Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

Housing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly-organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co-constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti-gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.     

Neoliberal privatisation? Remapping the public and the private in Sydney's masterplanned residential estates

The analysis of neoliberalism has become a key point of departure in critical urban studies and political geography. Its application in theorising new forms of residential environments is no exception. Common interest developments, gated communities and, in the Australian case, masterplanned residential estates (MPREs) are cast as vehicles of neoliberalist privatisation, extending private property rights and embedding market logics and neoliberal modes of privatised governance. This paper is a critical theoretical and empirical engagement with the interpretation of these residential developments as iconic expressions of urban neoliberalisation. We bring poststructuralist thinking on neoliberalism as an assemblage of diverse practices and projects together with poststructuralist conceptions of the public and private as contextual and enacted political constructions, to provide an alternative analytic—an analytic of assemblage—for investigating putative pathways of neoliberal privatisation. We suggest the purchase of this extended framework through an exploration of MPRE development by Sydney's largest MPRE developer. In this framework, MPREs become contingent productions in which multiple and overdetermined projects, practices and paradigms of governance are at work including, amongst others, social sustainability and interventionism. Rather than producing neoliberal privatisation, we explore how MPRE developments involve the complex constitution of new forms of public and private that exceed coding as neoliberal. We conclude that the framework engaged with here can enable productive advances for urban theorising. Its emphasis on practice, enactment, multiplicity and assemblage can resist a tendency to reify urban neoliberalism and nurture the development of new conceptions and discourses of urban governance less bound to the neoliberal imaginary.     

Waves,Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

The task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high-pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world-ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being-otherwise with water and its meanings.     

Electricity Transformed: Neoliberalism and Local Energy in the United States

Abstract: The concept of neoliberalism is explored with respect to the history of the electricity industry and policy in the USA. Rather than view “neoliberalism” as an all‐encompassing form of governmentality or a hegemonic regime, it is instead situated in a political field of competing ideologies, policies, practices, and agents that includes social liberalism, socialism, and cooperativism, with hegemonic and redistributive forms of both social liberalism and neoliberalism distinguished. The field approach enables a dynamic interpretation of the history of the electricity industry in the USA that tracks the relative role of government intervention in the economy, scale shifts in the level of government intervention, and the extent to which the policies favor elite accumulation or redistribution to less favored economic categories. The field approach also enables an analysis of local responses to market restructuring that suggest some examples of redistributive politics, even local socialism, that have emerged as a consequence of marketplace restructuring.     

Topologies of tourism enclaves

Abstract

Research on tourism enclaves has relied mainly on topographical understandings of the phenomenon. The focus has been on the ontic, that which is or exists instead of the relational qualities or properties of tourism enclaves. Topographical conceptions thus tend to simplify enclavic processes and attributes that are much more complex than meets the eye. In this article, we make the case for topological understandings of tourism enclaves, based on a relational ontology, as a complement. We thereby strive to offer more nuanced conceptions of tourism enclaves. We depart from Agamben’s political ontology to illustrate our claim. Seen topologically, tourism enclaves are not simply spaces marked-off from the norm, but rather constituents of the norm. Tourism enclaves need to be theorized as ‘prototypes’ or ‘laboratories’ of new subjectivities (ways of being, relating, and experiencing the world). The tourist thus emerges as a model figure of biopolitics in the contemporary, the norm rather than the exception. The tourist is not that which is abandoned by the sovereign in the manner of Agamben, but rather a free exilant, a subject that self-willingly chooses abandonment. We deploy topological concepts, like Agamben’s the ban, the camp, and state of exception. Such a conception, we argue, widens the ontological register or horizon of tourism theory.     

Uncorking the neoliberal bottle: neoliberal critique and urban change in China

Neoliberalism’s theoretical ascendancy within urban geography coincided with the rapid growth of scholarly attention to Chinese cities. Therefore, it is unsurprising that neoliberal causality has been a widely used tool for interpreting China’s spatial transformation. This paper critically reviews some of the most prominent debates on neoliberalism in the Chinese context. China’s Leninist political hierarchy and Dual Structure, crucial institutions for the management and regulation of society and economy under Mao, are now reduced to the quirks of “actually existing neoliberalism.” Neoliberal critique applied to China, however, fails to adequately explain China’s spatial development because it assigns causality for social and economic inequality to globalized processes of capital accumulation while ignoring the continued importance of Maoist institutions in China’s present-day political economy. Uncritical acceptance of neoliberalism’s explanatory power for spatial change has led to flawed and inaccurate portrayals of the development and future trajectories of Chinese cities, and misrepresents the sources of social injustice in Chinese society.     

What to do with conspiracy theories?: Insights from contemporary Turkey

This article presents ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of people who circulate conspiratorial narratives through an ethnographic study of ultranationalist men in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on the findings of this research, the author suggests that conspiratorial discourses should be examined not solely in terms of their (anti-)truth qualities but as social practices through which masculine subjectivities and socialities are engendered. The author then explores how the circulation of conspiratorial narratives forges agency and political subjectivity for the men involved, while also inducing sociopolitical effects such as vigilantism and paramilitary violence. This article contends that through the circulation of conspiratorial narratives and everyday engagements with vigilantism and extralegal violence, the men reconfigure sovereignty and the way that the state operates in contemporary Turkey. The findings of this research suggest that the focus should be moved away from the epistemological shortcomings of conspiratorial narratives or strategies to debunk them – such as fact-checking – which presume that exposure of ‘the truth’ would lead to the dissolution of ‘untruthful’ conspiracies. Rather, the author suggests that researchers attend to the particular forms conspiracies take in concrete situations, how they mould political subjectivities and social groups and reconfigure the ways that the state operates alongside the law in other similar settings.     

Manufacturing Modernity: Cleaning,Dirt, and Neoliberalism in Chile

Since the coming to power in 1973 of the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, neoliberalism in Chile has been discursively tied to the goal of “modernizing” Chilean society. This discourse of modernization has relied for its articulation upon another important discourse, that of “cleanliness” as a marker of progress: clean spaces are seen as those of modernity whereas dirty spaces are taken to represent social and economic “backwardness”. In this paper, then, we explore how spaces which are considered emblematic of the modern economy—shopping malls, giant office complexes, university campuses—are maintained as clean spaces. However, in order for the discourse of cleanliness as modernity to work, it is crucial that the corridors of mobility—train routes, subways, city streets—which allow passage between these nodes of the modern economy also be maintained as sanitary spaces. The result is the construction discursively of an almost seamless nexus of hygienic spaces, one which stands in contrast to the dirty spaces of the “other” Chile. The paradox in all of this, however, is that the workers who are crucial to this project—janitors—have suffered greatly as a result of neoliberalism.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

The politics of protecting the poorest: Moving beyond the ‘anti-politics machine’?

Famously derided as the ultimate ‘anti-politics machine’, international development has increasingly sought to integrate a stronger political perspective within its ambit. This includes devising new forms of political analysis to inform development interventions and efforts to support forms of politics that are deemed to be ‘pro-poor’. However, this engagement with pro-poor politics remains limited and the agenda of advanced liberalism that international development agencies remain embedded within tends to draw its understandings of politics from ideology rather than evidence. Case-study analysis of the politics associated with successful social protection interventions in eight countries suggests that the political modes preferred within advanced liberalism – including civil society representation, inclusive policy spaces, and securing ownership – have been much less important in securing poverty reduction than more deeply political institutions and processes, particularly efforts from within political society to re-embed capitalism and extend social contracts to previously marginal groups. Deeper forms of political, political economy and political geography analyses are required to capture the politics of reaching the poorest groups, which needs to be understood in terms of processes of capitalist and political development that have important spatial dimensions, and which can be conceptualised in terms of extending the ‘social contract’ between states and citizens.     

Neoliberalism and Socialisation in the Contemporary City: Opposites, Complements and Instabilities

This paper explores some dialectics of neoliberalism and socialisation in contemporary urbanism. The significance of socialisation—nonmarket cooperation between social actors—in both production and reproduction has tended to increase in the long term. Socialisation does not always take politically progressive forms, yet it always has a problematic relation with private property and class discipline. Socialisation of diverse forms grew during the long boom, but this exacerbated the classic crisis tendencies of capitalism and resulted in increasing politicisation. Neoliberalism offered a resolution of these tensions by imposing unmediated value relations and class discipline, fragmenting labour and capital and fostering depoliticisation. However, this has led to manifest inefficiencies and failure adequately to reproduce the wage relation. Many longstanding forms of socialisation have therefore been retained, if in modified forms. Moreover, substantially new forms of urban socialisation have developed in cities. This paper examines the role of business organisations, industrial clusters, top–down mobilisation of community and attempts at “joined–up” urban governance. It is argued that these fill gaps in socialisation left by neoliberalism. Their neoliberal context has largely prevented their politicisation, in particular heading off any socialist potential. Indeed, the new forms of urban socialisation have internalised neoliberal social relations and often deepened social divisions. Thus, paradoxically, they can achieve the essential aims of neoliberalism better than “pure” neoliberalism itself. Nevertheless, these forms of socialisation are often weakened by neoliberalism. Contemporary urban class relations and forms of regulation thus reflect both opposition and mutual construction between neoliberal strategies and forms of socialisation. The paper ends by briefly contrasting this theorisation with associationalist and regulationist approaches.     

Spaces of care in the city: the place of a community drop-in centre

This paper explores the ways in which drop-in centres may at times function as spaces of care in the city. Drawing on participant observation research within a particular centre in Bristol, a city in south-west England, it focuses upon social relations within the drop-in space and the various subjectivities that were observed to emerge in this relational environment. Through a consideration of individuals who appeared to be positively assisted by their involvement in the drop-in, a sense is developed of the different ways in which such agencies may function as spaces of care. Use is made of Carl Rogers' notion of the core conditions for successful therapeutic encounter, as developed within the person-centred school of humanistic psychotherapy, to explicate these positive experiences. At the same time it was clear that some individuals found the drop-in to be a less than comfortable or even exclusionary environment. The paper concludes by reflecting on the broader significance of drop-in centres as caring environments and on the value of humanistic conceptions of therapeutic relation for interpreting organizational spacings of subjectivity.     

Gendered water spaces: a study of the transition from wells to handpumps in Mozambique

In many parts of rural Africa, women and children spend a lot of time collecting water. In the development literature, the water collection task is portrayed as oppressive, arduous, and disliked by women. Eliminating this activity from women's lives is believed to empower them, yet there has been little research investigating what actually happens at the water source or how women themselves perceive the time spent there. This research is based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in five rural communities in the northern province of Nampula, Mozambique. Over this year, handpumps were constructed in communities where people previously collected water from distant shallow wells and rivers. This article compares the social interactions and activities between the customary water sites and the handpump through the lens of gendered space. The customary water sites are controlled by women and highly valued for their social attributes. While clean water is more accessible at the handpumps, men often regulate access to the technology and social activities are limited. This article contributes to feminist geography and political ecology by showing how differences in the materiality of water spaces interact with local norms to shape social interactions and gendered subjectivities, and how, in turn, men and women contribute to the production and meaning of these spaces. I argue that the handpumps open up new spaces for men and women to negotiate gender roles and (re)define their associations with modernity and development.     

Policing authoritarian neoliberalism in South London

In pointing out the exclusionary and nondemocratic reconceptualization of states following the financial and Eurozone crises, research by geographers and critical political economists on authoritarian neoliberalism (AN) has shed light on key state transformations. Exploring the criminalization of council estates and the policing of three austerity-ridden south London districts, this article contributes to efforts to expand the concept of AN further by centering questions of violence and physical state power in the form of discourses and practices of (criminal) punishment and policing. Building on qualitative work with local young people and interviews with former police officers, community leaders and activists, I demonstrate the spatial dimension of AN and the role of policing logic and mechanisms for its administration in south London. I argue that through post-crisis austerity measures and long-term mechanisms of criminalization, young people perceive their home neighborhoods as insecure and alter how they navigate them. Further, I show that spaces of inclusion and welfare, such as social housing estates and schools, have been reimagined as sites of exclusion and punishment, often administered by police.     

Gun rites: hegemonic masculinity and neoliberal ideology in rural Kansas

Drawing upon empirical data from a qualitative research project in Southeast Kansas, this paper employs feminist and decolonial theories to analyse the interlocking relationality of hegemonic masculinity, neoliberal ideology, social conservatism, rurality, and gun culture. The first goal is to shed light on the subordinating and marginalizing tendencies that arise as a result of gendered conceptions of gun use. The second aim is to illustrate how gun culture is normalized, and often valorized, through individualistic narratives of self-reliance, security, protection, and defence. The third objective is to interrogate the ways in which particular material practices and gendered discourses regarding gun use are reinforced by settler colonialism, whiteness, heteronormativity, enabledness, and nationalism. Finally, the paper critically examines the social hierarchies that are reaffirmed as a result of culturally embedded patriarchal, white supremacist, and neoliberal ideologies, and how rurality mediates the masculinist subjectivities that are produced in such spaces.     

CHILDHOOD IN A NEOLIBERAL UTOPIA: PLANNING RHETORIC AND PARENTAL CONCEPTIONS IN CONTEMPORARY STOCKHOLM

This article addresses how neoliberalism as a utopian ideal of the urban affects the practices of planners and parents, drawing on Stockholm, Sweden, as an example and foregrounding how these adult conceptions of the city are manifested, both socially and physically, and shape children's geographies. Through an analysis of planning documents and interviews with planners and parents, this study shows how Stockholm's planning is clearly conditioned by neoliberal beliefs, but rather than being linked with political sympathies, neoliberalism is expressed as a contemporary urbanism. This specific urbanism is not compatible with children's independent mobility and easy access to nature and play spaces, but demands, as expressed by planners and parents, certain “sacrifices” in order to be achieved. The study shows that age is an organizing norm in terms of spatial justice in the city and that ideological beliefs about the urban development affect how this (in)justice is organized. The planning documents reflect utopian neoliberal ideas about a specific urban identity, and when private actors are given more influence over what is being built and which spaces are developed, there is a deliberate transition from welfare‐planning values and the belief that children and adults have equal rights to urban neighbourhoods. This is expressed as a necessary transformation to a more urban and globally competitive city but given the extent to which welfare values are taken for granted in Sweden it is unlikely that the effect this transition will have on social and spatial justice in the city is recognized.     

Burned,Broke, and Brilliant: Latinx Community Workers’ Experiences Across the Greater Toronto Area's Non‐Profit Sector

This paper explores how women and non‐binary Latinx community workers (LCWs), in the Greater Toronto Area, navigate multiple interlocking forces of oppression like racialisation, heterosexism and neoliberalism, when advancing social justice across the non‐profit sector. Using an intersectionality framework in tandem with testimonio methodology, including 37 testimonios, a workshop and participant observation, I show how LCWs are constrained by, but also contest, a white neoliberal non‐profit funding structure and patriarchal political system. I also explore how community work has contradictory effects on the mental, physical and economic wellbeing of LCWs. Lastly, I demonstrate how LCWs persist by weaving together their family and community histories, personal experiences and women of colour feminisms to enact a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis. I consider what lessons a Latinx decolonial feminist praxis can bring to bear on debates in human geography around neoliberalism, the non‐profit sector and social justice transformation.     

Taking Stands: A feminist perspective on 'other' women's activism in forestry communities of northern Vancouver Island

The author examines alternative and possibly contradictory positions associated with 'other' women's political activism in forestry and land use debates. The article traces research on women's activism, noting that the main focus has been placed on community management and social mothering as sources of motivation, political perspective and activity. The author suggests that these explanations have been imbued with a predetermination of appropriate action (progressiveness) that effectively renders as radical the activism by some women while ignoring the activism by others. This separation and privileging has arisen, in part, because of a theoretical preoccupation by feminist researchers with illustrating women's marginality and an empirical focus on public actions. When feminist perspectives have been applied to women's participation in environmental debates, there has been a narrowing of visibility of women's motivations, perspectives, and actions. It is argued that feminist conceptions need to go beyond maternal/community explanations and advocate that activism be considered in terms of its embeddedness in local social and spatial contexts. The author suggests that embeddedness overcomes the implicit reverse hierarchy of marginalisation discourses and includes both private and public spaces and actions in conceptions of women's activism. Turning to northern Vancouver Island, the author illustrates how embeddedness helps to render visible and intelligible, the multiplicity, consistencies and contradictions in women's positions and activities in support of conventional forestry. For these reasons, the author believes that embeddedness is useful as a means to generate dialogue across current divisions among women, forms of activism, and notions of appropriate relations with non-human nature.     

Insurgency,heritage and the working class: the case of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners of Lota,Chile

This paper examines the construction and preservation history of the Theatre of Union Nº6 of the Coal Miners in Lota, Chile, a city whose identity has been redefined due to changes in the capitalist economy, becoming known as an ‘ex-coal mining community’. Drawing on insurgent planning theory and through a political, economic and social analysis of the history of this national monument, the paper explores how grassroots heritage movements, grounded on their historical memory of social struggle, question authorised voices in the field, influencing the production and definition of their urban heritage. The strategies used by these groups are discussed in the context of the emergence of social movements at the beginning of the twentieth century, the influence of the Modern Movement in Chile as a symbol of social justice, and the communities’ current preservation efforts. Through interviews, participant observations, archival research and analysis of the physical built environment, I argue that moving across ‘invited’ and ‘invented’ spaces of participation, Lotinos are capable of disrupting hegemonic conceptions of heritage, using it for their own social, cultural and economic purposes and creating opportunities for a more inclusive and democratic cultural process.