Martin Jones

Over the past three decades, the Basque Country has been celebrated as a balanced and inclusive model of regional development. Yet the compounding pressures of a global polycrisis—climate change, geopolitical turbulence, digital disruption and democratic backsliding—now expose its limits. This paper examines how institutions, policymakers and activists confront these challenges through anticipatory governance and contested development pathways. Drawing on 2024 fieldwork, we argue that the Basque Model illustrates both the promises and pitfalls of hybrid strategies that selectively adapt emergent imaginaries of the future. The case highlights broader lessons for rethinking anticipatory regional development in uncertain and polarised times.

This commentary takes ‘fallen-below’ seriously but hesitates and points to a need to develop some spatially enabled building blocks to advance foundational liveability thinking. Placing and scaling foundational liveability, first, a geographical perspective needs to be more explicitly stated as a point of theoretical and political entry. Second, place needs to be conceived relationally but with coherence for community collaboration to develop foundational economy citizens. Third, to avoid spatial particularism, foundational liveability needs to demonstrate how alliances and citizenship loyalties can be mobilised as part of a progressive scalar strategy without falling into the trap of localism.

There is renewed interest in conjunctural approaches within urban studies, human geography and beyond to help interpret the troubles of the political present. Moves have been made to specify and systematise a methodological remit for conjunctural analysis, yet there is a risk of losing the political impulse motivating such approaches. As such, this article brings together different intellectual and political currents informing conjunctural analysis to posit an alternative heuristic attuned towards social and political intervention. We frame this through four key concepts – hegemony, crisis, articulation and praxis – each explored as the ‘causes’ of conjunctural thinking, understood capaciously as purpose, nature, method and form, and not only origin and explanation. In doing so, we offer a practical framework for a conjunctural action-research agenda refocused on generating theory that is useful for place-based struggles. Focusing on how new municipalist politics are transforming the urban political economy of Zagreb, Croatia, we demonstrate how this framing by hegemony, crisis, articulation and praxis can illuminate the shifting balance of forces faced by activists – and how these may be turned to tactical advantage – to, in turn, shed light on conjunctural thinking as a promising theory and method for praxis. Analysing the new municipalist movement, in Zagreb and beyond, as both a product of the current conjuncture – as conjunctural municipalism – and as a deeply conjunctural strategy made in response to crisis conditions and opportunities – as municipalist conjuncturalism – we conclude by suggesting possible ways forward for the kinds of conjunctural methods and politics so urgently needed.

This article conceptualises the circular economy as a space of immaterial, as well as material, metabolic flows mediated by capitalism and planetary urbanisation. World-ecology provides us with the critical lens to view the circular economy as part of an emergent regime of accumulation that may supersede neoliberalism. However, if each regime entails new frontier zones for appropriating cheap natures and dumping wastes, then the circular economy—as a strategy for revalorising waste—presents a possible structural limit to capitalism’s further expansion. Moreover, when combined with notions of degrowth and doughnut economics, the circular economy may provide an imaginary and set of prefigurative practices that point towards a postcapitalist economy. Through a case study of Amsterdam—a city aiming to be fully circular by 2050—we examine this contradictory crossroads, problematising the idea of circularity within capitalism and exploring the potential of postcapitalist alternatives within the circular economy.

This paper analyses the role of trades councils and trade unions in organising within local and regional contexts around the challenges facing and potential union strategies for addressing the needs of insecure and precarious workers. We deploy a case study on the Sheffield Trade Union Council and the Sheffield Needs A Pay Rise campaign as a way of exploring innovations and challenges for the trade union movement for organising the unorganised. We explore the potentials as well as limitations of local organising and campaigning around insecurity and marginalisation by trade unions to demonstrate theoretically and empirically within industrial relations research the role of strategic spaces for action by workers and trade unions and the set of institutional, economic, social and cultural resources that workers can draw on in developing their respective strategies.

Dr Gordon MacLeod, Reader in Human Geography at Durham University, died on 14th October 2022, aged 58 (Figure 1). Gordon was an internationally significant thinker and shaper of interdisciplinary d...

Uneven development is back and high on academic, policy and political agendas. Resurgent sociospatial inequality and national discourses are a timely illustration of this enduring feature of the capitalist space economy. Building on an in-conversation Regional Studies Association (RSA) webinar, leading researchers discuss what the current conjuncture of capitalism and its historical geographical specificities mean for uneven spatial development. They reflect on how they encountered the issue of uneven development, how treatments have changed over time from a ‘heyday’ in the early 1980s to the present day, and set out an agenda for where uneven development research needs to go next.