Surely Foucault and the 'gaze' are essential to this? I just completed a John O'Groats to Land's End bike ride and saw quite a few signs challenging the setting-up of wind farms (for instance). Irrespective of the politicization of at least some of these movements (British Nuclear Fuels is known to have been involved in using agents to set up and run some of these groups as a generalized resistance to alternative energy), basing resistance to wind farms which may be dozens of miles away from you because they alter your 'view' is surely an extended form of 'nimbyism' through the socio-cultural representation and commodification of the 'gaze'?
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer/Research Associate
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU
Office: 01509 228193
Mob: 07984 813681
________________________________________
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Deverteuil G. [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 08 July 2011 17:58
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: CFP: 30 years after 'Not on Our Street': Is NIMBY still relevant to geography?
**Apologies for cross-posting**
Call for Papers, Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (AAG) 2012, New York, February 24th - 28th 2012
30 years after 'Not on Our Street': Is NIMBY still relevant to geography?
Session organiser: Geoff DeVerteuil (University of Southampton, UK)
Sponsorship: Urban Geography Specialty Group
It is now approaching thirty years since Dear and Taylor's landmark Not on Our Street (1982). A key insight of the book was the sophisticated treatment of community attitudes to mental health care facilities, particularly the determining role that distance played in the production of community opposition and locational conflict, as the authors stated on page 1: "faced with the possibility of having a mental health facility located in their neighborhood, residents are typically sympathetic in principle toward the policy of treating the mentally ill in community rather than in institutional settings, but resistant in practice to a facility in the immediate neighborhood".
In the decades following the book, geographical interest in locational conflict (as seen through the lens of NIMBY) flourished, with considerable extensions of how space inherits, and feeds into, the social production of opposition and the broader maintenance of socio-spatial exclusion (Hubbard, 2009). These extensions were based in theorizations of stigmatization, race, gender, difference/Otherness and hierarchies of acceptance. And yet currently, geographical interest in NIMBY has seemingly waned, despite its continuing relevance and significant material effects on urban neighborhoods, and with potentially substantial impacts in the UK given the current move to devolve significant siting powers to localities. This waning is perhaps due to critiques of NIMBY being overly prejudicial, of being applied too indiscriminately -especially for more justice-oriented opposition - and of the sense that it fails to capture opposition that is not necessarily distance-dependent.
In this session, I contend that studying the causes and consequences of locational conflict - and socio-spatial exclusion more broadly - through the lens of NIMBY remains an important and useful task. I therefore call for papers that have the potential to reconsider and revitalize the relationship between NIMBY and urban geography. Topics that could potentially help us reconsider and revitalize NIMBY may include, but are not limited to:
- Lefebvre's 'right to the city' and 'right to centrality'
- gentrification and the remaking of the inner city along higher-class lines
- race, environmental racism and environmental justice
- urban justice (and injustice)
- urban inequality, identity politics and socio-spatial exclusion
- the role of the state in balancing NIMBY with larger issues of urban burdens/benefits
- gender and children's geographies
- the role of the voluntary sector
Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by September 14th 2011. Abstracts and inquiries can be sent to [log in to unmask]
Dr Geoff DeVerteuil
Lecturer, School of Geography
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton UK, SO17 1BJ
Tel: +44 (0)23 80 599622
Fax: +44 (0)23 80 593295
email: [log in to unmask]
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