The Ultimate Handbook of Political Geography

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Cities as Lobbyists

In the United States, state-local relations are characterized by increasing urban-rural polarization, and several states have recently engaged in high-profile preemption efforts that seek to limit local power. But cities aren’t powerless when it comes to shaping the political environment in which they operate. In fact, local governments are among the most active lobbyists in state politics. When and why do some local officials choose to hire lobbyists to represent them in other levels of government? How does this ability to pay for representation influence politics and policymaking? And what are the broader implications for intergovernmental representation? This chapter previews a theory of municipal lobbying that emphasizes political geography and outlines the structure and organization of the book. It also introduces the qualitative and quantitative data from dozens of sources that will be used throughout the book—including newly compiled longitudinal data on lobbying disclosures in all fifty states.

How City Lobbyists Bridge Representational Gaps

This chapter develops a simple theory of intergovernmental lobbying that emphasizes the relationship between cities and their elected delegations. Compared to most interest groups, cities are uniquely dependent on the state and federal officials who are elected to represent them by virtue of their political geography. The quality of this representation should therefore influence the demand for the lobbying. This chapter tests several observable implications of this theory using original panel data on annual city lobbying activity in all fifty states. A series of difference-in-differences designs reveal that municipal officials hire lobbyists in response to a wide array of representational challenges, such as hostile redistricting efforts and flips in the partisan composition of their delegations. The results are broadly consistent with a model of intergovernmental lobbying in which cities use lobbyists to compensate for the representational gaps that sometimes emerge in federal systems.

Political geography II: Violence

This report focuses on the diverse and multiple manifestations of political, state, and counter-state violence. Many of the examinations of political violence in this report highlight the continued need for disparate methodological and analytic lenses towards robust understandings of political violence across scales. Displacements and mobilities associated with flight from conflict are discussed in relation to the institutionalization of harm, trauma and containment through various state and supranational mechanisms of control. These mobilities include border crossings and associated violence against vulnerable populations seeking refuge. This is buttressed by discursive binary logics, such as us/them categorizations, which remain endemic to both structural and physical violence and foundational to right wing populism, jingoism, and other forms of political extremism. This report concludes by arguing the peace is not the opposite of war but rather its temporal substitute and partner in an assemblage of political and economic co-dependence.

Il diritto ad aspirare nelle geografie dei bambini. Una ricerca-azione partecipativa nel quartiere CEP di Palermo

Questo lavoro si propone di indagare criticamente il ruolo che le aspirazioni urbane, vale a dire la capacità collettiva di immaginare spazi alternativi per le proprie città, hanno nella costruzione delle geografie quotidiane delle bambine e dei bambini. In linea con i presupposti della Political Geography of Children, bambine e bambini vengono qui consideraticome attori socio-spaziali capaci di rinegoziare pratiche e rappresentazioni imposte dagli adulti. Muovendo da queste considerazioni teoriche e dai principi metodologici della ricerca-azione partecipativa, analizzeremo il percorso laboratoriale organizzato con le ragazze e i ragazzi dell'Associazione San Giovanni Apostolo del CEP di Palermo, uno dei quartieri più marginalizzati della città. In particolare, prenderemo in considerazione le attività di photo-walk e di mappatura collettiva condotte nel quartiere e i tentativi di trasformare il campo abbandonato di via Calandrucci da zona di ‘disimmaginazione' a luogo di desideri e rivendicazioni per i suoi abitanti più piccoli.