Sarah E Knuth
Durham University, Geography, Faculty Member
- Oberlin College, Environmental Studies, Faculty MemberPenn State University, Geography, Graduate Student, and 4 moreadd
- Human Geography, Urban Geography, Political Economy, Political Ecology, Urban Political Economy, Urban Political Ecology, and 76 moreGeography of Finance and Financial Crises, Green Economy & Green Jobs Perspectives, Green Economy, Gentrification, Economic Sociology, Climate Change, Real Estate, Real Estate Appraisal, Real Estate Finance, Energy, Energy efficiency, Renewable Energy, Asset and investment valuation, Climate Justice, Materiality (Anthropology), Urban History, Urban Environmental History, Infrastructure, Green Infrastructure, Cleantech, Green Technology, Economic History, Green Cities, Green Building, Sustainable Building Materials, Green Building Materials (Architecture), Land Grabbing, Foreign Direct Investment and Land-Grabbing, Urban Planning, Green Infrastructure, Ecosystem Integrity, Economic Geography, Environmental Economic Geography, Environmental Economics, Ecological Economics, Green Economy, Climate Finance, Green bonds, Carbon Trading, Energy Efficiency Buildings, Energy Efficient Retrofitting, Tax Policy for enhanced Energy Efficiency, Energy Efficiency in buildings and cities, Thermal comfort & Energy efficiency in hot climates, ICT for Energy Efficiency, Impact of human behaviour on energy efficiency of the built environment, Construction, Building and Construction Trades, Green Collar Economy, Legal Geography, Critical Legal Geography, Critical Legal Studies, Urban Fiscal Crisis, Municipal Bonds, Fiscal Policy and debt Management, Public Debt, Sovereign Debt, Bond and Capital Markets, Financialization, Social Studies of Finance, Performativity, Incubation Centers and Clusters for Innovation, Eco-Cities, Global cities, Real Estate Development, Austerity Measures, Economic Injustice, Race and Ethnicity, Critical Race Theory, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Whiteness theory, Risk and Vulnerability, Resilience, Development Studies, Resource Geography, Urban Studies, Urban Planning, Urban Sociology, Value Theory, and World-Ecologyedit
- Sarah Knuth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research investigates ... moreSarah Knuth is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Durham University. Her research investigates the contemporary intersection of neoliberal urban strategy, new ideas in green economic development and climate change resilience, and ongoing transformations in the global financial system. In places like the United States, making cities energy efficient, low carbon, and resilient means fundamentally reworking existing urban geographies and modes of city building. These radical changes require major upfront investments. Powerful institutions increasingly frame this challenge as a task for experimental finance and the creation of new forms of public and private indebtedness. Simultaneously, they frame it as a massive untapped market for institutional funds in search of novel assets. They describe experimental green fiscal instruments that range from new kinds of municipal bonds to infrastructure trusts, bids to tap into carbon markets, and real estate-tied financial products. In the years since the 2008 financial collapse, cities such as New York, San Francisco, and Chicago have been centers for the working out of these proposals. They have developed climate change plans, major initiatives to retrofit buildings for energy efficiency and reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and dedicated financing mechanisms. Sarah’s postdoctoral research asks how these instruments are being structured, disseminated, and placed within financial markets, and with what potential repercussions for economic and environmental justice in “financialized” cities.
Sarah’s current project builds on past participatory research on US urban climate change mitigation planning and local resilience, and more particularly on dissertation research she conducted in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Publications are currently available or forthcoming from her work in journals including Antipode, Environment and Planning A, The Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Applied Geography, and Local Environment. Her dissertation explored green economic visions that coalesced around the US urban built environment in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse. In it, she argues that finance and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more socioeconomically redistributive visions. Financial innovation is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make sustainable urbanism increasingly risky and exclusionary, bolstering real estate speculation and green gentrification in wealthy cities like San Francisco while withholding badly needed investment from less “creditworthy” cities and regions.
Dissertation chapters and publications explore questions including: why the United States has experienced more success with building energy efficiency than with other fields of “Green New Deal” development; how green real estate is being sold as a new kind of environmental “resource” and a basis for experimental financial engineering; how unruly materialities and urban geographies obstruct these market environmentalist visions; and how green experimentation in US cities is advancing financial institutions’ emerging global investment strategies vis-à-vis climate change, land, and urban (re)development.edit - Dissertation advisor: Dr. Richard Walker (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Nathan Sayre (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Paul Groth (UC Berkeley), Dissertation committee member: Dr. Daniel Kammen (UC Berkeley), Master's thesis advisor: Dr. Brent Yarnal (Penn State University)edit
Editors' Introduction, Theme Issue Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation. Its ever-present threat, in competitive capitalist struggles and recurrent economic crises, compels capital forward... more
Editors' Introduction, Theme Issue
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation. Its ever-present threat, in competitive capitalist struggles and recurrent economic crises, compels capital forward to enclosures of new values and to new realms, techniques, and geographies of production and surplus extraction. It drives bitter struggles among capitalists as different actors, sectors, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere” – with profound consequences for the human and environmental geographies “brought in”, altered, and/or destroyed in such processes. These competitive devaluations, crisis-fueled jostlings, and transformations have a long history. With this special issue, however, we seek to open a lens onto contemporary encounters with devaluation that are novel in significant, yet insufficiently explored ways. Articles collected here consider new forms of value destruction and biophysical wasting as capital compulsively seeks to reproduce itself on an expanded scale – global-systemic and intimate transformations reflected in mainstream narratives of the Anthropocene and a so-called “used” planet (Ellis et al. 2013). Simultaneously, these articles interrogate qualitatively novel ways in which such devaluations have been recast as opportunities for capital accumulation, whether during acute crises or in the context of capitalist volatility-as-usual. Taken as a collection, they forge new analytical ground by illuminating parallels and interrelations between sites of de- and re-valuation usually considered separately: industrial obsolescence and waste-to-resource schemes; rural landscape degradation and ecological restoration; urban blight and redevelopment/gentrification; collapsed financial asset prices and new forms of speculation; and beyond. This discussion suggests key lineaments of an expanded theory of devaluation for capitalism’s contemporary moment – and makes a case for the significance and vitality of such an agenda for further geographic research...
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation. Its ever-present threat, in competitive capitalist struggles and recurrent economic crises, compels capital forward to enclosures of new values and to new realms, techniques, and geographies of production and surplus extraction. It drives bitter struggles among capitalists as different actors, sectors, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere” – with profound consequences for the human and environmental geographies “brought in”, altered, and/or destroyed in such processes. These competitive devaluations, crisis-fueled jostlings, and transformations have a long history. With this special issue, however, we seek to open a lens onto contemporary encounters with devaluation that are novel in significant, yet insufficiently explored ways. Articles collected here consider new forms of value destruction and biophysical wasting as capital compulsively seeks to reproduce itself on an expanded scale – global-systemic and intimate transformations reflected in mainstream narratives of the Anthropocene and a so-called “used” planet (Ellis et al. 2013). Simultaneously, these articles interrogate qualitatively novel ways in which such devaluations have been recast as opportunities for capital accumulation, whether during acute crises or in the context of capitalist volatility-as-usual. Taken as a collection, they forge new analytical ground by illuminating parallels and interrelations between sites of de- and re-valuation usually considered separately: industrial obsolescence and waste-to-resource schemes; rural landscape degradation and ecological restoration; urban blight and redevelopment/gentrification; collapsed financial asset prices and new forms of speculation; and beyond. This discussion suggests key lineaments of an expanded theory of devaluation for capitalism’s contemporary moment – and makes a case for the significance and vitality of such an agenda for further geographic research...
Research Interests: Industrial Ecology, Political Ecology, Gentrification, Value Theory, Brownfields Redevelopment, and 13 moreEcological restoration, Financialization, Accumulation by Dispossession, Financial Crisis, Predatory Lending, Obsolescence, Economic Crisis, Anthropocene, Degradation, Politial Economy, Wastelands, Devaluation, and Waste-to-resource
In today's populist moment, climate change response has become anything but " post-political ". The project to decarbonize energy supplies is generating ongoing political clashes today, including between competing forms of capital/ism. In... more
In today's populist moment, climate change response has become anything but " post-political ". The project to decarbonize energy supplies is generating ongoing political clashes today, including between competing forms of capital/ism. In the United States, rising renewable energy industries in places like California contend with fossil fuel blocs and their regional bases. Such confrontations are sparking populist organizing on the right and left. I argue that critical geography must further consider left populist movements' role in these politics of clean energy transition, grievance, and reparation; and openings for collectively advancing more liberatory futures. I survey a wave of coalition-building that has evolved in the United States since the beginnings of the New Economy, allying U.S. environmentalists, organized labor, and more recently racial and community justice organizers. This movement became most visible as it built networks around calls for national " green collar " job creation during the late 2000s financial crisis and 2008 Presidential campaign. Its organizing shaped noteworthy, if ultimately limited Obama Administration programs and continues to influence clean energy rollout in regions such as California; particularly, campaigns for job quality and racial diversity in green construction. I consider here both these successes and their limits in a turbulent cleantech sector: the need for farther-reaching transformations in energy-industrial policy, and democratic participation in shaping them.
Research Interests: Political Economy, Renewable Energy, Political Ecology, Populism, Construction, and 12 moreGreen Economy & Green Jobs Perspectives, Labor History and Studies, California History, Trade unions, California, Right-Wing Movements, Democratic Socialism, Infrastructure, United States, Green Economy, New Economy, and Energy transition
Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a " postnatural " ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable... more
Using a regional political ecology lens, this paper explores emerging geographies and politics of a " postnatural " ecomodernist turn in mainstream environmentalism. We examine the unfolding case of ecological restoration and renewable energy development at Southern California's Salton Sea. Ambitious proposals to restore the massive, increasingly degraded lake (and finance restoration) by reengineering it as a hub for geothermal energy generation and high-tech green industry hinge upon the ambiguity and malleability of restoration in an environment long classified as postnatural. These plans coincide with a broader rush on renewable energy sites in the California desert, and mounting conflicts over water and land with legacy agro-industrial interests. The case illustrates significant problems within postnatural environmentalism. First, it demonstrates how theorizations of the postnatural can intersect with green capitalist projects of re(e)valuation and development, as the Sea's managers manipulate environmental framings to support accumulation-minded projects, and accumulation imperatives swamp other functionalities of restoration. Meanwhile, despite the flourishing of postnatural discourses, the " pristine " is shown to do continued work as the Sea becomes a sacrifice zone for development deflected from better-protected spaces. This postnatural positioning has rendered the Salton Sea vulnerable to neoliberal austerity and speculation in ways that compromise its future existence.
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In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into... more
In the 2010s, major US initiatives framed urban retrofitting as a decarbonization solution. These programs address an obtrusive legacy of industrial capitalism: its built environments shed energy and emissions when they fall into disrepair. Political ecology and economy have been slow to engage retrofitting, an absence that is conspicuous as these fields take on planetary repair as a conceptual provocation and turn in mainstream conservation. This paper explores US retrofitting as a distinctive material repair practice, one born as an energy poverty program amid the scarcity fears of the 1970s Energy Crisis but seeing a renaissance today as a program for green capitalist growth. I interrogate two economies of repair now emerging around retrofitting, energy market and clean tech aspirations to make energy efficiency a resource and articulated efforts to sell retrofits as new green value for real estate development and investment. Such urban revaluation efforts join an expanding array of green gentrification schemes today. Paradoxically, even as would-be green entrepreneurs are drawn to these seemingly intangible and “clean” forms of waste and value in-waiting, retrofitting presents intransigent materialities. Its decarbonization ambitions demand not just profit-generating urban repair today but large-scale urban maintenance into the future. This need confronts longstanding efforts to render US cities and built environments flexible to recurrent creative destruction in service of ongoing economic growth. Such logics of de/revaluation and essential disposability permit concurrent US programs for gentrification and urban abandonment today.
However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.
Keywords: retrofitting, planetary repair, green growth, green gentrification, political ecology/economy
However, decarbonization requires a more substantial confrontation with capitalist ruination-as-usual.
Keywords: retrofitting, planetary repair, green growth, green gentrification, political ecology/economy
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Reimagining energy infrastructures for the 21st century increasingly means choosing between competing economic futures, a dilemma that is now provoking conflicts across many places and realms. In the United States, one critical clash is... more
Reimagining energy infrastructures for the 21st century increasingly means choosing between competing economic futures, a dilemma that is now provoking conflicts across many places and realms. In the United States, one critical clash is unfolding among tech sector advocates for a clean energy transition, as U.S. cleantech has worked to regroup from Silicon Valley's failed clean energy manufacturing push of the late 2000s and to navigate an ongoing solar trade war with China: about what that transition might look like, how it might be achieved, and, critically, what economic sectors and rents might emerge from it. One set of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists argues that "breakthrough" clean energy technologies are needed to produce an energy transition and to bolster U.S. economic power into the 21st century. Meanwhile, a competing set prioritizes deploying existing technologies and infrastructures at scale. The latter argues that new kinds of innovation can accomplish this task, and in the process defend embattled U.S. hegemony: notably, so-called financial innovation, and new articulations between finance and high tech. This debate has major implications for the nature and global politics of a green economy.
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This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a... more
This paper argues that taking up questions of value can help political ecologists and economists develop a more powerful analysis of the green economy, as it introduces new urban, industrial, and technological dimensions into a self-identified green capitalism. More specifically, I maintain that processes of green devaluation, decommodification, and techno-industrial replacement are as important in understanding green economic development as new value enclosure and green growth. 21 st century green economic politics have been marked by Schumpeterian ambitions and zero-sum intra-capitalist struggles, alongside a more general hardening of anti-fossil fuel industry politics from both grassroots climate justice activists and, increasingly, mainstream investors. I explore three interrelated initiatives – disruptive innovation in Silicon Valley cleantech, the US fossil fuel divestment movement, and the global financial industry's stranded assets organizing – as windows into these struggles. Themes of devaluation; obsolescence, both technological and " moral " ; and decommodification, more or less absolute, carry through this discussion, as activists struggle to translate quantitative advances against fossil fuels into a more profound qualitative break. Understanding these fights is essential to developing more effective engaged scholarship on climate change and a just energy transition.
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The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certifications, and, critically, explored how... more
The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certifications, and, critically, explored how greening might pay. Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon “green” value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconventional resource discovery requires a highly partial view of buildings’ socio-natural entanglements in and beyond the city. I illuminate these efforts and their obscurities by exploring the experience of an exemplary green building in San Francisco, an office tower that has successively served as a headquarters organizing a vast resource periphery in the American West, a symbol and driver in the transformation of the city’s own second nature, a financial “resource” in its own right, and, most recently, an asset in an emerging global market for green property.
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Editor's Introduction, Environment and Planning A Theme Issue: Legal Geographies of Finance
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ABSTRACT Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets. Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship... more
ABSTRACT Understanding global land transformations today requires greater attention to finance, and how financial institutions are making land and property into financial assets.
Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance’s new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.
RÉSUMÉ Pour comprendre les transformations foncières globales actuelles, il est nécessaire de porter notre attention à la finance et à la manière dont les institutions financières font de la terre
et la propriété des actifs financiers. S’appuyant sur l’économie politique géographique et la littérature sur la financiarisation, je questionne la nature et la temporalité de l’intérêt récent
de la finance pour la terre, à savoir si celui-ci est spéculatif et à court terme ou plutôt une stratégie à long terme. J’étudie comment différents types d’institutions financières investissent dans la terre de manière distincte, quels arguments et outils sont mis de l’avant et comment une rareté croissante des actifs « sécuritaires » peut encourager même des acteurs financiers conservateurs vers de nouvelles expériences avec la terre et vers d’autres frontières d’accumulation.
Drawing on geographical political economy and scholarship on financialisation, I question the nature and temporality of finance’s new interest in land – notably, whether it is speculative and short term or an emerging longer-term strategy. I consider how different kinds of financial institutions invest in land differently, how they are mobilising value arguments and tools and how a growing scarcity of “safe“ assets may push even conservative financial players into new experiments with land and other accumulation frontiers.
RÉSUMÉ Pour comprendre les transformations foncières globales actuelles, il est nécessaire de porter notre attention à la finance et à la manière dont les institutions financières font de la terre
et la propriété des actifs financiers. S’appuyant sur l’économie politique géographique et la littérature sur la financiarisation, je questionne la nature et la temporalité de l’intérêt récent
de la finance pour la terre, à savoir si celui-ci est spéculatif et à court terme ou plutôt une stratégie à long terme. J’étudie comment différents types d’institutions financières investissent dans la terre de manière distincte, quels arguments et outils sont mis de l’avant et comment une rareté croissante des actifs « sécuritaires » peut encourager même des acteurs financiers conservateurs vers de nouvelles expériences avec la terre et vers d’autres frontières d’accumulation.
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Federal political deadlock has long forced progressive climate change mitigation efforts in the United States to target greenhouse gas emissions and reduction options at regional, state, urban, and local levels. Even as a national... more
Federal political deadlock has long forced progressive climate change mitigation efforts in the United States to target greenhouse gas emissions and reduction options at regional,
state, urban, and local levels. Even as a national mitigation agenda solidifies, researchers and political actors might strategically maintain local places and types of landscape –
center cities, older and newer suburbs, and rural areas in different United States regions – as distinct spheres for analysis and action. This local articulation permits ongoing analysis
of how place/landscape type-specific conditions structure everyday greenhouse gas emissions and the prospects for reducing them. As such, it promotes mitigation programs
that encompass broad, long-term infrastructure and lifestyle transformations for energy efficiency and conservation; not only top-down changes to energy generation technologies.
Participatory climate change mitigation research in the Philadelphia suburbs demonstrates how geographically particular metropolitan development patterns shape the
prospects for two such policies, residential energy efficiency improvement and the promotion of local food systems. The sprawling suburb investigated here, with the center
city its development has helped impoverish, challenges these mitigation options in
particular and emissions reduction in general. Deeply problematic elements include both the landscape’s ever-extending physical morphology and the socioeconomic inequalities
that this built environment – and the stakeholders who build it – help to create and maintain. Reshaping this and other suburban landscapes can not only promote long-term
climate change mitigation but also reduce vulnerability to climate change’s unavoidable impacts.
state, urban, and local levels. Even as a national mitigation agenda solidifies, researchers and political actors might strategically maintain local places and types of landscape –
center cities, older and newer suburbs, and rural areas in different United States regions – as distinct spheres for analysis and action. This local articulation permits ongoing analysis
of how place/landscape type-specific conditions structure everyday greenhouse gas emissions and the prospects for reducing them. As such, it promotes mitigation programs
that encompass broad, long-term infrastructure and lifestyle transformations for energy efficiency and conservation; not only top-down changes to energy generation technologies.
Participatory climate change mitigation research in the Philadelphia suburbs demonstrates how geographically particular metropolitan development patterns shape the
prospects for two such policies, residential energy efficiency improvement and the promotion of local food systems. The sprawling suburb investigated here, with the center
city its development has helped impoverish, challenges these mitigation options in
particular and emissions reduction in general. Deeply problematic elements include both the landscape’s ever-extending physical morphology and the socioeconomic inequalities
that this built environment – and the stakeholders who build it – help to create and maintain. Reshaping this and other suburban landscapes can not only promote long-term
climate change mitigation but also reduce vulnerability to climate change’s unavoidable impacts.
Research Interests:
While US climate change mitigation policy has stalled at the national level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this... more
While US climate change mitigation policy has stalled at the national
level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this
grassroots effort by targeting their own emissions and by working with other local
actors to develop climate change mitigation programmes. Researchers at the
Pennsylvania State University have collaborated with university administrators and
personnel to inventory campus emissions and develop mitigation strategies. In
addition, they have facilitated a stakeholder-driven climate change mitigation
project in one Pennsylvania county and started an ongoing service-learning project
aimed at reducing emissions in another county. These campus and community
outreach initiatives demonstrate that university-based mitigation action may
simultaneously achieve tangible local benefits and develop solutions to broader
challenges facing local climate change mitigation efforts. Outcomes include
improved tools and protocols for measuring and reducing local emissions, lessons
learned about service-learning approaches to climate change mitigation, and
methods for creating climate change governance networks involving universities,
local governments and community stakeholders.
level, local and regional actors are increasingly taking progressive steps to reduce
their greenhouse gas emissions. Universities are poised to play a key role in this
grassroots effort by targeting their own emissions and by working with other local
actors to develop climate change mitigation programmes. Researchers at the
Pennsylvania State University have collaborated with university administrators and
personnel to inventory campus emissions and develop mitigation strategies. In
addition, they have facilitated a stakeholder-driven climate change mitigation
project in one Pennsylvania county and started an ongoing service-learning project
aimed at reducing emissions in another county. These campus and community
outreach initiatives demonstrate that university-based mitigation action may
simultaneously achieve tangible local benefits and develop solutions to broader
challenges facing local climate change mitigation efforts. Outcomes include
improved tools and protocols for measuring and reducing local emissions, lessons
learned about service-learning approaches to climate change mitigation, and
methods for creating climate change governance networks involving universities,
local governments and community stakeholders.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan Brett Christophers' new book makes an original and important intervention into questions of enduring significance for historical geographers and geographical political economists. How has a chronically... more
Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan Brett Christophers' new book makes an original and important intervention into questions of enduring significance for historical geographers and geographical political economists. How has a chronically crisis-‐prone capitalist system survived over the long term? What social and political forces have intervened to stabilize it in particular times and places, and how should scholars periodize and prioritize these reorganizations? What particular strains and perceived drivers, precisely, have successive interventions targeted? How have stabilizations in one conjuncture produced destabilizations elsewhere and down the road? Framing The Great Leveler's significance to geographical scholarship in terms of these often thorny theoretical and empirical questions is apt: one of the book's signal contributions is to reignite inquiries that have somewhat lapsed in geography with the cooling of debates over regulation theory. Christophers suggests that the Regulation School and other Marxian theorists have neglected a central dialectic in Marx's own thought: how the unfolding of processes of capitalist competition produces market monopoly/ies over time, and how monopoly conditions themselves then endanger ongoing accumulation, a recurring tendency rather than a one-‐time historical shift (here he particularly rejects Baran and Sweezy's model in Monopoly Capital (1966)). Furthermore, Christophers argues that Marxists' elevation of production within the expanded reproduction of capital/ism has led them to abandon the moment of exchange to neoclassical economics – a significant omission given that political interventions on competition and monopoly have most explicitly targeted market powers, prohibitions, and organizational structures. The Great Leveler suggests that the historical geography of capitalist regulation has veered between extremes. In one period and place, it responds to excessive competition system-‐wide and its threat to profitability by tolerating or actively supporting monopoly formation. Later, it course-‐corrects to break up monopolies, combat their neo-‐rentier drag on the system, and recharge growth. Still later, it veers back toward monopoly protections in response to reemerging crises of profitability, and so forth. Significantly, Christophers highlights an important 'leveling' mechanism for these recalibrations underexplored by both the Regulation School and Harvey's theory of the spatial/spatio-‐temporal fix: economic law, and its major interpretive shifts and organizational restructurings over time. The book proposes a long-‐term dialectic between successive moves to codify and strengthen intellectual property law – a major route to monopoly power – and opposing efforts to establish and enforce antitrust provisions, a century-‐plus long conflict in the United States and United Kingdom. Like similar work in regulation theory and Marxian economic history, The Great Leveler lays out an argument that joins a relatively abstract theoretical intervention (Part I of the book) to a historical survey (Part II), in this case a wide-‐ranging review of primary and secondary sources on US and UK economic and legal history from the late 19 th century to present. Economic and historical geographers may usefully draw on the book for its intriguing, deliberately open-‐ended theoretical provocations and its comprehensive introduction to empirical material still novel for the discipline, despite promising new work in relational and comparative legal geography. At the same time, the book's argument...
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A major question in understanding emerging geographies of property transformation is what discourses are impelling capital into new spaces and places: if powerful economic players are framing urban and rural land globally as part of a... more
A major question in understanding emerging geographies of property transformation is what discourses are impelling capital into new spaces and places: if powerful economic players are framing urban and rural land globally as part of a common landscape of accumulation, how are they narrating this commensuration? The spread of investment vehicles such as asset-‐backed securities and real estate investment trusts (REITs) is heightening institutional investors' ability to invest in real property, in various forms: urban real estate, infrastructure, and rural land. Financialization is facilitating new forms of land ownership, large-‐scale property transfers, and more rapid speculative flows. These transformations stand to reshape landscapes and livelihoods worldwide, from small farmers in the global South to renters in rapidly gentrifying cities in the North. Critical scholarship must dig deeper into why institutional investors, in the United States and beyond, are pushing into these new frontiers. I highlight a significant defensive element cropping up in the financial industry's crisis-‐era narratives, circulating among investors, economists, and US and international regulators: questions about what investments might be safe in a time of economic volatility. Emerging storylines, and reform measures such as Dodd-‐Frank and Basel III, look variously to safe assets – sometimes defined as real property, sometimes as anything but real property – to protect individual life chances, stabilize " too big to fail " financial institutions, and secure the future of the international financial system. I argue that this often-‐paradoxical search for safe assets is a powerful force in contemporary property transformations. The years since the 2008 collapse have been a peculiar time for observers of US cities: a crisis initially triggered by failed financial experiments in US real estate has produced a fresh wave of real property speculation globally, one which is rapidly exporting US urban financial instruments to a startlingly diverse set of landscapes. Banks and fund managers in twenty-‐six countries and counting across six continents are now using US-‐style real estate investment trusts (REITs) or REIT-‐like vehicles to speculate in urban real estate; more radical financial innovators are engineering REITs around farmland and timberland in the United States and beyond; ambitious solar infrastructure developers have tried their hand at asset-‐backed securitization (ABSs) and even more exotic financial vehicles like yieldcos 1 in their US, European, North and South American, and Asian expansions. Explaining this global phenomenon and apparent paradox is imperative: the lives of billions of people, from country and city, Global North and South, stand to be affected by its transformations in the meanings and treatment of property. Moreover, this new financialization offers an important lens into how formidable but brittle financial institutions in an era of " too big to fail, " and their neoliberal regulators, are attempting to reassert their power in an increasingly unruly world. In this chapter, I suggest that these diverse geographies and forms of real property financialization, in real estate, infrastructure, and rural resource-‐producing land, are being driven by common storylines and institutional imperatives at the center, even as contingent politics and cultural meanings shape a variety of experiences on the ground. It is tempting to read today's financial experiments as simply capitalism's latest move to transgress traditional boundaries in search of gain. The financial sector's own narratives often advance this sense of an aggressive but successful and creative capitalism, e.g. via Hernando de Soto-‐style " yield gap " arguments about markets' power to unlock nascent value in the world (e.g. Christophers 2010; White et al. 2012, Li 2014). In contrast, I argue here that defensive understandings are powerfully shaping the new property boom. Major financial institutions in the United States and beyond, and system regulators such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), US Federal Reserve, and Bank of International Settlements (BIS) have been rocked by repeated shocks since 2008, made no less serious by their ability to displace this pain onto the less powerful. In response, they have promulgated influential
Research Interests: Real Estate, Political Economy, Property, REITS, Biopolitics, and 13 moreFinancialization, Legal Geography, Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, Institutional Investors, Economic Crisis, Land Grabbing, Land Use-Land Transformation, Mortgages, Subprime crisis, Capital flight, Financial Geography, and Geographical Political Economy
In an era of global ecological destabilization, cities are being framed as the solution to a host of problems engendered by capitalism. Transnational networks such as C40 Cities, multilateral institutions, and major investors suggest that... more
In an era of global ecological destabilization, cities are being framed as the solution to a host of problems engendered by capitalism. Transnational networks such as C40 Cities, multilateral institutions, and major investors suggest that a new age of green city-building and redevelopment can at once dramatically alter energy and emissions trajectories and create defensible spaces to weather a more turbulent world. Expressed variously in cities globally, from eco-city construction to " green " slum removal to climate retrofitting, densification, and resilience initiatives, these imagined solutions propagate a common fallacy: that getting urban form " right " can resolve profound problems of capitalist accumulation (e.g. Hodson and Marvin 2010). These technocratic and entrepreneurial visions are increasingly coming under progressive and radical critique, even as renewed intractability in international climate and environmental negotiations (once again) forces urban action to the fore. However, the problem of capital accumulation in these initiatives has been insufficiently interrogated: the role of extraction, appropriation, and domination in both unevenly enabling these emerging forms of defensive urbanism, and as reproduced in new ways through their realizations. In this session, we seek to address this lacuna in several ways, alternatively moving beyond and doubling down on green urbanism's " methodological cityism " (Angelo and Wachsmuth 2015). First, we seek papers that explore alternatives to the bounded urban visions promoted by common urban emissions inventory methods and design proposals, theoretical interventions and counter-mapping strategies such as critical footprinting and global institutional ethnography capable of drawing out cities' global linkages (e.g., Cohen 2016). We welcome papers that unpack definitional questions emerging around the concept of " urbanization " in contemporary planetary urbanization debates, most particularly as it articulates with and diverges from notions of surplus accumulation, and cities as creatures of surplus produced and appropriated (Brenner
Research Interests:
Constructing the economic and social infrastructure of a clean energy transition is an expensive proposition – and a necessary one to avert profound climatic destabilization in the 21 st century. Its new forms of fixed capital, whether... more
Constructing the economic and social infrastructure of a clean energy transition is an expensive proposition – and a necessary one to avert profound climatic destabilization in the 21 st century. Its new forms of fixed capital, whether produced in retrofitting programs to conserve energy in existing buildings – most recently, a central focus of California's ambitious energy/climate commitments under 3B 350 – in distributed energy initiatives (e.g., for rooftop solar), or in the development of utility-scale renewable energy projects and their grids, present distinct material and political economic challenges. For example, retrofit programs require public and private actors to spend money upfront to see longer-term energy and emissions cost savings, while stretching often limited funds to cover as many properties as possible. US renewable energy developers contend with a market dependent on the vagaries of state renewable energy polities, federal tax credits, and the tax shelter needs of large financial institutions. However, financial institutions and entrepreneurs are increasingly reframing these obstacles as a problem that experimental financing can solve. Moreover, they propose it as a major opportunity for the financial sector itself: a massive untapped market for pension funds and other institutional investors scrambling for returns amid ongoing financial turbulence since 2008. This paper examines a notion increasingly uniting new "green" financial experimentation in the US context: asset-backed securitization, a pathway to mass-market standardization and major capital markets badly tarnished by the subprime crisis. Undaunted, proponents are now selling reworked asset-based securitization models as the future of many different forms of clean energy infrastructure.
Research Interests:
Today's interconnected energy crises-worsening climate change; battles between fossil interests and challengers in a volatile global economy; economic decline, austerity, and new energy poverty; and deeply unequal global access to the... more
Today's interconnected energy crises-worsening climate change; battles between fossil interests and challengers in a volatile global economy; economic decline, austerity, and new energy poverty; and deeply unequal global access to the benefits of reliable and clean energy supply-command political and scholarly attention. In this period of instability and transformation, energy infrastructures in particular have become increasingly powerful objects as loci of emerging technological revolutions and industry restructurings, major targets and stakes in geopolitical conflicts, and symbols of alternate futures. We argue that energy geographers are well positioned to analyze and critique these emerging energy challenges, and to help cultivate desirable energy futures. Geographic approaches offer unique insights into the spaces and politics of infrastructure (re)production, from the political ecologies of violent extraction and urban metabolism to political economic treatments of urban-regional infrastructure privatization and industrial change, socio-technical work on low-carbon transitions, and cultural and geo-humanities engagements with infrastructural materialities and meanings. This paper session aims to generate discussions about the future of critical energy geographies. Accordingly, we seek papers that engage with energy infrastructures from various perspectives and that are capable of provoking intellectually and politically creative conversations across areas of geographical inquiry. We seek to take up the challenge of understanding energy as a " physical medium through which to tilt the balance of power and exert social control, " (Calvert 2015), to emphasize the ethical implications of uneven energy infrastructure development (Huber 2015), and, taking the advice of anthropologists, to reflect upon what the role of energy, as a concept itself, does to our study of geography (Boyer 2014). We invite contributions that both engage in critique and/or move beyond it to envision and make possible productive, just, and " abundant futures " (Collard et al 2015).
Research Interests:
Session Description: The production, perception, and representation of urban space and property relations have been urgent "technological" questions since before the birth of geography as a discipline. From the punctuated modernization of... more
Session Description: The production, perception, and representation of urban space and property relations have been urgent "technological" questions since before the birth of geography as a discipline. From the punctuated modernization of buildings and infrastructure to successive revolutions in the mapping of cities and neighborhoods, both from above and below, cities have been (re)shaped by an ever-advancing technological frontier. Real estate has been at the forefront of this technological deployment and upheaval throughout the modern era. Almost a century ago, the real estate profession's foundational quest to rationalize property markets and financing radically reshaped buildings and neighborhood plans, rewrote property law, codified appraisal practice-and, for decades after, crystallized spatial patterns of injustice through processes of state-sponsored urban "renewal," highway construction, and sanctioned exclusion of mortgage financing differentiated by race, class, and location. Today, real estate in global cities, both established and emerging/aspirational, is experiencing yet another major technical and technological boom, as transnational barriers to accumulation and speculation fall and capital (re)discovers urban cores across the Global North. New advanced materials and construction techniques, digital mapping, and frontier forms of property appraisal, marketing, financialization, and exclusion complicate and obfuscate our understandings of real estate as a social, cultural and political economic relation. Futurist visions of smart, digital and green cities collide with new technologically mediated displacements and resistance struggles. In this session, we argue that critical geographers are poised to offer unique insights into these urban technology politics, past and present. Organizing questions ask how technologies developed and used for real estate: 1) reorder existing exchange practices, spaces, and relationships; 2) capture or create accumulation frontiers; and 3) render property technical, quantifiable, and governable. The session aims to bring together scholars broadly interested in urban geography, critical political economy, and technology studies (whether of STS, Critical GIS/quant, or other stripes). We seek papers which address discursive and/or material relationships between technology, broadly defined, and real estate in its many forms. We welcome papers from a variety of urban contexts and real property regimes.
Research Interests:
DOPE 2016 CFP: In Value’s Shadows: Degradation as Accumulation Frontier Dimensions of Political Ecology annual meeting, February 26-27, 2016, Lexington, KY Organizers: Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan and Jenny Goldstein, Cornell... more
DOPE 2016 CFP: In Value’s Shadows: Degradation as Accumulation Frontier
Dimensions of Political Ecology annual meeting, February 26-27, 2016, Lexington, KY
Organizers: Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan and Jenny Goldstein, Cornell University
The notion of socio-environmental “degradation” has concerned political ecology since its founding. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), influentially investigating the structural causes of land degradation, presented the process as a relatively straightforward (anthropocentric) calculus of loss: socionatural changes that reduce the productivity and value of an environment for human uses. However, capital’s own encounters with degradation and devaluation are increasingly anything but straightforward. With the help of environmental economics, new markets are reframing waste, environmental loss, and devalued spaces as economic opportunities. Their unconventional “resources” include ecosystem services and tradable pollution credits, key topics of political ecological inquiry. However, capital’s schemes for converting degradation to accumulation potential do not stop in rural peripheries: they treat urban and industrial processes and spaces as equally important new resource frontiers.
This session aims to strengthen political ecology’s analytical purchase on the changing treatment of degradation in several key ways. First, we seek papers that engage different spheres in which this reframing is occurring. Discussing these functionally and geographically differentiated processes and spaces together can help us recognize common – or strategically distinct – discourses, actors, drivers, instruments, institutions, and other meaningful linkages. For example, we invite papers that might theoretically or empirically consider, but are certainly not limited to:
● Rethinking waste, garbage, industrial byproducts, and pollution as resource (e.g., Gidwani and Reddy 2011, Moore 2012, Labban 2014, Romero 2016),
● Commodifying ecosystem restoration/rehabilitation (e.g., Lave et al. 2010),
● Revaluing waste land/degraded land (Baka 2013, Goldstein 2014),
● Making energy (in)efficiency in urban built environments a financialized resource (Knuth 2016), or
● Reframing climate change risks as financial assets (e.g., Johnson 2014, Knudson 2015).
Second, this session aims to help advance political ecological discussion of degradation, devaluation, and their transformations. Important recent calls to more deeply theorize value/valuation within political ecology (Robertson and Wainwright 2014, Kay and Kenney-Lazar forthcoming) should be accompanied by related but distinct engagement with devaluation. We contend that devaluation is not only an alternative way of framing new valuations and extensive enclosures of nature. Degradation-related markets may facilitate capital’s expansion into new “first natures,” but they simultaneously entrain urban-industrial processes and biophysical environments already reworked by capitalism (Smith 2008). Engaging devaluation helps us analyze this differentiation in capitalist strategies: do devaluations and revaluations (more or less direct and strategic) meaningfully differ from new valuations? How and for what kinds of actors? How can they help us better understand “green” capitalism as a project, one that draws on industrial ecology and ecological modernization theory to (in theory) promise transformative eco-efficiencies and economic sectors as well as speculative bubbles and accumulation by dispossession?
Finally, by engaging theories and practices of devaluation, we also seek contributions that consider political ecology’s deepening engagement with geographical political economy (McCarthy 2012, Knuth 2016). For example, the latter has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for analyzing how finance capital strategically abandons and revalues urban geographies (e.g., Weber 2002). In so doing, the session aims to continue and extend the work that urban and First World political ecology have done to help political ecology engage new realms. Political ecology is compelled both analytically and politically to survey capital’s new accumulation frontiers – especially as problems like climate change and projects like the so-called green economy render diverse reframings and geographies of socio-environmental degradation ever more entangled.
Please send abstracts to Sarah Knuth (sknuth@umich.edu) and Jenny Goldstein (jeg347@cornell.edu) by November 15th. To facilitate deeper conversation, we will ask for full papers in advance of the conference. Depending on participant interest, we are excited to consider potential publication venues for these papers.
References
Baka, J. 2013. The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India. Development and Change 44:409–428.
Blaikie, P., and H. Brookfield. 1987. Land Degradation and Society. New York: Meuthen & Co.
Gidwani, V., and R. N. Reddy. 2011. The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode 43.5:1625–1658.
Goldstein, J. E. 2014. The Afterlives of Degraded Tropical Forests: New Value for Conservation and Development. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5 (1):124–140.
Johnson, L. 2014. Geographies of Securitized Catastrophe Risk and the Implications of Climate Change. Economic Geography 90.2:155-185.
Kay, K. and Kenney-Lazar, M. Forthcoming. Special Issue: The Value of Capitalist Natures, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Knudson, C. 2015. Commodification by Other Means: Mitigating and Adapting to Risk through Financialization. Paper, 2015 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Knuth, S. 2016. Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier Antipode 48.3. Forthcoming.
Labban, M. 2014. Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.3:560-576.
Lave, R., M. Doyle, and M. Robertson. 2010. Privatizing Stream Restoration in the US. Social Studies of Science 40.5:677-703.
McCarthy, J. 2012. Political Ecology/Economy. Chapter 39, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard, Eds., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell:612-625.
Moore, S. A. 2012. Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste. Progress in Human Geography 36.6:780–799.
Robertson, M. M., and J. D. Wainwright. 2013. The Value of Nature to the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103.4:890–905.
Romero, A. 2016. “From Oil Well to Farm”: Industrial Waste, Shell Oil, and the Petrochemical Turn (1927-1947). Agricultural History 90.1. Forthcoming.
Smith N (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd Edition. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press
Weber, R. 2002. Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment. Antipode 34.3:519-540.
Dimensions of Political Ecology annual meeting, February 26-27, 2016, Lexington, KY
Organizers: Sarah Knuth, University of Michigan and Jenny Goldstein, Cornell University
The notion of socio-environmental “degradation” has concerned political ecology since its founding. Blaikie and Brookfield (1987), influentially investigating the structural causes of land degradation, presented the process as a relatively straightforward (anthropocentric) calculus of loss: socionatural changes that reduce the productivity and value of an environment for human uses. However, capital’s own encounters with degradation and devaluation are increasingly anything but straightforward. With the help of environmental economics, new markets are reframing waste, environmental loss, and devalued spaces as economic opportunities. Their unconventional “resources” include ecosystem services and tradable pollution credits, key topics of political ecological inquiry. However, capital’s schemes for converting degradation to accumulation potential do not stop in rural peripheries: they treat urban and industrial processes and spaces as equally important new resource frontiers.
This session aims to strengthen political ecology’s analytical purchase on the changing treatment of degradation in several key ways. First, we seek papers that engage different spheres in which this reframing is occurring. Discussing these functionally and geographically differentiated processes and spaces together can help us recognize common – or strategically distinct – discourses, actors, drivers, instruments, institutions, and other meaningful linkages. For example, we invite papers that might theoretically or empirically consider, but are certainly not limited to:
● Rethinking waste, garbage, industrial byproducts, and pollution as resource (e.g., Gidwani and Reddy 2011, Moore 2012, Labban 2014, Romero 2016),
● Commodifying ecosystem restoration/rehabilitation (e.g., Lave et al. 2010),
● Revaluing waste land/degraded land (Baka 2013, Goldstein 2014),
● Making energy (in)efficiency in urban built environments a financialized resource (Knuth 2016), or
● Reframing climate change risks as financial assets (e.g., Johnson 2014, Knudson 2015).
Second, this session aims to help advance political ecological discussion of degradation, devaluation, and their transformations. Important recent calls to more deeply theorize value/valuation within political ecology (Robertson and Wainwright 2014, Kay and Kenney-Lazar forthcoming) should be accompanied by related but distinct engagement with devaluation. We contend that devaluation is not only an alternative way of framing new valuations and extensive enclosures of nature. Degradation-related markets may facilitate capital’s expansion into new “first natures,” but they simultaneously entrain urban-industrial processes and biophysical environments already reworked by capitalism (Smith 2008). Engaging devaluation helps us analyze this differentiation in capitalist strategies: do devaluations and revaluations (more or less direct and strategic) meaningfully differ from new valuations? How and for what kinds of actors? How can they help us better understand “green” capitalism as a project, one that draws on industrial ecology and ecological modernization theory to (in theory) promise transformative eco-efficiencies and economic sectors as well as speculative bubbles and accumulation by dispossession?
Finally, by engaging theories and practices of devaluation, we also seek contributions that consider political ecology’s deepening engagement with geographical political economy (McCarthy 2012, Knuth 2016). For example, the latter has developed increasingly sophisticated tools for analyzing how finance capital strategically abandons and revalues urban geographies (e.g., Weber 2002). In so doing, the session aims to continue and extend the work that urban and First World political ecology have done to help political ecology engage new realms. Political ecology is compelled both analytically and politically to survey capital’s new accumulation frontiers – especially as problems like climate change and projects like the so-called green economy render diverse reframings and geographies of socio-environmental degradation ever more entangled.
Please send abstracts to Sarah Knuth (sknuth@umich.edu) and Jenny Goldstein (jeg347@cornell.edu) by November 15th. To facilitate deeper conversation, we will ask for full papers in advance of the conference. Depending on participant interest, we are excited to consider potential publication venues for these papers.
References
Baka, J. 2013. The Political Construction of Wasteland: Governmentality, Land Acquisition and Social Inequality in South India. Development and Change 44:409–428.
Blaikie, P., and H. Brookfield. 1987. Land Degradation and Society. New York: Meuthen & Co.
Gidwani, V., and R. N. Reddy. 2011. The Afterlives of “Waste”: Notes from India for a Minor History of Capitalist Surplus. Antipode 43.5:1625–1658.
Goldstein, J. E. 2014. The Afterlives of Degraded Tropical Forests: New Value for Conservation and Development. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 5 (1):124–140.
Johnson, L. 2014. Geographies of Securitized Catastrophe Risk and the Implications of Climate Change. Economic Geography 90.2:155-185.
Kay, K. and Kenney-Lazar, M. Forthcoming. Special Issue: The Value of Capitalist Natures, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism.
Knudson, C. 2015. Commodification by Other Means: Mitigating and Adapting to Risk through Financialization. Paper, 2015 Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.
Knuth, S. 2016. Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier Antipode 48.3. Forthcoming.
Labban, M. 2014. Deterritorializing Extraction: Bioaccumulation and the Planetary Mine. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104.3:560-576.
Lave, R., M. Doyle, and M. Robertson. 2010. Privatizing Stream Restoration in the US. Social Studies of Science 40.5:677-703.
McCarthy, J. 2012. Political Ecology/Economy. Chapter 39, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography, Trevor J. Barnes, Jamie Peck, and Eric Sheppard, Eds., Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell:612-625.
Moore, S. A. 2012. Garbage Matters: Concepts in New Geographies of Waste. Progress in Human Geography 36.6:780–799.
Robertson, M. M., and J. D. Wainwright. 2013. The Value of Nature to the State. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 103.4:890–905.
Romero, A. 2016. “From Oil Well to Farm”: Industrial Waste, Shell Oil, and the Petrochemical Turn (1927-1947). Agricultural History 90.1. Forthcoming.
Smith N (2008) Uneven Development: Nature, Capital, and the Production of Space, 3rd Edition. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press
Weber, R. 2002. Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment. Antipode 34.3:519-540.
Research Interests:
More fully understanding how new "green" value and markets operate in urban spaces requires engaging the tools of both urban political ecology and urban political economy. In spaces where enabling new accumulation often means clearing... more
More fully understanding how new "green" value and markets operate in urban spaces requires engaging the tools of both urban political ecology and urban political economy. In spaces where enabling new accumulation often means clearing away or radically repurposing existing landscapes, capital has evolved sophisticated tools for detaching the economic value of buildings and infrastructures – and what happens to that value over time – from their useful material lifespan. The value of urban built environments is thus a complex amalgam of biophysical materialities and processes, social influences on those processes, and changing representations of those forces and their results. Urban metabolic processes such as physical and chemical weathering produce material deterioration in buildings over time: windows leak, building seals loosen, water heaters rust. All affect the work these spaces do as human environments, including the flows of energy required to operate and maintain them. Buildings' entropic breakdowns are represented in tax depreciation schedules as part of their " natural " lifespans. However, this discursive naturalization and the tools that encode it obscure materialities that are profoundly socionatural: building lifetimes vary widely depending on the initial quality of construction and interventions made over time – or neglected. Critical geographers have shown that economic representations nevertheless have material results: foreshortened formal lifetimes for buildings and fixed capital embedded within them prefigure and facilitate foreshortened lifetimes in practice. In the contemporary moment, green ventures such as large-‐scale energy efficiency retrofitting and financing schemes are speculating on further revaluations of deteriorated structures and their internal environments, surveying these socionatures as sites for generating unconventional " resources " like valuable streams of energy savings. Both the possibilities and unruly materialities facing these reframings demand critical exploration.
Research Interests:
Toward an Expanded Theory of (De)Valuation Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation and an ever-expanding vista of enclosed value. Its threat compels capital ever forward, to constant... more
Toward an Expanded Theory of (De)Valuation
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation and an ever-expanding vista of enclosed value. Its threat compels capital ever forward, to constant overturning of existing techniques, fields, and geographies of production. And it drives bitter struggles within capital itself, as different actors, factions, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere.” In this session, we invite papers that take on processes of devaluation emerging in the current moment: whether as a threat to capital or a tool for capital.
Radically new sources and forms of devaluation now threaten capital’s ability to reproduce itself. Novel threats range from abrupt environmental change and material risks and instabilities that overwhelm attempts to “bring them in” as engines for accumulation, to the destabilization effected by ever more frequent and generalized financial crises, to, ultimately, new forms of political volatility and systemic challenge. Simultaneously, capital’s response to these threats is conditioned by internal tensions such as, for instance, a heightened competition for “safe” assets among pension funds and other massive institutional investors.
At the same time, financiers and other actors are developing ever-more-sophisticated ways to turn devaluation into a tool and weapon, against states, against workers and against each other. Far beyond the blunt destructions of value effected through war, capital is expanding its fine-grained tools for effecting and making strategic use of devaluation, in many forms and fields: speculative accumulation by dispossession, competitive devaluation, manufactured obsolescence, distressed asset trading, geographical clearances and displacements. Most often, these strategies are about devaluation for some actors in the present, in order to secure higher values for different actors in the future. They are the dark side to every scheme that sells new sources of enclosed value, new forms and geographies of private property.
These contradictory transformations not only vary by kind, but by geographical and regulatory context, and have recently engaged many geographers. Related work on value, property, and materiality has fueled work that bridges traditional divisions between rural and urban geographers; scholars and activists working in the Global South and Global North; and political ecologists and geographical political economists – particularly financial geographers (e.g., Ghertner and Lake 2015, Kay and Kenney-Lazar, Forthcoming). We aim to build on these important developing conversations.
We particularly invite papers that develop precise engagements with new forms of devaluation, consider connections between these forms and more established strategies, and/or consider these processes’ broader grounding in value theory. Relevant examples include strategic real estate depreciation and “obsolescence” to facilitate gentrification and urban redevelopment (e.g., Smith 1984, Weber 2002); speculative manipulations of official fixed capital depreciation rates (Hanchett 1996); transformations of property deterioration into an asset for “green” retrofit markets (Knuth, Forthcoming) and catastrophic risk of fixed capital devaluation under climate change into a financial asset (Johnson 2014); and distressed debt trading to profit off sovereign defaults in Argentina, Greece or Puerto Rico. Papers might take up topics including, but not limited to:
- New, and newly-evident, kinds of devaluation threats: financial volatility, political challenge, environmental risks, intransigent materialities, new kinds of technology-induced obsolescence and “moral depreciation,” and so on.
- Tools and methods for strategic devaluation, new and old: “shorting” stock, tools for betting against financial bubbles, “creditworthiness” manipulations, manufactured obsolescence, accelerated depreciation within tax codes, blight designations, land value write-downs, etc.
Devaluation is the shadow haunting every capitalist fantasy of endless accumulation and an ever-expanding vista of enclosed value. Its threat compels capital ever forward, to constant overturning of existing techniques, fields, and geographies of production. And it drives bitter struggles within capital itself, as different actors, factions, and places strive to deflect the ravages of devaluation “elsewhere.” In this session, we invite papers that take on processes of devaluation emerging in the current moment: whether as a threat to capital or a tool for capital.
Radically new sources and forms of devaluation now threaten capital’s ability to reproduce itself. Novel threats range from abrupt environmental change and material risks and instabilities that overwhelm attempts to “bring them in” as engines for accumulation, to the destabilization effected by ever more frequent and generalized financial crises, to, ultimately, new forms of political volatility and systemic challenge. Simultaneously, capital’s response to these threats is conditioned by internal tensions such as, for instance, a heightened competition for “safe” assets among pension funds and other massive institutional investors.
At the same time, financiers and other actors are developing ever-more-sophisticated ways to turn devaluation into a tool and weapon, against states, against workers and against each other. Far beyond the blunt destructions of value effected through war, capital is expanding its fine-grained tools for effecting and making strategic use of devaluation, in many forms and fields: speculative accumulation by dispossession, competitive devaluation, manufactured obsolescence, distressed asset trading, geographical clearances and displacements. Most often, these strategies are about devaluation for some actors in the present, in order to secure higher values for different actors in the future. They are the dark side to every scheme that sells new sources of enclosed value, new forms and geographies of private property.
These contradictory transformations not only vary by kind, but by geographical and regulatory context, and have recently engaged many geographers. Related work on value, property, and materiality has fueled work that bridges traditional divisions between rural and urban geographers; scholars and activists working in the Global South and Global North; and political ecologists and geographical political economists – particularly financial geographers (e.g., Ghertner and Lake 2015, Kay and Kenney-Lazar, Forthcoming). We aim to build on these important developing conversations.
We particularly invite papers that develop precise engagements with new forms of devaluation, consider connections between these forms and more established strategies, and/or consider these processes’ broader grounding in value theory. Relevant examples include strategic real estate depreciation and “obsolescence” to facilitate gentrification and urban redevelopment (e.g., Smith 1984, Weber 2002); speculative manipulations of official fixed capital depreciation rates (Hanchett 1996); transformations of property deterioration into an asset for “green” retrofit markets (Knuth, Forthcoming) and catastrophic risk of fixed capital devaluation under climate change into a financial asset (Johnson 2014); and distressed debt trading to profit off sovereign defaults in Argentina, Greece or Puerto Rico. Papers might take up topics including, but not limited to:
- New, and newly-evident, kinds of devaluation threats: financial volatility, political challenge, environmental risks, intransigent materialities, new kinds of technology-induced obsolescence and “moral depreciation,” and so on.
- Tools and methods for strategic devaluation, new and old: “shorting” stock, tools for betting against financial bubbles, “creditworthiness” manipulations, manufactured obsolescence, accelerated depreciation within tax codes, blight designations, land value write-downs, etc.
Research Interests:
Laws and legal practices are fundamental to finance. The contract, and its state-backed enforceability, is at the center of every financial transaction, and financial (de)regulation sets the rules for the entire market. Since the 1970s,... more
Laws and legal practices are fundamental to finance. The contract, and its state-backed enforceability, is at the center of every financial transaction, and financial (de)regulation sets the rules for the entire market. Since the 1970s, economic law courses have become increasingly central to every lawyer’s training, and financial firms have hired larger and larger legal teams to negotiate and litigate their economic deals. During the same period, “financialization” and “neoliberalization,” culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, have brought the topics of finance and regulation to the forefront of popular and academic debates.
This session is inspired by two related assumptions. The first is that the law-finance relationship is central to the production of financial geographies. Not only do state and federal regulations define the borders of market spaces, but financial players have also long exploited this geographic differentiation in their accumulation strategies. Territorially defined spaces like offshore zones have been central to the rising power of financial institutions since the 1970s, and these same institutions continue to use their influence over states to produce other kinds of supportive jurisdictional spaces. We argue that this legal-financial power is central to the expansion of many important financial frontiers today, including but not limited to: speculation in environmental regulatory commodities like traded carbon, contemporary rural land grabs, the production of new sovereign and sub-national government debt markets, and innovation in other emerging classes of securities. Legal-financial power also continues to structure the uneven geography of the global financial system, for example bolstering the influence of financial centers like New York over other territorial configurations. These processes demand more theoretical and empirical investigation.
The second assumption driving this call is that a deeper understanding of the law-finance relationship is necessary if we are to understand the role of the state and politics in enabling and shaping financial flows. Geographers of law and geographers of finance have each worked to expose the power relations behind the supposed neutrality of, respectively, legal and financial spaces. Articulations among law, finance, geography and the state shape financial geographies at multiple scales, from the municipal to the federal to the transnational, making the power of the financial class inseparable from political struggles at all levels. These interrelationships provoke many questions. For example, which legal, financial and political actors are engaged in the production of specific financial geographies? When do legal-financial players attempt to design spaces for maximum closure or coherence, and conversely, when do they aim for selective permeability of these spaces? When do these strategies overlap or conflict?
This session invites papers exploring any of these financial-legal spaces, emerging frontiers, or pressing questions; or considering other articulations among law, finance and geography. Relevant focus areas may range in scale from the micro-ethnographies of legal-financial practice, through state and federal regulatory spaces, to the geopolitical engineering of transnational jurisdictional boundaries. We also seek panelists and discussants for a potential accompanying panel session on these questions.
This session is inspired by two related assumptions. The first is that the law-finance relationship is central to the production of financial geographies. Not only do state and federal regulations define the borders of market spaces, but financial players have also long exploited this geographic differentiation in their accumulation strategies. Territorially defined spaces like offshore zones have been central to the rising power of financial institutions since the 1970s, and these same institutions continue to use their influence over states to produce other kinds of supportive jurisdictional spaces. We argue that this legal-financial power is central to the expansion of many important financial frontiers today, including but not limited to: speculation in environmental regulatory commodities like traded carbon, contemporary rural land grabs, the production of new sovereign and sub-national government debt markets, and innovation in other emerging classes of securities. Legal-financial power also continues to structure the uneven geography of the global financial system, for example bolstering the influence of financial centers like New York over other territorial configurations. These processes demand more theoretical and empirical investigation.
The second assumption driving this call is that a deeper understanding of the law-finance relationship is necessary if we are to understand the role of the state and politics in enabling and shaping financial flows. Geographers of law and geographers of finance have each worked to expose the power relations behind the supposed neutrality of, respectively, legal and financial spaces. Articulations among law, finance, geography and the state shape financial geographies at multiple scales, from the municipal to the federal to the transnational, making the power of the financial class inseparable from political struggles at all levels. These interrelationships provoke many questions. For example, which legal, financial and political actors are engaged in the production of specific financial geographies? When do legal-financial players attempt to design spaces for maximum closure or coherence, and conversely, when do they aim for selective permeability of these spaces? When do these strategies overlap or conflict?
This session invites papers exploring any of these financial-legal spaces, emerging frontiers, or pressing questions; or considering other articulations among law, finance and geography. Relevant focus areas may range in scale from the micro-ethnographies of legal-financial practice, through state and federal regulatory spaces, to the geopolitical engineering of transnational jurisdictional boundaries. We also seek panelists and discussants for a potential accompanying panel session on these questions.
Research Interests:
As the ongoing crisis forces the United States to accept further erosion of its global political economic power, we seem to be living through Arrighi’s predicted terminal crisis of US hegemony (Arrighi, 2010). However, many question... more
As the ongoing crisis forces the United States to accept further erosion of its global political economic power, we seem to be living through Arrighi’s predicted terminal crisis of US hegemony (Arrighi, 2010). However, many question whether global capital can muster the revolutionary changes to its productive forces needed to support a corresponding new wave of accumulation, particularly as climate change, peak oil, the lack of a third agrarian revolution, generalized waste, and other evidences of declining ecological surplus loom as a longer-in-the-making threat to capitalism’s continued reproduction (e.g., Balakrishnan, 2009; Moore, 2010). States and finance capital have seized upon the green economy as insurance for the long-term future of capitalism and an explosion of new green products as a driver of a new material expansion. Paradoxically, these commodities—units of decarbonization, traded energy efficiency credits, and nitrogen reduced via ecosystem services, among others—derive use value not from materiality but its converse: dematerialization, decarbonization, and reductions in energy and pollution intensity.
This session seeks papers that survey the green economy’s many new forms of commodification and the rapidly expanding primary and secondary markets on which these commodities are traded. The session also aims to question how these evolving technological and financial products force geographers to employ and to reexamine traditional Marxian concepts including value, the real economy, productive and unproductive labor, formal and real subsumption, and the spatial fix. How can we distinguish productive growth from speculative bubbles in commodities whose use value depends entirely upon fluctuating and uncertain regulatory policies, and for which accurate tests of value have not been devised? How and to what extent are booming financial markets translating into on-the-ground investment and developing spaces of the green economy, and what long-term future can we forecast for these places? Does this new wave of commodification mark the beginning of a new phase of material expansion through which ecological surplus is decoupled from capital accumulation, or merely the fitful dying struggles of the latest, and perhaps the last, cycle?
This session seeks papers that survey the green economy’s many new forms of commodification and the rapidly expanding primary and secondary markets on which these commodities are traded. The session also aims to question how these evolving technological and financial products force geographers to employ and to reexamine traditional Marxian concepts including value, the real economy, productive and unproductive labor, formal and real subsumption, and the spatial fix. How can we distinguish productive growth from speculative bubbles in commodities whose use value depends entirely upon fluctuating and uncertain regulatory policies, and for which accurate tests of value have not been devised? How and to what extent are booming financial markets translating into on-the-ground investment and developing spaces of the green economy, and what long-term future can we forecast for these places? Does this new wave of commodification mark the beginning of a new phase of material expansion through which ecological surplus is decoupled from capital accumulation, or merely the fitful dying struggles of the latest, and perhaps the last, cycle?
Research Interests:
As the twenty-first century begins, climate change has become an urban problem. Global urban networks and institutions such as the World Bank point to cities’ energy demand and major greenhouse gas emissions share. Simultaneously, they... more
As the twenty-first century begins, climate change has become an urban problem. Global urban networks and institutions such as the World Bank point to cities’ energy demand and major greenhouse gas emissions share. Simultaneously, they frame cities as a critical source of environmental solutions, through green building, energy efficiency retrofitting, “smart” infrastructure, and other transformations of twentieth century urban geography. And critically, they argue that innovative cities can make these changes profitable, and thereby help propel a technological revolution in advanced capitalism: the development of a “green” economy. Amidst the economic turmoil that followed the 2008 financial collapse, many public and private institutions took up the idea of green economic development as a pathway to economic recovery and twenty-first century accumulation.
In this study, I critically examine the crisis-era development of green economic ideas in the United States, particularly in cities like San Francisco. I focus on new forms of value and unconventional resources being developed for the green economy, from energy efficiency to the “green-ness” of buildings. I examine how the federal government and cities hope to harness this value for transformative economic development, and how financial institutions and real estate developers are pioneering distinct visions of the profits to be made from environmental change and/or its mitigation. Critical resource geography and political economy/ecology offer important theoretical windows into green economic development. I consider how critiques of market environmentalism developed to analyze rural resource extraction can be expanded to analyze a new urban resource geography. I use methods such as surveys of industry and policy literature, participant observation at conferences, historical research, and analysis of financial instruments.
I find that financial institutions and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more economically redistributive visions. Finance is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice, aided by new “green” financial instruments. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make green urbanism increasingly speculative and exclusionary, and delimits more ambitious federal programs to promote green manufacturing and mass employment.
In this study, I critically examine the crisis-era development of green economic ideas in the United States, particularly in cities like San Francisco. I focus on new forms of value and unconventional resources being developed for the green economy, from energy efficiency to the “green-ness” of buildings. I examine how the federal government and cities hope to harness this value for transformative economic development, and how financial institutions and real estate developers are pioneering distinct visions of the profits to be made from environmental change and/or its mitigation. Critical resource geography and political economy/ecology offer important theoretical windows into green economic development. I consider how critiques of market environmentalism developed to analyze rural resource extraction can be expanded to analyze a new urban resource geography. I use methods such as surveys of industry and policy literature, participant observation at conferences, historical research, and analysis of financial instruments.
I find that financial institutions and major real estate developers have become driving players in urban greening, even as green collar jobs organizers won governmental support for more economically redistributive visions. Finance is helping transform green building and retrofitting from a niche sector into mainstream real estate and urban development practice, aided by new “green” financial instruments. Simultaneously, financialization threatens to make green urbanism increasingly speculative and exclusionary, and delimits more ambitious federal programs to promote green manufacturing and mass employment.
Research Interests:
Participatory planning document prepared for 2006 MS thesis; presented to Montgomery County, PA County Commissioners and County Planning Department 2006.
Research Interests:
Participatory planning document prepared for 2006 MS thesis; presented to Montgomery County, PA County Commissioners and County Planning Department 2006.
Research Interests:
Participatory planning document prepared for 2006 MS thesis; presented to Montgomery County, PA County Commissioners and County Planning Department 2006.