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Through a narrativization that connects heterogeneous and often undetected social lives in Bogotá, Colombia, this article charts the rhizomatic spatial crossings of continuously mobile urban trajectories, the often-unsettled forms of dwelling that they inhabit, and their capacity to make place despite the dismantling of community cohesion and the necropolitical forms of urbanity operated by racial capitalism and coloniality across Latin America – what the article refers to as relational territories, drawing on a rich scholarship on Black Geographies of the everyday and Latin American ‘territorios’. From there, the article explores how paths are being charted out of the racial-colonial maze of Latin America’s city-making, through multiple forms of ordinary resistance/re-existence that create life in the interstices of ongoing necro-politics . Ultimately, the article shows how this pluralistic repertoire mobilized from the urban margins not only points to the difficulties of emplacement for Afro-descendant dwellers in Latin American cities but also to the possibility of respatialising the urban from the decolonial relationality of Améfrica. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on environmental justice have paid limited attention to procedural injustice in parks. Using the concept of slow violence, this paper interrogates the ideological and philosophical foundations of American public parks in order to unearth enduring structural patterns of procedural injustice. The paper illustrates that community, state, and national parks in the U.S. were founded upon the elitism, eugenics, and racism of affluent and powerful White conservationists and social reformers. To materialize their own interests, the White elite defined, built, and managed public parks by displacing, excluding, and criminalizing the Indigenous, the poor, people of color, and immigrants. As such, many of today's park injustices, such as inequitable park availability and quality, gentrification, and non-visitation of people of color, originated from the beginning of the public parks in the 19th century and have been sustained ever since. The paper discusses corrective justice strategies to alleviate the enduring slow violence in parks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, based on 16 months of in-depth interviews and participant observation conducted over five years, explores the participation of young Afro-Italian women entrepreneurs in new initiatives related to Black beauty, style, and (natural) hair care. While based primarily in northern Italy, these projects draw on economic and cultural connections to the broader Black diaspora. I argue that entrepreneurship has emerged as an important strategy for Afro-Italian women seeking to advance new narratives about Blackness (and specifically, Black womanhood) and its inclusion within the material and symbolic boundaries of Italy. At the same time, Afro-Italian entrepreneurship is transforming Italian material culture, and, by extension, the meanings of Italianness itself. Entrepreneurship is thus a key terrain of struggle through which Afro-Italians have begun to assert claims to Italian citizenship and belonging in the context of both economic stagnation and a refugee 'emergency'. It is one example of a nascent Black spatial politics in Italy that is conditioned by, but also pushes back against, dominant regimes of racist exclusion and neoliberal racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The presence of poor migrants from the EU countries of Romania and Bulgaria (mainly Roma subjects) who beg in Swedish cities has since 2010 caused a collective crisis in Sweden, affecting Swedish identity and institutions such as the (local and national) welfare state. Employing a psychoanalytic framework, inspired primarily by Lacan and Žižek, we describe the various dimensions of this crisis and explain the socio-psychological processes that produce the experience of crisis. We argue that the reason the 'EU migrant'/'beggar' produces these crises is because this figure is a symptom of the Real. Encounters with 'EU migrants' in the Swedish landscape become ethical encounters with the Real within three main realms: intersubjective (individual), national identity (collective), and political economy (institutional). The individual experiences an ethical crisis where no action in the meeting with a 'beggar' provides a satisfactory solution to the problem. The presence of 'EU migrants' also threatens to undermine the hegemonic Swedish self-image as a moral superpower. And the 'EU migrant's' presence interferes with the nation's desire to believe in its political and economic institutions. Finally, the attempt to satisfactorily locate responsibility for solving the problem of the 'EU migrant' reveals contradictions within capitalism, nationalism, and liberalism as they operate in the Swedish context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, Danish-Palestinian Omar El-Hussein shot and killed two men in Copenhagen, before being killed himself by the police. Danish media immediately classified El-Hussein's actions as 'a terrorist attack', and they became the object of extreme concern to the Danish public. In the following days, the two murder sites were momentarily turned into public memorial spaces. When the site of the killing of El-Hussein also became a site of mourning, however, it prompted a negative reaction from politicians and the white majority public. While the mixed reactions to publicly mourning a murderer are understandable, they also reveal something about the racialized conditions of public mourning. Reading the different acts of publicly mourning El-Hussein, the article investigates the ways in which public sites of grief are outlined by racialized economies. This article builds upon Butler's argument that public mourning forms as indicative of which lives are considered lives at all. However, we argue that such an analysis must consider the racialized logics of the performativity of public mourning: Thus, while non-white grief seems not to be recognized as grief at all, white grief tends to reiterate the racialized processes that outline white lives as grievable at the expense of non-white lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a society dominated by a colorblind approach to racial difference, racial categories are often viewed as unchanging and constructed in a time past. This article examines the making of racial categories and subjectivities in everyday perceptions and portrayals of place and belonging related to environmentalism. It examines the ways in which middle-class white people, who engage regularly with Latino immigrants, simultaneously construct the racial category of ‘white’ and affirm their own belonging in Boulder, Colorado through an exclusionary discourse of environmentalism. In Boulder, immigrants and non-immigrant Latinos are often portrayed as unaware of environmentalism, not interested in environmentalism, and/or too busy or poor to participate in environmentalism. In interviews, white residents of the city reproduce discourses of privilege and exclusion through environmental discourses and reinforce their own white environmental subjectivity as the norm. The insider/outsider division established through environmental discourse in Boulder is a specific example of how exclusion is enforced through the racialization of ‘natural’ spaces and environmental activities and how environmentalism itself is an important articulation of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the illumination of streets by electric streetlights in Western cities is a given today, in the early part of the twentieth century it was a technology whose conspicuous consumption was a status symbol for both individuals and towns. Not long after its introduction, however, electric lighting in cities also became noticeable in its absence. This paper draws on municipal records to consider how ideologies of white supremacy and progress came together to produce the uneven deployment of streetlighting in the small town of Rocky Mount, North Carolina, thus contributing to the city's segregation in the early part of the twentieth century. By tracing the development of hierarchical streetlighting systems, such as General Electric's White Way, I also show how the racialized deployment of streetlighting was aided by large electrical equipment manufacturers. In conclusion, I argue that these insights are crucial to understanding how technologies racialize space, but also how technologies such as streetlighting are central to the production of the spaces in which race is produced and racism takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the US-based ‘Southern Strategy,’ an electoral scheme which created conditions that resurrected a broadly conservative agenda in the USA during the 1970s. While scholars have long studied the Southern Strategy from the standpoint of the electoral and political geography of the USA, its role in transforming the political economy of the USA is underappreciated. By reworking the nature of racism from the overt white supremacy of previous eras the Southern Strategy speaks to the changing socio-spatial manifestations of racism in the USA and the workings of the US political economy. By connecting the Southern Strategy with a broad economic argument this paper crystallizes the role race plays in the development of the US political economy as well as implications for understanding the way race and capitalism in the USA are co-constituted with one another. Through an examination of the Southern Strategy we can trace both the changing coordinates of the US political economy and race as the USA made the transition from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) to better understand the way the truth process in Greensboro, North Carolina intersects with conceptions of restorative justice and geographic understandings of the ‘right to the city.’ The GTRC was a grassroots truth process focused on a shooting of labor organizers in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party Members and the complicity of local officials in the violence. In 2006, the GTRC released its report to the citizens of Greensboro and its recommendations for the city touched off a contentious debate. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and archival research—I argue the GTRC process engages with notions of right to the city activism that challenges the right to the city literature to focus on broader discussions of racism, activism, and white privilege that emerges from critical race scholarship and contributes to the growth of robust, multiracial anticapitalist coalitions; an approach to scholarship on the right to the city that has broad academic purchase for social geography and urban political engagement in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article combines political and economic geographies with social and cultural theory by reviewing structural and actor-centred approaches to urban governance alongside work on identity, community, masculinity and ‘rights to the city’. The article seeks to bring these literatures into dialogue via an analysis of mayoral politics, presenting empirical research from a UK city in order to highlight the influence of class, sexuality and racism on urban politics. It shows how theoretical and empirical engagement with unequal social relations and their discursive construction through cultural forms and practices offers fruitful avenues for geographical understanding of territorial and relational urban governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we discuss the recent success of extreme right politicians in the Flemish countryside. Because the Vlaams Belang, the dominant extreme right-wing party in Flanders, plays to racist attitudes and everyday fears, we study the interrelations between the rise of the extreme right, racism and a spatialized and racialized culture of fear. Based on a multi-level analysis of spatial variations of racism and a qualitative analysis of focus group interviews on fear of crime, we suggest that a rural or suburban vote for the extreme right Vlaams Belang has to be understood as a protest vote against the racialization and the insecurity of the central cities and as an anticipatory vote that has to stop the imagined infection of the 'white' and 'safe' countryside with urban 'diseases' like crime and foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the twin problems of racism and sectarianism in Scotland, exploring everyday experiences of them, the geographical bases of their production and their relationship to the wider Scottish society. I use qualitative interview and ethnographic research from Scotland, carried out in 2001, to examine these issues, arguing that they can be usefully considered together, within a framework focusing on diasporic belonging, hybridity and difference. These areas help uncover the positionalities of the groups involved, relative to each other and to Scotland, as well as the processes through which different minority groups are Othered and exteriorized whilst simultaneously (if differentially) embedded within Scottish/British society. Referring these issues to the ongoing political processes in post-devolution Scotland, ambivalences of belonging and desire can be identified which serve to complicate diasporic identities, which make both problems particularly intractable, and which pose questions for the construction of an inclusive 'civic' identity in Scotland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]