Kevin R Cox
Biographic Data
| ID | 226895 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Kevin R Cox |
| GIVEN NAMES | Kevin R |
| FAMILY NAME | Cox |
| SIGNATURE | COX K R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-4462-1521 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 89 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1143 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 89 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1968 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
The new revanchism and its geographies
This article revisits Neil Smith's concept of the revanchist city in light of contemporary right-wing populism. While questioning Smith's original account of urban revanchism, it argues that his attention to affect, resentment and visceral reaction remains crucial for understanding today's political geographies. The article identifies a ‘new revanchism’ rooted in the shift from class politics to identity politics, intensified by economic stagnati…
South Africa In History’s Shadow
States and their territorializations: Class, local dependence, and how geohistory matters
Despite its significance for social research, the territorial structure of the state remains a lacuna. States can vary quite significantly, but this is not something attracting attention. Understanding this variation depends first on a recognition of the capitalist form of the state. The result is that class conflicts have to enter into their division into sub-units and the powers and responsibilities accorded to them. These conflicts are never i…
Country
As a central explanatory concept in human geography, “country” remains undertheorized. For the most part it is treated as a container for empirical materials. The division of the world into territorially bounded, relatively homogeneous units raises numerous questions, including how they came about, what functions they fulfil, and how they affect the geography of the world. As recognizable entities, countries come into being along with the growth …
Rentier capitalism in question
Rentier capitalism is an idea that has been drawing increasing attention. This article identifies the incoherence of the idea and then addresses its weaknesses as a critique of contemporary political economy. In the first place, it derives from a view of capitalism which privileges exchange rather than production. This explains its view of the relation between the monopoly control of assets and competition. While there may indeed be a current ten…
The long and winding road
Growing up in a capitalist society means induction into a set of taken for granted concepts that seemingly get realized through the way that world works. As a result, a grasp of the very different fundamentals of Marxism has to be a lifetime pursuit. For the author, it started in secondary school for reasons that were both personal and intellectual. In terms of the overall geohistorical trajectory of the author’s life, it bears emphasis that it i…
Uneven development: Convergence, divergence and politics
The paper positions itself in contrast to some themes in work on local and regional development. These have included an emphasis on policy rather than politics, tendencies to over-generalize across countries, and to abstract from the more global context. The empirical context for the discussion is the shifting character of geographically uneven development since the Second World War: first a convergence and then, after the mid-1970s, a divergence…
Massey, Marx, and human geography: Disjunctures and provocations
Doreen Massey made contributions that command the attention of historical geographical materialists. Although she was close to the left, her work strayed very significantly from Marx. Nevertheless, through her emphases she revealed, intentionally or not, important lacunae in the work of Marxist geography. Methodologically she was close to critical realism. She accepted the idea of separate structures of social relations and patriarchy was one tha…
Theorising in urban and regional studies: Negotiating generalisation and particularity
Responses and Challenges
The shrinking state? Understanding the assault on the public sector
The public sector appears under siege across the globe. While there are variations across and within nations in how this plays out, the arms of the state that provide the social safety net and protect citizens' well-being are especially at risk. The erosion of the state as an institution can be seen in cuts to social programmes and public sector jobs, underfunded infrastructure, the sale of public assets and other forms of privatization along wit…
Development policy, Western Europe and the question of specificity
In the Anglophone literature on local and regional development policy there are tendencies to overextension of claims from one side of the Atlantic to the other, or there is no comparative framing at all. As a result the specificity of the West European case tends to be lost. In contrast with the USA, the West European instance is very different indeed. Although there have been changes since the postwar golden years of urban and regional planning…
Realism, Critical
Critical realism is a philosophy of science that generated considerable interest among human geographers during the 1980s. A critique of the positivism of the spatial‐quantitative revolution, it posited structures of social relations as the necessary conditions of events. Part of its attraction was that it seemed to offer a methodology for radical geography. Such hopes may have been misplaced. Attention shifted away from it toward the various “po…
Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for local politics
The relation between spaces of dependence and spaces of engagement is a contingent matter. In the case of the community builders the Federal Housing Administration clearly had a national space of dependence in mind and was interested in promoting its interest in boosting the demand for housing in the United States. Local politics appears as metropolitan, regional, national or even international as different organizations try to secure those netwo…
Revisiting ‘the city as a growth machine’
Written 40 years ago, Harvey Molotch’s paper ‘City as a Growth Machine’, is a milestone in urban studies. By its focus on land owners and land related interests and their collective promotion of urban growth he radically shifted the centre of gravity of studies of urban politics. This article celebrates his achievement. It then shows, first, how his insights might be deepened by a critique whose point of departure is a recognition of the capitali…
Failed States’ in Question and the Case of Sub-Saharan Africa
While the idea of the failed state can be easily contested as a Western conceit, understanding the symptoms typically claimed as indicating the condition is an important part of addressing it. A common argument has been that failure is a result of conditions internal to the country in question. This, though, is to ignore the way in which, in various ways, colonialism, and latterly a particular position in the international division of labor, have…
Geographies, Critical and Marxist, and Lessons from South Africa
Analysis in human geography has shown persistent tendencies of a pluralistic sort: a view of the world as the product of numerous independent and interacting forces. The advent of Marxist geography in the 1970s promised a path in a more totalizing direction. This emphasized the contradictory unity of the world, while placing production as the point both of departure and of return. The social process was conceived as a unity and its different mome…
Making Human Geography
1. Human Geography: The First Half Century 2. Long Live the Revolution! 3. Social Theory and Human Geography: Material Matters 4. Social Theory and Human Geography: Worlds of Meaning 5. New Understandings of Space 6. Methods in Question 7. Human Geography and How and Why Things Happen 8. Making Space for Human Geography in the Social Sciences 9. Making Sense of Human Geography, Past and Present Postscript
A review of the Birth of Territory
Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait. John Western
Territory, Scale, and Why Capitalism Matters
A number of recent contributions have been critical of those theorizations of scale and territory that emerged in the last two decades. They have argued, variably, that a de-centered world of flows and networks, whether a recent phenomenon or something that is in the nature of space relations, trumps the assumptions of verticality, centricity and fixity that are, in their view, central to those theorizations. They define their view of space as re…
Notes on a brief encounter: Critical realism, historical materialism and human geography
In human geography today little is heard any more about critical realism. A quarter of a century ago, it attracted attention because it seemed to offer a method for radical geographers and was accepted by some at least as such. Yet, despite the claim that Marx could be regarded as a critical realist before his time, there were always very significant differences from the methods of historical geographical materialism. These include different appr…
The continuing relevance of old debates
How carefully my paper was read is in question. Some of the claims made both mystify and dismay. There is also a general bemusement as to why I wanted to reopen this debate but some of the responses suggest that it was indeed needed. Critical realism usefully opened up a number of important methodological issues. These included ones of abstraction, internal relations, emergence and the nature of causation. The Marxist position on these was always…
Commentary. From the New Urban Politics to the ‘New’ Metropolitan Politics
The state and the question of development in sub-Saharan Africa
A common view of the developmental prospects of sub-Saharan Africa is that the crucial obstacle is political. Stronger states and representative institutions are a necessary precondition for development. This is a common view in both the media and in academe. The paper argues that this is to get things the wrong way round. Rather it is development, specifically the capitalist form of development, which is the necessary condition for strong states…
Spaces of dependence, spaces of engagement and the politics of scale, or: Looking for Local Politics
Locality and Community in the Politics of Local Economic Development
Concomitant with the contemporary restructuring of local economies in the United States has been a distinctive local politics: one which revolves around a competition among localities rather than conflict with in them. The role of the local dependence of various actors is explored with a view to explaining this politics. Some firms are locally dependent and form business coalitions to stimulate investment in their local economy. They attempt to h…
The Local and the Global in the New Urban Politics: A Critical View
Recent US literature on urban politics has been characterized by significant convergence. There has been a marked focus on the politics of local economic development, and there has also been an attempt to situate that politics with respect to processes of globalization. In particular, the globalization of the economy and correlative hypermobility of capital arc seen as exerting strong redistributive pressures on urban communities. This is the 'ne…
From Localised Social Structures to Localities as Agents
The paper is an attempt to clarify the concept of locality for further research by investigating two common meanings of locality: locality as localised social structure and locality as agent. The first is developed through linking local dependence to territorial forms of the division of labour; to enable this a new concept, 'the scale division of labour', is introduced. This concept describes what roles in the social division of labour exist at d…
Urban development, collective consumption and the politics of metropolitan fragmentation
Globalisation, Competition and the Politics of Local Economic Development
The study of urban politics in the US is now dominated by issues of local economic development. These are situated analytically with respect to a more global space economy. This is the New Urban Politics. The central logic of the New Urban Politics is one of cities or communities competing for mobile capital. This competition supposedly has adverse distributional consequences for those living in cities or communities. Three areas of critical cont…
Rescaling the state' in question
This paper puts in critical focus a major tenet of the state rescaling literature. This is that over the last 25 years or so there has been a significant decentralization of state functions, largely with a view to re-energizing national economies. Several points are at issue. The first is that the evidence for a decentralization of any significance is insubstantial. Second, the territorial structure of the state has indeed been in question but la…
The Problem of Metropolitan Governance and the Politics of Scale
Cox K. R. The problem of metropolitan governance and the politics of scale, Regional Studies. In the United States, the problem of urban governance is in part, and in virtue of a characteristic jurisdictional fragmentation, one of metropolitan governance. This paper argues that in order to understand emergent solutions to these governance problems, it is important to place local governments both in the context of the state as a whole and the stat…
Levels of Abstraction in Locality Studies
Territory, Scale, and Why Capitalism Matters
A number of recent contributions have been critical of those theorizations of scale and territory that emerged in the last two decades. They have argued, variably, that a de-centered world of flows and networks, whether a recent phenomenon or something that is in the nature of space relations, trumps the assumptions of verticality, centricity and fixity that are, in their view, central to those theorizations. They define their view of space as re…
Suburbia and Voting Behavior in the London Metropolitan Area
Widely noted spatial regularities in political activity include suburbancentral city differences in party preference and political participation. The spatial regularities can be found both in the United States and in Britain. In the London metropolitan area both party preference and participation are related to suburbanism in particular, and to other socio-economic dimensions in general, derived from a factor analysis. A causal model which attemp…
Globalization and the politics of local and regional development: The question of convergenc
Globalization, and the increased exposure to international competition that it has supposedly induced, has led to expectations of institutional convergence in, among other things, local and regional development policy and the politics surrounding it. There have been changes in the United Kingdom, but not of the decentralizing, neo‐liberalizing form anticipated. A comparison of the British with the very different, highly decentralized, American ca…
The shrinking state? Understanding the assault on the public sector
The public sector appears under siege across the globe. While there are variations across and within nations in how this plays out, the arms of the state that provide the social safety net and protect citizens' well-being are especially at risk. The erosion of the state as an institution can be seen in cuts to social programmes and public sector jobs, underfunded infrastructure, the sale of public assets and other forms of privatization along wit…
Questions of Abstraction in Studies in the New Urban Politics
Recent work in the politics of urban development is characterized to a significant degree by undertheorization. Concepts tend to be relatively concrete. The more abstract concepts through which they are necessarily interpreted lack the critical attention they should receive. Abstract concepts, therefore, do little for the interpretation of lower level concepts in terms of the higher. These contentions are illustrated by reference to recent argume…
Neighborhood Activism in the American City: Behavioral Relationships and Evaluation
Residential Relocation and Political Behavior: Conceptual Model and Empirical Tests
A conceptual model of the effects of residential relocation of voters upon their voting behavior is elaborated; in this model relocation is related directly to instability of voting preferences, susceptibility to short-term influences and to the weakness of a neighborhood or contextual effect. The interaction ef fects of voluntary organization affiliation and political involvement are also discussed. A number of hypotheses are derived from the co…
Territoriality, politics and the 'urban
Jurisdictional fragmentation in the American metropolis: Alternative Perspectives
The Spatial Components of Urban Voting Response Surfaces
(1971). The Spatial Components of Urban Voting Response Surfaces. Economic Geography: Vol. 47, PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN SPATIAL SYSTEMS, pp. 27-35
Commentary. From the New Urban Politics to the ‘New’ Metropolitan Politics
Behavioural Problems in Geography: A Symposium
Representation and power in the politics of scale
The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Argument in the New Urban Politics
(1991). The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Argument in the New Urban Politics. Journal of Urban Affairs: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 299-306
Revisiting ‘the city as a growth machine’
Written 40 years ago, Harvey Molotch’s paper ‘City as a Growth Machine’, is a milestone in urban studies. By its focus on land owners and land related interests and their collective promotion of urban growth he radically shifted the centre of gravity of studies of urban politics. This article celebrates his achievement. It then shows, first, how his insights might be deepened by a critique whose point of departure is a recognition of the capitali…
Political geography and the territorial
Conflict Behavior in a Spatio-Temporal Context
Suburbia and Voting Behavior in the London Metropolitan Area
Widely noted spatial regularities in political activity include suburbancentral city differences in party preference and political participation. The spatial regularities can be found both in the United States and in Britain. In the London metropolitan area both party preference and participation are related to suburbanism in particular, and to other socio-economic dimensions in general, derived from a factor analysis. A causal model which attemp…
On The Utility and Definition of Regions in Comparative Political Sociology
Residential Relocation and Political Behavior: Conceptual Model and Empirical Tests
A conceptual model of the effects of residential relocation of voters upon their voting behavior is elaborated; in this model relocation is related directly to instability of voting preferences, susceptibility to short-term influences and to the weakness of a neighborhood or contextual effect. The interaction ef fects of voluntary organization affiliation and political involvement are also discussed. A number of hypotheses are derived from the co…
The Spatial Components of Urban Voting Response Surfaces
(1971). The Spatial Components of Urban Voting Response Surfaces. Economic Geography: Vol. 47, PERSPECTIVES ON URBAN SPATIAL SYSTEMS, pp. 27-35
Behavioural Problems in Geography: A Symposium
Conflict, Power and Politics in the City: A Geographic View
Dominance and dependence in an international context
Bargaining power in an international system should, theoretically at least, be closely associated with the pattern of international transactions. In the literature, this consideration has often been linked to the polar concepts of dominance and dependence. A methodology is developed in this paper for evaluating the degree to which a state dominates the transactions of some other state. Specifically, a series of international transaction behaviors…
Spatial Implications of Public Policy
The Cognitive Organization of the North American City: Empirical Evidence
In the literature on cognitive maps, studies of the cognitive representations of specific areas are common. Much less adequately represented are mental maps of general applicability to a diversity of specific areas. In an attempt to adduce such general rules of the cognitive organization of space, two case studies of the North American city are discussed. The first involves student expectations of land-use geography and reveals strong senses of r…
In-Migration Field Dynamics: A Conceptualization and Empirical Analysis
Little research has been conducted into how urban in-migration fields evolve over time. This paper examines two particular aspects that have been discussed, geographical expansion and the progressive erosion of deviations from the distance-decay rule (decrease in the relative frequency of movement with increasing distance from the urban area), but places them in a more general theoretical context, presents an approach to measurement, and provides…
Neighborhood Activism in the American City: Behavioral Relationships and Evaluation
Jurisdictional fragmentation in the American metropolis: Alternative Perspectives
Location and Public Problems: A Political Geography of the Contemporary World
Housing Tenure and Neighborhood Activism
In the literature on neighborhood activism, common hypotheses are that home ownership is a major explanatory variable, and that this is due to a concern for the home as an investment. The first hypothesis is validated but the second is not. Rather, the greater activism of homeowners when confronted by problems in the neighborhood stems in all likelihood from transaction cost barriers to relocation. Concern for the home as an investment, on the ot…
Location and Public Problems: A Political Geography of the Contemporary World
Behavioral Problems in Geography Revisited
Neighborhood Conflict and Urban Social Movements: Questions of Historicity, Class, and Social Change
(1984). NEIGHBORHOOD CONFLICT AND URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: QUESTIONS OF HISTORICITY, CLASS, AND SOCIAL CHANGE. Urban Geography: Vol. 5, No. 4, pp. 343-355
Social Relations and Spatial Structures
Urban Social Movements and Neighborhood Conflicts: Mobilization and Structuration
(1988). URBAN SOCIAL MOVEMENTS AND NEIGHBORHOOD CONFLICTS: MOBILIZATION AND STRUCTURATION. Urban Geography: Vol. 9, No. 4, pp. 416-428
Locality and Community in the Politics of Local Economic Development
Concomitant with the contemporary restructuring of local economies in the United States has been a distinctive local politics: one which revolves around a competition among localities rather than conflict with in them. The role of the local dependence of various actors is explored with a view to explaining this politics. Some firms are locally dependent and form business coalitions to stimulate investment in their local economy. They attempt to h…
Levels of Abstraction in Locality Studies
Territorial Structures of the State: Some Conceptual Issues
Redefining ‘territory’
The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Argument in the New Urban Politics
(1991). The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Argument in the New Urban Politics. Journal of Urban Affairs: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 299-306
Political science (63 works) · Sociology (61 works) · Geography (51 works) · Politics (48 works) · Law (47 works) · Economic geography (36 works) · Economics (31 works) · Law (31 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (24 works) · Epistemology (23 works)