1. Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning

Geography sculpts the future, or: escaping—and falling back into—the tyranny of absolute space

“…By contrast, for an example of how 'just-in-time' networks can be leveraged for worker power (or at least some workers' power) see Herod 2000. 23 See Mitchell 2017 and2013;Gilmore 2008;Fullilove 2004.…”

“…His specific concern is with how technological disasters (power-grid failures, Chernobyllike meltdowns) can almost instantaneously create anti-landscapes, but the point can easily be extended to other sorts of destruction too (bombing raids, scorched-earth warfare, napalm defoliation, Katrina-like flooding, massive wildfires, levelling earthquakes) which certainly have technological components and which certainly reduce the built environment to a state of unlivability, but which might be far less technologically driven. 24 Moreover, it ought to be even further extended to include less instantaneous processes of destruction, like that which occurs through disinvestment, and through what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2008) has identified as 'organized abandonment' by capital and the state, which just as thoroughly undermine the ability of the landscape to support life.…”

An Intimate Inventory of Race and Waste

“…State failure to redress racialised toxic exposure despite decades of environmental justice organising (Pulido et al. 2016) suggests that toxicity reproduces neo‐colonial oppression (Bagelman and Wiebe 2017) through “organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2008). In this racialised risk‐scape, Black futurity is endlessly deferred by governance strategies reinscribing Black bodies3 as pathological (Mitchell 2010; Smith and Vasudevan 2017) and a threat to be contained (Grimmer 2017).…”

“…Exploiting a regulatory loophole, Alcoa declared itself a “responsible polluter” through an alternate legislation, the Resource Conservation Recovery Act (RCRA), shifting oversight of Badin Works to Alcoa, in negotiation with the NC DEQ. Through minimal intervention and active collusion, the state and Alcoa have evaded responsibility, reflecting a strategy of organised abandonment (Gilmore 2008).…”

Incarceration and the Depletion and Denial of Life/Health in California

“…153 Gilmore explains that the term has helped scholars from various geographic regions "compare political, economic, territorial, and ideological valences that distinguish and might unite disparate places shaped by external control or located outside particular developmental pathways." 154 The desakota in California are regions in which prisons can be built, as well as the layered spaces that workers, prisoners, families inhabit in relation to prisons. That being said, the desakota is not defined because of the construction of prisons necessarily; it is the desakota because it is vulnerable environmental degradation that accompanies state and corporate projects.…”