This paper fills out part of the missing story of the “second act” of the life of the maverick American-Canadian geographer, Bill Bunge. It is for the period Bunge lived in Ontario, Canada, from 1970 to 1978, first around London, and later in Toronto. During that time, he developed a Canadian version of his earlier celebrated neighbourhood study of Fitzgerald, Detroit. Carried out under the auspices of the Toronto Geographical Expedition (TGE) (1972–1974), it resulted in the 1975 volume, The Canadian Alternative: Survival, Expeditions and Urban Change , written by Bunge and Ron Bordessa, Chair of Geography at Atkinson College, York University. Drawing upon both publicly and privately held archival collections of Bunge’s papers along with long interviews with those who worked with him in Ontario, the paper uses a geographical biographical approach to tell Bunge’s story. The paper argues that the very geographical move made by Bunge to self-exile in Canada significantly changed both the expedition within Toronto compared with Detroit and the writing that stemmed from it.
Situated in urban and economic geography, this paper proposes a Marxist–ANT (actor-network theory) framework to examine power and its spatiality in the financialisation of the city. The framework recognises the importance of structural dynamics to financialised power and its spatiality. However, it also suggests that actors’ individual interests, which are conditioned by but not reducible to structural dynamics, and the relationships constructed through interaction also exert significant influence. The paper uses China’s financialisation as an empirical case to apply the framework and demonstrate its explanatory power. The findings show that the central government tries to promote sustained capital accumulation through financialisation, while local officials and managers of state-owned enterprises can collaborate in ways that diverge from the goal and advance their personal interests in political career progression. Power spatiality, as reflected through the geographies of actors and capital flows, can be understood by multi-level administrative boundaries and actors’ relations constructed, highlighting its structural and topological dimensions. This framework contributes to financialisation research on power by enriching the critical dialogue between structuralist and post-structuralist perspectives.
This article takes up the special issue’s theme of “remote sensing” through asking what it means to engage in sensing affective “touching encounters” from afar. Through a focus on touch and encounter, the article uses theorizations of remote sensing to intervene in conversations in blue humanities, more-than-human geography, and multispecies ethnography. Issues of proximity, distance, connection, materiality, and ethics weave into questions about touch and being touched. Touch here takes on a dual sense, as both physical touch and, more figuratively, being emotionally and affectively “touched” through multispecies encounters. The article argues for an expansive interpretation of both touching encounters and remote sensing. Situating the specific case of touching encounters with gray whales in and beyond the lagoons of Baja California Sur, Mexico, within a broader literature about touch, haptic-optic sensing, and affective encounters with nonhuman animals, oceans, and “nature,” this article unpacks the theoretical and methodological implications of remotely sensing these touching encounters.
More-than-human conviviality describes how humans might live with other beings in relations of cooperation, interdependency, and radical equity. Geologic conviviality explores this question with a focus on materials like rocks or sand. This article documents an artistic experiment that explored what conviviality with sand can mean within the extractivist setting of the Netherlands. Based on arts-based research and inspired by Indigenous approaches, the experiment involved making an installation, a poem, and a video and facilitating two workshops. Four situated and sensory experiences recurred across the making and workshop processes in engaging with sand: discomforting, soothing, harmonizing, and resisting. Some experiences pointed to frictions when participants felt uncomfortable touching sand or when participants raised questions of anthropomorphism and elitism. Other moments showed ontological shifts when participants reflected on becoming ‘Sandpeople’. These different experiences show that artistic experiments can generate ontological openings that trouble ingrained hierarchies and relations. Yet, while for some, these openings created space for new human-sand relations, for others, they offered the opportunity to redraw the distinction between humans and sand and justify human exceptionalism. These boundary-drawing practices can be seen as ontological gatekeeping, which limits the ability of experiments to foster geologic conviviality. We conclude by discussing the importance of fundamentally questioning extractivism as a dominant logic that enables violence, exploitation, and injustice for humans and nature alike as part of a more radical move toward geologic conviviality.
This article advances pluriversal entanglements, a conceptual framework that reimagines urban wetland regeneration through a heterogeneous approach grounded in dweller-led epistemologies and praxis, building on insights from an actually existing restoration initiative. Responding to the escalating degradation of urban wetlands amid climate change and exclusionary development, pluriversal entanglements critiques dominant technocratic governance paradigms rooted in colonial legacies and modernist planning. Our argument is that restoration frameworks for southern urban wetlands need to engage with livelihoods, embodiment and commoning as political processes. In conversation with scholarship from decolonial planning, feminist political ecology and critical urban theory, the framework comprises three overlapping lenses: wetland-livelihood assemblages , which explores the socio-ecological labour and material practices through which degraded wetlands are (re)produced; contested commoning , which analyses collective stewardship processes that contest state-centred and market-based models; and embodied knowledges , which factors in how environmental change is differentially experienced, generating situated forms of knowledge and resilience. The article foregrounds the tensions within pluriversal modes of governing as productive spaces for ongoing theory-making and negotiated actions. Emerging from ongoing engagements in the Global South, specifically a wetland restoration initiative, pluriversal entanglements challenges dominant conceptions of urban nature and offers pathways for cultivating multispecies flourishing, climate resilience and social-ecological justice in 21st century urban wetlands.
The prospect of knowing feels tantalizing. The secret of eternal life – the universal language; the real truth – all seem promising, even though many ancient stories also warn against the hubris associated with wishing to know too much. Understood in this way, the very prospect of knowing becomes ambivalent. How much knowing is too much? Which knowledge? For whom, and how? What happens when the processes of attempting to know become unwieldy, or require such complex arrangements that technological augmentation becomes the subject of social knowledge rather than an emergent property of it? This commentary develops the concept of unwieldiness in order to reflect on the conflicting or paradoxical ways that knowledge and technology intersect in urban contexts.
Contemporary economic growth relies on infrastructure. However, post-growth scholarship has only recently begun to grapple with infrastructure as a specific object of analysis and often reduces it to little more than a set of barriers to be overcome or a means to essential service provision. This article challenges such limited perspectives by developing a holistic framework through which to understand post-growth infrastructure, how it works and how it can change. Building on the insights of infrastructural analysis conducted in the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS), geography and anthropology, we advance a relational understanding of post-growth infrastructure, which we define as those that foster social practices that satisfy situated needs, limit consumption and resist capitalist co-optation. Furthermore, we examine the logics that both explain the social dominance of infrastructure and represent pathways for its transformation; that is, as a phenomenon that simultaneously coerces and seduces individuals to adopt certain practices, yet remains suggestive of and open to other uses. We argue that, in order to explain post-growth transformations, post-growth studies must engage with these logics. Finally, we identify strategies for post-growth infrastructural transformation: appropriating growth infrastructure, reconstructing it in line with a post-growth agenda and ensuring its maintenance in the face of capitalist pressures. In this way, our framework represents an important step towards a larger body of research on post-growth infrastructure.
This article originates from a sense of dissatisfaction with the outcomes of a participatory action research project we undertook in Eastern Uganda, concerned with land and water access. We are proud of the research: its design, the process we engaged in, our conduct, the relationships we formed, and our endeavour to engender meaningful change. And yet we are left wondering what the project actually achieved. To better understand this dissatisfaction, we review the literature that constitutes the context for the project – participatory action research, scholar activism, and decolonising methodologies. We bring this literature into conversation with our own project in order to shed light on the gap between aspirations and outcomes. Our hope is that this critical exploration, and the advice we offer, contributes to a better understanding of the possibilities and limitations of both participatory research and of Westernised research in the Global South.
In this editorial, we present our special issue that explores the relationship between urbanisation and knowledge production, positioning cities as epistemic environments that shape how they are known, sensed, and governed in our digitally mediated age. Challenging the idea that “the city” is an object or a set of processes to be observed and known, we advance an understanding that knowledge of urban environments is always situated and embodied. The papers draw from creative and theoretical projects to collectively propose alternative ways of knowing the city through participatory, sensory, and more-than-human approaches. By unsettling dominant methods of measurement, mapping, and representation, we argue that they foreground reflexivity, relationality, and epistemic humility. Despite being increasingly mediated by digital and data-driven technologies, which purport ideas of objectivity, we call for a critical examination of how we might maintain a healthy scepticism of objectivity in digital systems while simultaneously implementing technologies into our modes of enquiry about the city. Ultimately, the issue opens up possibilities for more plural and critical forms of urban knowledge in a digitally mediated age. But this is about more than cities; the issue contributes to wider fields of study that question dominant knowledge systems and pose the question of how we might think and act otherwise for a better future with technology.
We document how river stories, as sources of local knowledge, can inform management applications in the Waimatā Catchment on the East Coast of Aotearoa New Zealand. Analysis of semi-structured interviews with residents and users of the catchment shows how river stories express deep-seated connections for the river, emphasising concerns for river health, ancestral relations, recreational and aesthetic functions and biodiversity values. By opening dialogue about the catchment, river and its management, we show how river stories can help to extend participation processes from ‘being informed’ to ‘being an informer’. Equally, stories provide a basis to challenge or refute commonly held beliefs. Identification and coding of local knowledge derived from river stories provides a readily accessible method to appraise socio-cultural connections to rivers, providing nuanced understandings of social, cultural, economic and biophysical considerations. Ways of being and knowing expressed in/through river stories can help to facilitate locally owned and locally informed, place-based approaches to river management.
While a great deal of critical attention has been focused on the experimental use of automotive sensing technologies within electronic vehicle development, their integration into production cars continues apace. Despite a long history of incorporating vision and other automated sensing systems into production cars, we are yet to fully appreciate how these ‘smart objects’ function and interoperate, how ‘observable’ these systems are (Rieder and Hofmann, 2020), what roles they play in shaping our day-to-day experiences of the automation of automotive space. In this article, we examine the vision-sensing capacities of one proprietary in-vehicle computer vision system (Subaru EyeSight) and how its visual sensors operate and interoperate to form a unified ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) accident mitigation system. In particular, we seek to understand the forms of driver-to-vehicle handover that modern ADAS facilitate and require. Drawing on social scientist James Ash’s concept of ‘phase space’, and cyberneticist W. Ross Ashby’s earlier conception of ‘phase-space’, our contention in this article is that ADAS like EyeSight actively intervenes in and reconfigures automotive space. We detail how EyeSight’s automated vision sensors and decision-making system reshapes how automotive space is viewed, understood, and acted upon, with implications for those behind the wheel.
What is the role of crisis in the racialization of the built environment? Four of the articles in this special issue take up this question and, in the process, reveal how scholarship investigating the racialization of the built environment extends the framework of racial capitalism and underscores potential new directions for scholarship focused on how racialization shapes the commodification, development, and experience of ecologies and the built environment. These papers specifically turn to the concept of the racial-spatial fix to underscore both how Black people are the surplus capitalism tries to “solve” in the short term and how the plundering of Black land and communities is one method capitalists use to resolve crises of surplus. A Black feminist approach to social reproduction has the potential to reveal how both Black Ecologies and the racial-spatial fix are examples of how Blackness and Black people are figured in the social reproduction of racial capitalist society and the roles of gender and sexuality in the management of land in capitalist societies.
Power mapping is widely treated as an emancipatory technique for revealing hidden influence and clarifying sites of intervention. This paper reframes qualitative power mapping as a generative practice of legibility: a method through which political relations are stabilized into forms that can be interpreted, coordinated around, and acted upon. Drawing on critical cartography, critical Graphic Information Systems (GIS), and social theory, it argues that mapping does not merely surface power but organizes it through ontological selection, epistemic ordering, and strategic positioning. These operations make political terrains tractable, but they also establish representational thresholds. Forms of power that can be discretized, relationally specified, bounded within analytic frames, and positioned within intervention horizons stabilize more readily than those operating through slow violence, affective atmosphere, infrastructural sedimentation, historical durability, or strategic opacity. The paper develops three mapping logics—strategic, diagnostic, and reflexive—to show how different traditions configure legibility and distribute its narrowing effects. It then introduces mapping mapability as a recursive heuristic for identifying where representational stabilization strains. Such strain is not treated as a methodological failure but as diagnostic information about forms of power that require different representational grammars or methodological supplements. Building on this insight, the paper proposes methodological triage: a disciplined approach to reflexive pluralization in which complementary methods are selected in response to diagnosed stabilization limits rather than through methodological maximalism. By theorizing representational thresholds and methodological sequencing under resource constraints, the paper contributes to debates in planning theory, critical cartography, and qualitative methodology concerning the politics of legibility.
The city has long captivated feminists as both a site of possibility and a terrain of struggle structured by patriarchal foundations. Contemporary feminist engagements with the smart city extends this tradition of critique, highlighting how current smart urban imaginaries remain male-centric and unsafe for women. Within this discourse emerges the “feminist smart city”: an urban future imagined as efficiently automated, safe, and gender-inclusive all at once, on the condition that women are invited to “voice” their concerns and experiences to co-shape this so-called smart future. Taking Safecity and Safetipin—two feminist crowdsourcing platforms founded in India and now globally influential—as emblematic sites of this vision, I examine the promise and limits of this invitation to “voice.” Analyzing a decade’s worth of materials surrounding the two initiatives, including media coverage, app interfaces, websites, stakeholder reports, academic papers (co)authored by the platforms’ founders, I show how, despite being cast as empowering, grassroots perspectives are flattened into clusters of data points: gathered only to be separated, amassed only to be isolated, and assembled only to be disassembled and reassembled with other datasets. In such processes, their interoperability is valued over their narrativity. Ultimately, I argue that the feminist investment in a safer, more just smart city has not materialized through these data-driven incorporation of women’s voice in smart urban governance; rather, what ensues is the encroachment of operational and securitized rationality into the very pursuit of gender justice.
This article introduces the concept of Daoist elemental actions. It explores how they work as artist/activist interventions into data’s damaging socio-ecological effects in smart cities along China’s Digital Silk Road, or what I call the Silicon Archipelago. The Digital Silk Road is seen as a front in a US–China data technology trade war. Daoist elemental actions involve an analysis-prediction-intervention system for describing, predicting and resisting data damage. Using some new concepts of Daoist elemental actions and the Chinese Five Element system, I explore how I can analyse data damage and predict ways to resist this in the Digital Silk Road. To explain this system, I use Daoist and Western philosophy and theory to explore in-depth novel concepts such as Elemental Analysis, Elemental Prediction, Effortless Actions and Cosmopolitical Stories. Re-interpreting Daoist concepts allows the human and the non-human to be considered together, as the Chinese element wood, when examining their relationship to data damage via elemental balance in the Digital Silk Road. Data flow can be analysed through Daoism and its relationship to Qi flow, bringing a novel decolonial ecofeminist perspective to the issues. Taking on the role of an Elemental Healer in this article, I combine academic and more performative styles of writing, exemplifying a new practice-based methodological approach.
Debates over “constrained” labor agency open a chance to rethematize “scale” and “urban” in labor geographies. My work helps labor geography grasp how workers’ desire becomes a local locus of capitalist regulation and how this locus can constrain the labor movement into the form of grassroots counter-conducts engaged at the ground level. I analyze scales of labor movements and labor subjectivity in Japanese and US urban histories. These histories have nurtured just-in-time (Japan) and right-to-work (US), post-Taylorist technologies that stimulate workers’ desire to paralyze “labor’s spatial fix” and assist capital’s flexibility/mobility. Using Foucault’s scalar and urban imaginaries centering on the concept of security (power reconstruction through a population’s subjectivity), I explain how regimes as different as just-in-time and right-to-work developed comparable processes of workplace reformation, both “humanizing” capital’s flexibility/mobility into labor’s post-political desire for a workplace “without classes.” The urbanization of capital has developed such security-oriented workplaces to maximize labor’s consent to management. Urban capital circuits in space are assisted by security-oriented workplaces and the rescaled labor regulation these workplaces cultivate. The impetus of urban autonomy is unleashed vis-à-vis territorial power and converts (rescales) the state’s centripetal labor regulation into centrifugal, urbanized forms.
Individual actions of practitioners and activists are crucial to achieving carbon emission reductions and improving resilience to climate change impacts. However, policy narratives have overlooked people’s complex engagements with climate change in professional settings. Few scholarly accounts of individual experiences of working to address climate change in cities inform climate policy because ethnographic and sociological accounts of climate change experiences do not lend themselves easily to actionable policy narratives. This article reflects on the potential of design-oriented tools we developed to research and communicate in the context of policymaking situated accounts of climate change experiences. We call this experimental methodological approach ‘life bio-graphics’. ‘Life bio-graphics’ combines biographic interviews with designerly thinking in a unique way to visualise life narratives. We demonstrate the application of this method in an analysis of four selected situated experiences of the development of professional careers in urban climate change governance. The use of life bio-graphics reveals the influence of place-based interactions on professional practice, as well as the generation of motivations through the multiple connections generated in diverse life experiences. The visual representation of life bio-graphics challenges linear narratives of biography, focusing instead on the salient moments (nodes) that get sedimented through experiences. Thus, life bio-graphics offer new methods to study how experience, meaning, and materiality become intertwined and impact professional practices, in this case, in climate change governance.
