This article examines the emergence of ‘open’ urban economic projects that promote the transformative potential of social innovation and civic enterprise. By putting the burgeoning literature on an open paradigm of work and innovation within cultural economic geography into dialogue with scholarship on open cities, I problematize the inherently progressive framing of openness. The paper makes two contributions. First, it emphasises how open narratives encourage entrepreneurial communities that manifest as individualization-masked-as-collectivism. It argues efforts to design new spaces of social innovation through the blurring of boundaries simultaneously reproduce social and material exclusions. Second, it demonstrates how the championing of open ecosystems of social innovation intersects with austerity localism. New modes of state withdrawal are facilitated through co-creation, crowdfunding and social enterprise. Illustrated through research into a co-working space in London set up in response to the 2007–2008 economic crisis, I reveal the geographies of exclusion, enclosure and exploitation embedded in the pursuit of openness. Against the claims of enabling conditions for progressive civic futures, I establish the limits to openness whereby such ideas are easily assimilated into the processes of neoliberalisation that they seek to reject.

This paper explores how 'place' is conceptualised and mobilized in health policy and considers the implications of this. Using the on-going spatial reorganizing of the English NHS as an exemplar, we draw upon relational geographies of place for illumination. We focus on the introduction of 'Sustainability and Transformation Plans' (STPs): positioned to support improvements in care and relieve financial pressures within the health and social care system. STP implementation requires collaboration between organizations within 44 bounded territories that must reach 'local' consensus about service redesign under conditions of unprecedented financial constraint. Emphasising the continued influence of previous reorganizations, we argue that such spatialized practices elude neat containment within coherent territorial geographies. Rather than a technical process financially and spatially 'fixing' health and care systems, STPs exemplify post-politics-closing down the political dimensions of policy-making by associating 'place' with 'local' empowerment to undertake highly resource-constrained management of health systems, distancing responsibility from national political processes. Relational understandings of place thus provide value in understanding health policies and systems, and help to identify where and how STPs might experience difficulties.

Although we know that the aims of devolution are to improve health and reduce health inequalities, it is less clear how this will be achieved. Kieran Walshe and colleagues examine how it might work and the likely problems

In this paper, we examine how space is integral to the practices and politics of restructuring health and care systems and services and specifically how ideas of assemblage can help understand the remaking of a region. We illustrate our arguments by focusing on health and social care devolution in Greater Manchester, England. Emphasising the open‐ended political construction of the region, we consider the work of assembling different actors, organisations, policies and resources into a new territorial formation that provisionally holds together without becoming a fixed totality. We highlight how the governing of health and care is shaped through the interplay of local, regional and national actors and organisations coexisting, jostling and forging uneasy alliances. Our goal is to show that national agendas continued to be firmly embedded within the regional project, not least the politics of austerity. Yet through keeping the region together as if it was an integrated whole and by drawing upon new global policy networks, regional actors strategically reworked national agendas in attempts to leverage and compete for new resources and powers. We set out a research agenda that foregrounds how the political reorganisation of health and care is negotiated and contested across multiple spatial dimensions simultaneously.

This paper provides new direction for geographic scholarship on architecture by focusing upon architectural projects that go well beyond designing and producing material objects. Recent work on practising architectures by social and cultural geographers has examined the multiple processes of human and non-human actors that cohere and congeal to produce buildings. Responding to concerns that geographers are failing to work closely with architects, I introduce ideas of spatial agency to examine the practices of architects working beyond buildings. Arguing that the profession has always been under threat, I outline why socially progressive architects are rejecting claims as expert technical problem-solvers or artistic form-givers by instead initiating and contributing towards explicitly spatial projects prioritizing social and economic objectives. By calling for creative engagement with such projects, I set forth an agenda for a politically progressive geography of architecture. « Spatial agency » et pratique de l'architecture au-delà des bâtiments RÉSUMÉCet article propose une nouvelle direction pour la recherche géographique sur l'architecture en mettant l'accent sur des projets architecturaux qui vont bien au-delà de la conception et de la production d'objets matériels. Des travaux récents sur la pratique de l'architecture par des géographes sociaux et culturels ont examiné les processus multiples d'acteurs humains et non-humains réunis et associés pour produire des bâtiments. Répondant aux inquiétudes que les géographes ne réussissent pas à travailler en étroite collaboration avec les architectes, j'introduis les idées de « spatial agency » pour examiner les pratiques des architectes qui travaillent au-delà des bâtiments. Soutenant que la profession a toujours été en danger, j'expose les raisons pour lesquelles les architectes socialement progressistes rejettent des demandes en tant qu'experts techniques de résolutions de problèmes ou donneurs de forme artistiques en initiant plutôt des projets explicitement spatiaux et en contribuant à donner la priorité aux objectifs sociaux et économiques. En appelant à l'engagement créatif pour de tels projets, j'établis un programme pour une géographie politiquement progressive de l'architecture. La agencia espacial y la práctica de la arquitectura más allá de los edificios RESUMENEste documento proporciona una nueva dirección para los estudios geográficos en la arquitectura, centrándose sobre proyectos arquitectónicos que van mucho más allá del diseño y la producción de objetos materiales. El trabajo reciente sobre la práctica de las arquitecturas de los geógrafos sociales y culturales ha examinado los múltiples procesos de actores humanos y no humanos que se adhieren y se solidifican para producir edificios. En respuesta a la preocupación de que los geógrafos están fallando a trabajar en estrecha colaboración con arquitectos, se presentan ideas de agencia espacial para examinar las prácticas de los arquitectos que trabajan más allá de los edificios. Argumentand...