Global Networks

This article argues that the ways automation is imagined illustrate a wider problematisation of labour. The concept of an ‘automative imagination’ is proposed to articulate these different habits of considering and discussing automation. In these forms of imagination, I argue labour is discursively reconfigured as a logistical infrastructure. The concrete value of labour, the labouring body and the place of work as such are abstracted into an opaque logistical infrastructure in the narratives of an automative imagination. The impetus for this analysis comes from press releases and reports concerning automation and COVID-19 focused on the UK economy, creating a vanguard of abstracting ‘labour’ into infrastructure. The work of automation can usefully be understood as a relation, both in its implementation and in its imagining—a relation that geographers can, and should, interrogate. The automative imagination powerfully articulates the normative force of the performative abstraction and devaluation of work.

Global infrastructures are often analyzed and interpreted under a specific framework that highlights the visible infrastructural nodes where flows and capital accumulation reach maximum intensity. This article, in contrast, moves away from infrastructural nodes and offers a grounded and exploratory perspective of global infrastructures focusing on their invisible face: the spaces, practices, economies, ways of inhabiting, and flows that, despite their strong connection to large global infrastructures, are not recognized as such due to their unregulated, unexpected, and loosely codified forms. By applying the lens of critical logistics and focusing on Aspropyrgos, the hinterland of the Piraeus Port (Greece), this article advocates for re-discovering global infrastructure through the variegated, informal, illegible, and incomplete logistical spaces they generate. The article makes two key contributions. First, it shows how global infrastructures are built through the interdependence between formal–informal, visible–invisible, and completeness–incompleteness. Second, it highlights how these infrastructures are intensely shaped by often invisible, individual, and socially constructed actions that unfold through numerous everyday practices.

In this paper, I investigate the changing connections between atmospheric pollution, spectral colour, ideas of a spatially ‘modern’ built environment, and racism. In the nineteenth century, the blackening effects of air pollution were seen as creating disordered spectral colour in the city, in a manner that was sometimes associated with ideas of the physical regression and degeneration of the urban population. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, this colour disorder was more often depicted as the sign of an ‘out of joint’ temporality in which the ‘bad old’ Victorian era was haunting the present. This enabled urban reformers to advocate for planning as a force that could exorcise these spectres and instead create a clean, white and unpolluted urban environment, with a colour palette that was restrained rather than vivid. However, in the post-war context of mass immigration, this created a series of associations in which ideas of urban decay were all too easily associated with racialised blackness, with new immigrants figuring simultaneously as a blackening and blighting influence on urban neighbourhoods, and as too vivid in their sartorial colour choices to ‘belong’ within British culture.

In this paper, we argue that the political right is a coherent object of analysis and a powerful presence in US politics, because it possesses a spatially-informed alternative theory and practice of society. We thus propose the concept of battlespace as an analytic to understand the political right’s project. The right constructs its alternative theory and practice of society, we argue, through spatial tactics that seek to generate collective experience around the feeling of embattlement. We then analyze the ways in which this collective experience is constructed for and with participants through tactical performances. We understand tactical performances as a constellation of creative, improvised, and adversarial actions that spatially create shared experiences among participants. We then trace three modalities of action – hostility, frontierization, and validation – that characterize the tactical performances of the political right. What unites the right against racial, gender, and sexual self-determination is its ability to forge a common identity and experience through an alternative vision of society. Tactical performances are enacted to nullify and threaten such heterogeneity and processes of pluralization. Finally, using the concept of postdemocracy, we discuss how these spatial tactics undermine democracy’s conditions of possibility.

In this article, I discuss Blackfoot oral histories of Treaty 7, an agreement the Blackfoot confederacy entered into with the Canadian government and two other Indigenous nations in September of 1877. Drawing from critical legal and legal geographic studies, I deploy jurisdiction as an analytical concept, exploring the ways jurisdiction can give concrete form to Indigenous understandings of treaty as a means of ‘sharing’ the land with settlers. I argue that, for the Blackfoot Confederacy members that participated in the making of Treaty 7, this agreement did not represent the surrender of land or extinguishment of Blackfoot legal traditions, but the continuation of Blackfoot jurisdiction across the confederacy’s traditional territories. I also discuss Northwest Mounted Police (NWMP) Lieutenant-Colonel MacLeod’s positive relationship with Blackfoot confederacy members. I contend this relationship with MacLeod and the NWMP contributed to a Blackfoot understanding of Canadian law as governing relations between people. Thus, through entering into Treaty 7 with Crown representatives, the Blackfoot Confederacy representatives were recognizing Canadian jurisdiction as a non-territorial form of authority governing the conduct of settlers, a form of recognition that is far different from agreeing to surrender land title and accepting Crown sovereignty.

This article centres the everyday resistance practices by illegalised migrants contained in EU hotspots in Greece. Set against the regime of violent abandonment governing these carceral spaces, the article draws on ethnographic research in the Aegean archipelago to explore how resistance is enacted, experienced, and suppressed. The analysis foregrounds three distinct tactics of resistance – insubordination, insurrection, occupation – whereby migrants, individually and collectively, seek to disrupt carceral mechanisms. By shifting the analytical focus to migrants’ often barely visible dissenting practices, the article sheds new light on how modalities of bio/necropolitical power and resistance intersect in the everyday workings of the EU hotspots. It reveals how migrants transform these spaces into stages of (infra)political struggle against forced confinement, even if they are unable to fundamentally weaken the hotspot regime as such. The article concludes that attending to migrants’ everyday resistance practices, however fragile, fragmented, and fleeting, is critical. These practices not only unmask the racialised violence that resides at the core of the hotspot regime but its inability to fully contain migrants’ desire for autonomous movement.

This article draws on ethnographic work with tour guides in Kingston and local radio animateurs in Abidjan to document their “atmotechnics” – the practices through which they enliven urban atmospheres. Through cross-contextual juxtapositions, we delve into the relational intricacies and contextual variegation of atmotechnics. Crucially, we point to their complexity and significance in cities whose atmospheres are fractured by racialized socio-economic divides and practices of territorial control. We show that tour guides and radio hosts animate atmospheres of conviviality that are radically indeterminate: they evade and unsettle dominant models of “reconciliation” or “social cohesion,” inviting us instead to think/feel commonality within and despite fractures. In making this argument, we contribute to scholarship on urban atmospheres, which acknowledges their political nature without considering the street-level agencies that shape them; and we extend scholarship that theorizes conviviality as a non-normative mode of interrelation.

This article advances a new theoretical understanding of the global political economy of austerity through an examination of austerity policies in Norway, a country with soaring fiscal surpluses. Critical scholarship has analyzed austerity as an incoherent economic idea – a product of unreasonable public accounting, or simply ideological nonsense. No national context seems to confirm such a view more than Norway, where wage growth has been curbed and welfare spending restrained in a context of unprecedented public prosperity. Yet, this article argues that there is a rational core to Norwegian ‘austerity without deficits’, if seen from the vantage point of capital in globally integrated neoliberal capitalism. Examining the development of Norwegian economic policies since the 1970s, we demonstrate how the Norwegian state has imposed austerity measures in order to bolster national capital’s global competitiveness. Disciplining labor and public budgets is, we argue, the cost of doing business in today’s world economy. We call this uneven and combined austerity: combining national economies in a global structure of interlocking dependence, neoliberal austerity imposes limits to popular demands for welfare and better material conditions of living, even in countries where public money abounds.

For over 180 years, Singapore, a town buried under the sands on Lake Michigan’s shore, has sparked imagination—and controversy. Names and naming are integral to the conflict, revealing competing investments in the site as space, place, property, and land. In this piece, we mobilize Indigenous, Black feminist, and anthropological perspectives to track how competing categorizations of the former town deploy names and naming as centerpieces in acts of geographic storytelling that construct narratives both about and beyond the constructed bounds of a Western Michigan community.

This article develops the concept of “uncommoning” as a critique of prevailing modes of energy transition in the Global North. It integrates insight from critical geography, anthropology, and decolonial studies that challenge assumptions of linear progress, inevitability, and commonality underpinning energy transition experiments and highlight the fraught temporalities involved. Informed by ethnographic data on the contentious implementation of an Energy Transition Zone (ETZ) in Aberdeen (Scotland), we demonstrate how residents, campaigners, and their allies interrogate the shared ground on which dominant narratives of energy transition are staked, revealing underlying relationalities of power, epistemic inequity, and socioeconomic disparities. The perspective of uncommoning does not propose simplistic alternatives but rather illuminates an emergent propositional politics that orients to modes of care, equity and justice.

Learning the city refers to collective processes through which urban inhabitants experience, negotiate, and shape urban contexts. In the past decade, urban scholarship has emphasised the significance of learning the city as a political act. However, the full diversity of potentials of learning the city through urban agriculture remains underexamined. Drawing on fieldwork with an urban permaculture collective in Seville, Spain, this article examines four processes of learning the city through urban agriculture and reflects on their potential for driving urban change. We label these processes as learning the city through: experimentation; embodiment; socio-nature; and conscientisation and ecological citizenship. In closing, the article reflects on how progressive, political forms of urban learning in one city firstly raise important questions regarding the social and political impacts of diverse forms of urban agriculture elsewhere, and secondly, offer potential pathways to enhance relations between urban and rural socio-environmental struggles.

This article explores conflicting environmental imaginaries that have surfaced around the development of Spaceport Cornwall, a satellite launch site in South West England. Spaceport Cornwall is significant for foregrounding environmental responsibility as a key promise of its development. In press releases they highlight that they are the first spaceport to carry out a full carbon impact assessment of their operations. They also present satellite data as an essential tool for monitoring climate change. Through the development of this ‘climate conscious’ space infrastructure, the spaceport promises to open a new economic future for Cornwall, grounded not in the extractive industries that shaped the region’s industrial past, but in visions of the region as an environmentally responsible space hub. However, the eco-friendly futures promoted by the spaceport have attracted criticism from local climate activists concerned with the environmental impact of the infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork conducted with Spaceport Cornwall and local environmental groups, as well as the analysis of government documents and marketing materials, this article examines imaginaries of climate promise and peril that were articulated across multiple spatial and temporal scales in relation to this infrastructure during its pre-launch phase, as space became a key place-making tool for South West England.

Urban land formalization, i.e., land titling and registration, is commonly viewed as a primary policy tool for addressing urban poverty and fostering socioeconomic and spatial development, especially in the urban informalities of the Global Southeast. While critical perspectives on urban land formalization highlight the threats and risks associated with the market-driven logic of land formalization, in this paper, we examine the perils of displacement and property rights erosion in the context of settler colonial land regime. Through the analysis of Israel’s initiative to formalize Palestinian land in East Jerusalem, we contend that risks and benefits of land formalization programs are contingent upon the land regime whithin which they are implemented. We demonstrate how potential benefits of land formalization, alongside its potential threats, produce ambivalence among target communities. This ambiguity becomes ingrained in settler colonial land practices of land formalisation and translates into noncooperation by Palestinians with the Israeli land formalization initiative. Thus, we emphasize the significance of analyzing local land regimes and politics to better understand the specific threats and opportunities and their impact on target communities.

This article explores the entwined politics of infrastructure and (im)mobility through a relational comparison of the Suez Canal Area Development Project (SCADP) in the Suez Canal Zone, Egypt and the Euroméditerranée Urban Renewal Project (EuroMed) in Marseille, France. Two of the largest urban maritime development projects in North Africa and the ‘Euro-Mediterranean’, SCADP and EuroMed were planned and constructed amidst an overlapping surge in global infrastructure construction and a racialized refugee reception crisis. Through a situated analysis of the everyday urban lives of SCADP and EuroMed, the article analyzes how these large-scale infrastructures rely on and reproduce historical and place-specific geographies of uneven and racialized mobility. These include migrant containment regimes and urban displacement. Building on this analysis, the article proposes the concept of infrastructural (im)mobility, which argues that coerced mobility is a pervasive and underlying force driving global capitalist urbanization and infrastructure construction today. Through a multi-scalar analysis of SCADP and EuroMed, it shows how the concept elucidates a global political geography increasingly defined by the intersecting patterns, economies, and crises of infrastructure and (im)mobility. The article accordingly contributes to critical debates on the coloniality of infrastructure in and beyond the urban ports of the Mediterranean Sea.