‘We want to be there for everyone’: imagined spaces of encounter and the politics of place in a super-diverse neighbourhood

In the context of increasingly diverse urban populations in European cities, neighbourhood organizations are often seen as offering spaces of encounter that can foster a sense of belonging. As a result, they have formed an important element in urban policies on community identity and social cohesion. Yet everyday encounters in such micro-publics may not necessarily be experienced as positive, and these spaces themselves might become sites of contestation and exclusion. Through an ethnographic study in a super-diverse neighbourhood in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, this paper investigates how residents’ sense of belonging to the neighbourhood is informed by competing claims on a neighbourhood centre. Although envisioned as a collective space, contestations between different groups of residents over the centre as a functional and meaningful place illustrate how governing institutions shape informal politics of place through their own vision for the neighbourhood and their selective support of some initiatives over others.     

Social Distance in Settled Communities the Conceptual Metaphor, <Emphasis Type="SmallCaps">Social Distance is Physical Distance</Emphasis>, in Action

Settled communities worldwide are shaped by the conceptual metaphor, social distance is physical distance. People build their houses so they are near those they are close to socially—which is usually their immediate kin—unless confounded by other factors. This metaphor is, at core, a neural connection, linking neural networks underlying the concept of distance with social categories. This connection forms in the brains of young children, under conditions found in all human societies, and should therefore operate universally. This article suggests how this metaphor can be used to reconstruct immediate social connections from the layouts of small settlements. It illustrates this by predicting the social structure of Kireyka (Darfur) from archaeologically visible materials, then compares these predictions with reported genealogies. Over three quarters of predicted social clusters are wholly or largely correct, despite competition from other concepts, as well as constraints of space, architecture, and topography. Other case studies suggest that there is no upper limit to the size of communities which may be structured by this metaphor, and that social relations may organise communities for generations.     

THE ECOSYSTEM HEALTH METAPHOR IN SCIENCE AND POLICY

Ecosystem health' is an increasingly common metaphor in the langauge of science and policy. Given the prominence of both the ecosystem and health concepts within geography, this paper examines the meanings generated by the adoption of the metaphor for scientific research and for environmental policy on the North American Great Lakes. 'Ecosystem' can be characterized as an entity, an abstract concept, or a perspective. As perspective, ecosystem shares many features of postmodern science, emphasizing complexity and holism and calling for the inclusion of human beings in our considerations of nature. The ecosystem health metaphor is politically powerful in its ability to evoke action and concern for the environment with an appeal to the universal experiences of human ill-health. The organismic ecosystem health metaphor provides a new, relevant way of thinking about the natural world. In policy discourse, however, metaphor can be problematic in that there is potential for the author or speaker to hide behind the nonliteral language. Moreover, the acceptance of the ecosystem health metaphor which can draw upon widely held beliefs and norms implies that other ways of knowing the world are necessarily omitted. We highlight some of these issues in a case study of a policy document prepared by the Ecological Committee of the Great Lakes International Joint Commission. To continue to know how to study nature in new ways, metaphors must be encouraged, but their meanings must also be widely explored     

Multiple Partial Couplings in the Multiple Streams Framework: The Case of Extreme Weather and Climate Change Adaptation

In this paper, I draw insights from a detailed case study of adaptation policymaking to develop a novel interpretation of John Kingdon's original work that shows how policy entrepreneurs can couple the problem, policy, and political streams through multiple partial couplings. Researchers and policymakers often assume that extreme weather opens a window to adopt policies aimed at adapting to long‐term climate change. However, empirical evidence shows that crises can redirect attention to urgent, short‐term goals. Using the Multiple Streams lens in an abductive case study, I investigate how these competing forces interact to influence the policy process. By unpacking Kingdon's familiar “streams” metaphor and elaborating his overlooked concept of partial couplings, I illustrate how the policy entrepreneurs' strategy of issue linking explains Australia's adoption of the 2007 Water Act, one of the world's first major adaptation policies, at the height of its decade‐long Millennium Drought. Employing this novel theoretical understanding offers new insights into this important case. I conclude by developing tentative hypotheses for testing in future studies.     

From three Ottoman gates to three Serbian sites of memory: The performative rewriting of Belgrade from 1878 until today

ABSTRACT

This essay analyses how three entrances to Ottoman-era Belgrade have been reconstructed since 1878. It demonstrates how the rewriting of these places entailed silencing the Ottoman past and constructing sites of Serbian national memory. By examining city space as a palimpsest, it shows how a new national narrative has been written in relation to earlier Ottoman space, thus making the national narrative a mediator of the memory of the seemingly erased Ottoman past.     

A Rhetoric of Change: The Language of the Howard Government's 2005 Work Choices Agenda

Understanding how public political discourse acts or does not act as a persuasive force in promoting and justifying political policy remains of critical importance. This paper presents a rhetorical criticism of the public political language used by the then Prime Minister John Howard and Minister Kevin Andrews, the chief spokespersons for the introduction of the Work Choices legislation. We demonstrate that these speakers drew upon a metaphor of evolutionary change as a means of promoting their legislation to the Australian working public. We argue that although this metaphor has persuasive utility, this merit was outweighed by the contradictions that arose when the metaphor was situated within a surrounding discourse promoting the concept of individual choice.     

Cultural brownfields in European cities: a new mainstream object for cultural and urban policies

This paper develops the concept of ‘cultural brownfields’ and discusses how organic cultural projects developed in derelict sites have been progressively included in mainstream cultural and urban planning strategies and policies over the last 10?years. To do so the paper assesses the transformation of three mature cultural brownfields in Berlin, Marseille and Lausanne and their distinctive internal and external dynamics. It develops a typology of cultural brownfields which stresses the diverse nature of these spaces and their differential role in cultural and urban planning policies. The paper concludes by highlighting a series of policy lessons for urban planning and cultural strategies.     

China’s urban ideology: new towns,creation cities,and contested landscapes of memory

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that “the urban” has emerged as the most significant ideological realm in contemporary China. In developing this argument, I suggest an alternative approach to how we theorize urbanization in China. Seeking to avoid the dichotomized analyses that often characterize scholarship on China’s urbanization, the paper suggests reading “the urban” as an ideological device. Such a reading calls for an analytical distinction between the city as a technology of socialist party-state planning and government and urbanization as a messy social process over which the state struggles for control. It also calls for a recognition of the ways that ideology itself has shifted dramatically in China, from the Mao-era centrality and coherence of class struggle and its overriding goal of proletarianization to a much less coherent post-reform message of “stability”. The paper begins with a brief discussion of ideology and Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” in a Chinese register. It then considers the film 24 City, directed by Jia Zhangke, as a template for understanding urban spaces as sites of conflict between the city as an ideological device and urbanization as a social process. New urban spaces are then explored in an effort to tease out their complex and contradictory ideological renderings. I conclude with an argument about the openness and contradictions of China’s urban spaces and how an ideological analysis can resist the kind of theoretical closure that much work on urbanization in China seems to aim for.     

Time perspectives,palimpsests and the archaeology of time

This paper explores the meaning of time perspectivism, its relationship to other theories of time used in archaeological interpretation, and the ways in which it can be implemented through an analysis of the palimpsest nature of the material world we inhabit. Palimpsests are shown to be a universal phenomenon of the material world, and to form a series of overlapping categories, which vary according to their geographical scale, temporal resolution and completeness of preservation. Archaeological examples are used to show how different types of palimpsest can be analyzed to address different sorts of questions about the time dimension of human experience, and the relationship between different types of processes and different scales of phenomena. Objections to the apparently deterministic and asocial character of time perspectivism, and its apparent neglect of subjective experience and individual action and perception, are dealt with. The line of thinking developed here is used, in its turn, to critique other approaches to the archaeology of time, and conventional understandings of the relationship between past, present and future.     

Concepts of community in the pursuit of an inclusive archaeology

Community is a key concept that shapes how we approach our relationships with other individuals and groups. In this article, the author reviews how scholars and laypeople alike use the concept of ‘community’ in both theoretical and applied contexts. What do heritage professionals expect from the communities with whom they work? How do these communities define and constitute themselves? The answers to such questions have broad implications for the way that scholars interact and collaborate with stakeholders. Examples are presented from the author’s archaeological projects at sites associated with communities in the African diaspora that illustrate the importance of an explicit and critical approach to the idea of ‘community’. The discussion concludes with preliminary findings from an investigation of the meanings of community among black Chicagoans in the twentieth and twenty‐first centuries.     

TIPPING AND RESIDENTIAL SEGREGATION: A UNIFIED SCHELLING MODEL*

ABSTRACT This paper presents a Schelling‐type checkerboard model of residential segregation formulated as a spatial game. It shows that although every agent prefers to live in a mixed‐race neighborhood, complete segregation is observed almost all of the time. A concept of tipping is rigorously defined, which is crucial for understanding the dynamics of segregation. Complete segregation emerges and persists in the checkerboard model precisely because tipping is less likely to occur to such residential patterns. Agent‐based simulations are used to illustrate how an integrated residential area is tipped into complete segregation and why this process is irreversible. This model incorporates insights from Schelling's two classical models of segregation (the checkerboard model and the neighborhood tipping model) and puts them on a rigorous footing. It helps us better understand the persistence of residential segregation in urban America.     

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.     

The Right to Mobility: The Production of Mobility in the Courtroom

This paper considers the way mobility has been given meaning by decisions in the United States Supreme Court. It argues that in four key decisions the Court constructed a de facto “right to mobility” by linking mobility to notions of citizenship. The paper suggests that these cases illustrate the importance of considering how mobilities are given meaning in particular contexts and how these meanings are framed within notions of mobility as an essential human freedom. The paper is framed by discussions of mobility, rights and citizenship and concludes with a discussion of the role of othering in the production of mobility‐as‐citizenship.     

The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams

The Mekong is a region whose geopolitics are shifting in complex ways. They are shifting with the post-Cold War reconfiguration of ideological as well as strategic power deployments. They are also shifting with rapid economic development and associated regional integration. This paper employs these various dimensions of shifting geopolitics to explore and partially explain the (re)emergence of hydropower development in the Mekong. It does so by outlining both the shifting geopolitics of river and region, and showing how the Mekong as metaphor extends to much more than the materiality of the river from which the multiply constructed region derives its name. It suggests that the regional geopolitics produced by these shifts is key to the re-emergence of mainstream hydropower.     

Foucault,deleuze, and the ontology of networks

The concept of the network has become embedded in social thought and imagery, articulating what at root is inarticulable. The network metaphor occupies an ontological space, but this space, insofar as it is posed as a philosophical question, seems to assume a network-like shape itself. It may be particularly rewarding to read the constellations studied by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze from this point of view, in light of the analysis of the preconditions of networks. This paper examines how the question of the ontology of networks is addressed by these thinkers, especially with regard to the historicity of ontology.     

“Urban Ecology Under Fire”: Water Supply in Madrid During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939)

This paper investigates the critical role of workers to enhance the resilience of water supply services in cities at war through analyzing the case of Madrid and the Madrid water company Canales del Lozoya during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). We argue that securing the protection of vital urban flows mediated through infrastructures is a key objective of cities under attack. In doing so we contend that examining how those affected by the interruption of these flows cope with the situation represents a valuable but largely neglected form of water management. We illustrate how quotidian knowledge about the urban geography of water flows may have important repercussions for the war effort itself. In a nutshell, the case of Madrid offers an early account of the critical role of water workers in sustaining “urban ecologies under fire” securing the complex urban metabolism while also contributing to the struggle against invading forces.     

Flexible topographies: Muslim spaces in a German cityscape

This paper examines transient and semi-permanent Muslim spaces, their social construction, use, and relevance for diverse pious Muslims in Stuttgart, Germany. I describe the location, creation, negotiation, and maintenance of such spaces and analyze their position and contribution to a larger urban Muslim social geography. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, Germany, I illustrate how individuals mark or inhabit spaces momentarily or more permanently as Muslim spaces. I illustrate how at least for the length of a particular encounter, spaces are used in manners that reflect Islamic sensitivities and normativities. These spaces are ever more inseparably and irreversibly woven into the urban fabric. Over time they become and indeed some already have become integral parts of the cityscape. Some spaces in the process of recurrent islamically inspired uses become semi-permanent or even permanent Muslim spatialities, especially in contexts with considerable Muslim interaction or movement. The density of transient encounters and spaces over time contributes to the consolidation of an increasingly well-known and shared urban Muslim social geography. Within this spatiality, pious Muslims know that planned or unplanned encounters will be framed by Muslim beliefs and practices. Paying attention to the ‘elusive evidence of the ordinary’ [Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York. New York: Basic Books, p. 10], I demonstrate how increasingly visible Muslim spaces and practices slowly become part of the urban fabric and every day culture.     

Informal (In)security in Urban Afghanistan

Poverty and insecurity in Afghan cities are intricately intertwined with conditions of “informality.” The term and the realities it describes refer to living situations in which basic needs and activities such as work, housing, and social security are unprotected by laws and standards. Immersion into such a convolution of informality determines the life of a majority among urban populations in Afghanistan and conveys a deep sense of insecurity for the urban poor. The paper looks at how rapid and unprecedented urban growth in Afghanistan goes along with rising levels of livelihood insecurity and explores how the urban poor cope with livelihood risks through a range of informal arrangements. Conceptually, the notion of “informal security regimes” helps capture informality as a coping strategy and how it relates to urban poverty in Afghanistan. Informed by extensive empirical fieldwork, the paper identifies different elements of the “informal security regime” in urban Afghanistan and explores their specific operations. The paper is mainly focused on the Afghan capital, Kabul, supplemented with evidence from other urban sites in Afghanistan.