The overreliance of local governments on land finance has resulted in a series of problems in China, which call for the transition of land finance. While existing research focused on the risk and ...sustainability arising from land finance overreliance, an assessment of land finance transition performance is still lacking. Based on neo-liberalism and neo-Marxism theories, we proposed an analytical framework for assessing land finance transition considering market-government interplay. Based on this framework, we evaluated the performance of the market, government, and overall transition among 105 prefecture-level cities using land market data and governmental policy data. The results indicated that market-oriented transition performance declined gradually from the eastern cities to the western and northeastern cities. Government-led transition performance was still low in the central and northeastern cities. Overall, the land finance transition in eastern cities achieved positive progress, contrasting with the lagged progress in northeastern cities because of urban shrinkages and revenue shortages. We further reflected our analytical framework and empirical findings on land finance transition by integrating neoliberal and neo-Marxism approaches and market-state interplay, which can provide insights for the continual transition in the future.
•We reflect land finance transition combining neo-liberalism and neo-Marxism.•Market and government interplay contribute to land finance transition.•Land finance transition performance declines from coast to inland regions.•Government transition remains lagged compared to market transition.•Transition is challenging from imperfect markets and strong state interventions.
Abstract In 1972, designer Emilio Ambasz (b. 1943) organized the symposium “The Universitas Project” at MoMA in New York City. The issue at stake was how the field of design should tackle the ...possibly irresolvable societal, political, and ecological problems of post-industrial society. Ambasz proposed a new design approach, which he named design as a mode of thought, with the aim of building a new research-education institution for design that could tackle the wicked problems ahead. In order to articulate his proposal, Ambasz turned to the speculative realm: discursive design critique, metaphysical cybernetics, design fiction, and storytelling. By critically engaging with some of the participants’ conference presentations, the article first discusses how the concept of the environment was reconfigured by the emerging ecological catastrophe. Then the article discusses ideological responses to the Universitas Project to show how the seemingly different ideological positions between French so-called “radical left” and American “right-wing technocrats” were grounded in the same; all-encompassing uncertainty and a strive for open-endedness. Finally, the article analyses Ambasz’s design fiction writing and the speculative nature of the Universitas and thereby identifies the Universitas as a rare moment in the history of design in which design stopped engaging in the status quo and turned towards a speculative future for finding seeds for new beginnings. The article re-visits the Universitas in order to support a presentist argument: that speculation, discursive design critique, and storytelling might not be sufficient methods on their own to tackle the forthcoming accelerating wicked uncertainties that lie ahead.
ABSTRACT
Contemporary spatial history is founded on the potential for maps and other visualizations to show the historical constructedness of space, usually in broadly neo‐Marxist terms, yet ...neo‐Marxist geographical theory is famously critical of visual representation, especially mapping. At stake in this contradiction isn't just the relationship between digital enthusiasm and spatial theory (or the wider spatial turn), but the theoretical status of the visual itself in spatial scholarship. It raises a crucial question: how does visual material—everything from today's statistical maps and cutting‐edge data graphics to the broader use of primary‐source photographs or drawings—in fact shape our understanding of space, and what theoretical work does it do? By extension, how can humanists make critical theoretical interventions through their own visual production? This article proposes an analytic vocabulary of “visual argument” grounded in an image‐focused rereading of two canonical bodies of work: the neo‐Marxist theory most cited by spatial history (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja) and the conspicuously uncited work of Fernand Braudel. By focusing on how these authors’ illustrations make claims about spatial subjectivity and the historicity of space—especially through visual relationships of background and foreground—I argue for a new way of understanding and responding to this work and to the visual project of spatial history today. A visual analysis highlights not only the limitations of neo‐Marxism but also the pervasiveness of certain assumptions—shared across the neo‐Marxists, Braudel, and digital visualization—about temporality, the natural/human dichotomy, and the methodological tensions between argument and visualization. I present my own mapping of Phoenix as one possibility for an argument‐driven rethinking of familiar visual commitments, which also suggests a broader meditation on the relationship between visual and textual scholarship.
Signalling that ‘humanity’ has radically changed the Earth’s environmental parameters, the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. In this context, neo-Marxist and ...new materialist approaches stand out for the way they oblige social theory to catch up with new material realities. We share the conviction that the Anthropocene might constitute a genuine event for social theory and practice. However, we argue that the search for alternative ways of problematizing and ‘dramatizing’ our eco-political predicament confronts these approaches with unresolved issues of scientism and economic totalization. Looking for another path, we turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS), and especially Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We relay the long-standing focus on nonhuman agency characteristic of this field via Isabelle Stengers’ argument that we must ‘accept’ the reality of Gaia’s intrusion into collective historicity. The challenge posed by Stengers, we suggest, requires the development of an art of immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across diverse ecologies of practice. Extending further than the present preoccupations of Euro-American social theory, other areas within and across environmental history, activism and politics offer sites of resistance as well as experimentation whose conceptual possibilities and practical efficacies have yet to be explored. Slowing down theory sufficiently to learn from these multiple sites, we argue, is the starting point for an approach more adequate to the problems posed by the Anthropocene event.
The roots of the political-economy-of-youth perspective can be traced to the neo-Marxist attempts to account for the youth movements and countercultures of the 1960s and to argue that youth ...constitute a potentially revolutionary 'class'. Although this perspective influenced subcultural views of youth, since the 1980s sociological and cultural studies approaches to youth studies have tended to focus on the disadvantaged and working class rather than the entire youth segment of the population, while becoming increasingly preoccupied with subjectivities rather than the material conditions. Although these approaches to class divisions within the youth segment are useful, there is recent evidence of a systemic proletarianisation of the entire youth population in many countries, raising again materialist concerns and the issue of youth-as-class. Evidence for class-relations between youth and adults with respect to reduced earning power and education-to-work prospects is presented, followed by a critique of current youth-studies approaches that do not provide explanations of the root causes of youth proletarianisation. The paper ends with a call for a revival of the political-economy-of-youth perspective that is capable of generating ideas about solutions to this proletarianisation.
El presente texto explora desde la perspectiva de la historia conceptual la evolución del término comunes digitales (digital commons) desde sus primeras apariciones. En particular, se rastrea la ...forma en que el significado del término comunes digitales sufre la influencia de una nueva modulación del término comunes planteada desde coordenadas neomarxistas. Explorando la forma en que esta acepción neomarxista surgió tras la crisis de 2008 gracias a las intervenciones discursivas de una serie de autores más o menos vinculados con el Midnight Notes Collective, analizamos posteriormente el grado de penetración de esta nueva concepción de los comunes en el ámbito de los comunes digitales. A nuestro juicio, la dispar recepción que reciben estos postulados confirma el carácter esencialmente controvertido del concepto de comunes digitales.
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