{"title":"Unleashing speculative urbanism: Speculation and urban transformations","authors":"H. Leitner, E. Sheppard","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231151945","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231151945","url":null,"abstract":"The papers and commentaries constituting this special issue offer new insights into speculative urbanism from the perspective of two southern metropolises. Based on an international and interdisciplinary collaboration comparing speculative urbanism in central and peri-urban Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bengaluru (India), and interrogating the literature triggered by a seminal 2011 paper by Michal Goldman, this issue extends existing speculative urbanism scholarship in four ways. First, the papers in this special issue take a multi-scalar approach, placing speculative urban practices within the broader spatio-temporal conjunctural contexts shaping their emergence. Second, extending currently economistic framings, they show how speculation also is socio-cultural. The diverse actors engaged in speculative urbanism do not simply seek to accumulate wealth; they do so with aspirations in mind for differentially imagined, but yet-to-be-realized, urban/peri-urban futures. Third, they highlight how speculative urbanism involves a broader range of actors than the usual suspects (developers and financial institutions), including land brokers, individual landlords, the state and its actors, and residents displaced from informal settlements. Fourth, they draw attention to diverse objects of urban speculation; not only land and property, but also more-than-human phenomena such as urban socio-ecologies and socio-technical networks.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"1 1","pages":"359 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83609789","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Value magic","authors":"R. Lake","doi":"10.1177/0308518x231154254","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518x231154254","url":null,"abstract":"The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a material force that is real in its consequences. Unpacking the concept of value reveals a contentious debate regarding the ontological status of value as a driver of the urban process. Alternative formulations posit value as intrinsic or extrinsic, objective or subjective, residing in the world or constructed in the mind, driven by universal law or spatially and temporally contingent. Transcending all such dualisms, a transactional approach drawn from Deweyan pragmatism understands value as a co-constitutive interrelation among a valuing subject, an object of valuation, and the enveloping context in which valuation occurs. The delineation of value's ontology is fraught with political consequences for reproducing or altering the urban status quo. The move toward desired outcomes begins with articulating the foundational assumptions that underlie the value practices propelling the urban process in specific situations. Pluralizing value assumptions focuses the problem on the political question concerning whose value(s) prevail in a given situation. This redefinition shifts the focus from ameliorating current practices of extracting value to politically contesting the value commitments at work in the world.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"174 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85428591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Grasping transformative regional development – Exploring intersections between industrial paths and sustainability transitions","authors":"Camilla Chlebna, H. Martin, J. Mattes","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221137346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221137346","url":null,"abstract":"A comprehensive perspective of transformative regional development is pertinent considering complex present and future challenges such as the climate crisis. Particularly in face of ecological boundaries which manifest themselves in limited resources and result in social disputes, a realistic grip on transformative regional development is of utmost importance. To advance this field, we propose a research agenda that draws on the debates on regional industrial path development and sustainability transitions. We define two core dimensions: interrelations between several industrial paths and interrelations between regions and between spatial scales. We argue that both dimensions need to be considered against ecological boundaries and as embedded in social dynamics. We combine specific questions on these interrelations into a research agenda.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"16 1","pages":"222 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85516723","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The new whole state system: Reinventing the Chinese state to promote innovation","authors":"Lin Zhang, Tu Lan","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221088294","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221088294","url":null,"abstract":"This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs. market, East vs. West, and new vs. old) in existing discourses concerning state capitalism. Focusing on the New Whole State System in relation to tech companies owned by Tsinghua University, we analyze the actually existing state capitalism in China as a spatiotemporally specific and conjuncturally situated assemblage of discourses, policies, and practices. We show that under both the Old Whole State System (1950s–1970s) and New Whole State System (mid-2000s onward) eras, the Chinese state, reacting to foreign economic and geopolitical pressures, attempted to graft a centralized innovation system onto preexisting decentralized governance structures, concentrating resources to promote selected strategic industries. Unlike the Old Whole State System, the New Whole State System relies on new policy tools characterized by state-led financialization and state–private fusion. The evolution of New Whole State System as an assemblage reveals that, contrary to the dominant geo-imaginary, the Chinese state is not monolithic, unchanging, and culturally essentialist. Rather, it is actively engaged in global debates about, and in contested experiments with expanding the state's role in the economy in response to global, conjunctural crises of overproduction and financialization. By foregrounding this non-Western country/region’s internal debate about its own development trajectory, its uneven success in overcoming uneven development, and its interaction with the rest of the world, we propose an alternative perspective that contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the epistemologically Euro-American centric literature of state capitalism.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"11 1","pages":"201 - 221"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79519771","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Anticipating Sino-UK fintech networks and the changing geographies of money as infrastructure","authors":"Sarah Hall","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221140413","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221140413","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines Sino-UK financial relations in the fintech sector. Through an empirical focus on fintech payments systems, the analysis locates fintech within broader research on the internationalisation of Chinese finance. Conceptually, the paper responds to calls for more attention to be paid to state actors in fintech development. By examining the relationship between the UK and China in fintech, as part of the UK's wider role in Chinese financial internationalisation, I argue that such a focus on the state needs to be expanded beyond the current focus on domestic policy to include wider questions regarding how fintech sits alongside overseas and international policy concerns. I suggest that one productive way of doing this is to understand fintech as a monetary infrastructure. In so doing, the paper argues that fintech needs to be understood as much as a monetary geography as it is a financial geography.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"27 1","pages":"931 - 948"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90556177","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Who builds Shanghai's fiber-optic network? Thinking urban infrastructure through migrant construction labor","authors":"Leif Johnson","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221140886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221140886","url":null,"abstract":"While a growing body of literature understands infrastructure through the social relations and labor that make it possible, the work of construction in infrastructure projects remains under-theorized. Drawing on participatory research with migrant construction workers in Shanghai, China, I consider the outcomes of a reliance on informal, migrant labor in Shanghai's multi-year “Overhead-Underground” infrastructure renovation project, which moves overhead fiber-optics cabling underground. Like other Chinese infrastructure projects, this reconstruction of Shanghai's fiber-optic network relies on large quantities of on-the-ground construction labor, drawn from a low-wage, precarious, and largely informal migrant workforce that is not expected not be incorporated into the city. Through engagement with scholarship that has viewed people and social relationships as infrastructure, I demonstrate the processes by which informal migrant construction labor facilitates both physical construction and the accumulation of infrastructural knowledge, both of which are necessary to the completion of infrastructural upgrading projects.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"87 1","pages":"795 - 809"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74490307","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neoliberal multiculturalism in Dallas: The discursive foundations of diversity-led gentrification in an aspiring U.S. global city","authors":"Richard Kirk","doi":"10.1177/0308518X231152258","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X231152258","url":null,"abstract":"This article investigates the relationship between neoliberal multiculturalism and gentrification using a case study of the forthcoming Dallas International District. Informed by a conceptual framework considering neoliberal urbanism, the (aspiring) global city, and racial–ethnic identity, this article attempts to reveal the dominant discourses that lay the foundation for gentrification in the Dallas International District, an urban renewal project planned to be built atop a former freedmen's town. Rather than investigating gentrification after it has taken root in a specific location, this work investigates the discursive foundations of gentrification before it takes hold. This is accomplished through a discourse analysis of interviews with Dallas public officials, developers, and community members, as well as web sources. On the basis of these data, it is concluded that plans to redevelop the area foreshadow the gentrification of an existing Black and Latino population and that this planned gentrification is permeated by neoliberal discourses about multiculturalism that are entrenched in Dallas’ desires to transform itself into a global, world-class city.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"31 1","pages":"1392 - 1407"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81642480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distance creates proximity: Unraveling the influence of geographical distance on social proximity in interorganizational collaborations","authors":"Philip Roth, J. Mattes","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221143115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221143115","url":null,"abstract":"A vital ingredient for the success of interorganizational collaboration projects is strong personal relationships among the partners. Their formation is structured by geographical distances between partners. In the corresponding research, it is assumed that geographic distance inhibits face-to-face interactions, which are highly effective for tie-formation. However, findings from adjacent fields of research suggest that greater distances can also be conducive to the development of personal relations. In this paper, we unravel these contradictions. Empirically, we examine the development of 2132 personal ties between individuals from 20 government-funded interorganizational innovation projects using a mixed-method design. Statistical analysis of the data reveals a U-shaped correlation between geographical and social proximity. Contrary to common assumptions, large geographical distances are found to be particularly conducive to forming relationships. The qualitative data explains this finding by identifying and systematically relating five practices which are associated with specific distances and which are (differently) effective for tie-formation.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"26 1","pages":"1372 - 1391"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82140302","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The double movement and the triple-helix: Divestment, decommodification, and the Dakota Access Pipeline","authors":"L. Horowitz","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221147299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221147299","url":null,"abstract":"This paper investigates divestment movements’ attempts to influence investment decisions. I use the example of #DefundDAPL, which targeted private-sector funding of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), an oil conduit crossing the Missouri River a half-mile from the Standing Rock Reservation. I analyze activists’ engagements with banks as a manifestation of Karl Polanyi's second movement, that is, resistance to environmental destruction and human rights violations that accompany “commodification” (the subordination of social relations to the economy). I identify divestment as a “withdrawing” type of decommodification that restrains free-market dominance by defunding environmentally and socially destructive projects. Next, I explore how investment practices can be analyzed as a “triple-helix” comprised of three intertwined strands—ideologies, power dynamics, and private-sector policies—that pull one another toward commodification and/or decommodification as they coproduce each other in dynamic tension, creating a constantly evolving investment environment. Applying this framework to #DefundDAPL, I examine how activists’ success in mobilizing societal ideologies to paint DAPL as an unethical investment was informed by banks’ concerns about project profitability as well as by place-based conditions and relationships between banks and pipeline companies. Further, I find that private-sector policy changes in response to the DAPL controversy were prompted by evolving societal ideologies yet constrained by interbank power relations. In conclusion, I argue that a triple-helix lens helps unpack the black box of decommodification by revealing complex interactions among ideologies, power relations, and policy-making and demonstrates limits to private-sector initiatives’ ability to impose adequate restrictions on environmentally and socially harmful investment practices.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"7 1","pages":"1337 - 1354"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90247612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Territorial development in Bavaria between spatial justice and austere federalism: A historical-materialist policy analysis of Bavarian regional development politics and policies, 2008–2018","authors":"Simon Dudek, Hans-Martin Zademach","doi":"10.1177/0308518X221140893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X221140893","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines the territorial development reforms in the federal state of Bavaria, Germany between 2008 and 2018 in light of the rise of austerity policies, introducing the concept of ‘austere federalism’ as a new state spatial process in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Methodologically, the paper draws on the historical-materialist policy analysis and identifies three processes – municipalisation, competitisation, and responsibilisation – as key elements of a new hegemonic project. Our findings suggest that the years following the crisis saw a paradigm shift in spatial planning taking place, characterised by a carrot-and-stick policy of planning deregulation and austerity discipline. Rather than diminishing disparities, however, this shift runs the risk of exacerbating spatial inequality.","PeriodicalId":48432,"journal":{"name":"Environment and Planning A-Economy and Space","volume":"224 1","pages":"890 - 904"},"PeriodicalIF":4.2,"publicationDate":"2023-01-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80037156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}