Selected Publications
Published Work
17 September 2021
The New Silk Road, also called China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is the largest single infrastructure project since the Marshall Plan and an exemplar of infrastructure-led development of a scope and scale with no precedent in modern history. The project is estimated to cost up to US$8 trillion, involve 130 countries and impact more than 65% of the world's population. Through novel combinations of infrastructure and industrial projects with investments in the urban built environment, the BRI is transforming urban space across the global South and North altering the social and urban geographies of cities at a historically unparalleled scale. Nonetheless, its role in driving global urban transformation remains fundamentally underexplored. Relevant geographical research is scarce and comparative approaches focusing on cities are in their infancy, leading researchers to talk about an ‘anti-urban’ bias in contemporary BRI scholarship that prevents an in-depth understanding of the initiative's true scope. This paper introduces the novel concept of Silk Road urbanisation and puts forward the need for a new research agenda that has the potential to transform geographical and urban research on infrastructure-led development, urban transformation and inequality.
2020
This book unravels the profound implications of biodiversity offsetting for the relationships between nature, society and space and its links to social, spatial and environmental inequality. Drawing on people’s resistance against its implementation in several urban and rural places across England, it explores how the production of equivalent natures, the core promise of offsetting, reframes socionatures and places both discursively and materially transforming the geographies of everyday lives.
The book draws on theories and concepts from human and social geography, political ecology, and political economy, and aims to shift the trajectory of the current literature on the interplay between offsetting, urbanization and the neoliberal reconstruction of conservation and planning policies in the era following the 2008 financial crash. By shedding light on offsetting’s contested geographies, it offers a fundamental retheorization of offsetting capable of demonstrating how revanchist neoliberal policies, are increasingly used to support capitalist urban growth producing socially, environmentally and geographically uneven outcomes.
Nature Swapped and Nature Lost brings forward an understanding of environmental politics as class politics and sees environmental justice as inextricably linked to social and spatial justice. It effectively challenges the dystopia of offsetting’s ahistorical and asocial non-places and proposes a radically different pathway for gaining social control over the production of nature and space by linking struggles for the right to the city with struggles for the right to nature for all.
2020
The spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) has resulted in the most devastating global public health crisis in over a century. At present, over 10 million people from around the world have contracted the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19), leading to more than 500,000 deaths globally. The global health crisis unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic has been compounded by political, economic, and social crises that have exacerbated existing inequalities and disproportionately affected the most vulnerable segments of society. The global pandemic has had profoundly geographical consequences, and as the current crisis continues to unfold, there is a pressing need for geographers and other scholars to critically examine its fallout. This article provides an overview of the current special issue on the geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic, which includes 42 commentaries written by contributors from across the globe. Collectively, the contributions in this special issue highlight the diverse theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and thematic foci that geographical scholarship can offer to better understand the uneven geographies of the Coronavirus/COVID-19.
This special issue highlights that the COVID-19 pandemic is thoroughly spatial in nature as well as the value of geographical theory and praxis in providing critical (what is happening) and normative (what should happen) thinking as well as applied outcomes (making things happen). While much attention is being focused on scientific and technological responses to COVID-19, it is clear that the myriad of political, economic, and social crises that have accompanied the public health crisis of the pandemic require critical and reflexive analysis and theoretical insight. Such scholarship and praxis can expose the socio-spatial processes at play and their consequences, and can translate these to shape public discourse and public policy which have the potential to transform everyday lives.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global crisis in which the ‘normal’ conditions and structures of societies have been upended. Much of the rhetoric in ’telling the story of the pandemic’ (Mathur, 2020) is about returning to ‘normality’, but it is clear that whatever happens we will be entering a ‘new normal’, whether that be altered social practices, truncated mobility, reconfigured labor relations, increased precarity, deepened inequalities, or more cooperative, communal, caring arrangements. There are also increasing concerns that governmental attempts to deal with the pandemic without further disrupting the market may ultimately lead to the emergence of a new neoliberal authoritarianism, already expressed in cities across the globe in measures that have allowed the re-opening of shopping malls and tourism but criminalize people’s gatherings in public spaces—as we have witnessed with police crackdowns on anti-racism demonstrations in response to the police killing of George Floyd. As Arundhati Roy (2020) has written, the pandemic can act as ‘a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it’.
In addition to documenting and explaining the socio-spatial processes driving the transformations occurring as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, geographers need to envisage new geographical imaginations and help fight to realize them. This special issue provides starting points for constructing and practicing such spatial interventions.
2019
In this paper I seek to explore the role of biodiversity offsetting in the evolution of public debates over controversial urban development projects and the way it may influence the outcome of social‐environmental conflicts. By drawing on empirical data obtained through 25 interviews with key stakeholders involved in a conflict around executive housing in North East England, 48 interviews with several stakeholders involved in offsetting across England, and an extensive document analysis, I explore the depoliticising effects of offsetting as an indicative example of actually existing neoliberal conservation. I also pay attention to the way offsetting relates to the fast policy complex to trace the links between neoliberalisation and depoliticisation particularly in the era following the 2008 financial crash. Understanding social‐environmental conflicts through the lens of the post‐political hypothesis can shed light on the way both participatory planning and neoliberal conservation, by favouring technocratic management and consensual policy‐making, attempt to remove contestation and agonistic engagement from the public terrain. On the other hand, seeing conflicts only through the post‐political hypothesis has important limits, primarily because it implies a catholic hegemony of post‐politics that can be both disorienting and paralysing. I conclude by showing through five key propositions the necessity for contextualised readings of historically and geographically specific political practices and for analysing depoliticisation by means of a theory of hegemony.
2019
Welcoming the renewed interest in value among geographers, we engage with the arguments that Kay and Kenney-Lazar (2017) put forward in their article, ‘Value in Capitalist Natures: An Emerging Framework’. We organize our contribution around three important aspects that can advance current debates and propose an agenda for future research. Firstly, we argue that current debates need to refocus from whether nature contributes to material wealth to whether and how nature relates to the value form under capitalism. Secondly, we highlight the need for a systematically joint analysis of value and rent to understand the role of nature in capitalism. This analysis leads to a focus on class and class struggle and requires interdisciplinary collaborations between nature–society geographers and other scholars working within the value theoretical framework to bridge current struggles over rent and value. Thirdly, contra Kay and Kenney-Lazar, we argue that beyond capitalism we do not need either alternative valuation systems or value but rather a new vocabulary to redefine social needs and social wealth.
2018
In this paper we explore the logic of biodiversity offsetting, focusing on its core promise: the production of ‘equivalent natures’. We show how the construction of equivalence unravels the environmental contradictions of capitalism by exploring how and why it is achieved, and its profound implications for nature-society dialectics. We focus on the construction of an ecological equivalence between ecosystems, the construction of ecological credits that are considered equivalent in monetary terms, and, finally, the construction of an equivalence between places. The existing critical literature, in some cases implicitly and unwittingly, assumes that biodiversity offsetting creates value. In contrast to this argument, we draw on Marx’s labor theory of value to conclude that in the majority of instances offsetting does not create value, rather it is an instance of rent. We also draw on Marxist analyses on the production of nature and place to show that biodiversity offsetting radically rescripts nature as placeless, obscuring the fact that it facilitates the production of space, place, and nature according to the interests of capital while emphasizing that at the core of offsetting lie social struggles over rights and access to land and nature. Biodiversity offsetting’s dystopian vision for the future makes it an important focus for all critical scholars seeking to understand and challenge the contradictions of the capitalist production of nature.
2018
Since the 2008 financial crash the expansion of neoliberalism has had an enormous impact on nature-society relations around the world. In response, various environmental movements have emerged opposing the neoliberal restructuring of environmental policies using arguments that often bridge traditional divisions between the environmental and labour agendas.
The Right to Nature explores the differing experiences of a number of environmental-social movements and struggles from the point of view of both activists and academics. This collection attempts to both document the social-ecological impacts of neoliberal attempts to exploit non-human nature in the post-crisis context and to analyse the opposition of emerging environmental movements and their demands for a radically different production of nature based on social needs and environmental justice. It also provides a necessary space for the exchange of ideas and experiences between academics and activists and aims to motivate further academic-activist collaborations around alternative and counter-hegemonic re-thinking of environmental and social politics.
This book will be of great interest to students, scholars and activists interested in environmental and social policy, social-environmental inequality and justice and social and environmental movements.