Joe Pierce
I am an urban geographer based in Worcester, Mass.
I position my work between critiques of neoliberalism and a relational view of how place-based communities emerge.
Place, Networks, and Politics
I am working to articulate how theories of place, networks, and political process co-constitute each other. With Deborah Martin and Jim Murphy, I argue that understanding the process of what we call "relational place-making" offers a broadly relevant theoretical framework for geographical research. Building on the work of Martin, Harvey, Merrifield, Massey, etc., I use this theorization of place-making as my primary lens for understanding how urban residents and users construct themselves into communities and motivate the iterative construction of urban landscapes.
Neoliberalism and the Urban Process
Notwithstanding real concerns about its overuse and abuse, the critique of neoliberal development offers a vocabulary to describe how ongoing economic restructuring has created an increasingly hostile environment for those who are not already socially and economically empowered. I find the concept of neoliberalism useful in two key ways. First, neoliberal ideology has been so successfully promulgated that its central tenants have in many ways been depoliticized and rendered normal. This depoliticization shapes urban politics and development patterns in ways that continue to sabotage both urban justice and issues of urban sustainability. Second, a number of scholars (Badiou, Harvey, etc.) have begun to speculate on how the contemporary global economic downturn might shape neoliberal orthodoxy going forward. Critiques of neoliberalism help to understand what the stakes are as societies struggle to find new logics of growth moving forward.
Scale
The analytical problematic of scale is a central theme in geography; however, we have not "solved" it so much as identified the challenge of resolving it in quite varied contexts. For questions of urban ecology and urban economic systems, scale offers an ongoing analytical challenge: how do we choose scales of analysis? How do we reconcile competing "best practices" and "optimal outcomes" at different scales? And, perhaps most importantly, how do concerns about urban justice (environmental or otherwise) play into policy implementation at neighborhood, urban, or urban-regional scales?