Dispatches from consequential geography: Introduction – Volume 44,issue 4

On behalf of the Society & Space editorial team, it is my pleasure to introduce the nine papers that make up Issue 4 of Volume 44. The papers follow different contours, but expand the consequential political, spatial, and epistemological terrain that we have sought to make space for at EPD: Society and Space. In our January 2025 editorial, we outlined how “the challenge we see for critical scholarly inquiry going forward is how to make consequential knowledge and build consequential theory” (Derickson et al., 2025, p. 4). What defines such consequential geographic inquiry is empirically rich, theoretically ambitious, and intellectually imaginative work that provides both the conceptual vocabularies to explicate the troubles of our times, and the resources to scaffold liberatory and emancipatory projects that remain alert to the very concrete and differentiated consequences of world- and meaning-making. Responding to our invitation to elucidate consequential geographies, this issue's nine original research articles cohere around two areas: experimentation as a consequential praxis of geographical inquiry and space-making; and the interregnum as a consequential time-space wherein/where at shifting power structures and affects impinge on the future. Notwithstanding the different geographical contexts in which the articles are grounded, they are all unified by an interest in the relations and processes that encourage or enfeeble emergent geographies.

The first four papers of the issue offer disparate examples of experimental geographies in substance and practice. Three of the interventions take up how space emerges through experiments with and contestations over the urban as a terrain of concern, while one takes up experimentation as a model of geographic inquiry. All four papers cast a light on how the relationships between space, power, and socioecological matter are continually re-shaping boundaries of territory, be they boundaries between humans and nonhumans, or among humans with differentiated access to power.

In “Commoning, heterotopia, and transformation,” Amy Poteete, Pavel Kunysz, and Nik Luka elaborate conditions under which commoning, as mutualization, fosters transformative geographies and subjectivities. Their analysis, based in a comparative study of contested urban green spaces in Liège (Belgium), Montréal (Canada), and Brussels (Belgium), shows that commoning's transformative potential is not inherent or inevitable. When commoning converges with heterotopic processes, which are processes of denormalization, the emergent geographies can be marked by subjectivities and social relations that profoundly challenge dominant planning rationalities. Poteete, Kunysz, and Luka offer a compelling framework of heterotopic commoning to conceptualize the kinds of geographies that can emerge from urban experiments where commoning and heterotopia intersect.

The article by Diego Astorga de Ita, Gabriela Alejandra Morales Valdelamar, Adriana Cadena Roa, and Patricia Balvanera models experimental geographic theorizing through an exploration of human and other-than-human communities unpending dipossession. The adopt a transdisciplinary research approach that embraces plural onto-epistemologies of nature. In their article, “Axolotl soup,” they center the hydropoetic memories of chinampa farmers of Xochimilco as a form of campesino biopower. This affirmative biopower of axolotl care, in which conservation of the species and its consumption are reconciled, is a sharp contrast to state hydropolitics that conceive of the human and nonhuman species of lacustrine communities in hierarchical and ontologically separable categories available for the extraction of value. Their consideration of the axolotl as a metonym of lacustrine foodscapes and socioecological communities unsettle the rationalities of flagship species conservation.

“Beyond Borders” by Nick Smith and Callysta Thony focuses on outcomes of socio-spatial fragmentation between Jakarta's urban enclaves. The contemporary urban landscape, they show, is the outcome of real estate developers’ experimentation with gated communities as part of a project of aspirational modernity that problematized the kampung (traditional village). Smith and Thony explore how the enclave wall, as an artifact of political economy and socio-spatial contestation, is enrolled in the placemaking projects by those on either of its sides. The porosity of the wall, they show, evinces moments of de- and re-territorialization at which urban residents manipulate the enclave-border assemblage in ways that were not always anticipated by developers. The assemblage is not simply the subject of those unanticipated relations; it is constitutive of the agency and politics articulated in respect of it. Smith and Thony invite us to think “beyond borders,” toward a spatial politics attentive to the in-betweenness of spaces (an epistemological and methodological move Teresa García Alcaraz makes in “Navigating contingent transitions,” which also appears in this issue).

In “Planning in nature's metropolis,” Yousaf Nishat-Botero and Matthew Thompson make municipalist experiments the object of study. The article is resonant with Poteete, Kunysz, and Luka's argument. Exploring how conceptions of “a right to the metabolism” can mediate new politics of social control through distributed planning, particularly around agri-food sovereignty, Nishat-Botero and Thompson make the case for a praxis of metabolic municipalism. As an experiment in how to thwart capitalist metabolic domination, Nishat-Botero and Thompson show that such municipalist experiments can reconfigure urban-agrarian logistics and relations that can ameliorate ecological rifts, the climate crisis, and social inequalities.

Subtending the remaining five articles of this issue is a concern with the interregnum; the in-between and transitional geography. As a liminal time-space of disjuncture, deterritorialization, and disarticulation, the interregnum is characterized by political, economic, and infrastructural struggles to reshape incumbent sociospatial formations. The articles pursue two related sets of questions: what coalitions and processes make harnessing the contingency of the interregnum possible; and how do informational infrastructure, affects, and visions of the future bear upon meaning-making within and contestations over interregnums.

Tai Kondo Koester's “Dependency, sovereignty, and “underdevelopment” examines how members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe make sense of the economic and political interregnum constituted by the energy transition. Koester describes the underdevelopment produced by energy infrastructure dependency, which animates tribal desires and debates for alternative energy sovereignty. The realities of the current energy regime make fossil-fuel development an attractive pathway for self-sufficiency and self-determination based on Tribal sovereignty over the extraction of its coal reserves. That pathway though, deepens the incorporation into extractive capitalist systems and the settler state. At stake in the ongoing energy transition are consequential geographies of energy infrastructure that will mediate socioecological relations—at the scale of the tribal nation, the region, and global capitalist economy.

In “Are Energy transitions suffering from archive fever?” Pablo Jaramillo and Valeria Tafurt analyze the role of archives of environmental licensing as informational infrastructure that shapes the reenactment, reproduction, and contestation of extractive regimes at Colombia's renewable energy frontier. In the interregnum of an underway energy transition, they show how archives accruing as the artifact of a solar bonanza create conditions of informational excess that undermine the public's knowledge and ability to participate in environmental decision-making. Energy transitions do not necessarily entail replacements of old extractive energy regimes. As such, the opacity and confusion arising from archival frenzies can secure continuity of extractivism at the extractive-renewable nexus.

Santiago del Rio's “From cruel optimism to foreclosed futures” interrogates how potentiality and futurity are shaped by the experience of long interregnum. In their case, a time-space of protracted precarity. Del Rio's shows that young people's inhabitation of geographies of precarity entails a “temporal–affective formation” that inculcates negative sensibilities of non-precarious futures. This sense of foreclosed futures that structures the imaginations of Barcelona's youth, because it shapes their aspirations and sense of belonging, impels the possibilities of the neoliberal city. Under such conditions, the political mobilization of nostalgia, especially what del Rio’ describes as cruel nostalgia, can prop up exclusionary and reactionary projects.

Jan Winkler, Lilith Kuhn, and Louisa Freytag, in “The affective topologies of the climate crisis,” offer an analysis of how understandings of the climate crisis and anxieties about ecological futures come to bear upon environmental protests in Lützerath. Through the notion of affective topologies, they offer a way to understand how the sense of the climate crisis constitutes atmospheres of experience and localized spatializations of spaces to notice and contest the climate crisis. By examining how the geographies of the future become contested based on climate-political feelings, Winkler, Kuhn, and Freytag shed light on the production of space based on an anticipatory agenda to counter dystopian landscapes of ruination.

The final article in the issue, “Navigating contingent transitions,” by Teresa García Alcaraz, examines urban transitional geographies or in-between spaces straddling periods of sociospatial conflict and peace. García Alcaraz's comparative analysis of in-between spaces of Belfast (Northern Ireland) and Caracas (Venezuela), which are characterized by ethno-nationalism and socio-economic disparities, respectively, illustrates interregnums as consequential arenas wherein (re)negotiations of identity, territory, status, and power can unfold new urban solidarities or entrench institutional and social divides. García Alcara offers a theorization of contingency to interpret “in-between spaces as both products and agents of transition.” The article's treatment of in-betweenness engenders liminality with catalytic and cataclysmic value.

Together, these articles in Volume 44, Issue 4 model approaches for interrogating the politics and processes of encounter that attend spatial production across regions, human-environmental relations, and temporal imaginations. Rooted in deep ethnographies, attentive historical geographical analyses, and urgent eco-political struggles, the papers are generative resources for traversing the problem space of a world of geographical emergence.