Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

As an introduction to a theme issue on the politics and practices of geoengineering, this paper outlines a framework for thinking about the ‘geoengine’ that underpins concepts of planetary modification. It reviews some of the ways in which geoengineering has been framed as a technological, governance, and promissory discourse and examines the contradictions inherent within some of these framings. Questioning some of the motivations and forms of participation that are evident in the governance of geoengineering, and its current challenge to existing forms of global democracy, the paper speculates on the wider geopolitical implications of operating at the scale of the planet, and what this means for how we currently understand the ‘geo’ in geopolitics. While there is a big mismatch between the restricted decision-making processes around geoengineering and the potential scope and impact of those decisions, there are also opportunities for geographers to make incisive contributions to this debate to change what geoengineering is and becomes as a material–discursive practice. This paper suggests that only by attending to the geo-ontological formations inherent in the fabrication of an engineerable earth, can a new geopolitics be accommodated within political thought that takes account of a much more active ‘geoengine’ that is being opened to political and material modification.

In this paper we argue that recent policy treatments of solar radiation management (SRM) have insufficiently addressed its potential implications for contemporary political systems. Exploring the emerging ‘social constitution’ of SRM, we outline four reasons why this is likely to pose immense challenges to liberal democratic politics: That the unequal distribution of and uncertainties about SRM impacts will cause conflicts within existing institutions; that SRM will act at the planetary level and necessitate autocratic governance; that the motivations for SRM will always be plural and unstable; and that SRM will become conditioned by economic forces.

In this paper we highlight the need to attend to the structuring power of knowledge production in geoengineering research, because of the way that problem definitions are shaped by disciplinary ways of thinking and describing the world. We also draw attention to a number of problematic assumptions about how interdisciplinary research should be approached and organised in this area. We first look at the logic of ‘subordination’, in which certain disciplines are given the task of problem definition and others—typically the social sciences—are allocated the task of filling in gaps within that given frame. We then examine the more fundamental ‘integrative imaginary’ which, we argue, mistakenly assumes that disciplines can be combined in a straightforward way to reveal different aspects of the same underlying world. We conclude by proposing a more reflexive imaginary for interdisciplinarity, one that challenges the idea of integration and subordination, that promotes and benefits from the multiplicity and heterogeneity of ways of seeing that different disciplines offer, and that can thereby contribute to greater ‘epistemological responsibility’ in geoengineering research.

Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: A thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that recent styles of ontological and political thought do not prepare us well for engaging with geologic issues in general, and geoengineering in particular. It is suggested that, rather than viewing geoengineering discourses and imaginaries as a retreat from politics, we might view them as playing an important role in opening up new kinds of politics oriented towards earth systems and their dynamics. This new ‘geologic politics’ involves a turn from issues hinging on territorial divisions of the earth's surface toward the strata that compose the deep temporal earth. As a political challenge, the question of how to live with dynamic and stratified earth systems not only promises to extend the scope of politics, but also points to the ‘inhuman’ limits of the political per se.

Both the suburbanization of poverty and the growth of suburban social movements have been the focus of much academic discussion of late, even if these two discussions are not necessarily linked. One area that has been relatively underresearched when it comes to both phenomena are exurban regions, critical spaces of change and crisis, in particular in upmarket regions like those in Northern and Southern California. This paper presents a case study of the ‘social movement space’ of eastern Contra Costa County, on the edge of the San Francisco Bay Area. It argues that not only did propoor, social-justice-oriented movements arise over the past decade in response to changing geography, they exhibited a form of ‘scalar promiscuity’ which differs from the regionalization of social movements or other forms of ‘scale jumping’ well known in the literature.

Recent decades have witnessed a significant transformation in strategies of urban environmental governance as authority has shifted from statist command-and-control systems to more horizontal, networked forms of governance-beyond-the-state. In the USA the changing nature of state authority over urban-regional planning processes has been particularly dramatic in metropolitan regions promoting ‘smart-growth’ agendas. Smart-growth strategies address regional planning and land-development concerns through market-based incentive programs aimed at increasing development densities and coordinating other land-management priorities. This paper explores the scalar politics through which smart-growth policies in the Greater Boston region of Massachusetts (USA) are being constructed and contested. In this region the state of Massachusetts has used incentive programs, new forms of regulation, and public-private coalitions to implement a smart-growth agenda that seeks to ameliorate the region's housing crisis and sustain its pool of knowledge-economy workers, but these programs also challenge the traditional authority of local communities in governing land-use decisions. Crucial to this assertion of land-management authority at the state scale has been the legacies of past forms of authority and land management, the ability of the state to exploit the positionalities of key actors associated with the smart-growth agenda, and the role of crises (in housing, congestion) in making increased state control more palatable.

We aim to find a way to produce knowledge of attractiveness of place that is representative of the variety and complexity of what attractiveness entails and the same time productive for place development and planning. On the basis of a study of an INTERREG IV A-project in Norway, we question how and by whom the discourse regarding what is attractive about places is constructed and how the implicit or explicit knowledge is treated in local planning. We find that planning must produce knowledge in which the different narratives about place confront each other, and highlight differences and mutual debate between adversaries. We conclude by arguing the case for applying a model of agonistic pluralism where the coproduction of discursive knowledge from ‘a logic of difference’ is at the heart of planning.

Does the housing market reflect cultural heritage? We estimate several specifications of a hedonic price equation to establish whether distance to, and density of, cultural heritage site is capitalised into housing prices in Greater Dublin, Ireland. We use a very rich dataset of housing and neighbourhood characteristics and include 104 location-fixed effects, which represent very small areas, ensuring the identification of the price effects on similar houses in similar areas. Our results show that some types of cultural heritage sites, such as historic buildings, memorials, and Martello towers, provide positive spillovers to property prices while archaeological sites seem to be a negative amenity. We interpret these premiums (or lack thereof) as capturing aesthetic beauty.

Recording studios are distinctive spaces in which artists are encouraged to expose their emotional selves in intimate moments of musical creativity and performance. In this paper we focus on how music producers and recording engineers perform emotional labour as part of the performative engineering of this musical creativity and performance. Through emotional labour performances, producers and engineers create recording studios as emotional spaces, characterised by trust and tolerance. This is often referred to, by recording studio staff and musicians, as creating the right ‘vibe’. We highlight two forms of emotional labour as particularly pertinent to ‘creating the right vibe’: Emotional neutrality and empathetic emotional labour. Emotional labour performances help to reconstruct the recording studio as a space free of the social and feeling rules that otherwise shape our emotional landscape, and allow musicians to produce their desired musical performance.

Conceptual and methodological differences notwithstanding, both the ‘new’ economic geography and evolutionary economic geography insist that both history and geography matter when accounting for the changing spatial distribution of economic activities. To date, discourse has been conducted largely at a theoretical level, with few attempts to evaluate the empirical validity of either of these competing claims about the dynamics of the capitalist space economy. In this paper we contribute to this evolving discourse by utilizing a dynamic econometric perspective to empirically test the key notions of path dependence, place dependence, and equilibrium dependence in the context of a ‘peripheral’ resource dependent and export-oriented economy: Western Australia, 1984–2011. We find evidence of ‘weak’ path dependence in the evolution of local unemployment rates, with a small number of local labor markets exhibiting ‘strong’ equilibrium dependence. Furthermore, we find evidence of ‘place’ dependence, particularly between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan labor markets, suggesting the existence of a ‘patchwork economy’.

China's massive volume of and dramatic increase in migration have stimulated increasing research in this area. However, researchers have not paid sufficient attention to return migration until recently when the issue of migrant labor shortage in Southern China has been linked to return migration back to the rural areas. Taking advantage of information contained in the 1995 China 1% Population Sample Survey and the 2000 China Census, this paper provides a systematic analysis of interprovincial return migration to Sichuan province, one of the most important migrant-sending provinces in China. We focus on return migrant selectivity, the impact of local labor-market conditions and migration networks on return migration, and nonfarm work participation among return migrants. Return migration in the late 1990s shows positive selection on education and return migrants are more likely to engage in nonfarm work. The pattern for the early 1990s is just the opposite of what is observed in the late 1990s. Our multilevel models show that labor-market conditions as well as migration networks in destination areas play important roles in the return migration process. Policy implications of this trend of return migration are discussed.

This paper explores theoretical and practical issues related to employment migration and integration of Eastern European migrants in Scotland. Emerging mobile lifestyles create different patterns of living and working ‘on the move’, which challenge existing social policies. By drawing on theorizations of mobility and integration from economics and geography, we propose a broader conceptualization of integration that recognizes the changing migration trajectories of Eastern European migrants. We adopt an interdisciplinary approach to the collection and analysis of data gathered from individual interviews and survey data in order to investigate the relationships between the movement of migrants, integration and employment.

Walking and cycling are considered to be healthy and environmentally friendly modes of travel that can mitigate the harmful effects of motorised journeys. This study aims to reveal the individual and built environmental characteristics that are associated with these behaviours by examining the current level of walking and cycling for transport in three UK case-study areas. Obligatory and discretionary journeys were separately modelled under the assumption that different factors would affect mode choice. Over 70% of respondents incorporated walking and/or cycling into their weekly travel and about 15% had ridden bicycles at least once for nonrecreational purposes during the last seven days. We also found that more walking journeys were made for discretionary purposes compared with obligatory journeys whilst cycling was more common for obligatory journeys. Using the concept of the active travel share, we developed models analysing active travel behaviour. The results confirmed that both personal and household characteristics had clear associations with the tendency for nonmotorised travel. In particular, age, physical fitness, and vehicle ownership were significantly associated with active travel in all models. The built environment, on the other hand, had significant associations with active travel only for obligatory journeys with the exception of distance to the main activity site, which was found to be significant for both journey types.

We examine the role of regional import flows for renewal of regional industries. The hypothesis is that imports stimulate renewal of local industries by being vehicles for technology diffusion and means by which local firms can exploit advantages of global specialisation. We find robust and positive relationships between high-quality imports and renewal of regional exports, where the latter are measured by the introduction of novel export products of local firms. Connectedness to international markets via import networks appears to be a stimulus for the renewal of regional exports.