Engaging Geographies : Landscapes, Lifecourses and Mobilities [1 ed.] 9781443861830, 9781443856041

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Engaging Geographies

Engaging Geographies: Landscapes, Lifecourses and Mobilities

Edited by

Michael Roche, Juliana Mansvelt, Russell Prince and Aisling Gallagher

Engaging Geographies: Landscapes, Lifecourses and Mobilities, Edited by Michael Roche, Juliana Mansvelt, Russell Prince and Aisling Gallagher This book first published 2014 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2014 by Michael Roche, Juliana Mansvelt, Russell Prince, Aisling Gallagher and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-5604-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-5604-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ........................................................................................... vii List of Tables ............................................................................................. ix Acknowledgements ................................................................................... xi Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 Connecting Landscape, Lifecourse and Mobilities Michael Roche, Russell Prince, Juliana Mansvelt and Aisling Gallagher Part I: Landscapes Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 13 Sparky Geographies: Engaging Journeys through Landscapes of Teaching and Research Juliana Mansvelt Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 29 How Infrastructure became a Structured Investment Vehicle Phillip O’Neill Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 45 Policing Art: Political Potential of Creative Practices in Aotearoa New Zealand Gradon Diprose Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 63 Responding to Changing Fortunes: The Experiences of Small Town New Zealand Etienne Nel

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Part II: Lifecourses Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87 Governing Motherhood: Parenting Services and Maternal Empowerment in Ireland Aisling Gallagher Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 101 “That’s life isn’t it”: Investigating Inequalities in Older Age Mary Brehney, Christine Stephen and Juliana Mansvelt Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 117 The Uncertain Spaces of Great-Grandparenthood Ruth Allen and Janine Wiles Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 137 The Paradoxes of ‘Home’ within a Palliative and End of Life Care Context Merryn Gott, Lisa Williams and Tess Moeke-Maxwell Part III: Mobilities Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 155 Parents’ Understandings of the Intergenerational Decline in Children’s Independent Outdoor Activity Karen Witten, Robin Kearns, Penelope Carroll, Lanuola Asiasiga and Nicola Tava’e Fa’avale Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 175 Moving to Learn/Learning to Move: New School Environments after the Canterbury Earthquakes David Conradson, Maria Connolly and Ross Barnett Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 191 Topologies of Mobile policy: Neoliberalism and Creativity Russell Prince Contributors ............................................................................................. 207 Index ........................................................................................................ 213

LIST OF FIGURES

4.1 Henderson Free Store showing line of participants ............................. 53 5.1 New Zealand main centres and small towns researched ..................... 67 5.2 Aggregate urban population growth rates: 1911-2006 ........................ 69 5.3 Aggregate population change in the two smallest categories of urban settlements ............................................................................. 70 5.4 Changing aggregate business numbers in key categories of small towns in Canterbury ............................................................................ 72 5.5 Changing aggregate business numbers in key categories of small towns in Otago-Southland ................................................................... 72 5.6 Changing aggregate business numbers in key categories in selected settlement types in Otago-Southland – Canterbury ............................. 73 10.1 Factors influencing children’s active travel, informal play and formal activities .......................................................................... 165

LIST OF TABLES

5.1 Population change in key Categories of Canterbury & Otago/ Southland towns .................................................................................. 70 8.1 Participant characteristics ............................................................... 122 11.1 Post-Earthquake Site Sharing Arrangements for Christchurch Schools 2011 ...................................................................................... 180 11.2 2011 NCEA Results for Site Sharing and Non Site Sharing Schools............................................................................................... 182 11.3 2011 NCEA Results for Short and Long Term Site Sharing Schools............................................................................................... 182 11.4 Questionnaire Participants from the Case Study School ................. 184 11.5 Junior Students’ (Years 9-10) Perceptions of the Impact of the Sharing Arrangements ............................................................. 187 11.6 Senior Students’ (years 11-13) Perceptions of the Impact of the Sharing Arrangements ............................................................. 188

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This collection has been a collaborative and cooperative venture drawing in colleagues from a number of institutions both within and beyond geography. Our thanks also go to other colleagues who agreed to referee papers and provided feedback on the various chapters. The permission of Taylor and Francis to republish as Chapter 10 an abridged version of a paper from Children’s Geographies is also acknowledged. Finally, thanks to Olive Harris, for making a welcome return to the scene to assist with the final editing of collection and to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for their forbearance in the latter stages of this project. Michael Roche Juliana Mansvelt Russell Prince Aisling Gallagher

CHAPTER ONE CONNECTING LANDSCAPE, LIFECOURSE AND MOBILITIES MICHAEL ROCHE, RUSSELL PRINCE, JULIANA MANSVELT AND AISLING GALLAGHER

Introduction The chapters comprising Engaging Geographies are derived from papers originally presented at the 2012 New Zealand Geography Conference. This meeting of the New Zealand Geographical Society was held in Napier, a city destroyed by earthquake in 1931 and predominantly rebuilt in Art Deco style. It was also the first occasion on which the society has met in a non-university city venue and in that sense was a conscious effort to connect with a neglected part of our constituency. This endeavour was mirrored in the conference theme of ‘Connecting Landscapes’. The chapters in this book, echoing many of the conference presentations reflect the ways geography has developed in its thinking about space, while still being interested in the discipline’s core concerns with space and the spatialities of people’s lives. This comes through in the book in two ways. Landscapes are a typical geographical concern. But human geography also recognises that geographies are not just resting on the landscape, they emerge around people as well. Through our lives our geographies change as the world expands and contracts, as we age and negotiate its social, spatial and structural complexities which can be both enabling and disabling. And geography has always been concerned with change, particularly tracking the flows of mobile people and things, from trade flows to migration flows. Each section of the book speaks to these overarching and historical themes of geography. A further dimension of ‘engagedness’ comes through in the affiliations of authors of the chapters, particularly in the case of those who are geographers by background but now work in other institutional settings and those who are not geographers

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but who have found it useful to interact with geographers and geography particularly around lifecourse and mobilities. But on closer inspection the chapters also demonstrate the way geographical thinking has moved on from the relatively stable conceptions of these aspects of geography, considering how landscapes are not fixed, or how lifecourse geographies can change dramatically between and within generations and between and within different places, or how mobility is not an exception to the normally stable world reflecting the movement of things between otherwise stable places, but how mobility is always a part of the world and how apparent stability might be the exception rather than the rule. We have sought to capture and some of the energy of the conference in this volume which brings together 11 chapters of selected and revised papers derived from the original presentations. In doing so we are mindful that with cessation of the New Zealand Geography Conference Proceedings series in 2003 the tone and insights from the conference as a whole are dissipated without trace. While acknowledging that individual papers from previous New Zealand Geography Conferences have routinely been published in a range of journals and that special issues have also emerged (e.g. Gorman Murray, 2012), by and large the distinctive flavour of the discipline as captured at the conference now tends to end with the conference. This volume does not fully counter this tendency but it does endeavour to bring together a body of writing that captures something of the flavour of human geography in New Zealand in the second decade of the 21st century. Engaging Geographies contains three connected clusters of chapters organised around the themes of ‘landscape’, ‘life courses’ and ‘mobilities’. The contributors are human geographers and allied social scientists working from Australia and New Zealand and the chapters offer insights into the trajectories of geography as a discipline written from the Southern Hemisphere. The majority of the chapters have an Antipodean orientation and make selective use of suitably adjusted conceptualisations employed in Anglo-American geography. Thus the content for Northern hemisphere readers may be accessible but not entirely the same as that with which they would typically engage.

Landscapes Anglo-American geographers in the middle of the 20th century were somewhat mired in the consequences of translating landschaft into English as landscape, but by the 1980s landscape had regained some renewed

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vigour as ‘a way of seeing’ through amongst others the efforts of Dennis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (1984). The first section of the book is headed ’Landscapes’ and the term is used simultaneously in several senses. In a more orthodox fashion it provides an entry point into geography’s concern for place and space and spatial interactions where this provides a ‘container’ in which ‘life courses’ have an implicit temporality. Even where it is not measured simply in terms of industrial time discipline, concepts of landscape can enrich the ‘timelessness’ of space encompassing aspects of mobilities which evokes geography’s longstanding concern with movement across and space. Moorings in contrast point to anchor points and enclaves of certainty, stability, and stillness in times of flux, and moments and spaces of fixity which are necessary in order to make people and things flow (Cresswell, 2010). That said landscape can also be used in a metaphorical sense in terms of ideas and politics as expressed in the landscape which in turn with the values inscribed in it then serves as some sort of mediator of social behaviour. In the case of Juliana Mansvelt’s chapter the ‘landscape’ in question is one that is close to home being that of the academy itself in New Zealand where she explores the place of the teaching-research nexus. In the mid-1980s New Zealand was transformed by a Neo-liberal experiment which extended far beyond the removal of agricultural subsidies, privatisation and state sectors restructuring (Le Heron and Pawson, 1996). Within the university line management models were introduced along with an audit culture, student loans as well as completion amongst ‘tertiary providers’ to use the terminology of the day. The impacts are continuing and include a national research assessment exercise, the ‘PBRF’ (Performance Based Research Fund) to allocate research funding amongst tertiary institutions (Larner and Le Heron, 2005). The New Zealand geography students of 21st century are noticeably different from those of a generation ago and Mansvelt through her personal life-course narrative speaks to some of the challenges and excitement of bringing insights from research into teaching to produce creative and ‘sparky geographies’ (Cook et al., 2007). In doing so she argues for a structural and social landscape which celebrates the diversity of geographical practice and which provides for opportunities to ‘play’ and ‘flirt with space’ (Crouch, 2010), conveying a sense of why geography continues to matter. Phillip O’Neill’s landscape is an urban-industrial one and his concern is with movement across the landscape facilitated by the development of infrastructure. Simultaneously he engages with ideological and spatial dimensions of infrastructure provision whereby he steps beyond some

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conventional categories such as public goods and monopoly goods. Indeed he argues that the neglect of the spatial dimension of infrastructure have actually undermined the Left’s capacity to argue for state involvement of infrastructure provision. In the second part of O’Neill’s chapter he critically examines the notion of categories that can be applied to understanding infrastructure such as public goods, which enables him to develop an argument whereby privatisation of infrastructure, something of a feature of States where Neoliberal experiments proceeded, is not intrinsically bad policy but that financialisation can be used to push finance into infrastructure investment at time when government options for infrastructure are limited. He consequently highlights the importance of the conduits through the urban-industrial landscapes, collapsed under the heading of ‘infrastructure’ that restores spatiality and movement to these environments. Gradon Diprose situates his chapter in the urban landscape where he theorises the position of an art project in the shape of the establishment of a Freestore in New Zealand’s capital city Wellington in 2010 at time when there were a considerable number of empty office premises in the CBD. The ‘shop’ was staffed by volunteers and open to ‘customers’ who could take un-priced food times from the shelves. The food was donated by local retail and supermarket outlets and would otherwise have been consigned to the tip. Other stores were opened in Auckland and Palmerston North. As an art project, where art was conceived of a set of practices, performances and experiences, rather than as a physical object, the Freestore argues Diprose, was a political moment, one that disturbed some conventional and established categories, refined by a generation of Neoliberalism policy discourse about ‘poor’ and ‘needy citizens. As Diprose further shows ‘place matters’ conceived of as an Art project in Wellington, the Freestore in Auckland was regarded in the mainstream media as a welfare charity around which there was much racialised discourse, particularly about health and ethnicity. This first section closes with Etienne Nel’s chapter which examines the ebb and flow of small town New Zealand over the last 30 years during which time, in the aftermath of ‘Rogernomics’, many of them experienced limited population growth and in some case decline as well as economic stagnation. Nel deploys concepts of productivism and post-productivism drawn from the UK rural geography literature, where it was robustly debated (Wilson, 2001) and uses it to anchor his analysis of the New Zealand small rural townscapes. In this regard he side-steps the caution and scepticism of some New Zealand geographers over the extent to which these ideas were useful in the local setting (Willis, 2003, Jay, 2005). In all

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events, based on interviews with a range of community leaders Nel is able to itemise strategies used in the small towns which have been able, to varying degrees, to prosper by reinventing themselves. When we engage with the geographies around us, we see that those geographies, whether they are landscapes, lives or places, are always engaged with other landscapes, lives and places as well. They are not in splendid isolation but connected up, and not just connected, but shaped and reshaping each other. As these chapters show, geography is developing the tools to understand and examine the always engaged character of the geographies we live in.

Lifecourse Matters of connection, mobility and landscape are also integral to the Life-course section of this book. From birth to death - stillness and movement, varying degrees of connectedness and ones being in place, are integral parts of ‘growing up’ and growing older. One’s identity, the extent to which we are included or excluded from participation in social, economic and political life and our capacity to be socially and spatially mobile are all shaped in place. Lifecourses are relational – framed and punctuated through shifting connections to other people, things and places. Our bodies, the social and spatial trajectories of our lives and our connectedness to others produce and are produced by the operation of power in place, creating material and discursive landscapes which may be both enabling and disabling of our capacity to be, do, move, and make things flow. The papers in the lifecourse section of this book extend a tradition of critical interpretations of the lifecourse (Katz and Monk, 1993) - refuting notions of childhood, adulthood and old age as fixed temporally, socially or spatially. In taking up a view of ageing as occurring across one’s biographical life span, rather than as an issue faced by older adults, we seek to emphasise the nuanced ways in which dimensions of ageing are constructed, experienced and represented across the lifecourse. In that vein recent work in geography has focussed on life course transitions [see papers on ‘Theorising Life Transitions’ in Area (Hörschelmann, 2011)] as well as intergenerational and intersectional concerns (Evans and Holt 2011; Hopkins and Pain, 2007, Valentine and Hughes 2011). Though the chapters in this section cover diverse aspects of the lifecourse such as mothering and childcare, living standards in later life, the ambiguous spaces of great-grandparenthood and death at home, all the authors in the section are interested in matters of power and how this is shaped

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relationally. Each speaks to intergenerational concerns and to the intersectional connections that exists between people situated differently with regard to matters of age, ethnicity and social class/position. Life events and disruptions to the norms of everyday life are also identified to provide critical lenses on the taken for granted practices, powers and places of ageing. Aisling Gallagher’s chapter on the work of new mothers highlights the connections between societal framings of parental anxiety and State concerns about the moral, educational and economic shaping of future citizens. In discussing biopolitical interventions under neo-liberalism, Gallagher examines the intersection between landscapes of governance and those of everyday life with relation to the practices of mothering. Her research highlights tensions between the particular and placed representations of the home as a site of care in Ireland and the governing of subjects in the context of changing relations and powers of Church and State. Through her examination of the practices of a parental home visitation service, concerned with encouraging mothers to care and educate their children well, Gallagher shows how the kinds of structural and discursive framings of parental empowerment drawn on to encourage mothers to become ‘self-reflexive’ parents, may actually re-affirm rather than challenge negative experiences of mothering. Mary Breheny, Juliana Mansvelt and Christine Stephens also emphasise the ways in which everyday practice and power are connected, but their focus is on older people, inequalities and the differing capabilities their material standard of living affords. Like Gallagher they discuss the varying discourses at work in shaping subjectivities, but focus on the way in which older people’s talk (rather than practice) can provide powerful insights into the kinds of material constraints which impact on their social and economic mobilities as they move through the life-course. Their discussion then focusses on the rhetorical function of talk, noting how it simultaneously draws on material landscapes and gives meaning to self, in relation to bodies and objects. Reflecting on the capabilities of individuals with differing living standards to effect change and act on the world, Breheny et al. demonstrates how discourses of positive and active ageing position older people in various ways; but that these positionings are themselves dependent on individuals’ material and social situatedness. Ruth Allan and Janine Wiles’ chapter considers the socio-spatial construction of great-grandparenthood in Aotearoa/New Zealand, within a context where the rights and duties of great-grandparents are much less socially defined than that of parent or grandparent. Recognising the growing prevalence of great-grandparents in western societies, the chapter

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sheds light on the conflicting positions great-grandparents hold: on one hand publically celebrated and on the other fraught with ambiguity about their position in the broader family structure. Analysing the narratives and ‘storylines’ of great-grandparents the authors capture the sense of uncertainty with which great-grandparents participate in their children’s and grand-children’s lives. To that extent the role of a great-grandparent is shown to be deeply mediated by and within complex familial relations, such that perceptions of ageing by their family members shape their ability to engage with family life (scripting decisions such as the amount of time you get to spend with your grandchildren or whether you are kept informed of all familial events). Finally Allan and Wiles suggest that this mediation of the role of great-grandparents can be experienced as both empowering (in being able to take a ‘step back’ from daily family life) and disabling (in feeling ‘removed’ from familial relations). Finally Merryn Gott, Lisa Williams and Tess Moeke-Maxwell in examining landscapes of death, challenge conventional spatial understandings of home as associated with a ‘good’ end of life. Like Gallagher and Breheny et al., they discuss ‘home’ as a site whose meaning is not fixed, understanding home space as relational and contested across the lifecourse. Questioning the reductive equation of ‘home’ with a physical space (the home) in end of life, they instead call for an understanding of home space as a malleable ‘spatial imaginary’. In doing so they suggest it becomes possible to find new ways to make people feel ‘at home’ within palliative care, even if it is not their ideal place to be at the end of their life.

Mobilities The theme of mobility has emerged in geographical scholarship in recent years as both a consequence and a driver of geography’s interest in the dynamism of social systems (Sheller and Urry, 2006). As we more and more see past the illusion of settled space produced by scholarship which unproblematically located itself somewhere on the scalar hierarchy from the local through the urban, the regional and ‘up’ to the nation-state, with the latter often seen as the ultimate spatial form, we find ourselves examining movement and mobility not as occurring across pre-existing space, but as productive of space itself. The near constant movement in the world around us, whether it is patterned, random, or somewhere in between, demands attention if we are to understand shifting economic, social, cultural and political spaces. This is not to suggest that those scalar categories are themselves illusionary, but it is to recognise that they are produced as much by

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movement between, across and within different spaces as by any real or imagined semi-permanent border. Indeed, the constraints on and possibilities for movement placed on people by various forces can tell us a lot about the changing nature of particular scaled spaces. In a chapter that overlaps with some of the lifecourse concerns of the previous section, Karen Witten and her colleagues write about the mobility of schoolchildren in Auckland, focusing especially on how this has changed in the last few decades. They reveal an intriguing relationship between children’s mobility and the changing social relations that constitute ‘the local.’ They suggest at one point that there is something of a vicious circle here: parents are more likely to be comfortable with their children having more independent mobility around their neighbourhood if they feel like they can trust their neighbours and so be confident someone nearby will be watching out for them. In the days when there was, perhaps ironically, less mobility amongst people as they moved houses and neighbourhoods less frequently, people were more likely to know, and know whether to trust, the people in their local area. But as people have, for various reasons, moved more and become less connected to the people immediately surrounding them, they have been more reticent about letting their children wander. And as fewer children can be seen on the streets – walking to school instead of being driven for instance – so people are even less confident: and so it goes on. The reasons for these shifts are legion, including economic and political changes since the 1980s especially, but the point here is that children’s mobility can tell us something about the changing circumstances of the social relations that make up the local. Children are also the subject of the chapter by Conradson et al. which explores the impact of natural disasters on children in the aftermath of the devastating Canterbury earthquakes of 2010 and 2011. The particular context is provided by the consequences of school site sharing arrangements put in place after the earthquakes. In some instances these also dramatically reshaped school hours. Drawing on the limited existing secondary literature, Conradson et al. explores the disruption of attachment to and familiarity with school environments wrought by site sharing through questionnaire data and official information on performance in national school examination performance. But a focus on mobility does not need to be about the movement of people. Other things move as well, and these also have consequences for the geographies in which we live. One particularly mobile object is public policy, and in recent years geographers have become increasingly interested in the way that particular policies move between cities, countries and continents (McCann and Ward, 2011). In the final chapter of

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the book Russell Prince considers the relationship between policy and space, and argues that policies have both topographies and topologies that shape space in important ways. Reflecting on recent debates about the spatiality of neoliberalism and the difficulty of theorising its ‘seeming everywhereness’ (Peck and Tickell, 2002) without reproducing an overly monolithic and unnuanced conception of it, Prince argues that policies have topographies, both in their formation and in their rolling out, but also topologies: spatial logics that enable and shape their movement across space. Using the example of increasingly ubiquitous policy programmes that focus on utilising human creativity, he argues for thinking about the relationships between policy topographies and topologies, and the way that space gets both organised and transformed in particular ways by these relationships. Thinking about policy mobility in this way, Prince argues, helps us to grasp the way certain policy regimes can seem to be both everywhere present and yet highly differentiated and diverse across space.

References Cook, I., J. Evans, H. Griffiths, R. Morris, and S. Wrathmell. 2007. "'It's more than just what it is': defetishising commodities, expanding fields, mobilising change...", Geoforum, 38, 6, 1113-1126. Crouch, D. 2010. Flirting with Space. Journeys and Creativity. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate. Cosgrove, D. and S. Daniels. 1984. The Iconography of Landscape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cresswell, T. 2010. "Towards a politics of mobility." Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 28, 1, 17-31. Evans, R. and L. Holt. 2011. "Diverse spaces of childhood and youth: gender and other socio-cultural differences." Children's Geographies, 9, 3-4, 277-284. doi: 10.1080/14733285.2011.595902. Gorman Murray, A. (ed). 2012. Special Issue: Revisiting Geographies of Sexuality and Gender Down Under. New Zealand Geographer, 68, 2, 77–149. Hopkins, P. and R. Pain. 2007. "Geographies of age: thinking relationally." Area, 39, 3, 287-294. Hörschelmann, K. 2011. "Theorising life transitions: geographical perspectives." Area, 43, 4, 378-383. doi: 10.1111/j.1475-4762.2011.01056.x. Jay, M. 2003. Productivist and Post-productivist Conceptualisations of agriculture from a New Zealand perspective. In Glimpses of a Gian World. Essays in Honour of Peter Holland, edited by G. Kearsley and

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B. Fitzharris, 151-170, Dunedin: School of Social Science University of Otago. Katz, C. and J. Monk, (eds). 1993. Full Circles: Geographies of Women over the Lifecourse, London: Routledge. Larner, W. and R. Le Heron. 2005. “Neo-liberalizing Spaces and Subjectivities: Reinventing New Zealand Universities.” Organisation, 12, 6, 843-862. McCann, E. J. and K. Ward. 2011. Mobile Urbanism: Cities and PolicyMaking in the Global Age. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Peck, J. and A. Tickell. 2002. “Neoliberalizing space.” Antipode, 34, 3, 380-404. Sheller, M. and J. Urry. 2006. “The new mobilities paradigm.” Environment and Planning A, 38, 2, 207-226. Valentine, G. and K. Hughes. 2011. "Geographies of ‘family’ life: interdependent relationships across the life course in the context of problem Internet gambling." In Geographies of Children, Youth and Families: an International Perspective, edited by L. Holt, 121-135, Abingdon: Routledge. Willis, R. 2003. “Rural Decline and Change in Post Restructuring New Zealand: Both Evolution and Revolution”. In The New Countryside, Geographic Perspectives on Rural Change, edited by K. Beesley, H. Milward, B. Ilberry and L. Harrington, 64-77, Halifax N.S.: Brandon University (Rural Development Institute) and St Mary’s University. Wilson, G. 2001. “From productivism to post-productivism … and back again? Exploring the (un)changed natural and mental landscapes of European agriculture.” Transactions of the Institute British Geographers NS, 26, 1, 77-102.

PART I: LANDSCAPES

CHAPTER TWO SPARKY GEOGRAPHIES: ENGAGING JOURNEYS THROUGH LANDSCAPES OF TEACHING AND RESEARCH JULIANA MANSVELT

Performing Sparky texts If writing the keynote on which this chapter is based caused me some angst, then so too have the challenges of translating the spoken and embodied word into a written text. I began my presentation by holding up a driver’s ‘L’ plate which signalled both my relative newness to the role of ‘keynote speaker’ and the challenge set before me in giving a talk on constructing landscapes through my research and teaching (a topic one could ‘drive a bus through!’). In many ways the presence of the L plate still reverberates in this chapter, a prompt that my own journey through the discipline continues to be a ‘sparky’ experience in discovering and learning. While the L plate was a powerful and tangible prop for a speech (and one which evoked some laughter) its absence in this written text is a reminder of the challenges I find in conveying my excitement as geographer through differing contexts and mediums. In reflecting on my learning journey through the mundane and everyday practice of research and teaching in the pages that follow I am endeavouring to manage the tension between spoken and written text, and between my own personal story and the wider effects and affects which geographers might make as they engage in creative journeys. This tension serves as reminder that my performance as a geographer and academic occurs not just through book chapters, articles and study guides, but through the ways in which I interact online and face to face in a range of contexts both in and outside the university. As I have crafted and ‘played with’ the material for this chapter it has prompted me to consider and attend to the ways in which the personal and the embodied is sometimes embraced and sometimes held at a distance in constructing the products of our teaching and researching

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across an academic landscape in which the kind of communicative forms which establish legitimacy as a scholar do not always adequately accommodate our multiple ways of being or doing. My hope in writing this piece is that it will not simply be read as an introspective selfreflection of my own performance and practice, but that it may provoke readers to consider how we can recognise and promote creative ways of doing geography, communicating the contribution of our subject and engaging with a range of participants and audiences both within and outside the discipline. Cook et al.’s (2007) exhortation to produce more radical and sparky geographies in an article on "Defetishising commodities" was a call for geographers to reflect on the relationship between their theory, politics and practice, a call for a radical geography which is less didactic, less instructive, less moralistic – a kind of geography centred on mobilising rather than dictating meaning. Through the work and writing of his students he shows the reader ‘heartful auto-ethnographies’, arguing these provide ‘mundane yet sparky connections’ with the people’s whose lives they are trying to understand. For him such geographies are “original, absorbing, thought-provoking, and full of life” (Cook et al., 2007, pg 122). Cook’s writing style is provocative and wide ranging in terms of both scale and scope. In fact a title of one of Cook’s previous publications was “You want to be careful you don’t end up like Ian. He’s all over the place” (Cook, 1998) (which could be read as a compliment, given geographers’ claims to space!). Cook et al. (2007) leave open the possibilities for how ‘radical geographies’ might be constituted and the potential means by which geographers might produce meaningful engagements with others, but I appreciate the ways in which his writing encourages me to wrestle with my own beliefs. The term ‘sparky’ is not one you come across too often in geographical journals, but is a term which upon reading, held some affinity for me in relation to my own experiences and my teaching and research journey as an academic. There is something about the prospect of producing ‘sparky geographies’ that I find inherently exciting. As Valentine (1998) so heartfully expressed on her experiences of being ‘outed’ as a lesbian, our personal and academic lives are intimately connected. Much of my learning has come from considering the ways in which my scholarly and private life intersect. On thinking about the characteristics of ‘sparkyness’, I was reminded of our family dog named Sparky, a friendly little corgi-terror cross (or so we thought) till one day she took a dislike to a courier who was entering my parent’s property. Sparky barked, growled and then launched herself into the air and bit the courier on the bottom. My parents were surprised and

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horrified, as was the courier, who promptly showed them the mark the dog left ‘behind’ (literally)! The incident was no laughing matter, but as I have thought about the event and the attributes of ‘sparkyness’ embodied in the dog’s behaviour, being ‘sparky; implies something more than business as usual, a kind of tenacity, and an element of surprise that leads to something new and enthralling (though in the case of a dog-bite something quite appalling!). There is something about a spark which both draws us to it and creates, if we fuel its growth, a blaze which not only takes in ‘that which makes it stronger’ (thanks to J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter for that phrase) but a blaze which has the capacity, to shed light, create some heat, transform landscapes and provoke action and (re)action.

The potential for engaging geographies: attributes of a spark How then might the ‘spark’ become a basis for thinking about more engaging, creative heartful geographies? Three attributes of a spark come to mind: the potential for sparks to ignite fires, the production of something bigger which results from the combination of a spark with other elements, and the ability of a spark to command attention. A spark has the potential to burst into flame igniting fires. An oft cited quote attributed (with some debate) to the poet William Yeats “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire”, might seem trite and idealistic, yet it encaspsulates my desire to try and ignite a passion for things geographical in my students, to going beyond delivery of content to develop students’ geographical imagination and to encourage creativity in the ways they represent this (something I try to reflect in internal assessment tasks). A spark has the potential to create a blaze which is beyond control, however discussions about ingenuity and creativity seem to be ‘bounded’ in discussions of its codability and transferability of the phenomenon as part of political economic geographies connected with enterprise culture. The possession of innovative ability and the establishment of a cultural context in which creativity is fostered now regarded as a key source of productivity that pervades an expanding knowledge based economy (Tornqvist, 2011). While Tornqvist (2011, pg 62) argues that “Genuinely creative people and original ideas are as rare as gold in a prospector’s pan” I take heart (and perhaps some comfort) in psychologist Ruth Richard’s (2007) view that creativity is not simply a domain of the eminent or exceptional people, but is a capability that it part of our intimate daily lives and personalities. A desire to acknowledge, learn from and engage with the incredibly creative strategies, tactics and

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practices by which people make sense of and manage the lifeworlds has provided a spark for the development of my research and teaching. Part of what makes me proud to be a social geographer is my desire to reflect on the extraordinary relationships and practices and tactics which characterise ordinary life as Holloway and Hubbard eloquently phrase it “Behind our everyday ‘being-in-the-world’ are extraordinary sets of relationships between people and places” (Holloway and Hubbard 2001, pg 6-7) The second attribute that comes to mind in relation to a spark is that when combined with other elements, it produces a reaction. A spark plug for example, delivers electric current from an ignition system in order to ignite compressed fuel/air mixture thereby combining with these elements together to produce a reaction. The combination of these other elements the diverse people, practices, ideas and things that constitute the collective networks of academic practice is something that I find ignites my enthusiasm and creativity whether it be at conferences, in classrooms, in research teams, or interviews and focus groups. Durkheim (Tiryakian, 1995) has called this ‘Collective effervescence’, the perceived energy formed by a gathering of people united around a common experience. While such a reaction has its down sides (the potential for individual wills and thoughts and practices to be subjected to the dominant moral norms and actions of a group) I have found the synergism, and creative outcomes of the relations and associations formed through such groups immensely thought provoking and exciting. Recently we had some more insulation installed in our roof of our home, and the installers came down and told us that one of the electrical connections to the kitchen downlights was sparking. The prospect of a house fire provoked us to ring an electrician immediately. Thus the third attribute of a spark, and the light/flash/heat that emanates from it is that it commands one’s attention. I think recently of the of the debate which occurred over the email list-server of the Institute of Australian Geographers around David Bissell’s and J. D. Dewsbury’s abstract inviting contributors for panel session on “Will Power: creative ontologies for changing difference” for the AAG conference in Los Angeles in 2013. An online comment by an academic about the opaqueness and incomprehensibility of the panel abstract was like a spark, drawing more attention till the multitude of web postings in response ranged far beyond a matter of understanding the session to debates about relevancy, impact, audience, the legitimacy of various voices to engage in the debate, and ultimately matters of what counts as geography. While such a debate was productive in one sense (it certainly provoked discussion on the nature of the discipline our subject and caused me to weighed up and consider my

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position and response to the various arguments), the heat it created had the capacity to harm, particularly as the email exchanges remained attached to people in particular and personal ways. Thus like the dog bite, sparky debates and engagements are not always positive and may have unintended impact as they circulate and are constructed and mobilised through different spaces and subjects in ways which we cannot foresee. Recognition of the ways in which sparky debates are framed may mitigate potentially harmful effects (and affects) but need not prevent our endeavours to engage with and challenge others to produce more hopeful geographies (Lawson, 2005). So if sparks have the potential to fuel something bigger than themselves, to attract attention, and to emit light and heat, why is that they don’t always blaze - transforming landscapes? Over the nearly two decades I have worked as a geographer at Massey University in New Zealand, there have been many changes associated with the neoliberalisation of university education and shifts in drivers of research, funding and teaching which have been well articulated in articles and commentaries (Curran and Hague, 2008; Thrift, 2012) which tend to dampen down rather than fuel any sparky moments I may have. Personally, I have felt the weight of the intensification of my work practices across all areas of my job and increasingly struggle manage everyday tasks in serving the university, teaching distance and internal students and conducting researching - all the while having to produce information about these various activities and their relative value and submit evidence of this into a variety of institutional and disciplinary (and disciplining) conduits! The ongoing task of applying for research funding, and of meeting deadlines for reporting outputs, applying for new grants means at times I feel like I concentrate more on acquiring funds and producing the measurable outcomes of the research rather than on the substantive insights of it. I’m mindful of the demands of a range of groups and individuals who seek to frame and measure my worth in different ways, including my students. As a scholar with interests in consumption I am a more than a little suspicious that the commodification of higher education (Molesworth et al., 2009) is gaining momentum when students ask “How many of these references do I have to read to get a C?” I always struggle in my response to this question, recognising that my own teaching and my student’s learning goals appear to be increasingly framed around instrumental and accessible outcomes as part of an implicit educational contract in which I am a complicit commodifying agent rendering education into ‘commodity’ and teaching into contractible forms (Ball, 2009).

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Under such conditions sparky moments can be fleeting, and I find a kind of inertia envelopes me, a smothering blanket which squashes any thoughts I might have had about doing things differently, about being creative, about spending time to develop new avenues of engaging geographies in teaching and research. Despite such tendencies, I am encouraged to fan the flame on sparky moments through reading David Crouch’s (2010) “Flirting with Space”. Much of Crouch’s writing has centred on what can seem quite mundane activities, such as caravanning, gardening and art. But through writing and researching these Crouch reflects on these practices to provide a fascinating analysis of the creative interrelationship between space and journey of himself and his participants. Finding a spark in the everyday, he notes: “The more explorative, uncertain and tentative ways in which our being part of a world of things, movements, materials and life; openings and closures, part openings mixed with part closures; engage in living suggests a character of flirting; spaces of possibility. It can be exemplified in the way in which we can come across very familiar sites finding new juxtapositions of materials, materialities and feelings, as it were, ‘unawares’. The unexpected opens out. Ordinary, repetitive, extraordinary, we find that we can ‘look….for the first time’; feel the world anew (Bachelard 1994, pg 156, cited in Crouch, 2010, pg 1)”

Feeling the world anew: Sparky engagements in learning and teaching How then have I felt the world anew, in the mundane practices of my research and teaching? There are four aspects of my teaching and research through which sparky geographies emerge.

Engaging with the subjects of our research and teaching In my first year of teaching two students obviously exceptionally bored with a lecture on research practice, decided to light a piece of paper at the back of the room. This was not exactly what I had in mind when I thought of teaching as ‘igniting a fire’, but it was that experience, perhaps not so mundane in terms of classroom practice, that encouraged me to interact with my students more, to engage them in the learning process and to give them opportunities where I could, to lead the learning encounter. Sparky geographies are also created in learning from and with research participants. There is now a substantive tradition of participatory research in geography (Kindon et al., 2007) but this is only recently an area I have

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been involved in. As part of a team led by researchers from the Waikato University1 researching the relationship between older people and a range of commercial and voluntary service providers, I have seen the tangible benefits of giving opportunities for participants (individuals, representatives of various local organisations and a local iwi) to direct the research programme through participant observations, workshops and interviews. One of most rewarding aspects of this was attending the final project workshop and hearing these groups talk about how the research team had partnered with them to produce outcomes that were helpful and relevant. Engaging with the lifeworlds of my participants and laying aside my own preconceived notions of how their worlds should be has also provided me with ‘sparky’ learning experiences. I remember interviewing Fred in his home in rural Manawatu (Mansvelt, 2008). I could hardly move through the front door and the house smelt musty with every room packed with piles of books and papers. The dirty windows almost obscured the view out, but as Fred talked animatedly about his life I realised his house reflected not my participant’s isolation but the distanced relations he had brought it in. Inside the boundaries of his house was the world of his work, of his private interests and hobbies. As he pulled documents and meeting minutes knowingly from the huge piles around me and discussed his involvement in numerous voluntary organisation and places, I realised this was not rubbish, not the result of a lack of care, but of love. Fred had built a real and meaningful repository of meaning, providing a sense of worth, achievement and pleasure, given meaning to his relative spatial isolation (he lived in a small community on the outskirts of the city) and to his identity as a contributing member of society through his involvement in numerous societies and organisations. This experience provoked me to challenge the taken for granted views about the necessarily negative effects of spatial isolation, ultimately informing my understanding about the diversity of what constitutes successful ‘ageing in place’. Learning from the subjects of my research has also provided a starting point for research ideas and papers, understanding the creativity and resourcefulness that is to be found in a range of mundane spaces and practices, and even where the capability to change one’s situation is very limited. Dana for example, was chronically ill and unable to engage in paid employment. Despite her low income she had developed ingenious and complex strategies for sourcing commodities for herself and her family (Mansvelt, 2012). Dana’s story and that of many other participants who were struggling materially, emotionally and bodily to retain a sense of ‘being in the world’ and to resist social and spatial exclusion and processes of Othering, demonstrate for me the extraordinary geographies to be found

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in the everyday (Mansvelt, 2013). Hearing their stories of resilience and creativity has been a humbling, but heartful experience as I work towards representing their narratives in ways which I hope will engage other audiences who might have the capability to effect real change.

Making the subject of our research and teaching more engaging A second way in which I endeavour to promote sparky moments in the mundane of my everyday practices is through exploring ways of conveying the benefits of geographical perspectives for critical understanding of consumption and ageing for a range of academic and non-academic audiences. Conveying the merits of complex geographies which consider the multiple connections which constitute people and place relations has its challenges, but one of the means by which I try and generate sparks, provoking audiences to think about their own beliefs and assumptions is through the use of cartoons, images and videos drawn from popular culture. I’ve found interrogating visual texts can make the subject of ageing, consumption and place more engaging for both students and community groups, opening up issues of the relationality and intergenerational aspects of ageing, and new possibilities for dialogue, discussion and questioning of ageing beyond deficit. My interest in elearning and using new technologies also encourages me to think about the possibilities for a variety of tools and technologies to engage audiences both within and outside academia. A more conscious effort to be involved with and speak to community groups which related to my areas of expertise has also provided me (and I hope those whom I have been involved with) a range of sparky experiences. Sparking conversations in which geography matters is critical to engaging with and learning from a range of audiences, as is I believe identifying oneself as a geographer (a conscious act in naming and claiming a place to speak from to all our publics) whether we occupy position labelled ‘geographer’ or not. While I have found that being a geographer can be a bit of conversation killer at times (such as when the person you are speaking to hated geography at school!), I consciously try and promote the ways in which my discipline gives me ‘a window on the world’ and to discuss the kind of questions I endeavour to explore through my research. Being part of interdisciplinary research teams has also given me an opportunity to promote and expound the sparkyness of being a geographer, but has also prompted me to think about the partiality of the perspectives which frame my understanding and to consider the possibilities and limitations of my geographical imagination.

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Just as a spark captures one attention, so I have found do stories. As powerful, embodied and situated ways of making sense of our world, they speak to our own and others human experiences, fears and joys sparking interest in the subject matter at hand and reflecting the discourses we are subject to and producers of (Wiles and Rosenberg, 2005). Writings on non-representational and emotional geographies (Cadman, 2009; Bondi et al., 2005) have also encouraged me to reflect on how everyday sensations and feelings of being and becoming, and the bodily practices we engage in are also an important part of the way that we might engage and coconstruct our research and teaching. Of the three Progress in Human Geography reports I was invited to write, I found the second on “Geographies of consumption: the unmanageable consumer” (Mansvelt, 2009) was the most challenging and yet the most moving to compose because it caused me to confront the intellectual arguments about empowerment and autonomy of elders I professed in my writing and teaching (both different kinds of stories) and my narratives of my struggles in managing life at home with Mary, my 93 year old mother in law who lived with us at the time. As I tried to negotiate my tiredness and frustration in accessing forms of care and services, I came to the sparky but real revelation that personal landscapes of care are not distant from, or subservient to circuits of capital and spaces of governance but a part of their daily reproduction!

Subjecting ourselves to engaging with failure This doesn’t sound very sparky, but for me has perhaps been the most significant area of insight, innovation and creativity in my learning in my teaching and research. Ever since my disastrous first year of teaching with students burning things in the back of my class, getting drunk and trashing a camp cabin while I led my first fieldtrip, being told in a student evaluation “that I could have been a stand-up comedian” (I don’t think that was intended as a complement!) and that I “needed to learn to use technology” I have endeavoured to improve my teaching. At least now I feel the students laugh with me rather than at me (and if it’s the latter I don’t mind too much!). Inspired by a paper by Graham and Thrift (2007) on repair of objects, which examined what happens when objects and systems fail, I have begun to think much more carefully about the taken for granted powers at work in maintaining functioning in socio-technical networks in everyday life. I have not only looked to examples of network failure in my participants lives (such as when walking to the letterbox is no longer possible, or care arrangements fail) but to my own failings, and

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how these moments might be productive of new and transformative networks and circulations. My failure to listen to Alice (aged 79) a women who could no longer use her hands and needed a wheelchair to move around the house, exemplifies how failure can become part of more sparky geographies. In the middle of an interview about goods and services, and a conversation about phone banking, Alice mentions her bidet: “Alice: Yeah. But with the phone banking see, I’ve got to touch. Juliana: Oh I see. Gotcha. And I’ve got the most wonderful toilet. Want to have a look at it? Oh I might later. She is fabulous. Oh that’s great. Oh if you know of anyone who has got problems, it is, well they didn’t want me to come out [of hospital], I was in rehab and they didn’t want me to come home and not be able to look after myself personally wise like that. So my son, you know, got these bidet, what do you call them? Bidets, yeah, yeah. Type of thing. Well I’ve got a concrete floor and we couldn’t think how we’d get that in. But he found a firm in Auckland and they send this one down that you attach on the toilet. Fabulous! Absolutely fabulous!” (Mansvelt, in press)

As I read Alice’s transcript, I realized the invitation to look at her bidet reoccurred at several points throughout the interview, but I dismissed it. If only I had had let Alice show me and talk about the bidet – instead my ‘ablest’ preconceptions about what constituted legitimate forms of informational and material networks that would enable Alice’s body and mind to travel and connect with other organizations prevented me from listening to Alice’s story. Analysis of Alice’s transcript revealed that her bidet mattered, enabling her to move out of a hospital rehabilitation unit, continuing to extend her distance from its discursive and material power as a place of relative dependence. Her son’s purchase of the bidet allowed her to retain mobility and independence within her own home, to reclaim a sense of agency and control over who and what services came in and enabled toileting to continue as a personal and private ritual (Mansvelt, in press). A sparky moment generated by my recognition of my failure in the context of the interview ironically became part of research publications on the ways in which networks material things and people enable home-based elders to be mobile beyond the body.

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Engaging possibilities with other subjects and other scholars Though I had previously written with other colleagues, my first experience in writing as part of an interdisciplinary research team was in 2009 with two New Zealand Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (now Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment) research projects related to ageing and consumption. Both projects involved working with scholars from a wide range of disciplines - media and communication, sociology, economics and critical psychology. Not only have they broadened the range of perspectives I have on the phenomena I have studied, but they have provided a foundation for arguing for theories and perspectives which emerge from human geography. A comment I heard from colleagues on a number of occasions in these projects was “Oh you sound like a geographer’, and while I am not sure what a geographer sounds like, so taken for granted are my own ways of seeing, speaking and being, I hope that is a positive! The collective effervescence from engaging with others in workshops and in the research and teaching groups that I am a part of, I find tremendously fulfilling. Though there is vulnerability in offering ones ideas and personal and disciplinary knowledge up for critique, doing so can take geography beyond its disciplinary boundaries and broadens my own horizons, causing me to question assumptions about what is possible, appropriate and worthwhile, and what constitutes evidence and argument. Participating in research and reading groups, sharing ideas and resources, and being involved in critical conversations about what questions matter, in what contexts and why has been hugely beneficial. In fact, the keynote on which this chapter is based was a product of numerous conversations with colleagues and members of my narrative research group2 and I hope much sparkier for it!

Being a sparky geographer: conclusions or starting points… McCormack (2003, pg 490, cited in Crouch 2010, pg 129) says the habitual economies of the everyday are not simply the matter upon which power works, they are powers in and of themselves. If we are to ‘flirt’ with space (Crouch, 2010) and fan the fire of our creativity, then establishing space and time through which to fuel our sparky moments, experiences and encounters would seem to be critical. However, recognising the disciplinary and institutional imperatives that impinge on ones practice to perform and become in certain ways in order to achieve ‘success’ as an

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geographer, means flirting and playing with space might be seen as a practice open to the privileged few, who have ‘earned’ the right to play. Though I have outlined a few ways in which I personally have endeavoured to keep the sparks alive in my academic practice, my desire and my attempts to play, imagine, and even experiment beyond conventional ways of teaching and research are function of deliberate attempts to make time and space for ‘play’, and an acceptance of the consequences (be they negative or positive) of doing things differently. More engaged and engaging geographies, the pleasure of flirting with topics, ways and mediums of writing which intersect teaching and learning landscapes and the sort of collective effervescence I described earlier are at least in part a reflection of the extent to which we are able to interact and learn from our own practices and well as from others be they the subjects of our research, our students, our colleagues, research audiences or collaborators. I am mindful of Chris Hamnett’s (2003, 1) challenge not to ‘fiddle while Rome burns’ but don’t believe that the nature of contemporary human geography means that the discipline 'will cease to be taken seriously in the world beyond the narrow confines of academe'. There is much to be gained in celebrating and making visible the diverse and different ways and spaces in which we do geography, and to share these order not just to have effects, but also ‘affects’ beyond our selves. As I find avenues and mediums to talk about and present my research and engage in teaching and learning within and beyond the academy, I remain hopeful that in a small way I might encourage others to ‘fan the fire’ and to promote their own ways in shaping the ‘difference geography makes’ (Massey, 1999) to understanding and confronting the issues and challenges facing many people and places in a globalising world. For me sparkyness comes from the freedom to practice my discipline in the areas which stem from my interests and expertise, in spaces where I believe I can make a difference. I am conscious that the ways our value and status are measured as academics do not always satisfactorily account for the diversity of ways in which we practice our craft, nor necessarily provide a useful measure of the difference and impact we might make as sparky geographers both within and outside the academy. I love doing research, but I also derive pleasure from helping explain tricky concepts in texts and encyclopaedias, writing reviews which help map the contours of discipline, and talking and being involved in advocacy and service organisations for older people, and in helping my students learn. Keighren (2008) notes the impressive reception of American Geographer Ellen Churchill Semple’s ideas about human society being a product of geographic environments encapsulated in her 1911 book “Influences of

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geographic Environment”, were not simply a result of the diffusion of the printed word. Rather the embodied and performative aspects of Semple’s public lectures, and the combination of spoken word with ‘compelling visual material’ had the capacity to engage her audiences’ imaginations, communicating her ideas beyond the geographic academy. However, with institutional markers of excellence being weighted towards the international peer review article and various metrics of scholarly recognition centred on written publication, I am mindful that it not always easy to flirt with space, to take the time to play, and to produce more creative forms of engagement which will speak to and with a range of audiences. Despite the relatively free editorial hand given to me in writing this chapter I have felt frustrated about my personal inability to ‘flirt’ with the space of the written text to articulate adequately the sense of fun, excitement and passion that for me constitutes sparky geographies. Nevertheless, I do feel optimistic about the possibilities new technologies provide me for more embodied forms of engagement in my teaching and research. My hope is that as Hansen and Philo (2007: 49) suggest in relation to disability, that our disciplinary, academic and institutional structures might ‘enable the normality of doing things differently’ celebrating the diversity of our strengths and expertise through a range of mediums, fields and spaces which recognise not just the written word but the ways geographies are produced through and across other forms of performance and practice. None of the four strategies I have outlined are new or ground breaking, yet they have helped me to see the creativity in the mundane landscapes of my research and teaching and to find my place in the discipline I love. All are grounding in learning, the point (and the prop) with which I had begun this chapter. I have learnt that research with rather than on my participants can be both stimulating and humbling. I have learnt to enjoy the challenges of making my teaching more engaging, and to find the means to effectively communicate my research so as to engage others those who have a capacity to translate and act on it. I have learnt (gradually) to look on my failures as learning opportunities and to examine failures in everyday life as a basis for asking interesting research questions. I have learnt also that engaging with other disciplines (people and agencies) does not diminish my own spark, but inflames it! As a Christian I am aware that my faith provides a partial world view influencing my practice and ethics in particular ways, but it has also been helpful in countering some of the less sparky moments in my career and the struggles I have in juggling my teaching, service and research commitments in the half time I am employed for. Having outlined some of the institutional factors which not only have the potential to dampen down my spark, and recognising as

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Thrift (2012) does that political, economic and institutional changes in universities do present real challenges to addressing challenges which face our planet, I believe it is important we guard those sparks, and fuel that which makes our geographies exciting and engaging. My aim in writing this chapter is to encourage readers to consider the attributes of sparks which might be found and promoted though their geographical practice. My desire is that readers will have captured a little of my heart-full and for, the subject and discipline I feel privileged to be a part of, but more importantly they too will also be encourage to guard and lay claim to moments and spaces for play in which sparkyness emerges and has affect. As a teacher and a researcher, my geographies may never ‘set the world on fire’ but I am ever hopeful they might ignite a small part of it!

Notes 1.

The Waikato University Project of which I was privileged to be a part of was entitled “Engaging Senior Stakeholders: Positive Ageing at the Organisation-Elder Interface” and funded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology. The Team was led by Professor Ted Zorn (now Massey University) and Waikato University colleagues Dr Mary Simpson, Dr Margaret Richardson, Dr Michael Cameron, and Professor Peggy Koopman-Boyden 2. Sincere thanks to my colleagues at Massey University: Mike Roche, Heather Kavan, Mary Breheny, Lesley Patterson, and Robyn Andrews for their input into this chapter and the presentation on which it was based! Their sparky reflections are very much appreciated.

References Ball, S. J. 2009. “Privatising education, privatising education policy, privatising educational research: network governance and the ‘competition state’.” Journal of Education Policy, 24, 1, 83-99, doi: 10.1080/02680930802419474. Bachelard, G. 1994. The Poetics of Space. The classic look at how we experience intimate places. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Bondi, L., J. Davidson, and Mick Smith. 2005. Emotional Geographies. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate. Cadman, L., 2009. “Non-Representational Theory/Non-Representational Geographies.” In International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, edited by R. Kitchin and N. Thrift, 456-463. Oxford: Elsevier. Cook, I. 1998. ‘You want to be careful you don’t end up like lan. He’s all over the place’: Autobiography in/of an expanded field (the director’s

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cut). Research Papers in Geography No. 34, Falmer: University of Sussex. Cook, I., J. Evans, H. Griffiths, R. Morris, and S. Wrathmell. 2007. “‘It’s more than just what it is’: Defetishising commodities, expanding fields, mobilising change….” Geoforum, 38, 6, 1113-1126. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.08.015. Crouch, D. 2010. Flirting with Space. Journeys and Creativity. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate. Curran, W. and E. Hague. 2008. “A special brand of sausage.” Antipode, 40, 5, 724-728. Emerson, L. and J. Mansvelt, in press 2014. “‘If they’re the customer, I’m the meat in the sandwich’: An exploration of tertiary teachers’ metaphorical constructions of teaching.” Higher Education Research & Development. Graham, S., and N. Thrift. 2007. “Out of order: understanding repair and maintenance.” Theory, Culture and Society, 24, 3, 1-25. Hamnett, C. 2003. “Contemporary human geography: fiddling while Rome burns?” Geoforum, 34, 1, 1-3. Hansen, N. and C. Philo. 2007. “The Normality of doing things differently: bodies, spaces and disability geography.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 98 (4), 493-506, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9663.2007.00417.x. Holloway, L. and P. Hubbard. 2001. People and Place: The Extraordinary Geographies of Everyday Life. Harlow: Pearson Education. Keighren, I. M. 2008. “Giving voice to geography: Popular lectures and the diffusion of knowledge.” Scottish Geographical Journal, 124, 2-3, 198-203, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14702540802411782. Kindon, S., R. Pain, and M. Kesby. 2007. Participatory Action Research: Connecting People, Participation and Place. London: Routledge. Lawson, V. 2005. “Hopeful Geographies: Imagining ethical alternatives.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 26, 1, 36-38. doi: 10.1111/j.0129-7619.2005.00201.x. Mansvelt, J. (in press) “Elders.” In The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, edited by P. Adey, D. Bissell, K. Hannam, P. Merriman, and M. Sheller, Routledge. —. 2013. “Situating Ageing, Consumption and Materiality through the Life-Course.” In Growing Up Growing Old. Trajectories of Times and Lives, edited by A. Nicolas, and I. Flaherty, 195-215, Freeland, Oxfordshire: Inter-disciplinary Press. —. 2008. “Urban spaces–ageing places? Insights from interviews and focus groups into the spatiality of later life.” In Qualitative Urban

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Analysis: An International Perspective, Studies in Qualitative Methodology volume, edited by P. J. Maginn, S. Thompson and M. Tonts, 197-211, Oxford, Amsterdam, and San Diego, CA, USA: Elsevier. —. 2009. “Geographies of consumption: the unmanageable consumer?” Progress in Human Geography, 33, 2, 264-274, doi:10.1177/ 0309132508094080. —. 2012. “Consumption, ageing and identity: New Zealander's narratives of gifting, ridding and passing on”. New Zealand Geographer, 68, 3, 187-200, doi: 10.1111/j.1745-7939.2012.01233.x. Massey, D. 1999. “Geography matters in a globalised world.” Geography, 84, 3, 261-265. McCormack, D. P. 2003. “An event of geographical ethics in spaces of affect.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 28, 4, 488-507. Molesworth, M., E. Nixon, and R. Scullion. 2009. “Having, being and higher education: the marketisation of the university and the transformation of the student into consumer.” Teaching in Higher Education, 14, 3, 277-287, doi: 10.1080/13562510902898841. Richards, R. 2007. “Introduction.” In Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature, edited by R. Richards, 3-22, Washington DC: American Psychological Association. Thrift, N. 2012. “The Novelist-Academic-Poet on Campus.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 2. http://chronicle.com/blogs/worldwise/the-novelist-academic-poet-oncampus/30750. Tiryakian, E. A. 1995. “Collective Effervescence, Social Change and Charisma: Durkheim, Weber and 1989.” International Sociology, 10, 3, 269-281. Tornqvist, G. 2011. The Geography of Creativity. Cheltenham, UK and Northhamptan, MA, USA: Edward Elgar. Valentine, G. 1998. ““Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones”: A Personal Geography of Harassment.” Antipode, 30, 4, 305-332, doi: 10.1111/1467-8330.00082. Wiles, J. L. and M. W. Rosenberg. 2005. “Narrative analysis as a strategy for understanding interview talk in geographic research.” Area, 37, 1, 89-99.

CHAPTER THREE HOW INFRASTRUCTURE BECAME A STRUCTURED INVESTMENT VEHICLE PHILLIP O’NEILL

Introduction Urban infrastructure crisis has become chronic worldwide (OECD, 2008; Gil and Beckman, 2009; Productivity Commission, 2009; Clayton Utz, 2010; HM Treasury, 2010).1 Problems include maintenance of ageing structures, congestion and poor operation, and a failure to invest in projects capable of delivering sustainability for cities of the future. Compounding the crisis is an absence of solutions. In advanced Western economies, the ownership of infrastructure assets and the delivery of infrastructure services have been shifting from public to private hands for over three decades. Often this has been necessitated by fiscal crisis. But it has also been driven by widespread belief that public services like infrastructure are better delivered by private sector providers involving some form of market competition. This shift, usefully labelled as the privatisation of infrastructure, has had success, but it has been a confined success. Certainly, there are many examples where privatisation has generated improved levels of service alongside windfall financial gains to governments. Yet there is also evidence that the shift to private ownership and provision has failed to generate a reproducible model of infrastructure provision where individual infrastructure items are capable of, on the one hand, generating consistent, competitive returns to investors over long time periods; and efficient, integrated, just and sustainable cities, on the other (Vining and Boardman, 2008; Weber, 2010; Siemiatycki, 2011). Important financial and engineering issues explain much of this failure. This chapter argues, however, that failure also comes from deficiencies in our conceptual understandings of the nature of infrastructure, such that

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fresh approaches to what infrastructure is and what it might become could well open up better solutions to infrastructure crisis. Specifically, I want to put a geographic argument that begs for the inclusion of spatialised processes into a post-structuralist urban political economy of infrastructure. Otherwise, I think we will lose the argument that says urban infrastructure provision is crucial to the existence of just, sustainable cities (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Bakker, 2005), to an argument in favour of selective, ongoing privatisation and financialisation of the infrastructure sector where narrow commercial outcomes are unfairly privileged.

Where we start Surprisingly, a detailed history of urban infrastructure in modern times has yet to be written. Herein we sketch some aspects of this history. One key chapter is the twentieth century development of the infrastructure organisational vehicle we know as the utility. The rollout of transport, water, electricity and telecommunications infrastructure under control of the utilities was a remarkable human achievement. Perhaps underrecognition of this role is attributable to the ways urban infrastructure provision by the utilities was largely a subsumed political process, with infrastructure provision taking place as an ongoing, instinctive state role. Claus Offe’s insights (Offe, 1984; O’Neill, 1996) into the role the state played in mediating a crisis-prone, post-war capitalism might be usefully applied to analysis of urban infrastructure provision during the same decades. The deployment of the utilities is also a much underwritten urban and economic geography event. Jane Jacobs’ (1961) Death and Life of Great American Cities holds up Robert Moses as the enemy of a liveable city, perhaps rightly. Yet Jacob’s book is blind to the extraordinary vehicle created by Moses, namely the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey (Doig, 2001).2 No explanation of the extraordinary success of New York is possible without understanding the role of this authority, as we see below in respect to the developed-world’s busiest bridge. Around the western world, the utilities were remarkable repositories of engineering and urban design skill, planning power, fiscal strength and, crucially, public legitimacy.3 Ironically, given that it may well have been the public sector’s most successful post-war administrative creation, the way the utility bundled together physical assets, with legal titles and engineering, financial and administrative services meant it was an efficient vehicle for removing the control of vast infrastructure systems from public hands. Over the last three decades many of the world’s twentieth century

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utilities have become the world’s largest private corporations, especially in the telecommunications, electricity and gas sectors, and to a limited degree in the water sector (Allen and Pryke, 2013). Where the break-up of utility assets has taken place, individual infrastructure items – like ports, bridges, roadways, and sections of public transport systems – are now prized assets in the portfolios of pension and sovereign wealth funds. Not unrelated, many are operated by global infrastructure service companies such as DP World (UAE), Veolia (France), Serco (UK) and Ferrovial (Spain). It seems, though, that the sell-off of the utilities and their assets has failed to produce a replacement model capable of persistent, effective infrastructure supply, especially of greenfield items. Fiscal expediency in the 1980s, at the height of the crunch between roll-back Keynesianism and roll-out neoliberalism (Peck and Theodore, 2012), forestalled intelligent debate over what infrastructure was, who should fund and own it, and what should it do. Decades of instinctive and sensible behaviours, and a trust in utilities meant those with a pre-existing (ideological) disposition opposed to privatisation were ill-equipped to construct successful opposition movements. We return to the failure of this opposition below.

Adam Smith’s view In The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith – the father of classical and now neoclassical economics – assigned responsibility for infrastructure to ‘the sovereign’. It was one of only three duties that Smith argued should be assigned to the fledgling state. This responsibility was for: “... erecting and maintaining certain public works and certain public institutions, which it can never be the interest of any individual or small number of individuals to erect and maintain.” (Smith, 1976, pg 687–88)

In effect, Smith urged a major role for the state in the supply of what we now call infrastructure; acknowledging, first, that public works were vital, but, second, they were beyond the capability of private capital to enact. Smith’s prediction of both the importance of public works and the role of the state in their realisation proved highly accurate, and so the eighteenth century notion of ‘public works’ and synonyms like ‘civil works’ and, later, ‘infrastructure’ grew into a powerful category of human activity.4 It is important to understand Smith’s reasoning, and there is a considerable literature that attempts to uncover Smith’s concerns and motivations (e.g. West, 1977; Petkantchin, 2006). There is an argument that Smith was involving himself in the wider debate about state role and

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power at a time when Western Europe embraced the modernisation task of “constitution making”; with Smith having specific views about what economic powers the state should hold. It seems Smith wasn’t calling for the participation of the state in the delivery of public works per se, but in the development of a vehicle for the creation and preservation of passageways and thoroughfares, and their capitalization through road, rail and bridge construction and so on. Just as legislative empowerment was being sought for expanding the idea of property, including the creation of collective (albeit capitalist) entities such as joint stock enterprises, and the idea of limited liability; so too ‘commerce’ recognised that public works required their own sets of property titles, capital rights and liability protections; and, again, the state was looked to for their provision. Smith’s free enterprise society thus needed the state to legitimise capital’s acquisition of the means of production, its rights to exploit labour, and thereafter to guarantee private rights over income and property title. Smith’s privileging of public works in a limited portfolio of state functions showed, therefore, his understanding of the central role of legal frameworks and property rights in building larger-scale markets, as capitalism sought new ways of ensuring physical passage to more distant territories to access labour and resources, distribute product, and secure the gains (usually profit), all while limiting liabilities for incurring physical harm and financial loss. Smith’s argument for a state role in public works, therefore, was an argument for the creation of the legal instruments and frameworks needed by private enterprise to legitimise the expansion of capitalist production across wider territories and scales. History could show how the development of infrastructure and state role, both as ideas and as actually-existing entities, have an entangled history. My concern is that despite the importance of infrastructure to modern society and despite the centrality of the state in the provision of infrastructure, we have quite poor knowledge of this history and therefore poor understanding of the nature of infrastructure itself. An examination of the categories commonly used in discussion of infrastructure illustrates the latter deficit. The textbook categories variously used for the classification of infrastructure are public goods, monopoly goods and goods capable of generating positive externalities. Let me comment on each of these in turn.

Public goods This category is used by anti-privatisation campaigners to argue that urban infrastructure should, because it is seen as a public good, be owned and operated within the public sphere. The problem with this argument is

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that it seeks to enrol infrastructure in a category that contains many things that are quite different to infrastructure, such as education, health, public sanitation, parks, theatres, museums and so on. All of these facilities and services are important to cities; and are best provided in common, or collectively, and they certainly qualify as ‘public goods’ (see Batina and Ihori, 2005). Infrastructure, however, is different, chiefly because it serves a capitalist purpose at its core. Infrastructure enables labour to be drawn from near and far on a daily basis and thus underpins the specialisations and complex divisions of labour needed for successful capitalist production. In like manner, infrastructure enables the supply of raw materials and other non-labour factors of production, often from outside urban boundaries. Then infrastructure enables trade areas to expand, often into other urban areas, such that economies of scale can be realised. Thus the basic drivers of capitalism are infrastructure dependent, meaning infrastructure is closely connected to the production and supply of exclusively private goods. In these roles, infrastructure clearly isn’t acting as a public good.

Monopoly goods But is infrastructure a monopoly good such that state ownership and operation can be argued for in order to overcome market failure? Certainly this position is commonly put, but not in the same way as a Chamberlinean market taxonomy would suggest, nor in the way Baumol defined a natural monopoly (Shepherd, 1984). Both Chamberlin and Baumol explain the characteristics of a monopoly producer as deriving from its capacity to consistently lower long term average costs as it grows in scale. In this way, an additional producer would undermine such as advantage thereby reducing the consumer benefits of endlessly-expandable scale economies. My argument, however, is that the exclusiveness of infrastructure is not dependent on distinctive Chamberlinean cost structures. Indeed, weren’t our utilities renowned for their cost inefficiencies? Rather, the exclusiveness of infrastructure comes from the extraordinarily high transactions costs that come with securing and maintaining passageways through our cities and that securing such rights is rarely possible without direct state involvement; and as such, not worth repeating. This feature is not explainable by reference to a market competition framework.

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Goods with positive externalities In respect to infrastructure being the generator of positive externalities (see Webster, 1998), my argument is that positive externalities are a distributional option for infrastructure, not an inherent characteristic. Roads, for instance, can be configured in ways that benefit the communities they traverse, or they can forego creating such advantages. Either way they remain infrastructure items irrespective of any free externalities generated.

Towards a spatialised account of urban infrastructure My concern is that progressive opposition to the privatisation and financialisation of infrastructure has largely failed because of a heavy reliance on these three categories – public goods, monopoly goods, externalities – in justifying the public ownership and operation of infrastructure. Conceptually, arguments have been false or lacking. Ironically, those who privatise and financialise urban infrastructure, and their supporters, seem to understand better its role as a privileged passageway that generates spatialised flows and sequences in our cities. In contrast, a failure to grasp the spatial elements of infrastructure underpins the left’s inability to articulate a successful argument for infrastructure’s alleged public goods character. Here I draw on another paper called ‘Property Rights and the Financialisation of Infrastructure’ (O’Neill, 2013). The argument in that paper has four steps: 1. Infrastructure in the first instance is a spatial category which is produced and reproduced by material constructions that create passageways in cities primarily for the conduct of commerce. 2. The consistent application and performance of infrastructure produces the core characteristics of a city: that a city is sets of repeated, sequenced and regulated flows of people, materials and information, which function internally and in networked relations with elsewhere. 3. The repeated, rhythmic nature of these flows involves users with predictable characteristics. User dependency means that infrastructure items can be readily tolled and then financialised through complex structured investment vehicles. A politics of infrastructure, then, needs to understand that financialisation strengthens the presence of privatised infrastructure in our cities and helps resist a circulatory

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crisis of capitalism, even though distributional outcomes might be undesirable.5 4. Finally, my argument says that language plays a powerful role in enrolling items into the infrastructure category; and that political action to engineer infrastructure in ways that make cities more just and sustainable places can only succeed if it is informed by linguistic analysis. So analysis of language is necessary. Timothy Mitchell reminds us of the political power encased in economic knowledge: “What economics does...is not to represent what was previously unrepresented, but to try to reorganize the circulation and control of representations.” (2007, pg 248)

I think it is important to pursue the idea that the hegemonic status of neoliberalist economic rationalism comes from its texts. Putting aside distracting debates about an alleged separability of representational and material worlds, and claims to the latter having an a priori claim on existence (e.g. Fairclough et al., 2002; Fairclough, 2003), there is surely widespread acceptance of the powerful role of text in, say, the construction of political ideology such as neoliberalism. Indeed, it has become normal for social analysis to seek to understand how politics plays out through language events, even in modes of analysis that seek to advance an understanding of the influence of material entities and networked relations in what is described as beyond representational theory (e.g. Mitchell, 2002; Thrift, 2007). What I seek here, then, is an interrogation of the case of infrastructure – including how the built form of the city and its intersection with financial circuits of capital are played-out – through a lens of language. In particular, I am interested in the analysis of the language category we call ‘urban infrastructure’. My guide to the analysis of the category is linguist George Lakoff, and his remarkable, though challenging, book, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things (1987).6 Lakoff says that: “Categorization is not a matter to be taken lightly. There is nothing more basic than categorization to our thought, perception, action, and speech. Every time we see something as a kind of thing, for example, a tree, we are categorizing.

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Chapter Three Whenever we reason about kinds of things – chairs, nations, illnesses, emotions, any kind of thing at all – we are employing categories…Without the ability to categorize, we could not function at all, either in the physical world or in our social and intellectual lives.” (Lakoff, 1987, pg 5-6, emphasis in original)

Lakoff explains how the basic entity which constructs a category is the prototype. The prototype defines a basic structure, its shape and internal relationships; thus the prototype creates the general definition that allows entities to qualify to become members of a category. I think urban infrastructure draws on three entities to build its prototypes: the bridge, the road and the pipe; but most of all the bridge. Then Lakoff points to the role of radials. Radials are an important component of categories. Radials climb into a category because of some material or performance resemblance to a prototype. So a sea lane is a radial to the infrastructure category because the meaning of a thing called a sea lane is constructed by drawing on a key portion of the prototype underpinning infrastructure without having all the essential components of the prototype. Likewise atmospheric bandwidth set aside for telecommunications is a radial of infrastructure because it draws on passageway characteristics explainable by a pipe or a road, while extending the idea of infrastructure into new material dimensions. A bikeway is another example of an infrastructure radial in that the bikeway takes the idea of a road as an exclusive vehicular passageway and transfers it to a passageway for a different vehicular form, thereby legitimising the bike as a form of urban transport. Radials thus play a key role in innovation and development in the infrastructure sector. Together, then, the prototypes and the radials that derive from them build the infrastructure category.7 Let me explain further by referring to the George Washington Bridge. The George Washington Bridge is a key connector across the world’s most powerful, and wealthiest, urban conglomeration. It is the target crossing point for traffic from the main roads across New Jersey and Pennsylvania and regions further south; and it feeds traffic across the island onto the interstate road network to the northeast of the United Sates and beyond. Currently it carries over million east-bound vehicles every week. The architect Le Corbusier described the George Washington Bridge as the most beautiful bridge in the world (Jeanneret-Gris, 1947, pg 75). But it wasn't built as a thing of beauty. It was a major intervention by the state to ease congestion across the Hudson River. It opened in 1931 as a single deck bridge, and a second deck was opened in 1962. Its genesis goes back to 1825, however, when the Erie Canal was opened. This piece of

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transportation infrastructure linked New York City via the Hudson River to the Great Lakes and the vast agricultural commodity production regions of the mid-West. Manhattan became an international trade centre as a result; and together with New Jersey became the Atlantic port for all of midwestern America. But so busy was the Hudson River canal trade that localised vehicular movements by ferry across the Hudson River between the New Jersey side and the Manhattan side became a major navigation hazard. And the George Washington Bridge was built as a solution. There are lessons here. The George Washington Bridge – clearly a powerful prototype for the infrastructure category – does exactly what Adam Smith thought public works should do: it serves the needs of commerce by enabling the efficient expansion of supply chains, the deepening of divisions of labour and the territorial growth of markets. This service of commerce underpins the idea that urban infrastructure is an essential thing, reinforces infrastructure’s prototypical characteristics, and so rewards private sector enthusiasm for state-led infrastructure provision. The social and public good sides of infrastructure struggle for importance compared to the commercial side. My argument, again, is that an analytical understanding of infrastructure can’t be generated sufficiently from a ‘public good’ or a ‘monopoly good’ categorisation starting point. Rather, infrastructure’s meaning and, therefore, its material and flow-generation characteristics are better traced to a language of infrastructure that originates in spatial rather than aspatial-economic concepts. Let’s look more closely at the way the bridge has enriched the meaning of infrastructure via its key role as a prototype. At a simple level, the bridge demonstrates the physical essence of infrastructure: that it creates the medium for flows of goods, people, vehicles, water and energy, including energy signals used in telecommunications. In a sense all basic infrastructure items have the bridge as a prototype. At another level, though, the bridge as prototype reveals that infrastructure is a distinctive, probably a unique, class of property asset, one that is very different to other categories of private property. Infrastructure creates, first, a property right in non-territorialised space, such as in the air across a river, or underground through a city, or internationally like sea lanes or air routes, or like bandwidth through the atmosphere.8 Then, infrastructure demands an enduring socio-political solution to the need to traverse other (mostly private) property titles. This need is why new infrastructure items are so heavily contested. Infrastructure’s property demands are more than those needed for development approvals for urban subdivisions or densifications, however controversial they might be. Infrastructure requires permanent thoroughfares for movements across

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urban landscapes and beyond. That is why the transactions costs for infrastructure items are so high; why the regulatory landscape for governing infrastructure rights into the future is so intensely fought over; and why the state has always been so implicated in the creation of urban infrastructure. Once generalised inside the infrastructure category, the bridge as prototype is then mobilised across a vast domain of things and flows. A category’s prototype affirms membership of the category to some items and excludes others. Hence the passageway meanings that the bridge gives to infrastructure enables other passageway facilities to gain membership of the category, including railways, electricity wires, water pipes, and sea and air routes. The bridge also signifies a connector function, meaning that ports, electricity sub-stations, mobile-phone towers and railway stations can be tagged as infrastructure. Then it is a small step to label bundled infrastructure items as infrastructure – such as the town water supply, the electricity grid, and the road and rail networks – because their components arrive pre-enrolled in the infrastructure category. As infrastructure items, these bundled packages are granted the privileged rights of the prototype: property rights, the protection of the state, the externalisation of many transactions costs, the protection of a regulatory regime through time, and so on. Inside strong post-war Keynesian states, these bundles emerged as the infrastructure utilities, replete with substantial financial, organisational and political power, as exemplified by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey under the controversial leadership of Robert Moses. After the prototype, the next linguistic device that renders power to a category is the radial. If the prototype imbues a category with substance, the radial gives it novelty and dynamism. Radials are the items which enter a category with some but not all of the characteristics of a prototype. In this way they evolve and enrich the category. The right to broadcast on a given spectrum or bandwidth is a radial entity drawing on the idea of an assisted, privileged passage like a bridge, but in this case with a greater reliance on something other than a grand material construction. Broadcast rights are predominantly a non-material construction; they are an exclusive property right similar, say, to a sea or air route, defined at least in conjunction with the state and relying almost exclusively on the state for their exclusivity and longevity. Yet, in conjunction, the difficulty in defining and staking claim to such rights make it legitimate for the state to take a priori ownership of them and recoup revenue for their use under state-regulated conditions. Making broadcast rights an infrastructure item requires that the state extends its powers, and reinforces the state as society’s infrastructure controller.

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Other radials bend the infrastructure category in different directions. Structured investment vehicles (SIVs), for instance, take the role of a radial entity when they shift the material form of infrastructure into a liquid form (finance) while retaining (or claiming to retain) the essential infrastructure category characteristics of state-ensured legitimacy and longevity. So a financial instrument (a bond or security, or an equity product attached to a trust) with claims on the earnings from an infrastructure item, say from an airport or a motorway, moves inside the infrastructure category, blurring the boundary between the material and the financial. Then, having consolidated their membership, financial products can themselves evolve, attaching to enduring cash flows emanating from the services that are layered onto infrastructure entities like airport car parks, shopping centres and user-pays luggage trolleys, rather than to the services actually provided by the base infrastructure items. The progression of the financial instrument into a next layer of radials – like securities based on the earnings from municipal parking meters, funerals and retirement homes – is a relatively easy step. 9 It is an ease that shows the power of the category (and its internal definition and enrolment mechanisms) as a linguistic-political device. A further linguistic-political device associated with categorisation is the metonym. Metonyms are powerful enrolment and assemblage devices. In infrastructure the powerful metonyms are superstructure words like network and grid, each of which has its own rich category of meanings which when migrated to the infrastructure category creates the idea that infrastructure can be much more than a single item in an urban landscape. Infrastructure becomes a powerful organisational framework within which actual infrastructure items are bundled, again one imbued with stateguaranteed legitimacy and longevity. ‘The network’, ‘the grid’ and ‘the system’ are examples of these frameworks. But the most significant of them, as we have seen, is ‘the utility’. As noted above, in a post-Roosevelt, post-war Keynesian world, state-built and owned utilities in electricity, water and telecommunications became not just administrative entities, but vast ensembles of installations, distributors, and service providers and billers. Then in a neoliberalised, financialised world, the fact that all these things were pre-packaged inside discrete organisational units enabled utilities to be privatised as ready-to-roll corporations. Moreover, the robust linguistic histories of utilities enabled their privatisation to proceed in defiance of the arguments of competition regulators arguing for the “structural separation” of individual items, such as installations (e.g. an electricity generator) from distributors (e.g. controller of electricity poles

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and wires) and retailers (e.g. suburban electricity suppliers), in the interests of market competition.

Conclusion Academic research needs to be bolder in its conceptualisation of key political events if the academy’s excellent critical analysis is to be better translated to the wider world. My assessment of the politics of infrastructure is that progressive social and sustainability outcomes are being held back by the oppositional arguments of progressive academics that are not just dated, but probably conceptually wrong. There are reasons to be concerned about privatisation and financialisation in all spheres of human endeavour. But they are not bad policies and processes per se. Rather, both privatisation and financialisation are capable of being mobilised to steer finance in the direction of desirable infrastructure investments at a time when the fiscal options of governments are severely (if not permanently) limited. Australia, for instance, has the fifth largest pool of pension savings in the world, with total assets expected to reach $3 trillion by 2020 and $6 trillion by 2030 (Deloitte, 2007). While this money needs an investment home, its trustees are understandably reluctant to hand it to government agencies for infrastructure construction and operation in circumstances where there is a high risk of poor returns or investment failure (Flyvbjerg, 2007). Yet large pension and sovereign wealth funds have a recent history of strong funding support for infrastructure shown to have high likelihood of enduring financial returns. The movement of pension savings into infrastructure financing may also mean a shift in the politics of user-pay urban infrastructure. Superannuation or pension savers may find it is their fund that owns the revenue stream from fees to cross a bridge, or use a train. But their fund could also have the opportunity to finance, say: a smart road system where journey times can be guaranteed through genuine incentives for multipassenger vehicles; an electricity network that invites innovative smallscale private energy providers; or a water system that integrates all sorts of decentralised water providers. The public is rightly concerned at the inequity of congestion charges imposed on car-based commuters without public transport alternatives. On the other hand, partnerships between the public sector and private finance, especially when a collectivised societal entity such as a pension and superannuation fund is involved, have the potential to deliver a just, sustainable urban landscape even if this does involve the imposition of infrastructure user fees.

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My second observation is that progressive social science has been reluctant to mobilise the post-structuralism turnings of the last two decades for better political understanding and better political activism. Poststructuralism has had a major impact on the design and conduct of academic research (for overview see, for example, Hay, 2010) while feminist and queer studies seem to have had little difficulty forging a poststructuralist politics (Wright, 2010). Economic and urban geography need to take inspiration from these disciplinary colleagues. Finally, there is the under-developed idea of the city as a commercial entity and the role that infrastructure plays in producing economic success and prosperity, be it in respect of jobs and income for households or profit and capital accumulation for enterprises. It is difficult to find acceptance of the primacy of such an idea within progressive politics and heterodox economics, or among urban planning theorists or practitioners, or alternate economy advocates. Yet the economic success of cities has always been the prime reason why people live in them; and ultimately this is the rationale for the provision of infrastructure, be it by public or private hands. Harvey acknowledges this over and over in his works on the capitalist city (e.g. Harvey, 2010, pg 86). Cities have to be connected and inter-connected by infrastructure, and then infrastructure items have to work together to build the sequences and synchronicities (see Amin and Thrift, 2002) that facilitate daily urban life. These outcomes are the direct consequences of efficiently functioning infrastructure. We now know these flows can be readily financialised with undesirable distributional outcomes. At the same time, though, progressive outcomes can be secured even with privatisation and financialisation, and these can be engineered by the state because of its property-creating powers. Yet this is a political power that is misunderstood and therefore under-used as a raft of new brownfields privatisations follows the global financial crisis, and new infrastructure is built around the globe.

Notes 1.

I thank the New Zealand Geographical Society for hosting my visit to its 2012 conference in Napier where I presented a version of this paper. Comments and suggestions from participants, the reviewer and the editors are gratefully acknowledged. 2. For an organisational history of the authority see Doig (1990). 3. For a political history of the development of utilities in New South Wales, Australia, see Golding (2009). 4. It should be noted that the meaning of infrastructure in a maturing Keynesian world was also pushed to include other state expenditures such as on health and

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education, which were often tagged ‘social infrastructure’, but these were consistently relegated to subsidiary status in comparison to the commercial functions of infrastructure, especially as an enabler of supply chains, divisions of labour and expanding markets. 5. We should also acknowledge that infrastructure investment is consistent with periods of successful accumulation. Harvey (1982, 2010), in contrast, suggests infrastructure investment is motivated by the need for an alternative use of capital at a time of crisis. 6. The ‘category’ was also analysed much earlier by Foucault, starting with the Order of Things, published in French in 1966 and as an English edition as early as 1970, but remarkably not even cited by George Lakoff whose book was first published 17 years later. 7. It should be remembered that infrastructure is a very new concept, floating into English language use only from the 1950s and not in any significant way until the last decade. 8. Infrastructure thus codifies these non-territorialised spaces. 9 Over the last decade, various arms of the Australian financial services provider, Macquarie Group, has been actively involved in designing financial instruments for the privatisation of airports and urban water supply, as well as the earnings from airport luggage trolleys, funerals, parking meters and nursing homes.

References Allen, J. and M. Pryke. 2013. “Financializing household water: Thames Water, MEIF, and ‘ring-fenced’ politics.” Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, forthcoming, doi:10.1093/cjres/rst010 Amin, A. and N. Thrift. 2002. Cities: Reimagining the Urban. Oxford: Polity Press. Bakker K. 2005. “Neoliberalising Nature? Market Environmentalism in Water Supply in England and Wales.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 95, 3, 542-565. Batina, R.G. and T. Ihori. 2005. Public Goods: Theories and Evidence. Berlin: Springer. Clayton Utz. 2010. Emerging from the Crisis: Infrastructure Finance PostGFC. New York: Clayton Utz. Deloitte, 2007. Dynamics of the Australian Superannuation System: The Next 20 years 2011 – 2030. Melbourne: Deloitte. Doig, J. W. 1990. “Regional conflict in the New York metropolis: the legend of Robert Moses and the power of the Port Authority.” Urban Studies, 27, 2, 201-232. —. 2001. Empire on the Hudson: Entrepreneurial Vision and Political Power at the Port of New York Authority. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Fairclough, N. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. London: Routledge. Fairclough N., B. Jessop and A. Sayer. 2002. “Critical Realism and Semiosis.” Journal of Critical Realism, 5, 2-10. Flyvbjerg, B. 2007. “Policy and planning for large-infrastructure projects: problems, causes, cures.” Environment and Planning B: Planning & Design, 34, 4, 578 – 597. Gil, N. and S. L. Beckman. 2009. “Infrastructure Meets Business: Building New Bridges, Mending Old Ones.” California Management Review, 51, 6-29. Golding, P. 2009. They Called Him Old Smoothie. John Joseph Cahill: A Belated Biography of a Rather Exceptional Politician. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing. Graham, S. and S. Marvin. 2001. Splintering Urbanism. London: Routledge. Harvey, D. 1982. Limits to Capital. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hay, I. 2010. Qualitative Research Methods in Human Geography, 3rd ed., South Melbourne: Oxford University Press. HM Treasury, 2010. National Infrastructure Plan. London: HM Treasury. Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Jeanneret-Gris, C-E., 1947, (orig. 1937). Le Corbusier: When the Cathedrals Were White (translated by Francis L. Hyslop, Jr.). New York: McGraw-Hill Paperbacks. Lakoff, G., 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, T. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics. Modernity, Berkeley: The University of California Press. —. 2007. “The properties of markets.” In Do Economists make markets? On the Performativity of Economics, edited by D. A. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa, F. and L. Siu, L. 244-275, Princeton: Princeton University Press. OECD. 2008. Infrastructure to 2030, Policy Brief, January, Paris: OECD. Offe, C. 1984. Contradictions of the Welfare State. Edited by J. Keane, London: Hutchinson. O’Neill, P. M. 1996. “In what sense a region's problem? The place of redistribution in Australia's internationalisation strategy.” Regional Studies, 30, 4, 405-415.

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—. 2013. “The financialisation of infrastructure: The role of categorisation and property relations.” Cambridge Journal of Society, Economy and Regions, forthcoming, doi:10.1093/cjres/rst017. Peck, J. and N. Theodore, 2012. “Reanimating neoliberalism: processgeographies of neoliberalization.” Social Anthropology, 20, 2, 177185. Petkantchin, V. 2006. “Is The Wealth of Nations’ third duty of the sovereign compatible with laissez faire?” Journal of Libertarian Studies, 20, 3–15. Productivity Commission, 2009. Public Infrastructure Financing: An International Perspective. Canberra: Australian Government. Shepherd, W. G. 1984. “Contestability’ vs. competition.” The American Economic Review, 74, 572-587. Siemiatycki, M. 2011. “Urban transportation public-private partnership: drivers of uneven development?” Environment and Planning A, 43, 7, 1707-1722. Smith, A., 1976. [orig. 1776]. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 2 volumes. edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner, W. B. Todd, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thrift, N. 2007. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London: Routledge. Vining, A. and Boardman, A., 2008. “Public-private partnerships in Canada: theory and evidence.” Canadian Public Administration, 51, 944. Weber, R. 2010. “Selling city futures: the financialization of urban redevelopment policy.” Economic Geography, 86, 3, 251-274. Webster, C. J. 1998. “Public Choice, Pigouvian and Coasian Planning Theory.” Urban Studies, 35, 53-75. West, E. G. 1977. “Adam Smith’s public economics: a re-evaluation.” Canadian Journal of Economics, 10, 1–18. Wright, M. 2010. “Gender and geography II: bridging the gap -- feminist, queer, and the geographical imaginary.” Progress in Human Geography, 34, 1, 56-66.

CHAPTER FOUR POLICING ART: THE POLITICAL POTENTIAL OF CREATIVE PRACTICES IN AOTEAROA NEW ZEALAND GRADON DIPROSE

Introduction Within geography there has been an emerging body of work which explores the ways in which art practices can raise political questions around subjectivities, places and socio-economic relations (see for instance; Hawkins, 2013; 2011; Dixon, 2009; Dufour, 2002; Pinder, 2008; Hubbard, 2003). In referring to ‘art’ I mean both art objects (such as paintings or sculptures) and also those practices which are often called ‘social art’ or ‘relational aesthetics’ (see Bourriaud, 2001; Bishop, 2004). Bishop (2004) suggests that social art or relational aesthetics are characterised by the interactions and often temporary community of participants who take part in the project and actually constitutes the art work. In this chapter I draw on Hawkins’ (2011, pg 465) understanding of art as an ‘ensemble of practices, performances, experiences and artefacts rather than as a singular ‘object’ to explore a series of art projects in Aotearoa New Zealand which generated significant public participation and media attention. The projects, known as ‘Free Stores’ were initially started by the artist, Kim Paton and the first one was produced in 2010 by Letting Space in Wellington. This initial project led to a number of further Free Stores by Paton and others across Aotearoa New Zealand. These various Free Stores raised political questions around certain subjectivities; specifically the ‘good’ working consumer and the ‘needy’ welfare beneficiary, disrupting common sense ideas around charity. In this chapter I use these art projects as a lens to explore alternative socio-economic

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relations and show how more dominant neoliberal capitalist discourses discipline what it means to have a ‘legitimate’ life, but that these more dominant discourses are, importantly, always open to contestation.

Capitalism(s) and welfare subjectivities in Aotearoa New Zealand Like many other countries throughout the world such as Chile, Australia and the United Kingdom, Aotearoa New Zealand underwent significant neoliberal socio-economic reforms during the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms in Aotearoa New Zealand have been described by geographers and others elsewhere (see for instance Boston et al., 1999; Le Heron and Pawson, 1996; Kelsey, 1995) but essentially they dismantled what had been a relatively established, although increasingly economically unviable welfare state. Without painting a utopic picture of this welfare state as there were significant issues around gender, ethnic and sexual minorities’ rights, these processes of restructuring have often been blamed for higher unemployment and increasing socio-economic inequalities in Aotearoa New Zealand. Underpinning these more tangible state led restructurings there has also been a changing view of what it means to be a ‘legitimate’ citizen and what type of subject one should aim to be in society. The contemporary ‘good’ neoliberal subject is generally seen as one who is self-sufficient, entrepreneurial, competitive, is individualistic but looks after their family (because that is not the role of the state any longer) and is motivated and flexible (see for instance Larner, 2000; Vrasti, 2011; Oksala, 2012). Vrasti (2011) suggests that this subject is someone who is continually working on oneself, one’s finances, one’s health and one’s education with the goal of being an effective worker and consumer in a changing and competitive market. In this way certain priorities which feed into constructing neoliberal discourses can be understood ‘not merely as an economic doctrine, but also as a comprehensive framework for understanding ourselves and the political reality we live in’ (Oksala, 2012, pg 117). Critical and radical geographers have been exploring how neoliberal capitalist discourses shape subjectivities, but also how people negotiate the disciplining effects of these dominant discourses (see for instance Larner and Craig, 2005; Bondi, 2005; Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010). This work is often broadly connected to concerns that neoliberal capitalism is leading to what Chatterton (2010, pg 906) refers to as a ‘capitalist mess’. Whether we understand this mess as the recent global financial crisis, rising unemployment and austerity measures, the inability to tackle global

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climate change, increasing socio-economic inequalities or the surveillance and silencing of dissent, many societies around the world are facing difficult issues. Chatterton and Pickerill (2010) suggest that one way out of this mess is to investigate examples of how people subvert and imagine alternatives to more dominant neoliberal capitalist discourses. Similarly Gibson-Graham (2006) and Gibson-Graham et al. (2013) urge us to celebrate and foster alternative socio-economic relations to disrupt the meta-narrative of neoliberal capitalism. This chapter contributes to this broad body of work and explores how the performance of alternative subjectivities and relations through art practices can contribute to what Rancière and others call ‘political moments’ or forms of radical democracy.

The ‘political moment’ Conventionally political moments are seen as encounters where competing interests are expressed or where unequal power relations are challenged (Dikec, 2005). So for example, a wind farm development may generally be considered ‘political’ because it creates conflict between those who may want it to go ahead and those who oppose it (Swyngedouw, 2009). However Rancière (2004) argues that these kinds of conflicts actually play out through dominant discourses which he calls the ‘order of the sensible’. He describes this as ‘an order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task’ (Rancière, 1998, pg 29). So in the example of a wind farm dispute in Aotearoa New Zealand, those opposing the development would generally become positioned (or named and placed) through participation in the local planning hearing, administered through the Resource Management Act 1991. This national legislative framework and associated local planning rules would structure what opponents could say and how they express their views, while also naming them in the process as ‘submitters in opposition’. However Rancière points out the order of the sensible includes a whole range of activities - from these kinds of state and institutional processes to other spontaneous social relations. Dicek (2005) suggests that Rancière is not just talking about some form of state totalitarianism here, but rather the broader and dynamic struggle to fix and normalise meaning throughout society. The order of the sensible can therefore be thought of as a governance discourse which seeks to create a ‘whole’ society where everyone and thing is named, accounted for, and in their proper place. Dicek (2005) notes, that the order of the sensible can be tolerant of

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different demands, as long as the individuals and groups expressing these are properly recognised. So, to draw on the wind farm example again, the Resource Management Act allows for people to oppose developments, however to have a voice in the decision making process these people must be recognised as legitimately ‘affected persons’ and the Act provides guidance around who is considered ‘affected’. A significant point Rancière makes is that complete governance or absolute categorisation is impossible as people’s subjectivities, desires and lived experiences exceed the categories the order of the sensible seeks to construct. Consequently the order of the sensible is contested and in flux and it is the unstable nature of the order which allows for the possibility of what Rancière calls ‘true’ political moments. Rancière and others argue that the true political moment involves an interruption of the order of the sensible, where individuals or a group challenge the very nature of the relationship through which they are positioned. When a wrong can be addressed, or a voice can speak that wasn’t heard before and alternatives can be demonstrated (Dikec, 2005; Rancière, 2001, 2004; Swyngedouw, 2009). So for example, Rancière (1998) writes that a strike is not political if it only demands better wages or work conditions. It is political if it ‘reconfigures the relationships that determine the workplace in its relation to the community’ (Rancière, 1998, pg 32-33). Debates around the contemporary nature of politics have become increasingly pressing following the global financial crisis, austerity in the West and other forms of dissent and collective actions such as the Occupy movement and the ‘Arab Spring’. These recent examples of widespread dissent with various forms of politico-economic governance structures have led to an increasing view that the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism is being challenged. With these points in mind, I now move on to discuss the Free Store art projects and explore they ways they raised political questions around certain subjectivities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Letting Space and the Free Store The curatorial arts platform Letting Space was formed by two friends, Sophie Jerram and Mark Amery in Wellington in 2010. The project was initially a response to the increasing amount of vacant office space in Wellington resulting from the global financial crisis. Sophie and Mark thought this vacant space created interesting opportunities so they began working with artists to produce relational art projects in quasi-private and public spaces (Letting Space, N.D.). On May 22nd 2010 artist, Kim Paton

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opened Letting Space’s second project, titled ‘The Free Store’ in a vacant commercial building in Central Wellington. The project gave away free food sourced from local retailers and supermarkets destined for the landfill. Staffed by Paton and volunteers, the installation looked like an ordinary shop with food displayed on shelves, except there were no prices or money transactions. Participants were able to enter the store and take whatever food they liked for free (Letting Space, N.D.). Paton stated that one of the aims of the Free Store was to see what new social relations and experiences were created through the project. She described the Free Store as creating a ‘brief respite from the normal rules of trade’ while appearing to speak the language of retail ‘but with no EFTPoS (Electronic Funds Transfer at Point of Sale), no cash-drawer, no bartering, no stipulation for who takes what’ (Paton, 2010). In this way the project was both an experiment in ‘re-thinking what it is to be a consumer [and] what it means to be in business’ (Paton, 2010). This ‘lack of stipulation for who takes what’ was an important point for the project; there was no screening of participants. Those who took part could determine how much they wished to take, how much they thought they deserved or needed. In talking about the broader context for the Free Store, Paton describes the paradoxical position of contemporary consumers. Where on the one hand ‘[t]he most powerful thing that any of us can do on any given day is spend money’ (Paton, 2010). She also queries what this means for those who have less money and whether consuming is actually that powerful when the experience is increasingly constrained. To illustrate this she describes how the physical layout and product placement in supermarkets and elsewhere can create an unease where ‘the choice has been made for us, that the supermarket already knows how many items will be in our trollies. And it doesn’t matter what side of the road we stop to fill the tank because the petrol stations are likely to be owned by the same person’ (Paton, 2010). This description of the consuming subject possessing endless choices, which are however ultimately an illusion, reflect Debord’s (1966) writing on the ‘Spectacle-Commodity Economy’. In this work he argues that the capitalist ‘commodity reality’ has actually preselected everything and subordinated worker-consumers to the cult of the commodity. What Paton appeared to be attempting through Free Store was to make visible this commodity reality and provide consumers (or participants) with another type of experience where commodities were taken out of their normal contexts, laying them open to alteration. The initial installation of Free Store in Wellington was considered incredibly successful by many. Reviewers claimed that it successfully

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made visible wasteful practices in capitalist food supply systems and also facilitated interesting social encounters beyond the art savvy minority, providing a space for people to re-think their position within a consumeroriented society (see Galbraith, N.D.; Bell, N.D.). For instance, the number of people who participated was around 1000 in one eight hour day and the project grew organically (Walker, 2010b). Wellington High school students decided they would set up something similar at their school, a short film was made about the project and donations of food flooded in (Walker, 2010b). Paton’s project also received significant national media coverage, both in print and television news which is relatively rare for art projects in Aotearoa New Zealand (see for example Wood, 2010; McLeod, 2010). Positive responses tended to focus on the concept underlying the project. Online comments and participants’ responses in the Letting Space visitors book praised the initiative as a great idea for both the creative redistribution of food which would otherwise end up in landfills and the positive social service or function it provided; ‘a real community spirit at work’ (see comment in Greig, 2011). Other participants talked about the productive discomfort of taking food, how they felt unsure and slightly strange about taking food for free which caused them to question how they had been conditioned into more dominant consuming and purchasing practices without realising it. Still others noted that this discomfort came from a view of themselves as not being ‘in need’ and therefore uncomfortable about taking something for free which others may need more (Walker, 2010a). While working at a subsequent iteration of the Free Store in Left Bank Arcade, Wellington, I was involved in a number of similar interactions where taking food prompted discussion around participants’ need. The following excerpt from my research diary illustrates two such instances. A guy came up to the stall and said he thought what we were doing was great, we asked if he would like to take anything and he said he had just bought his dinner and that others needed it more. A co-worker asked whether he would like something sweet for dessert, he said again that he didn’t really need it for free and that others would probably need it more, while glancing at the others in line. I said it didn’t really matter and asked whether he would like it, he eventually decided to take it. Another guy came in and asked whether there were any sweet pastries. One of us said yes, that we had heaps left over and needed to get rid of the food before closing time. He said he didn’t really need it and should leave it for others, but as we were needing to close up he would take some (Research Diary).

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In Cook’s (2011) research on this same Free Store she discussed a number of similar interactions where participants expressed a reluctance to participate because they did not ‘need to’. For example one of her respondents said ‘I don’t need to go to the Free Store because I’m not in need of help… I’d think it is unethical for me to go and take’ (Cook, 2011, pg 39). Cook (2011, pg 40) suggests that these classed ideas about ‘need’ are linked to capitalist discourses where those who transgress the hegemonic economy by operating in the ‘gift’ economy of the Free Store ‘without qualified need – [are] deemed to be immoral’. These responses show how the projects raised an ethical demand for participants, which caused them to reflect on their perceived socioeconomic position. Here I am drawing on Critchley (2007) who argues that cultivating an ethical subjectivity involves the disturbance of the political status quo. Free Store participants were faced with an interruption of their perceived socio-economic subjectivity by being offered free food. The ethical demand involved the opportunity to take whatever one wanted from the temporary food commons, while balancing this opportunity with the knowledge that others also wished to partake and may need this food more. Critchley (2007) argues that ethical subjectivity comes about through accepting the demand to be infinitely responsible to the other. However this is also an overwhelming demand which can result in a form of tragic guilt. So in the example above, it could be overwhelming and uncomfortable for some participants to think through their level of need in relation to others, and then have to make a decision about how much to take from the food commons. Critchley (2007) argues that if a subject seriously considered the need of all ‘others’ at all times, they would be crushed by the burden of this responsibility. However what the project allowed was a suppression of this usual self-sufficient/needy dichotomy. Because the Free Store was not framed around existing charity and subjectivity norms, but was an art project, people were able to participate in an exchange which transgressed the order of sensible, and if they allowed it, reframed their subjectivity in relation to others and also capitalist exchange. An interruption or transgression of the ‘order of the sensible’ can be observed through the lack of screening and the open invitation to participate. This meant that participants were not necessarily already named and placed subjects, such as; the food bank recipient, the ‘needy’ welfare beneficiary or the beneficent donor. Those who participated were re-defined through the project, not named and placed through screening processes or other welfare, statist and capitalist technologies of governance. Rather participants were framed as ‘human beings’ who deserved (needed)

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a break from the dominant subjectivities and exchanges of the capitalist economy. In this way the Free Store projects provided participants with an experience that raised ethical questions of responsibility, but this was done through a subversion of capitalist discourses around specific places of exchange (the shop), and subjectivities (the consumer versus the welfare recipient). The projects partially revealed the structuring effects of capitalist discourses on certain subjects, yet also raised ethical questions and provided the space for participants to experience an alternative subjectivity and form of exchange. Participants expressed the hope that Free Store would continue and spread throughout the country, which it did (see comments after Wood, 2010; Walker, 2010b; Greig, 2011). New stores included the one mentioned earlier in Left Bank Arcade, Wellington, and a store in Palmerston North (see Free Store Wellington,. N.D.; Sutton, 2011). Paton also partnered with the Auckland Council and a Free Store opened in Waitakere, West Auckland in February 2011 for one month. However the Waitakere project had a significantly different reception in West Auckland than the stores in Central Wellington. In Wellington the project had been primarily understood and framed as an art event curated by Letting Space and partially funded by Creative New Zealand. However in Waitakere the Free Store was framed more as a social service and sustainability initiative with support from the Auckland Council. The Waitakere project and others such as the Palmerston North project prompted much more controversy and mixed reactions than the first Wellington project. They received joyful praise and positive feedback about reducing waste and re-distributing food, and also subtle criticism and outright condemnation. The Waitakere store in particular, generated a predominantly racialised debate which focused on the nature of charity, poverty and welfare beneficiaries.

Charity, categorisation and need Paton never described the Waitakere project as a traditional charity or poverty action plan, but rather as something for those who were ‘struggling to pay their weekly food bill but unwilling or ineligible to access a food bank’ (Harvey, 2011). Media reporting on the Free Store in Waitakere focused on the sheer number and neediness of participants. Steamson of Radio New Zealand states in reference to the opening day, ‘[t]he queue of people stretched hundreds down the pathway, every one of them with a tale to tell’ (Paton and Steamson, 2011). This tale was primarily narrated as one of need, of hardship and tough times on limited

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welfare benefits and inadequate incomes. Paton echoed this, describing those who took part as ‘dominated by unemployed people, people on the benefits and I would say really low income, large families and there was not one moment that I saw anyone under any kind of scrutiny that wouldn’t have qualified to be in there’ (Paton and Steamson 2011). The demand for food was so high at the Waitakere project that volunteers had to limit the number of people in the store at any one time and restricted what people could take to what they could carry - no bags were allowed (pers. communication).

Figure 4.1: Image of the Henderson Free Store showing line of participants. Source: author.

While Paton never framed the Waitakere project entirely like a traditional charity, responses indicated different understandings. One theme which emerged was a link between participation and shame. During the first Wellington Free Store, Paton talked about how some participants were ‘not living in poverty but were possibly struggling from one pay cheque to another, and would be ashamed to go to a food bank’ (Wood, 2010). This was re-iterated by participants in the Waitakere project. For example, one participant in the Waitakere project said ‘[y]ou know a lot of these people wouldn’t go to the Salvation Army, they’re too embarrassed. But they’ll stand in line here because there’s support. Look at all of us, you don’t feel so alone’ (Forsyth, 2011). However even though many people participated, there were still social risks. For example, while I was

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waiting in line at the Waitakere Free Store, people in two different cars drove past and shouted at us ‘poor people’ and ‘shame’. This idea that the Free Store was actually a charity and therefore should assess the ‘need’ of participants was a major theme in responses to the proliferating Free Stores (see for instance comments in response to Harvey, 2011; Fairfax NZ News, 2011).

Welfare beneficiaries, bodies and conspicuous consumption In response to a TV3 news story on the Waitakere Free Store there were also many comments about the bodies of participants waiting in line. Comments focused on the (often) large size of participants, their apparent lack of employment, their clothing choices and smoking habits. It’s good you are enlightening people of NZ that we do have poverty in this country, it was a shame that there were poor people standing on the street smoking tailor made cigarettes, wearing gold chains, $70 label hats and maybe of the many there 10% were slim or looked hungry, I hope any users were required to show proof of poverty e.g. community services card? (comment in response to Forsyth, 2011). Judging by the people in the queue at the Free Food Shop we must have the fattest poor people in the world (comment in response to Forsyth, 2011). None of those people looked malnourished or hungry, on the whole they looked like they had obesity issues! They also didn’t have jobs to go to. Why is there such a focus on how the government is failing society? It’s up to the individual or family to be responsible for their own welfare… (comment in response to Forsyth, 2011).

In response to such comments, others pointed out that obesity does not necessarily mean someone is rich, or that they are healthy and eat well. Others just condemned these people for being judgemental and meanspirited and perpetuating feelings of shame for those on benefits (see comments in response to Forsyth, 2011). Being on a benefit sucks with people like you making those less fortunate feel like shit because they have to use welfare to survive… (comment in response to Forsyth, 2011).

Others talked about how difficult it is to survive at the moment due to the global financial crisis, welfare cuts, GST rises and high unemployment.

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One writer who identified as relatively affluent noted that many middle class people have no idea of their privilege or the difficulties others in society face, noting that it is not so easy to get an education and ‘take responsibility’ for those who have been subjected to family violence and sexual abuse, who have parents with addiction problems and limited incomes (comments in response to Forsyth, 2011). Meanwhile others embraced and praised the projects; ‘[g]reat concept and yes it has been done before and I hope it spreads throughout the country’ (comment in response to Harvey, 2011). Others pointed out that the project should be read as a social art intervention; ‘I don’t think anyone has acknowledged that the Free Store is an artwork, and it’s open to anyone that wants to participate’ (comment in response to Forsyth, 2011).

The political potential of social art These varied responses illustrate the unsettling nature of the projects and point to the ways in which they challenged common sense ideas about certain subjectivities and socio-economic practices. Were these art projects, social services or alternative philanthropic community development models? Who should be allowed to participate, should participants be screened, and if it takes place in a poorer neighbourhood with higher numbers of Pasifika and MƗori; does that mean it is automatically a charity and those participating are open to critique and shaming? These are relatively challenging and potentially threatening questions. While some participants and sectors of society appeared to embrace these provocations, others responded by trying to fix, name and place the projects and participants in predictable ways. These fixing responses drew on understandings of certain places and subjectivities, illustrating Kwon’s (2002, pg 53) point that ‘specific locations or places imbue projects with certain uniqueness’. The Free Store in Wellington could more easily be understood as a form of social art because of its urban, ‘cool’ character. But in Waitakere where predominantly MƗori and Pasifika people lined up around the block to participate, it was automatically a charity in the eyes of many. However it was not only place that mattered, the different framings of the various projects were also influenced by the differing involvement of state and non-state actors such as Creative New Zealand, Letting Space and the Auckland City Council, the way Paton herself described the projects, and importantly, the participants themselves. It was interesting how the media reporting of Paton’s description of the Wellington and Waitakere projects changed. For example, media reported

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that she did not ‘wish to deny the ‘need’ of those in line’ at the Waitakere Free Store (Paton and Steamson, 2011). However I wonder whether through emphasising the ‘neediness’ of these participants, an opening was created which facilitated shaming discourses connected to dominant neoliberal framings of welfare beneficiaries as ‘lazy’, ‘greedy’ and ‘taking advantage’ of the state and other surpluses (see Larner, 2000). The framings of the projects point to a tension between acknowledging need, economic precarity and inequality, without allowing those aspects of someone’s subjectivity to become their only public story. What this also raises, is the question of whether it is only recognisable middle class people who are ‘allowed’ to legitimately engage in alternative socio-economic practices because they are not already named and placed as welfare beneficiaries or the ‘needy’ poor’. If, as Gibson-Graham (2006) and others argue (see Chatterton and Pickerill, 2010), academics should be investigating and fostering post capitalist practices, I would also argue that we need to be mindful of how these practices are framed and the consequences for those who participate. While some may consider that being called ‘lazy’ or ‘fat’, or shouted at by passing cars is relatively insignificant in comparison to the physical violence some bodies are subjected to, such abuse may be enough to discourage those already uncertain about participating in alternative socio-economic relations. What is at stake is what Butler describes whereby ‘each of us is constituted politically in part by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies, as a site of desire and physical vulnerability, as a site of publicity at once assertive and exposed’ (2006, pg 20). This assertive yet exposed vulnerability was publicly enacted by those of us lining up around the block at the Waitakere Free Store. We were subjected to ridicule yet also able to draw on a degree of collective agency and displace some of the shame being ‘poor’ or ‘needy’ induced.

Conclusion The Free Store and ensuing reactions to the projects point to the complex intersection of contemporary subjectivities in Aotearoa New Zealand. The project exposed the nature of surplus and waste in capitalist supply chains as well as demonstrating the ways in which shame is used to discipline certain subjects. What I have outlined are the ways these projects created moments which questioned the normative construction of certain subjects. The projects exposed the governing symbolic violence of neoliberal narratives which tend to be directed at shaming and disciplining certain racialised and classed groups – welfare beneficiaries and MƗori and

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Pasifika people in Aotearoa New Zealand (see also Kingfisher, 1999; Larner, 2000). However like Gibson-Graham (2006) suggest, there are always multiple stories and what I have attempted to show in this chapter are some of the ways in which subjectivities were also re-worked through Free Stores – both at an individual level for participants, and at a wider societal level. Kwon (2002) suggests that these kinds of art practices can ‘unwork’ community by unravelling ideas about a unified, coherent community and raise ethical questions to reveal dominant conceptions of who are considered legitimate subjects and what they can say. Dixon (2009) argues that these kinds of art practices are political if they ‘draw its audience into a refiguring of community and the redistribution of agency’ (pg 413). The Free Store clearly reconfigured communities and prompted discussions which began with a disruption of the usual framings of what it means to consume and be a recipient of charity. The project confused people, and while at times Paton highlighted the neediness of some participants, she also foregrounded the commonality of all participants as ‘human beings’. While the order of the sensible responded in predictable ways and sought to fix subjects within existing categories, the debate also exceeded and overflowed these disciplining discourses, creating at times a temporary community of care and understanding. The Free Store pointed to the very real possibility of people partially opting out of the current order of the sensible - whether that be the market economy or traditional charity practices. Oksala (2012) suggests that in a sense this is both the ultimate threat to, and transgression of, the order of the sensible. She writes that; [t]he free market has to be produced by artificial means. More fundamentally, the state must also make it impossible for people to simply opt out of the game. For the economic rationality of market mechanisms to extend maximally throughout society, the possibilities of engaging in practices with alternative, non-economic rationalities must be restricted, by violent means if necessary (Oksala, 2012 pg 141).

Some responses to the projects sought to shame certain subjectivities, while also framing alternative socio-economic practices as non-credible options to the capitalist order of the sensible. In this sense the projects revealed the fragility and constructed-ness of both the market and what it means to be a recipient of charity - where those wanting to opt out, or who participate in alternatives are threatened with shame and hate speech. The projects illustrated both the power of articulating ‘other worlds’ and also the risks involved for those who imagine and enact these ‘other worlds’. In this chapter I have hinted at the symbolic violence of contemporary

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neoliberal discourses. However I have also pointed to moments where people pushed against and beyond neoliberal discourses and argued for compassion, care, understanding and a widening of what constitutes a liveable or ‘legitimate’ life. For me these projects reflect Butler’s (2006, pg 43) comment whereby Free Stores actually solicited ‘a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the other’. The transformations were those moments when participants and conversations in wider media and online forums prompted people to re-think their own subjectivities and social actions. The petitioning of the future in relation to the other were the ways in which the projects sought to provide alternative ways of meeting people’s needs, of extending the value of human lives beyond their participation in the market economy, and ultimately providing glimpses of what another society could look like. The ‘other’ in this sense could be thought of as a specific subject, the unwaged neighbour who is also a human being, or more simply, that other future and other society where one’s legitimacy is based on our shared human-ness, not one’s earning and consuming power.

References Bell, A. N. D. Free Store. un. 4.2. Bishop, C. 2004. “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics.” October Magazine, Fall, 51-79. Bondi, L. 2005. “Working the Spaces of Neoliberal Subjectivity: Psychotherapeutic Technologies, Professionalisation and Counselling.” Antipode, 37, 3, 497-514. Boston, J., P. Dalziel, and S. St John. 1999. Redesigning the Welfare State in New Zealand. Auckland: Oxford University Press. Bourriaud, N. 2001. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses du reel. Butler, J. 2006. Precarious Life, The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso. Chatterton, P., and J. Pickerill. 2010. “Everyday activism and transitions towards post-capitalist worlds.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 4, 475-490. Chatterton, P. 2010. “SYMPOSIUM Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-Management and the Common: Introduction.” Antipode, 42, 4, 897-908. Cook, C. 2011. “Geographies of Art and the Disruption of Discourse: Kim Paton’s Free Store in Wellington’s Inner City.” Unpublished Dissertation, Wellington: Victoria University.

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Critchley, S. 2007. Infinitely demanding: ethics of commitment, politics of resistance. University of Michigan: Verso. Debord, G. 1966. “The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy.” Internationale Situationniste, 10 (March). Dikec, M. 2005. “Space, politics, and the political.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23, 2, 171-188. Dixon, D. P. 2009. “Creating the semi-living: on politics, aesthetics and the more-than-human.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 34, 4, 411-425. Dufour, K. 2002. “Art as Activism, Activism as Art.” Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies, 24, 1/2, 157-167. Fairfax NZ News. 2011. “Free store ‘could encourage dependency’.” The Manawatu Standard. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/features/5135445/Freestore-could-encourage-dependency Forsyth, L. 2011. “Overwhelming demand for free food store.” TV 3. Available from http://www.3news.co.nz/Overwhelming-demand-forfree-food-store/tabid/367/articleID/198287/Default.aspx Free Store Wellington. History of The Free Store N.D. Available from http://thefreestore.org.nz/about/history. Galbraith, H. N.D. Visible and Actual. Available from http://www.lettingspace.org.nz/essay-free-store/ Gibson-Graham, J. K. 2006. A postcapitalist politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson-Graham, J. K., J. Cameron, and S. Healy. 2013. Take Back the Economy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Greig, S. 2011. “Queues for free food grow as prices rocket.” The Wellingtonian. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominionpost/news/local-papers/the-wellingtonian/5314802/Queues-for-freefood-grow-as-prices-rocket Harvey, S. 2011. “Free Store to help Westies.” Stuff. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/auckland/4641059/Free-Store-to-help-Westies Hawkins, H. 2011. “Dialogues and Doings: Sketching the Relationships Between Geography and Art.” Geography Compass, 5, 7, 464-478. —. 2013. “Geography and art. An expanding field: Site, the body and practice.” Progress in Human Geography, 37, 1, 52-71. Hubbard, P. 2003. “In the border-zone: Warte Mal!--a video installation by Ann-Sofi Sidén.” Cultural Geographies, 10, 1, 112-119. Kelsey, J. 1995. The New Zealand Experiment: a World Model for Structural Adjustment. Auckland: Auckland University Press with Bridget Williams Books.

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Kingfisher, C. P. 1999. “Rhetoric of (Female) Savagery: Welfare Reform in the United States and Aotearoa/New Zealand.” NWSA Journal, 11, 1, 1-20. Kwon, M. 2002. One place after another. Site-specific art and locational identity. United States of America: MIT Press. Larner, W. 2000. “Post-Welfare State Governance: Towards a Code of Social and Family Responsibility.” Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, 7, 2, 244-265. Larner, W. and D. Craig. 2005. “After Neoliberalism? Community Activism and Local Partnerships in Aotearoa New Zealand.” Antipode, 37, 3, 402-424. Le Heron, R. and E. Pawson. 1996. Changing Places: New Zealand in the Nineties. Auckland: Longman Paul. Letting Space. Free Store N.D. Available from http://www.lettingspace.org.nz/free-store/ McLeod, R. 2010. “Recent ‘artistic’ endeavours stretch the boundaries.” The Press. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/ columnists/rosemary-mcleod/3793952/Recent-artistic-endeavoursstretch-the-boundaries Oksala, J. 2012. Foucault, Politics, and Violence. United States of America: Northwestern University Press. Paton, K. 2010. Let’s Be Human Beings. Now Future Dialogues With Tomorrow 2010 Series. Available from http://www.dialogues.org.nz/2010/index.php?/04/kim-paton/. Paton, K and D. Steamson. 2011. Auckland Stories: Radio New Zealand. Radio Broadcast. Available from http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/documentaries/auckland_stories Pinder, D. 2008. “Urban Interventions: Art, Politics and Pedagogy.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32, 3, 730736. Rancière, J. 1998. Disagreement. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2001. “Ten Theses on Politics.” Theory and Event, 5, 3. —. 2004. The politics of aesthetics. London: Continuum. Sutton, J. 2011. “Giving the desperate their daily bread.” The Manawatu Standard. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/ 5325892/Giving-the-desperate-their-daily-bread Swyngedouw, E. 2009. “The Antinomies of the Postpolitical City: In Search of a Democratic Politics of Environmental Production.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 33, 3, 601620.

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Vrasti, W. 2011. “‘Caring’ Capitalism and the Duplicity of Critique.” Theory and Event, 14, 4. Walker, D. 2010a. ‘Please Take One’, 26th May 2010 Darryl Walker Reports on a Performance in the Free Store. Available from http://www.lettingspace.org.nz/blog/2010/5/27/please-take-one-26thmay-2010-darryl-walker-reports-on-a-per.html. Walker, K. 2010b. “Mother Hubbard’s cupboard can be kept well stocked.” The Dominion Post. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/opinion/3782770/MotherHubbards-cupboard-can-be-kept-well-stocked Wood, S. 2010. “Shop turns giving things away into an art form.” Sunday News. Available from http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-news/news/ national-news/3782847/Shop-turns-giving-things-away-into-an-artform

CHAPTER FIVE RESPONDING TO CHANGING FORTUNES: THE EXPERIENCES OF SMALL TOWN NEW ZEALAND ETIENNE NEL

Introduction Small towns have long been regarded as a ‘research lacuna’, yet despite this, small rural towns and villages play a key role in the urban hierarchy, they are the service centres for a significant percentage of the population and are closely integrated in processes of urbanization, counterurbanization, community wellbeing and rural development. Small towns provide a lense into the impact of broader economic and social processes, offering us an opportunity to investigate the potential for economic and community resilience, in particular, in those towns outside of the immediate hinterland of large metropolitan areas, areas with a significant export industry or areas with touristic appeal (Hinderink and Titus, 2002; Knox and Meyer, 2009). These often struggling towns provide an opportunity to observe how peripheries are surviving against the odds, and to identify what they draw on to survive. The New Zealand small town experience is particularly insightful, especially given the dominance in recent decades of neo-liberal policy (Lewis, 2012; Peet, 2012), which has focused support on market driven growth, and frequently marginalized former productivist centres in a post-industrial age. Yet, as Leimgruber (2004) argues, seeming path-dependence can be reversed through a process known as ‘inversion’ with many small centres re-inventing themselves when local entrepreneurs identify new, often post-industrial economic opportunities. With resources drying up for economic assistance in peripheral areas globally it is useful to see what role local initiative can play, to ensure that what little external support there is, is carefully targeted.

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This study presents findings from an on-going research enquiry in New Zealand, which at one level examined demographic and economic trends over 100 years across the country, with a particular focus on the southern half of the South Island to establish how different categories of towns are evolving. Secondly the study draws on findings from interviews undertaken with key stakeholders in 55 small towns across the country (see Figure 5.1). Centres investigated ranged in size from tiny villages with a few dozen residents to places with populations of 4,000-5,000. Of particular interest was the role played by new economic opportunities, provided by the shift from productivism, to post-productivism and multifunctionality and prevailing market forces (Wilson, 2001; Wood, 2011). In addition factors outside of the town’s control such as the proximity to, or isolation from, major centres and/or tourism features impact on a town’s prospects (Shone and Memon, 2008). Finally, the role played by local ‘champions’, community initiatives, local innovation and resilience and local government is often critical to providing explanations for town’s growth, survival or decline (Sorenson and Epps, 1996). Given how, since the 1980s, central state support for small towns declined significantly in New Zealand, this consideration was of particular interest in this study (Conradson and Pawson, 1997). After exploring key theoretical themes relevant to this study, this chapter examines broad demographic and economic trends taking place in small town New Zealand before moving on to discuss the findings from the field research.

Theoretical Context Small town development and change in New Zealand and beyond is related to key themes in theoretical and applied literature about small towns in the Global North. These include processes of selective population and economic loss or gain dependent, on the changing nature of productivist rural activities, the growing significance of rural multifunctionalism, physical location relative to large urban centres, the importance of tourism and retirement and niche economic activity (Woods, 2011). Parallel themes of enquiry include the apparent downward spiral experienced by many mono-economy, resource-based towns and the role played by local resilience as towns and communities selectively succeed or fail to adapt to new economic opportunities (O’Toole, 2006). Key with respect to the latter consideration are issues of human and social capital, and the potential role played by local champions and mobilized communities. International evidence suggests that while resource based towns – such as forestry and mining dependent towns have generally

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experienced population and economic loss, many other towns have survived or experienced growth through tapping into new economic opportunities including those provided by tourism, retirement, proximity to large urban centres and multi-functional economies (Henderson, 2002). Trends such as the rise of the second modernity (Knox and Mayer, 2009) illustrate the potential role played by themes such as environmentalism, transition towns, slow towns, leisure and recreational activities in small town rejuvenation. Local economic development responses to small town change and the role played by community groups, local support agencies and social and benevolent entrepreneurs are noted in the international literature (Bryant, 1989; Sorenson and Epps, 1996; Scott and Pawson, 1999; Wilson, 2011) and are likewise considered in this New Zealand study. Numerous studies undertaken in New Zealand towns such as Gore, Tirau and Reefton which were subjected to economic restructuring and decline and the subsequent pursuit of post-industrial opportunities helped frame this study (Wilson, 1995; Conradson and Pawson, 1997, 2009; Panelli et al., 2011). Over and above these broad social and economic processes one must also factor in the changing political-economic context, which in the case of rural New Zealand is particularly pertinent. New Zealand has been heavily impacted on by the ‘neo-liberal turn’ which, since the 1980s has significantly shaped national and urban policy (Britton et al., 1992; Le Heron and Pawson, 1996; Shone and Memon, 2008). The New Zealand government’s abandonment of state-intervention in favour of one of the more aggressive forms of neo-liberal restructuring in the world led to removal of state agricultural subsidies, the ending of regional development support, the radical pruning down of state services and the rationalization of state engagement in the mining and forestry industries (Peet, 2012), leading to centralisation of services to a select number of larger centres. New Zealand’s previous levels of state spatial intervention and community economic support had all but vanished since the 1980s in favour of adherence to market-led development, usually in the export and tourism sectors and with a greater focus on larger population centres. Market based realities have left small towns to grow or flounder on their own. As a result of the ‘restless nature of capitalism’ and how space and spatial relations are produced and reproduced ‘uneven geographical development’ has been an inevitable outcome (Harvey, 2006). As a result most small towns and their enterprises need to self-drive their own initiatives and adapt to cope with market-led restructuring. This is in contrast to the realities in the European Union where higher levels of external support prevail. Beyond limited government support for communities under stress,

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small town communities desirous of change and local development have to generally look inward to their own resources and entrepreneurial potential (Knox and Meyer, 2009). Themes such as the appearance of civic entrepreneurialism and more importantly benevolent entrepreneurialism, where key local business leaders play a key role in encouraging local economic activity and diversity and supporting community initiatives are often critical to small town survival and development (Bryant, 1989; Wilson, 2011). What is observed in this study parallels findings in other countries in the North, notably the growth of well-placed towns in environmental attractive areas, in commuting belts and especially those with touristic, retirement, commuting and tele-commuting potential (Casey Institute, 2006; Knox and Mayer, 2009). This of course raises questions about what is happening in other towns e.g. resource and service towns, which our study hoped to begin to answer to some degree.

Methodology The first phase of the study was based on desk-top research which examined demographic and business change over time nationally, but with a particular focus on trends in the southern half of the South Island – in the regions of Southland, Otago and Canterbury. Demographic information was extracted from national census data covering the period from 1911 to 2006 (see reference list). Settlements were categorised based on the 1986 census classification (Department of Statistics, 1986) which identified main urban areas as places with more than 30,000 people, secondary urban centres as places with between 10,000 and 29,999 people, minor urban centres as places with between 1,000 and 9,999 people and rural centres as places with between 300 and 999 people. Small towns were taken as being the last two categories. This phase of the study was undertaken nationally and in the selected regions in the South Island to establish absolute and relative growth in the various categories of urban settlement. The objective in this exercise was to establish whether patterns of growth or decline were observable based on urban population and business unit numbers. In the three regions in the South Island, towns were subsequently classified according to a range of additional criteria, namely commuting towns (if within 50km of Christchurch), and towns with a distinctive economic character i.e. mining, manufacturing, timber or tourism. In addition, in these regions service/market towns were found to be divisible into two distinct categories based on whether they had more or less than 2,000 people. In terms of business data, business directories were utilised

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to indicate cchanging num mbers of busin ness in the reegions towns from the years 1936 to 2000. Thoough being a crude measuure, business numbers were taken aas a surrogatee to indicate changing c businness activity over o time (Universal B Business Direcctory, 1938, 1983, 2000). Figure 5.1: N New Zealand Maain Centres and d Small Towns R Researched

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The second phase of the study involved visits to and interviews undertaken with a range of key stakeholders in some 55 small towns across the country (see Figure 5.1). Towns were broadly selected to provide a cross-section of settlements across rural New Zealand, including resource based, tourism and commuting towns and agricultural settlements in differing farming zones. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken firstly with business and then secondly with civic leaders in each town in order to clarify details of recent local demographic and economic trends, but most importantly to identify what businesses found to be most effective in supporting new economic activity. Finally, the last focus was identification of the forms of support that were occurring and if they correlated with tangible outcomes. The objective of this survey was to identify: changes in business activity and employment, future plans and prospects, local growth catalysts, the impact of government and local government actions and the importance of local businesses action and community action.

Census and Business Data Figure 5.2 illustrates the changing aggregated population of all the settlements in each of the four categories of urban settlements captured in the 1986 census. The rapid growth of the 13 largest settlements is selfevident, whilst the next two categories – secondary and minor urban settlements have only experienced modest total growth over the last 100 years. The category of the smallest settlements, namely rural centres has been in absolute decline since 1966. Figure 5.3 indicates the aggregate changes experienced in the two smallest categories of settlement, i.e. the minor urban centres and the rural centres which would equate to the generic category of small towns. From the Figure it is apparent that whilst the rural centres have been in decline since 1966, the minor urban centres (places with between 1,000 and 9,999) continued growing till 1996 and only since that date have begun a phase of slow decline. An examination of the data indicates that in 1911 there were some 370 urban places with a population of less than 1,000, by 1996, however, this had fallen to approximately 125. This de facto ‘loss’ of nearly 250 small towns would be due to places falling below the minimal threshold of 300 people which was previously used to determine urban status, or in some rare cases, places exceeding 1000 and moving into the next urban category. This data and Figures 5.2 and 5.3 vividly illustrate the growing dominance of the larger cities and the relative decline of smaller urban centres in aggregate terms. However, as discussion below reveals, decline is not absolute in all small centres and many have experienced growth.

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Table 5.1 indicates key demographic and business trends in the Southland – Otago – Canterbury regions. In this part of New Zealand Christchurch is the dominant urban centre, with Dunedin and Invercargill serving as the key centres in their respective regions. The hinterland of these three regions is economically diverse being characterised by extensive productivist agriculture in Canterbury and Southland – dairy, cattle and sheep; niche agriculture viticulture and fruit in the central region and scattered mining, forestry and manufacturing settlements. Also significant are a number of growing tourism settlements around the inland lakes and mountains and the coastal and glacial areas and the emergence of commuter settlements close to Christchurch such as Rolleston and Lincoln, a role enhanced following recent relocation to such places following the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes. Related to each of the above economic categories distinct small towns have emerged and operated, being categorised by either a mono-economic focus e.g. mining in Ohai, manufacturing in Matuara, tourism in Arrowtown or by a rural/agricultural service function. Examination of the statistics revealed two clear clusters of settlements in the latter category – those with populations well below 2,000 and a small group of settlements, with populations well above 2,000 but less than 10 000. These two categories are reflected in the Table and it is apparent that the larger places have developed diversified economies and, over time, have come to supply an increasingly larger hinterland, often at the expense of the smaller, generally declining settlements. Figure 5.2: Aggregate Urban Population Growth Rates: 1911-2006

3500000

Main Urban Areas

3000000 2500000

Secondary Urban Areas

2000000 1500000

Minor Urban Areas

1000000 500000

Rural Centres

0 1911 Note:

1936

1966

1996

2006

Main urban centres= + 30 000; Secondary = 10 000 – 29 999; Minor = 1 000 – 9 999; Rural Centres = 300 – 999.

Source: Government Statistician, 1912; Census and Statistics Department, 1937; Department of Statistics, 1966, Statistics New Zealand, 1997, 2010.

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Figure 5.3: Aggregate Population Change in the Two Smallest Categories of Urban Settlements

350000 300000 250000 200000 150000 100000 50000 0

Minor Urban Areas Rural Centres

1911

1936

1966

1996

2006

Note: Minor = 1 000 – 9 999; Rural = 300 - 999. Source: Government Statistician, 1912; Census and Statistics Department, 1937; Department of Statistics, 1966, Statistics New Zealand, 1997, 2010.

Table 5.1: Population Change in Key Categories of Canterbury and Otago/Southland Towns Town Categories:

1936

1981

Canterbury towns >2000

28707

55448

93%

55182

0%

Otago-Sth towns >2000

19524

45598

134 %

45457

0%

Canterbury towns