The Rise of the Creative Class

Neil Brenner has in the past few years made a major impact on the ways in which we understand the changing political geographies of the modern state Simultaneously analyzing the restructuring of urban governance and the transformation of national states under globalizing capitalism, 'New State Spaces' is a mature and sophisticated analysis of broad interdisciplinary interest, making this a highly significant contribution to the subject

New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood

This and the subsequent papers in this special issue set out the contours of Marxian urban political ecology and call for greater research attention to a neglected field of critical research that, given its political importance, requires urgent attention. Notwithstanding the important contributions of other critical perspectives on urban ecology, Marxist urban political ecology provides an integrated and relational approach that helps untangle the interconnected economic, political, social and ecological processes that together go to form highly uneven and deeply unjust urban landscapes. Because the power-laden socioecological relations that shape the formation of urban environments constantly shift between groups of actors and scales, historical-geographical insights into these ever-changing urban configurations are necessary for the sake of considering the future of radical political-ecological urban strategies. The social production of urban environments is gaining recognition within radical and historical-materialist geography. The political programme, then, of urban political ecology is to enhance the democratic content of socioenvironmental construction by identifying the strategies through which a more equitable distribution of social power and a more inclusive mode of environmental production can be achieved.

Urban Political Ecology, Justice and the Politics of Scale (Reprint)

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. By Bruno Latour. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004; pp. x + 307. $55.00 cloth; $24.95 paper. The academic study of environmental ethics, particularly of "deep ecology," has generated extensive scholarly discussion in recent years. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy, by French author Bruno Latour, brings a fascinating and bold new twist to contemporary discussions about the nature of "nature." Latour proposes a radical shift in current conceptions of "political ecology," arguing that mainstream environmental movements are doomed to fail so long as they envision political ecology as inextricably tied to the protection and management of nature through political methodologies and policies. Instead, political ecology should abandon socially constructed representations of nature as an uncontrollable monolith. The former perspective is dangerous, Latour argues, because it enables science to silence public deliberation about ecological issues and close off options to prevent pending environmental crises. The rhetoric of science, whose credibility emanates from the dual sources of indisputable expertise and dire warnings, paralyzes the polis. Unable to contest scientific fact, and faced with pending environmental cataclysm, public and political discussion centered on the inevitable question of "What next?" becomes stagnant and devoid of solutions. In the first chapter, Latour argues that "nature is the chief obstacle that has hampered the development of public discourse" (9). Nature, or at least the agreed-upon external reality that is often represented as nature, allows science to render the public sphere voiceless. Unqualified to objectively test and observe natural facts, the polis is relegated to the sidelines, and engages in endless quibbling about matters of value which are a rung lower on the hierarchy of social concerns. The hegemony of science and the god-like status of the scientist, who is the only legitimate liaison between the natural world and the public, render meaningful political discourse impotent. "[T]he Scientist can go back and forth from one world to the other no matter what: the passageway closed to all others is open to him alone" (11). Latour concludes this chapter by examining how Western societies, particularly the United States, use nature to order and organize political life. Uncontestable facts of nature, and rhetoric that represents nature as something to be controlled, protected, or managed, permeate everyday political discourse and decision-making to a degree not seen in other cultures. Having thrown off the yoke of nature, Latour sketches one precondition for a more communal and sustainable political ecology in chapter 2. Here, a critique of anthropocentrism is used to cast off false, socially constructed distinctions between human and nonhuman, including animals and inanimate objects like rocks and trees. Of particular interest to rhetorical scholars, Latour also criticizes at length the modernist belief that speech and the capacity for rational thought distinguish humans from nonhumans. Instead, he posits that political ecology must be recast as a collective of beings both human and nonhuman, both capable of speech and mute: "a slight displacement of our attention suffices to show that nonhumans, too, are implicated in a great number of speech impedimenta" (62-63). This rethinking of the public collective is necessary to prevent scientists from imposing the idea that they definitively represent and speak for nature (the mute objects that they seek so earnestly to protect). …

Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy

Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy

What is the role sociality and belonging play within the particular exchange model that the sharing economy embodies? This article presents a theoretical review and a comparative analysis of the main sharing platforms in the accommodation domain in order to outline a conceptual framework on the relations between trust, reciprocity and belonging in the sharing economy. We argue that mobilising a sense of community is not only instrumental to promising a more intense consumption experience; it is crucial to eliciting users’ active participation in the self-regulation of peer-to-peer exchanges and for dealing with relevant trust issues, especially when sharing implies co-presence and/or non-monetary compensation. The drivers and potential outcomes of the decline in social depth of sharing practices are discussed.

The sharing economy as community marketplace? Trust, reciprocity and belonging in peer-to-peer accommodation platforms

Although Italian cities have undergone several waves of touristification, concerns about overtourism have only recently become widespread. In the article, we suggest that the diffusion of short-ter...

Overtourism and online short-term rental platforms in Italian cities

The Sharing Economy as community marketplace? Trust, reciprocity and belonging in peer-to-peer accommodation platforms

The aim of this article is to reflect upon the motivations and the outcomes of the socio-political conflicts which attempted to challenge the rationality of conservation in the Galapagos Islands, in light of recent inquiries into the post-political condition. Protected areas, we argue, are paradigmatic examples of post-political spaces where universal moral imperatives and the overwhelming role of scientific knowledge reduce the possibility for disagreement, and make traditional political means useless. In order to sustain this argument, we discuss the idea of a post-political condition in relation to the debates about biodiversity, social justice and the political ecology of protected areas in the Global South. We will see how the alliance between conservation science, the State and the tourism industry strongly influenced the territorialisation of the Galapagos Islands and what the political implications are. Such alliances became the object of violent confrontations during the 1990s, which favoured the...

The post-political ecology of protected areas: nature, social justice and political conflicts in the Galápagos Islands

Italy has been at the forefront in the implementation of place-based regional development strategies during the 2000s, and it constitutes therefore a privileged point of view to investigate the con...

Filippo Celata

Papers

The sharing economy as community marketplace? Trust, reciprocity and belonging in peer-to-peer accommodation platforms

Overtourism and online short-term rental platforms in Italian cities

The Sharing Economy as community marketplace? Trust, reciprocity and belonging in peer-to-peer accommodation platforms

The post-political ecology of protected areas: nature, social justice and political conflicts in the Galápagos Islands

Place-based strategies or territorial cooperation? Regional development in transnational perspective in Italy