Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Johnston, Caleb; Pratt, Geraldine

doi: 10.1177/0263775817730699pmid: N/A

We present an analysis of Tlingipino Bingo, which is the latest iteration of our on-going experiment to work with performance as a means of translating and transforming scholarly work to generate more informed and nuanced public debate about migrant labour. Tlingipino Bingo was a collaboration between white settler academics and Filipino and Tlingit artists in Whitehorse Canada, created in a context of rapid Filipino migration and racialised tensions between Filipino migrants and First Nations peoples in Whitehorse. It brought the communities together to participate in an interactive bingo game and to exchange stories of disparate but resonate experiences of colonialism. We document the public event of Tlingipino Bingo to interrogate how deeply settler colonialism burrows into everyday life, including practices of racialised immigrants, the ways that a model minority discourse functions within state multiculturalism, and to imagine other futures beyond settler colonialism, which could possibly include white settlers as allies. We venture that the performance might also help to think strategically about critical responses to contemporary claims of dispossession by white citizens in Canada and elsewhere, as well as their destructive nostalgia for a lost national time of whiteness.

Joronen, Mikko

doi: 10.1177/0263775817708789pmid: N/A

This paper is an attempt to explicate a peculiar logic of government Israeli state apparatuses use to control the Palestinian population and colonize the West Bank; namely, the one of slowness, delay and waiting. To understand the operational logic of such governing, I suggest the conditions of recognizing Palestinian rights, their theatric performance by the Israeli state apparatuses, and the maintaining of precarity among Palestinians are the critical aspects to expand. By looking at the West Bank sites close to expanding Israeli settlements, I show how this mode of governing operates by recognizing the Palestinian right to claim justice, security and governance without actualization of these rights, therefore directing Palestinian resistance and sense of injustice to support the theatric functions of settler colonial state. Hence, theaters of recognition are created, the ones that ceremoniously keep administrative, legal and security processes functional, but through the slow processing, stalling and endless piling up of decisions, regulations, requirements and security exceptions do not alleviate the induced precarities.

Lancione, Michele

doi: 10.1177/0263775817701731pmid: N/A

Following the case of 100 Roma people evicted from their home in the centre of Bucharest in September 2014, the article looks at evictions and practices of resistance from the ground-up, without assuming a-priori what a politics of resistance may look like in Bucharest or elsewhere. The aim is to understand eviction and resistance as part of the same continuum of home unmaking-remaking, and to fully take into account the role of non-humans and urban atmospheres in the process. In this sense, the article analyses the case of Bucharest through two, interconnected, affective atmospheric: that of uncanniness, which allowed for the resistant Roma body to articulate its demands; and that of inertia, which emerged from the imbrication of home-less people’s street life and gradually rendered resistance more difficult to assemble. Paying attention to these post-human entanglements, the article critically contributes to academic and non-academic debates on occupation, displacement and urban activism, with the aim to strengthen our capacity to imagine alternative strategies of resistance.

Ye, Junjia

doi: 10.1177/0263775817717988pmid: N/A

This paper interrogates processes of everyday urban diversification by challenging dominant narratives of “diversity” and “integration”. I address the management aspects of urban diversification through the normative and productive categorisations of race, citizenship and civility in shared spaces to highlight the forms of differential inclusion of newcomers, drawing upon ethnographic data from Jurong West in Singapore, to explain subjective inclusion through state-led measures and everyday forms of coexistence. There are two key aspects of differential inclusion discussed here: a) the explicit rules that form the basis of differential state treatment of its population by race, ethnicity and citizenship status and b) the implicit principles in which migrants are included according to normative forms of appropriate behaviour in public spaces. Consequently, social norms and civility become tools of inclusion, and, relationally, exclusion, producing a politicised logic of managing diversity both in structural and everyday spaces. Recognising the profound ways in which differential inclusion shapes space through its subtle yet pervasive ways not only imparts analytical purchase to the study of everyday interactions but also grafts the meaning of belonging and difference onto the ever-changing contours of diversification in the city.

Coyles, David

doi: 10.1177/0263775817707528pmid: N/A

The ‘peace-walls’ of Belfast represent a widely acknowledged architectural legacy of the Troubles, the period between 1969 and 1994 when sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was most extreme. This paper reveals a further crucial but unacknowledged architectural legacy. It is a Hidden City of unassuming inner-city architecture where everyday pervasiveness masks a capacity to perpetuate conflict-era forces in a post-conflict city. The first half of the paper presents a Foucauldian analysis of declassified government documents revealing the knowledge created through undisclosed systems of power-relations. Here a problematisation of accepted norms reassesses the Troubles-era urban landscape and exposes the latent significance of its socio-material complexity. The second half of the paper illustrates the material consequences of related hidden policy practices on the contemporary post-conflict community. It borrows from Goffman to offer an exposition of the institutionalisation of movement and meaning at play in the Hidden City. A triangulation of interviews, photography and architectural fieldwork is used to theorise the Material Event, a construction of meaning derived from the interaction between people, architecture and the wider systems of power-relations. The paper concludes by demonstrating the complexity of the systemic challenges posed by the Material Events and how these help constrain conflict-transformation practices.

Hönke, Jana; Cuesta-Fernandez, Ivan

doi: 10.1177/0263775817707762pmid: N/A

Economic infrastructure hubs, such as ports, are crucial sites for exploring new political geographies. In such environments, mobilities are enabled and rigidly channelled premised on the stasis of the port-as-checkpoint. Such nodes are part of an ever-growing political geography of zones that requires more attention. This article proposes a ‘topolographical’ approach – a combined heuristic drawing from political topography and topology – to comprehend more fully the transformations in the political geographies of large-scale infrastructures. The cardinal nature of the port of Dar es Salaam makes it a crucial site through which to illustrate the purchase of this framework. The topographical analysis puts forward the port of Dar as archipelago of global territories, within which heterogeneous actors claim graduated authority. Drawing on topology, the article shows what is folded into the port, constantly shaping not only who governs but, more importantly, how power and authority are exercised. It will be shown how imaginaries of the port – as gateway, seamless space, and modernity ‘from scratch’ – as much as new technological devices work to produce historically and geographically distinct political geographies, and indeed bring new ones into being.

Ritts, Max

doi: 10.1177/0263775817711706pmid: N/A

Music can enrich geographical efforts to understand ideology as a lived experience. This paper explores the history of whale music – instrumental music that samples or thematizes whale sound. For environmentalists who came of age in the late 1960s, whale music fostered new interrogations about the identity of nature and the nature of identity, interrogations that reflected structural changes in North American society. To understand whale music’s surprising ideological power, I draw on Althusser’s formative idea of interpellation, and refine it with insights from Antonio Gramsci, John Mowitt, and Neil Smith. As examples from British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and California’s Bay Area reveal, whale music interpellated environmentalists, capturing the energies of predominantly white middle-class subjects eager to develop new relationships with nature. Whale music was not discovered, as its devotees proposed it was, but invented, through a combination of animal sounds, recording techniques, consumer trends, and ideologies of nature. It reveals environmentalism as a sonorous formation – a system that recruits listeners into sonically-mediated realms of thought, action, and subjectivity.

Cockayne, Daniel; Leszczynski, Agnieszka; Zook, Matthew

doi: 10.1177/0263775817709018pmid: N/A

Contemporary practices of sex and intimacy are increasingly digitally mediated. In this paper, we identify two distinctly spatial effects of these mediations. First, the digital extends the spaces of sex/uality beyond the immediately proximate, simultaneously expanding the potential for non-human object choice in intimate encounters. Second, the digital intensifies the experiential fidelity of intimate encounters by folding the remote into the spatially immediate, such that non-proximate intimate relations with human subjects as well as non-human objects may feel more proximate. We articulate these effects by building on and contributing to developments in the geographies of encounter, which allows us to bring together theories and conceptual framings of intimacy, digitality and sexuality in a uniquely spatial register. These effects of extension and intensification resonate in a selection of empirical examples of digitally mediated sex/uality that we place along continuums of more-and-less human and more-and-less proximate. These continuums comprise the conceptual axes of a heuristic framework that we advance to both (i) capture particular points at which configurations of spaces, practices and subject/object choices of sex crystallize given conditions of pervasive digital mediation, and (ii) provoke further interrogations of the multiple ways in which sex, sexuality and intimacy are recast by the digital.

Pugh, Jonathan; Grove, Kevin

doi: 10.1177/0263775817709478pmid: N/A

This paper develops a novel approach to what we call ‘participation as assemblage’ by drawing upon Félix Guattari’s foundational work on assemblage theory. We develop and ground our concerns by taking the reader through the details of a participatory development case study that we have been involved in from the Caribbean since the 1990s. Through unfolding this long story, we explain how we have historically engaged different participatory literatures and today find Guattari’s work on transversality and ethico-aesthetics salient as a way into thinking through our central interest in participation as assemblage. Here both our case study and Guattari’s originating work on assemblage are further grounded by working through some salient relationships between experimental approaches to participatory development and the contemporary neoliberal university.