Services and Uneven Development

This book surveys the development of service industries in Britain from a geographical perspective, assessing their contribution to other sectors of the economy. The location of new service industries is described and explained, with an analysis of the effect of locational changes on employment opportunities and patterns. The contributors consider the economic role of private sector producer services and provide a British view of issues to complement parallel work already published on the situation in the USA. A final chapter gives the international perspective with contributions from the USA, Canada, and the European Community. This book is the outcome of the Producer Services Working Party, a limited-life working party established in 1984 by the Institute of British Geographers (IBG) and funded by the IBG and the Economic and Social Research Council

The everyday and the evental public space : rethinking the spatiotemporal modalities of radical political events

In this paper, we put forward an examination of the interconnections between public space, the everyday, and the event in order to rethink the spatiotemporal modalities of political action. Recent mass mobilisations and civil unrest events around the globe have brought to the fore the complex relationship between political practices and public space. These indicate a critique of representative democracy, authoritarian governance, and precarious living conditions, as well as entailing new ways of doing and conceptualising politics. Our paper approaches the production and (re)configuration of public space through a spatiotemporal analysis of collective action based on the events that took place in Athens, in December 2008, and in Tottenham, London, in August 2011. By considering the everyday socio-political dynamics of public space as formative of radical political practices, we also pay attention to its evental (re)production. Such a process, we argue, entails the potentiality for rupture, contestation and radical imagination.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe