Irregular Connections: Everyday Energy Politics in Catalonia

While questions of energy and energy transition have become hotly contested, the abstract and fetishized conception of energy that dominates contemporary political debates occludes connections to everyday life. By tracing the activities of Catalan activist network Alianza contra la Pobreza Energética (Alliance against Energy Poverty or APE), this article seeks to excavate the political possibilities opened up by a more everyday energy politics. The article addresses the practice of illegal utilities connections among the urban poor of Catalonia, arguing that this constitutes a form of makeshift urbanism resonant of that conceptualized from within ‘Southern’ cities. These ‘irregular connections’ to urban infrastructure networks are then distinguished from the ‘irregular connections’ formed between people within the collectivized social infrastructure of APE. APE, I argue, translate ‘energy’ as social reproduction, framing their struggle for the right to energy around the right to sustain life with dignity. This, I suggest, is the starting point for a feminist praxis capable of creating new and unruly subjectivities, reconfiguring reproductive relations in more caring and collective directions, and ultimately challenging the violence of the commodity form.     

中国能源安全形势现状分析与对策建议

在社会经济不断向前发展的今天,能源安全已成为一个国际性的话题和全球关注的焦点。确保能源安全已成为确保我国经济、政治安全,实现科学、全面、持续、稳定发展,建设和谐社会的必要条件。文章简要分析了中国目前的能源安全形势并在此基础上提出了确保我国能源安全的对策建议。     

Free collective bargaining and incomes policy: learning from Barbara Wootton and Hugh Clegg on post‐war British Industrial Relations and wage inequality

Growing income inequality has returned as a major political issue in affluent, advanced economies, often associated directly with the decline of trade unions and collective bargaining. In policy terms, this has been reflected in the British campaign for a ‘Living Wage’ and the new German minimum wage. Yet on the broader front, Industrial Relations (IR) struggles to find a credible regulatory strategy to address inequality—one that combines state and civil society initiatives and can be legitimised in political philosophy. This History and Policy article argues that there is much to learn from the IR past, before neo‐liberalism. My focus is the writing of Barbara Wootton and Hugh Clegg on ‘Incomes Policy’, from the 1950s to the early 1980s, when this was a central intellectual and policy issue in British IR. I explore the differing justifications for Incomes Policy, from corporatist macro‐economic management to social equality, comparing and contrasting the democratic socialist political principles of Wootton with Clegg's social democratic pluralism. The conclusion relates this historical debate between state pattern and civil society process to current concerns about how social democratic ideas and IR policy can address the problem of labour market inequality.     

The Symbiosis of the Urban and the Political

Historically, the urban was the condition of possibility for the political, but the symbiosis of the two has been concealed by the rise of the state and the concomitant development of the social sciences. The effort to recover the connection by denoting a separate domain of ‘urban politics’ is self‐defeating, because it re‐instantiates an ontology of the political that consigns the urban to the domain of ‘low’ politics. The dominant ontology suggests that ‘high’ politics — the most serious politics or politics proper — is always in the domain of states and empires, and that everything else is subject to it. This view is constantly reaffirmed by the political theory that underpins the state system and the modern social sciences. Nevertheless, a different ontology of the political is always already implicit in the concept of the city, understood as a local phenomenon and a global way of life. To see the political through the city is to notice how proximate diversity stimulates self‐organization and self‐government, generates politics in and between authorities in different registers, and defers the sovereignty claims it produces. On this view, the urban is neither high nor low, but is instead the very form of the political, encompassing states and empires as much as anything else.     

Beyond Urban Subcultures: Urban Subversions as Rhizomatic Social Formations

The article discusses what we term urban social formations and expands on prior work that predominantly examines urban ‘subcultures’ as opposed to the world city paradigm and homogeneous cityscapes. We describe the process of ‘subculturalization’ through which urban social formations, after they have been marginalized and illegalized, become formalized as subcultures and incorporated into the fabric of consumption and profit making. The article proposes that these ossified moments of crystallized practice are only part of wider rhizomatic territories that remain open fields for urban engagement, inviting fluid urban identities and creative states of becoming. The article concludes by exploring the challenges and opportunities of conceptualizing urban social formations as rhizomes.     

More voice after more exit? Unstable industrial relations in Central Eastern Europe

The article examines the industrial relations developments in the post‐communist countries that entered the EU in 2004. Rather than introducing the ‘European Social Model’, EU accession has led to some social tensions, in spite of relatively strong economic growth, because of deregulation, European Monetary Union conditions and the enduring need to compete for foreign investment. EU institutional promotion of social dialogue through the Directive on Information and Consultation of Workers, sector social dialogue committees and the European Employment Strategy has only had limited effects in increasing the ‘voice’ of employees in employment relations. National‐level social dialogue has produced poor results and has even been weakened in Slovenia (where it was originally strong) and, initially, in Slovakia. The lack of ‘voice’ for employees has led to increased ‘exit’ through political populism/abstention and migration. A double paradox emerges. Pro‐labour policies are being developed not by the EU, but rather by its opposite, Euro‐sceptical governments (in Poland and Slovakia), while in the workplaces, employers are forced to concessions not by their employees, but by those who leave and cause labour shortages. However, there is also some evidence of a resurgent ‘voice’ from below, through strikes, organising campaigns, informal collective protests and collective bargaining innovations. Drawing on both theory and history of industrial relations, it is concluded that some preconditions for more stable social compromises including more ‘voice’ are emerging.     

Urban Politics as the Unfolding of Social Relations in Place: The Case of Sexually Transmitted Disease Investigation in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Gay Seattle

Recent debates in urban politics stress the need to broaden conceptions of what counts as urban politics, as well as of where they take place. This means shifting attention to include more quotidian and prosaic social relations, including those taking place in spaces of civil society. We answer this call with a case study of the relations between an emerging gay male community in mid‐twentieth‐century Seattle, USA and the local public health department’s disease investigators (DIs). We focus on both the biopolitics and cultural politics of the investigation process, from the perspectives of both DIs and gay men. We point out certain tensions and paradoxes in these processes as a form of governmentality, and interpret them through a ‘noir’ cultural lens that is consistent with a notion of urban politics as the unfolding of social relations in place. We conclude by stressing how our findings and framework can augment urban political inquiry both intellectually and empirically.     

Animating the Urban Vortex: New Sociological Urgencies

The current era of global urbanization is defined by a convergence of economic and political crises requiring urgent sociological reflection on the meaning of the ‘urban' today. This article responds to the current rethinking of worldwide processes of urbanization sparked off by Brenner, and Brenner and Schmid, arguing for a renewed sociological approach to urban formations that probes beyond the economic logic of urban ‘de‐territorialization', towards the capricious life‐worlds and forms of planetary organization that define the urban. We pursue a theory of the ‘urban vortex' to capture the maelstrom of disorienting crises since 2008, and explicate the social formations implicated in the construction, materialization and practice of power and transgression in cities today. Our aim is to consider what forms of social change emerge in volatile, intense and centralized dynamics (the urban vortex), and how this might relate to arrangements of interconnectivity, particularity and variegation (the planetary). The article highlights three prominent processes of urban social formation: accumulation, stratification and hyper‐diversity—reinstating the need to theorize the centrality of the city within the formations of twenty‐first century capitalism.     

If Urban Regions are the Answer,What is the Question? Thoughts on the European Experience

This essay contributes to the current debate in the field of critical urban and regional studies on the meanings of the ‘regional’ and the ‘urban’. From a political science perspective, we focus on the European case. Firstly, we argue that the conception of the regional scale is not the same in various languages and traditions. Regions in Europe carry meanings and connotations that are not always easy to translate without losing their specific histories. Secondly, our analysis of contemporary debates on the ‘regional’ in the field of urban studies reveals that both practitioners and academics consider the regional scale mainly as a functional space, as the space for economic competitiveness. However, urban regions are also to be regarded as spaces for social and political mobilization. I argue that the political dimension of the ‘regional’ deserves more attention and that further research needs to be undertaken in this respect.     

Everyday Urbanization: The Social Dynamics of Development in Manila’s Extended Metropolitan Region

Attempts at understanding the urbanization process in Southeast Asia have, in recent years, focused on the emergence of extended metropolitan regions around primate cities. Many have argued that with a landscape of intensively mixed ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ activities, such regions represent a distinctive Asian form of urbanization and a challenge to the conventional urban-rural dualism. The implication, both in theoretical and policy terms, is that such regions of mixed land use form new ‘urban’ landscapes that will persist into the future on the basis of balanced ‘agro-industrial’ development. Drawing on fieldwork in a town on Manila’s agricultural periphery, this paper argues that such understandings present a static view of these regions, limited by macro-level data and analysis. A more ethnographic understanding of the social processes of ‘everyday urbanization’ at the interface of the ‘urban’ and the ‘rural’ dispels any sense of a stable rural-urban landscape or balanced development. The evidence points to an incompatibility of functions leading to the gradual ‘squeezing out’ of agriculture due to a changing economic calculus in agricultural households brought on by labour market shifts; environmental conflicts between agricultural and urban-industrial activities; social and cultural transformations in rural society; a political framework of bureaucratic corruption in the regulation of urbanization; and the influence of personalized power relations in agrarian society. — Ces dernières années, les efforts pour comprendre le processus d’urbanisation en Asie du sud-est se sont concentrés sur la naissance des régions métropolitaines étendues autour des cités centrales. Beaucoup soutiennent que ces régions, avec leurs paysages d’activités ‘rurales’ et ‘urbaines’ intensivement mélangées, représentent une forme d’urbanisation typiquement asiatique et mettent la dualité traditionnelle urbain-rural en question. L’implication, théoriquement et politiquement, est que de telles régions, avec leur utilisation mixte du terrain, forment de nouveaux paysages ‘urbains’ qui persisteront dans l’avenir sur une base de développement ‘agro-industriel’. Basé sur un travail de terrain dans une ville de la périphérie agricole de Manille, cet article soutient que de telles approches présentent une vue statique de ces régions, limitée par des données et une analyse de niveau macroscopique. Une approche plus ethnographique des processus sociaux de ‘l’urbanisation de tous les jours’ au point de rencontre du ‘rural’ et de l’urbain’ dissipe toute impression d’un paysage rural-urbain stable ou d’un développement équilibré. Les données font ressortir une incompatibilité de fonction causant un ‘écrasement’ graduel de l’agriculture dûà un calcul économique changeant dans les ménages agricoles occasionné par les changements du marché du travail; des conflits de l’environnement entre les activités agricoles et les activités urbaines-industrielles; des transformations sociales et culturelles dans la société rurale; une structure politique de corruption bureaucratique de la réglementation de l’urbanisation; et l’influence des relations personnelles de pouvoir dans la société agraire     

Community Leadership and the Construction of Political Legitimacy: Unpacking Bourdieu's ‘Political Capital’ in Post‐Apartheid Johannesburg

Apart from local monographs and normative texts on community participation, research on community leadership constitutes a blind spot in urban leadership, urban politics, social movements and urban studies. This article, based on case studies in post‐apartheid Johannesburg, contributes to theorizing community leadership, or informal local political leadership, by exploring Bourdieu's concepts of ‘political capital’ and ‘double dealings’. Considering community leaders as brokers between local residents and various institutions (in South Africa, the state and the party), we examine how leaders construct their political legitimacy, both towards ‘the bottom’ (building and maintaining their constituencies), and towards ‘the top’ (seeking and sustaining recognition from fractions of the party and the state). These legitimation processes are often in tension, pulling community leaders in contradictory directions, usefully understood under Bourdieu's concept of ‘double dealings’. Community leaders are required, more than formally elected political leaders, to constantly reassert their legitimacy in multiple local public arenas due to the informal nature of their mandate and the high level of political competition between them — with destructive consequences for local polity but also the potential for increased accountability to their followers. We finally reflect on the relevance of this theoretical framework, inspired by Bourdieu, beyond South African urban politics.     

Emerging Cultural Capital in the City: Profiling London and Brussels

This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.     

Flexibilization through Metropolis: The Case of Postfordist Seoul,Korea

Predicated upon a regulationist reformulation of postfordism, this paper attempts to explore the political economy of Korea's recent industrial restructuring which has led to a postfordist-like regime of accumulation. To do this, this study takes the Seoul metropolis as a case study. The underlying assumption is that the postfordism of Korea obtains its specificity through the metropolis of Seoul where a host of enabling conditions for postfordist regulation are concentrated. By looking into the process of Seoul becoming the locale of Korean postfordism, a more serious concern is to draw in the consequences which the metropolitanization of postfordism creates for urban society. It is assumed that in the course of postfordist urbanization Seoul's social and political life has been to a great extent enriched, but at the same time is deeply ‘schizophrenic’ due to its being exposed to two contrasting ultra (or post) modern and premodern socio-economic dynamics simultaneously. This urban schizophrenia (or bipolarity, in more common terms) derives from the processes in which Korea's postfordism operates within the context of ‘semi-peripheral capitalist economy’.     

Local development and embedded large firms

A classification of potential ties between large firms and local economies is proposed, first, by working on various sections of literature concerning multinational enterprises, subsidiaries and regional development. Then, building on a model of a dynamic local economy, i.e. the vital industrial district, a framework is sketched in which different combinations of linkages are put in relation to different pools and degrees of strength of social capital and other local factors. The main object of this paper is to present that framework and illustrate a proposition nested in it. The proposition is that involvement in knowledge exchange and institutional building, identifying ‘developmental embeddedness’, is more probable where and when the local factors are neither ‘too weak’ nor ‘too strong’, and contextual policies fostering the developmental role of large firm units are present.     

Where is Urban Politics?

We outline the rationale for reopening the issue of the spatiality of the ‘urban’ in urban politics. There is a long tradition of arguing about the distinctive political qualities of urban sites, practices and processes. Recent work often relies on spatial concepts or metaphors that anchor various political phenomena to cities while simultaneously putting the specificity of the urban itself in question. This symposium seeks to extend debates about the relationship between the urban and the political. Instead of asking ‘what is urban politics?’, seeking a definition of the urban as a starting point we begin by asking ‘where is urban politics?’. This question orients all of the contributions to this symposium, and it allows each to trace diverse political dimensions of urban life and living beyond the confines of ‘the city’ as classically conceived. The symposium engages with ‘the urban question’ through diverse settings and objects, including infrastructures, in‐between spaces, professional cultures, transnational and postcolonial spaces and spaces of sovereignty. Contributions draw on a range of intellectual perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science and political theory, anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, planning and environmental studies — indicating the range of intellectual traditions that can and do inform the investigation of the urban/political nexus.     

Political market failure? The effect of government unity on energy technology policy in industrialized democracies

When do governments implement technology policies that allow society to solve social problems at a lower cost? Focusing on the case of energy, we argue that in industrialized democracies, severe social problems provoke an effective technology policy response when the government is unified. A unified government can easily strike the bargains required to secure political support for new technology programs. We test this theory against data on public energy research and development (R&D) in 22 OECD countries, 1980–2006. We find that as government fractionalization increases in a country, the sensitivity of public energy R&D to wasteful energy use, which presents economic and environmental difficulties to the society, declines. The analysis reveals a new reason for ineffective technology policies and contributes to the broad literature on political market failure.     

Residential Enclosure,Power and Relationality: Rethinking Sociopolitical Relations in Southeast Asian Cities

As in many other areas around the globe, enclosed residential spaces have proliferated in Southeast Asia since the 1990s. Recent publications have presented such gated communities as ‘porous enclaves', implying multiple socio‐spatial dynamics of movements through gates and walls. However, the enclave model does not suffice for analyzing the relational dynamics generated by enclosed residential estates. The concept of ‘ecotonal space' and social geography are used to show, in the case of Cambodia's capital Phnom Penh, that the enclosure and its borders are producers and products of multiple social, spatial, economic and political relations, both symbolic and material. Property developers assert their position as an emerging elite in the city's society and politics, a process based on different types of everyday relations they have with the inhabitants of their residential estates and territorial institutions. The enclosed residential estate can serve as a resource for deploying new power relations. Consubstantial with the neopatrimonial nature of the Cambodian economy and politics, this process is a response to the opacity and uncertainty of real estate markets and urban development.     

Methods in applied social research: special characteristics and quality standards

This article argues that core methodological concepts of fundamental research like validity and reliability are transformed in special quality standards in applied social research. They retain much of their traditional strivings but have to realize them in quite other contexts and with quite different purposes. The conditions of their realisation do not have to become worse in the frequently unstructured field settings, as is usually thought, but can improve as well. The crucial role of the characteristic social and communicative settings for methods employed in this context is stressed. For instance, the dialogue between researchers and research subjects and sponsors obtains a special methodological significance here. Seven quality standards are distilled from the practice of applied social research and elaborated partly according to some concepts first suggested by the German action researchers Moser and Schneider. They are called ‘transparancy’, ‘consistency’, ‘communication and cooperation’, ‘stimulus function’, ‘multi-method’, ‘feed-back and confrontation’ and ‘dynamic method’. The general argument is made specific by a treatment of the consequences of these standards for the employment of interviews and questionaires.     

Politics in wage setting: does government colour matter?

This paper studies the relationship between wage formation and the political colour of the government in an economy with a centralized wage bargaining system. Ideological, organizational and personal ties between the central trade union and the social democratic political party suggest that the trade union may behave significantly different in wage negotiations under a social democratic than under a conservative government. Using time series data for Norway, we estimate that changing from a conservative to a social democratic central government significantly reduces manufacturing wages and makes wages more responsive to unemployment. This result is consistent with a wage bargaining model augmented by political preferences of the union leaders and suggests that the effect of bargaining coordination depends on the political colour of the government. The estimated effects are both robust with respect to model specification and stable over time. We are grateful to Fredrik Wulfsberg, participants at seminars in Trondheim and Oslo, and an anonymous referee for valuable comments.