Renewing the War on prostitution: The spectres of 'trafficking' and 'slavery'

The 1990s saw government initiatives restricting immigration in many countries, and a good deal of popular unease. Associated policies have targeted sex workers, as with the Policing and Crime Bill that is currently in its Third Reading in the House of Commons (UK). In the name of 'victims' of a trade organised by 'evil' traffickers, this Bill seeks further sanctions against all of those involved. This editorial asks whether initiatives during the current recession might not seem to succeed but for the wrong reasons. Immigrants are already leaving the UK in search of a living while local workers, who were promised safer working conditions in the wake of the murder of five women in Ipswich (2006), will be punished more and more. With its apparently humanitarian efforts to 'stop the traffic', the UK government will turn out to have replaced our 'slaves' from abroad with home-grown substitutes, and effectively solidified and further excluded an underclass. This situation suggests striking parallels with the panic over white slavery during the last comparable period of globalisation culminating in the First World War.     

Beginnings: women and geography at Northwestern in the 1960s

This brief article attempts to paint a picture of the social and intellectual atmosphere in which Susan Hanson's postgraduate education took place and then discusses her particular experiences in the Geography Department at Northwestern University. It describes the sexist characteristics of American geographical university education in the 1960s and the competitive and male-dominated environment of Northwestern. It suggests that Susan's experiences at Northwestern were an important influence on her subsequent values, skills and interests as a feminist academic.     

Liquid passions: bodies,publics and city waters

This article explores water’s capacities as a vibrant matter with specific properties that generates passions, attachments and a sense of belonging, and which enrols bodies in new connections, socialities, alliances and politics in unpredictable ways. Based on research into practices and engagements with water in a large urban public space the paper builds on studies of blue space. It concludes that water has the capacity to enhance a sense of well-being in those that swim in it and to mobilise a very particular sense of embodiment which gives this form of public space its distinctiveness constituting new forms of sociality and connections amongst diverse individuals. It seeks to do this by paying attention to the experiences of things themselves and the active participation of nonhuman forces in events and the ‘vital materiality’ that runs through and across bodies both human and non-human. The article also explores water’s capacity to be constituted and defined by experts as dangerous and risky matter, and to thus engender political associations and connections amongst diverse groups who seek to oppose such expert interventions.     

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg

Abstract: By unravelling the adoption and adaptation of the North American Business Improvement District (BID) model in South African cities, this paper considers the way neoliberal principles are making their way in the post‐apartheid context. Drawing on a comparative approach of BIDs in Johannesburg and Cape Town, we analyse the tensions and conflicts surrounding their implementation and unpack the resilience of this model. As unexpected as this resilience might be in such a context, that is, far away from the heartland of neoliberalism, we argue that this resilience is linked to the permeability of the local contexts and to the plasticity of the model itself at the city and neighbourhood levels, reflecting a capacity to adapt to inherited regulatory frameworks, patterns of territorial development and embedded socio‐political alliances of the local terrains, as well as an ability to accommodate post‐apartheid issues through the crafting of what we refer to as “local Third Ways”.