State Response to Contemporary Urban Movements in Turkey: A Critical Overview of State Entrepreneurialism and Authoritarian Interventions

This paper grapples with the state's response to contemporary urban movements. In light of recent debates on the changing nature of urban movements, it presents an overview of the responses of states in different modes of regulation, ranging from a Keynesian regime to sequential stages of neoliberalisation. Examples of authoritarianism and the entrepreneurial roles of the state are drawn from the Turkish experience to show how economic liberalism can be combined with increasing social control, restrictions, penalisation and exclusion. Reviewing Turkish urban policies and practice, the urban mobilisations against them, and the varying positions of the state will shed light not only on what is happening in Turkey but also on the transformative nature of neoliberalisation. © 2013 The Author Antipode© 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

A Critique in Search of a Corpus: Re-visiting Governance and Re-interpreting Urban Politics

One of the most profound changes of the last two decades has been in the form and the function of local government. Its role as part of the local state has been challenged through the re-scaling and re-configuration of many of its aims. This paper examines the growth of business sector involvement and the ascendancy of the partnership model in urban development, as part of an analysis of the changes and the continuities that stretch across the local government – local governance conceptualization of political relations. I start the paper with a discussion of the main issues in the local governance literature as a precursor to a commentary onImrie and Raco's (1999) recent paper, 'How New is the New Local Governance? Lessons from the United Kingdom'. The wider literature is drawn upon to discuss some of the theoretical approaches used to analyse this much-vaunted transformation and three key themes are used to structure the remainder of the paper. I argue that Imrie and Raco caricature the work of other academics in order to make their claims over omissions from the literature. In doing so, they ignore or under-play how state restructuring and the logic of capital has often been the object of analysis, rather that the voluntarist incorporation of business élites into the local governing apparatus. Using empirical examples from three English cities I argue that while, on the one hand, their examples are revealing and serve to sensitize current debates around governance, the state and regulation, on the other hand, there is still a need to interpret these 'local' politics within a broader and more scale-sensitive framework and in more abstract terms. This demands a clear distinction between local governance as a concept, and its investigation in an empirical way.     

Geographies and utopias of Cameron's Big Society

This commentary engages with UK Prime Minister David Cameron's concept of the ‘Big Society’ as a cure for issues of multiple deprivation in UK cities. It considers the extent that it can be summarily dismissed as the latest manifestation of processes of neoliberalisation or as a cover for major cuts in public expenditure. In the spirit of the arguments of critics who wish to have an open mind about the benefits or otherwise of neoliberalisation, this paper argues that it is not just those on the political right who have a critique of state action from the top down as a method of solving social problems. A well-funded alliance between professionals and local communities can deliver locally appropriate solutions. Given the UK Coalition Government's commitment to reducing public spending, however, adequate funding is absent, as is a genuine willingness to accept local empowerment or to combat inequality.     

Out from the (Green) shadow? Neoliberal hegemony through the market logic of shared urban environmental governance

Recent work in critical geography describes the neoliberalization of urban social service provision through a transition from state provision to civil sector delivery. The concept of a ‘shadow state’ is deployed by some social theorists to describe this process by which nonprofits with government contracts increasingly adopt a state-oriented agenda for the execution of social entitlement programs. Possible linkages between the neoliberalization of urban environmental service provision and a shadow state are lacking by comparison. I, therefore, use qualitative data concerning three organizations in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to demonstrate that civil sector groups are stepping up as local government diminishes its markets for municipal environmental labor. However, the diverse compositions of these shared governances potentially complicate the efficacy of a shadow state thesis for describing environmental provision in inner-city Milwaukee. Instead, I argue that a Gramscian interpretation of shared governance better accounts for the neoliberalization of environmental service provision as government agencies and civil sector groups relate to one another through hegemonic market logic. I argue that this provides a more nuanced picture of how governance concerning the urban environment is constructed by the government, market, and civil sectors to further shape human social reproduction.     

Neoliberalisation from the Ground Up: Insurgent Capital,Regional Struggle,and the Assetisation of Land

In this paper we argue that “assetisation” has been a central axis through which both neoliberalisation and financialisation have encroached in the post‐Fordist era. We focus on the mobilisation of land as a financial asset in northwest England's former industrial heartlands, offering an account of how property developer the Peel Group came to dominate the land and port infrastructure of the region through aggressive debt‐led expansion and, in particular, a hostile takeover of the Manchester Ship Canal for its land‐bank. In doing so, we illustrate how the capture of resources, especially land, by private corporations has shaped both substance and process of neoliberalisation from the ground up. By focusing on transformative struggles over land we contribute to research agendas attempting to understand the systemically dispossessive nature of assetisation, its relationship to fictitious capital formation, and the way such neoliberalising transformations are produced through grounded and situated socio‐spatial struggles.     

Local government reforms in Georgia and their impact on state-society relations

Abstract

This paper studies how the local governance reforms carried out between 1997–2014 shape state-society relations at Georgia’s local level. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyze how the reforms shape practices and actors at the local level. Research interviews with state officials at the national and subnational levels and citizens of the Georgian district Marneuli highlight both government rationalities and how people react to them. I argue that the reforms, which have been declared to promote participation and accountability, hardly contribute to bridging the huge gap between state and society, particularly with respect to the case of the Azeri minority in Marneuli. Thus far, the newly introduced formal actors at the local level, the municipalities, lack power. Societal action in absence of the state and interaction with the state via informal networks remains dominant. The study contributes to literature on state-building and transformation in Georgia by shedding light on the often-neglected local level and to the debate on external democracy promotion and policy transfer by empirically studying the effect of a policy transfer.     

Pluralising Political Forests: Unpacking “the State” by Tracing Virunga's Charcoal Chain

Peering through the lens of illegal charcoal production in the forested areas of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, this paper makes a case for disaggregating the notion of “the state” to better capture “the political” in contemporary political forests. It argues that to identify the fluctuating importance of different dimensions of “stateness”, it is crucial to acknowledge the polymorphous socio-spatial relations that produce political forests. Thus, we draw on the notions of territory, place, scale and network (TPSN) to examine how “stateness” in Virunga has transformed under the particularisation, transnationalisation, and regionalisation of authority. This approach allows us to show how these processes do not only stem from neoliberalisation, but are also driven by, inter alia, regional warfare and non-state militarisation. The resulting complexity of the regulatory landscape turns Virunga into a space marked by a plurality of partly overlapping and partly conflicting political forests.     

Cattle Slaughter Industry in Qing China: State Ban,Muslim Dominance,and the Western Diet

Cattle slaughter and beef consumption are barely mentioned in the literature on Chinese economic, food, or animal history. This is possibly due to the widely held popular and scholarly assumption that beef was avoided and even considered taboo in the daily diet of Chinese people in premodern times. This article investigates the tangible regulation and practice of cattle slaughter in Qing China—the period when the beef taboo was argued to be formally subsumed into Chinese morality. I ask the following questions: To what extent did the Qing state ban cattle slaughter? How was the ban enforced in the localities? Did Chinese people slaughter cattle for consumption? Were there lawful beef markets in Qing China proper? How did increasing beef-eating Western sojourners since the mid-19th century impact this sector? Accordingly, I demonstrate that with the leeway provided by the state, the cattle slaughter industry developed in many regions of China proper, especially large cities. In this sector, Chinese Muslim merchants played a dominant role, even though the Han merchants could outnumber them. Their efforts have prepared the state and Chinese merchants to better cope with new circumstances since the mid-19th century. Broadly, this paper sheds light on how different religious, ethnic, and national groups affected the economy and the practice of law in the Qing dynasty.     

Global Markets, Local Home-working: Governance and Inter-firm Relationships in the Balinese Clothing Industry

Abstract: Within the industrialization process of the Indonesian economy, the manufacture of clothing has played a significant role. Besides Java, Bali has the second highest agglomeration of industrial activities within this sector. However, in contrast to Javanese clothing firms, which have a strong emphasis on Western-styled clothing, Balinese clothing firms focus on the manufacture of Batik and embroidery products. Based on the commodity chain debate, I will show in this paper how Balinese clothing industry is organized into and governed within the global and local economy. This aims in particular to unravel how these types of garments (Batik and embroidery) can shape and reshape buyer relations. The analysis will also include a discussion of aspects, such as product development and raw material procurement. Furthermore, since Balinese clothing companies organize their production activities within extensive networks of rural home industries, the driving forces behind these specific network co-ordinations will be explored.     

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.     

Geographies of mediation: Market development and the rural broker in Maharashtra, India

This paper explicates the role of community-level intermediaries in post-liberalized economic sectors. Focusing on nascent commercial markets for improved, smokeless cookstoves in southwestern Maharashtra, I describe how development is encountered by three analytic groups – artisans, female stove users and NGO field officers. This study highlights patterns of strategic intermediary action, or forms of brokering, used to negotiate the commercialization process for individuals involved in the fabrication, distribution and use of improved cookstoves. A close analysis of the mediating agent can strengthen theories on how individuals and communities encounter sector privatization and state retrenchment. This study reveals a diverse set of brokering activities and actors, and shows how intermediaries combine tasks associated with traditional conceptions of the political fixer and market broker by working within and between groups of market, village and state operatives to transform market supply chains. Mediating agents coordinate counter regulating activities within civil society in the absence of heavy state intervention and play a crucial role in activating and connecting community interests to latent neoliberal state resources.     

TELECOMMUNICATION EXTERNAL ECONOMIES,CITY SIZE AND OPTIMAL PRICING FOR TELECOMMUNICATIONS*

ABSTRACT. In this paper I make use of a city systems model to examine how telecommunications may affect cities in urban systems. The model offers an explanation for the observation that the share of employment in the communication-intensive producer-service sector increases with city size in the U.S. I suggest that external scale economies associated with metropolitan employment size, telecommunication network size and total number of intrametropolitan telecommunication contacts are possible explanations for this observation. I go on to suggest that the presence of telecommunication size and contact level external scale economies at the metropolitan level affects the optimal price that should be charged for local telecommunication services.     

Making Space for “Neo‐communitarianism”? The Third Sector,State and Civil Society in the UK

During the 1990s the urban became an important "institutional laboratory" for state‐initiated policy experiments to address the social costs and political repercussions of economic polarisation and social exclusion associated with neo‐liberalism. One such policy experiment has been neo‐communitarianism, emphasising the contribution of the "third sector" to improving social welfare and reinvigorating a sense of civil society. Focusing on the UK, I examine the background to and implications of the emergence of a neo‐communitarian strategy under the "new" Labour government, which came to power in 1997. First, I consider the repositioning of the third sector within contemporary policy discourse as a result of the Labour government's programme of welfare reforms and Prime Minister Blair's "Third Way" political philosophy, which attempts to combine neo‐liberalism with a neo‐communitarian stance of stressing the importance of civil society for social cohesion. Then, I draw on Foucauldian notions of governmentality to examine how Labour's neo‐communitarian agenda has involved a fundamental reconfiguration of the governance of the third sector, centred on the creation of government–voluntary sector "compacts" at national and local levels. These compacts are of strategic importance for the restructuring of the UK third sector and so the local implications of such restructuring are then considered. In particular, case study evidence from Glasgow is used to critically evaluate government claims that the third sector can contribute to the "reinvigoration of civic life" by highlighting the importance of the internal characteristics and political environment of local third sector organisations for the differential development of social capital and citizenship.     

When Do We “Just Say No”? Policy Termination Decisions in Local Hospital Services

This paper develops a two‐stage decision‐making model of the public policy termination process, which integrates political and economic influences on local decision makers. We empirically explore the model using data on the provision of local public hospitals in California over 1981–95. The results provide support for the model as we find that triggering events as well as characteristics of the local decision‐making context affect the termination decision. For the case of public hospitals, we find that lower state and local revenue growth rates increase the likelihood of termination, while decision makers in communities with a larger local health budget, more unionized public employees, and a larger private hospital sector are less likely to terminate local public hospitals. The implications for public policy and for our understanding of the termination process are discussed.     

The Ambiguities of Homelessness Governance: Disentangling Care and Revanchism in the Neoliberalising City

Whilst “caring” responses to homelessness (e.g. shelters, drop-in centres) have been held up by some as a counter-current to the revanchist city, recent US studies highlight how the structural dynamics of neoliberalisation can implicate caring spaces in revanchist processes of discipline and spatial control. In this paper, we employ an assemblage approach to examine the intersections between care, revanchism and neoliberalisation in Brisbane, Australia. We extend the insights of recent studies by showing how the vulnerability of care to the revanchist pressures of neoliberalisation play out outside the US, despite the prominence of care rationalities and a milder revanchist politics. However, we also push beyond this insight to demonstrate the ongoing progressive potential of care in the neoliberalising city, despite its vulnerabilities to revanchism. Specifically, we highlight the capacity of housing-focused responses to homelessness to shield people from criminalisation and to prefigure and call-forth post-neoliberal practices and spaces.     

The “who” and “how” of place marketing: the role of the private sector in Rutherford County,North Carolina

ABSTRACT

Private sector actors are often viewed as a part of the outcome for an economic development project. The assumption, however, ignores the early role of the private sector in marketing places for firm recruitment. Through a study of two recruitment projects in Rutherford County, North Carolina, I examine the points of entry of private sector actors in the place marketing process. Data gathered from interviews and primary sources reveal that the private sector is actively leading the recruitment of firms and the marketing of places. This paper shows how private sector actors produce knowledge about places, market a place within their own interests, and shape a government’s agenda through their involvement in place marketing. Examining economic development actors as active place-makers reveals how, through place marketing processes, these actors incorporate their own interests in the construction of place.     

Territorially-nested urbanization in China - the case of Dongguan

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the question of extended urbanization by arguing for the need to overcome dualistic views to properly address the political specificities of urbanization in China. To this end, this paper understands state-territorial relations as a process of étatization by drawing on the particular literature on the role of the party-state in urbanization. Through a brief history of Guangdong, it elaborates on the political modalities of territorialization through China’s administrative rank system. This has enabled the party-state to mediate the production of urban space. From this, I arrive at the concept of “territorially-nested urbanization”, moving beyond limited accounts of hierarchical state powers in Chinese urban studies. Next, from a short periodization of Dongguan’s urbanization, the paper exemplifies how a particular mode of territorialization has evolved into tense relationships between the city and towns in the ongoing dilemma of multi-centered versus concentrated direction of urbanization. Based on insights from in-depth fieldwork, the last part of this paper illustrates the contradictory mobilization of village collectives within extended state power through local government, and the development of villagers’ politics and activism in contested land transformations.     

A geography of repoliticisation: Popularising alternative housing models in Oslo

The question of the political has gained renewed relevance in recent years. New movements are challenging what has been called ‘the post-political consensus’ and have facilitated the repoliticisation of a wide range of social, political and cultural phenomena—both on the left and the right. One task for geographers is to understand this repoliticisation spatially. The housing sector is a prime example of how such a repoliticisation occurs. With an emerging global urban housing affordability crisis, housing is becoming an important arena for engaging in emancipatory democratic politics. In this paper, we use Oslo as a case to analyse how housing, which has long been governed through liberal consensus, is being repoliticised. We investigate Oslo's agenda of establishing a ‘third housing sector’ beyond the privatised model, and its role in popularising alternative models in housing. We focus on the mobilisation and rearticulation of the genealogy of failure of housing in Oslo and the alternative housing solutions brought together in the city. Discussing the emerging geographical referencescape of housing as a distinctly spatial process of politicisation we show how arguments and positions gain legitimacy by situating references to other situations and places in a multiplicity of local and foreign arenas.     

Protest, Scale, and Publicity: The FBI and the H Rap Brown Act

This paper deals with issues of political dissent and the geography of state power through the lens of a particular law and its deployment by the US state in the context of the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota by American Indian Movement activists and local residents. I explore how the state responded to the highly mediated nature of the Wounded Knee occupation through tactics that minimized the visibility of its efforts to contain the protest. These efforts, I argue, also constituted a broader politics of scale. I begin with a theoretical discussion of the intersection of protest, scale and publicity. I then use the empirical example of the H Rap Brown Act to show how these dynamics were being reworked in the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In particular, I place the emergence of the H Rap Brown Act within a context of changing geographies of race and state power, more specifically as they were articulated around the unrest that was engulfing American cities. I then analyze how the law was deployed by the state during the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of what the case of the H Rap Brown Act has to tell us more broadly about our theoretical understandings of the geographies of public protest.     

Urbanisation and Financialisation in the Context of a Rescaling State: The Case of Spain

The secondary circuit is a central element in the processes of capital accumulation, and its relevance has become more acute in recent years as urban planning, housing, and real estate have become privileged arenas of the territoriality “variegated” processes of neoliberalisation. This paper explores three theoretical concepts, all closely associated with neoliberalisation: the rescaling of the state, urban entrepreneurialism and financialisation. The paper uses these three theoretical concepts to explain, on the one hand, the increasing relevance of housing and real estate and, on the other hand, their connection with two of the major manifestations of the current financial crisis: excessive private indebtedness and the credit crunch. Analysing the Spanish case is particularly revealing because of the intensity of construction work until 2007, the severity of the subsequent economic crisis, and the wide range of agents involved in the growth of a neoliberalised and financialised secondary circuit of capital in Spain.