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This paper considers the work that attentiveness can and can't do in generating more ethical relations with non‐humans. How to build better relations with non‐humans has been a central debate in geography and cognate disciplines. These concerns include ethical relations with non‐humans who both pervade and create liveable environments, such as soil biota. Scholars have specifically identified attentiveness as key in generating more‐than‐human ethics. However, how attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do in generating ethical relations, has not been sufficiently explored. Additionally, soils as relational materialities remain underexplored in social sciences. In this paper, I address these two important gaps in scholarship. Investigating the rising concern with soil biota in conventional English farming, I propose the care network as a way of conceptualising and investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness. As concerns grow about soil degradation, and the dangers this is posing to food production and to human survival, land managers are attending to soil ecosystems as part of caring for their farm businesses. While this attentiveness is producing some transformative effects, its potential is limited by the configuration of the soil care network. As long as soil care is configured primarily as farmers' concern, the potential of attentiveness in generating ethical regard to the needs of soil biota will be limited. In the Conclusions, I suggest ways of expanding attentiveness to soils and of building a wider and practical relational ethic of soil care. I also argue we need more attention in geographic research to attentiveness and care as systemic, unequally distributed, and operating at multiple scales. Human life depends on the life of soil ecosystems. This paper draws attention to soils as underexplored in social sciences, and asks how we may form better ethical and practical relations with soil biota. In doing this, it shows the need for a more nuanced understanding of the work that attentiveness can do in generating more‐than‐human care ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the crisis of post‐politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England. The proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment, marking not only the failure of consensus‐seeking politics in governing dissents but also the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. This is manifest in the intensification of state control, strengthening of executive power, and decline of democratic institutions, with a shift of emphasis from techno‐managerial to executive‐punitive practices, and from seemingly consensual to openly antagonistic approaches. This drift to authoritarianism has been justified by invoking a "state of exception," whereby the established rules and procedures are displaced by the appeal to "exceptional" circumstances, such as emergencies, national securities, and global pandemics. We draw on a case study of shale gas "fracking" in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision‐making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. We discuss the role of a "political moment" in the politicisation of fracking, arguing that the return of the political has engendered antagonistic and exclusionary practices, rather than the agonistic pluralism that planning scholars have called for. In managing planning conflicts, consent, compromise, and co‐option are increasingly complemented or replaced by discipline, control, and explicit exclusion. Instead of denying, neutralising, or suppressing antagonism by calling for consensus, authoritarian politics exaggerates it by establishing frontiers between legitimate and non‐legitimate voices of dissents. The paper concludes by emphasising that the authoritarian turn can only offer a contingent and fleeting solution to the failure of post‐political planning to deliver neoliberal pro‐growth goals. It cannot eradicate the crisis of legitimacy in planning, nor can it foreclose the political struggle for fixing its meaning and purpose. This paper argues that the crisis of post‐politics has sparked an authoritarian turn in spatial planning in England, and that the proposed reform of the English planning system in 2020 is a defining moment that marks the failure of consensus‐seeking politics in governing dissents and the rising authoritarian responses to fix it. We draw on a case study of shale gas "fracking" in England to show how authoritarianism has crept into planning processes through changes in legislation, reconfiguration of rules, rescaling of decision making, and shrinking of democratic spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years sexualised drug use, usually referred to as chemsex, has become the object of intense media health‐related panic and increasing academic scrutiny. Critical social scientists have challenged pathologising perspectives, analysing the socio‐cultural and political economy dimensions of chemsex. Against the silence of geographers in this emerging field, the paper develops a geographical relational analysis of chemsex, focusing on the experiences of gay men living with HIV in two Italian cities (Bologna; Milan) and Italian gay men living with HIV in three English cities (Leicester; London; Manchester). Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, that is, as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. To emphasise the central role of place and geographical knowledge to understand chemsex, the paper builds on 'weak theory', as it conceives things as open, entangled, connected and in flux, while focusing on ordinary practices and heterogeneity in more‐than‐human worlds. Showing how chemsex represents an embodied, relational geographical encounter among different human and non‐human actors, places (both physical and digital), imaginations and desires, the paper highlights the role of sexual practices in the relational construction of place‐making, therefore calling for an increased engagement with sex itself within the field of geographies of sexualities. The paper introduces a relational geographical perspective to the analysis of chemsex. Demonstrating the constitutive role of place in the practice of chemsex, the paper frames place relationally, i.e. as the encounter between here and there, the material and the virtual, imagined geographies and lived spaces. The paper calls for an increased engagement with the materiality of sex within the field of geographies of sexualities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arising from seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – "the homeless" – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. The "we" through which these auto/biographies are writ denotes an inflection on the spectral presence of my own experiences of homelessness, spectral because they reflect a historic occurrence brought back in the doing of this research. Affording a unique position of betweenness, this paper thus seeks to add depth and nuance to the homeless literature by emphasising the embodied performances through which we become more‐than‐homeless. To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than "homeless." This distancing is not to shade the ways in which we are different. Rather, it is to reveal a dimension of possibilities, both spatial and temporal, through which we resist a subsumption into the singular mass of "the homeless," becoming instead someone more‐than‐homeless. From seven months of auto/ethnographic research in an English city, this paper attends to the mundane practices through which we – "the homeless" – renegotiate ourselves to become more‐than‐homeless. Exploring the webs of relational engagements between human and non‐human others, space and subjectivity, the ongoing (re)negotiations expressed in acts of remembering, forgetting, suppressing, misremembering, and imagining, distance the moment of homelessness so that we are able to become someone other than "homeless." To this end, this paper contributes to recent approaches in homelessness research drawing on performativity and embodiment to show how we are neither ontologically nor existentially reducible to our homelessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the most ethnically diverse spaces in England. We define multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods as spaces where no one group is in a majority and at least five ethnic groups have representation. Around 4% of all English neighbourhoods (Lower Layer Super Output Areas) met these criteria in 2011. Often mislabelled as "segregated" spaces, the growth of ethnically diverse neighbourhoods helps benchmark increased inter‐ethnic contact, yet we know very little about their spatial extent and the dynamics of their expansion. We use Census data for 1991, 2001, and 2011 to consider how neighbourhood‐level diversity has changed during a period of substantial increase in ethnic diversity at the national scale. To what extent did these highly diverse areas grow, and what is the geography of that growth? Which types of areas did these neighbourhoods transition from? For example, were multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods formerly low or moderately diverse, and which groups dominated these locales? We also consider if multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods are here to stay, or if they are compositionally unstable. We reveal a surprising aspect in England's neighbourhood transitions: multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods are highly stable, and increasingly so. Some 88% of neighbourhoods that were multi‐ethnic in 1991 retained their high‐diversity status in 2001, while over 95% of 2001 multi‐ethnic neighbourhoods remained highly diverse by 2011. This is a different story to that of the USA, where high‐diversity neighbourhoods have received more scholarly attention, and where these neighbourhoods have high attrition rates, functioning as stepping stones to another type of space. We explore the demographic and housing dynamics associated with this stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The past decade has been a dynamic one for biodiversity offsetting policy. Efforts to incorporate offsetting into the Convention on Biological Diversity as a compliance mechanism did not succeed. The expansion of offsetting outside of the Natura 2000 network in the European Union (EU), which looked all but inevitable in the early 2010s, was withdrawn in the face of unexpectedly strong opposition from environmental groups and the business sector. Highly publicised offsetting programmes in some EU countries have had mixed outcomes, and many observers describe offsetting as a failed policy. And yet four years of interviews and policy analysis in Brussels, Spain, and England suggest that reports of offsetting's death may be exaggerated. While the possibility of an overarching EU Directive aimed at harmonising offsetting policy and practice across the region's countries seems unlikely, in Spain, offsetting has returned to the national policy arena via adoption as an implementation tool within the national Green Infrastructure Strategy. Offsetting in England persists in a handful of counties as a locally situated development strategy, and seems to have returned at the national level despite its spectacular flame‐out in 2014. This is not, after all, a high‐profile failure of neoliberal environmental policy. Rather, we see offsetting's persistence as a result of policy refugia: the retreat to small but amenable jurisdictions where offsetting policies can wait out inclement policy conditions and then emerge to recolonise the policy landscape when conditions improve. Highly publicised offsetting programmes in some EU countries have had mixed outcomes, and many observers describe offsetting as a failed policy. However, our analysis of offset policy development in the EU, Spain, and England suggests that offsetting has not failed but persists as a result of policy refugia: it has retreated to small but amenable jurisdictions from which it can emerge to recolonise the policy landscape as conditions improve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The burgeoning geographical literature on the financialisation of urban development has focused predominantly on the growing importance within this sphere of financial markets, motives, and institutions. This article starts from the observation that in examining such financialisation, scholars have paid insufficient attention to the details of the financial contexts within which it takes place. Through a consideration of certain high‐profile ongoing transformations in the property strategies of English local authorities, the article argues that we need to put urban financialisation – in this case, state‐led variants thereof – in its financial context: it needs to be understood as a response, at least in part, to specific financial conjunctures. After several decades of effective withdrawal, many local authorities have assumed a resurgent role in urban property ownership and development in recent years, and especially since the global financial crisis. This resurgence is apparent, albeit selectively, in regard to both commercial and residential property. On the one hand, local authorities have been rebuilding portfolios of investment (i.e., non‐operational) commercial property; on the other hand, they have been building new homes, typically not for social rent, through arms‐length housing companies. I argue that understanding these trends requires appreciation of local authorities' particular financial circumstances in the "post‐crisis" era – their operation at the intersection of devolved austerity, reformed housing finance, and unconventional monetary policy – and of the constraints and opportunities that these circumstances shape. A conjunctural analysis of financialised, state‐led urban development initiatives in England in the period since the financial crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]