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This paper provides an empirical overview of housing tenure transitions in Australia, the UK and the USA during a period of unprecedented economic instability in 2001–2017. Focusing on the neglected theme of episodic homeownership, we profile those who straddle the tenure divide by moving into and out of renting from time to time. Using panel data we model this 'churn' in three jurisdictions, showing that even the dislocation of a global financial crisis does not eclipse the independent impact of life events during rental spells. We find that whatever individuals bring from prior ownership, shocks occurring during a rental spell – unemployment, loss of a partner, additional dependent children – can be sufficient to prevent return. Churning is also health- and age-selective, adding 'drop-out' among the old to 'lock-out' for the young as a policy concern. Even those who successfully regain owner-occupation increase their credit and investment risks without necessarily improving their housing position. Overall 'churners' are a diverse constituency whose life chances are powerfully shaped by episodic ownership: what they share is time spent in an unacknowledged, under-instituted space between tenures where there is latent demand for innovative financial services and untapped potential for radical policy shifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking up the geographer's task of following and defetishizing the commodity, this research taps into the United States (US) federal banking data to locate the commodity "money". Law is used to specify money's locations. Relative to the size of its economy, Utah's banks report a lopsided share of US money. This paper unmasks important social relations embedded in the money commodities located in Utah's banks by tracing the history of US banking law, which has played a leading role in the processes responsible for Utah's outsized share of the sub-national monetary landscape. Banking law determined the scope and type of business in which banking firms and their corporate affiliates could engage. Throughout the 20th century, investment banks and commercial firms struggled to claim legal rights to engage in business combinations once deemed illegal: combining non-banking business with a commercial bank. The state of Utah, in coordination with financial and commercial firms, has expanded the legal and financial space of Industrial Loan Banks (ILBs), historically idiosyncratic chartered banks exempt from regulations separating banking firms from non-banking business. Utah marketed their banking charters to global, systemically important financial institutions and large commercial conglomerates, which then established or acquired ILB subsidiaries within the state. From Utah, the die had been cast: the largest non-banking firms on the planet were now legally empowered to accumulate capital in ways that had heretofore been forbidden at other locations. American banking had been transformed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding residential mobility, housing affordability, and the geography of neighborhood advantage and disadvantage relies on robust information about housing search processes and housing markets. Existing data about housing markets, especially rental markets, suffer from accuracy issues and a lack of temporal and geographic flexibility. Data collected from online rental platforms that are commonly used can help address these issues and hold considerable promise for better understanding the full distribution of available rental homes. However, realizing this promise requires a careful assessment of potential sources of bias as online rental listing platforms may perpetuate inequalities similar to those found in physical spaces. This paper approaches the production of rental advertisements as a social process driven by both contextual and property level factors. We compare data from two online platforms for the 100 most populated metropolitan areas in the United States to explore inequality in digital rental listing spaces and understand what characteristics are associated with over and underrepresentation of advertisements in certain areas. We find similar associations for socioeconomic measures between platforms and across urban and suburban parts of these metropolitan areas. In contrast, the importance of racial and ethnic composition, as well as broader patterns of segregation, for online representation differs substantially across space and platform. This analysis informs our understanding of how online platforms affect housing search dynamics through their biases and segmentation, and highlights the potential and limits in using the data available on these platforms to produce small area rental estimates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses 'Build to Rent' (BTR), a new form of tenure in London's housing market. We examine the ways in which private and public sector actors have shaped the context of BTR's emergence, and developed a model for delivery in London. We argue they relied on and constructed narratives of negativity about the private rental sector, which were juxtaposed with their product to position BTR as a solution to part of London's housing crisis. Building on this, and leveraging an emerging but supportive institutional context, real estate professionals have adapted a US model to the UK. We argue that both the narrative-generating activities and the model development reveal tensions, which help theorise the ways new models of financing housing emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Foucauldian literature on the 'financialisation of everyday life' has documented the way neoliberal discourses and practices call forth willing entrepreneurial-investorial and debtor financialised subjects. However, recent qualitative studies on the lived experiences of financialisation suggested that financialised households are often unwilling to adopt the subjectivities of neoliberal discourse (which we call 'reluctant financialisation') and only selectively draw on their elements (referred to as 'variegated subjectivities'). This paper uses quantitative data to examine whether willing or reluctant financialisation is more widespread and if there are geographical, cross-country differences; and to assess the 'variegated subjectivities' argument. We conduct two studies: in the first, we compare the extent to which financialised households embrace key aspects of the financialised subjectivities called forth by neoliberal discourse in the mature financialised economy of the United States vs newly financialising Hungary. In the second, we examine the 'variegated subjectivities' hypothesis in Hungary. Our results show, first, that the majority of financialised households do not hold the financialised subject position fostered by neoliberal discourse. Second, they lend support to the 'variegated subjectivities' hypothesis. This means that reluctance, rather than whole-hearted embracement of neoliberal subjectivities is the main experience of financialisation. Household financialisation is neither driven nor legitimised by households 'buying into' neoliberal discourses. Although this may indicate a larger resistance potential in everyday life than previously assumed, we suggest a more negative interpretation: that of 'domesticated neoliberalism', which does not require neoliberal subjects but co-opts households' existing moral economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurship is often seen as the cure-all solution for poverty reduction. Proponents argue that it leads to job creation, higher incomes and lower poverty rates in the cities in which it occurs. Others argue that many entrepreneurs are actually creating low-productivity firms serving local markets. Yet, despite this debate, little research has considered the impact of entrepreneurship on poverty in cities. This paper addresses this gap using a panel of US cities for the period between 2005 and 2015. We hypothesize that the impact of entrepreneurship will depend on whether it is in tradeable sectors, so likely to have positive local multiplier effects, or non-tradeable sectors, which may saturate local markets. We find that entrepreneurship in tradeables reduces poverty and increases incomes for non-entrepreneurs, a result we confirm using an instrumental variable approach, taking the inheritance of entrepreneurial traits as the instruments. In contrast, while there are some economic benefits from non-tradeable entrepreneurship, we find these are not large enough to reduce poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1996, a Guatemalan woman named Rody Alvarado was granted asylum in the United States but the decision was revoked three years later, triggering a controversy over border control, domestic violence and the standards of refugee protection. Through an intersectional, geographical and historical excavation of Alvarado's case, I illustrate how adjudicators justified revoking asylum by initially framing her as a victim of unfortunate domestic abuse and then as a "scalar threat" to the spatial and legal order. By tracing the gendered and racialized discursive tactics and legal maneuvers deployed to prevent her from winning asylum, I demonstrate the raced, classed and gendered logics that structured legal decision-making and the pivotal role of intimate violence in processes of legal border control. Through a deep contextualization of Alvarado's case, the paper advances critical and feminist geopolitical scholarship on the mutual constitution of the global and the intimate. In particular, I seek to advance feminist legal archeology as a methodology in political geography to make visible the discursive tactics and legal maneuvers involved in the struggle to delineate juridical and territorial borders, specifically as they relate to gender violence. I conclude by discussing how Alvarado's case demonstrates the transcalar quality of the intimate in legal reasoning and the ways in which scale is differently constructed through the legal process to retain control over which bodies have access to political asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the development of a Place-Based Food Insecurity and Vulnerability Index (PFIVI), which incorporates six indicators and 30 variables. It also presents an application of this Index within the context of Philadelphia, a postindustrial U.S. city. The paper argues that in order to thoroughly measure a multidimensional socioeconomic problem that is tied to the built environment (e.g., food insecurity and vulnerability), the use of participatory and mixed-methods approaches in GIS (e.g., participatory GIS or PGIS) may produce more comprehensive results compared to other commonly used methods. This paper makes an intervention in the food environment literature, which tends to analyze food access in a narrow way, by applying a methodology conceptually grounded in community food security and operationalized through a PGIS project. It also contributes to still-evolving PGIS methodologies by directly engaging stakeholders in a complicated GIS-based analytical process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is primarily concerned with the accessibility of airports located in small and geographically isolated communities. Specifically, it carries out a sensitivity analysis to derive rates of change for the parameters of a spatial interaction model applied to empirical air passenger trip data, and interprets the results focusing on the local airports subsidized by the Essential Air Service program. An empirical trip based accessibility measure is developed for individual airports in the contiguous US air transportation system. The measure enables us to capture the distinctive roles of small airports, which primarily function as regional associates of nearby cities and entrances for long-haul trips via major hub(s) to continental-scale connections. We observe the geographic and temporal variability of accessibility among airports, regarding the external factors including the dynamics of air carriers’ routing schemes, as well as global and local circumstances. Their impacts on passenger journey lengths are substantial at the local airports due to the few available connections. This issue has received less attention in existing subsidy program assessments. Furthermore, we explore the geographic distribution of non-subsidized local airports showing similar accessibility conditions. This paper enhances prior development by showing that the rates of change in accessibility scores are largely stable over recent national air passenger data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contractual agreements are becoming increasingly important for city governments seeking to manage urban development. Contractual governance involves direct relations between the local state and different public and private actors and citizens. Although abundant literature exists on public–private partnerships related to urban development projects, agreements made between citizens, interest organizations and market parties, such as Community Benefits Agreements remain under-explored and under-theorized. While it may seem that the state is absent from contemporary forms of contractual governance, such agreements remain highly intertwined with government policies. The central aim of this paper is to better conceptualize Community Benefits Agreement practices in order to build understanding of how contractual governance caters for direct end-user involvement in urban development, and to yield insights into its potential as to render development processes more inclusive. Based on academic literature in planning and law, expert interviews and several case studies in New York City, this paper conceptualizes end-user involvement in urban development projects and innovates within urban planning and governance theory through the use of two new concepts—project collectivity and the image of a fourth chair. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With its corresponding concepts of societal, territorial, and network embeddedness, firm embeddedness offers a theoretical framework for analyzing how retailers develop strategies and business models determined by their home country context, but also adapted to new places, consumers, and networks. This paper uses firm embeddedness to examine food retailer adaptation within a changing home market, focusing on Wal-Mart’s efforts to implement local produce sourcing in the U.S. Growing consumer interest in local food has sufficiently shifted the competitive landscape within the U.S. market that Wal-Mart and other food retailers have sought to incorporate local produce into their operations. This paper asks whether Wal-Mart’s core lean retailing strategy facilitates or impedes such efforts to localize its U.S. produce supply chains. Qualitative field research conducted in 2011–2012 in one U.S. region centered on semi-structured interviews with 27 fresh fruit and vegetable producers involved in Wal-Mart’s local produce supply chains and 20 representatives of organizations facilitating commercial relationships between local growers and Wal-Mart. We find that the lean retailing model developed by Wal-Mart in response to historical circumstances in U.S. retailing and central to its present global retail dominance also limits Wal-Mart’s ability to engage in the bottom-up learning and adaptation to local contexts necessary for adjusting to the new competitive environment of local food. Wal-Mart’s centralized management and distribution systems, practices of cutting out intermediaries, and emphasis on standardization all presented some barriers to establishing the territorial and network embeddedness that could facilitate adaptation. However, we conclude that rather than simply failing to adapt to the challenges of localization, Wal-Mart applied a hybrid strategy in its local produce sourcing program. This hybrid strategy combined lean retailing—Wal-Mart’s traditional basis of competition—with selected, rather than comprehensive aspects of localization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While immigration policymaking has traditionally been the sole prerogative of nation states, research has documented increased instances of migration policymaking at sub-national levels across migrant-receiving societies. This paper examines the temporally and spatially distinctive dynamics that underscore the adoption of these policies at the county level in the United States. The study considers the implementation of migrant labor market regularizations (LRs) for the time period 2004–2014. LRs are defined as discrete arenas of policymaking at the sub-national level that affect aspects of migrant workers' status in labor markets and include laws and ordinances related to: anti-solicitation, language access, local enforcement of federal immigration law, and employment verification. Utilizing a multilevel event histories model, we analyze data from a unique dataset of over 5000 LR policies across 2959 counties in the United States, and address two research questions: (1) What are the social, economic, and political factors that influence the adoption of LRs by counties and municipalities in the United States; and (2) do policy adoption trends that occurred during 2004–2014 indicate a unique type of diffusion pattern? We find that the adoption of LRs by county governments are influenced by the racialization of immigration discourse and by policy behaviors at the municipal and state government levels, while economic characteristics of the local labor market and perceived ethnic competition from migrants have little direct impact on the probability of policy adoption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the history of governance and speculation on US derivative markets from their emergence in the middle of the 19th century through their incursion into finance in the late 20th century. It explores the importance of derivatives’ extended ancestry in agricultural markets before analyzing their entanglement with financial markets, which came much later in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper is particularly concerned with the institutional inheritance of a set of legal–regulatory boundaries that prioritized price making and the speculative trading that was necessary to produce a consistent flow of prices. This governance system for derivatives is set in contrast with the governance of securities markets, which during the 1930s became subject to more strict government oversight, particularly with regard to speculative trading. The legal boundaries between these two markets began to deteriorate in the 1970s when the Chicago derivative exchanges applied the speculative logic of agricultural derivative markets to financial instruments. The implications of this are twofold. First the paper argues that market mechanisms and market regulation are analytically inseparable, and ought to be studied as such. Second, employing this approach, the paper argues that US financial derivative markets are originally ‘derivative’ not of New York and the finance sector, but of Chicago and the agricultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures-- economics and anthropology--enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North-South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callón), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question--important to environmental expertise and politics--of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we show that the economic crisis commencing in 2007 had different impacts across US Metropolitan Statistical Areas, and seek to understand why differences occurred. The hypothesis of interest is that differences in industrial structure are a cause of variations in response to the crisis. Our approach uses a state-of-the art dynamic spatial panel model to obtain counterfactual predictions of Metropolitan Statistical Area employment levels from 2008 to 2014. The counterfactual employment series are compared with actual employment paths in order to obtain Metropolitan Statistical Area-specific measures of crisis impact, which then are analysed with a view to testing the hypothesis that resilience to the crisis was dependent on Metropolitan Statistical Area industrial structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a historic preservation controversy that surrounded redevelopment efforts in Coney Island during the late 2000s. This longstanding amusement district in Brooklyn, New York inspired widespread agreement about its importance as a heritage destination. The apparent agreement, however, belied profound differences over the aspects of the neighborhood that contributed to its iconic stature and about how they should relate to plans for the area's redevelopment. Because heritage value is not an inherent attribute of the built environment, these divergent cultural claims raise questions about how this value comes about. The literature on heritage finds answers to these questions in processes of community formation. This explanation, however, offers limited insight into the classification of Coney Island features as objects of heritage. I make sense of the valorization of these features in terms of experiential qualities that cast an anachronistic glow over Coney Island and that inspired in preservation advocates a sense of the neighborhood's heritage. By looking beyond community dynamics and examining alternative ways in which heritage value arises, my research contributes to our understanding of the contentiousness that surrounds the redevelopment of historic places. It also poses a challenge to preservation efforts that assume the centrality of communities to heritage value claims, bypassing the anterior question of how people experience and understand places of heritage in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore what Cleveland, Ohio’s program of demolishing abandoned and foreclosed houses can teach us about the logics and politics of post-2007 austerity urbanism. We investigate the emergence of a local political coalition that has promoted demolition as a solution to the city’s housing crisis. In tracking how this political consensus is spatialized, we analyze how demolition both supports and complicates existing theories of austerity urbanism. We theorize demolition as a spatio-temporal fix, a locally negotiated response to the larger-scale political-economic limits imposed by neoliberal austerity. This fix occurs at both the neighborhood level, where demolitions clear land for future reinvestment, and at the regional level, where the increasingly more-than-urban nature of the US housing crisis allows demolitions to gain regional support among fragmented municipalities. In the seemingly paradoxical pursuit of demolition as a growth strategy, political actors in cities like Cleveland aggressively push to tear down the city in a desperate attempt to save it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing orientation of urban governance toward managing territory as a collection of real estate markets is an internalization of neoliberal reason, particularly its entrepreneurial logics, which results in an emerging market city, a city restructured in the service of markets and governed as a series of micro-market geographies. This reconfiguration of urban governance in US cities is a transition to the management for markets rather than population. This paper offers a case in which the rendering of the city as a series of markets underpins a multi-million dollar foundation-led planning project in Detroit that reimagines and restructures the role of urban governance in seeking a spatial fix for investment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marked-based reforms in education have garnered the support of politicians, philanthropists, and academics, reworking the nature of public education in the United States. In this paper we explore the methods used to produce consent for market-based reforms of primary and secondary (K-12) schooling in the United States, focusing on two case studies to interrogate how this consent is generated as well as how these reforms are resisted in place. In doing so we illustrate how market-making in public services is a contested terrain and the importance of understanding the nature of their roll-out at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although scholars agree that nationalism remains an important aspect of the new vocabulary of neoliberalism, little is known about how these discourses operate on the ground and in particular contexts. In this paper, we investigate how a specific adaption of national identity, one that underscores the values of cultural integrity, is used to naturalize neoliberal shifts in the tequila industry. Tequila has long circulated in the images and myths of Mexican identity. However, in the last two decades, the Mexican government has increasingly relied on tequila's reputation as the nation's 'spirit' to obscure changes in tequila regulatory policies that are linked to broader neoliberal changes in Mexico. Extralocal actors--in particular, multinational companies--have more influence over the direction the industry is taking and the institutions that regulate it, while tequila production is increasingly untethered from the communities and traditions that make it distinct. Here, we examine how private and public actors mobilize the language of authenticity, place, and quality to justify the adoption of neoliberal measures in the tequila industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bicycling for transportation in American cities has grown dramatically in the past twenty years, symbolizing the return of capital investment and commercial vitality to formerly disinvested urban cores. The cycling 'renaissance' taking place to the greatest extent in gentrifying neighborhoods has been noted, but the processes relating cycling and gentrification have gone largely unexplored. This paper examines the early role that bicycle advocacy organizations in San Francisco played in articulating the specifically economic value of bicycle infrastructure investment. This narrative is now commonplace, and widely applied both to neighborhood revitalization and urban competition for 'talent'. This alliance of bicycle advocacy with the 'livable' turn of gentrification raises serious questions for those who would pursue a more democratic and socially just politics of the bicycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]