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This short paper provides the initial provocation for a themed issue that emerges from a conference on the topic of geographies of social crises/crises of social geographies. The article calls for a (re)consideration of the “social question” in the 21st century. We call for social geographers to engage with the historical dynamics of places and milieus to understand novel class societies and the violence that underpins social inequalities. The article makes a case for an empirically saturated social geography. We believe this provides a useful programme which helps to understand current phenomena of political, social and economic crises.

This paper develops three analytical categories – range, supporting capacity, exigency/notability – to capture how supra-individual phenomena affect the people studied by empirical research. Researchers face a tension between constructivist and realist perspectives as the examined phenomena are simultaneously social constructs, in the way people perceive and understand them, and social facts in their consequences. Taking a critical perspective on the notion of large social phenomena – popularized by Theodore Schatzki – the paper develops an explorative terminology that aims to facilitate practice-oriented field research. Examples of empirical research on transition and degrowth initiatives illustrate how research subjects estimate the range of a phenomenon by trying to grasp whether they are in or out of its reach; the supportive capacity of a phenomenon by exploring how far it carries certain processes; and they experience the exigency of a phenomenon and ascribe a certain notability to it. Taken together, this terminology grasps the way phenomena are matters of concern, rather than matters of fact, for the research subjects.

Equality, a concept so central to democratic societies, is being scrutinized in a critical manner in this paper. It argues that the spatial borders of territorial states are also the limits of the validity of the principle of abstract equality, of its ideological productivity as well as its emancipatory potential. The paper discusses the Marxist critique of the limitations of the merely abstract, formal understanding of equality that is inscribed into the structures of democratic states, and the ways in which both the Marxist tradition and current theories of radical democracy find an emancipatory potential in the demand for abstract equality that makes possible going beyond its very abstractions. The focus of these discussions is on how spatiality is integrated into theories of radical democracy on the level of theory. The paper suggests that combining the insights on the productivity of spatial forms from discussions in human geography with the critique of merely abstract equality is a decidedly geographical contribution to the development of theories of the political.

This paper explores the use of fuzzy difference methods in order to understand the differences between forest classes. The context for this work is provided by REDD+, which seeks to reduce the net emissions of greenhouse gases by rewarding the conservation of forests in developing countries. REDD+ requires that local inventories of forest are undertaken and payments are made on the basis of the amount of forest (and associated carbon storage). At the most basic level this involves classifying land into forest and non-forest. However, the critical issues affecting the uptake, buy-in and ultimately the success of REDD+ are the lack of universally agreed definition of forest to support REDD+ mapping activities, and where such a definition is imposed, the marginalization of local community voices and local landscape conceptualizations. This tension is at the heart of REDD+. This paper addresses these issues by linking methods to quantify changes in fuzzy land cover to the concept of data primitives, which have been previously proposed as a suitable approach to move between land cover classes with different semantics. These are applied to case study that quantifies the difference in areas for two definitions of forest derived from the GLC and FAO definitions of forest. The results show how data primitives allow divergent concepts of forest to be represented and mapped from the same data and how the fuzzy sets approach can be used to quantify the differences and non-intersections of different concepts of forest. Together these methods provide for transparent translations between alternative conceptualizations of forest, allowing for plural notions of forest to be mapped and quantified. In particular, they allow for moving from an object-based notion of forest (and land cover in general) to a field-based one, entirely avoiding the need for forest boundaries.

The potentiality of crowds, in terms of possibilities for achieving a livelihood in the big and dense cities, gains centre stage in contemporary urban studies dealing with the global South. These emergent effects of crowds act as dissociation of further work in urban theory from the global North that often displays a universalistic claim. However, contemporary urban theory both from the global South and North has astonishing less to say about internal processes of crowds that could be interpreted as emerging effects. The paper analyses the work on crowds by Peter Sloterdijk and the performative theory of assembly by Judith Butler in terms of theoretical possibilities to enrich contemporary thinking on urbanity in the South. The paper accentuates two important arguments for urban theory that could be fit into existing work in the field. Sloterdijk emphasises the “affective synthesis” of crowds and the build environment as an important mechanism of interaction between crowds and urbanity, whereas Butler elaborates the performative effect of crowds to articulate the right of owning attested rights.

This paper examines questions of how issues of visual representation and vision have changed with the the quantitative and theoretical thinking in 1950s and early 1960s Anglophone geography. If the quantitative revolution in geography is understood as a scientific revolution, one should also expect a revolution of the ways in which geography made use of visualizations. At the center of this essay is William Bunge's “Theoretical Geography”, one of the founding text of this new geographical thought. This book forms the starting point for a discussion of the changed roles and changed forms of visualization in the production of geographical knowledge. Following Fred Schaefer's attack on Richard Harthorne, Bunge placed the search for morphological laws at the center of a geography that is strongly oriented towards geometry. In this paper, the text of Bunge serves as a starting point into the field of early analytical cartography and the first consideration of what later, become geographic information systems and their new visual language. In this paper this history of GIS is largely told without a history of technology a well as without its political context of the cold war and the Fordist state.

This paper undertakes a creative exploration of bulky rubbish [sperrmüll] in the City of Bonn by expanding on and utilising what has come to be known as non-representational thinking. Through a non-representational engagement with sperrmüll, I shed light on waste as a significant human-nonhuman ecology as it appears in an especially routinised manifestation in urban space. In doing so, the paper contributes to a discussion about enacting non-representational methodologies within German-speaking human geography. Here, there are three methodological interventions for a non-representational endeavour: (1) interfering, (2) material thinking, and (3) writing and presentation. These interventions are supported by revisiting Deleuze and Guattari's notion of assemblage; using it as a way to attend to sperrmüll as an area-sized fabrication connecting humans and various other materialities, and which directs thought towards a wide array of agencies. In conclusion, non-representational perspectives are advanced as a way to expose the affective ecologies that enable certain actions and hamper others.

Recent debate in human geography has challenged the problematic "alternative"/"conventional" duality that characterises contemporary food provision. Within this binary, alternative food networks and initiatives (AFIs and AFNs) are positioned in opposition to more conventional, agri-capitalist modes of food production and distribution. Framing food around materially, discursively and spatially distinct, albeit relational, geographies not only reinforces this binary but also reaffirms the hegemony of agri-capitalism that alternative provision seeks to undo. Focusing on examples of artisanal and industrial bread production in the UK and the USA, this paper challenges such ontological framings. Drawing from conceptual insights into diverse economies and alternative economic spaces (e.g. Gibson-Graham, 1996:2004; Lee and Leyshon, 2003) and adopting an integrative approach to practice (Shove and Pantzar, 2005; Hand and Shove, 2007), this paper examines the practices that constitute artisanal and industrial baking. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which embodied practices constitute the spaces of production for such foods. While acknowledging the considerable distances between the geographies that circumscribe these alternative and conventional foods, this paper argues that practices of food production narrow these distances, thereby destabilising the alternative/conventional binary. The geographies of food may mobilise an array of places, materials and ideologies, which are suggestive of two opposing systems of food provision, but practices of food production reveal an array of marginal spaces that challenge this. By reorienting critical attention onto these marginal spaces, the differences between artisanal and conventional food become blurred – and the affinities produced through normalised discourses and materialities of food are contested, resisted and disrupted. I argue these spaces are insurgent and that they come together through affinitive practices, which result in the potential for radical change within food provision.

The patterns, motivations, and consequences of the outmigration of young adults from rural areas is a classic topic in population geography. In our paper, we first take a critical look at statistical analyses and cartographic representations of migration patterns of young adults in rural areas using Central Germany1 as an example, stressing the shortcomings of quantitative analyses of residential mobility. We argue that migration is a complex social process, taking place as the result of the interplay of demographic, socio-structural, political, economic, and production-related factors involving the mobile individuals, as well as other actors, discourses, and practices. Following this, we discuss the emergence of cultures of (out-)migration in rural areas characterised by heightened mobility over longer periods of time and possible approaches to analyse such regional phenomena. We hence aim at a deepening of the concept of “culture of migration” and an expansion of the debate on motives and practices of migration to include psychological approaches, as well as a complex systems perspective.

This article deals with one of the most controversial topics in urban studies related to mobile capital and mobile people. At first glance this seems to be contradictory since numbers of short-term rentals have decreased dramatically due to the coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) pandemic. However, this paper is not about numbers and statistics. Instead it discusses structural issues regarding governance and power relations which remain important topics (especially) in times of crisis. It provides insights regarding the following issues: firstly, it deconstructs different “myths” that still surround short-term rentals and Airbnb and secondly, it delineates the structural power of Airbnb as a new urban institution. This helps us to understand some of the conflicts over Airbnb and the pitfalls with current forms of regulation on the one side as well as showing the complexity and agency of short-term rentals on the other.

The housing question is a topic of increasing concern in a number of European cities. Rising housing costs burden many households. Since the outbreak of the global economic crisis in 2008, housing has increasingly come under spotlight of investors. Institutional and private actors invest in real estate not only in metropolitan areas but also in middle and small-sized towns. Tourism-induced demand increases the pressure on housing markets particularly in tourist-dominated cities. The manifestation of these processes varies on a small scale and is influenced by regional-local planning and politics. Based on the example of the city of Salzburg, the article shows that the housing question manifests itself strongly aside metropolises as well. Financial investments by private and institutional actors in real estate and different forms of tourism demand exacerbate the housing shortage. By linking the discussions about the effects of (mass-)tourism and financial investments on regional housing markets, this paper provides additional insights. The additional demand for (residential) space by tourism is used to increase or secure the return on investments in real estate. Financial investments in housing offer additional (problematic) potential for tourist use, such as short-term rentals. Owners benefit from both processes. Due to the prevalent power relations, planning and politics have little to counter the current challenges. © 2019 Copernicus. All rights reserved.