“Neither too much nor too little” France,the USSR and the Helsinki CSCE

In the early 1970s, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was the cornerstone of French foreign policy regarding East-West relations. It was considered by Paris as the best way to maintain dialogue with Moscow as well as an instrument to reach the Gaullist goal of overcoming the European status quo. This double objective explains why the French adopted an ambiguous attitude during the CSCE: even though their goal was to challenge the Brezhnev doctrine and initiate a process to meet the aspirations of peoples under Soviet domination, they knew that this would be a lengthy process. For them, it was necessary to avoid provoking the Soviets by putting forward expressively liberal proposals. The French leaders of the 1970s saw the CSCE as the multilateral prolongation of the Gaullist policy of ‘détente, entente, cooperation’.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

Contesting the Divided City: Arts of Resistance in Skopje

This paper examines issues of power and resistance in “divided cities”. Basing my analysis on fieldwork I carried out in Skopje, Macedonia, I look at how urban space may be constructed and used by hegemonic groups as a means of asserting their power and how, in turn, the city may be a place of resistance where power is contested and public space reappropriated. Drawing on Lefebvre's perspective on the production of space, I compare the conceived city to the lived city and examine how urban inhabitants may resist the division of the city and challenge hegemonic representations. I also draw on Debord's psychogeography to define an artistic, active and participatory approach to urban space through which the inhabitants may re‐conquer their right to the œuvre and to the city. I argue that the city as a lived environment may offer narratives other than division and that there are alternatives to the divided city.     

An Informational Right to the City? Code,Content, Control,and the Urbanization of Information

Henri Lefebvre talked of the “right to the city” alongside a right to information. As the urban environment becomes increasingly layered by abstract digital representation, Lefebvre's broader theory warrants application to the digital age. Through considering what is entailed by the urbanization of information, this paper examines the problems and implications of any “informational right to the city”. In directing Tony Benn's five questions of power towards Google, arguably the world's most powerful mediator of information, this paper exposes processes that occur when geographic information is mediated by powerful digital monopolies. We argue that Google currently occupies a dominant share of any informational right to the city. In the spirit of Benn's final question—“How do we get rid of you?”—the paper seeks to apply post‐political theory in exploring a path to the possibility of more just information geographies.     

Oszillierende Weltmodelle versus Urknallmodelle. Das oszillierende Weltmodell Friedmanns,die Ablehnung der Anfangssingularität durch russische Kosmologen und die Zustimmung der katholischen Kirche zur Urknalltheorie Lemaîtres und Hawkings

The Russian mathematician and physicist Friedmann and the Belgian priest and physicist Lemaître were the first to consider non‐static world models in the framework of Einstein's general theory of relativity. Friedmann seemed to favour a periodic, oscillating cosmological model. His investigations were taken up by Russian cosmologists in the 1960s. They stated that the singularities present in many of the Friedmann‐Lemaître cosmological models seemed to be artificial and were ascribed to the assumption of a highly symmetric distribution of cosmic matter. Their disapproval of singularities seems to be in accord with Soviet ideological requirements during that time like atheism and dialectic materialism. They had to retract their statements after Hawking had proved his singularity theorems and after the microwave background had been discovered. Hawking followed the line of thought which was initiated by Lemaître in the early 1930s. Lemaître had combined for the first time quantum physics and relativistic cosmology and had developed his idea of the primeval atom, a beginning of the universe in a dense state with just one quantum containing the whole mass of the universe. Pope Pius XII brought together this primeval atom and God as the Creator of the universe and declared in 1951 that big bang cosmology is compatible with the Bible. Not surprisingly Hawking was awarded the Pius XI medal by the Vatican in 1975 for his contributions to big bang cosmology.     

Social spaces of little people: The experiences of the Jamisons

Dwarfs, midgets, even freaks, are the terms that have been used to label little people. Little people are individuals who for genetic or hormonal reasons grow to a height of less than 4 feet 8 inches (1.42 m). While little people face similar issues of access to those of other physically disabled groups, they live in spaces that are designed, both physically and socially, for people of 'average height'. In addition, little people face unique stigmas that are historically rooted in mythology, idealized body types, and the commodification of body difference for profit. This paper draws upon the spatial conception of Henri Lefebvre and the premise that social spaces are produced. Specifically, this paper offers the term, staturized space, to describe how the material environment produces relative stature in common representations of space. Furthermore, it identifies the ways in which dwarfism affects social relations as they are played out in spaces intended for average-height people. Finally, this study describes the ways little people's homes and meetings of the organization Little People of America are re-staturized spaces both physically and socially. The production of such alternative social spaces produces enabling and normative environments for little people. These issues are explored through in-depth interviews and participant observations with a married couple in which both individuals are little people. The case study of the Jamisons is part of a larger project which seeks to reveal aspects of the social spaces of a population that is difficult to access and frequently misunderstood. Geographers can benefit from the perspectives of little people by becoming increasingly sensitized to discourses of height and their material implications in the production of public and private spaces.     

Politics of the Anthropocene: Formation of the Commons as a Geologic Process

In the Anthropocene humanity acquires a new collective geologic identity. There are two contradictory movements in this Anthropocenic thought; first, the Anthropocenic trace in the geologic record names a commons from below insomuch as humanity is named as an undifferentiated “event” of geology; second, the Anthropocene highlights the material diversities of geologic bodies formed through historical material processes. This paper addresses the consequences of this geologic subjectivity for political thought beyond a conceptualization of the commons as a set of standing reserves. Discourses of limits and planetary boundaries are contrasted with the exuberance and surplus of fossil‐fuelled energy. Drawing on the political economy of Georges Bataille and the material communism of Maurice Blanchot, I argue for the necessity of a political aesthetics that can traverse the difference between common and uncommon experience in the formation of an Anthropocene commons.     

‘La doble condición’: landmine victims,forced displacement,and disability in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio

The small body of scholarship that examines the intersection between forced displacement and physical disability draws important attention to the material difficulties simultaneously disabled and displaced people experience. Instead of focusing on disability as a condition lived against the spatial backdrop of forced displacement, this paper approaches disability and displacement as mutually referential spatial conditions. Based on fieldwork with internally displaced landmine victims in Colombia’s Magdalena Medio region, this research highlights how the intersection between physical impairment and forced displacement produces both disabling spatial imaginaries of fear as well as painfully embodied rhythms of daily life. Nonetheless, this paper draws attention to urban agricultural projects’ enabling potential to produce grounding rhythms of labor for landmine victims. Finally, this paper suggests that contexts of forced displacement require close consideration of spatial imaginaries of fear as well as experiences of direct structural violence as key factors underpinning the social production of disability.     

Challenging New State Spatialities: The Open Marxism of Henri Lefebvre

Abstract: It is possible to identify a subterranean tradition within Marxism—one in which dialectical thought is harnessed not only to expose the necessarily exploitative and inherently crisis‐prone character of capitalism as an actual system of social organisation, but also to critique the very categories that constitute capitalism as a conceptual system. This paper argues that Henri Lefebvre's work can be included within this tradition of “open Marxism”. In demonstrating how Lefebvre's work on everyday life, the production of space and the state derives from his open approach, the paper flags a potential problem of antinomy in an emergent new state spatialities literature that draws upon Lefebvre to supplement its structuralist–regulationist (“closed”) Marxist foundations. A Lefebvre‐inspired challenge is therefore established: that is, to develop a critique of space which does not substitute an open theory of the space of political economy with a closed theory of the political economy of the regulation of space.     

Two Careers across Two Cultures

Beginning with my recollection of hearing C. P. Snow's ‘Two Cultures’ lecture, I sketch my experience of building two academic careers in succession, first in one of the natural sciences and later in the history of such sciences. I outline both the difficulties and the rewards that I encountered in crossing the alleged gulf between the sciences and the humanities, but also emphasise the diversity of cultures that I experienced within each. I describe my own encounter with the academic culture of continental Europe, within which the concept of a monolithic singular ‘Science’ could be dismissed as an ‘anglophone heresy’, and viewed from which the Two Cultures debate could seem both provincial and redundant.