Suchergebnisse

Although capitalist penetration results in a certain regional con vergence, uneven development does not disappear under advanced capitalist conditions. Two sources of geographic unevenness are spatial differentiation and capital mobility. Differentiation produces a spatial mosaic in which the pieces are neither equal, autonomous, nor properly considered "underdeveloped." Mobil ity of capital means that capital may use location as a strategy against labor, local development becomes more dependent on outside capital, development comes and goes over time("Boomtownism") and capital generates a permanent reserve of stagnant places — a lumpengeography of capital. These processes of uneven development are not principally owing to flows of surplus value but to the struc turing of places as use-values for capital, nor are the results particularly suscept ible to traditional regional development policies. Labor's appropriate strategies are several, but must be aimed at finding an alternative to capitalist development not toward a misguided effort to redress geographic differences.

Only one Scottish newspaper supported independence in the 2014 referendum. It was joined by The National daily newspaper in November 2014. In one of the most congested newspaper markets in the world why is there so little political diversity among an indigenous press? This article reviews the structural factors constraining ideological diversity regarding self-government in the Scottish press since devolution, and maps the emergence of Scotland's only pro-independence newspapers, the Sunday Herald and The National, and the editorial challenges of both newspapers in covering the SNP Government in Holyrood.

AbstractWhy do cities exist? Geographers Allen Scott and Michael Storper recently put the question before the field of urban studies and provided a clear and concise answer in terms of economies of agglomeration and the urban land nexus. I argue that two other basic elements must be added to this duo: the spatial concentration of economic surplus by ruling classes and states and the creation of a built environment or urban landscape. In addition, I take issue with Scott and Storper's neglect of the problem of scale in urban theory and their overly tidy sense of what constitutes a scientific approach to complex phenomena like cities.

AbstractAdam Smith in Beijing is a huge and sprawling book, but Giovanni Arrighi has done a great service with his world-historical vision of today's capitalism and the growing rivalry between a fading American empire and the rising power of China. This is a task beyond most of us, and one bound to put the writer at risk of criticism from many quarters. The book shines in two regards. One is to make geographical dynamics central to world-history ‐ which means seeing the global economy as more than the sum of development-histories of many places or, worse, the spread of capitalism from one country to another. A second virtue is embedding economic history in the politics of the international state-system, featuring the use of force, imperial expansion, and the role of hegemonic powers. Nevertheless, Arrighi's economic-geographic analysis fails to convince on a number of critical points, such as the origins of industrial revolution, why Europe overtook China in early modern times, why the US economy faltered after 1970, why finance has run amuck in our time, how Japan grew so enormously after World War II, or why China is expanding so prodigiously today.