John R Pierce
Biographic Data
| ID | 449164 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John R Pierce |
| GIVEN NAMES | John R |
| FAMILY NAME | Pierce |
| SIGNATURE | PIERCE J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7331-5044 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 36 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 507 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 36 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1972 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The implications of violence for theories of place-making
Geographers have written extensively about place-making as a mode of formal and informal politics. One of the key themes is a theorizing of geographical pluralism. This body of work rarely takes head-on the potential for physical violence, however. We explore how consideration of violence poses challenges to contemporary place theory
I don't think anybody’s ever been to scale: ” The imperative for growth and the implications of scale for Community Land Trusts in Minnesota, USA
This paper examines the scalar logics of Community Land Trusts, nonprofits that work to facilitate affordable housing and promote community control of local development. Like many nonprofits, CLTs face a tension between assumed efficiencies that come with larger size on one hand, and the assumed responsiveness to community stakeholders that comes with smaller size on the other. Through an examination of CLTs in Minnesota, USA that included over 1…
Walking as a method for epistemic justice in sustainability
Whitenesses in the city: A history of place-making in Little Five Points, Atlanta, USA
Atlanta has been known for decades as a center of Black culture and Black-owned development in the American South and in the nation. In the past 15 years, the city has begun shifting back toward a whiter residential base. As in other American cities, this trend is being driven by a move from the suburban fringe back to the center by relatively mobile, middle- and upper-middle class white residents. While literature has examined the mechanics and …
Building knowledge infrastructure for diverse stakeholders to scale up co-production equitably
Ownership is a habit of mind: How community land trusts expose key consensual fictions of urban property
Community land trusts (“CLTs”) have garnered attention as a novel, non-state organizational mechanism for enabling permanently affordable homeownership. In canonical form, they separate a home from the land upon which it sits, holding the land in trust and selling the home for its value without the land. Additionally, CLTs use ground lease restrictions to constrain the resale process and enforce long-term reproduction of affordability. Herein, we…
The Commodity Effects of Decommodification: Community Land Trusts and Neighborhood Property Values
This article explores the impacts of community land trust (CLT) properties on the real estate prices of nearby homes through a case study of a relatively large CLT in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We use hedonic regression and a difference-in-difference estimation with spatial error correction to measure price effects. The number of developments citywide is insufficient to yield significant results. However, we find evidence that clustering CLTs stemme…
Meanings of limited equity homeownership in community land trusts
Discourses regarding homeownership in the United States emphasize housing as an economic investment. This focus fosters a number of problems, including inflated housing values, increased segregation, economic divisions, and the foreclosure crisis. Community land trusts (CLTs) put land in a non-profit trust to keep it affordable long-term. We examine CLTs as affordable housing organizations where individual residents own homes in the trust and lea…
The Production of Community in Community Land Trusts
This paper explores the ways notions of community are produced and understood by homeowners/ members, staff, and board members of eight Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in the state of Minnesota. The CLT model utilizes a mixed property regime that ensures the permanent affordability of land to make it accessible to low–income people. In most cases, CLT land is made up of noncontiguous parcels spread across a neighborhood or municipality, embedded in …
How Can We Share Space? Ontologies of Spatial Pluralism in Lefebvre, Butler, and Massey
This article compares three arguments about how space might be shared: Lefebvre’s articulation of a shared right to urban space, Judith Butler’s argument for an ethical obligation to plurally cohabitat space, and Massey’s conceptualization of space and place as radically plural. Each theorist articulates a model of how to share space; this sharing is key to how each theorist imagines possibilities for justice. Rigorous reading of these different …
On the Transformative Potential of Community Land Trusts in the United States
Growing interest in non‐capitalist ownership models raises empirical questions about the political implications of such models. In this paper we ask: are non‐capitalist property ownership models inherently politically transformative? A study of community land trusts ( CLT s) based in Minnesota illustrates that alternative property models do not necessarily produce transformative political outcomes. Interviews of those involved in CLT s revealed t…
The City as "Dissonant" Fetish: Urban (Re)production, Gentrification, and the Conceptual Limits of Commodity Fetishism
This article exposes important conceptual limits to urban commodification in theorizing urban (re)production. We interrogate the concept of commodity fetishism—the process through which commodities come to be seen as performing the social and economic relations of their production in the marketplace—and argue that efforts to commodify the city for consumption generally produce a “dissonant fetish.” We examine urban commodity fetishism among gentr…
Provincializing urban appropriation: Agonistic transgression as a mode of actually existing appropriation in South African cities
Urban appropriation is a key dimension of both Lefebvre's widely hailed ‘Right to the City’ and Bayat's concept of ‘quiet encroachment’. For Lefebvre, appropriation is a (generally unrealized) claim by those who do not ‘have’ the city of a right to ‘take’ it. Bayat, in contrast, characterizes actually existing appropriation as motivated by everyday needs, not aimed at wider social change. While both theorizations may be useful, we argue that a th…
From precarious work to obsolete labour? Implications of technological disemployment for geographical scholarship
The displacement of jobs via mechanization and automation has long been understood as uncomfortable for labourers but also an intrinsic part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ leading to further growth in capitalist economies. This article argues that a seismic shift is currently underway in the dynamics of the labour market with regard to automation. Technologies of automation are capable of a rapidly rising proportion of all of the tasks th…
Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies
A range of conceptual terms and diverse theoretical traditions have been used to study geographies of race. Black geographical scholarship has persuasively articulated the need to better understand black agency and experiences. We suggest that the conceptual lens of place, and specifically relational place-making, is particularly congruent with the black geographical interest in agency, experience, and non-material spatial practices. It is also a…
Power and Development
Development is a power‐laden process involving the reconfiguration of power relations between individuals and institutions as well as across spaces and scales. Geographers have participated (and continue to participate) in the exertion of power by providing data and theoretical justification for development, while also providing critical analysis of these processes. Scholars have argued that development is enabled and constrained by power entangl…
The right to move: Informal use rights and urban practices of mobility
Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strate…
The law is not enough: Seeking the theoretical ‘frontier of urban justice’ via legal tools
This commentary examines the conceptual limits of urban justice through the use of legal tools, both generally and in actually existing neoliberal urban contexts. Our interest emerges from previous research on social service siting in a region with legal tools that seem exceptionally friendly to spatial justice due to limits on exclusionary zoning. Conceptually, such powerful legal levers might be expected to mitigate the generally observed tende…
Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” in The Globe and Mail
Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debat…
Against Power? Distinguishing Between Acquisitive Resistance and Subversion
Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. Th…
Inserting scales of urban politics: The possibilities of meso-urban governance shims
This article explores the geographic literature on governance at smaller-than-urban but larger-than-household scales, identifying a relative inattention to neighborhood and other partial-city scales of governance. Hegemonic power relationships are institutionalized at particular scales of state government (e.g. national, regional, municipal) and state-sanctioned governing units (e.g. jurisdictional districts or supranational bodies), which in tur…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Iterative parallelism as research praxis: Embracing the discursive incommensurability of scholarship and everyday politics
Discussions of geography's role outside the academy have tended toward arguments for greater public relevance, either by revising the discipline's empirical foci, or by adopting more public‐oriented or activist approaches to research. While we are sympathetic to these ideas, we see an inherent tension between the discursive goals of academic scholarship and the everyday political world beyond it. Political discourse makes productive use of signif…
Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities." Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), pp. 331–332
Relational place‐making: The networked politics of place
Place‐making – the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live – is an important but oft‐neglected part of political theory. Place‐making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio‐spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place‐frame. While place‐oriented scholars have long acknowledged the importance o…
Walking as Method: Toward Methodological Forthrightness and Comparability in Urban Geographical Research
Qualitative urban geographical research should explicitly acknowledge insights gained from walking (the iterative exploration and observation of cities on foot), which enhances local literacy and enables researchers to compare methods more explicitly. Some urban geographers might use walking as a method, but it is rarely reported in published scholarship. This article argues for the explicit inclusion of walking in methodological reporting for ur…
Placing Lefebvre: Placing Lefebvre
Geographers have extensively used Lefebvre's concept of space as a social product as a framework guiding urban and political critique. Lefebvre articulates social space through a primarily ontological engagement: he describes a complex and multi-faceted object that exists in three simultaneous but distinct, co-producing registers. The famous “triad” has become canonical within Anglophone geography, but the implications of this ontology for knowin…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies
A range of conceptual terms and diverse theoretical traditions have been used to study geographies of race. Black geographical scholarship has persuasively articulated the need to better understand black agency and experiences. We suggest that the conceptual lens of place, and specifically relational place-making, is particularly congruent with the black geographical interest in agency, experience, and non-material spatial practices. It is also a…
Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city
From precarious work to obsolete labour? Implications of technological disemployment for geographical scholarship
The displacement of jobs via mechanization and automation has long been understood as uncomfortable for labourers but also an intrinsic part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ leading to further growth in capitalist economies. This article argues that a seismic shift is currently underway in the dynamics of the labour market with regard to automation. Technologies of automation are capable of a rapidly rising proportion of all of the tasks th…
Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism
Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spati…
On the Transformative Potential of Community Land Trusts in the United States
Growing interest in non‐capitalist ownership models raises empirical questions about the political implications of such models. In this paper we ask: are non‐capitalist property ownership models inherently politically transformative? A study of community land trusts ( CLT s) based in Minnesota illustrates that alternative property models do not necessarily produce transformative political outcomes. Interviews of those involved in CLT s revealed t…
Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” in The Globe and Mail
Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debat…
Against Power? Distinguishing Between Acquisitive Resistance and Subversion
Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. Th…
How Can We Share Space? Ontologies of Spatial Pluralism in Lefebvre, Butler, and Massey
This article compares three arguments about how space might be shared: Lefebvre’s articulation of a shared right to urban space, Judith Butler’s argument for an ethical obligation to plurally cohabitat space, and Massey’s conceptualization of space and place as radically plural. Each theorist articulates a model of how to share space; this sharing is key to how each theorist imagines possibilities for justice. Rigorous reading of these different …
Inserting scales of urban politics: The possibilities of meso-urban governance shims
This article explores the geographic literature on governance at smaller-than-urban but larger-than-household scales, identifying a relative inattention to neighborhood and other partial-city scales of governance. Hegemonic power relationships are institutionalized at particular scales of state government (e.g. national, regional, municipal) and state-sanctioned governing units (e.g. jurisdictional districts or supranational bodies), which in tur…
The right to move: Informal use rights and urban practices of mobility
Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strate…
Urban Politics and Mental Health: An Agenda for Health Geographic Research
Siting of mental health service facilities has often been subject to public opposition and political struggles. These processes have produced a landscape of mental health provision that is powerfully uneven and concentrated in economically and socially depressed areas. We argue that understanding this landscape requires an examination of the political processes that shape such siting decisions. Although health geographers (most importantly Dear a…
The City as "Dissonant" Fetish: Urban (Re)production, Gentrification, and the Conceptual Limits of Commodity Fetishism
This article exposes important conceptual limits to urban commodification in theorizing urban (re)production. We interrogate the concept of commodity fetishism—the process through which commodities come to be seen as performing the social and economic relations of their production in the marketplace—and argue that efforts to commodify the city for consumption generally produce a “dissonant fetish.” We examine urban commodity fetishism among gentr…
Walking as a method for epistemic justice in sustainability
Meanings of limited equity homeownership in community land trusts
Discourses regarding homeownership in the United States emphasize housing as an economic investment. This focus fosters a number of problems, including inflated housing values, increased segregation, economic divisions, and the foreclosure crisis. Community land trusts (CLTs) put land in a non-profit trust to keep it affordable long-term. We examine CLTs as affordable housing organizations where individual residents own homes in the trust and lea…
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities." Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), pp. 331–332
The Production of Community in Community Land Trusts
This paper explores the ways notions of community are produced and understood by homeowners/ members, staff, and board members of eight Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in the state of Minnesota. The CLT model utilizes a mixed property regime that ensures the permanent affordability of land to make it accessible to low–income people. In most cases, CLT land is made up of noncontiguous parcels spread across a neighborhood or municipality, embedded in …
The law is not enough: Seeking the theoretical ‘frontier of urban justice’ via legal tools
This commentary examines the conceptual limits of urban justice through the use of legal tools, both generally and in actually existing neoliberal urban contexts. Our interest emerges from previous research on social service siting in a region with legal tools that seem exceptionally friendly to spatial justice due to limits on exclusionary zoning. Conceptually, such powerful legal levers might be expected to mitigate the generally observed tende…
Iterative parallelism as research praxis: Embracing the discursive incommensurability of scholarship and everyday politics
Discussions of geography's role outside the academy have tended toward arguments for greater public relevance, either by revising the discipline's empirical foci, or by adopting more public‐oriented or activist approaches to research. While we are sympathetic to these ideas, we see an inherent tension between the discursive goals of academic scholarship and the everyday political world beyond it. Political discourse makes productive use of signif…
The Hilliness of U.S. Cities
What is a hilly city, and which cities are hilliest? This study outlines a basket of methods for quantifying the differential hilliness of U.S. cities. We rank the 100 largest cities in the contiguous United States, using a selection of eight methods to evaluate their comparative hilliness. We then reflect on how four key "modes of encounter" with terrain shape human perceptions of urban hilliness: visual, pedestrian, automotive, and imagined/con…
Reduced Mortality Among Department of Veterans Affairs Patients With Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder Lost to Follow-up and Engaged in Active Outreach to Return for Care
Objectives. We determined whether contacting Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorders (serious mental illness [SMI]) who had dropped out of care for prolonged periods resulted in reengagement with VA services and decreased mortality. Methods. We developed a list of patients with SMI who were last treated in fiscal years 2005 to 2006, and were lost to follow-up care for at least 1 year. VA medical center…
Reinvigorating the Concept of Land Tenure for American Urban Geography
Tenure rights are durable privileges to use and benefit from specific pieces of land. In the USA, tenure rights are typically conceptually folded into the 'bundle of rights' associated with formal land ownership. Legally, this model rests on well-documented principles: private, serial, single-party property ownership and clear, well-regulated surveying. However, tenure does not begin and end in property. People negotiate the terms under which the…
The Psychology of Communication. Seven Essays
Almost All about Waves
Information Technology and Civilization
Relational place‐making: The networked politics of place
Place‐making – the set of social, political and material processes by which people iteratively create and recreate the experienced geographies in which they live – is an important but oft‐neglected part of political theory. Place‐making is an inherently networked process, constituted by the socio‐spatial relationships that link individuals together through a common place‐frame. While place‐oriented scholars have long acknowledged the importance o…
Reinvigorating the Concept of Land Tenure for American Urban Geography
Tenure rights are durable privileges to use and benefit from specific pieces of land. In the USA, tenure rights are typically conceptually folded into the 'bundle of rights' associated with formal land ownership. Legally, this model rests on well-documented principles: private, serial, single-party property ownership and clear, well-regulated surveying. However, tenure does not begin and end in property. People negotiate the terms under which the…
Reduced Mortality Among Department of Veterans Affairs Patients With Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorder Lost to Follow-up and Engaged in Active Outreach to Return for Care
Objectives. We determined whether contacting Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorders (serious mental illness [SMI]) who had dropped out of care for prolonged periods resulted in reengagement with VA services and decreased mortality. Methods. We developed a list of patients with SMI who were last treated in fiscal years 2005 to 2006, and were lost to follow-up care for at least 1 year. VA medical center…
Urban Politics and Mental Health: An Agenda for Health Geographic Research
Siting of mental health service facilities has often been subject to public opposition and political struggles. These processes have produced a landscape of mental health provision that is powerfully uneven and concentrated in economically and socially depressed areas. We argue that understanding this landscape requires an examination of the political processes that shape such siting decisions. Although health geographers (most importantly Dear a…
Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism
Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spati…
Walking as Method: Toward Methodological Forthrightness and Comparability in Urban Geographical Research
Qualitative urban geographical research should explicitly acknowledge insights gained from walking (the iterative exploration and observation of cities on foot), which enhances local literacy and enables researchers to compare methods more explicitly. Some urban geographers might use walking as a method, but it is rarely reported in published scholarship. This article argues for the explicit inclusion of walking in methodological reporting for ur…
Placing Lefebvre: Placing Lefebvre
Geographers have extensively used Lefebvre's concept of space as a social product as a framework guiding urban and political critique. Lefebvre articulates social space through a primarily ontological engagement: he describes a complex and multi-faceted object that exists in three simultaneous but distinct, co-producing registers. The famous “triad” has become canonical within Anglophone geography, but the implications of this ontology for knowin…
The Hilliness of U.S. Cities
What is a hilly city, and which cities are hilliest? This study outlines a basket of methods for quantifying the differential hilliness of U.S. cities. We rank the 100 largest cities in the contiguous United States, using a selection of eight methods to evaluate their comparative hilliness. We then reflect on how four key "modes of encounter" with terrain shape human perceptions of urban hilliness: visual, pedestrian, automotive, and imagined/con…
Against Power? Distinguishing Between Acquisitive Resistance and Subversion
Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. Th…
Inserting scales of urban politics: The possibilities of meso-urban governance shims
This article explores the geographic literature on governance at smaller-than-urban but larger-than-household scales, identifying a relative inattention to neighborhood and other partial-city scales of governance. Hegemonic power relationships are institutionalized at particular scales of state government (e.g. national, regional, municipal) and state-sanctioned governing units (e.g. jurisdictional districts or supranational bodies), which in tur…
Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory
Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing enta…
Iterative parallelism as research praxis: Embracing the discursive incommensurability of scholarship and everyday politics
Discussions of geography's role outside the academy have tended toward arguments for greater public relevance, either by revising the discipline's empirical foci, or by adopting more public‐oriented or activist approaches to research. While we are sympathetic to these ideas, we see an inherent tension between the discursive goals of academic scholarship and the everyday political world beyond it. Political discourse makes productive use of signif…
Rights in places: An analytical extension of the right to the city
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities
Toward an urban cultural studies: Henri Lefebvre and the humanities." Social & Cultural Geography, 17(2), pp. 331–332
Power and Development
Development is a power‐laden process involving the reconfiguration of power relations between individuals and institutions as well as across spaces and scales. Geographers have participated (and continue to participate) in the exertion of power by providing data and theoretical justification for development, while also providing critical analysis of these processes. Scholars have argued that development is enabled and constrained by power entangl…
The right to move: Informal use rights and urban practices of mobility
Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strate…
The law is not enough: Seeking the theoretical ‘frontier of urban justice’ via legal tools
This commentary examines the conceptual limits of urban justice through the use of legal tools, both generally and in actually existing neoliberal urban contexts. Our interest emerges from previous research on social service siting in a region with legal tools that seem exceptionally friendly to spatial justice due to limits on exclusionary zoning. Conceptually, such powerful legal levers might be expected to mitigate the generally observed tende…
Place‐making at a national scale: Framing tar sands extraction as “Canadian” in The Globe and Mail
Although the concept of place has most often been used to examine micro‐scale locales, recent explications of place‐making and place‐framing can usefully inform debates on nations, nationalism, and the nation‐state. Viewing the nation as a contested, unstable, and relational place enables a pluralist and dynamic understanding of how nation‐places are constructed and contested, by whom, and towards what ends. In this paper, we examine public debat…
Provincializing urban appropriation: Agonistic transgression as a mode of actually existing appropriation in South African cities
Urban appropriation is a key dimension of both Lefebvre's widely hailed ‘Right to the City’ and Bayat's concept of ‘quiet encroachment’. For Lefebvre, appropriation is a (generally unrealized) claim by those who do not ‘have’ the city of a right to ‘take’ it. Bayat, in contrast, characterizes actually existing appropriation as motivated by everyday needs, not aimed at wider social change. While both theorizations may be useful, we argue that a th…
From precarious work to obsolete labour? Implications of technological disemployment for geographical scholarship
The displacement of jobs via mechanization and automation has long been understood as uncomfortable for labourers but also an intrinsic part of a process of ‘creative destruction’ leading to further growth in capitalist economies. This article argues that a seismic shift is currently underway in the dynamics of the labour market with regard to automation. Technologies of automation are capable of a rapidly rising proportion of all of the tasks th…
Placing race: On the resonance of place with black geographies
A range of conceptual terms and diverse theoretical traditions have been used to study geographies of race. Black geographical scholarship has persuasively articulated the need to better understand black agency and experiences. We suggest that the conceptual lens of place, and specifically relational place-making, is particularly congruent with the black geographical interest in agency, experience, and non-material spatial practices. It is also a…
The Production of Community in Community Land Trusts
This paper explores the ways notions of community are produced and understood by homeowners/ members, staff, and board members of eight Community Land Trusts (CLTs) in the state of Minnesota. The CLT model utilizes a mixed property regime that ensures the permanent affordability of land to make it accessible to low–income people. In most cases, CLT land is made up of noncontiguous parcels spread across a neighborhood or municipality, embedded in …
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (27 works) · Law (20 works) · Epistemology (16 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (16 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Geography (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (9 works)