The research paper analyses the ongoing conflict between the residents of the Northern Netherlands and the central government regarding the compensation of damage caused by induced earthquakes and the gas-mining through the theoretical framework explaining relations between the periphery and the centre. The Groningen gas debate is an interesting case, as it shows the potential of change in the established power relationship between the periphery and the centre. the paper analyses the factors that led for this change and explains the change mechanism that is associated with the persuasive power of the local social movement. The paper contributes to the literature on environmental governance, energy transition, communication and political science.
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Short abstract:With our case study ‘Researching the City: Mapping Imaginaries’ of Amsterdam Zuidoost, we explore grass-root, collaborative knowledge practices through mixed methods of counter-mapping that fosters critical emancipatory awareness and affective engagement with areas in the urban semi-periphery.Long abstract:Urban transformations often result in ‘affective displacement’ and have consequences for the health and well-being of residents (Butcher & Dickens, 2016; Brummet and Reed, 2019). Displacement is a form of violence, that includes processes of ‘cultural appropriation’ (Elliott-Cooper et al., 2020) and its impacts need to be better ‘documented and resisted’ (ibid). Responding to this call, with our case study of ‘Researching the City: Mapping Imaginaries’ of Amsterdam Southeast (Zuidoost), we turned to medium specific, embodied, non-representational (Thrift, 2008) counter-mapping to better engage (in terms of cultural sensitivity and inclusivity) with the urban ‘semi-periphery’ (Blagojevic, 2009).We used digital methods (Rogers, 2013) to explore how Amsterdam Southeast is ‘seen’ through search engine results (stakeholders networks). We intervened in the mapping with local expert knowledge of activists, artists, and researchers. We also used affect as an intervention and collaboratively collected sensory data (recording with images, sounds, videos) with students and local communities. In this process we created a counter-archive, bringing to the forefront imaginaries, senses, emotions, and memories -- a repository of local affective knowledge.Our case study shows that "counter-mapping" can be a meditative and reflective practice that fosters critical and emancipatory awareness in students, partners, and local communities. It opens space for reimagining and productive affective engagement with areas in the urban periphery. It also enables various themes of consideration: ‘body as an archive’, and archiving 'imaginaries' practices such as performance, memory, and digital objects.
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This article compares two similar yet never compared cases of intra-European othering: Spain and the South Slavic region. Their common denominator is what I call the Periphery Problem: a hierarchical cultural difference between Europe’s symbolic centre (Western Europe) and its exotic peripheries. Using paradigmatic examples intertextually linked to Prosper Mérimée, this article focuses both on the centre (exemplified by Mérimée), and the peripheries’ recent responses to Mérimée through meta-images (your image of others’ image of you). The structural commonalities in characterization and the entanglements of internal and external images show that national characterization in Europe is profoundly a transnational phenomenon.
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Supermarkets are essential urban household amenities, providing daily products, and for their social role in communities. Contrary to many other countries, including nearby ones, the Netherlands have a balanced distribution of supermarkets across villages and urban neighbourhoods. However, spatial supermarket patterns, are subject to influential developments. First, due to economies of scale, there is a tendency for supermarkets to increase their catchment areas and to disappear from peripheral villages. Second, supermarkets are now mainly located in residential areas, although the urban periphery appears to be attractive for the retail sector, perhaps including the rise of hypermarkets. Third, today, online grocery shopping is still lagging far behind on other online shopping products, but a breaks through will dilute population support for in-store supermarkets and can lead to dramatic ‘game changer’ shifts with major spatial and social effects. These three important trends will reinforce each other. Consequences are of natural community meeting places at the expense of social cohesion; reduced accessibility for daily products, leading to more travel, often by car; increasing delivery flows; real estate vacancies, and increasing suburban demand increase for retail and logistics. Expected changes in supermarket patterns require understanding, but academic literature on OGS is still scarce, and does hardly address household behaviour in changing spatial constellations. We develop likely spatial supermarket patterns, and model the consequences for travel demand, social cohesion and real estate demand, as well as the distribution between online and in-store grocery shopping, by developing a stated preference experiment, among Dutch households.
