Action research and reducing the vulnerability of peri‐urban agriculture: a case study from the Montreal Region

Important pressures still increase the vulnerability of peri‐urban farming despite initiatives to protect agricultural land and activities since the mid‐1960s in several jurisdictions in the USA and Canada. Often, farmland is still removed from agricultural reserves for the ‘good of society’ (for example, creating industrial parks). In 2008, an action research project was initiated to attempt to reduce agricultural vulnerability in several peri‐urban and rural areas near Montreal by emphasising the importance of the appropriation of the value of these farmlands by non‐farm citizens and actors. The action research roles involved accompanying the farmers, facilitating meetings, mobilising non‐farm actors, and informing farmers of possibilities when asked to do so. In this article, one specific project is analysed in Senneville (in the west of Montreal Island). While the project was initiated by the farmers to guarantee their long‐term future, they also sought to involve other, mostly non‐agricultural, actors. In a colloquium, a collective vision for the project was constructed, integrating other functions of farmland such as conservation and leisure activities. Many meetings were organised over a three‐year period and formal presentations were made to the municipality. The project is ongoing, including new farm operations and the reinforcement of local markets for marketing mainly organic produce. The area is now an integral part of an emerging ‘green belt’ of the Montreal agglomeration and is already part of a ‘green coalition’ of both urban and peri‐urban actors (farmers and non‐farmers), and an emerging food system movement which represents a more holistic approach to food production.     

Post‐political planning and community opposition: asserting and challenging consensus in planning urban regeneration in Newcastle,New South Wales

This paper examines recent urban regeneration plans for inner city Newcastle, in New South Wales, Australia. The focus is on recent plans to rejuvenate the historical commercial centre of the city—the Hunter Street Mall. Recent plans for the city are positioned as post‐political efforts by planning and development agents to limit antagonistic politics and secure consensus around a future planning vision. Core to this new vision is high‐rise development. Formal and technocratic consultation processes are central to efforts to secure consensus and limit conflict. Yet, conflict nevertheless arises as local residents, community groups, and politicians oppose the planning vision pursued by planning and development agents. Debates about the need for regeneration and the form of regeneration surface as central points of contest. Likewise, the material configuration of the city and wider political context frame both post‐political planning efforts and oppositional politics. The paper contributes to a growing body of work by scholars who question the presence of a dominant, overarching post‐political condition. Rather, post‐political efforts emerge as contextual and fluid processes to secure the planning and development objectives of urban elites. As the case study illustrates, such post‐political efforts are rarely unchallenged, as contest and antagonistic politics emerge, allowing citizens to resist the efforts of state and development actors and help shape their cities.     

Overcoming obstacles on the peri‐urban fringe: young people making new geographies

Understanding contemporary youth lifestyles is a challenge for urban planners and geographers. Young people's everyday needs are complex, and urban spaces in new outer city developments offer unique spaces for shaping their identities. Juxtaposed with affordances of digital technologies, the physical location of home exists in a fluid landscape. Overcoming obstacles, such as access to public transport, places to socialise, and meet their peers, is characteristic of the everyday young person's experience. Knowing how young people decide where to go for personal space, as well as who to ask for personal advice, was the aim of this study. The study was conducted with samples of young people growing up in the rapidly growing peri‐urban northern suburbs of the Australian city of Melbourne. A survey questionnaire was administered to a gender‐balanced sample aged 12–15 years (n = 523) with follow‐up interviews to better inform the results. Logistic regression and factorial analyses of variance reveal their favourite places to be ‘my’ bedroom, being with friends, the park, and the café. Although not the focus of this study, some gender differences were noted. In addition to innovative use of space, the results show the positive influences on their well‐being of trusted family and friends. Young people's geographies offer transdisciplinary insights that highlight their creative usage of these new urban spaces. They offer a new imaginary for geographical education and research.     

The post‐politics of transport: establishing a new meeting ground for transport politics

This paper brings together two disparate but critical bodies of literature about contemporary citizen participation in the Australian city: transport politics and post‐politics. The argument is advanced that state and citizen actor relations—as they exist in the governance and management of Australian urban transport—have taken on characteristics of post‐politics. By conceiving of citizen participation in this manner, new ways of understanding it are generated and it is possible to appreciate how such participation is shaped by state actors both across time and in response to the politicisation of transport proposals. The paper illustrates the extent to which citizen engagement has become a new focal point in transport politics, particularly given citizens' capacities to politicise proposals and transport trajectories. It achieves such ends by drawing upon key‐informant interviews conducted between 2013 and 2016 with public transport advocates, select resident groups, and local and state level planning officials from Melbourne, Australia.     

The Politics of Carbon Market Design: Rethinking the Techno‐politics and Post‐politics of Climate Change

Carbon markets have provided fertile ground for research on the changing nature of political contestation. MacKenzie locates a “techno‐politics” of carbon markets that creates new possibilities for a “politics of market design”. In contrast, Swyngedouw argues carbon markets are part of a “post‐political” shift that narrows potential pathways through “depoliticisation”. This article engages with these debates by examining three recent attempts to reform the ailing European Union Emissions Trading System: restricting industrial gas offsets, backloading allowance auctions and the 2030 climate and energy package. It conceptualises the respective episodes as contests over the reach, force and priority of value determinations in climate policy, emphasising the contradictory imperatives facing states on each issue. The outcomes of contestation between industry groups and environmental organisations—real but limited reforms and a consolidation of the carbon market over alternatives—demonstrate the constraints facing technocratic campaigning and the ongoing politicisation of climate change.     

“I found the truth in Foot Locker”: London 2011, Urban Culture,and the Post‐Political City

The article begins with an overview of what is implied in the notion of the “post‐political” before looking closely at post‐political interpretations of the 2011 London riots. It presents a critique of the restricted sense of political subjectivity in such accounts. It demonstrates how participation in the riots and their aftermath may be seen as indicative of an embryonic form of urban politics that works with and against the post‐political city. This discussion is illuminated by an analysis of the discursive space of London hip‐hop which reveals an ironic, complex and reflexive dialogue about identity, justice and politics that is far removed from the caricature offered by “strong” interpretations of the post‐political subject. This is then linked to readings of the post‐political city that place a welcome stress not only on the evacuation of the political dimension from the city, but also on the opportunities for the re‐emergence of the proto‐political.     

Tracing resident antagonisms in urban development: agonistic pluralism and participatory planning

This article draws on research with resident action groups and other alliances in Sydney. It investigates the ways in which citizens work beyond the formal planning system to approach and achieve their urban development goals. The post‐political treatment of community voices in planning relies on the centrality of consensus politics in current participatory planning regimes. By providing a democratic outlet that is far removed from the actual development outcome, powerful urban actors can silence through inclusion. Planning theorists have posited that one pathway beyond this post‐political moment in urban planning is provided by Chantal Mouffe's critique of Habermasian communicative theory and consensus politics, which she bases on her theory of agonistic pluralism. Following Mouffe, to achieve a productive agonistic politics, any rigid antagonisms between “enemies” need to be moderated to more mutable “adversarial” positions. However, we have little knowledge of the conditions that might precipitate such a change in praxis. To address this gap between theory and praxis, we use focus group data to show how local resident action groups and urban alliances work through three modalities of antagonism to achieve their urban development goals. We add empirical weight to the idea that citizens can shift from rigid and fundamental antagonisms to the potentially more productive adversarial politics of agonistic pluralism but therein expose some limitations with how Mouffe's ideas are being applied to urban planning.     

Design in government: City planning,space-making,and urban politics

In recent years, design has appeared in an ever-broadening range of government processes and projects, particularly in cities. What has design become, such that its methods and practices could be applied to urban planning and public administration? And what are the governmental problems that design methods and designers are being mobilized to address? This article answers these questions by tracing the tangled intersections of design, city planning, and urban administration in the last century. Through a genealogical analysis, it shows how a number of designers came to redefine design as a set of procedures for formulating and proposing solutions to “wicked problems.” This understanding of design—which developed in fields such as industrial and product design that were remote from government—has recently gained salience in public administration and city planning. In contrast to an influential geographical analysis of design as spectacular architecture that is divorced from any broad social objective, the article argues that design in government can be analyzed as the design of politics. Its concern is not with the aesthetic or functional qualities of material objects—whether a manufactured product, building, or article of clothing—but with the ongoing work of organizing argumentation and decision making about complex, large-scale problems.     

Re‐valuing the Fringe: Some Findings on the Value of Agricultural Production in Australia's Peri‐Urban Regions

The agriculture that occurs in Australia's peri‐urban regions is not well understood, nor has its economic value ever been examined systematically. Using a spatial frame derived from research into population change, Agricultural Census data are used to calculate the value of this agricultural production. The analysis suggests that peri‐urban regions in the five mainland States produce almost 25% of Australia's total gross value of agricultural production. Evidence gathered from other surveys suggests that, in some respects, this may be an underestimate. Although qualified and provisional, these findings have important strategic implications for agricultural development, urban and regional development and, ultimately, sustainable development. However, peri‐urban issues are often submerged in public policy deliberations, and peri‐urban agriculture is poorly served by the Agricultural Census.     

Institutional contradictions and attempts at innovation. Evidence from the Italian urban facility planning

Spatial planning affects the way in which cities are created and developed, as well as their economics and welfare. It does so by constructing institutional frameworks that frequently undergo states of contradiction and demands for adjustment and revision. This situation is particularly evident by looking at the way in which urban facilities have been planned during the twentieth century. The article explores the issue of urban facility planning in Italy by taking into account the adaptations of the institutional framework governing and regulating their supply. In particular, it explores the central contradictions which guided reforms and revisions of urban facility planning in Italy, starting from the post-war period until now, and the main problems left unsolved after years of attempts at innovation aiming at a more flexible and quality-oriented approach. In order to contribute to this debate, specific policy implications and devices are presented.     

Mobility and diet in the Iron Age Pontic forest‐steppe: A multi‐isotopic study of urban populations at Bel'sk

High mobility among Scythian populations is often cited as the driving force behind pan‐regional interactions and the spread of new material culture c.700–200 bce , when burgeoning socioeconomic interactions between the Greeks, Scythian steppe pastoralists and the agro‐pastoral tribes of the forest‐steppe played out across the region. While interregional mobility central to warrior lifestyles is assumed to have been a defining feature of Scythian populations, strikingly few studies have investigated human mobility among communities located along the steppe and forest‐steppe boundary zone. Here, we document movement and dietary intake of individuals interred at Bel'sk, a large urban settlement in Ukraine, through strontium, oxygen and carbon isotope analyses of human tooth enamel. The results provide direct evidence for limited mobility among populations from Bel'sk, demonstrating the movement into, and out of, urban complexes. Strontium and oxygen isotope analyses reveal that groups at Bel'sk remained local to the urban complex. Dietary intake, reflected in carbon isotopes, was based on domesticated crops and livestock herding. The combination of low mobility alongside dietary evidence suggests local groups engaged in sedentary agro‐pastoral subsistence strategies that contrast sharply with the picture of highly mobile Scythian herders dependent on livestock portrayed in historical sources.     

The landscapes of professional farms in mid‐sized cities,France

In this paper, we provide a spatial analysis of agriculture in three mid‐sized French cities, with a particular focus on professional farms. The existence of important agricultural spaces inside the cities is confirmed. We reveal the persistence of a field‐based, market‐oriented agriculture in French mid‐sized cities, often ignored in studies on urban agriculture, and usually made invisible. Our results highlight the farms' diversity, as well as a diversity of farmers' viewpoints on the relations between urban and agricultural places. We emphasise the importance of three main determinants in the observed dynamics: the cities' geographies; the impact on farmers of land speculation and urbanisation; and the implementation of resistance and adaptation processes by some farmers. These results are discussed in relation to the literature on urban and peri‐urban agriculture.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

In the Nature of the Non‐City: Expanded Infrastructural Networks and the Political Ecology of Planetary Urbanisation

This paper proposes extending Urban Political Ecology's (UPE) ideas about the urbanisation of nature in order to include the geographical imprints of expanding, global metabolic flows of matter, energy and capital. It does so through the analysis of Huasco, a small agricultural village in northern Chile that has been overburdened with massive energy undertakings aimed at powering the operations of mines that supply raw materials to international markets. Like the sewage and technological networks that feed the life of cities, the paper argues that Huasco—as a metabolic vehicle of planetary urbanisation—has also been hidden from view, and thus the fetishisation of urban infrastructural networks initially theorised by UPE, has been ratcheted‐up to the global level by the mediating powers of neoliberalising capitalism. Just as the socio‐material arrangements that facilitate the smooth functioning of the modern city and household are riddled with glitches and exclusions, the paper suggests that globally up‐scaled infrastructures reveal even larger contradictions that put into jeopardy the very premises upon which the ongoing commodification of nature is grounded.     

Behind the form: A historical analysis of the agriculture encouragement system in the Song dynasty

Using the political culture analysis method, this paper discusses the origin, contents and functions of the agriculture encouragement system of the Song dynasty, which originated from the pre-Qin period (221–207 BC). The main content of this system in its early stage is that in the early Spring days, the king symbolically ploughed a piece of land near the suburbs of his capital in order to send to his subjects a clear message of the importance he attached to agriculture. It was expected that peasants would be encouraged by his majesty’s guidance, and thus agricultural production of the countryside would be promoted. With the rationalization of the political system since the Qin period, agricultural encouragement gradually became a routine work of the Chinese governments at different levels. Under the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127), “agricultural encouragement envoy” was added to the official rank of heads of counties and prefectures. They each were required to take the responsibility of persuading peasants in their jurisdiction to work harder in the field. The actual work as an “agricultural encouragement envoy” in the Song dynasty was to go to the countryside to reward peasants with food and wine in early February, and to write an essay to express his encouragement, and to distribute it to the peasants. Formalistic as it is, the agricultural encouragement system is a typical manifestation of the traditional Chinese political culture. As one of its social impacts on the Song society, it helped the spread of advanced agricultural technology with its institutional basis. __________ Translated from: Zhejiang Daxue Xuebao, Renwen Shehui Kexue Ban 浙江大学学报: 人文社会科学版 (Journal of Zhejiang University, Humanities and Social Science), No. 1, 2004     

Planning the post‐political city: exploring public participation in the contemporary Australian city

This special section examines the possibility of meaningful debate and contestation over urban decisions and futures in politically constrained contexts. In doing so, it moves with the post‐political times: critically examining the proliferation of deliberative mechanisms; identifying the informal assemblages of diverse actors taking on new roles in urban socio‐spatial justice; and illuminating the spaces where informal and formal planning processes meet. These questions are particularly pertinent for understanding the processes shaping Australian cities and public participation today.     

Urban memory and planning: investigating the use of oral history

Investigation of the reciprocal relation between individuals and space within its cultural and historical evolution allow us to conceive the intrinsic qualities and dynamics of any space in its context and to develop new conceptions to explain what kind of a place it is. Oral history provides opportunities to listen to the voice of space as well as a new way to discover its unique and different characteristics that give the users the feeling of belonging and place attachment. In this study, the place of oral history method in historiography, its use in diverse disciplines related to the shaping of urban space, such as urban planning and architecture, and the possible contribution of oral history to planning and designing urban space are discussed. It is revealed that the use of oral history in research and practice can give effect to develop a sense of belonging for all users and to achieve sustainability of urban memory. For this reason, place-based studies and utilization of oral history method within them are of significant importance, for either acquiring the knowledge embedded in memories or understanding the expectations of users or to provide solutions to place-based problems.     

The Evolution of Neoliberal Urbanism in Moscow, 1992–2015

This article examines the urban development of Moscow from 1992 to 2015, arguing that the city's recent transformation from grey asphalt jungle to a “city comfortable for life” is driven by a process of neoliberal restructuring. In particular, the study finds that a set of multi‐scalar dynamics—namely, the global financial crisis, the rise of a local protest movement, and an intensified rivalry between federal and Muscovite elites—were the key driving forces behind Moscow's current evolution. The work advances a conceptual framework of neoliberal urbanisation that enhances the literature on post‐socialist cities and, more generally, the broader debate on actually existing neoliberalism.