"The City is Dead, Long Live the Net": Harnessing European Interurban Networks for a Neoliberal Agenda

A network discourse has emerged during the last two decades, representing networks as self–organizing, collaborative, nonhierarchical, flexible, and topological. Progressive scholars initially embraced networks as an alternative to markets and hierarchies; neoliberal thinkers and policymakers have reinterpreted them in order to serve a neoliberal agenda of enhanced economic competitiveness, a leaner and more efficient state, and a more flexible governance. The European Commission and the German state have initiated and financially supported interurban network programs, broadly framed within this neoliberal network discourse, despite their long traditions of regulated capitalism. Really existing interurban networks depart, however, from these discourses. Embedded within pre–existing processes of uneven development and hierarchical state structures, and exhibiting internal power hierarchies, really existing networks are created, regulated, and evaluated by state institutions, and often exclude institutions and members of civil society, making them effective channels for disseminating a neoliberal agenda. At the same time, they create new political spaces for cities to challenge existing state structures and relations and are of unequal potential benefit to participating cities, both of which may catalyze resistance to neoliberalization.     

Comments on Charlotte Damm (2005): Archaeology,Ethnohistory and Oral Traditions: Approaches to the Indigenous Past. Norwegian Archaeological Review 38, 73–87.

Grave finds from the late Iron Age in the district of Sogn form the point of departure in this essay. Burial customs are regarded as conditioned by the society of the living in the sense that elements in the memorials built (or not) and rites performed at the burial are assumed to symbolize social relations—roles and ranks.

It is attempted to find out how these ranks are divided between men and women and why, and tentatively, what implications this division has for our general interpretation of the society in question.     

SOCIETY–NATURE COEVOLUTION: INTERDISCIPLINARY CONCEPT FOR SUSTAINABILITY

A brief historical background to the currently ascending interest in evolutionary and coevolutionary theory is sketched, and the concept of society–nature coevolution is positioned in this broader field. The significance of society–nature coevolutionary pathways for transition to sustainability is highlighted with Schellnhuber's heuristic ‘theater world’ for representing paradigms of sustainable development. Geography's recent re‐engagement in the geographical experiment of keeping society and nature under one conceptual umbrella is exemplified in the works of Hägerstrand and Harvey. This special issue's four contributions to developing society–nature coevolutionary theory are presented. The outlook these articles provide suggests that research into society–nature coevolution should play a key role in identifying physically, biologically and socially accessible pathways to sustainability. In order to keep the future accessible and navigable, we will need enhanced understanding of society–nature coevolution.     

Immigrants riding for justice: Space-time and emotions in the construction of a counterpublic

During the past two decades, a new immigrants’ rights movement in the U.S. has emerged, constructing a counterpublic that challenges hegemonic immigration discourses, policies, and practices. We show how a counterpublic is constructed in practice, using as a case study the Immigrant Workers’ Freedom Ride (IWFR), an event in 2003 that helped further the momentum of immigrant rights activism. We examine how immigrant activists and their allies came together and worked to construct, articulate, and enact a shared political identity that we refer to as an identity-in-alliance. Space-time and emotions were crucial in the development of this identity as ‘Freedom Riders,’ as well as a sense of solidarity. We reflect on the vulnerabilities within the counterpublic and challenges it faced when inserting its discourses on immigration, race, and citizenship into the hegemonic public sphere. Taking the insights gained from these practices, we extend Nancy Fraser’s concept of the counterpublic by demonstrating the centrality of space-time and emotions to its theorization.     

Effectiveness of Planning Instruments for Minimizing Spatial Conflicts of Biogas Production

Abstract

The energy policy in Germany encourages an ever-greater utilization of biomass to produce biogas. But this utilization interferes on the natural resources and affects new conflicts regarding other forms of land use particularly flood prevention measures, drinking water supply and recreation. A forward-looking planning is needed to minimize these conflicts. Hence, this paper aims to derive quality and protection standards, summarized in checklists, assessing the effectiveness of different planning instruments with respect to the impact of biogas production in practice. These checklists were used in four model districts in Lower Saxony to evaluate the effectiveness of planning instruments on the regional level. The results show that the investigated Regional Planning Programmes do not contain any explicit planning statements as to the production of biomass or biogas. Specific regulations regarding potential conflict situations are mainly to be found in the respective Protected Area Regulations. However, generally the German spatial planning and sectoral planning provide options to control the production of biogas in a way that it is compatible with the majority of competing land uses.     

THE PROBABILITY OF THE IMPROBABLE: SOCIETY–NATURE COEVOLUTION

This article aims to show how evolutionary theory, social‐metabolism and sociological systems theory can be utilized to develop a concept of society–nature coevolution. The article begins with a conception of industrialization as a socio‐metabolic transition, that is, a major transformation in the energetic and consequently material basis of society. This transition to industrial metabolism was essential for the emergence and maintenance of industrial societies and is at the same time the main cause of global environmental change. The article proceeds by asking what the notion of society–nature coevolution can potentially contribute to understanding environmental sustainability problems. An elaborated concept of coevolution hinges on (1) a more precise and sociologically more meaningful concept of cultural evolution and (2) understanding how cultural evolution is linked to the environment. Next I briefly outline major lines of thought and controversies surrounding the idea of cultural evolution. The direction proposed here commences with an abstract version of Darwinian evolution, which is then re‐specified for social systems, understood as communication systems, as developed by Luhmann. The re‐specification implies three important changes in the theoretical outline of cultural evolution: first, shifting from the human population to the communication system as the unit of cultural evolution and to single communications as the unit of cultural variation; second, shifting from transmission or inheritance to reproduction as necessary condition for evolution; and third, shifting from purely internal (communicative) forces of selection towards including also environmental selection. Adopting elements from the work of Hägerstrand and Boserup, the primary environmental selective force in cultural evolution is conceptualized as the historically variable constraints in human time–space occupation. In the conclusions I tie the argument back to its beginning, by arguing that the most radical changes in human time–space occupation have been enabled by major socio‐metabolic transitions in the energy system.     

World Class Aspirations,Urban Informality,and Poverty Politics: A North–South Comparison

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.