Eric Sheppard

• PhD University of Toronto
• Professor (Full) at University of California, Los Angeles

Conjunctural analysis, a social science epistemology rooted in deeply contextualized and situated modes of explanation, was initially developed by the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to understand how particular spatiotemporal conjunctures diverge from the general structural tendencies driving society, and to identify emancipatory...

Anglophone economic geography has played a central role in the evolution of human geography. That includes economic geography's various philosophical and theoretical shifts as it moved from an imperialist commercial geography, through to regional economic geography, spatial science and location theory, Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. The...

We respond as the Jakarta Collective to Prathiwi Putri’s constructive critique of Leitner and Sheppard’s research on Jakarta’s kampungs, to make visible the broader cluster of scholarship surrounding their research. Deploying six binaries, postcolonialism vs. neoliberalism, non-capitalism vs. capitalism, agency vs. structure, displacement vs. dispo...

Conjunctural analysis, a social science epistemology rooted in deeply contextualized and situated modes of explanation, was initially developed by the philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser to understand how particular spatiotemporal conjunctures diverge from the general structural tendencies driving society, and to identify emancipatory...

The papers and commentaries constituting this special issue offer new insights into speculative urbanism from the perspective of two southern metropolises. Based on an international and inter-disciplinary collaboration comparing speculative urbanism in central and peri-urban Jakarta (Indonesia) and Bengaluru (India), and interrogating the literatur...

This commentary includes a series of responses to Wainwright and Weaver’s “A Critical Commentary on the AAG Geography and Military Study Committee Report.” The contributors’ responses vary from the sympathetic to the critical, yet all agree that geographers’ engagements with military and intelligence organizations can be fraught with ethical issues...

We examine residents’ lived experiences of market-induced displacement from informal settlements and of their afterlives in greater Jakarta—the creeping displacement of residents under pressure to sell their land rights to developers and land brokers. We interrogate four aspects of these displacees’ afterlives: housing, livelihoods, rentiership, an...

This article explores a conjunctural approach to comparison as a means to capture the complexity of the processes shaping metropolitan land transformations in a city of the global South, comparing the co-implicated actions of developers and local residents across central and peri-urban Jabodetabek. A conjunctural approach shares with some other for...

Anthropogenic global heating is accelerating, with dramatic implications for the long-term prospects of humans and many other species, underwritten by the logics of Euro-centric capitalism compounded by the colonialism, racism, patriarchy, and commodification of nature that has accompanied it. Nationalism is re-emerging, as are socio-cultural divis...

Peri-urbanization is transforming the urban-rural interface of metropolitan areas across the global south. Large-scale planned developments and infrastructure projects result in the widespread displacement of residents and the disappearance of agricultural fields, vegetable plots, and small enterprises. Through multi-year fieldwork in eastern peri-...

We propose an epistemology for conjunctural inter-urban comparison, stressing the dialectical relationship between the general and the particular. We spatialise conjunctural analysis, avoiding methodological territorialism by extending the explanatory framework outwards in space to incorporate inter-territorial connections and supra-territorial sca...

Much attention has been paid recently to land grabs in rural and urban areas of the global South, but relatively little attention has been paid to such activities in the third dimension—vertical space. Yet vertical space has also been increasingly colonized, as manifest in the transformation of mega‐city skylines through the proliferating number an...

In this article, we examine how urban resilience has emerged as a global urban policy project, offering solutions for cities about how they can adapt to and recover from shocks and stresses, particularly those associated with climate change. We conceptualize this as a multicentric global urban resilience complex, catalyzed until recently by the Roc...

Resumo: No espírito de fortalecer seus fundamentos intelectuais e esclarecer suas contribuições para dar sentido ao mundo, devemos resistir a qualquer inclinação a tratar a geografia como um clube — uma disciplina com fronteiras a serem policiadas e defendidas. Advogo pelas forças de se pensar geograficamente, uma maneira de ser no mundo aberta a t...

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Wash...

This chapter expresses that David Harvey along with his students made Johns Hopkins University and Baltimore a key geographical node in North American radical geography. The role that geography plays in the production of knowledge has been conceptualized in several forms. In Michel Foucault's work, place is a heterotopic site, where the clash of di...

This chapter considers the regional and departmental context, and the intense engagement with the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG). It discusses two other centers of radical geographic innovation in the Midwest, the Universities of Wisconsin and Michigan. Minnesota, and the Upper Midwest more generally, was known for its Scandinavian collectivi...

The sociospatial dialectic conceptualizes the complex interrelationship between social and spatial structures, whereby the spatialities produced by societal processes themselves have causal influence over those processes. Developed initially as a foundational concept for geographical political economy, underwriting a distinctive approach to that of...

Active between 1974 and 1982, the Union of Socialist Geographers (USG) was a Canadian–US centred academic/activist collaborative venture in socialist geography, operating independently from the mainstream professional associations (the Canadian Association of Geographers, and the then‐named Association of American Geographers). Its origins were in...

Thinking through Jakarta, this paper explores the possibility of decentering understandings of conditions of possibility for economic transformation across the post-colony, by shifting the optic away from European-style Capitalism. Colonialism, racism and slavery enabled the hegemony of European-style Capitalism, characterized by nation-states and...

We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988: large-scale private-sector development projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political...

Urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberal urban governance are assuming new forms under finance‐dominated accumulation. We examine and contribute to theorizing the mechanisms through which urban governance is financialized, taking as a case study JESSICA, one of the European Union’s initiatives to implement an ‘urban sensitive’ policy for sustainable...

Urban resilience, a new urban development and governance agenda, is being rolled out from the top down by a network of public, private, non-profit sector actors forming a global urban resilience complex: producing norms that circulate globally, creating assessment tools rendering urban resilience technical and managerial, and commodifying urban res...

For most geographers, thinking geographically about the economy means something very different than for mainstream/geographical economists: what is heterodox for the latter constitutes geographers' orthodoxy. Nineteen propositions about geographical political economy demonstrate how thinking geographically disrupts core propositions about capitalis...

Gordon Clark assesses the urban and regional infrastructure funding problems created by contemporary developments in the globalization of finance, proposing solutions for the European context. This commentary interrogates the appropriateness of Clark’s approach for the Global South. I suggest that Clark’s discussion of a global savings glut is embe...

How do you turn economic geography into art? The Mexican painter, writer, and long‐time communist Diego Rivera did it between 1932 and 1933 in painting the 25 panels of the mural “Detroit: Man and Machine” at the Detroit Institute of Arts (see cover). The panels tell a rich and complex economic geographical story: extracting resources from the grou...

Competition is all the rage. It is, as Erica Schoenberger puts it, a hegemonic discourse in economics and economic geography, and has been central to how economic geographers think ‐ at least since they took economic theory on board in the 1960s. Economic geographers do not write many articles explicitly on competition but, like any hegemonic disco...

Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recr...

Anglophone economic geography has played a central role in the evolution of human geography, including its various philosophical and theoretical shifts, from neocolonial commercial geography, through regional economic geography, spatial science, and location theory, to Marxism, feminism, and poststructuralism. It is currently extremely diverse, ref...

In this essay, part of a special issue acknowledging the scholarship of Neil Smith, we trace his contributions to conceptualizing scale. From his important foundational text, Uneven Development, to his later works that fashioned a more malleable, constructivist, and socio-cultural approach, Neil Smith made lifelong contributions to our understandin...

Relationality is a persistent concern of socio-spatial theory, increasingly invoked in geographical scholarship. We bring geographical scholarship on relationality to bear on relational poverty studies, an emergent body of work that challenges mainstream approaches to conceptualizing, explaining, researching and acting upon poverty. We argue that r...

Geoff Mann makes a strong case for continuities within European thought, stretching from Keynes back to Hegel, with respect to questions of the state, economy and civil society. His reflections on their implications for radical academic practices are well-taken. His focus on deepening the temporality of Keynesian thinking does not attend, however,...

This book summarizes how globalizing capitalism-the economic system now presumed to dominate the global economy-can be understood from a geographical perspective. This is in contrast to mainstream economic analysis, which theorizes globalizing capitalism as a system that is capable of enabling everyone to prosper and every place to achieve economi...

The discipline of geography has a long albeit uneven engagement with militarism. This is witnessed in the on-going efforts of geographers to influence military policy as well as the development of technologies used in military action. This forum, based on papers originally presented at the 2014 Association of American Geographers annual meeting in...

Chang I-C. C., Leitner H. and Sheppard E. A green leap forward? Eco-state restructuring and the Tianjin–Binhai eco-city model. Regional Studies. China has experienced a remarkable explosion of designated eco-cities since the year 2000, with Tianjin–Binhai becoming the best-practice model. Embedded in broader political economic changes, shifting mul...

Advocating a provincialization of critical urban theory, we seek to move beyond current polarizations and disputes over the basis of urban theory, creating space to take seriously the possibility that no single theory suffices to account for the variegated nature of urbanization and cities across the world. Such provincialization requires a serious...

This focus section explores what it means to think geographically about an emergent Asia. The four articles are based on presentations given at the Presidential Plenary session at the 2013 Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Los Angeles. In this Introduction, I briefly examine the temporalities associated with the term emergent an...

In the spirit of strengthening its intellectual foundations and clarifying its contributions to making sense of Earth, we should resist any inclination to treat geography as a club—a discipline with boundaries to be policed and defended. I advocate for the strengths of thinking geographically, a way of being in the world open to all. This means att...

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current ‘urban century’ in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldw...

This book review symposium interrogates Joel Wainwright's recent text Geopiracy: Oaxaca, Militant Empiricism, and Geographical Thought (Palgrave Macillan 2013). Overtly, this text is a scathing critique of the Bowman Expeditions, launched in 2006 with several million dollars of funding from the Foreign Military Study Office (FMSO) of the US Army. T...

The specter of positivism haunts critical urban studies, distracting us from the possibilities of creative, rigorous, critically engaged activist scholarship beyond the obsolete dichotomies of quantitative/qualitative methodologies and positivist/post-positivist epistemologies. Yet a genealogy of positivism shows that the movement was never as phil...

In this paper we aim to provide a historical account of the evolution of Anglophone radical/critical geography in North America. Our account is structured chronologically. First, we examine the spectral presence of radical / critical geography in North America prior to the mid-sixties. Second, we narrate the emergence of both radical and critical g...

"To thematize requires a project to select its objects, deploy them in a bounded field, and submit them to disciplined inquiry" (Guha, 1997, xv) Mainstream urban scholarship envisions urbanization as a global process that is best achieved via the worldwide application of the development mechanisms pioneered in the advanced capitalist countries - cu...

Mainstream, place-based theories of economic development presume that there is a common set of stages of economic development that all territories (should) pass through. This perspective presents ‘resource peripheries’ such as the Pilbara as deviations from this norm. Based on a brief visit to the Pilbara, and drawing on economic geographical conce...

Critical urban geography came to dominate knowledge production in urban geography during the 1990s. This extremely fruitful research program nevertheless faces certain bounds to knowledge production that hinder its ongoing vitality. With respect to conceptual approaches, there has been considerable unbounding from an earlier focus on class and comm...

The role of post-secondary educational institutions in our ecology of knowledge production is shifting rapidly. Our Association must pay close attention to these shifts in its upcoming long-range planning process, given its 110 year commitment to representing the interests of academic/professional geographers. These changes, currently dominated by...

Proliferating environmental sustainability policy frameworks suggest that sustainability and economic competitiveness are essentially interdependent and mutually enhancing. Under these policy discourses, cities are designated as strategic geographical locales for fulfilling the green capitalist goal of reconciling the contradictions between the env...

Theories and conceptions of the economy profoundly shape how it comes to be known. In this chapter the author compares and contrasts the sociospatial ontologies of economists and geographers, theorizing the relationship between geography and economic development. These groups of scholars share the view that neoliberal globalization has undermined d...

Geography and Economics: Estranged Cousins?Unruly Discipline: The Reach and Grasp of Economic GeographyMore than Variegation: The Projects of Economic GeographySituated Economic Geographies: Organizing The Wiley - Blackwell CompanionOpen - ended Economic GeographiesReferences

The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Economic Geography presents students and researchers with a comprehensive overview of the field, put together by a prestigious editorial team, with contributions from an international cast of prominent scholars. Offers a fully revised, expanded, and up-to-date overview, following the successful and highly regarded C...