This paper considers aspects of spatial justice in the processes of land acquisition for large-scale solar energy projects in the developmentalist context of India. It explores the case of one of the world's largest solar park projects in Charanka, Gujarat. While the official rhetoric suggests an inclusive project for globally benign renewable energy production, the research reveals a more controversial land and power politics of renewable energy. It is argued, in particular, that the project increases the precariousness of vulnerable communities, who are exposed to the loss of livelihoods due to the enclosure of common land and extra-legal mechanisms through which land acquisitions for the project have reportedly taken place. This case exemplifies how solar megaprojects may manifest a regime of accumulation whereby low-carbon coalitions of interests can maximize their gains by dispossessing vulnerable social groups of their life-sustaining assets.

This paper conceptualises post-socialist urban economic geographies through the notion of hybrid spatialities that emerge from the mutual embeddedness of neoliberalism and socialist legacies. While the dismantling of state socialism was a massive moment towards the exacerbation of uneven development, ironically it is the socialist-era spatial legacy that has become the single major differentiating factor for the economic status of cities. This superficial overdetermination, however, masks the root causes of uneven development that must be seen in the logic of capitalism and its attendant practices which subsume legacy, recode its meaning, and recast the formerly equalitarian spaces as an uneven spatial order. The authors argue that the socialist legacy, rather than being an independent carrier of history, has been alienated from its history to become an infrastructure of neoliberalisation, conducive to capitalist process. The paper draws specifically on the experiences of Russia, although its reflections should reverberate much more broadly.

The narratives of`world cities' or`global cities' as exceptional centres of command and control in the global economy have become powerful in contemporary geography, social studies, and even popular discourse (

The recent process of housing redevelopment in central Moscow is examined in the light of the theory of gentrification. The study is based on the case of Ostozhenka as an emblematic example of a large-scale transformation of a central residential neighbourhood into the most expensive quarter of central Moscow. Using data collected through interviews, archive enquiries and field surveys, the paper addresses the preconditions, dynamics and mechanisms of this socio-political process. It is argued that gentrification in Ostozhenka shares many features observed in the other large cities of the world but, as predicted by theory, is locally embedded. It has been a product of a complex interplay of the market pressure aiming to meet demands from Moscow's successful post-Soviet economy and Moscow government's entrepreneurial and pro-development strategy for the city centre regeneration. The government privileges market forces: it empowers them vis-à-vis the original population and allows them to circumvent conservation institutions, while the achieved profit is shared between the private and public sides. Whereas the physical improvement of the city centre signifies departing from the Soviet legacies of under-investments in the housing built environment, the growing socio-spatial polarization undermines the social achievements of the Soviet system and denotes the triumph of the neoliberal urban regime in Moscow.