Resilience planning, economic change and the politics of post-recession development in London and Hong Kong

For much of the 1990s and 2000s, the emphasis of urban policy in many global cities was on managing and mitigating the social and environmental effects of rapid economic growth. The credit crunch of 2008 and the subsequent recession have undermined some of the core assumptions on which such policies were based. It is in this context that the concept of resilience planning has taken on a new significance. Drawing on contemporary research in London and Hong Kong, the paper shows how resilience and recovery planning has become a key area of political debate. It examines what is meant by conservative and radical interpretations of resilience and how conservative views have come to dominate ‘recovery’ thinking, with élite groups unwilling to accept the limits to the neo-liberal orthodoxies that helped to precipitate the economic crisis. The paper explores the implications of such thinking for the politics of urban development.

Contributing understanding of mitigation options for phosphorus and sediment to a review of the efficacy of contemporary agricultural stewardship measures

Experiences from the Mitigation Options for Phosphorus and Sediment (MOPS) projects, which aim to determine the effectiveness of measures to reduce pollutant loading from agricultural land to surface waters, have been used to contribute to the findings of a recent paper (Kay et al., 2009, Agricultural Systems, 99, 67–75), which reviewed the efficacy of contemporary agricultural stewardship measures for ameliorating the water pollution problems of key concern to the UK water industry. MOPS1 is a recently completed 3-year research project on three different soil types in the UK, which focused on mitigation options for winter cereals. MOPS1 demonstrated that tramlines can be the major pathway for sediment and nutrient transfer from arable hillslopes, and that although minimum tillage, crop residue incorporation, contour cultivation, and beetle banks also have potential to be cost-effective mitigation options, tramline management is the one of the most promising treatments for mitigating diffuse pollution losses, as it was able to reduce sediment and nutrient losses by 72–99% in four out of five site years trialled. Using information from the MOPS projects, this paper builds on the findings of Kay et al. to provide an updated picture of the evidence available and the immediate needs for research in this area.

Can objects perform?: agency and thingliness in contemporary sculpture and installation

In his 1967 essay, “Art and Objecthood”, Michael Fried bemoaned the theatricality of minimalist sculpture, which replaced the presentness of compositional sculpture with the staging of an experience for the viewer as performer. His argument has since been inverted by artists and art writers invested in the idea of sculptures as props forming part of an artistic experience economy. This discourse has accompanied the rise of relational aesthetics as a dominant paradigm for contemporary art. More recently, however, there has been a turn away from relationality to ‘object-oriented’ art, where objects are seen to stage their own theatrical experiences, performing themselves without requiring the activation of a viewer’s body. We trace parallels between the philosophy of Bruno Latour and the “Speculative Materialism” group and this emerging trend in sculpture. In ascribing agency to objects, Latour proposes a radical shift from philosophy’s traditional investigation of the relationship between the mind and the world. Drawn to the idea that matter can be creative, artists have embraced his thinking. However, we argue that this has lead to a generalized, universalizing humanism that disables political action. Moreover, it undermines the potential for anti-humanist critique latent in object-oriented philosophy.

On the troublesome relationship of feminism and terrorism: representing the female terrorist in contemporary art

This paper analyses tendencies in debates about cultural representations of terrorism to assume that artists make critical interventions, while the mass media circulates stereotypes. Some recent feminist analyses of female terrorist acts have re-instituted essentialist arguments in which violence and terrorism is described as inherently masculine, while women are by nature pacifist, so that femininity is the antithesis of militarism. More progressive analyses mostly tend to expose the circulation of stereotypes and their gender bias, in order to protest the misrepresentation of women in violence. These analyses do not construct alternative accounts. Through an analysis of two works by artists Hito Steyerl and Sharon Hayes, the paper argues that some of the moves to re-image the question of women, violence and agency have already been made in contemporary art practices. Through analysing legacies of terrorism and feminism, it becomes possible to rethink the question of agency, militancy and the nature of political art. The paper appears in an edited interdiscplinary collection arising from a conference at Universität der Bundeswehr in Munich. It relates to wider projects involving collaborations with Birkbeck and Edinburgh on representations of terrorism and on violence and contemporary art.

Choices, chance and change: luck egalitarianism over time

The family of theories dubbed ‘luck egalitarianism’ represent an attempt to infuse egalitarian thinking with a concern for personal responsibility, arguing that inequalities are just when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, choice, but are unjust when they result from, or the extent to which they result from, luck. In this essay I argue that luck egalitarians should sometimes seek to limit inequalities, even when they have a fully choice-based pedigree (i.e., result only from the choices of agents). I grant that the broad approach is correct but argue that the temporal standpoint from which we judge whether the person can be held responsible, or the extent to which they can be held responsible, should be radically altered. Instead of asking, as Standard (or Static) Luck Egalitarianism seems to, whether or not, or to what extent, a person was responsible for the choice at the time of choosing, and asking the question of responsibility only once, we should ask whether, or to what extent, they are responsible for the choice at the point at which we are seeking to discover whether, or to what extent, the inequality is just, and so the question of responsibility is not settled but constantly under review. Such an approach will differ from Standard Luck Egalitarianism only if responsibility for a choice is not set in stone – if responsibility can weaken then we should not see the boundary between luck and responsibility within a particular action as static. Drawing on Derek Parfit’s illuminating discussions of personal identity, and contemporary literature on moral responsibility, I suggest there are good reasons to think that responsibility can weaken – that we are not necessarily fully responsible for a choice for ever, even if we were fully responsible at the time of choosing. I call the variant of luck egalitarianism that recognises this shift in temporal standpoint and that responsibility can weaken Dynamic Luck Egalitarianism (DLE). In conclusion I offer a preliminary discussion of what kind of policies DLE would support.