ABSTRACT
This book considers the concept of ‘value’ at the root of our actions and decision-making. Value is an ever-present, yet little interrogated aspect of everyday life. This book explores value as it is theorised, practiced and critiqued from a variety of disciplinary perspectives.
It examines how value is operationalized, endorsed and contested in contemporary society. With international insights from leading scholars, chapters offer a diverse and vibrant geographical engagement with value to showcase its conceptual flexibility. The book explores value’s eclectic epistemic foundations; it’s ‘roll-out’ and legitimation across a range of policy fields; and its challenges and opportunities. The book draws on global examples of value in practice: from forest conservation in Indonesia; protected area management in arctic Norway; a state park in the US; certification schemes for biodiversity in the UK; protection of the international night sky; heritage planning in East Taiwan; a re-developed airport site in Norway; a, local food networks in Canada and the UK; a market in the US and urban development in China.
The book will be of interest to human geographers, political ecologists, heritage scholars and practitioners, planners and those working in public policy, as well as practitioners and policy makers interested in how valuation processes work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|71 pages
Knowing value
chapter 5|12 pages
“There’s no such thing as a unit of biodiversity”
chapter 6|11 pages
Commensuration as value making
part II|67 pages
Spacing value
chapter 8|12 pages
Urban-planning practice and the transformation of value in China
chapter 9|11 pages
Locating value in the Anthropocene
chapter 10|18 pages
“And what do you do with five-hundred million stars?”
chapter 11|11 pages
Value and diminishment
part III|53 pages
Practising value