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Popular politics and the production of space in Mexico City
Digital technologies have changed how we shop, work, play, and communicate, reshaping our societies and economies. To understand digital capitalism, we need to grasp how advances in geospatial technologies underpin the construction, operation, and refinement of markets for digital goods and services. In The Map in the Machine, Luis F. Alvarez Leon examines these advances, from MapQuest and Google Maps to the rise of IP geolocation, ridesharing, and a new Earth Observation satellite ecosystem. He develops a geographical theory of digital capitalism centered on the processes of location, valuation, and marketization to provide a new vantage point from which to better understand, and intervene in, the dominant techno-economic paradigm of our time. By centering the spatiality of digital capitalism, Alvarez Leon shows how this system is the product not of seemingly intangible information clouds but rather of a vast array of technologies, practices, and infrastructures deeply rooted in place, mediated by geography, and open to contestation and change.
Closer to Antarctica than to Buenos Aires, the port town of Ushuaia, Argentina is home to a national park as well as a museum that is housed in the world’s southernmost prison. Ushuaia’s radial panopticon operated as an experimental hybrid penal colony and penitentiary from 1902 to 1947, designed to revolutionize modern prisons globally. A Carceral Ecology offers the first comprehensive study of this notorious prison and its afterlife, documenting how the Patagonian frontier and timber economy became central to ideas about labor, rehabilitation, and resource management. Mining the records of penologists, naturalists, and inmates, Ryan C. Edwards shows how discipline was tied to forest management, but also how inmates gained situated geographical knowledge and reframed debates on the regeneration of the land and the self. Bringing a new imperative to global prison studies, Edwards asks us to rethink the role of the environment in carceral practices as well as the impact of incarceration on the natural world.
The book examines how globalised urban labour and property markets are produced by agrarian actors, institutions, spaces and territories.
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This book presents a fascinating, ethnographic account of the challenges faced by communities living in Majuli, India, one of the largest river islands in the world, which has experienced immense socio-environmental transformations over the years, processes that are emblematic of the Brahmaputra Valley as a whole. Written in an engaging style, full of the author's insider perspectives, this insightful volume explores the processes of flooding and riverbank erosion in Majuli, including re-configuration of the island’s geographies, loss of local livelihoods, and large-scale displacement of the population. The book begins with an examination of the physical geography of Majuli and its ecologi...
At the outset of World War II, California agriculture seemed to be on the cusp of change. Many Californians, reacting to the ravages of the Great Depression, called for a radical reorientation of the highly exploitative labor relations that had allowed the state to become such a productive farming frontier. But with the importation of the first braceros—“guest workers” from Mexico hired on an “emergency” basis after the United States entered the war—an even more intense struggle ensued over how agriculture would be conducted in the state. Esteemed geographer Don Mitchell argues that by delineating the need for cheap, flexible farm labor as a problem and solving it via the importa...
Growing Green Infrastructure in Contemporary Asian Cities examines to what extent green infrastructure (GI) is being implemented in East and Southeast Asian cities. The book reflects upon the integration of contemporary approaches to landscape planning alongside traditional forms of green space design and cultural understandings of the landscape in China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Working from a multi-locational perspective, the book illustrates how political, socio-cultural, economic, and ecological factors influence the delivery of GI and the consequences of these decisions. The book provides a set of best practice recommendations for the design, development, and management of greener urban areas. It both explains how GI is being utilised in East and Southeast Asia to address climate change, promote economic prosperity, and support the development of more livable places, and identifies future trends in its use. It is a key resource for any practitioners, students, and academics working in landscape planning and green infrastructure in an Asian context.
The problem of homelessness in America underpins the definition of an American city: what it is, who it is for, what it does, and why it matters. And the problem of the American city is epitomized in public space. Mean Streets offers, in a single, sustained argument, a theory of the social and economic logic behind the historical development, evolution, and especially the persistence of homelessness in the contemporary American city. By updating and revisiting thirty years of research and thinking on this subject, Don Mitchell explores the conditions that produce and sustain homelessness and how its persistence relates to the way capital works in the urban built environment. He also addresse...
This book is devoted to the Anthropocene, the period of unprecedented human impacts on Earth’s environmental systems, and illustrates how Geographers envision the concept of the Anthropocene. This edited volume illustrates that geographers have a diverse perspective on what the Anthropocene is and represents. The chapters also show that geographers do not feel it necessary to identify only one starting point for the temporal onset of the Anthropocene. Several starting points are suggested, and some authors support the concept of a time-transgressive Anthropocene. Chapters in this book are organized into six sections, but many of them transcend easy categorization and could have fit into tw...