Bringing together leading theorists and scholars in contemporary spatial thinking and political economy, this volume presents an unprecedented collection of essays on scale, as well as case studies on the restructuring of our global society.

To honour the distinguished career of Donald Savoie, Governing brings together an accomplished group of international scholars who have concerned themselves with the challenges of governance, accountability, public management reform, and regional policy. Governing delves into the two primary fields of interest in Savoie's work - regional development and the nature of executive power in public administration. The majority of chapters deal with issues of democratic governance, particularly the changing relationship over the past thirty years between politicians and public servants. A second set of essays addresses the history of regional development, examining the politics of regional inequalities and the promises and pitfalls of approaches adopted by governments to resolve the most vexing policy problems. Contributors provide readers with a valuable primer on the key issues that have provoked debate among practitioners and students of government alike, while reflecting on government initiatives meant to address inadequacies. Showcasing the practical experience and scholarly engagement of its authors, this collection is a valuable addition to the fields of public administration, public policy, political governance, and regional policy. Contributors include Peter Aucoin (Dalhousie University), Herman Bakvis (University of Victoria), James Bickerton (St Francis Xavier University), Jacques Bourgault (École nationale d'administration publique/UQAM), Thomas Courchene (Queen's University), Ralph Heintzman (University of Ottawa), Mark D. Jarvis (University of Victoria), Lowell Murray (Senate of Canada, retired), B. Guy Peters (University of Pittsburgh), Jon Pierre (University of Gothenburg) Mario Polèse (INRS-UCS), Christopher Pollitt (Leuven University), Donald J. Savoie (Université de Moncton), and Paul G. Thomas (University of Manitoba).

The urban condition is today being radically transformed. Urban restructuring is accelerating, new urban spaces are being consolidated, and new forms of urbanization are crystallizing. In New Urban Spaces, Neil Brenner argues that understanding these mutations of urban life requires not only concrete research, but new theories of urbanization. To this end, Brenner proposes an approach that breaks with inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded settlement unit-the city or the metropolis-and explores the multiscalar constitution and periodic rescaling of the capitalist urban fabric. Drawing on critical geopolitical economy and spatialized approaches to state theory, Brenner offers a paradigmatic account of how rescaling processes are transforming inherited formations of urban space and their variegated consequences for emergent patterns and pathways of urbanization. The book also advances an understanding of critical urban theory as radically revisable: key urban concepts must be continually reinvented in relation to the relentlessly mutating worlds of urbanization they aspire to illuminate.

RESCALING URBAN POVERTY “In this path-breaking book, Mahito Hayashi explores the rescaled geographies of homelessness that have been produced in contemporary Japanese cities. Through an original synthesis of regulationist political economy and immersive place-based research, Hayashi situates urban homelessness in Japan in comparative-international contexts. The book offers new theoretical perspectives from which to decipher emergent forms of urban marginality and their contestation.” —Neil Brenner, Lucy Flower Professor of Urban Sociology, University of Chicago “Mahito Hayashi traces the shifting spatial strategies of unhoused people as they create spaces of emancipation within Japanese cities. Attending to the complexities of contentious class politics and livelihoods barely sustained by the survival economies, Rescaling Urban Poverty is a unique and valuable contribution to the study of the geographies of urban social movements.” —Nik Theodore, Head of the Department of Urban Planning and Policy, University of Illinois Chicago Rescaling Urban Poverty discloses the hidden dynamics of state rescaling that ensnares homeless people at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Explains the oppressive effects of rescaling and its limits in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism Uses ethnography as a re-ontologising medium of critical theorisation in Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands Develops rich context-based and field-based arguments about social movements, poverty and housing policy, and public space formation in Japan Uncovers the radical geographies of placemaking, commoning, and translation that can create prohomeless urban environments under rescaling Refines the method of abstraction to broaden the international scope of critical literatures and links different scholarly standpoints without obscuring disagreements By advancing a broad research program for homelessness and poverty, Rescaling Urban Poverty provides the essential understanding of how state rescaling ensnares homeless and impoverished people in the interplay of the state, domiciled society, public space, urban class relations, social movements, and capitalism. Its three angles – national states, public and private spaces, and urban social movements – uncover the hidden dynamics of rescaling that emerge, and are resisted, at the fringes of mainstream society and its housing regimes/classes. Evidence is drawn from Japanese cities where the author has conducted long-term fieldwork and develops robust urban narratives by mobilising spatial regulation theory, metabolism theory, state theory, and critical housing theory. The book cross-fertilises these Lefebvrian, Gramscian, Harveyan, and other Marxian strands through meticulous efforts to reinterpret both old and new texts. By building bridges between classical and contemporary interests, and between the theories and Japanese cities, this book attracts various audiences in geography, sociology, urban studies, and political economy.

In Rethinking Feminist Interventions into the Urban, Linda Peake and Martina Rieker embark on an ambitious project to explore the extent to which a feminist re-imagining of the twenty-first century city can form the core of a new emerging analytic of women and the neoliberal urban. In a world in which the majority of the population now live in urban centres, they take as their starting point the need to examine the production of knowledge about the city through the problematic divide of the global north and south, asking what might a feminist intervention, a position itself fraught with possibilities and problems, into this dominant geographical imaginary look like. Providing a meaningful discussion of the ways in which feminism, gender and women have been understood in relation to the city and urban studies, they ask probing and insightful questions that indicate new directions for theory and research, illustrating the necessity of a re-formulation of the north-south divide as a critical and urgent project for feminist urban studies. Working through platforms as diverse as policy formulations and telling stories, the contributors to the book come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds and geographic locations ranging through the Caribbean, North America, Western Europe, South, East and South East Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. They identify a range of issues (such as care, work, violence, the household, mobility, intimacy and poverty) that they analytically address to make sense of and reanimate resistance to the contemporary urban through articulations of new grammars of gendered geographies of justice.

"In City of Wood, architectural historian James Buckley explores San Francisco's rapid urban development as a product of the physical and economic transformation of the natural environment of the American West. San Francisco is best known as a product of the gold and silver that were mined from California's mountains and streams, but as Buckley shows, the city's growth was in fact fueled by a wide range of natural resources that could be converted into marketable commodities. City of Wood investigates the architecture of a typical Western resource industry--redwood lumber--to determine how the exploitation of California's natural resources shaped the built environment of both San Francisco and its broader hinterland"--

The urgent need to resolve conflicts over forests, fisheries, farming practices, urban sprawl, and greenhouse-gas reductions, among many others, calls for a critical rethinking of the nature of our democracy and citizenship. This work aims to move the ideas of green democracy and ecological citizenship from the margins to the centre of discussion and debate in Canada. Environmental Conflict and Democracy in Canada offers sixteen case studies to demonstrate that environmental conflicts are always about our rights and responsibilities as citizens as well as the quality of our democratic institutions. By bringing together environmental politics and democratic theory, this path-breaking collection charts a new course for research and activism, one that reveals the deficits of citizenship and how democracy must be extended to achieve a socially just, ecologically sustainable society.

Pt. 1. Risk, precaution, governance -- pt. 2. Crime, deviance, exception -- pt. 3. Biopolitics, biometrics, borders -- pt. 4. Risks, tactics, resistances.

Processes of globalization have changed the world in many, often fundamental, ways. Increasingly these processes are being debated and contested. This Handbook offers a timely, rich as well as critical panorama of these multifaceted processes with up-to-date chapters by renowned specialists from many countries. It comprises chapters on the historical background of globalization, different geographical perspectives (including world systems analysis and geopolitics), the geographies of flows (of people, goods and services, and capital), and the geographies of places (including global cities, clusters, port cities and the impact of climate change).

Engineering Reality offers unprecedented insights into the power of environmental impact assessments in engineering a reality favourable to any investment, focusing on the highly contested environmental study of a large hydroelectric dam project in southern Colombia, El Quimbo. The inclusion of environmental impact assessments to project proposals of environmental influence has been an undeniably important step to environmental governance in many countries around the world. Regarding the science behind these studies as objective and their results as the closest in representing reality, however, is misleading. Many activists and scholars made it their mission to uncover the limitations and work towards filling the gaps. Participation processes are considered key to any successful evaluation, but local knowledges and alternative perspectives are still often disqualified through more widely accepted scientific methods. Engineering Reality systematically walks through and accounts for the shortcomings and injustices associated with environmental monitoring. It compares the reality as presented in the dam’s environmental impact study with first-hand accounts from the local and affected populations and observations gathered through two periods of fieldwork in 2012 (before) and 2016-17 (after the dam started operating). It explores how the knowledge of the study was used politically and to what end. Bringing the findings in conversation with the wider environmental impact assessment literature, the book proposes a new framework to assess energy projects -Energy Data Justice- that regards the environmental impact assessment a strictly political tool aimed at reaching the just energy transition in Colombia and worldwide.