Justin Beaumont

Geographies of postsecular rapprochement in the city

This paper explores the emergence of urban spaces of partnership between people of faith and those of no religious faith who come together to offer care, welfare and justice to socially excluded people. The activities of such groups are understood in terms of adjustments to the secularization thesis pointing to the possibilities of a series of emerging geographies relating to postsecular rapprochement and different forms of reterritorialization in the city. In particular, the accounts of postsecularism by Klaus Eder and Jürgen Habermas are used to explain both how the hushed-up voice of religion is being released back into the public sphere in some settings, and how the assimilation and mutually reflexive transformation of secular and theological ideas may represent crossover narratives around which postsecular partnerships can converge around particular ethical precepts and practical needs. Taking the particular example of Christian religion in western Europe, the paper traces both how a critique of secularism has led to some instances of contemporary political expression underpinned by theological precepts that are converted into practical ethics, and how a greater propensity among the Christian faith to explore faith-by-praxis has fuelled increased activity in the public sphere. Not all such activity can be regarded as postsecular, but emergent spaces of postsecular partnership in the city offer possibilities for new, perhaps liminal, geographies of resistance that cannot be explained away as simply the incorporation of religious capital into neoliberal governance. The possibilities of mutually transformative possibilities in these partnerships open both politics and faith up to processes of poststructural reterritorializing as part of the faith-in-practice of postsecularism.

Faith Action on Urban Social Issues

What evidence supports or refutes the claim articulated from various quarters that faith-based organisations (FBOs) have been repositioned as actors for combating social problems like poverty and social exclusion in cities? This paper explores FBOs as agents of social change in contemporary cities in Europe, with a glance at the US. The argument is, first, that we need to conceptualise changing dynamics between religion, politics and post-secular society in the conviction that cities are the pre-eminent loci where these new relations are forming with intensity. While state restructuring and the urbanisation of political action are well-documented processes, far less is known about similar changes in the governance of religious institutions and their consequences for the urbanising relations between religion and the public sphere. Secondly, there are a number of empirical instances of FBOs involving faith-motivated and other people who respond to problems of poverty and social exclusion in various cities across Europe and suggest a changing public role of FBOs in social and political issues. Such repositioning, however, does not relate to the public sphere without tensions and ambiguities and the paper draws out some implications for theory and practice that guide a new international and multidisciplinary research agenda.

Between relationality and territoriality: investigating the geographies of justice movements in The Netherlands and the United States

This paper examines the geographies of justice movements in Rotterdam in The Netherlands and Los Angeles in the United States. In their wider national and international frameworks movements in both countries continue to contest unjust forms of urbanization characterized by neoliberal initiatives that undermine the socioeconomic status of low-income residents. These movements are constituted by relations that stretch across several geographical levels. There remain, however, significant differences in their spatial organizational form: Rotterdam is characterized by loose networks of local associations which relate to constellations of nationally based Christian churches, unions, and humanist organizations, whereas networks between associations, unions, and university activists in Los Angeles have undergone institutionalization at the urban level. We show that movement territorialization is particularly evident at the urban level in Los Angeles while embedded at the national level in the shadow of state–corporatist institutional legacies and power relations in Rotterdam. By drawing upon important insights from several economic geographers, we develop a conceptual framework for explaining the spatialities of contention and contribute to contemporary controversies over relationality, territoriality, and political action at a variety of scales. A normative implication of the paper concerns the learning capacities of contesting actors to forge alliances and achieve their ambitions within path-dependent institutional frameworks.

The urbanisation of justice movements? Possibilities and constraints for the city as a space of contentious struggle

Have urban areas become strategic sites for the formation of justice movements? A justice movement is conceptualised as geographically extensive mobilisations that achieve a degree of territorial fixity at different spatial scales. It is proposed that a number of factors can encourage organisations implicated in this movement to make the urban arena a key front in their struggle to achieve justice. These factors include the intensification of urban inequalities, increased political opportunities resulting from the devolution of state capacities to sub‐national levels of government and new actors interested in pursuing innovative strategies and tactics. This hypothesis is tested through a comparison of movements in three different cities: Los Angeles, USA; Rotterdam, Holland; and Toulouse, France. The findings show that, despite the fact that new actors have begun to mobilise in these three cities around justice issues, they have experienced different degrees of territorialisation. The divergent outcomes are explained by the particular state–civil society power relations found in each of the cities. Thus, the paper concludes that, though the factors in our hypothesis may encourage actors to initiate urban justice movements, the degree of their territorialisation ultimately depends on local state–civil society power relations.

Introduction: Faith-based Organisations and Urban Social Issues

Dostoyevsky’s novel, Chicago was the initial home of various Alinsky-inspired mobilisations involving faith actors and the papers that comprise the issue critically investigate the growing interest in the more recent (re)positioning of FBOs—such as churches, mosques and para-religious organisations of various types and their affi liated groups—in tackling persistent social problems such as poverty, injustice and deprivation in cities. The majority of contributions are based on papers that were presented at two sessions of the 102nd Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG), Chicago, Illinois, 7–11 March 2006, supplemented with additional papers from scholars working on closely related themes. The central question posed in the collection as a whole is how FBOs are responding to new social and political challenges fashioned by neo-liberal urbanism. At least three strands provide the framework for the Special Issue (see also Beaumont and Dias, 2008). First, certain work on religion within the political and social sciences draws attention to increased penetration of FBOs in secular political issues, or the ‘deprivatisation’ of religion, since the 1980s (Haynes, 1998; McGuire, 1992; Bruce, 2003). This reaching Introduction: Faith-based Organisations and Urban Social Issues

Governance and Popular Involvement in Local Antipoverty Strategies in the U.K. and the Netherlands

This article deals centrally with the relationship between new interactive governance arrangements and democratization through a comparison of mechanisms for popular involvement in local antipoverty strategies in the U.K. and the Netherlands. Drawing on urban case studies in North Tyneside and Rotterdam, the article argues that, despite a diversity of governance models and novel attempts at popular involvement at the local level, new governance arrangements are not more democratic. Democratization of governance, rather, requires intervention along an explicit participatory ideology external to the internal logic of interactive governance, one where all social groups and organizations contribute on a mutually reinforcing and egalitarian basis. A more democratic governance system, moreover, needs to take a rational perspective on the nature of the relationship between state and civil society and to retain a normative and political conception of the “third-sector” under prevailing neoliberal conditions. While recognizing the normative and utopian tone of these suggestions, possible characteristics of such a project are outlined.

The value of collective intentionality for understanding urban self-organization

Urban self-organization (USO) is an important topic within the field of contemporary participatory planning. This article aims to investigate the role of certain socio-psychological traits embedded within the notion of USO. We will argue that USO builds upon on the relationship between processes of community organizing, socio-spatial proximity and, most intriguingly, collective intentionality. The intellectual and sensory experience of self-organizing processes is examined through the help of three spatially anchored community initiatives within The Netherlands. We suggest that our investigation into collective intentionality of USO has a promising role in setting the future research agenda for supporting a more inclusive planning theory and practice.

London: Deprivation, Social Isolation and Regeneration

Research undertaken for the London case study of the URBEX project forms the basis for this chapter. Evidence is presented from a number of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with residents felt to be the victims of social exclusion in two council estates (one core, the other peripheral), as well as from interviews with other local key-informants connected with the estates. The findings reveal that the processes and experiences of exclusion, and strategic responses, vary considerably with respect to Polanyi’s spheres of economic integration among the three groups, and that certain contextual factors distinguish the neighbourhoods. No evidence for a distinctive core-periphery ‘neighbourhood effect’ is found. Political tensions concerning the wider local regeneration efforts reflect similar conflicts elsewhere in London and the UK at large. Problems of low-income, poor housing and social isolation are common to all target groups in both estates. All groups, moreover, value and utilize their neighbourhood as an important resource as part of their struggle to make ends meet. Attachment to place, however, is paradoxical, reflecting socio-spatial immobility among deprived people, and the necessity of having to make do with spatially fixed assets such as housing.

Investigating the geographies of justice movements

The papers presented in this theme issue of Environment and Planning A investigate the geographies of justice movements in theory and practice. The aim is to provide readers with (1) new insights, in general, into the spatial constitution of social movements, and (2) more specifically an attempt to link traditional interest in social and spatial justice among geographers with the recent wave of research on new social movements. The collection offers a foundation for further theoretical and empirical enquiry at the creative interface between geography, social and spatial justice, and social movement scholarship. The papers have their origins in special sessions of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) annual meeting in Denver (2005). Geographers have long displayed an interest in issues concerning social and spatial justice, while conspicuous in their relative absence are systematic attempts among geographers to grapple with social movements. Following the radical turn of the 1970s, under the intellectual leadership of David Harvey after Social Justice and the City (1973), geographers have sought research agendas that centralize questions of social, spatial, economic, and environmental justice (and as a consequence injustice). Rooted primarily but not exclusively in structuralist and, in some cases, historicalmaterialist epistemologies, a long tradition that survives today among a broad array of poststructuralist approaches has emphasized structuralist explanations of injustices that play down the explanatory power of agency. The relative lack of attention within geography to political agency of social movements in tackling injustices at a variety of scales rests partly on the continuing influence of structural perspectives. More specifically, work on the political economy of neoliberalization and the structuration of scale in contemporary neostructural human geography (eg Brenner, 2004; Brenner and Theodore, 2002) has originally been associated with conceptions of social movements placed in the context of political-economic and institutional terrains that are socially structured and reproduced by patterned, bounded, and more constrained forms of political agency. It is only more recently that some geographers have begun to work across the analytical registers of political-economy and social-movement approaches. Recent geographical inroads into the social-movement literature herald a mounting challenge to this impasse in the context of globalization and transnational political action. Over the last decade or so, various contributions to the geographical literature have assessed the role of space within collective political mobilization by flirting with poststructural theories. Some of the most important examples include Barnett and Lows (2004) efforts to spatialize questions of citizenship, the state, and democracy, and how spatial concepts of territoriality, public space, and the city make democratic polities possible in the wider frame of globalization. Sharp et al (2000) and Herod and Wright (2002) analyze processes of power and resistance from a novel confrontation of political economy and poststructuralism, while Herod (1998; 2001) focuses on the geographical dilemmas facing trade unions in the globalizing economy. Routledges (1993) book is the first substantial attempt to link the geographical and sociological literatures on social movements, integrating poststructural theory, place analysis, and new social-movement theory to analyze nonviolent social movements in India. Miller (2000; 2004) presents the first comprehensive attempt to bring together the spatial constitution of social movements and in turn how Guest editorial Environment and Planning A 2007, volume 39, pages 2549 ^ 2553

A short history of distributive justice.

as individuals have the possibility to freely leave the group. Missing from many of these chapters are discussions how groups are formed and constructed in the first place. As Gurpreet Mahajan acknowledges in her chapter examining multicultural frameworks of accommodation: ‘Lacking the necessary resources to exit from the community is only one of the problems associated with the exit option. An equally important issue is whether exit is really a matter of individual choice’ (p. 101). Cultural geographers may be dissatisfied that contemporary theories of difference, race and marginality and debates of the construction of culture, religion and gender are only peripherally addressed and only in a few of the chapters. So, why should geographers read this book? Because it addresses important normative issues that have been neglected in geographical academic debate. Geographers have conducted detailed studies of ethnic, racial, religious and other minorities, and they have developed sophisticated theoretical frameworks related to social and political processes of marginalization and difference. However, they often dodge important normative debates that follow from their research. For a discipline with a healthy contingent of radical researchers and with critical scholarship on the rise, normative debates about political practices and values are important to make our research relevant beyond our narrow academic and disciplinary community. Minorities within minorities offers an example of discussions that should take place in our discipline, as well as presenting a debate to which geographers can contribute a disciplinary perspective that has been neglected in the book itself.