern
Authors: Doel M A
Published: October 2006

For a number of authors, the term deconstruction has come to signify an ‘interruption’ within the constitutive discourses of contemporary human geography. Specifically, a deconstructive event is said to mark a site where the coherent and legitimate linking of geographical phrases can no longer be maintained. It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that the deconstructive event of ‘interruption’ has been drawn upon as a device capable of marking the limit beyond which modern geography cannot go. Paradoxically, however, it is precisely upon the basis of this absolutely unbreachable limit that one can begin to think about a site which is nevertheless beyond it. Postmodernity is the name usually given to this ‘site’ beyond the ‘interruption’ of modernity. Whether or not one is for or against the attempted passage from the horizons of modernity, one will nevertheless have sought to have done with the event of ‘interruption’ itself. At its simplest, deconstruction is the reversible pathway, or pivot, which connects the modern with the postmodern. This, at least, is what the dialecticians have told us. Within this paper, the texts of Derrida and Lyotard will be drawn upon in order to argue that deconstruction and postmodernism have nothing to do with the passage from modernity into postmodernity. Specifically, it will be argued that the dialectical understanding of the term ‘interruption’ betrays a serious imprecision within our understanding of modernity itself. Ultimately, there will have been neither ‘interruption’ nor ‘pivot’ within the course of this paper, only the interminable vacillation of an interruption without interruption.
Space and Social Reproduction in Local Organizations: A Social Constructionist Perspective
Authors: Wilson D
Published: October 2006

An attempt is made to broaden the agenda for institutionalist studies in urban and regional analysis by demonstrating that local managers are important social reproductive variables. A study of two social-service managers documents their need to socialize workers into an organizational culture and the influence of past sociospatial landscapes on their regulatory methods. It is posited that managers are bearers of spatiality, mediating the imprint of past and present sociospatial configurations through the lens of evolving biographies. The results suggest that (1) managers are critical constructors of organizational reality and that (2) past processes of spatiality influence such manager constructions.
Urban Land Rent and Real Estate Markets in the Process of Social Restructuring: The Case of Germany
Authors: Krätke S
Published: October 2006

In this paper the urban real estate market is dealt with in the context of broad societal changes. Particular restructuring processes, such as the social and economic polarization between urban regions and the uncoupling of the spheres of production and financial investments, are leading to a rehierarchization of urban land markets and significant changes in the formation of urban land rents. The restructuring of urban land markets is demonstrated with empirical data on cities in West Germany. Against this background the author pleads for a partial reformulation of urban rent theory.
Workers' Competition, Class Relations, and Space
Authors: Gough J
Published: October 2006

In this paper the nature of workers' support for economic competition between areas is explored, The connection between class relations and competition in space is theorised through a distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘system’ and through a specifically Marxist conception of competition. It is argued that workers' interests in spatial competition are contradictory and thus take diverse forms. These interests are analysed through a development of the capital-labour relation at successive levels of abstraction and in relation to different systems of competition, The role of economic differences between workers in exacerbating competition between them is explored. The class relations of growth coalitions are examined.
Love—State—Ego: ‘Centres' and ‘Margins' in 19th Century Britain
Authors: Ogborn M
Published: October 2006

Questions of marginalization and the representations of ‘otherness' are increasingly important within geography. The author explores what such representations can tell us about the ‘centre’ rather than the ‘margins’. He does so by employing the tools of deconstruction to read a 19th century ‘historical geography’ of prostitution. This text, written by Horace St. John, forms a substantial part of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor. Volume IV: Those Who Will Not Work (1861–62). Through an exploration of the textual strategies deployed within the text it is argued that it operates within a discursive space marked out by three sets of oppositions between ‘the same and the other’: forms of sexual relations, forms of state power, and forms of the self. The elaboration of these oppositions, and their inherent contradictions, suggests the conclusion that the ‘centre’ is made up of multiple power relations which are never able to achieve closure.
The Crucial ‘Where’ of Graffiti: A Geographical Analysis of Reactions to Graffiti in New York
Authors: Cresswell T
Published: October 2006

This paper is an examination of the reactions to graffiti in New York during the early 1970s. It is argued that the reactions of the media and government present a discourse of disorder, a discourse in which graffiti is presented as a symptom of disorder and thus a threat to the image of New York City and civilization itself. Simultaneously the art establishment reacts to graffiti by (dis)placing it in Manhattan galleries and describing it as creative, ‘primitive’, and valuable. These discourses play an important role in the formation and maintenance of the meaning of a place. Simultaneously the place—New York, the subway, the gallery—plays a role in affecting the nature of the discourses and judgements of the value of graffiti. This case study is framed in the context of a wider discussion of the relation between place and ideology in which it is suggested that each plays a role in structuring the other.
Post-Fordism as Politics: The Political Consequences of Narratives on the Left
Authors: Graham J
Published: October 2006

In many theories of post-Fordism an epochal transition in capitalist societies is envisioned in which the industrial paradigm of mass production is replaced by flexible specialization. Often conjoined with this new model of industrial development are a post-Marxist politics and a postmodern culture, creating the impression of a grand economic and social realignment. It is argued that these holistic representations of industrialized social formations obscure the role of both capitalist and noncapitalist class processes in constituting contemporary societies and narrow the scope for political contestation and change.
Home and Homelessness in the United States: Changing Ideals and Realities
Authors: Veness A R
Published: October 2006

If meaningful change is to take place with regard to homelessness, future research must take on the difficult task of critically examining and evaluating the cultural ideal of home. For it is against that taken-for-granted, progress-driven idealization that our definition and management of homelessness begin. In this paper the historical contexts within which home and homelessness have been defined in the United States are traced, and the degree to which they are conceptually and functionally connected is shown, It is argued that we must examine the basic premises embedded in the home ideal, because this ideal is used as the standard against which homelessness is observed and treated. At root, the home ideal is found to be exclusive, arbitrary, ambiguous, and open to manipulation. Hence, contemporary homelessness must be understood within the culturally guided and historically contingent contexts that home and homelessness have been defined in the United States.
Space, Time, and Policing: Towards a Contextual Understanding of Police Work
Authors: Fyfe N R
Published: October 2006

Studies of policing have been dominated by two types of approach: those that are focused on the minutiae of routine police work and those that are concerned with the sociolegal contexts of policing. In this paper an attempt is made to connect these two approaches by the development of a contextual understanding of police work. The author's own and other ethnographic police research in the United Kingdom are woven together to examine the time-space sequences and settings of local, routine police action. In the first part of the paper, Hägerstrand's time geography is used to explore the time-space sequences of policing, highlighting the impacts of capability, coupling, and steering ‘constraints’. These constraints indicate the importance of the organisation of police work, the role of the community, and the impact of the law on the practice of policing. An important limitation of time geography, however, is its failure to scrutinise the settings of social interaction. In the second part of the paper this weakness is addressed by employing the concepts of locale and place in order to examine the time-space settings of policing, with examples to show the subtle but important differences between these concepts.
The Boundaries of Reason: The World, the Homeland, and Edward Said
Authors: Rogers A
Published: October 2006

The revival of social and cultural geography has tended to prefer the local and the metropolitan scale, and a number of obstacles lie between it and a recovery of the globe as a field of inquiry. In this paper some of these obstacles are reviewed, namely Eurocentrism and antihumanism which are not usually acknowledged by those who would lay claim to the globe. The recent writings of Edward Said are then considered for clues to an adequate position from which to investigate the world. Said's idea of a regime of essentializations, his continued commitment to a humanism which acknowledges its extra-European dimensions, and his call for a closer geographical imagination of homeland and nation together suggest a possible way forward. The paper ends with suggestions of how recent theories of justice might give the geography of nation a more critical normative edge.
The Queer Nation Acts Up: Health Care, Politics, and Sexual Diversity in the County of Angels
Authors: Goltmakor T
Published: October 2006

The emergence of organized political groups of people with AIDS has forced issues of health and illness into a public visibility which threatens traditional assumptions of privacy and public heterosexual privilege. The struggle against the stigmatization of AIDS has forced many gay men and lesbians to reject the relative pleasures of the closet and its legal girdings in discredited notions of constitutional privacy for a radical insistence on the right to be ‘queer’ on their own terms in public. ACT UP and Queer Nation present a threat not only to prevailing state and church ideologies of power and submission, but perhaps more importantly to the gendered and sexualized assumptions which define the boundaries of public space itself. People who are ill and people defined as degenerates present a special threat to the historical myths and antiurban morphology of Los Angeles, which still is perceived as an island of private consumption and public piety by those in power. The challenge presented by ACT UP and Queer Nation is an integral part of the spatial densification of the region, feared by old Anglo and new Catholic authorities.
Regulation Theory, the Local State, and the Transition of Urban Politics
Authors: Goodwin M , Duncan S , Halford S
Published: October 2006

An effort is made in this paper to contribute to recent debates, inspired by the regulationist literature, on the restructuring of capitalist society. A major weakness in this literature concerns the treatment of the state, and especially the local state. Despite the fact that the state is clearly identified as a key component of any mode of regulation, the actual processes through which economic and social forces are translated into state activity are rarely examined, Moreover, these forces are usually assumed to operate at the national scale, but in this paper it is contended that the practices and relations of regulation also operate locally. These local spaces of regulation arise not only because of the uneven development of capitalist societies, but also because local agencies are often the very medium through which regulatory practices arc interpreted and ultimately delivered. The local state is thus a key component in these local modes of regulation, and will be implicated in any transition from one mode to another. These issues are examined by looking at the changing nature of urban politics in three British ‘cities’: Sheffield, Bracknell, and Camden in inner London. It is concluded that the local state is both an object and an agent of regulation, which itself needs to be regulated so that its strategies and structures can be used to help forge a new social, political, and economic settlement.
To Boldly go Where no Planners Have Ever …
Authors: Hillier J
Published: October 2006

The author presents an empirical example of the systematic distortion of information and the consequent impacts in a particular planning context. In so doing, she raises issues of professionalism, ethics, and democracy, Habermas's consideration of communicative action is of value in such analysis. She further reveals, however, that Habermassian thought tends to demonstrate a significant blindness to the role of power in such interaction. Consideration of Foucault's ideas, with regard to the manifold relations of power which characterise and constitute society, thus add an extra dimension to the work. In a strategic linking of the two the author attempts to demonstrate how communicative action can illuminate the analysis of power relationships in a manner useful to planning theory and practice. The paper concludes with a development of the Habermas-Foucault framework into a proposal for discursive democracy in an attempt to enable achievement of negotiated planning policies through a process of planning through debate.
The Ritual of the Streets in Mid-19th-Century Toronto
Authors: Goheen P G
Published: October 2006

The central streets of mid-19th-century Toronto, the principal public open spaces of the city, were the preferred place for enacting a wide variety of demonstrations which ranged from well-organized official processions to informal and even violent crowd scenes, Their use for these rituals of collective behaviour followed a tradition, still honoured at mid-century, of almost unhindered public accessibility to the streets. The claims which groups asserted for the use and enjoyment of this symbolic space, and the responses of the inhabitants and city government to the exercise of these rights, reveal the process by which the community adjudicated social conflict and built consensus through the manipulation and control of a valuable collective asset: the streets.
Ambivalent Attachments to Place in London: Twelve Barbadian Families
Authors: Western J
Published: October 2006

There are good reasons for assuming that places symbolic for and valued by black people exist in Britain, One such locale is London's Notting Hill, which was, with Brixton, one of the two earliest zones of Afro-Caribbean settlement in the metropolis from the mid-1950s onwards. Notting Hill was also, in 1958, the locus of riots by young white people against black immigrants; the site of the Mangrove Restaurant, associated with the Black Power movement, and harassed continually by the police from its establishment in 1969 until its demise in 1991, Also, most notably, this area is the venue for the vast, annual, black-accented Notting Hill street carnival. These attributes did not, however, seem to engender strong responses in interviews with a set of twelve families of Barbadian origin. The interviewees, now materially successful, no longer inhabited the neighborhood, nor did their London-raised adult children. For the thirty-four interviewees, Notting Hill was a place that might once have been important for black people, but was no longer greatly valued for any such symbolisms; its looming gentrification by whites, for example, was not viewed with regret. This weak attachment to the place Notting Hill—or indeed to any other purportedly ‘black’ locales in London or Britain—has multiple sources in the particularity of this set of respondents: middle-class, respectable, generally conservative, homeowners, many of whom exhibit marked Barbadian island chauvinism. Most strikingly, some of the households still, after over thirty years in London, view themselves only as sojourners in Britain, who will before long return home to Barbados. Indeed, at least one household already has.
Beyond Theory: The Cumbersome Materiality of Shock
Authors: Strohmayer U
Published: October 2006

We all practice it, use its presumed power of explanation, and never seem to get tired of it: theory, only recently introduced to geography at large, appears to be indispensable for any truly rigorous analysis of the social world. But is it really? In this paper it is argued that even the most sophisticated of attempts at ‘theorizing the social’ can claim success only by abandoning reason where reason is needed most: in the abstract formulation of particularity. In the pursuit of this ultimately fatal flaw of any theoretical endeavour, the author ultimately asks what it is about society and space that seems to require a theoretical approach, and what precisely we stand to lose if we opt for a theoretically informed abandonment of theory. With reference to Walter Benjamin, whose work is read as an embodiment of the most crucial conflict between reason and justification, an attempt will be made towards a genuinely material social science that does not rely on external guarantees to achieve a modest goal in the possibility of cognizance.
Foucault on Theorizing Specificity
Authors: Hannah M
Published: October 2006

Philo has brought Foucault's early, ‘archaeological’ work to the attention of human geographers as a possible source of help in theorizing specificity. By contrast, in this paper the archaeological project is portrayed as an illuminating failure which holds valuable lessons for geographers. The archaeological period is placed in the context of Foucault's career, and then the Archaeology of Knowledge is situated as the arena for Foucault's most instructive encounters with the problems of necessity, contingency, and human subjectivity. Although Foucault's profound theoretical modesty does not solve the problem of how to theorize specificity, it does suggest that we make significant adjustments in our own attempts to do so. The implications of the argument are given a test drive through a brief reading of recent work by Thrift, after which a recasting of the notion of responsibility is put forward as a means of beginning to deal more bravely with poststrueturalism.
Social Europe, Legitimate Europe: The Inner and Outer Boundaries of Europe
Authors: Lipietz A
Published: October 2006

The legitimation of Europe as a ‘homeland’ does not depend only upon formal democracy, but upon a social compromise, as the example of the unification of Germany has shown. But this unification of a social Europe matches two problems, (1) The different nations constituting the EC are already engaged in different paths. Legitimation of the EC requires more integration of its social governance, (2) The other countries at the boundary of the EC (Eastern Europe, Turkey, Magreb) are very different. Their integration would mean disintegration; the integration of the EC without them would exclude them.

The author explores this paradox of ‘integration/exclusion’ from the social, political, and cultural point of view. The risks of a new boundary ‘Europe/barbarians’ (across the EC itself) will be outlined. Some suggestions will be made.
The Network Paradigm: New Departures in Corporate and Regional Development
Authors: Cooke P , Morgan K
Published: October 2006

Networking is a much-discussed organisational practice. The authors analyse the nature and extent of networking activity within and between firms, making the criticism that present organisational theory pays insufficient attention to network relations between firms and public or quasi-public intermediary agencies. This is an especially important phenomenon in small and medium-sized firms. A critical depiction of networking at the interregional and, more especially, the intraregional levels then follows. Detailed accounts are provided of network interactions in the economically strong regions of Baden-Württemherg and Emilia-Romagna, The experiences of regions that have sought to learn from strong regions are explored, the cases of the Basque Country and Wales being highlighted. It is concluded that, although it is unreasonable to expect regional networking policies to enable reconversion regions to reproduce the accomplishments of strong regional economies, it has become normal for such regions to be engaged in a productive learning and adaptation process based on the analysis of key mechanisms of intraorganisational and interorganisational networking.
Gentrification, Class, and Residence: A Reappraisal
Authors: Bridge Gary
Published: October 2006

This paper is an attempt to expose the inadequacies of current arguments on the influence of residence on class relations in a gentrifying neighbourhood. In the gentrification literature it is assumed that the influx of the middle class into working-class neighbourhoods disrupts the association between social relations and residential spaces and that this influences class relations. The results of research in a gentrifying London neighbourhood do not support such spatial formalism and, on the basis of social network analysis, suggest an array of sociospatial relations which are not tied to neighbourhood, It is suggested that the involvement in neighbourhood varies temporally (according to stage in the life cycle) and by gender, rather than spatially or by class location. The discussion is concluded with an assessment of the implications of this argument for the gentrification literature in particular and for social geography in general.
Gentrification and the Politics of the New Middle Class
Authors: Ley David
Published: October 2006

Whereas authors have frequently alluded to an adversarial politics among the new middle class of professional and managerial workers, surveys and electoral returns confirm a generally conservative disposition in this group as a whole. In this paper I seek to specify a social location for left—liberal politics among a distinctive cadre of social and cultural professionals, the cultural new class. This cadre also bears a distinct geographical identity, with an overconcentration in the central cities of large metropolitan areas, not least in their gentrifying districts. The part played since 1968 by the cultural new class in these gentrifying districts in redefining the urban politics of Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver is examined. In particular, the role of a gentrifying middle class in challenging a postwar hegemony of growth boosterism practised by the conservative regimes in all three cities, and their parallel attempt to sustain an alternative regime of reform politics, are assessed.
Going up the Country: Internationalization and Urbanization on Frankfurt's Northern Fringe
Authors: Keil Roger , Ronneberger Klaus
Published: October 2006

In this paper the current period of urbanization, which to a higher degree than ever before blurs conventional notions of core and periphery, is explored. Cities today appear as multicentered, nodal, flexible, and global. These trends are examined in the case of Frankfurt, with reference to the concepts developed by world city theory, regulation theory, and from the discourse on space and restructuring. Frankfurt presently faces two kinds of growth and two discourses on growth. First, the expansion of the citadel of the world city and, second, the expansion of world-city-related growth into the periphery. Central and peripheral growth are linked in an oscillating movement of mutually reinforcing dynamics. Examples of peripheral urbanization are presented, with emphasis on the specific role of the airport as a new node of development. In this paper the articulation of these growth dynamics with the local political space of the northern fringe of the municipality of Frankfurt, where rapid restructuring of the urban landscape is under way, is examined. It is argued that the new dynamics of growth which affects the urban periphery in an unprecedented way calls for a new regional mode of regulation.