This paper builds on a nascent literature on rural austerity to explore the variegated geographie... more This paper builds on a nascent literature on rural austerity to explore the variegated geographies of austerity and food banking in rural areas of England and Wales. The paper makes three key contributions. First, drawing on a range of existing and newly updated datasets on local authority spending power and service spending, changes to welfare benefits, benefit sanctions, and local welfare assistance schemes we use the Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2011 Rural-Urban Classification of Local Authorities to provide the first comprehensive analysis of austerity in rural England and Wales. We outline the variegated nature of rural austerity and examine the ways in which new geographies of austerity are overwriting and compounding problems of rural poverty in the UK. Second, we combine newly available data from the Trussell Trust and Independent Food Aid Network to outline a geography of food banking in rural England and Wales, highlighting the uneven distribution of food aid across rural areas and discuss some of the problems rural locations pose to both those seeking and providing food aid. Third, drawing on interviews with food bank managers, volunteers and clients in two very different rural areas we examine how different rural contexts produce different experiences of and responses to poverty and food insecurity, paying particular attention to localised cultures of charity, welfare and deservingness. We conclude by setting out a new research agenda around which scholars might further explore the relationships between austerity, food insecurity and food banking in rural areas.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of sca... more This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common sense, including in the common sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the “empty cupboard” and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy, we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity.
This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare sta... more This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.
Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have ... more Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have been in steady decline since the mid twentieth century, when the industry that built it began to downsize and relocate production away from the United States. Decades of disinvestment and racial division left a city with central neighbourhoods sparsely populated and crumbling, while resources and services were concentrated in wealthier suburbs. In recent years, the city's landscape has come to be emblematic of post-industrial decline, urban blight and civic abandonment. My research adopts a mixed-methods ethnographic approach to argue that this framing of the city is in fact a deeply ideological one, with constructions of Detroit as empty and chaotic serving to lay the groundwork for a large-scale project of recolonisation, which draws simultaneously on discourses of greening and redemption. Narratives of abandonment and the re-emergence of urban 'nature' work together to reclaim the city in the interests of a mobile elite whose 'white flight', widely cited as the source of Detroit's problems, never flew much further than the suburbs. Drawing on news media, documentary film, television, photography, semi-structured interviews and extended periods of participant observation in Detroit between 2012 and 2014, I show how constructions of emptiness, a wilful fictionalisation of Detroit's recent history, narratives of greening and a pervasive investment in structures of white supremacy serve to create a Detroit in which wholesale gentrification may be put forward as a social good. (Alberta 2014; Segal 2013) and CEO, owner, or public face of online mortgage broker Quicken Loans, Rock Financial Ventures, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Bedrock Real Estate, is via these companies' de-facto owner of upwards of 100 buildings in Downtown Detroit. Alongside Gilbert, John Hantz's 2013 purchase of 1500 lots on the city's East Side for use as a tree farm; The New York Times' enduring fascination with Detroit; the movement of the city's tax foreclosed property auction online in 2010; and the existence of a mobile, young, college educated, affluent American elite looking for a place to make their mark, all provide not just context but a medium through which the re-colonisation of the city's space is articulated. Chapter two's literature review begins with gentrification. Looking at work within geography and the social sciences more broadly, I consider the possibilities for developing Smith's (1996) idea of the 'urban frontier' in a place such as Detroit, where discussions around regeneration draw not only on a frontier metaphor, but the material conditions of a re-imagined American frontier landscape. I then turn to Florida's Creative Class thesis (Florida 2003), not as a theory to inform my own work, but as a construct that has entered popular discourse around the regeneration of struggling cities and which appears particularly prevalent in more recent constructions of Detroit. I situate my research within the wider gentrification literature, as work which-while building on data about a particular middle-class consumer experienceseeks not so much to understand what gentrifiers want, but how these wants, and the narratives that support them, actively work to dispossess existing residents from both land and civic power. I also situate my research within the wealth of scholarship on the neoliberal city and the idea of urban crisis. Work drawing on Agamben to understand Detroit as 'the homo sacer of American cities' (Draus et al 2010:668) is particularly useful here, as is Peck's tracing of the origins of narratives of urban crisis to discourse produced by right wing think tanks (Peck 2006); and I look to Wacquant (2004,2007) for an understanding of the relationships between blackness, stigma, and the withdrawal of material resources. I then turn to scholarship on ruins, a cross disciplinary field emerging from work in art, architecture and anthropology. Beginning with Doron's analysis of the 'dead zone' (Doron 2000), an urban planning term for derelict and supposedly empty spaces which he argues are in fact host to a range of human and other activity, I move on to Edensor, and a consideration of ruins as sites of meaning and potential, even in their derelict status (Edensor 2005). I critique Woodward's (2004;2012) work, demonstrating the processes of fictionalisation inherent in ruin appreciation, and look to Masco and Yablon to understand the centrality of images of the ruined, 'post-apocalyptic' city to the US cultural imaginary (Masco 2008; Yablon 2004). 'internal Other', and as a 'source of distinction, reminding middle class white Americans of their own status and superiority, of that which they are not and do not wish to become' (Draus et al 2010:664). Ruin Googling the term 'ruin porn' in 2013, I was presented with 6,880,000 results, ranging from photo blogs dedicated to the appreciation of landscapes of abandonment and the personal experiences of urban explorers, to more critical, journalistic accounts lambasting the recent fashion for 'staring at abandoned buildings', and the absence of political analysis it allegedly stands for (Binelli 2012). The term is used largely pejoratively in the latter; a label to apply to art or film that designates is inauthentic and exploitative (Piiparinen 2012, Johnson 2012). At the less professionalised end of the spectrum, where tumblr accounts, personal photography, 26 and urban exploration blogs did use the term they appeared to embrace it as referring to a guilty pleasure, a fascination with something illicit and hidden. Indeed, as Johnson (2012) notes, attaching the word 'porn' to the end of a noun has become both a way for commentators to condemn particular kinds of photography as fetishizing, and as a way for fans to refer to the visual enjoyment of any 'guilty' pleasure, from food to architecture, and even crochet (Johnson 2012). The idea of 'ruin porn' was noticeably absent from academic analysis however, possibly because this ubiquity was a relatively recent phenomenon. A number of journalistic sources cited a 2009 VICE Magazine article on Detroit as originating the term (Johnson 2012, Binelli 2012), and on (admittedly unscientific) research it does appear to be the earliest use (Morton 2009). Internet and news media discussions seemed to approach the issue with a number of concerns in common, and Detroit was at least referred to, if not focused on, in the vast majority. In all cases I encountered, the term 'ruin porn' applied specifically to the appreciation of modern ruins, particularly industrial and institutional architecture, but also abandoned theme parks, transport infrastructure, and domestic structures. Several made use of frontier imagery, particularly in reference to Detroit, describing a 'gold-rush mentality' (Morton 2009), or a 'bacchanal spirit' in the city's 'nothing left to lose Frontier' (Binelli 2012). These accounts invariably shared a running theme of competition for authenticity, and the various routes through which such claims are asserted; opposing art and political engagement, and variously positioning urban explorers, photographers, 'locals' and political activists in a moral continuum that shifts according to the particular point being made (Greco 2012, Binelli 2012, Mullins 2012, Piiparinen 2012). Such writing also continues to participate, to various degrees, in the construction of Detroit and other post-industrial landscapes as empty and even 'post-apocalyptic' (Morton 2009, Mullins 2012)-places where tourists and photographers come to witness 'the end of the world' (Binelli 2012). Many link the aesthetic appreciation of contemporary landscapes of decay with a wider history of ruin contemplation, referencing nineteenth century artistic preoccupations with ancient Greek and Roman Ruins (Binelli 2012, Greco 2012), in one case alongside practices of slum tourism (Mullins 2012). Dereliction, 'ruin porn', and disaster zones as spaces of interest and creativity is a significant and emerging field within art and architecture. For the purposes of this review however, I limit my discussion to studies that are directly relevant to either the neo-colonial dimensions of the production of urban emptiness, or the specifics of Detroit's landscape. Gil Doron's work is concerned with the idea of the 'dead zone'; a standard term in urban planning, and used to refer to spaces understood as empty, derelict, or awaiting development speculation in the Motor City. University of Michigan Press release, May 9 th 2016.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of sca... more This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common-sense, including in the common-sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the 'empty cupboard' and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity.
This paper builds on a nascent literature on rural austerity to explore the variegated geographie... more This paper builds on a nascent literature on rural austerity to explore the variegated geographies of austerity and food banking in rural areas of England and Wales. The paper makes three key contributions. First, drawing on a range of existing and newly updated datasets on local authority spending power and service spending, changes to welfare benefits, benefit sanctions, and local welfare assistance schemes we use the Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2011 Rural-Urban Classification of Local Authorities to provide the first comprehensive analysis of austerity in rural England and Wales. We outline the variegated nature of rural austerity and examine the ways in which new geographies of austerity are overwriting and compounding problems of rural poverty in the UK. Second, we combine newly available data from the Trussell Trust and Independent Food Aid Network to outline a geography of food banking in rural England and Wales, highlighting the uneven distribution of food aid across rural areas and discuss some of the problems rural locations pose to both those seeking and providing food aid. Third, drawing on interviews with food bank managers, volunteers and clients in two very different rural areas we examine how different rural contexts produce different experiences of and responses to poverty and food insecurity, paying particular attention to localised cultures of charity, welfare and deservingness. We conclude by setting out a new research agenda around which scholars might further explore the relationships between austerity, food insecurity and food banking in rural areas.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of sca... more This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common sense, including in the common sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the “empty cupboard” and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy, we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity.
This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare sta... more This paper seeks to extend geographic thinking on the changing constitution of the UK welfare state, suggesting the need to supplement ideas of the “shadow state” with an analysis of the blurring of the bureaucratic practices through which welfare is now delivered by public, private and third sector providers alike. Focusing on the growing convergence of the bureaucratic practices of benefits officials and food bank organisations, we interrogate the production of moral distance that characterise both. We reveal the ideological values embedded in voucher and referral systems used by many food banks, and the ways in which these systems further stigmatise and exclude people in need of support. Contrasting these practices with those of a variety of “ethical insurgents”, we suggest that food banks are sites of both the further cementing and of challenge to the injustices of Britain's new welfare apparatus.
Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have ... more Once a city of two million people, and the centre of US car manufacture, Detroit's fortunes have been in steady decline since the mid twentieth century, when the industry that built it began to downsize and relocate production away from the United States. Decades of disinvestment and racial division left a city with central neighbourhoods sparsely populated and crumbling, while resources and services were concentrated in wealthier suburbs. In recent years, the city's landscape has come to be emblematic of post-industrial decline, urban blight and civic abandonment. My research adopts a mixed-methods ethnographic approach to argue that this framing of the city is in fact a deeply ideological one, with constructions of Detroit as empty and chaotic serving to lay the groundwork for a large-scale project of recolonisation, which draws simultaneously on discourses of greening and redemption. Narratives of abandonment and the re-emergence of urban 'nature' work together to reclaim the city in the interests of a mobile elite whose 'white flight', widely cited as the source of Detroit's problems, never flew much further than the suburbs. Drawing on news media, documentary film, television, photography, semi-structured interviews and extended periods of participant observation in Detroit between 2012 and 2014, I show how constructions of emptiness, a wilful fictionalisation of Detroit's recent history, narratives of greening and a pervasive investment in structures of white supremacy serve to create a Detroit in which wholesale gentrification may be put forward as a social good. (Alberta 2014; Segal 2013) and CEO, owner, or public face of online mortgage broker Quicken Loans, Rock Financial Ventures, the Cleveland Cavaliers, and Bedrock Real Estate, is via these companies' de-facto owner of upwards of 100 buildings in Downtown Detroit. Alongside Gilbert, John Hantz's 2013 purchase of 1500 lots on the city's East Side for use as a tree farm; The New York Times' enduring fascination with Detroit; the movement of the city's tax foreclosed property auction online in 2010; and the existence of a mobile, young, college educated, affluent American elite looking for a place to make their mark, all provide not just context but a medium through which the re-colonisation of the city's space is articulated. Chapter two's literature review begins with gentrification. Looking at work within geography and the social sciences more broadly, I consider the possibilities for developing Smith's (1996) idea of the 'urban frontier' in a place such as Detroit, where discussions around regeneration draw not only on a frontier metaphor, but the material conditions of a re-imagined American frontier landscape. I then turn to Florida's Creative Class thesis (Florida 2003), not as a theory to inform my own work, but as a construct that has entered popular discourse around the regeneration of struggling cities and which appears particularly prevalent in more recent constructions of Detroit. I situate my research within the wider gentrification literature, as work which-while building on data about a particular middle-class consumer experienceseeks not so much to understand what gentrifiers want, but how these wants, and the narratives that support them, actively work to dispossess existing residents from both land and civic power. I also situate my research within the wealth of scholarship on the neoliberal city and the idea of urban crisis. Work drawing on Agamben to understand Detroit as 'the homo sacer of American cities' (Draus et al 2010:668) is particularly useful here, as is Peck's tracing of the origins of narratives of urban crisis to discourse produced by right wing think tanks (Peck 2006); and I look to Wacquant (2004,2007) for an understanding of the relationships between blackness, stigma, and the withdrawal of material resources. I then turn to scholarship on ruins, a cross disciplinary field emerging from work in art, architecture and anthropology. Beginning with Doron's analysis of the 'dead zone' (Doron 2000), an urban planning term for derelict and supposedly empty spaces which he argues are in fact host to a range of human and other activity, I move on to Edensor, and a consideration of ruins as sites of meaning and potential, even in their derelict status (Edensor 2005). I critique Woodward's (2004;2012) work, demonstrating the processes of fictionalisation inherent in ruin appreciation, and look to Masco and Yablon to understand the centrality of images of the ruined, 'post-apocalyptic' city to the US cultural imaginary (Masco 2008; Yablon 2004). 'internal Other', and as a 'source of distinction, reminding middle class white Americans of their own status and superiority, of that which they are not and do not wish to become' (Draus et al 2010:664). Ruin Googling the term 'ruin porn' in 2013, I was presented with 6,880,000 results, ranging from photo blogs dedicated to the appreciation of landscapes of abandonment and the personal experiences of urban explorers, to more critical, journalistic accounts lambasting the recent fashion for 'staring at abandoned buildings', and the absence of political analysis it allegedly stands for (Binelli 2012). The term is used largely pejoratively in the latter; a label to apply to art or film that designates is inauthentic and exploitative (Piiparinen 2012, Johnson 2012). At the less professionalised end of the spectrum, where tumblr accounts, personal photography, 26 and urban exploration blogs did use the term they appeared to embrace it as referring to a guilty pleasure, a fascination with something illicit and hidden. Indeed, as Johnson (2012) notes, attaching the word 'porn' to the end of a noun has become both a way for commentators to condemn particular kinds of photography as fetishizing, and as a way for fans to refer to the visual enjoyment of any 'guilty' pleasure, from food to architecture, and even crochet (Johnson 2012). The idea of 'ruin porn' was noticeably absent from academic analysis however, possibly because this ubiquity was a relatively recent phenomenon. A number of journalistic sources cited a 2009 VICE Magazine article on Detroit as originating the term (Johnson 2012, Binelli 2012), and on (admittedly unscientific) research it does appear to be the earliest use (Morton 2009). Internet and news media discussions seemed to approach the issue with a number of concerns in common, and Detroit was at least referred to, if not focused on, in the vast majority. In all cases I encountered, the term 'ruin porn' applied specifically to the appreciation of modern ruins, particularly industrial and institutional architecture, but also abandoned theme parks, transport infrastructure, and domestic structures. Several made use of frontier imagery, particularly in reference to Detroit, describing a 'gold-rush mentality' (Morton 2009), or a 'bacchanal spirit' in the city's 'nothing left to lose Frontier' (Binelli 2012). These accounts invariably shared a running theme of competition for authenticity, and the various routes through which such claims are asserted; opposing art and political engagement, and variously positioning urban explorers, photographers, 'locals' and political activists in a moral continuum that shifts according to the particular point being made (Greco 2012, Binelli 2012, Mullins 2012, Piiparinen 2012). Such writing also continues to participate, to various degrees, in the construction of Detroit and other post-industrial landscapes as empty and even 'post-apocalyptic' (Morton 2009, Mullins 2012)-places where tourists and photographers come to witness 'the end of the world' (Binelli 2012). Many link the aesthetic appreciation of contemporary landscapes of decay with a wider history of ruin contemplation, referencing nineteenth century artistic preoccupations with ancient Greek and Roman Ruins (Binelli 2012, Greco 2012), in one case alongside practices of slum tourism (Mullins 2012). Dereliction, 'ruin porn', and disaster zones as spaces of interest and creativity is a significant and emerging field within art and architecture. For the purposes of this review however, I limit my discussion to studies that are directly relevant to either the neo-colonial dimensions of the production of urban emptiness, or the specifics of Detroit's landscape. Gil Doron's work is concerned with the idea of the 'dead zone'; a standard term in urban planning, and used to refer to spaces understood as empty, derelict, or awaiting development speculation in the Motor City. University of Michigan Press release, May 9 th 2016.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2019
This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of sca... more This paper contributes to critical discussions of austerity by examining the constructions of scarcity that underpin it. Specifically, it shows how notions of scarcity (re)emergent in a period of austerity have shaped materially insufficient and stigmatising welfare systems. We do this through the example of UK food banks. We suggest that under austerity a particular moral economy of scarcity has become embedded at the level of common-sense, including in the common-sense of many of those distributing food aid. In UK food banks this moral economy is shaped by images of the 'empty cupboard' and discourses of absolute hunger which normalise practices of (self)rationing and exacerbate food insecurity. Tracing attempts by some food bank managers and volunteers to challenge this moral economy we conclude with a critical agenda for academics and practitioners to rethink relationships between welfare, austerity, and scarcity.
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