Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This article explores the changing legibility of the 2004 deadly Peeks Creek landslide in mountainous, historically rural, and rapidly urbanizing Macon County, North Carolina. The event is interesting because local media and other residents made it legible as flood, drawing on local historical experience of flooding. Months and years later, however, many of the same residents made Peeks Creek legible as a landslide. In other words, this event was not always explicitly considered a landslide, but instead had to become one. The article first argues that notions of legibility ought to be more thoroughly considered in urban political ecology scholarship. The article next demonstrates that the changing legibilities were driven by the tandem intervention of first, scientific experts in local policy discussions, and second, low-density exurban growth into landslide prone areas. The importance of this discursive shift was that landslides became legible as objects of environmental governance in a hotly contested 2010-11 county ordinance, revealing the changing and contested nature of expertise and regulation in exurbia.

This paper contributes to analyses of energy integration strategies in Latin America. Focusing on the case of Ecuador’s participation in regional energy networks, the paper traces how oilfields, region, firms, and state are entangled in the making of energo-political assemblages. The paper develops an analytic of subterranean frictions in order to trace the coproduction of subterranean space and oil geopolitical events and, more generally, propose a more expansive geography of subterranean geopolitics that challenges spatial simplifications of resource extraction. The paper discusses how subterranean geopolitics, alongside surface politics, contributes to our understanding of the promises (and failures) of emerging energy projects in Latin America.

Austerity appears to be a globally coordinated restructuring process, where international and national governments cooperate to stymie economic crisis and socialize the costs of systemic economic failure. However, austerity is also shaped from the bottomup. This paper examines the 2008 bankruptcy of Vallejo, California. This city of under 120 000 people became the first municipal bankruptcy in the Great Recession period. We explore how it became the first to fail. In doing so, we outline the finances of a city whose entrepreneurial activities continued to flounder, making it a good candidate for austerity reforms. However, we also find the city home to a political movement long predicting a municipal default. When economic crisis hit, this movement pushed for the city to make an unprecedented test of Chapter 9 bankruptcy law. Vallejo’s bankruptcy, and the related changes to Chapter 9 law, are therefore interpreted as events that were generated by systemic conditions but ultimately precipitated by decisions taken at the municipal level. We therefore call for austerity to be understood as both a top-down and bottom-up process of state restructuring.

This paper provides insight into the way in which state-led gentrification unfolded in three neighbourhoods in Amsterdam and The Hague. Although Dutch gentrification has been comparatively mild, state actors increasingly adopted gentrification as a policy tool. However, the Netherlands provides a particular context for state-led gentrification. First, the national government plays a key role, as regeneration policies increasingly promoted gentrification as an instrument for differentiating the housing stock and as necessary to prevent social problems and decline. These goals are adopted by local governments in neighbourhood regeneration. Second, housing associations are important stimulators of gentrification. They are hybrid organizations: although their task is providing affordable housing, they are also market-oriented actors who generate income from market activities. However, power inequalities between actors, different objectives and priorities of actors and different local contexts resulted in processes of negotiation and consequently, diverse regeneration strategies. Although interventions are moving into a neoliberal direction, governments and housing associations still form a strong buffer between market interventions and neighbourhood development.

Several theoretical debates in gentrification literature deal with the role and importance of migration, in situ social mobility, and demographic change in urban social change. These debates focus primarily on structural processes. However, we have comparatively little insight into how and to what degree different mechanisms actually underpin upgrading in urban neighbourhoods. This paper uses Dutch register data to show how residential mobility, social mobility, and demographic change each contribute to gentrification in Amsterdam and Rotterdam. First, our findings show that residential mobility remains key to understanding the growth of higher-income residents in gentrifiying neighbourhoods. At the same time, social mobility and demographic change— notably ageing—are most important in explaining dwindling numbers of lower-income residents. Second, large differences exist across neighbourhoods. By mapping three idealtypical drivers of gentrification, we show how the migration-based ‘displacement model’ occurs predominantly in upgrading neighbourhoods with a high status. Conversely, in low-status upgrading neighbourhoods social mobility is more important in explaining gentrification. These different forms of upgrading occur simultaneously in both cities and should be integrated to advance our understanding of gentrification as a process that is both widespread and occurs in different, ever-changing forms across neighbourhoods.

The authors explore energy as an alternative but important landscape of globalisation, where spatial geometries of global power and control are defined by particular historic and contemporary geopolitical and territorial forces. From the application of a social network analysis to energy corporate locations, it is argued that network geographic, relational, and hierarchical perspectives are all critical in enhancing understandings of the world city network. Some similarities with advanced producer services networks are noted, as well as important differences which are shaped by a combination of resource production and consumption, and geopolitical and economic power relations. The outcome is a dynamic set of interlocking local, regional, and global city globalisations.

It has been suggested that a paradigm shift has occurred in the study of urban systems, central places being displaced by networks because the latter are better suited to currently observable processes. Cities are understood as harbouring local networks (milieu, clusters, buzz), as well as being themselves functionally specialised nodes in wider nonhierarchical networks. We test the empirical validity of this contention by analysing the geography of service use by innovators in Canada. Consistent with the results of Christaller, we find that use of local services diminishes as one moves down the urban hierarchy, and services most strongly connected with innovation—which we deem to be high-order—have the highest probability of being sourced at its summit. Our conclusions interrogate some of the assumptions that underpin local innovation networks, question whether the network approach can apprehend all aspects of urban systems, and discuss in what respect contention that there has been a paradigm shift is warranted.

This study contributes to fuller understandings of the tensions in wind energy planning and politics. Through a q-method analysis of wind energy supporter and opponent discourses in communities hosting both proposed and constructed projects it extends the literature in three main ways. First, this study responds to the need for more nuanced understandings of wind energy supporter perspectives. It identifies and contrasts an impatient supporter with an idealistic supporter discourse. These differ in content, in constituents and in time of use. Second, it identifies an absolute opposition and qualified opposition discourse. Neither of these discourses confirm an expectation from previous studies that landscape and place attachment are the primary determinants for wind energy opposition, rather concerns over health risks, wildlife habitat and a rebuttal of the climate benefits of wind energy are of key concern. Finally, the study contributes to a critical mass of q-method studies of wind energy siting disputes from which tentative general patterns are identified.

Cities are becoming key transition spaces where new food governance systems are being fashioned, creating ‘spaces of deliberation’ that bring together civil society, private actors, and local governments. In order to understand the potential of these new urban food policy configurations, this paper draws on urban political ecology scholarship as a critical lens to analyse governance-beyond-the-state processes and associated postpolitical configurations. Taking Bristol and Malmö as empirical case studies, the paper illustrates the different paths that cities are taking as they strive to fashion more sustainable urban foodscapes. The analysis highlights the contested nature of “sustainability” in transition studies and explores whether concerted action on the part of civil society and municipal government is capable of creating more inclusive food narratives. Although progressive political currents can be neutralised by incumbent elites, as theorists of the ‘postpolitical city’ have argued, these cities also show that the food system is a highly contested battleground in which the themes of sustainability and justice can help to mobilize progressive forces and open up a range of new political possibilities.

This paper applies a multi-layered conceptualisation of place to the analysis of particular music scenes in the Netherlands, 1960–2010. We focus on: the clustering of music-related activities in locations; the delineation of spatially tied music scenes, based on a shared identity, reproduced over time through music practices and memory work; and the scale of interconnections in music practices. Using a variety of data sources (music industry locational data from 2011; pop chart entries, analysed by artist location, music genre, and social network ties; popular music history books; the Canon of Dutch Popular Music, published in 2007), we study the development of music scenes in the country. Our findings reveal that different dimensions of place come together in different combinations in music scenes in the Netherlands, allowing us to highlight three models: the big city; the infrastructure and media model; and the niche model. While we highlight the relative importance of specific locational and economic indicators, we also note the strength of memory work and narratives in legitimising certain local music scenes and supporting their endurance through time.