G A Jones
Biographic Data
| ID | 32758 |
|---|---|
| NAME | G A Jones |
| GIVEN NAMES | G A |
| FAMILY NAME | Jones |
| SIGNATURE | JONES G A |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9844-4547 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 441 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1979 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
From the infrastructure of food to food as infrastructure in Brazil’s urban peripheries
Infrastructural debates have examined how unequal, uncertain and fragmented service provision shapes the everyday lives of marginalised citizens, yet have largely overlooked the relations with food. In Brazil’s urban peripheries access to food is mediated by combinations of people as infrastructure, social infrastructures and infrastructures of care. Drawing upon fieldwork in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte, this article makes two contributions. Fir…
Finding Ramón
Failure is taboo. Yet as researchers we often encounter failure in the field and engage in confessional conversations with colleagues about 'what went wrong'. Failure is regarded as an unfortunate and unproductive part of research. Better luck next time. In this paper I offer an autoethnographic narrative, tracing the attempt to find Ramón to conduct a longitudinal life history. A 20-something member of a group of street youth increasingly involv…
My Neighbor the Gringo
During the past two decades, foreigners have acquired housing stock in many of Rio de Janeiro’s oldest and most iconic favelas, or self-built neighborhoods, and invested in capital improvements, with an eye toward turning private residences into lodging accommodations. These new arrivals, mainly from the Global North, have altered social milieus and property values. The proliferation of favela hostels has signaled a market-led displacement of res…
Re-framing popular governance in Brazil
In the periferias of Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the role of local actors to organise and manage networks, resources and discourses to support and advance residents’ demands. In this article, we argue that the pandemic gave visibility to emerging arrangements which remain under-theorised and under-analysed. Specifically, we examine how these arrangements reveal what we label re-insurgent and entrepreneurial forms of popular governance. …
Beyond the City Limits
The so-called “Chicago School of Sociology” (CSS) was the dominant current of sociological thought during the first half of the 20th century, particularly associated with its then cutting-edge studies of urban life. Today, however, it is frequently held up as an example of unreflexive, Northern-centric thinking, that put forward universalist claims and theories about cities on the basis of parochial empirical experiences that focused on Chicago. …
Trickle-out Urbanism
When the (face)mask slips
In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, masks and the act of masking have become emotive subjects for social and political debate. In Brazil, one of the countries most severely affected by the pandemic, the seemingly mundane act of mask-wearing has become part of a deep social, political and economic crisis at the centre of which is the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro. In this paper we explore the politics of (un)masking in Brazil from three …
Street Gangs
Gangs feature prominently in popular culture, in novels, songs, and more recently film and video games. The serious study of gangs, however, only took off in the 1920s following interest from the Chicago School of sociology. In their analysis, gangs were a sign of social disorganization as a result of rapid urbanization. These early studies located gangs in particular spaces, notably the street corner and “slum” neighborhood, but also linked them…
Brokers and Tours
This article explores how so-called “slum” tourism commodifies poverty and violence, transforming urban deprivation into a tourism product. In particular, we pay ethnographic attention to the role of brokers who mediate encounters between residents and tourists. The article explores how brokers—tour guides, art curators and civil society organizations—work to mediate power structures and enact a specific representational-performative politics. In…
What does poverty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation
The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through sensorial means. Such studies have tended to focus on either formal policies that seek to control territories and populations through a governance of the senses, or on more everyday micro-politics of exclusion where conflicts are articulated in a sensory form. This article seeks to extend this work by concentrating on contexts where people deliberate…
Ethnographies and/of violence
This paper examines ethnography as both a methodological practice and a form of writing, and specifically how ethnography as a textual product may shape and be shaped by the methodological process. We argue that a critical discussion of this relationship is especially important in relation to the ethnography/ethnographies of violence. Examining a range of recent texts, we consider whether different forms of violence necessitate, or have prompted,…
After Piketty
Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent history, selling millions of copies in dozens of languages. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from here in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of economists and other social scientists tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty,…
Spectacle and Suffering
Global economic crisis, austerity and neoliberal urban governance in England
The post-2008 global economic recession has had different spatial impacts as national and subnational economies are affected by and respond to economic downturn in a variety of ways. Drawing on recent research on the two English Core Cities of Bristol and Liverpool this paper develops an integrated and multiscalar analysis to explore the differentiated impacts of the economic crisis on cities and public services. This analysis is located within t…
Lost Opportunity
This paper provides a close analysis of a scandal that broke in Mexico following publication of a book that accused businessmen and politicians of involvement in child trafficking and paedophilia. The book’s author, Lydia Cacho, was abducted, imprisoned, threatened with violence and charged with defamation. As further evidence of complicity in the protection of paedophile rings surfaced, a firestorm of public anger and media scrutiny focussed on …
Youth Gangs and Street Children
Hang about
Children and development III
Slumming about
Slums are categorised as having a deficit of infrastructure, income and adherence to norms and a surfeit of dirt, disease, violence and other pathologies. Slums are spaces of stigma, regardless of improvements to material or social conditions. This paper is concerned with how stigmatic representations of slums might be tackled. The paper considers how urbanists might understand the relationship between slums and aesthetics. Identifying different …
Natural Neighbors
In South Africa, new gated communities have begun branding themselves as “eco-estates,” “game estates,” “nature estates,” and “forest estates.” The marketing and consumption of nature has become prominent in the production and consumption of gated communities. A particular emphasis is placed on the use of native or indigenous plant species in landscape design. Suburbanites seeking to escape the increasingly mixed and threatening postapartheid cit…
The continuing debate about urban bias
This article reviews the current state of the debate around the concept of ‘urban bias’. It first reviews Michael Lipton’s original formulation of an Urban Bias Thesis (UBT), and the initial debates that took shape in regard to his work and the work of Elliott Berg and Robert Bates. The main body of the article, however, considers a recent reworking of the UBT by Robert Eastwood and Michael Lipton, and four sets of objections that can be raised a…
Bodies on the line
This paper presents material from extended interviews and observations with 25 street youth in Mexico, revealing how their attempts to control and understand their lives relies on a control of and identification with their bodies. Using Goffman's ideas of stigma and performance, and Butler's performativity, the paper illustrates that even if these young peoples' bodies fall short of mainstream ideas for youthful bodies, they have developed some s…
Wither Participatory Banking? Experiences with Village Banks in South Africa
Managing Urban Futures
Children and development II
Globalising initiatives for gender equality and poverty reduction
Global economic crisis, austerity and neoliberal urban governance in England
The post-2008 global economic recession has had different spatial impacts as national and subnational economies are affected by and respond to economic downturn in a variety of ways. Drawing on recent research on the two English Core Cities of Bristol and Liverpool this paper develops an integrated and multiscalar analysis to explore the differentiated impacts of the economic crisis on cities and public services. This analysis is located within t…
The Reconquest of the Historic Centre
This is one of the first studies evaluating the experience of gentrification in a developing country. The conservation of the historic centre of Puebla, Mexico, is analysed with particular attention to the uses to which renovated properties are put and the nature and motivations of the agents involved. Gentrification in Puebla constitutes the symbolic reconquest of a space over which the local middle classes feared they had lost moral authority. …
Privatizing the commons
Few studies worldwide have analysed how to manage equitably the process whereby 'customary' or 'common' land can be incorporated into future urban development, particularly in so far as this might be achieved through privatization and deregulation. This paper focuses upon Mexico and the 1991-2 reforms of Article 27 which dramatically changed the tenure codes and political relations covering the widespread customary land sector - called ejidos. It…
The Contest for the City Centre
The historical centres of a great many cities in Latin America have been subject to conservation policies in the past 20 years (Hardoy and Gutman, 1991). Furthermore, the policies embarked upon in such cities as Cuzco, Mexico City, Salvador and Quito have been legitimised and sanctioned by UNESCO as part of a drive to celebrate a global heritage (Jones, 1994). Initially, these policies sought to restore key civil buildings and monuments in largel…
Youth, gender and livelihoods in West Africa
In this paper we report on preliminary fieldwork conducted in Ghana and The Gambia on the interrelationships among youth, gender and livelihoods. We examine how policy in developing countries, typically characterised as related to child labour or education, needs to emphasise the linkage across processes that affect young people. We argue that policy will be improved if young people are given voice to express how work, education, social networks,…
What does poverty feel like? Urban inequality and the politics of sensation
The emergent field of ‘sensory urbanism’ studies how socio-spatial boundaries are policed through sensorial means. Such studies have tended to focus on either formal policies that seek to control territories and populations through a governance of the senses, or on more everyday micro-politics of exclusion where conflicts are articulated in a sensory form. This article seeks to extend this work by concentrating on contexts where people deliberate…
The Rapid Preparation of Seawater ΣCO 2 for Radiocarbon Analysis at the National Ocean Sciences Ams Facility
We have established a laboratory for extracting ΣCO 2 from seawater samples for AMS analysis of the radiocarbon content. The seawater samples are collected at sea, poisoned and stored until analysis in the laboratory. Each sample is acidified; the inorganic carbon is stripped out as CO 2 with an inert carrier gas and then converted to graphite. We present results for Buzzards Bay surface H 2 O and Na 2 CO 3 standards that demonstrate we strip >98…
Spectacle and Suffering
The continuing debate about urban bias
This article reviews the current state of the debate around the concept of ‘urban bias’. It first reviews Michael Lipton’s original formulation of an Urban Bias Thesis (UBT), and the initial debates that took shape in regard to his work and the work of Elliott Berg and Robert Bates. The main body of the article, however, considers a recent reworking of the UBT by Robert Eastwood and Michael Lipton, and four sets of objections that can be raised a…
Ethnographies and/of violence
This paper examines ethnography as both a methodological practice and a form of writing, and specifically how ethnography as a textual product may shape and be shaped by the methodological process. We argue that a critical discussion of this relationship is especially important in relation to the ethnography/ethnographies of violence. Examining a range of recent texts, we consider whether different forms of violence necessitate, or have prompted,…
The World Bank's ‘new’ urban management programme
Natural Neighbors
In South Africa, new gated communities have begun branding themselves as “eco-estates,” “game estates,” “nature estates,” and “forest estates.” The marketing and consumption of nature has become prominent in the production and consumption of gated communities. A particular emphasis is placed on the use of native or indigenous plant species in landscape design. Suburbanites seeking to escape the increasingly mixed and threatening postapartheid cit…
Housing and finance in developing countries
The blind men and the elephant
Slumming about
Slums are categorised as having a deficit of infrastructure, income and adherence to norms and a surfeit of dirt, disease, violence and other pathologies. Slums are spaces of stigma, regardless of improvements to material or social conditions. This paper is concerned with how stigmatic representations of slums might be tackled. The paper considers how urbanists might understand the relationship between slums and aesthetics. Identifying different …
Megaprojects
Mexico is experiencing a series of debates about the shape of its cities. Most observers draw deeply pessimistic observations, noting a growing commodification of the urban landscape, high levels of crime and violence, social and spatial polarisation, state withdrawal and a general lack of innovative architectural design. Globalisation is widely held to be a root cause of these problems. Pressure to attract global capital and to cater for globali…
Tears, Trauma and Suicide
Despite considerable ethnographic research with young people in street situations and a growing interest in violence, little attention has been paid to suicide. The occurrence of suicide is a dramatic event that reveals weaknesses in support systems established by governments and civil society organisations, as well as perceived failings of friends. While an interest in suicide usually considers cause, in this paper we explore effect. How does th…
Bodies on the line
This paper presents material from extended interviews and observations with 25 street youth in Mexico, revealing how their attempts to control and understand their lives relies on a control of and identification with their bodies. Using Goffman's ideas of stigma and performance, and Butler's performativity, the paper illustrates that even if these young peoples' bodies fall short of mainstream ideas for youthful bodies, they have developed some s…
Children and development
The Land Market in Mexico under Salinas
It is a central contention of urban political economy that changes in the macroeconomy will have demonstrable effects on land and housing markets. However, in few empirical studies has this relationship been investigated, particularly in cities of developing economies. The structure of the land market in Mexico under the changing economic conditions heralded by the election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari as Mexican President for the six-year ( sexe…
Identifying the Inner City in Latin America
The inner city is a well-recognized concept in the First-World urban context. In seeking to identify the inner city in Latin America, the historic centre is examined, because the comparable central location and the common legacies of obsolescence and substandard amenities in the morphology suggest similarities, despite differing processes of evolution. Evidence from Quito in Ecuador shows that population losses in the historic centre during the 1…
The Latin American City as Contested Space
Gareth A. Jones, The Latin American City as Contested Space: A Manifesto, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 13, No. 1, Special Issue: The Latin American City as Contested Space (Jan., 1994), pp. 1-12
The relationship between urban conservation programmes and property renovation
Radiocarbon Dating of Deep-Sea Sediments
Radiocarbon dating (Libby, 1955) has been an important tool in the marine sciences since the early 1950s (eg, Arrhenius, Kjellberg & Libby, 1951; Ericson et al , 1956; Broecker, Ewing & Heezen, 1960; Emery & Bray, 1962) and the basic principles and analytic procedures of the method have changed little. In the late 1970s, the Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) method of 14 C dating was developed (Bennett et al , 1977, 1978), the major advantages …
The devaluation of action in Constant's Adolphe
Radiocarbon Dating of Deep-Sea Sediments
Radiocarbon dating (Libby, 1955) has been an important tool in the marine sciences since the early 1950s (eg, Arrhenius, Kjellberg & Libby, 1951; Ericson et al , 1956; Broecker, Ewing & Heezen, 1960; Emery & Bray, 1962) and the basic principles and analytic procedures of the method have changed little. In the late 1970s, the Accelerator Mass Spectrometer (AMS) method of 14 C dating was developed (Bennett et al , 1977, 1978), the major advantages …
Landlord and Tenant
Career Paths in Traditional Women’s Jobs
It has been argued that gender segregation within the labour market leads to women being overrepresented in a narrow range of jobs that offer limited promotion prospects. Presents the results of a questionnaire and interview study of women working in one such occupation, secretarial work, in England, France and Germany, and in the sectors of management consultancy and publishing. The results confirmed that secretaries in all three countries exper…
The New National Ocean Sciences Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Facility at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Start-up performance and first results of the new Woods Hole Accelerator Mass Spectrometer are discussed. Special attention is given to the hemispherical ionizer sputter source and the triple-isotope injector design
Residential Land Price Changes in Mexican Cities and the Affordability of Land for Low-income Groups
This research demonstrates that the price of residential land in Mexico declined significantly in real terms during the 1980s. Land prices appear to follow a cyclical trend which tracks Mexico's macro-economic performance. Data derived from advertised plot prices in newspapers, and from a large sample of household interviews conducted in low-income settlements in three intermediate-sized Mexican cities, suggest that, for the poor, real wage level…
The Land Market in Mexico under Salinas
It is a central contention of urban political economy that changes in the macroeconomy will have demonstrable effects on land and housing markets. However, in few empirical studies has this relationship been investigated, particularly in cities of developing economies. The structure of the land market in Mexico under the changing economic conditions heralded by the election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari as Mexican President for the six-year ( sexe…
The World Bank's ‘new’ urban management programme
The Rapid Preparation of Seawater ΣCO 2 for Radiocarbon Analysis at the National Ocean Sciences Ams Facility
We have established a laboratory for extracting ΣCO 2 from seawater samples for AMS analysis of the radiocarbon content. The seawater samples are collected at sea, poisoned and stored until analysis in the laboratory. Each sample is acidified; the inorganic carbon is stripped out as CO 2 with an inert carrier gas and then converted to graphite. We present results for Buzzards Bay surface H 2 O and Na 2 CO 3 standards that demonstrate we strip >98…
The Latin American City as Contested Space
Gareth A. Jones, The Latin American City as Contested Space: A Manifesto, Bulletin of Latin American Research, Vol. 13, No. 1, Special Issue: The Latin American City as Contested Space (Jan., 1994), pp. 1-12
The Contest for the City Centre
The historical centres of a great many cities in Latin America have been subject to conservation policies in the past 20 years (Hardoy and Gutman, 1991). Furthermore, the policies embarked upon in such cities as Cuzco, Mexico City, Salvador and Quito have been legitimised and sanctioned by UNESCO as part of a drive to celebrate a global heritage (Jones, 1994). Initially, these policies sought to restore key civil buildings and monuments in largel…
The blind men and the elephant
The Conservation Cycle in the Cities of the Developing World
Urban conservation in developing countries takes place despite limited funds, strong forces of deterioration, and the lack of popular and private-sector support. These challenges contribute to the existence of a conservation cycle in which policies evolve from an emphasis on monuments, to largely cosmetic enhancement schemes, to area-improvement projects, and, finally, to more ambitious removal programs. The four stages of the cycle are illustrat…
The relationship between urban conservation programmes and property renovation
Identifying the Inner City in Latin America
The inner city is a well-recognized concept in the First-World urban context. In seeking to identify the inner city in Latin America, the historic centre is examined, because the comparable central location and the common legacies of obsolescence and substandard amenities in the morphology suggest similarities, despite differing processes of evolution. Evidence from Quito in Ecuador shows that population losses in the historic centre during the 1…
Hell Hath no Fury like an Academic Scorned”
In our response to Pugh's critique of our work which he rather grandiosely describes as ‘Cambridge studies’, we take major issue with his arguments on three principal fronts. First, he is very selective in his review of our publications, and in seeking to defend the position of the World Bank, UNDP, and UNCHS, he fails to acknowledge an extensive debate in which we have already engaged with senior analysts from those institutions. Moreover, his r…
To reply or not to reply
Writing Orderly Geographies of Distant Places
Surveys of the boundaries, rivers and railways of Argentina have during the past cen tury extended a network of measurements around and over the country, covering it with a finer and larger mesh of surveyed lines and affording a general knowledge of the principal geographical features. 1
Junto con los ninos
A notable absentee from the ten-point action plan set out by the 1990 World Summit for Children was the issue of street children. Y et such children are a common sight in cities of the developing world, and live in some of the most extreme conditions of poverty. The article looks at the experience of street children in the Mexican city of Puebla. It argues that current research neglects the moral and geographic dimensions of work with street chil…
Early Agriculture in Primorye, Russian Far East
Privatizing the commons
Few studies worldwide have analysed how to manage equitably the process whereby 'customary' or 'common' land can be incorporated into future urban development, particularly in so far as this might be achieved through privatization and deregulation. This paper focuses upon Mexico and the 1991-2 reforms of Article 27 which dramatically changed the tenure codes and political relations covering the widespread customary land sector - called ejidos. It…
Resistance and the Rule of Law in Mexico
Judicial reform and promotion of the rule of law are at the very top of the political agendas of many developing countries. Moreover, in the context of democratization and a growing concern for human rights and citizenship, many social groups are prepared to use the law as a means to challenge the State. This article looks at how a group in Mexico used the law to resist the State's attempt to expropriate land for urban development. The law was us…
The Reconquest of the Historic Centre
This is one of the first studies evaluating the experience of gentrification in a developing country. The conservation of the historic centre of Puebla, Mexico, is analysed with particular attention to the uses to which renovated properties are put and the nature and motivations of the agents involved. Gentrification in Puebla constitutes the symbolic reconquest of a space over which the local middle classes feared they had lost moral authority. …
Public–private partnerships for urban land development in Mexico
Housing and finance in developing countries
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Economics (24 works) · Geography (24 works) · Law (21 works) · Law (16 works) · Politics (16 works) · Economic growth (14 works) · Urban and Rural Development Challenges (14 works) · Poverty (9 works)