I had come to Vancouver to interrogate the meaning of the word “local” from that expensive tasting menu out to valley farms, farmers’ markets, and community food hubs. My guide was J.B. MacKinnon, one of the inventors of the 100-Mile Diet. In 2005, MacKinnon and his partner Alisa Smith began eating only foods sourced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home, recording the experiment first in a blog, then a book, then a television series. The 100-Mile Diet became a touchstone of the locavore movement, spawning farmers’ market expansions, restaurant manifestos, and a new vocabulary for thinking about the ethics of eating.

The phrase that stayed with me from MacKinnon’s writing was simple and arresting: “distance is the enemy of awareness.” I met him at an outdoor bench at a plaza reclaimed from traffic during the Covid lockdowns. He still eats 85% locally but is not a zealot. “I don’t believe we should have no trade outside our foodshed,” he told me. “I just think the orientation, the balance, is wrong.” Local eating creates a sense of place, he argues, and with that comes a greater willingness to protect it. His ambition is, he insists, not parochial. He wants a world in which local orientation is happening “in Africa or Indonesia or Central Asia just as much as here.” Arguments against localism, he insists, are “arguments in favour of detachment and disconnection.”

The phrase followed me through the rest of my visit. I wanted to explore its limits.

Carlson’s restaurant pointed to the first complication. Burdock & Co serves wine from small producers in Italy rather than from British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, two hundred miles away. Why? Because, Carlson told me, small Italian producers were farming without intervention. In the Okanagan Valley that was less common. “Why would you care to have organic produce and have this beautiful food,” Carlson asked, “and then buy wine that is being made by a scientist that has all kinds of things added to it to make it purple?” Soil ethics, to Carlson, matter more than postcodes. The local was not simply a question of proximity.

***

The farms supplying Vancouver’s restaurants are mostly in the Fraser Valley, east of the city. I drove out through sheeting rain past the landscape where, months earlier, dramatic floods had killed over 600,000 chickens and 12,000 pigs, devastated berry crops, and closed the rail lines into Canada’s largest port. The floods were a violent demonstration of what fragile global supply chains look like when they break. They were a reminder of why locally embedded food systems matter.

At a grain farm near Agassiz I had lunch with a farmer who had been working this land for decades, joined by his wife and adult daughter. He grows organic wheat, rye and oats and sells flour through a CSA programme — 200 people collecting 20kg bags of heritage grain from a Vancouver pickup point every Saturday. The burdock on my Burdock & Co plate had come from this farm, grown by a Tokyo immigrant who works a plot here in exchange for land and help with administration.

Over lunch, the farmer made what struck me later as the best answer I had heard to a question I had been carrying since my conversation with MacKinnon. If distance is the enemy of awareness, how do we maintain care for people far away? “Look at Mexico,” he said. “The US dumped corn, got them to join NAFTA, and then proceeded to dump subsidised corn into Mexico and destroy the local market. So people have to migrate to get jobs. That’s just ludicrous.” Being local here was not a withdrawal from elsewhere. A commitment to place, followed far enough, becomes a commitment to other people’s places too.

His daughter stopped our conversation about farmers’ markets with an observation that has stayed with me. “The Vancouver farmers’ markets make me feel really icky,” she said. “Everyone there is quite wealthy, and you can’t really afford to buy much there unless you’re quite wealthy. It’s kind of a self-congratulatory environment. It’s all delicious food and everything, and it’s lovely. But then you walk down the street, and there are people who have nothing.”

I recognised myself in the people she found icky. I am the cosmopolitan shopper seeking moral worthiness through the purchase of my next bag of organic purple potatoes. The ethical narratives of local food come packaged, often uncomfortably, with narratives of taste and exclusivity.

***

A few miles away I visited a younger farmer — one of what she calls “the new generation.” She grew up in apartment blocks in southern Ontario, no garden, no tie to the land. Her first career was in climate change research. Reading the 100-Mile Diet changed the direction of her life. “A lot of money was being poured into research,” she told me, “but it wasn’t feeling like anything was happening.” She needed to get her hands dirty. She borrowed a half-acre from a dairy farmer and grew potatoes. She ended up with far more than she could eat and started a CSA to shift them. That was the beginning.

For the first couple of years, living in a shed on the farm, she filled the gap between her ideals and her bank balance at the food bank. “It’s crazy,” she said. “I was going to the food bank for cereal to support my obsession with growing food for my local community, which was still really only accessible to middle-class people.”Local food, in its current form, was largely feeding the people who least needed feeding.

My last visit was to an inner-city farm on contaminated land adjacent to the Olympic Village — the luxury apartment complex built for athletes of the 2010 Winter Olympics and subsequently sold to Vancouver’s wealthy. I paused before entering, struck by the uncomfortable awareness that I had flown a long way to understand the value of the close-to-hand. My flight from Edinburgh had emitted more carbon than a season of organic grain farming would sequester. As a frequent-flying cosmopolitan who had gone straight from the airport to a six-course locavore tasting menu, I was precisely the demographic the Olympic Village had been built for once the athletes had gone. I wanted to be the person who supported urban farms. I was also the natural target of the property salespeople selling high-end waterfront apartments just across the road.

Sole Food Farms employs thirty vulnerable Downtown Eastside residents in production-grade agriculture on raised plastic beds. The contaminated ground beneath cannot be broken. They supply twenty restaurants, including Burdock & Co. One third of their produce goes to Downtown Eastside community services. The same greens that appear on a Michelin-starred plate feed people in shelters just blocks away. Localism, it turns out, can have a social justice spine.

***

I had arrived in Vancouver with a radius on a map. One hundred miles: simple, measurable, and appealingly concrete. What the week’s conversations produced was the recognition that the local is a set of relationships — between a chef and the farmers she has known for thirty years, between a CSA subscriber and the harvest they have partly underwritten, between a Downtown Eastside resident and the farm that employs them, feeds them, and gives them somewhere to be.

MacKinnon was right that distance is the enemy of awareness. But distance, it turned out, was the wrong measurement. The large dairy farms near Agassiz are technically local. They are nearby. But they import their feed, export their manure, and have little idea who eats what they produce. Meanwhile Burdock & Co serves wine from small producers in Italy because Carlson’s soil ethics matter more than postcodes.

Local, in the end, is not about how far the food has travelled. It is about relationships and an economy of attention.

As I walked through Geneva airport in 2022, following my first post-Covid flight, I reflected on how this space was, supposedly, the antithesis of the local. Airports have become the ultimate symbols of placelessness, what the anthropologist Marc Augé called “non-places,” and what the urbanist Manuel Castells called the “space of flows”—a friction-free, mobile, networked world of familiar towels, duty-free cologne, and identical lines of welcome in each Marriott or Hyatt.

But there was something else going on in this airport too—something simultaneously located and global. Geneva was decidedly different from Edinburgh airport, the one I had left an hour and a half earlier. Gone were the references to thistles, tartans, single malt scotch, and the novels of Walter Scott. This was an airport decorated with the symbol of cosmopolitan wealth in the space of flows: the luxury watch. A large screen showed a beautiful multiface Breguet watch with the logo “MAKE HISTORY WITH US.” On another screen, an elegant beige cashmere-clad woman stared at me confidently, her wrist positioned to show off her Patek Philippe. “BEGIN YOUR OWN TRADITION” the advert, and by implication the woman, instructed me. Clearly some focus group had decided that advertising watches had to say something about the longue durée.

The space of flows and the space of places, places and non-places, while polar opposites in the world of social theory, are un-subtly layered in actuality. And I was travelling to one of the places where that layering began.

I was heading up into the Jura mountains, where the geographer Peter Kropotkin had once hung out with watchmakers while formulating the philosophy and practice of mutual aid. The whole thing seemed like a big intellectual joke for a geeky geographer: the father of mutual aid among the very watchmakers who were building the possibility of standardised clock time - the time that would help capitalism to conquer the world. Having seen a dramatic and sudden revival of calls for mutual aid during the pandemic lockdowns, I wanted to understand why local forms of action act as emergency first aid in the 21st century. So, I had to visit its birthplace.

The local train from Neuchâtel takes half an hour, ascending from 470 metres to 1,001. I finished a jambon and gruyère sandwich as the train headed sharp left into a tunnel. A landscape of bright white snow greeted it as it emerged. It was as if we had entered a different world.

My companion on this trip was Peter Kropotkin, who died in 1921 but who had once arrived here in search of the same thing I was. “Of all the towns of Switzerland that I know, La Chaux-de-Fonds is perhaps the least attractive,” he wrote, noting the high plateau devoid of trees where “the snow lies as deep as at Moscow, and melts and falls again as often as at St. Petersburg.” It is true that the town did not immediately strike me as beautiful. With a population of around 40,000, it is one of the highest industrial towns of its size in Europe. And yet it was here, and in adjacent Le Locle, that over 50% of all the watches in the world were made in 1900. At the same time, this small and isolated valley was the global centre of anarchism.

I left the station and headed into the town, which unfurled up a south-facing slope. This was a landscape of right angles - a grid. Such an arrangement might be familiar in North America or Ancient China, but it is highly unusual in Switzerland, where organic, winding medieval streets are the norm. Houses were built on the slope, facing south, to maximise light, each row far enough up that its higher windows looked over the roofs of the row below. This plan was not accidental. It emerged following a fire in 1794, when the town was rebuilt to facilitate a new way of making watches: the établisseur system.

It was this system that led Marx—not a man known for his brevity—to write the longest sentence in Volume One of Capital. “Formerly the individual work of a Nuremberg artificer,” it begins, “the watch has been transformed into the social product of an immense number of detail labourers, such as mainspring makers, dial makers, spiral spring makers, jewelled hole makers, ruby lever makers, hand makers, case makers, screw makers, gilders…”—and on it goes, for the better part of a page, through pivot makers and escapement makers and enamellers, all the way to the repasseur, “who fits together the whole watch and hands it over in a going state.”

What Marx did not note was that this particular division of labour brought with it a very specific urban form. The production of time was linked at the hip to the production of space. The workers in the établisseur system were, like many of us during the two years of lockdown, “working from home.” Home place and workplace were the same thing. The work involved tiny parts, steady hands, and wearable magnifying glasses. It needed good light in an age before electric lighting, which meant large and plentiful windows. And because each piece was highly specialised and spatially separated from the others, runners were needed to collect the parts and deliver them to the repasseur for assembly. This is where the grid came in.

Each worker was essentially a contractor who, in Marx’s terms, owned their own means of production. No one was working for anyone else - yet cooperation was needed for the watch to be made. It is, in many ways, a perfect model of cooperation between autonomous agents. Little surprise, then, that they did not look favourably on any kind of dictatorship—including the dictatorship of the proletariat preferred by Marx and Engels.

The end point of my walk up the gridded slope was a large white house overlooking the town. This is the Villa Jeanneret-Perret, the Maison Blanche. It was the home of Georges-Édouard Jeanneret, a watch enameller, one of the jobs on Marx’s endless list, and his wife Marie-Charlotte, a pianist. It was designed by their son Charles-Édouard, his first independent project. Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1887, the family had lived at the foot of the grid-patterned slope. Now the son’s white house looked down on the grid from above. It was cleaner, more geometrical, and entirely white. It was nothing like the art nouveau houses laid out below.

In 1920, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret changed his name to Le Corbusier. This was, for want of a better term, a branding exercise, one that allowed him to escape his rural and provincial Swiss roots and become the figurehead of a movement that sought to escape the limitations of the local altogether. He became the pioneer of the “international style” - an aesthetic rooted in standardisation and rationalisation. Just as his name change extracted him from his local context, his architecture leaned on the idea of “universal design” that could be applied anywhere. This was the man who proposed demolishing the winding streets of Paris’s Marais and replacing them with a rigid grid of sixty-storey towers and who built the Indian city of Chandigarh around a rectangular grid of wide roads. To Le Corbusier, the grid was a “machine for living.” He loved straight lines. “Man walks in a straight line,” he wrote, “because he has a goal and knows where he is going.”

I had been walking in straight lines—along the snow-burdened rows and up the connecting roads until I reached the top of the grid. As I caught my breath and gazed at the white mansion built for a watch enameller and his musician wife, I wondered whether the young Le Corbusier’s life in this unusual grid had informed his desire to abstract himself into a brand and his architecture into a practice that could be applied anywhere. I wondered whether the universalism of the International Style was actually just the imposition of principles from this particular version of the local – a version designed to make it possible to craft watches – onto everywhere else.

I chuckled at the thought that the same urban form had informed both the godfather of modernist space and the prince of militant localism. The watchmaking grid of La Chaux-de-Fonds has accidentally birthed two entirely opposed worldviews – the hyper-localism of mutual aid and the globalist standardisation of high modernism.

Kropotkin, unlike Le Corbusier, left no trace here. He was not mentioned in the UNESCO building below, nor in the Musée International d’Horlogerie. Yet his short visits were foundational.

Born into the Russian aristocracy in 1842, he had served as a page to Tsar Alexander II, so he knew what hierarchical authority looked like intimately. His fieldwork as a geographer in Siberia had undermined the lessons of his aristocratic and military upbringing, with its “confidence in the necessity of commanding, ordering, scolding, punishing, and the like.” Command “works admirably in a military parade,” he wrote, “but it is worth nothing where real life is concerned.” It was in Siberia, he said, that he “was prepared to become an anarchist.”

La Chaux-de-Fonds finished the job. Watching the watchmakers run their own health insurance schemes, community gardens, and grocery stores, and reading voraciously through the dark hours when no watch work could be done, he found independent people with opinions. “Here I saw that the workers were not a mass that was being led and made subservient to the political ends of a few men,” he wrote. “Their leaders were simply their more active comrades—initiators rather than leaders.” When he came away from the mountains, “after a week’s stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.”

The mutual aid he saw was rooted in free association at a local scale – the kind of scale possible in small towns like La Chaux-de-Fonds and St-Imier. It was exactly this spirit of “new life starting again,” as Kropotkin put it, that blossomed during the Covid pandemic. As the virus arrived in the spring of 2020, mutual aid organisations cropped up across the UK. The more useless the national government seemed, the more activists insisted it was local responses that would really make a difference. Covid-19 Mutual Aid UK advised groups to “act really locally, for example just on your street or apartment block.” The hope was that hyperlocal relationships between neighbours might transcend the generational, political, racial, and gender divides that formerly kept people apart.

In July 2023 I took the bus from La Chaux-de-Fonds to St-Imier for the International Anti-Authoritarian Gathering, marking 150 years since the founding of the Anti-Authoritarian International in the same town. I was supposed to be on a train, but anarchists camping too close to the tracks had led to the rare cancellation of Swiss trains and a replacement bus. Anarchists and timetables, it turned out, were not easy bedfellows.

The programme offered a dizzying array of options: “relationship anarchy,” “celebrating failure,” “basics of wound treatment,” and my favourite, “anticapitalist yodelling.” I chose a workshop on combating the pipeline from transphobia to fascism. My smart-casual attire and lack of tattoos probably marked me out as a fed—or possibly just a writer.

Anarchists are widely assumed to be violent, balaclava-wearing types intent on smashing all forms of organisation. It is this caricature that has prevented many from engaging seriously with anarchist thought, which is often, explicitly, about ways of organising. What emerged before me was a masterclass in consensus building, not through a figurehead but through conscientious listening: a choreography of hand signals, remarkable tolerance of critique, and gentle correction accepted with gratitude rather than shame. The anarchists were gently and beautifully teaching each other, and listening, as they moved towards consensus. I found it strangely moving. It was an embodiment of the mutual aid Kropotkin had seen in these same valleys 150 years before.

When I emerged from a film screening and sat down for a sandwich, a group of people dressed in black with balaclavas appeared and began arguing with a woman distributing pamphlets from a table. The distribution had apparently been forbidden. The shouting grew louder, the woman looked terrified, and eventually the people in black swept up all the pamphlets and took them away. It was a sudden dark, violent cloud in an otherwise sunny, cooperative event.

As I watched the men in black carry the pamphlets away, one of the central tensions of my journey became clear. The watchmakers themselves had learned this the hard way. By 1877, machine-made American watches had gutted the market for cheap Swiss ones and half the town was out of work. The municipality opened dining rooms serving meals at cost. La Chaux-de-Fonds was now firmly locked into a global system that, through the production of standard time, its own watchmakers had been busy making. It was the beginning of the pivot to luxury: the industry that now produces the Breguet watches whose billboards had asked me to make history with them in Geneva airport.

The reach for the local, with its dreams of community and mutual aid, is freighted with the constant possibility of being undone. It is immensely fragile. It is threatened from the outside by the larger standardising forces of contemporary globalised capitalism, just as the world of the watchmakers had been in 1877. And it is threatened from the inside by the urge for purity and the silencing of difference and dissent.

The local needs work. It does not just happen.

Just a few months ago, if you had been standing outside a hall in the town of Petrolia, California you would have heard an audience singing the words:

“Spawning time, we’re gonna do it till we die,
Take me, take me…
Spawning time, we’re gonna do it till we die,
Make me, make me…”

The occasion was a celebration of the lives of David Simpson and Jane Lapiner. Their daughter, Joyful Simpson, had returned to Petrolia along with some theatre buddies to perform a gentle roast of her aging parents. In the PR for the show, according to her mother, Jane, she had noted that she was “forced into animal unitards and political perspectives before she was a consenting adult. And I’ll bet you never had to have salmon sex on stage with your parents. Did you?” Joyful was singing a song from a theatre production from over 30 years ago. The audience all knew the words.

***

I visited Petrolia to explore how the philosophy of bioregionalism informed the process of “becoming local”. Bioregionalism is an environmental philosophy and practice that is centered on the idea that humans should find a home in, and be organized around, places formed by nature – most prominently, by watersheds. Central to this approach is a focus on sustainable self-sufficiency where people produce an enduring sense of being in place through connection to the ecosystems around them. I had read about the largely successful attempts of locals in the Mattole river valley to manage the watershed in the aftermath of disastrous histories of logging that had decimated the river’s salmon populations. I was heading there to find out how they did it, and how bioregionalism had informed their actions.

***

Exiting San Francisco across the Bay Bridge in 2026 is to encounter a series of billboards that are clearly advertising something – but it is not clear what. I recognized the iPhone 17. I’m less clear about the messages or the companies on others. THE WORLD’S BEST AI: IT RUNS ON CORNWEAVE., THE ONLY SITE BUILDER THAT SPEAKS DESIGN (FRAMER), BEHIND EVERY MAGICAL AI, THERE’S FIREWORKS, INFERENCE THAT SCALES WITH YOUR APP (TOGETHER AI) and, worryingly, WELCOME TO AI COUNTRY: POPULATION: EVERYONE. These billboards are certainly not advertising to me. I get the sense that they are speaking to each other or, perhaps, the occasional motorist who knows what Cornweave is selling and is in a position to buy it. For the previous week I had been sitting in cafes overhearing conversations between tech bros that were invariably AI related. This was what it was like to be alive in 2026 in the Bay Area. I was escaping all that for something very different.

In 1967 the poet Richard Brautigan published the poem All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. The poem counterposes images of fauna and flora familiar to the genre of “nature poetry” with the altogether more surprising presence of computers and machines. The final stanza reads:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

The poem is either a surprisingly optimistic view of the role of computers and machines in a future utopia or, alternatively, a deeply sarcastic note on the impossibility of that vision. It is hard to tell. I was thinking of this poem as I headed north out of the Bay Area, away from the Bladerunner billboards and tech-bro conversations and towards the redwood forests and the Lost Coast. I was driving north for a little over four hours to Humboldt County. As I drove up Highway 101, the presence of vineyards petered out around Geyserville, where I picked up some wine. The road narrowed and the trees closed in on the highway. And what trees. Thick girthed, soaring redwoods. The Mediterranean-looking, vineyard-covered landscape of Sonoma County had given way to something that looked much wetter and bigger. My drive ended at Scotia and the Scotia Lodge, a hotel that reminded me of a cross between The Shining and Twin Peaks (in a good way) sitting across the road from a massive, abandoned lumber processing plant, a supermarket, a gas station, and not much else.

Humboldt County is part of the Emerald Triangle, an area that was remote enough to be the largest cannabis growing area of the United States from the 1960s onwards and certainly well before the legalization of cannabis in 2016. It was precisely the remoteness of Humboldt County that had attracted San Francisco hippies, activists and artists to the area in the early 1970s. Some of them, it turned out, were to become environmental activists, taking it upon themselves to restore watersheds which had been decimated by the logging of redwoods and the rise of cannabis plantations. Of particular concern was the declining numbers of salmon in the Eel and Mattole rivers. I had escaped the AI world of the Bay Area to talk to these people about how they had restored both the watershed and the salmon runs – about how they related to the place they lived in relation to the philosophy of bioregionalism.

***

The next day I drove out to the town of Petrolia, beside the Mattole River. The drive is exhilarating – ascending to rolling range land for cattle, out of the spectacular trees the scene reminded me of parts of Scotland or Wales complete with roads too narrow for two cars to pass, cattle grids, and moments where I had to stop for the cattle. The twisty road makes its way across and around steep hills before plunging to the edge of a dramatic coast where the sea meets the hills – roaring breakers, the mist of sea spray, and chunks of salt-bleached trees. This is just north of the Lost Coast, so-called because of depopulation that happened in the 1930s and the inability or unwillingness to pay for a major highway. The area is effectively bypassed and undeveloped. You could easily miss the town of Petrolia – a town that acquired its name by being the site of the first oil well drilled in California – an ironic site for bioregional place-making. This is a very remote corner of northern California marked by steep hills, redwood stumps, and a river – the Mattole – that closes to the sea every summer and punches its way open in the first big autumn storm. Cattle, trees, and a few hundred people. Not the kind of place where you’d expect a nine‑person cast, a four‑piece band and a touring show.

I drove out past Petrolia to meet with some of the people responsible for restoring the river and the salmon. Among them were David Simpson and Jane Lapiner. I visited their self-made converted barn at the end of a dirt track and was introduced by a rancher neighbour. I was glad my rental car had been upgraded to a Chevy Blazer. The Prius I had intended would not have survived. The house was full of books, posters, black and white photos of dancers all lit by the sun coming through the large picture windows. A large poster of stylized figures knocking down an oil derrick read People vs. Fossil Fuels. A poster with the heading “human nature” of a Robert Crumb drawn wolf read The Wolf at the Door. I sat down with David and Jane, eager to hear about bioregional philosophy, erosion abatement, salmon hatcheries, and culvert replacements. What I got was entirely different.

***

David and Jane are incomers. Both émigrés from the East Coast. Jane had attended Bennington College, the birthplace of both modern dance (Martha Graham) and electronic music. It is a college with no grades where my daughter Alice had decided to go (now, in Bennington tradition, an anarchist organizer and book seller). David had been to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where I had taken my PhD with the noted humanistic geographer, Yi-Fu Tuan and where I had met my wife, Carol. We had a lot to talk about. David and Jane had made their way to San Francisco and Berkeley where they had been members of the Diggers and the San Francisco Mime Troupe in the late 1960s. The Diggers were a band of anarchist hippies who had the slogan “Everything is free. Do your own thing.” They were named after the English Diggers of the 17^th Century who had sought to farm common land in order to tackle poverty.

The idea of the Earth as a “common treasury” was replicated in the 1960s Diggers’ commitment to the idea of supplying things for free – free music, free medicine, free art, free food. They sought to live a life outside of the dictates and expectations of capitalism aided, often, by the likes of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Janis Joplin who agreed to play at free parties – or “happenings”. In addition to providing things for free, the Diggers consistently used forms of theatre to spread their message. Indeed, the Diggers had arisen, in part, out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe and lived by the code “create the conditions you describe” – acting as though a better future is already here – hence the act of giving out things for free. The activities of the Diggers and associated groups would eventually lead to what would be called “The Summer of Love” in 1967 centered on the Haight Ashbury district where the Diggers were active. By that time the member of the Diggers had grown jaded with the massive numbers of incomers looking to tune in and drop out and decided to leave the city. Before doing that, they held a parade through the Haight proclaiming The Death of the Hippie on October 6^th, 1967. The Diggers began to disperse, moving out into rural communes and homesteads in Humboldt County and elsewhere.

One of the Diggers activities was a constant stream of free broadsides and pamphlets – forerunners of the zine culture. The so-called Communications Company used two Gestetner mimeograph machines that had been obtained for free in true Digger style to print and distribute daily broadsides in Haight Ashbury throughout 1967. One of their publications was an 8.5-by-11-inch mimeographed broadside of Richard Brautigan’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace accompanied by a large image of a megaphone. The poem was to be reprinted in the final edition of The Digger Papers in August 1968 just as the Diggers dispersed to places like Trinidad and Petrolia in Humboldt County.

David and Jane had been active members of both the San Francisco Mime Troupe and the Diggers before they arrived in Humboldt County. Their house was full of material from the day. They laughed as they told me how collectors now wanted to pay absurdly large amounts of money for the posters that had once been dispersed for free.

***

Back in the late 1980s and early 90s, as salmon runs were collapsing and logging roads caused runoff into the rivers, a group of local residents, including David and Jane, decided they had to make sense of what was happening in a way their neighbours could feel in their bodies. They didn’t start with a policy paper or a bioregionalism reading group. They started with musical comedy.

They called it Queen Salmon with the subtitle “a biologically explicit musical comedy for people of several species.” The subtitle gives you a flavour of the thing. The play follows a Chinook salmon from ocean to river mouth to spawning grounds and back into the bellies of bears and humans. Along the way, in addition to salmon, you meet loggers, ranchers, illegal spear‑fishers at the river mouth, the CEO of Pacific Lumber from the city, and a chorus of salmon spirits. The whole community’s argument about what the river is for – livelihood, profit, wildness, dinner – was played out on stage.

What struck me, listening to David and Jane, the couple who wrote and directed it, was how absolutely rooted in the place it was. David noted how “The whole situation was a rural community of non-professional performers creating original material – all from here.” Every character, apart from the salmon, was built from someone who would be in the audience. A logger who slowly comes to understand “the beauty of restoration” because, in real life, he loved working in the woods and was torn between his job and what he could see happening to the hillsides. The local ex‑con who once beat up two highway patrolmen for stopping him on the road. And, of course, the amorous salmon.

The songs were equally specific. At one point in our conversation, Jane was joined by David in rendition of a song called Spawning Time – a duet between two salmon.

When you are a salmon,

you only get one shot.

Most all the other creatures

get to do it quite a lot.

So when the wind is blowing cold,

my blood is running hot,

I better get my ass upstream

before it starts to rot.

My sense of smell will guide me.

My love cannot fail.

Upstream lies my only piece of tail.

The refrain goes:

“Spawning time, we’re gonna do it till we die,
Take me, take me…
Spawning time, we’re gonna do it till we die,
Make me, make me…”

The rendition made us all laugh just as the audience must have laughed a quarter of a century earlier. They explained how the song was sung by a cast all dressed in skin-tight salmon suits – including their daughter, Joyful. I wish I had been there. The song is funny, rude, and accurate. The fish really do have one shot. They swim upriver, their bodies breaking down as they go, and they really do die on the spawning grounds. Reproductive biology is made tangible. Many years after the last tour, and not long before I showed up, Joyful, got a whole hall of Humboldt locals – people who had once speared salmon illegally, people who had sat through endless meetings about hatch boxes and timber harvest plans – to join in that chorus. “Spawning time, we’re gonna do it till we die…” Everyone knew the words. Other songs had titles like “The Different Priorities Waltz” and “A Girl Knows her Watershed”.

***

It seems to me that Queen Salmon does at least four things that are important for anyone interested in the local.

First, it takes complex ecological processes and turns them into story and song without flattening them. The play is “biologically explicit” in the best sense: it gets the details right, but you don’t experience it as a lecture. You experience it as romance, sex, hunger, conflict, timing. You come away with a sense of salmon as beings with their own urgencies, not just as numbers on a fishery biologist’s graph.

Second, it stages a community argument in a way that lets people see themselves. The illegal spear‑fishers at the river mouth are shown with sympathy as well as critique. The rancher who loves the hills and also makes a living from cattle is not a villain. The corporate raider from the city is a caricature, but a recognisable one. It is easy to imagine that people could see their own logic, and its limits, on stage without feeling directly attacked.

Third, it blurs the boundary between theatre and everyday life. It was people in the valley who performed the play and formed the first audience. Nine actors, four musicians and three stage workers were all from Humboldt County. It was people in the valley who the characters were based on. It wasn’t a show that a professional troupe brought in – it was something about the watershed that had been made by the watershed. A bioregional version of Brecht’s Lehrstücke(learning plays), or Augusto Boal’s invisible theatre, where the barrier between actors and audiences is broken down. Local people learning their own place by performing it. Joan Schirle, Director of the Dell’Arte International School of Physical Theatre at Blue Lake would tell a reporter that “It was like they had half the population of Petrolia moving, taking the show on the road. Here you had a group of people connected because they shared the same watershed producing a cultural event. That’s not done a lot.”

And finally, it circulates. Queen Salmon didn’t only play in the Mattole Valley. They took it up and down the West Coast, performed it in Portland, in San Francisco, in fishing towns and logging camps where similar tensions were playing out. The script never stopped being local but audiences in other valleys and cities could recognize themselves in it not because it was generic, but because it was specific enough to give them something to translate. They could apply it to their own version of “here”.

A piece of musical comedy helped make a watershed into a community. It provided a shared repertoire of images, ideas and tunes that people could draw on when haggling over culverts, or hatcheries, or logging permits. You could say to your neighbour “remember what happened when the salmon met the logger,” and they had a good chance of knowing what you meant. The local had acquired a musical, embodied dimension. Years later when Joyful came back to gently roast her parents, a whole audience could sing along.

David and Jane’s account of Queen Salmon suggested to me that theatre can be one of the ways a place becomes conscious of itself. It can be a forum where rivers and roads, animals and jobs, old ranchers and new arrivals are all present at once as characters you can sing with and against. When David and Jane started talking about theatre, I saw it as a distraction from both the serious conversation about bioregional philosophy I was hoping for and the nitty-gritty details of how to manage a watershed that I was expecting. Now I see how it was central.

As I entered Harie it quickly became clear that water was a kind of ordering principle. The sound of streams became a constant. They appeared alongside the road into the village, and between the houses clad in cedar boards charred and blackened for preservation. I arrived at the small booth at the community centre and paid my 1000-yen fee. We were joined by seven other visitors – from Japan, Korea, and a couple from Germany who had arrived on a motorbike. Our guide, Akira, asked us how we had found out about Harie as though we had discovered a secret. We had all seen the Attenborough film. This, he said, was true of about 60% of visitors who came because of the documentary. Before Covid, the numbers had been much higher but had dropped off since the world opened up again. I asked if this was a good or a bad thing. He left no doubt that it was good. At the very least, it makes his job easier and more personal. He led us through the village as though through a plumbing system – organizing the itinerary and stops besides springs, channels, ponds, kitchens, carp, vegetable-washing stations, and drains, with the ever-present Lake Biwa beyond us, and Kyoto and Osaka downstream. The water moved constantly. It passed through hands and houses and ponds, through the mouths and bellies of impressively large grey carp, before returning to a more-than-human circulation. On several occasions we stopped beside domestic water systems in small sheds outside the house and beside the road. “Anyone can dig for a spring here” he said “there are no rules.” In each domestic system there were two pools of water inside a large one. The first, where the spout provided a constant stream of water, was for drinking water, the next, which the drinking water overflowed into, was for washing and storing vegetables. Then this water spilled into the larger pool which was also a home for carp. The carp were there to clean the water of food from the dishes before it flowed out and joined one of the many streams that flowed between, around, and sometimes through, the houses. The carp were filtering devices. Groundwater was lifted into daily life, used, shared, and then returned “in as natural a state as possible.”

We were being shown the kabata system – household spring-water kitchens arranged around a culture of use and reuse. As we moved from one node in the system to another we were introduced to a set of small, repeated disciplines. Do not put curry roux into the water. Be careful with oil. Use detergents differently now that people know their environmental impact. Leave soil in the riverbed so aquatic plants can grow rather than sealing everything in concrete. Test the drinking water once a year and only tell visitors to drink from places that have been tested. We were each given a small paper cup and invited to taste the water at three different springs. We would place our cup under the spout where the water ran clear and cold. Akira asked visitors, as he often did at these spot, whether they could taste the difference between the springs. Generally , he said, half or more of visitors thought they could. Its “condition” or “balance” was different. I am not sure what I tasted — freshness, certainly — but I understood why he asked the question. The point was to make water perceptible again – something worth paying attention to rather than simply taking it for granted. Most of us encounter water as pressure, billing, infrastructure, or commodity – something that appears when summoned and vanishes down a hole. In Harie, Akira was telling us, water had texture, taste, direction, and social life. It was at the heart of a set of obligations running through kitchens and gardens and streams. Our final tasting was at two taps – one from a spring and one municipal (standard tap water was used for baths and laundry). Here, I could definitely tell the difference that the addition of chlorine makes.

I asked how community life was organized around the water. As it turned out, none of this required a manifesto. Akira said they did not really gather as a village to discuss the water in any formal way. They met for board elections or the fire brigade, but not especially for the water. There was, instead, a kind of tacit agreement. There would be people after them in the system – both in the village and then in Kyoto and Osaka, so the water had to be valued. Everyone in the village shared it, and so did the other living things.

The scale of this local water culture was at once intimate and regional. Akira showed us a map he carried in a folder and pointed east towards Lake Biwa, the largest lake in Japan, and reminded us that what happened here did not stay here. The used water flowed into wider systems that connected Shiga to Kyoto and Osaka. People in Shiga, he suggested, had historically been conscious of the water that entered the lake. The local, in this case, was a point of responsibility inside a connected world. Harie’s kabata system made locality by insisting that daily acts — washing vegetables, disposing of oil, feeding carp, leaving soil for water plants — mattered beyond the threshold of a single house. Here, proximity meant knowing that elsewhere began in the kitchen. The place was permeable.

This was also why it had been difficult to arrange this tour. ““Imagine if strangers from all over the world just came on their own to look at your home kitchen” Akira asked, “how would that feel?” The discomfort was obvious. The tours existed partly to prevent that intrusion – to make the village legible without turning private domestic life into an open exhibit. “They don’t do any commercial marketing” he said. You had to do the work of searching to find it. They sometimes appeared in magazines when a publisher happened to join a tour, but television variety shows were generally refused. This, too, was a lesson in locality. The same water culture that attracted visitors depended on restraint, privacy, and neighbourly trust. To make the local visible was always to risk damaging the very relations that made it local in the first place.

Beyond the waterways, the village opened into the wider world. We were shown a small textile mill where a kind of cotton crepe fabric - Takashima chijimi – was made. It benefitted from the humid atmosphere of the village, Akira told us. He mentioned the young people leaving Harie, like other rural villages in Japan. We stopped at local fish shop where an ex-teacher sold fish from Lake Biwa – including one produced by covering it in a rice slush and allowing it to ferment till it tasted like cheese. I had tasted a similar product in Norway. Never again. Food appeared here as another way water became culture as the village was connected to the lake. These fragments mattered because satoyama, and its watery cousin, satoumi, are a working mosaic of houses, fields, forests, water, food, craft, and labour, contingently held together by habit and attention. In Harie, the local was a more-than-human local. It was being negotiated through tours, tests, informal rules and tastes, and the knowledge that water shared by humans is also shared by carp, plants, and unseen downstream lives.

While there is a logic to quarantines and lockdowns on confined spaces such as a ship or small island, the logic becomes far more tenuous at the scale of a subcontinent. On March 24, 2020, a nationwide lockdown came into force in India, a country of 1.4 billion people. The lockdown was announced four hours in advance. While the lockdown produced inconveniences for the relatively well off, as it did in other countries, it was a nightmare for the millions of migrant workers and other laborers in the informal sector of the economy. There were no homes for them to go to where they could practice “social distancing.” In many cases their homes were places of insecurity and threats to health. In addition, on March 24, millions of these workers were nowhere near their homes but hundreds of miles away working on constructing the shiny new buildings of India’s booming economy. Lockdowns are designed to limit mobility and thus the spread of the virus. In an economy like India’s, reliant on migrant and informal labor, lockdown meant suddenly increased mobility as millions took to the road to return home. The lockdown in India was superimposed on existing patterns of migrant mobilities where “most men migrate from around August to May after the monsoon planting season to earn a living in factories, construction sites and other businesses.”^[iv] Workers suddenly without jobs lined up for miles at the Anand Vihar bus station outside of Delhi in the hope of catching buses that were not there. Many tried to hitch rides on trucks. Many walked or cycled over a hundred miles to get home. The lockdown filled the roads with what was effectively a forced migration. Many of these workers returned either on foot or in trucks to poorer rural states such as Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka without wages that were due or any prospect of future employment. They were crowded together and likely to be infectious. As Frédéric Landy and Camille Noûs wrote:

COVID-19 abruptly revealed the lives of all these shadowy workers, showing them to be either victims whose economic fragility was suddenly discovered or confirmed, or a threat, since trudging along roads without respecting “social distancing” they risked spreading the virus. A priori, the injustice against them thus appears to have two facets: they have suffered most from the lockdown; but even before the crisis, their invisibility prevented any real recognition of their rights.^[v]

The invisibility of the migrant worker population is, in part, a result of a sedentarist metaphysics and politics in action. The attribution of certain kinds of rights and the fullest kinds of citizenship are based on territorial units within which rights can be exercised. For instance, during Covid-19 lockdowns, people in India were theoretically provided with a minimal ration of food (rice, dal, and oil). Each person, however, was told a specific site, near their recorded home, where this could be picked up. This process made no sense to the millions of migrants who were nowhere near their recorded home.

Hence many flows are based on regional development differentials that provide a non-negligible income to migrants in normal times, but which are proving to be sometimes death traps during the COVID-19 crisis since . . . the few social rights that exist in India apply above all to sedentary people, officially registered in a place. The closure of internal borders made it impossible for migrants to regain the benefits and rights of their full citizenship in their places of origin, without the “house arrest” of lockdown being paradoxically possible in the place of immigration.^[vi]

In addition, the “place of origin” in the Indian subcontinent is likely to be a very different place from the place of employment, with a different language and customs. This made it very difficult for migrant workers to negotiate their way out of their predicament or to explain it to the police who were monitoring the lockdown. The migrant population, in other words, became shadow citizens, or for our purposes here, vagabonds. As Landy and Noûs argue:

At a deeper level, the non-recognition by the State of this social group, its “invisibilisation,” has been generated through its attachment to territorialised public policies. Not only can migrants no longer cross district and state borders, they cannot even enjoy their rights because they are not de jure attached to a space, even though the lockdown blocks them there de facto. . . . . Migrants suffer from political and administrative divisions of space which do not correspond to their space of circulation. By definition, they are caught between two places: they therefore tend to fall outside the ambit of the highly territorialized state rationales. And given this strong spatialization of social rights, they were already marginalized even before COVID-19.^[vii]

It was onto this landscape of migratory circulation that the lockdown policy was imposed on March 24, 2020. At the same time, around a thousand people a day were dying of tuberculosis when the lockdown was introduced. There were all kind of problems being faced by India’s poor that were more pressing than the 147 people who had died of Covid-19 at that point. Some would die trying to get home. As geographer Krithika Srinivasan put it, “A lockdown adversely affects the vast majority of people for whom this novel coronavirus is a smaller risk when compared to more serious and immediate issues such as hunger, domestic violence or eviction.”^[viii] Srinivasan described the lockdown policy as one that traveled poorly from Western countries to a place like India. She labeled the lockdown as a TINA (there is no alternative) response.^[ix] The lockdown model, and the accompanying practice of “social distancing,” Srinivasan argues, were developed in the Global North by and for people who were not used to feeling threatened by contagious disease. They were developed to “flatten the curve” and prevent the medical system from becoming overloaded with Covid-19 cases. Even in the Global North, she notes “they are public health measures that benefit only a minority of the population—those who have salaried jobs, savings, fridges large enough to stockpile groceries, homes that are spacious enough to remain indoors without confinement becoming a health problem in and of itself.”^[x]Clearly, she argues, social distancing is not an option in a crowded home in India (or anywhere else). The lockdown in India is likely to have exacerbated the spread of the disease among the poor while giving some comfort to the relatively wealthy. Indeed, to the wealthy, the poor are part of the threat that needs controlling—suspected vectors for the spread of the disease. The idea that “there is no alternative” to lockdown may well “flatten the curve,” Srinivasan argues, but it also “skews the curve,” making the poor and otherwise vulnerable more likely to catch the virus and more likely to die. Lockdowns, in other words, protect some people while making the lives of the already vulnerable even more vulnerable. It separated citizens from vagabonds:

[i] Mario Koran, “From Paradise to Coronavirus: The Grand Princess and the Cruise from Hell,” The Guardian, March 14, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/from-paradise-to-coronavirus-the-grand-princess-and-the-cruise-from-hell.

[ii] Pengcheng Xu, Hua Qian, Te Miao, Hui-Ling Yen, Hongwei Tan, Min Kang, et al., “Transmission Routes of Covid-19 Virus in the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship,” medRxiv (April 14, 2020); Kenji Mizumoto and Gerardo Chowell, “Transmission Potential of the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Onboard the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, 2020,” Infectious Disease Modelling 5 (2020).

[iii] Lauren Smiley, “27 Days in Tokyo Bay: What Happened on the Diamond Princess,” Wired, April 30, 2020, https://www.wired.com/story/diamond-princess-coronavirus-covid-19-tokyo-bay/ (accessed May 23, 2023).

[iv] Nitya Rao, “India’s Coronavirus Lockdown Will Hit Women and Migrant Workers Hardest,” The Conversation, March 26, 2020, https://theconversation.com/indias-coronavirus-lockdown-will-hit-women-and-migrant-workers-hardest-134689 (accessed May 24, 2023).

[v] Frédéric Landy and Camille Noûs, “What Covid-19 Tells Us About Spatial Injustices in India,” Justice spatiale/Spatial Justice 15 (September 2020), http://www.jssj.org/article/ce-que-nous-dit-la-covid-19-des-injustices-spatiales-en-inde/?lang=en.

[vi] Landy and Noûs, “What Covid-19 Tells Us About Spatial Injustices in India.”

[vii] Landy and Noûs, “What Covid-19 Tells Us About Spatial Injustices in India.”

[viii] Krithika Srinivasan, “Lockdown Protects the Well-Off, but What About Those Who Face Hunger, Homelessness or Poor Health?,” The Hindu, April 18, 2020, https://www.thehindu.com/society/lockdown-protects-the-well-off-but-what-about-those-who-face-hunger-homelessness-or-poor-health/article31373630.ece.

[ix] Krithika Srinivasan, “How Health Inequalities Are Made: The TINA Response to Covid-19,” MedEnv Network: Intersections in Medical and Environmental Humanities, May 24, 2020, https://medenvnetwork.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/health-inequalities-covid-tina-lockdown.pdf.

[x] Srinivasan, “How Health Inequalities Are Made.”

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

—Dante, The Divine Comedy

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

—Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”

Dante and Robert Frost both found themselves in woods—Dante lost, with no way forward, and Frost with a choice to make as his path forked. In both cases routes, and the absence of routes, signify aspects of human meaning making. Life is figured as a journey along actual or hoped-for routes. They reveal the central role of routes and routing in the way we make sense of space and time. It is revealing that some of the root words for wilderness and wastelands suggest not so much the lack of settlements but rather the lack of routes or paths. The Latin word avium refers to a place without paths, while the Old English wēglæst refers to a “way-less place.”^[i] The wilderness, the wastes, confront the traveler with a lack of routes. As such, it is unintelligible space. The first thing that is needed to make sense of the wild, or colonize nature, is a way, a path, a route. If we “lose our way,” we may find ourselves in “a forest dark.” Before space can be settled and before land can be cultivated, we must hack a way through. This suggests that the way that territory is claimed is not by marking its boundaries at the outset but by creating a network of routes that help the space to make sense.

Routes and routing are foundational to the power-laden process of human dwelling. The significance of routes and routing to both dwelling and power are also reflected in the etymology of the word route. In old French rute meant “road” or “way” or “path,” which was itself based on the Latin rupta, the feminine past participle of rumpere, “to break.” Rupta was used to describe a road opened by force—by breaking through a forest or wilderness for instance. It is linked to the word rupture. The violence of routes is a theme we will return to.

The mobilities of both citizens and vagabonds do not happen on an isotropic plain. They do not flow like a spilled liquid on an undifferentiated surface. The mobilities of citizens and vagabonds are routed, and the routes and channels through which they pass play an important role in differentiating one from another. There are citizen routes and vagabond routes, symbolized perhaps most grotesquely by the gradual erosion of the idea of “safe routes” to citizenship for asylum seekers and the precarious routes they must take instead—routes across the Mediterranean, the English Channel, or the Rio Grande, for instance. Here, the provision or denial of routes is most literally linked to the production of citizen and vagabond identities. The focus of this chapter, therefore, is on the way mobilities are routed and how these processes of routing are central to the production of kinetic hierarchies.

If we look at a standard atlas, we see both dots and lines. The dots tend to denote locations. The lines are either borders or routes (sometimes rivers, which are, of course, watery kinds of routes). The borders separate spaces while the routes, at first glance at least, connect them. Borders (and boundaries) have received a significant amount of theoretical and empirical attention in recent decades. There is a healthy field of border studies exploring how borders and bordering occur both at obvious borders (denoted by the lines on maps) and throughout everyday life, showing how borders both divide and in interesting ways bring hybrid forms of existence into being at various border spaces.^[ii]Some of this work concentrates on techno-material borders such as those at the US–Mexico border, Israel/Palestine or at the edges of the European Union,^[iii] while other work focusses on the border as a verb and the processes of bordering that happen everywhere in everyday life and in ways they impact different people in different ways according to race, gender, class, or bodily difference, for instance.^[iv] Setting an agenda for a “critical border studies,” Noel Parker and colleagues note: “Borders are not only found at territorially identifiable sites such as ports, airports, and other traditional ‘border crossings’. Instead, they are increasingly ephemeral and/or impalpable: electronic, non-visible, and located in zones that defy a straightforwardly territorial logic, Examples include biometric identification to control movement and other technologies designed to track mobility such as social security data, records of financial transactions, spyware placing individuals in distinct groups of consumers, and the many other systems of surveillance.”^[v]

***

We started this chapter with the use of routes and the decisions they entail in the poems of Robert Frost and Dante. Another poem that explores the meaning of routes, in a more experimental mode, is “The Sundering U.P. Tracks,” the final part of American poet Edward Dorn’s The North Atlantic Turbine (1967). The route here is the route of the Union Pacific Railroad as it passes through the town of Pocatello, Idaho. The poem starts with the narrator feeling sorry for himself that Leroy McLucus has visited town and not asked to stay with him. Leroy McLucus was a noted Black photographer; the narrator was white. McLucus had

taken rooms

with the Reverend Buchanan

over in that part of town owned

by Bistline, the famous exploiter.^[vi]

The poem quickly switches from the feeling of hurt to an explanation both of how McLucus got to Pocatello, and why he might have chosen to stay on the other side of town, a part of town, we might infer, on the “wrong side of the tracks.”

Every little bogus town

on the Union Pacific bears the scar

of an expert linear division.

The Union Pacific connects each of these “little bogus town[s]” while, at the same time, it divided them. The Union Pacific is indeed “sundering”—a word that means dividing. The poem cleverly plays on the traditional sense of the railroad as a uniting force—a route that represents manifest destiny and the binding of the United States into a coherent whole—with the sense of the railroad as this sundering force—this “expert linear division”—that creates the possibility of the “wrong side of the tracks.” The “Right of Way” is as much a border as a space of flow.

Each side of the shining double knife

from Chicago to Frisco

to Denver, the Cheyenne cutoff

the Right of Way they called it

and still it runs that way

right through the heart

Dorn refers to the work of the route as “rapacious geo-economic/surgery of Harriman.” E. H. Harriman was a financier and railroad tycoon, president of the Union Pacific Railroad as well as the Southern Pacific Railroad. The final words of the poem return to the racial divides that surround the Union Pacific:

You talk of color?

Oh cosmological America, how well

and with what geometry

you teach your citizens.

“The Sundering U.P. Tracks” uses the route of the Union Pacific to invert the conventional narrative of a route that binds the nation. Instead, it is a “shining double knife” and an example of “expert linear division.” While railroads were frequently tied to nationalistic discourses of unity that utilized the capacity of routes to connect, they were also material impositions on landscapes that served to divide communities in two as well as sites of intense land speculation that led to little bogus towns. If they were instances of geometry that taught citizens, then they were also instrumental in the production of vagabonds.

[i] I am grateful to Any Jeffs’s novel Wild for alerting me to these terms.

[ii] Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013); Chris Rumford, “Global Borders: An Introduction to the Special Issue,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28, no. 6 (2010); Rachel Silvey, “Borders, Embodiment, and Mobility: Feminist Migration Studies in Geography,” in The Companion to Feminist Geography, ed. Lise Nelson and Joni Seager (Blackwell, 2005); M. B. Sparke, “A Neoliberal Nexus: Economy, Security and the Biopolitics of Citizenship on the Border,” Political Geography 25, no. 2 (2006); Chris Rumford, “Theorising Borders,” European Journal of Social Theory 9, no. 2 (2006); Emily Gilbert, “Leaky Borders and Solid Citizens: Governing Security, Prosperity and Quality of Life in a North American Partnership,” Antipode 39, no. 1 (2007).

[iii] Étienne Balibar, “Europe as Borderland,” Environment and Planning D-Society & Space 27, no. 2 (2009); Reece Jones, Border Walls: Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India and Israel (Zed Books, 2012).

[iv] Noel Parker and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand? Towards an Agenda for Critical Border Studies,” Geopolitics 14, no. 3 (2009).

[v] Parker and Vaughan-Williams, “Lines in the Sand?,” 583.

[vi] Edward Dorn, “The Sundering U.P. Tracks,” in Way More West: New and Selected Poems, ed. Edward Dorn (Penguin, 2007 [1967]), 88.

One place where the citizen and the vagabond were clearly differentiated according to an emerging politics of mobility was in late fifteenth-century Bern, Switzerland. It was around this time that inhabitants noticed bedraggled strangers arriving from elsewhere, begging for alms. The population of the city at the time was something under five thousand people—not a small village, but certainly small enough to be a knowable community. These new people were not known. They were wandering strangers carrying with them the scent of other places. Something needed to be done. In a fine-tuned evocation of the politics of mobile identities, the Bern Council of 1481 decided to expel all poor people who were not citizens of Bern (excluding religious pilgrims, who were asked to move on more politely). A later edict of 1483 reiterated the wish to be freed of the wandering poor, this time picking out those wandering beggars who spoke French for particular loathing. This was repeated in 1503, 1510, and 1515. As well as wayfaring paupers, Gypsies, pilgrims, and an assortment of other travelers were asked to leave—and to never return.^[i] Clearly the Council of Bern was upset for over thirty years. They were upset by a group of people who are both poor and mobile. There had, of course, always been poor people in Bern and elsewhere. The problem was that these new wayfaring vagrants were not locatable. They produced anxiety because they were not legible within the clear hierarchies and geographies of medieval Europe. This was a world in which everyone had their place both geographically and socially. The poor were tied to the soil both through backbreaking labor and through law. They belonged to places, and it was the responsibility of those places to look after them. The Council of Bern, then, was responding to the mobility of the wandering poor. These were people without place (sans lieu) and “masterless men.”^[ii]

All the edicts from 1483 to 1515 in Bern demanded the expulsion of the wandering poor. But as the number of these wanderers increased it became increasingly difficult to tell who they were. They also had to be differentiated from (sometimes) legitimate wanderers such as pilgrims and merchants. In a small town, where everyone is known, this is not difficult, but as more and more wanderers turn up, this becomes complicated. By 1527 the Council of Bern required all the deserving poor (that is, the poor who belonged to Bern) to wear badges identifying them as worthy of alms. The authorities kept lists of all those entitled to wear these badges. Forms of identification became a key tool in distinguishing between two kinds of people, two figures. One who belonged and deserved charity, and one who did not belong and could be moved on. These events are outlined by the historian Valentin Groebner in his book Who Are You?,where he charts how the very notion of identity in a modern sense was invented in fifteenth-century Bern, where the supposed threat of the new mobile people led to the poor being issued identity documents to prove they were worthy of alms.^[iii] By the middle of the sixteenth century, similar ordinances could be found across Europe. From 1530, for instance, all those practicing beggars in England were supposed to carry a byllet (ticket) when begging for alms.^[iv] In 1662, the English parliament passed the Poor Relief Act (also tellingly known as the Settlement and Removal Act). This set the stage for how the wandering poor were to be treated over the next 170 years. The Act set a number of tests to establish legal senses of belonging to particular parishes. Among the tests were place of birth, settled residence for over forty days, being hired for over a year and a day, or paying rent of taxes of over £10 per year. If someone could prove belonging, then they could claim poor relief from that parish. People who qualified for belonging were given settlement certificates. The logic for the act, and the separation of those who belonged and those who did not, is clearly laid out in the Act’s preamble:

Whereas by reason of some Defects in the Law, poor People are not restrained from going from one Parish to another, and therefore do endeavour to settle themselves in those Parishes where there is the best Stock, the largest Commons or Wastes to build Cottages, and the most Woods for them to burn and destroy; and when they have consumed it, then to another Parish, and at last become Rogues and Vagabonds, to the great Discouragement of Parishes to provide Stocks, where it is liable to be devoured by Strangers.^[v]

Across medieval Europe, authorities responded to the presence of the wandering poor by differentiating the worthy (because local) poor from their wayfaring (and thus unworthy) counterparts by issuing forms of identification to those who are legitimate and refusing such identification to those who were not. Such a strategy also required forms of regulation in the form of people who could check identification and then punish or expel those who were too mobile. Punishment could be harsh, ranging from expulsion to branding and whipping. In 1571 those who were unfortunate enough to be caught in Bern after having been expelled were branded on the forehead with an iron cross.

In these early appearances of the vagabond, we can trace how this mobile subject was brought into being as a nightmare figure for a settled society—“the advanced troops or guerrilla units of post traditional chaos,” as Bauman has called them.^[vi] The very word vagabond, and the associated word vagrant, both come from the Latin vagari, which means “wander.”^[vii] Vagari is also the root of the word “vague” that arose in English in the sixteenth century as a word used to mean “uncertain” or “unclear.” The vagabond thus connects the idea of wandering to the idea of uncertainty. Certain things are things in their proper place. The lack of certainty associated with these new wanderers led to the creation of vagrancy laws that would travel across the Western world over the following centuries. We can see how particular kinds of mobile subjects were given identities through papers, badges, and other forms of identification that became necessary to the process of labeling. We can see how practices and technologies of surveillance were brought into being to keep the new enemy in view. We can see how the process of identification took the form of primitive biometrics via branding. All of these are reflected in aspects of life today—they continue to identify and bring into being suspicious, mobile subjects—dangerous travelers—alternative mobilities. The vagabond is there in the increasing number of antihomelessness laws that are proliferating in the twenty-first century.^[viii] They are there in the biometric passport, and in the iris scanner and fingerprint reader. The vagabond continues to haunt the nightmares of the modern state as the threatening traveler—the unworthy wanderer practicing unwanted ingress.

In reactions to the newly mobile poor such as that in Bern, we see how new relations of mobility were being formed. Certain kinds of mobility were being framed both in relation to other forms of mobility and in relation to investments in place-boundedness. In Bern, if you had the right document, you possessed a form of identification that suggested you were worthy of alms and were allowed to beg. If you had no papers, then you did not. Groebner argued that the act of begging was central to the creation of what we now know as modern identity papers. Mobility was central here as it was only the mobile strangers arriving in ever-larger numbers as the systems of feudalism broke down that provoked the need to be certain who someone was. The emergence of a class of wandering poor went hand in hand with the emergence of the merchant as a figure at the heart of new forms of trade over long distances. The mercantile class depended on new forms of legitimate mobility and circulation. Our notions of belonging and citizenship changed as the scale of authority over correct and incorrect mobility moved from the city to the new nation-state. A key part of this was the establishment of identities in the literal sense of your ID—the papers that prove that you are you. Importantly this was not purely about individual identity but rather group membership. If you had the right papers, you belonged and could move freely—you inhabited the figure of the citizen. If you did not, your mobilities were immediately suspect and you inhabited the figure of the vagabond. You could be moved on or punished. This was one place where the identity of the citizen was being created through its differentiation from another mobile identity—that of the vagabond, or vagrant. This act of sorting the citizen from the vagabond based on geographical imaginations of place and mobility provides a starting point for an account of these two figures. In the rest of this chapter, I consider first, the citizen, and second, the vagabond.

***

About four hundred years after the edicts of Bern, two Black men, Jimmy Lee Smith and Milton Henry, were waiting for a car a friend had promised to lend them, one cold weekday morning on a street in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. They needed the car to apply for much-needed employment in a produce company. Smith worked off and on in the produce industry and also helped to organize a local Black political group. Henry was an eighteen-year-old high school student. On that morning Smith had no jacket, so they went briefly into a dry-cleaning shop in the hope of staying warm. They were soon asked to leave. Still fighting the cold, they walked up and down the street looking for their friend. Seeing Smith and Henry pass by their store several times, the store owners became wary of the two companions and called the police. Two police officers searched the men and found neither had a weapon. Nevertheless, they were arrested due to lack of identification on the two men and distrust concerning their story. They were arrested on a charge of vagrancy according to the Jacksonville ordinance code 26-57, which read:

Rogues and vagabonds, or dissolute persons who go about begging, common gamblers, persons who use juggling or unlawful games or plays, common drunkards, common night walkers, thieves, pilferers or pickpockets, traders in stolen property, lewd, wanton and lascivious persons, keepers of gambling places, common railers and brawlers, [405 US 156, 157] persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object, habitual loafers, disorderly persons, persons neglecting all lawful business and habitually spending their time by frequenting houses of ill fame, gaming houses, or places where alcoholic beverages are sold or served, persons able to work per but habitually living upon the earnings of their wives or minor children shall be deemed vagrants and, upon conviction in the Municipal Court shall be punished as provided for class D offenses.^[ix]

The case of Smith and Harris came before the US Supreme Court on December 8, 1971. They were named in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville^[x] as two of eight defendants who had been convicted in a Florida Municipal Court of violating the vagrancy ordinance. The conviction had been affirmed on appeal by a Florida Circuit Court. Their codefendants had been convicted on charges of vagrancy as well as “being a common thief,” “loitering,” and “prowling by auto.”^[xi] The Supreme Court overthrew the convictions on the grounds that the ordinance was too vague and encouraged arbitrary arrests at the hands of an unfettered police force. Their decision was informed by a working knowledge of the history of vagrancy law that had been imported wholesale from medieval England:

The history is an often-told tale. The breakup of feudal estates in England led to labor shortages which in turn resulted in the Statutes of Laborers, designed to stabilize the labor force by prohibiting increases in wages and prohibiting the movement of workers from their home areas in search of improved conditions. Later vagrancy laws became criminal aspects of the poor laws. The series of laws passed in England on the subject became increasingly severe. . . . The conditions which spawned these laws may be gone, but the archaic classifications remain.^[xii]

In fact, vagrancy laws had been used in the United States for over 150 years. Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville had become a well-known case because it pointed out the absurdity and archaic nature of such laws that effectively allowed police to decide what kinds of activities would fit the idea of “vagrant.” Vagrancy was a crime of identity rather than identification of a particular action. Vagrancy laws, from the sixteenth century on, “aimed to control “undesirable” groups who threaten to destabilize local communities. Historically, these statutes have ensured that society’s most disadvantaged groups are kept within limits defined by and acceptable to majority groups.”^[xiii]

Perhaps the most notorious use of vagrancy laws imported from Elizabethan England to the United States was their use to reenslave Black people in the years following the abolition of slavery. The so-called Black Codes or Black Laws were used across the South during the Jim Crow era, following the introduction of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, to arrest people wandering around without visible means of support and unable to give a good account of themselves. In most instances this meant recently freed Black people.^[xiv] The Black Codes included versions of vagrancy laws that had been in force since the origin of the North American colonies. They were simply reconfigured for the Jim Crow era, where White supremacy felt threatened by newly free and newly mobile Black people. Notably, the punishment associated with the Black Codes were essentially slavery. In Kentucky, Black vagabonds could be bound to the highest bidder for a year’s service. Seven other states instituted similar processes for “convict leasing” or, as Douglas Blackmon called it, “slavery by another name.”^[xv] Between 1893 and 1909 every Southern state except Tennessee introduced new versions of vagrancy laws in ways that specifically targeted Black people.^[xvi] Vagabondage was very much part of racial capitalism as White bosses sought to ensure the availability of cheap or free Black labor across the South.

The Supreme Court decision in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville in 1972 appeared to signal an end to the racist use of vagrancy laws. In the years following 1972, however, most states and Canada abolished vagrancy laws and replaced them with new codes specifying particular kinds of behavior most often associated with the homeless. The Safe Streets Acts of Ontario and British Columbia passed in 1999, for instance, criminalized “aggressive” soliciting and the unsafe disposal of needles and condoms.^[xvii] In effect they reintroduced vagrancy laws through the back door. “Loitering” became a new kind of racialized crime. The Anti-Racism Daily reports how in California, an act was passed in forbidding “loitering with the intent to commit prostitution,” which effectively targeted Black and trans women due to modes of dress or their use of public street space. The article continues: “Three white men murdered Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia in 2020. They were suspicious that Arbery was jogging through their neighborhood: that is, ‘strolling about in idleness,’ or loitering. Philadelphia police arrested 15,552 young people for curfew or loitering violations over just three years. 85% of those arrested were Black youth, though just 42% of Philadelphians are Black. From coast to coast, look into the enforcement of bans on loitering and racism appears.”^[xviii] Back in California, descendants of the vagrancy laws and Black Codes were also being used to address gang violence by effectively making membership in gangs a crime in the absence of criminal acts that were already on the books. Among the activities these civic ordinances outlawed was the right for people identified as gang members to socialize in public. People identified as gang members almost always meant Black or Brown people. As Gary Stewart has argued, “Anti-gang injunctions share with postbellum vagrancy ordinances a repressive effect that stamps minority communities with badges of inferiority”^[xix] and “Although not framed in the explicitly racial terms of the postbellum Black Codes, anti-gang civil injunctions share with those earlier laws the effect of stigmatizing minority communities and maintaining white hegemony.”^[xx]

Similar uses of vagrancy statutes occurred in the West Indies, as Demetrius Eudell has shown regarding the laws surrounding the end of slavery that made departure from the estates on which they had been slaves on prohibitively difficult.^[xxi] Lisa Lowe has shown how vagrancy laws were used in Hong Kong in the mid-nineteenth century by colonial governments to prosecute the dislocated peasants from China who were labeled as outcast transients. “Vagrancy” she writes, “was an available category through which the colonial state could manage the Chinese population by disciplining and dividing “good” workers from “bad” vagrant.”^[xxii] As with the edicts of Bern, the twenty or so ordinances passed by the second Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Francis Davis, used techniques of governance including registration lists and passes to control the mobility of the vagabonds—in this case, Chinese people—both within Hong Kong and across its borders. The Chinese, for instance, “were required to carry a registration card at all times and faced imprisonment or deportation if not registered.”^[xxiii] Lowe shows how the ordinances were used to “legislate Chinese colonial difference”^[xxiv] and did this largely through the governance of mobilities.

In all these cases, and particularly in the attempt to define Smith and Harris as vagrants, the process of definition is conceptually and practically linked to the status of the mobile figure of the citizen. While vagabonds are those who move about and are unable to give a satisfactory account of themselves, citizens are those who are lawfully entitled to move, both within the space they are citizens of and across borders according to international law. Moving freely, or being stopped, are the attributes of citizens and vagabonds, respectively. They exist in relation to each other. In so far as literal citizens are not able to move freely either within the space they are citizens of or across its borders into other spaces, then they are experientially and politically something less than citizens. The experience of Smith and Harris, and the experience of countless other Black and Brown people, reveal how citizenship as a legal identity and citizenship as lived are often at odds. In addition to racialized others, homeless people, gypsies and travelers, LGBTQ+ people, disabled people, and many others are frequently treated in ways that make citizenship a dubious notion.

[i] Valentin Groebner, Who Are You?: Identification, Deception, and Surveillance in Early Modern Europe (Zone Books, 2007).

[ii] A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (Methuen, 1985).

[iii] Groebner, Who Are You?

[iv] Frank Aydelotte, Elizabethan Rogues and Vagabonds (Clarendon, 1913); Groebner, Who Are You?

[v] Full text of act available at https://www.workhouses.org.uk/poorlaws/1662act.shtml (accessed February 19, 2024)

[vi] Zygmunt Bauman, Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality (Blackwell, 1995), 94.

[vii] “Vagabond” and “vagrant” are used interchangeably throughout this text.

[viii] Don Mitchell, “The Annihilation of Space by Law: The Roots and Implications of Anti-Homeless Laws in the United States,” Antipode29, no. 3 (1997).

[ix] Jacksonville Ordinance Code 26–57 cited in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville 405 US ( 1972 ) ( 156–7 )

[x] Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 US 156 (1972)

[xi] “Prowling by auto” is not listed in Jacksonville’s vagrancy statute, but the Florida District Court of Appeal had construed this as a variant of “wandering or strolling from place to place” in a previous case.

[xii] Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 US 156 (1972 ) (161–2).

[xiii] Gary Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows: The Legacy of Racial Hegemony in Anti-Gang Civil Injunctions,” The Yale Law Journal 107, no. 7 (1998): 2249.

[xiv] Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (Anchor Books, 2009); Joseph A. Ranney, In the Wake of Slavery: Civil War, Civil Rights, and the Reconstruction of Southern Law (Praeger, 2006).

[xv] Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name.

[xvi] Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows.”

[xvii] Catherine T. Chesnay, Céline Bellot, and Marie-Ève Sylvestre, “Taming Disorderly People One Ticket at a Time: The Penalization of Homelessness in Ontario and British Columbia,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 55, no. 2 (2013); Nicholas Blomley, “How to Turn a Beggar into a Bus Stop: Law, Traffic and the ‘Function of the Place’,” Urban Studies 44, no. 9 (2007); Kristin O’Brassill-Kulfan, Vagrants and Vagabonds: Poverty and Mobility in the Early American Republic (New York University Press, 2019).

[xviii] Andrew Lee, “The Jim Crow Roots of Loitering Laws,” Anti-Racism Daily (May 31, 2022). https://web.archive.org/web/20240112173353/https://the-ard.com/2022/05/31/the-jim-crow-roots-of-loitering-laws/.

[xix] Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows,” 2251.

[xx] Stewart, “Black Codes and Broken Windows,” 2278.

[xxi] Demetrius Lynn Eudell, The Political Languages of Emancipation in the British Caribbean and the U.S. South (University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

[xxii] Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), 121.

[xxiii] Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 124.

[xxiv] Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 124.

On 23^rd March 2020, I watched with millions of others as Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced to the nation that we would enter a period of “lockdown” in response to the rapid spread of a novel coronavirus SARS- CoV-2that was causing the disease newly named COVID-19. We were told to stay at home. Workplaces, schools, and all shops deemed “non-essential” would be closed.People were allowed to leave home for food shopping and for medical reasons as well as for brief walks close totheir homes for the purpose of exercise. With some variations over time, this lockdown would stay in place until 4^thJuly. A second lockdown was announced on 5^th November as the hospitals began to fill up with COVID-19 cases and it was feared the National Health Service (NHS) would be overwhelmed. Before March 2020 I, along with many citizens of the UK, had watched as similar lockdowns had been introduced first in Wuhan, China, and then throughout the world. Lockdowns would continue to be introduced around the world throughout 2020 and 2021.

For a brief period, following Johnson’s announcement, a different world emerged - one that had lain dormant beneath the bustle of everyday life. Photographs and drone videos appeared on social media feeds showing streets that were once choked with traffic suddenly empty and silent. Stories emerged of wildlife, once banished, appearing in unlikely places. A wild herd of 122 Kashmiri goats took over the town square in Llandudno, Wales, wild boar took to the streets of Haifa, Israel, and just around the corner from our house in Edinburgh, a deer was photographed strolling down the main road outside the branch of Nero’s coffee shop. The most regular form of urban mobility, thejourney to work and back, ceased to exist for many of us who became used to working from home. The hour we were allowed for a walk became a precious part of the day and the significance of “going for a walk” was amplified. During these walks, new codes and gestures emerged thanks to the newly learned practice of “social distancing”. People began to engage in polite little swerves accompanied by a knowing nod of the head to acknowledge botheach other and the weirdness of it all. Condensation trails disappeared from the sky as flights were dramatically cut.Global passenger number decreased by 60%, a city of 2.5 million no longer in the air.

People began to remark on the possibility of a “new normal” as some aspects of the lockdown, in a generally well-to-do place like Edinburgh, seemed appealing. The local city council took the opportunity to reimagine what streets might look like if more space was given over to pedestrians and cyclists. The “Spaces for People” initiativesaw sidewalks widened, areas of road marked off with bollards and cones, and whole streets given over to pedestrians. Bus lanes that had previously been designated for rush hour only, became all day bus lanes. Elsewhere in Europe, street spaces were re-engineered to take account of the “new normal”. In Milan, for instance,22 miles of street space was reallocated from cars of pedestrians and cyclists. The plan was not simply to recognize the realities of mobility patterns under lockdown but to change mobilities permanently in what has traditionally been a congested city with high levels of air pollution. The Deputy Mayor of Milan, Marco Granelli, said that “[w]e worked for years to reduce car use. If everybody drives a car, there is no space for people, there is no space to move, there is no space for commercial activities outside the shops. Of course, we want to reopen the economy, but we think we should do it on a different basis from before. We think we have to reimagine Milan in the new situation. We have to get ready; that’s why it’s so important to defend even a part of the economy, to support bars, artisans and restaurants. When it is over, the cities that still have this kind of economy will have an advantage, and Milan wants to be in that category.”¹Back in the UK, the government decided that people without homes should be provided with shelter, paid for by the government. The unhoused were taken off the streets and taken to hotels that no longer had any tourists to service. One of the most remarkable of many remarkable visualizations that appeared in the media in the early days of the pandemic was a map from NASA showing the incredible lowering of air pollution over the Wuhan area since the onset of the stringent lockdown there.² The shrinking red blob represented a 63% reduction in Nitrogen Oxide concentrations which, itself, may have prevented over 10,000 premature deaths across China by April 2020.³

The strange “new normal” revealed what it was possible to accomplish when the global community was faced with a crisis. Roads could be reclaimed for people, air travel could be slashed, pollution and its attendant healthproblems could be eradicated seemingly overnight, and the unhoused could be provided with shelter. It led some of us to wonder why other crises had not been tackled with such urgency. There was, as Mimi Sheller has shown, a climate crisis, an urbanization crisis, and a refugee crisis – all entangled and implicated in each other.⁴ Each was likely to kill far more people than the COVID crisis. And yet governments had not reacted with anywhere near theurgency to any of these. Perhaps the COVID crisis would show exactly what governments were capable of?

Alongside the strangely utopian moments of the pandemic other, uglier, aspects started to become clear. Those of us who could work from home were serviced by a workforce, often in the gig economy and precariouslyemployed on zero-hour contracts, who could not stay at home. For me, and people like me, to be comfortably immobilized, an army of workers had to be franticly on the move. Demographically, the people servicing my stay-at-home existence were quite different. Many were people of color. This was also true of the health care and social care workers who worked in the most dangerous environments. At the same time, stories emerged of the super wealthy getting in their private jets and heading for island homes or escape bunkers in order to bypass both the virus and the lockdown rules. The reason unhoused people were suddenly provided places to stay was not for their own benefit, but to stop the spread of the disease to those of us who had homes. They had become a public health risk. Elsewhere in the world the efficacy of lockdowns was even more questionable. In India, a lockdown was imposed overnight on population of over a billion. There was no way to “socially distance” on the outskirts of massive cities. Hundreds of thousands of migrant and casual workers were asked to return home when home was hundreds of miles away and there was no transport. In any case, more people were dying from tuberculosis and other persistent diseases of poverty. Refugees in camps on the Greek isle of Lesbos remained crowded into camps with only a few standpipes as sources of water. In the United States, Trump’s administration layered a fear of COVID on to a generalized fear of immigrants to further clamp down at the US – Mexico border as well as to feed Sinophobia through references to the “China” or “Wuhan” virus.

In the fall semester of 2020 I was teaching my Geographies of Mobility course. It quickly became evident to the students that almost everything we were discussing in the course was being illustrated in real time across the world in COVID related ways. The course, like many others, became a COVID course in more ways than one. The pandemic was one massive “teachable moment”. At local, national, and global levels, while lockdowns made clear the possibility of other, better, worlds, they also revealed the persistence of the importance of mobility to the production and maintenance of social hierarchies. They underlined the central theme of this book - the importance of the politics of mobility to our understanding of processes of power.

_________________________________________________________________________

1 Laura Laker, “Milan announced ambitious scheme to reduce car use after lockdown,” The Guardian (Manchester), 21 April 2020,https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/21/milan- seeks-to-prevent-post-crisis-return-of-traffic-pollution.

2 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-51691967 (accessed 1 June, 2023).

3 Matthew A Cole, Robert J R Elliot, and Bowen Liu, The impact of the Wuhan Covid-19 lockdown on air pollution and health: a machinelearning and augmented synthetic control approach, University of Birmingham Department of Economics (2020).

4 Mimi Sheller, Mobility justice: the politics of movement in the age of extremes (London: Verso, 2018).

***

The Dominican Friar and teacher of Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, was a scholar of place. Informed by Aristotle and the Arabic texts of Avicenna and Averroes, he wrote De Natura Loci (The Nature of Place) around 1850. Albertus was also fascinated by rocks. He wrote a whole book on them called The Book of Minerals (De Mineralibus). In it he wrote that

“the specific form of individual stones is mortal, just like humans (mortalia sicut et homines); and if [stones] are kept for a long time away from the place where they are produced [extra loca generationis], they perish” (2.1.4)

In this reflection on the “death” of stones he suggests that stones flourish when they are in the right place and, essentially, die when they are moved.

***

A while ago I was fortunate enough to visit the archipelago of Svalbard as part of Alex Hartley’s Nowhereisland project. As the project involved digging up soil and rocks from an island recently revealed by retreating ice and then shipping it back to the UK to make a scale model of the island, we were led to reflect on moving rocks. The land that makes up Svalbard, which is now a little over 1000km south of the North Pole, was once (about 800 million years ago) very close to the South Pole. On its journeys, it crossed the equator (about 400 million years ago). If you visit Svalbard, and are inclined to look, you can see red rocks that look as though they belong in Arizona or Alice Springs. This is red Devonian sandstone and was formed when Svalbard was approximately where Morocco is now.

***

Thanks to the more recent travels of us humans, rocks have come and gone from this place on the edge of the world over the last 400 or so years. They have been used in the ballast of ships. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Ernest Mansfield, an eccentric English capitalist mined marble from a quarry at Ny London (New London) believing it would make him rich(er). The marble from Svalbard, he surmised, might compete with the marble from Italian quarries and furnish the kitchens do Mayfair mansions. The marble, cracked and shattered by freeze and thaw, fell apart on its voyage home to England and had to be thrown into the sea. Coal is still extracted to fire the industries of Russia and Scandinavia. Dotted around present-day Svalbard there are bits and pieces of bricks from the Netherlands (yellow) and England (red) left by explorers and adventurers.

***

In the natural world a rock out of place is referred to as an “erratic” – it is usually possible to trace its origins and account for its travels in the ice of a glacier or in the water of a stream or river. The cracked marbles of Ernest Mansfield and the yellow and red bricks left by explorers on the islands of Svalbard are also erratics, carried by us. Anthropocene erratics.

***

Poets like erratics. The poet Alyson Hallett, for instance, was “bewitched” when she learned of glacial erratics on the slopes of Cader Idris in Wales.

I felt as if a door had opened onto a different way of seeing the world. Instead of being eternally fixed in place, stones were suddenly fellow travellers and movement was an essential part of their natures. I thought not only of erratics but also of the stones we place on graves, the pebbles that we bring home after a day at the beach. Was it possible, I wondered, for that pebble to want to be picked up and taken away as much as I wanted to pick it up and take it with me?^[1]

Part of Hallett’s poetic practice has been to collect stones, engrave then with the words, “and stones moved silently across the world” and move then to sites around the world including near Bristol, at a retreat centre in Massachusetts, in Wollongong, Australia, and on the isle of Iona in Scotland.

***

The word “erratic” is etymologically derived from the 14^th century Middle English word erratik which is, in turn, derived from the Latin errāticus which means “wandering”, “roving” or “straying”. Errare, meanwhile, means “error” – to make a mistake, which is also “to wander”. Thus, the physical act of wandering – particularly aimless wandering – was essentially to make a mistake. The original “error” was an unpredictable movement that would lead you, or a rock, to be “out of place”. It was not until 1849 that the word “erratic” was used to describe geologically transported boulders.

***

Albertus Magnus’ treatise on place was an early form of environmental determinism. In it, he classified different human groups according to the climates they inhabited. This was a foreshadowing of the logic that would eventually lead to the invention of “races” which went hand in hand with European colonial projects. People, like rocks, had their “proper place”. Outside of these places, following this logic, they became “erratics” – vagrant wanderers – errors.

^[1] https://www.thestonelibrary.com/the_stone_library.html

Why we keep confusing “mobility”

Often, when I announce myself as a scholar of mobility in a gathering of social scientists, my companions will assume that I mean I am interested in how people move up and down a socio-economic hierarchy – how they become richer or poorer, or more or less successful. While I am referring to geographical or spatial mobility, they are interpreting it as social mobility. This is not that surprising as the two ideas have long been connected both in the pages of social scientific treatises and in the popular imagination. Indeed, clues to the conceptual connection between the two can be found in the etymology of the word “mobility” in the English language. The word has roots in the archaic mobile, an abbreviated form of the Latin mobile vulgus – the disorderly and excitable crowd – what we now call the “mob”. It was opposed to the nobility. The Old French term, mobilité, referred to a state of changeability, or restlessness or fickleness. By the 15^th Century, mobility was being used in English to denote the capacity for motion in a geographical sense. It was only in later centuries that some of the meaning of mobility was transplanted back into a social sense to refer to the ability to change a social or economic situation. In its original meaning of the “mob”, however, it was always coded in social ways.

Frontier Dreams.

It was not until the early 20^th Century that “social mobility” became a reasonably well-known concept in academic circles, and it had varied connections to the longer standing notion of mobility in space. In 1906, for instance, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in a summary of his frontier thesis in the American Historical Review wrote that:

The ideal of the West was its emphasis upon the worth and possibilities of the common man, its belief in the right of every man to rise to the full measure of his own nature, under conditions of social mobility. Western democracy was no theorist’s dream. It came. stark and strong and full of life, from the American forest.^[1]

Turner’s thesis was that Europeans arrived in the American colonies and moved west across the Appalachians and then the Mississippi, and in doing so, stopped being Europeans and became Americans. They needed to move west to free themselves of the shackles of Europe which was portrayed as ossified and socially immobile. Once the settler colonies were established on the East coast, then these too became signifiers of suffocating hierarchies that necessitated further movement west by the pioneers who escaped their social shackles and became properly American. Geographical mobility was linked to what Turner called “the right of every man to rise to the full measure of his own nature” – in other words, social mobility.

The Invention of Social Mobility

While Frederick Jackson Turner used the term “social mobility” as early as 1906 it was not until 1927 that the term was officially entered into the lexicon of social science by the Russian-born American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin.Sorokin used the term social mobility to refer to the “shifting of individuals within social space”^[2] but, unlike Turner, he was very careful to analytically differentiate movement in social space from what he called geometrical space, arguing that people very close to each other could be socially miles apart and vice versa.

The concept of social mobility followed, for Sorokin, from the concepts of social location and social distance. All of these are metaphors that have their roots in conceptions of absolute space and lead, almost by necessity, to the possibility of social mobility – the ability to move in social space across social distance from one social location to another. Despite Sorokin’s careful insistence that he was not talking about geometrical space, his concepts were, nevertheless, spatial in nature. Social mobility, Sorokin argued, could refer to transitions between social groups horizontally (such as moving from a Methodist church to a Baptist church) and, more importantly, vertically in a hierarchy, by becoming more affluent, or more educated.

Chicago Rings – Moving Out and Moving Up

Sorokin did not have Turner in mind when he sought to separate social mobility from geometrical mobility, rather it was the emerging work of the Chicago School of Sociology where Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and others had been developing what they called an ecological approach to urban life that firmly linked movement in social space to movement in geographical or geometrical space. Their work is most famously represented by the concentric ring model of the city, based on their explorations of Chicago.

The concentric rings are a spatial representation of the outcome of a series of spatial processes that Park and colleagues referred to, following the science of ecology, as succession. Immigrants would arrive in the central zone in transitionand as they became more successful, and more integrated, they would move out to the suburbs. As they moved up in the social world they moved out in the spatial one. The link could hardly have been made clearer. Park wrote, in his essay The Concept of Position in Sociology that “The point is that change of occupation, personal success or failure—changes of economic and social status, in short—tend to be registered in changes of location”, unlike in the work of Sorokin, social and spatial mobility were joined at the hip.

In the work of Park in particular, mobility as both social and spatial was remarkably thoroughly theorised well before anyone formulated a new mobility paradigm. “Mobility” Park argued, “measures social change and social disorganization, because social change almost always involves some incidental change of position in space, and all social change, even that which we describe as progress, involves some social disorganization”.^[3] The idea that upward social mobility in the city could be equated to outward geographical mobility towards the suburbs of the commuter zone rapidly became the formular of moving up and moving out. But geographical mobility was given meanings other than success in the urban ecology framework. Park’s colleague, Ernest Burgess, argued that areas of the city marked by constant mobility were where you would find “juvenile delinquency, boy’s gangs, crime, poverty, wife desertion, divorce, abandoned infants, vice”.^[4] Spatial mobility has been associated with marginality and disorganization as much as it has with success and aspiration. It is an activity of the vagabonds as much as it is of the citizens.

Sorokin, writing just two years after Park and Burgess, pitted his conceptualization of social mobility against their ecological approach. Sorokin criticized the Chicago approach as being of limited value as if failed to account for all kinds of social change that could not easily be mapped on to geographical change.

In a diagram of forms of social mobility, “territorial mobility” is listed as one amongst many forms of “horizontal” social mobility – equivalent to changing political party or occupation without any noticeable change in the social hierarchy. It is notably disconnected from either ascending or descending vertical social mobility.

The clearest, and most prevalent, way to account for connections between spatial and social mobility is to map one on to the other as both Turner and the Chicago sociologists have done from their very different perspectives. “Moving out” is seen as evidence of “moving up” whether in the city or across a colonized continent. While Sorokin’s conceptualization of social mobility deliberately split the spatial from the social, the logic that connects then became most clearly seen in classic theorisations of migration to which I now turn.

Push, Pull, and the Black Box of Movement.

The dominant way of thinking about migration is either explicitly or implicitly through the logic of push and pull factors which see migrants as actors seeking to maximise outcomes, most often stated in terms of economic success. This approach to migration has its origins in the work of E.G. Ravenstein’s “laws of migration” developed in two papers in 1885 and 1889 – several decades before social mobility entered scholarly discourse. Ravenstein was drawing on a report by the registrar-general on Britain’s 1871 census who noted how improved transport and communication has led to the movement of labourers from “spots where they were not wanted to fields where their labour is in demand”.^[5]

Ravenstein’s laws of migration focused on the observation that the primary cause of migration was the need for labour in larger urban centres. People in rural areas would move to the nearby market towns and gradually, through a kind of cascade of migration currents, feel the attraction of larger and more distant centres of opportunity. Thus, a larger flow of rural to urban migration would emerge as people sought to improve their circumstances. Law number seven stated: “Bad or oppressive laws, heavy taxation, an unattractive climate, uncongenial social surroundings, and even compulsion (slave trade, transportation), all have produced and are still producing currents of migration, but none of these currents can compare in volume with that which arises from the desire inherent in most men to ‘better’ themselves in material respects”.^[6] The connection between moving in space and seeking a better life could not be more clear.

It was not until 1966 that Everett Lee used Ravenstein’s work to formally develop a Push and Pull Theory of migration . Lee’s theory of migration focused on four drivers or obstacles to migration – the origin point (push factors), the destination (pull factors), obstacles along the way (primarily distance), and the personalities of those considering a move. The first three are represented in a diagram.

He was careful to note that the +ve and -ve signs in the origin point and destination were not necessarily actual factors but, rather, perceptions of costs and benefits that a migrant might factor into a decision to move of stay. What is notable about this classic formulation is that pays almost no attention to the practice of moving itself. It is effectively “black boxed”. There are, however, other ways of more directly linking the practice of mobility to positions in a kinetic hierarchy.

Kinetic Hierarchies – Status in Motion

While the Chicago School of Sociology equated moving out from the inner city to the suburbs as simultaneously moving up the social order, scholars of international migration have stereotypically seen the causes of migration as connected to the search for a better life. Both formulations focus more on the places left and arrived at than on the act of moving itself. Mobility itself (how, when, how often, how fast etc.) is also a social differentiator, creating “kinetic hierarchies”. How people move is as important as where they leave and where they arrive. Clues to this are to be found in earlier work. In Everett Lee’s foundational theory of migration, for instance, he notes how people who have migrated once are likely to migrate again, how there is a general sense of more developed countries, and regions, being more mobile and less stagnant than less developed ones, and how professional and managerial classes of employee are likely to be highly mobile in ways that are connected to their career advancement. Recent work on mobilities has made the connection between the act of moving and social position explicit and in ways that are not tied to older theorisations of social mobility. While classic push-pull migration theory focused on points of departure, points of arrival, obstacles to moving, and the influence of personality, mobility theory focusses more intently on the actual act of moving. Thomas Birtchnell and Javier Caletrio, for instance, describe what they call “elite mobilities” that “inform cultures of luxury, success and ‘the good life’ and enforce a self-stylization of global elitism founded on hypermobility, meritocracy and entrepreneurial heroism”.^[7] This is the world of first-class tickets, superyachts, private jets, fast lanes in airports, and other accouterments of “high net-worth individuals”. In many ways it is modes and experiences of mobility that define what it is to be elite, and elite mobilities become the organizing principle that defines mobilities for everyone else.

Infrastructures are designed first with the agendas of the few in view before the social considerations of the rest are addressed. The few set a certain tempo to the movement of the many through space and to their bodily conduct; elite mobilities are instrumental in the setting of speed limits, the location of airports, the provision of urban toll-roads, the comportment and apparel of travel and so on. ^[8]

To be socially mobile is not so much to move from one place to another but to move in different ways – to inhabit a different mobile world. And this mobile world is the one that sets the terms for others, in the middle or at the bottom of kinetic hierarchies.

Locals and Cosmopolitans

One of the most significant binaries that has emerged in the current political landscape is that between locals and cosmopolitans, or globalists. The cosmopolitan globalist has become the bogeyman of the new authoritarian right in ways that echo the cultural norms of fascism. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Jews, gypsy-travellers, and gay people were associated with both the city and, metaphorically, the desert – all spaces associated with shallow horizontality and a lack of roots. Aryans, on the other hand, were rooted in the deep fertile soils of the Black Forest. The binary of local ruralism and placeless urbanity is being played out again in contemporary US politics where “globalists” are frequently invoked as the metropolitan and cosmopolitan enemy within.

It is certainly the case that a social elite has been constructed around spatial mobility. It is exactly this move from a relatively local and relatively rural world to a more globally connected urban one that has been at the centre of theorisations of migration since the early work of Ravenstein. In a recent reflection on the opening up of free mobility in the European Union, Adrian Favell and Ettore Recchi reflected on the role of people they call “Eurostars” or “pioneers” in the process of affirming a European project centered on mobility. Talented, ambitious people, they argue, have long been associated with high rates of spatial mobility, moving out of “local worlds they live in, or order to move up”. This, they argue, “was a key dynamic of industrialization and the formation of the nation-state in the modern world”.^[9] They describe these acts of spatial mobility as part of an “escalator effect” “like stepping on a moving escalator that sweeps you along and upwards faster than your peers”.^[10] While general rates of both spatial and social mobility might not have increased as markedly as might be expected – these Eurostars, a mobile and cosmopolitan elite, have an influence on the EU project which is far greater than their numbers.

Locals and cosmopolitans have been contrasted in other ways. Literary scholar, Terry Eagleton, once wrote that “the rich have mobility and the poor have locality … the rich are global and the poor are local”^[11]. Sociologist Manuel Castells wrote “elites are cosmopolitan, people are local”.^[12] I presume Eagleton and Castells are well travelled. Even if they only travel as much as I do – they are well travelled. They inhabit the skin of the cosmopolitan elite in some sense. I do this too. When I do it, I encounter (for instance) taxi drivers from Ethiopia and Somalia. When I am in my hotel room I cannot help but notice that the people cleaning the room for me are invariably eastern European or/and from Southeast Asia. They appear to speak multiple languages and have relatives in London. The poor/people seem to be mobile and far more cosmopolitan than us – the kinetic elite. The English-speaking academics and business people who flit around the world rarely speak the number of languages spoken by their supposedly immobile and non-cosmopolitan underlings who drive them places and clean their rooms. They may do more miles but in many ways they travel less. It is the different ways in which they move that need to be attended to.

I presume that Eagleton and Castells rarely find themselves in agreement with Donald Trump but, in this case, their perspectives are shared. It is exactly the “liberal cosmopolitan elite” who have become the enemy of the new right. Citizens of nowhere. This seems to be a long way from the original meaning of mobility as the fickle, restless, “mob”. The mobile vulgus. But there are, of course, connections as the other enemy of the new right are the vagabonds – the migrant – and equally cosmopolitan – poor seeking a better life who have long been the exterior outsiders whose mobility threatens the rooted inside. It is the migrant poor who are given the label “economic migrant” as though that were a term of abuse. Just as mobility is the defining characteristic of elites that Eagleton, Castells and the authoritarian right identify, so it is the geographical reality of Hardt and Negri’s multitude – the new proletariat – the 21^st century mobile vulgus “Whether driven by officially sanctioned motives, such as fleeing war or persecution, or for reasons delegitimated by the authorities, such as simply seeking adventure” they write, “migrants affirm the freedom of mobility, which can serve as the basis for all other freedoms”.^[13] The two enemies of the new right – the cosmopolitan elite “globalists"“, and the economic migrants and refugees do not share much, but they are characterised by their mobility, taking their place along a kinetic hierarchy and threatening, in different ways, those who are invested in sedentarist ways of looking at the world.

Further Reading

Burgess, E. (1925). The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project. In R. Park & E. Burgess (Eds.), The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (pp. 47-62). University of Chicago Press.

Favell, A., & Recchi, E. (2011). Social mobility and spatial mobility. In V. Guiraudon & A. Favell (Eds.), Sociology of the European Union (pp. 50-75). Palgrave.

Lee, E. S. (1966). A Theory of Migration. Demography, 3(1), 47-57. https://doi.org/10.2307/2060063

Sorokin, P. A. (1927). Social mobility. Harper & Brothers.

Turner, F. J. (1906). The Colonization of the West, 1820-1830. The American Historical Review, 11(2), 303-327. https://doi.org/10.2307/1834646

^[1] Turner, F. J. (1906). The Colonization of the West, 1820-1830. The American Historical Review, 11(2), 303-327. https://doi.org/10.2307/1834646

^[2] Sorokin, P. A. (1927). Social mobility. Harper & Brothers.

^[3] Park, R. E. (1926). The Concept of Position in Sociology. Papers and Proceedings of the American Sociological Society, 20, 1-14.

^[4] Burgess, E. (1925). The Growth of the City: An Introduction to a Research Project. In R. Park & E. Burgess (Eds.), The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment (pp. 47-62). University of Chicago Press.

^[5] Ravenstein, E. G. (1885). The Laws of Migration. Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 48(2), 167-235. https://doi.org/10.2307/2979181

^[6] Ravenstein, E. G. (1889). The Laws of Migration. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 52(2), 241-301. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2397-2335.1889.tb00043.x

^[7] Birtchnell, T., & Caletrío, J. (2014). Elite mobilities [text]. Routledge.

^[8] Ibid.

^[9] Favell, A., & Recchi, E. (2011). Social mobility and spatial mobility. In V. Guiraudon & A. Favell (Eds.), Sociology of the European Union(pp. 50-75). Palgrave.

^[10] Ibid.

^[11] Eagleton, T. (2003). After theory. Basic Books.

^[12] Castells, M. (2000). The rise of the network society (2nd ed. ed.). Blackwell.

^[13] Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2019). Empire, Twenty Years On. New Left Review, 120, 67-92.

What is the relationship between place and identity - particularly ethnic identity? This question has been troubling me for some time. My clearest response is that any straightforward relationship between a group defined ethnically - as a coherent body of people with a coherent set of beliefs and practices often referred to as “culture” – and a clearly bounded portion of the Earth’s surface, is deeply problematic. Most obviously, neither the body of people, nor the portion of land, are likely to be coherent or clearly defined. Dividing the population of the world up into groups, either through some recourse of nature (race, phenotypes and the like) or to shared history, is almost always open to question. Such divisions are not arbitrary, rather they are divisions which deliberately serve sets of interests and deny others - almost the opposite of arbitrary. The same can be said of the division of the world into bounded spaces - most obviously nation-states. While some, such as bioregionalists, claim a natural basis for such divisions, they are clearly a matter of artifice. Recent reading and world events have led me to return to this core question of place and identity through three related additional questions: 1) What kinds of relationships can (or should) exist between a human collective and a particular place or landscape? 2) By what criteria do we decide that those relationships are legitimate? And 3) How do power and historical violence shape, distort, or invalidate claims of belonging?

***

My intellectual and political commitment to the separation of place from coherent ethnic identities has long been troubled by the claims of historically oppressed Indigenous peoples to places and landscapes that have been forcibly removed from them. Forceful removal and extermination have led to intergenerational trauma. Even without forceful removal, the process of land degradation can lead to solastalgia – a form of homesickness experienced without leaving home, entangled with profound ecological grief. Recently a paper by Vanessa Watts - a Mohawk and Anishinaabe Bear Clan Indigenous scholar and sociologist based at McMaster University has made me pause for thought. The paper is titled ‘Indigenous place-thought and agency among humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!).’^[1] The paper starts with the story of Sky Woman which is recounted as follows:

“According to Haudenosaunee, Sky Woman fell from a hole in the sky. John Mohawk (2005) writes of her journey towards the waters below. On her descent, Sky Woman fell through the clouds and air towards water below. During her descent, birds could see this falling creature and saw she could not fly. They came to her and helped to lower her slowly to waters beneath her. The birds told Turtle that she must need a place to land, as she possessed no water legs. Turtle rose up, breaking through the surface so that Sky Woman could land on Turtle’s back. Once landed, Sky Woman and Turtle began to go form the earth, the land becoming an extension of their bodies.” (21)

This story is similar to other origin stories in North America among Indigenous and First Nation people. Watts’s challenge to me is her assertion that these are accounts of events that “took place”. “This is not lore, myth, or legend. These histories are not longer versions of “and the moral of the story is…”. This is what happened.” (21). My problem is that I do not believe that “this is what happened”.

Watts describes the kind of thought evident in this account as “place-thought” “the non-distinctive space where place and thought are never separated because they never could be or can be separated. Place-thought is based upon the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and non-humans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts.” (21). As a scholar of place and someone interested in the relationship between place and knowledge, I am fascinated by Watts’s paper. My mind immediately makes links to kinds of non-Indigenous thought (also place-thought but rarely described as such) such as ecology and the more recent turn to the “more-than-human” in geography and beyond – all forms of thought that question the Western insistence on the specialness and separateness of the human. I think of the kinds of origin stories that Watts writes of as kinds of metaphors about how we might understand humans as entangled with other forms of life and, indeed, the non-living. I am drawn to one passage where she writes

“The agency that place possesses can be thought of in a similar way that Western thinkers locate agency in human beings. It follows that if, as Indigenous peoples, we are extensions of the very land we walk upon, then we have an obligation to maintain communication with it. …if we do not care for the land we run the risk of losing who we are as Indigenous peoples.” (23)

Watts writes about the loss of identity and physical displacement enforced through colonialism that redistributes agency away from the Indigenous human place nexus and towards new forms of power emanating from elsewhere. I find this compelling, yet, despite this, I do not believe, like Watts, that “this is what happened”.

If I suspend my disbelief in “this is what happened” for a while, however, new possibilities emerge. I see land as a form of relation among all living and non-living things rather than a resource, I see how agency is distributed and more-than-human, I see how obligations between people and place are reciprocal rather than one-way. Finally I see how thought and theories can never be separated from place. All thought is place-thought.

***

What happens when a similar appeal to the tight connections of people and place comes not from an Indigenous scholar, but from the future Vice-President of the most powerful nation on earth?

At the 2024 Republican National Convention JD Vance made a claim about what he believed constituted American identity and belonging. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future” he claimed, “It is, in short, a nation”. He illustrated this claim with reference to a cemetery in Kentucky where seven generations of his own family were buried.

Now. Now, that’s not just an idea, my friends. That’s not just a set of principles. Even though the ideas and the principles are great, that is a homeland. That is our homeland. People will not fight for abstractions, but they will fight for their home.^[2]

Here, Vance claims a connection to place expanding back into time is what makes America. Not a set of ideas framed in the Constitution but multi-generational connection to the soil. Vance’s arguments are central to a movement in the US known as National Conservatism - a movement that moves away from the form of Conservatism based on free markets and neoliberalism and back to, arguably, a more traditional form of Conservatism rooted in inter-generational traditions and continuity - on the idea of “conserving”.

There are many many ways that Indigenous Place Thought and National Conservatism are different - not least the very clear differences in power between First Nations people who have had their land stolen and colonized, and largely White Protestant people who were and are the colonized. The fact that Vance’s cemetery is the cemetery of unwelcome immigrants on stolen land never seems to become part of the equation. Such an observation is clearly way too “woke” to be a welcome one.

***

A third example of debate about the connections between place (the land, landscape) and group identity comes from the longstanding struggle over Israel and Palestine and has been brought to the fore over recent discussions about the right of a state to exist. This is a generalized version of the question over whether critics recognize the right of the state of Israel to exist. The UN rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, commenting on the ongoing war crimes and genocidal violence in Gaza^[3] was asked if she recognized Israel’s right to exist. Her response was more general, noting that in her view- no state has a right to exist - they either exist or they do not. ^[4]The idea that a state has the right to exist is a reflection of the idea that coherent group of people, usually sharing ethnicity, religion, or shared history, should be mapped on to territory. That a people should have a place. There is certainly no legal right for a state to exist – the claim is a moral and political one. The claim in Israel, of course, is that Jewish national self-determination is necessary as a measure of self-defense after thousands of years of exile and persecution as well as contemporary antisemitism and the stated aim of some near neighbours to erase Israel from the map. Many would also point to the longstanding presence of Jews in what is now Israel and Palestine as well as Biblical/historical claims to the land that is now Israel and Palestine (often called by their historical names of Judea and Samaria by those who insist that it is Jews who have been dispossessed from land that is rightly theirs). Indeed, there is a Judea and Samaria sovereignty movement and the claim is made that Judea and Samaria were part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people from 1200 BC onwards. The area is now known as the West Bank and is home to Palestinians in the increasingly widely recognized state of Palestine.

For their part, Palestinians also point to their indigeneity to the area and their ongoing dispossession from traditional homelands since the formation of Israel at the end of the British Mandate in 1948. As with Jews, Palestinians have several narratives linking them to the land going back thousands of years and even to shared ancestry with the Jews. Questions of who is most tied to the land are a key part of ongoing struggle. This was evidenced by Benjamin Netenyahu’s erroneous claim in 2019 that “A new study of DNA recovered from an ancient Philistine site in the Israeli city of Ashkelon confirms what we know from the Bible – that the origin of the Philistines is in southern Europe. ... The Palestinians’ connection to the Land of Israel is nothing compared to the 4,000-year connection that the Jewish people have with the land.”^[5]Philistines and Palestinians are not the same thing. The important point here though is that claims must be made and remade to multi-generational, deeply historical, ties to the soil.

***

The arguments (and bloodshed) over belonging leads me to spiral back to Watts’ discussion of Indigenous Place-Thought. She uses an origin myth to make claims about place and belonging and asks us to believe it. How do we decide whose land-story is the one to be believed in the case of Israel and Palestine? If we believe each story literally and follow Watts’ logic then both Jews and Palestinians run the risk of “losing who they are” if they are either removed from the land, or have the land changed so much under them that they are effectively disconnected. If we return to Vance’s account of a Kentucky cemetery as proof of belonging, then we might ask what happens when two groups of people have long buried their dead in the same “soil”?

I remain sceptical of claims that link an ethnic group to a bounded place. I am sympathetic to Watts’ story because it teaches me new things and because Indigenous and First Nations peoples have quite clearly had their land stolen from them – in part so that Kentucky settlers can be buried in family cemeteries. But if I am happy to learn from Watts’ stories, and more generally happy to support Indigenous claims to “land back”, then why am I less sympathetic to other claims to ethnostates for instance? I would be just as suspicious of a Palestinian version of an ethnostate as I am of Israel as one. Believing stories about links between people and place has material consequences including access to and ownership of resources, legal jurisdiction, and the “legitimate” use of lethal force. Believing stories about belonging has consequences.

***

My suspicion of simple mappings of people onto place starts as an academic one. Places and peoples cannot straightforwardly be identified and defined in ways that have impermeable borders. When people in the past have attempted to do this it has often ended badly. But I do think some sense of “belonging” is important. So, what might an acceptable version of belonging look like?

First, any notion of belonging, Watts teaches us, much include reciprocal obligation where the land and things on the land are also stakeholders in a more-than-human process of place making.

Second, and connected to this, forms of place belonging should include the consent of a place’s current living human inhabitants – otherwise it becomes dispossession.

Third, there is a need to account for history. Repair is needed for the historically dispossessed so that they can be made whole again. This might involve reparations, the possibility of return, and forms of shared sovereignty.

Fourth, and following the need for reciprocity, some form of environmental, social, and cultural sustainability should be at the centre of considerations so that a claim of belonging does not destroy that which it claims to love.

All of this is of course a tangle of complications. Honouring ancestors should not go hand in hand with evicting neighbours. Such a task might be less about origin stories, national mythologies, or modern forms of citizenship rights, and more about what we choose to do, together, in the places we share.

^[1] Vanessa Watts, (2013) Indigenous place-thought and agency among humans and non-humans (First Woman and Sky Woman go on a European world tour!). Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2/1 https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/issue/view/1440

^[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/jd-vance-speech-rnc-vp-trump-b2581857.html

^[3] According to United Nations Commission of Enquiry https://www.un.org/unispal/document/commission-of-inquiry-report-genocide-in-gaza-a-hrc-60-crp-3/

^[4]

^[5] https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2019-10-21/ty-article/.premium/magic-or-a-trap-dna-changes-study-of-the-past/0000017f-dec6-d3a5-af7f-feee44b00000

When I was pursuing my doctoral studies in Madison, Wisconsin in the late 1980s and early 1990s I inhabited a particular counter-cultural progressive zeitgeist. It involved, among other things, a deep suspicion of government agencies such as the CIA and FBI (busy surveilling so-called subversives or aiding the overthrow of Latin American democracies). It involved an embrace of alternative forms of medicine fueled by knowledge of machinations of the health-care industry in Tuskegee, Alabama (where Black people had been led to believe they were being treated for syphilis when, in fact, they were not), in India (where women were forcefully sterilized), or in Wales and many other countries where women treated with the drug Thalidomide as a tranquilizer gave birth to thousands of babies with severe deformities. It even involved a healthy disrespect for the University and the education system in general, which was seen as either a factory for the production of compliant cogs in the machinations of capitalism or, as a space where truly radical ideas were systematically excluded and erased. This was also a time when the word “globalization” was becoming part of widespread conversations (especially in a geography department). We were not yet using the word “neoliberalism” as a term of abuse, but it was just around the corner. Globalization was simply the most recent stage of capitalism as footloose capital was able to travel the globe to find new ways of extracting profit from relatively immobile workers. This general vibe continued into the nineties in rural West Wales where we were surrounded by English incomers getting back to the land, practicing self-sufficiency, electing to have home births (us included), possibly home schooling and, in some instances briefly falling for the discredited anti-vaccine “research” of Andrew Wakefield linking MMR vaccines to autism. By then, Tony Blair was telling us that globalization was inevitable and we had no choice but to make the most of it. Bill Clinton was bringing NAFTA into existence. Neoliberalism - the belief in denationalization, small government, broadly unfettered free markets, and individualism – had been born in its modern form in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. Neoliberalism quickly became the easiest, and often unthought out, term of abuse on the liberal and progressive left.

***

The critique of the global has other histories too. In our current climate, and particularly since Trump came to prominence, the term “globalist” has become a term of abuse. This term has an interesting history. A google ngram shows us that the word has really taken off in popularity since 2012. There was also a little bump in popularity, however, in the late 1940s reaching a peak around 1954. This is largely due to its use in hearings held by the US House of Representatives Committee to Investigate Tax-exempt Foundations during a time known for the activities of House Committee on Un-American Activities. The Committee was set up to:

“conduct a full and complete investigation and study of educational an (sic) philanthropic foundations and other comparable organizations which are exempt from Federal income taxation to determine if foundations and organizations are using their resources for purposes other than the purposes for which they were established, and especially to determine which such foundations and organizations are using their resources for un-American and subversive activities; for political purposes; propaganda, or attempted to influence legislation”^[1]

Among the records is an account of the activities of the National Education Association which was, at the time, a public education advocacy organization (it later became a Union). The text warns against the rise of the United Nations and its effect on school children who, the text insists are being indoctrinated into “world mindedness”. Terms like “world mindedness” are intermingled with “internationalism” and, following the interventions of Northwestern University based conservative political scientist Professor Kenneth Colegrove – “globalism”. This globalism, it was argued, led to the breakdown of nationalism and that such a breakdown was a prerequisite for communism. In addition to the National Education Association, the Committee explored the activities of the Carnegie Endowment, The Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation noting their funding of the Council on Foreign Relations – an organization, they insisted, which was dedicated to the promotion of globalism. In a survey of books distributed by the Carnegie Endowment, Professor Colegrove was asked to give his opinion on both the books and their authors. His comments are listed below. The term “globalist” appears alongside “leftist”, “communist” amd “Marxian” as a term of critique.

***

It is this latter strain of anti-globalism that was reborn with the widespread use of the term “globalist” as a term of abuse by the right wing provocateur Alex Jones who used the term alongside the idea of a “deep state” and a “new world order” in ways that reminded careful listeners of longstanding forms of anti-semitism. Globalism, to Jones, was a “global digital panopticon control system” instigated by an international elite with no loyalty to national interests.^[2] This is almost exactly the way that Hitler and Nazi thinkers portrayed Jews in the 1930s – as placeless and rootless people not tied to the deep Germanic soils in the way that Aryans allegedly were.^[3] But the geographical imaginary of globalism and the globalist were just one part of a constellation of enemies outlined by the new Trumpian right including the medical establishment (vaccines!), educational establishments (Harvard, Columbia, The Department of Education, Public schools in general), the FBI and CIA (who are both apparently woke organisations infected by the allegedly Marxist agendas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion).

Being anti-globalist also means being anti-neoliberal, at least performatively, if not in actuality. Trump’s insistence on “American first” and his wildly fluctuating and random use of tariffs are clearly not free-trade friendly in any conventional sense. Trump’s tariff policy also weirdly mirrors the economic thinking and practice of Marxist economic theorists of development like Andre Gunder Frank.^[4] Frank’s ‘dependency theory’ encouraged “import-substutition industrialization” as a route out of economic dependency and exploitation by wealthy western countries. It attempted to produce self-sufficient economies by producing goods locally that would otherwise be imported and imposing tarrifs on foreign imports. This was a noted strategy in India. For a long time, any backpacker travelling in India up to the early 1990s would be accustomed to drinking “Thumb’s Up” cola due to the unavailability of more familiar (to us) Western alternatives. This was before India signed up to the tenets of neoliberalism. Trump is bizarrely arguing that, and acting as if, the United States is not the global hegemon but, instead, an exploited and economically dependent country.

***

So, here we are in a world that appears to be turned upside down, where Trump’s authoritarian nationalism, at first blush at least, looks a lot like the positions of progressives in the early 1990s. Behind this are geographical imaginations of the global (and the cohort of globalists that allegedly promote globalisation) and the national and local. Progressives (myself included) imagined the globalists (though we did not use that term) as a pro-capitalist, neoliberal elite who were seeking ways to move capital around the world to find new opportunities for the extraction of profit from cheap labour and to simultaneously eradicate the safeguards of state regulation. The critique of globalisation was a critique of capitalism that accompanied critiques of many other institutions – many of which are now being critiqued and attacked by the authoritarian right. The new authoritarian right critique of globalism shares some of the same language, and even apes the economic theory of a Marxist scholar like Andre Gunder Frank, but has more in common with the use of the term “globalist” by Professor Kenneth Colegrove and the Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations in the 1950s. Indeed, it is notable that the Trump administration is once again attacking tax-exempt educational institutions such as Harvard and raising the possibility of taxing them while attempting to withdraw visas issued to their interntional students – a clear assault on at least one form of “globalism”. It is not surprising then, that one of the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci’s more pithy statements from his Prison Notebooks has again become popular among observers of the current moment:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

^[1] https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/Hearings/cKQp-0f1EXEC?hl=en&gbpv=1 Hearings before the Special Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations. House of Representatives, 83^rd Congress, Second Session on H.Res. 217, Washington D.C.

^[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/globalism-right-trump.html

^[3] Mosse, G. L. (1966). Nazi culture: intellectual, cultural, and social life in the Third Reich ([1st ] ed.). Grosset & Dunlap.

^[4] Frank, A. G. (1970). Latin America: underdevelopment or revolution; essays on the development of underdevelopment and the immediate enemy. Monthly Review Press.

The real reason for my visit to Kyoto on this occasion, though, was to explore the world of Satoyama. I had first become conscious of the word Satoyama while watching one of an endless series of cooking related programs on television during covid lockdowns. In a gladiatorial contest of international superchefs called The Final Table, one of the chefs was the Tokyo-based double Michelin star chef Yoshihiro Narisawa, who introduced his cuisine as “innovative satoyama cuisine” based entirely on farmed and foraged local ingredients. It was more than just an emphasis on any old local, however. It was the use of local ingredients from a specific kind of landscape - one where the mountains with their forests meet the farmlands and paddy fields. His recipes include “soil soup” which is not made from some pretend soil, as is common in elevated dining establishments, but from actual soil with its rich umami tasting brew of microorganisms. His dishes often have the appearance of mini landscapes including twigs and bark foraged from satoyama forests. I would have loved to have started by journey into satoyama with a visit to his restaurant. Sadly, a combination of the £400 tasting menu price combined with the policy of not admitting single diners, made this impossible.

As it turned out, I had already encountered the term while reading Anna Tsing’s wonderful book The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.^[1]In that book, Tsing traced the web of places that are connected by the growing, picking, trading, gifting, and eating of the matsutake mushroom – a mushroom that is highly prized in Japan. One of the sites her journeys took her to was a forest outside of Kyoto where scientists and locals were using the forest in such a way that the growth of red pine was encouraged. Red pine is the favoured companion of the Matsutake – a mushroom that cannot be cultivated so has to be encouraged. Red pine would only grow if the forest was regularly disturbed in the way that forests in Japan have traditionally been disturbed by small scale landowners who would use them for timber. Tsing referred to this traditional way of disturbing the forest as “satoyama”.

Satoyama literally means village (sato) mountain (yama). It refers to a specific kind of landscape whre humans and “nature” co-exist at the foot of mountains – often in the area between the mountains and the sea. The landscape includes secondary or disturbed forests, rice paddies, small villages or towns and some arable land. Traditionally it was in this landscape that locals would use the forest for firewood, charcoal production, thatch for the roofs of traditional houses, and mulch for farming. Advocates of satoyama insist that the use of local knowledge and techniques meant that humans existed in harmony with nature rather than dominating it, and that human interventions increased, rather than threatened, biodiversity. It is almost the opposite of the currently popular practice of “rewilding” which advocates for a (admittedly managed) return to wilderness. It was human interference, after all, that led to Anna Tsing’s matsutake mushrooms. It seemed to me that an exploration of satoyama would be a perfect episode for my book – a set of local knowledges and practices connected to a particular landscape in a country that, to me, already seemed otherworldly.

Traditional satoyama practices and knowledge, as well as the landscapes that resulted from them, began to disappear after World War Two with the rise of the use of fossil fuels for domestic heating and cooking. This meant that the areas of forest attached to village settlements, and often to individual properties, were no-longer needed for charcoal production or for other uses of wood. The forests stopped being disrupted by humans and many became dense stands of cedar and cypress that kept out the light from the understory. The red pine associated with matsutake mushrooms no longer had periodic moments of space and light to grown. The urushi tree that produced the lacquer used to make traditional Japanese lacquerware was crowded out and abandoned. Given that it was the late 1940s when this transformation happened it is little surprise that few people in Japan in the present day can remember how satoyama culture operated. I was told, on a visit to Ryukoku University’s satoyama forest, that only a few people over 80 can recall the traditional satoyama practice. People are, effectively, beginning over in re-discovering satoyama. During my visit to the forest, managed by the Research Center for Satoyama Studies, I saw areas of the forests where trees had been cleared and red pines were emerging, stacks of logs carefully placed and inoculated with shitake mushrooms, beehives designed to encourage the native exotic honeybee and protect them from the invasive European honey bee. Traditional uses of forest leaves for mulch production were being taught.

Beehive for local exotic honeybees in Ryukoku University satoyama forest.

Elsewhere, foreigners were leading the way. An Irish woman married to a Japanese architect had bought an old farmhouse by Lake Biwa. They had lain floorboards treated with lacquer in the traditional way. She had become interested in forest gardening while in Ireland but in Japan had found her calling working with organisations that were promoting satoyama ways of doing things. Sitting at her table, sharing coffee and delicious local pastries, she handed me a deep red bowl. It was remarkably light in the hands. She had lacquered this herself – over very thin, almost transparent, wood. Later, I visited the store in the central city where Tsutsumi Asakichi promotes the skills necessary to produce traditional Japanese lacquerware. Alongside the beautiful bowls and chopsticks there were examples of less traditional uses of lacquer including beautiful surfboards and even a bicycle. The store, called Und, is advertised as a “hub connecting nature, culture, and people” – satoyama in action. The urushi tree, that produces the lacquer, is becoming harder and harder to find, and the organization, Perspective, has started planting them in some borrowed state forest north of Kyoto city in Keihoku. This project, called “Forest of Craft” is tied to the Und store in the city. The trees take 10-15 years to grow large enough to be tapped for the meagre 150 grams of lacquer they can produce annually. They are not obviously capitalism compliant.

While satoyama is centered on forms of local knowledge and landscape, its influence is clearly spreading. Narisawa’s food has global acclaim, Tsing’s book is being taught around the world, research institutes such as the one at Ryukoku University, form part of a United Nations sponsored “Satoyama Initiative” that encourages satoyama practices around the world including in Papua New Guinea, Chengdu, China, and Tamil Nadu, villages outside of Rome, and in Baltimore County in Maryland, USA. Satoyama is becoming translocal, linking various kinds of local place through a set of environmental practices originally located in the space between the village and the mountains in a time before the dominance of fossil fuels.

^[1] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2015).

This development is both welcome and surprising. Advocates of local knowledge have their work cut out as the alternative – universal knowledge, or just “science” – has claimed for itself, the status of valid knowledge whereas local knowledge, it has long been argued, is merely a form of belief, folklore, or superstition – belief that may or may not be true. The idea of local knowledge carries with it the general negative senses of the local as “limited”, “parochial”, “subjective” or worse. There are any number of instances in history where local knowledge simply meant entrenched forms of conservatism that were thankfully transformed by the arrival of more enlightened forms of knowledge from elsewhere. Think for instance, of what it would have meant to celebrate local knowledge in the American South in the years before the Civil War. Local knowledge might be what you turn to if you are a tourist looking for authenticity, but not when you are person with cancer looking for treatment or a NASA scientist trying to figure out how to land a probe on an asteroid.

Despite the apparent limitations of local knowledge, it has always had appeal as knowledge that is closer to the ground and is more practical in nature, compared to the abstractions of bodies of knowledge such as science or philosophy. Local knowledge advocates come from wildly different political perspectives. On the right we famously had the spectacle of seeing the British MP and then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, during the Brexit debates declaring that “I think the people of this country have had enough with experts….” – a view that has been increasingly mirrored among right wing populist movements in the US and elsewhere. In a more thoughtful, philosophical mode, the conservative (and Conservative) British philosopher Roger Scruton defended an older form of Conservatism in his arguments for Conservative environmentalism based on “oikophilia” – or the love of home. To Scruton, it is local society that provides the best place to work on conserving the natural world, not the spaces of global thinktanks or pseudo governments. People are drawn to environmental action, he argues, when they can see it at work – such as in “adopt-a-highway” programmes in the US or in “Keep Britain Tidy” campaigns.

This is why the true environmentalist is also a conservative. For the desire to protect the environment arises spontaneously in people, just as soon as they recognise their accountability to others for what they are and do, and just as soon as they identify some place as “ours”.^[4]

Scruton’s argument for place-based environmentalism is remarkably close to the writing of the anarchist thinker James C. Scott in his book Seeing Like a State where he took what he called “high modernist” planning to task for applying techne – formal, scientific, epistemic knowledge – to problems that were locally variable in nature. Working through examples of high modernist urban planning, Soviet collectivization, and agricultural modernization, he revealed how large-scale plans which give little or no thought to local realities often ended in failure. He counterposed techne with metis – a kind of informal, practical, local knowledge that arises from the complexity of specific places rather than the desire to arrive at a universal and utopian plan.

While something can indeed be said about forestry, revolution, urban planning, agriculture, and rural settlement in general, this will take us only so far in understanding this forest, this revolution, this farm. All farming takes place in a unique space (fields, soil, crops) and at a unique time (weather pattern, season, cycle in pest populations), and for unique ends (this family with its needs and tastes), A mechanical application of generic rules that ignores these particularities is an invitation to practice failure, social disillusionment, or most likely both.^[5]

While advocates of local knowledge from the right of left question the applicability of “place-free” science and planning to specific local contexts, there has been another process at play in some forms of decolonial thought. Decolonial thinkers make it clear that knowledge that claims to be universal is also “local” and “place-based”.

Western philosophy, like science, sees itself as the culmination of inevitable progress – a process in which all other kinds of knowledge experience “becoming local”. As Western philosophy and Western science became twinned with the ravages of colonialism in a series of claims to universalism, so, other forms of knowledge became seen as local and specific. Science and philosophy both aspired to what philosopher Thomas Nagel called “the view from nowhere”.^[6]Once this view was claimed, and the specific places it arose from denied, then all other views became views from “somewhere”. This then became part of the structure of Western universities where disciplines with no geographical markers – like biology, literary studies, or geography itself, were accompanied by geographically specific areas such as “Latin American Studies” or “South Asian Studies”. Decolonial theorists Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh reflected on the Western habit of localizing all knowledge other than itself back on itself. What if we started to call work on Heidegger “German Studies” rather than “philosophy” they asked?^[7] The challenge has important consequences as, by localizing bodies of thought such as science and philosophy we insist in seeing them in context and, in the case of forms of knowledge emanating from Europe over the last three centuries, that means seeing them as forms of knowledge produced in places that were at the heart of empire. In the end, all knowledge is “local knowledge” – it is just that some forms accept this, while others do their best to deny it.

^[1] Frank Sejersen, "Local Knowledge in Greenland: Arctic Perspectives and Contextual Differences," in Cultivating Arctic Landscapes, ed. G. Anderson David and Nuttall Mark (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2004).

^[2] http://olohana.org/index.php/indigenous-knowledge-systems/

^[3] https://www.unesco.org/en/biodiversity/knowledge

^[4] https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/416-environmentalism-starts-with-loving-our-own-the-conservative-online-jan-2017

^[5] James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press, 1998), 318.

^[6] Thomas Nagel, The view from nowhere (New York ; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

^[7] Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On decoloniality : concepts, analytics, praxis (Durham: Duke University Press,, 2018).

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

(Dante – The Divine Comedy)

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

   (Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken)

Dante and Robert Frost both found themselves in woods, Dante lost with no way forward, and Frost with a choice to make as his path forked. In both cases routes, and the absence of routes, signify aspects of human meaning making figuring life as a journey along actual or hoped for routes. They reveal the central role of routes and routing in the way we make sense of space and time. It is revealing that some of the root words for wilderness and wastelands suggest, not so much the lack of settlements, but the lack of routes or paths. The Latin word “avium” refers to a place without paths while the Old English wēglæst refers to a “way-less place”.^[i] The wilderness, the wastes, confront the traveler with a lack of routes. As such, it is unintelligible space. The first thing that is needed to make sense of the wild, or colonize nature, is a way, a path, a route. If we “lose our way”, we may find ourselves in “a forest dark”. Before space can be settled and before land can be cultivated, a way through must be hacked. This suggests that the way territory is claimed is not by marking its boundaries at the outset – but by creating a network of routes that help the space to make sense.

Routes and routing are foundational to the power-laden process of human dwelling. The significance of routes and routing to both dwelling and power are also reflected in the etymology of the word “route”. In old French “rute” meant road or way or path which was itself based on the Latin “rupta” the feminine past participle of “rumpere” – “to break”. Rupta was used to describe a road opened by force – by breaking through a forest or wilderness for instance. It is linked to the word “rupture” suggesting a particular kind of violence. We can think of the images of new roads cutting through Amazonian forest (opening the potential for traffic in dangerous new viruses along with valuable resources). We can think of the way American politicians and planners drove highways through predominantly Black areas of cities from the 1950s onwards. Routes both create potential for connection and simultaneously produce new kinds of barriers and disconnect.

Routes and routing sift people who are arranged along kinetic hierarchies. There are two different kinds of routes as nouns. One kind of route is simply a designation for links between points that might be represented by lines on maps. The other is a specific material thing – a structure such as Route 66 or the trans-continental railroad. A route can be both a representation of mobility and an infrastructure that enables mobility. Route is also a verb. Routing can refer to the simple process of connecting two points. To route something is to direct something along a particular course or towards a particular point. We can think, for instance, of the work done by a “router” that enables connection of our devices to the world wide web. The verb routing suggests an act of channeling – of slotting a person, thing or information into an established way – the correct way. It suggests a certain kind of power and authority.

To return to the significance of routes and routing in poetry we can look to poetry in a more experimental mode. In The Sundering U.P. Tracks, the final part of American poet Edward Dorn’s The North Atlantic Turbine (1967), the route in question is the Union Pacific Railroad as it passes through the town of Pocatello, Idaho. The poem starts with the narrator feeling sorry for himself that Leroy McLucus has visited town and not asked to stay with him. Leroy McLucus was a noted Black photographer, the narrator was White. McLucus had:

                              [....]      taken rooms

with the Reverend Buchanan

over in that part of town owned

by Bistline, the famous exploiter.^[ii]

The poem quickly switches from the feeling of hurt to an explanation both of how McLucus got to Pocatello, and why he might have chosen to stay on the other side of town, a part of town, we might infer, on the “wrong side of the tracks”. 

    Every little bogus town

on the Union Pacific bears the scar

of an expert linear division.

The U.P. connects each of these “little bogus town[s]” while, at the same time, it divided the. The U.P. is indeed “sundering” – a word that means dividing. The poem cleverly plays on the traditional sense of the railroad as a uniting force – a route that represents manifest destiny and the binding of the United States into a coherent whole – with the sense of the railroad as this sundering force – this “expert linear division” – that creates the possibility of the “wrong side of the tracks”. The “Right of Way” here, as with the Dan Ryan Expressway on Chicago’s Southside or any number of other rupturing routes in American cities, is as much a border as a space of flow.

Each side of the shining double knife

from Chicago to Frisco

to Denver, the Cheyenne cutoff

the Right of Way they called it

and still it runs that way

right through the heart

Dorn refers to the work of the route as “rapacious geo-economic/surgery of Harriman”. E.H. Harriman was a financier and railroad tycoon, President of the Union Pacific Railroad as well as the Southern Pacific Railroad. The final words of the poem return to the racial divides that surround the U.P.

You talk of color?

Oh cosmological America, how well

and with what geometry

you teach your citizens.

The Sundering U.P. Tracks uses the route of the Union Pacific to invert the conventional narrative of a route that binds the nation. Instead, it is a “shining double knife” and an example of “expert linear division”. While railroads and other routes were frequently tied to nationalistic discourses of unity which utilized the capacity of routes to connect, they were also material impositions on landscapes that served to divide communities in two as well as sites of intense land speculation that led to little bogus towns. If they were instances of geometry that taught citizens, then they were also instrumental in the construction of kinetic hierarchies. They separated as much as they connected.

^[i] I am grateful to Any Jeffs’ novel Wild for alerting me to these terms.

^[ii] Edward Dorn, "The Sundering U.P. Tracks," in Way More West: New and Selected Poems, ed. Edward Dorn (New York: Penguin, 2007 [1967]), 88.

***

The Lure of the Local is the pull of place that operates on all of us, exposing our politics and our spiritual legacies. It is the geographical component of the psychological need to belong somewhere, one antidote to a prevailing alienation.

Lucy Lippard

We are living in a time when the idea of “the local” is resurgent. Right across the political spectrum we see calls for forms of localism in the face of various forms of globalism. The moral currency of the local is perhaps one of the few ideas that transcends political affiliation. The contemporary right and alt-right in the United States pits itself against the global and the globalists who allegedly promote it. Calls to localism have been at the centre of the neo-reactionary worldview of Donald Trump and his followers. Shortly after he was elected President, Trump told the crowd at one of his large rallies in Hershey, Pennsylvania, that “People talk about how we’re living in a globalized world, but the relationships people value most are local—family, city, state, and country. Local, folks, local.”^[1] In the United Kingdom, forms of localism have been at the heart of traditional Conservative philosophy. The late Roger Scruton, philosopher and advisor to Conservative governments, has made the case for a Conservative brand of green thought based on the observation that “There is no political cause more amenable to the conservative vision than that of the environment. For it touches on the three foundational ideas of our movement: trans-generational loyalty, the priority of the local and the search for home.”^[2] Broadly left of centre and liberal cultural lifestyle choices have, for a long time, bought into the idea of the local as an unquestioned good – particularly when it relates to environmental action and food consumption.  In Vancouver, the co-founder of the 100-mile diet - a diet where consumers only eat things grown and produced from within 100 miles - J.B. McKinnon declared that “distance is the enemy of awareness.”^[3] Recent responses to the COVID pandemic have drawn on the anarchist tradition of mutual aid instigated by the Russian geographer Peter Kropotkin who posited the value of local cooperation over the large scale workings of the state.^[4] In each case, and from radically opposed political starting points, the scale of the local has been valorized and opposed to the implicitly or explicitly immoral or unethical machinations of processes working at bigger scales. The question here is why? Why do so many thinkers and activists value the local when they disagree about pretty much everything else?

            There are many reasons for the valorization of the local that probably transcend political divisions but it certainly worth pausing to think about some of its negative consequences. There is something that connects the seemingly positive desire to eat local food, or frequent a local business, or even to help each other out in COVID inspired effort at mutual aid, with the clearly negative labelling of outsiders as deviant – to parochialism and xenophobia. Alongside the positive moral valance of the local is a long history of derogatory terms associated with the local. The word “parochial” originated in the term for a parish and has come to mean “limited” or “narrow” – a lack of ability to deal with wider contexts. The term “local yokel” suggests rural backwardness, a lack of civilization, parochialism and what Marx and Engels termed “the idiocy of rural life”.^[5] Clearly frequenting farmers’ markets as a sign of cosmopolitan belonging is somewhat paradoxical.

This book addresses this resurgence of the local in contemporary life asking why it is that we might value people and things that are close to us more than people and things that far away and  why  the idea of the local, at the current moment, is invested with moral, ethical and political worth in so many disparate contexts? In addition to the observation that forms of localism appear across the political spectrum this quest is informed by four prompts. The first prompt is a reflection on my own life - a life in which I never lived anywhere for longer than seven years and have become, over the course of 59 years, a fully paid-up member of what people on the right call the “liberal cosmopolitan elite”. The second is the experience of living through the COVID pandemic that began in late 2019 and whose effects continue as I write, a time in which the possibilities, and necessities, of the local have become glaringly apparent. The third prompt, no doubt related to my rootless existence, is a life as a geographer and poet reflecting on and writing about the themes of “place” and “mobility” in both academic and poetic registers. The final prompt is reflecting on the kind of place I now inhabit, the prosperous Edinburgh neighbourhood of Morningside where the local is promoted as a way of life.

***

When I was born, in 1965 in Cambridge, England I was the latest of 400 years of Cresswells in my paternal line born within 100 miles of the spot where I was born. The Cresswells were a remarkably immobile lot, mostly agricultural labourers with a smattering of carpenters, innkeepers and a miller who ran a windmill. Their places of birth ranged from Ipswich, in Suffolk up to King’s Lynn, in Norfolk. The most notable move happened when my third great grandfather, Edward Cresswell, moved from Ipswich to West Lexham in Norfolk sometime in the 1840s. He became a gardener and, eventually, the innkeeper of the Red Lion pub. So, while my ancestors in the Cresswell line were very fixed in place through inhabitation, work on the land, and in significant centers of local lives, such as pubs and mills, all of this changed when I was born.

At the age of 58, I have never lived anywhere for longer than seven years. My dad was in the Royal Air Force, an engineer on the new fleet of nuclear V-Bombers in RAF Marham in Norfolk. It was there he met my mum, the daughter of evacuees from the Isle of Dogs in East London.  Mum’s family, like dad’s had been largely confined to a relatively small area – London, particularly the East End, and the nearby counties of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire. Dad’s Air Force job made our life unusually globally mobile. By the age of two I was living in Berlin, where my brother was born (quite a change from 400 years of East Anglia). Then there was Oxfordshire near RAF Brize Norton, then, between the ages of seven and ten, Singapore at the fag-end of Empire. Back to Oxfordshire, and off to Woolverstone Hall, a state-run Boarding School near Ipswich where military kids mixed with children from inner London. I went to university at University College London (3 years), very much a “first generation” student before I knew there was such a designation. My reading of the work of Yi-Fu Tuan and others made me an enthusiastic geographer and I flew off to Madison, Wisconsin, to undertake my PhD with Yi-Fu as my supervisor. I lived in Madison for six years and it was there I met my wife, Carol, and from there we moved to Connecticut (six months), Lampeter (in Wales, 7 years), Aberystwyth (also in Wales, 5 years), Acton (London, 7 years), Boston (3 years), West Hartford (Connecticut, 3 years) and now Edinburgh (5 years and counting). Since arriving in Wisconsin in 1986, I have had fifteen home addresses responding to the possibilities opened up by my academic career and the fact of a trans-Atlantic family.

As well as moving house, I have spent a considerable amount of time travelling. I have very clear memories of flying to Singapore on an air force VC 10, stopping along the way in Cyprus and at RAF Gan, in the Maldives. The excitement of flying was mixed with the feeling of everything being different as I exited the plane into heavy tropical air and unaccustomed heat. I equally recall arriving back at RAF Brize Norton three years later and the feeling of wet-cold and the taste of full fat milk coating my tongue. While in Singapore I became accustomed to the excitement of different kinds of food including the mee goreng with red hot chilli sauce from a modest stand on the air base, and the thin sticks of chicken satay and thick peanut sauce with chunks of cooling cucumber. These were served off the back of an improbable bicycle that included the necessary charcoal fire just behind the saddle. The person who pedaled the bike and made the satay was an equally improbable sinewy and elderly man who I worried might expire at any minute. All of this was, of course, a highly unusual set of experiences for the child of two parents who left school at sixteen. Military life was one of the few ways I was ever likely to have travelled, or to have encountered these foods, in this way. There is no doubt that this experience has marked my general disposition towards travel since then. At an early age I became aware of how places are different and learned to enjoy those differences. In terms of the local this meant two paradoxical things. One was a love of the possibilities that local difference offered and the other was the recognition that I needed to be in some sense global in order to experience these possibilities. I became, over time, a global being forever in search of the novelty that comes with the fact of the local. The geographer Doreen Massey put it well when she asked us to understand space (as opposed to time) “as the sphere of the possibility of multiplicity in the sense of contemporary plurality; as the sphere in which distinct trajectories coexist; as the sphere therefore of coexisting heterogeneity.”^[6] Moving through space, in other words, is how we experience that fact that things are or could be different – a possibility not afforded in the same way by time. Put even more simply, we know that things are one way in Edinburgh but are another way in Oslo, or Chennai.

As an academic geographer, my research has generally focused on archives that need to be visited. Clearly, I am privileged in being able to visit archives, but it is always a little disappointing to find that an archive has been digitized when one of the greatest pleasures was to travel and visit real places, don white archive gloves, and explore the past with the assistance of knowledgeable and caring library and special collections staff. Conferences and invited talks around the world have also been part of my life. An early example that had a big impact was a small workshop of geographers and anthropologists in Dubrovnik, Croatia. It was, perhaps, the first such event I was invited to, expenses paid. I sat overlooking the Mediterranean with fascinating scholars and reflected on how precisely that kind of experience made a life in academia, and as a geographer, such a privileged and rewarding one. Travelling, in other words, has been part of my self-conception as a scholar, along with teaching and writing. It was part of the rewards package.

One of the books I reread to help me write this one was Pico Iyer’s The Global Soul. Iyer and I are very different beings united by a seeming restlessness. His book recounts his search for something he could call home as a person without routes – or with different kinds of roots in India, the United States, England, and Japan. Iyer is a person of colour, I am not. Iyer comes from a cosmopolitan family and mine, ancestory.com tells me, is not. And yet there is something similar at work. While his book recounts a search for home, this book is a search for an idea - the idea of the local as it is pursued in different local contexts. While his book travels through spaces of the avowedly global, from an Olympic Games venue to a shopping mall and an airport, mine is a search for spaces where inhabitants are searching for some local essence.

^[1] Quoted in Patrick W. Watson, “The World is Entering a “Localism” Era” Forbes January 4^th, 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickwwatson/2017/01/04/the-world-is-entering-a-localism-era/#45ce570b2d75

^[2] Roger Scruton, “Conservatism and the Environment” Conservative Home March 2013 https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/281-conservatism-and-the-environment.

^[3] Alisa Dawn Smith and J. B. MacKinnon, The 100-mile diet : a year of local eating (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2007), 69.

^[4] Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin, Mutual aid, a factor of evolution (London: Allen Lane, 1972).

^[5] Karl Marx et al., The Communist manifesto, Penguin classics, (London: Penguin Classics, 2014).

^[6] Doreen Massey, For space (London: SAGE, 2005), 8.

In an age of environmental crisis, war-ridden global hotspots, and massively corrosive inequality it is surely surprising that perhaps the best-known policies of both the new Labour government in the UK and the Harris/Walz campaign in the USA, is a desire to build new housing on a massive scale. Housing has rarely been the first thing on political agendas and sometimes it has been absent completely. Now we have the Harris/Walz campaign promising to build (or, more precisely, facilitate the building of) three million new homes. The new Labour government, meanwhile, promised 1.5 million news homes within five years of coming to power – including in a series of “new towns.”

The massive production of housing appears to address a simple and elemental need – the need for shelter. The simplest version of the argument is that housing has become too expensive for many, in both the USA and the UK, because it has become scarce. When demand is high and supply is limited, then prices increase. Housing becomes unaffordable. The solution, therefore, is to increase supply.

The promises to produce more houses can be seen as part of what has been called “The Abundance Agenda”. This policy programme was promoted by Derek Thompson in an article in The Atlantic in January 2022, in the dark days of COVID lockdowns. He noted the United States seemed to have been short of lots of things – particularly vaccines and protective masks during COVID but also semi-conductors and skilled immigrants. He argued that life in America was characterized by “manufactured scarcity”. The reason for this, he suggested, was often that well-meaning policy got in the way. Everyone would like more doctors, he argued, but federal policy deliberately restricted supply. Similarly, it seemed obvious that there was a need for ambitious clean-energy infrastructure projects but environmental policy, most often in “blue” Democrat states where such projects were most popular, made it impossible to build them. He made a similar argument for housing:

“Homes have become famously unaffordable in many coastal cities. Since 1980, average house prices in the New York City metro area have risen about 700 percent; in San Francisco they have increased by more than 900 percent. Simply redistributing cash or slashing taxes along won’t do much to fix this problem, The culprits are largely regulations that prevent the destruction of taller apartment buildings that can hold more units.” 

                                                   Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, January 12, 2022.

Since then, the abundance agenda has itself become abundant – encouraged and promoted by, among others, the New York Times opinion writer and podcaster Ezra Klein. Building lots of houses (and other stuff), it seems, can unite Conservatives and Liberals like few things can. The famously anti-government scholars at the Mercatus Center of George Mason University like it – only if it means reducing government involvement. A Senior Research Fellow at the Center, Michael Farren, writes in The Hill that “Much of the reduction in economic growth seems connected to the accumulation of regulations.” Liberals have also embraced abundance in various forms – going back to the rise of the YIMBYs (yes, in my back yard) in California who argued that restrictive zoning laws designed to protect wealthy families in big single-family homes were unfair and often racist – impeding the provision of housing to those who really needed it. Abundance has also been taken up by the Center for New Liberalism (CNL) – a new form of the Clintonesque global (neo)liberalism of the 1980s and 1990s. One way of looking at the Abundance Agenda is to see if as a sexy rebranding of “moderates”. Moderation has never been sexy, but abundance has and is, perhaps easier to sell to both ends of the political spectrum.

It seems clear from the headline Harris/Walz policy of more houses that the abundance agenda has jumped into the mainstream. It also seems clear that it has jumped the Atlantic and found fertile ground in the UK. While the Abundance Agenda thought leaders have been largely North American, and there is very little discussion of the agenda in the UK, it is notable that the Conservative Party has a panel on the Abundance Agenda at its recent Party Conference, perhaps seeking to combat the association between the party and the seeming opposite of abundance – austerity. Most notable, though, is the Labour government’s promise of new houses – a much more ambitious promise that that being made by Harris/Walz given the size of the UK population.

Problems with Abundance – Landlordism

Increasing the supply of houses seems like a pleasingly common-sense response to a perceived shortage of housing. This is basically mainstream economics 101 in action. However, such a strategy does have its critics. Take the arguments of Nick Bano, a barrister (lawyer) specializing in housing law and homelessness rights. To Beno, the problem in the UK is not the lack of housing, but the cost of housing.

“In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. It is impossible to make a case for unique levels of housing scarcity in Britain, in comparative international or historical terms. What has changed for the worse is not the amount of housing per household, but its cost. And cost, in turn, has a great deal to do with the landlordism that is at the heart of the present crisis.”

                                        Nick Beno, The Guardian, 19 March, 2024

Beno notes how Thatcher’s government following 1979, both decimated the provision of social housing through its “right to buy” scheme and made conditions much more favourable for private landlords to buy-up property and make a profit from renting it out. “We now find ourselves in a situation where one in every 21 adults in the UK is a landlord”, Beno notes.  “[w]e have four times as many landlords as teachers. As a consequence, virtually everyone struggles to afford a home that meets their needs despite a net gain in housing stock.” Remarkably, Beno notes, the US currently has more houses per capita than at any time in its history. The UK is even better off.

Looking at increasing supply without addressing “landlordism”, then, seems a little backwards. The remarkable unaffordability of houses in San Francisco reflects the ability of landlords to buy up properties for short term rentals such as through Airbnb as much as it does a shortage. And then, in the US and UK there are vacant properties owned by the very rich but only lived in for short periods of the year, or simply left empty as an investment. Building millions of new houses, absent reforms in the market to address Landlordism, is likely to result in speculators buying up much of the new stock in the same way as they have been doing between 1979 and the present day.

Problems with Abundance – Thinking about Place

There are other problems with the simplicity of abundance thinking. There are plenty of examples of mass house building around the UK. Around Edinburgh, where I live, there are a seemingly endless supply of new homes built by mass housing producers. Some are on the edge of the city, and some are outside the city built on green fields. These housing developments are often simply houses with very little infrastructure to support them creating traffic problems in what used to be small rural villages as well as increased pressures on local schools and health care provision. In North America we have seen massive amounts of urban sprawl as automobile based (anti)planning continues an obsession with large lots and single-family homes with double or triple garages – often built completely without sidewalks and with no thought of public transport provision. Driving out of a city like Calgary, Alberta it is hard to avoid the seemingly endless creep of lookalike homes into the prairie. Similar scenes can be seen in many cities in the South of the United States.

Urban Sprawl in Calgary, Alberta.

Abundance suggest quantity and we can see that it has been expressed in terms of millions of homes. This says very little about what these places will be like to live in. Of course, it is possible that affordable and livable places will emerge from a house building frenzy. In the UK there is a history of semi-utopian new town building going back to the garden-cities of early Twentieth Century that attempted to combine the benefits of the city with the benefits of the country. This spawned the new town movement after World War II leading to places such as Welwyn Garden City in the 1940s, Redditch in the early 1960s, and, most famously, Milton Keynes at the end of the 1960s, Despite being the butt of many jokes, the site of interminable roundabouts, and concrete cows, Milton Keynes is often voted one of the best and happiest places to live in the UK. Other places were not so successful and became sites of high levels of crime and unemployment. It is only recently, perhaps, that new towns have acquired a certain cache as they have become “lived in” and pleasingly (to some) retro. This has taken at least fifty years. Perhaps that is what any place needs.

Finally, there has been another notable success story in mass house building. After World War I, Prime Minister Lloyd George promised that servicemen would return to “homes fit for heroes”. The Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 put local government at the center of providing these houses – with support from the central government though housing bonds and other mechanisms. The Beacontree Estate in Dagenham, the east of London housed more than 100,000 people by the 1930s. New houses had modern services and bathrooms and were generally thought to be a massive step up from pre-war living conditions. A programme such as this now seems unthinkable thanks to our remarkably stunted political imaginations. These homes were not built for profit and were never meant to be investments. They were places to live that provided shelter, warmth, hygiene and security. They could not be bought up by landlords until the Thatcher government on the 1980s.

Problems with Abundance – Environmental Impacts

The final problem with the Abundance Agenda is that by addressing a perceived problem of housing supply, it seeks to get rid of regulations that were put there in the first place for good reason. In Derek Thompson’sAtlantic piece, he tells the story of the proposal to build the biggest solar plant in the US – a proposal that was apparently stymied by the presence of an endangered desert tortoise. The story is told, no doubt, because Thompson imagined it would seem ridiculous that regulation designed to protect the environment was getting in the way of a technology that is part of the solution to increasing carbon emissions. To Thompson this seems straightforward while to me, this requires more nuance. While the shortage of housing is, at least, contestable, the rapid rate of species extinction is not. We are currently going through an extinction event that is largely our own fault. The World Wildlife Fund estimates that we are currently going through an extinction rate which is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than natural extinction rates. Among the reasons for this are what we might think of as “abundance” practices – most notably, the use of land to increase food and biofuel production. It would be supremely ironic if conversion of land to alternative energy production added to this extinction rate. The earth is not just a place for humans to live but a place for us to share with other species. I am a supporter, even a fan, of alternative energy production. I believe, like those who promote the abundance agenda, that we need to build more alternative energy infrastructure. But there was always a point to environmental regulation that emerged in the 1970s. It was designed to protect both our fellow earth inhabitants and ourselves. Simply getting rid of it, in order to build more stuff, does not seem a level-headed way forward. So, when the new UK government says that it wants to cut regulations so that its 1.5 million new homes can be built, I do wonder about the environmental impacts not to mention issues of human health and safety that regulations are designed to protect.

UK road traffic statistics are not the only way speed has been equated with a successful economy. There is now a considerable body of work that reveals how the individual pace of walking increases with more successful economies and larger cities. Researchers argue that the speed of walking is related the perceived value of time in relation to wage rates and the cost of living.^[ii]  In 1976, Bornstein and Bornstein timed pedestrians as they covered 50 feet in 15 cities in 6 countries and concluded that pedestrian speed is a log linear function of city size.^[iii] Using a more sophisticated set of measurements, Walmsley and Lewis confirmed this general observation in 1989, noting four possible reasons including the need to walk longer distances in bigger places, the need to avoid social contact in bigger cities, and the increased value of pedestrian time in economically more vibrant areas.^[iv] Still more recently, in 1999, Levine and Norenzayan surveyed the “pace of life in 31 countries” arguing that the size of cities alone was unlikely to be the cause of faster walking pace. The 1999 study drastically expanded the number of sites investigated and increased the range of locations across the globe to account for cultural differences in walking pace. Rather than sampling a range of city sizes they focused on the biggest cities in their respective countries. They started with six hypotheses in addition to the already familiar hypothesis that bigger cities will have a higher pace of life. These included a projected link between higher pace of life and better subjective wellbeing, a suspicion that hotter climate would be correlated with slower speeds, and that people would smoke more in faster places. The first hypothesis, however, was “the more vital a city’s economy, the faster its pace of life.”^[v] Economic vitality was measured using a combination of GDP, the amount people could purchase on their income (purchasing power parity (PPP)), and the average calorific intake. They concluded that economic vitality was the strongest predictor of pace of life.

Faster paced places will tend to be more economically productive—which then raises the value of time and, subsequently, the pace of life. The consequences of this economic vitality, as the present findings suggest, are mixed. On one hand, the very time stressors that are responsible for success lead to unhealthy behaviors (e.g., smoking) and stress-related physical problems (notably CHD). On the other hand, the tangible rewards of economic success raise the general level of psychological well-being. People in fast-paced places tend to be happier.^[vi]

Most of the excited commentary on worlds of increasing speed (whether positive or negative) have been generalized diagnoses of the costs or benefits of speeding up. What is often missing is  how speed is differentiated and distributed, how it forms a key part of a politics of mobility.

It is not just high speeds, whether in cars or on foot, that has been coded with positive values. Slow speeds have too. Slow food, slow cities, slow sex – all of these and more have been promoted as antidotes to a speeded-up world suffering, in German sociologist Hartmut Rosa’s terms, from an excess of “acceleration”.^[vii] Capitalist society, according to Rosa, forces us into worlds of incessant speed and growth which leads to permanent and increasing levels of stress. The moments when we escape that are, according to his argument, moments when we “resonate” with the world in ways that are non-instrumental. Despite his insistence that slowness, in and of itself, is not the solution to the pathologies of acceleration, his examples of “resonance” include things like a walk in a forest, reading a book, or spending time with art, most of which require significant deceleration from the ambient pace of the world. This general promotion of deceleration, slowness, and resonance is noted by sociologist Filip Vostal in a nuanced critique of the politics of slowness.

Simply stated, there is a powerful cultural discourse maintaining speed as a juggernaut limiting human well-being, jeopardizing progressive social development and reproduction, and negatively impacting nature and ecological systems. Slowness is then depicted as a desirable and necessary antipode to the ‘evil’ fast world and is underpinned by positive and emancipatory connotations.^[viii]

Carl Honoré is one of the leading evangelists for the cult of slowness. His book In Praise of Slow is just the latest in a long line of screeds diagnosing the negative consequences of speed and advocating for a slowing down of almost everything. “Despite Cassandra-like mutterings from the speed merchants”, Honoré writes, “slower, it turns out, often means better – better health, better work, better business, better family life, better exercise, better cuisine and better sex”.^[ix] Honoré argues that we should “seek to live at what musicians call the tempo giusto – the right speed”.^[x] He interviews Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Italian slow food movement who makes the same point. “Being Slow means that you control the rhythms of your own life” Petrini says, “if today I want to go fast, I go fast; if tomorrow I want to go slow, I go slow. What we are fighting for is the right to determine our own tempos”.^[xi]

Neither high speeds nor slowness are good or bad in themselves. While normative lifeworlds have been created around being fast or slow, it is not a particular velocity that will bring happiness, self-actualization, or justice. The focus, instead, should be on both the relations between speed and slowness and the capacity for individuals to have autonomy over their own velocities. It is also important to keep the relational nature of speed in mind. Speed or slowness may feel emancipatory on an individual level but be systematically linked to speeds for others which are imposed rather than chosen. Even for an individual, different phases of high speed and slowness are often logically related. This point is made by Rosa who notes that the provision of moments and spaces of slowness within contemporary capitalism are often little more than an opportunity to regain lost energy which can be used once the fast lane of life is reentered.^[xii]It is no accident that there is a lucrative market selling slowness as a commodity including a whole range of highly expensive alternative therapies, yoga retreats, forest bathing, and the like.

The valorization of slowness as an antidote to the speed of modern life, like similar calls for a return to “authentic” forms of place, brings with it the danger of regressive and reactionary forms of localism. The narrative of technologies of speed leading to time-space compression and globalization leads to a mapping of high speeds on to global scales. Slowness, on the other hand, is all too easily mapped on to searches for an authentic and historically rooted sense of the local. This logic is dangerous. There were, after all, many progressive benefits that came with the opening-up of slow localisms by the technologies of speed. In other words, slowness can also be associated with a narrow and repressive life that can only in retrospect be labelled as “authentic” or somehow in touch with the speed and rhythms of the natural world. One thing that speed allowed, and still allows, is the smashing asunder of regressive forms of conservatism – which is one reason why the enemy of the populist right are often the “globalists”. “In short,” political scientist William E. Scheuerman writes, “we need to confront the normative and institutional difficulties raised by incessant motion and speed without succumbing to a misplaced nostalgia for static and impervious forms of communal life.”^[xiii]

^[i] See https://datasciencecampus.ons.gov.uk/projects/faster-indicators-of-uk-economic-activity-road-traffic-data-for-england/ (accessed 23/02/2024).

^[ii] D. Jim Walmsley and Gareth J. Lewis, "The Pace of Pedestrian Flows in Cities," Environment and Behavior 21, no. 2 (1989), https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916589212001, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0013916589212001; Robert V. Levine and Ara Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 30, no. 2 (1999),https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022199030002003, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0022022199030002003.

^[iii] Marc H. Bornstein and Helen G. Bornstein, "The pace of life," Nature 259, no. 5544 (1976/02/01 1976),https://doi.org/10.1038/259557a0, https://doi.org/10.1038/259557a0.

^[iv] Walmsley and Lewis, "The Pace of Pedestrian Flows in Cities."

^[v] Levine and Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," 181.

^[vi] Levine and Norenzayan, "The Pace of Life in 31 Countries," 201.

^[vii] Hartmut Rosa and Bjørn Schiermer, "Acceleration and Resonance: An Interview with Hartmut Rosa," Acta Sociologica E-Special: Four Generations of Critical Theory in Acta Sociologica (2020). https://journals.sagepub.com/pb-assets/cmscontent/ASJ/Acceleration_and_Resonance.pdf.

^[viii] Filip Vostal, "Slowing down modernity: A critique," Time & Society 28 (2017): 1042.

^[ix] Carl Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed, 1st ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 14. Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1308/2004274150-b.html.

^[x] Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed.

^[xi] Carlo Petrini quoted in Honoré, In praise of slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed, 16.

^[xii] Hartmut Rosa, Social acceleration: a new theory of modernity, New directions for critical theory, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

^[xiii] William E. Scheuerman, "Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed," Polity 34, no. 1 (2001): 61,https://doi.org/10.2307/3235508, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/3235508.

When public space is shared between cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, the politics of speed becomes a matter of life and death. According to the National Safety Council in the United States, speeding was partly responsible for 29% of all traffic fatalities in 2020 – a total of over 30 people per day.^[i] According to the British organization, Roadwise, at a speed of 35 mph there is a 50 percent chance that a pedestrian will be killed in a collision. At 40 mph the figure becomes 90%.^[ii] Speed is deadly and relational. The faster the traffic, the less safe the space becomes for those not in motorized vehicles. In March 2023, the devolved government of Wales reduced the default speed limit for built-up areas from 30 mph to 20 mph. Reducing accidents involving pedestrians was a significant reason for the cut in the speed limit but not the only one. It was argued that by reducing the speed of traffic, forms of “active travel” (walking, running, and cycling) would become safer and therefore more appealing. This, in turn, would lead to increased social interaction as more people would encounter each other in public space and build community in the process. Physical and mental health outcomes would improve thanks to the increase in exercise outdoors. Local economies would also improve due to increased footfall on high streets. A decrease in car use for local trips might also lead to a reduction in carbon emissions from travel.^[iii] The nationwide decrease in default speed limits was based on monitoring in seven test sites across Wales where several positive effects had been recorded including a significant increase in the use of active travel to get to primary schools. Parents felt that the new speed limit made the use of space safer for them and their children.

In the United States, traffic speed is also spatially differentiated in ways that contribute to racial inequity. An analysis of pedestrian fatalities in Oregon, for instance, concluded that “BIPOC experience a disproportionate fatal injury burden with Black people experiencing the greatest disparity. The next greatest disparity was found among American Indian and Alaskan Native peoples, followed by Latinx people. Asian people also have a higher rate of pedestrian injury than the state average.” An analysis of pedestrian deaths and race at the level of census tracts revealed that areas where BIPOC were more concentrated were also places with roads with higher speed limits and lower car ownership. So, more people walked, cycled, or used public transit. The higher levels of walking alongside higher speed of traffic led to higher rates of fatal injury for pedestrians.^[iv] These findings have been replicated across urban areas of the United States. An article in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine reports that:

… fatality rates per 100 million miles traveled are systematically higher for Black and Hispanic Americans for all modes and notably higher for vulnerable modes (e.g., Black Americans died at more than 4 times the rate for White Americans while cycling, 33.71 [95% CI: 21.84, 73.83] compared with 7.53 [95% CI: 6.64, 8.69], and more than 2 times the rate while walking, 40.92 [95% CI: 36.58, 46.44] compared with 18.77 [95% CI: 17.30, 20.51]).^[v]

In Los Angeles, a report by researchers at UCLA concluded that while Black residents represent 8.6% of the city’s population, they accounted for 18% of pedestrian deaths and 15% of all cyclist deaths.^[vi]Efforts to reduce speed limits, such as the reduction of 30 mph speed limits to 20 mph in the United Kingdom, have become symbolic of wider political currents. In September 2023 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak chose to fix on speed limits in efforts to make a case for Conservative government arguing that 20mph zones “aren’t the right values of the British people.” He promised to set out a “plan for motorists” that would limit such zones and favor drivers over public transport passengers, cyclists, and pedestrians.^[vii]Similarly disparaging comments were made about the idea of the 15-minute city – an idea that focusses on the ability to reach key services within 15 minutes at walking pace.^[viii]Efforts such as these to slow down traffic in order to increase opportunities for safe travel at slower speeds became central to wider conspiracy theories of sinister attempts by governments and the United Nations to impose various kinds of mobility restrictions on everyone. The speed of automobility, it was argued, was the speed of citizenship – indicative of “right values”.

We can see here how questions of speed are also questions of what Mimi Sheller calls mobility justice.^[ix] The relatively fast speed of some has externalities which are related to the comparatively slow speeds of others – or, in some instances, death. The children who might walk to school in Wales, or BIPOC in Oregon have mobility capacities which are directly and indirectly related to the speed of people in cars. The same logic occurs at other scales. If I choose to fly to Paris from Edinburgh because it will get me there quicker than travelling by train, then I will emit 437 kg of CO2 rather than the 46kg I would have emitted on the train. I would save some time of course, due to the speed of planes vs trains. Speed is the main reason people choose to fly rather than travel by train. But my decision impacts the lives of people who are not able to, or choose not to, make that choice. The impacts of global warming that result from the carbon emissions of flights to Paris are experienced first and hardest by the world’s poor, far from where I live in Edinburgh. At the scale of U.S. urban space, and at the scale of a globe subject to global heating, speed is part of Ruth Wilson Gilmore definition of racism as the “state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”^[x] Speed, it turns out, is often political.

^[i] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/motor-vehicle-safety-issues/speeding/ (accessed 24 April, 2023)

^[ii] https://www.roadwise.co.uk/using-the-road/speeding/the-chance-of-a-pedestrian-surviving/ (accessed 24 April, 2023)

^[iii] Transport for Wales/Trafnidiaeth Cymru, Default 20mph speed limit on restricted roads. Phase 1. Interim monitoring report., Transport for Wales/Trafnidiaeth Cymru (Cardiff, 2023).

^[iv] Governors Highway Safety Association, An Analysis of Traffic Fatalities by Race and Ethnicity, Governors Highway Safety Association (Washington D.C. , June 2021 2021), 5.

^[v] Matthew A Raifman and Ernani F Choma, "Disparities in Activity and Traffic Fatalities by Race/Ethnicity," American Journal of Preventative Medicine 63, no. 2 (2022): 160.

^[vi] Madeline Brozen and Annaleigh Yahata Ekman, The need to prioritize Black lives in LA’s traffic safety efforts, Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, U.C.L.A. (Los Angeles, 2020).

^[vii] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/28/rishi-sunak-expected-to-limit-powers-of-councils-in-england-to-curb-car-use-20mph-speed-limit-traffic-camera-fines (accessed 15/02/2024)

^[viii] Natalie Whittle, The 15-minute city (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2021).

^[ix] Sheller, Mobility justice: the politics of movement in the age of extremes.

^[x] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing California, American crossroads, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28.

One of the paradoxes of place is that it is both universal (all humans live in places) and particular (it is central to the idea of place that no two are the same). When we talk of a sense of place one of the things we mean is that a place stands out from other places. When we encounter somewhere that seems in some way cookie-cutter, or generic, we write of placelessness or, following the French anthropologist, Marc Auge, “non-place”. One of the things that placemakers are attempting to do, is to create distinctive places – places you might want to visit and return to.

It was for this reason that I was struck by some things that jogged my memory when I read about Edinburgh’s planned “West Town” – to be built, we are told, in ways informed by placemaking. The list of attributes for the new neighbourhood includes a significant number of trees planted along its new streets, “green corridors”, an emphasis on small and medium size parks, and, most specifically “varying rooflines”. It was this last attribute that took me back to the decade or so I spent studying the area around the old Maxwell Street Market in Chicago – just to the south and west of the Loop, adjacent to the University of Illinois at Chicago campus.^[1] When I first started visiting the area, there were billboards advertising the new “University Village”. The “Village”, it turns out, was being built entirely over the area where the lively, mostly immigrant centered, market had once been – a unique place if ever there was one. The market had been the largest open-air market in North America since its origins in the 1880s, and by many accounts, a very lively kind of place. Descriptions of the new “village” had all the hallmarks of placemaking discourse – lively public spaces, ground floor retail opportunities, and, of course, the use of the term “village” to designate a positive kind of place. A pamphlet mailed to University employees promoted University Village in familiar terms:

“Yesterday’s Heritage. Tomorrow’s Treasure”

   Chicago’s newest, most convenient, most thoughtfully planned neighborhood ... a great life in the city.

   University Village presents traditional Chicago style architecture on tree-lined streets.

   Townhome exteriors feature varying rooflines,

   The site features neighborhood parks and green space corridors.

            “Chicago’s next great neighborhood”

If we look at the list of attributes of Chicago’s University Village – tree-lined streets, green spaces and corridors, and “varying rooflines” – we can see that they are almost exactly the same as the attributes of Edinburgh’s planned West Town. These examples are thousands of miles and several decades apart. Placemaking processes, it seems, are likely to produces places every bit as similar as Starbucks outlets or shiny glass skyscrapers. This is diametrically opposed to the focus on particularity at the heart of the idea of ‘sense of place’. Is it possible that the activities of placemakers are actually succeeding in doing the opposite – producing a new kind of algorithmic placelessness?

^[1] Tim Cresswell, Maxwell Street: writing and thinking place (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).