This paper introduces a special issue of the journal on the subject of Project Varenius, a threeyear effort funded by the US National Science Foundation to advance geographic information science. Geographic information is first defined as an abstraction of primitive tuples linking geographic locations to general descriptors. Geographic concepts originate in the human mind, and are instantiated in geographic information. Geographic information technologies apply digital methods to geographic information. Finally, geographic information science is defined as the set of basic research issues arising from these technologies. Three motivations are presented for research in this area: scientific, technological, and societal. Within the project, geographic information science is structured by a three-part framework that includes cognitive, computational, and societal issues. The paper ends with an introduction to these three parts, which define the infrastructure of the project and are discussed at length by the subsequent three papers. question for GIScience in each case is whether the geographic context makes the problem in any sense unique.

This special issue, papers presented at an Urban Studies Foundation-funded conference in Jakarta (March 2011), examines the current 'urban century' in terms of three revolutions. Revolutions from above index the logics and norms of mainstream global urbanism, particularly the form they have taken as policymakers work with municipal officials worldwide to organise urban development around neoliberal norms. Revolutions from below refer to the multifaceted contestations of global urbanism that take place in and around cities, ranging from urban street demonstrations and occupations (such as those riveting the world in early 2011 when these papers were written) to the quotidian actions of those pursuing politics and livelihoods that subvert the norms of mainstream global urbanism. It also highlights conceptual revolutions, referencing the ongoing challenge of reconceptualising urban theory from the South -not simply as a hemispheric location or geopolitical category but an epistemological stance, staged from many different locations but Downloaded from always fraught with the differentials of power and the weight of historical geographies. Drawing on the insights of scholars writing from, and not just about, such locations, a further iteration in this 'southern' turn of urban theorising is proposed. This spatio-temporal conjunctural approach emphasises how the specificity of cities -their existence as entities that are at once singular and universal -emerges from spatio-temporal dynamics, connectivities and horizontal and vertical relations. Practically, such scholarship entails taking the field seriously through collaborative work that is multi-sited, engages people along the spectrum of academics and activists, and is presented before and scrutinised by multiple publics.

Urban entrepreneurialism and neoliberal urban governance are assuming new forms under finance-dominated accumulation. We examine and contribute to theorizing the mechanisms through which urban governance is financialized, taking as a case study JESSICA, one of the European Union's initiatives to implement an 'urban sensitive' policy for sustainable and integrated development. Like other initiatives promoting financialization, JESSICA deploys the logic of finance to select and fund urban social initiatives and development projects on the basis of their potential return on investment (ROI). Understanding this process requires placing questions of political economy––how urban governance is shaped by the broader political-economic context––with questions of governmentality––how stakeholders are enrolled in and come to take for granted new governance initiatives. Following the multi-scalar institutional infrastructure is crucial to understanding how this works. Taking a relational multi-scalar approach, we trace how changes at the supranational scale filter down to shape urban policy selection and performance in Sofia, Bulgaria, where we document how ROI calculations conflict with social welfare priorities. Contrasts between the trajectory of financialization of urban governance in the European Union and the United States demonstrate how this is geographically variegated, shaped by the broader context/conjuncture within which such financialization is embedded.

Across cities of the global South, major initiatives are underway to assemble land from informal settlements in order to make it available for large-scale infrastructure and commercial real estate projects. Driven by global city aspirations, profit-seeking developers, demands from emergent middle classes for modern residential, consumption and recreational spaces, and, last but not least, the availability of finance, these land transformations seek to commodify and enclose residential urban commons and involve the displacement of thousands of urban residents. Through an examination of two field sites, a 'legal' kampung where land is being acquired through negotiations between kampung residents with land rights and developers' land brokers, and two 'illegal' kampungs whose residents were evicted in the name of flood mitigation, we conclude that the default theory for explaining these processes-accumulation by dispossession-is inadequate for capturing the variegated and complex nature of such processes. By thinking through Jakarta, we seek to provincialize the dominant concept of accumulation by dispossession, proposing an extension that we suggest is better attuned to capture the distinct features of Southern cities: Contested accumulations through displacement. A dramatic urban land transformation is underway across Asian cities and many other cities of the post-colony. In the context of the variegated neoliberalization of global urbanism, conjoined with political elites' intents that their city achieve world class status, an emergent middle class aspiring to western urban lifestyles, and the attractiveness of real estate as an investment opportunity, developers have been converting informally settled spaces of an urban commons into privatized, commodifiable land assets. This is a struggle over space that plays out locally, while influenced by supra-, inter-and national scale developments. These processes are not only variegated but also contested: Those engaged in these struggles

We analyse dramatic land transformations in the greater Jakarta metropolitan area since 1988:large-scale private-sector development  projects in central city and peri-urban locations. These
transformations are shaped both by Jakarta’s shifting conjunctural positionality within global political economic processes and by Indonesia’s hybrid political economy. While influenced by neoliberalisation, Indonesia’s political economy is a hybrid formation, in which neoliberalisation coevolves with long-standing, resilient oligarchic power structures and contestations by the urban majority. Three persistent features shape these transformations: the predominance of large Indonesian conglomerates’ development arms and stand-alone developers; the shaping role of elite informal networks connecting the development industry with state actors; and steadily increasing foreign
involvement and investment in the development industry, accelerating recently. We identify three eras characterised by distinct types of urban transformation. Under autocratic neoliberalising urbanism (1988–1997) peri-urban shopping centre development predominated, with large
Indonesian developers taking advantage of close links with the Suharto family. The increased indebtedness of these firms became debilitating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis. Thus post-Suharto democratic neoliberalising urbanism (1998–2005) was a period of minimal investment, except for shopping centres in DKI Jakarta facilitating a consumption-led strategy of recovery from 1997, and the active restructuring of elite informality. Rescaled neoliberalising urbanism
(2006–present) saw the recovery of major developers, renewed access to finance, including foreign capital, and the construction of ever-more spectacular integrated superblock developments
in DKI Jakarta and peri-urban new towns.

Under the influence of the discourses and practices of global neoliberal urbanism, municipal administrations worldwide aspire to make their cities world class spaces, where informality is an anachronism and poverty can be made history. In this essay, drawing on fieldwork conducted in Jakarta, Indonesia, San Francisco (California), and Seattle (Washington), we address the question of how a geographic relational poverty approach can help us understand, or at least expand ways of thinking about these processes by attending to urban informality and the politics of poverty. Informality, a pervasive feature of the global South and North, functions as a survival strategy whereby the monetarily poor can compensate for their lack of income through commoning. Market-driven, state underwritten urban development initiatives for housing those with wealth is limiting the conditions of possibility for the monetarily poor, and informality. This is compounded by emergent political discourses rendering informality as inappropriate, and the monetarily poor as undeserving of a right to the city. Yet long-standing more-than-capitalist and communal informal practices pursued by the urban poor remain effective and necessary survival strategies, supporting residents whose presence is necessary to the city and whose practices challenge capitalist norms. Keywords informality; housing; relational poverty; urban development; housing crisis; 1 2 1 1 2 e.Proofing