Critical Geography

This working paper examines the concept of metabolism and its potential as a critical analytical lens to study the contemporary city from a political perspective. The paper illustrates how the metabolism concept has been used historically, both as a metaphor to describe the technological, social, political and economic dimensions of human-environment relations, and as a concrete analytical tool to quantify and better understand how flows of matter and energy shape the territorial and spatial configurations of cityscapes. Drawing on the example of the urban water metabolism of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area (GAMA), the paper shows how the metabolism concept can be applied to study the politics of water in the city.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene? offers answers to these questions from a dynamic group of leading critical scholars. They challenge the theory and history offered by the most significant environmental concept of our times: the Anthropocene. But are we living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man”? Is a different response more compelling, and better suited to the strange—and often terrifying—times in which we live? The contributors to this book diagnose the problems of Anthropocene thinking and propose an alternative: the global crises of the twenty-first century are rooted in the Capitalocene; not the Age of Man but the Age of Capital.

In the 1990s the Secretary General of the 1992 UN ‘Earth Summit’ and initiator of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (Maurice Strong) asserted in a series of widely quoted lectures that ‘global sustainability’ could only be achieved through the principles of business: “Earth Incorporated” should thus be run ‘with a depreciation, amortization and maintenance account’. In the wake of this statement, the world has become awash with business-oriented solutions to environmental harm. The natural environment is now widely conceived as the provider of ‘ecosystem services’ that should be paid for; as a series of variously calculable, substitutable and exchangeable units of ecological and economic value; and as a ‘bank of natural capital’ that should be invested in and may be leveraged financially.
In this chapter I honour the role that Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch played for me as I sought to understand and respond critically to the world-making capacities of market-based approaches to the management of environmental health and harm. I focus on three main matters of concern:
- parallel and different dimensions of the visioning of the ‘reproductive capacities’ of the bodies of both women and the earth as labour that should be paid for, focusing in particular on implications of the commutation to money payments effected by so-called ‘payments for ecosystem services’ discourse and practice;
- innovations in associated techno-statistical divisions of nature as ‘the world’s body’ and the ways these are acting to facilitate the bonding of nature to capital in unforeseen ways;
- the implications of the historical transition to capitalism as the unfortunate outcome of anti-feudal struggles for the possibility of a longer–lasting social programme for change linked with contemporary contestations over the capitalization of nature as ‘earth incorporated’.
I close with some reflections on the positioning and potential of struggles in a moment of populist politics in which women’s bodies and the natural world are once again experiencing intensified capture, violation and erasure.

The ongoing expansion of renewable energies entails major spatial reconfigurations with social, environmental, and political dimensions. These emerging geographies are, however, in the process of taking shape, as their early configurations are still open to democratic intervention and contestation. While a recent line of research highlights the prominent role that maps are playing in directing such processes, the potential effects of countermapping on these evolving geographies have not yet been explored. In this article, we present a countermapping initiative promoting a dialogue between critical geography, political ecology, and environmental justice. Our work is the result of an alliance between Geocomunes—a collective of activist cartographers based in Mexico—and the EjAtlas—a global collaborative project tracking cases of grassroots mobilizations against environmental injustices. We take the case of Mexico's low-carbon development strategy to dissect the spatial expansion of wind and solar mega-projects at both national and regional scales. Our project consists of a series of databases and maps aimed to “fill” the spaces and relations otherwise “emptied” by the state's cartographic tools designed to promote investments in the sector. When presenting our results, we highlight how renewable energy projects in Mexico have so far juxtaposed with local territories, peoples, and resources, in ways that trigger instances of environmental injustice on the ground. We close this article by discussing the role of critical cartography and countermapping in building alternative political–economic projects for the energy transition.

Keywords
Maps, political ecology, neoliberalism, energy transitions, land

Simon Springer (Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada) contributes this short essay about his visit to Moscow and Domitrov. He organized a session titled “For Kropotkin” with Anthony Ince for the IGU Moscow Regional Conference and made a trip to the Kropotkin museum in Dmitrov.

Au moment où le Covid 19 se répand partout dans le monde, il peut être intéressant de voir comment le thème de la pandémie mortelle s'inscrit dans une vieille tradition apocalyptique. En effet, depuis les origines du genre, l’apocalypse a toujours fasciné les auteurs de science fiction qui ont puisé dans les écrits de Saint Jean des thèmes et des images durablement enracinés dans notre mémoire collective. S’il est vrai que la menace a souvent changé au fil du temps, le châtiment est resté le même pour une humanité qui a déçu son Créateur ou trahi la Nature : la fin du monde, ou pour le moins, la fin d’un monde, et en particulier celui des villes qui, à l’image de Babylone, sont présentées comme le réceptacle impur de tous les maux de nos sociétés. Même si la proposition est en apparence ludique, analyser les discours sur l’apocalypse dans les récits de science-fiction (romans, films, bandes dessinées, jeux vidéos…), permet donc de mieux comprendre les dysfonctionnements politiques, économiques et sociaux qu’ils révèlent dans un monde réel perçu comme toujours plus vulnérable, à la confluence entre géographies imaginaires, lieux symboliques et souvenirs d’un futur incertain.

Southeast Asian cities have long been produced as the ‘exemplary centres’ of the region, shaped in various and overlapping ways by the imperial gaze, nationalist visions (and their democratised versions), and by the familiar blueprints of international capital. Through such exemplary visions, the region’s cities have been designed to cultivate collective memories and subjectivities, as well as to project power and authority. In addition, and often as an integral result of the realisation of grand visions, regional metropolises are also dynamic sites of rapid urbanisation, of contested processes of expropriation and eviction, and places of dissent and resistant subject formation. Further, impoverished urban populations increasingly suffer environmental discrimination and bear the worst of the effects of contamination and climate change, while at the same time, discourses of hygiene, criminality, and uninhabitability are employed to denigrate the urban poor and their environments...

A thorough analysis of capital punishment from a political-geographical perspective is lacking in the discipline of geography. This is despite the fact that capital punishment overlaps with numerous geographic approaches, concepts, and areas of study. This study serves as a call to geographers to begin considering capital punishment's wide interaction and interrelation with developed areas of knowledge in the discipline. Specifically, political geographers stand to contribute in novel ways to wider discussions about capital punishment by analyzing executions relative to contemporary work in geography on violent, legal, and carceral spaces. I first introduce the need for geography's engagement with this pressing issue. Then, I clarify several terms needed to understand this violent practice. A third section highlights several pathways of development in the critical geographies of capital punishment. It is organized around four broad themes-critically mapping capital punishment, bodies in motion, politics of access, and executing the "other"-connecting capital punishment to developing concepts, literatures, and sub-disciplines in geography. The final two sections outline an epistemological approach to the geographies of capital punishment and how legal and carceral geographies might contribute.

My current research focuses upon the varied strands of the squatting movement in Rotterdam from the 1960s to the present day. Whereas Western European capital cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin and Copenhagen all have well established narratives concerning the development and impact of the local squatters movement, very little research has been done on Rotterdam (and indeed other Dutch cities). In this presentation I aim to show that squatting in Rotterdam was already well established by 1970 and a movement has persisted through time.

Through different sources such as personal experience, interviews with former squatters, films,  zines, flyers, digitised newspapers and historical archives I created first a database of squats and then a map of squatted Rotterdam (http://maps.squat.net/en/cities/rotterdam/squats). My research is directed towards social centres, defined in a loose sense to mean squats with a public function and so my concern here is not with residential squats, of which there undoubtedly have been thousands.

I document a movement which had different strands, with groups dedicated to specific goals such as housing people, helping immigrants, providing music venues, conserving buildings, protesting urban regeneration and so on. Squatting was used as a tool by these various groups, which tended not to unite under any specific political banner, unlike in Amsterdam where the movement had a strong far left identity. Whilst there are/were political squatters in Rotterdam, they were few in number and often ended up joining the braindrain to the capital.

I have found evidence of squatting advice hours, a well-established practice of providing help to people looking to squat, but I also show that most squatting in Rotterdam has always been 'wild,' that is to say people have simply self-organised and done it for themselves rather than going through interactions with an organised central network. Thus I suggest that in Rotterdam, perhaps as in other smaller cities across Europe, squatting has been a useful tool in the activist repertoire which gained strength from struggles fought out on the streets of Amsterdam and then followed its own specific trajectory.

What is the relationship between vigilantism on gentrification? As state and private capital actors begin to see urban areas in need of renewal, they also construct those areas as 'dangerous', and their inhabitants as 'criminals'. This gentrification-security nexus has, however, been analyzed mostly as a top-down process, in which it is agents endowed with high levels of political and economic capital that are able to steer urban renewal policies. This paper focuses on agents that emerge from 'the grassroots', and especially on vigilante groups. These groups have far-right or conservatory ideologies. As such, they enact exclusionary practices of security that enforce gentrification. I illustrate this with the case of the City Angels, a group that has contributed to the renewal of Milan's main train station. I show how this group combines security with social work, and at the same time maintains a coercive presence in the train station. The City Angels patrol, deter, denounce and pacify the marginalized people that live around the train station, and ultimately push them out of that area. Vigilantes operate in tandem with the state by creating an appearance of security in the area that they are patrolling. Within this stabilized and domesticated landscape, the state and the real estate developers can operate unhindered. The increased security raises the value of the city scape. It also eliminates or neutralizes those who seen as hindrances to gentrification.

This is an unpublished draft of the fifth and final chapter of a book to be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2016. In the book I argue that progressive environmentalism should avoid presenting climate change as an imminent natural catastrophe. Instead, climate change should be seen as a key "contradiction" produced by neoliberal capitalism. Accordingly, the generations-long work of undoing neoliberal governance constitutes an adequate response, rather than the wishful thinking that a sudden convergence of climate activism is likely to meet the complex social and political challenges entailed in global climate change.

For six years Maya Stovall staged Liquor Store Theatre, included in the Whitney Biennial in 2017, a conceptual art and anthropology video project in which she danced near the liquor stores in her Detroit neighborhood as a way to start conversations with her neighbors. In this book of the same name, Stovall uses the project as a point of departure for understanding everyday life in Detroit and the possibilities for ethnographic research, art, and knowledge creation. Her conversations with her neighbors—which touch on everything from economics, aesthetics, and sex to the political and economic racism that undergirds Detroit's history—bring to light rarely acknowledged experiences of longtime Detroiters. In these exchanges, Stovall enacts an innovative form of ethnographic engagement that offers new modes of integrating the social sciences with the arts in ways that exceed what either approach can achieve on its own.

https://www.dukeupress.edu/liquor-store-theatre

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

Meta-geography is a specific branch of critical geography developed in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia.
The foundational principle of the practice of meta-geography is the understanding that changing space or its image/imago, or the representations of the latter, means changing life—and vice versa.
Meta-geography offers a new perspective on geography that champions the interdependence of any given space, its images/imagoes, and its representations.
The knowledge and practices developed by successive generations of Soviet thinkers and scientists allow us today to understand meta-geography as a tool for navigation by way of “rewriting” and constructing spaces.

Until 1993 there were conducted first excavations in what promised to be the site of one of the most important buildings of Petra, the stunning capital of the Nabataean kingdom. Its construction, whose initiation century BC, several changes, reconstructions and landslides along its more than five hundred years of operation. But despite this still unknown for certain functions for which it was designed and that, regardless of the construction elements, materials have been located just still less inscriptions that shed some light on a mystery that will try here exhibit various theories that enable closer to resolution.

Stadens periferier och i synnerhet dess unga befolkning har allt mer framstått som ett hot mot samhällets lag och ordning. Utmaningen benämns utanförskap. Debatten har på kort tid skenat iväg i jakt på snabba åtgärder och massmedial synlighet. Det finns idag – som jag ser det – stort behov av perspektiv som kan kasta kritiskt ljus över den situation som råder i de svenska städerna och över de sociala villkor som ungdomar i städernas periferier lever under. Förortens unga, utanförskapets kids. Kärt barn har många namn. Stadens unga som hot och som politiskt problem har funnits i en rad olika skepnader, i olika tider. Så låt oss, med avstamp först och främst i forskning som jag själv varit med om att bedriva under två decennier, närma oss frågan om ungas uppväxtvillkor i stadens periferier, hur de ter sig idag och hur de skulle kunna tänkas, inför framtiden.

The coastal Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico – known locally as the Istmo – is regarded as one of the best wind energy generating sites in the world. Marketed as a preeminent solution to mitigating climate change, wind energy is now applying increasing pressure on indigenous groups in the region. The article begins by outlining a definition of colonialism that assists in identifying the temporal continuity of the colonial project to understand its relationship with wind energy development. The next section briefly reviews colonial genocide studies, discussing disciplinary debates between liberal and post-liberal genocide scholars, the relevance of self-management within colonial systems, the genocide-ecocide nexus and the ‘intent’ of destructive development projects. This leads into reviewing the claims and findings that emerged from fieldwork in the Istmo, which is divided into the north and south to show the different, yet similar dynamics taking place in the region. Finally, the article concludes that wind energy development as a ‘solution’ to climate change not only distracts from its dependence on fossil fuels and mining, but renews and continues a slow industrial genocide, assimilating and targeting (indigenous) people who continue to value their land, sea and cultural relationships.

A assombrosa riqueza petrolífera de Angola e as suas histórias de conflito e desigualdade atrai-nos a construir narrativas binárias sobre o poder e a exploração, as quais não são, todavia, suficientes para uma compreensão precisa e uma ação esclarecida. O presente artigo utiliza uma perspectiva geográfica relacional que pretende ir além dos binarismos simplistas mediante uma análise conjunta da Praça 4 de Fevereiro, situada no centro da cidade de Malanje, e da proposta de construção do novo memorial rural da revolta da Baixa de Kassanje, a leste da cidade no Município de Kela. Com base em notícias dos meios de comunicação social e em registos etnográficos e históricos, situo a Praça 4 de Fevereiro na história mais geral da cidade na era colonial e assinalo as suas atuais tensões, ironias e utilizações práticas e políticas na geografia quotidiana da cidade. O memorial de Kassanje é um projeto relativamente desconhecido e tem vindo a estiolar desde que o Presidente Agostinho Neto anunciou a construção de uma primeira aldeia-piloto modelo, numa visita realizada em 1979. Analiso os planos e a cobertura dada pelos meios de comunicação social à construção em Kassanje de um projecto de aldeia e de um novo monumento e memorial, bem como de novas habitações e infra-estruturas sociais na mesma zona. Examino igualmente os pedidos de restabelecimento sobre o feriado nacional de 4 de Janeiro em memória dos mártires da repressão colonial (incluindo em Kassanje) e de atribuição de pensões militares aos angolanos da área afectados pela revolta de Kassanje. A análise mostra como os planos e o debate sobre a revolta revelam vozes diversas em conversa, e alterações significativas nas narrativas dominantes a seu respeito. De um modo mais geral, as discussões sobre Kassanje mostram as geografias rurais do nacionalismo (e dos monumentos que lhes estão associados), com a especificidade que lhes é própria e as respetivas ligações às zonas urbanas. Analogamente, uma compreensão dos dois monumentos nos respetivos contextos provinciais – tal como as suas ligações a Luanda – pode abrir novas perspectivas aos trabalhos que se têm centrado em Luanda e nas cidades de maior dimensão.

anarchistische geographien stellt die erste umfassende deutschsprachige Publikation dar, in der geographische Perspektiven und Konzepte mit Kämpfen, Praktiken und politischen Ideen von Anarchismen zusammen gedacht werden. In den Beiträgen des Bandes wird unter anderem an die mit feministischen Positionen geteilten Zugänge zu Wissen und Macht, Diskurse kritischer Pädagogik und die Migrations-, Stadt- und Wohnungsforschung angeschlossen und spezifisch anarchistische Perspektiven auf diese angewendet. Zudem werden ideengeschichtliche und konzeptionelle Debatten der anarchistischen Bewegung und der Disziplingeschichte der Institution Geographie aufgefächert und Anschlüsse an aktuelle akademische Diskurse zum Verhältnis von Anarchismen und Geographieren, wie sie in den letzten Jahren in anglo-, franko-, und lusophonen Sprachräumen geführt wurden, hergestellt.

The United States Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operates the largest confinement system in the country, no small accomplishment in the world’s largest prison system. This article analyzes the US immigration detention system as a series of spatial strategies through which state officials seek to manage and redirect transboundary migration. I argue that while detention works to confine, segregate, and categorize migrant bodies, detention is also a performance of state power. As such, it produces effects beyond deportation. The article will first outline how immigration detention both relies upon and extends the US criminal justice system to open up spaces of arbitrary administrative discretion. I then draw on my research on noncitizen detention and visitation programs to demonstrate how detention is more than a fixing of bodies in space; it is a process of isolation, criminalization, and marginalization. I argue that detention cannot be subsumed under or explained by deportation, and that it plays a key role in the production of migrant precarity in current US immigration and border control.

This article exposes the violences encoded within many contemporary, mainstream gay spaces and connects these violences to a wider politics of the modern LGBT movement. No longer are queer places sites of radically disrupting time, space, and social norms, a practice that in some ways were constitutive of Queerness. Instead, many queer spaces have been organized and reorganized to reflect, reinforce, and support the integrationist and assimilationist goals of contemporary gay (white, cisgender, male) liberals and the State and corporate institutions they seek to become or have become a part of. I develop this argument by undertaking Queer readings of three " gay " maps of Washington, D.C. In deconstructing the violences within spatial representations of gay spaces within the nation's capital, I hope to engage in a broader disruption and subversion of both the cooptation of queer/Queer struggle by State and multinational corporate formations and the assimilationist and (white) nationalist trends within mainstream LGBT politics that allow this to happen. In the " slippage " or " fissure " produced by this disruption, I hope to open a path that allows us to " cruise " ahead towards new thought on what can and should constitute Queer and queer politics and spaces.