Spatial and sectoral differentiation of support to innovative companies from EU funds in Czechia

This paper aims to introduce a case study of Czechia in distribution of the EU funds and their spatial patterns. EU funds receive plenty attention from both European society and the scientific community. However, there is a lack of detailed evaluations of spatial and sectoral differentiation, which might bring a better understanding to the whole EU funds system. This paper attempts to fill this gap with a method of geographical differentiation analysis of the Czech operational programme Enterprise and Innovations 2007–15, which should increase the competitiveness of industry and develop services for commercial activities. Historically, subsidies often go to peripheral regions at the borderland with Slovakia and Poland, while regions along the borders with Germany and Austria receive only a low level of support. Jurisdictions of the major recipients from hi-tech sectors are mainly in the close vicinity of the largest cities (Praha, Brno), which are natural centres of high technologically demanding sectors, but a high share of high-tech subsidies goes to some peripheral districts as well. These findings can contribute not only to the academic discussion about contradictory developmental impacts of subsidies but to the all-European debate on the EU funds purposes as well.     

Dies-non: refusal of work in the 21st century

Abstract

My comments aim to cast light on a specific political proposal that can arise from a discussion of the topic of the ‘refusal of work’ and its implications for a social radical change. Autonomist, anarchist and feminist activism, have been and are the main sources of a long-term conceptual and empirical work on the refusal of work. Refusal of work is a very complex concept that has traversed history and is reduced for uncritical dominant common sense to unemployment, laziness, idleness, indolence but it is in reality one of the basic foundational qualification to think any radical change. Among many important intuitions, the added value of Silvia Federici’s work is to have offered a different perspective on the refusal of work discussion and how it can be expressed to develop different forms of communing. Her work provides the backbone for this brief excursion on the issue of the refusal of work. Emerging and consolidated social movements, for example in Southern Europe, have, consciously or not, taken position, often contradictorily, regarding what refusal of work means. In the context of current neoliberal capitalism, an increasing structural unemployment and precarious jobs are one of the trademarks of austerity policies to ‘revive’ economies. Drawing on Federici’s insights on the women exclusion as a useful way of thinking about the spatial dimension of these issues in feminist theory, this article looks at examples of prefigurative politics that define their strategies of refusal of work building significant spatial patterns.     

Care,pay, love: commodification and the spaces of live-in care

This paper investigates uses of the concept of commodification in contemporary analyses of waged care. Drawing on theoretical work on commodification and discourse-analytical research on private live-in care in Switzerland, I explore how Swiss live-in care questions central discussions in the literature. Scholars have focused on the ways in which care is embroiled within market relations and the adverse effects of commodification on the character and quality of care. The paper outlines the two central discussions, identifies important limitations and explores the ways in which Swiss live-care contests their underlying assumptions. Swiss live-in care exhibits intricate processes of waging elder care. Live-in care services are offered and arranged on agency websites while taking place at elderly persons’ private households. Elder care thus becomes entangled in market relations both in virtual spaces and at home. Furthermore, live-in care workers do not distance themselves from their work but actively seek to improve their conditions of work. In so doing, they complicate the assumption that paying for care corrupts caregiving or turns it into a product for sale. Based on this evidence from Swiss live-in care, I propose that a careful use of commodification might best serve feminist interventions.     

The $15 Wage Movement Moves South: Politics of Region in Labor Union Campaigns

The North American labor movement continues to wrestle with the challenges of organizing workers in the US South. This article explores the contradictory position of the South in the contemporary labor movement, using the circulation of the $15 minimum wage to ground the analysis. By problematizing the place of the South in US labor, this article contributes to efforts to complicate the geographic imaginaries of the South and to our understanding of the contemporary labor movement's expansionary projects. Drawing on qualitative interviews and participant observation in Greensboro and Durham, North Carolina, and Richmond, Virginia, I trace the abstract circulation of organizational resources, strategies, and tactics of the $15 wage movement into, throughout, and back out of the South.     

Radical Urban Horticulture for Food Autonomy: Beyond the Community Gardens Experience

For those who are interested in radical changes, it is important to analyze the forms of resistance that promote self‐managed practices, also at apparently very small scale. In Italy the experience of “community gardens” is usually named “orti urbani”. In the last 10 years, the occupation of abandoned urban spaces to set up orti urbani has increased within the squatting movement. The case of the city of Rome is interesting because there has been a widespread activity to organize self‐managed spaces to grow fruit and vegetable plants. These initiatives make up not only potential spaces of dense social networking, political action and discussion on environmental issues, but also supporting large food autonomous configurations such as Genuino Clandestino, that are challenging dominant food production. A proliferation of orti urbani located in Social Centers, squatted houses or other abandoned spaces represents a scalar strategy to re‐appropriate and commune urban space.     

Going beyond the grid: literary mapping as creative reading

Drawing from the importance of narrative inquiry in contemporary geographical reasoning and teaching, this paper focuses on some practices set around the relationship between maps and literature. Reader-generated maps, maps produced starting from the reading of a literary text, are at the core of a reflection on the potentialities of literary mapping in higher education; relating maps and literature in an educational environment, I suggest creative reading and creative mapping as co-constructive practices that are able to guide students in addressing and internalising the complexity of spatial categories. Reflecting on the students’ literary mappings, I focus on the various ways that the literary map contributes to mobilising the space of the text, guiding students in approaching spatial issues from a different (and creative) perspective. Time, point of view and literary trans-scalarity are the key narrative concepts that guide and inform possible inductive ruminations on literary mapping as a learning strategy. Following the core question of “what literary mapping might be and do in the digital age”, I aim to resituate contemporary discussions on literary mapping in an educational environment.     

基于GIS的沈阳旧城区叙事空间研究

20世纪60年代,叙事学作为一门学科始于西方历史学、文学领域。直至20世纪末,叙事学开始转向空间领域研究形成空间叙事学,并被逐步应用到城乡规划中,尤其是城乡空间结构等领域。空间叙事学不仅关注城市发展中的物化要素,更加注重物化要素所代表的城市文化和城市记忆等非物化要素的深入挖掘,是探究场所本体与场所精神的重要研究思路。本文从空间叙事学出发,基于GIS平台运用核密度及K函数对古代、近代、现代三个时期沈阳旧城区人工叙事要素和人文事件叙事要素进行点模式量化分析,得出沈阳旧城区叙事空间的总体结构,以及叙事点核、叙事廊道、叙事簇群等叙事空间结构单元,指出沈阳旧城区叙事空间的动态发展性、功能多样性和历史传承性特点,探讨了叙事空间的经济驱动、自然要素、城市定位和交通发展四大演变机制。从人文地理学的视角出发,结合叙事空间理论对沈阳旧城区叙事空间进行分析,结果具有文化地理和城市地理双重属性,丰富了城市研究在该视角下的研究成果。     

近70年来中国历史城市地理研究进展

历史城市地理是历史地理学的重要分支之一。近70年来,中国历史城市地理研究经历了奠基与探索、缓滞、复苏与拓展、深化与融合等发展阶段,在研究内容拓展、理论与方法总结、新技术探索等方面取得了长足进步和丰硕成果,促进了中国历史地理学的整体发展。基于近70年来历史城市地理领域的代表性研究论著,总结了中国历史城市地理研究的阶段性特征,论述了九大专题领域的研究进展,并对历史城市地理研究相关问题进行了辨析,对今后的研究趋向加以展望。     

‘IT'S ALL A QUESTION OF BUSINESS’: INVESTMENT IDENTITIES,NETWORKS AND DECISION‐MAKING IN THE CLEANTECH ECONOMY

Cleantech has emerged in the last decade as a major new investment sector at the forefront of the green economy. It responds to the need for innovative technologies to combat the impact of global environmental, climate and resource trends. Focusing on the cleantech sector, this article explores the central importance of relationality within the financial domain of the green economy. The central aim of this article is to deepen understandings of the operation of cleantech investment by examining the decision‐making processes of cleantech actors, how these are influenced by (and influence) cleantech investment networks, and the relationships between these factors and the macro‐level drivers and discourses focused on the cleantech sector. A relational economic geography approach is used in conjunction with other frameworks (spanning the cultural, structural and actor‐network dimensions of cleantech investment) to investigate: how cleantech investors define the sector; the macro‐ and micro‐level drivers of cleantech investment; and how cleantech networks form and operate to create and disseminate cleantech discourses and to generate the mutual trust and information sharing needed to secure cleantech investments. In so doing, the article seeks to shed greater light on the micro‐level processes contributing to the creation and growth of cleantech investment markets as an essential catalyst and component of the green economy.     

The 1892 General Election and the Eclipse of the Liberal Unionists

This article seeks to establish that the 1892 general election marked a major change in the relative positions of the parties in the Unionist alliance. Not only did it reveal the limitations of the Liberal Unionist Party's strategy and appeal in an age of increasingly organised, mass politics, but it also acted as a brake on the ambitions of the new leader of the Liberal Unionists in the house of commons, Joseph Chamberlain. It argues that the Liberal Unionist Party suffered a more severe setback in 1892 than has been recognized hitherto and that Chamberlain's attempts to revive his party both before and after the general election were now prescribed by the reality of the political position in which the party now found itself. Rather than regarding the fluid political circumstances of the 1890s as the outcome of an emerging struggle between increasingly polarised ideologies, it seeks to reinforce the significance of local political circumstances and the efficacy of party management in the growing dominance of Lord Salisbury and Arthur Balfour and the Conservative central organisers.