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This paper critically questions the state's hostile takeover of planning regulation followed by experimentation initiated by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has been seeking to subordinate the planning apparatus to market calculus and to short-term political ends. To substantiate this argument, I have examined a large corpus of documents (official government documents, planning records, and court appeals and rulings, and NGO reports) and analyzed the media coverage between 2011 and 2016. By introducing fast-track planning that is firmly controlled by the central state and focusing on the fictitious delivery of housing units, the structure of the planning regulation has dramatically changed. Further, two already-dominant government ministries (Finance and Defense) have been significantly empowered, becoming the supervisors of the reformed planning system. In a state captivated by neoliberal fixation and embroiled in a housing crisis, the restructuring of planning governance has been a means to an end. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why and how do alternative economies emerge, how do they develop and what is their contribution, if any, to transformative politics? Alternative economies proliferate in the countries worse hit by economic crisis and austerity, such as Spain or Greece. Yet the existing literature is stuck in a counter-productive division between celebration and critique. We move beyond this division applying philosopher Daniel Bensaïd's understanding of politics to two alternative food economies, one in the Basque Country and one in Greece. We illuminate the activist strategies and specific conjunctures within which the two alternatives emerged and explain how they develop in the face of political-economic barriers. Alternative economies, we conclude, can be transformational when they are inserted in activist strategies directed to extend conflict, social struggles and challenge the capital-state nexus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the affective memories of Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I reflect on how bodies and spaces connect and disconnect at violent junctures, and on the vital forces vulnerability and precariousness ignite in displacement. Throughout the geography of separations and shifting shelters, refugee women engaged in place-making, transforming the transience enforced by their continuous evictions into the permanence of home, not as a static identity-place-nation, but as a site of dynamic affective, social relations and connections. Read through Michael Hardt's metaphor of 'social muscles', as bodily and emotional drives that blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for concrete relations and for existing in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing attention to the governing role of capital accumulation and its interaction with the state, this study examines the dynamics of the new wave of suburbanization in China, which is characterized by the development of new towns. New towns essentially function as a spatial fix in China's contemporary accumulation regime. Rather than resulting from capital switching from the primary to the secondary circuits, new towns help to collect funds for the leverage of industrial capital and thus simultaneously sustain both circuits. Meanwhile, the development of new towns is also a process of territorial development, in which municipal governments expand the space of accumulation under strengthened fiscal and land controls and develop a metropolitan structure. Underlying the specific form and dynamics, however, is the worldwide trend of capital switching from declining manufacturing industries in developed countries to the new investment frontier in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades financial relationships between conservation and extraction have become conspicuously close. Both sectors unabashedly publicized these business deals as a form of greening extraction and marketizing conservation. This essay uses a case study in Perú to propose a tentative theory of how this seemingly incompatible but very profitable union unfolds on the ground. The development of fictitious commodities in nature for each sector is examined and the labor theory of value is combined with the labor of persuasive work to expose a fundamental shared need in both sectors: in Perú's contemporary political and economic context extractive and conservation actors increasingly must persuade landowners-usually indigenous communities-to allow for specific forms of capital to flow through their territory. In some cases this need to secure the 'social license' is shared across sectors and the labor to secure the license can be undertaken together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on the materiality of cities has been criticized by critical urban scholars for being overly descriptive and failing to account for political economy. We argue that through the conceptualization of urban metabolisms advanced by ecological economists and industrial ecologists, materialist and critical perspectives can be mutually enriching. We focus on conflict that has erupted in Delhi, India. Authorities have embraced waste-to-energy incinerators, and wastepickers fear that these changes threaten their access to waste, while middle class residents oppose them because of their deleterious impact on ambient air quality. We narrate the emergence of an unlikely alliance between these groups, whose politics opposes the production of a waste-based commodity frontier within the city. We conclude that the materiality and political economy of cities are co-constituted, and contestations over the (re)configuration of urban metabolisms span these spheres as people struggle to realize situated urban political ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a historically contextualised intellectual history of the entangled development of three competing post-war economic approaches, viz the Austrian, Chicago and post-Walrasian schools, as three forms of neoliberalism. Taking our cue from Foucault's reading of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality under which the social is organised through 'economic incentives', we engage with the recent discussions of neoliberal theory on three accounts: neoliberalism is read as an epistemic horizon including not only 'pro-' but also 'post-market' positions articulated by post-Walrasian economists who claim that market failures necessitate the design of 'incentive-compatible' remedial mechanisms; the Austrian tradition is distinguished from the Chicago-style pro-marketism; and the implications of the differences among the three approaches on economic as well as socio-political life are discussed. The paper maintains that all three approaches promote the de-politicisation of the social through its economisation albeit by way of different theories and policies. © 2013 The Author. Antipode © 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No abstract is available for this article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]