Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The purpose of this essay is neither to praise or condemn dialectic nor to adjudicate between dialectics. I seek instead to investigate a particular relation between dialectic and dualism that was developed in the ancient Greek polis as a way of opening a conversation concerning the necessity of waging a posttranscendent, postdualist politics. Approaching the polis through the problematic nomos of flesh, and focusing on the produced opposition between reason and appetite, the essay suggests how a dispositif of transcendence operated in the polis to reduce the rule of the many, associated with the mob-like appetites of the body, in favor of the few who had (allegedly) achieved self-mastery and transcendence. For beings produced as body this meant a greater degree of corporeal vulnerability and a reduced, at times radically reduced, potential for survival. This politics of transcendence did not vanish with the polis but persisted in diverse forms, continuing to under-write the unevenly distributed right to be that it originally authorized and that, beginning in ‘1492’, was globalized, becoming the massive assault on bodies that has characterized the bio(geo)politics of Western modernity and still dominates the present. The essay concludes with a consideration of what a posttranscendent politics might be and a postscript regarding the cunning of passion.

I stage the question ‘What about dialectics?’ by showing Frantz Fanon's insurrectionary fidelity to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and his dialectic. Fanon is an acute and disloyal reader of Hegel, and relentlessly probes the moment of negation in Hegel's dialectic to pry it open for an emancipatory, nonsublative politics of a ‘new humanity’. Fanon's attempts to side with the radical implications of otherness disclose the ‘subaltern moment’ in Hegel's dialectic and leave us a deformed Hegel, profoundly equivocal and no longer easily named (hence, recognized) as the philosopher of synthesis and reconciliation.

The persistent divide within French philosophy between so-called structuralists and poststructuralists has been recently revived in the writings of Badiou and others. This narration of the history of French philosophy is trapped inevitably in the very way it poses the problem: as a dialectic of the negative. The abstracting of these traditions from all their messiness into a dialectical opposition is itself part of the problem, a misrepresentation, ignoring any points of convergence. Drawing centrally on the work of Pierre Macherey, I suggest this divide can be traced back to Hegel's profound misreading of Spinoza, which became the basis for Hegel's dialectic and Marx's subsequent inversion. I explore crucial points of convergence between Marx and Spinoza, and a resonance between Deleuze and Macherey (who are often stereotyped as emblems of oppositional tendencies within French philosophy). Their work converges on a rejection of negation as the defining quality of essence or multiplicity and, in the case of Deleuze and Macherey, a shared uptake of Spinoza's concept of potentia. Their work gestures towards the development of a dialectics of the positive: a problematic that might enable us to think across our differences to a political ontology that embraces the posthuman, immanent, and affirmative qualities of struggle.

As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian conception of the dialectic. This Hegelian imaginary reflects the intellectual history of radical and/or critical anglophone geography. Yet, dialectics can be read in a non-Hegelian, much less totalizing and ideological, and more geographical way. This broader reading opens up space for considering parallels between dialectics, the assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari, and aspects of complexity theory.

The dialectical tradition that derives from Hegel and Marx has been very influential within social science, flowing into human geography from the early 1970s through the work of Lefebvre and Harvey. In their different ways these two scholars sought to extend dialectical logic to encompass the contingencies of space, and it is in this context that their seminal contributions to scale analysis can be understood. Since the 1980s, however, confidence in the dialectical tradition has been undermined by poststructural philosophers such as Derrida—who (whilst being careful to avoid simply negating Hegelian dialectics) has exposed the nontotalisable structure of contingency that both subtends and subverts dialectical reason. In this paper I draw upon Derrida's treatment of contingency, and explore the nondialectical ‘foundations’ of dialectical logic through a reading of Neil Smith's 1984 book on Uneven Development (Blackwell, Oxford), a classic text from Marxist geography which was the first to articulate a fully theorised scale framework.

This paper begins with the question of what about dialectics might be interesting to geographers today. I argue that, for those who are interested in engaging dialectical thought, Slavoj Žižek's work offers a productive way of conceptualizing an open dialectic without synthesis or totality. The goal of this paper is to explain Žižek' idea of the parallax view and to demonstrate its relevance for geographers. To do this, I begin by showing how Žižek's dialectical vision differs from that of David Harvey by using the example of Harvey's analysis of ‘capitalist imperialism’. Next, I turn to Deleuzian spatial ontology and its understandings of virtual and actual spaces. I discuss Žižek's engagement with Gilles Deleuze's thought and draw out the implications of a dialectical understanding of the virtual and the actual.

Dialectics is a powerful way of engaging with our conflicted world, and yet it remains obscure, neglected, and badly misunderstood. Despite the prevalence of attempts to come to terms with all manner of antagonisms, contradictions, polarities, and oppositions across a host of theoretical practices and domains, relatively few authors make recourse to dialectics, and those who do invariably frame it within the following, rather unhelpful, terms: thesis–antithesis–synthesis or position–negation–negation-of-the-negation. While the advent of poststructuralism in general, and of deconstruction in particular, has arguably robbed the dialectic of much of its purchase, it is nonetheless worth revisiting dialectics since it offers an exemplary distillation of what is at stake in thinking through the Real as conflicted and charged. Accordingly, the paper is an attempt to clarify the dialectical articulation of the Real in its confliction, and advances the heretical possibility that the Real may be bereft of charge. Almost everyone works on the basis of a charged Reality—of a Real that is essentially polarized, antagonized, and conflicted—and most critical and fatal theorists dream of discharging the Real: selectively in the case of the former; wholesale in the case of the latter. Thinking through dialectics in the company of deconstruction and poststructuralism, however, opens up an entirely new terrain for the Real that is untouched by the positive and the negative, and which slips through the grasp of both critical and fatal theory. Reality is always already cracked open, but there is nothing to discharge.

This ‘afterword’ to the papers on dialectics situates the debate in the ground between Marxism and poststructuralism. Rather than a wholesale rejection of the dialectic, these authors attempt to think how poststructuralism might force an encounter with it, retaining yet transforming it. Drawing on Deleuze's characterization of abstract thought as dealing with concepts that “like baggy clothes, are much too big”, and Bergson's complaint that dialectics are “too large … not tailored to the measurements of the reality in which we live”, the paper moves to thinking about the relation of dialectics, measure, and world. It does so through an interrogation of a nondialectical materialism, that of Alain Badiou and his ex-student Quentin Meillassoux, particularly Meillassoux's critique of correlationism. One of the key issues raised is the return of mathematics, and its embrace within some aspects of human geography. Raising the question of how this may reverse some of the gains of poststructuralism and Marxism in combating the reduction of the quantitative revolution, the paper concludes by asking if geography is really willing to accept mathematical ordering, not merely in terms of a way of understanding the world, but as a suggestion that this is how the world actually is.

Much of the writing on urban regeneration in the UK has been focused on the types of urban spaces that have been created in city centres. Less has been written about the issue of when the benefits of regeneration could and should be delivered to a range of different interests, and the different time frames that exist in any development area. Different perceptions of time have been reflected in dominant development philosophies in the UK and elsewhere. The trickle-down agendas of the 1980s, for example, were criticised for their focus on the short-term time frames and needs of developers, often at the expense of those of local communities. The recent emergence of sustainability discourses, however, ostensibly changes the time focus of development and promotes a broader concern with new imagined futures. This paper draws on the example of development in Salford Quays, in the North West of England, to argue that more attention needs to be given to the politics of space–time in urban development processes. It begins by discussing the importance and relevance of this approach before turning to the case study and the ways in which the local politics of space–time has influenced development agendas and outcomes. The paper argues that such an approach harbours the potential for more progressive, far-reaching, and sustainable development agendas to be developed and implemented.

This paper explores the disparities between the ideological discourses and material outcomes of three key urban policies, contextually grounded within the neoliberalised social and institutional spaces of Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati. Whilst the rhetoric of neoliberal doctrine presents an emancipatory urban imaginary based upon individual freedom and the beneficent role of free markets, the embedding of the policies discussed accentuates the political and economical disenfranchisement of the most marginalised neighbourhood inhabitants. Moreover, the ability of this group to politically mobilise against hostile neoliberalisation and gentrification is undermined by the facilitation of out-migration of stable low-income families and community leaders, and the reproduction of the negative, criminal, and blighted aspects of Over-the-Rhine's environment. Neoliberalisation is seen to operate through material and discursive moments of social exclusion and in perpetuating sociospatial structures which justify the continued implementation of repressive political and regulatory projects. In concluding, I suggest neoliberal hegemony may be undermined through exposing the ways in which it reproduces and exacerbates the phenomena it condemns.

Given the neighbourhood focus of much regeneration policy, we need to know more about the functional roles that neighbourhoods play in the way that households move within the housing market and hence about the different functional types of neighbourhood amongst deprived areas. Such knowledge would help both to guide the priorities of policy and to interpret the probability of policy interventions being successful. This exploratory study draws on an evaluation of the British government's National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal, part of which entails an interpretation of household mobility data from the 2001 Census. It suggests four categories of neighbourhood—transit, escalator, isolate, and improver areas—based on the relationship between where households move to and move from, focused on the 20% most deprived lower super output areas in England. Evidence on the ground suggests the plausibility of the different functional roles played by the four neighbourhood types. Some continuing conundrums—the robustness of the categorisation, the need to take account of the spatial context of deprived areas, and the difference between movers and stayers—are discussed as a prelude to further continuing research.

The author draws on a case study of Austin, Texas to argue that the emerging cannon of critical obesity studies should be situated in and interrogated with reference to empirical research undertaken in the urban spaces that enable or constrain healthy behavior. With federal, state and city-scale government departments calling for concerted obesity-prevention efforts, it is suggested that this enterprise has now rendered Austin a space of philanthropic entrepreneurialism. Drawing on stakeholder interviews with those charged with healthy-lifestyle promotion, the author contends that the city's bifurcation by Interstate-35 marks a clear real and imagined socioeconomic and racial divide. Moreover, this divide permits the delineation of East Austin as ‘at risk’ by virtue of its Hispanic population and the assumption that higher prevalent rates of obesity among Hispanic residents are an outcome of certain cultural norms. As a result, East Austin has been legitimized as a strategic place of intervention to help boost the city's image as a healthy, and therefore good, place to live. However, such interventions favor changing personal behavior and therefore neglect to address the environmental and structural factors which, it is asserted, often have far more immediate and profound effects on health.

Based on ethnographic work, this paper examines the market research practices of the outdoor advertising industry in the UK and their commercial production of space. I focus on the role of calculation in the performance of market relations between a range of actors in the field and the use of marketing research's classificatory practices as a currency which enacts those relations. In many accounts of urban governance, city space is produced by various statistical and classificatory devices as calculable and hence governable. But with recent developments in commercial enterprises, the performative quality of market relations engenders calculative space, a nexus of people-in-space, commercial imperatives, and a calculative energy or orientation to calculation. This is understood by the industry as a kind of commercial vitalism—an enlivening of market relations and of objects of commercial calculation—which firms aim to exploit by tapping into and channelling the energy they perceive it generates.

Interaction terms are constructed with georeferenced attribute variables and spatial filter eigenvectors, and then used to compute geographically varying regression coefficients. These coefficients, which are analogous to geographically weighted regression (GWR) coefficients, display preferable properties, and this specification is used to critique selected features of GWR. Comparisons are illustrated with the Georgia data appearing in the standard GWR tutorial.

Using data from retrospective surveys carried out in the Netherlands during the early 1990s, we describe how the residential mobility of couples—that is, short-distance moves—is affected by family events and how fertility is affected by residential mobility. The results show that residential moves are particularly likely to happen in a short period preceding a wedding or during pregnancy, supporting the hypothesis that residential mobility is likely to occur in anticipation of family changes. Anticipation is also suggested by the fact that the likelihood of having a child is greater after a residential move, but only starting from some months after the move. Family events also have a hampering effect on residential moves. Starting from some months after the wedding, being married is associated with a lower propensity of experiencing a short-distance move, while the presence of children is associated with less residential mobility only when children are school-aged.