Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Between 1948 and 1959, perceptions of Israeli water resources changed dramatically from a strong belief in water abundance in the prestate period to an equally strong and unequivocal belief in water scarcity after 1959. This paper tells the story of how the water resources of Israel came to be constructed as scarce. On the substantive level, the paper tells the story of the dismantling of a network of water abundance and the emergence, instead, of a network of water scarcity and centralization, which helped to construct all of the following: water resource scarcity as ‘fact’; centralized policy-making institutions as most ‘efficient’; centralized technologies as ‘appropriate’; the national space as the only source of identity; the national scale of water management as ‘necessary’; a strong and centralized state as ‘legitimate’; legal precedents for the use of state apparatus for surveillance, discipline, and control over water resources; and, consequently, a form of citizenship that is seen as at once heroic and disciplined. On the theoretical level, in this paper I argue that the ontological distinction often assumed between scientific (eg water scarcity) and political (eg centralized nation-state) fields of practice is exaggerated, especially in literature on water politics in Israel. I further demonstrate that technoscientific debates about water availability, efficient technologies for its utilization, and appropriate institutions for its management are constitutive of relations of power and government and are themselves implicated in the construction of an Israeli style of government.

This paper begins to explore the historical-geographic development of the culture industry. By expanding upon David Harvey's understanding of culture as that “special” commodity which can earn monopoly rents based on its extraordinary qualities, I examine, in particular, how professional baseball became a profitable segment of the culture industry. This historical-geographic process, similar to most forms of cultural production, was fraught with contradictions that threatened its survival. In addition to the three contradictions that Harvey identifies, this paper focuses on an additional contradiction, one that is found within the labor processes of cultural production, between productive capital and commodity capital. Scrutiny over the ways in which baseball's premier professional organization—the National League—struggled to overcome this and other contradictions suggests that the culture industry depends upon the production of certain geographies.

This paper is concerned with the ways in which prisoners talk about the production of space within a prison in New Mexico. We focus specifically on the role of vision in interpersonal relations, including relations between inmates and between inmates and officers, and we attempt to assess the significance of seeing and being seen in the ‘personal projects’ of prisoners working their way through the system. This involves examining the roles of looking and of surveillance in the organization and control of space. In our study, interpersonal relations are not divorced from the material geographies of the prison. Rather, the breeze-block walls and the steel gates are integral elements of the scopic regime as it affects relations between prisoners and their relations with the prison staff. In our account, the complex connections between actors, architecture, and technologies of surveillance are voiced by the inmates. We provide just one perspective on the making of space in the prison but it is one which has been neglected.

This paper considers how environmental knowledge practices and learning are coproduced through heterogeneous assemblages of inscriptions, devices, skills, ecologies, and people in the field. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies, I use the certification processes of the Forest Stewardship Council as an example, because its processes of verification through embodied and emplaced fieldwork explicitly seek to make abstract standards of environmental management ‘fieldworthy’ in different places and thus enable their implementation on the ground through specific environmental knowledge practices. Hence, it is only through the field as a shared space that certification processes can work (and travel) in the interests of better environmental management. The space of fieldwork thus enables knowledge workers to exploit the uncertainty, heterogeneity, and discretion in environmental science and management more readily than do other spaces, rendering these qualities more beneficial than problematic.

Geographers dealing with religion have pointed to the process of conflict and contestation involved in the production of sacred sites. This paper explores the conflict over a sacred site in the formulation of a minority identity through transformation of the place into a nexus of resistance and collective memory formation. I argue that under hegemonic secularizing states and within the context of ethnonational conflicts minority groups mobilize and articulate a dynamic meaning of sacred sites which allows an elaborate politics of identity. Further, in the context of their national struggle, members of the community emphasize different aspects of the sacred. In the context of the national struggle (and for the duration of the conflict), minority members enhance inclusive nationalistic (Palestinian in this particular case) identity; however, while in a community context they emphasize the religious (Islamic) meaning of the place. Particularly, I examine the dynamic nature of interpreting and constructing the sacred through the analysis of the restoration project of the Hassan Bek mosque by the Arab-Palestinian community of Jaffa, Israel.

After nearly 450 years of colonial administration, Portugal returned the territory of Macao to the People's Republic of China in 1999. Following the handover, Macao's postcolonial government dismantled the forty-year-old local gambling monopoly and opened Macao to investment by gaming companies from North America, Australia, and Hong Kong. These companies are collectively spending $25 billion to tap the increasingly affluent and mobile market of tourists just across the border in mainland China. This investment has prompted remarkable economic development in the tiny city as well as a phantasmagoric transformation of the cityscape and a concomitant transmutation of Macao's social landscape. Understanding contemporary Macao requires attending to how the legacies of Portuguese colonialism and fascism and Chinese communism and market socialism merge in the spaces of the city today. Drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin's dialectical analysis of the obsolete commodities of mass culture, this paper meditates through text and photographs on four copresent moments of Macao—socialist fossil, colonial ruin, capitalist dream, and Utopian wish. A form of physiognomic urban ‘dream analysis’ rescues these multiple contradictory meanings of Macau and investigates the city's crucial role in both China's economic reforms and its Utopian desires.

Humour and laughter are socioembodied phenomena which may be evident in interview, ethnographic, or other social research settings. In this paper I argue that we should engage with humour and laughter in our research accounts, rather than simply relegate these themes to the brackets in our transcripts. Drawing upon doctoral research carried out with members of specialist visually impaired walking groups, I show how laughter and humour form a temporary sonic element to the landscapes they pass through and how laughter and humour are used to negotiate the relations between sighted guide and walker, relieve nervousness, and subvert stereotypes. I argue that recognition should be given to laughter and humour as both a conscious reflective strategy and a ‘nonrepresentational’ embodied and contagious phenomenon, for laughter and humour are intimately connected both to the subject positions of walkers with visual impairments and to the embodied, muscular practice of walking itself. I note that, while humour is a useful individual coping strategy that gives people with blindness a sense of liberation from a notion of ‘the blind’ as subjects of pity, laughter and humour can also betray a certain pessimism—sometimes used as a way of coping with, rather than actually challenging, some of the subtle prejudices that they face as users of rural space.

Despite its preoccupation with issues of space, power, and subjectivity, as well as being a prominent home for immigration-related scholarship, geography includes little research on the intersection of immigration and sexuality as well as on their joint regulation through immigration law. This paper looks at the intersection of immigration and sexuality through the lens of the Cold War practice of homosexual exclusion in US immigration law. By drawing linkages between homosexual exclusion and current immigration law, I argue that homosexual exclusion is not an aberrant part of US immigration law history, that immigration law has important social control functions, and that, as a result, immigration researchers in geography attend to immigration control beyond border enforcement per se.

The logic behind land allocation for residential purposes has undergone a dramatic shift in many states with a colonial legacy in the recent decade, from an ethnonational logic that favors the ethnonational majority to a more liberal-democratic, market-based logic that disregards ethnicity. In Israel, following this shift, a new claim for biased allocation has been voiced by the ethnonational majority, politicians, and administrators, which is based on multiculturalism and recognition. According to this claim, land allocation should serve the communal needs of the majority by limiting the access of minority groups to the majority group's residential areas. In this paper I argue that, despite the decline of ethnonationalism, the discourse of multiculturalism remains a substitute discourse that rationalizes the interests of the majority group, hence contributing to the stratification of societies on the basis of ethnicity. Through an analysis of three case studies of land allocation in Israel, the paper explores the material and cultural weaknesses of a multiculturalism that has been imported from societies with a strong liberal-democratic tradition into societies with a profound ethnonational legacy.