Joseph Pierce

Urban Politics and Mental Health: An Agenda for Health Geographic Research

Siting of mental health service facilities has often been subject to public opposition and political struggles. These processes have produced a landscape of mental health provision that is powerfully uneven and concentrated in economically and socially depressed areas. We argue that understanding this landscape requires an examination of the political processes that shape such siting decisions. Although health geographers (most importantly Dear and Wolch) have periodically engaged with politics, the important role of informal development politics in producing landscapes of health remains insufficiently examined. We introduce the case of residential social service facility (“group home”) siting in central Massachusetts to explore the political dynamics of the production of health. Siting of group homes in Massachusetts is governed by a legal framework that provides social service agencies with legal protection and autonomy from local governments as they make siting choices. This exemption from local zoning ordinances often shifts local politics from formal to informal channels, leading to the application of many forms of soft influence over siting decisions. A comprehensive geographic analysis of mental health should include the social and political processes of siting.

Unlearning (Un)Located Ideas in the Provincialization of Urban Theory

Lawhon M., Silver J., Ernstson H. and Pierce J. Unlearning (un)located ideas in the provincialization of urban theory, Regional Studies. Postcolonial scholars have argued for the provincialization of urban knowledge, but doing so remains an opaque process. This paper argues that explicit attention to ‘learning to unlearn’ unstated theoretical assumptions and normativities can aid in provincialization, and demonstrate ways in which theorizing entails a socio-spatial situation. The authors’ efforts to grapple with operationalizing learning to unlearn in three different urban cases are described, followed by an articulation of strategies for theorizing which more explicitly acknowledge theory-building’s situatedness as well as points of reflection for developing postcolonial urban theory. It is argued that this usefully shifts the focus of unlearning from ‘who’ is theorizing ‘where’ towards theory’s unstated norms and assumptions.

Walking as method : toward methodological forthrightness and comparability in urban geographical research

Qualitative urban geographical research should explicitly acknowledge insights gained from walking (the iterative exploration and observation of cities on foot), which enhances local literacy and enables researchers to compare methods more explicitly. Some urban geographers might use walking as a method, but it is rarely reported in published scholarship. This article argues for the explicit inclusion of walking in methodological reporting for urban research. We suggest that reporting the walking that researchers do adds rigor to research findings and should be distinguished from research where this practice is absent, we report on international experiences using walking in combination with other methods, and we conclude with a proposal for comparable urban geographic walking practices.

Inserting scales of urban politics: the possibilities of meso-urban governance shims

ABSTRACT This article explores the geographic literature on governance at smaller-than-urban but larger-than-household scales, identifying a relative inattention to neighborhood and other partial-city scales of governance. Hegemonic power relationships are institutionalized at particular scales of state government (e.g. national, regional, municipal) and state-sanctioned governing units (e.g. jurisdictional districts or supranational bodies), which in turn shapes urban research. We propose a new analytical term, governance shims, to describe the insertion of new scales of governance between those already reified and reproduced; institutions at such scales may be unusually grounded in authority beyond the state. Geographers seem well positioned to explore the characteristics of governance shims at the meso-urban scale. We illustrate this by briefly tracing how common interest communities (CICs), housing cooperatives, and community land trusts (CLTs) might be analyzed through a shims approach. Provocatively, emergent governance at the meso-urban scale often leverages idiosyncratic structures of property ownership to produce institutional authority.

The right to move: informal use rights and urban practices of mobility

ABSTRACT Everyday urban practices are enabled by both formal and informal rights regimes. Researchers often focus on the effects of formal rights; informal rights to use urban spaces have been less widely examined, particularly in North America. This article examines practices of intra-urban mobility in a gentrifying area of Portland, Oregon. We find that rights regimes regarding movement in urban space importantly shape who uses particular transit strategies and infrastructures. Specifically, we identify rights regimes rooted in explications of a city ideal and a neighborhood ethic. We suggest that Portland’s widely admired transit planning process has not sufficiently engaged with informal use rights in transit spaces, leading to uneven adoption of a transportation infrastructure that re-inscribes historic racialized injustices. An examination of informal use rights complicates common rights analytics, including those leveraging Lefebvre’s right to the city, emphasizing how all urban rights are contingent, contested and negotiated.

Scale and the construction of environmental imaginaries in local news

Abstract Environmental imaginaries are shaped by a range of influences, including the media. While most analyses of the effects of environmental media coverage focus on national- and international-scale news outlets, local-scale outlets continue to be important: in some cases, they are the most commonly read news sources. We suggest that the role of local news in is particularly significant where local environmental imaginations diverge from global discourses. Mindful of the challenges of defining environmental media, we outline some of the potential implications of the distinctive properties of local environmental news coverage. We then explore the dissonance between global and a specific local environmental imaginary through a case study of community newspaper coverage in Boksburg, Gauteng, South Africa. Our analysis shows a strong focus on so-called ‘brown’ issues, including concerns with pollution, water and electricity, in contrast to studies at other scales; when included, ‘green’ issues are often presented idiosyncratically. In follow-up focus groups, local residents indicate that local environmental reporting resonates more with their own environmental imaginary than national or international scales of news sources. This disjuncture between local and global imaginaries has significant theoretical and political implications, warranting further investigation of local newspapers and environmental imaginaries.

The law is not enough: Seeking the theoretical ‘frontier of urban justice’ via legal tools

This commentary examines the conceptual limits of urban justice through the use of legal tools, both generally and in actually existing neoliberal urban contexts. Our interest emerges from previous research on social service siting in a region with legal tools that seem exceptionally friendly to spatial justice due to limits on exclusionary zoning. Conceptually, such powerful legal levers might be expected to mitigate the generally observed tendency towards revanchism in contexts of urban government devolution. However, even given exceptional legal accommodations, we found a spatially concentrated service landscape, mirroring neoliberal market-led framings of ‘highest and best use’. Using this prior research as a point of departure, we highlight related findings in the broader literature on the use of the law by urban social justice activists. We argue that even maximally powerful legal protections for justice-oriented actors cannot blunt systematic spatio-political dynamics that lead marketised states towards revanchist outcomes. We call for future research which more explicitly charts the specific frontiers of the potential of the law as a tool for social justice.

A spoiled well (of data): addressing the procedural injustice of contemporary environmental justice research through collaborative qualitative data gathering

Despite the growing acknowledgement that Environmental Justice (“EJ”) is multidimensional and includes distribution, procedure, recognition, and capacity (among potential others) as registers of (in)justice, a majority of empirical studies continue to focus primarily on the appropriate distribution of amenities and strategies for remediation of distributional injustice: a more equal sharing of environmental benefits (and the deconcentration of environmental burdens) across spatial and socioeconomic contexts. Though distribution is important, a long line of scholarship insists that a distributional focus is insufficient for capturing the intrinsically plural registers of EJ (Pulido 1996, Holifield 2001, Walker 2009). Crucially, for instance, such an approach fails to account for stakeholder exclusion from environmental decision-making – or indeed, the treatment of individuals or communities as valid stakeholders at all. This persistent tendency in recent EJ empirical scholarship can seem perplexing in the context of the repeated scholarly insistence on the expanded conceptual understandings of EJ for over a decade (Walker and Bulkeley 2006). We are by no means the first to call attention to this imbalance in EJ research. Reed and George (2011), for example, conclude from their review of scholarship published from 2000 to 2009 that EJ research continues to focus primarily on distributional justice despite a notable conceptual broadening. Their review uncovers this important and ongoing bias in EJ scholarship, yet it does not explain why EJ scholarship diverges on conceptual and empirical paths. In this commentary, we first describe several key reasons that this bias persists in research and activism, and we argue that any successful effort to more equally balance attention to procedural and distributive aspects of EJ will have to go beyond better intentions (which have been oft-expressed) to realise a systematic shift in data management and methodological approaches. In light of the structural limits of contemporary research practices, we propose for discussion a set of alternative strategies in future EJ research, which we label collaborative qualitative data for environmental justice (“CQD-EJ”).

Against Power? Distinguishing Between Acquisitive Resistance and Subversion

Abstract Critiques of contemporary political‐economic formations, while grounded in an array of theoretical traditions, have often centered on strategies for relocating power (as embodied in accumulated wealth, control of labor and corporate entities, or the state) in institutions that are nominally more egalitarian or democratic. Such alternative institutions are intended to better represent those who have been historically harmed by the use of power. This article argues for an analytical distinction between such strategies of capturing power on behalf of those without it, and strategies for reducing power differentials directly or annihilating the capacity to accumulate power. We adopt the analytical term subversion to describe these latter efforts to reduce the intensity of, and undermine the capacity to reproduce or deepen, power relationships. Rather than focusing on redistribution or inversion of asymmetrical power relations to benefit the disempowered, subversive strategies work toward decreasing the possibility of accumulating power or, in the extreme case, completely evacuating existing unequal power relations. Thinking about political engagement in terms of limiting the possibility of asymmetrical power relationships (regardless of who holds that power) helps to illuminate a distinction between reactive politics against injustice and proactive politics that pursue alternative, increasingly just conceptual norms. We draw on threads in critical, political, and urban geographies to articulate a particularly geographic concept of “fleeing‐in‐place” as subversive resistance to hegemony, the undermining of the possibility of asymmetrical socio‐spatial power relations within existing contemporary political economies. We propose strategies for research that better highlight the differences between resistance and subversion.

The Hilliness of U.S. Cities

Abstract What is a hilly city, and which cities are hilliest? This study outlines a basket of methods for quantifying the differential hilliness of U.S. cities. We rank the 100 largest cities in the contiguous United States, using a selection of eight methods to evaluate their comparative hilliness. We then reflect on how four key “modes of encounter” with terrain shape human perceptions of urban hilliness: visual, pedestrian, automotive, and imagined/conceptual. Varying priorities among these different modes of encounter shape which of our indices may best correlate with lay understandings of urban hilliness or particular policy problems. We conclude with implications of this work for contemporary geographic scholarship and suggestions for further research, particularly with regard to the political and economic effects of hilliness.