understandings of the agreements through which reliance systems come to be, and are sustained and developed, are insufficient. All well and geographical, but whenever so much comes to rest on grounded deliberation and agreement (of some form, however contested), reservations unhelpfully nag away; power, co-option, capture, misrecognition, bland consensus, exhaustion. All the more so when the spatial contract is described as a ‘nested and constantly evolving series of collective settlements’ (p. 40), fine conceptually, but practically deeply involved; and six principles for a ‘healthy social contract’ are outlined, all hard to disagree with, but suggesting a policing of what grounded deliberation may deem constitutes ‘an agreement’. First and foremost though an intellectual and analytical framework is proposed, assertively laying down a normative proposition and an approach to analysing reliance systems, starting from how they already are, in order to ‘build healthier systems’ from the bottom up. Some may well find their explicit rejection of political ideology and dramatic change problematic. But ‘retrofitting is the only revolution that doesn’t threaten people’s capacities to lead their lives’ (p. 79) is a rather nicely expressed endorsement of the materiality of reformism, which I found hard to refute. On the other hand with so much in the mix, fractures open up. Seeing like a system (chapter 2) I found hard to reconcile with seeing like a settlement (chapter 3) and begs questions about what spatial contracts would then be oriented to. Positioning, in the final chapter, the universal basic income as one of two examples of the ‘spatial contract in practice’ also for me undermined some key propositions made earlier, in particular in relation to the essential materiality of reliance systems as tangible things in the built environment, and the grounding of the spatial contract in place. But there is a compelling and accessible narrative here, with a political relevance that readily resonates, for example, with the substance of the climate emergency and to inequalities in experiences of Covid-19. Gordon Walker Lancaster University, UK IV Reliance Systems and the Contingencies of Human Freedom: Author Response The kind words and insightful criticisms the symposium authors offered for The Spatial Contract are both generous and generative. They give us hope that future readers will find the book to rate highly on what Gordon Walker refers to as their ‘useful-ometer’. The Spatial Contract is above anything else a framework, and frameworks are designed to be useful. 6 Progress in Human Geography XX(X Book review symposium 1737 institutional form, a push-back against currents of individualism in both their neoliberal and frugal self-reliance forms. Arguments are strongly made. That reliance systems are the primary purpose of politics, in our recent experience exploitative, destructive, unsustainable, but also transformative and progressive, something crucial to argue for and argue over. And there are some nice distinctions between the material and functional components of reliance systems, and their dynamics are stressed rather than their inertia, echoing conceptualizations of relations between infrastructure and practice. So, I could imagine working with the idea of reliance systems, even if it’s not a language to capture the political imagination. The core idea of the spatial contract was, in the end, a bit less persuasive, early on described as a ‘politics of provisioning for human agency’ (a rather circular phrase) and not helped by the deficiencies and dangers of Hobbes’ social version. But I swung again from cool to mildly warm as it emerged as a sort of grounded version of the social contract, retaining the notion of formal and informal agreement (from the ground up), but emphasizing the specificities of history and geography that mean that general, abstract understandings of the agreementsunderstandings of the agreements through which reliance systems come to be, and are sustained and developed, are insufficient. All well and geographical, but whenever so much comes to rest on grounded deliberation and agreement (of some form, however contested), reservations unhelpfully nag away; power, co-option, capture, misrecognition, bland consensus, exhaustion. All the more so when the spatial contract is described as a ‘nested and constantly evolving series of collective settlements’ (p. 40), fine conceptually, but practically deeply involved; and six principles for a ‘healthy social contract’ are outlined, all hard to disagree with, but suggesting a policing of what grounded deliberation may deem constitutes ‘an agreement’. First and foremost though an intellectual and analytical framework is proposed, assertively laying down a normative proposition and an approach to analysing reliance systems, starting from how they already are, in order to ‘build healthier systems’ from the bottom up. Some may well find their explicit rejection of political ideology and dramatic change problematic. But ‘retrofitting is the only revolution that doesn’t threaten people’s capacities to lead their lives’ (p. 79) is a rather nicely expressed endorsement of the materiality of reformism, which I found hard to refute. On the other hand with so much in the mix, fractures open up. Seeing like a system (chapter 2) I found hard to reconcile with seeing like a settlement (chapter 3) and begs questions about what spatial contracts would then be oriented to. Positioning, in the final chapter, the universal basic income as one of two examples of the ‘spatial contract in practice’ also for me undermined some key propositions made earlier, in particular in relation to the essential materiality of reliance systems as tangible things in the built environment, and the grounding of the spatial contract in place. But there is a compelling and accessible narrative here, with a political relevance that readily resonates, for example, with the substance of the climate emergency and to inequalities in experiences of Covid-19. Gordon Walker Lancaster University, UK IV Reliance Systems and the Contingencies of Human Freedom: Author Response The kind words and insightful criticisms the symposium authors offered for The Spatial Contract are both generous and generative. They give us hope that future readers will find the book to rate highly on what Gordon Walker refers to as their ‘useful-ometer’. The Spatial Contract is above anything else a framework, and frameworks are designed to be useful. 6 Progress in Human Geography XX(X) The book was released in March 2020, and within 2 months the coronavirus pandemic and the murder of George Floyd altered our lives and our perspectives. These terrible events, which were compounded by the looming climate disaster, have sadly only made a core claim of the book more relevant: we must start seeing our politics in terms of the reliance systems that realize our basic freedoms and essential life functions. This means understanding, for example, the right to health in terms of personal protective equipment (PPE) supply chains or understanding the right to safety in terms of policing systems instead of only police officers. ‘Seeing like a system’ helps us appreciate where injustices emerge, and how we might address them. Understanding these systems in relation to settlements – ‘seeing like a settlement’ – reveals starkly how systems like healthcare and policing touch down in places in radically different ways. While it may seem obvious that reforming policing in Minneapolis is not the same as reforming policing in Oakland, and that fixing one city’s policing system isn’t the same as reducing gross differences in Covid death, we hope that the book provides useful tools to analyse systems and settlements, and to understand both better. Systemic racism may be part of inequality in most settlements and most systems, but they are ultimately systems of different racisms we need to unpack if we are to make real change. As multiple authors point out, this sort of language often is too abstract. We agree. A core challenge to demonstrating the value of the Spatial Contract is to develop more detailed applications of the model to a heterogeneous range of concrete cases. To rectify this would require several lengthy studies. In this short space, we offer a sketch of one application to a capacity the recent pandemic has shown to be very important – the capacity to test for SARSCoV-2 infection. From a spatial contract perspective, this capacity is realized in a complex reliance system. It is not centred on any one person or any one tool. For example, in the case of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) tests, there is, from our point of view, no such thing as a test, full stop. This may seem paradoxical. But it’s not. Rather there are swabs, the collection kits, technicians who assist in collecting and others who process the sample, machines that do the processing, the labs housing those machines, those labs’ heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) and biocontainment systems, the data collection equipment and so on. All of these, conceived diachronically and not synchronically, must operate in a complex dance in order for someone to have the effective capacity to administer a single RT-PCR test. Even this sketchy analysis drives us away from an idealized, abstract conception of a SARS-CoV-2 test to a materially and socially realized conception of the capacity to test for infection. The book argues that using this model avoids the mistake of conceiving of phenomena as distinct as mass transit and healthcare as somehow discrete abstracta, and instead facilitates conceiving of them as geographically, historically and socially contextualized systems that evolve in time. The book also argues that this approach reveals the complex ways in which retrofitting existing systems can expand certain rights, such as, for examp

Human agency, the capacity to act, is typically conceived of as centered on the human body. But a careful assessment of the necessary conditions for almost all capacities to act reveals that these capacities are realized via engagement with material technologies. This essay argues that we should therefore understand human agency not as the capacity to do things with a typical human body, but instead as the capacity to use technologies for the sake of some end. As a consequence, there are no universal, generic act-types we are capable of performing. Instead, each human's capacities are realized in the technological moment in which they live, conditional on the technologies to which they can access.

This chapter focuses on building an analytical framework for understanding reliance systems and spatial contracts. It is based on the argument that we must begin with the system, and understand the politics from the system up, rather than from the politics down. The framework draws on systems thinking to establish how we can differentiate between different systems. It then uses this systems perspective to repurpose ideas from economics which are useful if focused on systems instead of commodities.

This chapter furthers the development of the analytical framework by focusing on the relationship between reliance systems and exploitation. It reworks Iris Marion Young's five faces of oppression for use with reliance systems and the spatial contract. These five faces are exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence.

The digital era has brought about huge transformations in the map itself, which to date have been largely conceptualised in spatial terms. The emergence of novel objects, forms, processes and approaches in the digital era has, however, posed a swathe of new, pressing questions about the temporality of digital maps and contemporary mapping practices, and in spite of its implicit spatiality, digital mapping is strongly grounded in time. In this peer-reviewed collection we bring time back into the map, taking up Doreen Massey's critical concern for 'ongoing stories' in the world, but asking how mapping continues to wrestle with the difficulty of enrolling time into these narratives, often seeking to ‘freeze’ and ‘fix’ the world, in lieu of being able to, in some way, represent, document or capture dynamic phenomena. This collection examines how these processes are impacted by digital cartographic technologies that, arguably, have disrupted our understanding of time as much as they have provided coherence. The book consists of twelve chapters that address different kinds of digital mapping practice and analyse these in relation to temporality. Cases discussed range from locative art projects, OpenStreetMap mapping parties, sensory mapping, Google Street View, visual mapping, smart city dashboards and crisis mapping. Authors from different disciplinary positions consider how a temporal lens might focus attention on different aspects of digital mapping. This kaleidoscopic approach generates a rich plethora for understanding the temporal modes of digital mapping. The interdisciplinary background of the authors allows multiple positions to be developed.

This chapter continues the work of building the analytical framework. Rather than pulling apart systems to appreciate their differences, as in Chapter 2, this chapter explains how systems must be seen together as human settlements. This settlements perspective illuminates two important sets of divisions that may hinder the development of healthier spatial contracts – the divide between urban and rural, and that between formal and informal.

This chapter explains the concept of reliance and reliance systems – the way in which human agency stems from collectively produced systems. It then links this understanding of reliance and agency to capabilities theory, and explains the contribution that reliance systems make to rendering capabilities theory more aware of the materiality of capabilities. The chapter then delves into the nature of reliance systems, focusing on separating the material and functional components of reliance systems. We explain the need to modify social contract theory in order to pursue a better politics of reliance systems, as opposed to other possible political avenues such as rights and deliberative democracy. The chapter ends by suggesting six principles for examining the morality of any given spatial contract.

This book examines how material systems such as transportation, energy and housing form the basis of human freedom. It begins by explaining this linkage by defining reliance systems, the basic way in which we become free to act not only as a result of our bodily capabilities or the absence of barriers but because of collectively produced systems. As virtually all of us rely on such systems – water, food, energy, healthcare, etc. – for freedom, the book argues that they must form the centre of a twenty-first-century politics. Rather than envisioning a healthier politics of reliance systems exclusively through rights or justice or deliberative democracy, we argue that they must become the centre of a new social contract. More specifically, we discuss the politics of reliance systems as a set of spatial contracts. Spatial contracts are the full set of politics governing any given system, and as such they are historically, geographically and system specific. In order to fully understand spatial contracts, we develop an analytical framework focused on three areas. Seeing like a system shows how systems thinking can enable us to avoid ideological approaches to understanding given spatial contracts, repurposing key ideas from mainstream and heterodox economics. Seeing like a settlement shows how systems come together in space to form human settlements, and exposes key political divides between urban and rural, and formal and informal. Adapting Iris Marion Young's five faces of oppression enables an understanding of the specific ways in which reliance systems can be exploitative.

This chapter argues that a constitutive feature of authority over oneself is intentions functioning as content-independent reasons not to reopen deliberations and as content-independent reasons to do as intended. It first argues that deliberations and intentions have certain functional roles, namely, completed deliberations function as reasons to intend, intentions function as reasons not to reopen deliberations about whether to act as intended, and intentions also function as reasons to act as intended. Second, it argues that if any form of authority is possible at all, it must be an agent’s authority over herself. We are, in short, authorities over ourselves and we exercise this authority by commanding ourselves to act. These commands are intentions. The chapter concludes that either sound deliberations and the intentions they produce are reasons or there is no such thing as agential authority.

This chapter explores features characteristic of the Lewisean and Bratmanian models of social facts–models of what the author call hypercommittal social practices and show that models of social facts that have these features ought not to be used to explain the way in which a social practice is at the foundations the law.' It argues against continuing to employ certain models of social practices to explain how the foundations of law are social practices. The chapter explores example of a Bratmanian analysis of legal institutions in order to illustrate how Bratman's theory is used to analyze the way in which legal institution are social practices. It concludes that hypercommittal social practices such as Lewisean conventions or Bratmanian shared activities are not at the foundations of law.

Intentions have been a central subject of research since contemporary philosophy of action emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. For almost that entire period, the approach has been to treat the study of intentions as separate from the study of morality. This essay offers a brief overview of that history and then suggests some ways forward, as exemplified by the essays collected in this volume.

An oft-rehearsed objection to the claim that an intention can give one reasons is that if an intention could give us reasons that would allow an agent to bootstrap herself into having a reason where she previously lacked one. Such bootstrapping is utterly implausible. So, intentions to φ cannot be reasons to φ. Call this the bootstrapping objection against intentions being reasons. This essay considers four separate interpretations of this argument and finds they all fail to establish that non-akratic, nonevil, and deliberatively sound intentions cannot be reasons. The first argument is the argument from evil intentions, the second is the argument from akratic intentions, the third is the argument from errors in deliberation, and the last is what I call the 'wizardry' argument. This 'argument', put forward most clearly by John Broome, claims that intentions are so insubstantial that were they on their own reasons for action, that would amount to creating something out of nothing and that is impossible. The essay argues that the claim that intentions are insubstantial is too strong a premise to put forward without argument. For there are other attitudes that are on their own sufficient to generate reasons, such as loving attitudes. The essay then argues that the bootstrapping objection's status as dogma in the philosophy of action has led to insufficient attention being paid to the entirely reasonable question of whether intentions are sufficiently like other reason-giving attitudes, such as loving and valuing. It may turn out that, just as loving someone can give the loving person a reason to act in a certain, so too can intending to do something give someone a reason to act in a certain way, but we cannot effectively engage this question without first giving up our commitment to the bootstrapping objection as a central "insight" in philosophy of action. The essay concludes by proposing two research questions that are opened up by the abandonment of the bootstrapping objection as dogma, and proposes that we turn our philosophical attentions to those questions.

What question is an appeal to dignity supposed to answer? In the mid-twentieth century, the question was perhaps: ‘What is the fundamental moral feature of human beings – the feature on which all other moral and political considerations depend?’ Thus, the UN Declaration of Human Rights appeals to the ‘inherent dignity … of all members of the human family’ as ‘the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world’. The first article of the German Grundgesetz (The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany) says: ‘Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.’ These documents treat human dignity as the moral bedrock on which contemporary legal–political structures are to be built. Dignity is what explains why people have human rights and explains the most basic limits of state authority. Jeremy Waldron, in a new book, Dignity, Rank, and Human Rights, which collects his Tanner Lectures, disagrees with all this. In a bold reversal, Waldron denies that dignity explains or conditions legal and political orders and instead argues that legal and political orders constitute dignity. On this view, the law constructs the dignity of the individual instead of the dignity of the individual existing independently of and prior to the law.