Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble
land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale
infrastructure and commercial real estate ...projects. Driven by global city
aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for
modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not
least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify
and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands
of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a ‘legal’ kampung
where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with
land rights and developers’ land brokers, and two ‘illegal’ kampungs whose
residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the
default theory for explaining these processes—accumulation by dispossession—is
inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By
thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of
accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better
attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested
accumulations through displacement.
Discussions of the spatiality of globalization have largely focused on place-based attributes that fix globalization locally, on globalization as the construction of scale, and on networks as a ...distinctive feature of contemporary globalization. By contrast, position within the global economy is frequently regarded as anachronistic in a shrinking, networked world. A critical review of how place, scale, and networks are used as metaphors for the spatiality of globalization suggests that space/time still matters. Positionality (position in relational space/time within the global economy) is conceptualized as both shaping and shaped by the trajectories of globalization and as influencing the conditions of possibility of places in a globalizing world. The wormhole is invoked as a way of describing the concrete geographies of positionality and their non-Euclidean relationship to the Earth's surface. The inclusion of positionality challenges the simplicity of pro- and antiglobalization narratives and can change how we think about globalization and devise strategies to alter its trajectory.
Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an ...anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market‐driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long‐standing more‐than‐capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms.
Geographic Dialectics? Sheppard, Eric
Environment and planning. A,
11/2008, Volume:
40, Issue:
11
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
As radical geography, inflected by Marx, has transformed into critical geography, influenced by poststructuralism and feminism, dialectical reasoning has come under attack from some poststructural ...geographers. Their construction of dialectics as inconsistent with poststructural thinking, difference, and assemblages is based, however, on a Hegelian conception of the dialectic. This Hegelian imaginary reflects the intellectual history of radical and/or critical anglophone geography. Yet, dialectics can be read in a non-Hegelian, much less totalizing and ideological, and more geographical way. This broader reading opens up space for considering parallels between dialectics, the assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari, and aspects of complexity theory.
Thinking through the Pilbara Sheppard, Eric
Australian geographer,
09/2013, Volume:
44, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Mainstream, place-based theories of economic development presume that there is a common set of stages of economic development that all territories (should) pass through. This perspective presents ...'resource peripheries' such as the Pilbara as deviations from this norm. Based on a brief visit to the Pilbara, and drawing on economic geographical concepts of the socio-spatial dialectic and socio-spatial positionality, I contest such a 'northern' reading of development possibilities. Thinking through the Pilbara, I identify two substantial shifts in socio-spatial positionality. As the Pilbara has become more interconnected with the now increasingly Northeast Asian core of globalising capitalism, Western Australia has become increasingly resource oriented and prosperous; a strategy to be assessed on its own terms rather than through Rostowian eyes. The emergence of FIFO (fly-in/fly-out) labour has been accompanied by novel geographies of connectivity within Australia, shifting positionalities and creating distinctive regional development patterns and challenges. These Western Australian issues pose questions also for resource peripheries elsewhere.
Over the last decade, a new research program has emerged at the interface between geographic information science and geographical social theory, now called critical GIS. In this article I analyse the ...emergence of critical GIS as an example of knowledge production in geography. I examine its genealogy, highlighting the key debates, events, and individuals instrumental in facilitating a rapprochement between two initially opposed scholarly communities and tracing the directions that this has since taken. Addressing its current incarnation as critical GIS, I relate it to the critical theory tradition in the social sciences and assess the pertinence of the term “critical” for describing the epistemology and philosophy of critical GIS. I examine how technology, the geography of GIS research, and politics are shaping the future trajectory of critical GIS. Drawing on Helen Longino's vision for strong knowledge production, I argue that the future of critical GIS will depend on the ability of its practitioners to remain conscious and reflexively critical of their own emergent presuppositions.
Jakarta’s great land transformation Herlambang, Suryono; Leitner, Helga; Tjung, Liong Ju ...
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
03/2019, Volume:
56, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These ...transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism (2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.
我们分析了自 1988 年以来雅加达大都市区发生的剧烈土地变迁：中心城市和城郊地区的大型私营部门开发项目。这些转变受到了雅加达在全球政治经济进程中不断变化的交汇位置和印度尼西亚混合型政治经济的影响。虽然受新自由化的影响，但印度尼西亚的政治经济是一个混合型的形态，新自由化与大多数城市长期存在的、富有韧性的寡头力量结构和竞争共同发展。三大持续性特征塑造了这些转变：印度尼西亚大型企业集团的开发部门和独立开发商的支配性优势；将开发业与国家行为者联系起来的精英非正式网络的塑造作用；外资对开发业的参与和投资稳步增加，尤其近期加速增长。我们确定了三个以不同类型城市转型为特征的时代。专制式新自由化城市规划期（1988-1997），城郊购物中心开发占主导，此时印度尼西亚大型开发商利用了与苏哈托家族的密切联系。1997 年亚洲金融危机之后，这些公司因债务增加而变得脆弱。因此，后苏哈托民主新自由化城市规划期（1998-2005）是一个最小投资时期，可资一提的只有雅加达的购物中心促进了从 1997 年开始的消费主导型复苏策略，以及精英非正式性的积极重组。重新调整的新自由化城市规划期（2006 年至今）见证了主要开发商的复苏，包括外资在内的融资渠道重新建立，以及在雅加达和城郊新城镇建设更加壮观的超大型综合开发项目。
Neil Smith's Scale Jones, John Paul; Leitner, Helga; Marston, Sallie A. ...
Antipode,
January 2017, Volume:
49, Issue:
S1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In this essay, part of a special issue acknowledging the scholarship of Neil Smith, we trace his contributions to conceptualizing scale. From his important foundational text, Uneven Development, to ...his later works that fashioned a more malleable, constructivist, and socio‐cultural approach, Neil Smith made lifelong contributions to our understanding of the processes of scale production—contributions that have forever altered how we understand the relationships among space, capitalism, and politics.
Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility ...that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious engagement with both mainstream and critical Anglophone urban theory, challenging the seeming naturalness of knowledge claims through rigorous theoretical and empirical scrutiny from the standpoint of peripheral perspectives located outside the core. This entails recognizing the existence of a shifting ecosystem of critical urban theories, putting these into even‐handed critical conversation with one another. The collective resilience of urban theory will be dependent upon ongoing engagement across such diversity. At the heart of such an ecosystem are shifts in practice, seeking a new comparative analytic that destabilizes the universalism of the dominant norm, against which all other exemplars are to be compared, with the imperative of taking the field seriously.
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