Race and the Making of Southeast San Francisco: Towards a Theory of Race‐Class

San Francisco is engaged in a redevelopment project that could bring millions in investment and community benefits to a starved neighborhood—and yet the project is embedded in an urban development process that is displacing residents. In trying to unsettle these contradictions, this paper achieves two aims. First, I unearth a little known history of redevelopment activism that frames debate around the current project. Second, I use this history to argue for a reframing of the language of race. To wit: although the social construction of race and racism is well established, race is still deeply understood in everyday life as natural. This paper offers a theoretical fusing of race and class, “race‐class”, to help us think race through a vital constructionist lens. Race‐class makes present the economic dynamics of racial formation, and foregrounds that race is a core process of urban political economy. Race‐class works both “top‐down” and “ground‐up.” While it is a vehicle for capital's exploitation of people and place, race‐class also emerges as a mode of power for racialized working‐class residents.     

Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering,community, and belonging in enclaves along the India–Bangladesh border

This paper explores the politics of community making at the India–Bangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclave—a sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exceptionality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitors—narratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the complicated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the India–Bangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging community—to articulating who belongs and why—as are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations.     

Energy Colonialism and the Role of the Global in Local Responses to New Energy Infrastructures in the UK: A Critical and Exploratory Empirical Analysis

Governments, namely in the global North, are fostering the deployment of large‐scale low carbon and associated energy infrastructures (EIs), such as power lines, to mitigate climate change. However, when infrastructures are to be deployed, opposition is often found. Environmental justice—involving issues of distributive and procedural justice and recognition—and associated inter‐group relations, has been identified as a key aspect for local opposition. However, research has rarely examined local perceptions of environmental justice and associated practices, such as energy colonialism, within a global perspective. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, we examine if and how different‐level intergroup relations and collective narratives shape people's social‐psychological and geographical imaginaries and responses to EIs. Focus groups were conducted with community members affected by proposals to construct high‐voltage power lines in the UK. Analyses suggest that narratives around England's colonial history—within Britain and beyond Britain—shape responses to EIs.     

Abstracts

As visibly extractive industries reliant on the material and semiotic commodification of nature, forestry and mining have come to be popularly viewed as “environmental pariahs.” Yet forestry and mining continue to be successfully profitable enterprises despite a significant increase in environmental awareness and activism in the latter half of the twentieth century. To understand the relative stability and growth of these sectors in the face of overt contradictions arising from their use of the environment, this article revisits the work of regulation theorists who asked similar questions about the persistence and maintenance of capitalism in general. Two case studies are presented—forestry in British Columbia and gold mining in California and Nevada—which demonstrate how the political economy of forestry and mining is subject to contradictions arising out of the technological and organizational mechanisms through which nature is appropriated during production. Analysis of the case studies shows that the regulation of these contradictions is increasingly achieved through the deployment and cooptation of sustainability narratives. The case studies therefore juxtapose the recent proliferation of sustainability narratives within the forestry and mining sectors with the sectors’ persistent challenge to concepts of sustainable development>     

Foodscapes and the Geographies of Poverty: Sustenance,Strategy, and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood

This paper argues that food should be a more central focus of critical geographical research into urban poverty and that the concept of “foodscape” can contribute to this literature. We utilize the concept in a study of the daily practices of accessing food among low‐income residents of the Downtown Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, BC. We highlight how food access for the urban poor involves a complex and contradictory negotiation of both sites of encounter and care and also exclusion and regulation. Focusing on foodscapes emphasizes the social, relational, and political construction of food and thus highlights not simply food provision but also questions of existing power structures and potentialities for future change. Therefore, we discuss efforts to question the existing food system in Vancouver, to resist the gentrification processes that threaten the Downtown Eastside's food resources, and to build alternative strategies for urban food justice.     

Daily,Immediate Conflicts: an Analysis of Villagers' Arguments about a Multinational Nickel Mining Project in New Caledonia1

Local communities are not the homogenous entities, unanimously opposed to industrial development, that academic and popular literature often portray them to be. In this paper, I discuss my research in New Caledonian villages near a potential mining project. I analyse the diversity of individuals' responses to industrial activities, the intra‐community conflicts that this development triggered or exacerbated, and the discourses that people implemented to support their positions. Specifically, people's statements — and, presumably, beliefs — about dangers from ecological damage and ancestral anger reflected their expectations of the project's consequences for their sub‐group's social status. I argue that, through their interactions with the mining company, what many if not most of these villagers primarily sought was respect of their social positions and control of their own destinies. They especially aspired to determine what happened to their land, the source of their identity and dignity.     

New‐Build Gentrification and the Everyday Displacement of Polish Immigrant Tenants in Greenpoint,Brooklyn

In response to research that has downplayed or denied the reality of gentrification‐induced displacement, critical urban geographers have called for rethinking the concept of displacement. This article takes up that call by examining the impact of new‐build gentrification on the everyday place‐making abilities of Polish immigrant tenants in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Based on nearly four years of work as a tenant organizer, this article looks at the forms of “everyday displacement”—the ongoing loss of the agency, freedom, and security to “make place”—experienced by immigrant tenants who struggle to remain in the neighborhood. Drawing upon Lefebvre's spatial triad and Blomley's work on the social relations of property, this article argues that everyday displacement is experienced through the production of new spaces of prohibition, appropriation, and insecurity that constitute a form of neighborhood erasure.     

Scale,Factor Analyses,and Neighborhood Effects

Studies of potential neighborhood effects have been constrained in most situations by the absence of small‐area data generated to characterize the local contexts within which individuals operate. Using small‐area data from the U.K. Census, this paper Illustrates the creation of bespoke neighborhoods—local areas defined separately for each individual in a sample survey—at a variety of scales, and their characterization using factor analysis techniques. Theories of neighborhood effects are uncertain as to the spatial scale at which the relevant processes operate, hence the value of exploring patterns consistent with those processes at a range of spatial scales. One problem with such comparative study is the incommensurability of regression coefficients derived from analyses using factor scores as the independent variables. The work reported here adapts a procedure introduced for reconstituting partial regression coefficients to circumvent that problem, and illustrates that patterns of voting at a recent British general election showed neighborhood‐effect‐like patterns at two separate scales simultaneously—with individual voter characteristics held constant.     

Introduction. Anarchism and the national question—historical,theoretical and contemporary perspectives

This article provides an introduction to the themed section ‘Anarchism and the national question—historical, theoretical and contemporary perspectives.’ We discuss first the long and often overlooked engagement of anarchists with the colonial and national liberation question, particularly—but not exclusively—in the heyday of the movement (from the second half of the 19th to the first decades of the 20th century). We discuss in particular the overlaps and tensions between anarchists and republicans (those who favoured republics as opposed to monarchies) and anti-colonial nationalists (anti-colonialists who defended the right of national self-determination). Then we proceed to discuss the potential for a dialogue between anarchist and nationalism studies based on three interventions. First, to problematise the narrative that conflates nations with state-building processes. Second, to better grasp the emergence of alternatives to the nation–state as a historical construct. Third, to complicate narratives that associate in an unproblematic fashion internationalism and classless society. Finally, the introduction highlights the four questions which lie at the core of the themed section and discuss briefly how the papers relate to these.     

Residents' attitudes toward ethnic neighborhood tourism (ENT): perspectives of ethnicity and empowerment

ABSTRACT

Ethnic neighborhood tourism (ENT) has the potential to not only alter the identity of the ethnic landscape but to also influence the distribution of power and economic benefits from tourism between ethnic groups. Such unequal distribution may foster divergent attitudes toward tourism between minority residents whose culture is at the center of ENT and those of the majority population whose cultural heritage is being overshadowed. With this in mind, this study compared the relationship between Japanese and Brazilian residents’ perceived empowerment from tourism and their attitudes toward tourism development in the ENT destination of Oizumi, Japan. Results revealed that even though the Brazilians perceived themselves to be more psychologically and socially empowered from ENT, the perceptions of empowerment among the Japanese were slightly better predictors of support for tourism and Japanese residents’ perceptions of tourism's contributions within the community. The findings suggest the importance of sociocultural determinants of resident attitudes especially among those who do not perceive economic benefits from tourism. The study also indicates the appropriateness of combining social exchange theory with more holistic theories to capture the complexities influencing resident attitudes toward tourism.     

Planning with communities in regeneration projects: toward a gendered civic capacity

This article explores the central role that gender plays across a variety of scales in the development of civic capacity among residents of Meonot-Yam neighborhood in Bat-Yam, Israel. The article proposes a new, gendered reading of civic capacity which involves transforming women’s and men’s ways of thinking and acting out of the ordinary in this regeneration project, with the aim of updating and revising the term as related to planning with communities approaches. Using a performative understanding of gender based on feminist poststructuralist analysis to identity knowledge/power and place, we combine the analysis of community and personal scales, looking at ‘paradoxical moments’ to understand how the transformation in power relations has taken place and how civic capacity is developed. We do so by conducting a critical analysis of biweekly meeting minutes and in-depth interviews held over a three-year period (2010–2013). This civic capacity development is particularly important for women who manage to enhance and increase their social capital throughout those years.     

‘I Do Not Work: I Do Commercial Sex Work’. Ambiguities in the Discourse and Practice of Selling Sex in Mombasa,Kenya

Building on the narratives of women selling sex in Mombasa, this article shows how the livelihoods and strategies of women who self‐identify as sex workers are influenced by the discourses and activities of the NGO sector, the sex workers’ movement, and international tourism on the one hand, and by their struggle for survival and personal advancement on the other hand. More specifically, while the term ‘sex industries’ or ‘sex workers’ — as used by a number of local and international actors — is partly internalized by women selling sex, these terms obscure the more complicated realities of women who seek to secure income for their households.     

NEIGHBORHOOD SOCIAL MIX AND ADULTS' INCOME TRAJECTORIES: LONGITUDINAL EVIDENCE FROM STOCKHOLM

We investigate the relationship between neighborhood income composition and income trajectories of adults, employing annual panel data from Stockholm over the 1991–2008 period and multiple measures of neighborhood income mix. We advance the human geography literature in three ways by quantifying neighborhood effects that: (1) are unusually precise due to our large sample size; (2) are arguably causal and unbiased due to the econometric techniques employed; (3) are potentially heterogeneous, varying according to gender, income group, and ethnicity. Our innovative, fixed‐effect change modeling indicates that neighborhood income mix affects subsequent one‐ and five‐year income trajectories of residents in highly heterogeneous ways according to gender, income and ethnicity, and for some groups this effect is substantial. The evidence supports on Pareto improvement grounds a social mix policy that attempts to reduce the incidence of lower‐income dominant neighborhood environments and replace them with more mixed or middle‐income dominant ones.     

Antagonism,Neo‐liberalism and Movements: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Abstract: The “movement of movements” has reached an impasse, from which innovation and expansion appear out of reach. Given these circumstances a re‐examination of concepts such as antagonism and class hatred might be timely. Antagonism has never disappeared. It is present in climate‐change politics as much as in those of the Black Bloc—both examples we discuss here. Indeed antagonism permeates capitalism and drives capitalist development. But a politics founded purely on antagonism quickly comes up against its own limits. The transformative power of love—whilst simultaneously coupled in productive tension with antagonism—offers the possibility of exodus.     

Gender and Life Course in the Narratives of Melbourne's High‐rise Housing Developers

Socially constructed ideas about the life course, sometimes encompassing gender relations, have long informed the views of those within the housing development industry about who should be housed where in the city, living what sorts of lives. Drawing on the findings of a recent study of developers’ narratives about the construction of expensive, high‐rise housing in central Melbourne, a relatively new form of dwelling even in this part of the metropolitan area, several themes are found to characterise the taken‐for‐granted ways in which these city‐builders view the gendered life courses of housing consumers. Developers’ narratives oppose the suburban ‘home’ to the high‐rise ‘lifestyle’, consider central city high‐rise residences as appropriate only for people without families, and see women, separately from the couples they make up with men, only as potential victims requiring the security that high‐rise apartment living is said to provide. These narratives reiterate the characteristics of an essentialised ‘empty nester’, or ‘young professional’ housing consumer, who is envisaged to occupy the new housing and is defined according to life course stage and gender. The developers’ partial and narrow accounts of the likely consumers of this high‐rise housing is one factor amongst many that explains the building of precincts of high‐rise housing that have limited facilities for children and for pursuits other than consumption of the individual ‘lifestyle’.     

The Public Assistance Policies of Cities and the Justice Concerns of Elected Officials: The Centrality of the Floors Principle in Addressing Urban Poverty

City councils are significant, though seldom central, actors in local policy networks providing public assistance to disadvantaged residents. Mayors and council members in 12 American cities more often support than oppose public assistance initiatives. They claim that their own normative judgments are more important to their preferences and voting behavior on such matters than are public opinion, group demands, or economic considerations. While such elected officials hold a variety of justice principles, the most important of these affecting their positions on public assistance issues is the “floors” principle. A broad ethical commitment to providing social minimums enhances support for living‐wage ordinances, for linking subsidies for economic development to assistance to less advantaged citizens, and for exempting spending on social services from budget cuts. We discuss the implications of these findings for major theories of urban politics and policies—collective‐action theory, regime theory, and pluralism—and for advocates on behalf of the urban poor.     

‘Humanitarianized’ Development? Anti‐trafficking Reconfigured

Over the past three decades humanitarianism has broadened considerably in scope. Humanitarian aid agencies have increasingly moved beyond a traditionally narrow concern with immediate relief aid to engage the wider implications of their work. Humanitarian arguments have also become central to policy legitimation in a range of contexts outside the humanitarian aid sector. By contrast, this article, based on research into anti‐trafficking programmes in the Mekong region of Southeast Asia, considers a case where a particular humanitarian discourse has in fact narrowed. Anti‐trafficking, once informed by development discourses of poverty reduction and long‐term well‐being of populations, has become increasingly shaped by a humanitarian emergency logic of exceptionalism. Long‐term development modalities have contracted into a zeal for the immediateness of ‘rescues’ and saving lives. By drawing attention to how development and humanitarian discourses intersect in anti‐trafficking interventions, this article explores how such shifts in legitimization and mobilization have taken place, in turn transforming actors and practices. The article will suggest that it is the different temporal registers of the two discourses — development and humanitarianism — that help account for this shift from the former to the latter.     

Girl soldiers with Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda fighting for survival: experiences of young women abducted by LRA

For this study the narratives of 16 young women who had served as child soldiers with the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda were collected. They had spent between 2 months and 16 years in captivity before managing to escape. All of them spent time at the Gulu Support the Children Organization Rehabilitation centre, from which 12 had moved back into their communities. The narratives start with their capture, the time with the LRA, the escape and the returning and reintegrating. Even though the narratives included appalling stories about the time in captivity, the participants expressed hope for the future and focused on giving their children a good start in life. We used Antonovsky’s theories about ‘sense of coherence’ coupled with resilience theory to discern the factors that helped these young women cope. The participants all managed to leave captivity. We have no comparative information about those who are still in captivity.     

Une histoire de résidus : à propos des facteurs généraux et locaux de croissance régionale au Canada,de 1971 à 2001

Starting from an econometric model of local employment growth, applied to Canada (1971–2001), residuals—relative to model predictions—are analyzed over time and over space, in turn allowing us to draw a distinction between general explanatory variables and factors of a more local, cyclical or accidental nature. The model's explanatory power grows over time, founded on variables such as urban size, market access and industrial structure, allowing us to conclude that local employment growth in Canada follows an increasingly geographically predictable pattern. However, an examination of the residuals reveals more localized processes. Growth volatility is most manifest in Alberta and British Columbia, home to the most erratic local economies. Emerging patterns are visible in the last period, most notably the underperformance of Northern Ontario and of non‐metropolitan communities between Windsor and Québec City, lying along the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence. The over‐performance—compared to model predictions — of small and mid‐sized towns in south‐eastern Québec can, on the other hand, be interpreted as a sign of truly local social processes, generally associated with a particularly dynamic local entrepreneurial class.     

Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.