Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

In this paper I attempt to explore how ‘ordinary acts’ of dealing with money and with money technologies fabricate enabling and disabling—dis/abling—spaces of calculation. Rather than referring to money merely as a general symbolic medium of exchange, I highlight the materiality and the sensory practices involved in handling money and shaping the practice of sociality. Drawing on empirical material, I explicate some of the ways in which everyday practices with money are distinctively important for visually disabled people. Combining sociological and social philosophical thoughts with insights from science and technology studies, I rethink the social understanding of money and disability. I explore how (visual) dis/ability is situated in everyday practices and suggest that it can be understood neither as an individual bodily impairment nor as a socially attributed disability. Both money and blindness become visible as complex sets of calculate practices, linking bodies, material objects, and technologies with sensory practices. These practices, I conclude, draw attention to the heterogeneous fabrication of sociality and to the emerging dis/abling spaces of calculation that unfold in the course of everyday life.

There has been much interest in the neo-Foucauldian framework of governmentality as a way of understanding contemporary policy processes. In this paper I examine evidence from a case study of local sustainability indicators in the light of this framework. The role of indicators as a potential governmental technology is addressed, covering issues of their ability to objectify sustainability the scope for altered subjectivities, their positioning within central–local government relations, and the construction and responsibilisation of communities, particularly in urban regeneration contexts. I conclude that the use of indicators at the community level may tell us more about central–local relations within contemporary governance than about the construction of subjects and objects to enable governance with regard to sustainable development.

Somewhat surprisingly the concept of dwelling remains largely unconsidered within contemporary geographical thought. Despite signs of a renewed interest in the term it remains all but bereft of a sustained critical appraisal and as a consequence firmly tied to the name and writing of Martin Heidegger. The aim of this paper is to begin to open the concept up beyond this attachment and to provide a rationale for its reassessment. Through a double reading of dwelling, once via Heidegger and again via Emmanuel Levinas, I offer a twofold consideration of how the concept can be assembled, orientated, and organised. Where Heidegger organises and articulates the concept around an enclosed figure being-at-home-in-the-world for Levinas dwelling gains its significance from a constitutive openness to the incoming of the other. These are two accounts, then, which differ radically in their apprehension of the concept and in the unfolding of its implications but which agree on the central importance of the concept in the determination, figuring, and phrasing of subjectivity, sociality, and signification. Ultimately, what emerges from these opening remarks is a depiction of two attempts to make thought respond to and reckon with the event of space: two attempts to bring to thought the space between us.

This paper begins with two observations: that UK homes appear to have accumulated increasing numbers of domestic technologies, yet new houses are smaller, on average, than those built before 1980. The spatial pressures placed on homes that result from the accumulation of technologies are explored by drawing upon forty household interviews which enquired into the domestic organisation of kitchen and bathroom technologies and practices. Many households have responded to such spatial pressures by extending or reformulating their domestic spaces: such that kitchens are becoming increasingly multifunctional spaces and bathrooms are multiplying. It is argued that these trends are not simply driven by an unstoppable tide of material possession but reflect context-specific arrangements related to the temporal and ideological structuring of domestic practices. Technologies and practices coevolve with the result that new demands are made on homes—the commodities and objects with which we live our lives influence our experience of space and the value placed on different physical configurations. Domestic technologies are therefore implicated in the structure and reproduction of practice and hence in the choreography of things and people in time and space.

This paper provides a critique of the concept of the throwaway society. Drawing on two years of intensive qualitative research, we argue that the concept of the throwaway society does not bear scrutiny. Rather than throwing things away households are shown consistently to engage in simultaneous practices of saving and wasting when getting rid of consumer objects. Saving and wasting are shown to be critical to materialising identities and the key social relations of family and home. Focusing on self, the couple relation, and the mother–child relation, we show how wasting things is intimately connected to the narration of self and to the enactment of specific love relations. The paper also shows how wasting things is central to moving home, constituting a surplus and then an excess of household possessions. The paper concludes by arguing that to understand the increasing amount of matter being turned to waste in the UK requires a focus on love relations and mobility, and not on the trajectories of things themselves.

Stimulated by recent controversies about the headscarf in France, this paper offers a fresh look at the spatial and urban dimensions of the work of Frantz Fanon. While there is widespread agreement that the work of Fanon (which preceded the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in social theory) includes powerful spatial dimensions, there is no consensus about the status of ‘space’ in Fanon's texts. Postcolonial theorists, whose reading of Fanon dominated the Anglo-American academic world until recently, have applauded the prevalence of spatial metaphors in Fanon's work as a sign for the latter's discomfort with dialectical thought and matters of historical transformation and thus as a sign for ‘third-space’ thinking. Representing a new, heterodox wave of Fanon interpretation and insisting on Fanon's Hegelian–Marxist, radical Black, and phenomenological preoccupations with liberation, other readers have detected a shift from spatial to temporal concerns in Fanon's work. While building on this latter reading of Fanon, I argue that the spatial aspects in Fanon's work are neither a function of a philosophical imperative of nonrepresentability nor in contradiction with his concerns about temporal transformation. Fanon analyzed everyday racism as an alienating spatial relation, treated colonization as spatial organization, and viewed decolonization in part as a form of reappropriating and transforming spatial relations in the colonial city and through the construction of nationwide sociospatial alliances. Fanon's complex historical-geographical perspective on everyday racism, the colonial issue, and national liberation makes it possible to link his work to Henri Lefebvre's insights into the processes by which postwar French urbanization mediated a shift from colonial war to the ‘colonization’ of everyday life in the metropole. Given the growing role of controlling urban space in the core and peripheries of our neo-imperial world, excavating an urban and spatial Fanon is promising for strategies to emphasize the urban dimensions, microaspects and macroaspects, and multiple scales of what colonization means today.

Recent strategies to enforce the United States boundary with Mexico have shifted undocumented immigrants into remote lands federally designated as protected areas (as in national park or national wildlife refuge). Government and media institutions represent such entries as a threat to nature. In this paper we argue that representations and interpretations of threats to nature in border-protected areas are laden with identity attachments. In repeatedly defining that which is threatened as ‘American’, such discourses work to draw boundaries around the nation, thereby narrating inclusion and exclusion.

This paper offers a critical analysis of the role of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that deal with planning policy in general and in Israel in particular. The inherent dilemmas of the different NGOs' tactics and strategies in reshaping the public sphere are examined, based on a critical reading of Habermas's conceptualization of the public sphere. The main objective of this paper is to investigate to what extent, and under which conditions, the NGOization of space—that is, the growing number of nongovernmental actors that deal with the production of space both politically and tangibly—has been able to achieve strategic goals which may lead towards social change.