Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Most ‘progressive’ Latin American governments, which have come to power over the past decade or so, continue to rely on agriculture and resource extraction as the primary generators of wealth. Scholars argue that this ‘neoextractivism’ is made politically possible by directing some profits toward the funding of progressive social programs. The Brazilian Amazon's vast wealth of extractive resources and its large economically depressed population make it the emblematic site for neoextractivism. Its biodiversity and inhabited landscapes, however, mean that the neoextractive program encounters concerted resistance from the global environmental community as well as from traditional, indigenous, and migrant smallholders. In response, neoextractivism must deploy another form of progressivism—environmentalism. The author uses the case of agroindustrial soy production in the Brazilian Amazonian state of Pará to demonstrate how the emergence of environmental governance there facilitates neoextractivism by ‘greening’ it. Through an analysis of the mechanisms and effects of two programs, implemented through partnerships between nongovernmental organizations and corporations, to manage soy expansion into the Amazon, it is demonstrated that these programs have questionable environmental benefits at best and at worst work to reenforce the hegemony of international environmental organizations, to green the image of agri-business multinationals, and to destabilize strategies of resistance.

Geographers broadly, and political ecologists in particular, have been at the forefront of analyzing the progressive linking of Northern consumption practices with livelihoods elsewhere, problematizing the devolution that places ‘citizen-consumers’, NGOs, and corporate actors as key political agents of protecting workers and environments, promoting ‘ethical’ trade, and ‘greening’ economies through their purchasing choices. Utilizing empirical work on the development of certification and labeling schemes designed to ensure the safe recycling of used electronics, or e-wastes, across a global supply chain, this paper extends lessons learned from these critical analyses of consumer politics to ongoing debates about e-waste, trade, and recycling. I highlight the ambiguities and democratic deficits that emerge from promoting global environmental justice politics through market-driven disposal choices. I analyze the practices of representation through which NGOs and institutions produce e-waste as an object of regulation/commodification that is amenable to consumer action and argue that there is a disconnect between the abstractions necessary to sell ‘ethical’ e-waste recycling and the nuances of place-specific recycling practices. Like other fair trade schemes, certifications for ethical electronics recyclers rely upon narratives, such as environmental justice, that construct the e-waste problem in ways that render it governable, or ‘legible’ in Scott's sense. However, given the complexity of global commodity-networks like those for used electronics, these governing narratives rely on abstractions that oversimplify and rework the fetish of what e-waste is, where it goes, and how it should be managed. In unearthing both what labels do as well as the silences and ambiguities embedded within them, the limits and opportunities of consumer-driven waste politics come more clearly into view.

This paper explores the built environment of a shopping mall in light of recent theoretical interventions that stress the affective dimensions of everyday political life. By drawing on sixteen weeks of ethnographic fieldwork at a shopping mall in central Buenos Aires, Argentina, I explore how retail affects are unevenly distributed across a diverse public, and how different bodies, in turn, affect the mall in particular ways. In short, this paper explores embodiment as an affective experience that coheres around raced, classed, and gendered bodies at the mall. As such, this paper helps clarify how ethnographic research can benefit from nonrepresentational theory and the ‘new materialism’ literature that challenges prevailing conceptual approaches to the politics of consumption.

This paper examines the neoliberal reshaping of infrastructure provision in Brazil's extreme north since the mid-1990s, when roadway investments resulted in unprecedented regional connectivity. The BR-174 upgrade, the era's most important project, marked a transition from resource-based developmentalism to free-market transnationalism. Primarily concerned with urban competitiveness, the federal government funded the trunk roadway's paving to facilitate manufacturing exports from Manaus. While an effort was made to minimize deforestation, planners sidelined development implications in adjacent Roraima. The state's urban system has thus experienced reperipheralization and intensified primacy. Market-led growth now compounds the inheritance of hierarchical centralism and ongoing governmental neglect. Our study shows a vast territory dependent on primate cities for basic goods and services. Travelling with Roraimans from bypassed towns, we detected long-distance passenger transportation and surface logistics with selective routes. Heterogeneous Roraiman (im)mobilities comprise middle-class tourism and heightened consumerism as well as informal mobility tactics and transnational circulations of precarious labor. The paper exhorts neoliberal urbanism research to look beyond both Euro America's metropoles and their Global South counterparts. Urbanization dynamics in Brazil's extreme north demonstrate that market-disciplined investments to globalize cities produce far-reaching spatial effects. These are felt even by functionally-articulated-yet-marginalized peripheries in ostensibly remote locations.

Over the past fifty years a growing body of work has sought to address the problem of planning for transportation in the long-term future through scenario building. Such thinking has generally been restricted to issues concerned with environmental sustainability and the ‘images’ of future transport so created are usually weak in terms of their social sustainability content, either treating social issues superficially, or ignoring them entirely, or even creating images that are socially undesirable. At the same time, there has generally been a marked decrease over the past twenty years in socially oriented Utopian thinking. As a direct result of these two factors, hardly any consideration has been given recently to imagining socially sustainable views of transport in a future utopia. The key underlying aim of this paper is to provide some background thinking about how this lack might be addressed. To do so, it examines concepts about utopia in terms of their form, content, and function, and considers possible reasons for the recent decline in Utopian thinking and their ‘replacement’ by a type of futures-thinking that is referred to as dystopian avoidance. It then examines transport characteristics of Utopian thinking in urban planning in the 20th century and considers various ‘antinomies of transport’ with respect to future Utopias. Based upon the insights gained, the paper comments on two existing ‘practical’ sets of transport-related scenarios in terms of their Utopian and dystopian characteristics. One particular result is that the Utopian aspects of these scenario sets in terms of their social content are relatively weak, in line with the hypothesised recent general decline in (social) Utopian thinking. Various conclusions are made which emphasise the usefulness of Utopian thinking in transport planning, particularly in participatory approaches. It is suggested that three elements of the transport system should be separately ‘utopianised’: The mobility of people and goods; physical aspects that facilitate or inhibit such mobility; and the system of governance with respect to formulating and implementing transport policy.

Geographers have shown considerable interest in neoliberal educational restructuring as states across the Global North have sought to respond to the challenges of economic change through the development of a skilled population. Existing research provides a wide-ranging analysis of the ways neoliberal states seek to shape individual citizens through their own learning. Greater attention now needs to be paid to new and developing ways in which they seek to influence the context in which future citizen-workers are raised. This paper focuses on parenting education which is growing across OECD countries. Social science critiques suggest that parenting classes are part of a professionalisation of parenting which has sought to impose middle-class mores on working-class parents, at the same time as parenting has been unwarrantedly cast as a context-free skill. This paper uses quantitative and qualitative data to explore the attitudes of parents of different social class positions to parenting education, tracing the ways these emerge in and through particular sociospatial contexts. The paper reveals the importance of local class-based cultures of mothering in influencing both the attitudes of individual mothers to parenting classes, and the success of neoliberal policy implementation in diverse socioeconomic neighbourhoods. In conclusion the paper emphasises: The importance of geographical research into newly emerging forms of education; the value of engaging with the subjects of neoliberal education policy because their attitudes influence its implementation in practice; and the need to set educational provision in its wider geographical context, as this can shape the success of policies delivered in and through educational institutions.

After World War Two, youth in Britain was constructed as unruly, troublesome, and deviant, particularly in public urban space and streets. However, not all children and young people were discouraged from entering these environments or engaging with the general public. Drawing from literature published by the Boy Scout Association and a case study of Bob-a-Job Week in Britain launched in 1949, I examine the institutional geographies of responsibility, risk, and reward embedded in this youth activity, orchestrated by the most popular youth organisation in Britain. This fundraising scheme involved Boy Scouts completing domestic tasks for householders and encouraged uniformed youth to be visible, proficient, and useful. Significantly, this also took place in largely urban areas—complicating our understanding of scouting as an idealised ‘rural’ practice with camping as its central activity. Furthermore, this paper explores how this fundraising spectacle also functioned as a hybrid space that permitted ‘feminine’ domestic tasks as appropriate for ‘British boyhood’ until the scheme's eventual demise in the 1990s. Overall, the complex geographies of Bob-a-Job Week reveal how this organisation negotiated the boundaries between domestic and public space, providing an insight into broader constructions of youth and gender in the postwar period.

The intrametropolitan relationship between municipality-level physical environment and crime changes appears to have been overlooked by crime and environment researchers. The current effort focuses on permeability; suggests dynamics whereby permeability affects changing municipality-level crime patterns across a metropolitan area; selects and operationalizes theoretically appropriate permeability indicators; and links permeability to unexpected crime changes. Data are from 355 municipalities in the Philadelphia metropolitan area, and property and violent crime unexpected changes over two change periods are assessed. Three municipality-level indices reflecting internal and boundary permeability are developed that are internally consistent and cross reference in sensible ways with large-scale physical environment features of municipalities. Permeability indicators link as predicted with unexpected violent and property crime changes. This research provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for linking permeability to changing municipality-level crime rates across a metropolitan area.

If places are increasingly regarded as brands in both the practice of place marketing and its associated theory, then the study of place names (toponymy) arguably overlaps with theories and concepts involving brand naming within the marketing literature. This paper synthesises the diverse literature streams surrounding critical toponymy and brand naming through an exploration of place branding activities. The paper develops the concept of place name commodification, beyond the limited attention it has received within existing critical toponymy research, before examining the issues of endogenous and exogenous contestation that surround it. The paper concludes by discussing how the commodifying effects of places as brand names, with their associated brand values and imagery, can potentially suppress the alternative place perceptions of users, and in doing so stifle the natural potential for cocreation of the place ‘product’ and its related value.

This paper focuses on Australian development firms in the console and mobile games industry in order to understand how small firms in a geographically remote and marginal position in the global industry are able to relate to global firms and capture revenue share. This paper shows that, while technological change in the games industry has resulted in the emergence of new industry segments based on transactional rather than relational forms of economic coordination, in which we might therefore expect less asymmetrical power relations, lead firms retain a position of power in the global games entertainment industry relative to remote developers. This has been possible because lead firms in the emerging mobile devices market have developed and sustained bottlenecks in their segment of the industry through platform competition and the development of an intensely competitive ecosystem of developers. Our research shows the critical role of platform competition and bottlenecks in influencing power asymmetries within global markets.

We evaluate by means of Monte Carlo simulations the W-based spatial autoregressive model and the structural equation model with latent variables (SEM) to handle two types of simultaneously occurring weak spatial dependence: (i) spillover from a hotspot, and (iia) spillover from first-order, queen contiguous neighbours, (iib) inverse-distance-related spatial units, (iic) the first three nearest neighbours. Although it is possible to account for several different types of weak spatial lag dependence by several different weights matrices, the W-based approach usually proceeds on the basis of a single weights matrix that is implicitly assumed to adequately capture all types of spatial dependence. SEM on the other hand has been developed to explicitly distinguish between different types of weak spatial dependence in a model. In addition, whereas conventional higher order spatial econometric models entail specification and parameter space definition problems, SEM spatial dependence models can be routinely specified and estimated. In this paper we briefly discuss the pitfalls of including several types of weak spatial lag dependence (and thus different W matrices) in a standard W-based lag model and how these problems are mitigated by the SEM approach. Furthermore, the single W-based and the SEM approach are compared by means of simulations in terms of bias and root mean squared error (RMSE) for different values of the spatial lag parameters, specifications of the weights matrices, and sample sizes. We also include in the comparison the W-based approach with spatial dependence accounted for by the two weights matrices used to generate the data: That is, the correctly specified model. The simulation results show that compared with the single W-based models, SEM frequently has smaller bias and RMSE. Furthermore, SEM even outperforms the correctly specified W-based models (based on the same two weights matrices used for data generation) in many cases. These trends increase when the values of the spatial lag parameters increase. The dominance of SEM also increases with sample size. Finally, SEM is more stable in terms of both bias and RMSE over various dimensions.

This paper examines aspects of space consumption in two very different housing types: The communist mid-rise estates and postcommunist suburban self-built housing. Examining residents' perceptions in order to categorise space as overcrowded or underoccupied, the paper engages critically with the issue of the inefficient distribution of Romanian housing: that is, a considerable mismatch between dwelling and household size. The analysis documents the continued salience of overcrowding in the communist estates and, conversely, self-builders' satisfaction with the generous size of their new homes. Market forces permit various modes of residential mobility, but their likely outcome is growing housing inequality while any redistributive impact will remain insignificant unless policy incentives could facilitate conversion of underoccupied space into (social) renting housing. However, only a sustained delivery of larger and affordable new dwellings could alleviate overcrowding.

This paper consists of a discussion of data sonification—a procedure in which information gathered from systems such as bodies or environmental processes is analyzed and reprocessed into audio models, so aspects of the process generating the data (for example, emotional or tidal ebb and flow) can be apprehended by human senses. This serves various purposes relevant to geography. Firstly, it sets out the principles of sonification as a method, defining its basic principles and relating it to both qualitative and quantitative data. Secondly, it offers potential to geographic interests in process, times, rhythm, landscape, place, and more besides— ‘representing’ various aspects of processes that are beyond normal human apprehension, perhaps through register, duration, pitch, and so on. Thirdly, in the illustrating examples, which comprise sonifications of tides and other processes in the Severn Estuary, UK, it highlights possibilities of engaging local communities and stakeholders with the dynamics of landscapes such as tidal processes, which have significant implications for culture, economy, and ecology, as do other tidal and other process geographies elsewhere.