The current globalization of the world is resulting on entire regions suffering sudden structural reconfigurations through the re-organization of economic activities of industrial towns and agrarian landscapes. Contemporary Western societies have seen industries and its associated values move away to cheaper locales, replaced by a services economy focused on providing leisure to these urban dominated societies. Postindustrial landscapes, characterized by economic decay, depopulation, and abandonment, followed by reinvestment, resettlement, and rejuvenation, are not unique to the last century. But what marks out the last thirty years of the twentieth century is the technological revolution in travel and communication, accompanied by the rise of modern environmentalisms.

This introduction and the essays that it prefaces are taking forward a growing debate on how to re-theorize the concept of social nature, by reflecting upon it under the specific light of postindustrial social formations. They look at how nature is imagined and pursued as an aesthetic, a moral compass, and as diverse locations inside and outside the cultural and material separations already made in the social construction of industrial space. The emergence of distinct postindustrial social imaginaries, where divisions like folk and rational thought are not only questioned but also newly remade, is of particular interest to this collection of essays.

During the 1997–2000 period, the Confédération Paysanne (CP), a union of French family farmers, played a central role in politicizing the French debate over GM crops. This paper is broader than an analysis of the CP's fight against industrial and post-industrial agriculture. It also explores the ways in which French family farmers, disenfranchised for decades from industrial agriculture, have become key figures in defining new notions of agricultural quality in both a national and international context.

While the first part of the paper traces the rise of ‘quality agriculture discourse’ (QAD) as a form of governmentality that normalizes perceived environmental and social issues associated with industrial agriculture, the second half analyzes the way in which the CP utilizes QAD in developing and legitimizing their broader social and agricultural vision and agenda, both within and beyond the context of the French debate over GM crops. As I will illustrate, while the CP establishes GM crops as the symbol of industrialized and ‘place-less’ agriculture, they establish ‘quality’ as the symbol of agricultural place-attachment. By studying the CP's anti-GMO campaign, we may better appreciate the ways in which disenfranchised groups of family farmers are appropriating techniques of governance to promote their own post-industrial agendas.

In this paper I outline the institutional history of forestry and conservation in Mexico and describe changing understandings of fire and forest production. Industrial forestry has lost legitimacy with urban audiences, whilst conservation and biodiversity protection have gained increasing moral authority and financial clout. Conservationists in Oaxaca see forests as a location for biodiversity protection and ecotourism. Conservationists' representations of logging and agropastoral fires are widely supported by urban audiences, and may threaten the economic base of Mexico's community forestry movement. Paradoxically, these conceptions of nature suppress the ecological knowledge both of conservationists and rural people.

At the dawn of the twenty first century, nature, in the valley of Lillet, is represented by luxuriant forests, the return of charismatic animal species and dramatic landscapes. The valley of Lillet is located in the Catalan Pyrenees in Northeast Spain. Its complex recent history has left deep tracks on its landscape. The wilderness that currently characterizes this area is a direct result of this history. In the last two centuries this valley sequentially experienced a transition from traditional agricultural life to a modernized and hyper-industrialized mode of production. Once covered by farms and agricultural terraces, the valley became an industrial center. After the seventies and the global oil crises, mines closed and factories fled the valley, and with them most of its population. Subsequently, the landscape was ready for the postmodern takeover: protected areas and ski resorts occupied the ranges. Thus, the deindustrialization of the valley did not bring the farms back. The postindustrial landscape that emerged from the transformation is not just the product of this double transition, but the result of a simultaneous cohabitation of elements from each “period”. In postindustrial and mostly urban Catalonia, wilderness and eco-leisure have become an extremely desirable commodity. Depopulated rural Catalonia provides an ideal setting for a new wave of urban re-appropriation of the landscape.

In recent years the consumption of shade grown coffee has expanded rapidly in North America, becoming an established sector of the growing green products market. The certified shade grown coffee market is influenced by North American fantasies of pure, untouched nature and romantic portrayals of small coffee farmers as natural conservationists, eager to protect birds, biodiversity, and natural resources. These Northern constructions of habitat and eco friendly agricultural production directly influence the regulations constituting the shade grown certification system. Consequently, farmers seeking shade grown certification and access to the sustainable coffee market confront a rigid certification system whose requirements may appear irrational and excessive within a local agricultural system.

Ramos-Zayas, Ana Y. 2003. National performances: The politics of class, race and space in Puerto Rican Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. xvi + 289 pp. Pb.: $21.00. ISBN: 0 226 70359 2.

Dávila, Arlene. 2004. Barrio dreams: Puerto Ricans, Latinos and the neoliberal city. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. xi + 260 pp. Pb.: $19.95. ISBN: 0 520 24093 6.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The transformation of social capital in a Boston barrio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 246 pp. Pb.: $21.00. ISBN: 0 226 76292 0.

The three works discussed here all focus on transnational, reterritorialised Puerto Rican communities in the United States by studying the urban neighbourhoods or barrios they live in, using different methods and highlighting different themes in their approaches to the topic. Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas' work studies the dynamics of nationalism and transnationalism in Chicago's Puerto Rican barrio; Arlene Dávila studies processes of gentrification and neoliberal policies in Spanish Harlem, the main New York barrio; and Mario Luis Small uses the case of Villa Victoria, a barrio in Boston, to illustrate the workings of social capital in poor neighbourhoods. All three studies place a strong emphasis on spatial factors, paying special attention to intersections of class, ethnicity or ‘race’, and space in the cities studied. In this, mirroring the cultural turn in geography, these studies indicate a ‘spatial turn’ in anthropology (Low 1996; Low and Lawrence-Zuniga 2003). Especially when researching transnational communities, such efforts to ‘locate culture’, with emphases on the shifting role of space and place, are indispensable. However, many earlier urban anthropological and sociological studies have tended to neglect these aspects of the city, while early Chicago School theories displayed a tendency towards ecological determinism.