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This article brings mold metabolisms into dialogue with urban metabolism in urban political ecology (UPE) and animal geographies by conceiving mold and its spores as vital objects to think with for an enriched understanding of a more-than-human urban metabolism. Both research strands, UPE and animal geographies, offer several conjunctions: the city as a common contact zone, lively commodities, and animate capital. Mold fungi understood in terms of their most vital metabolistic function (growth and reproduction) in regard to rot, decomposition, and their transformative capacity of changing states between airborne spores and spatialized colonies will be related to some of the most significant objects of research in urban metabolism like water, built structures, commodities, waste, and capital. This, then, helps to flesh out the concept of Rotten Capital that is organized around two key categories of critical engagement: first, Rotten Capital as a form of urban metabolism that (de-)territorializes microbial mobilities, effecting the (de-)valuation of labor, commodities and capital (dis)investments; secondly, Rotten Capital as a form of (un)intended obsolescence and creative destruction in the wider logic of capital circulation and accumulation, in which mold is functionally similar to but accelerates "time" in the decay of value. Thus, three different moldy trajectories (mold as hydrological cyborg fungus, mold's spatial fix, and mold's biosemiotic switch) will be explained in discussing mold as a potent driver entangled in more-than-human urban metabolisms that can become profitably utilized in different directions in the form of Rotten Capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An outpouring of critical sub/urban scholarship in recent years has explored the historical and ongoing linkages between race, real estate, and space in the United States. Much of this literature has positioned residential segregation as crucial for structuring the geographies of capital accumulation, highlighting how segregation delimits places for extraction and dispossession. In this essay, I build from the foundations this literature lays by bringing together Charles Abrams' concept of "the racist theory of value" (RTV) and David Harvey's notion of "anti-value" to illuminate the centrality of racialized devaluation in the accumulation process in the US. Specifically, I contend that the RTV, in its role in entrenching residential segregation and collapsing race and value together in space, has helped to demarcate and contain the devaluation that capitalism requires in Black residential spaces. As a key innovation for real estate capital to manage the geographies of (anti-)value, the RTV ensures that the economic losses generated in the accumulation process are felt most acutely in Black communities. In this way, the RTV constitutes a form of planned spatial obsolescence wherein the restricted movement of Black people is converted into the controlled movement of devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We re-examine the systemic cycles of accumulation (SCA) of Arrighi (2010) and Arrighi and Silver (1999) which provide a framework for the analysis of the cyclical patterns of geographical expansion of trade and production and the related shifts of hegemonic power within the world capitalist system. Within the SCA framework, the last stage of a hegemonic cycle is characterized by what is called 'systemic chaos'. However, the drivers of these dynamics have not been explicitly analyzed. This article fills this gap by providing a link between the accumulation process and systemic chaos. Introducing the logistic map into the SCA analysis, our approach provides the missing detailed understanding of how systemic chaos is an outcome of the contradictory socioeconomic dynamics of capital accumulation itself while being based on the key insights of the SCA framework of hegemonic cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital platforms, such as Google, Amazon, or Instagram, provide a promising spatial fix to urban-economic problems by leveraging technology and data while connecting stakeholders and overcoming spatial barriers to make urban life, consumption, sales, and production more efficient. This article contributes to the debate on digital platforms in economic geography by advancing the emerging lens of the platform fix, adopting a critical standpoint concerning the solutionist viewpoint that presents platforms as a fix for various challenges. The article develops its perspective against the background of 57 semi-structured interviews, 200 conducted standardized questionnaires, and long-term on/offline observations. We aim to provide a platform fix perspective revealing how digital platforms redefine spatial interactions, addressing economic challenges through spatial fixes while becoming established as indispensable infrastructures; however, platform fixes often fail to address underlying issues, leading to platform dependencies and the instrumentalization of actors. Therefore, we suggest a cautious application of urban platforms as solutions and critically evaluate the formation of public–private platform partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of neoliberalism has produced varied effects on cities ranging from rapid growth to gradual disempowerment. Instead of considering neoliberal urbanization as a fixed, predetermined process, I discuss the possibility of leapfrogging in urban repositioning. Particularly, I examine Eskişehir's repositioning process in response to disempowerment, placing particular emphasis on the "spatial fix." Rather than being passive recipients of neoliberalization, local ruling elites might develop political agency to not only counter but also capitalize on disempowerment. To overcome financial and political constraints vital for the spatial fix, Eskişehir's mayor leveraged multiscalar networking strategies and symbolic revitalizations at particular historical conjunctures. Accordingly, Eskişehir's municipality, ruled by the center‐left opposition party, sought to redefine the city as a stronghold of secularism with the claims of Europeanization and modernization. They introduced the "Eskişehir model" as a contrasting narrative to the ruling AKP's urban vision rooted in Islamist‐nationalist agenda. These mechanisms reveal that ideological‐political clashes at the national level can serve as windows of opportunity for local ruling elites to counter disempowerment. As the ethnographic research shows, these mechanisms had leapfrogging effects not only on repositioning and fostering political power but also dissembling existing inequalities, disparities, and segregation beneath the celebrated Eskişehir model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban disaster governance in global Southern cities is shaped by relationships with development finance institutions. As state capacity wanes, development finance is seen as an agenda-setting driver of "resilience" and "innovation" but needs an accommodating state to function at the urban scale. This study complicates claims that development finance can "fix" overaccumulated capital in global Southern cities through resilience efforts. In Mexico City, "anti-neoliberalism" rhetoric and an austerity campaign make it difficult for the World Bank to carry out an established resilience agenda, revealing limits to institutional reach in politically uncertain spaces. I theorize this as a variegated relationship between fixity and uncertainty that is modulated by a public and counterpublic dialectic. By investigating (1) attempts to expand a municipal contingency fund and (2) ideological organizational activism, this study interrogates discourses that produce institutional arrangements and sites of opposition, where they frustrate the fix and constrain possibilities for radical action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Norwegian stateʼs integration into the global web of neoliberal economic relations, a largely neglected dimension of contemporary Norwegian history. It argues that since the 1980s, restrictions in the domestic market have generated problems of overaccumulation within key state-controlled sectors of the Norwegian economy, and that the state has met these crisis tendencies by developing what Harvey calls ‘spatial fixesʼ. On the one hand, the state has set in motion a comprehensive process of internationalization of state-owned enterprises that have exhausted the limits to expansion within the domestic market. On the other hand, it has built up the worldʼs largest sovereign wealth fund by channeling surplus petroleum profits into rent extraction in global financial markets. These spatial fixes provide the backbone of what the paper calls the neoliberalization of the Norwegian welfare state: By turning public companies and investment funds into internationally oriented profit-maximizing entities, the state has externalized a significant share of its productive and extractive activities beyond territorial boundaries and thus become thoroughly integrated into the neoliberal world economy – all the while maintaining a relatively strong system of public ownership and social redistribution within its national borders. Seen from a global vantage point, the relative persistence of social democratic institutions within territorial borders has become increasingly dependent on – and thus combined with – more aggressive processes of neoliberalization elsewhere.

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The development of industrial capitalism led to a reconfiguration of the social function of culture. A commodification of Western culture and fetishisation of art emerged that was inseparable from the expansion of this world system. This historical process consolidated insofar as it produced a series of material and imaginary rifts between interconnected spheres. In this article we analyse the way in which these rifts operated within aesthetics, economics and ecology, positing an eco-Marxist critique of the exhibition space and its associated social experience. Our analysis focuses first on the dawn of industrial modernity, highlighting the colonial and imperial matrix of this Eurocentric project. Secondly, the article underscores how contemporary art and the Great Acceleration of the ecosocial crisis are linked due to an exponential increase in the infrastructures of cultural industries. By exploring these connections, we show how the spatiality of contemporary art is linked to the dynamics that characterise the political, economic and cultural global system, interacting with the accumulation of ecosocial crises in which we are immersed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The growing influence of digital platforms on cities has captured the attention of urban scholars, marking a ‘platform pivot’ in digital geography and urban research. This article reviews emerging literature on platform urbanism, using the metaphors of the fix and the glitch as starting points from which to discuss two contrasting perspectives on the phenomenon. Rooted in Marxist political economy, fix-thinking highlights how platforms generate new opportunities for value-extraction through processes of disembedding, datafication and deregulation. Influenced by feminist, queer and Black media studies, glitch-thinking performatively underscores the breakdowns and openings in the working of platforms. Where fix-thinking highlights the role of platforms in furthering urban capitalism, glitch-thinking encourages us to envision how things could be otherwise. The review leads to two original insights that may further knowledge on this phenomenon. First, it points to a gap in research investigating instances when breakdown and disruptions turn into organised action and sustained social change. Second, it underscores the citational politics that limit engagements between the two strands, and the potential usefulness of drawing on earlier scholarship that softens or challenge the ‘fix-glitch divide’.

Since the early 2010s, China has experienced an urbanization paradigm shift from quantity-oriented to quality-oriented urbanization. Under different urbanization paradigms, local governments have employed numerous types of urban spaces in order to accumulate capital. If an extant urban space yields negative consequences that might hinder further accumulation of capital, spatial fix and capital switching will occur in accordance with the new urbanization paradigm. This article proposes a theoretical framework aimed at revealing the interconnection among urban paradigm shift, spatial fix, and capital switching. Furthermore, this article conducts the national and urban space scale studies to illustrate this framework. This article not only contributes to a deeper theoretical understanding of urban paradigm shift, spatial fix, and capital switching, but it also contributes to a better understanding of the ways in which different urban spaces function as spatial solutions to sustain capital accumulation at different urbanization stages in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing capital over-accumulation and excessive industrial production have forced policy makers in Beijing to search for profitable outlets overseas. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which focuses on infrastructure connectivity projects across Eurasia, reflects these efforts. This paper theorizes BRI as a spatial fix, aimed to overcome the recurring problem of over accumulation of capital. This paper focuses on BRI-led projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. By conducting unstructured interviews with experts and examining projects, this paper found that BRI-led projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan not only provided a new geographical space and under saturated market for Chinese surpluses but also created demand for Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) which were facing decline in returns. This paper also found that through elements such as non-competitive bidding, embedded conditionality, and double preferential loans, China has successfully stimulated overseas demand for its surpluses. The study therefore concludes that BRI-led projects in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan serve as a spatial fix for China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates what investments in shorter supply chains, especially post-outbreak (COVID), mean in relation to broader agrifood corporatization trends. The paper draws from 25 interviews with individuals connected to large-scale vertical farming operations in the US and Canada, from investors and executives of vertical agriculture firms to managers of restaurants and grocery stores that sourced from capital-intensive indoor farms. The spatial fix literature is used to interrogate this push to pursue local food in COVID's shadow through capital-intensive vertical agriculture, noting these farms are as much about a time as they are about a place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beijing has been undergoing significant spatial restructuring, aiming to transform itself from a sprawled megacity into China's capital city-region. This paper develops a theoretical framework to reveal the inter-connection among spatial restructuring, spatial fix, and crisis management, then the case of Beijing is employed to illustrate this framework. Based on the analyses of the motivations, practical measures, and challenges associated with Beijing's spatial restructuring, this research finds that the spatial restructuring of Beijing is an outcome of the state upscaling its spatial governance, and it can be considered a spatial fix for the crises linked to decentralization, capital accumulation, and regional competitiveness. This paper employs an ongoing case in order to facilitate a better understanding of how a world-class city attempts to solve its various crises through spatial restructuring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) – a flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative – addresses the problem of overproduction in China’s energy industry. It argues against CPEC as a win-win opportunity for both countries. Drawing on David Harvey’s concept of spatial fix, the CPEC power projects are designed with China’s quest for a new geographical space to absorb its surplus production, and to create demand for its state-owned enterprises, which face less return on investment at home. In other words, China is diversifying surplus capital in order to mitigate domestic economic crises. The study therefore concludes that the CPEC energy projects serve as a spatial fix for China, but adds to Pakistan’s debt burden and threatens its national sovereignty.

Ian McEwan’s Solar has been the subject of many a debate, mostly due to its controversial representation of climate change’s cause and the solution offered for the global disaster. The paper explores the novel’s judgment over climate change’s fountainhead and the protagonist’s vain project to save the earth. The scope of the study encompasses the narrator’s accounts of the characters and events in the story. In the light of David Harvey’s notion of ‘spatial fix,’ the study, through a close reading of the novel, focuses on the context within which the story unfolds in order to elaborate on the transformation of the earth into a globalized monolithic built environment called ‘the planet’ for the sake of efficiency and free flow of capital and commodities. It also argues that the protagonist’s solar energy generation project is a neo-liberal initiative to replace a less lucrative production mode and tackle the system’s critical spell of overaccumulation, rather than global warming.

I am proposing to use the term EUfication to define the process of creating the EU as territory out of the geographical disparities (re)produced across the core and periphery of Europe. The article contends that EUfication is a manifestation of the phenomenon of spatial fix. In a first step, it describes the dynamics of territorial unevenness within the EU: on the one hand, by some relevant socio-economic cohesion data compiled from Eurostat indicators, and – on the other hand – through the diagnosis on spatial injustice in different Member States, as it was revealed by a comparative research conducted between 2017-2019. Furthermore, my analysis explains territorial unevenness by reconstructing the well-known historical formation of the union through a less acknowledged perspective, i.e., in the context of the changing regimes of capital accumulation. The article concludes that the theory of spatial fix allows us recognizing: the position and timing, from which and when different countries took part in the process of EUfication is a factor leading to the persistence of uneven territorial development among the European core and periphery. My contribution to theorizing on this process consists in bringing together the perspective of the spatial fix with the critical analysis of how is the social dimension paradigm overshadowed by the economic concern of capital accumulation in the socio-economic governance of the European Single Market, including the politics of territorial cohesion.

This article examines the spatial history of U.S. food production through the evolution of two carceral spaces: rural penitentiaries and Indian reservations. These sites have long provided opportunities to spatially fix surplus labor and capital in U.S. agriculture: from the confinement of Indians during settler colonialism, through the regulation of labor surpluses after Reconstruction, to the present-day expansion of convict leasing to backfill migrant labor shortages. This article challenges traditional framings of prisons and reservations as peripheries excluded from core landscapes of food production and consumption. Instead, these "carceral fixes" participate in specially mediated relationships with "free" agriculture—relationships that respond to the crisis-driven demands of capital and currents of racism and nativism. Within the U.S. food system, this flexibility has made prisons and reservations indispensable for spatially fixing not only capital and labor, but racial violence. Through these relationships, the indirect violence of falling farm prices is translated into the direct violence of physical and mental abuse, exploitation, alienation, diabetes, and malnutrition. Critically, this state-mediated violence is redirected from white to nonwhite bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article approaches different concepts of Large Urban Developments (LUDs) as products of the notion of a “spatial fix” (Harvey, 2001), which explains why built or natural environments can be deployed in the process of creating opportunities for new investments. Greece and Cyprus are two countries in the south of the European Union that underwent delayed urbanisation and significant land fragmentation in the form of small size private ownerships and with limited experience in comprehensive development. Greece has adopted a well-structured but complex spatial planning system, bureaucratic with limited effectiveness, adaptability or flexibility of delivery processes. On the other hand, Cyprus has a flexible but centralized system, effective in processing change but problematic in regulating quality in the built environment. Both countries recently experienced major financial crises. In the early 2010s, both governments promoted, as part of an economic recovery policy, extensive real estate development on public or privately-owned land with emphasis on LUDs as ways of addressing economic shortfalls. Inappropriately, LUDs have been primarily “conceived” as opportunities to attract foreign investments rather than a means of tackling crucial current deficiencies. New spatial planning frameworks merely add greater “flexibility” to the system in order to accelerate large private real estate investment. The article attempts to reveal, through case studies’ reviews, the impact of LUDs in countries with no infrastructure or experience in accommodating large-scale investment. It explores how the experience in Greece and Cyprus differs in terms of the relevant legislation adopted, the effectiveness in fulfilling its primary objective in attracting investment, and what are the possible social and environmental consequences on the planning acquis.

With this article, I introduce the 'algorithmic fix' as a framework to analyze contemporary placemaking practices. I discuss how algorithmic practices of placemaking govern and control mobilities. I theorize such practices as the 'algorithmic fix', where location determination technologies, data practices, and machine learning algorithms are used together to 'get a fix on' our whereabouts with the aim of sorting and classifying both people and places. Through a case study of location intelligence, I demonstrate how these digital placemaking practices do not only control and prevent physical mobilities – they are designed to fix who we are and whom we may become with the aim of creating a predictable future. I focus on geo-profiling, geo-fencing, and predictive policing as three key aspects of location intelligence to present a discussion of how 'algorithmic fix' as a framework can provide valuable insights to analyzing contemporary placemaking practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the links between infrastructure‐led development, urban transformation and inequality in China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). I theorise the BRI as a spatial fix to the overaccumulation problems of Chinese capitalism and I pay particular attention to the role of urbanisation. By drawing on postcolonial geographies, my goal is to offer a relational analysis of divergent trajectories of socio‐spatial urban change driven by BRI projects in Athens, Colombo and London. My key argument is that urban transformation driven by the BRI signals the emergence of a new form of infrastructure‐led, authoritarian neoliberal urbanism. This engenders both new urban formations and new urban politics that, despite variegated expressions across different contexts, are reconfiguring urban space and are transforming the social geography of each city by creating, facilitating or exacerbating spatial fragmentation and social segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Cet article présente les résultats de deux études semblables menées entre 2017 et 2020, au cours desquelles 68 entretiens de type récit de vie avec des femmes violentées ayant vécu une ou plusieurs situations d’itinérance ont été réalisés, ainsi que 17 groupes de discussion auprès d’intervenant·es communautaires oeuvrant auprès d’elles. Il expose une analyse féministe des obstacles rencontrés dans l’accès au logement dans certaines régions périphériques du Québec, au moment de quitter un contexte de violence conjugale. Il montre que la spirale de l’itinérance des femmes (Gélineau, 2008) peut être liée à leur fragilité économique à la sortie d’un contexte de violence, mais surtout aux inégalités (re)produites par le spatial fix. Les résultats illustrent 1) l’effet du développement économique, lequel est principalement axé autour des domaines traditionnellement masculins, sur le prix des logements, et 2) les difficultés à accéder, principalement pour les femmes seules, à un logement social. Par conséquent, les femmes tentant d’échapper à un contexte de violence sont contraintes 1) de se reloger dans un secteur éloigné des centres, loin des pôles de développement, renforçant du même coup leur précarité ; 2) de résider dans un logement vétuste ou d’être sujette aux abus d’un propriétaire ou d’un concierge dans les centres urbains régionaux ; ou 3) de retourner dans un contexte de violence.

The production of space in capitalism is marked by instability, as expressed in both its materiality and its use. In the article, we seek to understand this historical specificity of spatial instability in capitalism through analysis of the logic of the circuit of capital and its intertwining with the production of space. The unsuitability of spatial forms is no coincidence, but is the expression of the production of space being subordinated to the logic of capital accumulation, marked by the constant revolutionising of both the forces and relations of production. However, space and its production are not just a reaction to the circuit of capital, but permeate the whole process with the dynamic tension between fixity and mobility, the production and realisation of surplus value, the absolute and relative conception of space. The instability of spatial forms thus expresses capitalism’s constant inability to solve its internal contradictions by producing space, and the contradictory demands that capitalism brings into it.

In 2013, with the city’s 2002 urban renaissance policy seemingly having reached its limit, Tokyo won its bid to stage the 2020 Olympics. The city plan was modified, with Olympic clusters replacing the special zones of urban redevelopment. However, the highly selective, centrally concentrated nature of urban renaissance and Olympic infrastructure has created a two-tier city, provoking debate over what David Harvey calls the spatial fix, i.e. the temporary spatial solutions adopted by capitalists to save their assets from a downward spiral in values.This paper will examine the assumed continuity between the 2000s (urban renaissance) and the 2010s (Olympic development) and discuss the pertinence of the term spatial fix in Tokyo. It will formulate the idea of a trend fix to debate the uneven development associated with the Olympics.

Through a review of the literature that develops the "socio‐ecological fix" concept, this paper makes two arguments. First, it argues that the concept is trapped in a specific historical understanding of 20th‐century capitalism that goes through "crisis" and "fixes." Second, the paper argues that this understanding of history largely ignores the potential for revolutionary ruptures that create social systems entirely at odds with capital. The severity of the climate crisis suggests that moving further into the 21st century will not allow such clean "fixes." The climate crisis will make revolutionary ruptures not only possible, but inevitable. The "socio‐ecological fix" has become increasingly popular to understand a possible and future energy transition off fossil fuels within the confines of capitalist social relations of production. The concept emerges and builds off David Harvey's famous "spatial fix" concept to understand how capitalism can temporarily transcend the current climate crisis. The "socio‐ecological fix" helps see how capitalist crises and fixes are economic and environmental at the same time, intertwined together. Through a review of the literature that develops the "socio‐ecological fix" concept, I make two clear arguments. First, I argue that the concept is trapped in a specific historical understanding of 20th‐century capitalism that goes through crisis and fixes. According to this framework, from which the "socio‐ecological fix" functions within, the capitalist mode of production is here to stay indefinitely and can only be reformed through series of fixes. This understanding of capitalism not only downplays class struggle but also has too much of a narrow sense of politics in the context of the ongoing climate crisis. Second, I argue that this understanding of history largely ignores the potential for revolutionary ruptures that create social systems entirely at odds with capital. The severity of the climate crisis suggests that moving further into the 21st century will not allow such clean fixes. The climate crisis will make revolutionary ruptures not only possible, but inevitable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article offers a critical account of Spanish high-speed rail (HSR) through the lens of the spatial fix. I designate the integration of Spanish HSR into a Europeanwide process of circulation of finance capital as the HSR-finance complex. The analysis of the inner workings of the HSR-finance complex reveals the way in which European finance has laid the conditions of possibility for the development of the project and offers a forewarning about the dangers of leveraging finance capital toward green infrastructure. The analysis of the Spanish HSR-finance complex shows that the particular form of capital circulation that has made it possible has not brought about new productive combinations but has instead deepened traditional relations of economic dependency and magnified their socioenvironmental consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aims to integrate Africa into an ambitious Chinese-constructed infrastructure network. The terms of this integration however deepen Africa's dependent position and perpetuate its terms of (mal)integration into the global political economy. These terms, which are characterised by external domination and socially-injurious and extraverted modes of accumulation, are likely to be exacerbated by the BRI's focus on facilitating extraction from the African continent while importing huge amounts from China. While the BRI aims to resolve contradictions within China's own economy, the latent dynamics within the BRI vision may result in an entrenched African dependency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last decade has seen the adoption of the imaginary of a circular economy (CE) by cities. To date, much of the debate has been technical in orientation, making that the implications of the CE for urban theory and praxis have hitherto not been explored in great depth. This Debates and Interventions contribution collects work from diverse disciplinary quarters and geographical contexts, documenting the CE as an emerging alternative space of urban politics and praxis albeit constrained by neoliberal urbanism. The selected contributions show that circular strategies constitute a 'spatial fix' marrying capital accumulation with the rising environmental challenges at the urban scale, hence reproductive of the splintered urbanism that mark contemporary neoliberal cities. At the same time, it appears the CE can be embedded in value systems that challenge neoliberal urbanism, opening spaces for a socio-ecological transition that the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has made more urgent than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the twenty-first century, a widening array of unassuming fruits, vegetables, seeds and grains have been crowned "superfoods." While many are exotic imports marketed to Western consumers through neocolonial narratives, others are familiar domestically-grown supermarket staples spectacularly rebranded. Why has "superfood" status become so central to the American produce industry? What sort of subjectivities does a superfood cultivate among consumers? This paper charts the ascent of the almond to superfood status as the latest in a series of spatial fixes alleviating the pains of chronic overproduction. The spatial-fix is a material-semiotic process with important psychosocial dimensions often downplayed in the historical materialist tradition. Drawing on historical archives, advertising materials, interviews with current and recently retired almond industry marketing professionals, and observation at the annual industry conference from 2015 to 2018, I show that as almond production surges the industry must constantly work to change the way consumers see almonds (from seasonal specialty to superfood) and the way they see themselves (from sophisticated to superhuman). While consumers resist and reinterpret the shifts in food meanings fashioned to compensate for overproduction, a century of effective material-semiotic fixes attests to the industry's influence on foodways. The case of almonds is used here to theorize the broader superfood trend and its imagined "super" subjects as produced through the political economy of industrial agriculture. Understanding the political economic underpinnings of superfoods reveals not only the historical foundation of this contested contemporary food phenomenon, but also sheds light on the metamorphoses of food meanings fundamental to agrarian capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Coworking movement in China is generated by both top-down and bottom-up forces. • Central state backs coworking movement as a spatial fix for transitional crisis. • Local states support coworking spaces for territorial competitiveness. • Techno-capital, real estate and policy free-riders gain in coworking movement. This study examines the production of coworking spaces in Shenzhen, China. Coworking space is a global phenomenon that has been continuously growing since the late 2000s. From a user perspective, this phenomenon is mainly attributed to the increasing number of freelancers and start-ups seeking community and knowledge spillovers. From the supply side, the movement is believed to be integrated into the neoliberal urban development process. However, the burgeoning of coworking spaces in post-socialist China arguably deviates from the neoliberal model with its strong and direct state interventions, multi-faceted public–private relations, and considerable emphasis on social goods. The central state proposes an entrepreneurial policy and supports the production of coworking spaces as a spatial fix for the national economic transitional crisis, while the local state promotes local competitiveness. However, numerous founders of coworking spaces tacitly strive to maximize utilities in the national entrepreneurial movement. Inevitably, this movement leads to uneven distribution of social goods and quasi-coalition among techno-capital, real estate, and policy free-riders. With the aim of understanding the complex development of entrepreneurial spaces, this study investigates co-working spaces using interviews with managers, entrepreneurs, and experts in Shenzhen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper traces the transformative travels of the metaphor of the 'fix' across the unbounded terrain of geographical political economy. It argues for taking the fix seriously as a root metaphor of the field, a signifier of its history and theory-cultures. Critically excavating the entwined genealogies of the metaphor and the field, it illuminates several historically successive and thematic moments of 'fix thinking', including: the spatial fix (1980s); institutional and spatio-temporal fixes of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s); and the scalar fix of state rescaling theory (2000s). It reviews these stages and their broader intellectual and political implications for critical geographical scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social glocalization (portalization of globalization and localization) represents the simultaneous occurrence of universalization and particular tendencies in contemporary social, political and economic systems. In our paper we deal with the impact of the glocalization approach on solving social problems. Through socio-economic analysis we focus on the basic problems, terminological context, related topics and context of application of glocalization approaches to the solution of social problems as well as the relation of application of this approach to social practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are currently witnessing a global trend of intensifying and deepening relationships between extractive companies and biodiversity conservation organisations that warrants closer scrutiny. Although existing literature has established that these two sectors often share the same space and rely on similar logics, it is increasingly common to find biodiversity conservation being carried out through partnerships between extractive and conservation actors. In this article, we explore what this cooperation achieves for both sectors. Using illustrative examples of extractive-conservation collaboration across sub-Saharan Africa, we argue that new entanglements between extractive and conservation actors are motivated by multiple purposes. First, partnering with conservation actors serves as a spatial and socio-ecological fix for extractive companies in response to multiple crises that threaten the sector's productivity. Second, new forms of collaboration between extractive and conservation actors create pathways for both sectors to produce new value from nature. For the extractive sector, creating new value from nature works as a further fix to capitalist crises whereas, for the conservation sector, producing value through nature amounts to new opportunities for capital accumulation. Importantly, working together to produce shared value from nature within and beyond extractive concessions secures both sectors' control over the means of production. Theoretically, our analysis links literature on value in capitalist nature with that on spatial and socio-ecological fixes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interplay between intensifying labour market precarity and gentrification constitutes a hitherto under‐researched topic in the fields of labour and urban geography. To rectify this lacuna, we argue that gentrification and labour flexibilisation are both socio‐spatial manifestations of capital's efforts to confront crises of accumulation. Distinguishing between what we call "weak" and "strong" links between them, and drawing upon the concepts of "gentrification‐supporting" and "gentrification‐fostered" labour flexibility, we outline a framework for connecting gentrification and precarity. This allows us to make links between the restructuring of the built environment and the reorganisation of work in the post‐industrial city; it also allows us to show how workers, through their agency, can shape rent gaps in the contemporary city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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