The post-colonial has often functioned as a code word for a form of French post-theory. In more recent efforts to reconstruct linkages between metropolitan Marxism and counter-colonialism, the post-colonial refers to an open-ended research field for investigating the present weight of colonial histories. But even in these reformulations, post-colonial research presents formidable challenges to Euro-American urban Marxism. In this context, this paper redirects Henri Lefebvre’s work to analyse post-colonial situations. It traces in particular the notion of ‘colonisation’ as it develops (...) from his critique of everyday life to his work on the state. We argue that Lefebvre’s notion of ‘colonisation’ presents a promising opening to understanding the ‘colonial’ aspects of urbanisation today. Still, for this promise to be realised, Lefebvre’s notion must be refracted through dialectical-humanist counter-colonial traditions. (shrink)

The process commonly referred to as business-as-usual has given rise to dangerous climate change, but its social history remains strangely unexplored. A key moment in its onset was the transition to steam power as a source of rotary motion in commodity production, in Britain and, first of all, in its cotton industry. This article tries to approach the dynamics of the fossil economy by examining the causes of the transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry in the (...) second quarter of the nineteenth century. Common perceptions of the shift as driven by scarcity are refuted, and it is shown that the choice of steam was motivated by a rather different concern: power over labour. Turning away from standard interpretations of the role of energy in the industrial revolution, this article opens a dialogue with Marx on matters of carbon and outlines a theory of fossil capital, better suited for understanding the drivers of business-as-usual as it continues to this day. (shrink)

I argue that what’s so bad (qua film fiction) about the cinematic practice of actor-character race-mismatching—be it the historically infamous and intuitively repugnant practice of blackface or one of its more contemporary kin—is that the extent to which film-fictions employ such practices is typically the extent to which such film-fictions unrealistically depict facts about race. More precisely, I claim that race-mismatching film fictions—understood as a species of unrealistic fiction—are prima facie inconsistent fictions with the capacity to mislead their audiences about (...) certain morally relevant actual-world states-of-affairs and thus, prima facie aesthetically, epistemically, and morally defective. (shrink)

The term natural is effective in the marketing of a wide variety of foods. This ambiguous term carries important meaning in Western culture. To challenge an uncritical understanding of natural with respect to food and to explore the ambiguity of the term, the development of Western ideas of nature is first discussed. Personification and hypostasization of nature are given special emphasis. Leo Marx’s idea of the pastoral design in literature is then used to explore the meaning of natural as applied (...) to food, emphasizing Marx’s distinction between a sentimental and a complex pastoral. The latter is applied to natural as a means of collapsing a dichotomy of man and nature to the idea of second nature. From this perspective an understanding of the industrialization of the food system and the importance of local and organic food are considered. The extent to which processed foods might properly be considered natural is raised and discussed for several common foods. Although marketing of natural foods might make us think that we consume nature, I suggest that what is consumed is more appropriately second nature. I suggest that in order to maintain a critical perspective about one’s relationship to the natural world, everyone should make an attempt to experience the complex pastoral with respect to at least something that is consumed as food. When nature is understood as second nature in the context of a complex pastoral, the question of whether a food or ingredient is to be considered natural is replaced by deliberative thought based on our best knowledge and judgment, and the result will be less constrained by ideology. (shrink)

That various legal orders preside in any one jurisdiction has long been seen as evidence of legal pluralism; however, this approach lacks a systematic understanding of history in general, and as such, tells us little about the inner machinations of law’s relation to capitalist development in particular. What is needed instead is a dialectical materialist approach to legal development; for this reason, I tender an uneven and combined development theory of law. Law flexes in concert with ever-changing social relations, or (...) more plainly, law evolves in an uneven and combined manner. More than being mired in the contradictions that are the driving force of the UCD of capitalism, however, law also boasts its own set of contradictions that, if carefully accounted for, helps distinguish the historical evolution of capitalism as a social totality. (shrink)

This article views capitalism not only as a mode of production, but also as a mediation of the reproduction of life, following the concept of ‘social metabolism’ that Marx employs to analyze the interaction between the individuals composing a society and their natural environment. Insofar as the ‘value-form’ is the distinctive social relation of capitalism, it appears necessary to ask whether the metabolic process of reproduction can be fully subsumed under this form. Marx takes for granted the idea that the (...) reproduction of labor-power consists only in the consumption of commodities resulting from abstract labor, thus omitting the appropriation of unpaid domestic work, mostly performed by women. Feminist criticism clarifies how capitalism always depends on some reproductive work being appropriated for the accumulation of surplus-value without being integrated in the value-form. Following Jason W. Moore, I attempt to indicate that the same logic is at work for the reproduction... (shrink)

It is almost a truism that nature is social, but by what means is nature made social at the level of the interactional encounter? While the transformation of society/nature relationships is often approached through the problematic of distance, and at the scale of macro-historical transformation, this article uses a conflict between American birdwatchers and ornithologists over scientific “collecting” (literally, the killing of birds) to examine the processes through which individuals come to know nature, and come to know it so differently. (...) With John Dewey’s (1958 [1925]) “experience” as the unit of analysis, I trace changes in each group’s experience with birds over the past century; the phenomenology of the resulting encounters; and the understanding that emerges from each in order to understand (1) how, empirically, these two very different loves of birds are formed, and (2) knowledge of nature as an affective sensibility shaped by experiences of closeness. (shrink)

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 and the way they see themselves. 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. (shrink)

The process of contemporary gentrification is a key feature of post-industrial growth and urban re-generation. A central concern of this research is to investigate the implications of the process of gentrification at the level of locality. This study approached this investigation by an examination of these processes within a particular inner city neighbourhood in Dublin called Ringsend. It is the understandings and experiences of contemporary processes that this research has aimed to capture. The aim of this research was to examine (...) the changes occurring in Ringsend at a particular point in time and in a particular context. Ringsend is an inner city working-class ‘urban village’ in Dublin, Ireland. The identity of Ringsend as ‘place’ is deeply entwined in its industrial development. However, since the 1970s Ringsend’s industrial base has been constantly eroded. In recent years Ringsend has attracted considerable private investment as the area is undergoing a shift to a post-industrial landscape. The process of contemporary gentrification is extremely visible in the built environment. The aim of this study was to capture these shifts as they are occurring and as the landscape changes further the opportunity to explore this particular juncture may not arise again. The central findings of this research indicate the importance of ‘place’ in recent transitions. However within these changes place is being re-imaged and re-structured. Further this research also highlights the importance of the specificity of locality in gaining a deeper insight into the process of contemporary ‘gentrification’. Finally this thesis argues that the changes occurring in Ringsend are impacting on understandings of ‘community’ and community re-generation. A central theme within this study is that while the shift to a post­ industrial society is advantageous for capital accumulation contemporary gentrified sites, increasingly surrounded by walls and gates, function as symbols of the uneven development of contemporary urban renewal. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that thewestern view of humanity's place in nature isdominated by a dualistic opposition between nature andculture. Historically this has arisen fromexternalization of nature in both productive andcognitive practices; instances of such externalizationhave become generalized. I think the dualism can bedecomposed by identifying dominant elements in eachparticular instantiation and showing that their strictseparation evaporates under close scrutiny. The philosophical challenge this perspective presents isto substitute concrete socioecological analysis forfoundational metaphysics. A review of majorinterpretations of the history of (...) the dualism inWestern thought indicates that the legacy is moremultistranded than is usually admitted. Modern scienceis often assumed to lie squarely within the dualism,but this is unfounded. In contrast, science providestools for contextual analysis on how human activitiesand natural processes merge. The dualism thusevaporates in actual research practice. Nevertheless,the foundational metaphysics needs to be challenged,primarily because of its paralyzing effect onenvironmental philosophy. (shrink)

Contemporary work on the links between geography and morality tends to focus on the spatial aspects of moral conduct. This paper argues that in addition to geographical space, geographical scale also plays a crucial role in the construction and maintenance of moral frameworks. Focusing on the emergence of the sustainable region in the UK, this paper argues that purportedly sustainable spaces, like the region, contain distinctive moral codes of socio-ecological conduct which are designed to guide actions and locational decisions within (...) regional space. Drawing on the case of regional development in the West Midlands, however, analysis shows that sustainable regions are characterised by not only a moral geography of space, but also a morality of scale. Combining recent work on moral geography with analyses of the political construction of geographical scale, this paper uses the case of post-war regional development in the West Midlands to show how the construction of moral landscapes is intimately tied to the production of particular moralities of scale and scales of morality. (shrink)

The gap between Marx’s theoretical writings on political economy and his historical writings arises out of certain limitations that Marx placed upon his political-economic enquiries. These limitations are outlined in the Grundrisse where Marx distinguishes between the universality of the metabolic relation to nature, the generality of the laws of motion of capital, the particularities of distribution and exchange, and the singularities of consumption. What an analysis of the content of Capital shows is that Marx largely confined his efforts to (...) identifying the law-like character of production to the exclusion of all else. While this allowed him to identify certain laws of motion of capital within any form of the capitalist mode of production, it did not and could not constitute a total theory of a capitalist mode of production. A better understanding of what it is that Marx can do for us through his identification of the general laws of motion leads to a far better appreciation of what it is that we have to do for ourselves in order to make Marx’s theoretical findings applicable to particular conjunctural conditions, such as those that have arisen throughout the economic crisis that began in 2007. (shrink)

Described as ‘the most original and innovative Latin American Marxist’ by Michael Löwy – a sentiment repeated by many others – the work of José Carlos Mariátegui remains a largely untapped resource in the Western Marxist tradition outside of specialist circles. This review essay considers the recent publication of a translation and anthology of Mariátegui’s work into English by Harry Vanden and Mark Becker as a first step towards correcting this trend. It highlights Mariátegui’s understanding of race, power, and identity; (...) the combined and uneven development of capital; and the role of myth and voluntarism in revolutionary struggle as key points in which the early-twentieth-century Peruvian contributes to contemporary debates in Marxist praxis in Latin America and beyond. (shrink)

For this collision, the role of nonhuman animals as woodland theater and naturalizing agents is questioned. In remediated sites, animals are actors that legitimize everyday pollution, oppression and violence. How can the lived realities of nonhuman animals be embraced without naturalizing the discourse that externalizes those lives? As life and industrial-nature cohere, how might aesthetics engender agency in recovery?

In this paper, we critically interrogate the benefits of an interdisciplinary and theoretically diverse dialogue between ‘local food’ and ‘alternative food networks’ and outline how this dialogue might be enriched by a closer engagement with discourses of food sovereignty and the politics of scale. In arguing for a shift towards a greater emphasis on food sovereignty, we contend that contemporary discourses of food security are inadequate for the ongoing task of ensuring a just and sustainable economy of food. Further, rather (...) than treating the local and the global as ontologically given categories around which to contest the politics of food, it is our contention that recognising the socio-spatial aspects of the politics of scale has the potential to reinvigorate discourses of food security, food sovereignty and AFNs. Understanding scale as both fixed to a degree as well as contingent and dynamic has implications for an understanding of the role of food systems, for how the rescaled state privileges certain food systems and the possibilities for resistance through ‘jumping scale’ and food utopias. All of these aspects are significant if we are to fully comprehend and contest the challenges of envisioning and enacting real utopias of food sovereignty. (shrink)

A largely qualitative body of literature has contributed to understanding the contradictory dimensions of community gardening as a social justice tool. Building on this literature through a city-wide, quantitative intervention, this paper focuses on community gardening as a facilitator of ecological gentrification in St. Louis, Missouri. Combining the analytical lenses of spatial justice, urban political ecology, and the rent gap theory of gentrification, I deploy spatial regression analysis to show that community gardening was positively associated with gentrification in St. Louis (...) between the years 2000 and 2010, as measured by the growth of high socioeconomic status residents in each neighborhood. This result suggests that a sociospatial dialectic exists in which the implementation of a community garden, a change in the use of urban space, leads to unintended social outcomes. Contextualizing this finding within the broader literature, I conclude that the potential of community gardening as an instrument for spatial justice is contingent on institutional support against larger-scale processes, like gentrification, that lead to spatially unjust outcomes. (shrink)

Rezensierte Publikation : Harry D. Harootunian: Marx after Marx: History and time in the expansion of capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015, 312 pp., ISBN 978-0-231-17480-0.

With a few notable exceptions, urban garden scholarship tends to be either celebratory or critical of the role urban gardens play in wider political, social, cultural, economic and ecological dynamics. Drawing on urban political ecology scholarship, this article explores the question of nature within scholarship on urban gardens. I argue that failing to adequately scrutinize the co-constitutive character of nature and society has led some scholars to overlook the potential for urban gardens to achieve broader socio-political goals, and led others (...) to overstate the potential. Employing a political ecology approach to urban garden analysis clarifies the material and discursive role of nature in urban garden practice, and ultimately contributes to untangling the potential and limits of urban gardens as sites of socio-political change. (shrink)

El presente artículo nos interpela acerca de si vivimos en un período de transición epocal que requiere nuestra inmediata atención. La crisis financiera de 2008 y sus dramáticas consecuencias en la vida de millones de ciudadanos de las dos principales potencias económicas del planeta —la Unión Europea y Estados Unidos— han revelado, para quien todavía necesitara pruebas de ello, la naturaleza global de los cambios sistémicos operados en el mundo desde la década de 1980. Todos los indicadores señalan que el (...) período histórico conocido como modernidad ha llegado a su fin. (shrink)

Geography is experiencing a ‘moral turn’ in its research interests and practices. There is also a flourishing interest in animal geographies that intersects this turn, and is concurrent with wider scholarly efforts to reincorporate animals and nature into our ethical and social theories. This article intervenes in a dispute between Michael Dear and Richard Symanski. The dispute is over the culling of wild horses in Australia, and I intervene to explore how geography deepens our moral understanding of the animal/human dialectic. (...) I begin by situating the inquiry into ethics and animals in geography. Next, I provide a synopsis of Dear and Symanski's comments on ‘animal rights’, followed in turn by discussions of moral value and value paradigms. I then introduce a value paradigm termed geocentrism as a geographical account of our moral relations to animals. Finally, I discuss the wider significance of this debate for geographical ethics, moral philosophy and social theory. (shrink)

Australia is currently experiencing a prolonged period of water scarcity that is challenging a diverse range of water-dependent activities ranging from household gardening to horticultural production to the viability of riverine ecosystems. The political and ecological importance of water in Australia is not, however, only a recent phenomenon. For the majority of Australia’s settled history, water politics, economics, culture and engineering have reflected and embodied a dynamic relationship between Australian hydrology and Australian society. This essay examines that relationship by first (...) reviewing the work of the Australian historical geographer, Emeritus Professor J. M. Powell. For 40 years Powell has been writing about the process of natural resource appraisal and management in Australia and he has been Australia’s leading authority on the role of water in that process for most of that time. The essay then argues for an extension of Powell’s work by applying the insights provided by the scholars Karl Wittfogel, Donald Worster and Eric Swyngedouw. Their work, it is argued, suggests the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of water in Australia than that currently offered by the majority of the Australian literature, and ultimately provides some tools for thinking ourselves out of the current water crisis. (shrink)

Recently, a shadow has been cast over how geographical scale has been theorized. Neil Brenner has argued that scale risks becoming a empty concept because it has been conflated with other terms in geography such as place, region, and space; Marston, Jones, and Woodward have proposed doing away with scale altogether; while Wood has accused geographers of having a “scale fetish.” The following article defends the theory of scale against these various detractors and attempts to become a bulwark to support (...) the many contributions that geographers have made to effectively characterizing the socio-spatial world. I outline four ways of understanding geographical scale: measurement, size, hierarchy, and relation. I then argue for an understanding of scale that is relational because I believe it provides the most adequate language to characterize how geographers have come to understand the social ontology of the spatialworld. Moreover, I set out to show how the relational description of scale, complements other research on scale, which has shown the importance of scale in the production of geographical difference and uneven social relations. Hence, the understanding of scales relationally, allows for people to have relative positions in the world. Finally, I speculate on two implications that the understanding of scale relatively has for characterizing the effects of globalization: 1) the possibilities that this understanding has for confronting a dominant tenant in the ideology of neoliberalism; 2) the promise that it offers for forms of political resistance. (shrink)

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, (...) including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui. (shrink)

This paper presents a case study of Gardens and Green Spaces (GGS), a resident-driven, grant-funded project in Cleveland, Ohio working toward community change. Through both placemaking and entrepreneurial strategies, the main grant objectives are to effect change at the intersection of food (and agriculture), arts, and culture in Kinsman, a 96% Black Neighborhood on Cleveland’s east side. While community development (CD) projects are often designed by outside ‘experts’ who inform the scope and focus of grant-funded projects, this project is rooted (...) in the hypothesis that a resident-driven approach to CD will lead to increased community buy-in and participation, resulting in more lasting and substantive community change. GGS works across sectors, integrating arts, culture, and food to promote placemaking and community-based entrepreneurial engagement as a path towards greater health, equity, and economic resilience. This paper argues that community-based and resident-driven development—although not without its own challenges—can result in more holistic community transformation across sectors, with the potential for greater resident participation, sustainability, and equity. The case study presented in this paper, including in-depth interviews and neighborhood surveys, is an examination of the pilot phase of GGS, and argues that both placemaking and entrepreneurialism represent a negotiation between market driven community development and a solely philanthropic model. It provides insight into more equitable and sustainable change that has the potential to shift the traditional paradigm of expert driven, or “outside-in” community development. (shrink)

A transition to a sustainable future depends on mobilizing social and cultural resources associated with a re-animation of place. Taking as its basis ongoing research in Rjukan, an industrial monocultural town in Norway, the article shows how industrialized regions in a post-industrial world are in the frontline of western societies' relationship to nature and the environment. There is much potential in the restoration of human relationships to place in industrial towns, in terms of health and social and economic development, but (...) not least in terms of sustainability understood as authentic, positive and healthy self-development. (shrink)

In recent years, the vast increase in information flows has made it possible to instantly connect location-dependent information with physical spaces. These technologies have provided new forms of the representation of space as much as new forms of perception through tools and techniques used in land surveying, remote sensing, etc. From a critical point of view, pervasive computing, location-based applications, or, in other words, “locative media” provide an interesting framework to understand how these technologies relate to our understanding of space (...) and place. Concretely, we want to examine how the uses of locative media in social-oriented artworks interact with people's sense of place. This article therefore discusses contemporary theories on space related to media and technology with a specific focus on the conceptualization of the notion of place. It also relates these theories to the study of different locative media artworks: Canal Accessible, Bio Mapping, Disappearing Places, and Coffee Deposits. We contend that locative media artworks act upon distinctive ways to understand the mediation of technology in current place-making practices. (shrink)

This article critically engages with debates on uneven and combined development and particularly the lack of attention given in this literature to accounts of spatial diversity in capitalism’s outward expansion as well as issues of Eurocentrism. Through interlocutions with Antonio Gramsci on his theorising of state formation and capitalist modernity and the notion of passive revolution, we draw out the internal relationship between the structuring condition of uneven and combined development and the class agency of passive revolution. Interlocuting with passive (...) revolution places Antonio Gramsci firmly within a stream of classic social theory shaping considerations of capitalist modernity. As a result, by building on cognate theorising elsewhere, passive revolution can then be established as a lateral field of causality that necessarily grasps spatio-temporal dynamics linked to both state and subaltern class practices of transformation in social property relations, situated within the structuring conditions of uneven and combined development. (shrink)