Regenerative, resilient and really diverse, new economic geographies

Presenting author: Miriam Williams (Macquarie University)

Other authors: Lillian Tait (Macquarie University)

There is burgeoning interest in the role of infrastructures as performative socio-technical systems that shape urban life. In this paper we make visible an often-hidden and diverse infrastructure of care, the Community Food Provisioning Initiative (CFPI) sector. Following Power and Mee (2019), we discuss the governance, materialities and diverse economic practices that perform CFPIs as an infrastructure of care.

Drawing on research on the CFPI sector in Sydney, Australia, we make visible the spatial extensiveness of CFPIs across the city, the ways in which caring practice is made possible by "things", and the diverse enterprises, transactions, labour, property and finance that constitute the diverse economies of CFPIs. Throughout the paper we highlight how CFPIs are diverse and vital infrastructures of care that contribute to people's ability to survival well in the city.

Presenting author: Katharine McKinnon (University of Canberra)

Other author: Centre for Sustainable Communities, University of Canberra

Care economies are often narrowly understood as the financial dynamics through which health-care services are delivered. In a diverse economies framing however, all economies must be understood as founded on relations of care, to some extent. As elaborated by Ethan Miller, in Rethinking Livelihoods, all human livelihoods are a balance between making a livelihood for ourselves (autopoesis), accepting the livelihoods that are made for us by others (allopoesis), and the ways we compose a livelihood for others (alterpoesis). Embedded deeply in the process of balancing these three complementary practices is care and the work to determine how to care for ourselves, care for others and care with those upon whom our livelihoods depend. This paper explores the shift in perspective that is required in order to fully think through the implications of an interdependent care economy, one shaped simultaneously by the ways that we make, are being made, and are making for others. In a health-care context this requires thinking of care more broadly than the simple delivery of a service by professional to clients (patients). And it requires recognition of a mutual and shared assurance of health, in which the client is not only a passive recipient of care.

To explore the possibilities of a diverse economy of care, this paper takes an example of a project which has sought to reconfigure health services in the resource scarce environment of Luang Prabang Province, in northern Laos. Here, a group of antipodean midwives has partnered with Provincial health authorities to offer training to midwifery staff posted in remote rural health centres. It is a program built on interpersonal relationships of mutual respect, an ethic of knowledge sharing, and a belief that low-tech, hands-on skills and kind and respectful care for mothers are the best tools for improving maternity care. This paper explores the 'under-the-radar' aspects of this program and what it is able to achieve as a result of being relationship based, small and informal, concluding that it can be understood as an example of 'renegade development' based on global networks of care instead of formal development programs built on global networks of bureaucracy.

Presenting author: Carl Grodach (Monash University)

Other author: Nicolas Guerra Rodrigues Tao (Monash University)

Industrial lands may provide a route toward more equitable economic development and support a more diverse economic base. However, Australian cities ignore this opportunity. They have rezoned a significant proportion of inner and middle suburban industrial land for higher value residential and mixed-use development and instead seek to develop "innovation districts" and other areas intended to grow knowledge economy jobs. These trends combine to reinforce a long-standing shift towards a polarized economy consisting of highly skilled professional service jobs and often minority and immigrant labor funneled into lower wage services industries. Further, under Covid-19, those working in consumer service jobs that are unable to be performed at home are increasingly vulnerable.

Do industrial zones support quality jobs and a diverse business mix compared to other targeted employment areas? We examine if and how industrial zones in Greater Melbourne support a mix of jobs and industry clusters and compare this to other designated employment areas in the city. We also analyze income, industry, and occupational mix across the employment areas. We find that industrial zones are more likely to provide a diverse employment and income base compared to other employment areas. 

Presenting speaker: Ville Santala (University of Wollongong)

Numerous smart city strategies in Australia highlight the critical role of experimentation in successful smart city implementation and for the 'meaningful' engagement of citizens in local smart city development. This paper focuses on innovation competitions, e.g. hackathons and challenges, as a specific technique of experimentation that enables cities to simultaneously facilitate community engagement but also drive local economic development.

Drawing on theoretical debates on citizens' roles in smart cities, this paper explores the framing, practices and materialisation of innovation competitions aiming to shed light on their potential implications in shaping emergent citizens' subjectivities in the context of Australian smart cities. Findings indicate that while smart city competitions are often framed as 'open for everyone', they mostly engage businesses, start-ups and business-minded individuals looking for new economic opportunities. Nonetheless, from a governmentality perspective, competitions as a mechanism of experimentation embody several related logics of smart urbanism and shape entrepreneurial citizens in several modes: start-ups and entrepreneurs are enabled to innovate and to act in smart city space and, simultaneously, citizens' skillsets and entrepreneurial potential are built. This paper reflects on the implications of smart city competitions for emergent smart citizenry and notions of citizen participation.

Presenting author: Richard Le Heron (University of Auckland)

Other author: Paula Blackett (National Institute Water and Atmosphere), Erena Le Heron (Le Heron Leigh Consulting)

The presentation is an output of a transdisciplinary project of the New Zealand Sustainable Seas National Science Challenge (SSNSC) and a first reaction to the 2021 International Science Council (ISC) call for a global agenda for' risk science'. It mobilises (1) findings from a wide-ranging SSNSC  study of 13 knowledge disciplines which identifies how each defines risk and knows uncertainty and probes their comparative strengths and weaknesses as methodological framings for changing worlds, (2) the disciplinary lens are introduced into a 'thought experiment' centred on actors adopting different risk dimensions that are highlighted or discounted when seeking to locate a hypothetical windfarm in an imagined setting, and (3) the knowledge resource generated by the SSNSC research is used to critically examine and problematise the ISC initiative where a key aspiration is a 'global agenda shaped by multiple perspectives'. The challenge ahead is developing grounded and situated just transitioning agenda focusing on regenerative, resilient and really diverse new economic geographies in the shadow of an influential and powerful 'science' intervention. 

Presenting author: Angus Dowell (University of Auckland)

Other authors: Nick Lewis (University of Auckland), Ryan Jones (University of Auckland)

Regenerative, Restorative and Circular (RRC) economies describe new economic practices that claim to address socio -environmental challenges. In this paper, we draw on Social Studies of Economisation and Marketisation to examine the development of RRC economic initiatives in Aotearoa-New Zealand. The paper aims to explore the ways in which these forms of economy are constructed, stabilised, the shape and characteristics they imbue, and to get some insight into the state into which they will materialise as a different form of economy in the NZ context. We argue processes of experimentation, intermediation, and the production of market-qualifying devices are central to the construction and maintenance of embryonic RRC economies. First, experimentation takes multiple forms working to test and evaluate new configurations of resources and actors. Second, market-qualifying devices arrange particular actors, spaces and economic models for the purpose of re-conceptualising and re-ordering economic activity. Third, state and enterprise driven intermediation shape and hold the initiatives together through the brokering and negotiation of partnerships.

For the most part, the geographic literature on RRC economies fails to capture these practices and the political implications therein. We find that the initiative's approaches to addressing socio-environmental challenges are producing mixed political outcomes. On the one hand, our analysis highlights far more cooperative, messy and experimental forms economy-building are emerging, signalling the presence of diverse and bottom-up forms of societal transformation that are yet understood. On the other, we find cause for concern in the initiatives and their active reworking of the social, cultural, environmental and economic into new socio-ecological hierarchies. 

Presenting author: Thomas Sigler (University of Queensland)

Other authors: Zachary Neal (Michigan State University), Kirsten Martinus (University of Western Australia), Julia Loginova (University of Queensland)

Cities play an important role in brokering flows of information, capital, labour, and other resources in the global economy. Networked approaches to urban geography look to place cities within urban systems operating at global, national, and regional scales.

This presentation reports on the findings of a multi-year project on the role of Australian cities in global city networks. It first outlines how city networks are constructed using firm level data, and then explains how we can understand the dynamic positionality of cities from the vantage point of global networks. It concludes that cities' globalisation is to a large degree determined by dominant industries and their level of global engagement. 

Presenting author: Stephen Healy (Western Sydney University)

In 2017 China renounced its role as the world's recycler. In response, circular economy policy rapidly took centre stage in Australia and elsewhere as something that names a "new" way of engaging with waste.  Supported by powerful NGOs like the Ellen MacArthur Foundation the circular economy reframe waste as "opportunity".  While this recodification is driven by good intentions there is a danger in doing away with the concept of waste altogether.  Valenzuela and Böhm use post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to re-read circular economy as a capitalocentric social fantasy that allows for the continuity of business as usual where economic growth (opportunity) is decoupled from ecological consequence (waste). In the face of this dangerous disavowal, Hird and Corvellec insist on retraining waste a category. 

Waste's fundamentally indeterminate value acts as a provocation, continually calling into question how we might rearrange life, matter, economies, value, ourselves and our relations with one another. Here Miller's tripartite concept of livelihood provides an accommodating structure for the surplus of possibility that comes from attuning to waste, including the possibility of a new and more responsible relationships with waste.  

Presenting author: Abby Mellick Lopes (University of Technology, Sydney)

Other author: Cameron Tonkinwise (University of Technology, Sydney)

Urban canopy trees are widely acknowledged as a critical part of the response to urban heat particularly in low-SES areas where people have limited access to 'cool refuges', shaded public spaces and pedestrian linkages. However, as conventions of planning driven by conventional economic indicators of value have traditionally replaced trees with residential developments and roads, the spaces to reintroduce trees in cities have tightened or in some cases been completely erased. The Cooling the Commons interdisciplinary research program addresses this situation by bringing a diverse economies lens to the design, planning and governance of cities as they seek to adapt to a changing climate. In this presentation we will take urban street trees as an example of a social common that acknowledges the complexity of competing interests impacting on the capacity to reintroduce trees in cities.

We propose pattern thinking as a way to analyse this complexity, demonstrating what can be done to address it across short, medium and long-time scales. Pattern thinking is a key methodology of a commons-based approach to design - moving from the design of 'things' to the design of criteria and practices of adaptation. Unpatterning and repatterning are design modes of adaptation for the existing and future city, requiring changes in planning practice responsible for how just urban futures are conceived.

Presenting speaker: Pauline McGuirk (University of Wollongong)

Other speaker: Robyn Dowling (University of Sydney), Pratichi Chatterjee (University of Sydney)

The concept of urban entrepreneurialism has a well-established lineage in urban political geography. Yet recent urban scholarship has begun to trouble the performances, roles and practices it assumes of municipal states. This paper explores evolving theorisations of urban governance through the lens of urban entrepreneurialism by engaging with the entrepreneurial municipal statecraft involved in smart city governance. 

Utilising empirical research on smart city governance across Australia's two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, we identify and tease out the active roles and the constitutive and experimental practices involved in smart city governance. We frame these as 'extrospective' or 'beyond-the-state' in which new forms of partnerships are forged, and 'introspective' in which the dispositions, capabilities and competences of the municipal state itself are reformed. The paper enriches entrepreneurial accounts of smart cities and the situated agenda pursued in the name of governing 'the smart city'. It highlights plural municipal state agendas and the reworking of practices and performances of the municipal state these entail. It remains imperative, the paper concludes, to attend critically to the ways that smart co-constitutes the state in unpredictable ways.