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Spotlighting a "green building" project in Chicago (East Garfield Park), this paper explores the various cultural, geographical, and topological factors that serve to pluralize land commodification pathways. Building on the scholarship on rent capture, I re-assemble the politics of green gentrification in East Garfield Park in order to lay bare the dynamic interactions between structure (e.g. financialization of urban space), agency (e.g. expression of needs, purposes, interests), and spatial materiality (e.g. landscapes of built environment). My approach draws on Polanyian geographies, focusing in particular on plural social agencies, the impact of spatial infrastructural configurations on local politics, and the role of narrative/script-making in land development. The resulting conversation entails thicker criticism of municipal planning practices that fail to challenge the foundational assumptions of land market and property economy. Moreover, a number of implications arise from the performative political possibilities of spatial infrastructure: while broader economic structures may constrain the agency of diverse actants, spatial landscapes can nevertheless prove enabling for transformative value politics, with competing narratives on "what is the best use for the land" defying a singular ontology of land as "real-estate-land." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The humbling climate crisis of the twenty-first century poses a challenge to classical humanism that cherishes the spontaneity of human action and its possibility of instigating newness. With more-than-human philosophies on the mainstream horizon, there remains a conundrum regarding how one can retain the "humanistic" core while attending to the arresting gravity of environmental degradation. This article addresses this enigma in three ways. First, we synthesize urban environmentalism debates and their embattled relationship with humanistic concerns; second, we illuminate everyday creative interventions that urban youth themselves are generating in their continual negotiations between individual and social, old and new, vernacular and technical; and third, we deflect the linear projection of a "Capitalocene" future by exhibiting contingent practices of southern urbanism. Accordingly, we propose new ways of reinventing urban environmentalism that see humans as a part of its divergent future landscapes. Our version of humanistic city frames the urban as a provisional space in which youth socialities and sensibilities are seen as emerging potentialities calibrating the pace of spatial transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to propose a new theorisation of "scale" in doing earthly politics (i.e. who is acting, who should be responsible for addressing planetary environmental degradation). I connect the politics of scale in global urban politics with the scale question in environmental politics. While the existing paradigm on "politics of scale" have made an excellent contribution on performative aspects of scale, they have failed to respond to the affirmative movements in which scholars and policy makers attempt to theorise scales as ranges in which political action can be mobilised. On the other hand, the new "down-to-earth" affirmative ecopolitics movement often fails to move beyond the romanticisation of the local, which is easily subject to criticisms, such as "local trap" where the small is not always intrinsically "good". As an alternative, I theorise "scales of political action" that can be simultaneously both materially situated (local) and ubiquitous (global), mainly using Gaian ecology and complex theory. Finally, as a concrete example of "scales of political action", I propose cities as frontiers of doing earthly politics, focusing on the characteristics of urban conditions that match our new theorisation of scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies how approaches to disaster planning have been changing with the rise of 'resilience,' a concept that has been widely recommended by various international institutions. The critical studies on resilience argue that resilience only serves to legitimise a neoliberal policy agenda that is compatible with a global economic system of capitalism. Contesting that position, this paper argues that the rise of resilience can imply a shift in the mode of governance, and an opportunity for planners to engage with more progressive practices. To make this argument, we propose a 'postmodern lens' through which resilience can be seen as an attitude and a style of governance that goes beyond neoliberal assumptions by embracing uncertainty and complexity of governance challenges. Postmodern framing of resilience notes (1) how the concept can initiate a shift in the planner's view of and practices on knowledges (going beyond 'expert knowledge'), (2) how the flexibility of the concept can be used for developing political narratives that are progressive (3) how the concept can open up potential venues for nonconventional powers to intervene in policy making processes. To demonstrate how this lens works, we compare the cases of Seattle and Paris, which have drastically different risk governance political structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Weather Service has adopted warning polygons that more specifically indicate the risk area than its previous county‐wide warnings. However, these polygons are not defined in terms of numerical strike probabilities (ps). To better understand people's interpretations of warning polygons, 167 participants were shown 23 hypothetical scenarios in one of three information conditions—polygon‐only (Condition A), polygon + tornadic storm cell (Condition B), and polygon + tornadic storm cell + flanking nontornadic storm cells (Condition C). Participants judged each polygon's ps and reported the likelihood of taking nine different response actions. The polygon‐only condition replicated the results of previous studies; ps was highest at the polygon's centroid and declined in all directions from there. The two conditions displaying storm cells differed from the polygon‐only condition only in having ps just as high at the polygon's edge nearest the storm cell as at its centroid. Overall, ps values were positively correlated with expectations of continuing normal activities, seeking information from social sources, seeking shelter, and evacuating by car. These results indicate that participants make more appropriate ps judgments when polygons are presented in their natural context of radar displays than when they are presented in isolation. However, the fact that ps judgments had moderately positive correlations with both sheltering (a generally appropriate response) and evacuation (a generally inappropriate response) suggests that experiment participants experience the same ambivalence about these two protective actions as people threatened by actual tornadoes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Weather Service has adopted warning polygons that more specifically indicate the risk area than its previous county-wide warnings. However, these polygons are not defined in terms of numerical strike probabilities (p s ). To better understand people's interpretations of warning polygons, 167 participants were shown 23 hypothetical scenarios in one of three information conditions-polygon-only (Condition A), polygon + tornadic storm cell (Condition B), and polygon + tornadic storm cell + flanking nontornadic storm cells (Condition C). Participants judged each polygon's p s and reported the likelihood of taking nine different response actions. The polygon-only condition replicated the results of previous studies; p s was highest at the polygon's centroid and declined in all directions from there. The two conditions displaying storm cells differed from the polygon-only condition only in having p s just as high at the polygon's edge nearest the storm cell as at its centroid. Overall, p s values were positively correlated with expectations of continuing normal activities, seeking information from social sources, seeking shelter, and evacuating by car. These results indicate that participants make more appropriate p s judgments when polygons are presented in their natural context of radar displays than when they are presented in isolation. However, the fact that p s judgments had moderately positive correlations with both sheltering (a generally appropriate response) and evacuation (a generally inappropriate response) suggests that experiment participants experience the same ambivalence about these two protective actions as people threatened by actual tornadoes., (© 2017 Society for Risk Analysis.)