Remembering, reimagining political space

Presenting author: Adam Morton (University of Sydney)

The attempted extirpation of indigenous populations has been an enduring condition of the 'idyllic proceedings' of primitive accumulation. For Marx, such acts of evisceration characterised the dawn of the era of capitalist production. Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness of the West, is read here as one such annal of mankind written in 'letters of blood and fire'. Contributing to an interdisciplinary approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, the focus is on how geography, space and frontier zones are present in Blood Meridian.

A literary economy analysis of Blood Meridian therefore reveals how 'capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt'. This is evidenced through the real spaces and historical occurrences that shaped capitalist expansion recounted in Blood Meridian. The latter included the racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state between the 1840s and 1850s in Mexico through the actions of the Glanton Gang; the slaughtering of the buffalo that reached its peak in the 1870s marked in the novel by bonepickers that trawl the calcined architecture for skeletons to turn into commodities for the West; and the systematic mapping and simplifying practices conducted through outposts of appropriation on the frontier, such as Fort Griffin, which signal the barbed-wire fencing of rangeland into ranches. The meridian of bloodiness marked by these racialised acts is therefore revealed as an intrinsic aspect of the literary economy of primitive accumulation.

Presenting author: Ari Jerrems (Monash University)

Over the last decade, there have been numerous urban uprisings across the world from Myanmar to Hong Kong, Lebanon to Chile. Scholars have analysed how uprisings contest structural inequalities and formulate new frameworks of citizenship. This paper revisits Henri Lefebvre's theorisation of autogestion, particularly through his work on the Paris Commune and May 1968, to expand on the political significance of urban uprisings. Scholars have noted the importance of the European context for understanding Lefebvre's theory of autogestion, whilst relatively little attention has been given to what Lefebvre terms 'the world situation' in his study of May 1968. If we recognise the world situation, autogestion should be situated in relation to battles for self-determination and decolonisation.

Building on this, I argue that transient autonomous spaces constituted by urban uprisings create not only nascent forms of autogestion but also spaces of self-determination and popular sovereignty. These provisional spaces of popular sovereignty enter into conflict with dominant configurations of space. The theoretical framework developed allows for a deeper analysis of the urban geopolitics of uprisings, underlining contested notions of sovereignty and citizenship inscribed in space through both street occupations and state repression.  

Presenting author: Duvan Lopez Meneses (Polytechnical University of Catalonia)

Taking as a starting point multiple complaints regarding the ethical and political problems of resilience, is deemed verifiable the intensification of these conflicts in the global South, where theoretical mismatch with heterogeneity will be demonstrated as an expression of ontological contradictions between the codifying function exercised by the concept of resilience, from the technical-scientific paradigm, and the eccentric nature of reality (Saez, 2009), from where informality is intended to be interpreted.

The un-formed will be theorised as corresponding with the constitutive substrate of the reality (Deleuze & Guatari, 2004), a genetic domain for the emergence of space and resilience as political constructions. The notions of form and information, preindividuality, and individuation (Simondon, 2009) will provide the logical framework to explain such operations. The "formality" will be described, consequently, as contingent or "a posteriori" elaboration by political subjectivities, where dominant projections of territory and sovereignty are unveiled taking place; but also are discussed the scenarios opened in that "un-formed", to condense tangible revolutionary forms. 

The notion of resilience (and its criticisms) will be discerned from this ontological framework, seeking to contribute to demystification of any objective, apolitical or neutral condition granted to it. The convenience of an epistemology built from the south for the management of informality will be sustained, not by ideological biasing or moral affinities, but because of the insistence of informality, and its eloquence in that geographical realm. The content of resilience as an emerging quality will be discussed, and the practical application of these discussions for emancipatory practices in the urban transformation of the landscape.

Presenting author: Grant Walton (Australian National University)

While the nature of the relationship is contested, many scholars from political science and economics have argued that decentralisation reform has great potential to mitigate corruption.  However, such scholarship often fails to account for the social-spatial relations that can shape decentralisation efforts and the potential for corruption. While geographers are increasingly engaging in debates about corruption, the topic is still under-researched in the discipline. 

This presentation examines findings from fieldwork conducted with 136 public servants in four subnational administrations across Papua New Guinea.  Reflecting on the impact of decentralisation reform, respondents described how elites were able to direct subnational resources - sometimes for their own personal gain - by reaching across space to control subnational affairs.  Anti-corruption measures were largely ineffective because they were unable to reach out to resources and political power.  These findings suggest that topological approaches to understanding power relations - approaches that stress the importance of proximity and reach - could help reimagine the potential for decentralisation reform to address corruption.  

Presenting author: Lachlan Barber (Hong Kong Baptist University)

The final kilometre is the distance between where a passenger disembarks from public transport and their final destination. These short linking trips are integral to public transport systems and are a form of physical activity. What else can be said about the final kilometre?

Following in the vein of studies of walking as a socio-cultural practice, this paper ventures an exploration of an embodied politics of mobility in the space of the final kilometre in Hong Kong. The paper considers the differentiated experiences of the sidewalk and street as infrastructures that are public transport spaces and political spaces. Empirically the paper draws upon twenty walking interviews along a route near universities, a major public transport hub, the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Kowloon Barracks. Parts of the route subsequently became blocked by protesters during a period of university campus occupations in 2019. The paper weaves together insights from the interviews about the taken for granted significance the final kilometre with a discussion of spaces of public transport, including metro stations, were transformed into political spaces by the 2019 protest movement and government response.

Presenting author: Matthew Ryan (University of Sydney)

In correspondence in 1797, Joseph Banks impelled Governor Hunter 'to press forward the improvements.'   Back in London, Banks was a chief supporter of and advocate for the Australian colonies, and the political weight that this botanist carried is most instructive of the types of knowledge relevant and important to a colonial governor, busy with his role in the process of state formation. This paper is framed by a commitment to accounting for the socioecological origins of our internally related crises of ecology, economy, and politics. It sees world-ecology as a useful frame to consider our present, as well as the contingent history that brought us to this moment. But as is noted by Parenti, arguments regarding the centrality of 'Cheap Nature' demand an agential account of its production - who is 'cheapening' nature, and why? His answer: the state.

And so, this paper seeks to explore Parenti's premise in the context of colonial New South Wales. It will sketch a socioecological theory of the state through the projects of securing, opening, and knowing Nature. The utility of this theory will be explored by tracing the internal relations of apparently distinct state actors: the surveyor, the botanist, and the native police. In doing so this paper poses challenging questions. Could it be that the state is constrained not only by its relative autonomy from capital, but also by its own needs to ensure the provision of Cheap Nature? We fail to theorise and historicise the state as a socioecological process at our peril. 

Presenting author: Sirma Altun (Koc University Center for Asian Studies)

Hong Kong and Taipei embraced global city formation in the late 1990s as part of their socio-spatial 'repositioning' amidst the rise of China and transformations in global capitalism. In this paper, I draw on a dialectical strand within socio-spatial theory to explore the contradictions of centrality and counter-centrality in Hong Kong and Taipei's process of global city formation in the 2000s. Departing from the previous literature and its depiction of global city formation as a neutral and coherent socio-spatial process, I question the politics of spatiality in global city formation. 

Informed by insights on socio-spatial struggles in Hong Kong and Taipei, the paper sets out to conceptualize the ways in which multiple and contested spatial imaginations and differentiated claims to urban space play out in global city formation. To do so, my argument addresses centrality from a relational and materialist perspective, while also asserting Henri Lefebvre's approach to differential space, counter-spaces and the right to city to emphasize dialectics in the production of centrality. Finally, the paper offers an original conceptual contribution by defining socio-spatial struggles in Hong Kong and Taipei in the 2000s through the prism of counter-centrality to represent those who are excluded from access to and decision-making about the use of global city resources.

Presenting author: Riki Scanlan (University of Sydney)

The geography of Sydney, as a settler-colonial city, is contoured by the residues of frontier violence. The aim of this paper is to examine how the urban imaginary of Sydney within contemporary political discourses of planning, heritage, and development depends on these residues of frontier violence. It conducts this task by tracing how key figures of Sydney's history-from the Macquaries to Bradfield-are invoked in order to legitimate specific projects to transform the production of space in Sydney, including the present round of capital-oriented urban restructuring under the rubric of the 'three cities' program. These colonial and twentieth century figures were, in their own times, involved in key projects to reshape Sydney-yet these transformations were not innocent of the ongoing process of dispossession. Their invocation within contemporary urban politics is an attempt to locate current urban political actors as bearers of a 'home-grown' tradition of urban development.

The paper thus offers a critique of the construction of a settler-colonial imaginary of spatial history and its deployment for the benefits of capital accumulation. In so doing, it broaches the theoretical and political task of reimagining the constitution of spatial history under settler-colonial conditions. 

Presenting author: Sulagna Basu (University of Sydney)

Implicit in many analyses of cyberspace is the assumption that it is a globalised hyperspace with discussions debating the extent of state powers within this space. While cyberspace has an undeniable material foundation in the hardware needed to construct such a space, the question of who designs, controls and dominates this space is widely overlooked. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre's conception of the state mode of production (mode de production étatique), this paper considers how the US generates cyberspace as a new kind of politco-spatial arrangement that allows the state to introduce its presence, control and surveillance.

Through analysis of the evolution of public-private partnerships within the US, this paper examines the role of the US state in continually restructuring the relation between private interests and public powers to commodify and organise cyberspace. By developing some provisional ideas about the political economy of cyberspace, this article attempts to offer a critical geographical perspective of the mobilisation of cyberspace as the US state's strategy to regulate, monitor and represent this space.