Tom Gillespie

This is an escalating national emergency that requires a mass social housing programme, not more business-as-usual policies seeking to deregulate planning and 'enable' private construction

A leaked memo, a Maga-style hat and a trail of broken pledges – it’s Labour’s great housing betrayal | Aditya Chakrabortty Ignore the bombast: Steve ‘build, baby, build’ Reed’s boast looks likely to end in targets more pathetic than they are now, says Guardian columnist Aditya Chakrabortty

‘One former insider at the department recalls sustained pressure from No 10 and the Treasury to bin the emphasis on social housing, which was always successfully resisted by Angela Rayner…Until the government’s personnel changed abruptly last month, that is’

www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Raila Amolo Odinga The man whose political career defined Kenya’s multiparty politics

Raila Amolo Odinga: kenopalo.substack.com/p/raila-amol...

If this $53 billion estimate is from February, it’s from before a very large proportion of the most methodical IDF destruction of urban Gazan neighborhoods

If you don’t see the link between ICE and the IDF, you haven’t been paying attention. We are being asked to accept a world where whole communities are made disposable and marked for disappearance. If we accept that for anyone, no one is safe anywhere.

📣 New Special Issue 📣 'New Urban Frontiers' co-edited by Tom Gillespie and Claire Mercer collects four original research articles that can be found in Volume 46 issue 8 out now! www.urbangeographyjournal.org/journal/volu...

If you've never been to Gaza, you won't appreciate what the yellow line means. Basically Israel now holds most of Gaza's small but important agricultural land. Continued Israeli occupation, which I judge the likely outcome, makes Gaza even more unliveable and more dependent on outside goods.

YouTube video by FREE – Forum for Real Economic Emancipation Rebuilding Gaza — For Profit | Adam Tooze

"In Gaza, destruction is rewarded with contracts and the “peace plan” is property development.

Historian @adam_tooze & economist @ClaraEMattei
trace how capitalism profits through ruin: war, austerity, and reconstruction form one system of control. "
youtu.be/0iIEgp1LPpA

stellar investigation by 972Mag on IDF's manufactured videos that are reproduced uncritically in media. Truly a propaganda war."These videos are produced in-house by a small animation cell in the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, working mainly in After Effects + Blender"
www.972mag.com/israeli-army...

The World Transformed is in Manchester this weekend and the programme is EPIC

Looking forward to leading an urban financialisation field trip with @invisiblemapper.bsky.social at 11am tomorrow

We will discuss MCR's real estate boom and community resistance

theworldtransformed.org/twt25/

Palestinians will feel understandable relief. The West should feel nothing but shame. Gaza has been obliterated. The territory rendered uninhabitable. Tens of thousands murdered in cold blood. The entire population subjected to starvation tactics. And now, colonial subjugation under Trump and Blair

The current establishment campaign to demonise and criminalise anti-genocide protest must be understood in the context of record UK arms exports to Israel

2 million rally in Italy for Gaza as general strike halts key services Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

Over 2 million people across Italy have rallied in more than 100 cities for a one-day general strike.

BREAKING: Over a thousand people gather in Trafalgar Square to oppose genocide and the Palestine Action ban.

Police have already started arresting peaceful protestors under the Terrorism Act for silently holding signs which say "I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action"

Al Jazeera reports that its possible one boat from the Global Sumud Flotilla has broken through the Israeli blockade and is now in Palestinian territorial waters off the coast of Gaza.

According to new research by Channel 4's FactCheck, Britain sent a record number of military cargo to Israel in June 2025.

Starmer's government can try to hide it all it wants, but we know that Britain is arming Israel's genocide.

ARMS EMBARGO NOW!

Trump and Netanyahu to Hamas: accept Gaza peace plan or face consequences Pair say proposal represents new chapter but Israeli PM threatens to ‘finish the job’ if Hamas officials fail to agree

This is not a peace plan. It's a colonial mandate whereby Israel’s allies will rule Gaza on terms acceptable to Israel, with no Palestinian consent or agency. It was presumably "offered" to Hamas in the hope (at least on Israel's part) that it would be rejected.

www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

Tony Blair set to serve on Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ for Gaza Some in former UK prime minister’s Labour party react with surprise at his proposed role in Palestinian territory

the idea of Blair acting alongside Trump in a peacemaking role in the Middle East surprised some in his Labour party

One UK minister said: “It’s like a mini-series where the scriptwriters have lost the plot. It has jumped the shark and should be taken off air.”

www.ft.com/content/527b...

Over the past 5 days, more than 57,000 Palestinians have been forcibly displaced from northern Gaza.

Israel is ethnically cleansing Gaza in real time - with the support of the British government.

Mass walkout to clapping and cheers as Netanyahu takes to the podium at the UN general assembly. The chair calls for order in the hall several times.

How is debt reshaping African cities?

In Malawi, the bond financing of roads in Lilongwe challenges the idea of African cities as “unbankable.”

👉 Matthew Lane, Evance Mwathunga & Jennifer Robinson in Finance & Space: doi.org/10.1080/2833...

Taken together, these papers offer new ways of thinking with the concept of the frontier that encompasses revisions to established urban theory ('the rent gap'), new concepts from beyond urban studies ('articulation'), new materials (sand), and new geographies (the coast)

Ecologies of alterity: rethinking the coastal frontier The urban seashore is often seen as a natural frontier, its sands and seawater deemed an exceptional geography to be made productive through industrialization and urbanization. The coastline of Che...

Niranjana R extends theories of agrarian urbanisation to the oceanic in order to critically reflect on representations of Chennai’s coastline as an urban frontier, arguing that fishing can be understood as an agrarian activity that disrupts rural/urban binaries

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Demarcating the granular frontier: planetary urbanization without an inside In its age of global crisis, sand has acquired a conspicuous profile as an urban resource and undercover vector of statecraft. Amidst mounting reports of the disastrous effects of sand mining stoke...

Situating the case of Singapore within the global geographies of sand extraction, William Jamieson's paper identifies three 'granular frontiers' that demonstrate how sand constitutes a critical but understudied 'outside' of the capitalist urban process

doi.org/10.1080/0272...

Urbanization without guarantees: articulation, rentier capitalism and occupancy on the agrarian urban frontier This article engages with the work of Stuart Hall to examine conditions of agrarian city-making on India’s urban frontier. The article draws on Hall’s writings on articulation and marxist method to...

Drawing on Staurt Hall to discuss agrarian urbanisation in Gurgaon, @termcern.bsky.social argues that the agrarian world operates as an 'articulating principle' that structures capitalist urban expansion 'without guarantees'

doi.org/10.1080/0272...

Rethinking rent gaps from the Amazon: urban contestation and extractive frontiers in Ecuador Contemporary postcolonial urban geographies aim to challenge dominant knowledge production by providing a more in-depth understanding of the frontiers of capital reproduction. This article explores...

In their contribution, @angrygeographer.bsky.social and Michael Janoschka rethink rent gap theory through an ethnographic case study of frontiers of resource extraction and extended urbanisation in the Ecuadorian Amazon

doi.org/10.1080/0272...

New urban frontiers The frontier is undergoing a resurgence as a productive spatial trope in urban geographical research. This article provides a critical overview of this “frontier moment” and contextualizes it withi...

In our introduction, @clairemercer.bsky.social and I:
1. Provide a critical overview of research on urban frontiers
2. Develop a new typology of urban frontier thought
3. Propose two principles for critical and reflexive frontier scholarship

doi.org/10.1080/0272...

Urban Geography New Urban Frontiers. Volume 46, Issue 8 of Urban Geography

'New Urban Frontiers'

This @urbangeography.bsky.social special issue edited by me and @clairemercer.bsky.social has now been published online: www.tandfonline.com/toc/rurb20/4...

A thread on the papers 👇

I hear 'unboxing videos' are a thing. Matilda decided otherwise.

It's really exciting as well as sobering to receive my new book (with Mel Nowicki) Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State.

Royalties to @seacharity.bsky.social

Please order!

www.waterstones.com/book/debt-tr...

Chartbook 409 Beyond the "Marshall Plan": China's solar boom as world-changing industrial policy. In the first six months of 2025 China installed more than 250GW of solar power capacity.

"China is the only large country driving the energy transition at anything close to the necessary speed and scale."

It's also the only one whose energy transition is not hamstrung by reliance on the motive force of renewables profitability.

Coincidence?

I think not.