Showing papers in "Environment and Planning D-society & Space in 1985"

Industry and Space: A Sympathetic Critique of Radical Research

Abstract: In this paper are developed a number of criticisms of radical research on industry and space, and it is argued that many of the problems are generated by three basic types of error, These are: an i...

Power, Space, and the Body: A Critical Assessment of Foucault's Discipline and Punish

Abstract: The work of Michel Foucault has recently been subjected to considerable scrutiny. This paper is an examination of his book, Discipline and Punish, which describes an historical transformation in the exercise of power. The themes (section 2) and the significance (section 3) of the book are discussed in terms of Foucault's conception of history and power. In the rest of the paper, its implications are examined more closely, through four categories: ‘institutions’, ‘the economy’, ‘law and the state’, and ‘struggle and strategy’. Under these headings are discussed the connections and contradictions between Foucault's analysis and more conventional Marxist or Weberian approaches. Although Foucault's perspectives cannot be ‘incorporated’ within such theories of power, they are far from being completely incompatible with them.

Regions in Context: Spatiality, Periodicity, and the Historical Geography of the Regional Question:

Abstract: The regional question has emerged as an important theoretical and political issue over the past twenty years. Contemporaneously, established regional theories and planning doctrines have been serio...

The Rise and Fall of Urban Movements and the Role of Comparative Analysts

Abstract: The paper is concerned with the changing incidence and militancy of urban movements since the 1960s, The diversity of experience between countries, and within countries over time, poses a problem of comparative analysis. This can be tackled by advancing a single model applying in highly diverse situations—as in Castells's The City and the Grassroots—or by constructing a series of submodels each of which applies in specific conditions. Castells's work is criticized for stressing movement characteristics at the expense of contextual characteristics, and an alternative approach is argued for in which urban movement experience is shaped by five contextual features: urbanisation conditions, state action, the political context, the development of middle class, and the general economic and social conditions. Submodels drawing on these features are used to make a comparative analysis of urban movement experience in France, Italy, and Spain. A typology of urban movements is drawn up: movements for the provision of...

The Spatial and Temporal Constitution of Social Action: A Critical Reading of Giddens

Abstract: A number of social theorists have attempted to elaborate poststructuralist analytics that capture the dialectics of social structure and human agency. Giddens proposes a ‘general theory’, centered on the notion of ‘structuration’. He is particularly important to geography because he suggests that the spatiality of social practices belongs at the center of social theory and historical analysis. Systems of social practices are defined by their time–space characteristics. There are problems in the corpus of Giddens's work that require attention, however, before such a theory can be fully viable. These include: Giddens's derogation of intentional action in favor of practical knowledge; his notion that structure is ‘instantiated’; his concept of power; his treatment of material resources; and his lack of attention to discursive strategies. From an examination of these areas of Giddens's work, it can be seen that he advances several, inconsistent, theories of social change. In a reinvigorated theoretical human ...

Regional Intervention, Defence Industries, and the Structuring of Space in Britain: The Case of Bristol and South Wales:

Abstract: This paper is an Illustration of how different state practices have had a direct impact on uneven development between, and within, two adjacent regions in the United Kingdom. In one case, South Wal...

Regional Restructuring, Class Change, and Political Action: Preliminary Comments on the 1984–1985 Miners' Strike in South Wales:

Abstract: This paper sets out an analysis of the determination of the character of the 1984–1985 miners' strike. This character is to be understood in terms of the continuities between the strike and preceding developments in terms of (1) the reorganisation of the British coal industry, (2) wider patterns of change in the economic and social structure of the coalfields, and (3) active and self-conscious political organisation, especially within the National Union of Mineworkers and left political parties. By means of a detailed analysis of the South Wales coalfield, the highly differentiated regional character of these developments is demonstrated.

Accounting for Place and Space

Abstract: lt is proposed that social practices-practical social activities-involve a kind of knowledge distinct both from technical skills (knowing-how) and thc application of theoretical knowledge (knowine-that): thev involve ar knowing of thc third kind (knowinu-from), a contextual form of knowing from within a situation rvhich takes into account, in what is knou,n. thc situation within which it is known. Such a kind of knowledgc cernnot be communicated in the form of theories. only in the form of narrative accounts. The nature of hor,r, pe

Cities, Socialism and War: Hanoi, Saigon and the Vietnamese Experience of Urbanisation:

Abstract: The processes of urbanisation and urban development in the developing countries of the socialist world are poorly understood, yet they are clearly of some significance. In comparison with the rate of urbanisation in developing countries with predominantly market economies, the rate of urbanisation in socialist developing countries usually slows down considerably after the revolution that brings the socialist regime to power, In the Murray–Szelenyi model this slowdown in the rate of urbanisation is attributed to class struggle, as a newly formed state class attempts to wrest power from the bourgeois class. With Vietnam as a case study this article is an examination of urbanisation under socialism in the light of the Murray–Szelenyi model, It is argued that the model attributes too much importance to the power of the state in socialist societies. As a result it underestimates the significance of external pressures, particularly warfare, and the structure of civil society, especially ethnic conflict, in shap...

Political and Technical Moments in Development: Agropolitan Development Revisited:

Abstract: The problem addressed is one of strategy and practice: how to promote agricultural and rural development in peasant societies in ways that will benefit the large majority of the people. In a number of earlier essays, the author had proposed what he called a strategy of agropolitan development which would stress the importance of linking a self-generated process of dynamic change from within agricultural communities to the larger processes of central guidance by the state. The strategy involved a substantial devolution of power to small territorial units within the overall system of societal guidance. In the present paper the desirability of such a devolution is considered in terms of political, ecological, and technical–administrative arguments. As a political strategy, agropolitan development requires a commitment on part of national elites, and this may be difficult to obtain. Alternative strategies, on the other hand, although possibly successful when measured in terms of production, are unlikely to in...

Routine Action, Reproduction of Social Relations, and the Place Market: Consett after the Closure

Abstract: Reproduction of social relations has been most problematic in communities undergoing drastic and sudden economic and social change. Through the experience of one such community, the town of Consett, County Durham, this analysis is an attempt to draw out the broader implications of this reproduction. Two particular policy measures are highlighted as expressions of the general aim of the reintroduction of the commodity form: a conventional reindustrialisation strategy through a local development agency, and initiatives sponsored by the Manpower Services Commission. Given the lack of success of such measures in terms of their stated objectives, the question of why they are actively accepted is addressed. The answer lies in the dominance of the work ethic for routine action, seen in Consett through the legacy of the company town and in the nature of the anticlosure campaign. More generally, the broader consequences of this acceptance of unemployment in the marketplace can be seen through the development of a ...

Worker Militancy in South Africa: A Sociospatial Analysis of Trade Union Activism in the Manufacturing Sector

Abstract: The independent trade union movement has become increasingly significant in the popular struggle against racial capitalism in South Africa, yet it has so far attracted comparatively little attention from geographers in the region. One of the concerns of this paper, then, is to consider ways in which the spatial configuration of South African industry affects workers' organisations. In this context, the focus centres upon strike activity in the manufacturing sector. From an analysis of the changing composition, fortunes, and strategics of the trade union movement since the 1950s—substantially reviewed here—it can be seen how such activity is influenced by factors at work within the state apparatus and within the unions themselves, and is indicative of the everchanging relationship that exists between these two. Our major objective here, though, is to demonstrate how certain spatial and temporal variations in strike action may also be related to particular developments in the structure of South African capi...

Cities, Culture, and Social Change: Books in 1984

Abstract: This is the third in a series of annual reports on books likely to be of interest to readers of Society and Space. The report is again indicative rather than comprehensive. Given the enormous amount of literature that is now appearing in so many different subject areas, no other approach is possible. This year the report is divided into five sections: “Economy”, “Culture, Ethnicity, Neighbourhood, and Community”, “Cities, State Control, and Social Change”, “The Third World”, and “Methodology and Social Theory”.

The Neighbourhood Organisation as a Pedagogic Project

Abstract: This study is a look at the neighbourhood organisation as a pedagogie project wherein local residents undergo a subjective transformation in their level of consciousness. Within this context, two pedagogies are examined. One, which has close affinities with Marxism, seeks to expose the structural contradictions underlying the problems confronted by the organisation, and attempts to translate this knowledge into practice. The other, which is closely associated with the humanist tradition, tries to decipher intersubjective and intrasubjective barriers, to expose repressed desires, and to encourage their fulfillment in a creative manner. Neither of these pedagogies is found to be satisfactory. The Marxist pedagogy subordinates human values, that is, ‘what is' to the absolute of ‘what ought to be’. In contrast, the humanist pedagogy tends to relativise the organisation's values, and accept them uncritically and thus infer the ‘what ought to be’ from the ‘what is’. In a preliminary attempt to break away from m...

Special Economic Zones: The Chinese Road to Socialism?

Abstract: The death of Mao Zedong signifies a change of policies in China. The balanced growth of city and countryside which occurred in the Maoist era is now replaced by a relative emphasis on an elitist ur...

The Crisis of the State and the Region: Regional Planning Questioned

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the political significance of the alternatives for regional development in which community participation and the decentralization of decisionmaking power are proposed. Although their discourses are similar, they have different ideological motivations and content. These proposals, together with the crisis in regional theory and planning are associated with the contradictions inherent in the economic globalization of the contemporary world: the conflict between the corporation and the state; the crisis of the state and the region; and the intensification of protest movements organized on a territorial basis. The central question is the sharpening of the contradictions of the state, which ensures bourgeois domination but is also (in countries of peripheral capitalism) the only force capable of (a) ensuring social investments on the necessary scale and (b) confronting global capitalism. This question is denied both in proposals for decentralization and in the criticism ...

Review 3: “Let Them Eat Chips”

Abstract: In 1983, thirty-three US states spent over $250 million on Rand!) facilities to speed the growth of high-technology industry within their borders. Meanwhile, thousands of local governments were scheming to devise the optimal package of tax breaks, incentives, and regulatory relief, in order to lure entrepreneurs and innovative firms to their turf. As old industrial sectors and regions continue to stagnate or decline, the competition reaches a feverish pitch* Attracting high tech hthe economic development strategy of the 1980s, It is the only economic development game in town, No wonder, then, that Silicon Valley has captured the public imagination. In Juno 1984 alone, electronics manufacturing firms created 2400 new jobs in the valley; and over 24000 jobs had been created during the preceding year (Calvert, 1984), With local unemployment below 5%, this booming California region has come to symbolize the innovative dynamism that new technologies will bring to the USA's economy. For most North Americans, Silicon Valley represents the promise of future growth. For policymakers across the nation it is also a model, one which they study in order to replicate it. In this context, a serious analysis of the history of Silicon Valley's growth is sorely needed. Before throwing more taxpayers' dollars into a frenzied scramble for high tech, policymakers, along with scholars and citizens concerned about our economic future, should understand the social, political, and economic contours'of the Silicon Valley experience. This is why a serious book about Silicon Valley is so necessary, and why the book under review is ultimately so disappointing. Silicon Valley Fever is dedicated to Frederick Terman. This is fitting for a book which exalts entrepreneurs. Terman was, after all, the original entrepreneur of Silicon Valley. Guided by the vision of an academic-industrial 'partnership' which would jointly enrich the university and private companies, he used his position as VicePresident and Provost at Stanford University to lure federal research dollars and contracts in order to support promising local innovators and their fledgling enterprises. He simultaneously channeled the earnings from leases on land in the Stanford Industrial Park (his 'secret weapon') into the recruitment of a top-notch engineering faculty, thereby boosting the prestige and academic excellence of the university. Terman's successes are manifest: Stanford now ranks as a world-class university, and Silicon Valley is a universally vaunted model of high-technology development. The story of Terman is just one among a multitude of tales recounted by authors Everett Rogers and Judith Larsen in Silicon Valley Fever—which is more a compilation of such anecdotes than a coherent unified-book. In true entrepreneurial fashion, Rogers and Larsen recognized a product whose time had come, and capitalized on it. They have collected and recorded in a single volume all of the tales of local heroes, the newspaper revelations of high-tech crime, intrigue, and riches, and a variety of

Thoughts on Theory

Abstract: Thoughts on theory We have heard a lot in these pages about 'contextual social theory'—about the inadmissibility of theorizing 'society' as a gyroscope spinning on the point of a pin, and about the various ways in which the contextuality of social life might be conceived. But we have heard much less about a seemingly more simple question: how, exactly, are we to understand and to use 'theory' within this new problematic? Two options are usually offered. In some quarters, 'theory' still means generalization: searching the empirical field with experimental rigs and drilling bore-holes (exactly the right word) to test hypotheses about it. There is no better way to fracture and freeze the ebb and flow of social life. In others, however, 'theory' means abstraction: dissecting the multiple layers of the world by use of scrupulously sharpened conceptual scalpels and a broadly 'realist' knowledge of anatomy to tease out its 'connective tissue'^. This gets us much closer to 'the concrete and the particular', of course, but neither of these metaphors is innocent; and if the skeletal vocabulary of the engineer is strikingly at odds with a more organic conception of inquiry, so too, I think, are the sterile procedures of the clinician. This prompts me to propose a third way of thinking about 'theory'—as contextualization— which involves translations moving back and forth between 'texts' (in the widest of senses) and their contexts. This conception of 'theory', which insists on its creative, interactive capacity, on a fundamental reciprocity between theoretical constructs and empirical materials, is derived from hermeneutics and poststructuralism: but it is not altogether estranged from realism. Indeed, it is precisely the intersections between these two traditions and (theoretical) realism which seem to me so important in underwriting the critical integrity of contextual social theory. This is not a matter of privileging the recovery of 'intentions', let me say. Often the result, as Culler (1983, page 9) reminds us, is \"to make strange the familiar and to make readers conceive of their own thinking, behaviour and institutions in new ways\". In fact, modern literary criticism—where this notion of contextualization is a commonplace—treats as an explicit problem \"the question of the relationship between intentions, in so far as they can be plausibly reconstructed, and what the text may be argued to do or to disclose\" (LaCapra, 1983, page 36). One finds the same impulse in Foucault's 'interpretative analytics' and in Geertz's interpretative anthropology (see Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Geertz, 1973). But one also finds there two other features of singular importance. First, 'contextualization' accentuates what Skinner identifies as \"the importance of the local and the contingent\". If there is a 'return to Grand Theory' in the human sciences then, Skinner argues (1985), it is one which entails (on the part of some of its most interesting proponents at any rate) a radical scepticism about the traditional project of 'totalization' (see also Jay, 1984)—which is, I think, reinforced by the incorporation of time-space relations into contemporary social theory— and puts in its place the recovery of more particular truths: what Geertz calls \"local knowledge\" (Geertz, 1983). Such an emphasis does not reduce inquiry to a spirited polishing of the parish pump (on the contrary, since the concept of 'intertextuality' is indispensable), and neither does it raise the spectre of relativism (cf Jarvie, 1983; Rabinow, 1983). Some commentators claim that this phantom only frightens Kantian philosophers anyway, because they regard truth as 'a vertical relationship between representation and what

Survey 7: The New Naturalism—A Critique of Order Out of Chaos

Abstract: \"Physics and metaphysics are indeed coming together in a conception of the world in which process, becoming, is taken as a primary constituent of physical existence...\" (page 303). \"The world is far from being homogeneous\" (page 16). \"In the world we are familiar with equilibrium is a rare and precarious state\" (page 128). \"...most of reality, instead of being orderly, stable, and equilibrial, is seething and bubbling with change, disorder, process\" (page xv).

Commentary on G C Pickvance's ‘The Rise and Fall of Urban Movements …’

Abstract: The attempt by Pickvancc to elaborate a comparative framework for the analysis of urban movements, taking as a point of departure the work presented in The City and the Grassroots, is most welcome, because the purpose of my book is precisely to stimulate further research on the subject. Unfortunately, the result is a complete failure, given Pickvancc's theoretical confusion and methodological weakness. Thus, I shall first try to substantiate my evaluation of his contribution, and later discuss some of the important social and methodological questions Pickvance pointedly raises. As the reader knows, Pickvance proposes to explain the incidence of different types of movements according to five contextual features of national societies. The first difficulty arises from the absolute imprecision in the definition of these 'features', itself the result of the lack of any theoretical foundation to justify the importance given to the proposed characteristics. For instance, one of the features is nothing less than \"general economic and social conditions\", which is \"a catchall category ... intended to capture the general disposition to political activism prevailing at a given place and time\" (page 43). Not only does this \"category\" mix the explanatory and the explained variables (the context is supposed to explain the level of activism, and thus cannot be defined as \"disposition to political activism\" without being tautological), but it is so imprecise, so broad, that it represents the abandonment of all specificity in the understanding of social processes. Another feature is the \"cultural understandings of the scope of urban politics\" (page 41); how can anyone pretend to explain anything, and not just social movements, with this kind of 'concept'? To be fair, this 'feature' apparently translates into the presence/absence of significant Communist parties (as an indicator of class culture), something that is highly debatable and that, in any case, relates to the political system, not to culture. Another feature, \"development of the middle class\" (page 43), fails to grasp the ambiguity of such a term and, more fundamentally, is irrelevant to differentiating national contexts, because in all countries under consideration there is a growing proportion of the \"middle class\" as a result of the development of the service economy. Two other features (\"rapid urbanisation\", \"state action\") are somewhat more clear, but their empirical meaning is either confusing or wrongly evaluated. For instance, concerning rapid urbanization, Pickvance says that \"countries discussed have all passed the period of rapid urbanisation. They would have been relevant if I had been discussing nineteenth century Europe, or Third World countries twenty or more years ago\" (page 50). This is sheer ignorance. How can one ignore the current process of accelerated urban growth for two-thirds of human-kind? Or the metropolitan explosion in the American Sunbelt? But even more important for this critique is that although Western European urban growth has stagnated in the last

Possibilities of a Territorial Ordering for the Transition in Nicaragua

Abstract: The object of this paper is an analysis of the possibilities of a politically oriented territorial transformation in the process of building a new state in Nicaragua. Three central questions are posed. How should the struggle of popular sectors be connected with the contradictions associated with territorial organization? Is there an autonomy of the spatial, that is, is spatial concentration simply a product of capitalism? Does the construction of socialism necessitate decentralization, or does spatial concentration remain in socialism because it is a universal tendency associated with the nature of technology? Not even neoclassical conceptions of territorial organization, nor those of the new Marxist school (which analyzes the society–space relationship in universal terms), are effective in orienting popular struggles. To advance the analysis of the relationship between the political and the territorial, we require an examination of concrete situations. In the paper are thus presented some basic concepts...

Integrated Regional Planning as an Agent of the State Vis-à-Vis the Local Community and the ‘Patria Chica’ (Homeland): A Summary of Central American Experiences

Abstract: This paper is a critical analysis of the local community as an instrument in the integration of development policies. It is a tentative analysis, providing a critical reconsideration of some of the main options comparing ‘from the top down’ policies with ‘from the bottom up’ policies. This involves an awareness of a competing perspective (‘from below’) and of the questions ‘for whom?’ and ‘development to what extent?’. According to this perspective, the point of departure is the conflict existing in the local community, and the conflict between the local community and the state.

Seven Equivocal Theses about Amazonia

Abstract: This paper underlines the importance of the debate now being carried on in Brazil with reference to Amazonia and stresses the symbolical character with which it has been clothed. This debate is more than a clash between intellectual and political conceptions, the conflict-ridden encounter of the nation with its own destiny is dramatized within it. Seven theses stand out, representing the main prospects in question and their variants. In dismantling them one by one, the author proposes alternatives and above all suggests a kind of analysis epistemologically oriented by successive shiftings of viewpoint. This mobile approach makes it possible to reveal the partial truth of each thesis over the others. Theses (1) and (3) refer to the inexorable and all-encompassing character of capitalist expansion in rural areas, qualities which are regarded as likely to cause the reactive social movements themselves to succumb. It is shown that economic and political processes are often episodic, reversible, and subject to...

The Economic Crisis in Brazil

Abstract: In this paper are presented data on the behavior of the Brazilian economy in 1983 including the more immediate effects of the economic crisis and its links with the ‘national development model’. Economic development of the last decades has determined the core of the economic structure formed by the relationship between international capital, private national capital, and the public sector. The current crisis and, in particular, financial speculation are explained by the (contradictory) movement of the core. Finally, the political implications that are arising in the process of solving the economic crisis are stressed.