STREET NETWORK STRUCTURE AND CRIME RISK: AN AGENT‐BASED INVESTIGATION OF THE ENCOUNTER AND ENCLOSURE HYPOTHESES

Street networks shape day‐to‐day activities in complex ways, dictating where, when, and in what contexts potential victims, offenders, and crime preventers interact with one another. Identifying generalizable principles of such influence offers considerable utility to theorists, policy makers, and practitioners. Unfortunately, key difficulties associated with the observation of these interactions, and control of the settings within which they take place, limit traditional empirical approaches that aim to uncover mechanisms linking street network structure with crime risk. By drawing on parallel advances in the formal analyses of street networks and the computational modeling of crime events interactions, we present a theoretically informed and empirically validated agent‐based model of residential burglary that permits investigation of the relationship between street network structure and crime commission and prevention through guardianship. Through the use of this model, we explore the validity of competing theoretical accounts of street network permeability and crime risk—the encounter (eyes on the street) and enclosure (defensible space) hypotheses. The results of our analyses provide support for both hypotheses, but in doing so, they reveal that the relationship between street network permeability and crime is likely nonlinear. We discuss the ramifications of these findings for both criminological theory and crime prevention practice.     

Combustion and Toxic Gas Production from Disposable Barbecues in Enclosures

The production of carbon monoxide from disposable barbecues in an enclosed room has been investigated. Hazard calculations have shown that lethal concentrations of CO and CO₂ can be produced easily. Burning rates and the relative formation of CO and CO₂ depend on the ambient oxygen concentration. Smoke does not correlate with CO concentration as it is mostly produced by the combustion of volatile hydrocarbons added to facilitate ignition. In a typical room, this results in smoke clearing before the maximum CO concentration is reached. Smoke obscuration is therefore a poor indicator of the danger posed by CO. This is an important observation for those discovering or attempting to resuscitate or rescue comatose victims. Dilution caused by ventilation is described numerically and has allowed total volumes of CO and CO₂ produced to be estimated.     

The new enclosures: critical perspectives on corporate land deals

The contributions to this collection use the tools of agrarian political economy to explore the rapid growth and complex dynamics of large-scale land deals in recent years, with a special focus on the implications of big land deals for property and labour regimes, labour processes and structures of accumulation. The first part of this introductory essay examines the implications of this agrarian political economy perspective. First we explore the continuities and contrasts between historical and contemporary land grabs, before examining the core underlying debate around large- versus small-scale farming futures. Next, we unpack the diverse contexts and causes of land grabbing today, highlighting six overlapping mechanisms. The following section turns to assessing the crisis narratives that frame the justifications for land deals, and the flaws in the argument around there being excess, empty or idle land available. Next the paper turns to an examination of the impacts of land deals, and the processes of inclusion and exclusion at play, before looking at patterns of resistance and constructions of alternatives. The final section introduces the papers in the collection.     

The Krishna Baradwaj and Eric Wolf Prize 2011–2012

The political geography of environmental governance can overlap and converge with uneven agrarian change in forest frontiers subject to violent enclosures. When the governance of conservation territories converges with and reinforces enclosures, spaces can be controlled with authority and violence that places livelihoods at greater risk in the context of uneven agrarian political economies – the outcomes of which reflect ‘violent enclosures’. This paper examines how indigenous resource users negotiate the discursive and material impact of environmental governance converging with militarized-insurgent spaces as overlapping enclosures in a protected area on Palawan Island, the Philippines. Drawing on local experiences, we examine how the livelihood vulnerability arising in the local political economy is exacerbated by access and use constraints from the overlapping enclosures of environmental and military governance in the buffer zone of Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park. We argue that the seemingly less governable forest frontiers of protected areas are often the poorest, highly politicized and contested spaces of political and ecological refuge. Here, scarce forest resources are managed closely, and recalcitrant groups seek refuge as military powers frame, conflate and manage local behaviour as criminal and dangerous, merging conservation and military interventions as coercive governance. We conclude that only by critically engaging how governance processes and enclosures converge to yield structural and discursive violence – and by making this apparent to policy makers – will indigenous peoples successfully negotiate the double bind of violent enclosures in frontiers.     

Commentary: Food regime for thought

This essay engages with Henry Bernstein's critical survey of food regime analysis, focusing on the claim that my interpretation of the food regime takes a misguided ‘peasant turn’. I argue Henry's representation loses sight of my reformulation of the ‘agrarian question’, as more than analysis of the uneven process by which capital subordinates landed property, and therefore of the class fate of the peasantry, as such. Rather it is about social and ecological fate on a global scale, involving questions of ecosystem survival, precarious labor circuits, urban slum proliferation, privatization of states, financialization, intellectual (property) rights, climate change mitigation and so on. Significantly, global recognition of these connections to processes of agro-industrialization and enclosure was informed by a ‘peasant’ mobilization that would be unthinkable within the terms of the classical agrarian question. Peasant organizations catalyzed challenge to the neoliberal food order institutionalized in the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime, in a time of massive dispossession. Politicizing neoliberal ‘food security’ as an agribusiness project, the ‘food sovereignty’ counter-movement used a politics of strategic essentialism to unmask the undemocratic and impoverishing architecture of the ‘free trade’ regime privileging corporate rights over state and citizen rights. In effect, this counter-movement performed a food regime analysis from within, importantly reaching beyond a peasant project. This essay revisits the comparative-historical method by which the food regime trajectory can be understood, as a contradictory set of interacting forces and relations that complicate and shape and reshape its politics, and yet allow identification of emergent possibilities.     

The moving frontiers of genetically modified soy production: shifts in land control in the Argentinian Chaco

This article attempts to understand how control over land (power in practice) is built, achieved and contested in the context of land transfers involving pressures over possession rights in Santiago del Estero in northern Argentina. Here new forms of land control – due to expansion of the speculative, soy and cattle frontiers – are changing and involve new relationships while using novel mechanisms to gain and maintain control. The article adopts the notion of shifting ‘frontiers of land control’ as an analytical lens, following Lund and Peluso (2011). We can say that the process of soy and cattle expansion into the new frontiers happens through a group of different mechanisms which range from voluntary purchase to violent evictions. As shifts in land control in the frontier involve pressures on possession rights, we observe different mechanisms of control, mainly in the direction of dispossession and enclosure. The paper adds to the debate on ‘land grabbing’ by (a) showing how domestic investors operate to advance industrial agriculture and (b) showing how this frontier advances in a context of (rather unsecured) possession rights where rights are being shifted through transfers (sales, leases, evictions) and compensation mechanisms as well as conflict and judicial procedures.     

Globalisation and the foreignisation of space: seven processes driving the current global land grab

The current global land grab is causing radical changes in the use and ownership of land. The main process driving the land grab, or ‘foreignisation of space’, as highlighted in the media and the emerging literature is the production of food and biofuel for export in the aftermath of recent food and energy crises. However, there are several other processes driving the land rush. In this article I argue that an analytical framework that focuses on only one or two processes that drive the global land grab offers a narrow perspective on this complex process. It will be unable to take into account the full range and extent of agrarian and social changes that occur in light of the land grab and their strategic implications for poor people's livelihoods. An important starting point is to identify the broad processes driving the current land rush, and trace their structural and institutional origins. To do so, I identify and examine seven factors that are giving rise to radical changes in landownership and land use in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Finally, ‘codes of conduct’ as proposed by several quarters in the context of global land grab are unlikely to work in favour of the poor.     

Land expropriation and displacement in Bangladesh

This paper examines land grabbing in Bangladesh and views such seizures through the lens of displacement and land encroachment. Two different but potentially interacting displacement processes are examined. The first, the char riverine and coastal sediment regions that are in a constant state of formation and erosion, are contested sites ripe for power plays that uproot small producers on their rich alluvial soils. The second examines new patterns of land capture by elites who engage gangs, corrupted public servants and the military to coerce small producers into relinquishing titles to their ever more valuable lands in and near urban areas. These historically specific and contingent land grabs draw attention to in situ displacement, where people may remain in place or experience a prolonged multi-stage process of removal. This contrasts with ex situ displacement, a decisive expulsion of people from their homes, communities and livelihoods. In both the char and peri-urban case, we signal new forms of collective action in response to involuntary alienation of land resources in a rapidly and violently transforming political economy. We conclude with a caution against naturalizing displacement, casting it as an ‘inevitable’ consequence of changing weather conditions in the former and population dynamics in the latter.