James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (New Texts Out Now)

James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (New Texts Out Now)

James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (New Texts Out Now)

By : James K. Boyce

James K. Boyce, Economics for People and the Planet: Inequality in the Era of Climate Change (London: Anthem Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

James K. Boyce (JKB): I believe that improving human wellbeing and protecting our planet’s environment can and must go hand-in-hand.

Too often these are juxtaposed as if they are competing ends. Human wellbeing, some allege, can be improved only at the expense of the environment, and the environment can be safeguarded only at the expense of human wellbeing. I wrote this book to challenge that assumption and to stimulate thinking about practical ways to combine these two goals.

Ironically, the trade-off notion is propagated not only by mega-corporations opposed to environmental regulation, but also at times by environmentalists when they use the phrase “limits to growth” to describe nature’s limited capacity to provide raw materials and dispose of wastes. In the book’s opening chapter, “Limits to Growth – Of What?” I call for a new banner: Grow the good and shrink the bad.

...equity—that is, fairness—must be a central feature of climate policies for them to be effective....

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

JKB: The book is divided into three parts, with twenty-seven chapters in all. So, the chapters are short and to the point. Part one discusses economics and the environment. Here, among other things, I argue that the state-market dichotomy along which so much political debate has been waged in the past is less important today than the more fundamental dichotomy between democracy and oligarchy. In an oligarchic society, where wealth and power are concentrated in few hands, neither markets nor states can be counted upon to produce positive outcomes for the majority of people or the natural environment.

Part two is about environmental justice and environmental injustice. Here, I delve into the two-way relationship linking inequality to environmental degradation. Greater inequalities of wealth and power tend to result in more environmental degradation, and in turn, environmental degradation exacerbates inequalities across lines of race, ethnicity, and class.

Part three of the book turns to climate policy. The most pressing environmental challenge of our time—global climate destabilization—is driven above all else by profligate use of fossil fuels. I make the case that equity—that is, fairness—must be a central feature of climate policies for them to be effective. One way to address this is to curtail the supply of fossil fuels, thereby raising their price (a policy known as “carbon pricing”), and return most or all of the revenue to the people as equal per capita dividends. Carbon dividends help to ensure the political durability of what otherwise would be an unpopular policy, turning a regressive tax into a progressive net impact. At the same time, dividends give concrete expression to the ethical maxim that the gifts of nature belong to everyone in common measure. Another important way to build equity into climate policies is to maximize the air quality co-benefits of the transition to clean energy, improving public health and reducing environmental inequalities. Equity also comes to the fore when we consider how to allocate scarce resources for adaptation to climate change. I argue that we should prioritize protecting human life, not the real estate of the rich, contrary to the conventional logic of cost-benefit analysis.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

JKB: I have been working on these issues for a number of years. The essays in the book appeared originally in other outlets—newspapers, magazines, blogs, and so on. The book updates them and draws them together into an accessible whole. My last book, Economics, the Environment, and Our Common Wealth (2013), touched on similar themes in a somewhat more technical and academic treatment.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

JKB: I would be delighted if the book attracts readers around the world who share a common interest in building new economies that work better for people and better for the planet. The book is also suitable for classroom use at the high school and university levels. In addition to the electronic version, the book’s publisher, Anthem Press, will issue a paperback edition in October 2019.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

JKB: Much of my effort these days is devoted to climate policy. Another book of mine published this year, The Case for Carbon Dividends, delves more deeply into the idea of treating the limited carbon absorptive capacity of the atmosphere as a resource owned by all, charging for its use (instead of the now-usual practice of giving it away for free), and returning the money to the people.

I also continue to work in the field of development economics. At the moment, I am working with colleagues to better understand the phenomenon of capital flight from Africa—illicit financial flows by which money is siphoned from some of the poorest countries in the world.

J: Climate policy and capital flight seem like very different topics. How are they connected in your mind?

JKB: Both topics have a common root. They stem from the ability of those with wealth and power to advance their own narrow, short-run interests at the expense of the long-run wellbeing of the vast majority of people. Extreme inequality is the underlying disease, and it has many morbid symptoms.

 

Excerpt from the book 

From chapter thirteen: “Letter from Delhi”

Arriving in Delhi in January, at the height of the winter pollution season, you notice the air as soon as you step off the plane. A pungent smell with hints of burning rubber and diesel fumes assaults the nose and stings the eyes. On the highway into the city center, a digital screen shining through the smog displays the current level of suspended particulate matter. You don’t need to understand the numbers to know it’s bad.

Delhi has extensive parks, broad avenues, beautiful buildings and a vibrant culture. But casting a pall – quite literally – over it all is the worst air pollution of any major city in the world.

I lived in Delhi in spring 2015, accompanying my wife who had a research fellowship there. I brought along work to do on air pollution inequality in the United States. For the first week, we stayed in a guesthouse near the center of town. One night I was awakened around 2 a.m. by the acrid smell of pollution. To get back to sleep, I had to slip on an N95 pollution mask (at the suggestion of a doctor friend, I’d brought some with us).

In the morning it struck me that it would be absurd to devote all my time in Delhi to working on U.S. air pollution while ignoring the far higher levels around me. In an environmental twist on the spiritual maxim, ‘be here now’, I resolved to educate myself about Delhi’s air pollution and what can be done about it

One of the most dangerous air pollutants is particulate matter. In Delhi it comes from multiple sources, including diesel trucks that are allowed to pass through the city in the middle of the night, rapidly increasing numbers of passenger vehicles, coal-burning power plants and brick kilns that ring the city, construction debris and open burning of wastes. Particulates are measured by an Air Quality Index (AQI). An AQI below 50 is considered ‘good’. Anything above 300 is considered ‘hazardous’ and would trigger emergency health warnings in many countries.

An intrepid team of Beijing-based volunteers today assembles real-time data from air pollution monitors around the world and posts them on the website aqicn.org. In Delhi I soon fell into the habit of checking the data from our nearest location several times a day. This could be pretty alarming. When I checked on the morning of Valentine’s Day, the AQI for particulates was 399. Overnight it had hit at 668, off the standard AQI chart. Sometimes it soared even higher.

A month before I arrived in Delhi, the Centre for Science and Environment, India’s leading environmental advocacy organization, released the results of a study in which several residents were equipped with handheld devices to monitor air pollution levels over a typical day. Some of their readings topped 1,000.

A 2014 World Health Organization report identified Delhi as having the highest average level of particulate air pollution among 1,600 major cities worldwide. In the past two years, Beijing’s air had qualified as ‘healthy’ for just 58 out of 730 days. Delhi’s air qualified for only seven.

In the run-up to President Obama’s three-day visit to Delhi in January 2015, a satirical website reported that U.S. security agencies were flying in 20,000 gallons of clean air for him to breathe, the Secret Service having concluded that ‘more than any terrorist strike, the Delhi air poses a serious security threat to POTUS.’ Extrapolating a bit too literally from health risk statistics, Bloomberg.com reported that the visit took six hours off the president’s lifespan.

Air Pollution as Environmental Injustice

Everyone in Delhi, young and old, rich and poor alike, is exposed to air pollution. But not all are exposed equally. A study in the scientific journal Atmospheric Environment found that Delhi’s low-income households experienced significant adverse health effects from air pollution, whereas high-income households were not significantly affected. Part of the explanation may be that affluent households have access to air conditioning as well as better health and nutrition. The authors also found that low-income men in Delhi spend on average about seven hours a day outdoors, whereas at the top of the income scale the time spent outdoors is close to zero. A study by professor Amit Garg of the Indian Institute of Management examined the correlation between suspended particulates and socio-economic status, and concluded that exposure is generally higher in the city’s low-income neighborhoods.

Health risks for children are especially acute as their developing brains, lungs and immune systems are vulnerable to air pollution. A study for the Government of India’s Central Pollution Control Board that examined more than 11,000 Delhi school children in the early 2000s found that 43.5 per cent of them had reduced lung function, which was likely to be irreversible. The lower the family’s socio-economic status, the higher the percentage. The study made recommendations on everything from where new schools should be sited to when children should be allowed to play outside. But according to its principal researcher, ‘absolutely nothing was followed up on’. Since that time Delhi’s air pollution has deteriorated further.

Some of the most extreme exposures are experienced by those who earn their livings on Delhi’s arterial roads, including drivers of the three-wheeled auto-rickshaws that ply the streets. A study of in-rickshaw pollution concentrations found that levels of ultra-fine particles were eight times higher than the levels at rooftop monitors one kilometer away.

Just as not everyone is harmed equally by pollution, not everyone benefits equally from the activities that cause it. Delhi’s upper-income residents ‘consume more of energy intensive and emission-producing goods such as electricity and private transport’, Garg observes, ‘while the poor bear a disproportionately higher share of the resultant air pollution health burden’.

In other words, Delhi’s air pollution is a classic case of environmental injustice. The distribution of its costs and benefits mirrors the distribution of wealth and power.

What to Do?

Public awareness of air pollution in Delhi lags behind that in China, where face masks are a common sight and the remarkable film Under the Dome received 100 million views within 48 hours when it was posted in March 2015 (before being banned by Chinese authorities). But this may be starting to change. In spring 2015, the Indian Express, one of the country’s leading newspapers, ran a searching multi-part investigative series on Delhi’s air pollution called ‘Death by Breath.’ The Centre of Science and Environment, which successfully campaigned a decade ago for conversion of Delhi’s buses and autorickshaws to compressed natural gas, continues to raise public consciousness and advocates for policy remedies.

In the expatriate community, Delhi’s toxic air is viewed with rising alarm. The U.S. embassy has imported 1,800 top-of-the-line air purifiers for its personnel. ‘My business has just taken off,’ the director of a local firm selling air filtration units told the New York Times. ‘It started in the diplomatic community, but it’s spread to the high-level Indian community, too.’

But such individual solutions – for the few who can afford them – can only go so far. Returning to the United States after three years as the New York Times Delhi correspondent, Gardiner Harris wrote that the city’s air pollution is ‘so frightening that some feel it is unethical for those who have a choice to willingly raise children here’. His own eight-year-old son suffered asthma attacks requiring emergency hospitalization. So many expatriates are leaving Delhi, he reports, that the American Embassy School is ‘facing a steep drop in admissions next fall’.

Indian government officials aspire to make Delhi a ‘world-class city’. This goal is utterly incompatible with the city’s current air quality.

Because Delhi’s pollution has multiple causes, clearing the air will require multiple solutions. Important measures that could be undertaken immediately include expanded pollution monitoring with real-time reporting of the results; emergency health advisories and school closings when pollution exceeds dangerous thresholds; and the provision of particulate-grade masks to autorickshaw drivers, traffic policemen and others who earn their livings on the streets, not only to protect them but also to build public awareness of the issue.

In the longer term, key measures in the transportation sector include cleaner fuel standards and a phase-out of diesel vehicles; completion of bypass roads, so trucks no longer pass through the city; the expansion of public transport, including state-of-the-art bus rapid transit systems plus pedestrian walkways and bicycle lanes for ‘last-mile connectivity’ between stops and final destinations; and a cap on numbers of private automobiles.

Other necessary steps include strict (and strictly enforced) controls on emissions from coal-fired power plants and brick kilns (and enforcement of the ban on burning old tires in the latter); a rapid buildout of clean, renewable electricity generation; and a ban on open burning of wastes, including the burning of plant debris and crop residues which effectively turns beneficial fertilizer into hazardous pollution.

These same measures would also reduce carbon dioxide emissions, helping to mitigate global climate change – a linkage that may help to unlock international finance for green infrastructure investments. The potential air quality co-benefits from curbing use of fossil fuels are substantial even in high-income countries with relatively clean air. In India, the public health co-benefits of a clean energy transition would be enormous.

Another possible source of finance would be revenues from capping the supply of automobile license plates and auctioning them to the highest bidder. In Singapore, which has been doing this since 1990, the current price of a license plate valid for 10 years is US$60,000. The environmental writer Aseem Shrivastava and I have suggested a similar policy for Delhi with part of the auction revenue dedicated to green infrastructure and part returned to the residents of Delhi as equal dividend payments, based on the principle that the limited amount of public space that is available for private vehicles belongs in common measure to all the city’s residents.

Other major cities around the world have shown that clean air and economic development are not only compatible but can go together. These goals can be reconciled in Delhi, too, if and when its citizens demand it and its politicians respond.

Khalid Madhi, Urban Restructuring, Power and Capitalism in the Tourist City: Contested Terrains of Marrakesh (New Texts Out Now)

Khalid Madhi, Urban Restructuring, Power and Capitalism in the Tourist City: Contested Terrains of Marrakesh (Routledge, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Khalid Madhi (KM): Growing up in a small Moroccan town with less touristic “appeal,” I often imagined Marrakesh in contradictory terms: a modern and cosmopolitan city, a place of authentic Moroccan lifestyles, tradition, and an international tourist destination. My interest in Marrakesh began in 2004 when my spouse and I visited the city, eager to immerse ourselves in the "tourist experience". Having then lived and worked in the United States for five years, I felt I had earned the “right” to travel to my country of origin and show my foreign partner its wonders. During our stay, however, we had a first-hand encounter with money and power, as well as their opposites—pauperization and marginalization. On one occasion, a five-star hotel guard denied us entry on the pretext of our "improper" casual attire. And on another, a restaurant waiter warned me, rather in solidarity, that the tourism police were rounding up les faux-guides (unauthorized tour guides), because I was in the company of a white tourist. 

As a result of the touristification of their city, the subaltern in Marrakesh endure all forms of class-based Hogra (contempt) from high living costs to precarious housing and job markets. Yet, Marrakeshis console each other, in jest, that Hogra is due not to their inadequacy but rather to the incongruities inherent to touristic rituals when they intersect with longstanding relations of power and money. It was during this visit that I began to appreciate the subversive nature of Marrakeshi satire and the "tiny revolutions," as George Orwell aptly put it, that Marrakeshi jokes evoke.  

Years later, I found myself back in Marrakesh (as a doctoral researcher) to further understand those power dynamics. I found that Hogra still persists and so does satire, but most importantly, Marrakesh continues to be a site of various forms of exclusionary practices resulting from attempts to reorient the city toward the global market. Hence, my book about power and capitalism in the tourist city

...state and corporate spatial practices, legitimized by hegemonic discourses, instantiate a range of shifting subjectivities...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

KM: The book focuses on the processes of urban restructuring, power relations, and the political economy of touristic authenticity. Conceptually, the book proposes a comprehensive analytical framework, highlighting the issues of (post-)coloniality, ideology, heritage-commodification, subjectivity, and counter-conduct in the shadow of global capitalism.

The book is structured around two coterminous modalities of power: control and resistance. In the first section of this book, I argue that the state and corporate spatial practices, legitimized by hegemonic discourses, instantiate a range of shifting subjectivities. The second section concerns itself with the ways in which the city’s residents interpret, and resist, those urban processes.

With regard to the second part of the question, the book relies on Marxist critiques of political economy, Foucault’s works on biopolitics, governmentality, and counter-conduct, as well as Bourdieu’s analyses of non-financial capital and of the social structures of the economy. I also acknowledge the unique contributions made in contemporary Moroccan studies investigating questions of spatiality and subjectivities, along with local identities, as products of globalization. For instance, David McMurray’s work titled In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown (2001) addresses the ways in which global processes are intricately interwoven with local practices. Emily Gottreich’s study of Marrakesh in The Mellah of Marrakesh: Jewish and Muslim Space in Morocco’s Red City (2007) provides insights on how Sultanic rule and European encroachment shaped Marrakesh’s urban space, particularly its Jewish quarters. Through the same lens of global and local processes, David Crawford’s Moroccan Households in the World Economy (2008) on the root causes of global capitalism’s expansion and appeal, is indeed useful. I should also mention that Rachel Newcomb’s Women of Fes Ambiguities of Urban Life in Morocco (2010) and my book share two common themes. First, the paradox of women’s non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as both spaces for “women’s rights” and an outlet through which the central state shirks its responsibility to mitigate the deleterious effects of neoliberal capitalism. And, second, the deployment of rumor as a way for urbanites to express solidarity.

Finally, Koenraad Bogaert’s most recent monograph, Globalized Authoritarianism: Megaprojects, Slums, and Class Relations in Urban Morocco (2018), is a welcome addition to the field of Moroccan and urban studies. In his book, Bogaert focuses on the “deeply political” nature of the most recent installation of mega-projects across Morocco’s major cities.  

The connection between Bogaert’s Globalized Authoritarianism and my book can hardly be overemphasized, and it is refreshing to see that a book of Bogaert’s caliber is treating a related topic, utilizing comparable methodological and theoretical instruments. However, while Bogaert focuses on the ways in which mega-projects in two large sized cities serve as dispositifs of authoritarian control and domination, my book concerns itself with a wider spectrum of (superordinate) spatial practices in a medium-sized city, as well as a whole range of (subordinate) struggles and positions. Put simply, readers who are interested in understanding Moroccan urbanism in the shadow of twenty-first-century neoliberalism will find it useful to learn about how mega-projects transform Casablanca and Rabat—but also how large- and small-scale projects shape Marrakesh and its residents, and, most importantly, how these residents contest power. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your academic discipline?

KM: I am a political scientist by training, and—while urban studies is a dynamic subfield in the discipline—not too many political scientists approach the urban question in the way I do in this book. For the most part, the questions that I raise in the book, and the ways in which I address these questions, are typically left to (urban) sociologists and anthropologists. I, however, like to think of my book as an exploration of political theoretic questions, as well as qualitative methodologies in ways that are of interest to political scientists—particularly those interested in cities of the Arab world currently experiencing significant political transitions.  

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

KM: The book’s intended audience includes students and scholars interested in the MENA region, critical urban studies, and qualitative methodologies. Many of the men and women with whom I interacted in Marrakesh showed an eagerness to read about their city from a compatriot’s perspective. These were graduate students and faculty at Cadi Ayyad University in Marrakesh, and urban activists and journalists with whom I made a commitment to share my work—in its original version or in translation. Hence, this book has a definite international appeal. In short, this book will be valuable to academics and practitioners across disciplines, including geography, political science, urban planning, and architecture.

The book attempts to shed some light on a host of micro-technologies of power that operate at the granular (city) level and that can be overlooked when one adopts a state-centric analysis. That is to say, the central state—or, better yet, the monarchy—is far from being the sole shaper of Morocco’s social and political life. To be sure, the local government, private actors, NGOs, and the media (among others) all contribute, often in conflicting terms, to the shaping of the city’s social relations, local values, social markers, and boundaries. The example of Morocco helps us understand a phenomenon affecting many other cities of the global South. 

 

Excerpt from the Book

From the introduction:

[…]

Since the mid-1990s, Marrakesh has evolved as a “world class destination” by attracting flows of capital devoted to building a tourism sector and creating a diverse real estate market. In addition to the construction of tourist and entertainment facilities, large-scale housing projects and gated communities, the marketization of a large area of gentrifiable houses in the historic quarters of the city, have become the modus operandi for the state and its private partners to respond to the “economic imperative” of growth. 

The economic imperative, alone, is hard to attend to if not invigorated by a political logic and an institutional and ideological practice. For instance, in order to meet the expectations of a world-class clientele, Marrakesh’s elite prioritize “modernization” as a strategy. 

[…]  

Marrakesh [we are told] is a microcosm of the country, by virtue of its status in history, and hence the best possible site for government policies to create a space for modernity and tradition to “cohabit”. Ultimately, this rhetoric relegates the marginal “Other” and the space they occupy to the status of “traditional” against which a “modern” vision for the city emerges. On the ground, the modernization strategy, a reoccurring theme in Moroccan politics, creates an urban spatial structure that is highly segmented between areas of development and ‘islands’ of marginality. As a result, the Marrakeshi communities who prize the “use value” of their space experience further marginalization in the process. 

[…]

The medina is not the only urban space that is transformed by capital, other residential and industrial areas are also subjected to such transformations. Those extended families who sell their riads are scattered in government-subsidized apartments in new suburbs such as Tamansourt, Azzouzia and M’hamid. Under the monarch’s command and with governmental collaboration providing land, the private sector built and marketed 200,000 social housing units in Tamansourt located 10 miles northwest of the city. Halfway between the Medina and Tamansourt, a two-mile strip of workshops, showrooms, garages and art galleries, Quartier Industriel Sidi Ghanem, is where the local government seeks to attract offshoring investments by foreign expatriates. Already saturated in 2008, an extension project was initiated by al-Omrane Group, the powerful semi-public land development and construction holding, annexing an additional 185 acres (45 land parcels) to the already-existing 432 acres (500 parcels).

These urban transformations are not without serious implications at the social level. In the absence of government regulations to organize the market, and determine its long-term objectives within a vision of sustainable development for the city, the economic gains are concentrated in the hands of the few. Further, the socio-economic gap between the locals and the newcomers exacerbates the sense of powerlessness of the former group and the presumed “superiority” of the latter, thereby recreating and refashioning colonial hierarchies. Meanwhile, Marrakeshis are bombarded with messages stressing on the necessity of maintaining their image as “tolerant, hospitable and friendly” and the image of Marrakesh as a city where “modernity and authenticity” live side by side and where “the senses feast.” One of the earliest media campaigns targeting the local population in mid-1990s, was a TV advertisement which aimed to ‘raise awareness’ about the harms of informal services on the tourism-based economy. The TV advertisement teaches that such practices as non-authorized guided tours, pick-pocketing, overcharging tourists are bad for the economy – since they would drive the tourists, and their hard-currencies, away. 

[…] 

When I returned to Marrakesh in the spring of 2014, my research goal was to learn more about the spatial practices and the discursive formations shaping this assemblage of proximities and the, potentially, troublesome voisinage between subordinate and superordinate, locals and newcomers, state and citizenry, capital and working class. I knew well that narrowing the physical distance among socially-distant communities does not go unnoticed or unexamined. Certainly, the subaltern cast their gaze, observe, interpret, and most importantly, speak about the changes underway in their city. What I learned was the degree to which these spatial practices were imbued with historically and ideologically motivated power structures. 

[…]

Governing Marrakesh in the Global Era

In Moroccan vernacular, it is often said that the world in the global era has become a “small village”. Whether this analogy has any serious analytic import, the uncanny use of “village” rather than “city” instructs us to think of globalization’s central paradox: those very urbanites who make globalization happen in the South are the ones who render the city irrelevant, if not, “village-like”.  The urban elites live in one city (e.g., Marrakesh) and shop, celebrate New Year’s Eve, educate their children and seek medical treatment in Paris, Barcelona, London or Milan. Globalization, however one might choose to define it, is one of the processes affecting the economic, political and social life in all cities of the globe.  Marrakesh’s Urban Agency, in its policy papers, envisions the city’s future as one that is “at the crossroads of urbanization and globalization”.

Globalization is an historical trend of growing and deepening interconnectedness among people and societies worldwide. To some, globalization also means the “homogenizing impact of global capital”. Since capitalism is essentially an expansionary and polarizing system, its “globality” has touched all aspects of contemporary urban (and certainly rural) life, from the economic to the political, the financial to the sociocultural. The growing transnational financial nodes have intensified inter-urban networks, while the intra-national distances and linkages became weaker. This is also true for the major cities in the global South; they have become increasingly connected to the major nodes of global capital, while the periphery (be it the shantytowns or the ‘economically dormant’ villages) are increasingly alienated.

Against the “homogenizing” account about, and of, globalization, Ananya Roy and Aihwa Ong (2011) argue that the reliance on a “singular causality” such as global capitalism, is an unwarranted generalization that smacks of “economistic […] reductionism”. Roy and Ong suggest that we look beyond the lens of the growing transnational financial nodes that have intensified inter-urban networks and, instead, think of cities as “sites for launching world-conjuring projects”. Cities, Roy and Ong tell us, are “[c]aught in the vectors of particular histories, national aspirations, and flows of cultures”. Since urbanites in the Global South “like to think of their hometown as having some degree of global significance,” is useful to consider the multiple ways those residents act in order to “symbolically re-situate” their city beyond the “mega-projects supported by politicians, planners, and boosters”. It is in this backdrop that cities like Marrakesh become contested terrains where residents resist policies and practices that favor attractiveness over local priorities.

[…]

Method, Justification and Structure

Designed in terms of encounters, interactions and confrontations among the various (extra)urban actors, this book is divided into seven chapters. In Chapter 2, I explore these encounters, interactions and confrontations among institutional actors exercising what I term “the institutional control” over the city. These encounters take place, first, between the colonial and national state; between the local and central state and; finally, between the state and global capital.

[…]

Chapter 3 explores the processes by which a “Marrakesh identity” is being constructed and branded.

[…]

Chapters 4 though 6 delve into this process of normalization by way of media, advertising and policy discourses. In Chapter 4, the analysis rests on the understanding that individual media articles cannot be studied in isolation from their wider contexts: media content is therefore a pastiche of references, quotations and allusions from other “texts”. 

[…]

Chapter 5 undertakes a thorough analysis of the legal texts, government-issued reports as well as reports by non-governmental and international institutions in order to trace, on the one hand, the legal and juridical foundations of Marrakesh’s territorial restructuring, land-use policy and, on the other hand, the challenges to governing.

[…]

In chapter 6, I attempt to disclose the “social structures” of the housing market by focusing on the large-scale housing projects as well as the “niche” housing market of riads.

[…]

Chapter 7 is based on extensive ethnographic field work to “dig out” the various subjectivities resulting from the narrowing of the “physical distance” among “socially-distant” communities… [it] also focuses on fragmented, non-confrontational forms of resistance (counter-conduct). The chapter is divided into three spatially and topically-specific sections: each section focuses on a distinct territory in/adjacent to Marrakesh as well as a distinct form of counter-conduct.