Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper investigates the emergence of ‘controlled tipping’ as the dominant method of municipal waste disposal in Britain between 1920 and 1960. The triumph of controlled tipping, despite the availability of alternative disposal technologies, needs to be understood in the context of the contested meanings of ‘waste’ and ‘wasteland’, which helped to determine attitudes and approaches to disposal. Following the conclusion of the First World War there was an urgent requirement for a cheap means of disposing of increasing amounts of urban municipal waste. The obvious choice was tipping. Before the war, however, refuse tipping had been rejected as insanitary by the emerging waste disposal profession. Public cleansing professionals therefore had to recuperate tipping as a medically and environmentally benign mode of disposal that was reconcilable with the needs of sanitary science and landscape preservation. Controlled tipping, with its combined claims to scientific progress and the revalorization of refuse, enabled dumping to be successfully re-produced as the dominant mode of municipal refuse disposal in Britain. However, tipping faced further challenges after 1945 from changing popular understandings of the value of ‘derelict’ landscapes and from the politics of amenity. The ‘refuse revolution’ was a work in progress.

The author argues for the necessity of a macro-theoretical framework for a systematic understanding of the waste–society relationship—a synthesis of the Marxist mode of production concept and the posthumanist concept of actor networks, sociomaterial assemblages, or collectives. Based on empirical data on Hungary's socialist and capitalist waste history (1948 to the present), it is shown that macro dynamics are qualitatively different from micro ones and thus their analytical separation is retained. At the same time, it is demonstrated that the common fallacy of Marxist and posthumanist theories to conflate social scale with level of abstraction unduly demonized macro-level concepts. Finally it is shown that existing syntheses of Marxism and actor-network theory cannot but treat waste as a theoretical derivative of the concept of value, and thus elide waste's concrete materiality. The concept of waste regime is proposed to resolve these shortcomings.

This paper forwards a performative reading of asbestos in economies of disposal. It argues that materials need to be thought through transformative states, not just stable states, and that materials’ performativity varies according to material states. As a radical intervention in form, demolition is one such transformative state, which disturbs and animates materials. Relatively unconsidered in the academic literature, demolition is argued to be the means to an endless source of surprise in the built environment as well as a singular and multiple practice entailing the dissolution of form, the purposeful reduction and dismantling of large-scale objects, salvage and remediation work, and a host of micropractices, including cutting, tearing, sorting, and separating. The paper illustrates asbestos' interventions in demolition activities, using as its exemplar the case of ship breaking in the EU. More broadly, the paper works with asbestos to show that material properties are not fixed but processual, relational, and distributed. The paper also flags some key questions for the emergent debate on vital materialisms, highlighting the difficulties materials like asbestos pose for thinking through enchantment and generosity; the importance of thinking a vital materialism through remediation as well as salvage; and the need to extend an ethics founded on generosity to encompass respect, humility, responsibility, and surprise towards those materials that most threaten human life.

The iconic images heralding an age of connectivity are the plane and the trace of digital flows bearing information. However, not far behind has been the cumbrous yet essential ‘big box’ of containerization, shipping all manner of goods across the planet on great vessels remorselessly circling the globe. Critiques of global trade have latched upon the counterimage of these mighty ships' ruinous carcasses beached and being broken in South Asia. Here then is the antipode of globalization—ships, once carrying cargoes, now themselves sold around the globe for scrap and ending up broken up according to the very logics of cheap locations that their routes made possible. This paper interrogates these counterimages of global capitalism. Looking at the works of various photographers it examines how waste ships are made to work aesthetically. It examines the photo-documentary and traditions of the industrial sublime to find ‘time-images’ that speak to the material and labour worlds of global capital.

In this analysis I examine how Dominican grocery-store owners (bodegueros) in Philadelphia gain the ability to operate corner stores in predominantly African American and Puerto Rican neighborhoods where they are often considered to be outsiders. A central element of the survival strategy of the grocers is to bend over backwards in order to serve their clients and ‘perform’ to the expectations of community residents. These actions disrupt discrete notions of community ‘outsider’ and ‘insider’ and suggest that urban citizenship is not a static positionality based solely on contestations with the state but, rather, an identity created by the interactions between the heterogenous elements of the modern city. I use the experience of the grocers to argue that our understanding of insurgent forms of citizenship must be attuned to this fluid definition of citizenship—one in which the relationships between different members of the polity is crucial.

Recent studies of new institutional spaces typically underplay the uneven and contested process of institutional change by undervaluing the role of inherited institutions and discourses. This is a critical issue as neoliberal networked forms of governance interact with inherited institutional arrangements, characterised by important path dependencies that guide actors. Contradiction and tensions can emerge, culminating in crisis tendencies, and producing both discursive and material contestation between actors. It is with an understanding of path dependencies, ideas (structured into discourses), and (perceived and actual) crisis tendencies that this paper examines contested institutional change through a case-study analysis of one city, and a critical engagement with neoinstitutionalism. The purpose is to examine, firstly, the significance of inherited path-dependent arrangements in fostering conflict and crisis tendencies during interaction with emergent state action; secondly, the extent to which crisis is evident in processes of institutional change and the form that this takes; and, thirdly, the importance of ideas in producing institutional transformation. It is found that institutional conflict is evident between inherited institutions and emergent state action, and stems both from the way agents are organised by the state and from certain path dependencies, but that this does not lead to an actual material crisis. Rather, the nation-state, in partnership with senior city government actors, use ideational/discursive ‘crisis talk’ as a means by which to induce institutional change. The role of ideas has been in critical in this process as the nation-state frames problems and solutions in line with its existing policy paradigm and institutional arrangements, and with discourses further reinforcing existing material power relations.

Geographers and others have written many words about British Columbian environmental politics. Stories about this place often revolve around conflicts between the government, the forest industry, First Nations, and environmentalists, battling it out to secure their vision of appropriate land use on the ground. This paper examines a particularly heated conflict over land use in the Great Bear Rainforest region, a large tract of temperate rainforest blanketing the central and north coasts of British Columbia. But this essay takes a different cut into understanding this particular political event, in that it tracks an often-unrecognized actor through the politics there: the grizzly bear. Drawing inspiration from scholarship that challenges the primacy of humans in our understandings of politics and social life, I argue that the grizzly bear influences and inflects BC's coastal forest politics; it is an important player in the transformation of the Great Bear Rainforest. I tell the story of environmental politics there by tracing the grizzly bear's shifting relationships with others, including with settlers, conservation biologists, environmentalists and money, all of which are consequential for the grizzly bear, and for others in the region.

The author argues that migrant place-making can become counterproductive for migrant communities for a variety of reasons. Existing place-making literature is often optimistic about the ability of places to offer migrants common identities and means of mobilising collectively. The author constructs a four-stage general model of migrant place-making to examine the potential pathologies of migrant organisational strategies at each of these four stages. In order to demonstrate the use of this model, an analysis of post-2004 Polish migration to the UK, drawing upon forty-two semistructured interviews with Polish migrants and domestic service providers, is presented. Although earlier migration displayed a number of the ideal characteristics of positive place-making described in the ideal four-stage model, centring around the Polish Catholic churches of England and Wales, post-2004 migration has introduced a series of problems that illustrate the various pathologies that can occur. The author concludes by calling for (i) a greater appreciation of the role of host organisations in the production of successful and unsuccessful place-making, and (ii) a recognition that place-making as a migrant settlement strategy is deeply fallible at various stages of its development.

Access to parks and recreational facilities, as well as their quality, congestion, and affordability, relates to physical activity levels and, in turn, various health outcomes. Yet park and recreational resources are often insufficient and unevenly distributed within metropolitan regions. This paper documents and analyzes the allocation of federal, state, special district, municipal, and nonprofit resources to parks and recreation facilities across municipalities within the Los Angeles region. Results indicate that local funding for parks and recreation resources is highly uneven (from less than $1 to over $500 per capita annually). Because most park and recreation spending originates at the local level, fiscally healthier cities allocate more resources to these uses. State and nonprofits funds tend to favor middle-income communities and fail to equalize spending. Inner-ring suburbs with large minority populations, and low-income exurban communities are most likely to suffer from low expenditure. Federal devolution, increased localization of service provision, and limited intergovernmental transfers have resulted in large intrametropolitan disparities in the distribution of resources for parks and recreation, ultimately shaping the landscape of health risks for local populations.

Cinema was one of the hallmarks of early-20th-century urban life in the US, and it was quickly seen as symptomatic of a ‘crisis of governmentality’ faced by a rapidly changing society. Urban reformers debated how best to regulate it, but this was not only a debate over the unprecedented agency of the moving image itself. It was also a debate over how to understand the specific relations that constituted the ‘vulnerable and impressionable’ spectators who were the special concern of social reform and which underlay the more generic categories of population in reformist discourse. Also problematized was the precise relationship between spectators, the image, and the conditions of exhibition. While the problematization of cinema has largely been seen as a national phenomenon, in fact it had a geography that varied by scale and location and was constituted through local differences in population and governmental strategies.

While poor health has been associated with economic outcomes at the national level, its effect on economic outcomes at the individual and local level remains less well known. Using nationally representative longitudinal data from Sweden, we examined the extent to which an individual's poor health leads to poor economic outcomes for that individual. In order to understand the effects of poor health at a regional level, we also examined the spillover effects of the individual's poor health on the economic outcomes of the people linked to the individual. We report an association between an individual's poor health and both that individual's subsequent adverse economic outcomes and adverse economic outcomes of the individual's network. Our study highlights the importance of the association between health and economic well-being as well as potential adverse spillover effects of poor health on local economies.

We explore the distances between home and work for employees at twenty-eight different employment sites across Northern Ireland. Substantively, this is important for better understanding the geography of labour catchments. Methodologically, with data on the distances between place of residence (566 wards) and place of work for some 15 000 workers, and the use of multilevel modelling (MLM), the analysis adds to the evidence derived from other census-based and survey-based studies. Descriptive analysis is supplemented with MLM that simultaneously explores individual, neighbourhood, and site variations in travel-to-work patterns using hierarchical and cross-classified model specifications, including individual and ecological predictor variables (and their cross-level interactions). In doing so we apportion variability to different levels and spatial contexts, and also outline the factors that shape spatial mobility. We find, as expected, that factors such as gender and occupation influence the distance between home and work, and also confirm the importance of neighbourhood characteristics (such as population density observed in ecological analyses at ward level) in shaping individual outcomes, with major differences found between urban and rural locations. Beyond this, the analysis of variability also points to the relative significance of residential location, with less individual variability in travel-to-work distance between workers within wards than within employment sites. We conclude by suggesting that, whilst some general ‘rules’ about the factors that shape labour catchments are possible (eg workers in rural areas and in higher occupations travel further than others), the complex variability between places highlighted by the MLM analysis illustrates the salience of place-specific uniqueness.

The business-decision environment is increasingly complicated by the emergence of competing economic, environmental, and social goals, a notion typified by the current pressures of global economic instability and climate-change targets. Trade-offs are often unclear and contributions by different actors and stakeholders in the supply chain may be unequal but, due to the interdependencies between businesses and stakeholders in relation to total environmental or social impact, a whole chain, simultaneous, and strategic approach is required. After a review of relevant literature and the identification of knowledge gaps, the author introduces and illustrates the use of goal programming as a technique that could facilitate this approach and uses real case evidence for alternative food supply chain strategies, at local, regional, and national levels. It is shown that the method can simplify a complex simultaneous decision situation into a useful and constructive decision and planning framework. Results show how a priori beliefs may be challenged and how operational and resource efficiency could be improved through the use of such a model, which enables a broad stakeholder appreciation and the opportunity to explore and test new environmental or social challenges.