Where do experiments end?

types: Editorial CommentCopyright © 2010 Elsevier. NOTICE: This is the author’s version of a work accepted for publication by Elsevier. Changes resulting from the publishing process, including peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting and other quality control mechanisms, may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Geoforum, 2010, Vol. 41, Issue 5 pp. 667 – 670 DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2010.05.003Editoria

Risk, rescue and emergency services: The changing spatialities of Mountain Rescue Teams in England and Wales

This paper considers the role of the emergency services in society and, in particular, their role in controlling, mitigating and resolving risk. Using a network approach, Mountain Rescue Teams are studied in order to examine how people, agencies, animals, technology and knowledge are deployed to resolve emergencies. The paper traces the changing nature of risk in rural places and the impact of state regulation on the deployment, spatialities and practices of the emergency services. In doing so, it argues that greater attention should be paid to the emergency services by geographers. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Code, space and everyday life

In this paper we examine the role of code (software) in the spatial formation of collective life. Taking the view that human life and coded technology are folded into one another, we theorise space as ontogenesis. Space, we posit, is constantly being bought into being through a process of transduction – the constant making anew of a domain in reiterative and transformative practices - as an incomplete solution to a relational problem. The relational problem we examine is the ongoing encounter between individuals and environment where the solution, to a greater or lesser extent, is code. Code, we posit, is diversely embedded in collectives as coded objects, coded infrastructure, coded processes and coded assemblages. These objects, infrastructure, processes and assemblages possess technicity, that is, unfolding or evolutive power to make things happen; the ability to mediate, supplement, augment, monitor, regulate, operate, facilitate, produce collective life. We contend that when the technicity of code is operationalised it transduces one of three forms of hybrid spatial formations: code/space, coded space and backgrounded coded space. These formations are contingent, relational, extensible and scaleless, often stretched out across networks of greater or shorter length. We demonstrate the coded transduction of space through three vignettes – each a day in the life of three people living in London, UK, tracing the technical mediation of their interactions, transactions and mobilities. We then discuss how code becomes the relational solution to five different classes of problems – domestic living, travelling, working, communicating, and consuming

Borders, distance, politics

The ‘borderless world’ narrative was, perhaps, nothing more than that: a narrative associated with a specific, and specifically neoliberal, project – that of globalization in the 1990s. Yet, at the turn of the millennium, the idea that state borders were becoming less significant in a globalized world was widely shared across the academic field. Classic texts of the globalization debate deploy a similarly de-territorialized understanding of the transformations associated with neoliberalism. Whether concerned with networked societies, global cities, transnationalism, or, more broadly, with theorizing ‘new’ spatialities of globalization (Amin, 2002), these contributions privileged connections, horizontality, and circulation, over territorial boundedness, verticality, and immobility/immobilization, as explanatory tools for global transformations. In capturing and condensing into a soundbite these complex set of processes, however, Kenichi Ohmae’s (1990) book title became the strawman for those who wanted to contrast the ‘flat world’ depicted by these accounts and to re-emphasize its bordered, unequal and difference-inflected nature

The European Union and Assembling Biofuel Development – topological investigations concerning the associations between law, policy and space

Biofuels for transport are a renewable source of energy that were once heralded as a solution to multiple problems associated with poor urban air quality, the overproduction of agricultural commodities, the energy security of the European Union (EU) and climate change. It was only after the Union had implemented an incentivizing framework of legal and political instruments for the production, trade and consumption of biofuels that the problems of weakening food security, environmental degradation and increasing greenhouse gases through land-use changes began to unfold. In other words, the difference between political aims for why biofuels are promoted and their consequences has grown – which is also recognized by the EU policy-makers. Therefore, the global networks of producing, trading and consuming biofuels may face a complete restructure if the European Commission accomplishes its pursuit to sideline crop-based biofuels after 2020. My aim with this dissertation is not only to trace the manifold evolutions of the instruments used by the Union to govern biofuels but also to reveal how this evolution has influenced the dynamics of biofuel development. Therefore, I study the ways the EU’s legal and political instruments of steering biofuels are coconstitutive with the globalized spaces of biofuel development. My analytical strategy can be outlined through three concepts. I use the term ‘assemblage’ to approach the operations of the loose entity of actors and non-human elements that are the constituents of multi-scalar and -sectorial biofuel development. ‘Topology’ refers to the spatiality of this European biofuel assemblage and its parts whose evolving relations are treated as the active constituents of space, instead of simply being located in space. I apply the concept of ‘nomosphere’ to characterize the framework of policies, laws and other instruments that the EU applies and construes while attempting to govern biofuels. Even though both the materials and methods vary in the independent articles, these three concepts characterize my analytical strategy that allows me to study law, policy and space associated with each other. The results of my examinations underscore the importance of the instruments of governance of the EU constituting and stabilizing the spaces of producing and, on the other hand, how topological ruptures in biofuel development have enforced the need to reform policies. This analysis maps the vast scope of actors that are influenced by the mechanism of EU biofuel governance and, what is more, shows how they are actively engaging in the Union’s institutional policy formulation. By examining the consequences of fast biofuel development that are spatially dislocated from the established spaces of producing, trading and consuming biofuels such as indirect land use changes, I unfold the processes not tackled by the instruments of the EU. Indeed, it is these spatially dislocated processes that have pushed the Commission construing a new type of governing biofuels: transferring the instruments of climate change mitigation to land-use policies. Although efficient in mitigating these dislocated consequences, these instruments have also created peculiar ontological scaffolding for governing biofuels. According to this mode of governance, the spatiality of biofuel development appears to be already determined and the agency that could dampen the negative consequences originating from land-use practices is treated as irrelevant.Siirretty Doriast

World city network research at a theoretical impasse::On the need to re-establish qualitative approaches to understanding agency in world city networks

From the late 1990s, the establishment of a new relational ‘turn’ in the study of world city connectedness in globalization has run parallel to the wider relational turn occurring in economic geography. Early work, built firmly upon a qualitative approach to the collection and analyses of new inter-city datasets, considered cities as being constituted by their relations with other cities. Subsequent research, however, would take a strong quantitative turn, best demonstrated through the articulation of the inter-locking world city network (ILWCN) ‘model’ for measuring relations between cities. In this paper, we develop a critique of research based around the ILWCN model, arguing that this ‘top down’ quantitative approach has now reached a theoretical impasse. To address this impasse, we argue for a move away from Structural approaches in which the firm is the main unit of analysis, towards qualitative approaches in which individual agency and practice are afforded greater importance

'“A strange enough region wherein to wander and muse": Mapping Clerkenwell in Victorian Popular Fictions'

Drawing on the work of Bertrand Westphal, this essay attempts to perform a geocritical reading of the London district of Clerkenwell. After discussing the spatial turn in the Humanities and introducing a range of spatial critical approaches, the essay “maps” literary Clerkenwell from the perspectives of genre hybridity and intertextuality, spatially articulate cartography, multifocal and historically aware public perception and potentially transgressive connection to outside areas. Clerkenwell is seen to have stimulated a range of genre fiction, including Newgate, realist, penny and slum fiction, and social exploration journalism. In much of this writing, the district was defined by its negative associations with crime, poverty, incarceration and slaughter. Such negative imageability, the essay suggests, was self-perpetuating, since authors would be influenced by their reading to create literary worlds repeating existing tropes; these literary representations, in turn, influenced readers’ perceptions of the area.Intertextual, multi-layered and polysensorial geocritical readings,the essay concludes, can producepowerful andnuanced pictures of literary placesbut also face a formidable challenge in defining an adequate geocentric corpus

Subaltern geographies: Geographical knowledge and postcolonial strategy

In recent years a small but rich geographical literature has engaged with Subaltern Studies to explore the geographical and geopolitical imaginations of subaltern subjects and groups. Such writings have deployed subalternity to designate a substantive subject or group marginalized in the face of power. Departing from this, the paper instead treats subalternity more figuratively, as a word able to evoke spatialities occluded by the Euro-American power that haunts disciplinary geography. The paper argues that using subalternity like this holds the potential to pluralize geographical interventions, particularly in the light of the discipline's materialist turns since the late 1990s. To make this argument, the paper engages Gayatri Spivak's seminal critique of the Subaltern Studies collective, suggesting how this might speak productively to a postcolonial geographical methodology. It demonstrates the potential of this methodology by weaving it through a broader attempt to critically engage the politics of nature and environment in Sri Lanka