Critical Geography

During these past years, contemporary urban entertainment economy has been increasingly driven by social and spatial inequality and segmentation of consumer markets. This dominant mode of production has involved a displacement of older modes of working-class nightlife. However, social resistances mainly played by suburban young working classes are being especially (re)produced during their nighttime leisure activities. In the case of Barcelona (Catalonia), youth policies carried out by local administration during these past three decades have intended to reinforce social sanitation through the re-catalanization of its suburbs and by marginalizing social and cultural practices of the young suburban working classes. Focusing on the Catalan capital, this chapter explores how a suburban otherness is mainly built up through the (re)production of highly politicized suburban nightscapes, which are largely related to the claiming of a Spanished ‘suburban’ identity, clashing with the Catalan official one. This chapter ends up opening a debate about the relationship of the re-bordering of postcrisis urban inequalities, the collapse of social cohesion in suburbs, and the emergence of new topographies of urban and suburban power in Barcelona.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

"With the recent availability of open source application programming interfaces for digital mapping, programmers have been able create applications that literally put music and sound on the map. Since the mid-2000s, sound artists, electroacoustic composers and archivists have been able to use digital resources to map their field recordings, most popular of which has been Google Maps. Many of these maps allow for users to upload their own recordings, creating maps with thousands of sound clips. This presentation aims to explore the possibility of musicological scholarship concerning practices of digital mapping of music and sound on computers, tablets and smartphones.
This presentation will provide a history of sound mapping as used by sound recordists and composers.  Beginning with Tony Schwartz’ sound documentary form which examples of this New York 19 and The World in My Mailbox, I will explain how these recordings establish a sense of place. Schwartz’ recordings influenced the members of the World Soundscape Project to develop their own sound maps for their series The Music of The Environment. I will also review the uses of the twenty-two largest participant-interactive online sound maps, including the Toronto Sound Map, The London Sound Survey, The Göteborg Sound Map, and the Tactical Sound Gardens. Additionally, I will discuss my own use of sound maps as a musicological teaching resource, working on projects with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, MIT Media Lab professor Tod Machover, and for the University of Alberta/Cape Breton University project “Celebrating East European communities and cultures in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia”. All of these examples of contribute to the use of digital sound mapping as an ethnographic research tool and a teaching resource."

"Can we open up different definitions of commons? Are there different ways of understanding and discussing commons through artistic and (h)acktivist practices? What can we learn from the various uses of free software's, copy-left movements, peer-2-peer and do-it-yourself systems, the logic of open source, and creative commons? With the aim of conceptualizing a contemporaneous version of commons, paratactic commons, the paper will focus on two best practices such as ‘The Hurricane Hackers’ of MIT Media Lab’ and ‘Mapping The Commons of Istanbul and Athens’ project of Pablo de Soto and Daphne Dragona. By making the hidden
data sensible and recognizable, while these specific practices of paratactic commons work within the spatial and temporal units of cities, they also operate and create the media cities."

""This article is concerned with the relationship between (pedestrian) movement and (local)
knowledge. Drawing upon ethnography conducted with a team of urban outreach workers, the
article considers mapping, and specifically the use of Global Positioning System technology, as a
method with which to document the spatial distribution of the team’s practice as they search
for and locate their rough-sleeping client group. Outreach workers are experts in the terrain in
which they operate; maps of their movements, therefore, might be said to entail a mapping of
knowledge, enacted in movement, and our informants do not move randomly, but knowledgeably.
Our argument, however, grounded in an attention to the way in which knowledge and movement
combine in the street-level practices of urban outreach, provides a foundation for a critique of
mapping as an analytic practice in and through which relations of knowing and going can be shown
and understood.""

"Neoliberal economics have emerged in the post-Cold War era as the predominant ideological tenet applied to the development of countries in the global south. For much of the global south, however, the promise that markets will bring increased standards of living and emancipation from tyranny has been an empty one. Instead, neoliberalisation has increased the gap between rich and poor and unleashed a firestorm of social ills.

This book deals with the post-conflict geographies of violence and neoliberalisation in Cambodia. Applying a geographical analysis to contemporary Cambodian politics, the author employs notions of neoliberalism, public space, and radical democracy as the most substantive components of its theoretical edifice. He argues that the promotion of unfettered marketisation is the foremost causal factor in the country’s inability to consolidate democracy following a United Nations sponsored transition. The book demonstrates Cambodian perspectives on the role of public space in Cambodia's process of democratic development and explains the implications of violence and its relationship with neoliberalism.

Taking into account the transition from war to peace, authoritarianism to democracy, and command economy to a free market, this book offers a critical appraisal of the political economy in Cambodia.
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Reviews:

Gunn, G. C. 2013. Journal of Contemporary Asia, 43.1: 188-191.

Brickell, K. 2011. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 52.3: 372-374.

Percival, T. 2011. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 32.2: 270-272.

Christie, R. 2010. South East Asia Research, 19.2: 349-372.

Ordóñez de Pablos, P. 2010. International Journal of Asian Business and Information Management, 1.4: 65-66."

In this paper I explore how learning strategies based on competition and zero-sum thinking are inscribed into the dynamics of classroom interaction shaping relations between high-achieving pupils, and link elements of these practices to market trends in British education policy discourse. A detour through the politico-historical negotiations shaping relations between neo-liberal governance and education is initially sketched out, bringing into focus how the proliferation of policy discourses of consumerism and marketization aim to facilitate and shape the conduct of persons in classroom settings. Drawing on ethnographic observation data taken from a study of two London comprehensive secondary schools, I then outline how pupils are incited to behave as competitive strategists in the classroom and reflect on the gender constructions underpinning these performances and their slippery dynamics.

Perchè studiare geografia? Cosa ha da dire la geografia di un mondo quotidianamente sotto gli occhi di tutti? Non è sufficiente viaggiare, guardare la televisione, navigare in Internet, leggere un giornale? Nonostante gli sforzi che anche in Italia i geografi stanno compiendo per far comprendere, oggi più che mai, l´importanza della geografia, le nuove generazioni appaiono, più delle precedenti, colpite da "analfabetismo geografico". E il mondo dell´informazione di massa non è da meno. Ripartendo dalla lezione della fenomenologia geografica, il testo si snoda nei percorsi della geografia contemporanea, cercando di far apparire quale ricchezza di idee, approcci, entusiasmi lo studio geografico del mondo possa suscitare, inaspettatamente, nei giovani e non solo. Gli interrogativi della geografia odierna sono gli interrogativi della nostra civiltà, quelli che si presentano negli interstizi della vita quotidiana, spesso inavvertiti come le parole scritte più in grande in una carta geografica. Fare geografia vuol dire porsi seriamente quelle domande che continuano a farci visita dopo esser tornati da un viaggio, dopo aver spento il televisore, il computer, dopo aver riposto il giornale.

"This multi-species, multi-ethnic ethnography explores aspects of southern African regional culture through the analysis of material culture, historical records, and contemporary ethnographic observation involving the use of a large beetle (Brachycerus ornatus, Red-spotted Lily Weevil), and the beetle’s food plant, the poisonous bulb known as ‘Bushman’s poison bulb’ (Boophone disticha or Ammocharis coranica).  The cultural objects discussed here come from nineteenth-century collections of Henry Wellcome (London), The British Museum (London) and the Naprstek Ethnological Museum, Prague. These ‘magic bundles’ incorporate plant and animal materials in the context of cultural meanings of landscapes in order to offer protection against witches and evil, and in hunting, trance, and healing.  It is argued that these practices are regional rather than ‘ethnic’ or ‘tribal’, spanning across San (Bushman), Khoe, Bantu and Afrikaans cultures.  These practices integrate nature and culture through specifying sets of relations that link human, plant, animal and mineral elements in what has been called ‘natureculture’ and ‘human-animal collectivities’.  Exploitation of the ‘healing’ and magical herbs is conducted today, as in the past, with stone tools made from large stone flakes of local dolerite (diabase).  They are made opportunistically on the spot—a contemporary reinvention, or in continuity with ancient lithic technologies—thus linking the mineral with plant and animal parts of the landscape. Landscape and culture are seen to be mutually productive of each other.  This article offers new insight into the history and material culture of traditional healing in this regional context.
[Keywords: multispecies ethnography; natureculture; material culture, landscape, African traditional medicine; traditional healers; southern Africa; lithic technologies; stone tools; Boophone disticha; Ammocharis coranica; Brachycerus ornatus]
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"Discourses about sex and sexuality seem to have become more public and in many ways more acceptable in recent years. We have become much more open to discussing varieties of sex and sexual activity, and to pondering over our relevant appetites, insufficiencies and achievements to the point where prominent newspapers now have resident sexologists to answer our questions, and sex blogging on the internet has become almost passé. Indeed, the recent media picnic over a music video by pop divas Lady Gaga and Beyonce featuring lesbian tropes emphasise the ravenousness with which we digest apparent sexual deviance.  Public discourses about sex have also changed remarkably over recent years and this paper analyses the ways in which public discourses and public spaces have opened up to other sexualities in ways that appear quite liberating for the non-heterosexual. Indeed, the effects of such public discourses have been largely positive with respect to adult entertainment and other forms of sexual commerce. This paper, however, will focus on the effects of public discourses on sexual identity and how the apparent opening up of public spaces and public discourses has actually contributed to the continued marginalization of sexual minorities through the appropriation of “otherness” in the service of heteronormativity and through a failure to recognize the experience of shame in relation to sexuality. It questions the liberating effects of the current discursive preoccupation with sex and sexualities and suggests that these discourses serve to define and regulate non-heterosexualities more than ever before.
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