Radical Geography as Mere Political Economy: the Local Politics of Space.

This article focuses on the way in which radical urban perspectives in geography and sociology have misinterpreted the relationships among class, capital and space in Great Britain. The argument is that the structuralist position of the old new radical geography and the postmodernist turn from it which constitutes the new radical geography. The line of this article is essentially a development of the theme identified by H. Beauregard in his cogent discussion of the relationship between the direction of modern radical geography and the absence of practice. The article concludes with an argument for active strategies of "empowerment" directed towards the working poor as a component of the social proletariat. However, things in urban and regional studies have moved on since those pieces were written, and moved on in a direction which seems not only to have absolutely ignored the points made in them, but to have exacerbated the problem by a transition. The postmodernist turn from structuralism, which in the new geography seems to be less of a turn than a writing of postmodernist pessimism and eclecticism on top of a virtually unmodified structuralism.