By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Market Creation by Leninist Means: The Regulation of Financial Services in the People’s Republic of China

Abstract

Within the process of China’s transition from a centrally-administered to a more market-oriented economy, financial services have played a very special role, but in a counter-intuitive way: what looks like Western market economics turns out to be a Leninist regulatory model. Even as international financial service providers and regulatory communities are invited to play a role in the creation of a Chinese market in financial services, the Communist Party has strengthened its control of top personnel, the judiciary and the media. The reform of the central bank and the establishment of technically independent regulatory agencies seemed to have taken China down the path of OECD economies. The model of a very specific post-regulatory state with Chinese characteristics, however, has not fully incorporated the notion of private authority. Such an acceptance would pose a threat to the CCP monopoly on political power. The attempt to use only semi-private organisations to develop financial markets undermines the long-term stability of the political and economic order.     

Editorial: Two Years at the Top

The results of the ISI 2005 Journal Citation Reports, releasedin June 2006, are once again extremely encouraging for the Journal.As shown in Table 1, on the basis of the citation ‘impactfactor’ rankings, Journal of Economic Geography retainedboth its No. 1 position in geography (out of 38 geography journalscovered by the SSCI) and No. 3 position in economics (out of175 journals covered by the SSCI). The Journal's impact factorincreased marginally to 3.22, indicating that articles publishedin the Journal in 2003 and 2004 were cited on average more thanthree times each in 2005 and, in geography, the gap betweenthe Journal and its major competitors widened slightly. Papersfrom these years achieving significantly higher levels of citationthan the Journal's average in 2005 included Martin and Sunley     

State Collapse as Business: The Role of Conflict Trade and the Emerging Control Agenda

This article examines the role played by conflict trade in the process of state collapse. Conflict trade is defined here as the trade in non–military goods such as diamonds, timber and drugs that finances war. Such trade includes both the export and import of goods to a war zone as well as extra–territorial trade undertaken by supporters of a warring faction. It is argued that the decline of superpower military aid coupled with the broader effects of centre–periphery exploitation mediated through a neo–liberal and western imposed version of globalization has meant such trade has a particular salience both in contemporary conflict and the process of state collapse. Equally, though, the reliance of warring factions on conflict trade means they are also susceptible to changes in the market for their goods, creating a vulnerability that can (and to some extent has been) exploited to promote peace. The emerging control agenda on conflict trade is currently characterized by a number of problems — most notably, the risk that the control of conflict trade might become a substitute for action on arms exports; that international action has largely been undertaken within an inappropriate statist paradigm; that control has sometimes taken second place to economic or strategic interests and that policy has become hostage to a ‘drugs and thugs’ agenda which risks undermining its effectiveness.     

New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy

This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.     

Introduction: Transnational retail and the global economy

The fastest retail-system transformation in history has beensweeping across the emerging markets of East Asia, Central andEastern Europe, and Latin America over the past decade withprofound impacts on economies and societies in those regions.Conceptualized by researchers in development studies and agriculturaleconomics as the ‘supermarket revolution in developingcountries’ (see, for example, Reardon et al., 2003; Reardon,2005; Reardon and Hopkins, 2006; Humphrey, 2007; Reardon etal., 2007), that transformation has been driven not only bydemand-side forces such as urbanization and income growth inthe emerging markets, but also by supply-side forces such     

Public open space exposure measures in Australian health research: a critical review of the literature

Numerous studies have shown associations between public open space and a variety of health outcomes. Yet the extent to which firm conclusions and planning policy recommendations can be drawn from this body of work depends on how public open space availability has been measured and reported. Other researchers have highlighted potential issues with the way that public open space has been measured but have not systematically assessed the extent of this problem. This paper provides a comprehensive critical review of studies of public open space and health conducted in Australia to identify and compare public open space measurement and data treatment. Our analysis showed wide variation in how public open space was measured, as well as a lack of consistency in reporting public open space exposure measures and under‐reporting of measurement methods. We find that such tendencies limit how much these studies can be compared and contrasted with each other. The corollary of that finding is that without more detailed reporting of exposure measures, it will be difficult to establish an evidence base that informs planning for healthy, liveable environments. In response, we develop and present a checklist for reporting public open space exposure to address this challenge.