From Urban Social Space to Social and Environmental Justice: Observations on Laurence Ma's Essay

A senior American specialist on China and noted geographer evaluates the merits of an essay by an equally prominent specialist who advocates reflexive activism as a method designed to generate more relevant studies of the country. The author of the evaluation stresses the value of empirically based work, noting a number of contributions by geographers to the study of China's transition from doctrinaire communism to "socialism with Chinese characteristics." While not denying the need for geographical research focused on deficiencies in social and environmental justice, he is not in favor of excessive activism that may overlook advances in economic development and related accomplishments of China's governing regime. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P30. 24 references.     

China and Geography in the 21st Century: A Cultural (Geographical) Revolution?

A noted Singapore-based cultural geographer and specialist on Asia reviews the recent emergence of cultural geographic research on and within China and the implications of China's rise for the study of 21st century cultural geography more broadly. She identifies six major issues modern China is confronting that, when addressed from a cultural geographical perspective, may both enhance an understanding of the country and reshape the practice of cultural geography as a subdiscipline: agricultural reform, economic reform, urban change, rural-urban migration and related social inequalities, the changing family structure, and environmental change. The author argues that if China's cultural geography is to help the subdiscipline at large develop a more international and inclusive approach, it must be driven by questions of significance in China, yield constructive answers of relevance to China, and at the same time derive theoretical ideas that diversify the collective geographical imagination.     

An American Prototype in Thomas Mann's Königliche Hoheit

This study is inspired by Henri Lefebvre's theories on the production of space to consider the issues of geographic scale, urbanism, and historical memory in Spanish playwright Jerónimo López Mozo's 1999 play El arquitecto y el relojero. In this drama, the discourses of scale and the spectacle of urban space permeate the dialogue and staging of the work while the characters confront contemporary anxieties about the spatial component of historical memory. Relying on Henri Lefebvre's tripartite theory of the production of space to explore this spatial component not only illustrates the important relationship between culture and space, but it also demonstrates how the production of space at one scale—the urban—simultaneously “articulates” (Delaney and Leitner) with the broader geography of the nation.     

Social areas in Beijing

Cities in the Western world have been subjected to a spatial process that essentially reflects rules of the market economy. People with ‘might’, defined in terms of money, have priority access to better residential locations. This allows a larger measure of personal preference to sway on residential location, and has ushered in the secondary factors of family or life–cycle effects as well as individual perception and choice regarding what is an acceptable neighbourhood and acceptable distance for commuting. Some parallel work has been done in socialist and Third World cities in the 1970s and 1980s which provides evidence of divergence from the original construct. Yet due to lack of good quality and sufficient data and general lack of interest in the social geography of cities there was little work done in China. Up to 1990, Chinese cities had combined the characteristics of socialist central planning, and characteristics of Third World cities of low level of economic development and limited ability of city governments in improving urban housing. Based on the latest 1990 Census, we study the social areas of Beijing of 1990 and the dynamics behind their formation. In particular, we shall highlight the impacts of the housing supply situation and allocation under central planning and the interrelationship between these and the conventional social areas dynamics. The Opening and Reform after 1978 has introduced new dynamics in China's urban social space. The 1990 census netted out some evidence of these new factors. However, their real impact may only be more adequately measured by the coming census in 2000. Limited by the census data, our examination has excluded the latest situation (after 1990). In spite of the use of the Shevky and Bell construct the purpose of the present study focuses on understanding the social geography of contemporary Chinese cities, and provides a useful historic and ideological dimension for comparative studies for related key concepts in urban and social geography.     

Current Literature

A noted specialist on China's urban and economic geography investigates the processes underlying the massive and occasionally wasteful practice of land development that has accompanied China's rapid economic advance. By critically juxtaposing elements of conventional neoliberal economic theory (e.g., the so-called "tragedy of the commons") with the actual exercise of land property rights and the practice of land development in transitional China, he argues that, contrary to Western experience, land property rights have evolved from the bottom up and thus functioned not as a bundle of standardized and uniform legal prerogatives but rather as a diverse set of local practices adaptable to regional conditions. The author illustrates these processes though a thorough review of Chinese laws and regulations as well as a case study of land development in a province (Guangdong) in which land development has been allowed to proceed more rapidly under a special economic regime and exposure to global forces. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: P260, Q150, R140, R520. 2 figures, 1 table, 95 references.     

Québec et la géographie sociale en questions

Questioning Québec through social geography In the early 1960s, two revolutions were underway: the quiet revolution in Québec and the quantitative revolution in geography. Apparently unrelated, these episodes of change probably shared common underlying values associated with modernity. Since then, the transformations experienced in Québec have been interpreted in a multitude of ways, including geographical considerations. Research careers, mine included, have been shaped by this undertaking. All along, I have found that social geography, with the capacity it has to reinvent itself, has helped making sense of this turbulent environment. In the 1970s, exploring the structural dynamics of Canada's social space helped in figuring out the place occupied by Québec in this ensemble. Then, analyzing the historical relationships between cosmopolitan Montréal and provincial Québec City suggested that the oxymoron ‘quiet revolution’ stood for a central process in the cultural dynamics of Québec's social space, where new ideas arriving through Montréal are sifted and institutionalized by the state in Québec City. Nevertheless, Québec City is also capable of initiating progressive urban movements, as illustrated by the odyssey of the Rassemblement populaire de Québec, documented through participant observation. Such urban movements may affect the urban fabric but, as intense and creative social networks, they may affect even more their interacting members, as it seems to have been the case with regard to rapidly evolving gender relations during the last decades. All in all, after more than four decades, I keep the conviction that a practice of social geography that is open to various theories and methods is capable of producing liberating knowledge.     

Shifting Electoral Geography in Russia's 1991 and 1996 Presidential Elections

This research note reexamines Russia's 1991 and 1996 presidential elections, focusing—unlike studies emphasizing stability of Russia's electorate—on differences in electoral geography in the two elections, with oblast-level vote totals for Boris Yel'tsin in 1991 and 1996 being only poorly correlated. Although Yel'tsin's performance in both elections was better in urban than in rural regions, the urbanrural divide in 1996 is shown to differ from that in 1991. Nonetheless, the Russian electorate is stable after 1993, regional voting patterns between 1993 and 1996 being both similar to each other and different from that in the 1991 election. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H10, O50, Z10. 6 tables, 14 references.     

Beneath the “Zunami”: Jacob Zuma and the Gendered Politics of Social Reproduction in South Africa

Abstract: In April 2009, African National Congress leader Jacob Zuma was swept into power in South Africa's fourth democratic general election. To date, this political “Zunami” has largely been presented as either a leftist rebellion against Mbeki's neoliberalism, a reassertion of patriarchal “traditionalism”, or an example of Zulu ethnic mobilization. This article draws on a long‐term ethnographic study to provide a critical gendered perspective on Zuma's rise. It argues that Zuma resonates with many poor South Africans, including women, in part because of his ability to connect the personal and political in ways that talk to South Africa's “crisis of social reproduction”. A key point the article emphasizes—one virtually absent from contemporary discussions about Zuma—is the profound gendering of growing class divisions, specifically the way this manifests itself in huge reductions in marital rates and heightened gendered contestations.     

Restructuring of Beijing's Social Space

Four China-, U.S.-, and UK-based senior specialists on the urban geography of Beijing team up to present the results of their investigation of the change in the city's social landscape on the basis of restricted subdistrict-level data covering the period from 1982 to 2000. Adopting a factor ecology approach, the authors seek to identify the extent to which factors that shape urban social landscapes in Western countries have played a role in Beijing during a period of economic transition (e.g., from administrative toward market allocation of housing). Similarly, they investigate the relative strength of processes of social differentiation vis-à-vis mixing accruing from the restructuring of Beijing's physical space (e.g., housing cost differentiation and accelerated in-migration that lead to the emergence of concentrated areas inhabited by migrants and/or minorities, and of relatively low density suburbs) revealed by the 2000 Census. The paper includes a section on developments since 2000, citing data (through 2006) on population, scarcity of affordable housing, traffic congestion, and industrial and residential relocation, relating in part to the forthcoming Olympic Games in 2008. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I31, O15, O18, P20. 6 figures, 7 tables, 93 references.     

MATTER(S) OF INTEREST: ARTEFACTS, SPACING AND TIMING

This paper argues that time‐geography can make a contribution to contemporary ‘rematerialized’ geographies, because the interconnections among social processes, human corporeality and inanimate material artefacts within the landscape were among Hägerstrand's central concerns. Time‐geography needs none the less to be extended in several ways to make it more reconcilable with current thinking about materiality in geography. The possibility of combining Hägerstrand's framework with notions from (post) actor‐network approaches is therefore explored. It is suggested that concepts and notions from the latter may contribute to the advancement of the conceptualization of action at a distance and agency in general in time‐geography, as well as the incorporation of the immaterial realm into space—time diagrams. The resulting materially heterogeneous time‐geography is a framework for studying the spacing and timing of different material entities that is sensitive to the role of artefacts and their local connectedness with other material forms. Some of its elements are illustrated briefly through an empirical study of the roles played by a few mundane artefacts in working parents ‘coping with child‐care responsibilities on working days. The case study suggest that these artefacts not only enable goal fulfilment and routinization but also result in further spacing and timing practices, and can introduce uncertainty and novelty to existing orders.     

Consumption,Environmental Sustainability and Human Geography in Australia: a Missing Research Agenda?

‘Consumption’ is a central concept in the global environmental sustainability agenda. However, one important argument from Agenda 21 — that all social actors must now practise ‘sustainable consumption’— has been publicly and politically marginalised in high‐income countries such as Australia. Geographers potentially have a role in bringing consumption back onto the agenda by constructing a critical geography of consumption. Such research can help understand how the contextual use of natural resources is perceived and practised, and how consumption helps to shape contemporary social relations. This body of knowledge is vital for building sustainable development into everyday lives. Yet a focus on urban consumption perceptions and practices appears somewhat lacking in Australian geography. Ways forward can be drawn from international geography, such as in the United Kingdom where a substantial body of work has drawn a complex picture of contemporary consumption and environmental understanding. It has also challenged prevailing ‘ecological modernisation’ policy approaches, which ignore consumption's cultural facets. In sum, considering consumption in Australia can offer insights into cultural practices expressed through consumption; can challenge and add to European geographical literatures, and can also contribute to sustainability debates by offering alternatives to currently ineffective policy discourses.     

居民消费行为与城市生活空间行为规律研究

进入消费社会以后,社会经济的发展促使居民生活行为发生了很大的变化。消费作为居民日常生活的一部分,在社会空间秩序中起着越来越重要的作用。文章以"人本主义"地理学为出发点,应用数理统计和随机过程理论,结合影响居民消费行为的因素对居民消费行为的演进过程进行分析,来探讨城市居民消费行为与日常生活空间行为的关系,并总结出相应的居民消费生活空间行为规律。     

Refractions and recombinations of the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’: a personalized reflection on challenges by—and to—feminist urban geographies

This invited essay responds to requests by the Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture Nominating Committee and by the former Editor of this journal to take stock of and provide intellectual‐historical context for the major preoccupations that characterized feminist urban geography in its early years, by means of a personalized reflection in light of the author's own positioning in those debates and interventions. The thread running through the article is that of the relationship between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in urban geography. The last section briefly considers new challenges that neoliberalism poses for critical feminist urban geographies.     

Commuter lives: a review symposium on David Bissell's Transit Life

This article presents a series of commentaries on Transit Life: How Commuting is Transforming Our Cities, published by MIT Press in 2018. Centring on an in—depth case study of Sydney, the book argues the need to attend carefully to the fine—grained detail of the commuting experience. In all sorts of ways, Transit Life presents a way of thinking about urban transportation radically different from that used by mainstream transport planners and geographers. Geographical Research asked six researchers—Tim Edensor, Michele Lobo, Debbie Hopkins, Helen Fitt, Juliana Mansvelt, and Donald McNeill—to reflect on what kind of research vistas might be opened up bring the tools of cultural geography and mobility research to the world of commuting. Here are their responses, rounded out by a reply by David Bissell, Transit Life's author.     

Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment.     

The Poolitical City: “Seeing Sanitation” and Making the Urban Political in Cape Town

In an urbanizing world, the inequalities of infrastructure are increasingly politicized in ways that reconstitute the urban political. A key site here is the politicization of human waste. The centrality of sanitation to urban life means that its politicization is always more than just service delivery. It is vital to the production of the urban political itself. The ways in which sanitation is seen by different actors is a basis for understanding its relation to the political. We chart Cape Town's contemporary sanitation syndrome, its condition of crisis, and the remarkable politicization of toilets and human waste in the city's townships and informal settlements in recent years. We identify four tactics—poolitical tactics—that politicize not just sanitation but Cape Town itself: poo protests, auditing, sabotage, and blockages. We evaluate these tactics, consider what is at stake, and chart possibilities for a more just urban future.     

当代国外对城市生活空间评价与社区规划的研究

西方发达国家20世纪70年代以后陆续进入后工业化阶段,城市的空间问题主要涉及到社会空间方面。地理学对其研究的核心是在探讨城市社会-生活空间结构的基础上,准确地理解、判识生活空间的质量与类型,并通过规划制定出社会-生活区域治理对策,以提高城市空间(社区)的生活质量为最终目的。对以上命题的探索涉及到当代社会地理学、城市地理学以及在此基础上产生的城市社会地理学前沿性研究。本文从综合理念与研究模式的角度,概括当代西方国家地理学对其的探索现状、研究内容、运用的方法论以及代表成果类型。     

Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories

This article takes up the recent interest in assemblage theory in urban geography and considers the potential for art to contribute to our narrations of urban assemblages. In particular, it uses Chris Ware's recent magnum opus, Building Stories, as not only an account of the urban as an assemblage, but to indicate more broadly the way in which comics might be used to narrate urban assemblages in ways that highlight their multiplicity and plurivocality. The article draws out three themes in its analysis of Building Stories: more-than-human subjects, the various temporalities of the city, and the way memory and narrative are emergent from urban assemblages.     

1990年以来西方城市社会地理学研究进展

本文对1990年以来西方城市社会地理的研究特点进行概括,表现为研究成果不断增多、主题多样化和研究方法上从量化到质化的转变,然后从内容上进行归纳,包含社会公平、疾病与健康地理、犯罪地理、感应地理等研究重点,其中社会公平又细分为对弱势群体地理研究、福利地理以及女性地理学。这些研究在侧重点上有较大转变,从一般性社会要素空间区位探讨过渡到要素背后的社会、文化、政治等情境的结构式剖析,注重研究社会空间的隐喻和文化意义、社会问题对空间的塑造机制以及特定空间对人的再造等。在此基础上对西方城市社会地理研究进行简要评价,归结为问题导向、主题多样化、地方性研究和质化与本位研究主导,最后提出对中国社会地理研究的初步建议:壮大中国社会地理研究队伍、积极借鉴其它学科、以居民日常行为地理研究为突破口。     

Restructuring Beijing's Social Space: Observations on the Olympic Games in 2008

Two American geographers comment on the preceding analysis of restructuring of Beijing's social space (Feng et al., 2007) by presenting observations on the city's Olympic Games, forthcoming in the summer of 2008. The authors focus on some of the more salient geographical impacts stemming from construction, relocation, and related measures undertaken by the authorities to accommodate the event. Included in the paper are sections on environmental concerns (particularly air pollution), infrastructure (water supply, automobile traffic, and mass transit), and relocation and displacement of residents (particularly of migrants and other disadvantaged segments of the population). Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I31, O15, O18, P20. 2 figures, 2 tables, 44 references.