It’s early January and already we’re looking forward to volume 48, issue 3 of Antipode, which comes out this June.
The issue is shaping up nicely, with papers on: Occupy, postsecularity and protest; work and tourism in the Amazon; geography and anti-colonialism in Italy’s Age of Empire; whiteness, masculinity and drinking; neocolonial urbanism in Paris; green building in San Francisco; and “millennial philanthropy” and making global market subjects, among many others.
There’s also a cracking piece by Sig Langegger (Akita International University, Japan). “After the Ban: The Moral Economy of Property” explores the complex economic relationships between housing policy, property law and homelessness. In his paper Sig argues that practitioners and advocates looking to house the homeless often overlook the relationships to home and property that sustain the lives of people living on the street. Reporting an ethnographic assessment of the impacts of Denver’s recent camping ban, “After the Ban” builds on John Searle’s constructivist social theory to argue not only that undomiciled people construct homes, but that they also exercise rights to property. Though fragile, these rights, because they are woven beneath, between and behind state apparatuses, prove resilient and are able to withstand emphatic disruption. However, by depriving homeless people not only of the stability of home but also of the social power afforded by property, this ban dismantles heterodox orders, which decay from anarchy. Perhaps focusing on shoring up extant webs of reciprocity and exchange would prove a more effective homelessness policy than inventing new ones…
You can see Sig talking about his paper below.
Sig Langegger is an assistant professor of geography at Akita International University, a small liberal arts university located in the Tohoku region of Japan. Trained an urban planner, a historical geographer, and in ethnographic methods, he is interested in how formal and informal regulation of publicly-accessible space affects, empowers, and often disenfranchises marginalized people. Focusing on public space allows him to pursue two related research agendas: gentrification and the criminalization of homelessness. In addition to writing chapters for edited books and contributing to professional reports he has recently published articles in Urban Studies (see here and here) and Cities. He is currently in contract with Palgrave Macmillan to write a book titled Rights to Public Space: Law, Culture, and Gentrification in the American West.