Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I offer a reading of Jacques Rancière's conceptualization of politics, and consider its implications for the links between space, politics, and the political. I provide an overview of Rancière's conceptualizations of ‘the police’, politics, and the political, and try to recover the spatiality of these notions. Based on this overview, the argument pursued in the paper is that space does not become political just by virtue of being full of power or competing interests. It becomes political by becoming the place where a wrong can be addressed and equality can be demonstrated. This definition makes space not only an integral element of the defining moment of the political, but an integral element of the disruption of the normalized order of domination as well.

By using a framework of spatial categories to illuminate social change, scale analysis intersects with a series of arguments that have been put forward over the years regarding the relationship between society and space. The coherence of scale analysis and its contribution to our understanding of this relationship are examined here, with a focus particularly upon the influential writings of Swyngedouw. It is argued that these writings are haunted by a spatial fetishism that has deconstructive consequences, confounding the distinction between society and space upon which their composition depends. But this conclusion points (through a sort of ‘spectral logic’) towards a wider deconstruction, which suggests that the distinction between these terms or realms is itself the product of a kind of ‘scaling’. Despite its centrality to the development of geographical thought, and its congruence with other dualisms such as culture/nature, the juxtaposition of society and space remains the unexamined ground of much contemporary writing. Recent efforts by feminists and others to rework the notion of ‘space’ and indeed of ‘society’ would benefit from addressing these together in their articulation through the in-between-ness of scale.

In this paper I focus on the concept of diagrams, as they have been appropriated from a Deleuzean discourse into the philosophy of Manuel DeLanda. For strategical reasons Gilles Deleuze reiterated on several occasions a caution against subjecting diagrams to history. Yet, this is exactly what DeLanda seems to invite us to do. To counter this tendency, without abandoning DeLanda's perspective, a new passage between the virtual plane of consistency and concrete machines is invented. This paper is not a final solution, but an elaborated strategy which points ahead towards intensified efforts in investigating the evolution of visual screens.

In this paper I provide a critical discussion of Foucault's work on government and governmentality. I argue that geographers have tended to overlook the ways in which practices of self-government and subjectification are performed in relation to programmes of government, and suggest that they should examine the technical devices which are embedded in networks of government. Drawing upon these observations I suggest how geographers might proceed, tracing the geographies of a specific artefact: the British government's 1958 Motorway Code. I examine how the code was designed to serve as a technology of government that could shape the conduct of fairly mobile and distant subjects, enabling them to govern their conduct and the movements of their vehicles.

In this narrative of the water contamination in Walkerton, Ontario, in 2000–02 I consider the local priorities defining good water. These vernacular understandings emphasised taste, softness, and thrift in municipal water, and they highly valued local sovereignty in matters of water quality, and solidarity as a quality of local citizenship. By using contemporaneous evidence from media reports and the judicial enquiry into the incident, I trace how the qualities of good water were redefined, and with them community standards of safety, expertise, and risk. The emphasis on community consent to vernacular water monitoring practices and the implications of this shared responsibility differ from the journalistic and judicial accounts which emphasise individual culpability.

In a recent essay on modernisation and ecology, Latour claimed that the environmental movement had lost important ground within political debate. He argued that this reversal in political fortunes had in part emerged out of an internal tension within the environmental movement itself—a tension between overinflation and banalisation. In this paper I analyse the nature of the purported processes of overinflation and banalisation within contemporary ecological politics, and explore ways in which it is possible to image a reinvention of environmental politics, forged between the socioecological marvellous and the mundane. Focusing on struggles over the treatment of nature and the urban environment in the socialist city of Katowice in Poland, I reveal a brand of environmental politics emerging out of communist Eastern Europe which appears to have important implications for a reinvented environmentalism. Considering the particular utilisation of the everyday environment which was forced on environmental groups in Katowice by political circumstances, I claim that the quotidian could provide a new ground upon which to perceive and connect social and ecological politics at a variety of different spatial scales and in a powerful array of different socionatural contexts.

Gentrification today spreads and deepens in US cities. In this paper we examine the progentrification rhetoric and tactics confronted by the second largest Puerto Rican community in the United States, Chicago's Humboldt Park. Three points are documented in this current case. First, real-estate capital and the media now target and script Puerto Rican youth bodies to communicate a new gentrification-sanitizing theme: a disgust for ‘ghetto’ morals and social order. Second, this coding of bodies involves a key process, taking readers to imaginary spaces in discourse. Third, possibilities to thwart gentrification exist but organizing strategies are ineffective in that they fail to confront the politics of youth bodying. The results shed light on one of the ascendant strategies of capital to restructure Spanish-speaking neighborhoods and a subset of them, Puerto Rican communities.