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This report draws upon political ecology and nature–society geography to examine the production network–nature nexus. Indebted to these approaches, a growing number of production network and value chain studies are expanding well beyond the field’s traditional remit of environmental governance. This work centers the institutional arrangements of firms, laboratories, workers, and regulations that organize and combine extensive and intensive strategies to appropriate nature’s value. ‘Nature’ is neither input nor output here; rather, it is metabolized in and through the functional coordination of these spatially distributed activities. I explore these themes in recent studies of resource extraction and frontier-making, chemical geographies of biocides, and the material-cum-geographical claims of ethical supply chains. Expanding and deepening the dialogue between conjunctural analyses of states, labor, and supply chains, on the one hand, and how socionatures condition these arrangements, on the other, is both analytically and politically necessary. I offer this, my final report, as a modest contribution to this endeavor.
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Thinking through Urban Obsolescence: Tinkering, Repair and the Politics of Joona in Bombay/Mumbai's Taxi Trade
Abstract In this article I use the lens of Bombay/Mumbai's taxi trade from the early twentieth century to the present to examine how obsolescence becomes ingrained in the political and public imagination, and how this can illuminate the contradictory experiences of time in changing cities. Based on a labor‐centric approach to transport infrastructure, I ask what happens when particular technologies and linear understandings of progress rooted in obsolescence pass over or attempt to erase certain urban subjects. How are these temporal contradictions manifested, and what kinds of political and value claims emerge as a result? Further, how do people actively produce other time‐spaces using alternative temporal claims to challenge progress‐oriented development narratives? How, in other words, does obsolescence resist becoming obsolete? Finally, I examine the role that materiality and physical objects such as cars play in mediating these temporal relationships.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1917969
- PAR ID:
- 10244990
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
- Volume:
- 45
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0309-1317
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 848-868
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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