Video abstract – 'The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg'

We’ve just sent issue one of 2013’s volume to the printers, and – though we say so ourselves – it’s a good one. Among many other things, there’s Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann’s tremendously provocative paper ‘Climate Leviathan’ (the subject of a recent symposium);  the winner of the 2012/13 Graduate Student Scholarship, Teo Ballvé, discussing his doctoral research ‘Territories of Life and Death on a Colombian Frontier’;  an engagement with the thorny concept of ideology which argues that the thing itself works through what it makes available to the senses and what it makes to make sense (ideology as ‘an aesthetic affair‘);  an investigation of how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda (arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualisation of progressive resistance);  a mobilisation of the Gramscian concept of passive revolution to unearth some of the contradictions of participatory development within neoliberal governance systems in the global South;  an examination of the emergence, and recent resurgence, of gang labour in the UK and the privileging of the reproduction of some workers over others;  and an exploration of the contradictory nature and unintended consequences of workers’ efforts to defend their communities against the ravages of capital restructuring (focussing on pulp and paper mills in two British Columbia towns).

Here we’re pleased to be able to present an insight into one of the papers, Sophie Didier, Marianne Morange and Elisabeth Peyroux’s ‘The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and Johannesburg‘. Sophie and colleagues have prepared an excellent video abstract, explaining how their paper unravels the adoption and adaptation of the North American ‘Business Improvement District’ model in South African cities, considering the way neoliberal principles are making their way in post-apartheid Johannesburg and Cape Town. Their paper analyses the tensions and conflicts surrounding the implementation of the model and unpacks its curious resilience.

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Antipode, Volume 45, Number 1

Climate LeviathanJoel Wainwright and Geoff Mann

Immigrants, Banlieues, and Dangerous Things: Ideology as an Aesthetic AffairMustafa Dikeç

Audit Bodies: Embodied Participation, Disability Universalism, and Accessibility in IndiaMichele Friedner and Jamie Osborne

Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical PluralismDeborah G. Martin and Joseph Pierce

Teaching Global and Social Justice as Transgressive Spaces of PossibilitySara C. Motta

Participation and Passive Revolution: The Reproduction of Neoliberal Water Governance Mechanisms in Durban, South AfricaFiona Nash

The Adaptative Nature of Neoliberalism at the Local Scale: Fifteen Years of City Improvement Districts in Cape Town and JohannesburgSophie Didier, Marianne Morange and Elisabeth Peyroux

Constructed Revolutions: Cinematic Representation of the Spaces of Politics – Ankara: Serdce Tureckii – Guven Arif Sargın

Regimes of Ethical Value? Landscape, Race, and Representation in the Canadian Diamond IndustryKolson Schlosser

Unfree Again: Social Reproduction, Flexible Labour Markets, and the Resurgence of Gang Labour in the UKKendra Strauss

Banking Nature? The Spectacular Financialisation of Environmental ConservationSian Sullivan

Problematising Labour’s Agency: Rescaling Collective Bargaining in British Columbia Pulp and Paper MillsBrendan Sweeney and John Holmes

Territories of Life and Death on a Colombian FrontierTeo Ballvé

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