Geography Compass 2/5 (2008): 1635–1658, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2008.00133.

Space and Government: Governmentality and

Geography
Margo Huxley*
Department of Town and Regional Planning, University of Sheffield

Abstract
This essay outlines the main aspects of Foucault’s notion of governmentality as a
historically contingent and dispersed form of power seeking to act on the action of
others and on the self. It explores conceptual dimensions of governmentality and its
connections to Foucault’s historical philosophical investigations of truths, rationalities
and the subject. As a focus of geographical analysis, Foucauldian approaches first
appear in historical geographies of disciplinary institutions, but this focus on the
enclosed spaces of discipline also raises questions about the management of
populations beyond the institutional walls. Governmentality approaches are now
found in nearly every sub-field of human geography, forming the basis of much
innovative work exploring the significance of space in projects of government.

Introduction

The term ‘governmentality’, coined by the French social philosopher and

historian, Michel Foucault (1926–1984), can be understood as having two
aspects: first, as a historical analysis of the logics of government by the state
and, second, as investigations of forms of governing others and the self,
instantiated throughout society in institutions, organisations, and regimes
of self-care. In both senses, governmentality seeks to act on the actions of
others to bring about particular comportments, behaviours and subjectivities,
but is also the ways in which subjects act on themselves to produce particular
bodily habits and attitudes to the self.
Foucault’s (1979a, 1991c) lecture ‘On Governmentality’ appeared in English
in 1979 and was reprinted in 1991 (Burchell et al. 1991), and since then,
the concept of governmentality has stimulated significant original research
across the English-speaking social sciences, including human geography,
to the point where a field of ‘governmentality studies’ is identifiable. The
diversity of the uses made of the concept is evidence of its productivity, but
in this very diversity, there is a danger of governmentality being seen as
too diffuse and lacking in focus to provide a meaningful framework for
analysis. This tendency is, in part, also the result of Foucault’s own constant
revisiting, revising and expanding the concept over the course of his researches,
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1636 Space and government: governmentality and geography

and such variations and modifications need to be taken into account

when engaging with governmentality perspectives (see Senellart 2007; also
Elden 2007a; Rose et al. 2006; and for an extremely useful general intro-
duction to Foucault’s work, see O’Farrell 2005).
The chief purpose of this essay is to outline Foucault’s notions of ‘govern-
mentality’, the scope of the concept and the insights it provides, and to
examine some of the fertile grounds opened up in geographical govern-
mentality studies. The essay is thus a form of ‘exegesis’ that relies on various
‘elaborations’ (Hannah 2000, 4 –5).
At the outset, it should be noted that in ‘governmentality’, Foucault is
not proposing a ‘grand’ theory that could provide an explanation of a social
totality. Rather, governmentality is a framework or perspective that allows
certain kinds of questions to be asked about how particular aspects of
taken-for-granted social relations came to be as they are.
Thus, governmentality needs to be understood in the context of Foucault’s
genealogical analyses – examinations of the mechanisms for, and struggles
over, distinguishing true from false – in which the ‘problem is to see how
men govern (themselves and others) by the production of truth’ (Foucault
1991b, 79). Hence, the focus of the study of governmentality is on truths,
rationalities and aims of government, which may be identified, on one hand,
in disquisitions on political or moral theory; or on the other hand, in the
successes, failures of, or resistances to, specific projects of reform. But equally,
if not more importantly, these aims and rationalities are expressed in
mundane texts, rules, timetables, and spatial arrangements of schools, factories,
prisons and offices; and they are evident in projects for the management
of populations, conceptions of the causal consequences of their spatial
distributions and the qualities of their environments.
The concept of governmentality also raises questions about Foucault’s
conception of power and the subject. There is not space here to pursue
these debates in detail (for a critique of Foucault’s general concept of power
and its spatial implications, see Allen 2003). But governmentality as a form
of power must be understood both as an element of Foucault’s attempts to
disconnect power from ideas of domination and repression, and as involving
a radically de-centred view of the subject as historically created (see, for
example, Foucault in Faubion 2002; Foucault 2007, 183–185; O’Farrell
2005). Government is
. . . a kind of intermediate region which is not purely one of either freedom or
domination, either consent or coercion. It is located by Foucault . . . between a
primary type of power as an open, strategic and reversible set of relations
between liberties, and domination as the fixing and blocking of these relations
into permanent hierarchical distributions. (Dean 1999, 46– 47)

Similarly, Foucault wishes to disassociate the idea of the subject from humanist
philosophies that postulate transcendental human will and intention as the
source of historical change and social relations (Foucault 1988, 1990).
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 Space and government: governmentality and geography 1637

In proposing a ‘history of the subject’, Foucault emphasises that, like

‘truth’, the subject is not prior to history. Rather, ‘it is constantly dissolved
and recreated in different configurations, along with other forms of knowledge
and social practices . . . The subject is a form, not a thing, and this form is
not constant, even when attached to the same individual’ (Foucault 2002b,
118; O’Farrell 2005, 113).
With these general positions in mind, the first part of the article outlines
two main strands of development of the concept of governmentality, and
is thus not particularly geographical. It covers Foucault’s descriptions of
the historical emergence and transformations of governmentality as modes
of government by the state and as dispersed forms of ‘action on the action
of others and on the self ’. It then considers governmentality from a conceptual
angle and examines the interplay of ‘truths’, rationalities, technologies, and
practices of government. The second part of the article turns to considerations
of the significance of space in governmental rationalities and practices and
indicates some of the ways that these conceptual aspects have been developed.
The last section outlines developments of governmentality in historical
geography, economic geography and policy studies, and post-colonial
approaches that explore the interlacing of space and government. The essay
concludes with comments on further potentials for bringing spatial sensibilities
to bear on governmentality studies.

Governmentality
Foucault treated governmentality in two distinct but related ways: the first
considered governmentality as a mode of exercise of power by the state, and
the second saw governmentality as a generalised power concerned with the
‘conduct of conducts’. This section considers these in turn.

THE ART OF GOVERNMENT

The 1979 ‘On Governmentality’ (Foucault 2007, Lecture 1 February 1978)

lecture was, as noted, highly influential on the way that the concept came
to be understood in English-speaking studies as an analysis of the state.
This lecture is taken from the 1977–1978 lecture series, Security, Territory,
Population (Foucault 2007), and needs to be seen in this context as part of
Foucault’s analysis of ‘security’ as a technique of government.
In this formulation, the study of governmentality traces the historical
shifts, transitions and continuities in the logics and purposes of government
by the state, how problems of government come to be identified as such,
and what solutions are imagined possible. In it, Foucault conceives of ‘govern-
mentality’ as a style of reasoning about the purposes of the state that emerged
in Europe around the mid-16th century, which contrasts sovereignty’s concerns
for territory and lineage with a focus on discipline, police power and the
management and regulation of individuals and populations – a mode of
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1638 Space and government: governmentality and geography

government that shifted towards ‘liberal’ governmentality over the course

of the late 18th and 19th centuries.
In its concern with individual behaviours and the management of a
population, governmentality stands in contrast to the mediaeval monarch’s
interests in acquiring and defending territory, making strategic alliances
through marriages and treaties, and preventing challenges to sovereign
power. The people owed the sovereign obedience – to the monarch’s person
and to his laws: little attention was given to the welfare of individuals or
their behaviour (generally, the province of the Church), nor to population
or its relation to territory.
But, Foucault (2007, 88) argues, ‘. . . throughout the period going
roughly from the middle of the sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth
century, there is a flourishing development of a significant series of treatises
that . . . are presented as arts of government.’ These texts consider multiple
questions relating to ‘how to be governed, by whom, to what extent, to
what ends and by what methods’ (Foucault 2007, 89). This general concern
is what Foucault calls ‘reasons of state’ or ‘the art of government’, which
sees the wealth and power of the monarch as tied to the productivity of
the territory and trade between states. Hence, the number and orderly
deployment of the population in the territory becomes a focus of concern,
epitomised by European mercantilist economic theories and the adminis-
trative (‘cameralist’) monarchies.
In this context, ‘Polizwissenschaft’ – police power or policy science – comes
to characterise practices of government. Police power attempts to order
the ‘men and things’ in a territory to bring about specific ends (Foucault
2007, 98–99): it attempts to organise and regulate in detail the activities,
circulation and localities of the people and commodities (especially in towns
– the centres of trade and of government). A cameralist ‘art of government’
or police policy attends to a national territory, and the people disposed across
it, protected from war, disease, scarcity and discontent, and regulated in
its commercial and daily activities. Medical and sanitary practices, particularly
in urban areas, also become important elements of police regulation,
linking the individual body to the multiplicity, and both to the qualities
of the territory (Elden 2003; Foucault 2002a).
In this respect, police power parallels the regulation of bodies in disciplinary
institutions, and it is worth quoting Foucault at length on this point, because
the question of the links between disciplinary power and governmentality
has been of concern to geographers.
Discipline is of course exercised on the bodies of individuals . . . but I have tried
to show . . . how the individual is not the primary datum on which discipline
is exercised. Discipline only exists insofar as there is a multiplicity and an end,
or an objective or result to be obtained on the basis of this multiplicity . . . The
individual is much more a way of dividing up the multiplicity for a discipline
than the raw material from which it is constructed. Discipline is a mode of
individualization of multiplicities, [rather than working on individuals] first of
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 Space and government: governmentality and geography 1639

all, as individuals. So sovereignty and discipline, as well as security, can only

be concerned with multiplicities. (Foucault 2007, 12)
In this way, the changes that Foucault traces between sovereignty and an
art of government can be seen as implicated in the forms of disciplinary
institutions and practices, illustrated at the start of Discipline and Punish
(Foucault 1979b) by the starkly contrasting descriptions of the torture of
the regicide, Damiens, and his spectacular public dismemberment in 1757;
and the daily routines of punishment and discipline set out in Faucher’s
1838 ‘Rules for the House of Young Prisoners’: ‘a public execution and a
timetable’ (Foucault 1979b, 3–8). Sovereignty acts to annul disobedience and
rebellion, and the public spectacle serves to deter others, while discipline
seeks to form and reform habits and comportments to produce docile,
regulated and productive individuals.
By the late 18th century, however, ‘the art of government’ or ‘reasons of
state’ become modified, although are not superseded by, the liberal forms of
governmentality (which have been the main focus of governmentality studies).

LIBERAL AND ADVANCED LIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

By the end of the 18th century, various fields and practices of government
mutate in ‘a shift in accent and the appearance of new objectives, and
hence of new problems and new techniques’ (Foucault 2007, 363). Contin-
gently and unevenly, governmental concerns become infused with a ‘liberal
mentality’ aiming to act through free and autonomous individuals and quasi-
natural bio-social and economic processes.
The training of bodies, the spatial ordering of subjects and the gathering
of information through which discipline and police power operated did not
cease, but were articulated into the field of bio-politics, augmented by
knowledges of demography, statistics and the human sciences (Legg 2005;
Philo 2001, 2005). In contrast to police power’s concerns with the detailed
regulation of ‘men and things’ – but nevertheless, emerging from these concerns
– the development of what Foucault (1981, Part 5; 2003, Lecture 17 March
1976; 2007, Lecture 11 January 1978) calls ‘bio-power’ or ‘bio-politics’ makes
visible as objects of knowledge, the socio-biological processes of population
– fertility and mortality, health, illness and death. These ‘problems’ were the
focus of the sanitary campaigns of the 19th century; together with accidents,
old age and incapacities, which were not only the objects of charity work,
but also increasingly of schemes for insurance, savings and safety.
Bio-politics also attempts to deal with the environments inhabited by
the human ‘body-as-living-being’ (Foucault 2003, 242) and human beings
as living species – geographical, climatic, hydrographic, but especially, urban
conditions (Foucault 2003, Chapters 9–11; 2007).
Population comes to be seen through the grid of politically or administratively
identified natural phenomena and processes affecting relations between individual
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1640 Space and government: governmentality and geography

living beings coexisting within in a general system of living beings, or ‘species’,

and what increasingly is seen as a kind of vital environment. (Burchell 1991, 126)

Because the laws of the bio-social environment are not totally transparent
and, therefore, the results of ‘intervention’ in them cannot be entirely
predictable, the solution to problems thrown up by ‘disturbances’ to the
processes of society cannot be found in detailed regulation. Security thus
takes on an increasingly bio-social and contingent aspect, involving the
assessment of risks and the statistical measurement of chance (Elden
2007b; Foucault 2007, Lectures 18 and 25 January 1978).
The bio-politics of the management of population involves a reconfiguration
of the relations between population and economy: there is corresponding
critique by the proponents of ‘political economy’ of the over-regulation of
economic processes under mercantilism (Foucault 2007, 106–107). ‘The word
“economy” designated a form of government in the sixteenth century; in the
eighteenth century . . . it will designate a level of reality and a field of intervention
for government’ (Foucault 2007, 95 emphases added). In this new economic
reality, individuals are constituted as agents whose actions in economic markets
produce desired outcomes: regulation is necessary only insofar as the market,
constituted by the decisions of these autonomous individuals, fails to produce
anticipated effects of prosperity.
But for these processes to operate, individuals must come to adopt appro-
priate, regulated behaviours and subjectivities. The work of government
is reconfigured as training, fostering, inciting, and if needs be, coercing
individuals to adopt self-regulating behaviours and to govern themselves as
if they were free (Gordon 1991; Hindess 1997). The regulations of others
and the self intersect: the modern state and the modern individual ‘co-
determine each other’s emergence’ (Foucault 2002f, 2007; Lemke 2001, 191).
Again, an image from Discipline and Punish (Foucault 1979b, Chapter 3)
serves to capture the shift in governmentality from regulatory police power
to the presuppositions of liberal government. The figure of Bentham’s
Panopticon is a ‘diagram’ that, at one and the same time, not only encapsulates
the aims of disciplinary practices of temporal routines, spatial divisions, bodily
training and categorisations of types, but also foreshadows the aims of a liberal
governmentality to constitute freely acting subjects in whom duty and self-
interest coincide.
The Panopticon, with its regimented single cells in which the solitary
inmates are visible to the unseen watcher in the central tower, divides space
and time in a thoroughly disciplinary register, and suggests how a web of
surveillance and inspection could ensure that this discipline could be
maintained throughout society (Foucault 1980a). But Bentham’s plans were
also of a ‘machine’ for the automatic production of right-acting individuals:
a technology that would be cheaper, more efficient and more humane than
the disciplinary institutions of the prisons, the workhouses and the asylums
or the institutions of police power. The inmates of the Panopticon would be
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enabled to bring their own actions into acceptable conformity, simply

because they could not tell whether or not they were being watched, or
at what moment they might be punished. In this way, the Panopticon can
be read as an ‘element in a genealogy of the modern “soul” ’ (Elden 2001,
130 –141; Foucault 1979b, 29; Foucault 1980a; Rose 1990): the individual
is brought to engage in internal self-monitoring of the kind that comes
to mark liberal political subjectivities (Barry et al. 1996; Gordon 1991, 27).
From these underlying presuppositions, forms of ‘advanced liberal’
government emerged in the 20th century (Dean 1999; Rose 1999).
‘Advanced liberal governmentality’ (Rose 1999) is associated with neo-
liberal political rationalities and programmes of government (Lemke 2001,
2002), and often used interchangeably (Foucault’s treatment of post-war
neo-liberal economic theories and political programmes are elaborated in
his 1978–1979 lectures, published in French as Naissance de la Biopolitique
in 2004, and in English in 2008). However, it is possible to distinguish
between political re-orientations of state programmes and privatisation of
welfare provision, and their intersection with discourses and practices of
the self that encourage self-governing capabilities in individuals, centred
on freedom, autonomy and enterprise (Dean 1999, Chapter 8; Rose 1996,
1999, Chapter 4). Rose (1999) suggests that attempts to produce forms of
advanced liberal subjectivities are diffused through spaces, institutions, discourses,
knowledges, practices and programmes as diverse as the gym, the school, the
office, the bar, the bedroom, the shopping mall and the Internet. Subjects
are thus incited to be entrepreneurs of their own lives.
The historical narrative of governmentality traces the emergence of a
form of liberal government by the state, the aims and practices of which
are distinct from sovereignty and from police power and discipline, but in
which these are nonetheless present (Foucault 2007, 107–108). Attention
to the presuppositions and justifications for government links political and
state-centred aspects of governmentality to Foucault’s interests in the ‘truths’
and ‘rationalities’ informing attempts to conduct the conducts of others
and the self; and with his historical ontology of the subject. The next
section examines these conceptual aspects of the approach.

SUBJECTS OF GOVERNMENT

A second, generalised treatment of governmentality brings to the fore an

older of meaning of ‘government’: not simply as a political problem for the
state, but as dispersed practices of governing – management of the household,
family and children; a ship and an organisation; Christian pastoral governance
of the soul; ancient and modern guidance for self-discipline and appropriate
comportment (Foucault 2007, Lecture 8 February 1978). Governmentality
indicates a generalised type of power aiming to form and guide the conduct,
behaviours and/or the inner-states of individuals – ‘the conduct of conducts’
(Foucault 2002c, 341).
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1642 Space and government: governmentality and geography

Forms of governmentality, then, aspire to shape the actions and

comportments of subjects towards certain ends, but this does not mean
that such projects automatically achieve their aims: government and subjects
are complex, multiple and contradictory.
Dean (1994a, Chapter 9; 1994b) distinguishes between three aspects of
governmentality as the conduct of conducts: ‘political subjectification’,
‘governmental self-formation’ and ‘ethical self-formation’ (Dean 1994b,
154–158). Political subjectification involves practices and discourses that
position individuals as political subjects of various kinds, and particularly
in liberal formulations, as ‘sovereign subjects or citizens within a self-governing
political community under the conditions of liberal democracy’ (Dean 1994b,
155; Hindess 1997). Governmental self-formation relates to the ways in which
assorted agencies, authorities, organisations and groups seek to shape, and to
incite the self-formation of, the comportments, habits, capacities and desires
of particular categories of individuals towards particular ends. Ethical self-
formation concerns the government of the self by the self ‘by means of which
individuals seek to know, decipher, and act on themselves’ (Dean 1994b, 156).
Government as political subjectification and as governmental self-formation
seeks to work on both the body-as-object and to mould the interior state
of the knowing and self-knowing subject (Patton 1998). But because projects
of government are multiple and intersecting, there is no implication that
a singular subjectivity is seamlessly produced and reproduced (Foucault
2002c, 345). That is to say,
[h]uman beings are not the unified subjects of some coherent regime of
government that produces persons in the form in which it dreams. On the
contrary, they live their lives in a constant movement across different practices
that subjectify them in different ways. (Rose 1996, 35)
Subjects have capacities to set governmental projects against each other in
counterconducts, for instance, by claiming subjecthood in the name of the
very qualities by which they are simultaneously invoked and excluded (gender,
sexuality, race and bodily capacities; Foucault 2007, Lecture 1 March 1978).
Projects of government, and indeed self-government, are congenitally prone to
failure and cannot guarantee their outcomes or achievement, but this does not
mean that they have no effects. And failure to achieve governmental aims does
not mean that programmes and their underlying rationalities are abandoned
– on the contrary, failure has a tendency to produce ‘more of the same’.
For this reason, it is important to examine the underlying ‘postulates of
thought’ of government in order to illuminate these projects for the ‘conduct
of conducts’, and to see what can be accepted, and what, ‘on the contrary,
deserves to be set aside, transformed, abandoned’ (Foucault 2002e, 383).

MENTALITY AND RATIONALITY

Governmentality can be seen a composite of two elements: that of ‘gov-

ernment’ – practices, programmes and projects that aspire to bring about
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certain aims for the government of individuals; and that of ‘mentality’ –

the discursive ‘truths’ that serve as rationales for the aims of government of
others and the self (Dean 1999, Chapter 1; Lemke 2001, 191). The significance
of seeing government as ‘mentality’ lies in the ways the truths of the aims
and objects of government are constructed, not as programmes, the outcomes
of which can be measured and tested against ‘reality’, but as discursively
produced and circulated rationalities (Foucault 1991a,b,c).
Practices of government are
[b]oth made possible by and constrained by what can be thought and what
cannot be thought at any particular moment in our history. To analyse the
history of government, then, requires attention to the conditions under which
it becomes possible to consider certain things to be true – and hence to say
and do certain things – about human beings and their interrelations as they
produce, consume, reproduce, act, infract, live, sicken, die. (Rose 1999, 8)
Governmentality identifies problems in relation to attempts to govern
conduct, and ‘problematisation’ involves forms of rationality, discursively
mediated, practical and localised within specific ‘regimes of truth’. As
Foucault (1991b, 79) remarks:
Practices’ don’t exist without a certain regime of rationality . . .
If I have studied ‘practices’ . . . it was in order to study [the] interplay between
a ‘code’ which rules ways of doing things . . . and a production of true discourses
which serve to found, justify and provide reasons and principles for these ways
of doing things . . .
Within these regimes of rationalities, ‘strategic configurations’ of causal
assumptions, laws, theories, buildings, daily routines and designations of
problematic behaviours may be entirely conscious, but equally, they may
not necessarily be intentionally formulated: their origins and purposes
‘. . . are often not very clear even to those who occupy a place and play a
role in them’ (Foucault 2002c, 2002e, 386).
A programme or plan, in contrast, is ‘posted in black and white and
serves as a justification’ (Foucault 2002e, 386). It articulates the ends or
goals of a project, institution or organisation and the means by which
these goals are to be achieved. But the ‘non-correspondence’ (Gordon
1980a, 249) or ‘lack of fit’ (Burchell 1996, 26) between goals and realisations
or effects becomes the source of further problematisations, which may result
in the installation of more exacting programmes, or become implicated in
the modification underlying operative rationales (Dean 1999, Chapter 1;
Foucault 1991b, 80 –81; Foucault 2002e, 385–386). One can think of the
prison and its rules and regulations, the problems these raise in practice,
the resistances they provoke; and the relation between such situated rules
and practices and theories of justice, criminology, punishment or rehabilitation.
To sum up: the concept of governmentality has two parallel strands:
historical studies of forms of rule, and broader analyses of governmentality
as ‘the conduct of conducts’. The first traces changes in state administration
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1644 Space and government: governmentality and geography

of populations and individuals: from ‘the art of government’ to the concerns

for ‘population’ and bio-social processes; to conceptions of autonomous subjects
of liberal forms of governmentality; and ‘advanced liberal’ governmentality
fostering entrepreneurial self-fashioning.
The second – governmentality as the ‘conduct of conducts’ – explores
projects of subjectification – action on the action and subjectivities of others
and the self at multiple sites with diverse, cross-cutting aims. It is also seen
as having dual aspects of ‘government’ and ‘mentality’ in which the thought
and aims of government are as important as the projects and outcomes of
rule.
Governmentality, then, consists of rationalities and practices – in and
beyond the state – seeking to act on the action of others or on the self, and
directed towards certain ends. It comprises temporarily stabilised technologies
that are ‘multiform instrumentations’ made up of ‘bits and pieces’, employing
‘disparate sets of tools and methods’ (Foucault 1979b, 26), which contingently
come to connect ‘the regular application of some form of relatively systematised
knowledge to the pragmatic problems of the exercise of authority . . .’ (Dean
1996, 59; Rose 1999, 51–55).
Among its ‘instrumentations’, governmentality incorporates spatial elements
that are integral to both rationalities and practices aspiring to form, control
or guide the actions of others and the self (Foucault 2007, Lecture 11 January
1978). However, while Foucault’s allusions to the spatial aspects of government
are potentially stimulating, they are relatively undeveloped (Elden 2007b).
These are examined in the next section.

Space and Government

Foucault’s work, as well as containing meticulous studies of actual spaces,
is rich in general spatial sensitivities that indicate that ‘space is fundamental
in any form of communal life; space is fundamental in any exercise of power’
(Foucault 1980c; 2002d, 361; 2003, 249–251; 2007, Lecture 5 April 1978).
While the focus of disciplinary institutions is on categorising, canalising and
normalising bodies in space and time, spatial organisation implicated in
projects of government is also present in the taken-for-granted localisation
of routines, habits and behaviours dispersed across time and place: in
[l]ibraries and studies; bedrooms and bathhouses; courtrooms and schoolrooms,
consulting rooms and museum galleries; markets and department stores . . . it
is in the factory as much as the kitchen, in the military as much as the study,
in the office as much as the bedroom that the modern subject has been
required to identify his or her subjectivity. (Rose 1996, 143 –144)

Spaces and specific sites are integral to projects of governmentality (e.g. Foucault
2007, Lecture 11 January 1978). But although stressing the importance of space
to sovereignty, discipline, security and governmentality alike (Foucault 2007,
12), the space of territory and the relation of the population to it are
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not pursued in any detail (Elden 2007a,b). There are some hints in the
interview on ‘Space, Knowledge and Power’ (Foucault 2002d) in relation
to the importance of communication and the construction of railways across
territories, and on the significance of the quality of territories for the
management of populations (Foucault 2003, Chapters 9–11). But despite
this relatively undeveloped treatment, as Elden (2007b, 578) suggests, territory
should be seen as ‘more than merely land, but a rendering of the emergent
concept of “space” as a political category: owned, distributed, mapped,
calculated, bordered, controlled.’ And while there has been substantial
work, for example, examining the roles of maps and plans in producing and
representing space, and enabling differential exercises of power (e.g. Harley
1989, 2001; Pickles 2004), there is potential for further geographical
development of the relation between ‘territory’ and ‘population’ implicit
in Foucault’s work.
However, although governmental projects might seek to create ordered
sites or qualities of milieu with the aim of inculcating certain habits in
bodies, calling forth particular behaviours in subjects, or fostering certain
qualities of populations (Foucault 2007, 20–23), spatial distributions of bodies
and canalisations of activities do not, in and of themselves, produce obedient,
docile subjects. As Foucault (2002d, 354–355) remarks: ‘I do not think that
it is possible to say that one thing [architectural project] is of the order of
“liberation” and another is of the order of “oppression” . . . Liberty is a practice.’
The ‘slippage’ between governmental aspirations and the outcomes of
programmes (whether because of ‘miscalculations’, stubborn continuities of
practices, or active resistances) is a reminder that, as well as being material
technologies, space, built forms and environments feature in the thought
of government as ‘truths’ having causal effects (Huxley 2006). ‘Irreal’ (Rose
1999, 32) spaces exist in the plans and ‘diagrams’ government, and act as
aims and justifications for programmes and practices having effects ‘in the
real’, whether intended or unintended. That is to say, for instance, that even
though a real Panopticon was never built exactly to Bentham’s specifications,
the ‘diagram’ of unseen surveillance as a technology to produce self-monitoring
subjects serves as an aspiration for disciplinary institutions, and for projects
of government more generally.
. . . The fact that this real life isn’t the same thing as the theoreticians’ schemas
doesn’t entail that these schemas are therefore utopian, imaginary, etc. One
could only think that if one had a very impoverished notion of the real . . . [T]hese
programmes induce a whole series of effects in the real . . . they crystallize into
institutions, they inform individual behaviour, they act as grids for the perception
and evaluation of things. (Foucault 1991b, 81)

The ‘multiform instrumentations’ of government thus involve, for example,

taken-for-granted practices, localised institutional rules and mundane reg-
ulations, state legislation, built forms, political philosophy, architectural
theory, popular opinion, utopian visions: in short, they connect together
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material and discursive elements into forms of dispositif (Foucault 1980b,

194–198; variously translated as ‘disposition’, ‘arrangement’, ‘grid of intel-
ligibility’, ‘mechanism’, ‘apparatus’; see Elden 2001, 110; also Deleuze 1992;
Rabinow and Rose 2003, xv–xvii). A dispositif is a ‘heterogeneous ensemble
consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions,
laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and
philanthropic propositions . . . the said [and] the unsaid’ (Foucault 1980b, 196).
Hence, for instance, The History of Sexuality, Volume I (1981) is an exam-
ination of the historical emergence of a dispositif of sexuality in the 19th and
20th centuries, which includes attempts to bring together medical rules,
bourgeois self-fashionings and moral regulation of the working class, the
disposition of houses, rooms, beds and bodies within them (Elden 2001,
110–111; Foucault 1980b, 194–198; see also, Matless 1998; Rabinow 1989,
for detailed studies of what are, in effect, dispositifs – of English landscape and
national subjectivities; and complex genealogies of French urban modernism).
Such dispositifs express a governmentality that renders certain ‘problems’
visible, knowable and manageable, while simultaneously obscuring other
connections, practices and subjectivities.
The problems of space in governmentality can be seen as problems of the
location of individuals in specific sites and built forms and of demography
and population distributions across a territory – ‘of knowing what relations
of proximity, what type of storage, circulation, mapping . . . and classification
of human elements should be adopted in a given situation to achieve a given
end’ (Foucault, cited in Elden 2001, 116).
From these examinations of the spatiality of projects of discipline and
government, some general observations can be derived. The spatial boundaries
– the inclusions and exclusions, the categorisations and hierarchies – delineated
in Foucault’s studies of the prison, the asylum and the hospital are material
instantiations of Western society’s divisions between the ‘Same’ and the ‘Other’
– between ‘Reason’ and Madness’, ‘Order’ and ‘Disorder’, the ‘Normal’ and
the ‘Abnormal’ – the limits of identity and culture (Elden 2001, 93; Philo
1992, 2004a). The examination of these divisions takes the form, not of met-
aphysical disquisitions on the nature of space, but of ‘spatial histories’, in which
Foucault is interested in seeing how the physical divide of segregation and
exclusion interrelates with the experience of madness, with science and rationalist
philosophy. This relationship of the real and the imaginary – of the practical and
the theoretical – underpins his studies throughout. (Elden 2001, 94)
That is, these studies do not undertake to provide a ‘theory of space’, nor
a ‘history of spaces’, nor an analysis of space, place, locality or built forms
to be added to other aspects of the study of prisons or discipline. Rather,
they ‘make use of space itself as a critical tool of analysis’ (Elden 2001,
119; Philo 2004a): they tease out how ‘space “works” in history, tracing
how power and knowledge operate . . .’: they envisage ‘a spatialised ontology
of the social world’ (Philo 2004a, 124).
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But, as already emphasised, Foucault’s studies do not assume that the

spaces that are thought or produced necessarily have the effects that are
intended. Spaces, like subjects, are formed at the inter-sections of cross-
cutting powers and knowledges, imaginaries and practices, and only in
exceptional circumstances (such as perhaps, the army or religious orders;
Foucault 2002d) do spaces, buildings, regulations and subjectivities coincide.
Nevertheless, and exactly because the assemblage of dispositifs is contingent
and their effects are specific and, often as not, unintended, ‘spatial histories’
have the capacity to illuminate present rationalities and configurations of
government and space.
Space, then, is inseparable from government: projects of government
imagine spatial and environmental causalities (Huxley 2006), draw up plans
and programmes that deploy spatial techniques, and aspire to produce
spatially specific conducts, even as they provoke counterconducts and
counterspaces.
Governmentality is seen to be inextricably spatial, from the volume of
the body to the micro-spaces of the room to the expanse of the territory.
In sociological and political governmentality literature, it is only recently
that attention had been paid to Foucault’s spatial sensibilities, but Foucauldian
questions of space and government have been developed in various ways
in geography, and the next part of this paper examines some of the
geographical approaches to Foucault’s thought.

Geography and Governmentality

Explicitly ‘governmental’ work was being undertaken in sociology from
the mid-1980s (e.g. Miller and O’Leary 1987; Rose 1985, 1990), but it
was not until the early 1990s that geography began to develop the spatial
aspects of governmentality. Since then, there has been a proliferation of
governmentality studies in various sub-fields of geography (Huxley 2007).
Geographical approaches elaborating the entanglement of government and
space include (although this list by no means exhausts the profuse range
of amplifications, nor the intersections between them): historical accounts
of institutions and state-initiated moral/social reform; studies of the spatial
regulation of race, sexuality and gender; examinations of geo-politics,
globalisation and neo-liberalism in economic and political geography;
critiques of contemporary government policies, including issues of sur-
veillance; studies of cartographic and calculative technologies; and colonial
and post-colonial governmentality studies. Alongside these fields, and in
some sense underpinning them, are theoretical debates seeking to extend
the implications of Foucauldian spatial insights.
Of these, the following overview touches on historical geographies,
policy critiques, globalisation and post-colonial studies. These are selected,
because studies of discipline and the ‘micro-spaces’ of institutions have
been influential in the geographical uptake of Foucault’s work; studies of
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1648 Space and government: governmentality and geography

globalisation, neo-liberalism and policies demonstrate the contemporary

relevance of critiques of governmental rationalities; and post-colonial approaches
move beyond the European focus of much of Foucault’s work to examine
colonial and post-colonial governmentalities, largely neglected by Foucault.

HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF BODIES AND POPULATION

Historical geography’s initial engagements with spaces of discipline were

extremely influential in the uptake of Foucauldian perspectives in geography
(Crampton and Elden 2007), and represented significant developments of
Foucault’s studies of the problematisation of bodies and behaviours and
the spaces activated in response to these problems (Driver 1985, 1993, 1994;
Philo 1987, 1989, 2004b). Rather than merely dealing in spatial metaphors
(Smith and Katz 1993), Foucault’s historical studies, and these developments
of them, can be seen to map out ‘substantive geographies’ (Philo 1992) in
the arrangements, visibilities and the particularities of timing and placing
described in detail in Foucault’s histories of the asylum, the prison, the
spaces of medical practices and in the city (Philo 1992, 155 –158).
But in spite of their explicit focus on disciplinary regimes and spaces,
what might also be called ‘substantive geographies of government’ can also
be found in these developments of Foucauldian approaches in historical
geographies of the workhouse and the asylum. They give an immediate
sense of the intertwined powers, rationalities, practices and spaces involved
in attempts to discipline certain kinds of bodies, regulate certain kinds of
actions, and produce certain kinds of subjects; and they draw attention to the
locally specific, variable ways in which such attempts are installed, despite,
as Driver (1993) shows, state policies (e.g. Poor Law Reform) aiming at
territorial uniformity. But although Driver (1985, 444) mentions ‘governmen-
tality’ as an undeveloped direction for understanding the ways in which
‘micro-powers’ of order and discipline might be coordinated, these studies
do not explicitly employ governmentality as a central analytical framework.
The focus on discipline opens up questions of how ‘micro-powers’ of
bodies and institutions might be related to ‘molar powers’ of management
of populations (Driver 1990). But these might also be framed as differences
in ‘problematisations’, in order to examine the converging or conflicting
rationalities underpinning both the ‘anatomo-politics’ of bodily discipline
and the ‘bio-politics’ of the regulation of populations (Foucault 1981,
138–145). These involve not necessarily issues of ‘scale’ or ‘extent’, but
the formulation of particular objects to be made governable by different
authorities for specific purposes through various techniques in an array of
sites and spaces.
Foucauldian-inspired historical geographies of urban spaces and the
regulation of urban behaviours beyond disciplinary institutions (e.g. Driver
1988; Ogborn 1992, 1998) can thus be considered as contributing to the
study of practices of governmentality. Driver’s (1988) exploration of ‘moral
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 Space and government: governmentality and geography 1649

geographies’, in effect, traces the interconnections of a dispositif of reform

of the 19th-century ‘slum’ that involved: statistics and the Royal Statistical
Society; medical miasma and ‘anti-contagion’ theories; the pipes and drains
of sanitary engineering; spatial organisation of urban areas; housing design;
population densities; and ideas about environmental influences on moral
behaviour.
Governmentality approaches appear more explicitly in historical geographical
studies examining the production of ‘population’ and ‘territory’ as objects
of regulation through mapping, statistics and calculation (e.g. Braun 2000;
Clayton 2000; Hannah 2000; Legg 2005; Philo 2001, 2005; Rose-Redwood
2006; Sparke 1998). Hannah’s (2000) examination of the US Census at the
end of the 19th century sees the Census as part of an inherently spatial cycle
of social control in the modern American nation-state in which ‘population’
is differentiated and mapped across the territory. But the emergence of geology
and earth sciences as political rationalities also provides knowledge of, and
makes visible, the qualities of the territory itself, which are as important
as those of the population (Braun 2000); and this draws attention to the
significance for governmental projects of the relations between ‘men and
things’, populations and territories (Elden 2007b).
Studies such as these serve to emphasise and make evident the integral
place of space in rationalities of government – how different kinds of spaces
are constituted as objects and aims of government; how they figure in
programmes and practices of government; and how material spaces and built
forms are deployed as techniques of rule by multiple institutions of reform
and control, which may or may not be linked to the state. However, when
examining relations between territory and population, the state – as his-
torically identified with, and working to delineate the extent of, territory
– is necessarily implicated in formulating the problems and managing the
processes of population. Investigations of state control and regulation of
an ‘individual-population-environment complex’ (Burchell 1991, 142) on
one hand, and the unsettling of the taken-for-granted relation of state and
territory in discourses of ‘globalisation’ on the other hand, are taken up
in studies of the contemporary ‘neo-liberal’ state.

SOME GEOGRAPHICAL GOVERNMENTALITIES

Since the emergence of Foucauldian approaches in historical geography,

there has been an expansion of geographical work from governmentality
perspectives, too extensive and diverse to cover in detail here. Instead, four
applications of geographical governmentality are briefly alluded to, in order
to illustrate some of the directions taken: policy critiques; examinations of
‘globalisation’; development studies and colonial governmentality.
A major development of governmentality in the geographical literature
is a focus on contemporary policy analysis, and particularly, examinations
of current manifestations of the ‘neo-liberal’ state. State-focussed approaches
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1650 Space and government: governmentality and geography

to present forms of governmentality emphasise the fragmented nature of

state institutions and policies and the contradictory effects of disparate state
programmes in different localities. Governmentality approaches are seen to
be especially pertinent for analysing neo-liberal policies of withdrawal of
state social support and fostering individual responsibility (an aspect of what
Rose 1999 terms ‘advanced liberal governmentality’) under conditions of
simultaneous globalisation and fragmentation of the state, its functions and
its territory (e.g. Brand 2007; Jessop 2007; May et al. 2005; Raco 2003).
Raco (2003), for instance, shows how devolution of particular UK national
state powers and responsibilities to Scotland was accompanied by attempts
to foster particular subjectivities in ‘business communities’, mobilising them
as agents of governance in a specifically Scottish territory. Business com-
munities, however, were not passive recipients of unidirectional projects,
but engaged in tactics and practices to shape the policy terrain according
to other agendas, and so attempted to significantly reshape the form of
devolution. This is a useful antidote to the charges that Foucault suggests
governmental power automatically achieves the controlling and repressive
ends that it supposedly seeks (e.g. Amin and Thrift 2002; Thrift 2000).
Nevertheless, in this analysis, the business communities’ responses could
be interpreted simply as Marxian fractions of capital pursuing economic
interests, and this is partly because the analysis rests on a conceptual conflation
of ‘government’ with ‘the state’ that misses the genealogical emergence
other multiple sites of production of ‘Scottish’ and ‘business’ identities that
might constitute the ‘problem’ of devolution.
In a study that also examines policy attempts to foster certain subjects
as objects of government, Murdoch and Ward (1997) examine the construction
of agriculture as an economic sector requiring state management. The
UK ‘national farm’ emerged in the late 19th century from the convergence
of problems of food supply, population growth and the use of statistics to
define and know territory and population. These ‘problematisations’ and the
techniques of knowing and managing them ran counter to national moral
imaginaries of the small holding farmer as the ‘last redoubt of free-minded
independence’ (Murdoch and Ward 1997, 313), located in place and tradition.
Post-war policies, therefore,
[e]ncouraged a view of agriculture as an economic sector in need of structural
rationalization and modernization. Hence, there was great interest in disseminating
amongst the farming community forms of calculation and self-regulation that
would teach farmers to see themselves as modern business people, concerned
solely with food production. (Murdoch and Ward 1997, 320)

More recent attempts to recast farming identities and practices to encourage

‘diversification’ in order to mitigate the economic, social and environmental
effects of large-scale mono-crop modernised agriculture, can be seen as
examples of how the ‘solution’ to one problematised facet of population and
territory becomes the conditions of emergence for another set of ‘problems’.
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Despite mobilising a conventional division between ‘the state’ and ‘civil

society’ in which ‘governmentality’ becomes just another way of theorising
the relations between them, this analysis of a particular national form of
subjectification serves to highlight how government, as an attempt to act
on the actions and subjectivities of others, can operate ‘at a distance’ at
the level of population and territory.
But a governmentality perspective attentive to the rationalities and
taken-for-granted ‘truths’ activated in governmental projects might also
question the very terms in which analyses are conducted – ‘nation’, ‘state’,
‘civil society’, ‘economy’, ‘region’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. For example, by
bringing governmentality into contact with insights into the ‘pauses’ or
‘stutters’ in ‘performances’ of discourses and subjection (Butler 1997), and
an active politics of becoming (Connolly 1999), Gibson (2001) illuminates
how subjectivities and spaces have been historically constituted in the
Latrobe Valley, a coal mining and electricity producing area in southeastern
Australia.
This article interrogates concepts of ‘the Economy and the Region’ and
unpicks ‘devices of meaning production’ – official tables and graphs, texts
and maps that attempt to translate economic discourse into a (contested and
highly contingent) spatial governmentality (Gibson 2001, 642–643). Gibson
interweaves the voices of Latrobe Valley residents with these techniques
to offer an opportunity to examine the incomplete and unstable nature of
governmental projects, as subjects come to question dominant constructions
of the problems of the Valley. In this way, she argues, it is possible to begin
a ‘task of denaturalizing the Economy as it has become known and lived
. . . [and for] fugitive energies to be directed towards new performances of
economy, region and subjecthood . . .’ (Gibson 2001, 365).
Governmentality perspectives can move beyond critiques of neo-liberal
economic policies as either: evidence that the welfare state has been
captured by right-wing political interests; or responses to the adjustments
demanded by the inevitable globalisation of economic forces (see Larner
2000). The taken-for-granted status of ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’
themselves are subjected to scrutiny through examinations of the multiple
discursive sites and constructions of spaces of globalisation and the diverse
governmental attempts to foster and manage subjects within them (Gibson-
Graham 1996; Larner 2000). Such ‘deconstructions’ throw into question the
suggestion that globalisation heralds the deterritorialisation or demise of the
nation-state (e.g. Hardt and Negri 2000).
Rather, ‘globalisation’ can be seen as a mobile and multivalent form of
governmental rationality (Larner and Walters 2004) that informs, is modulated
by, and intersects with, the rationalities of ‘neo-liberal’ economic policies
and practices in particular ways in particular times and places (Larner and
Le Heron 2002). Central to this approach is consideration of how ‘glo-
balisation’ as a form of problematisation emerged; how it is made into an
operation of government; and its implications for forms of the self (Larner
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1652 Space and government: governmentality and geography

and Walters 2004, 510). And importantly, what and who does this rationality
make visible? Who and what does it exclude? What does it repress and
what does it enable? Such questions engender a situated engagement with
specific ways ‘globalisation’ is deployed – by local organisations, transnational
corporations, the International Monetary Fund, various tiers of the state,
political parties and grass roots movements – as reason, cause or problem
demanding certain responses at particular times and places – in neighbour-
hoods, towns, cities, regions and nations in the global North or South.
Thus, discourses and practices of globalisation may call into question
assumptions about the legitimacy of the nation’s authority over ‘the local’,
as evidenced in Ferguson and Gupta’s (2002) study of the intersection of
‘transnational governmentality’ with grass roots organisations in India and
Africa. The spatial presuppositions of national government and conventional
political divisions between international organisations, national government
and local or grass roots mobilisation are unsettled by discourses of a ‘trans-
national governmentality’ that disrupts the mundane bureaucratic practices
integral to the achievement of taken-for-granted hierarchical spatialisations
of the nation-state (Ferguson and Gupta 2002, 982; on development and
governmentality, see Watts 2003; on bio-power, space and the nation-state
in Latin America, see Radcliffe 1999; and on the recalcitrance of the ‘governed’
and their negotiations of the state, see Corbridge et al. 2005).
In the wake of criticisms of Foucault’s work for being Eurocentric and
lacking in awareness of the ‘colonial constitutive other’ of the West, taking
up the challenge to redress this lack has produced a wealth of Foucauldian-
inspired work in the fields of post-colonial studies and in geography (for
an overview of this literature, see Legg 2007a). In addition, Foucault failed
to see that fundamental aspects of the rationalities, strategies, plans and
practices of discipline and government in Europe were the consequences
of inventions and experiments in the government of the ‘colonial other’
(e.g. Mitchell 1988; Rabinow 1989; Stoler 1995).
Examinations of the making and regulation of colonial and ex-colonial
cities (e.g. Legg 2007b; Robinson 1996, 1997; Yeoh 1996) reveal a ‘colonial
governmentality’ (Scott 1995) at work in the divisions and hierarchies of urban
space. Legg and Yeoh record the aims of the British colonial administrators
expressed in texts, plans, drawings and regulations of the differentiated urban
spaces they aspired to create and the subjectivities they strove to foster, or
if necessary, repress by force (e.g. Legg 2007b, Chapter 3). From the stark
spatial divisions so apparent in apartheid South Africa (Crush 1994; Robinson
1996) to the unremarkable separations of ‘incompatible uses’ of mundane
town planning regulation, a spatial governmentality is revealed that, in part,
emerges from techniques of colonial rule (Rabinow 1989). Meticulous archival
researches such as these indicate further productive directions for post-
colonial governmentality studies in illuminating the slippages and failures
of such projects in the face of material obduracy, mundane refusals or
collective acts of resistance; and in tracking the connections between colonial
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 Space and government: governmentality and geography 1653

government and present practices of the management of space (see also, for
example, Driver and Gilbert 1998; Jacobs 1996).
Geographical approaches are demonstrating that space is indeed an important,
if until recently, conceptually underdeveloped, aspect of governmentality;
that projects of government are necessarily as spatial as those of discipline;
and that developments of governmentality studies need to take equally into
account the materialities of built form, locality, place, territory and space,
and the ways in which space figures in the ‘thought’, aims and rationalities
of government.

Conclusion
This paper has aimed to give an outline of the main aspects of Foucault’s
notion of governmentality as a historically contingent and dispersed form
of power seeking to act on the action of others and on the self. It has also
suggested its underpinnings in Foucault’s historical philosophical investi-
gations of truths, rationalities and the subject. Governmentality – state and non-
state – is seen to be thoroughly spatial, implicated in the assemblage of dispositifs
of rule – interrelations of thought and practices, rationalities and materialities,
calculations and regulations, spaces, buildings, institutions and cities.
The criticisms that governmentality is too diffuse and all-encompassing
to be a meaningful framework for research and analysis are countered by
studies that examine specific, located instances of governmental projects
revealing aims and strategies for the conduct of conducts. While Geography’s
initial focus on disciplinary institutional spaces may have temporarily diverted
attention from governmentality, the questions raised by these studies about
space and subjection have central significance for governmentality studies.
Historical approaches also demonstrate the importance of a genealogical
sensibility in Foucauldian perspectives, analysing the problematisation of
behaviours and environments at specific times and in specific places, to throw
light on aspects of our present.
Genealogical frames, in which historically constituted space appears as
a substrate, an object and a technology of government, could add much
to contemporary policy studies. Genealogy might indicate continuities and
ruptures in what is problematised in the management and regulation of
an ‘individual-place-population-territory-environment’ complex, and what
is obscured or suppressed in the aims and programmes of government.
The ‘mentalities’ of government are thus also important aspects of under-
standing the aims and aspirations of forms of rule and the role of space in
them. Governmental rationalities exhibit ‘thought’ about the effects of built
form, place and space on the conduct of individuals and the qualities of
populations. These ‘irreal’ spaces of thought and their presence in plans
and programmes have effects in ‘the real’, though not necessarily those
intended; and failures to achieve certain aims provoke further projects of
government.
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1654 Space and government: governmentality and geography

However, a focus on the rationalities of government can, at times, appear

to attribute unchallenged power and intention to the ‘programmers’ view’.
But as Rose et al. (2006, 100) point out, this focus brings valuable insights
that are not at odds with approaches that attend to refusals of, or resistances
to, governmental agendas – a point well illustrated by studies such as Gibson’s
(2001).
Finally then, geographical governmentality has the potential to bring
different spatial sensibilities to the fields of post-colonial studies, and to
significantly augment the work of filling the lacunae in Foucault’s original
formulations.
Geographies of governmentality engage with the complexities of the
concept, and have potential to place space at the heart of genealogies of
the present, in order to disturb taken-for-granted truths about the state,
about repressive power and about the nature of the subject. In such projects,
space enters a field of governmental practices – ways of thinking, constructing
and acting in relation to spaces and environments in the assemblage of
specific dispositifs. That is, ‘spatial histories’ and a ‘historical ontology of
space’ (Elden 2001; Philo 1992) can be mobilised in political and analytical
questions (Rabinow 1982, 269) to wear away accepted presuppositions and
to interrogate the manifold modes of the conduct of conducts – of and
by others, of and by ourselves.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the two anonymous referees for their incisive and helpful
comments, and to Jon May for his supportive editorship, all of which have
significantly improved this paper.

Short Biography
Margo Huxley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Town and Regional
Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK. Previously, she has been
at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Melbourne,
the University of Melbourne, and the University of New England, New
South Wales, Australia, teaching in urban studies, public policy and urban
planning. She has a BA (English and History) from the Australian National
University; a Master of Urban Planning from the University of Melbourne;
and PhD in Geography from the Open University. Her research interests
include historical examinations of spatial planning and land use control as
forms of Foucauldian governmentality and technologies of subjectification;
gender and the built environment; community activism, residential protest
groups and resistance to urban development projects. Some indicative
publications include: McLoughlin and Huxley (eds) (1986) Urban Planning
in Australia: Critical Readings; ‘The suburbs strike back: culture, place and
planning in an Australian city’, in Yiftachel et al. (eds) (2001) The Power of
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 Space and government: governmentality and geography 1655

Planning: Spaces of Control and Transformation; ‘Spatial rationalities: order,

environment, evolution and government’, Social and Cultural Geography, 7
May 2006; ‘Geographies of governmentality’, in Crampton and Elden
(eds) (2007) Space, Power and Knowledge: Foucault and Geography.

Note
* Correspondence address: Margo Huxley, Department of Town and Regional Planning, University
of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK. E-mail: [email protected].

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