John Pickles

A history of spaces : cartographic reason, mapping and the geo-coded world

Part1. Introduction 1. Maps and Worlds Part 2. Deconstructing the Map 2. What Do Maps Represent? The Crisis of Representation and the Critique of Cartographic Reason 3. Situated pragmatics: Maps and Mapping as Social Practice Part 3. The Over-Coded World: A Genealogy of Modern Mapping 4. The Cartographic Gaze, Global Visions, and Modalities of Visual Culture 5. Cadasters and Capitalism: The Emergence of a New Map Consciousness 6. Mapping the Geo-Body: State, Territory, and Nation 7. Commodity and Control: Technologies of the Social Body Part 4. Investing Bodies in Depth 8. Cyber-Empires: Cartographic Reason and the Technological Sublime in a Digital Age Part 5. Conclusion 9. Counter-Mappings: Cartographic Reason in the Age of Intelligent Machines and Smart Bombs

Upgrading, changing competitive pressures, and diverse practices in the East and Central European apparel industry

After a period in the 1990s of rapid integration into the production and trade networks of the European Union (EU) (and to a lesser extent of the United States), clothing manufacturers in East and Central Europe have had to adjust quickly to the changing costs of production with EU accession, the rise of Chinese exports, and the 1 January 2005 final phaseout of quantitative quotas into major markets. In this paper we focus on the changing competitive pressures on clothing producers in the region and on the diversity of adjustments currently being made in response to these changes. In particular, we detail the wide range of adjustment strategies being adopted by firms in Slovakia and Bulgaria, and show how interregional price competition, downgrading, and geographical shifts in patterns of sourcing and production are articulated with imperatives to regionalized production for major markets, stabilization of supply networks, industrial upgrading, and the expansion of localized sourcing and domestic-marketing strategies.

Cutting it: European integration, trade regimes, and the reconfiguration of East - Central European apparel production

Since the late 1980s the European apparel sector has witnessed a dramatic transformation. Driven by increasing costs in Western Europe, major Western apparel retailers and buyers have expanded their contracting of production into lower cost regions of ‘postcommunist’ Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. One consequence of these changes is a burgeoning of apparel producers in peripheral European and North African regions, locked into supply relations with Western buyers. Equally apparent is a dramatic growth in apparel trade between the European Union (EU) and the countries of East–Central Europe (ECE). For much of the 1990s these processes were driven by outward processing trade arrangements between EU countries and applicant states in ECE, along with the EU customs union with Turkey. Further liberalization of trade regimes during the 1990s removed these outward processing customs arrangements, but outward-processing forms of assembly production continue. The authors chart these transformations, and signal one part of the emerging architecture of trade relations between the EU and ECE after 1989. They explore the trade regulation changes that have provided a context for outsourcing and examine the different strategies of EU retailers and manufacturers in the governance of pan-European apparel production and trade.

New keywords : migration and borders

“New Keywords: Migration and Borders” is a collaborative writing project aimed at developing a nexus of terms and concepts that fill-out the contemporary problematic of migration. It moves beyond traditional and critical migration studies by building on cultural studies and post-colonial analyses, and by drawing on a diverse set of longstanding author engagements with migrant movements. The paper is organized in four parts (i) Introduction, (ii) Migration, Knowledge, Politics, (iii) Bordering, and (iv) Migrant Space/Times. The keywords on which we focus are: Migration/Migration Studies; Militant Investigation; Counter-mapping; Border Spectacle; Border Regime; Politics of Protection; Externalization; Migrant Labour; Differential inclusion/exclusion; Migrant struggles; and Subjectivity.

Bring In, Go Up, Go West, Go Out: Upgrading, Regionalisation and Delocalisation in China’s Apparel Production Networks

Abstract The rise of China’s export-oriented apparel industry since the 1990s has been driven largely by global sourcing practices intent on capturing the cost advantages of a development model predicated, in part, on unskilled or semi-skilled migratory labour flows, linking western and central labour pools to coastal production sites. Until recently, the dominance of this model has fuelled growth in low-wage employment in the coastal regions and has provided few opportunities for economic and social upgrading. Since the early 2000s, coastal factories have increasingly had to confront difficulties generated by the increasing social and economic costs of this regionally concentrated low wage growth model. Specifically, this paper focuses on the role of the apparel industry in this process. It documents the major changes in organisation and geographies of economic activity in the industry, and demonstrates how the central and local state, domestic and international capital and Chinese and other Asian workers are shaping the changing organisation and geography of China’s apparel industry. The paper focuses particularly on firm strategies and state policies that have arisen in response to pressure to increase wages from workers, rising materials and energy costs and competition from other low-cost producers in Asia.

The spirit of post-socialism: Common spaces and the production of diversity

Since 1989 scholars and policy-makers have articulated different notions of post-socialist reform. Each presupposes or privileges distinct notions of space. This paper focuses on the ‘spirit of post-socialism’ and outlines these different understandings of post-socialist reform and their corresponding embedded assumptions about space and geography. It then argues that various attempts to frame post-socialism in terms of a series of broader universal projects of economic harmonization and integration have been increasingly supplemented by more conjunctural analyses of diverse economic and social post-socialist practices and spaces, and comparative analyses of post-socialism and reform-socialisms across and beyond Central and Eastern Europe.

Ground Truth 1995–2005

In the mid-1990s, Los Alamos had a vision to develop a truly cognizant surveillance system that is adaptive and capable of learning normal behaviors based upon past experiences integrated with human expert knowledge and current scenarios to determine the state of the surveillance area. They would build predictive capabilities for future scenarios and trend analysis. DOE NN-20 sponsored the research necessary to develop such capabilities as adaptive reasoning, image processing (providing image differencing and feature extraction), an integrated facility status system (providing the overall state of a facility), advanced biometrics, pattern recognition, anomaly detection, real-time communications, and data fusion.

Outward Processing, EU Enlargement and Regional Relocation in the European Textiles and Clothing Industry: Reflections on the European Commission’s Communication on ‘the Future of the Textiles and Clothing Sector in the Enlarged European Union’:

The European clothing industry faces a number of important challenges which have been at the forefront of policy thinking across the European Union and beyond. This paper provides a set of reflections on the European Commission’s recent Communication on the future of the industry in Europe in the light of pressures of liberalization, globalization and EU enlargement. Based upon ongoing research on the restructuring of the Central and East European clothing sector, the paper highlights the limits of the outward-processing model of production that has dominated east-west interactions in this sector. It also examines the uneven role of upgrading and emerging design capacity in the industry, the role and limits of clothing-industry clusters in the new member states, and considers the role of ‘countermarkets’ in the pan-European clothing-contracting system.

Environmental Pasts/Environmental Futures in Post-Socialist Europe

This contribution focuses on the limits of European Union programmes and accession practices on environmental policies and performance in Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, we document some of the ways in which state socialist and post-socialist environmental conditions, practices and policies are shaping, and in turn being shaped by, the path of accession and integration. We focus on the diverse and changing patterns of air, water and soil quality in Central and Eastern Europe, the contested nature of new environmental policies, the environmental consequences of economic change, and the sustainability of emerging environmental regimes. The contribution concludes with several questions about the consequences of new state membership for future EU environmental policies.

‘Good neighbours make good fences’: Seahorse operations, border externalization and extra-territoriality

In recent years border externalization has emerged as a central policy framework for European Union (EU) border and migration management. New multi-lateral and bi-lateral agreements on border management have been forged between the EU, its member states, and its North African neighbours and neighbours-of-neighbours. In the process, what is meant by the ‘border’ is being transformed with implications for where the border is located, who has jurisdiction over particular spaces, and how border and migration management is undertaken. This paper analyses the spatial logics of EU border externalization practices as they are being applied to and in North and West Africa. It focuses on Operation Seahorse and the transnationally coordinated border control projects and infrastructures implemented by the Guardia Civil of Spain. Seahorse serves as an implementation case of the Migration Routes Initiative, an approach toward migration management emphasizing interregional cooperation between designated origin-transit-destination countries. The initiative is the organizing strategy of the Global Approach to Migration, the EU’s overarching framework toward migration policy. The paper shows how Seahorse is changing migration policy and re-articulating Europe’s relations with African countries, producing new bordering processes, creating new geographies of integration and border management, and redefining the practices of territory, sovereignty, and extra-territoriality.