Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity combines urban and cultural discourses in order to defend a foundationalist social theory against the challenges raised by new social movements, political philosophies, and cultural practices. Adopting Jameson's definition of postmodernism as an embracing historical condition in which the valorization of fragmentation and difference conceals the spatioeconomic relations that underlie the totality of late capitalist society, Harvey contends that intellectual and aesthetic currents which insist on different starting points of social analysis or identify new objects of political analysis are necessarily complicit with advanced capitalism's concealment of social reality. It is no accident that Harvey's claim to perceive an objective basis of totality entails a refusal of feminist theories of representation, for feminists have analyzed such totalizing visions as the fictions of subjects driven by the desire to disavow their own partial and fragmented condition through the refusal of difference.

Soja's Postmodern Geographies and Harvey's The Condition of Postmodernity are two of the major recent works within geography addressing the debate around modernity and postmodernity. Moreover both of them, while examining the relation between ‘space and society’, are broad in scope and carry the debate beyond the confines of the geography discipline. In this paper they are examined from a feminist perspective. The arguments range across a number of issues, from the question of style and the construction of the texts, the assumption of universals which are in fact particulars, the lack of recognition of the feminist literature, to a politics in which it is assumed that the only enemy is capitalism. These arguments therefore go beyond feminism to link up with issues of other groups, most particularly ethnic minorities and those from non-Western societies. In the end, it is argued, consigning these groups to parentheses after the supposed universal of the white, male, heterosexual vitiates the projects which the two books undertake.

Central to attempts to restructure the economic and industrial base of deindustrialised regions is the redefinition of image and the creation of new forms of identity. It is argued that this cultural focus is often absent from analyses of industrial change and the regeneration of localities. With a focus on two deindustrialised areas in Australia which have faced significant job loss in recent years, the local promotional texts are analysed to investigate how important the production of a revitalised image has been to the regeneration of these areas. The author looks at what elements in the texts drew on specifically local or national myths and culture and what elements drew on more universal symbolic discourses and realities, in particular dominant Western notions of masculinity. The concern was to see if the form of representation of the dominant discourses varied spatially or in the process of change.

The disturbances in the global economy induced by the US trade and budget deficits are widely recognised by economists, even if the precise causes and effects of these deficits remain a topic of debate, What is less widely understood is that the deficits are pregnant with geographical implications for the world economy and that the production of the deficits can be explained in part by the changing and asymmetrical location of the USA in international economic and geopolitical relations. In this paper, both of these points are expanded. In section 2, competing accounts of the production of the US trade and budget deficits are considered. Particular attention is paid to ‘Reaganomics’ as an economic and geopolitical discourse. In section 3, the implications of the twin deficits for the US space-economy are considered. The regional impacts of increased military (and other) spending under Reagan are noted, as are the likely effects of the alienation of US real assets and of the buildup of debt-servicing obligations for future generations. In section 4, the implications of the US deficits for the rest of the world, and for the less developed countries in particular, are examined. Attention is drawn to the emerging links between the geography of international trade and the geography of international debt. The regional implications of a debtors' surplus are discussed in section 5, which serves also as a conclusion.

Over the past decade, the city of Cambridge has been used increasingly by academics and the media as an exemplar of the role that entrepreneurial high-technology development can play in local and national economic growth. Politically, this symbolism has found a ready resonance with the Thatcher government's vision of the ‘new Britain’. In this paper the reality and rhetoric behind this use of Cambridge is critically examined. First, the politics and polemics of locality under Thatcherism are highlighted. Second, the dominant account of the much-celebrated ‘Cambridge phenomenon’ is outlined to reveal its ideological leitmotivs of entrepreneurship, high-technology, postindustrialism, the small firm, and the union of academic science and business. Third, it is shown how these rhetorical constructions of a ‘boomtown’ locality are in reality weakened by a number of tensions within the ‘phenomenon’ itself. Moreover, it is then shown that there are important silences in the dominant view of Cambridge, certain ‘other sides’ to the city that portray a rather different set of meanings, both about Cambridge as a success story and about high-technology development as the basis of economic prosperity. These other sides of Cambridge provide a much more complex and, in some important respects, a very different expression of the socioeconomic renewal championed by Thatcherism.

The debate over whether class and community are alternative or mutually complementary bases of collective action is examined. A typology is developed to examine the relative contribution of each in determining the demands of grass-roots organizations. Specific emphasis within this analysis is on Tri-State Conference on Steel, a community–labor organization fighting plant closings in the Pittsburgh, PA, area. It is concluded that class consciousness can emerge out of participation in grass-roots movements, and the author focuses on the role of human agency in shaping this process. Further, it is concluded that grass-roots movements do have the potential for effecting structural reform.