Youth movements are among the largest volunteer organizations in Belgium, but they also and above all provide very important leisure activities for young people, especially in peri-urban Flanders. In this paper we investigate which role these organization (can) play for the wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ young people, based on interviews with and participatory observations by LGBTQIA+ young people.A complex picture emerges from our analysis. With group-specific ‘safe(r) spaces’ concentrated in urban centres and thus less accessible, LGBTQIA+ young people in peri-urban areas are facing cisheteronormativity in their everyday life, including in mainstream youth organisations, and have developed various strategies to nagivate these environments, from avoidance to accomodation.However, the particular structure of youth movements as bottom up, youth-governed and community embedded organisations also allows them to function as a sort of heterotopia. Foucault defined heterotopia as places characterized by both separation and connection, thus allowing for a sort of real-life utopia. To a certain degree shielded from mainstream society as places for and by young people, youth movements can support the flourishing of different local norms, in particular when LGBTQIA+ young people take up leadership roles in the organisation. Simultaneously, well embedded in local communities, youth movements are nodes from which local norms can infiltrate and alter mainstream society, thereby improving the wellbeing of LGBTQIA+ youngsters in youth organisations, as well as in their wider communities.

China's new wave of social housing construction has led to estates which have become prime sites of urban diversity. We investigate migrant-native interactions in spaces of encounter in the biggest, and gated social housing neighbourhood in Nanjing, China. Developing a multi-scalar understanding of spaces of encounter, we investigate the interplay between three often neglected dimensions of contact theory: affective experiences with, avoidance of and authoritative support for intergroup contact. Inside the gates, negative experiences with intergroup contacts around home reinforce prejudice, leading to microscale avoidance of contact inside the wider compound. Outside the gates, a lack of representation in the neighbourhood committee (juweihui) adds to migrants' avoidance of the more institutional spaces, while these spaces are indicated to be effective to promote intergroup relationships by organized activities. We suggest that our multi-scalar analysis of contact inspires a richer understanding of spaces of encounter in gated neighbourhoods, and could stimulate a more integrated, inclusive policy for social cohesion inside China's gated (social) housing estates.

The International Journal of the Commons is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed open-access journal, dedicated to furthering the understanding of institutions for use and management of resources that are (or could be) enjoyed collectively.These resources may be part of the natural world (e.g. forests, climate systems, or the oceans) or they may be created (e.g. infrastructures such as irrigation systems, the internet or (scientific) knowledge, for example of the sort that is published in open-access journals).The IJC is an initiative of the International Association for the Study of the Commons (IASC).Our aim is to promote inclusion, diversity and equity on this platform. To that purpose (and to the extent that we can), we offer support to majority-country scholars, for example through offering waivers, mentorships, and extra review rounds to authors from low and middle income countries affiliated with institutes from low and middle income countries. Contact us to see what we may be able to do for you.

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the measures to curb it have profoundly affected the geography of urban activities in the past years. In this paper, we discuss its effects on urban activity in Tokyo during the first wave of COVID between February and July 2020. Different from other papers, which have analysed general changes in urban activity levels or changes in specific activities, we have focused on changes in activity levels in different types of multifunctional urban activity centres (UAC), allowing us to reveal interactions between UAC types, (combinations of) activities and location within a wider urban system. Our results show how the distribution of urban activity across UAC changed in space and time in reaction to pandemic measures, and relate these dynamics to the spatial patterns of functional specialization of UAC. The existing spatial pattern of UAC allowed urban activities to redistribute spatially, but continue without too much inhibition. Moreover, these changes appeared to be temporary, rather than resulting in irreversible urban transformations. Our analysis thus suggests that Tokyo's multilayered polynuclear structure appeared to contribute to the city's pandemic resilience, allowing urban activities to spatially reorganize, without needing to resort to a total lockdown and collapse of urban life.

Solidarity as a moral appeal has made a regular appearance in water policies, but the concept has rarely been theorised in relation to water governance from a socio-political perspective. As a consequence, the real-life sociological and political underpinnings of hydrosolidarity have remained underexplored. This has limited its conceptual elaboration, analytical use and practical applicability in critical water governance theory and practice. Recent developments in sociopolitical research on solidarity have the potential to make up for this gap. This literature broadly defines solidarity as the willingness or moral obligation to share and redistribute material and immaterial resources. It emphasises solidarity as a situated praxis that is influenced by, and simultaneously constitutive of, social structures. Drawing from this literature, we identify four perspectives through which theories of hydrosolidarity can be enriched: first, an exploration of the sociopolitical foundations of hydrosolidarity as situated praxis; second, an expansion of the spatial imaginaries of hydrosolidarity; third, a broader understanding of the role of infrastructures for hydrosolidarity; and, finally, a more thorough theorising of hydrosolidarity beyond the human. These four perspectives, we argue, open up new lines of empirical inquiry on collective water governance.

The introduction of rural domestic wastewater treatment (WWT) installations is part of a grand scheme to realise China’s 'ecological civilisation' on Chongming in the Yangtze Delta region. Taking a cultural approach to hydrosocial territoriality, this article examines why this seemingly well-intended welfare intervention is rejected by rural islanders. The introduction of WWT does not only imply an upgrading of rural services, but is also seen as a top-down attempt at reshuffling the hydrosocial territories in which Chongming villages are embedded. Villagers perceive the WWT project as a forerunner of the greater threat of urbanisation and displacement of rural livelihoods, and also express a cultural reaction rooted in alternative rural understandings of landownership and engrained traditions related to water, waste, and soils. Village resistance forces local village cadres to intervene as cultural mediators between the villagers and the state. This moves the village cadres, against their own will, into a prominent position in the hydrosocial network. The article reveals how hydrosocial territories emerge from confrontations between top-down governance reshuffling and bottom-up manoeuvring.

Drip irrigation is often considered a technological solution to increase water use efficiency and crop productivity. However, all too often, its social and institutional entanglements are ignored. This paper treats drip irrigation as a socio-material assemblage and discusses the social and institutional changes triggered by the introduction of drip irrigation infrastructure in Ağlasun, a rural town located in the southwest of Turkey. Through an ethnographic study, we investigate how the switch from surface irrigation to drip irrigation entails an interaction of institutional re-arrangements, material infrastructures and strategizing actors to reshuffle the operation and maintenance of irrigation infrastructures, water distribution rules and water pricing. Expanding the concept of institutional bricolage to socio-material bricolage, we offer a nuanced understanding of how material infrastructures and institutions are mutually shaped by individual and collective agency.

Perfectionisme is geen deugd als het op reizen aankomt. Wie van A(ntwerpen) naar Z(ebbug) wil zonder vliegen, moet kunnen improviseren en relativeren. 'Be like water', en je laveert rond vertragingen, buigt als riet voor gemiste aansluitingen om meanderend doorheen Europa een alternatieve route te vinden.

Rural China is experiencing rapid socioeconomic transformations, including suburbanisation and rural gentrification. In this paper, we argue that to understand these processes, we have to take into account the changes in rural land rights. Based on an analysis of a pilot case for China's rural collective commercial construction land (RCCCL) reform policy at the edge of Chengdu City, we demonstrate how state-led rural land reform paves the way for stealthy land dispossession and rural gentrification. Our argument in this paper is threefold. First, given the entrenched collective land use rights of rural villagers in China, state-led land commodification, is a necessary condition for rural gentrification in China. Secondly, the prospect of capital accumulation through rural gentrification motivates entrepreneurial public and private actors to promote such reforms in ways that dispossess rural peasants and peasant collectives of their land (use) rights. Thirdly, the particularities of dispossession through state-led land reform result in particular experiences of displacement and displacement pressure on the side of affected rural communities. Our findings contribute to the decentring of rural gentrification theory, in that they underline the necessity to include the particular histories of land commodification and dispossession in our understanding of rural gentrification in contexts where rural land is partly or wholly shielded from market influences. In the case of China, dynamics of rural gentrification are blurring the ruralurban boundary on three dimensions: political economy (land use governance), material infrastructure (landscape and residential architecture), and socio-cultural practices (rural livelihoods and identity).

For more than a decade, a broad social movement has organised significant opposition to the expansion of the Antwerp ring road. By linking the very mobile, intangible and unplaceable problem of traffic-related air pollution to the highly local, concrete, immobile issue of the highway, they succeeded in creating the largest mobilization against air pollution ever in Belgium. A distributive justice discourse which portrayed Antwerp residents as being unfairly affected has played a crucial role in this endeavour. At the same time, the movement has struggled to involve and represent those who will be most affected by the ring road extension. Low income and ethnic minority residents living close to the ring road are strikingly absent from the movements’ ranks and tend to be silenced in its discourse. In this paper, we scrutinise this disparity between the social composition of the most affected areas and the social composition of the movement dealing with the issue, and reflect on the movement’s practices of knowledge production and dissemination from an environmental justice perspective. We highlight the need for expanding environmental justice beyond a merely distributive approach and argue that environmental justice movements need to see knowledge dissemination and public pedagogy as more than just a mobilizing strategy. Without pursuing equity in the distribution of networks, capabilities and knowledge, enhancing the possibilities of those who are most affected to develop their own strategies, environmental justice is difficult to realize.

Inequalities in access are a major concern for the management of common pool resources. In the case of irrigation water, inequalities are often explained by spatial "head-ender/tail-ender" distinctions, determined by distance to the water source. However, inequalities in access are also produced by social relations and social institutions. Drawing from ethnographic research in Aglasun, a rural town in the south-west of Turkey, we examine socio-spatial inequalities vis-a-vis water access in a small-scale, locally managed irrigation system. Our findings demonstrate that spatial "head-ender/tail-ender" differences in the irrigation system intersect with social relations. By introducing the concept of "social head-enders," we emphasize how social and political relations may introduce a complementary asymmetry in access to water between farmers. Analyzing the socio-spatial dynamics in such asymmetric systems allows us to further explore the interaction between access and authority. This leads us to illustrate important conditions for more equitable and democratic local irrigation governance.

Historical land cover (LC) maps are an essential instrument for studying long-term spatio-temporal changes of the landscape. However, manual labelling on low-quality monochromatic historical orthophotos for semantic segmentation (pixel-level classification) is particularly challenging and time consuming. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology for the automated extraction of very-high-resolution (VHR) multi-class LC maps from historical orthophotos under the absence of target-specific ground truth annotations. The methodology builds on recent evolutions in deep learning, leveraging domain adaptation and transfer learning. First, an unpaired image-to-image (I2I) translation between a source domain (recent RGB image of high quality, annotations available) and the target domain (historical monochromatic image of low quality, no annotations available) is learned using a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN). Second, a state-of-the-art fully convolutional network (FCN) for semantic segmentation is pre-trained on a large annotated RGB earth observation (EO) dataset that is converted to the target domain using the I2I function. Third, the FCN is fine-tuned using self-annotated data on a recent RGB orthophoto of the study area under consideration, after conversion using again the I2I function. The methodology is tested on a new custom dataset: the ‘Sagalassos historical land cover dataset’, which consists of three historical monochromatic orthophotos (1971, 1981, 1992) and one recent RGB orthophoto (2015) of VHR (0.3–0.84 m GSD) all capturing the same greater area around Sagalassos archaeological site (Turkey), and corresponding manually created annotations (2.7 km² per orthophoto) distinguishing 14 different LC classes. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of open-source annotated EO datasets for multiclass semantic segmentation is provided, based on which an appropriate pretraining dataset can be selected. Results indicate that the proposed methodology is effective, increasing the mean intersection over union by 27.2% when using domain adaptation, and by 13.0% when using domain pretraining, and that transferring weights from a model pretrained on a dataset closer to the target domain is preferred.

Leuven, Belgium ‘ Properly equipped racing pigeons can gather continuous real-time air pollution data while moving through the air at key heights not accessible to the of fi cial instruments, as well as from the ground where they are released for their homing fl ights ’

This paper argues how communicative planning approaches, as one of the most dominant conceptualisations of participatory planning, often ignore the embodied dimensions of participation as a socio-political learning processes. To do so, the paper theoretically traces why a Habermasian conceptualisation of political intersubjectivity fails to democratise planning processes and turns to an alternative Mouffean framework where coproductive methods are conceptualised as public pedagogic interventions, allowing for different meanings to be created and shared in a dialogical process. Based on an analysis of two experiments the authors have conducted, some lessons are drawn on how specific methods can be designed to stimulate more embodied forms of intersubjectivity between involved actors, while avoiding top-down consensus-making. In this way, the analysis demonstrates how such methods stimulate participants to share experiences, while orienting the discussion in a spatialised direction and creating a space where the ambivalence of place is effectively stimulated.

Unprotected sex is the primary mode of HIV transmission in China. In 2014, 25.8 per cent of newly diagnosed cases were attributed to unprotected sex between men (National Health and Family Planning Commission 2015). While the majority of the nation's new HIV infections are due to heterosexual sex, HIV is deeply tied to homosexuality in public discourse in China. Standing at the intersection of a stigmatised disease and sexual dissidence, HIV-positive gay men are particularly 'Othered', suffering from intense prejudice and discrimination. However, we analyse how this intersection not only presents oppression, but also agency. Whereas Chinese mainstream discourses are often imbued with homo-negativity, the intersection of being gay and HIV-positive has allowed the creation of LGBTQ+ NGOs as heterotopia which do not only function as counter-sites where alternative social relations and norms can be imagined, but also as nodes in wider societal networks from where LGBTQ+ rights can be promoted.

Scholars and social movements have long studied how cooperative values of solidarity and democracy can spill over to the rest of the society. However, such studies have failed to develop a sociospatial theory of solidarity. Focusing on two types of agricultural cooperatives in Cuba, this paper draws on recent geography literature on solidarity to explore the sociospatial dimensions of cooperative solidarity. We find that cooperatives represent a crucial nexus between grassroots, lived community-based solidarity practices and top-down, multiscalar, organized solidarities and act as transformers between mechanical and organic solidarity. Cooperatives may lose their capacity for catalyzing solidarity if market pressure disturbs the sociospatial entanglement of grassroots and top-down efforts.

Met meer dan 275.000 actieve leden behoren de Vlaamse jeugdbewegingen (Chiro, Scouts & Gidsen, KSA, KLJ,etc.) tot de grootste vrijwilligersorganisaties in België, maar zijn ze ook en vooral een van de belangrijkste vrijetijdsbestedingen voor jongeren. Zelfs in coronatijden gingen vele tienduizenden jongeren deze zomer samen op kamp, en de wekelijkse activiteiten zijn voor vele jongeren het hoogtepunt van de week. Maar voelen alle jongeren zich er even goed op hun gemak? Jeugdbewegingen worden wel eens verweten dat ze te wit en te middenklasse-georiënteerd zijn. Maar hoe zit het op vlak van gender en seksualiteit? In dit artikel bekijken we, op basis van interviews en participerende observaties binnen Vlaamse jeugdwerkingen, hoe welkom LGBTQIA+-jongeren zich voelen in de jeugdbewegingen.