Driving Spaces
A Cultural-Historical Geography of England's M1 Motorway
Part 17 of the RGS-IBG Book series
Peter Merriman traces the social and cultural histories and geographies of driving spaces through an examination of the design, construction and use of England's M1 motorway in the 1950s and 1960s.
• A first-of-its-kind academic study examining the production and consumption of the landscapes and spaces of a British motorway
• An interdisciplinary approach, engaging with theoretical and empirical work from sociology, history, cultural studies, anthropology and geography
• Contains 38 high quality illustrations
• Based on extensive, original archive work.
Geographies of British Modernity
Space and Society in the Twentieth Century
Part 81 of the RGS-IBG Book series
This volume brings together leading scholars in the geography and history of twentieth-century Britain to illustrate the contribution that geographical thinking can make to understanding modern Britain.
• The first collection to explore the contribution that geographical thinking can make to our understanding of modern Britain.
• Contains thirteen essays by leading scholars in the geography and history of twentieth-century Britain.
• Focuses on how and why geographies of Britain have formed and changed over the past century.
• Combines economic, political, social and cultural geographies.
• Demonstrates the vitality of work in this field and its relevance to everyday life.
The Urban Question in Africa
Uneven Geographies of Transition
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Illuminates the path to more generative urban transitions in Africa's cities and developing rural areas
Africa is the world's most rapidly urbanizing region. The predominantly rural continent is currently undergoing an "urban revolution" unlike any other, generally taking place without industrialization and often characterized by polarization, poverty, and fragmentation. While many cities have experienced construction booms and real estate speculation, others are marked by expanding informal economies and imploding infrastructures.
The Urban Question in Africa: Uneven Geographies of Transition examines the imbalanced and contested nature of the ongoing urban transition of Africa. Edited and authored by leading experts on the subject, this unique volume develops an original theory conceptualizing cities as sociotechnical systems constituted by production, consumption, and infrastructure regimes. Throughout the book, in-depth chapters address the impacts of current meta-trends-global geopolitical shifts, economic changes, the climate crisis, and others-on Africa's cities and the broader development of the continent.
• Presents a novel framework based on extensive fieldwork in multiple countries and regions of the continent
• Examines geopolitical and socioeconomic topics such as manufacturing in African cities, the green economy in Africa, and the impact of China on urban Africa
• Discusses the prospects for generative urbanism to produce and sustain long-term development in Africa
• Features high-quality maps, illustrations, and photographs
The Urban Question in Africa: Uneven Geographies of Transition is essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students in geography, urban planning, and African studies, academic researchers, geographers, urban planners, and policymakers.
Theory and Explanation in Geography
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
THEORY AND EXPLANATION IN GEOGRAPHY
"With this book Henry Yeung puts Geography back into the driver's seat of new theory development. Foregrounding mid-range theories and mechanism-based explanations, he offers a pragmatic approach that has the capacity to shape the wider social sciences for years to come. The timing of this intervention is pitch-perfect, as scholars search for ways to understand and intervene in an increasingly distrustful and polarized world."
-KATHARYNE MITCHELL, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
"Critical human geography possesses a distinctive theory culture-pluralist, creative, distributed, restless, contested-prone to "turning," wary of orthodoxies and fixed positions. In this original and provocative contribution, the leading economic geographer Henry Yeung steps out beyond his home turf to engage styles and practices of theorizing across this diverse field, carving out a new remit and rubric for middle-range theorizing."
-JAMIE PECK, Canadian Research Chair and Distinguished University Scholar, University of British Columbia, Canada
Grounded in a generous reading of a multitude of critical approaches in human geography and their diverse conceptions of theory, Theory and Explanation in Geography draws upon cutting-edge debates on the mechanism-based approach to theory and explanation in analytical sociology, political science, and the philosophy of social sciences to inform current and future geographical thinking on theory. This consolidated conceptual work represents an extension and much further development of the author's well-cited works on relational geography, critical realism and causal explanation, process-based methodology, globalization and the theory of global production networks, and "theorizing back" and situated knowledges that were published in leading journals in Geography.
The work has several chapters that identify new directions for Geography's current and future engagement with the wider social sciences and relevant research agendas in geographical thought. Its main chapters provide the necessary conceptual toolkits for mobilizing such an expanding research program in the 2020s and beyond. Compared to typical texts on geographical thought, this book is less retrospective and historical and more prospective in nature. Detailing why and how mid-range explanatory theories can be better developed through causal mechanisms and relational thinking that have been revitalized in the social sciences, Theory and Explanation in Geography is an essential read for academics, geographers, and scholars seeking unique perspective on an important facet of the field.
Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948–199
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
DECOLONISING GEOGRAPHY?
"This book presents an extraordinarily sensitive account of geography's histories in five African countries subjected to British colonial rule. Craggs and Neate draw together political and imaginative processes of decolonisation, through an innovative biographical approach that humanizes and enlivens the story of our academic discipline. It will be an invaluable resource for those seeking a deeper understanding of decolonisation, its recent trajectories and far-reaching implications, on the African continent."
-Shari Daya, Affiliate Associate Professor in Environmental and Geographical Science, University of Cape Town
"By placing the experiences, ideas, and practices of African geographers in the center of their analyses, Craggs and Neate provide an unprecedented account of historical and contemporary decolonizing struggles within Geography and the academy. This book should be required reading for all those looking to decolonize the discipline and dislodge it from its Global North histories, institutions, and ideologies."
-Mona Domosh, Professor of Geography, The Joan P. and Edward J. Foley Jr. 1933 Professor, Dartmouth College
"This meticulous work explores how colonialism, decolonization and postcolonialism shaped African geography and geographers. It sheds light on efforts to 'Africanize' the discipline, a process which I was both witness to and a participant in."
-Stanley Okafor, Professor of Geography (Retired), University of Ibadan
How did a generation of academic geographers engage with constitutional decolonisation during the end of the British empire in Africa? In Decolonising Geography? Disciplinary Histories and the End of the British Empire in Africa, 1948-1998, Ruth Craggs and Hannah Neate explore how the teaching, research, administration and activism of geographers in Africa shaped the discipline and the post-colonial geopolitics of the continent. The authors follow the professional lives of individual geographers to provide fresh insights into decolonisation in the former British Empire in Africa, drawing from extensive archival research and more than 40 oral history interviews with geographers in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and the UK. Decolonising Geography is a must-read for any reader in the UK and Africa with an interest in the relationships between geography and decolonisation.
Geopolitics and Expertise
Knowledge and Authority in European Diplomacy
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Geopolitics and Expertise is an in-depth exploration of how expert knowledge is created and exercised in the external relations machinery of the European Union.
• Provides a rare, full-length work on transnational diplomatic practice
• Based on a rigorous and empirical study, involving over 100 interviews with policy professionals over seven years
• Focuses on the qualitative and contextual, rather than the quantitative and uniform
• Moves beyond traditional political science to blend human geography, international relations, anthropology, and sociology
The Improvised State
Sovereignty, Performance and Agency in Dayton Bosnia
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
The Improvised State provides a highly developed account of the nature and outcomes of Bosnian state practices since the Dayton Peace Agreement. Jeffrey presents new and significant theories, based on extensive fieldwork in Bosnia, which advance understanding of state building.
• Provides a major contribution to recent academic debates as to the nature of the state after violent conflict, and offers invaluable insights into state building
• Introduces the idea of state improvisation, where improvisation refers to a process of both performance and resourcefulness
• Uses the theoretical framework of Pierre Bourdieu to explore how powerful agencies have attempted to present a coherent vision of Bosnia and Herzegovina following the conflict 1992-5
• Advances our understanding of the Bosnian state by focusing on the practices of statecraft fostered in the post-Dayton era
• Research based on four periods of residential fieldwork in Bosnia, which allowed a detailed analysis of political practices in the country
People - States - Territories
The Political Geographies of British State Transformation
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
People/States/Territories examines the role of state personnel in shaping, and being shaped by, state organizations and territories, and demonstrates how agents have actively contributed to the reproduction and transformation of the British state over the long term.
• A valuable corrective to recent characterizations of territory as a static and given geographical concept
• An explication of the political geographies of state reproduction and transformation, through its focus on state territoriality and the variegated character of state power
• Considerable empirical insight into the consolidation of the British state over the long term.
Geochemical Sediments and Landscapes
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This state-of-the-art volume reviews both past work and current research, with contributions from internationally recognized experts. The book is organized into fourteen chapters and designed to embrace the full range of terrestrial geochemical sediments.
• An up-to-date and comprehensive survey of research in the field of geochemical sediments and landscapes
• Discusses the main duricrusts, including calcrete, laterite and silcrete
• Considers deposits precipitated in various springs, lakes, caves and near-coastal environments
• Considers the range of techniques used in the analysis of geochemical sediments, representing a significant advance on previous texts
Queer Visibilities
Space, Identity and Interaction in Cape Town
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Combining current theory and original fieldwork, Queer Visibilities explores the gap between liberal South African law and the reality for groups of queer men living in Cape Town.
• Explores the interface between queer sexuality, race, and urban space to show links between groups of queer men
• Focuses on three main 'population groups' in Cape Town-white, coloured, and black Africans
• Discusses how HIV remains a key issue for queer men in South Africa
• Utilizes new research data-the first comprehensive cross-community study of queer identities in South Africa
Respatialising Finance
Power, Politics and Offshore Renminbi Market Making in London
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
RESPATIALISING FINANCE
'In Respatialising Finance Sarah Hall uses the internationalisation of the Chinese Renminbi (RMB) to work through a sympathetic conceptual and empirical critique of prevailing analyses of International Financial Centres (IFCs). Her conceptual (re)framing stresses the politics, institutions and economics of IFCs and will be essential reading for all social scientists interested in the dynamism of contemporary finance and financial centres.'
Professor Jane Pollard, Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies (CURDS), Newcastle University, UK
'Through detailed study of Chinese RMB internationalisation and combining analytical insights from economic geography, sociology, and international political economy, Sarah Hall shows why offshore networks anchored in territories such as the City of London are both core to global monetary and financial landscapes, and provide a key terrain for state power and politics.'
Professor Paul Langley, Department of Geography, Durham University, UK
Respatialising Finance is one of the first detailed empirical studies of how and why London became the leading western financial centre within the wider Chinese economic and political project of internationalising its currency, the renminbi (RMB). This in-depth volume examines how political authorities in both London and Beijing identified the potential value of London's international financial centre in facilitating and legitimising RMB internationalisation, and how they sought to operationalise this potential through a range of market-making activities.
The text features original data from on-the-ground research in London and Beijing conducted with financial and legal professionals working in RMB markets and offers an original theoretical approach that brings economic geography into closer dialogue with international political economy. Recent work on territory illustrates how financial centres are not simply containers and facilitators of global financial flows—rather they serve as territorial fixes within the dynamic and crisis-prone nature of global finance.
Everyday Moral Economies
Food, Politics and Scale in Cuba
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Offering a rare glimpse of rural life in modern-day Cuba, this book examines how ordinary Cubans carve out their own spaces for 'appropriate' acts of consumption, exchange, and production within the contradictory normative and material spaces of everyday economic life.
• Discusses the conflict between the socialist-welfare ideal of food as an entitlement and the market value of food as a commodity
• Bridges the fields of human geography and anthropology
• Approaches food networks and the scale of food systems in a novel way
• Provides a comprehensive look at Cuba today, with coverage of history, politics, economics, and social and environmental justice
• Enhanced by vivid photos from the field
Cryptic Concrete
A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state.
• A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geo-and bio-politics
• Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war
• Zooms in on two types of structures-the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo
• Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures' complementary nature
Unhomely Life
Modernity, Mobilities and the Making of Home in China
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
How do Chinas mobile individuals create a sense of home in a rapidly changing world?
Unhomely life, different from houselessness, refers to a fluctuating condition between losing home feelings and the search for home - a prevalent condition in post-Mao China. The faster that Chinese society modernizes, the less individuals feel at home, and the more they yearn for a sense of home. This is the central paradox that Xiaobo Su explores: how mobile individuals-lifestyle migrants and retreat tourists from China's big cities, displaced natives and rural migrants in peripheral China-handle the loss of home and try to experience a homely way of life.
In Unhomely Life, Xiaobo Su examines the subjective experiences of mobile individuals to better understand why they experience the loss of home feelings and how they search for home. Integrating extensive empirical data and a robust theoretical framework, the author presents a journey-based critical analysis of "home" under constant making, un-making, and re-making in post-Mao China. Su argues that the making of home is not a solely economic or rational calculation for maximum return, but rather a synthesis of resistance and compromise under the disappointing conditions of modernity.
Offering rich insights into the continuity and disruption of China's great transformation, Unhomely Life:
• Develops an original theory of unhomely life that incorporates contemporary research and traditional Chinese ideas of home
• Explores the process of homemaking and its implications for understanding the costs of high-speed economic growth in China
• Analyzes mobile individuals across different genders, ages, ethnicities, social classes, and economic backgrounds to address the balance between meaning and money in everyday life
Containing in-depth and sophisticated empirical data collected from 2002 to 2020, Unhomely Life: Modernity, Mobilities, and the Making of Home in China is an invaluable resource for advanced undergraduates, graduate students, lecturers, and academic researchers in cultural studies, migration, tourism, China studies, cultural anthropology, sociology, and social and cultural geography.
Mapping Partition
Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
MAPPING PARTITION
"A hugely productive partnership between geography and history, 'Mapping Partition' does a great service to the field of Partition studies - it leaves us in no doubt about both the long-term cartographical processes that contributed to how South Asia was divided in 1947, and the importance of bringing a geographer's insights to bear on this complex history of boundary making."
Professor Sarah Ansari, Professor of History (South Asia), Royal Holloway University of London
"Fitzpatrick produces spatial readings of partition's knowledge formations, geopolitical imaginaries, administrative cartography, and legal geographical expertise. These enrich the histories and geographies of partition through painstaking archival, textual, and visual analysis which will resonate far beyond historical geography and South Asian studies."
Professor Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham
Mapping Partition delivers the first in-depth geographical account of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The book explores the impact of colonial geography and geographers on the boundary, both during the partition process and in the period preceding it.
Drawing on extensive archival research, Hannah Fitzpatrick argues that colonial geographical knowledge underpinned the partition process in heretofore unacknowledged ways. The author also discusses the consequences of placing different ethnic, communal, and linguistic groups onto the colonial map and the growing importance of majority and minority populations in representative democratic politics.
Mapping Partition: Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan is required reading for students and researchers studying geography, colonial and imperial history, South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary border studies.
Rescaling Urban Poverty
Homelessness, State Restructuring and City Politics in Japan
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
RESCALING URBAN POVERTY
"In this path-breaking book, Mahito Hayashi explores the rescaled geographies of homelessness that have been produced in contemporary Japanese cities. Through an original synthesis of regulationist political economy and immersive place-based research, Hayashi situates urban homelessness in Japan in comparative-international contexts. The book offers new theoretical perspectives from which to decipher emergent forms of urban marginality and their contestation."
-Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago
"Mahito Hayashi traces the shifting spatial strategies of unhoused people as they create spaces of emancipation within Japanese cities. Attending to the complexities of contentious class politics and livelihoods barely sustained by the survival economies, Rescaling Urban Poverty is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of the geographies of urban social movements."
-Nik Theodore, Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago
Rescaling Urban Poverty provides the essential understanding of how state rescaling ensnares homeless and impoverished people in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism. Its three angles-national states, public and private spaces, and urban social movements-uncover the hidden dynamics of rescaling that emerge, and are resisted, at the fringes of mainstream (domiciled) society and its housing regimes/classes. Evidence is drawn from Japanese cities where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork and develops robust urban narratives by mobilising spatial regulation theory, metabolism theory, state theory, and critical housing theory. Rescaling Urban Poverty cross-fertilises these strands through meticulous efforts to reinterpret both old and new texts. By building bridges between classical and contemporary interests, and between the theories and Japanese cities, this book attracts various audiences in geography, sociology, urban studies, and political economy.
Domesticating Neo-Liberalism
Spaces of Economic Practice and Social Reproduction in Post-Socialist Cities
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Based on in-depth research in Poland and Slovakia, Domesticating Neo-Liberalism addresses how we understand the processes of neo-liberalization in post-socialist cities.
• Builds upon a vast amount of new research data
• Examines how households try to sustain their livelihoods at particularly dramatic and difficult times of urban transformation
• Provides a major contribution to how we theorize the geographies of neo-liberalism
• Offers a conclusion which informs discussions of social policy within European Union enlargement
Military Geographies
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Military Geographies is about how local space, place, environment and landscape are shaped by military presence, and about how wider geographies are touched by militarism.
• A book about how local space, place, environment and landscape are shaped by military presence, and about how wider geographies are touched by militarism.
• Sets a new agenda for the study of military geography with its critical analysis of the ways in which military control over space is legitimized.
• Explores the ways in which militarism and military activities control development, the use of space and our understanding of place.
• Focuses on military lands, establishments and personnel in contemporary peacetime settings.
• Uses examples from Europe, North America and Australasia.
• Draws on original research into the mechanisms by which the British government manages the defence estate.
• Illustrated with maps, plans and other figures.
Rehearsing the State
The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Rehearsing the State presents a comprehensive investigation of the institutions, performances, and actors through which the Tibetan Government-in-Exile is rehearsing statecraft. McConnell offers new insights into how communities officially excluded from formal state politics enact hoped-for futures and seek legitimacy in the present.
• Offers timely and original insights into exile Tibetan politics based on detailed qualitative research in Tibetan communities in India
• Advances existing debates in political geography by bringing ideas of stateness and statecraft into dialogue with geographies of temporality
• Explores the provisional and pedagogical dimensions of state practices, adding weight to assertions that states are in a continual situation of emergence
• Makes a significant contribution to critical state theory
Geopolitics and the Event
Rethinking Britain's Iraq War Through Art
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
An original exploration of the 2003 Iraq war and geopolitics more broadly through the prism of art.
• Offers a reappraisal of one of the most contentious and consequential events of the early twenty-first century
• Advances an original perspective on Britain's role in the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq
• Maps out new ways of thinking about geopolitical events through art
• Examines the work of artists, curators and activists in light of Britain's role as a colonial power in Iraq and the importance of oil
• Reflects on the significance, limits and dilemmas of art as a form of critical intervention
• Questions the implications of art in colonialism and modernity
Spaces of Colonialism
Delhi's Urban Governmentalities
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Examines the residential, policed, and infrastructural landscapes of New and Old Delhi under British Rule.
• The first book of its kind to present a comparative history of New and Old Delhi
• Draws on the governmentality theories and methodologies presented in Michel Foucault's lecture courses
• Looks at problems of social and racial segregation, the policing of the cities, and biopolitical needs in urban settings
• Undertakes a critique of colonial governmentality on the basis of the lived spaces of everyday life
Learning the City
Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Learning the City: Translocal Assemblage and Urban Politics critically examines the relationship between knowledge, learning, and urban politics, arguing both for the centrality of learning for political strategies and developing a progressive international urbanism.
• Presents a distinct approach to conceptualising the city through the lens of urban learning
• Integrates fieldwork conducted in Mumbai's informal settlements with debates on urban policy, political economy, and development
• Considers how knowledge and learning are conceived and created in cities
• Addresses the way knowledge travels and opportunities for learning about urbanism between North and South
Articulations of Capital
Global Production Networks and Regional Transformations
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Articulations of Capital offers an accessible, grounded, yet theoretically-sophisticated account of the geographies of global production networks, value chains, and regional development in post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe.
• Proposes a new theorization of global value chains as part of a conjunctural economic geography
• Develops a set of conceptual and theoretical arguments concerning the regional embeddedness of global production
• Draws on longitudinal empirical research from over 20 years in the Bulgarian and Slovakian apparel industries
• Makes a major intervention into the debate over the economic geographies of European integration and EU enlargement
Assembling Export Markets
The Making and Unmaking of Global Food Connections in West Africa
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Assembling Export Markets explores the new 'frontier regions' of the global fresh produce market that has emerged in Ghana over the past decade.
• Represents a major and empirically rich contribution to the emerging field of the social studies of economization and marketization
• Offers one of the first ethnographic accounts on the making of global commodity chains 'from below'
• Denaturalizes global markets by unpacking their local engagement, materially entangled construction, need for maintenance, and fragile character
• Offers a trans-disciplinary engagement with the construction and extension of market relations in two frontier regions of global capitalism
• Critically examines the opportunities and risks for firms and farms in Ghana entering global fresh produce markets
Defensible Space on the Move
Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Both theoretically informed and empirically rich, Defensible Space makes an important conceptual contribution to policy mobilities thinking, to policy and practice, and also to practitioners handling of complex spatial concepts.
• Critically examines the geographical concept Defensible Space, which has been influential in designing out crime to date, and has been applied to housing estates in the UK, North America, Europe and beyond
• Evaluates the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the US to the UK and into English housing policy and practice
• Explores the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented, as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English housing estates
• Critiquing and pushing forwards work on policy mobilities, the authors illustrate for the first time how transfer mechanisms worked at both a policy and practitioner level
• Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories and in-depth interviews, this important book reveals defensible space to be ambiguous, uncertain in nature, neither proven or disproven scientifically
Geomorphology of Upland Peat
Erosion, Form and Landscape Change
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
The Geomorphology of Upland Peat offers a detailed synthesis of existing literature on peat erosion, incorporating new research ideas and data from two leading experts in the field.
• Presents the most detailed and current work to date
• Written in a style that is both intelligent and accessible
• Fully illustrated with original drawings and photographs
• Relevant and information for a broad audience working on organic sediments in various environments
Pathological Lives
Disease, Space and Biopolitics
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Pandemics, epidemics and food borne diseases are a major global challenge. Focusing on the food and farming sector, and mobilising social theory as well as empirical enquiry, Pathological Lives investigates current approaches to biosecurity and ask how pathological lives can be successfully 'regulated' without making life more dangerous as a result.
• Uses empirical and social theoretical resources developed in the course of a 40-month research project entitled 'Biosecurity borderlands'
• Focuses on the food and farming sector, where the generation and subsequent transmission of disease has the ability to reach pandemic proportions
• Demonstrates the importance of a geographical and spatial analysis, drawing together social, material and biological approaches, as well as national and international examples
• The book makes three main conceptual contributions, reconceptualising disease as situated matters, the spatial or topological analysis of situations and a reformulation of biopolitics
• Uniquely brings together conceptual development with empirically and politically informed work on infectious and zoonotic disease, to produce a timely and important contribution to both social science and to policy debate
Globalizing South China
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This insightful account demonstrates that capitalism in China has a history and a geography, and combines perspectives from both to demonstrate that regional economic restructuring in South China is far from an economic 'miracle's.
Swept Up Lives?
Re-envisioning the Homeless City
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Utilizing innovative ethnographic research, Swept Up Lives? challenges conventional accounts of urban homelessness to trace the complex and varied attempts to care for homeless people
• Presents innovative ethnographic research which suggests an important shift in perspective in the analysis and understanding of urban homelessness
• Emphasizes the ethical and emotional geographies of care embodied and performed within homeless services spaces
• Suggests that different homelessness 'scenes' develop in different places due to varied historical, political, and cultural responses to the problems faced
Geographies of Anticolonialism
Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
A fresh approach to scholarship on the diverse nature of Indian anticolonial processes.
• Brings together a varied selection of literature to explore Indian anticolonialism in new ways
• Offers a different perspective to geographers seeking to understand political resistance to colonialism
• Addresses contemporary studies that argue nationalism was joined by other political processes, such as revolutionary and anarchist ideologies, to shape the Indian independence movement
• Includes a focus on a specific anticolonial group, the "Pondicherry Gang," and investigates their significant impact which went beyond South India
• Helps readers understand the diverse nature of anticolonialism, which in turn prompts thinking about the various geographies produced through anticolonial activity
Geomorphology and the Carbon Cycle
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
The first systematic examination of the role of geomorphological processes in the cycling of carbon through the terrestrial system.
• Argues that knowledge of geomorphological processes is fundamental to understanding the ways in which carbon is stored and recycled in the terrestrial environment
• Integrates classical geomorphological theory with understanding of microbial processes controlling the decomposition of organic matter
• Develops an interdisciplinary research agenda for the analysis of the terrestrial carbon cycle
• Informed by work in ecology, microbiology and biogeochemistry, in order to analyse spatial and temporal patterns of terrestrial carbon cycling at the landscape scale
• Considers the ways in which, as Humanity enters the Anthropocene, the application of this science has the potential to manage the terrestrial carbon cycle to limit increases in atmospheric carbon
A New Deal for Transport?
The UK's Struggle With the Sustainable Transport Agenda
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Comprising contributions from a range of experts, this volume offers a critical commentary on the government's sustainable transport policy.
• A critical commentary on the Blair government's sustainable transport policy and its implementation.
• Firmly rooted in an appreciation of the politics of this controversial field.
• Experts contribute up-to-the-minute analyses of the key issues.
• Will inform debate over the future of transport policy.
• Includes a Foreword by David Begg, Chair of the Commission for Integrated Transport.
Publics and the City
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Publics and the City investigates struggles over the making of urban publics, considering how the production, management and regulation of 'public spaces' has emerged as a problem for both urban politics and urban theory.
• Advances a new framework for considering the diverse spatialities of publicness in relation to the city
• Argues that a city's contribution to the making of publics goes beyond the provision of places for public gathering
• Examines a series of detailed case studies
• Looks at the relationship between urbanism, public spheres, and democracy
Bodies, Affects, Politics
The Clash of Bodily Regimes
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This book seeks to understand the coexistence of bodily regimes and the politics that emerge from the clash between them:
• Presents a novel conceptual model for understanding the relationship between bodies and affects
• Reworks Rancière's notions of the distribution of the sensible and the aesthetic unconscious
• Establishes a dynamic and multiple understanding of the repressive, distributive and communicative unconscious by rethinking Freudian psychoanalysis
• Utilizes a variety of empirical materials, from Hollywood movies to Freud's case studies
• Sets its argument about politics within the context of significant social events to ensure its conceptual and empirical material is relevant to the contemporary political moment
Global Asian City
Migration, Desire and the Politics of Encounter in 21st Century Seoul
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Global Asian City provides a unique theoretical framework for studying the growth of cities and migration focused on the notion of desire as a major driver of international migration to Asian cities.
• Draws on more than 120 interviews of emigrants to Seoul-including migrant workers from Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, English teachers from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, UK and USA, and international students at two elite Korean universities
• Features a comparative account of different migrant populations and the ways in which national migration systems and urban processes create differences between these groups
• Focuses on the causes of international migrant to Seoul, South Korea, and reveals how migration has transformed the city and nation, especially in the last two decades
Material Politics
Disputes Along the Pipeline
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
In Material Politics, author Andrew Barry reveals that as we are beginning to attend to the importance of materials in political life, materials has become increasingly bound up with the production of information about their performance, origins, and impact.
• Presents an original theoretical approach to political geography by revealing the paradoxical relationship between materials and politics
• Explores how political disputes have come to revolve not around objects in isolation, but objects that are entangled in ever growing quantities of information about their performance, origins, and impact
• Studies the example of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline—a fascinating experiment in transparency and corporate social responsibility—and its wide-spread negative political impact
• Capitalizes on the growing interdisciplinary interest, especially within geography and social theory, about the critical role of material artefacts in political life
Geographies and Moralities
International Perspectives on Development, Justice and Place
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This topical book addresses contemporary concern with the interconnections between geography and morality.
• Covers both the geographical context of morality, and moralities in geographical methods and practices.
• Contains up-to-date case studies based on original research.
• Deals with controversial issues, such as problems of globalization, European integration, human rights in Nigeria, territorial conflict in Israel, and land reform in post-apartheid South Africa.
• The editors are well-published leading international authorities.
• The contributors are drawn from Australia, Eastern Europe, Israel, South Africa, the UK and the US.
Putting Workfare in Place
Local Labour Markets and the New Deal
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This book is the first comprehensive and authoritative analysis of the New Deal and examines how far the programme has succeeded in responding to the diversity of conditions in local labour markets across the UK.
• Argues that profound differences in local labour market conditions have exerted a telling influence on the New Deal's achievements
• Includes extensive new research data on the current conditions of local labour markets in the UK and local impacts of the New Deal
• Illustrated by a large series of original maps and figures.
• Based on numerous interviews with local and regional policy actors.
Work-Life Advantage
Sustaining Regional Learning and Innovation
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Work-Life Advantage analyses how employer-provision of 'family-friendly' working arrangements-designed to help workers better reconcile work, home and family-can also enhance firms' capacities for learning and innovation, in pursuit of long-term competitive advantage and socially inclusive growth.
• Brings together major debates in labour geography, feminist geography, and regional learning in novel ways, through a focus on the shifting boundaries between work, home, and family
• Addresses a major gap in the scholarly research surrounding the narrow 'business case' for work-life balance by developing a more socially progressive, workerist 'dual agenda'
• Challenges and disrupts masculinist assumptions of the "ideal worker" and the associated labour market marginalization of workers with significant home and family commitments
• Based on 10 years of research with over 300 IT workers and 150 IT firms in the UK and Ireland, with important insights for professional workers and knowledge-intensive companies around the world
Domicile and Diaspora
Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Domicile and Diaspora investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• The first book to study the Anglo-Indian community past and present, in India, Britain and Australia.
• The first book by a geographer to focus on a community of mixed descent.
• Investigates geographies of home and identity for Anglo-Indian women in the 50 years before and after Indian independence in 1947.
• Draws on interviews and focus groups with over 150 Anglo-Indians, as well as archival research.
• Makes a distinctive contribution to debates about home, identity, hybridity, migration and diaspora.
Metropolitan Preoccupations
The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
In this, the first book-length study of the cultural and political geography of squatting in Berlin, Alexander Vasudevan links the everyday practices of squatters in the city to wider and enduring questions about the relationship between space, culture, and protest.
• Focuses on the everyday and makeshift practices of squatters in their attempt to exist beyond dominant power relations and redefine what it means to live in the city
• Offers a fresh critical perspective that builds on recent debates about the "right to the city" and the role of grassroots activism in the making of alternative urbanisms
• Examines the implications of urban squatting for how we think, research and inhabit the city as a site of radical social transformation
• Challenges existing scholarship on the New Left in Germany by developing a critical geographical reading of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the complex geographies of connection and solidarity that emerged in its wake
• Draws on extensive field work conducted in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany
Nothing Personal?
Geographies of Governing and Activism in the British Asylum System
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
In this groundbreaking new study, Nick Gill provides a conceptually innovative account of the ways in which indifference to the desperation and hardship faced by thousands of migrants fleeing persecution and exploitation comes about.
• Features original, unpublished empirical material from four Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded projects
• Challenges the consensus that border controls are necessary or desirable in contemporary society
• Demonstrates how immigration decision makers are immersed in a suffocating web of institutionalized processes that greatly hinder their objectivity and limit their access to alternative perspectives
• Theoretically informed throughout, drawing on the work of a range of social theorists, including Max Weber, Zygmunt Bauman, Emmanuel Levinas, and Georg Simmel
On Shifting Foundations
State Rescaling, Policy Experimentation and Economic Restructuring in Post-1949 China
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This book introduces readers to the current social and economic state of China since its restructuring in 1949.
• Provides insights into the targeted institutional change that is occurring simultaneously across the entire country
• Presents context-rich accounts of how and why these changes connect to (if not contradict) regulatory logics established during the Mao-era
• A new analytical framework that explicitly considers the relationship between state rescaling, policy experimentation, and path dependency
• Prompts readers to think about how experimental initiatives reflect and contribute to the 'national strategy' of Chinese development
• An excellent extension of ongoing theoretical work examining the entwinement of subnational regulatory reconfiguration, place-specific policy experimentation, and the reproduction of national economic advantage
Everyday Peace?
Politics, Citizenship and Muslim Lives in India
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Providing important insights into political geography, the politics of peace, and South Asian studies, this book explores everyday peace in northern India as it is experienced by the Hindu-Muslim community.
• Challenges normative understandings of Hindu-Muslim relations as relentlessly violent and the notion of peace as a romantic endpoint occurring only after violence and political maneuverings
• Examines the ways in which geographical concepts such as space, place, and scale can inform and problematize understandings of peace
• Redefines the politics of peace, as well as concepts of citizenship, agency, secular politics, and democracy
• Based on over 14 months of qualitative and archival research in the city of Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, India
Lost Geographies of Power
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This original study explores the difference that space and spatiality make to the understanding of power.
• Explores the difference that space and spatiality makes to an understanding of power.
• Moves forward the incorporation of ideas of space into social theory.
• Presents a new understanding of the exercise, uses and manifestations of cultural, economic and political power in the second half of the twentieth century.
• Illustrated with cases and examples.
How Cities Learn
Tracing Bus Rapid Transit in South Africa
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
How Cities Learn traces the circulation of bus rapid transit (BRT) to understand how and why it was widely adopted in South Africa.
• Investigates the global proliferation and localization of BRT
• Examines the production and distribution of transportation knowledge in the global south
• Addresses the spatial and social legacy of apartheid in South African cities
• Reveals a new way of understanding the intersections between policy, people and place
• Essential reading for scholars of geography, politics, sociology and transportation, as well as urban planners and practitioners
Spatial Politics
Essays For Doreen Massey
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
This critical engagement with Doreen Massey's ground-breaking work in geographic theory and its relationship to politics features specially commissioned essays from former students and colleagues, as well as the artists, political figures and activists whose thinking she has helped to shape. It seeks to mark and take forward her compelling contributions to geographical theorizing and political debate.
• High profile contributors include Lawrence Grossberg, Chantal Mouffe, Jamie Peck and Jane Wills
• The global reach and significance of Massey's work recommends this volume to a diverse readership
• Provides an agenda for work on spatial politics and critical geography
• Sets out the contours of a human geography informed by Doreen Massey's work
Millionaire Migrants
Trans-Pacific Life Lines
Part of the RGS-IBG Book series
Based on extensive interviewing and access to a wide range of databases, this is an examination of the migration career of wealthy migrants who left East Asia and relocated to Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, in the 1980s and 1990s.
• An interdisciplinary project based on over 15 years of research in Vancouver, Toronto, and Hong Kong, with additional comparative visits and consultations in Sydney, Beijing, and Singapore
• Traces the histories of the migrants families over a 25 year period
• Offers a critical view of the spatial presuppositions of neo-liberal globalization, and an insertion of geography into transnational theory