Paolo Giaccaria

Re-scaling ‘EU’rope: EU macro-regional fantasies in the Mediterranean

This article engages with the most recent spatial fantasy for the making of ‘EU’ropean space: the idea of trans-European macro-regions, currently in vogue in the policy literature. In particular, we focus on the imaginings of a Mediterranean macro-region as the latest incarnation of the macro-regional fad, but also as a useful prism for reflecting on some of the underlying conceptual as well as political and geopolitical challenges of the on-going remaking and rescaling of ‘EU’ropean space. We argue that, although there exists by now a vast literature by geographers and other scholars that engages with the production of ‘EU’ropean spaces through regionalization, the policy literature generated by EU ‘macro-regional experts’ appears to entirely ignore these debates, professing an understanding of regions that is a conceptual pastiche at best, and that entirely occludes the political and geopolitical implications of region-making within, at, and beyond ‘EU’rope’s borders

Local development and competitiveness

Preface. Part One. 1. Space and technological dynamics. 2. Enterprise organisation, hierarchies, networks and competitive environments. 3. The plural economy. 4. Regional development and policies. The legacy of functionalism. 5. The language of systems. Part Two. 6. Competitiveness and development: from enterprise to place. 7. Time, scales and local systems. Theoretical foundations. 8. The relational economy: networks, space and knowledge. 9. The local value production system: empirical evidence. Conclusions. 10. A story still to be told. Bibliography. Index.

Nazi biopolitics and the dark geographies of the selva

This article examines the spatialities of Nazi genocidial practices. It does so by engaging with the concepts of selva and città, as inspired by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben and drawing upon a broader tradition in human geography. Although the historical events that we recall have been extensively discussed elsewhere, we revisit them here through the lens of two geographical metaphors, the selva and the città, in order to gain new insight into the spatial and philosophical dimensions of Nazi geopolitics and biopolitics. We also comment on how these latter have contributed to the merging of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘factual’ realms of the Nazi geopolitical project for the creation of new vital space for the German people. We suggest that much can be learned from an examination of the ways in which particular understandings of (imagined and material) space marked the genocidial plans and practices of the Nazi perpetrators, producing a specific geography of genocide, where (spatial) theory and the implementation of extermination came together.

Life in space, space in life: Nazi topographies, geographical imaginations, and Lebensraum

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the pivotal role the notion of Lebensraum played within the Nazi spatial mindscape. Tracing the complex and contradictory genealogies of Lebensraum, we note how geographers’ engagement with Geopolitik has only made modest reference to the role Lebensraum played in shaping the biopolitical and genocidal machinery implemented by Hitlerism and its followers. Moreover, most of this literature highlights a clear discontinuity between the Lebensraum concept formulated by German academic geographers and the Nazis respectively. Rather than emphasizing the divide between German Geopolitik and Nazi biopolitics, we claim that the Third Reich incorporated Lebensraum by merging its duplicitous meaning, as living/vital space and as life-world. Equality important were both Nazi ‘functionalist’ understandings of Lebensraum as well as its ontological merging of Lebens and Raum in which the racialised German nation is conceived as a spatial organism whose expansion is the essential expression of life. As such, we approach the Nazi Lebensraum grand imagery as a truly geo-bio-political dispositif, in which life and space matched with no gap, no residues. The attempted realisation of this perfect coincidence, we argue, contributed in a crucial way to produce spaces of eviction and displacement and, ultimately, genocide, and annihilation.

Dead liveness/living deadness: Thresholds of non-human life and death in biocapitalism

The opening of a post-genomic age and the possibility of patenting life itself have changed the relationship between biopolitics and capitalism and contributed to the emergence of a new phase of capitalist accumulation, currently known as biocapitalism, the full integration of life and capital into complex architectures of control and ownership. In this paper, we combine Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the threshold and bios/zoē with Nicole Shukin’s idea of rendering to address the connection between life and death in biocapitalism, through a specific focus on the commercialisation of the semen of the Piedmontese bulls. We show how death, rather than merely life, is productive in biocapitalism. Further, in proposing an analysis of some of the ways in which, social and biological, animal life gets incorporated (i.e. owned and sold), we contribute to recent debates in geography on more-than-human understanding of capital accumulation.

COSMOPOLITANISM: THE MEDITERRANEAN ARCHIVES†

Abstract. The existing postcolonial literature privileges the British and French imperial/colonial history that mirrors the ongoing debate on the relationship among cosmopolitanism, universalism, and imperialism. These debates take for granted the Kantian and Hegelian hierarchy of European civilizations, hence marginalizing the southern shores of Europe and the broader Mediterranean space. Drawing on Mignolos notion of “border thinking” and on Isins account of the city as a “difference machine,” I address the issue of how imperialism, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism come together and relate to each other in the context of the Mediterranean (allegedly) cosmopolitan cities. In particular, cosmopolitanism is read as the outcome of the reciprocal adjustment of interior and exterior borders in the making of modernity/coloniality in the Mediterranean. Focusing on the Ottoman millet system, my main claim in this article is that cosmopolitanism worked as a peculiar dispositif within the urban difference machine, enabling the city to sustain the tension between different accounts of citizenship.

Local Economic Development

This contribution focuses on the evolution of the concept of local economic development (LED) in economic geography and other social and economic disciplines. Defining LED as the process that links economic growth and development to specific features and dynamics that take place to the local scale, the author focuses on the broad array of meanings and interpretations that are associated to LED. Although LED mainly arises as analytical framework to put in context phenomena such as the diversification of regional development pattern and the resisting importance of urban and regional agglomeration in a globalized economy, LED literature traditionally associated with governance and policies praxis in order to enhance the performances of local economies in a context of global competition. In particular, we shall focus on the concept of territorial competitiveness, considered as the “cartina di tornasole” (non so come si traduca) of the extreme consequences of the LED discourses. In fact, the concept of territorial competitiveness pushes the main assumptions of LED literature so far to assume that not only firms but also territories do compete with each other. In this perspective, the processes of economic development are so strictly tied to local dynamics and assets that the territories assume a sort of economic – but not only economic – collective agency. In the conclusions, hence, we shall argument that this emphasis on cohesion and homogeneity that lies behind many discourse on LED and territorial competitiveness has some important consequences in terms of reification of the territory.

The language of systems

The lesson of history would thus seem to have punished the great theoretical constructs that represented the two post-war cornerstones of development theory: the positive approach to development as an inevitable destiny, predictable in its outline, and the dominant Marxist approach, pessimistic about the possibilities of snapping the mechanisms of dependency.

Book review forum: David Harvey, Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009; 352 pp.: 9780231148467, US

key contribution from postcolonial literature around reconstituting the structures through which we know. For example, as postcolonial literature in urban geography has shown (e.g. Robinson’s Ordinary Cities, 2006), certain cities and forms of urbanism have come to dominate our conceptions of urban geography because of the historical place they have held in urban theory. Our conceptions of the city are often premised on the experiences and theoretical work based upon cities in western Europe and North America, and cities outside the ‘global North’ are often understood in relation to those referent objects. This creates two lingering problems. First, claims about the nature of the city as a category or formation are often made with cities in the ‘North’ implicitly in mind, i.e. the often implicit, unnoticed slippage between claims about certain cities (e.g. New York, London or Paris) and claims about ‘the city’ as an abstract, generalized category. Second, urban geographical work has been surprisingly slow at accounting for how the experience of cities in the ‘South’ might cause us to rethink urban knowledge and urban theory. An urban geography that would exhibit what Robinson (2006) calls a cosmopolitan imagination needs to critically reflect not just on the content of its knowledge, but on the structures through which that knowledge is produced. These structures include mundane sites like the prominent regulatory role of certain predominantly western academic journals in shaping urban geographical knowledge globally, as well as everyday research practices such as comparison (a key strategy in how we develop knowledge of other places), and practices like translation from different languages, developing new international research connections and collaborations, and so on. In short, it requires a critical interrogation of our theory cultures and how they serve to structure how we come to learn geographical knowledge and assemble, as social scientists, our cosmopolitan imaginations (Connell, 2007; Jazeel and McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2006). If a rejuvenated cosmopolitanism depends on learning geography more critically, we also need to carefully consider both whom we learn with and how, and the sites through which knowledge is produced and translated; it seems to me that this is a contribution from postcolonial thinking that might enrich Harvey’s focus on the conditions of possibility for geographical knowledge. In closing, the questions that I raise here are a result of Harvey’s excellent and provocative engagement in the geographies of cosmopolitanism. The book is a pleasure to read and is in places an exciting showcase of Harvey’s unique conceptual and political grasp of the nature and importance of geographical understanding.

27.50/£19 (hbk).

We shall now turn our attention to the enterprise as a key actor in the functioning of the economic system. Called on to play the function of controlling and co-ordinating the factors of production, the modern industrial company, in the tradition of management science, is distinguished from other historical forms of organisation because of its formal way of regulating production and power relations. The reference is not therefore to the scarcely formalised company that characterised the manufacturing economy of past centuries, peopled with small independent producers usually working on a single product and in a restricted geographical area. Even at an intuitive level, it is easy to observe how the concept of (company) organisation indicates a rather complex actor. Faced with the “disorder” of the external world, it provides answers aimed at the most profitable use of resources and the definition of the most efficient forms of operation and expansion (Simon, 1960).