Victories from Insurgency: Re‐Negotiating Housing,Community Control,and Citizenship at the Margins

This article considers how insurgent campaigns for housing the poor in New York City and Chicago succeeded in engaging the local state, non‐profits and financial institutions in the creation of community land trusts. These campaigns had long arcs in which victories and losses built from each other, neither as permanent as they initially seemed. The campaigns moved iteratively between spaces of “invited citizenship” (courtrooms, planning committees) and “invented” spaces of collective action (property takeovers). They found their greatest success when, exploiting state incapacity to defend abandoned property, they elicited a degree of complicity from local governments in their takeovers of housing and land. The article thus contests dichotomised accounts of social movements that oppose losses to victories, cooptation to resistance, and movements to institutions. Instead, we call for situated and dynamic accounts of insurgent practice, capable of theorising the long, messy, co‐constituted evolution of political contexts and popular struggle.     

Changing the face of GIS education with communities of practice

A principal focus in GIS higher education has been with developing curricula or accommodating new technologies to reflect the needs of the developing discipline. Pedagogy has largely reflected traditional metaphors of acquisition and transfer in the context of formal education, and this extends to preparation of students for the workplace. In this paper, the authors explore the potential for communities of practice, and in particular virtual communities of practice as a complement to more formal GIS education to provide a route to more situated, participatory learning. In so doing, the emphasis towards creating a GIS professional community of practice offers both the recognition of the role of situated knowledge in developing professional GIS expertise, and provides an important bridge from higher education to the workplace.     

Characterization and origin of black and red Magdalenian pigments from Grottes de la Garenne (Vallée moyenne de la Creuse-France): a mineralogical and geochemical approach of the study of prehistorical paintings

Pigments sampled from wall paintings and from crayons taken on the floor, at the Grottes de la Garenne (Saint-Marcel – Indre, France) have been analyzed and characterized by infrared spectroscopy, Raman micro-spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, ICP/MS and analytical TEM. The red pigment used for the wall paintings is mainly composed by hematite, clays, carbon matter and carbonates. Results on the red pigments show that the compositions of the paintings are similar to that of some crayons. Regarding these analyses, their origin is compatible with local siderolithic facieses. Analysis of black pigments shows that they are made of cryptomelane, pyrolusite, clays, carbonates and carbon matter. It shows also that paintings and some crayons compositions are compatible. On the contrary of red pigments, the origin of black pigments is probably allochtonous. Indeed, the traces of thallium detected in cryptomelane, the cerium anomaly and the absence of iron are not compatible with local facieses or other sites from the French Massif Central.     

Organic Public Geographies: “Making the Connection”

Abstract: A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape ( Fuller 2008 ) in geography's mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non‐ academic outlets ( Castree 2006 ; Mitchell 2008 ; Oslender 2007 ), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area‐based or single‐interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome” ( Ward 2006 :499; see Fuller and Askins 2010 ). A number of well‐known projects exist where research has been “done not merely for the people we write about but with them” ( Gregory 2005 :188; see also Cahill 2004 ; Johnston and Pratt 2010 ). However, collaborative writing of academic publications which gives research participants authorial credit is unusual ( mrs kinpainsby 2008 ; although see Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006 ). This paper is about an organic public geographies project called “Making the connection”. It is written by a diverse collection of (non‐)academic participants who contributed to the project before it had started, as it was undertaken, and/or after it had finished. This is a “messy”, process‐oriented text ( Cook et al. 2007 ) working through the threads (partially) connecting the activities of its main collaborators, including a referee who helped get the paper to publication.     

From ignorance to commitment: how periurban municipalities deal with agriculture?

Urban growth leads to decreases in area of farmland. In France, considerable attention is paid to this problem, including in frequent public policy debates. In this article, we explore issues associated with agriculture in 24 French periurban municipalities. We compare the treatment of agriculture in municipal policies by analysing urban planning documents and conducting in‐depth interviews with elected representatives. Our study reveals a high level of congruence between these two sources of information, confirming that planning documents are a sound proxy to identify municipalities' agricultural strategies. The study also shows both diverse degrees of municipal commitment to agriculture, which range from ignoring it to strongly supporting it, and diverse issues about agriculture that depend on local context and concerns.     

Gender Blindness and the Annulment of the Development Contract

This contribution to the Forum Debate responds to Horner and Hulme's analysis on the ‘rise of the South’, which they see as suggesting a dramatic redrawing of the global map of development and inequality. This response presents a critical South feminist perspective, informed by the lived realities of women in the South. It is based on a historical and political perspective that goes beyond income inequality to understand gender inequality in development within the persistent North–South divide.