Spatial Politics

Large-scale arts-led urban regeneration strategies are typically distinguished from the grassroots authenticity of community art projects, but this article examines how the trope of community facilitates gentrification in Oakland, California.  Community murals of the 1960s to 1990s played a critical social role by making visible minority concerns and galvanizing movements for social justice, but questions emerge about contemporary community art in relation to neoliberal values and urban precarity.  The Black neighborhood of West Oakland has been resistant to gentrification due to decades of disinvestment and through robust activism against displacement in one of the most progressive cities in the United States.  Based on longitudinal ethnographic research and situated visual analysis, I show how neighborhood resistance was only overcome when change appeared to come from the ‘community’ itself, through the specific imagery and spatiality of community mural projects that resignify the neighborhood to accommodate gentrification.  I critique gentrification as a dualistic insider and outsider dynamic; such structural analysis elides ‘community’ as a contested category that may be complicit with urban restructuring.  Real estate interests also appropriate signifiers of ‘community’ to reshape neighborhood identity, valorize property, and police public space.  I argue that in West Oakland the ‘community mural’ is vertically integrated in municipal and capital logics that serve to dis-embed, rather than support, historic neighborhood populations.

Tsitsi Dangarembga’s landmark novel, Nervous Conditions, offers a complex interrogation of intracommunity social dynamics in 1960s colonized Rhodesia. Specifically, Dangarembga’s text interrogates social relations surrounding food and nutrition in a racist and colonized society, charting the ways gender and class, as well as race, inflect food’s social and psychological significations. Many commentators have analyzed food’s role in the text, paying special attention to the spaces in which food is consumed and the gendered spectacle of the family meal. This paper shifts the focus away from consumption and towards production, offering a novel reading that centers spaces of gendered reproductive labor. Reading Nervous Conditions alongside Frantz Fanon’s celebrated analysis of the colonized city, the paper argues that spaces of gendered reproductive labor emerge as “micro-colonies” in Dangarembga’s text, or carceral environments bounded by the convergence of colonial and patriarchal forces. Yet in the teeth of this convergence, sites of gendered labor also assert themselves as fecund spaces of solidarity and creative self-making. Following Saidiya Hartman’s work on the infrapolitics of subaltern groups, this paper argues that a “politics of a lower frequency” inscribes itself in acts of autonomous self-definition, joy, sensuality and intimacy shared by Dangarembga’s female characters. The paper reads Nervous Condition as a political literature in a minor key, or a “minor literature” that gives precedence to the diffuse politics of the quotidian. As an exemplar of such a literature, Nervous Conditions deftly illustrates how micro-colonial spaces breed their own, “minor” registers of solidarity—and their own “minor” scales of resistance.

Spatial Activism in the City: Perspectives of Body, Identity and Memory
PhD Abstract

The research focuses on spatial and urban contexts of activism, gender and sexuality in Tel Aviv, with the aim of understanding the modes of creation and construction of physical, socio-cultural and symbolic spaces of activism. Special emphasis is given to the research arenas and activities occurring within them through three concepts – body, identity and memory – and the complex interactions between them. The research focuses on spatial politics and how it is constructed and reproduced through spatial activism in the contexts of gender and sexuality, particularly feminist and LGBT/queer activism. Theoretically, it is based on theories of social movements and activism, political geography, and feminist and queer geographies and theories. Its theoretical aim is to broaden the knowledge and understanding of activism from a geographical-spatial perspective that, unlike other social scientific disciplines such as sociology or political sciences, has been relatively neglected in the political activism literature.

Based on a qualitative research design that includes 51 in-depth interviews, participant observations and visual materials such as mental maps, the research has been conducted in three different organizational arenas in Tel Aviv: City Center for the LGBT Community in Gan Meir, Bayit Banamal in the Tel Aviv port, and Beit Achoti (My Sister’s Home) in a downtown neighborhood. These arenas differ from each other in their geographical locations in the city, the community they produced, and the nature of their activity. The common aspect to all three is their involvement in issues of gender or sexuality and that a regular activity takes place in all.

The main conclusion emerging from examining these arenas is that spatial activism striving to promote significant social and political change can take different forms and address different publics with different identities, and is not necessarily a conventional expression of resistance and protest, though it can also appear in this form. In many cases social and political change can be achieved by means of spatial activism in a variety of public and also semi-public spaces, including government and private sector spaces, and not only those that fully or purely identified with civil society. Wherever spatial activism occurs there is potential for constructing autonomous spaces that also enable the construction of a third activist space that brings together different people with different identities and experiences of activism.

Another, related conclusion is that spatial activism that operates in organizational arenas and not necessarily in spaces and configurations of ad-hoc protest affects the daily life and personal and collective spatial management of individuals, and creates “an activist lifestyle” in which spatial activism becomes an integral and significant part of the individual’s life.
Finally, despite the common tendency to view activism as limited only to certain social classes or to “professional activists” who consider activism their goal in life, the cases examined in this research indicate that spatial activism can emerge not only from a variety of physical and social-cultural locations but also in a variety of identity configurations. Thus, the importance of spatial activism lies also in the fact that enables many people to be involved, among them those who do not regard themselves as activists.

What if oil is magic?

Sure, we are used to think of oil as a curse disguised as a blessing: as oil is extracted and refined, it turns into black gold for the few and misery for the many. Oil reeks of pollution and corrupt autocrats, it smothers democratic forces. Oil makes a nation addicted to non-renewable resources and dependent on a global market out of its control. Oil spoils nature, society and politics.

And yet the forgotten story of a city in Iran reminds us that oil can also be the stuff of imagination, bringing life to a place, making people dream and remember.

This is the story of a city that was brought into being by oil, almost killed by oil, and yet still understands itself through oil.

http://ajammc.com/2015/02/16/abadan-oil-city-dreams/

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as an opportunity to move beyond the technocratic elitism that often characterizes both civil societies and the neoliberal approach to development, and is further recognized as the battlefield on which the conflicting interests of the world's rich and poor are set. Contributing to the growing recognition that geographies of resistance are relational, where the “global” and the “local” are understood as co-constitutive, a radical democratic ideal grounded in material public space is presented as paramount to repealing archic power in general, and neoliberalism’s exclusionary logic in particular.

This article aims to flesh out how Stan VanDerBeek created what Time magazine in 1964 rather glibly describes as 'a curious chapter' in animation. The main focus is on his pre-computer painted and puppet animation and collage animation works. After considering relevant terminologies, it explores VanDerBeek's own writings to see how and why his artistic and cultural philosophy could be expressed using animation techniques. After a discussion of a stop-motion puppet film and a painted film, I introduce, via Modernist contexts of collage and photomontage, some of VanDerBeek's many collage and cutout animation films, proposing how his visual neologisms bear comparison with James Joyce's portmanteau technique. I then undertake an aesthetic and socio-political analysis of his praxis within found footage genres and techniques and suggest viewer strategies for watching his works. I conclude with describing some of his manifold poetics and aesthetics as 'a curious chapter' within the continuum of political photomontage and independent animation production.


Keywords:

additive animation, collage animation, spatial politics, James Joyce, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, anticontinuity, visual portmanteau, found footage

Malayalam cinema’s explorations into spatiality had been minimal till the beginning of the new millennium. Except for some straight forward simplistic portrayals of exotic locations, Malayalam cinema stayed focused on social reality within the contexts of the narrative, where locations were spaces instrumental in foregrounding the narrative action. New generation films, as it was called, at the turn of the new millennium, started exploring the possibilities of exploiting the immense potentials of the space itself in the narrative. Diegetic spaces evolved as prominent presence in the new films, enquiring into spatial identities and the collective memories that they invoke to the viewer.

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is 'irrational' marks particular cultures as ‘other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to putatively ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.

Walking has moved into increasing visibility in social, cultural, and geographical studies as well as art and cultural practice in recent times. Walking practices are often mobilised as a means for sensing and learning about spaces, for enabling reflection on the mutual constitution of bodies and landscapes, and for finding meaning within and potentially re-enchanting environments. Through the influence of Michel de Certeau in particular, the idea that walking ‘encunciates’ spaces and is a creative, elusive, and resistive everyday practice, counterpoised to the ‘solar eye’, has become commonplace. This paper focuses on projects by the artist Francis Alÿs that are based on walking in London and other cities, to consider their engagements with the politics of urban space. Attention is paid to walking as his method of unfolding stories, and to its potential to unsettle and bring into question current realities, especially in the context of the regulated, fortified, and surveilled zones of London. Addressing the poetics and politics of his spatial practices, however, reveals the inadequacy of undifferentiated models of creative resistance, nomadism, and subversion beloved of much recent theory, and often endorsed through a partial reading of Certeau. Instead, the openness and ambivalence of these practices suggest a need for a more nuanced approach to the multiple rhythms, trajectories, and narratives that constitute urban spaces as well as to their contested (in)visibilities.

This proposed chapter seeks to analyze the position of Amerindians within the Guyanese polity, focusing on how political discourse and legal recognition of Amerindian status as “First Peoples” within the Amerindian Act 2006 purports to confer self-determination, control of ancestral lands and territories, and “good governance” between states and indigenous nations . While ostensibly being rights-bearing subjects through processes of state recognition, I argue that spatial (re)ordering and imaginaries operate on various scales to extend their marginalization and subjection to imperatives of racial cohesion and integration as a facilitator of national progress and development.

3al-Janib (‘ala -l-janib or ‘on the side’) tells stories from the margins about moments where the world around us can be reimagined differently. The texts are in English and Arabic.
These liminal moments, when individuals or groups decide to bend formal regulations and rethink the use of resources around them, are moments where new social relations and knowledge are forged, and alternative conceptualisations of a brighter future are introduced. The newspaper format allows for the drafts and the notes that are already present in the different research projects on which the publication builds, and which were part of a collaborative effort by partners in Morocco, Egypt, Palestine and Germany entitled Liminal Spaces as Sites of Socio-Cultural Transformation and Knowledge Production in the Arab World (funded by Volkswagen Foundation). The newspaper introduces three thematic axes: 1. Other Voices from the Cultural Field, 2. The Politics of Solidarity and Disintegration, 3. Agencies of (Im-)Mobility.

This is an abstract of a chapter in a forthcoming volume edited by Profs. Ulrike Freitag and Nelida Fuccaro (to be published 2014).

"In December 1942, unrest broke out in Abadan, arguably Iran’s first modern city and home to the world’s biggest oil refinery. Two scuffles in the bazaar provoked Iranians from the Ahmadabad neighbourhood to attack Indian labourers in the so-called ‘Indian Lines’ of the Bahmashir  neighbourhood. Although not as bloody or widespread as more well-studied occurrences of unrest in Abadan, I will argue that this ‘Bahmashir Incident’ represents an important case with which to understand the interconnectedness of oil, space and violence. As such, this chapter has two aims.

The first is to fill a gap in the existing literature on Abadan and the oil-producing province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran. This literature tends to focus on the struggles of the Iranian labour movement against the Anglo-Persian, later Anglo-Iranian, Oil Company (A.I.O.C., henceforth ‘the Company’), and specifically on the great oil strikes of 1929 and 1946 and the oil nationalisation movement of 1951.  In this literature, a very crucial element is normally either mentioned only in passing or simply neglected: imported Indian labour. Through material from, among other places, the underexplored British Petroleum Company archives, I will investigate the context of the event (the Bahmashir Incident) synchronically, and the history of a particular community (the Indians) diachronically.

Through these investigations, an alternative labour history of Abadan emerges, which, I will argue, can complement and challenge the existing literature.  Key Iranian leftist and nationalist accounts of Abadan’s history tend to cast all violence in the binary terms of a struggle between ‘the oppressor’ and ‘the oppressed’. This chapter will instead propose that since Abadan had multiple subaltern agencies, urban violence operated on several levels. The presence of Indians in Abadan’s labour hierarchy and social fabric challenges the idea of Abadan as a ‘dual city’,  and complicates simplistic interpretations of urban violence.

Secondly, by disentangling the web of interests spun between the Company, the British military and the diplomatic machinery, this chapter will nuance the notion, so often reiterated uncritically in Middle East Studies, of ‘The British’ as one single, cohesive actor. The Company drew on the colonial legacy of British imperialism, was protected by the British army, and was influenced by its major shareholder, the British government; yet, the Company was nonetheless an autonomous entity with a distinct mode of operation. In order to ‘see like an oil company’,  this chapter thus examines how World War II affected the Company in Abadan on the eve of victorious nationalist movements and the dissolution of the British Empire – events that eventually drove companies born in colonial settings into the present globalised world of neo-liberal corporate capitalism."

This study intended to analyze discursive production about Çamlıca Mosque in terms of relationships between the concept of necessity and spatial politics. This aims to reveal conceptual semantic transfers and leaks through finding out of relation networks of the concept of necessity that is quantitative, closer and homogenised, and is used in columns. This paper emphasizes that the point which physical reality evolved in the context of conceptualisation of spatial politics in today’s world is imaginary. Knowledge to be produced about that objects or practices of architecture cannot dominate for human is an illusion. In architecture field, to be aware of this illusion refers to having some doubts on speaking about worship place architecture, especially mosque. This paper makes evaluations through the concept of necessity with this doubt. The reason of this is to Express the wish to product rational and undisputable reality. Eventually, quantitative evaluations have closer effects in the architectural thought routes. Therefore this study wants to propose some ideas to open the ways that architecture is considered and produced as well.

Conceptualizing Territories
By Frédéric GIRAUT
The social use of the term “territory” has tended to proliferate in the context of globalization. French-language geography has also indulged an immoderate use of the concept. The apparent paradox has made the contemporary notion of territory the target of detractors who see it as something obsolete (a product of modernity now superseded by a de-territorializing postmodernism), too reductive (not allowing for a grasp of the mobile aspect of spatial relationships), and mystifying (masking the true social issues, further dismantling the welfare state). These criticisms suggest that the term should be re-conceptualized rather than dropped, given that territorial complexity is a given of postmodernism. Nor dropping the term is likely to happen anytime soon, sinceusage currently ranges from a portmanteau word synonymous with region or area to a specifcally geopolitical notion based on the delimited extension of state sovereignty. Between the extensive and restrictive uses of the concept, cultural and political geographies converge on the necessarily “constructed” nature of the territorial object. Contradictions nevertheless remain between these constructivist approaches; the most promising paths for overcoming them call for a clear grasp of territorial confgurations and ideologies. Proposals are thus offered here for rendering the concept functional on a political level, notably by making a clear distinction between theterm and the zone or area it applies to.

The works in this book have been developed at the intersection of the concepts of human rights and right to the city. The authors try to contribute to both concepts, with the belief that the existing system is not a resilient one and it should change, and this book tries to provide a guideline for the betterment of the world and human life on it during this transformation process.

In this article, the author studies the local response to the nation-building process that constructs society, its space, and history, by focusing on the particular case of Greece in the nineteenth century. How local inhabitants actively participated in this process is discussed in the example of the Plaka district on the northern slope of the Athenian Acropolis. The author argues that mutual relations among modernization, Hellenization, and living tradition constructed modern Greece as a new nation in the nineteenth century. The official efforts toward Hellenization and modernization with the emphasis on classical antiquity gave rise to the emergence of alternative tendencies that were shaped by the local inhabitants according to the way they perceived society and experienced space. The author’s focus in this article, then, turns to nineteenth-century houses in Plaka as a folk expression of the official neoclassical style to discuss the local performance in the construction of a national identity.

Edited version of published paper presented at 'Is Black and Red Dead?' Conference, Centre for the Study of Social and Global and Justice (CSSGJ) University of Nottingham, 7-8 September, 2009

https://socialhistoryportal.org/news/articles/110943

Roads and Anthropology is the first collection of road ethnographies, edited by two pioneers in the anthropological explorations of infrastructures, the essays published in this book aim to pave the way for that rising field of anthropological research.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Table of Contents
-Dalakoglou D. & P. Harvey. Introduction. Roads and Anthropology: Ethnographic Perspectives on Space, Time and (Im)Mobility
-Nielsen M. Roadside Inventions: Making Time and Money Work at a Road Construction Site in Mozambique
-Campbell J. Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia
-Kernaghan R. Furrows and Walls, or the Legal Topography of a Frontier Road in Peru
-Harvey P. & H. Knox. The Enchantments of Infrastructure
-Klaeger G. Rush and Relax: the Rhythms and Speeds of Touting Perishable Products on a Ghanaian Roadside
-Pedersen M. & M. Bunkenborg Roads that Separate: Sino-Mongolian Relations in the Inner Asian Desert
- Dalakoglou D. ‘The Road from Capitalism to Capitalism’: Infrastructures of (Post)Socialism in Albania

Questions about what it means to locate and be located are being significantly reconfigured through the digitalization of urban life and space, and as computer processing becomes embedded or ‘pervasive’ in urban environments. With position becoming increasingly automatically monitored and tracked within a standardized space and time, some critics suggest that it becomes less consciously thought about than part of a ‘technological unconscious’. Emblematic in this regard is the global positioning system (GPS), which is often promised to resolve questions of location definitively. This paper focuses on efforts by artists working within the realm of locative media to appropriate, reframe and repurpose GPS so as to question aspects of positioning technologies as well as their targeting of locations and their subjects. Attention centres on how these practices are embedded within a context of urban militarization and securitization, and how they may be complicit with military and corporate interests. But asserting the need to move beyond generalized condemnatory or celebratory accounts of the kind that have characterized much discussion in the field, the paper focuses on specific cases to draw out their dis-locative dimensions whereby they unsettle, unfix and reimagine forms of locating and being located. If political claims on their behalf are not secured in advance, critical potential is nevertheless found in the ambiguities, disturbances and resistances they hold open.

This article carries out a long-term exploration of the changing forms of organizing commemorative space in postcolonial Cuba. From a non-representational and processual approach, it argues that there is a close connection between different ideologies, and the social and material organization of commemoration. Because commemorative spaces are socially constituted and embedded in power relations, this study addresses the shifting forms of connecting the subjective and objective sides of memory, that is, how commemoration organizes the relation between people and the materiality of commemorative artefacts. During both the capitalist-republican and communistrevolutionary periods, commemorative spaces were constructed and reworked to renew
political hegemony under different premises. These  transformations are examined through three conceptual metaphors—text, arena and performance—and three organizing practices—enchantment, emplacement and enactment. The focus is placed on one of the main Cuban commemorational spaces: the Civic Square or Square of the Revolution of Havana.

Indonesia is up for grabs. In the division of labour in the newly liberalised ASEAN economy, it has
taken on the role of providing natural resources to the more advanced economies in Southeast Asia.
With its MP3EI “accelerated development programme,” a national, state-coordinated programme of
land grabs is taking place, in which different provinces are assigned different development foci (food
and energy for Papua, palm oil processing for North Sumatra, mining for Central Kalimantan etc.). A
key dynamic in this development plan is the commoditisation of space by spatial planning. Although
the  spatial  planning  process  is  supposed  to  be  open,  transparent  and  participatory  in  Indonesia,  in
reality it is the opposite. Maps are made by consultants and government offices favoring the interests
of capital and local elites. Concessions are given mostly without the consent (and often without the
knowledge) of local communities. Access to maps and spatial information is limited and commodified.
This paper shares our experience of using unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) to generate high-quality
community  controlled  maps  to  challenge  spatial  planning  from  above.  Developed  at  first  as  a
component of action research looking at the political ecology of the Kapuas River, the drone mapping
soon  developed  its  own  dynamics.  In  one  case  of  a  large  bauxite  mining  operation  in  Tayan,  the
community could use maps made with the drone to prove that the company had operated outside the
concession and had destroyed a nearby lake that was important for their livelihood. This evidence was
presented at the provincial spatial planning meeting and led to the inclusion of a passage guaranteeing
customary land rights within the provincial spatial planning law. In a further development, community
members used drone photographs to give testimony before the constitutional court that was reviewing
a  challenge  by  large  mining  corporations  to  the  2009  national  mining  law.  The  court  ruling
subsequently upheld the stipulation in the law that requires mining corporations to build smelters and
refineries. The drone technology is now being replicated, with a community training centre now set up
at the Swandiri Institute in Pontianak, and with plans by the environmental justice network WALHI to
introduce the technology across the country.

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as ‘problematic’ in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance.

""The thesis makes an attempt to explore and theorise the ways that the socio-economic trajectory of a locality evolves, through the Gramscian (1971) concept of “ideological hegemony”. The thesis questions to what extent certain powerful industrial groups can be regarded as local ideological hegemonic blocs, and explores what this might mean for an understanding of the local socio-economic trajectory. Antonio Gramsci’s writings are integrated along with Anthony Giddens’s Structuration Theory (1984) and this integrated theoretical framework constitutes the conceptual platform of the thesis, while the ontological platform is inspired by the relational perspective (Harvey, 2001, 2005, Massey, 2005) that views space as an “existent alterity” and as a medium for action. The conceptual framework developed in the thesis is applied and contextualised through empirical research on the function of the tourism industry in two Greek localities (Rhodes and Preveza), using holistic qualitative methodology.

The analysis shows that the concept of “ideological hegemonic blocs” can provide the field of Uneven Spatial Development with a supplement explanation that unpacks the ways that a local industry affects the spatial atmosphere of the locality, and subsequently the local power geometry. In other words, this concept can unpack the ways that a local industry can efficiently exploit local resources (e.g. natural environment, labour) and how this exploitation can be seen, through an ideological assimilation, as common sense by the local population, thus as a legitimate action. Moreover, it is evident that the Gramscian literature, as applied through the thesis, may help form a new way to look at the inequality of difference of human perceptions and meanings in time-space, and how these meanings reproduce and sustain specific power relations that legitimate one view of reality over others.

""

Neoliberal policies explain why authoritarianism and violence remain the principal modes of governance among many ruling elites in posttransitional settings. Using Cambodia as an empirical case to illustrate the neoliberalizing process, the promotion of intense marketization is revealed as a foremost causal factor in a country's inability to consolidate democracy following political transition. Neoliberalization effectively acts to suffocate an indigenous burgeoning of democratic politics. Such asphyxiation is brought to bear under the neoliberal rhetoric of order and stability, which can be read through the (re)production of public space. The preoccupation with order and stability serves the interests of capital at the global level and political elites at the level of the nation-state. Citizens themselves may fiercely contest these particular interests in a quest for a more radical democracy, as evidenced by the burgeoning geographies of protest that have emerged in Cambodian public spaces in the posttransition era.

From my book manuscript, On the Doorstep of Europe: Asylum and Citizenship in Greece. Given the recent interest in European border management regimes attached to the current crisis, this chapter outlines some of the key border formations shaping the response to earlier refugee movements into Greece,

Cities in the global South have long been characterised by dynamic street economies. Large numbers of urban residents have derived livelihoods by appropriating urban spaces in ways that can sustain their economic and social practices. Such appropriations are, however, being reversed in many places. Previously created spaces are being reduced, tightly controlled or reclaimed by powerful actors. The spaces, subjects and practices of street work are increasingly problematised as a threat to an envisaged socio-spatial order and as a priority field for intervention. They are increasingly targeted by a variety of political technologies and practices that redefine and refashion key livelihood spaces and delineate the appropriate behaviours and subjectivities to be included. Spatial interventions are intensifying with a view to separate, remove or enclose street work practices and populations seen as problematic. These attempts to govern informality are variously deployed across urban space and contribute to a re-spatialising of informality and the redrawing of socio-spatial configurations of urban exclusion and inclusion. But these attempts are seldom complete. In many cases, street workers are able to maintain a presence in highly contested spaces or learn how to navigate the highly uneven patterns of spatial regulation in the city. This article discusses different ontologies of informality and draws on their respective strengths to propose a more comprehensive picture of the spatial politics of informality. The article then discusses related thematic areas that run through this special issue: the multiplicity of actors governing street work spaces; the diversity and ambiguities of state-led interventions; street workers’ diverse spatial practices; the contradictory nature of their agency; as well as the material infrastructures of street work.

In this essay we seek to engage with the emerging research agenda related to the analysis of deviant activities performed in times and spaces conventionally associated with leisure. Using a reading of Mikhail Bakhtin's seminal work on the governmental structures informing medieval festivals, we suggest that much leisure research has misunderstood the role of deviance in the performance of social relations. Rather than the superficial commodification arguments routinely advanced on behalf of Bakhtin, we argue that his work reveals a much deeper message about the hegemonic regulatory function performed by the licensing of deviant practices within such festivals. With reference to the contemporary example of the regulation of public sexual practices, we argue that the public legitimation (and relaxed policing) of private 'deviance' (performed in public places) is a cornerstone of the enduring governmental tactics used to licence illicit behaviours according to strict temporal and spatial boundaries. We conclude that Bakhtin's work remains highly relevant to the deconstruction of contemporary social relations, but through the analysis of, for example, the 'playful deviance' of illicit sexual practice, rather than through simplistic comparisons of medieval and contemporary festivals.

This paper discusses aspects of spatial politics and activism at the municipal Gay Community Centre in Tel Aviv. It focuses on one marginal group within the LGBT community that is active in the centre – gay seniors. Drawing on theories of queer geography, queer gerontology and geographies of activism and social movements, the qualitative research reported here uses in-depth interviews and participant observations to demonstrate how these men construct the space for their activity both inside and outside the centre. On the one hand, this spatial politics shifts along a delicate axis between proximity to the municipality and community hegemony, looking ‘inside’ the community on the one hand. On the other, it subverts and challenges the existing communal order, looking ‘outside’ to the surrounding society. However, these two directions are not necessarily binary; rather, as the paper shows, they stand in a dialectic that holds them in tension. This tension is evident in the ways in which the group operates from within the core of the hegemony, creating a complex non-dichotomous reality that enables politics that acts within – and despite – the mainstream.

Our research uses the concept of “territories” to describe the production of migrant space. The article describes a project based in London where the everyday practice of walking is used to map migrant territories, which are conceptualized as dispersed and overlapping, causing topological deformations to the actual lived space. We interrogate these deformations through focusing on the micro-scale and the everyday, mapping them as “scapes” and “spheres.” Using specific computational techniques, we transform the original walks into an architectural tool for investigating the fluctuations and flows of the contemporary city. In doing so, we approach
territories from two distinct angles: from the geopolitical perspective of territories seen as the product of the interplay of politics, power, and space and from the biological perspective of territories seen as the primal need of all animals, including humans, for space and a certain
distinction from their environment and from others.

In this chapter I explore how four African-initiated Pentecostal churches stage a campaign of spiritual warfare in Hong Kong. I foreground the spatial politics of this project at different scales. First, I look closely at how the four pastors of the churches rhetorically frame Hong Kong in a wider geopolitical imaginary which is indebted to the ‘global city’ paradigm of urbanisation. Second, I focus in detail on one particular technique of spiritual warfare, the prayer walk, which I suggest resembles a form of ‘psychogeography’ by which the churches seek to redeem urban space. The chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Hong Kong at the time of the Occupy and Umbrella Revolution protests in 2014. I conclude by reflecting on how this campaign of spiritual warfare, when taken as a mode of inhabiting the city, can itself be understood as a form of ‘occupation’ in demonstration against precarity.