B
back-to-the-city movement A term usually
indicating repopulation of cities by former
suburban residents. The perception of a
back-to-the-city movement has, since the
1990s, been influenced by media reports and
some research studies that indicate, advocate,
and/or celebrate the return of mostly affluent
classfractions to some inner-city neighbour-
hoods (Florida, 2002). The term is, then,
closely associated with discussions ofgentrifi-
cation. Recent research in the USA cautions
that most residentialmigrationstill involves
suburbanization or counter-urbanization
and notes that we are far from seeing a wide-
spread back-to-the city movement (Kasarda,
Appold, Sweeney and Sieff, 1997). em
Suggested reading
Kasarda, Appold, Sweeney and Sieff (1997).
balkanization The fragmentation of a larger
political entity into smaller, mutually hostile
units. The term originates from thegeopolit-
icsof nationalself-determinationin a con-
text of continental power rivalries in the
Balkans at the end of the nineteenth century.
The term returned to prominence with the
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and was
brought to bear upon other states, especially
Russia. Balkanization has been used as ameta-
phorforimmigrationpatterns into the USA
producing a spatial and social segmentation of
the population (Frey, 1996: seesegregation).
Such usage has been contested for its negative
connotations (Ellis and Wright, 1998). cf
bare life (‘naked life’) Life that is excluded
from political participation, and so can be
abandoned toviolence and death without
recrimination or penalty. The emphasis on
exclusion and abandonment is vital: ‘bare
life’ is not a given but is socially produced.
Agamben (1998) claims that classical Greek
philosophy made a vital distinction between
political life (bios) and merely existent, bio-
logical life (zoe): and, as he uses the term,
bare life is actively poised between the two.
To show how vulnerable such a position is,
Agamben locates the production of bare life
at the intersection of two distinctive modalities
of power:sovereign powerandbiopower.
His thesis is a double critique of Michel
Foucault’s theses onbiopolitics,disciplinary
powerandgovernmentality.(1) Agamben refuses Foucault’s historical
trajectory. Foucault (1981a[1976],
p. 141) argued that a crucial junction
between modernity and capitalism
was the novel ‘entry of life into history’
that took place in eighteenth-century
Europe, whereas Agamben insists that
‘the inclusion of bare life in the political
realm constitutes the original – if con-
cealed – nucleus of sovereign power’: in
other words, for Agamben this is a pro-
cess with a much longer history (which is
why he returns to classical philosophy).
What characterizes political modernity
for Agamben is then the ‘coincidence’
of bare life with the political realm, but
a coincidence that is profoundly contra-
dictory: bare life is no longer at the
margins of the political order, in fact
it becomes a central object of political
calculation, but it is also excluded from
its deliberations (Mills, 2004, p. 46). It is
by no means clear that Foucault and
Agamben mean the same thing by ‘life’,
but the bearers of Agamben’s ‘bare life’
are political objects not political subjects:
they are wilfully exposed to violence and
death because they are treated as
though they do not matter so that, col-
lectively, they become so many versions
ofhomo sacer.
(2) Agamben twists Foucault’s spatial tem-
plate. His account turns not on strategies
through which the normal order contains
and confines its ‘outside’ – the sick, the
mad, the criminal, the deviant – but on
strategies through which the ‘outside’ is
included‘by the suspension of the jurid-
ical order’s validity – by letting the jurid-
ical order withdraw from the exception
and abandon it’. Agamben argues that
this space of exception (seeexception,
space of) is typically produced through
martiallawand a state of emergency,
which then become the ground through
which sovereign power constitutes and
extends itself.Gregory / The Dictionary of Human Geography 9781405132879_4_B Final Proof page 41 31.3.2009 11:01am