“Our Journey,Our Choice,Our Future”: Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ Self‐Government enacted through the Maa‐nulth Treaty with British Columbia and Canada

In 2011, Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations became one of five Nuu‐chah‐nulth Nations on the west coast of Vancouver Island in Canada to implement the Maa‐nulth Treaty with the Province of British Columbia and Canada. Modern treaties are dense and lengthy legal documents that exhaustively set out the obligations of each signatory party. They are heavily criticised for being unjust extensions of colonialism that limit Indigenous self‐determination and transform homelands under settler colonial property regimes. Yet, some First Nations accept these agreements as their chosen path for self‐government in state structures. We document Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ decision‐making that resulted when the Maa‐nulth Treaty was implemented and replaced the Indian Act by analysing the Maa‐nulth Treaty and interviews conducted with Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations leadership. We demonstrate how ?iisaak (respect) and ?uu?a?uk (taking care of) guided Huu‐ay‐aht First Nations’ self‐government, while nesting this discussion in the complexities and critiques of modern treaties.     

Urban Systems of Accumulation: Half a Century of Chilean Neoliberal Urban Policies

We analyse a half‐century of Chilean urban reforms to explain the introduction of a system of urban accumulation by dispossession of public resources and opportunities. Three stages have been conceptualised in the imposition of a neoliberal creative‐destructive process: proto‐neoliberalism, roll‐back and roll‐out periods. Empirical studies have traditionally analysed this process by examining a single urban policy's evolution over time. In this paper, we go beyond these types of studies by performing a systemic analysis of multiple urban policy reforms in Santiago, Chile. We use a genealogical thematic analysis to track changes in laws, government programmes and planning documents from between 1952 and 2014. Our analysis identifies different “urban systems of accumulation” by looking at the interplay of four urban policies: (1) urban planning deregulation; (2) social housing privatisation; (3) devolution of territorial taxes; and (4) decreased public service provision. Moreover, our multidimensional policy analysis in Santiago characterises a more radical, fourth expression in the creative destruction process of “accumulation by dismantling”. Consequently, we advocate for more multidimensional urban policy research that goes beyond a three‐period analysis in order to gain a deeper understanding of contemporary neoliberal creative‐destructive processes in variegated geographies.     

The “Blind” State: Government Quest for Formalization and Conflict with Small‐Scale Miners in the Peruvian Amazon

The Peruvian government is attempting to implement a formalization plan to deal with the chaotic expansion of small‐scale mining activities in the Amazon. However, this plan has been contested, delayed and halted by local miners. Why exactly has it been so hard for the government to enforce a formalization plan in Madre de Dios? This article aims to answer this question by analysing both government efforts to establish control over the region and the challenges it faces in enforcing its formalization plan. It is argued that current resistance to and conflict over the formalization process in Madre de Dios reveals a state governance problem due to the region having been historically governed as a zone for exploitation rather than for social and economic development. Similarly, the analysis highlights the absence of major corporations through which the state can establish a basis for governance, as in other parts of the country.     

From Contention to Co‐governance: The Case of the Right to Inhabit Movement in Rome (2000–2013)

Based on interviews with activists and local government officials and on secondary data, this paper analyzes the development and effects of the Roman Right to Inhabit Movement (RIM) from its origins till 2014. The first section describes the origins and characteristics of the new housing question in Rome. The second presents a brief genealogy of the RIM, paying special attention to how it has framed the housing question. The third describes the activities of the RIM by focusing on its interplay with the city politics and administration and the resulting changes in the housing policy of the city of Rome. The fourth section analyzes the modes of state regulation and of political articulation of the housing question that these transformations have brought about. The final section argues that these emerging arrangements are a significant example of how new forms of social protection are being created by urban movements after the neoliberal erosion of the welfare mechanisms.     

“Compassionate” Strategies of Managing Homelessness: Post‐Revanchist Geographies in San Francisco

Abstract: After almost 30 years of Federal retraction from anti‐poverty initiatives, many American cities have been left with the dual burden of intensified poverty and far fewer resources to combat the problem. At the same time, such devolution has afforded cities the authority to forge poverty policy at the local level, such that the familiar neoliberal imperatives of state retraction and the mobilization of territory for capitalist expansion are frequently tempered by more progressive political imperatives at the local scale. What has thus emerged is a deeply ambivalent policy landscape, of which “kinder and gentler” poverty management strategies are a central feature. Using the example of a recent homeless program in San Francisco, “Care Not Cash”, this paper argues that such poverty management strategies, while less punitive than their revanchist predecessors, nonetheless introduce a new set of exclusions to the service delivery system, many of which are obscured by the language of compassion. In order to illustrate those new exclusions, I describe the city's homeless geographies—the public spaces, shelters, service sites, and housing models—that have been produced and reconfigured according to a logic of managing homelessness through the provision of care.     

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.     

Urban shrinkage: an unspoken challenge of spatial planning in Russian small and medium-sized cities

Shrinkage since the collapse of state socialism has been evident in many Russian cities, especially in small and medium-sized (SMS) ones. The Russian state, de jure, has been promoting the idea of self-governance; thereby, urban municipalities ought to develop and adopt own planning decisions to cope with various challenges, including those related to depopulation. The current research focuses on planning responses to urban shrinkage. It aims at understanding how the phenomenon is conceptualized in the planning documents of Russian SMS cities and what solutions are proposed to cope with it in the conditions inherited from the Soviet times housing and infrastructural deficit. The empirical evidence for the analysis is drawn from over 70 SMS cities located in Central and Southern Russia. Results state that despite obvious and persisting urban shrinkage, most of the reviewed documents ignore or underestimate the phenomenon. Instead of suggesting flexible solutions, which would help overcome the shortage of urban infrastructure not aggravating shrinkages’ effects in the cityscape, long-term spatial plans are being developed with hope for future growth proposing measures that contribute to the intensification of urban sprawl and fragmentation.     

Beyond the Property Rights Approach: Welfare Policy and the Reform of State‐Owned Enterprises in China

During the pre‐reform era, Chinese state‐owned enterprises (SOEs) operated not only as firms, but also as mini‐welfare states, providing employees with lifetime employment, inexpensive housing, free health care, and pensions. Since China’s market transition began in the late 1970s, however, SOEs have had to bear increasingly heavy burdens for welfare provisions to their employees. The steep increase in welfare spending has not only eroded the base of state revenue, but has also impeded further SOE reforms. To lighten welfare burdens upon SOEs and to remove institutional obstacles to marketization and privatization embedded in the existing welfare system, the Chinese state has imposed many welfare reforms aimed at shifting responsibilities for welfare provision from SOEs to a combination of government, enterprises, communities, and individuals. This article examines the belated welfare reforms in China’s state sector and their impact upon the reform of SOEs. It finds that reform implementation has been sluggish. To achieve the policy goal of welfare reforms, high degrees of state autonomy and capacity are needed.     

In‐Situ Marginalisation: Social Impact of Chinese Mega‐Projects

This study offers a detailed analysis of an under‐researched social problem of in‐situ marginalisation and its causes by drawing on the concept of state entrepreneurialism. Our empirical data stem from the Lingang mega project in Shanghai and one of its neighbourhoods named Neighbourhood No.57 where we find that the residents have not been relocated but are instead suffering from declining public services and environmental quality from surrounding industrial developments. The root cause of this problem is the municipal government’s prioritisation of its strategic objectives of economic development over the livelihood of local residents. The strategic vision of the municipality has led to mass relocation in its early phases of development but in its later stages leaves many residents waiting for relocation whilst being gradually surrounded by industrial developments. Despite continued residential complaints and petitions, in‐situ marginalisation is not resolved due to the institutional arrangement of Lingang, which has centralised planning and financing powers to newly created project‐oriented state organisation. Social responsibilities have been relegated to lower‐tiered governments in Lingang which have neither planning power nor the financial resources to resolve the problems of residents. By examining the case of Lingang, this paper provides a different analytical framework for explaining the social problems emerging from China’s mega urban developments.     

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

Bodies in “Heathen” Places: Regulating Marriage without a State

In 1787 Bishop in the Moravian Church August Spangenberg drew up a set of Instructions and an official statement (Gutachten) on the problem of marriage within the “Heathen” congregations. Alarming reports from the missionaries revealed that lack of civic laws, a particular mindset cultivated by said laws, and a well‐organised state meant that the sexuality of non‐European congregants could not be regulated and ordered. The present article analyses the seemingly coherent European context, which Spangenberg uses as a contrast to the unruly native communities in the first part of the Gutachten and examines what he emphasises as the parameters within which proper marriage regulation can take place. Given the pre‐Revolution date, and the current state of the state at this point in history, the Gutachten could give us valuable insights into the process of the formation of the state and its fundamental institutions.     

Planning for Rural Housing in the Republic of Ireland: From National Spatial Strategies to Development Plans

This paper examines the role of spatial planning as a policy framework for managing rural housing within an integrated territorial development strategy. The paper focuses on the Republic of Ireland, which provides a useful case for analysing spatial planning and rural housing relationships, due to the State's recent shift towards spatial planning (formalized with the publication of the Irish National Spatial Strategy), as well as the level of housing construction that has been observed in an increasingly post-productivist countryside (triggered by counter-urbanization flows, increased affluence and demands for second holiday homes, etc.). The paper reviews all policy instruments that have been used to manage rural housing at various scales (from national strategies to local level development plans). It is argued that while spatial planning adopts an integrative vocabulary, as policy moves down the spatial scale hierarchy, multi-dimensional spatial goals are implemented through traditional, narrow land-use regulation. This often leads to rural housing being addressed in isolation from its wider social and economic context, disconnecting housing from wider rural community issues and ultimately failing to deliver a coordinated and coherent spatial policy for managing rural settlements.     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

The Myth of “Broken Britain”: Welfare Reform and the Production of Ignorance

Abstract: This article takes on the challenge of what Robert Proctor calls “agnotology” (the study of ignorance) to analyse the current assault on the British welfare state by think tanks, policy elites and conservative politicians. The assault is traced back to the emergence of the Centre for Social Justice think tank, founded in 2004 by the current Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan‐Smith. I argue that a familiar litany of social pathologies (family breakdown, worklessness, antisocial behaviour, personal responsibility, out‐of‐wedlock childbirth, dependency) is repeatedly invoked by the architects of welfare reform to manufacture ignorance of alternative ways of addressing poverty and social injustice. Structural causes of poverty have been strategically ignored in favour of a single behavioural explanation—“Broken Britain”—where “family breakdown” has become the central problem to be tackled by the philanthropic fantasy of a “Big Society”. My agnotological approach critically explores the troubling relationship between (mis)information and state power.     

COMMODIFYING DANISH HOUSING COMMONS

Housing was a backbone of the Danish welfare state, but this has been profoundly challenged by the past decades of neoliberal housing politics. In this article we outline the rise of the Danish model of association‐based housing on the edge of the market economy (and the state). From this, we demonstrate how homes in private cooperatives through political interventions in the context of a booming real estate market have plunged into the market economy and been transformed into private commodities in all but name, and we investigate how non‐profit housing associations frontally and stealthily are attacked through neoliberal reforms. This carries the seeds for socio‐spatial polarization and may eventually open the gate for commodification – and thus the dismantling of the little that is left of a socially just housing sector. Yet, while the association‐based model was an accessary to the commodification of cooperative housing, it can possibly be an accomplice in sustaining non‐profit housing as a housing commons.     

International Transformations of the Capitalist State1

Abstract: There has not been a retreat but a transformation of the state, involving significant changes in both the public sphere of politics and the so‐called private sphere of economic activity, and in their modes of interaction, especially law. The privatization of state‐owned assets and the reduction of direct state economic intervention have not led to a reduced role of the state but to changes in its form, involving new types of formalized regulation, the fragmentation of the public sphere, the decentering of the state and the emergence of multi‐level governance. This has been complemented by the increased salience of “private” regulation, so that in many ways the apparently private sphere of economic activity has become more public. In fact, there has been a complex process of interaction with a blurring of the divisions between apparently private and public regulation. Despite talk of deregulation there has been extensive reregulation, or formalization of regulation, and the emergence of global regulatory networks, intermingling the public and the private. The transition from government to governance means a lack of a clear hierarchy of norms, a blurring of distinctions between hard and soft law, and a fragmentation of public functions entailing a resurgence of technocracy.     

Tribal Sovereignty and the Problem of Difference in Environmental Regulation: Observations on “Measured Separatism” in Indian Country

Abstract: The legal and juridical sovereignty of American Indian nations is supposed to help Native peoples maintain their own distinct political and cultural communities. In the context of environmental issues, this means that tribal governments have both the inherent and statutory right to set their own environmental standards, which have the potential to protect tribal peoples and their natural resources in culturally relevant ways. In the past, the US Supreme Court has sought to curtail this kind of sovereignty when the due process of non‐Indians might be hindered. In this article, we look at why tribal environmental sovereignty can and should address the issues of due process in the context of environmental regulation in tribal borders, and make a call for this to be done in a way that supports American Indian tribal sovereignty. Moreover, we connect these issues to the current legal and juridical struggles of other environmental justice groups and the need for more meaningful participation in environmental regulation within the nation‐state for all cultural minorities.     

The Urban Injustices of New Labour's “New Urban Renewal”: The Case of the Aylesbury Estate in London

This paper discusses the urban injustices of New Labour's “new urban renewal”, that is the state‐led gentrification of British council estates, undertaken through the guise of mixed communities policy, on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, London, one of the largest council estates in Europe. In this particular case of post‐political planning I show how the tenant support for the regeneration programme was manipulated and misrepresented and how choices were closed down for them, leaving them ultimately with a “false choice” between a regeneration they did not want or the further decline of their estate. I look at what the estate residents thought/think about the whole process and how they have resisted, and are resisting, the gentrification of their estate. I show revanchist and post‐political practices, but ultimately I refuse to succumb to these dystopian narratives, very attractive as they are, for conflict/dissent has not been completely smothered and resistance to gentrification in and around the Aylesbury is alive and well. I argue that we urgently need to re‐establish the city as the driver of democratic politics with an emancipatory agenda, rather than one that ratifies the status quo or gets mired in a dystopic post‐justice city.     

Welfare Reform and Economic and Housing Capacity for Low-Income Households, 1997–1999

The 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) marked the continued devolution of social policy to state and local government in addition to restructuring an ailing welfare system. Despite concerns that welfare recipients would find greater obstacles to economic stability as a result, declining welfare rolls have been accompanied by declining poverty rates over the past seven years. An important question is whether low‐income families have gained greater employment and housing capacity following welfare reform. Moreover, does capacity vary across states with different welfare policies? In addition, do families face greater economic vulnerability with respect to food scarcity and health care? This article uses the data from the 1997 and 1999 waves of the National Survey of America's Families to systematically assess differences in capacity and vulnerability among lower income families across different policy regimes. Using two measures of capacity for housing and employment, and quality of life, findings suggest that more stringent welfare rules are related to greater job and housing attainment but a reduced quality of life.     

The Space of Local Control in the Devolution of us Public Housing Policy

Sweeping changes in national policy aim to radically transform public housing in the United States. The goal is to reduce social isolation and increase opportunities for low income tenants by demolishing ‘worst case’ housing, most of which is modern, high‐rise buildings with high vacancy and crime rates, and replacing it with ‘mixed‐income’ developments and tenant based assistance to disperse current public housing families. Transformation relies on the national government devolving more decision‐making power to local government and public housing authorities. The assumption here is that decentralizing the responsibility for public housing will yield more effective results and be more efficient. This paper explores the problematic nature of decentralization as it has been conceptualized in policy discourse, focusing on the underlying assumptions about the benefits of increasing local control in the implementation of national policy. As this paper describes, this conceived space of local control does not take into account the spatial features that have historically shaped where and how low income families live in the US, including racism and classism and a general aversion by the market to produce affordable rental units and mixed‐income developments. As a result, this conceived space of local control places the burden on low income residents to make transformation a success. To make this case, Wittgenstein's (1958) post‐structural view of language is combined with Lefebvre's view of space to provide a framework in which to examine US housing policy discourse as a ‘space producing’ activity. The Chicago Housing Authority's Plan for Transformation is used to illustrate how local efforts to transform public housing reproduce a functional space for local control that is incapable of generating many of the proposed benefits of decentralization for public housing tenants.