ABSTRACT As we noted in the introduction we have chosen to produce a book about Mediterranean mass tourism. Not just mass tourism that happens to take place in the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean variety and inflection of mass... more
ABSTRACT As we noted in the introduction we have chosen to produce a book about Mediterranean mass tourism. Not just mass tourism that happens to take place in the Mediterranean, but the Mediterranean variety and inflection of mass tourism. With this choice we wanted to emphasize the fact that (even) mass tourism has histories and geographies. Moreover, the space of tourism has often been methodologically fragmented and marginalized as a side effect of two trends in research. First, research on tourism practices (as in many chapters in this volume) has often proceeded empirically through case studies of single destinations. Partly, this may be down to the logistics and funding of research, partly the difficulties of comparative work. Second, the space of tourism has been marginal both in academia conceptually but also on the ground – where resorts are often at the end of the line, and the edge of territories. Thus recent assessments on regeneration and decline in British resorts point to transport and communication links leaving them marginalized (Communities and Local Government Committee 2007), while for many traditions of area studies tourism areas are equally on the edge of the territory and the fading edge of the culture. This scale and focus is a variant of a methodological nationalism that is by no means confined to work on tourism. Indeed, in historiography it has often seemed that history only occurs at the scale of the nation state (Bentley 1999). However, we also want to outline some cautions on the imagining of the Mediterranean. The anthropology of Mediterranean studies has all to often given a homogeneity to the region, indeed we might say defined the region through key attributes such as cultures of ‘honour’ and ‘shame’ (Albera 2006) and notions of cultural survivalism, where the antique survives into modernity (Mitchell 2002). Critics have argued with some force and justification that while Braudel and others have argued for the Mediterranean as ‘an ecological unit’, anthropology has seen it as a culture area characterized by the presence of codes of honour and shame in gender relations of a hierarchical nature and in so doing end up opposing the primitivism of the Mediterranean with the modernity of Europe (see examples in Albera 2006: 116). As such a regionalist anthropology has colluded with a literary trope that portrays the Mediterranean through a limited range of generally cultural stereotypes of its people (Shore 1995) and a geohistoire has spoken to a region grounded in climate and agriculture – which themselves ascribe a different temporality to the region. Indeed geography has long learnt to be wary of models of cultural areas that all too often suppress heterogeneity, internal conflicts between subcultures and tend to be founded on models of rustic society (Crang 1998: 21). Where tourism is addressed at all it is as a problem, for people, places and research, not as one of the engines forging a Mediterranean regional identity. So we begin by asking what it is that a Mediterranean focus offers, first in terms of destabilising the usual categories of nation and place by focusing upon a maritime imaginary like Homer’s wine dark sea, second by looking at the analytic risks and commercial uses of fixing and exoticising the Mediterranean, and then, third, asking how mass tourism is refracted through Mediterranean practices and imaginations and the diversity of outcomes now emerging creating many Mediterraneans and many mass tourisms.
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Introduction: Engaging Qualitative Geography - Dydia DeLyser et al PART ONE: OPENINGS Introduction - Dydia DeLyser A History of Qualitative Research in Geography - Meghan Cope 'Throwntogetherness': Encounters with Difference and... more
Introduction: Engaging Qualitative Geography - Dydia DeLyser et al PART ONE: OPENINGS Introduction - Dydia DeLyser A History of Qualitative Research in Geography - Meghan Cope 'Throwntogetherness': Encounters with Difference and Diversity - Stuart C Aitken A Taut Rubber Band: Theory and Empirics in Qualitative Geographic Research - Steve Herbert Policy, Research Design and the Socially Situated Researcher - Kari B Jensen and Amy K Glasmeier Mixed Methods: Thinking, Doing and Asking in Multiple Ways - Sarah Elwood PART TWO: ENCOUNTERS AND COLLABORATIONS Introduction - Steve Herbert Ethnography and Participant Observation - Annette Watson and Karen E Till Autoethnography as Sensibility - David Butz Interviewing: Fear and Liking in the Field - Linda McDowell Life History Interviewing - Peter Jackson and Polly Russell Focus Groups as Collaborative Research Performances - Fernando J Bosco and Thomas Herman Visual Methods and Methodologies - Mike Crang Doing Landscape Interpretation - Nancy Duncan and James Duncan Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork - Hayden Lorimer Textual and Discourse Analysis - Jason Dittmer GIS as Qualitative Research: Knowledge, Participatory Politics and Cartographies of Affect - Stuart C Aitken and Mei-Po Kwan 'A Little Bird Told Me ...': Approaching Animals through Qualitative Methods - Mona Seymour and Jennifer Wolch Performative, Non-Representational and Affect-Based Research: Seven Injunctions - J D Dewsbury PART THREE: MAKING SENSE Introduction - Mike Crang Writing Qualitative Geography - Dydia DeLyser The Art of Geographic Interpretation - Sara MacKian Representing the Other: Negotiating the Personal and the Political - Garth Myers Major Disasters and General Panics: Methodologies of Activism, Affinity and Emotion in the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army - Paul Routledge Reflections on Teaching Qualitative Methods in Geography - Deborah G Martin
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A growing body of literature has emerged that examines cities as key sites for socio-technical experimentation with a variety of initiatives and interventions to reduce carbon emissions, upgrade ageing infrastructure networks and... more
A growing body of literature has emerged that examines cities as key sites for socio-technical experimentation with a variety of initiatives and interventions to reduce carbon emissions, upgrade ageing infrastructure networks and stimulate economic development. Yet while there has been a wide survey of global initiatives and attempts to explain the wider processes driving such experimentation (Bulkeley and Castán Broto, 2013) there remains a lack of empirical case study analysis to bring the concepts into context. In this paper we use the concept of urban experimentation as a lens to discuss the political and social ramifications of one such intervention in a city’s energy infrastructure network, with an examination of the Pecan Street smart grid project in Austin, Texas. The ability for cities to manage socio-technical transitions and their inflections by specific locales has been largely neglected in social science research, yet cities around the world are facing similar problems ...
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Introduction Cultural geography, with its traditions of studying regional cultures, has tended to position ‘tourism’ as a problem, as something that homogenises local cultures towards one undifferentiated aggregate – an ‘erosion thesis’... more
Introduction Cultural geography, with its traditions of studying regional cultures, has tended to position ‘tourism’ as a problem, as something that homogenises local cultures towards one undifferentiated aggregate – an ‘erosion thesis’ where change is seen only as diminishing original cultures and reducing global differences (Hannerz, 1996). However, recent work has tried to open up this grim account in two main directions. First, examining tourism not simply as consuming places but also as a dynamic force creating them – which still leaves room for conflict, exploitation and resistance, but takes a more neutral start-point. Second, looking at the cultures of tourists and seeing how these evolve historically. So rather than dismissing tourism as just ‘a logical extension of the general principle of industrial capitalism to the realm of leisure’ (Borocz in Koshar, 1998: 325), treating it as a modern culture in and of itself. Tourism mobilises powerful social dreams and desires as the currency in which it trades by offering dream holidays, romance, paradise on earth and so on (Krippendorf 1987). These are social imaginaries, maps of what people believe and hope for – but they are rarely examined as such. As Inglis notes: ‘The dreams are powerful and beautiful. Of course, dedicated dreambusters in their big boots will, correctly, point out the horrors and boredom of actually existing tightly packaged trips, the mutual exploitation of tourist and native’ (Inglis, 2000: 5). In this chapter then I want to sketch how tourist cultures develop rather than engage in the ‘dreambusting’ that tends to characterise academic work which so often exemplifies distaste, treating tourists almost as another species – ‘turistas vulgaris’ (Lofgren, 1999: 264) who travel in ‘herds’, ‘stampede’ onto beaches, ‘flock’ to see places, and ‘swarm’ around ‘honey-pots’. Analyses of how tourism shapes places can become locked into a ‘coercive conceptual schema’ of tourism ‘impacting’ on local cultures which sees a local culture pitted against a global industry where ‘cultural changes arising from tourism are produced by the intrusion of a superior sociocultural system in a supposedly weaker receiving milieu’ (Picard, 1996: 104, 110). This risks portraying the ‘hosts’ as a bounded, static, undivided and happy culture prior to tourism. Now this is a dubious characterisation of even island destinations – as Picard (below) shows in terms of Bali – but seems cockeyed when we think of places like Las Vegas, Blackpool, or Benidorm, or the city tourist centres of London, New York or Hong Kong. Thus it seems more productive to use: ‘a more culturally complex rendering of tourism’s “consumption” of places, one that sees not merely a globalizing force bearing down upon a once-isolated community, but also the dynamic ways local cultural meanings -which are themselves a product of a dialogue between local and extra-local cultural systems - wrap the tourism experience in an envelope of local meaning.’(Oakes, 1999: 124). I want to thus start by thinking about what cultural geography can say about the shaping of destinations, about tourism as inventing, making and remaking places.
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A specially commissioned text by Professor Mike Crang, Head of Department of Geography and member of CVAC (Centre for Visual Arts and Culture) for the exhibition "The Liveliest of Elements, an Ordinary Extraordinary Material" by... more
A specially commissioned text by Professor Mike Crang, Head of Department of Geography and member of CVAC (Centre for Visual Arts and Culture) for the exhibition "The Liveliest of Elements, an Ordinary Extraordinary Material" by Laura Harrington. Laura Harrington is interested in the natural world and how humans understand and interact with it – she works with multiple mediums including film, drawing and installation. A shared interest in upland environments and peat as a lively and dynamic material provided the impetus for a collaboration with physical scientist Dr Jeff Warburton (Department of Geography, Durham University) as part of a Leverhulme Trust Artist Residency. Their collaboration focused on Moss Flats, an upland bare peat flat in the North Pennines. Harrington has evolved this research into an exploration of this dynamic eco-system through moving image, words and sound. The title of the exhibition is inspired by artist Joseph Beuys who once described a European...
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Chapter four provides a detailed account of the sources of capital to initiate and sustain a counterfeiting scheme, the settlement of payments in the business, costs incurred by counterfeiting entrepreneurs, and profits and investment of... more
Chapter four provides a detailed account of the sources of capital to initiate and sustain a counterfeiting scheme, the settlement of payments in the business, costs incurred by counterfeiting entrepreneurs, and profits and investment of proceeds of counterfeiting.
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Commentary around the electronic media has raised issues of political action, community formation and changing identities. This paper explores how the notions of 'public space' can inform this debate over electronic media. It... more
Commentary around the electronic media has raised issues of political action, community formation and changing identities. This paper explores how the notions of 'public space' can inform this debate over electronic media. It examines the metaphorical adoption of urban models to look at electronic sociality and suggests four principle approaches: cities set in or against world flows, suburbanised telecities, communitarian visions and accounts that appeal to a renewed public sphere. The paper examines how these share many assumptions. However, instead of trying to sift these metaphors by contrasting them to a purported real world, the paper examines how they shape an electronic architecture. Spatial metaphors and electronic practices are seen as entangled and shaping each other. The paper suggests that the different metaphors for the city reflect a range of anxieties about and desires for urban life. In this sense, the 'real' city is the indefinable complexity and fol...
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Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than the practices that create these... more
Geographers have shown the centrality of representations of landscape to understanding social geographies. This article suggests that so far more attention has been paid to the representations than the practices that create these representations. Using the example of popular photography, this article suggests that such a focus on representations misses some important processes and reproduces some social ideologies. First, perhaps surprisingly, focusing on the practices of photography serves to reinstate the corporeality of experience often claimed to be lost in visual theory. Secondly, this embodied experience serves to highlight the mediation of visual worlds through technologies and epistemologies. Thirdly, it is suggested studying practices displaces some of the ways geography has posited an ‘authentic’ popular experience against its commodified forms. These ideas are pursued with reference to popular and principally tourist photography. In total it is suggested that such an appr...
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Some recent work in architecture has begun to think through the implications of an electronically mediated environment - both in terms of new forms of spaces and of changes to existing ones. New possibilities are read as resulting from... more
Some recent work in architecture has begun to think through the implications of an electronically mediated environment - both in terms of new forms of spaces and of changes to existing ones. New possibilities are read as resulting from these new technologies not only in ...
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In some way photography seems an improbable medium for examining the future. It has long been associated rather with acts of remembrance and recollection. The photograph is so often the memento mori, the treasured relic of a lost loved... more
In some way photography seems an improbable medium for examining the future. It has long been associated rather with acts of remembrance and recollection. The photograph is so often the memento mori, the treasured relic of a lost loved one, of a time past. How then might photographs speak to the conflicted times of a landscape labelled post-industrial or de-industrialised? And how might such photography speak to the conditions of Northern England? Here it seems we are looking at a time and a place caught ‘in-between’. There is an industrial legacy fading rapidly from sight and living memory; a landscape of industrial despoliation and dereliction that has been rapidly transmuted into a post-industrial consumerist landscape; and yet that consumerist future now seems like a future ruin – with developments and promises teetering on the edge of collapse, traces of what might have been. All this is occurring in a land that labels itself the ‘North’ in contradistinction to the powerful global city of London and the prosperous south and yet, is sandwiched between that and the culturally re-assertive nation of Scotland to its own north. A region whose self-identity is founded on an industrial era, whose prosperity and produce were deeply connected to supplying an empire that no longer exists. Post-industrial and postcolonial northern England, defined as much by its lack and losses as any positive identity. And yet, the celebration of this very condition remains part of a deeply sedimented and felt belonging. How are such conflicted and overlain spatial and temporal coordinates to be pictured?
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China is facing an important period of rural governance innovation and restructuring of territorial spatial patterns. This paper selects catchments as the most closely related spatial units for rural industrial development and rural... more
China is facing an important period of rural governance innovation and restructuring of territorial spatial patterns. This paper selects catchments as the most closely related spatial units for rural industrial development and rural settlement activities, profoundly revealing the characteristics of transformational development and spatial governance in mountainous areas. To date, extensive literature in this area has produced a broad multidisciplinary consensus on catchment water and soil conservation and rural industry development; however, the interactive mechanism of ecological, social, and economic networks, and the characteristics behind small catchments which benefit from spatial governance, have never been analyzed and are relatively new to the sphere of rural governance. Our research argues the relative importance of multi-scale catchment units compared with traditional administrative village units in enhancing the organizational benefits of rural revitalization in terms of ...
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In recent years there has been growing interest in the use of computers within qualitative geography. In this paper we review the types of software packages that have been adopted and outline some of their distinctive features. We discuss... more
In recent years there has been growing interest in the use of computers within qualitative geography. In this paper we review the types of software packages that have been adopted and outline some of their distinctive features. We discuss the intellectual and institutional reasons for the interest in the software and highlight the ways in which such reasons have shaped the use made of these packages. We argue that only a contextual account of how packages are adopted, adapted, and used can explain the situation in geography. Furthermore we suggest that the archaeologies underlying the packages—their theoretical presuppositions—are remarkably homogeneous and need to be clearly understood before deciding how the packages might be used. We outline how some of these presuppositions have affected the ways in which the packages have been used, and develop—from our own experiences—some points about informal networks of adoption and institutional contexts. The point of this is to suggest th...
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There is a long history of thinking about materiality and temporality through flux and flow. The question then is how do we envision such incessant movement? Michel Serres derives this sort of materiality from the physics of Lucretius... more
There is a long history of thinking about materiality and temporality through flux and flow. The question then is how do we envision such incessant movement? Michel Serres derives this sort of materiality from the physics of Lucretius that sees the apparent stability of the world as an illusion caused by the turbidity of incessant flows, as the flow becomes turbulent it leads to 'vortices in which the atoms combine to form a quasi-stable order’ forming a world out of the myriad combinations of atoms arising from chance encounters so we need to set ‘aside the principles and habits of thinking in terms of solids and treats atoms as the condition for a theory of flow’ (Webb, 2006: 127). The world is constantly in flow, just some of it at a very slow rate, and full then of nonorganic life as De Landa (1992) argued. Such an approach highlights not things moving through empty space, but the world as becoming-things. The focus of this essay is though a negative becoming, or a sense of ...
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This short paper will just try and pick apart a couple of examples to reveal how mobilities are both differentiated and differentiate among people. That is they are both a function of social status but also help enact social status.... more
This short paper will just try and pick apart a couple of examples to reveal how mobilities are both differentiated and differentiate among people. That is they are both a function of social status but also help enact social status. Slightly against the implication above I will also show that it is not just that digital is fast and materials mo0ving are slow, but rather that all speeds depend upon material things that come to shape them, and that all forms of movment increasingly interact with forms of data and informational realms. For the sake of symmetry the paper will look at two flows of people each of around 220 persons per year: the movement of the ‘floating population’ of migrant workers in China, and the mass tourism market of the Mediterranean. In so doing with will ask about how we think about ‘dwelling’ in a mobile world – what changes with our senses of self and place as the world is on the move. It will look at the assemblage of materials, media and bodies that enables...
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This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist market is markedly divided between an upmarket north and mass market south. In the midst of this tense clash of tastes, the island was the... more
This chapter will focus upon the contested practices and imaginations of one island whose tourist market is markedly divided between an upmarket north and mass market south. In the midst of this tense clash of tastes, the island was the setting for the book and the film of Captain Corelli’s mandolin. So this chapter moves between the Louis de Bernieres’ book Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1997), the Miramax film of the book (released 2001) and the touristic experience of the island. In the year after the release of the film visitor numbers from the UK to the island, who form some 87% of those arriving by plane, rose by 22% and 10% again the year following, more strongly than growth in visitors from other countries, and growing more rapidly than British tourism to Greece in general (Hudson and Ritchie 2006: 263-4). It was by all accounts a classic case of movie driving up the popularity of a destination. This has set in play competing and complementary imaginaries of the island as lands...
Research Interests: Geography, Tourism, Greece, Popularity, Film Tourism, and 4 moreRomance, Captain corelli, Beaches, and Kefalonia
Ships are both the glue and grease of the global economy. The merchant vessel of the late twentieth-century and early twenty first-century, combined with the technology of the big box container, is the means by which most commodities move... more
Ships are both the glue and grease of the global economy. The merchant vessel of the late twentieth-century and early twenty first-century, combined with the technology of the big box container, is the means by which most commodities move around the world—although its central role and those of maritime spaces are all too often overlooked (Levinson, 2006; Sekula 2001). But ships themselves are also commodities and they too change value and move through value regimes. In the case of their commercial life, which is likely to be 25 – 32 years including periodic refits, ships progressively downgrade in terms of profitability and value. This chapter charts the passage of such vessels. We look at how these enduring and mobile objects that, in life, link topographically distant ports into trading networks carrying commodities, cross into different networks of disposal and reuse, at the death. At this moment they are linked to different locations such as breaking yards, where they become mutable and are broken apart. These breaking locations enable them to be reborn as new commodities in different networks of value. As in Thompson’s (1979) formulation, the category of waste is a fulcrum point, where one form of value dies, yet another can be born. Here, we show how disparate networks are linked through processes of material destruction and transformation enabling the rebirth of value.
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This paper examines logistics in the space of action between production and consumption to provide (1) a rethinking of logistical power, not as seamless flow but through seam space and friction, and (2) a re-conceptualisation of cargo... more
This paper examines logistics in the space of action between production and consumption to provide (1) a rethinking of logistical power, not as seamless flow but through seam space and friction, and (2) a re-conceptualisation of cargo mobilities, as the dynamic articulation between things being freight cargo, and being products and goods. The paper uses empirical research on cargo movement in Northern Europe to reveal the frictions resulting from freight cargo’s spatial ordering and from systemic imbalances in trade flows. It shows the multiple lines of friction produced by and productive of cargo mobilities across maritime and terrestrial space. It argues that logistics is an art of accommodating this and creating competitive advantage through making interruptions, discontinuities or seams in the spaces of flow. This is done through different temporal logics of ordering physical cargo sequenced across maritime and terrestrial space. The paper further shows the frictions between the...
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ABSTRACT Waste and its connections to a profligate consumerism have become a core concern for public policy in the developed nations in the twenty-first century. Whether the focus is food or mobile phones, computers or electrical goods,... more
ABSTRACT Waste and its connections to a profligate consumerism have become a core concern for public policy in the developed nations in the twenty-first century. Whether the focus is food or mobile phones, computers or electrical goods, waste – and particularly post-consumer waste-is never far from view and moral concern. Reports have shown how at least a third of the food produced by the planet ends up not on the plate but as food waste (Wrap, 2008; Stuart, 2009; IME, 2013). Trends to faster manufacturer product cycles, cheaper products undermining the economics of repair, and technology and fashion-induced pressures to upgrade goods are seen to be critical to the emergence of 'a). In the EU it is accepted that this has to change. A wave of policy initiatives has identified minimising and preventing waste as central to sustainable futures. In waste policy a first priority is minimising waste generation; the second is to reduce waste by diverting unwanted materials from the waste stream. Diversion is achieved via recovery, be that for re-use, recycling or as energy-from-waste. Recovering wastes via recycling means that wastes become potential feedstock for other industries: they have become resources. This is a major transformation – not just in how we think about waste, but also in what happens to it. Disposal through 'controlled tipping' (or landfill) has gone from being the default option for waste in many EU-member states to become the least desired option for managing wastes. This is not only because of the contribution of landfill gases (principally methane) to greenhouse gas emissions and hence to climate change, but also because materials disposed of as wastes are no longer circulating and so are lost to economies whilst their replacement depletes natural resources. Since the late 1990s the imperatives to minimise and reduce waste have been enacted through the principles of the EU-wide Waste Hierarchy. 1 As a result, national level waste policies have implored millions of European households and consumers to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle, promoting these actions as part of a transition to sustainable consumption. In the UK, long stereotyped as the 'dirty man of Europe', this has necessitated the development of an infrastructure to divert waste materials from landfill. This is the biggest change to have occurred in domestic waste management in the UK since the end of the Second World War (c.f. Cooper, 2010). Rather than one bin for 'the rubbish', UK households now have multiple bins for multiple materials: dry recyclables (paper, card, tins and plastic containers), glass, green waste, food waste and residual waste. Increasingly too, the principles of the Waste Hierarchy are being extended to producer responsibility. Manufacturer and retailer responsibilities with respect to waste minimisation and recovery are being ratcheted up, whilst 'end-of-life' is a core principle in sustainable product design.
Research Interests: Business and Consumerism
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The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city—moving from historicism... more
The relationship of space and time has become a vexed issue in accounts in the postmodern metropolis. Rich and enlivening accounts use spatial categories to describe the interrelationships of elements of the city—moving from historicism to geography, to gloss Jameson's development of cognitive mapping. Postmodern geographies utilising the ideas of cognitive mapping show marked similarities with the accounts of time and space describing classical and medieval arts of memory and the Romantic writings of Flaubert on Athens. However, spatialised accounts of the city often seem to replicate problematic divisions of space and time that also underlay historicist accounts and merely invert the latter's priorities. The work of Bergson offers key insights into how this division occurred and a sense of temporality that may be lost in spatial metaphors. This is a sense of difference and alterity that we trace in the work of Proust and argue can be brought to inform the urban theatre of ...
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This paper is an attempt to juxtapose a variety of ways in which a city's history can be portrayed by working through various forms through which the history of Bristol has been envisioned. First, I hope to use the concept of the... more
This paper is an attempt to juxtapose a variety of ways in which a city's history can be portrayed by working through various forms through which the history of Bristol has been envisioned. First, I hope to use the concept of the palimpsest from historical geography as a stage on which other ways of portraying the city can be interrogated. These other envisionings I subsequently stage are the visions bound up in touristic sights, that is in the pictures used in and created by heritage displays; and the ‘dispersed memory’ of archive pictures, principally the Reece Winstone archive of Bristol By studying the connections and disjunctures in this triptych I hope to suggest the importance and complexity of technologies used to envisage the city. I try to suggest that pictures of the city cannot be used as naive documents to illustrate the passage of time—despite how often they are used to do this. Different senses of historicity are manufactured through the space—times created by dif...
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ABSTRACT This article both joins with recent arguments in economic geography that have made connections between work on industrial symbiosis and agglomerative tendencies and recasts this work. Drawing on the case of Sitakunda-Bhatiary,... more
ABSTRACT This article both joins with recent arguments in economic geography that have made connections between work on industrial symbiosis and agglomerative tendencies and recasts this work. Drawing on the case of Sitakunda-Bhatiary, Bangladesh, it shows that symbiosis is intricately bound up in the global circulation of wastes and their recovery through secondary processing. It draws attention to the importance of key places as conduits in the transformation of materials and secondary processing; emphasizes their importance as sites of symbiotic activity; and shows how such places exemplify economies of recycling, reuse, and remanufacturing, but in conditions of minimal environmental regulation. It therefore shows that contemporary symbiosis is not necessarily clean and green and may be very messy; that it can be generative of agglomerations, not just dependent upon prior agglomerations; that such agglomerations may be cross sectoral, not just interplant; and that symbiosis needs to be thought of not just through geographic proximity, but through the spatialities of globalization.
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We outline the frameworks that shape and hold apart waste debates in and about the Global North and Global South and that hinder analysis of flows between them. Typically, waste is addressed as municipal waste, resulting in a focus on... more
We outline the frameworks that shape and hold apart waste debates in and about the Global North and Global South and that hinder analysis of flows between them. Typically, waste is addressed as municipal waste, resulting in a focus on domestic consumption and urban governance and an emphasis on cities and the national scale. The prevailing ways of addressing the increasingly global flows of wastes between the North and South are those of global environmental justice and are underpinned by the geographical imagination encoded in the Basel Convention. New research on the trades in used goods and recycling in lower income countries challenges these accounts. It shows that arguments about dumping on the South need revision. Wastes are secondary resources for lower income countries, harvesting them is a significant economic activity, and consequent resource recovery is a key part of the global economy. Four areas for future research are identified: (a) changing patterns of global harvest...
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Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries;... more
Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that re...