The ambivalent relations behind civil society’s engagement in the “grey zones” of migration and integration governance: Case studies from Belgium

Based on qualitative data collected in two different Belgian cities (Brussels and Liège), this article focuses on the emergence of civil society initiatives to address the grey zones of migration and integration governance in the country. We define the concept of grey zones as situations that appear in specific time-spaces where problematic issues arise and the state fails to intervene. This triggers the intervention of civil society to deal with specific governance issues. In Belgium, the state – through an indifference-as-policy approach – delegates the responsibilities of reception and integration policies to multiple actors and leaves space for a variety of citizens’ initiatives to emerge. The grey zones of government policies become spaces for possible citizen-organised actions aimed at both providing initial reception and legal support to migrants, and denouncing the absence of state intervention. These citizen actions operate in particular on the issue of housing and reception of forced migrants with different legal status and migration aspirations. We also highlight the ambivalent relations emerging between civil society actors and the state. Through the analysis of two situated case studies, this article aims to provide evidence on how these civil society initiatives develop and how their humanitarian approach becomes political.     

A relational approach to walking: Methodology,metalanguage, and power relations

To better understand walking practices and the power relations informing them, Mattias Kärrholm and colleagues argue for a relational methodology and metalanguage. In the process, they propose a threefold approach: (a) identify different walking assemblages; (b) investigate how diverse types of walking assemblage relate in series; and (c) study how certain objects can gather or bind series together and act as boundary objects. In this article, we explore the worth of that approach, drawing on research interviews held over 2015–16 with residents from Wollongong, Australia, during a period when their municipal government was implementing a walkable city strategy. Here, we analyse participants' conversations with us for what they reveal about walking types, walking assemblages, interseriality, objects of passage, and boundary objects—five terms used by Kärrholm et al. to interrogate urban walking. Our work suggests that participants are adept at gauging the constant transformations that characterise their walks. This narrative evaluative capacity is, perhaps paradoxically, both compelling and mundane and suggests that participants make sense of a range of meanings from complex social and spatial dynamics and do so in ways that highlight privilege and disadvantage in the city. These findings have wider relevance for those interested in walking and mobilities studies and methodologies.     

In pursuit of productive conflict in strategic planning: project identification

This paper discusses three normative standpoints on conflict in strategic spatial planning: no conflict, conflict for consensus and conflict for meta-consensus on the validity of dispute. These views apply to the questions of whether and why projects, as a major source of conflict, should be identified in the process of strategic planning. In their approaches to these questions, the performance school advocates the production of general guidelines to avoid conflict, the collaborative perspective supports the identification of projects in strategic planning in order to utilize their potential in a conflict-to-consensus journey and the conflict-oriented perspective favours the identification of projects in strategic planning in order to arrive at meta-consensus on the immediate disputability of robust agreements. Reflecting on the collaborative perspective, this paper tests a hypothetical model of how conflicts created in the face of project identification can feed in making consensual strategies. Findings in the North West region of England support the model and suggest some difficulties with reviewing such consensus around which a resistance network forms. The paper puts forward some recommendations for overcoming the review challenge.     

Snail assemblages: interrogating an environmental controversy involving Powelliphanta augusta and the mining industry in Aotearoa New Zealand

In 2004, a controversy arose in Aotearoa New Zealand's coal mining sector that involved Powelliphanta augusta, a species of land snail. This paper considers that controversy in terms of emergent assemblages involving the snail, the mining industry, the Department of Conservation, political action by environmental non‐government organisations, and public expressions of environmental and other values. Three sets of relations embedded in those assemblages are examined—those related to positioning and organising nature; values, politics, and power relations; and human and non‐human materialities. Those relations illuminate how a protracted controversy and its objects form a “social test bed” for contested views in legislation and guidelines dealing with economy, conservation, and restoration. To assess the dynamics, complexities, and contingencies of such relations, attention is paid to the controversy's detailed time line and legal framing, as well as to ontological shifts of snail and habitat and snail metrics. This analytical focus highlights the shifting quality of ideas about how the snail and its habitat are understood as entangled in fraught and mutating strategies of translocation that are played out in a particular regulatory setting. It also provides insights into international geographical efforts to re‐shape environmental governance and management.     

L'identification des zones calmes et un diagnostic d’équité environnementale à Montréal

Quiet urban areas are places with low noise levels that can help people to support physical and mental wellness. This paper has two objectives: to identify quiet urban areas in Montreal and to check for the presence of environmental inequities in access to such areas for vulnerable groups (children, older people, low‐income individuals, and visible minorities). Using a GIS‐based methodology, 2,282 quiet urban areas were identified in Montreal. The results of a mixed effects logistic regression model analysis showed that there are no major inequities in access to quiet urban areas for the population groups studied. The analysis did, however, revealed substantial spatial disparities in terms of the distribution of quiet urban areas across the boroughs and municipalities examined.     

The inclusion record of fluid evolution,crack healing and trapping from a heterogeneous system during rapid cooling of pegmatitic veins (Dronning Maud Land; Antarctica)

Granitoid (pegmatite and aplite) veins in metamorphic rocks and intrusive syenites of central Dronning Maud Land, Antarctica, are flanked by conspicuous light‐coloured alteration halos, which represent the damage zone of fracture propagation. The damage zone is characterized by a high density of sealed or healed microcracks, about 1 order of magnitude above background. Fluid inclusions along healed microcracks in quartz of both pegmatite and alteration halos are inspected by optical and scanning electron microscopy, and their composition is analysed by microthermometry and quadrupole mass spectrometry. The similar inclusion record in the granitoid vein and in the damaged host rock indicates the derivation of the fluids from the hydrous melt phase. The aqueous inclusions bear abundant daughter crystals, mainly silicates, and may represent a hydrous melt. The volatile composition is variable in the system H₂O–CO₂, with mostly subordinate amounts of N₂. Phase separation with partitioning of CO₂ into the fluid phase coexisting with the hydrous melt, and possibly immiscibility in the subsolidus range, govern fluid evolution during cooling. The variable CO₂/N₂ ratio suggests mixing with fluids from an external source in the host rock and vigorous circulation at an early stage of high transient permeability. Experiments have shown that healing of microcracks at high temperatures is a matter of hours to weeks, hence similar in time scale to the cooling of the cm‐ to dm‐thick granitoid veins. In this case, rapid cooling and concomitant crack healing in a system undergoing phase separation causes a broad compositional variability of the inclusions due to necking down, and the underpressure developing in closed compartments precludes a meaningful thermobarometric interpretation.     

In situ Measurements of Oxygen Dynamics in Unsaturated Archaeological Deposits

Oxygen is a key parameter in the degradation of archaeological material, but little is known of its dynamics in situ. In this study, 10 optical oxygen sensors placed in a 2 m deep test pit in the cultural deposits at Bryggen in Bergen have monitored oxygen concentrations every half hour for more than a year. It is shown that there is a significant spatial and temporal variation in the oxygen concentration, which is correlated to measured soil characteristics, precipitation, soil water content and degradation of organic material. In these deposits oxygen typically occurs when the air content of the soil exceeds 10–15% vol, while oxygen dissolved in infiltrating rainwater is of less importance for the supply of oxygen in the unsaturated zone.     

Narrating urban assemblages—Chris Ware and Building Stories

This article takes up the recent interest in assemblage theory in urban geography and considers the potential for art to contribute to our narrations of urban assemblages. In particular, it uses Chris Ware's recent magnum opus, Building Stories, as not only an account of the urban as an assemblage, but to indicate more broadly the way in which comics might be used to narrate urban assemblages in ways that highlight their multiplicity and plurivocality. The article draws out three themes in its analysis of Building Stories: more-than-human subjects, the various temporalities of the city, and the way memory and narrative are emergent from urban assemblages.     

Fluid effect on hydraulic fracture propagation behavior: a comparison between water and supercritical CO2‐like fluid

The initiation of hydraulic fractures during fluid injection in deep formations can be either engineered or induced unintentionally. Upon injection of CO₂, the pore fluids in deep formations can be changed from oil/saline water to CO₂ or CO₂ dominated. The type of fluid is important not only because the fluid must fracture the rock, but also because rocks saturated with different pore fluids behave differently. We investigated the influence of fluid properties on fracture propagation behavior by using the cohesive zone model in conjunction with a poroelasticity model. Simulation results indicate that the pore pressure fields are very different for different pore fluids even when the initial field conditions and injection schemes (rate and time) are kept the same. Low viscosity fluids with properties of supercritical CO₂ will create relatively thin and much shorter fractures in comparison with fluids exhibiting properties of water under similar injection schemes. Two significant times are recognized during fracture propagation: the time at which a crack ceases opening and the later time point at which a crack ceases propagating. These times are very different for different fluids. Both fluid compressibility and viscosity influence fracture propagation, with viscosity being the more important property. Viscosity can greatly affect hydraulic conductivity and the leak‐off coefficient. This analysis assumes the in‐situ pore fluid and injected fluid are the same and the pore space is 100% saturated by that fluid at the beginning of the simulation.     

Fluid flow in shear zones: insights from the geometry and evolution of ore bodies at Renco gold mine,Zimbabwe

The geometry of mineral deposits can give insights into fluid flow in shear zones. Lode gold ore bodies at Renco Mine, in the Limpopo Belt, Zimbabwe, occur as siliceous breccias and mylonites within amphibolite facies shear zones that dip either gently or steeply. The two sets of ore bodies formed synchronously from hydrothermal fluids. The ore bodies are oblate, but have well‐defined long axes. Larger ore bodies are more oblate. High‐grade gold ore shoots have long axes that plunge down dip; this direction is perpendicular to the long axes of the low‐grade ore bodies. The centres of the high‐grade ore bodies align within the low‐grade ore bodies along strike in both gently and steeply dipping groups. The range of sizes and shapes of the ore bodies are interpreted as a growth sequence. Geometrical models are proposed for the gently and steeply dipping ore bodies, in which individual ore bodies grow with long axes plunging down dip, and merge to form larger, more oblate ore bodies. The models show that when three or more ore bodies coalesce, the long axis of the merged ore body is perpendicular to the component ore bodies, and that ore bodies in the deposit may have a range of shapes due to both growth of individual ore bodies, and their coalescence. The long axes of the high‐grade ore bodies are parallel to the shear directions of both the gently and steeply dipping dip slip shear zones, which were the directions of greatest permeability and fluid flow. The larger, lower grade bodies, which may have formed by coalescence, are elongate perpendicular to these directions.