Economic Geography Network Seminar Series 2024-25

Lessons from Organising Small Businesses in East London: A four-year ethnographic study 

This talk examines the lessons learned from four years of ethnographic research on the community organising efforts of small businesses in East London. Based on my collaborative doctoral research with the East End Trades Guild, I will explore how small business owners have come together to resist rising commercial rents and displacement pressures, using community organising to challenge growth-dependant urban planning. Through case studies of campaigns, from anti-eviction efforts to collective advocacy for affordable rents, I will highlight how community organising has enabled these businesses to build power, influence decision-making, and push back against extractive commercial landlords. The talk will reflect on the opportunities and challenges of sustaining collective action and fostering solidarity in a diverse business community, offering broader insights into the role of community organising in addressing urban economic inequalities.

Deivi Norberg (UCL/QML) will be sharing her recently completed PhD research. 

Open to all. 

The Development of Grassroots Simulation as a Support System for Action-Centred City Planning

Cities are becoming more complex because of urbanisation, aggravated by issues like climate change. Apart from the top-down government interventions, grassroots actors take part in addressing emerging urban issues as a result of the lack of government interventions. However, because of their small scale, sudden emergence, and non-government nature, not all of them can consistently survive and continue to contribute to cities. So far, their emergence and development are organic without any consideration of locational factors that could make them survive longer. There is a lack of a tool to detect the location suitability to implement the initiatives considering their survivability and location characteristics. 

This study aims to formulate a grassroots simulation model by investigating the survivability factors and neighbourhood characteristics of waste bank initiatives in Yogyakarta City, Indonesia.  A mixed-method approach is utilised and is analysed using an epidemiological approach, which is combined with thematic analysis. It reveals that neighbourhood characteristics have a more significant impact on survivability than the initiatives themselves, suggesting the importance of being in a suitable location to implement such initiatives. The key factors include the existence of help each other culture, the prevalence of local community figures, the number of other D-I-Y projects, and clusters of like-minded people. Time also plays a role in determining the project’s survival, such as sudden events (e.g. the COVID-19 pandemic) and the introduction of new government policies. These factors are then translated into an index, indicator, parameter, and scoring rule for developing an online simulation dashboard to provide a tailored planning support system (PSS) for decision-makers to help detect suitable locations for a longer-lived grassroots initiative implementation in an urban neighbourhood scale. It can be accessed via this link: https://zulfikarputra.shinyapps.io/ComSim. 

The overall argument of this study is that grassroots simulation as a PSS can be tailored to detect the suitability of grassroots initiative location implementation based on the survivability factors and characteristics of the neighbourhood area. It contributes to the underexplored theoretical debates on the intersection between grassroots-based PSS, (community) action planning, urban governance, and grassroots urbanism, which could act as an alternative approach to addressing contemporary and future urban problems.

Zulfikar Putra is a PhD student at The Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis,UCL, and a lecturer in the Urban and Regional Planning program at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. His research interests are related to planning support systems, spatiotemporal analysis, community planning, people-centred smart cities, co-creation processes, urban innovation, online platforms, and climate action.

Open to all. 

Alternative Urban Economic Imaginaries Beyond Neoliberal Capitalism

Diverse alternative development imaginaries pointing beyond neoliberal capitalism – from degrowth and doughnut economics to community wealth building and the foundational economy – are beginning to gain traction in cities and regions around the world. This presentation introduces the thinking behind and preliminary findings of an urban-comparative research project investigating how such alternatives have been mobilised and harnessed, to varying political-economic effect, in various cities and regions across Europe. It will focus on the experiences of Zagreb and Amsterdam, in particular, as cities where left-green city administrations aligned with the new municipalist movement are experimenting in different ways with post-neoliberal alternatives. And reflect on the differences between these alternative models and the prospects for their wider adoption.

Matthew Thompson is Lecturer in Urban Studies at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, and a visiting research fellow at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD). His current research is focused on municipalism and alternatives to capitalism through the lens of critical urban theory, urban political economy and conjunctural analysis. He is the author of Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives (Liverpool University Press).

Open to all. 

New State Capitalism as Politicisation of Overaccumulation: A Marxian Economic Geographical Interpretation 

Even under neoliberalism, capitalist states have been active agents in designing, implementing, and removing obstacles for hyperglobalisation as the regimes of accumulation. Therefore, the "new state capitalism" phenomenon is not a "return" of the state but rather a transformation in the mode of state intervention. This paper examines this debate from a Marxian economic geography perspective, advancing two main arguments: 1) Many characteristics of state capitalism discussed in the literature are peripheral and/or misinterpreted. What truly matters is mercantilist industrial policy, and the new mercantilist industrial policy is likely to form an emerging accumulation strategy. 2) The rise of new state capitalism can be attributed to the scalar mismatch that emerged as a limitation of the spatial fix strategy within the neoliberal regime of accumulation. Under the hyperglobalized neoliberal economy, the scale of accumulation became increasingly global while the scale of state sovereignty remained national, which led to deindustrialization of cities and regions in advanced economies. State support for such furthering mismatch has resulted in a legitimacy crisis for liberal states, compelling them to respond. A key spatial outcome of new state capitalism has been the partial realignment between the scale of capital accumulation and the scale of state sovereignty.

Jung Won Sonn is Associate Professor at The Bartlett School of Planning, UCL. He has held visiting posts at Seoul National University, Korea Research Institute for Human Settlements, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, among others. His research focuses on the political economy of spatial planning, urban impacts of technological innovations, and East Asian cities. He serves as an editor of the International Journal of Urban Sciences.

Open to all.