Metropolitics

Remaking Black Political Spaces for Black Liberation

Akira Drake Rodriguez — 2016-12-01T06:00:00Z

What are the political implications of the redistribution of the Black population in the US? Akira Drake Rodriguez looks back at the long-running strategies of Black political mobilization and the political economic contexts that have hindered them. She calls for moving beyond place-based electoral strategies with a full embrace of the Movement for Black Lives policy platform.
Following a politically volatile and racially charged election, this moment marks a particularly precarious state for

- Essays / gentrification, elections, race, space, Blackness, electoral geography, Black politics, political geography

Mapping votes and social inequalities: the case of Paris and its inner suburbs

Jean Rivière & translated by Oliver Waine — 2012-06-27T13:39:13Z

Analysing local contexts can prove particularly enlightening when it comes to understanding electoral processes, whether in terms of party-political mobilisation or in terms of the choices voters make. In the inner Paris suburbs, as we shall see, voting patterns are very much structured by the geography of social inequalities.
Following any kind of ballot, electoral maps are sure to proliferate across the media, and the 2012 French presidential election was no exception – especially as

- Essays / Paris region, inequalities, Paris, vote, elections, mapping, cartography, Greater Paris, electoral geography

Explaining the periurban right-wing vote: “social frustrations” of low-income households or the reshaping of the working classes?

Violaine Girard & translated by Oliver Waine — 2012-06-13T11:36:19Z

There is a growing interest in voting patterns in periurban areas, which tend to lean to the right or even far right. However, the interpretation of these patterns is often unsatisfactory: Violaine Girard shows that they reflect not a “downgrading” or “relegation”, but rather the profound transformations that have, for several decades, affected the stable fractions of the working classes.
Although periurban areas have for a long time been almost absent from research and media coverage, they

- Essays / homeownership, working-class neighborhoods, periurban, housing estates, work, vote, suburbs, elections, electoral geography, Front national, far right wing

Maps and opinion polls

Joël Gombin & Jean Rivière & translated by Oliver Waine — 2012-06-06T08:34:00Z

Presidential elections – a crucial moment in the democratic life of France – generate all sorts of analyses that seek to interpret and decipher voting behaviour. Joël Gombin and Rivière highlight the limits of opinion polls and the risks of monocausal geographical analyses, instead advocating an innovative approach that is able to situate voters' choices within their territorial contexts.
As with previous ballots, the 2012 presidential election proved to be the perfect opportunity for public

- Essays / vote, elections, opinion polls, mapping, cartography, electoral geography