Securing the Global City: Crime, Consulting, Risk, and Ratings in the Production of Urban Space

The last decade has witnessed the rise of private transnational institutions that increasingly influence the organization and management of urban space. Two institutions are especially powerful in this regard: bond-rating agencies and global security firms. Bolstered by a discourse of risk and the need to securitize cities, these institutions have garnered enormous amounts of power with respect to urban social and spatial control. They are implicated in the imprisonment and displacement of marginalized populations, the intensification of gentrification, and general shifts in municipal funding priorities. The authors illustrate these themes through a case study of New York City, followed by an example of the transnational movement of these forces and their exportation to sites such as Mexico City. Democracy and the Transnational Private Sector, Symposium. Indiana University School of Law – Bloomington, April 12-13, 2007

Migrant agency and embodiment in space – commentary to van Liempt

In this reflection, I use van Liempt's analysis of emplacement as a helpful instigation to challenge and nuance three current theoretical debates in migration studies and geography. Focusing on the spaces of embodied migrant agency I counter the legacy of static concepts such as ‘immigrant integration’, refine ideas about the city and public space, and explore the contemporary politics of refusal. In each of these conversations, bringing in ideas of the spatial agency of migrants helps us to contest received ideas and categories and open up new ways of thinking about scale, society, public space, and refusal

Crime and the Global City: Migration, Borders, and the Pre-Criminal

In recent years social scientists have been interested in the growth and transformation of global cities. These metropolises, which function as key command centers in global production networks, manifest many of the social, economic, and political tensions and inequities of neoliberal globalization. Their international appeal as sites of financial freedom and free trade frequently obscures the global city underbelly: practices of labor exploitation, racial discrimination, and migrant deferral. This chapter explores some of these global tensions, showing how they have shaped the strategies and technologies behind urban crime prevention, security, and policing. In particular, the chapter shows how certain populations perceived as risky become treated as pre-criminals: individuals in need of management and control before any criminal behavior has occurred. It is demonstrated further how the production of the pre-criminal can lead to dispossession, delay, and detention as well as to increasing gentrification and violence

The Grassroots and the Gift: Moral Authority, American Philanthropy, and Activism in Education

Parental activism in education reform, while often portrayed as an exemplary manifestation of participatory democracy and grassroots action in response to entrenched corporate and bureaucratic interests, is in fact carefully cultivated and channeled through strategic networks of philanthropic funding and knowledge.  This paper argues that these networks are characteristic of a contemporary form of neoliberal governance in which the philanthropic “gift” both obligates its recipients to participate in the ideological projects of the givers and obscures the incursion of market principles into education behind a veneer of progressive activism.  Drawing on archival research as well as personal interviews with Seattle-based reform advocates, representatives of philanthropic organizations, and school administrators, the paper points to the need to critically evaluate the “roots” in grassroots movements and trace their connections to larger institutions and agendas

Editorial: Re-spatializing transnational citizenship

Thinking about citizenship in the context of transnational flows and global actors provides opportunities to considering new possibilities for politics and human agency in the contemporary era. Joining the interdisciplinary discussions where these approaches are adopted, this special issue on “transnational lived citizenship” sets out to challenge fixed notions of citizenship and calls for its re-spatialization and re-politicization. Specifically, we stress the importance of the non-state-based material and locatable situated practices, memories, and imaginings of particular actors. Importantly, we do not limit the forms of political agency associated with citizenship to individuals, or to the positions, practices, and acts related to polity memberships. Rather, we identify how citizenship is also made and acted out collectively in various socio-spatial contexts. Moreover, the individual papers propose new ways of understanding how people, as political subjects, are differently positioned in their communities and societies, and how they pursue new political stances and actions in their transnationalizing worlds. Centering ‘the geographical’ as the basis of enquiry, the issue as a whole seeks to provide spatial-theoretical contributions to the interdisciplinary debates on relational and contested citizenship

Geographies of Lifelong Learning and the Knowledge Economy

With the advance of neoliberal globalization in the 1990s, lifelong learning emerged in the policy frameworks of the United States, Canada, and the EU. Neoliberal policies during this era worked to orchestrate personal development within the increasingly flexible processes of global capitalism, placing both within the rhythm of a personal life that must be fulfilled. Such an orchestration produced certain spaces—captured in notions such as the “learning society” and “creative city”—in which citizens were expected to take responsibility for their own human capital development as flexible entrepreneurs. For the majority of the population, however, this process led primarily to their own deskilling. Moreover, not only did lifelong learning strategies promote the standardization and homogenization of educational skills, and thus the abstraction and interchangeability of labor, but they were also bound up with the production of a so-called learning society that demanded increasing levels of external management. This chapter looks at some of the ramifications of these processes on workers and systems of education

Spaces of the Geosocial : Exploring Transnational Topologies

Published online 14 Sep. 2016

Covid-19 discloses unequal geographies

The collective editorial discusses inequalities that scholars in Europe and the Americas world have paid attention to during 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic has unevenly and unpredictably impacted on societies. The critical reflections reveal that the continuing ramifications of the pandemic can only be understood in place; like other large-scale phenomena, this exceptional global crisis concretizes very differently in distinct national, regional and local contexts. The pandemic intertwines with ongoing challenges in societies, for example those related to poverty, armed conflicts, migration, racism, natural hazards, corruption and precarious labor. Through collective contextual understanding, the editorial invites further attention to the unequal geographies made visible and intensified by the current pandemic