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Presents a study on the impact both of production and transportation from changes in taxation or costs of inputs in the United States paper industry. Background of paper production; Analysis of possible variations in tax policies; Comparison of results from scenario analysis; Discussion and conclusions.

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]

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]

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]

The paper explores the interconnections between legal and animal geographies as manifested in American zoos. On the one hand, law shapes not only the zoo's physical facilities, but also the very identity of zoo animals. On the other hand, the peculiarity of zoo animals-and of zoos as public spaces that display such animals-also translates into an anomalous state of zoo laws. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part demonstrates that, despite the numerous official laws that pertain to animals in various settings, exceptions and exemptions that apply to the zoo animal make it into an almost extralegal creature. The second part examines the laws that regulate the zoo's physical facilities, showing how-in this context too-the zoo is regulated mostly through variances and exceptions. The third part focuses on the zoo's self-regulating industry standards, arguing that they provide yet another reason for the peculiar legal state of zoos and their animals. Drawing on a set of interviews, conducted mostly with American zoo professionals, the paper explores the interstitial nature of law, space, and animals, offering a fresh perspective into, and a few interconnections between, the literatures of animal geography and law and geography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the concept of collective housing, notably the North American model of purpose-built cohousing, to understand better the functions of space and time at the neglected scale of collective (colocated) interhousehold collaboration. The defining features of this form of intentional community typically include the clustering of smaller-than-average private residences to maximise shared open spaces for social interaction; common facilities for shared daily use; and consensus-based collective self-governance. This paper critically examines the infrastructures of daily life which evolve from, and ease, collective activity and the shared occupation of space. Discussion draws on observations from eight communities in the UK and USA, using selected ethnographic vignettes to illustrate a variety of alternative temporalities which coincide with a shifting and blurring of privatised dwelling. The resulting analysis exposes multiple temporal scales and innovative uses and meanings of time and space. The paper concludes by speculating on the contemporary significance of collective living arrangements and the role this might play in future sustainability [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the impact of time and space negotiations on the family, personal health and work responsibilities in the U.S. It offers information on financial poverty and time-space interactions that have serious health problem for individuals. It provides information on the condition of young people affected with AIDS in Malawi and Lesotho

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]

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]

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 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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

This paper examines the history of credit scoring in Britain, and how this technology was imported from the US and adapted by the British retail banking sector. It seeks to highlight the elites who develop the social codes embedded within credit scoring software, to offer insight into the complex techno-economic networks that produce the geographies of financial inclusion, exclusion, and differential risk pricing. It is argued that the scientific status of these systems is questionable, due to the social interactions involved within the statistical modelling. Finally, the paper suggests that the spaces of credit are fluid, based upon the frequent social recalibrations of these models [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]

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]

After the 1970s the new urban poverty (NUP) ballooned in Japan and the US, and it evoked policy responses that produced new, rescaled regulatory spaces to contain the poor on the fringe of social rights and the capital circuit. The paper illuminates this process through the comparison of Japanese and US trajectories, both of which, evolving through economic crises, have established unique pathways. The author first constructs a theoretical framework based on Marxian, Polanyian, and Lefebvrean traditions. Then, he compares national-scale poverty regulation in Japan and the US from the 1950s through the 2000s. Lastly, the author examines how the countries' regulation of a major aspect of the NUP--homelessness--intensified multiscalar reseating processes. The paper concludes that regulation of the NUP represents a significant instance of uneven spatial development of capitalism mediated by the state that requires synthetic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I propose to push the frontier of global value chain (G VC) governance analysis through the concept of 'polarity'. Much of the existing GVC literature has focused on 'unipolar' value chains, where one group of 'lead firms' inhabiting a specific function in a chain plays a dominant role in governing it. Some scholars have explored the dynamics of governance in GVCs characterized as 'bipolar', where two sets of actors in different functional positions both drive the chain. I expand this direction further to suggest conceptualizing governance within a continuum between unipolarity and multipolarity. Empirically, I do so by examining the evolutionary dynamics of governance in biofuel value chains, with specific focus on the key regulatory and institutional features that facilitated their emergence and expansion. First, I examine the formation, evolution, and governance of three national/regional value chains (in Brazil, the US, and the EU); then, I provide evidence to support a trend towards the increasing but still partial formation of a global biofuel value chain and examine its governance traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the public self-representations of Muslim American leaders from major Muslim organizations in the United States as articulated in a local community engagement. I argue that the prevalent self-representations of the 'mainstream Muslim' and 'American Islam' have become politicized terms in an effort to construct a political and religious constituency in resistance to rampant Islamophobic expressions. By stressing compatibility and reconciliation with American political and social life, a counternarrative of citizenship and belonging emerges. Hence, the self-representations also shed important light on how Muslims as a minority group negotiate and perform politics of belonging and inclusion in the United States through the appropriation of powerful notions of what represents 'the mainstream'. As any religious definition, 'American Islam' has to be understood as a particular discursive product specifi c to time and place. While highlighting hybridity and fluidity, as well as the flexibility of the religious faith with respect to interpretation, 'American Islam'--a definition used by activists as well as scholars--also has essentializing tendencies overlooking particular voices and geographies within the Muslim community in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the spatial patterns of subprime mortgage lending, the process of securitization, and the role of the state in the mortgage market boom in the U.S.

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]

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]

Redlining refers to the officially sanctioned practice of denying mortgage loans in some areas in order to racially discriminate against Black people and other people of colour. Recent studies have shown the persistent impacts of redlining on health risks in effected neighbourhoods. This study contributes to that growing body of work by analysing the relationship between the category that neighbourhoods were assigned on redlining maps and the percentage of the population with 3+ risk factors as defined by the Census Bureau's Community Resilience Estimates. The areas given the lowest redlining grade of D are significantly different than those given the grades of A or B and the areas not graded at the time. This result supports the argument that historical governance and planning decisions do not stay in the past and planners must work to rectify equity issues lest we be complicit in this pattern of racial discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the scientific practices that constitute carbon economies by rendering carbon countable, fungible, and governable. Examining US biofuel governance, I draw on field research and document and policy analyses to consider the roles state, private industry, and civil society actors play in negotiating scientific practice in biofuel governance and to explore the geographically uneven consequences of contrasting science-society configurations. This research illustrates the complex and contradictory roles of nature's quantification and state-supported science in carbon economies. Although nature's quantification as carbon was initially used as a technology of opposition and accountability to limit vested interest power and maintain biofuels' greenhouse gas reduction capacity, it ultimately served industry interests by focusing policy deliberation on technical issues industry deftly navigated and away from policy rationale, value conflict, and biofuels' broader social-ecological consequences. Drawing attention to state-supported environmental risk assessment and place-based approaches to integrating science and agriculture, this research describes multiple, conflicting modes of state scientific practice and emphasizes the importance of considering multiple scientific perspectives in climate change research and intervention. I argue that, rather than focusing on mitigating climate change through universal, carbon-focused science alone, future science-society configurations should include efforts to build institutional capacity for transformation and adaptation to confront uneven and changing social-ecological circumstances using site-specific scientific knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past quarter century has witnessed a 'quieter revolution' in land-use management in the United States, from top-down regulation and adversarial environmentalism to multistakeholder collaboration and voluntary market-based mechanisms designed to forge a compromise between nature protection, property rights, and local livelihoods. The latter approach has become hegemonic, and yet this dramatic shift has received little attention from political ecologists. In this paper I argue that two contradictory lessons on the topic can be drawn from political ecology. On the one hand, proponents of the 'quieter revolution' invoke themes and normative stances shared by political ecologists, celebrating self-management by place-based communities drawing on local knowledge, in opposition to control by central governments and powerful environmental groups wielding 'big science'. On the other hand, the 'quieter revolution' exemplifies the neoliberalization of nature, which political ecologists have critiqued as providing a 'stamp of environmental approval' for capitalist expansion, often at the expense of the nature values it claims to defend. Thus, the 'quieter revolution' exposes tensions in the application of the Third-World-based political ecology orientation to a First World setting. I explore these tensions through a case study of voluntary and collaborative approaches (specifically, transfer of development rights and habitat conservation planning) in exurban Collier County in southwest Florida. I argue that in this context, it is more useful to focus on the neoliberalization of nature than on the valorization of local knowledge and control, because the discourse of local knowledge and livelihoods aligns with the (anti-environmental) interests of locally powerful actors. These power relations-and the limits of deeply embedded assumptions that undergird the political ecology literature-are revealed most effectively through ethnographic examination of the micropolitics of particular cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a conceptual framework in which 'the family' is situated as an object of governmental intervention, on the one hand, and a site of discursive proliferation, on the other hand. Reading across the works of Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot, I argue that the family served an important, but often overlooked, role in Foucauldian conceptualizations of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopolitical modalities of power. In particular, the elaboration of disciplinary institutions and biopolitical governance converged in the family household; as a central point in these governmental strategies, the family's relationship to sexuality, child-rearing, and kinship provoked anxieties over race, nation building, sexuality, and gender. After reviewing how these concerns overlapped in US immigration policies, I analyze the debates concerning noncitizen family detention policy in the United States. I show how a series of proposals for family detention and release congealed around competing discourses of childhood innocence and criminality, prison and home, and parental authority and security. On the basis of this analysis, I argue that state and nonstate actors produce multiple normative family subjects through strategic spatializations of state and familial power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Low-wage migrant workers in the United States confront a perilous labor market, where wages are low, the risk of injury on the job is high, and the fear of apprehension by immigration authorities is widespread. There is increasing empirical evidence that civil society organizations are becoming involved in mediating labor-market problems, but work remains to be done in developing a robust theoretical conception of why such organizations are involved in this arena and how we might evaluate the impacts of their interventions. This paper presents a framework for interpreting the role of migrant civil society organizations as labor-market intermediaries, by extending Karl Polanyi's theory of the 'double movement' and more recent writing to neoliberalism and precarious work. On the basis of data collected from migrant nonprofit organizations in Chicago, I theorize migrant civil society organizations as part of the creation of a new countermovement that protects the interests of both workers and employers from the destructive nature of an unregulated labor market, as predicted by Polanyi. I catalogue organizations' responses to precarious work and create a generalizable framework for evaluating the contingent outcomes of their strategies. Organizations' work is interpreted as complex and sometimes contradictory: the potential to shield workers and advocate for progressive change is in constant tension with the neoliberal patterns of state and economic restructuring that such organizations can support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages recent arguments regarding the transformation of credit (default) risk within US mortgage markets. With the growing integration of mortgage lending into volatile circuits of finance, emergency interventions during financial crises have become productive moments for credit risk, securing the broader norms of risk taking by selecting out problematic loans—a distinctive orientation to risk that I characterize as the financial exception. I develop this argument by focusing on emergency interventions during two signal moments in the recent history of US mortgage markets— the late l980s banking crisis and the post-2007 mortgage crisis. In both cases the regulatory practices of isolating system-threatening risk-segmented borrowers into distinct market spaces, deepening and extending particular forms of credit risk inherited from the New Deal financial system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) are a domain of urban governance that has been aptly characterized as a form of neoliberal urbanization aimed at improving the business climate of down- towns. This paper engages with a growing body of literature on contingent neoliberal urbanisms to consider BIAs as an assemblage of coevolving projects and actors. It focuses specifically on two `community' BIAs in Toronto's downtown West, where recent actions of differently positioned stake- holders effectively reveal how multiple agendas can inform BIA practices. Our objective is twofold: (a) to draw attention to the practices of smaller, community-based BIAs that predominate in North America; and (b) to explore the analytical and political openings that arise when institutions commonly identified as neoliberal are investigated as an assemblage of related but distinctive and sometimes disjunctive projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper responds to concerns over a lack of diversity in alternative food movements by entertaining the possibility of understanding difference as a visceral process—a process of bodily feeling/sensation. Participatory research within and around the Slow Food (SF) movement reveals the complex role of feelings in motivating food actions and activism. On the whole, the cocreated data from this research illustrate that food is never ingested by itself: in the body, molecular connections develop between food and a countless array of other factors. Thus, food and food movements come to feel differently in different bodies as a result of inner-connected biological and social forces. In paying attention to such biosocial processes alternative food movements like SF may develop new under- standings as to why they activate some people to participate in alternative food practices while chilling others. Accordingly the paper suggests that attentiveness to visceral feeling could enhance the ability of food movements to mobilize across difference. [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]

This paper contributes to the emerging body of literature examining the interregional income migration in the United States and offers explanations for why certain areas emerge as magnets for nonearnings income flows while other areas are losing this increasingly important source of personal income. By synthesizing ideas from contemporary understandings of life-course influences on migration and earlier work on income migration, the paper builds a theoretical model of factors shaping income migration across space and tests the model with evidence from Census 2000 by using both ordinary least squares and geographically weighted regression techniques. The analysis highlights the importance of life-course understandings of migration in shaping nonearnings income flows across space. Demographic factors such as concentrations of married couples with no children combine with quality-of-life and economic variables to explain nonearnings income migration. Other factors such as housing-market costs and immigration rates shape nonearnings income flows more powerfully in certain regions than in others. The results have important policy implications. With the baby boomers on the cusp of retirement, an understanding of the geographies of nonearnings income will be important for future regional economic planning and forecasting, as these income sources will become increasingly large components of total personal income. [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]

My purpose in this paper is to investigate the extent to which metropolitan economic growth is related to various types of knowledge externalities in high-technology industries in metropolitan areas for the period 1990–1999. The empirical results indicate the relative importance of the effects of high-technology specialisation externalities on metropolitan economic growth. In this paper I also find positive and highly significant evidence of spatial dependence in metropolitan economic growth. This finding suggests that spatial spillover effects in metropolitan economic growth transcend metropolitan boundaries. From the convergence point of view, I have not found significant evidence of absolute convergence for the period. However, after controlling for structural characteristics determining metropolitan economic growth, I have found significant evidence of convergence for the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore immigrants' notions and practices of citizenship, and how these contribute to the citizenship debate. In order to achieve this, I examine Latin American immigrants' struggle for belonging in Toronto by looking at the Canadian Hispanic Day Parade. This multicultural celebration of ethnic diversity takes place in a marginalized suburban neighbourhood of the city, and I argue that Latin Americans use it to affirm the existence of a Latin American identity and community in Toronto. But, while the parade serves to contest dominant representations of immigrants, visible minorities, and the disadvantaged, it also reveals how forms of community mobilization can internalize neoliberal social relations and even promote a neoliberal agenda. The aim of the paper is to reflect upon the political potential of ethnic celebrations, as well as the constraints and complexities of immigrant citizenship practice within the contemporary context of Canadian multiculturalism and neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I consider the performativity of racial identities and difference at a southern US high school. I utilize Butler's performativity theory along with geographic theories of race, racial difference, and racism to argue that teenage girls reinstate racial difference through their everyday spatial practices. The paper has two substantive sections in addition to the introduction and the conclusion. The first explores the segregated high school lunchroom. Here I examine two girls' narratives and suggest that these girls encounter the spatiality of racial difference in the lunchroom and repeat the practices of segregated sifting. Thus, they reinscribe racialized difference and identity through their spatial practices of sifting with same-race friends. The second substantive section focuses on girls' practices of identifying others' racial identities. In this section I argue that these identifications are spatialized and that racial difference and categorization are achieved through spatial policing and boundary making. Throughout the paper I argue that racial identity and racial difference are performative, but that performativity must account for the normative spatiality of social and racial practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper compares British and US government policy initiatives to combat financial exclusion and promote community reinvestment. Financial exclusion, a general term for those who lack financial products, is concentrated in a small number of deprived urban areas in larger cities that are also starved of private sector investment. British policies, though they have drawn on US experience, predominantly treat exclusion as an individual problem and pay insufficient attention to the wider interconnections between people and place that underlie financial exclusion. These are more prominent in the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) that has led to significant improvements in financial inclusion and community investment in the USA. The CRA is underpinned by a more compartmentalised and locally embedded system of financial regulation. Consolidation in the banking sector and the growth of competition between banks and other financial institutions in an increasingly integrated US financial sector threaten this. British policies seek to provide 'joined-up' solutions to financial exclusion in a manner that is more in tune with an integrated financial sector where a small number of large banks compete on a level playing field with other financial institutions. The paper highlights the difficulties that these policies face in enlisting the cooperation of financial institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a context of public policy debate in the United Kingdom on social exclusion, health inequalities, and food poverty, the metaphor of the 'food desert' caught the imagination of those involved in policy development. Drawing from a major cross-disciplinary investigation of food access and food poverty in British cities, the authors report in this paper findings from the first 'before/after' study of food consumption in a highly deprived area of a British city experiencing a sudden and significant change in its food-retail access. The study has been viewed as the first opportunity in the United Kingdom to assess the impact of a non-healthcare intervention (specifically a retail-provision intervention) on food-consumption patterns, and by extension diet-related health, in such a deprived, previously poor-retail-access community. The paper offers evidence of a positive but modest impact of the retail intervention on diet, and the authors discuss the ways in which their findings are potentially significant in the context of policy debate. [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]

In this article, the author reflects on the effect of climate changes on the future of life in urban areas. It mentions that the U.S. is focusing on creating compact cities that will have limited impact on the environment. It also adds that people living in urban areas don't take the issues of climatic imbalance seriously.

This paper introduces a unique approach for characterizing contemporary urban dynamics in US cities and metropolitan areas. The proposed approach utilizes a socially and spatially integrated framework, and combines the traditional factorial ecology analysis with a novel spatial interpolation technique. The approach is demonstrated on a mid-size, decentralized metropolitan area in the US. It is found that agglomeration, sprawl, gentrification, and poverty concentration coexist in the study region, and that, despite the physical proximity, gentrified areas are largely isolated from deprived areas. The findings, although not surprising when placed in the broader urbanism literature, are not explainable by any single 'school' of urbanism. Researchers are recommended to adjudicate among the old and new models of urbanism and focus on integrated knowledge such as the growing threats of geographic inequity and spatial injustice in contemporary metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many school districts in the United States allow parents to choose which school their child attends ('school choice' or 'magnet schools') while other school districts require students to attend their nearest ('neighborhood') school. Such policies influence children's transportation. We survey elementary-school parents in St. Paul and Roseville, Minnesota, to discover how children travel to school and underlying factors influencing parent's choice of their child's travel mode. From this information we develop a statistical model of travel mode choice. We find that children's commute mode and parental attitudes towards school selection differ by school type (magnet versus neighborhood), income, and race. Relative to neighborhood schools, magnet schools draw from broader geographic regions, have lower rates of walking, bicycling, and commuting by automobile, and higher busing rates. Parent attitudes towards transportation also differ by race and school type. For example, parents of nonwhite and magnet school students placed greater-than-average importance on bus service and quality. This paper highlights the potentially unintended influence of school district policy on school commute mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the rise and fall of a micro-learning region in Philadelphia. The central actors in this region are undocumented Mexican immigrants who until recently were able to draw on the intensity of their workplace interactions and their heterodox knowledge to produce new and innovative building techniques in the city's residential construction. The new knowledge they developed was primarily tacit. More significantly, the learning practices through which immigrant workers developed skills and innovated new techniques were also heavily tacit. Because these practices were never made formal and were never made explicit, they remained invisible and difficult to defend. With the housing-market collapse and subsequent decline in housing renovation in the south-center region of Philadelphia, this tacit knowledge, and the practices that gave it shape and significance, are no longer easily accessible. We draw on this case to demonstrate the importance of access to the political and economic resources to turn learning practices into visible structured institutions that protect knowledge and skill. Whether or not the practices that support knowledge development are themselves made explicit can determine whether the knowledge they produce becomes an innovation that is recognized and adopted or whether it remains confined to a set of ephemeral practices that exist only so long as they are being enacted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]