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This paper examines the shifting fortunes of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant in California to better understand how asset owners are dealing with an increasingly-significant problem in changing energy landscapes: the devaluation of large fixed capital assets. In 2016, Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced a Joint Proposal to retire the Diablo Canyon plant by 2025, the result of a negotiated compromise with labor unions, environmental and community groups. Heralded by many commentators as a model for "just transitions" in the energy sector, this agreement has lately been called into question as new subsidies and political coalitions have emerged to support for the plant's continued operation. This paper investigates the political and economic conditions for the Joint Proposal as an example of "negotiated devaluation," aiming to understand why and how this strategy took shape, and what lessons it offers for other transition processes. Linking literatures on just transitions and devaluation in the energy sector, we show how negotiated devaluation may offer an emerging strategy for owners of energy assets to manage decline in a changing energy landscape. The case also demonstrates the political contingency of these coalitions and the transitions they subtend, and the limited dimensions of justice that might be affirmed in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In California, wildfires caused by electrical infrastructure have left the state's investor-owned power utilities with major and growing liabilities. But even in such an incendiary environment, the financial industry has demonstrated that it can profit from disaster. This paper uses the 2019-2020 bankruptcy of Pacific Gas & Electric to explain how. In it, I show how "risk" in California's electricity industry is legally constituted, mediated, and allocated. First, I explain how financial perceptions of wildfire risk in California's electricity industry are shaped by the state's legal and regulatory environment, and how the law is used to manage this risk. I then turn to PG&E's bankruptcy to show how litigation functions as a financial strategy. In court, risk is endogenous to legal-financial practice. I develop the concepts of "legal arbitrage" and "leverage" to explain how law mediates the relationship between risk and finance. I adapt the concept of legal arbitrage to show how financial assets (like those in a utility with unprecedented wildfire liabilities) can possess both legal and market value, which can and often do diverge in circumstances of distress. I use the term leverage to refer to a particular kind of legal-financial power which enables actors to transfer risk away from themselves and onto others. In working through these concepts, I argue that that mainstream perceptions of risk in the financial industry are inadequate, especially in an era of increasing climate insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tax increment financing (TIF) is a mechanism used by municipal governments throughout the United States to fund public and private urban development projects. This paper examines the trajectories of TIF in the state of California and the City of Chicago, where the expansion of TIF as a mechanism for publicly financed development is inextricable from disinvestments in social reproduction and the transformation of public funding for K-12 education. Taking seriously the divergent paths of TIF in each case, we argue that the framework of social reproduction helps expand the scope of TIF as a "policy in place," bringing into view other path and place-dependent factors that shape the adaptation and implementation of public finance mechanisms. Bridging the literature on urban policy and feminist political economy, we suggest that scholars must investigate the place-specific entanglements of social reproduction and public finance if we are to understand how mechanisms such as TIF are adopted, expanded, or curtailed within the broader framework of neoliberal urban governance. In making such an intervention, we expand on calls to attend to the ways public finance can heighten or mitigate economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses three recent struggles over public space in California’s East Bay (Berkeley and Oakland) to critically interrogate the ‘end of public space’ thesis. Developing a historical analysis of the discourse of the ‘end of public space’ over the past two and a half decades, the paper shows that dismissal of arguments about the end of public space both ignores the dialectical nature of the original interventions and comes at a real political and scholarly cost. The paper concludes that the tendency towards the end of public space in capitalism is closely related to the necessity for capitalism to produce abstract space. Both this tendency and this necessity are struggled over and contradictory, and it is out of these struggles and contradictions that actually-existing public space is produced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. Vulnerability is typically understood as a condition besetting poor and marginalized communities. Frequently ignored in these discussions are the experiences of those who live in more affluent areas. This paper seeks to more closely explain vulnerability at its interface with affluence. The aim is to challenge uncritical explanations of vulnerability. We also offer alternative ways of conceptualizing vulnerability as a material condition and social construct that acknowledges broader cultural, ecological, and economic conditions, which may offset, maintain or deepen true risk exposure. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents and emergency service managers, the paper presents a suite of vulnerability categories that intersect to create two concomitant and competing conditions. First, vulnerability is variegated between households within communities, including those in more affluent areas. Second, household vulnerability is collectively altered, and oftentimes reduced, by the broader affluent community within which individual households reside. By paying closer attention to the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface the paper reveals a recursive process, which is significant in the context of building more disaster resilient communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critics often mourn a loss of publicness in cities due to the increased presence of antiterror security zones and related behavioral and access controls, although recent work suggests that security landscapes have shifted from the hard, intense, militarized architecture of the late 1990s-early 2000s to a softer, less obtrusive approach more commonly seen today. Nonetheless, these studies are mostly anecdotal in nature: few studies attempt to back these claims with empirical evidence and even fewer connect this physical security imposition with the policies and plans governing its implementation and operation. In this paper I describe results of site visits to Civic Centers and Financial Districts in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. In each neighborhood I catalog security landscapes using a simple tool to assess the intensity, duration, and location of individual security zones. I find that the security landscape covers between 3.4% and 35.7% of publicly accessible space in the districts studied, and that this landscape is most prevalent and intense in New York City. I also find that security zones governed by multistakeholder networks are more intense and militarized than zones managed by a single entity. By understanding how the policies impact physical security, albeit in a relatively small sample of cities and districts, we can better predict what the future of urban security measures might hold. This paper provides empirical grounding to more common theoretical speculations regarding the future of the urban security landscape in the global West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence over the last 30-40 years of what is variously termed edge city, edgeless, and postsuburban development in North America and elsewhere raises a set of challenges for urban theory and existing ways of understanding the politics of urban growth and management. These challenges and their global import have been outlined in their broadest terms by members of a 'Los Angeles School'. In this paper we try to develop the detail of some of these challenges in ways that might allow for comparative analysis. We begin by considering three analytical dimensions along which distinctively postsuburban settlements might be identified. These dimensions are not without their limitations but we regard them as a heuristic device around which to centre ongoing comparative research. We then go on to highlight three political contradictions attending postsuburban growth which appear to flow from some of these defining dimensions. To the extent that such postsuburban growth and politics are distinctive, they pose important challenges to established theories of urban politics. We briefly consider these challenges in the conclusion of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los Angeles in the United States. In their wider national and international frameworks movements in both countries continue to contest unjust forms of urbanization characterized by neoliberal initiatives that undermine the socioeconomic status of low-income residents. These movements are constituted by relations that stretch across several geographical levels. There remain, however, significant differences in their spatial organizational form: Rotterdam is characterized by loose networks of local associations which relate to constellations of nationally based Christian churches, unions, and humanist organizations, whereas networks between associations, unions, and university activists in Los Angeles have undergone institutionalization at the urban level. We show that movement territorialization is particularly evident at the urban level in Los Angeles while embedded at the national level in the shadow of state - corporatist institutional legacies and power relations in Rotterdam. By drawing upon important insights from several economic geographers, we develop a conceptual framework for explaining the spatialities of contention and contribute to contemporary controversies over relationality, territoriality, and political action at a variety of scales. A normative implication of the paper concerns the learning capacities of contesting actors to forge alliances and achieve their ambitions within path-dependent institutional frameworks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austerity appears to be a globally coordinated restructuring process, where international and national governments cooperate to stymie economic crisis and socialize the costs of systemic economic failure. However, austerity is also shaped from the bottomup. This paper examines the 2008 bankruptcy of Vallejo, California. This city of under 120 000 people became the first municipal bankruptcy in the Great Recession period. We explore how it became the first to fail. In doing so, we outline the finances of a city whose entrepreneurial activities continued to flounder, making it a good candidate for austerity reforms. However, we also find the city home to a political movement long predicting a municipal default. When economic crisis hit, this movement pushed for the city to make an unprecedented test of Chapter 9 bankruptcy law. Vallejo’s bankruptcy, and the related changes to Chapter 9 law, are therefore interpreted as events that were generated by systemic conditions but ultimately precipitated by decisions taken at the municipal level. We therefore call for austerity to be understood as both a top-down and bottom-up process of state restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Turkey and California suffer similar wildfire risks, they have developed diametrically opposed flre-suppression strategies: the former adopted an increasingly centralized strategy, while the latter depends upon a highly decentralized system. This paper is a comparative analysis that relates the politics of land use in wildland-urban interfaces (WUIs) to this divergence in flrefighting strategies. Our argument is that the evolution of the divergent fire-suppression strategies in California and Turkey are linked to two different types of rent-seeking behavior. Developers and landed interest seek absolute rent in Turkey and differential rent in California. The decentralized strategy in California allows property prices to be distinguished between areas of low and high protection, and commodifies safety as a form of investment regulating the market prices of land. In Turkey, the tendency toward centralization of firefighting is a part of the composite political strategy to open new land for development by completing the hitherto unfinished cadastral records of the WUIs. Thus, the centralized firefighting strategy leads indirectly to extensive commodification of the WUIs in Turkey and expands the national land market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper tests for excessive employment agglomeration among twenty southern California manufacturing industry clusters using two methods claiming to control for the natural and planned geography constraining industrial location generally. We find broad consistency across the alternative tests; although fewer industry clusters test statistically significant for agglomeration or dispersion using the weighted kernel density estimator than when we use the more established weighted case-control approach. Similarly, the observed values for the former statistic test significant over a subset of the spatial scales over which the case-control method tests significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper it is argued that the spatial segmentation of financial services in urban areas, generated by a combination of financial market characteristics, transnational movements of people and capital, cultural practices, ethnic resources, and social networks may produce, at the early stages of the home mortgage application process, a sorting of Asian borrowers into mortgage channels that may differ from those of other minority groups and may have, in the long run, a different impact on the exposure and vulnerability of borrowers to adverse lending practices and products. The study employs multinomial logistic regression and GIS analysis of annual Home Mortgage Disclosure Data and explores trends in home mortgage loan applications to different types of lenders by Asian, white, and other minority prospective borrowers in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Findings indicate that Asian applicants feature a greater propensity to apply for mortgage loans at very large mainstream banks and Asian-owned banks than at subprime lenders compared with other minority prospective borrowers. The larger presence of competing financial institutions in Asian immigrant markets may result in a greater access by Asian prospective borrowers to more options and, possibly, to higher quality and affordable mortgage products than other pools of minority applicants. At the same time, some of the social and cultural resources typically found in ethnic enclaves may affect how Asian applicants react to the outreach practices, sorting procedures, and products offered by different lenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alleys are enigmatic, neglected features of the urban fabric. In this paper we explore the distribution, physical features, activity patterns, and resident perceptions of alleys in one major US city, Los Angeles, California. We do so through an integrated mixed-methods strategy involving participatory research with community-based organizations, spatial analysis, physical audits and behavioral observation of alleys, and focus groups. Results show that most alleys in Los Angeles are underutilized and walkable, quiet, and clean, although they can be, and are often perceived as, dirty and unsafe. Alley density is greatest in park-poor, low-income Latino and African-American neighborhoods. Alleys represent unrealized community assets that could be transformed by urban planners and managers into `green infrastructure' to simultaneously offer multiple ecological, economic, and social benefits—including urban walkability and mobility, play space and green cover, biodiversity conservation, and urban runoff infiltration—and thereby to contribute to a more sustainable urbanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geography of hometessness is often characterized as containment in marginalized spaces of cities or as placelessness necessitating continuous travel. These characterizations, which reflect discourses about 'the homeless' as an imagined deviant homogeneous group, have had substantial effects on policy formation and critiques of punitive turns in urban governance. Suggested policy responses frequently assume straightforward relationships between power/powerlessness and mobility/immobility binaries that do not appropriately portray actual mobility patterns of homeless individuals. Through focus groups and structured interviews, this paper examines the daily mobility of homeless adults in Long Beach, California, to identify the ways in which the everyday travel of homeless individuals compares with these 'imagined' characterizations and with national US household travel patterns. Results show that homeless mobility is highly spatially constrained and structured by sociocultural relations of stigmatization, economic productivity, and personal responsibility that are reflected in the operational conventions and institutional practices of transportation and social welfare systems. Nonetheless, during the course of a day, homeless individuals move among spaces where they experience varying levels of inclusion and exclusion, thus complicating static, homogeneous characterizations. This analysis contributes to both the urban transport and social geography literatures by demonstrating the value of combining sociocultural approaches to the study of mobility with more typical transportation geography analyses of individual travel behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to parks and recreational facilities, as well as their quality, congestion, and affordability, relates to physical activity levels and, in turn, various health outcomes. Yet park and recreational resources are often insufficient and unevenly distributed within metropolitan regions. This paper documents and analyzes the allocation of federal, state, special district, municipal, and nonprofit resources to parks and recreation facilities across municipalities within the Los Angeles region. Results indicate that local funding for parks and recreation resources is highly uneven (from less than 1 to over 500 per capita annually). Because most park and recreation spending originates at the local level, fiscally healthier cities allocate more resources to these uses. State and nonprofits funds tend to favor middle-income communities and fail to equalize spending. Inner-ring suburbs with large minority populations, and low-income exurban communities are most likely to suffer from low expenditure. Federal devolution, increased localization of service provision, and limited intergovernmental transfers have resulted in large intrametropolitan disparities in the distribution of resources for parks and recreation, ultimately shaping the landscape of health risks for local populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the spring of 2005, numerous racially motivated, large-scale fights broke out in Los Angeles, California, high schools, from the San Fernando Valley to south Los Angeles. Most of the fighting occurred between youth who identify as ethnic-racial minorities, like Latinos, African-Americans, and Armenians. Just after one such fight involving several hundred students, which quickly became known as a 'race riot' at the school, I conducted a series of interviews with teenage girls asking them what they thought of this outburst of ethnic - racial violence, in their valley school's case between Latinos and Armenians. In the research, girls detailed to me their postracial attitudes (typified by such ideals as 'race doesn't matter, we are all the same'), but their narratives evidenced extreme racial-ethnic segregation and their own racist sentiments. In this paper, I explore this contradiction and focus on how girls articulate multicultural and humanist ideals to situate themselves as antiracists. However, concurrently, I argue that the girls' racialized resentments of others illustrate their profound and wounded investments in difference. The girls' narratives and identities also indicate why multicultural attempts to foster respect of diversity in this urban high school have failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper opens with an identification of the phenomenon of employment relocation (runaway production) from Hollywood and the concomitant formation of satellite production centers in other parts of the world. A brief theoretical analysis of this issue is provided, emphasizing the role of scale effects and transactions costs. The empirical record of the decentralization of film-shooting activities from Hollywood over the period from the early 1980s to the early 2000s is reviewed. We describe the effects of these activities on the rise and consolidation of the Vancouver film-production complex, and we engage in a broad discussion of the spatial and economic structure of the complex. We subsequently show that many places in other countries (for example, Australia, New Zealand, Romania, the Czech Republic, Mexico, South Africa, and elsewhere) are now competing strongly with Vancouver for film-shooting activities from Hollywood. We predict that this competition is likely to intensify greatly over the next decade or so, and that the global geography of film-shooting activities will almost certainly become increasingly more variegated as new studio complexes open up around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

his paper presents an object-centred account of the politics of memory at a National Historic Landmark: Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco. Once a port of entry and detention for Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States, the Immigration Station exists today as a historic site managed by California State Parks who are in the midst of implementing a new interpretive programme with a mission to: ‘turn a history of exclusion into a future of inclusion’. The discussion fixes on three objects located within the park which play an important role in the representation of the site's past despite being labelled as ‘noncontributing’ in the site's National Historic Landmark's nomination. The biographies of a bronze bell, a granite monument, and a group of wax mannequins as sketched out here suggest novel ways to be sensitive to the many and often unexpected contributions brought by the materiality of an object in practices of remembrance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine, in two separate analyses, actual and planned residential moves. Although we now have robust models and substantive empirical analysis of residential mobility, especially of the role of housing consumption and the variables that trigger residential moves, we are less clear about how the model applies to minority households and in diverse ethnic settings. We use data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study—a longitudinal study of mobility and neighborhood change in the Los Angeles region—to contrast the mobility outcomes for white and Latino households. In a separate analysis we examine planned mobility and extend the analysis of the role of neighborhood variables in explaining expected mobility. Through the incorporation of measures of neighborhood satisfaction and dissatisfaction we find, as hypothesized, that low levels of satisfaction and whether or not the neighborhood is perceived as ‘close-knit’ are modest predictors of the likelihood of future moves. However, the additive effect of neighborhood variables on intentions, beyond the structural effects of age and housing needs, is quite small. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This ethnographic paper examines the complex cultural politics of Tibetan transnational migration by examining racialized everyday practices in Tibetan communities in the San Francisco Bay Area and Boulder, Colorado. After providing an overview of Tibetan migration to the USA, we discuss migrants' contradictory insertion into American racial bipolarism. On the one hand, Tibetans' racialized class positions place them at the lower end of a spectrum of moral deserving and worth. On the other hand, the discursive practices of the transnational Tibet Movement and the traveling of Tibetan Buddhist institutions to the USA `whitens' Tibetans by making them seem particularly worthy and deserving of sponsorship. After exploring the production of Tibetan migrant subjectivities through white sponsorship, we examine how the successful articulation of Tibetan identities for a transnational political struggle is a double-edged sword which has unintended, and sometimes violent consequences. These play out in various ways, including intergenerational struggles over hip-hop and internalized racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the role of claims of global conspiracy in undermining a local environmental planning process known as Natural Heritage 2020 (NH 2020) in Nevada County, California. County officials intended NH 2020 to mitigate the environmental impacts of rapid growth in this gentrifying rural community. This program illustrates the increasing use by land-use planners of landscape-scale approaches derived from conservation biology to protect biodiversity on private land. In Nevada County, this new planning vision met intense resistance. The ensuing struggle demonstrates the conflicts that can arise between social groups with competing visions for the future of the local environment in response to efforts to realize particular visions through land-use planning and policymaking. Opponents perceived a significant threat to their property rights from the use of a landscape-scale vision from conservation biology in county planning, which some depicted as part of a global environmental conspiracy. We explore the links between broader conservation science, ideology, and activism in the case of NH 2020, and suggest that quite real conceptual connections to global conservation politics potentially make local conservation planning efforts susceptible to claims of ‘outside’ interference. Although NH 2020 had no direct link (despite claims by some opponents) to global conservation efforts, the successful use of claims of global conspiracy in efforts to halt the program underscores social realities that planners and scholars need to consider when promoting what they often view as simply ‘good planning.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of migration and financial globalization focus on either the movement of money, with people staying put, or on the movement of people, with little attention to the impact of the money that moves with them. This paper uses in-depth interviews with executives at ethnic-Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles to consider the comovement of people and money. We find that understanding the causes and consequences of this comovement requires adding both ethnic and macrostructural layers to discussions of financial globalization. The forces that have led to the rise of a ChineseAmerican banking sector and to the opening of twenty-one Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles are intertwined: immigration from the Chinese diaspora to the USA, the growth trajectory and financial transformation of East Asia, and the financial and economic evolution of Los Angeles. Ethnic-Chinese foreign-bank offices in Los Angeles have dual roles: they function both as global outposts managing their headquarters' cross-border financial flows, and as localized institutions that are gradually becoming incorporated into Southern California's internal banking and financial markets. Foreign and domestic ethnic-Chinese banks play complementary roles in facilitating ethnic-Chinese economic development in Southern California. Framing these cross-border money-population flows and this cross-border institution building, respectively, are macrostructural constraints rooted in aggregate net financial flows and the changing strategies of global megabanks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability of firms, industries, and regions continually to translate information and knowledge into viable new products, services, and production processes in the face of constantly changing technology and market conditions is increasingly at the core of competitive success in the contemporary economy. Such economic learning is ultimately dependent on the ability of individuals to learn, and yet most of the literature in this area has focused on firms and organizational learning processes, and is only beginning to engage seriously with people's learning processes. This paper explores the links between social learning processes and dynamics of innovation in Silicon Valley, arguing that cross-firm, occupationally based, 'communities of practice' provide a critical context for individuals to learn and maintain the competencies they need to be successful in the region's dynamic but volatile economy. These cross-firm occupational learning communities in many cases are being built through the activities of formal professional associations, which are playing an increasingly important role in providing the organizational infrastructure to sustain these learning communities. Using a case study of an association of women in Internet design and development occupations, the author illustrates the value of such communities in supporting individual and collective learning processes. These findings suggest that economic development strategies could productively be focused on identifying, strengthening, and expanding access to such cross-firm occupational learning communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]