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In this editorial we ask key questions about what it means to publish ‘a journal’ in a world of publishing which is driven by individual article metrics and online access. Seeing the value of journals as venues for intellectual debate, we therefore set out a renewed vision as to how the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers can provide space for more collective and collaborative approaches to geographical debate. This approach revolves around the idea of ‘transactions’ itself and creating spaces in the journal for more commentary, debate and dialogue, alongside continuing to publish landmark papers.

Popular politics—a heterogeneous set of grassroots demands and subjectivities antagonistic to dominant power blocs—finds itself at a crossroads in Latin America. In Argentina and Chile, progressive governments have failed to curtail a resurgent populist‐right despite, as recently as 2019, appearing to be on the brink of a new centre‐left hegemony. This paper argues that paying attention to the spatiality of popular politics demonstrates a failure to articulate popular politics within a national movement, either neglecting them (under Boric in Chile) or incorporating them in a top‐down strategy that erased particularities (under Fernández in Argentina). It does so from the vantage point of two neighbourhoods at the urban margins in Buenos Aires and Santiago. Bringing together Ernesto Laclau's work on populism together with Henri Lefebvre's relational understanding of urban space, it analyses how popular demands and subjectivities have been articulated in relation to national progressive politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2007, Buenos Aires has been governed by a centre-right coalition that has made participation an integral part of its approach to governance. Under mayor Horacio Rodríguez Larreta (2015–2023), the idea and practice of proximity became central, notably through weekly meetings with neighbours across the city. This article demonstrates that proximity was a strategy for building urban democratic legitimacy. In so doing, it introduces the work of Pierre Rosanvallon to an urban studies readership. Contemporary literature on urban participation is at risk of establishing ontologically fixed positions, as seen in recent debates on the 'post-political city'. Rosanvallon's legitimacy of proximity is an analytical device that provides an open and non-essential reading of participation. Based on extensive qualitative research, the article examines how and why Larreta and his city government deployed the strategy of proximity, while also highlighting its limits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How and why does geography inform the organisational strategies of political parties? Encuentro por la Democracia y la Equidad (Encounter for Democracy and Equity, hereafter EDE) is a centre‐left Argentine political party that, since arriving in Buenos Aires in 2008, quickly became one of the largest oppositional parties in the city in terms of its activist base and electoral representation. This was achieved by explicitly prioritising a territorial organisational strategy: building the party at the scale of the neighbourhood by opening branches, accumulating activists and constructing linkages with civil society. Through a qualitative analysis of EDE's organisational strategy over 10 years (2008–2018), the paper proposes four dimensions for understanding the relationship between grassroots territorial organising and party strategy: party‐building; electoral success; democratic linkages; and alliance building. The findings are of relevance not only to party‐building in Latin America but also to the recent surge of territorial organising in parties in Europe. The paper makes three contributions to geographical literature. First, it adds to limited Anglophone geographical engagements with Latin American electoral and party politics by highlighting the centrality of spatiality to party‐building. Second, it emphasises sub‐national dynamics of party organising, contributing to a dismantling of methodological state centrism that pervades party scholarship. Third, it develops a geographical analytical approach to party organisation that demonstrates how sociospatial relations constitute parties' unfolding relations with the state and civil society. How and why does geography inform the organisational strategies of political parties? The paper proposes a model for analysing the geography of political parties by focusing on the relationship between territory and party organisation. It draws on empirical work in Buenos Aires to outline four dimensions through which parties strategically organise in and through territory in order to pursue their objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territory has been increasingly interrogated within Anglophone human geography, yet it has been little examined beyond the context of the modern, Eurocentric state. Developing an open definition of territory, the appropriation of space in pursuit of political projects, this paper opens epistemological dialogue with diverse Latin America strategies to decolonise territory in thought and practice, oriented around the themes of land, terrain and the state. In so doing it aims to contribute to the dismantling and reversing of colonial hierarchies that are both reproduced through Anglophone scholarship and sustained through dominant imaginations and practices of territory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking space has been a common feature of recent social movements worldwide, and was a defining act of the Occupy movement. This article examines the taking of two spaces by Occupy London in October 2011, and argues that there was a tension between taking space as a moment of rupture, lived space-times of intensity that provide an opening to new possibilities, and everyday life, the routines and rhythms through which social life is reproduced. My argument builds on the work of Lefebvre, bringing together his conceptualisation of 'moments' and everyday life, and his radical theory of the production of space. I argue that examining the tensions over taking space provides a useful angle to explore some of the challenges faced by the Occupy movement, such as an unequal division of labour on camp, and may help in negotiating them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]