UPWARDS,OUTWARDS AND WESTWARDS: RELOCATION OF ETHNIC MINORITY GROUPS IN THE OSLO REGION

Our purpose in this article is to examine socio‐economic and spatial integration of ethnic minorities in the Oslo region. We analyse relocation between 1998 and 2008 for members of ten minority groups along three overlapping dimensions: upwards in the neighbourhood hierarchy, outwards from the inner city to all suburbs, and westwards from a less affluent to a more affluent part of the region. The results provide some limited support for spatial assimilation theory. Two minority groups, Iranians and Vietnamese, comply partly with the theory. Another group, Filipinos, has stagnated in its socio‐economic and spatial integration. The remaining groups do not relocate in accordance with the native pattern, or fail to integrate in socio‐economic terms. The discrepancy between theory and results is most pronounced along the westward axis. We interpret the results in a broader context of regional and national circumstances: spatial assimilation theory may have different utility in different welfare regimes, depending on spatial inequality and the politics of place.     

Thinking State/Space Incompossibly

Abstract: This paper develops multi‐dimensional analyses of socio‐spatial relations. Building on previous research, we identify some tensions associated with different dimensions of socio‐spatiality and introduce the theme of compossible and, more importantly, incompossible socio‐spatial configurations. Two short studies are deployed to highlight the socio‐spatial implications of the principle that not everything that is possible is compossible. The first shows the power of thinking varieties of capitalism compossibly (via the concept of variegated capitalism) and then examines the successive strategies adopted by the European Communities and European Union to address the significance of changing patterns of variegation for approaches to European integration, spatial strategies, and economic and social policies. The second case discusses some related problems for state spatial projects, starting in the 1980s with spatial planning, promotion of a Europe of the Regions and/or of Europe and the regions, and then turns to examine city‐regional development strategies.     

Planning Sustainability: Intergenerational and Intragenerational Justice in Spatial Planning Strategies

Abstract: Subsequent to the Brundtland Report (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987, Our Common Future), sustainability has been set up in many countries as a mission statement of cross‐sectoral policies. Sustainable development carries the normative notions of equity, empowerment and environmentally sensitive economic development. Thus, it seems to suggest a fundamentally different vision to neoliberal dogma, which is at the same time described as dominating all socio‐political processes. This paper intends to explore the relation between these two discursive framings of contemporary policies through the example of German spatial planning guidelines. More precisely, it addresses social justice as one pillar of sustainability and how it is operationalised in spatial planning policies in Germany. This may exemplify how the seemingly opposing discourses interact in policy practices. The empirical analysis suggests that the ways in which the German spatial planning report focused on social space in territorial terms promotes an economistic and truncated view of social justice, one which fosters the neoliberal idea of regional competition for global capital and reduces socio‐spatial justice to territorially equally distributed economic inclusion.     

Spatially Disaggregated Modelling of Voting Outcomes and Socio‐Economic Characteristics at the 2001 Australian Federal Election

This study uses GIS and spatial modelling to relate voting outcomes at the 2001 federal election for polling booths across Australia with the socio‐economic characteristics of polling booth catchment areas. The data and analysis used are more detailed and comprehensive than previous studies. It is conducted at a fine level of spatial disaggregation across the whole nation to examine voting outcomes for both major and minor political parties. Because the aim of the paper is to distinguish voting outcomes between political parties rather than to predict voting outcomes for particular political parties, a discriminant analysis is used rather than regression analysis. The statistical discriminant analysis identifies two main socio‐economic dimensions that are able to predict polling booth outcomes with a relatively high degree of accuracy. That analysis shows how, at the 2001 federal election, the middle ground, in terms of socio‐economic characteristics, was being claimed by the Liberal Party, Country Liberal Party, The Greens, and, to a lesser extent, by the Australian Labor Party. However, the Australian Democrats, National Party and One Nation had more distinctive constituencies, with the National Party and One Nation Party competing for areas with similar socio‐economic characteristics. Using GIS mapping tools, examples of actual and predicted polling booth voting outcomes are given, along with selected socio‐economic characteristics of booth catchments.     

A Mona effect: How place discourse constitutes culture‐led change

The arrival of the Museum and Old and New Art (Mona) in the disadvantaged municipality of Glenorchy was heralded as the beginning of significant social change in Australia's island state of Tasmania. These expectations were premised on a local place discourse known as the “Tasmanian gothic,” and, in this article, our aim is to illustrate the importance of place specifications in culture‐led change, including in relation to how place discourse constitutes such change. To do this work, we illustrate a Mona effect that comprises a critical account of the Tasmanian gothic informed by an empiric of tourist movement to and from Mona. We demonstrate that tourist movements follow existing socio‐spatial patterns, with tourists from higher socio‐economic backgrounds bypassing Glenorchy and those from lower socio‐economic backgrounds more likely to stop in this disadvantaged municipality. This socio‐spatial account unsettles the characterisation of Tasmania and Tasmanians provided by the Tasmanian gothic and we conclude by observing (1) a lack of significant social change resulting from Mona, in part explained by well‐established socio‐economic patterns; (2) signs of more subtle change that warrant further investigation; and (3) how local place discourse can act to curtail culture‐led change by reinforcing existing socio‐economic patterns.     

Interpretive walks: advancing the use of mobile methods in the study of entrepreneurial farm tourism settings

This article draws on the application of interpretive walks in a socio‐geographical study of tourism‐oriented entrepreneurial activity on multi‐generational family farms in New Zealand. We highlight the great potential this method holds for tourism researchers interested in the ways tourist spaces are produced in processes of place‐making. Mobile methods have been a feature of qualitative field research in several disciplines for some time, particularly in cultural geography with its emphasis on human interactions in and with landscapes. The interpretive walk, known also as the walking interview, has been applied mainly in urban neighbourhood, health, transport, and housing research, where it has proven very useful for revealing human connections to place that have been difficult to elicit using stationary face‐to‐face interviews. This article is one of the few that reports on the use of the method in a farm tourism setting. It is also one of few applied studies seeking to understand the local geographies of farm tourism and their connections to the farm site as both family home and place of primary production. The method is characterised as an effective tool for navigating and interpreting the socio‐spatial settings in which new rural tourism ventures emerge, evolve, and are embedded. The approach allows for unexpected encounters with spatial practices and strategies, projects, and objects, behind which lie stories of changing human relationships with the land, economy, and community, and of the exigencies of everyday life that are less readily unearthed using conventional interviews.     

Divided Post‐Soviet Small Cities? Residential Segregation and Urban Form in Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk,Kazakhstan

This paper maps and analyses ethnic and socio‐economic residential segregation in two small post‐Soviet mining and enrichment cities in Eastern Kazakhstan, Leninogorsk and Zyryanovsk. The study is based on data collected by the author in collaboration with the Eastern Kazakhstan oblast' statistical authority in an extensive questionnaire survey carried out during January 2001. The paper investigates the linkages between the physical spatial structure of small post‐Soviet cities and the socio‐spatial landscape that has unfolded in their context, and attempts to identify the principal factors that underlie the observed segregation patterns.     

A HISTORIC NEIGHBOURHOOD AS ARTS SPACE: THE LITTLE INDIA EXPERIENCE

Many cities around the world are redeveloping their neighbourhoods as arts and cultural precincts. Urban industrial zones and lower‐income residential areas have taken on new life as arts neighbourhoods in a bid to attract high‐yield visitors, propel their creative industry and brand themselves as attractive to investors and residents. This article has two aims. Conceptually it explores the notion of arts urbanization – the creation of arts spaces in cities and the socio‐spatial dynamics which they embody. Empirically, the concept is tested using the case of Singapore's Arts Housing Scheme. Under this scheme, historic ethnic precincts take on new roles as arts and creative belts. While the scheme has yielded some success by way of fostering spaces of identity and inspiration for artists, it has also generated social concerns and spatial challenges. Singapore's Little India offers an empirical setting to explore this concept. The paper argues that geography matters to the arts and that arts‐led urbanization creates distinct spatial configurations in cities. For this reason, a greater understanding of and research into arts neighbourhoods and their socio‐spatial dynamics are essential if we are to aspire to sustainable and sensitive development of cities and their creative communities.     

AGAINST POWER? DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN ACQUISITIVE RESISTANCE AND SUBVERSION

Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. This article argues for an analytical distinction between such strategies of capturing power on behalf of those without it, and strategies for reducing power differentials directly or annihilating the capacity to accumulate power. We adopt the analytical term subversion to describe these latter efforts to reduce the intensity of, and undermine the capacity to reproduce or deepen, power relationships. Rather than focusing on redistribution or inversion of asymmetrical power relations to benefit the disempowered, subversive strategies work toward decreasing the possibility of accumulating power or, in the extreme case, completely evacuating existing unequal power relations. Thinking about political engagement in terms of limiting the possibility of asymmetrical power relationships (regardless of who holds that power) helps to illuminate a distinction between reactive politics against injustice and proactive politics that pursue alternative, increasingly just conceptual norms. We draw on threads in critical, political, and urban geographies to articulate a particularly geographic concept of “fleeing‐in‐place” as subversive resistance to hegemony, the undermining of the possibility of asymmetrical socio‐spatial power relations within existing contemporary political economies. We propose strategies for research that better highlight the differences between resistance and subversion.     

KLAVS RANDSBORG AND THE NINTH CENTURY AD

Archaeology over the past fifty years has shown that in the early 9^th century Western Europe experimented with a coalescing of states affirmed by a common reform ideology and with it increased communication to regions beyond. At different speeds, regions of Western Europe adopted this new strategy known as the correctio. Within a generation, the correctio gave rise to a new ‘feudal’ economy and significantly a new regionalism. The archaeology of Europe shows that there were winners and losers in these fast‐changing regions. The losers, in many cases, controlled the written narratives and ascribed their altered socio‐economic condition to the Others of the time, not least because the Others were leading exponents of the post‐correctio economic agenda. This paper revisits Klavs Randsborg's groundbreaking book, The Viking Age of Denmark, in the context of post‐war approaches to Europe's post‐classical narrative.     

A SPATIAL AND TEMPORAL AUTOREGRESSIVE LOCAL ESTIMATION FOR THE PARIS HOUSING MARKET

ABSTRACT This original study examines the potential of a spatiotemporal autoregressive Local (LSTAR) approach in modeling transaction prices for the housing market in inner Paris. We use a data set from the Paris Region notary office (Chambre des notaires d’Île‐de‐France) which consists of approximately 250,000 transactions units between the first quarter of 1990 and the end of 2005. We use the exact X–Y coordinates and transaction date to spatially and temporally sort each transaction. We first choose to use the STAR approach proposed by Pace et al., 1998 . This method incorporates a spatiotemporal filtering process into the conventional hedonic function and attempts to correct for spatial and temporal correlative effects. We find significant estimates of spatial dependence effects. Moreover, using an original methodology, we find evidence of a strong presence of both spatial and temporal heterogeneity in the model. It suggests that spatial and temporal drifts in households socio‐economic profiles and local housing market structure effects are certainly major determinants of the price level for the Paris Housing Market.     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

The haves and have nots in Australia's Tropical North – New Perspectives on a Persisting Problem

There is significant confluence in the literature that leads one to expect groups of haves and groups of have nots in socio‐economic systems within common spatial contexts. Several economic theories suggest economic activity to be concentrated in a few core areas with geographically large ‘peripheries’ relying on one or two industries for employment and income. In the context of the north of Australia, issues of disparities in socio‐economic status between the region and elsewhere in Australia, and also within the region have been highlighted in the literature for some time. This paper discusses the contemporary situation using customised data collected and analysed for 55 river‐basin catchments in the Tropical Rivers region of northern Australia to highlight the extent of the haves and have nots problem. A range of spatial economic theories are discussed as theoretical bases for the present day situation and as pointers to revisionist approaches which may address it. Transforming the have nots to improved states of well‐being will be a costly and difficult process. Consequently, we argue that factors other than raw incomes and economic production should be reconsidered and re‐prioritised by governments as redress to the ongoing ‘problem’ of the North.     

THE GREEN ECONOMY,SUSTAINABILITY TRANSITIONS AND TRANSITION REGIONS: A CASE STUDY OF BOSTON

This article is focused upon exploring the development of the green economy in particular locations, with the aim of identifying why some cities and regions have been successful in engendering green growth. To date we have little idea where the green economy is developing, nor much insight, beyond anecdotal evidence, into why certain cities and regions appear to be more successful than others in this regard. We position our analysis within the context of research on socio‐technical transitions that has theorized the potential shift to a more sustainable economy. We review the literature on sustainability transitions and the development of the multi‐level perspective encompassing niches, regimes and landscapes. However, most research into socio‐technical transitions has not given adequate consideration to the influence of places and spatial scale in these transition processes, and we therefore critique the socio‐technical transitions literature from a geographical perspective. In this article we are interested in four key questions. What role does the enabling and facilitative state play in these cities and regions? What new institutional forms and governance structures are being developed? How do actors in particular cities and regions construct their green vision, and how do they encourage other actors to buy‐in to this vision? How are links across levels and spatial scales developed to connect niches with the regime? We address these through a focus upon the Boston city‐region in the USA, drawing upon both primary and secondary research material. We utilize this case study example to re‐examine and re‐theorize work on sustainability transitions from a spatial perspective.     

Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity. Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.     

Using Spatial Filters and Exploratory Data Analysis to Enhance Regression Models of Spatial Data

Residual spatial autocorrelation is a situation frequently encountered in regression analysis of spatial data. The statistical problems arising due to this phenomenon are well‐understood. Original developments in the field of statistical analysis of spatial data were meant to detect spatial pattern, in order to assess whether corrective measures were required. An early development was the use of residual autocorrelation as an exploratory tool to improve regression analysis of spatial data. In this note, we propose the use of spatial filtering and exploratory data analysis as a way to identify omitted but potentially relevant independent variables. We use an example of blood donation patterns in Toronto, Canada, to demonstrate the proposed approach. In particular, we show how an initial filter used to rectify autocorrelation problems can be progressively replaced by substantive variables. In the present case, the variables so retrieved reveal the impact of urban form, travel habits, and demographic and socio‐economic attributes on donation rates. The approach is particularly appealing for model formulations that do not easily accommodate positive spatial autocorrelation, but should be of interest as well for the case of continuous variables in linear regression.     

The folding of sport space into carceral space: On the making of prisoners’ experiences and lives

Sport and exercise are prominent activities in the daily routines of prisoners around the world, yet the spatial significance of these activities in carceral environments has not been deeply investigated. With a focus on the experiences of former federal prisoners in Canada, this paper addresses this scholarly gap by bringing together emerging trends in the literatures on sociology of sport, sports geography, and carceral geography to investigate the complex social meanings of prison sport and exercise. Specifically, we explore the folding of sports space into carceral space, often with the effect of reinforcing violent and exclusionary situations, but which also helps construct alternative spatial and temporal realities. Indeed, our overarching theoretical analysis considers how prisoners use sport to produce space in ways that assert a limited degree of agency over their daily lives and temporarily transcend their unpleasant conditions of confinement. By drawing from diverse theoretical frameworks and literatures, we advance novel arguments about the socio‐spatial significance of sport in prisons and raise some important questions for further research.     

Screening Singapore: The Cinematic Landscape of Eric Khoo's Be With Me

This paper investigates the mutually constitutive relationship between the context of film production and the composition and content of images produced. Singapore film director Eric Khoo is central to our investigation, and his 2005 film Be With Me is a key example of how Singapore's ongoing urban redevelopment to become a world city reflexively shapes the style and appearance of the city‐state projected in the film. Singapore's history as a developmental state, its pervasive influence on the public and private spaces of its citizens, and recent state‐led initiatives to nurture the arts and media sectors all make it an ideal site to examine the relations between the cinema and space. Be With Me also lends itself to spatial analysis as its mise‐en‐scène is a geography of the life course: particular parts of the city are ‘cast’ as spaces of youth, middle, and old age. We elaborate how the landscapes deployed in the film are simultaneously constituted through state policies, mise‐en‐scène, and gender/age/class considerations. In so doing we show how Khoo's vision of the city‐state has altered since his emergence as a film director in the 1990s: from an oppressed site of hyper‐modernity to a more ambivalent ‘globalised’ built environment in which marginalised or liminal urban spaces for sensuous life and hope for human connection can be experienced.     

Governing Post Apartheid Spatiality: Implementing City Improvement Districts in Cape Town

Abstract: To achieve a world‐class city capable of attracting business in a competitive global market, the municipal government of Cape Town, South Africa, like many cities of the global North, has adopted a model of urban revitalization popularized by New York City: business or city improvement districts (BIDs or CIDs). By examining CIDs in city center Cape Town, the paper casts light on the socio‐spatial relationship facilitating the neoliberal post‐apartheid regime and its governance. Analyzing discursive and spatial practices of Cape Town Partnership, the managing body of downtown CIDs, from 2000 to 2006, the paper reveals its difficulties in stabilizing the socio‐spatial relations of a transnationalizing urban revitalization strategy and rejects the view of CIDS as simply a global roll‐out of neoliberal urban policies. It highlights how CIDs are challenged from both within and outside of their managing structures by contentious local issues, and in particular by vast social inequalities and citizens' historical struggle for inclusive citizenship and the right to the city. Whether and how CIDs' inherent limitations can be overcome to address socio‐spatial inequalities is an open question.     

Re‐Politicising the Analysis of “New State Spaces” in Hungary and Beyond: Towards an Effective Engagement with “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”

Abstract: Recent scholarship grounded in strategic‐relational state theory has offered a compelling approach to state spatial restructuring under neoliberal capitalism. By drawing on Hungary's post‐1990 state spatial reforms, this paper discusses a major limitation of state theoretical frameworks. In particular, the paper seeks to challenge state theorists’ generally subtle but persistent bias to capitalist economic structures, and argues that the above bias impedes an adequate and effectively critical account of state spatial regulation. Finally, it makes a case for a perspective on new state spaces that acknowledges the wider socio‐historical embeddedness of state space production, as well as its inherently political nature.