The Province of British Columbia (BC), Canada, is experiencing acute and overlapping health and social crises that have spread from the largest cities into smaller municipalities, where limited resources and supports are increasingly strained by visible poverty, homelessness, and substance use on local streets. While some smaller municipalities have responded by seeking additional supports for affected populations, others have pursued more punitive measures, such as dismantling tent encampments, opposing harm reduction initiatives, and enacting restrictive bylaws. In this paper, we examine the City of Campbell River, BC as a case study in municipal opposition to provincial health and social interventions. Drawing on political and legal geography and law and society scholarship, we identify three oppositional strategies used by the city: lobbying upper levels of government, creatively deploying nuisance bylaws, and leveraging financial and budgetary tools. We argue that these actions, while grounded in local governance, had discursive and political reach beyond municipal boundaries. They not only recalibrated the boundaries of what is considered permissible municipal action, they influenced broader legal and political discourse in the province. They also limited the spatial extent of housing and social service provision in the community, and by extension, where marginalized people “could be.” The case also illustrates how smaller municipalities can scale up actions and rhetoric to influence upper-level legislation in ways that reverberate back to affect vulnerable populations locally. By tracing these dynamics, the paper contributes to critical understandings of how municipal law and policy can shape governance of overlapping social crises.
Universities increasingly rely on land assets alongside enrolments, fees, loan schemes, and public funding. Resistance has intensified where universities seek to redevelop or repurpose campuses on land granted, transferred, or viewed as gifted for educational purposes. Using Australia’s University of Tasmania (UTAS) as an intrinsic case, this paper examines how land, trust, and governance can be contested during organizational and institutional transformation. We analyse 151 public submissions to a 2022–25 Legislative Council Inquiry into the University of Tasmania Act 1992 , convened amid proposals to relocate the main campus from a suburban site to Hobart’s central business district. Drawing on qualitative, abductive analysis, we show how submissions mobilized certain claims about university landholdings as endowments that enshrined particular obligations. Specifically, submissions gave expression to strong views about campus life, place attachment, intergenerational responsibility, transparency, governance, and institutional purpose. Yet, gift-based claims are ambivalent: they challenge market-oriented spatial strategies but may reinforce established spatial privileges and uneven claims to authority. They also depend on property assumptions that can obscure Indigenous relations with land. Here, we treat campus transformation as a diagnostic moment in which sociospatial contracts become visible and contested, rather than adjudicating specific development proposals. We argue that ideas about land-as-gift produce moral and political claims that intensify under institutional change, and shape how public trust is articulated and strained. The case contributes to debates about public land, urban commoning, institutional responsibility, and spatial entitlement. Contestation may provide a resource for institutional reflection, governance reform, and reimagining higher education’s civic and spatial futures.
The UK-Rwanda Deal sought to overhaul the UK’s migration policy by outsourcing the asylum process to Rwanda, a move that would have dissolved the state’s international protection for refugees. Whilst the incoming Labour Prime Minister scrapped the policy upon taking office, the question remains: Why did the UK-Rwanda Deal endure through two years of court injunctions and widespread criticism? A question that remains salient as Italy, the Netherlands, and the European Union attempt to pursue similar externalisation policies. Far from a failed experiment, we argue that the UK-Rwanda Deal was a calculated attempt to enact the historically enduring border politics of distancing. Physical distancing creates a spatial buffer to skirt legal obligations while isolating asylum seekers from support systems. Symbolic distancing functions as a deterrence, presenting the illusion that safety is unreachable while easing populist anxieties by framing the constructed ‘problem’ as resolved. Mental distancing normalises the violence of deportation by reducing asylum seekers to bureaucratic items. In practice, the externalisation of asylum functions both as a mechanism of control (physical) and the desire for racialised exclusion (symbolic and mental). By situating our critique within the historical context of deportations to third countries, we argue that the UK-Rwanda Deal is less a novel development than a resurgence of a longer standing practice. The cancellation of the UK-Rwanda Deal is therefore not the end of the story, but a chapter in the ongoing border politics of distancing, as former colonial powers in Europe, the USA and Australia eagerly seek to enact this practice of racialised exclusion.
This study examines Taiwan’s Jianan Irrigation System as a rehearsal stage for sovereign performance under diplomatic constraints. It argues that state-led heritage preservation and historical reframing have produced a site through which sovereignty is simultaneously performed at domestic and local scales and rehearsed at the international scale. On one hand, this scaled practice expands existing conceptualisations of rehearsing stateness. On the other hand, it reexamines the relationship between heritage diplomacy and sovereign performance under diplomatic constraints. Drawing on fieldwork and discourse analysis, this paper traces how heritage preservation supports Taiwan’s sovereign legitimacy. These findings offer broader theoretical implications for understanding how diplomatically marginalised but functionally operative states rehearse sovereignty through cultural infrastructure.
Local governments are increasingly turning to digital platforms in urban planning practices to improve democratic participation, but how do they become ‘democratic’? This paper explores this question through a qualitative study of the adaptation process of the digital participatory platform Decidim by the municipality in Oslo, Norway. Decidim is a particular kind of digital participatory platform, belonging to a technopolitical movement that normatively commits to develop technologies through democratic means for democratic purposes. While the design and use of Decidim have been the subject of multiple studies, little attention has been paid to the very process by which municipalities adapt Decidim into their urban planning practices. Thinking with Karen Barad’s posthumanist performativity, the analysis focuses on the reworkings and boundary-making practices that refigured power dynamics that unfolded in the adaptation process. Unlike approaching Decidim, the municipality, or citizens as pre-established actors, the adaptation process is approached as the phenomena from which different actors and digital-physical participatory spaces co-emerge. Through inquiring into the practices that differentiate one from another, this paper articulates how the technopolitical genealogy of Decidim interfered with the mattering of ownerships and identities shaping the participatory space. The analysis points to the tension between securing and opening the digital platform that also refigured the responsibility of actors. The findings have implications for the way in which digital participatory platforms are conceptualized in planning theory and what such platforms do to the materialization of power dynamics in participatory processes.
Subnational governance levels play a pivotal role in biodiversity protection, as evidenced in multilevel democracies over recent decades. Yet while research on decentralization’s impact on environmental governance has expanded, it remains unclear whether granting regional authorities greater self-rule has improved biodiversity outcomes in coastal areas. To address this gap, this study employs a qualitative research design to assess Spain’s decentralized political system, focusing on three regions: the Canary Islands, the Valencian Community, and the Region of Murcia. The findings contribute to environmental politics literature by highlighting the importance of cross-level judicial checks and balances, challenges related to institutional and regulatory complexity, the growing regional adoption of legislation despite limited authority in coastal governance, the benefits of regional governments’ closer connection to subnational realities, and the risk of policy capture by powerful economic elites.
Deterrence messaging has become an important border enforcement strategy, and digital dissemination of messaging campaigns has become commonplace. In Australia, the use of digital deterrence messaging campaigns in the 2010s brought enforcement into everyday, intimate spaces. Using an approach drawing on intimacy and geopolitics and informed by scholarship on digital geographies, this paper argues that the devices where people access social media, particularly mobile phones, have become intimate technologies that transform how people experience bordering practices. Encounters with Australian deterrence messaging in the 2010s show how encounters with border enforcement through intimate technologies introduce new spatial and temporal experiences of the border, impacting belonging and connection.
How do we live together? This question, at the heart of society, is vividly debated in contemporary European cities in times of rapid demographic changes and rising inequalities. While these discussions often point towards increased differences and the emergence of new cleavages over identity, they fail to grasp what unfolds in everyday relationships. Creating a dichotomy opposing identity and alterity, thinking through difference muffles the power relations that impact how living-together unfolds and how people experience it. Inspired by ethnographic explorations in six cities in Finland, France, and Sweden, the article proposes an alternative, and more nuanced way to unpack the complex dynamics of what takes place between people in daily relationships. Giving prominence to what arises in-between people, we formulate a research agenda into everyday coexistence that unpacks how everyday life emerges as a contested domain of continual negotiations and persisting tensions, where the living-together is at the same time already there and permanently reinvented. This renewed epistemological horizon that the concept of the everyday opens, shifts attention toward the inherently open and relational existential space between the self and others and reinstates the importance of taking note of abundance and open-endedness in the study of living-together.
Once the site of a mining community and historic conflict during the 1984 miners’ strike, Orgreave has undergone a complex transition and regenerated into a modern advanced manufacturing district. This study examines how community stakeholders narrate and contest the ‘success’ of Orgreave’s post-coal regeneration, and what this reveals about justice in transition initiatives. Through applying a just transition conceptual lens to qualitative interviews with multiple community stakeholders, this study shows the role played by historical and political issues in making transitions socially just, rather than defining success in solely economic terms. Proactive planning, remembrance of the past, and challenging entrenched social inequalities emerge as lessons. Ultimately, these representational, distributive, and recognitional justice elements intertwine to suggest that future just transitions should be tailored to local communities through a meaningful awareness of politicised and contextualised social realities.
This paper examines the emotional and aspirational dynamics of grassroots transport activism in Hong Kong at a time of contracting civic space through a Bourdieusian-affective lens. The study combined a sensitising review of 766 social media posts (2020–23), interviews in 2023 with 15 activists and two of their institutional interlocutors (a transport official and a district councillor) and follow-up conversations in 2024–25. Everyday attachments to public transport, formed through long histories of embodied mobility, shape feelings of recognition, loss, and belonging, and become politicised within emerging activist groups. Mobilisations around bus rationalisation, congestion, and route withdrawal answer not only to technical framings of demand but to orientations sedimented in habitus, which underpin struggles over symbolic control, the repair of stigma attached to “transport hobbyism”, and efforts to convert subcultural passion into professional legitimacy. That conversion runs on sticky affinities: credentials and expertise are pursued not only for what they return but because the pursuit itself becomes compelling. Returns are seldom legible, so activists rarely learn whether their report led to a change; recognition is inferred rather than observed, and uneven illusio names the variation in whether effort comes to feel answered. The paper contributes by showing activist feeling is patterned by capital position and embodied history, shaping participation and withdrawal; by foregrounding the internal emotional politics of grassroots groups, where some affective styles are authorised as professional; by conceptualising aspiration as affective practice; and by reading one interview encounter through representational and more-than-representational registers together.
This article examines China’s expanding presence in Latin America’s energy sectors through three contrasting cases: Brazil’s Pré-Sal offshore oil, Peru’s Las Bambas copper mine, and Ecuador’s Coca Codo Sinclair hydropower plant. It introduces the concepts of strategic para-coloniality and spatial counter-hegemony to analyze how Chinese state-led interventions simultaneously challenge Western dominance while operating through extractive logics forged under European colonialism and consolidated through (and against) U.S. hegemony. Drawing on a spatiality–materiality–relationality framework and a diverse-deviant case study approach, the article shows that Chinese energy projects add new layers of renewable energy and critical-mineral flows for electricity without displacing the global economy’s fossil and extractive foundations. Rather than signaling a decolonial or post-fossil transition, China’s rise reconfigures the power–energy nexus by redirecting material flows, consolidating strategic geographies, and reproducing unequal relations under new South–South imaginaries. The article contributes to debates on energy transitions, critical geopolitics, and decolonial political economy while moving beyond binary China–West framings.
This article maps and analyses the imbricated forms of corporate and state power that forms the basis of expanding detention regimes in the US, the UK and Australia, countries that have the largest and most privatised detention estates in the world. We propose theorising these relationships as a carceral web that entraps people, spaces, and communities. We argue that the web is transnational, sticky and elastic, made possible by the alliance between corporate and state power that produces carceral economies and carceral subjects. Harm is fundamental to the carceral web: we view harm as both intrinsic to the function of immigration detention and integral to wider processes of carceral exploitation and extraction by which corporate profit is obtained and state power is maintained. More than just adopting similar detention policies, the countries under examination have adopted a carceral logic, with its touchstones of deterrence and crisis, in response to migration and surplus labour. These logics are rooted in racial capitalism, and a historical racial ordering.
This paper examines how land conflict participates in the assembly of political authority in post-conflict urban Somaliland. Through the 2012 Warshadda Kabista dispute in Hargeisa, it argues that urban land conflicts should be understood as generative political arenas in which historically transformed state institutions and historically transformed customary authority are jointly recalibrated under pressure. The paper specifies generative sequencing as an observable mechanism with three effects: the routinisation of procedural pathways, the documentary translation of customary settlement into evidentiary form, and the reputational recalibration of institutional conduct under public scrutiny. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in 2014–2015 and supplementary interviews and documentary material gathered in 2023, the analysis reconstructs the dispute’s movement across executive allocation, military adjudication, customary mediation, appellate review, and presidential pardon. The case shows how layered histories of military expropriation, post-war reoccupation, and peri-urban commodification condensed into a single spatial claim, producing a sequence of institutional encounters that ranked forums, stabilised expectations about closure, and coupled distinct normative registers without fusing them. The analysis also delineates the limits of this ordering work. Returnee and dispossessed claimants were structurally inaudible within both statutory and customary forums until armed confrontation reframed the dispute as a security crisis, and the closure the sequence eventually delivered did not address the conditions producing that inaudibility. By foregrounding dispute trajectories and the micro-politics of adjudication, mediation, and recognition, the paper contributes to debates on hybrid governance, legal pluralism, and post conflict urban political geography, demonstrating how peri-urban land conflicts operate as mechanisms of institutional redistribution within Somaliland’s evolving political order.
As cities seek solutions to reduce GHG emissions, transit-oriented development (TOD) is increasingly recognized as a promising approach, given that transportation is a major emitter in urban areas. However, densification and TOD are subjects of intense debate and controversy. This research sheds light on urban residents’ perceptions of transit-oriented development, focusing on an initiative recently approved by the City of Vancouver, the Broadway Plan, as a case study. Through observation of public hearings and semi-structured interviews with residents, community groups, and experts, we identify three analytical positions structuring these debates: NIMBYs (Not-In-My-Backyard), YIMBYs (Yes-In-My-Backyard), and PHIMBYs (Public-Housing-In-My-Backyard). Rather than representing stable, homogeneous groups, these categories capture patterns in how differently positioned residents understand housing needs, displacement risks, and the role of market mechanisms in addressing affordability. Our analysis reveals that presumption about NIMBY versus YIMBY over-reifies class along property ownership lines while obscuring displacement vulnerability as a key axis shaping political positions. We demonstrate how this dualistic framework marginalizes residents who challenge housing commodification, with important implications for understanding TOD conflicts and designing inclusive planning processes in cities facing affordability crises.
This paper examines how visual narratives of Egypt’s class politics over the past decade have problematized contemporary urban configurations and socio-spatial ordering. Following the 2011 political rupture, multiple class imaginaries have emerged, intricately linked to the country’s newly reconfigured political economy. Recent state policies have systematically marginalized the middle classes by tightening political control and exacerbating economic pressures, thereby foreclosing avenues for civic agency. Conversely, affluent groups have consolidated their presence in urban politics, shaping emergent spatial dynamics, while underclasses have sustained resilience through localized knowledge networks and grassroots resources. Within this contested landscape, the paper explores creative dissent schemes as sites where class interplay and state–citizen relations are visually negotiated. In these schemes, the city appears devoid of its middle classes, represented instead as a polarized environment housing only the wealthy and the destitute. This phenomenon is conceptualized as the agency of the invisible middle classes. Drawing on in-depth interviews and visual ethnographic methods, the paper seeks to reintegrate questions of class, representation, and agency into broader debates on urban politics. Preliminary conclusions are drawn toward mapping the middle class(es) in post-revolutionary Egypt, highlighting how their visual erasure both reflects and reinforces broader structures of exclusion and dissent.
Urban planning in T & uuml;rkiye has become increasingly subject to judicial oversight through lawsuits filed by professional chambers, particularly the Chamber of City Planners. This article examines the judicialization of urban planning in Ankara based on the judicial actions of the Chamber -defined as the increasing exposure of planning to judicial assessment and decisions rather than democratic processes-while also tracing how litigation has functioned as a professional strategy of contestation that has important consequences for democratic politics and spatial justice. Based on analysis of Chamber activity reports documenting the lawsuits from 2000 onwards and in-depth interviews with Chamber executives, we identify four systemic and interrelated features driving judicialization: rent-seeking instrumentalization, top-down authoritarian governance, political Islamist spatial politics, and global Southern characteristics. Through lawsuit examples-Atat & uuml;rk Forest Farm, Bank of Provinces, Sara & ccedil;o & gbreve;lu Neighborhood, and piecemeal plan amendments-we demonstrate two primary consequences. First, judicialization shrinks democratic space by displacing contestation from public forums into courtrooms, limiting participation to planning and legal experts, while constraining the Chamber's potential to contribute to the expansion of democratic space. Second, it exacerbates spatial injustices through temporal uncertainties: politically connected developers and investors acquire building rights rapidly while working-class neighborhoods wait indefinitely. The analysis reveals judicialization's paradox-simultaneously responding to authoritarian urbanism while reinforcing democratic erosion. The article concludes that legal mechanisms alone cannot sustain democratic urban politics, requiring complementary strategies building broader democratic capacity and inclusive engagement beyond captured judicial venues.
Geographical theories of attachment have illuminated why progressive change is so difficult to bring about, yet the question of how detachment from dominant ways of life is actually lived and felt remains an open one. This paper develops recent debates on attachment and detachment by examining the detachments that happen in fully-remote working from home among knowledge workers in Australia. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with almost fifty home-based worker households and focusing in on 11 participants who work entirely from home, we extend Anderson’s notion of a ‘scene of attachment’ to theorise ‘scenes of detachment’ as occasions in which attachments to work are felt to loosen, attenuate or fray. Through analyses of three interviews, we identify three modes of detachment that crystallise for our fully remote workers: restorative detachment from work-dominated subjectivities; activist detachment from corporate policies that devalue connective and caring labour; and disillusioned detachment from under-stimulating and isolating work that nevertheless remains structurally necessary. Each mode is a partial and situated reconfiguration of attachment rather than a wholesale refusal of work and is shaped by social difference and structural positioning. Attending to these modes of detachment unsettles totalising assumptions about immutable attachments to work and points towards a geography of partial detachment that foregrounds the transforming nature of contemporary relations to work.
Mega-regionalisation is reshaping regional development patterns, drawing attention to both city-regions and ‘in-between spaces of city-regions’ (ISCRs) within a megaregional system. However, it remains unclear how regional identities emerge in such intermediary territories when infrastructure investment and corridor development reorganise territorial relations before a coherent region takes shape. Existing regional identity studies primarily focus on regions with governance structures or territorial coalitions, without discussing how identity building unfolds in infrastructure-led development contexts. This study addresses this issue by examining how the Rebana Metropolitan Area in northeastern West Java, Indonesia, is interpreted and mobilised as a region by actors operating at different governance levels. Using qualitative analysis of policy documents, interviews, and public discourse, the study traces how national, provincial, local, community, and private sector actors interpret Rebana as a region. The findings reveal that Rebana’s regional identity develops unevenly across governance arenas: national actors frame it as part of an industrial corridor, provincial actors promote it as a metropolitan growth pole while local governments treat it mainly as a coordination framework, communities through livelihood and land-use change, and private actors as an investment location. The study reveals that in infrastructure-led ISCRs, regional identity often emerges less as a reflection of territorial cohesion than as a coordination narrative that helps align actors around corridor-driven spatial transformation.
This intervention bears witness to the scholasticide in Gaza: the systematic destruction of educational spaces and the killing of students and scholars as part of Israel’s ongoing occupation. Writing as a geography graduate and Master’s student at Al-Aqsa University, I document the transformation of my university from a space of learning into a site of displacement and mourning. Drawing on personal testimony, I recount the deaths of colleagues and mentors, including Dr Abdel Nasser Al-Saqqa and Dr Wiesam Essa, situating their loss within wider estimates that thousands of students and hundreds of educators have been killed (OHCHR 2024). This writing becomes an act of resistance against erasure. In bearing witness, it affirms that geographical knowledge endures beyond the destruction of classrooms, insisting on place attachment, memory, and return.
Tasked with commentary of Lubna Abu Sitta’s ‘Writing against erasure: a geography of resistance in Gaza’, we can add little to her defiant words. We instead seek to speak alongside Abu Sitta and the geographical community in Gaza she carefully memorialises. As part of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, academic life has been systematically taken apart in the bombing of university buildings and the killing of staff and students. Yet Abu Sitta also teaches us that universities are more than buildings as she carries the inspiration of her killed colleagues and teachers into her current reality of studying via remote methods. With care not to overstate, we read this as a reminder that scholasticide refers to military intent that can only be incomplete in its effects. Abu Sitta and others like her are testament to the defiance and resistance of indigenous intellectual life that is the still-beating heart of universities in Gaza.
