Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
10. Planning History
31-2283
Mobility. Planning. Policy. Tourism. War.
In light of the burgeoning academic interest in policy mobilities and policy tourism, this paper offers a critical insight into international planning study tours. Countering the contemporary focus of much of the research on these topics, this paper draws on archival research to explore the international study tours of the UK’s Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) between 1947 and 1961. In doing this, the paper makes two wider arguments; first, that there remains significant mileage in bringing together the policy mobilities literature with the work on past exchanges and visits by architects, engineers and planners and, second, that greater awareness and appreciation of past examples of comparison and learning might allow contemporary studies to be situated in their longer historical trajectories.
31-2284
Governance. Postwar development. Public-private relations. United Kingdom.
Partnerships between the public and private sectors have been a central feature in the development of British cities since the nineteenth century. Many major civic projects, transport links and even industrial estates have been successfully completed thanks to government, central and local, working with private interests, developers and investors. After the second world war, however, these partnerships became fundamental to the redevelopment of urban Britain. While the state provided legislation, finance and policy directives, local government worked with the private sector to build social housing, new roads and schools. However, the council also relied on private investment to transform tired city centres by building new shopping centres, hotels and office blocks. While contemporary studies recognize the importance of these partnerships in the growth of cities since the 1980s, this article will look at their significance in a broader historical perspective, highlighting the pivotal role they played from the 1950s to the 1970s, and assessing their relevance not simply in terms of the material redevelopment of the built environment but also in what is revealed about urban governance.
11. Concepts of Planning
31-2285
Heritage. Negotiation. Planning. Urban redevelopment.
Dealing with conflict through dialogue receives considerable attention in current planning approaches. However, debate and negotiation are also inevitable features in the planning of urban redevelopment projects. Insight into the negotiation process contributes to current planning practice as negotiation provides a strong basis for addressing conflicts and satisfying both individual and common interests. In this paper the concepts of integrative and distributive negotiation are explored and analysed in two urban redevelopment projects involving cultural heritage buildings in the Netherlands. The paper shows the negotiation dynamics over time and argues that openly formulating joint ambitions and making strong statements to fulfil individual interests are both essential in coming to a mutually beneficial agreement.
31-2286
Collaboration. Models. Planning. social learning.
Planners making groundwater plans often use scientific hydrological forecasts to estimate long term the risk of water depletion. We study a group of Chicago planners and stakeholders who learned to use and helped develop agent-based models (ABM) of coupled land-use change and groundwater flow, to explore the effects of resource use and policy on future groundwater availability. Using discourse analysis, we found planners learned to play with the ABM to judge complex interaction effects. The simulation results challenged prior policy commitments, and instead of reconsidering those commitments to achieve sustainability, participants set aside the ABM and the lessons learned with them. Visualizing patterns of objections and agreements in the dialogue enabled us to chart how clusters of participants gradually learned to grasp and interpret the simulated effects of individual and policy decisions even as they struggled to incorporate them into their deliberations.
31-2287
Planning. Planning system. Uncertainty.
Recently, the emphasis on the strategic dimension of spatial and land use planning has brought along new instruments of “soft” and informal planning. While these instruments may enhance the strategic quality of planning, more attention needs to be paid to how they relate to the existing statutory land use planning instruments. In the regulatory planning systems of continental Europe, the statutory planning instruments manifest non-strategic features, yet they cannot be ignored in strategic spatial planning. Therein lies the paradox of strategic spatial planning. The theoretical argument of the article is developed by drawing on Wilden’s distinction theory that builds on the notion of logical paradox. With a view on the Finnish planning system, the article explores practical implications by utilizing Schwarz’s and Healey’s ideas of scenario planning and strategic framing, respectively. In so doing, the article reflects on a few cases of strategic spatial planning in Finnish city-regions, and the Finnish government’s aim to develop the strategic character of statutory local master plans.
31-2288
Land allocation. Planning. Spatial analysis.
Several master plans have attempted to lessen the divide between the poor southern neighborhoods of Tel Aviv–Jaffa and the well-off central and northern ones. We compared the planning visions, the main policies and detailed schemes, financing methods, and actual implementation efforts. We found that each planning generation has promoted different development locations, regulations, and allocation methods, and yet implementation has generally been much more durable and with superior socio-spatial impacts in the more affluent areas. To analyze and explain these findings we studied planning allocations in the light of ideas of distributive justice and of urban regime practice. We found that while the welfare state’s direct allocation of housing and infrastructure for communities and individuals was not really equal, the later indirect allocations by neoliberal regimes mainly stimulated market forces in the more affluent or attractive areas. We also found that while planning allocation varied in different neighborhoods, the pace and order of planning and realization became crucial elements in urban inequality.
31-2289
Collaboration. Collective action. Consensus. Integration. Knowledge. Landscape. Urban planners. Urban planning.
In this paper we address two challenges that are faced by scientists who engage in transdisciplinary landscape planning. In building a common understanding and application of the knowledge they bring in, they face the need to integrate knowledge from a range of scientific disciplines to create comprehensive solutions, while aligning the diverging values and perspectives on the future of involved actors. Boundary management has been proposed as a strategy to support the decision-making of actors by reconfiguring the boundaries between different forms of academic and non-academic expertise and between facts and opinions, interests and values. In this paper we investigate how landscape concepts can play a role as a boundary concept in transdisciplinary landscape planning. By analysing three Dutch case studies, we conclude that collective views and coordinated actions within the local planning groups grew during the planning process. We argue that the characteristics of the landscape concepts contributed to this emerging collaboration by creating a discursive space for actors with different values and knowledge bases. We find that this role evolved during the planning process, from conceptually binding, via broadening the planning focus and the coalition, towards facilitating the implementation of collective action to adapt the landscape. Thus, whereas in the early phases of the planning process the concept linked landscape value to landscape functioning, later on it connected landscape functioning to landscape structure.
31-2290
Collaborative planning. Development. Disabilities. Partnerships.
This article examines how an action research partnership developed and then influenced social justice outcomes during a 3-year research project to promote disability-inclusive road development in Papua New Guinea. The purpose of this article is to reflect on possible reasons why this partnership obtained certain positive results and not others. By reflecting on how the partnership developed, transformed over time, engendered achievements and failures, and affected the individuals and organizations involved in it, I aim to contribute to the understanding of how collaborative research partnerships can better promote the rights of those who are often marginalized from public space and decision-making. In this case study, neo-colonialism and underlying tensions between engineering and social development “world views”, both within and between partners, affected both positive outcomes and lost opportunities in terms of improving the lives of people with disabilities.
31-2291
Emotions. Professionalism. Rationality.
Planning aims to change people’s behavior, and success depends on understanding human motivation. However, Enlightenment culture discourages understanding emotional experiences central to human activity. Many social sciences and professions have given increased attention to emotional concerns, but most planners hold fast to a view that people think and act only rationally. This article shows why emotional understanding matters for planning, examines the nature of emotional experience, and describes how Enlightenment culture hinders comprehension. The article reviews studies of emotion in the social sciences and professions and contrasts them with a paucity of published interest in emotion in planning. The article interprets planners’ resistance to emotion in terms of the nature of professions and societal needs for order.
31-2292
Canada. Cities. Population density. Suburban areas.
Examining patterns in suburban density and mix in a mid-sized Canadian city illustrates the challenges of trying to achieve planning targets for urban intensification and mixed use in mid-sized cities with relatively slow rates of growth. A mixed methods study documents trends in Halifax over a 50-year period. Although planning theory and policy often promote growth nodes and corridors, the case study illustrates the ways in which market forces, conflicting regulations, demographic shifts, and local conditions may undermine efforts to increase densities and generate fine-grained mixing of uses and housing types in suburban areas.
31-2293
Community development. Experiential learning. Governance. Innovation. Political legitimacy.
Positioned on the margins of formal government agencies and sometimes even beyond their purview, civil society initiatives in Western Europe are playing an expanding role in the provision of services and in local development at the present time, as formal government reorganises and retreats. Drawing on personal experience in a local development trust in a relatively remote rural area in England, I consider three questions: “What creates and sustains such initiatives?”, “How do they build governance capacity?”, and “How can their activities be rendered legitimate?” In conclusion, and drawing on this specific experience, I consider the extent to which such enterprises are pioneering new ways of doing governance work and creating public value, their future sustainability, and their potential for enriching democracy. Finally, I suggest some directions on which future research might focus.
31-2294
Land administration. Models. Sustainability. Urban planning.
The management of land resources, particularly the role of planning regulations, is critical in defining what land can be used in urban development – and this throws up certain key questions: How can one best manage land resources available? How can one address future urban development needs on the basis of existing land from a sustainable perspective? In this article we propose to question the extent of planning theories in the light of concrete urban development using land availability information. By using comprehensive national data we explore the case of Luxembourg, a small European country facing exacerbated pressures for metropolitanization. We use scenarios that go from a lesser to a greater degree of sustainability in order to project and articulate different configurations of land consumption based on a critical literature review (Smart Growth, New Urbanism, and transit oriented development (TOD)). We explore how modelling might be used to help inform spatial planning for urban growth. This framework is intended as an approach that would be applicable to other urban settings by using data that can be found in any typical municipal authority along with implementation in a geographical information system (GIS). The results create a tool which is useful for planning, monitoring or forecasting land consumption. The results also clearly show the limited impact of planning practices in terms of sustainability using land availability.
31-2295
Discourse. Institutional analysis. Institutions. Policy. Social construction. Sociology.
In infrastructure planning, the “missing link” metaphor can be deployed to demonstrate the necessity for development. Yet a vexed question is how missing links are socially constructed upon particular norms, values and ideas. In this article institutional theory is used to help investigate the social construction of missing links into policy discourses on infrastructure development, by adopting a relational view towards planning. Through qualitative data appraisal the case of the A4 Delft–Schiedam (A4DS) in the Netherlands is studied to tease out how missing link metaphors, and attendant claims of legitimacy, are embedded into policy discourse. The A4DS proponents are shown to have originally focused on enhanced mobility and economic growth as a result of infrastructure development, but that a new legitimacy was constructed upon the notion of spatial quality. From the case it is concluded that development proponents purposefully utilize norms, values and ideas associated with infrastructure development to the missing link metaphor. The article ends by reflecting on future research challenges and developments in the institutionalist approach to planning.
31-2296
Cultural policy. Design methods. Regulatory policy. Strategic planning.
The current hype about culture-led local development models is causing an increasing interest in cultural policies in the broader context of urban policy. This is not necessarily a transitory situation bound to fade once the hype is over. Under certain conditions, there is room to believe that culture may indeed become a main development driver of urban systems. For this to happen, however, it is necessary to abandon simple mono-causal developmental schemes (such as the ‘creative class’ model) and look for more articulated approaches. This calls in turn for a complex systems-based conceptual framework that is at the same time rich enough to capture the complexity of the interdependences among policy and state variables, and manageable enough to be of practical use, not only for policy design professionals but also for local stakeholders who want to take part in collective decision-making processes. Inclusiveness and collective decision making are almost unavoidable in the case of cultural planning strategies, as the social sustainability of culture-based value creation processes crucially depends on boosting the level of access to cultural opportunities by local residents. In this article we present an approach that may be a tentative first step in this direction.
31-2297
Complexity in planning. Infrastructure. Uncertainty.
How should one cope with complexity and uncertainty in mega infrastructure projects? While rational theories tend to eliminate or reduce these unruly conditions, the authors of this article are in search of a different approach to deal with the characteristics of complexity and uncertainty proactively. Three theoretical reflections are introduced to explore possible solutions: (1) the change of institutions to address the problem of excessively simple structures for making decisions on complex projects; (2) the shaping of a learning environment in order to deal with uncertainty and emergent properties; and (3) balancing the generation and the reduction of a variety of policy options in order to select a limited number of feasible options and to bridge the strategic exploration and the operational processes of decision making. Informed by this conceptual thought, concrete pathways are developed and discussed by means of a case study of the construction of a high-speed railway line in the Netherlands.
31-2298
Complexity in planning. Methodology. Models. Planning. Planning theory. Problem solving.
An earlier generation of planners turned to Rittel & Webber’s 1973 conception of “wicked problems” to explain why conventional scientific approaches failed to solve problems of pluralistic urban societies. More recently, “complex systems” analysis has attracted planners as an innovative approach to understanding metropolitan dynamics and its social and environmental impacts. Given the renewed scholarly interest in wicked problems, we asked: how can planners use the complex systems approach to tackle wicked problems? We re-evaluate Rittel and Webber’s arguments through the lens of complex systems, which provide a novel way to redefine wicked problems and engage their otherwise intractable, zero-sum impasses. The complex systems framework acknowledges and builds an understanding around the factors that give rise to wicked problems: interaction, heterogeneity, feedback, neighbourhood effects, and collective interest traps. This affinity allows complex systems tools to engage wicked problems more explicitly and identify local or distributed interventions. This strategy aligns more closely with the nature of urban crises and social problems than the post-war scientific methodologies about which Rittel and Webber had grown increasingly sceptical. Despite this potential, planners have only belatedly and hesitantly engaged in complex systems analysis. The barriers are both methodological and theoretical, requiring creative, iterative problem framing. Complex systems thinking cannot “solve” or “tame” wicked problems. Instead, complex systems first characterize the nature of the wicked problems and explore plausible pathways that cannot always be anticipated and visualized without simulations. The intersection of wicked problems and complex systems presents a fertile domain to rethink our understanding of persistent social and environmental problems, to mediate the manifold conflicts over land and natural resources, and thus to restructure our planning approaches to such problems.
31-2299
Children. Community. Participation. Urban planning. Youth. Youth enterprise.
A number of communities across the United States are creating visionary documents called youth master plans (YMPs) to promote youth participation and to focus on youth needs. This article presents an analysis of 38 YMPs from communities across the United States. This multiple-methods research included a questionnaire, interviews, and an extensive document analysis. Four key YMP ingredients, which enable youth participation were revealed: valuing youth voice through an asset-based approach; providing specific and meaningful participation opportunities for youth in both everyday life and community governance; the presence of a community champion alongside the collaboration of multiple entities within a community; and specific implementation strategies to ensure participation occurs in meaningful ways. Recommendations for YMP improvement and suggestions for future research are also presented.
31-2300
Decentralization. Democracy. Local governance. Participative planning.
The intent of this article is to reflect on the notion of empowered participatory governance in order to gain a better understanding of the institutional contexts and parameters that encourage a more participative democracy, and thereby bring to light the political mechanisms that contribute to broadening the decision-making process. The example we consider is the Montreal Participative Budget (PB). We focus on the impact of decentralization, more specifically on the form this took as the Montreal PB was being elaborated. We examine how much decentralization circumscribes the PB process. The Montreal Participative Budget provides an illustration of the emergence of a participative level in a political context that is, on the whole, hostile to participatory decision making. We suggest that the PB in this context benefits from a new window of opportunity. The chosen example has a dual significance: it underlines the role of temporal contingencies and scales of the process of decentralization in the participative structures at the local level, and it enables us to gain a better grasp of the problem of institutional architectures in implementing participatory democracy by emphasizing the political and social realities underlying new loci for decision making.
12. Policy and Planning Administration
31-2301
Empowerment. United Kingdom. United States. Urban renewal.
Over the course of the 1990s the concept of empowerment became firmly established within the vocabulary of urban politics in several different national contexts. This article analyzes the spread of this concept by looking at the politics of urban renewal in the United States and the United Kingdom. It shows that even if (and possibly because) the definition of empowerment remained vague, the turn to empowerment came out of and contributed to a shift in the nature of urban politics and to a reconfiguration of governmental methods, the role of the state and, consequently, to changes in civil society, all of which were associated with a rise to prominence of a neoliberal perspective.
13. Planning Law and Legislation
31-2302
Land use planning. Planning. Policy analysis.
Land policy and land-use planning policy are two types of public policy pertaining to space. In general, land-use planning policy deals with land-use allocation and property rights, whereas land policy defines the land regime of a society. These differences have shaped a unique discourse for each of these policy types. The purpose of this article is to examine the differences and similarities between the land discourse and the planning discourse by analyzing two public campaigns conducted in Israel against two proposed reforms: the 2009 reform of the Israel Land Administration and the 2010–12 reform of the Planning and Building Law. The findings reveal substantive differences between the two campaigns, manifested in the nature of the leading players, the types of public activities they chose, and most notably in the discourses and the hierarchy of considerations they addressed. The findings raise profound questions regarding universal trends in spatial policy reforms; their influence on the activities of public coalitions and the discourses they adopted; possible future effects of these trends on the differences between the land discourse and the planning discourse; and the impact of these trends on the ability of groups and individuals elsewhere to influence spatial policies (such as planning and land policies).
14. Planning and Society
31-2303
Economic development. Neighborhoods. Poor.
Since the inception of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in 1975, cities and large urban counties have been entitled to funding based on a formula designed to approximate community need. As with any such federally funded and locally administered program, there is a tension between federal and local control. At the federal level, one of CDBG’s main goals is to benefit low- and moderate-income (LMI) people and places. While a substantial literature assesses how well CDBG funds are targeted to needy recipient jurisdictions, evidence on how funds are distributed within recipient jurisdictions is much more limited. In this article, we examine the distribution of CDBG funds relative to the share of LMI people at the council-district and neighborhood levels in Chicago, Illinois, and Los Angeles, California, for 1998 – 2004. In Los Angeles, we find that relatively poorer council districts receive more than they would were funds distributed following the share of LMI people. In contrast, Chicago’s relatively poorer council districts receive lower funding than predicted by their share of the LMI population. This difference across council districts within the cities is partially explained by the greater sensitivity of allocations in Chicago to the location of high-income households. Despite these disparities, policy answers are not obvious; any policy that aims to enhance CDBG’s reach to LMI people must contend with the erosion of broad-based political support that this would engender.
31-2304
Europe. Neighborhood effects. Poverty.
Studies of neighbourhood effects typically investigate the instantaneous effect of point-in-time measures of neighbourhood poverty on individual outcomes. It has been suggested that it is not solely the current neighbourhood, but also the neighbourhood history of an individual that is important in determining an individual’s outcomes. Using a population of parental home-leavers in Stockholm, Sweden, this study investigates the effects of two temporal dimensions of exposure to neighbourhood environments on personal income later in life: the parental neighbourhood at the time of leaving the home and the cumulative exposure to poverty neighbourhoods in the subsequent 17 years. Using unique longitudinal Swedish register data and bespoke individual neighbourhoods, we are the first to employ a hybrid model, which combines both random and fixed effects approaches in a study of neighbourhood effects. We find independent and non-trivial effects on income of the parental neighbourhood and cumulative exposure to poverty concentration neighbourhoods.
31-2305
Homeownership. Poor. Private finance. Suburban areas.
When working-class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people’s relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in-depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.
31-2306
Discrimination. Ethnic minorities. Homeownership. Housing. Low-income housing. Policy. Rental housing.
Over the last two decades, the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program has repeatedly been adapted as a vehicle to respond to federal disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, and terrorist strikes. In this article, I describe the use of the CDBG program for disaster recovery, identify changes in rules governing the use of special disaster-related allocations, and explain the advantages and limitations of using the CDBG program to distribute funds to disaster-devastated areas. In particular, I analyze the operation of CDBG disaster-recovery assistance programs in Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I examine how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development–approved CDBG disaster-recovery programs in these states were designed and implemented in a class and racially discriminatory manner that violated the Fair Housing Act and the low-and-moderate-income rules of the Housing and Community Development Act. In conclusion, I critique the practice of granting waivers of CDBG rules and requirements and suggest policy recommendations to better address the needs of disaster-impacted communities in the future.
31-2307
Borders. Boundaries. Interest groups. Planning. Territory.
This article examines the weaknesses of liberal planning institutions when dealing with organised group action. The case under review, the Kiryat-Ha’Yovel neighbourhood in Jerusalem, was considered as secular for many years. In 2000 the neighbourhood became attractive to the nearby Haredi (ultra-orthodox Jews) group of the “Kol-Torah’ community. Differences in lifestyle led to a collision between the group of “Kol-Torah”, who began “Haredification” processes to change the character of the area to be suitable to Haredim, and the veteran population, who tried to prevent it. Identifying the main engines of organised neighbourhood change and evaluating the difficulties of liberalism dealing with non-autonomous individuals in the housing market sheds light on similar processes occurring in other city centres with diverse population groups.
31-2308
Cities. Globalization. International planning. Urban spaces. Urbanism.
In the last decade, the right to the city has evolved as a powerful rallying cry in the struggle against the exclusionary processes of globalization and the commodification of urban space, and in conflicts over who has claim to the city and what kind of city it should be. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre the vision of the right to the city has inspired a global social movement, legislative reform in Latin America and international debates (e.g. at World Urban Forum 5 in Rio de Janeiro). Nevertheless, despite its theoretical appeal, the content remains elusive and implementation is fraught with challenges. This article critically examines the right to the city through the lens of contributions to the UN-HABITAT e-debate in November/December 2009, which gave voice to those who might otherwise not be heard. Drawing on these contributions, the article argues for a new conceptualization of citizenship, and for a redefinition of the role of the local state and social actors in implementing the rights-based agenda that the right to the city entails.
31-2309
Property. Real estate. Urbanization.
This article explores the role of liberalized real estate markets in shaping financial-sector development in the Arab Gulf region. Since 2001, record oil revenues and the inflow of repatriated wealth into the region have generated immense demand for new, productive destinations for surplus capital. Gulf Cooperation Council states have subsequently undergone rapid growth that is intimately tied to the regulatory transformation of urban real estate markets and the circulation of surplus capital from oil rents to the ‘secondary circuit’ of the built environment. With an emphasis on the city of Dubai, we employ the notion of diversification by urbanization to trace the re-regulation of real estate markets and highlight how these strategies have subsequently shaped Gulf financial markets. Through an examination of the impacts of real estate mega-project development on local banking credit, equities and Islamic financial markets, we reframe recent urbanization in the region as a process of financial re-engineering, and identify the emergence of capital groups whose accumulation activities are tightly connected to both the real estate and financial circuit.
31-2310
Cities. Cultural policy. Discourse. Economic planning.
While a growing body of research analyses the functional mechanisms of the cultural or creative economy, there has been little attention devoted to understanding how local governments translate this work into policy. Moreover, research in this vein focuses predominately on Richard Florida’s creative class thesis rather than considering the wider body of work that may influence policy. This article seeks to develop a deeper understanding of how municipalities conceptualize and plan for the cultural economy through the lens of two cities held up as model ‘creative cities’ — Austin, Texas and Toronto, Ontario. The work pays particular attention to how the cities adopt and adapt leading theories, strategies and discourses of the cultural economy. While policy documents indicate that the cities embrace the creative city model, in practice agencies tend to adapt conventional economic development strategies for cultural economy activity and appropriate the language of the creative city for multiple purposes.
31-2311
Architecture. Economic restructuring. Urban planning.
In recent studies on the role of architecture in urban restructuring, city marketing and the related struggles for meaning, there has been a focus on high-profile architects and iconic architecture. In this article I wish to examine architecture and building types as ‘socially signifying devices’, in order to take more everyday buildings and their images into account as well. Using Vienna as a case study, I explore how the commercial office tower is utilized to represent the internationalization of the local economy and render new urban political-economic strategies socially meaningful. This is done by examining recent shifts in urban policy, and the means, channels and practices of discursive and visual representation of the local office architecture. Connecting the concept of economic imaginaries from cultural political economy (CPE) with a sociological approach to building types, I argue that economic imaginaries gain in plausibility if they are discursively and visually anchored in urban space. However, it is also shown that this kind of spatialization of new economic imaginaries is constructed on a selective visual representation of buildings: the assignment of international economic activities to local office towers is revealed to be only partially true in the case of Vienna.
31-2312
Affordable housing. China. Migrants. Planning process. Rural areas. Spatial analysis. Urban development.
Urban villages are widespread in many Chinese cities, providing affordable and accessible housing for rural migrants. These urban villages develop rapidly over time to create more housing units and accommodate increasing numbers of residents. This article provides systematic analyses of urban village development in Shenzhen in the period 1999–2009. It reveals that the development of urban villages was driven by the overall planning and urban growth of the city, which resulted in significant variation in urban village development at the city scale. Three distinct but overlapping phases were observed: expansion, densification and intensification. The growth of urban villages was spatially clustered and changes over time in the distribution of growth centres suggest the possible diffusion of migrant employment out of the Special Economic Zone into two outer districts. In the recent urban regeneration process, the pattern and trend of urban village development is shown to contradict the city’s urban village redevelopment programmes. This not only helps to explain the slow progress of the policy implementation, but also implies severe risks of jeopardizing the migrant housing market in certain urban sections.
31-2313
Apartment housing. Change. Europe. Urban communities.
This article seeks to conceptualize and value some of the quotidian geographies responsible for contemporary forms of urban change. The starting point for the argument is an attempt to account for recent urban change in the Palestinian city of Ramallah, particularly the proliferation of apartment buildings, using emerging work on verticality. It is argued that work on verticality focuses empirically on prominent cities and spaces of violent conflict, invokes the vertical as politically suspect and offers a theorization of space that is topographical in nature. Consequently, accounts of verticality have produced narratives that obscure topological spatial relations. This article seeks to make space for such topologies, which it is argued are crucial to producing urban and political life itself in many contexts. The concept of ordinary topologies is proposed as a means of attending to the complex and undervalued practices that are thought to be normal (but not static) and common within and across intensive or qualitative spatio-temporal relations. This approach is fleshed out through a discussion of changing topographic–topological landscapes in Ramallah. In particular, it is argued that the increasingly verticalized landscape of the city, embodied in rapidly proliferating apartment buildings, must be understood in relation to frequent journeys to other places and changing family relations.
31-2314
Economic crisis. Urban areas. Urban policy.
It is common knowledge that crisis also signifies opportunity and opens spaces for change. When responding to the current economic crisis, is urban planning seizing this opportunity? This article investigates the case of the Swedish city of Malmö and explores its responses to the crisis by looking dialectically at the crisis, municipal planning policy and real-estate capital. In this article, the local state and urban planning are regarded as social relations, with the aim of going beyond traditional formulations that oppose market (neoliberal) and state intervention (Keynesianism) as the main focus for crisis management. Against this background, the article shows that the 2008 crisis was met in Malmö by an active municipality that confirmed the existing visions and tendencies, rather than exploiting the crisis as a moment for changes and transformation. The article seeks to explain this by looking at the social relations that have constituted the urban policies in Malmö for the past two decades.
31-2315
Cities. Rights. Urban policy. Urban spaces. Urbanism.
In many cities around the world we are presently witnessing the growth of, and interest in, a range of micro-spatial urban practices that are reshaping urban spaces. These practices include actions such as: guerrilla and community gardening; housing and retail cooperatives; flash mobbing and other shock tactics; social economies and bartering schemes; ‘empty spaces’ movements to occupy abandoned buildings for a range of purposes; subcultural practices like graffiti/street art, skateboarding and parkour; and more. This article asks: to what extent do such practices constitute a new form of urban politics that might give birth to a more just and democratic city? In answering this question, the article considers these so-called ‘do-it-yourself urbanisms’ from the perspective of the ‘right to the city’. After critically assessing that concept, the article argues that in order for do-it-yourself urbanist practices to generate a wider politics of the city through the appropriation of urban space, they also need to assert new forms of authority in the city based on the equality of urban inhabitants. This claim is illustrated through an analysis of the do-it-yourself practices of Sydney-based activist collective BUGA UP and the New York and Madrid Street Advertising Takeovers.
31-2316
Advocacy coalition. Community organizing. Empowerment. Faith. Social change.
Existing literature offers many examples of how social action organizations build empowerment in marginalized communities. The primary argument for this article is that multiple mechanisms of empowerment exist and should be understood as much in terms of their trade-offs as for what they achieve for activists, organizations, and communities. Rather than thinking of a single organization as empowering or disempowering, we argue that any activist organization can be analyzed for its combination of empowering mechanisms and corresponding trade-offs. In a case study of a faith-based, social action organization in Detroit, we find support for the connection between empowerment building and the mechanisms identified in existing research. We also present trade-offs among these mechanisms of empowerment, in part caused by the divisive regional context, and conclude with the argument that a better understanding of the multifaceted quality of empowerment could help organizers work in coalition to leverage their strengths toward shared goals.
31-2317
Culture. Industrialization. Space.
How is the notion of ‘culture’ understood and used in planning the transformation of obsolete industrial space? This article analyses the evidence from a current planning project in Suvilahti, Helsinki. It shows that ‘culture’ is imagined and employed as an instrument capable of producing difference in urban space. The transformation of the Cable Factory in Helsinki and the subsequent consensus on the importance of ‘culture’ are shown to have influenced the planning of Suvilahti. On the one hand, planning is being carried out with a deliberate minimization of planning interventions and the promotion of the spontaneous, non-planned practices of cultural producers: the future Suvilahti is imagined as a ‘cultural enclave’ and its community is characterized as a ‘living organism’. On the other, ‘culture’ is planned in terms of its supposedly positive effects on urban space. Planners do not want to interfere with the non-planned character of ‘cultural production’, yet at the same time they express certainty about cultural production’s positive spatial and socioeconomic effects. The transformation of Suvilahti is playing an important part in the large-scale planning project to redevelop the old industrial harbour in Kalasatama, Helsinki. The changes in the nature of planning are analysed under the concept of cultural governmentality.
31-2318
Activism. Cities. Rights. Urban areas.
The right to the city concept has recently attracted a great deal of attention from radical theorists and grassroots activists of urban justice, who have embraced the notion as a means to analyze and challenge neoliberal urbanism. It has, moreover, drawn considerable attention from United Nations (UN) agencies, which have organized meetings and outlined policies to absorb the notion into their own political agendas. This wide-ranging interest has created a conceptual vortex, pulling together discordant political projects behind the banner of the right to the city. This article analyzes such projects by reframing the right to the city concept to foreground its roots in Marxian labor theory of value. It argues that Lefebvre’s formulation of the right to the city — based on the contradiction between use value and exchange value in capitalist urbanism — is invaluable for analyzing and delineating contradictory urban politics that are pulled into the vortex of the right to the city. Following Lefebvre’s lead in such an analysis, however, reveals certain limitations of Lefebvre’s own account. The article therefore concludes with a theoretical proposition that aims to open up space for further critical debate on the right to the city.
31-2319
City government. Governance. Individual freedoms. Urban spaces.
In this article, I examine how contemporary Berlin is governed, with a particular focus on the production of urban space. My points of reference are the term ‘government’ (as employed by Foucault) and the field of governmentality studies (where it is applied empirically). Based on a critical discourse and dispositive analysis of the city’s current urban development policy, I propose that urban governance in Berlin may be analysed through the lens of three central dispositives: the dispositive of governing through citizenship; the dispositive of the creative city; and the dispositive of the social city. I discuss the characteristics of these dispositives of urban governance, drawing on a number of examples taken from the discipline of urban space production in order to look specifically at the aims and objectives of governance, its subjects and the ways it manifests itself. In conclusion, I suggest that the new forms of governance based on empowerment and cooperation have by no means replaced disciplinary technologies of governance, but are rather embedded within them.
31-2320
Asia. Politics. Technology. Urban areas.
This article examines how ‘urban experience’ is objectified and transformed into something that is legible to the state and its experts. It conceptualizes design guidelines as a political technology where bodies of expert knowledge, emplaced in a planning bureaucracy, shape the way the built environment is produced and experienced. Using Singapore as an example of a centralized planning bureaucracy, I analyze how lighting, public art and advertisement signs are targeted to produce a total environment with normative narratives. This article makes two contributions. First, it unpacks the processes that translate different modes of legibility in an attempt to make ‘experience’ legible for planners. The political efficacy of guidelines and pre-established bureaucratic boundaries means that planners can only intervene through a series of combinations, mediations and approximations. Thus, legibility proceeds in a way that is akin to ‘feeling around’. Second, it foregrounds the ‘middle layer of urban governance’ that is often ignored in the discipline. Guidelines represent one coordinate in a system of political technologies that is concerned with producing the norm, that substrate of urban production mechanized through a series of repetitions, gradations and classifications.
31-2321
Cities. City planning. Space.
Cities obviously differ from each other. Sociologically, this difference becomes significant when your aim is to ascertain the influence of local factors in a globalizing world or to understand processes of societal differentiation. To do so, scholars in the areas of urban and regional sociology, community research and local policy can turn to a number of theoretical and empirical studies on cities, municipalities, or, less specifically, the local setting as societally formative units that resist global influences. In this article I continue to ask how cities socialize in a way that allows shared experience to emerge in communities. Grounded in the sociology of knowledge shaped by German thinkers such as Max Weber, Alfred Schütz, Karl Mannheim, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, my aim is to illustrate that specific stocks of knowledge based on habitualized experience arise in every city. Intrinsic logic captures the hidden structures of cities as locally well-established, operative processes of sense-making along with their physical, material manifestations.
31-2322
Australia. Education. Ethnic minorities. Migration. Networks.
‘Education–migration nexus’ policies in Australia between 1998 and 2010 linked international education with different forms of temporary and permanent migration. This resulted in a blurring of boundaries around student, worker, consumer, migrant and ethnic identities. While the exploitation, marginalization and vulnerability of international students in Australia has gained a great deal of media and scholarly attention, less consideration has been given to the varied forms of subsequent protest undertaken by student migrants in Australian cities. This article analyses three case studies of protests involving student migrants in Melbourne: a protest against unfair assessment; a fight for a campus prayer room; and labour protests within the retail service and taxi industries. It draws on theoretical work on new social movements and social transformation in urban spaces to find ways to conceptualize this activism in relation to the scales of campus, city and nation. In doing so, it argues primarily that these sites of protest are socio-spatial experiences that encompass shifting and socially produced spatial scales, as well as complex networks of association across different communities, which in turn reflect different student-migrant identities.
31-2323
Ecology. Infrastructure. Public space. Technology. Urban areas. Urban spaces.
The aim of this article is to explore new ways of integrating technology, nature and infrastructures into urban public spaces. This is done through a case study, the design of General Vara del Rey, which is offered here as a model to explore a novel urban political ecology that calls into question dominant definitions of public spaces as self-contained sites operating independently of natural and infrastructural spaces. Through the double movement of ‘the technification of public space’ and ‘the publicization of infrastructures’, the square aims to rethink the political ecology of urban public spaces by enabling the effective incorporation and participation of infrastructural and natural elements as active actors into the public and political life of the community. It is argued that the transformation of infrastructures into fully visible, public and political agents provides a useful model to address the growing proliferation of infrastructural and technological elements onto contemporary urban surfaces and to open up the possibility of new forms of civic participation and engagement.
31-2324
Activism. Political process. Urban areas. Urban planning.
A constant and largely unquestioned characteristic of contemporary studies of urban movements is their conception of the activist ‘subject’— the reflective agent or ‘doer’ who participates in, and shapes, urban movements. Whereas it has become increasingly common in other scholarly research to regard the subject as a contingent, context-specific outcome or creation, studies of urban movements have not been swayed. The latter, even as they proceed to conceptualize more and more of the urban scene in terms of malleable ‘processes’ rather than inert ‘structures’, have continued to regard the makeup of the activist subject as universal and invariable. This article, in contrast, proposes and explores a different approach. Through a review of the recent urban movements literature, a focused consideration of potentially complementary literatures, and a demonstrative case study, this article aims to show that it is possible and indeed worthwhile to examine how political subjects are contingently remade both prior to, and through, their active participation in contentious urban politics. The remaking of political subjects, it concludes, is often central to the formation and achievements of urban movements. Devoting increased attention to this process — alongside other, already-recognized political processes — could, therefore, promote a richer, more complex understanding of activism and the ever-changing city.
31-2325
Europe. Financial crisis. Neoliberalism.
In view of debates among critical urban scholars regarding the relationship between the current economic crisis and the stability of neoliberal hegemony on the urban scale, this article analyzes (1) the impact of the economic recession on the city of Frankfurt am Main, and (2) whether urban politics in the German financial center will witness a new phase of post-neoliberalization. Statistical analyses of the local labor and property markets and of municipal budget trends reveal that the implications of the current crisis are relatively limited, especially when compared to the dot.com crisis in the early 2000s. Furthermore, a discourse analysis of the debates in the Frankfurt City Council between 2008 and 2010, supplemented by interviews with local political elites, shows that neoliberal hegemony remains stable and powerful regardless of the deep economic decline and a short period of uncertainty and intensive hegemonic struggles. In my analysis I focus on the power of neoliberal subjectivity and knowledge production in order to try and explain the deepening of the general consensus among local elites by demonstrating that a broad majority of actors from different political parties interprets the crisis within a neoliberal rationality.
31-2326
Asia. Culture. Economy. Urban regeneration.
This article investigates the ways in which cultural economy is formed through negotiation and interaction between local actors in the case of culture-led regeneration in Gwangju, South Korea. It looks at the dynamics between the bureaucrats’ pursuit of economic growth in the city and the efforts of civil society to maintain a strong political spirit throughout the regeneration process. Through in-depth interviews with various participants and archival analysis, the politics of cultural economy are examined in relation to the Gwangju Biennale and the City of Culture project. The findings show that in these two cases bureaucrats were the dominant force, a tendency that instrumentalized culture. They also illustrate that this dominance brought about resistance from civil society. However, in the process of both engaging in conflict and working with each other, the different discourses of economic growth and cultural meaning were integrated, and in the process mutual learning and adaptation took place among members of the two groups. Civil society also faced cleavages resulting from different approaches to how to collaborate with the bureaucrats and its ensuing self-reflection on communicative value enhanced its rehabilitation. The article argues that the politics of cultural economy is dynamic, involving processes of renegotiation, adaptation and self-realization. It also offers the possibility of a new arena for the public sphere. Civil society plays a critical role in the integration of culture and economy.
31-2327
Activism. Capitalism. Economic planning. Europe. Social impact analysis.
The Free Town of Christiania is an autonomous community of about 1,000 inhabitants in the centre of Copenhagen. Built as a squat for a hippy community in the 1970s, it is today a central node in the geography of activism, anarchism and alternative social life. This article analyses Christiania from the specific perspective of creativity and within the context of the ‘creative city’ debate. The Free Town is a lively innovative milieu, nurturing the arts, social experimentation, ideas and original architectural solutions. As such, it is becoming a more and more relevant space from the point of view of the market economy and in the promotion of the idea of a ‘creative Copenhagen’. But I argue that much of its creative potential is connected to place-specific socioeconomic factors. In this sense, the Christiania experience troubles mainstream conceptions of creativity by revealing that creativity is both fluid and situated.
31-2328
Canada. Neoliberalism. Social impact analysis. Social indicators. Sports. Urban planning.
Vancouver’s successful bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games took place at a transformational moment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In the first decade of this century, the IOC began to require host cities to address a much wider range of local impacts of the ‘global Games’, and to undertake planning initiatives to ensure maximum local social inclusion. In this article, we present a case study of the policies and principles of social inclusion used by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) in preparing for the 2010 Games. We use key informant interviews, document analysis and participant observation to study a specific programme — Building Opportunities with Business (BOB) — that was showcased as one of VANOC’s prominent demonstrations of social inclusion. Our evidence suggests that Games planning processes have become even more powerful instruments for the promotion of liberal philosophies through neoliberal local governance regimes; social inclusion is promised through the proliferation of ever more institutionally diffused public–private partnerships. With the neoliberal shift from public service provision to private sector entrepreneurialism, individual employability becomes the primary goal of, and normative justification for, social inclusion policies. Heavily circumscribed VANOC efforts at specific types of social inclusion have met with limited success, but it appears clear that the fusion of transnationally mobile mega-events and prevailing doctrines of neoliberal entrepreneurialism has become a significant new framework for local urban social policy.
31-2329
Market demand. North America. Traffic. United States.
The volume of firearms sold in USA and trafficked across the US–Mexico border is notoriously difficult to estimate. We consider a unique approach using GIS-generated county-level panel data (1993–1999 and 2010–2012) of Federal Firearms Licenses to sell small arms (FFLs) to estimate the realized demand for firearms based on the distance by road from the nearest point on the US–Mexico border. We use a time-series negative binomial model paired with a post-estimation population attributable fraction (PAF) estimator. We do so to control determinants of domestic demand. We are able to estimate a total demand for trafficking, both in terms of firearms and dollar sales for the firearms industry. We find that nearly 2.2% (between 0.9% and 3.7%) of US domestic arms sales are attributable to the US–Mexico traffic in the period 2010–2012, representing 212,887 firearms (between 89,816 and 359,205) purchased annually to be trafficked.
31-2330
Ethnic minorities. Health services. Learning. Methodology. Multiculturalism. Planning.
This article examines contributions and challenges of learning alliance methodology to multicultural planning in health provision services in an urban context. A learning alliance was implemented to target health needs of different ethno-racial groups through an action research project in Swale, Kent, UK. We argue that a learning alliance is an innovative methodology that can contribute to multicultural planning by (1) promoting the involvement of new planning stakeholders and the institutionalization of learning alliance outcomes, (2) ensuring capacity-building strategies, (3) emphasizing documentation and dissemination as innovative practices, and (4) strengthening the network capacity of a community. Critical reflections are presented here as a constructive view to improve both the learning alliance methodology and multicultural planning. The article contributes to debates on public service delivery in the context of discussions about multiculturalism, health and planning.
31-2331
Community planning. Health care. Participatory research. Rural communities. United States.
This article describes the methodological approach used to conduct a community health needs assessment (CHNA) using community-based participatory research (CBPR) principles in a Mississippi Delta community. Eighty-five residents participated in the study that was conducted in Charleston, Mississippi. The mixed-methods research design included five components: key informant interviews, focus groups, assessments of the built and the nutrition environment, and assessment of selected health policies. Findings from the CHNA revealed priority health concerns, social and environmental issues, strengths, weaknesses, and assets of the community, as well as existing organizations that could be involved in efforts to improve health. Findings from the CHNA identify the priority health issues, needs, and service gaps. These findings will be used to inform future planning, development, implementation, and evaluation of programs to improve the health of the Charleston community. This study provides numerous methodological contributions to the existing literature regarding CBPR and CHNAs that may help development researchers and practitioners.
31-2332
Ethnic minorities. Housing. Inequality. Land use regulation. Urban sprawl.
This article investigates the effect of urban sprawl, as measured by employment decentralization, on minority housing consumption gaps since the housing bust. Previous research contends that sprawl contributes to reducing the Black–White housing consumption gap by increasing the supply of land in housing markets and thereby increasing affordability. Antisprawl policies may therefore exacerbate the Black–White housing disparity. This research makes two contributions to the literature. First, the article examines how changes in sprawl may have varying influences on the Black–White housing gap, a previously unexamined facet of this relationship. In the vast majority of metropolitan areas in this sample, sprawl is predicted to exacerbate the Black–White housing gap until sprawl reaches a threshold. Only in a limited number of high-sprawl metropolitan areas does sprawl contribute to reducing the Black–White housing gap. Second, the article examines differences in housing gaps for three distinct minority groups—Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics—using recent data from the 2009 American Housing Survey. For Blacks, sprawl continues to have varying effects on housing consumption. For Asians, urban sprawl yields significant gains in housing consumption relative to Whites. However, no significant results occur for Hispanics. This article demonstrates that the independent effect of urban sprawl on U.S. minority housing consumption is a highly uneven process in the post–Great Recession economy. As such, arguments that antisprawl policies reduce minority gains in housing should be treated with considerable skepticism.
15. Development Planning
31-2333
Europe. Green areas. Immigrants. Immigration. Sovereignty.
During the past 15 years, the Casc Antic, a traditionally low-income and immigrant neighborhood in Barcelona, has been the site of community-based mobilization to revitalize abandoned areas and improve local environmental conditions. The organization of residents and their supporters is situated within a broader context of urban political and socioeconomic change — the transformation of the urban economy into a decentralized, global and technology- and service-focused system, accompanied by rising socioeconomic inequality and displacement in inner-city areas. To date, few studies in the urban environmental arena have been placed within processes of urban change and offer specificity on the purposes, intents and goals that poor and minority residents develop as they understand, resist and challenge their marginality. Why do residents of marginalized neighborhoods and their supporters organize to proactively improve livability and environmental quality? To what extent do the environmental struggles of marginalized communities serve as means to advance more complex political agendas in the city? Through the examination of neighborhood organization for livability in the Casc Antic, I analyze how activists use their environmental endeavors as tools to address stigmas attached to their place, control the land and its boundaries, and build a more transgressive form of democracy.
31-2334
Community development. Democracy. Education.
While many English speaking community developers are familiar with the early work of popular education in Latin America that sprang up during years of dictatorship, most are not aware of the advances in theory and practice our Latin American and Caribbean colleagues created during the era of re-democratization from the mid-1980s into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The social movement linking popular education, community development, and democracy (CDD) is exemplified in the emergence of the Council of Popular Education of Latin America and the Caribbean and its journal of theory and praxis, La Piragua. We situate the social movement and its intellectual work, then examine its utility for CDD practice through an application on the ground, and consider its implications for community development praxis elsewhere.
31-2335
Citizenship. Democracy. Food. Local development. Welfare.
The promise of democracy rests on the practice of active citizenship. Historically, local government has been a key incubator of civic leadership. In recent decades, however, community fortunes have grown increasingly dependent on economic and policy decisions made elsewhere. Has the concentration of power in corporations and the state undermined the practice of local citizenship? Using data from two decades of field research in California communities, I argue that citizenship is alive if not entirely well in California communities, often taking unconventional or less heralded forms. The paper draws on democratic theory to articulate three essential attributes of democratic citizenship: metis (prudent knowledge), craft (skilled practice), and civic mindedness (sociable sensibility). It then provides examples of these attributes as they shape citizenship practices within welfare-to-work and local food systems networks. Finally, it suggests lessons for community developers interested in deepening the practice of democratic citizenship in contemporary communities.
31-2336
Community. Environmental impact analysis. Health and well-being. Knowledge.
Engagement with local residents is increasingly being used as a source of evidence for making health impact assessment (HIA) predictions. However, there have been criticisms about the community engagement process and the value of evidence derived from it. This study aims to investigate the constraints of engagement and to gage the usefulness of local knowledge to the HIA evidence base. Questionnaire responses were collected from 52 HIA practitioners in the United Kingdom, and interviews were conducted with 11 practitioners (8 of whom also completed the survey). Forty-two of the 52 respondents (81%) had undertaken engagement with local residents, and the techniques used for community engagement were focus groups (76%), workshops (52%), questionnaire surveys (43%), interviews (41%), and other less common approaches (14%). Interestingly, while more than one-third of the practitioners found engagement difficult, nearly all of them rated local knowledge to be a useful or very useful source of evidence. It is vital, therefore, to understand ways of minimizing the constraints encountered in the community engagement process in order to fully tap into local knowledge and strengthen the evidence base of the HIA process.
31-2337
Advocacy coalition. Collective action. Community organizing. Power.
Collective impact is a framework for achieving systems-level changes in communities through coordinated multi-sector collaborations. It has quickly gained influence in public health, education, and community development practice. Many adherents to the collective impact framework position it as a novel approach, however, and they often neglect many of the relevant findings from previous research on coalitions, interorganizational alliances, and other forms of organizational and cross-sector collaboration. Additionally, the collective impact model differs in important ways from other effective models for community-driven changes in systems and policies, including grassroots community organizing. This article situates collective impact in relation to similar approaches, makes key distinctions between the collective impact framework and principles for grassroots community organizing, and draws on these distinctions to offer recommendations for enhancing collaborative practice to address community issues. The clarification of these distinctions provides possibilities for future innovations in community development practice, evaluation, and research. To tackle the root causes of the systemic issues that collective impact efforts seek to address will require learning from the community organizing approach to community engagement, analysis of power, and capacity for conflict.
31-2338
Community development. Housing. Urban development.
This article evaluates how well the current allocation formula for the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program allocates funds with respect to community development need. We assemble an index of community development need from a variety of demographic and economic indicators which capture the components of need that can be addressed directly by the CDBG program based on its statutory objectives. We use this index to estimate the relation between funding levels and community development need and how this relation has changed over time. In particular, we assess the effectiveness of targeting by examining the horizontal and vertical equity of the formula. Results suggest that the relation between the formula data inputs and community development need has deteriorated over the past two decades. The present formula is shown to underfund Formula A grantees conditional on need and to overfund a select number of high-income, slow-growth, older communities. Finally, we consider several alternative formula specifications, which we evaluate against the community development needs index.
31-2339
Community development. Democracy. Performance.
“Magic moments” are experienced when people are transformed by feelings of surprise and delight, moments when they experience that collective “aha” feeling, or experience the joy of connection with a group. These moments allow people to temporarily suspend their belief systems and feel a collective openness to something new and transformative. They can sometimes be life changing. These moments do not happen on their own; rather, practitioners often have to facilitate the creation of environments in which they can happen. Community developers in this field strive to engage citizens holistically, including their emotional and creative assets. These community development workers challenge traditional models that often reflect class, race, and gender biases. The process of creating environments for magic to happen can promote a culture of democracy, where principles of inclusion and participation are manifest. This article will reflect on examples of magic moments in the author’s theater and community development work, discuss the methods used to create environments where they were possible, and explore the impacts of such environments on democratic practice and community development.
31-2340
Assessment. Economic development. Entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs. Human capital. Regional development. Strategic planning.
An emerging area of scholarship can be found at the nexus between entrepreneurship and community development. Beyond a mere focus on firms and their contributions, this growing nexus in the literature seeks to understand the complex ways that entrepreneurs benefit their communities, and that communities enhance or inhibit entrepreneurship. This exploration is fundamentally economic, sociological, psychological, strategic, behavioral, and cultural; it should incorporate many contributions of scholars across a wide range of disciplines. This introductory article examines the current state of research at the nexus of community and entrepreneurship, and conceptually positions entrepreneurship as deeply embedded in – and inseparable from – community, social, and economic structures. The article presents community entrepreneurship development as a multidimensional and challenging strategy economically speaking, but one that produces many benefits beyond economic growth. The article discusses both the challenges and benefits of promoting entrepreneurship in the community, presents the articles comprising the special issue, and ends with a call to action and scholarship in this exciting conceptual space.
31-2341
Citizen participation. Democratic governance. Education. Educational planning.
Community developers must possess specialized skills and knowledge to effectively promote democratic practice. The training literature indicates strong agreement on the values of the profession, including inclusion, broad participation, and empowerment. Only rarely in the literature are these values translated into a comprehensive set of core competencies. Following a research synthesis approach, we identify seven specific competencies: (1) listening, (2) emotional awareness, (3) cultural awareness and humility, (4) public deliberation, (5) facilitation, (6) appreciative inquiry, and (7) empowerment. We propose this initial framework to spur a robust discussion and debate among practitioners, scholars, and educators. We believe that the field of community development will be strengthened if there is a widely accepted set of competencies for those who seek to build just and democratic communities.
31-2342
Economic modeling. Housing. Job accessibility. Neighborhoods.
One of the federal government’s largest housing programs over the past 20 years, HOPE VI, has reduced the concentration of poverty, changed the physical shape of housing, and provided supportive services. HOPE VI has leveraged government funds and private investments to achieve the goal of revitalizing neighborhoods throughout the United States. The sheer magnitude of the program has created much research on the effects of HOPE VI. However, little research has examined the impact HOPE VI has had on job creation. Using three economic multiplier models (preservation economic impact model, the economic impact forecasting system model, and impact analysis for planning), our analysis showed that HOPE VI helped revitalize two small Kentucky cities: Newport and Covington. In these two cities, our findings show a significant number of jobs generated by the creation of attractive, affordable housing. These findings suggest that policymakers should focus on job creation when planning programs like HOPE VI.
31-2343
Asset-based community development. Community. Food. Health. Values.
Asset mapping has emerged as a promising tool for mobilizing and sustaining positive changes related to community health and wellbeing. In contrast to approaches that focus on communities’ needs or deficits, asset mapping harnesses community resources in order to foster transformation and growth. In this article, the authors analyze asset mapping workshops, which focused on access to food and safe places to be active, that were conducted in two North Carolina (USA) study communities. The authors highlight the results of the workshops and show how they demonstrate the underlying values expressed by participants. Community members differ in what they value within existing community structures and what their priorities are in determining the direction of future efforts. This article argues that an understanding of why organizations are named as exemplary in their improvement of access to healthy foods or places to be active allows community members and leaders to connect assets in ways that are rooted in community values and the realities of existing community and social structures.
31-2344
Asia. Colonialism. Community transformation. Leadership. Values.
The South Pacific islands face a myriad of challenges caused by the ongoing effects of colonization, historical conflict, and geographic isolation. Leadership capacity within the region requires continued development in order to facilitate indigenous solutions to the challenges facing the region. The transformational leadership model has been successfully applied cross-culturally, and this article proposes a values-based approach to facilitate the indigenous application of the concept. In light of recent studies supporting a values-based approach, the paper describes challenges and limitations of current models, and extrapolates the relevancy of applying values in leadership development. A foundational understanding of common South Pacific values is then presented as the starting point for facilitating a values-based application of transformational leadership, with characteristics of transformational leadership introduced as factors to support pre-existing indigenous values.
31-2345
Community development. Democratic governance. Economy.
Solidarity economy (SE) is a set of theories and practices that engenders ethical economic relationships and new possibilities for democratic and transformative community development. SE advances democratic community development by providing an alternative to capitalist ideology from which the core goals of solidarity and agency can be imagined, identified, and realized. Further, it advances a set of concrete economic practices that enact these goals while sustaining people and the planet. Politically, SE is a movement that can build power within and across scales and win supportive policy and public resources. Using the development of SE in Boston, Worcester, and Springfield, Massachusetts as examples, the article discusses the possibilities and challenges for SE projects to negotiate across differing values and politics, racial and class divides, and the challenge of accessing startup capital and building finance. SE suggests trajectories of “scaling up,” where local and regional efforts might be part of a strategy for deeper political-economic transformation. How SE expands depends on how actors in particular places and times take advantage of opportunities and overcome ideological, economic, and political challenges.
31-2346
Development policy. Economic development. Entrepreneurialism.
Research on the economic impact of entrepreneurship makes the case for entrepreneur-focused economic development. Community economic development practitioners and policy-makers face the challenge of identifying and implementing the most promising strategies. Some community development researchers have argued effectively for an entrepreneurial development system, or ecosystem, approach as a way to build and grow a pipeline of entrepreneurial talent. Others document the importance of building community capacity as a prerequisite for the establishment of an effective ecosystem. This paper draws on field-based learning, primarily in Kansas and Australia, to develop the conceptual underpinnings for an approach to creating entrepreneurial communities that builds: (1) the capacity of the community to host and support an entrepreneurial ecosystem and (2) the capacity of entrepreneurs to grow themselves and their businesses in support of community economic development.
31-2347
Community development. Revitalization. Urban renewal.
During the latter half of the twentieth century, many inner city neighborhoods with majority black/African American populations fell into decline, neglect, and crime. East Russell, an inner city neighborhood in Louisville, Kentucky, was no different. It was ranked as one of the most dangerous and impoverished neighborhoods in the USA. In 1992, with no previous precedent, community leaders wanted “renewal” without population displacement. Currently, scholars question if “renewal” can happen without removal. We examine the East Russell case to better understand this possibility. Utilizing data from the Jefferson County Property Valuation Administration, the US Census Bureau, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and a recent neighborhood charrette, we examine the conditions of the neighborhood from 1992 to 2012. We find that the efforts of the revitalization did have some successes: 575 housing units were renovated, homeownership increased, property valuations increased, crime rates declined sharply, single automobile usage fell, foreclosures were among the lowest in the city, and employment increased. While revitalization brought benefits, there are still issues that need to be addressed. Our findings contribute to the current debate that this type of place-based policy is possible without population dispersal.
31-2348
Africa. Asset-based community development. Community development.
This research was aimed at exploring asset-based community development (ABCD) practice of the Awramba community in Ethiopia, focusing on seven specific principles. A qualitative research design, including in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, observations, and document analysis, was used. The findings revealed that Awramba was practicing ABCD, albeit with some practical deviations. Genuine respect for human dignity has enabled its members to effectively implement most of the ABCD principles. Community members have high levels of shared meaning, sense of community/commitment, full participation and democratic power distribution, civil engagement, internally-focused development, bonding social capital, and effective access to internal resources. However, there were poor relationships with external communities and organizations (due to prejudices both from the outsiders and the community itself), and the community was inflexible towards external resource utilization. Interrelatedness among the principles of ABCD was also observed. Implications for practice and research are proposed.
31-2349
City planning. Crime. Redevelopment. Revitalization.
While many researchers have examined strategies for revitalizing downtowns, few have done so in small or mid-sized legacy cities. This article adds to the literature by examining 1263 survey responses to statements about potential improvements to the downtown area of Flint, Michigan (USA). Descriptive statistics were used to identify perceptions of the most promising strategies for improvement. Those strategies were further analyzed using regression methods, to determine which characteristics of participants influenced responses. We found that while there are many improvements that might encourage people to come downtown – such as reducing crime, having more to do, making parking easier, and having suitable housing – some traditional improvements advocated by planners (involving proximity, walkability, and bikeability) were not desired. Additionally, we found that responses appeared to be influenced by age, residency status, and perception of downtown, but not by education level, frequency of visiting, or whether or not one currently works downtown.
31-2350
Australia. Economic development. Indigenous organizations. Indigenous people. Livelihoods. Sustainability. Water.
Sustainable development programs can lead to tension and conflict in human communities when natural capital is used as the foundation for livelihood programs. Building on the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF), this study demonstrates that including community perceptions in the creation of sustainable livelihoods programs is important in designing programs that are legitimate to community members, and this is especially important in the context of natural capital. Using the SLF, the allocation of water rights to Indigenous groups in remote northern Australia is examined to determine the acceptability of this form of natural capital to support sustainable livelihoods. The findings indicate that there are competing values of water within communities, and that balancing the preferences for spirituality and conservation with economic development and self-sufficiency is critical to the success of sustainable livelihoods programs across the region.
31-2351
Community development. Entrepreneurialism. Ethnicity. Financial services. Lending. Race. Small businesses.
Despite federal and state efforts to ensure equal access to credit, ethnic disparities in financial capital remain. Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs) represent one type of institution working to address this inequality. Based on interviews with the staff of ten Los Angeles, CA (USA) area CDFIs, this article explores the unique way CDFIs lend to ethnic entrepreneurs. The findings highlight the role of CDFIs in providing extensive technical assistance, utilizing flexible lending criteria, and building co-ethnic weak ties. Furthermore, CDFI staff members’ specialized knowledge about particular ethnic groups, shared cultural background, and/or language ability allow them to take on greater risk. As the demand for financial capital grows in a tight credit market, it will become increasingly important to understand these community institutions and their potential impact on community development more broadly.
31-2352
Community development. Housing. Neighborhoods.
Since the 1930s, federal housing policy has pursued an array of goals: addressing housing quality and affordability, neighborhood conditions, and residential segregation; and seeking to increase local employment opportunities and cities’ tax bases. While the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, established in 1974 to replace a number of categorical grants, was designed to be flexible and broad enough to include all of these goals, in most cases, local decision makers have focused program dollars on improving housing, not neighborhood-wide, conditions.Public community development and housing programs can play a central role in prompting positive neighborhood change and ultimately repositioning weaker neighborhoods. There is a growing consensus in the literature that subsidized housing investments are more likely to generate such spillover effects if they are geographically targeted. What is less well known is exactly how much spending is required—what the threshold amount is—to positively impact neighborhood-wide conditions and values.This project tests recent estimates of threshold spending amounts using data on investments funded by Philadelphia’s Community Development Block Grants and Section 108 loans, and house value trends at the census-tract level. According to this analysis, Philadelphia census tracts receiving above-sample-median amounts of CDBG and/or Section 108 loan funds saw property values increase far more than those tracts receiving less subsidy or control group tracts receiving no subsidy at all. This suggests that geographically targeting subsidies can help maximize their neighborhood-wide effects.
31-2353
Community development. Neighborhood revitalization. Urban policy.
This article reviews the origins and evolution of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, the federal government’s largest program providing direct assistance to local governments. The article examines the program’s changing national policy context over its 40-year history, as manifest in presidential, executive, and legislative deliberations over the program’s national goals and objectives, as well as the key components of the program’s policy design and administrative structure. The article also explores how the decisions affecting policy design adopted at the national level play out at the local level, through an examination of the choices communities have made regarding uses of CDBG funds and the social and geographic targeting outcomes that have been obtained. The article then revisits the extent to which the CDBG program conforms with the basic characteristics of block grants. The article concludes with several recommendations for revising CDBG that will provide a policy tool better aligned with the new community-building paradigm that has emerged over the past two decades, with its emphasis on collaborative, comprehensive, community-based initiatives.
31-2354
Citizen participation. Cooperative networks. Deliberative planning. Democratic processes.
Despite the rise of many new forms of public participation, citizens often find themselves on the sidelines of civic initiatives. Observing that nascent democratic capacities are an under-used resource for community development, this article explores how widely applied understandings of capacity building fail to recognize the democratic capacities of communities. By exploring notions of capacity that span the fields of community development and civic engagement, this discussion argues that both fields can improve their ability to address complex public problems by paying close attention to the inherent democratic capacities of a community’s citizens, organizations, and networks. It suggests a framework for recognizing and analyzing these democratic capacities. An overlapping “democratic practices” framework is presented as a way to analyze how communities apply their democratic capacities. The article concludes with case studies from Cooperative Extension that illustrate how citizen-centered community development and civic engagement grounded in public deliberation and dialog can build on and strengthen the democratic capacities of communities.
31-2355
Africa. Agriculture. Community organizing. Development strategies. Partnerships. Social capital.
Development interventions increasingly support active participation of community members especially through community-level groups. This article explores the quality of participation in community groups in a rural setting in Uganda, focusing on how members participate and the factors that facilitate or impede their participation. Data sources included 20 in-depth group interviews and related documentary evidence. Findings indicate that members participate best in groups where material benefits and capacity building opportunities are realized, and that groups successful in achieving project objectives tend to establish networks with other stakeholders. Low trust in leadership and unsuitable leadership styles inhibit participation quality. Based on these findings, the authors recommend that development programs work with community groups to identify and address capacity gaps, support establishment of networks with other stakeholders, and pursue strategies to institutionalize and sustain changes derived from program interventions.
31-2356
Neighborhoods. Smart growth. Urban form. Urban planning. Walking.
What research supports the view that compact, walkable, diverse (CWD) neighborhoods are beneficial for urban residents? To make this assessment, we searched the literature to try to understand the current status of evidence regarding claims about the CWD neighborhood. We find that research linking CWD neighborhoods to effects on residents coalesces around three main topics: social relations, health, and safety. We conclude that on the basis of the literature reviewed, most of the intended benefits of the CWD neighborhood have been researched and found to have significant, positive effects for urban dwellers. While physical factors are but one element affecting behavior and outcomes, and the issues of self-selection and causality remain, overall, key dimensions of the CWD neighborhood have been found to positively affect social interaction, health, and safety.
31-2357
Community. Education. Migration. Sense of community. Youth.
Data drawn from the Rural Youth Community Survey were used to examine the associations of community attachment, sense of community, and educational aspirations of rural youth in Texas with their migration intentions. Multivariate logistic regression revealed that the three measures are independently and significantly associated with students’ intentions to migrate. Based upon these findings, several recommendations for community leaders hoping to retain youth in rural areas and/or encourage young people to return to their home communities after receiving post-secondary education or training are offered. Possible implications of these findings for community developers, public leaders, Cooperative Extension personnel, and other practitioners are addressed, as are suggestions for future research.
31-2358
Community development. Culture. Enterprise. Learning.
Entrepreneurship education has increased in prominence over the past decade yet somewhat paradoxically remains outside the statutory school curriculum in many places, including the UK. Despite this, there has been a growing movement to embed enterprise education widely, including supporting enterprise through community-based learning. This article is the output from a participatory action research case study which analyzes the implementation of community-based enterprise learning in Rotherham (UK) and examines the experiences of developing community-based enterprise learning and the challenges of creating a sustainable model. The article finds that such a model depends on creating an effective community of practice with distributed leadership that is able to co-produce community-based enterprise learning. The article concludes by reflecting on the emerging model and identifies recommendations for achieving sustainable community-based enterprise learning.
31-2359
Civic regionalism. Community development. Deliberative planning. Participatory research. Urban policy.
We investigate the relationship between community organizations and the implementation of a multi-ward participatory budgeting (PB) process in Chicago. Drawing on observations and surveys administered during 2012–2013, we find that participation in PB varied across the four wards, as did the involvement of community organizations. The ward with the highest turnout also had the lowest associational involvement, possibly because residents were familiar with the process and because some organizations there did not want to appear to endorse a process associated with the alderman. We found that the engagement of organizations depended on their missions, as well as their relationships to their elected officials. Reform-oriented groups that focused on the built environment participated more than advocacy organizations whose agendas were less physical and more ideological. The positive linkages found between the pre-existing civic infrastructure and participation in PB in other contexts (notably Brazil) may be less apparent in politician-led, infrastructure-focused processes where top-down mobilization is more common.
31-2360
America. Economic development. Race. Rural development. Social capital.
During the past 30 years, the federal government has transferred more responsibility for the control, development, and support of public policy to states and local communities in a process known as devolution. In this context, economic hardships that have hit many rural communities often lead to increased tension over economic development strategies, which is further influenced by a community’s racial composition and racial history. Using devolution as a framework, we quantitatively explore the relationship between general economic development strategies, including two concepts that are linked to entrepreneurship, the creative class and bridging social capital, on several measures of economic development. Analysis includes rural communities that have historically excluded African-Americans from living within city limits, as well as rural communities that did not. Using data from 217 rural communities in the American Midwest and nontraditional South, we find no support for the creative class, the importance of tolerance, the importance of technology, or bridging social capital on increasing economic development, but we do find that formal education and incorporating economic development strategies are significantly related.
31-2361
Economic development. Natural gas. United States.
This study examines the impact of Marcellus shale development on Pennsylvania (USA) residents’ income, as reported on state tax returns between 2007 and 2010, and pays special attention to the distribution of these economic impacts across residents within Pennsylvania counties. The analysis shows that Marcellus development has had a positive effect on taxable income of local residents and that the increases in lease and royalty income going to mineral right owners exceed local employment and compensation impacts in high drilling activity counties. This suggests that focusing on employment effects from such activity, as has been done in much recent economic research, misses an important potential impact on resident income. In addition, because land ownership is highly concentrated, it means local economic benefits of unconventional drilling are heavily concentrated among a small percentage of the population, potentially raising equity issues about the distribution of costs and benefits from such activity.
31-2362
Energy resources. Rural development. Rural economies.
Here, we examine the perceptions of unconventional shale development held by city and county officials in the New Albany shale play in Southern Illinois and Northwest Kentucky. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 officials before development occurred. Twelve supported introducing shale development to their communities, four were opposed, and two were undecided. Many view it as a way to overcome an economic vulnerability of their areas, population decline, by boosting the local population. Several also believe shale development will strengthen their communities’ economic specialization and social identity related to resource extraction. Although leaders held high hopes for it, most of their communities’ economic vulnerabilities are structural and likely cannot be improved by introducing shale development. This gap between hope and reality suggests that many community officials will be disappointed with major development projects – many of which are portrayed as economic boons – as they often cannot fulfill officials’ high hopes.
31-2363
Corporate group. Economic restructuring. Europe. Industrialization. Regional redevelopment.
While earlier research has shown that regional restructuring after reunification has led to broad de-industrialization processes in eastern Germany’s chemical industry, this article focuses on how re-bundling processes at the corporate level have stimulated adjustments to the changing economic and political environment leading to a renewed regional development trajectory. The analysis is based on a conceptualization that assesses diachronic processes of rupture and re-bundling by applying a bottom-up perspective of how corporate adjustments and restructuring processes generate re-bundling types that manifest themselves in broader regional re-bundling scenarios. The empirical analysis focuses on a qualitative case study of Bitterfeld-Wolfen, the eastern region with the largest chemical industry. The research provides evidence that, although new firm formation has remained weak and acquisitions of chemical multinationals have generated structures only tenuously embedded in the regional economy, modernization and re-bundling process have contributed to a renewed, smaller yet stable, regional chemical industry. The analysis further shows that the associated processes depended on the roles of individual industrial leaders in the region, who acted as network builders, mobilized joint action and stimulated the development of a collective regional spirit.
31-2364
Africa. Informal sector. Waste.
This article examines the management of solid waste in Addis Ababa from 2004 to mid-2011. It describes how solid waste management has evolved and how relationships between the informal sector and the local authority have shifted in relation to the political atmosphere in the city. The author shows how good governance promoted by international donors does not necessarily result in improved service delivery on the ground. In line with the principles of good governance, the Ethiopian government decentralized the city’s administration and entered into partnerships with non-state actors in order to improve service delivery. However, these structural changes have not led to improvements in providing services for dealing with solid waste, nor have they improved accountability to or participation by civil society. The study shows that the established ways of exercising power are continuing within the new structures of the city administration, resulting in increased control over the actors involved in the process, and more conflicts and deeper mistrust of the city administration. This, in turn, has prevented the successful integration of the informal sector and provision of an improved solid waste service in the city. The city administration in Addis Ababa claims to have adopted good governance, but in reality it has adapted good governance to suit its own interests and agendas.
31-2365
Canada. Governance. Policy. Regional development. Regional economics.
This article analyses the changing trends in regional economic development policy delivery in multilevel governance systems. Although the imperatives of coordination of public policy interventions across multiple levels has generally been recognized, not enough attention has been given to how different political systems actually adapt their institutional and policy designs to effectively operate in the emergent complexity of multilevel governance systems. The article focuses on regional economic development policy governance in the province of Ontario, Canada over the past three decades, drawing insights from new regionalism, organization theory and governance literature to examine the prospects and challenges of policy delivery in politically complex multilevel systems. The case study illustrates how regional economic development policy is increasingly dictated by complex environmental and institutional forces of multilevel governance that are shaped by the particular character of a political system.
31-2366
Africa. Informal sector. Land use planning. Management.
Since the late 1970s, Western aid agencies, including the US Agency for International Development (AID) and the World Bank, sought to assist the Egyptian government in planning its capital, Cairo. The aim was to foster an administratively competent Egyptian state able to respond, for example, to informal urbanization of the city’s agricultural periphery by channelling the city’s growth into planned and serviced desert sites. However, these initiatives were almost entirely unsuccessful. Egyptian officials rejected engagement with the informal urbanization process. The projects became enmeshed in bureaucratic struggles over control of valuable state desert land. This article examines these failed planning exercises, first, in order to assess what they indicate about Egypt’s authoritarian dispensation of power, in place since 1952 but challenged in the February 2011 overthrow of President Husni Mubarak. It concludes that project failure is diagnostic of the regime’s exclusionary nature and the presence of autonomous centres of power such as the Egyptian military. Secondly, the article looks at how this political order shaped Cairo’s largely uncontrolled growth by constraining the Egyptian state’s capacity to manage it. Thus, urban planning in Cairo reveals how authoritarian power relations have been inscribed upon Egyptian social space.
31-2367
Boundaries. Governance. Space. Spatial planning. United Kingdom.
This article explores the responses of senior local government actors to the 2004 Wales Spatial Plan and its 2008 update. An example of the so-called ‘new spatial planning’ which has emerged in the movement towards regional devolution in the UK, this planning discourse foregrounds elements of relational thinking that seek to alternatively augment, destabilize and overturn orthodox administrative categories and divisions of space. Whereas spatial planners have traditionally thought and practised with and through clearly bounded scales (national, regional, local), in this century the new spatial planning is imposing relationally inscribed concepts such as ‘soft space’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries’ into the lexicon of spatial planners. Keystones in a vocabulary used to conceptualize the emergence of new spaces of more networked governance, the importance attached to both concepts in current thinking is that they seek to translate theory into policy, and policy into action. A key question arising from this, however, is how the lexicon of the new spatial planning translates, intersects, and compares with the spatial imaginations of the local government and non-government officials who have to implement and deliver the strategy. By drawing on the case study of post-devolution Wales, this article draws on interview data to critically explore the impact of the Wales Spatial Plan as a strategy indicative of the new spatial planning in action, and the implications it has had for service delivery.
31-2368
Ethics. Planning practices. Spatial planning.
When considering how ethical considerations should be applied to the practice of spatial planning, most attention has been given to how individual spatial planners should do that. Our focus in this article is different: it is on the public agencies that carry out spatial planning. What ethical principles should they follow, both for determining the content of the planning policy and the procedures by which those principles are applied? We argue that it is possible to construct a ‘domain ethics’ specifically for spatial planning, a set of normative principles based on widely shared values and taking account of the peculiar features of spatial planning. Using four sources — some ‘middle-range’ ethical principles, national law, international law, and the principles behind the idea of ‘due process’— a domain ethics for spatial planning is put forward. In the ‘power game’ of planning practice, the public agency should adhere to these ethical principles. Ultimately, this is a task for the individual planner acting responsibly within the organization. We argue that planners should construct an ethical frame of reference, specifically adapted to every situation, which takes into account the nature and motivations of the other partners in that power game. That frame of reference should be established before the discussions and negotiations begin, and it should be used to influence them.
31-2369
Destabilization. Regional development. Spatial planning.
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the understanding of how spatial entities in general — and those spatial entities that are defined as ‘regions’ in particular — form, evolve and sometimes stabilize. Inspired by the scholarship of Noortje Marres, the article explores how regions-in-becoming may be gainfully conceptualized as publics-in-stabilization. In the article it is argued that some of the mechanisms involved in such processes pertain to how territorially framed issues sometimes become formulated as loosely articulated propositions for regionalization. These can, with time, generate emergent stakeholder communities, which in turn may become stabilized and delegated to more durable forms and materials which can eventually become naturalized as recognized regions. A suggested conceptual model is utilized to perform an analysis of empirical material from three contemporary processes of regionalization in Northern Europe with the purpose of examining and discussing some of the potential merits and shortcomings of the conceptual model. It is concluded that adopting the proposed perspective can enable scholars to highlight some of the mechanisms whereby vague and non-coherent propositions for regionalization within time may be singularized and stabilized to such a degree that they become taken for granted as naturalized spatialities.
31-2370
Cooperative planning. Partnerships. Regional government.
Scholarship abounds on the importance of city-regions to regional and national prosperity, and to the wider global economy. But little is known about their capacity to function as effective, legitimate and robust policy actors. This article begins to address the important question of what determines the governance capacity of city-regions by unpacking the concepts at the core of this research. It focuses on sources of horizontal capacity as a function of the strength of intermunicipal partnerships. Research suggests a variety of determinants of the strength of inter municipal partnerships, from rational choice to institutional perspectives. This article acknowledges the contribution of these approaches, but argues that none of the approaches presented to date can alone explain observed variations in the strength and capacity of city-regional partnerships. Instead the article presents an alternative theoretical framework that reimagines and combines existing approaches, and introduces the concept of civic capital as a critical determinant of governance capacity.
31-2371
Development policy. Environmental modeling. Innovation.
The triple helix model (THM) is being widely used as a source of inspiration for policies and programmes aimed at fostering innovation. This is evolving across the range of policymaking geographical scales, as well as independently of the geographies of context that determine different framework conditions for promoting innovation. This article questions the extent to which the THM provides a solid conceptual basis for development policies, particularly at the local level. It does this by exploring the experience of a Portuguese small municipality, in which the development policy effort is not only guided by the model itself, but is also targeted at the materialization of local ‘triple helices’. The authors take advantage of their direct involvement in the local policymaking exercise and confront their observations of the change dynamics evolving in the municipality with the ‘endless transitions’ that are at the very core of the THM.
31-2372
China. Cross-border regions. Spatial planning.
Drawing on recent theoretical tenets regarding cross-border regions, this article analyzes China’s state spatial policies that aim to transform Yunnan from a peripheral frontier into an economic bridgehead. The purposes of the present study are threefold: to contextualize the formation of Yunnan as China’s frontier; to examine why Yunnan has been strategically selected as a bridgehead to promote China’s transnational economies; and to explore the central–provincial alliance as an innovative institutional arrangement and look at how this alliance can convert Yunnan into a space of exception or new state space of development. This study finds that in order to convert regional assets into real competitiveness, the Chinese state (national, provincial and local) emphasizes transnational cooperation, endeavors to maximize Yunnan’s place-specific locational advantages and promotes the differentiation of regional developmental trajectories across China’s national territory. The article contributes to studies of institutional arrangements for cross-border cooperation in a non-Western context and sheds light on China’s regional development policies in its hinterland.
16. International Planning
31-2373
Leadership. Planning strategies. Urban governance.
An enigma lies at the heart of this article. In December 2006, the mayor of Saint-Étienne, Michel Thiollière, was elected as the fifth best mayor in the world by the internet site City Mayors. Yet no publicity was made locally around this award. Taking this anecdote as a starting point, this article deals with the motivations that can lead a city mayor to become involved in urban international relationships’ policy (city twinning, participation in cities networks, study trips, etc.). On the one hand these activities provide resources for building up political legitimacy and for electoral control, and on the other they provide resources for policy solutions to urban problems in the public realm. Nevertheless, in a context of transformation of the process of legitimization of urban elected officials, the second kind of resources seems to be the most sought after in mayoral involvement in international activities.
31-2374
European Union. Implementation. Policy analysis. Social capital.
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the debate on the Europeanization of new member states by discussing the impact of European Union (EU) regional policy on Polish regions. Analysis of the institutional setting connected to the regional policy proves that the general lack of social trust in Poland determines the unjustified complexity of procedures affecting the absorption of structural funds. In this investigation we adopt the social capital perspective to explain regional variation in the capacity to implement EU regional policy. The conclusions contradict the mainstream thesis that it is bridging social capital that correlates positively with regional economic development and administrative capacities. On the contrary, among the case study regions the one with higher bonding social capital proved more efficient in the absorption of EU funds. The following question remains — does the pace of absorption correspond to allocation decisions that would support the development of a region in a long-term perspective?
31-2375
Capitalism. International planning. Privatization. Sports.
Much of the urban studies literature on the London Olympics has focused on its social legacies and the top-down nature of policy agendas. This article explores one element that has been less well covered — the contractual dynamics and delivery networks that have shaped infrastructure provision. Drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests, this article explores the mechanisms involved in the project’s delivery and their implications for broader understandings of urban politics and policymaking. It assesses contemporary writings on regulatory capitalism, public–private networks and new contractual spaces to frame the empirical discussion. This article argues that the London Olympic model has been characterized by the prioritization of delivery over representative democracy. Democratic imperatives, such as those around sustainability and employment rights, have been institutionally re-placed and converted into contractual requirements on firms. This form of state-led privatization of the development process represents a new, and for some, potentially more effective mode of governance than those offered by traditional systems of regulation and management.
31-2376
Capitalism. International planning. Privatization. Sports.
Much of the urban studies literature on the London Olympics has focused on its social legacies and the top-down nature of policy agendas. This article explores one element that has been less well covered — the contractual dynamics and delivery networks that have shaped infrastructure provision. Drawing on interviews and freedom of information requests, this article explores the mechanisms involved in the project’s delivery and their implications for broader understandings of urban politics and policymaking. It assesses contemporary writings on regulatory capitalism, public–private networks and new contractual spaces to frame the empirical discussion. This article argues that the London Olympic model has been characterized by the prioritization of delivery over representative democracy. Democratic imperatives, such as those around sustainability and employment rights, have been institutionally re-placed and converted into contractual requirements on firms. This form of state-led privatization of the development process represents a new, and for some, potentially more effective mode of governance than those offered by traditional systems of regulation and management.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
21. Population
31-2377
Community. Population density. Residence.
This article examines how different levels of internal organization are reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. In this case, the Haredi community comprises sects and sub-sects, whose communal identity plays a central role in everyday life and spatial organization. The residential preferences of Haredi individuals are strongly influenced by the need to live among ‘friends’ — that is, other members of the same sub-sect. This article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two of Jerusalem’s Haredi neighbourhoods: Ramat Shlomo, a new neighbourhood on the urban periphery, and Sanhedria, an old yet attractive inner-city neighbourhood. We reveal two segregation mechanisms: the first is top-down determination of residence, found in relatively new neighbourhoods that are planned, built and populated with the intense involvement of community leaders; the second is the bottom-up emergence of residential patterns typical of inner-city neighbourhoods that have gradually developed over time.
22. Economics
31-2378
Community development. Entrepreneurialism. Ethnic minorities.
How entrepreneurship is portrayed in media can play an important role for how attractive it is perceived as a career and/or investment option. Communities need people of all ethnicities to be interested in starting businesses because economic development is tied so closely to community development. To date, little to no community development literature has been published about how newspapers frame ethnic minority entrepreneurs and how that might affect the community. This article examined such framing and its implications. This article presents a textual analysis of how ethnic minority entrepreneurship is represented in US newspapers included in the LexisNexis Academic Database from 2003 to 2008. Overall, ethnic minority entrepreneurship, including the struggles the entrepreneurs face, is almost invisible in the newspapers, despite its importance for the economy. From the articles that were published in this field, important patterns were identified. The article concludes with suggestions about how community development officials can assist ethnic minority entrepreneurs.
31-2379
Debt. Economic growth. Multilevel models. Public finance.
This article reanalyses data used by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010c, American Economic Review, 100: 573–78—RR), and later Herndon et al. (2013, Cambridge Journal of Economics, online, doi: 10.1093/cje/bet075) to consider the relationship between growth and debt in developed countries. The consistency over countries and the causal direction of RR’s so called ‘stylised fact’ is considered. Using multilevel models, we find that when the effect of debt on growth is allowed to vary, and linear time trends are fully controlled for, the average effect of debt on growth disappears, whilst country-specific debt relations vary significantly. Additionally, countries with high debt levels appear more volatile in their growth rates. Regarding causality, we develop a new method extending distributed lag models to multilevel situations. These models suggest the causal direction is predominantly growth-to-debt, and is consistent (with some exceptions) across countries. We argue that RR’s findings are too simplistic, with limited policy relevance, whilst demonstrating how multilevel models can explicate realistically complex scenarios.
31-2380
Economic development. Entrepreneurialism. Mapping techniques. Research methodology. Rural development. Rural economies. Urban areas.
This article proposes a scale that measures the local entrepreneurial culture of a place based on residents’ perceptions. The initial 36-item pool was developed through semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs in Kentucky (USA) and then reviewed by a focus group composed of entrepreneurship coaches. These items were included in an extensive survey of rural and urban Kentuckians. Factor analysis resulted in a 17-item scale with four major components. To ascertain the predictive validity of the subscales, a series of analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models evaluated their correlations with county-level rates of entrepreneurship obtained from an independent data set. The analysis confirmed that perceptions of the local entrepreneurial culture do correlate with entrepreneurial activity. In line with the theoretical model presented in this article, the ANCOVAs also controlled for the modulating effect of important individual-level characteristics and regional factors. The proposed scale is recommended for use by entrepreneurship support programs that provide one-on-one assistance for small businesses, yet seldom assess nor consider how they might improve the entrepreneurial culture of the place where these businesses operate. Furthermore, this measure is an important contribution to entrepreneurship research. Existing measures of entrepreneurial culture focus mostly on the regional and national levels, overlooking the role of local cultural characteristics; they also tend to focus on general cultural attributes rather than on residents’ perceptions of the entrepreneurial climate. This entrepreneurship culture scale opens the door to new directions in research.
31-2381
Competitiveness. Europe. Rent. Urban areas.
The turn towards the knowledge-based economy and creative strategies to enhance urban competitiveness within it has been well documented. Yet too little has been said to date about the transformation of land use for new productive activities, and the contradictions inherent to this process. Our case study is Barcelona, an erstwhile ‘model’ for urban regeneration which has sought to transform itself into a global knowledge city since 2000. Through the lens of Marxian value theory, and Harvey’s writing on urban monopoly rents especially, we show how the 22@Barcelona project — conceived with received wisdom about the determinants of urban knowledge-based competitiveness in mind — amounted to an exercise in the capture of monopoly rents, driven by the compulsion of public sector institutions, financiers and developers to pursue rental profit-maximizing opportunities through the mobilization of land as a financial asset.
31-2382
Airports. Infrastructure. Professionalism. Spatial distribution.
The link between airports, air service and regional economic development has been well-established and used to justify airport expansion at the expense of local communities because of subsequent region-wide benefits. However, local-level spatial analyses based on US Economic Census data indicate that economic benefits in terms of professional and administrative employment do not necessarily offset local economic and quality of life costs. Furthermore, arguments for an airport city or aerotropolis phenomenon in the US context ignore the individual histories and morphologies of metropolitan areas and overstate the influence an airport has on the economic development of its region.
31-2383
Commuting. Input-output analysis. Labor supply. Regional productivity.
To date, theoretical and empirical insights in the determinants of regional resilience are still limited. Using a model, we explore how three regional factors jointly contribute to the resilience of regional labour markets to economic shocks. The localization of the supply network (1) is used to model the propagation of the shock, while possibilities for intersectoral (2) and interregional labour mobility (3) to analyse the recovery. An application of the model to Dutch data suggests that labour markets in centrally located and service-oriented regions have, on average, a higher recovery speed, irrespective of the type of shock hitting the economy.
31-2384
Entrepreneurialism. Entrepreneurs. Europe. Urban economics.
Both Rotterdam’s Kop van Zuid and the Glasgow Harbour waterfront developments are examples of different forms of European urban entrepreneurial megaprojects. They are both situated on formerly vacant land in older industrial cities. In Rotterdam, the municipality has taken the initiative in planning and developing the megaproject, while in Glasgow, this task has been left to the private sector, with the City functioning as a facilitator. While urban entrepreneurialism and megaprojects have been discussed in academic literature for almost three decades, there are too few case studies which delve into the specific visions guiding these projects, the goals which they are meant to achieve and the positions which different actors play. The aim of this article is to analyze the relationship between these visions, goals and positions of actors in megaprojects and whether these relationships can explain how the different outcomes are produced. What we see is that in municipally-led projects, entrepreneurial goals are more easily formed and implemented than when the public sector acts only as a facilitator to private developers. It will also argue that it is not only structural contexts which are important in determining the types of megaprojects which get built and the success which they achieve, but also the specific values, visions and goals that different stakeholders have.
31-2385
Development. Economic development. Entrepreneurialism. International planning.
Entrepreneurship promotion and support is an integral component of an economic development strategy. The state of a community’s entrepreneurial ecology impacts the volume and success rates of new ventures. Building a better understanding of a community’s entrepreneurial ecology will facilitate better policy and program interventions for the purpose of economic development. This research endeavors to build a better understanding of the entrepreneurial ecology of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. In particular, the primary focus is the impact of government policy and practice on the entrepreneurial ecology. The research determines that according to key informants, municipal, provincial, and federal government supports for entrepreneurs in Halifax are helpful but may have an unduly bad reputation. Additionally, business registration and reporting processes have been successfully streamlined, government supports often involve removing risk from entrepreneurs with potential unintended consequences, and secondary government interactions may be undermining encouragement and support for entrepreneurship.
31-2386
Business services. Capital. Economic geography. Education. International economy. Private sector. Transnational corporations.
In this article, I advance understandings of the intersection between financial and educational services from an economic geographical perspective by examining the importance of financial networks in shaping the internationalization activities of for-profit business education service firms. By combining relational approaches to the globalization of transnational corporations (TNCs) with work on monetary networks I argue that extra-firm networks with financial services are an important element in understanding how, where and why business education service firms internationalize. Theoretically, this argument responds to calls for firm finances to be more fully incorporated into understandings of wider economic geographies and, in particular, addresses the neglect of finance in extant understandings of the internationalization of TNCs. Empirically, I position educational services as an overlooked business services sector that deserves greater attention within economic geography.
31-2387
Economic geography. Paths. Peripheral regions. Regional development.
Recent theorizing of path dependence supplements the traditional view of regional path-dependent industrial development characterized by lock-in effects with paths dealing with change, that is, path renewal and path creation. Few studies, however, examine why different types of regions experience diverse path-dependent development. This article examines why organizationally thin regions are much less likely to achieve path renewal and path creation than core regions. By use of a case study of industrial development in an organizationally thin and rather peripheral region in Norway the article contends that thin regions often need external investments to avoid being trapped in path extension.
31-2388
Adaptation. Regional economics. Urban economics.
Over the past few years a new buzzword has entered academic, political and public discourse: the notion of resilience, a term invoked to describe how an entity or system responds to shocks and disturbances. Although the concept has been used for some time in ecology and psychology, it is now invoked in diverse contexts, both as a perceived (and typically positive) attribute of an object, entity or system and, more normatively, as a desired feature that should somehow be promoted or fostered. As part of this development, the notion of resilience is rapidly becoming part of the conceptual and analytical lexicon of regional and local economic studies: there is increasing interest in the resilience of regional, local and urban economies. Further, resilience is rapidly emerging as an idea ‘whose time has come’ in policy debates: a new imperative of ‘constructing’ or ‘building’ regional and urban economic resilience is gaining currency. However, this rush to use the idea of regional and local economic resilience in policy circles has arguably run somewhat ahead of our understanding of the concept. There is still considerable ambiguity about what, precisely, is meant by the notion of regional economic resilience, about how it should be conceptualized and measured, what its determinants are, and how it links to patterns of long-run regional growth. The aim of this article is to address these and related questions on the meaning and explanation of regional economic resilience and thereby to outline the directions of a research agenda.
31-2389
Agglomeration. Developing countries. Informal sector.
A large and growing informal sector is a major feature of developing countries. I analyze coagglomeration patterns between formal and informal manufacturing enterprises in India, and study (i) the causes underlying these patterns, and (ii) the positive externalities, if any, on the entry of new firms. I find that buyer–seller and technology linkages explain much of formal–informal coagglomeration. I also find that this sectoral, within-industry, coagglomeration matters mostly to small- and medium-sized formal firms births. Traditional measures of agglomeration remain important in explaining new industrial activity, whether in the formal or the informal sectors.
31-2390
Cities. Cultural differences. Ethnic minorities. Innovation. Patents.
Minority ethnic inventors play important roles in US innovation, especially in high-tech regions such as Silicon Valley. Do ‘ethnicity–innovation’ channels exist elsewhere? Ethnicity could influence innovation via production complementarities from diverse inventor communities, co-ethnic network externalities or individual ‘stars’. I explore these issues using new UK patents microdata and a novel name-classification system. UK minority ethnic inventors are spatially concentrated, as in the USA, but have different characteristics reflecting UK-specific geography and history. I find that the diversity of inventor communities helps raise individual patenting, with suggestive influence of East Asian-origin stars. Majority inventors may benefit from multiplier effects.
31-2391
Asia. Capitalism. City planning. Urban planning.
For city planners and policymakers in many parts of the world, Singapore has come to embody a model of efficient and growth-oriented urban development. Yet there has been very little research that goes beyond descriptive assessments of urban design and urban policy and understands the political economy that has produced the current system of planning in Singapore. This article explores the role of land acquisition and land management in Singapore’s urban development. It argues that Singapore is best understood as a model of urban planning under state capitalism. Drawing largely on academic studies, reports of Singapore government agencies and government-linked corporations, and interviews the article analyzes the mechanisms through which the Singaporean state has used direct involvement in the commercial real-estate market as a powerful tool to gain access to revenue, achieve urban redevelopment objectives and exert powerful influence over the Singaporean society and economy. Through the commercial exploitation of state landholdings and through stakes in state-owned and private enterprises, the Singaporean state has harnessed urban development to an agenda of political hegemony, nation building and economic development within a framework of globalization.
31-2392
Canada. Economic growth. Industrial growth. Urbanism.
In mainstream media, policy circles and academic scholarship, economic discourses have highlighted the importance of knowledge, creativity and innovation for generating economic growth. This has been translated into an urban planning and policy agenda which favours the establishment of research parks, innovation clusters, and especially universities along with amenities to attract creative-class workers. In much of this literature universities are invested with an almost magical power to spur economic growth, and the benign language of ‘transition’ is used suggesting a rather seamless progression from one urban economic engine to another. Through analysis of policy documents and key informant interviews related to the establishment of a new university in Oshawa, Ontario, this case study seeks to challenge the straightforward relationship that is assumed to exist between universities and local economic development. Like other lagging regions across the OECD attempting to repair their economies through creative and knowledge urbanism, Oshawa’s recent achievements are tempered by growing concerns about poverty, homelessness and inequality. Planners and policymakers that mistake the complexities of economic restructuring for a smooth ‘urban transition’ put their cities and citizens at risk of creating new problems out of efforts to improve local conditions.
31-2393
Europe. Sustainability. Urban development. Urban economics. Urban planning.
Financialization and sustainable urban planning are now two major components of urban production and landscape change in Western cities. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the intervention of financial actors influences urban sustainability in the building of megaprojects, by developing a conceptual framework for analysis and interpretation. This framework aims first to examine the way in which sustainability has been produced by the different actors involved in a real-life situation, and then to place these interactions in their institutional, spatial and temporal context. Consequently, sustainability is understood as a social construct which is the object of negotiations that have led to the making of institutional arrangements in order to allow the project to be carried through. This framework has been constructed from the financial geography and urban geography literature on ‘finance, the city and sustainability’ and from a case study. The latter looks at the regeneration of a brownfield site to create a shopping and leisure complex that was the biggest in Switzerland and was purchased by financial actors.
31-2394
Community development. Economic development. Local governance. Networks.
Local economic development research assumes that the policy-making process does not happen in a vacuum containing only government officials. The process consists of collaboration between various community actors within a network in pursuit of economic policy goals. However, little empirical work has been done in the past decade to understand which actors have the strongest statistically significant relationships with local officials’ planning of economic development policy. This research note explores the gap by using descriptive statistics and phi coefficient analysis with data from the International City/County Management Association’s 2009 Economic Development Survey-South Region. Findings from the southern United States show that city governments have significant relationships, ranging from weak to moderately strong, with county governments, colleges and universities, and chambers of commerce. Interestingly, cities did not have significant relationships with economic development corporations, state governments, or the federal government in their economic development pursuits.
31-2395
Economic crisis. Economic geography. Employment. Europe. Income.
Coming on the heels of the global financial crisis, the Euro crisis was first an issue of banking solvency, then an issue of sovereign indebtedness, and then an issue of the stability and integrity of the Eurozone and its currency. Market agents take bets on the future of the Euro, how it might be saved (or not), and the likely interventions (or not) of leading politicians and their governments as well as the European Central Bank. The integrity, powers and governance structure of the ECB are fundamental issues for the Eurozone, its members and the stability of global financial markets. Just as important are the geographical manifestations of the Euro crisis, since the national and urban and regional effects of the crisis often translate directly into political movements that question the legitimacy of the European project. This special issue brings together a set of papers that provide an overarching perspective on the Euro crisis and maps the uneven spatial effects of the crisis across countries, cities and regions.
31-2396
Banking. Credit. Financial crisis.
This article identifies the main determinants of financial inclusion, defined as the probability of using both banking and credit services, across 18 Eastern European economies and 5 Western European ‘comparator’ countries. We elicit demographic and socio-economic information on 25,000 European households from the second round of the Life in Transition Survey undertaken during the 2008–2010 global crisis; the survey also includes several questions on households’ financial decisions collecting data at the regional and local level. Our results show that households hit by negative job or income shocks and without any asset to pledge are less likely to be financially included, especially in Eastern Europe. The individual likelihood of financial inclusion is also affected by the average use of financial services at the local level suggesting the presence of a financial multiplier effect. These results provide useful information for mapping financial inclusion across Europe during the crisis, which in turn can inform policy action at the local level.
31-2397
Cities. Economic crisis. Europe. Regions.
Growth before and especially after the crisis differed from large-city-led growth pattern. The crisis has led to big contractions especially in urban regions and in remote rural regions, while intermediate and rural regions close to a city displayed more resilience. In some countries, the capital metro region had much higher economic growth prior to the crisis, but this pattern was inverted by the crisis. Capital cities are now central to the problems faced by national economies in Europe, and appear to have exacerbated the adverse effects of the crisis. This implies that a development strategy primarily focused on the capital city can lead to more volatile and potentially lower growth, than a more a balanced development strategy. The article uses data from the OECD regional database to investigate the performance of rural, intermediate and urban regions and Eurostat data to investigate metro regions.
31-2398
Economic crisis. Europe. Heterogeneity. Unemployment. Urban policy. Welfare.
The article analyses the impact of the ongoing economic crisis on Greek urban economies. Utilizing a dataset of socio-economic, demographic and policy variables at the municipal level and applying spatial econometric techniques, it provides strong statistical evidence of heterogeneous effects on regional-municipal labour markets and welfare with the cities/municipalities that performed best in the pre-crisis period suffering more than the lagging municipalities and with urban agglomerations more vulnerable to crisis, thus questioning the length of bottoming. However, exogenously set variables, tourism and policy related, the inherent features of urban economies, such as the specialization of industry, and their inter-linkages with their peri-rural municipalities, act as stabilizers that ease the crisis effects and may support recovery. Fiscal policy has been cyclical to the economic downturn. The findings have substantial policy implications for crisis management, recovery policy measures and the country’s cohesion.
31-2399
Class analysis. Commodity chains. Global economy. Inequality.
The majority of global commodity chain analysis is concerned with producer firm upgrading, because it is held to engender local-level development. This represents a myopic comprehension of the interaction of firms under capitalism. This article argues, in contrast, that lead firm chain governance and supplier firm upgrading attempts constitute strategies and practices that reproduce global poverty and inequality. Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction represents a starting point in undertaking this endeavour. However, his formulation of capitalist competition ignores class and global economic relations. A Marxian conception of creative destruction, in contrast, rests upon an understanding of globally constituted class relations, which provides a novel perspective in comprehending and investigating processes that re-produce global poverty and inequality. The article substantiates these claims by examining cases of buyer-driven global commodity chains, and lead firm strategies of increasing labour exploitation throughout these chains.
31-2400
Economic crisis. Financial crisis. United Kingdom.
We use employment data for 2008–2012 to analyse the impact of the subprime and Eurozone crises on the British and German financial sector. In the UK, the sector contracted and its spatial concentration increased across regions and urban hierarchy, with London as the sole winner. In Germany there has been no contraction overall, and no significant change in the spatial distribution of financial employment. We argue that while in both countries forced consolidation and financial re-regulation have acted as centripetal forces, in Germany they have been offset by strong regional and local banking, underpinned by a decentralized state.
31-2401
Accessibility. Europe. Institutions. Regional economics. Unemployment.
Unemployment rates differ dramatically across European regions. This article analyses these differences by integrating institutional and spatial perspectives into a unified dynamic framework distinguishing between slow and fast processes of change. The framework forms the basis for an econometric model that is used to analyse labour market differences among European Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques 2 regions. The results of random-effects models indicate that four key factors—all of which are of the slowly changing type—explain a large part of the variation in unemployment as well as employment rates. Flexible labour market regulations and above-average levels of interpersonal trust are institutional factors that reduce unemployment. Accessibility factors such as inter-regional transport connectivity and local access to skilled workers have similarly substantial effects. Whether a region belongs to the Eurozone or not seems to be less important.
31-2402
Cities. Employment. Population density. Rent. Simulation.
Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg (L&RH) (2002, Econometrica, 70: 1445–1476) and Fujita and Ogawa (F&O) (1982, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 12: 161–196, 1989, Environment and Planning A, 21: 363–374) develop urban models in which economic activity self-organizes due to spillovers in production. However, F&O (1982, Regional Science and Urban Economics, 12: 161–196, 1989, Environment and Planning A, 21: 363–374) show that rents and employment density are flat or falling as the city center is approached, while in the simulations of L&RH (2002, Econometrica, 70: 1445–1476), rents rise at an increasing rate toward the center suggesting a concentration of employment near the center. For the Lucas and Rossi-Hansberg model, we prove that land rents and density must be flat or falling near the center. We explain how using a polar coordinate system when approximating a two-dimensional integral can create systematic imprecision in their simulations, and then present revised simulations. The proofs and simulations suggest that in urban models where economic activity self-organizes firms do not unduly cluster at the center of a central business district even in monocentric equilibria.
31-2403
Housing vouchers. Labor markets. Low-income housing. Public housing. Spatial analysis.
This article estimates the extent to which different types of subsidized households live near employment, measuring the extent of spatial mismatch between these households and employment. Using census tract–level data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on housing subsidy locations and employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau, this article uses a distance-decay function to estimate job-accessibility indices for census tracts in metropolitan statistical areas with 100,000 people or more. I use these data to create weighted job-accessibility indices for housing subsidy recipients (public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, Section 8 New Construction, and housing voucher households) and the total population and renter households earning below 50% of area median income as points of comparison. I find that of all these groups, by a large margin, public housing households live in census tracts with the greatest proximity to low-skilled jobs. However, they also live among the greatest concentration of individuals who compete for those jobs, namely, the low-skilled unemployed. These findings suggest that we pay close attention to the trade-offs that public housing residents are making as these units are demolished and replaced with vouchers.
31-2404
Human capital. Migration. United Kingdom.
New university graduates are highly geographically mobile, but, as the literature has shown, often struggle in the labour market, working in non-graduate level jobs or in a field different from the one for which they are qualified. In this context, inter-industry moves can act as complements or substitutes for geographical moves, with graduates reacting to job mismatches by either changing location, industry, or both. Self-selection is also likely; industry movers may differ from non-movers in ways that also affect their career outcomes. We analyse the relationship between migration and inter-industry moves using longitudinal microdata for 7060 recent UK graduates.
31-2405
Culture. Diffusion process. Public sector. Spatial analysis.
We document the spatial diffusion of Friedrich Froebel’s radical invention of kindergartens in 19th-century Germany. The first kindergarten was founded at Froebel’s birthplace. Early spatial diffusion can be explained by cultural proximity, measured by historical dialect similarity, to Froebel’s birthplace. This result is robust to the inclusion of higher order polynomials in geographic distance and similarity measures with respect to industry, geography or religion. Our findings suggest that a common cultural basis facilitates the spill-over of ideas. We further show that the contemporaneous spatial pattern of child care coverage is still correlated with cultural similarity to Froebel’s place of birth.
31-2406
China. Financing. Foreign direct investment. Taxes.
A large share of the outward foreign direct investment (FDI) of emerging market MNEs is directed towards a small number of specific tax havens and offshore financial centres. The establishment of investment-holding companies for taxation related purposes is frequently adduced as a key motivation (‘round-tripping’) for these investments. This explanation, however, accounts for neither the concentration of such investments in specific havens nor the comparatively large national shares of such investments that originate from emerging markets. Here we draw from and build links between the geography of money and finance and international business literatures to conceptually and empirically explore this prominent, if somewhat disregarded, feature of global FDI flows.
31-2407
Agglomeration. Capital. Economy. Financial crisis. Forecasting. Territory.
This article measures the spatial heterogeneity of the costs of the economic crisis and assesses the role of cities as sources of regional resilience in Europe. Cities hosting financial activities have been severely hit during the crisis; however, they also host hard and soft territorial capital elements—high physical accessibility, access to information and knowledge, advanced functions, agglomeration economies—generating inter-sectoral productivity growth and the ability to adjust to the crisis. A scenario approach is used to capture the long term costs of the crisis, applying a new version of a macroeconometric regional growth forecasting model (MASST), recently updated to take account of the crisis. Results show that cities play a role in the resilience of regions; the quality of production factors hosted, the density of external linkages and cooperation networks and the quality of urban infrastructure give greater economic resilience to cities, and to the regions hosting them.
31-2408
Europe. Growth. Innovation. Knowledge. Models. Regional productivity. Research and development.
By adopting a semiparametric approach, the ‘traditional’ regional knowledge production function is developed in three complementary directions. First, the model is augmented with region-specific time trends to account for endogeneity due to selection on unobservables. Second, the nonparametric part of the model relaxes the standard assumptions of linearity and additivity regarding the effect of R&D and human capital. Finally, the assumption of homogeneity in the effects of R&D and human capital is also relaxed by explicitly accounting for the differences between developed and lagging regions. The analysis of the genesis of innovation in the regions of the European Union unveils nonlinearities, threshold effects, complex interactions and shadow effects that cannot be uncovered by standard parametric formulations.
31-2409
Economic planning. Productivity. Retail industry. Town planning.
We use store-specific data for a UK supermarket chain to estimate the impact of planning on store output. Exploiting the variation in policies between England and other UK countries, we isolate the impact of Town Centre First (TCF) policies introduced in England. We find they directly reduced output by forcing stores onto less productive sites. We estimate TCF policies imposed a loss of output of 32% on a representative store opening after their rigorous implementation in 1996. Additionally, we show that, household numbers constant, more restrictive local authorities have fewer stores and lower chain sales within their areas.
31-2410
Affordable housing. Economic modeling. Urban economics.
This article explores the potential to mobilize in an urban context the key insights of the burgeoning literature on the performativity of economics. It argues that our understanding of contemporary urban political-economic transformation needs to explicitly recognize the active role of economics in making and remaking the urban world, as opposed to merely describing and analysing it in some kind of passive, detached fashion. It develops this argument through the elaboration of a case study of just such world-making in action: the growing use in the United Kingdom, since the early 2000s, of economic models for assessing the viability of affordable housing provision in new residential developments. The world of urban redevelopment that such models attempt to describe formulaically has, the article submits, increasingly come to act according to the model and the assumptions it contains; the model, in this sense, has been progressively actualized in the urban landscape. The article conceptualizes such performative economic models as examples of what Michel Callon calls economics ‘in the wild’, and it focuses on the work of the leading commercial developer and marketer of such models in the affordable housing planning environment over the last decade — a consulting company called Three Dragons.
31-2411
Economic crisis. Europe. Nation-states. Regions.
In their different ways, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the US Fed combine expertise with representation: key members of these institutions along with their staff are appointed on the basis of their expertise and professional qualifications whereas each organization is conceived, in part, so as to represent the constituent nation-states or regions that make up their currency zones. In this article, the tension between expertise and representation apparent in the constitution of each institution is explored with emphasis on the ways in which geography is represented in monetary policy decision-making. The formal representation of nation-states in the ECB, their voting rights, and the significance or otherwise of large Eurozone countries is also considered. Being an analytical assessment of the effectiveness of the ECB compared with the Fed, the effectiveness of each institution is assessed in the light of financial risk and uncertainty and the complex interplay between monetary policy-making and fiscal federalism. Implications are drawn as regards the management of the Euro crisis has been managed, and the ways in which the welfare of peripheral countries have been discounted.
31-2412
Business services. Financial services. Investment. Networks. Production.
The patterns and dynamics of contemporary financial capitalism are mirrored in micro-production structures of finance in international financial centres (IFCs). Applying the global production network framework allows for analyses of these structures in greater detail, better illuminating the industry’s organization, its locally anchored professional practices, and the far-reaching power relationships between IFCs. The example of the IFC Luxembourg, the world’s largest cross-border investment fund centre, shows that, in particular, advanced business services firms facilitate the global reach of investment funds (i) in their close collaboration with both local and global financial corporations, and (ii) in their exploitation of localized arbitrage assets.
31-2413
Economic geography. Manufacturing. Railroads. Scales.
American Manufacturing Belt (AMB) emergence has been used by NEG theorists as a prime example of how increasing returns foster industrial concentration. Other studies suggest the AMB was in place before increasing returns became established. This study examines this previously unrecognized contradiction. An analysis of Cleveland, one of the fastest growing of AMB cities, is undertaken using new data sources. This finds the railroad sector crucial in generating direct employment and stimulating related industrial investment through forward and backward linkages. The former are associated with ‘factor channeling’—planned strategies to direct raw material flows to the city. NEG theorists’ under-emphasis on raw material provision and their use of the iceberg model to avoid analysis of the railroad sector is therefore found to be erroneous. The increasing returns hypothesis is evaluated using new data for several industrial sectors and rejected as a valid explanation for early manufacturing growth in Cleveland.
31-2414
Energy planning. Spatial analysis. Statistical analysis.
We develop a method to screen for local cartels. We first test whether there is statistical evidence of clustering of outlets that score high on some characteristic that is consistent with collusive behavior. If so, we determine in a second step the most suspicious regions where further antitrust investigation would be warranted. We apply our method to build a variance screen for the Dutch gasoline market.
31-2415
Asia. Economic planning. Governance. Spatial planning.
This article articulates the relational capacity of the nation-state, and its role in the growth of information and communication technology (ICT) entrepreneurs and industry cluster formation. In particular, it emphasizes the state’s strategic coupling with the private sector and social groups as the main forces that facilitated the rise of ICT entrepreneurs and the high-technology industry cluster in Teheran Valley (TV) in Seoul, Korea, during the post-1997 financial-crisis downturn. Historical analysis shows that the seemingly serendipitous rise of TV is an outcome of the dynamic interplay between the state, ICT entrepreneurs and other social forces in the post-industrial restructuring process. Importantly, while the Korean state still maintained its role as a reformer of industry structure, it continuously and flexibly revised its mode of governing in response to technological change and social demands, forming a governance system that I term ‘relational governance’. During the industrial upgrading period from 1980 to the early 2000s, the governance system for the ICT sector shifted from centralized planning to selective deregulation through close partnership with ICT entrepreneurs, and then later to a more flexible mode of governance whereby the state re-centralized ICT policymaking functions while devising indirect ways of supporting emerging small and medium ICT enterprises.
31-2416
Capital assets. Europe. Growth.
After German reunification, interregional subsidies accounted for approximately 4% of gross fixed capital investment in the new federal states (i.e. those which were formerly part of the German Democratic Republic). We show that, between 1992 and 2005, infrastructure and corporate investment subsidies had a negative net impact on regional economic growth and convergence. This result is robust to both the specification of spatially weighted control variables and the use of instrumental variable techniques to control for the endogeneity of subsidies. Our results suggest that regional redistribution was ineffective, potentially due to a lack of spatial concentration to create growth poles.
31-2417
Economic growth. Heterogeneity. Mapping techniques. Place identity. Spatial analysis.
This article deals with heterogeneity and spatial dependence in economic growth analysis by developing a two-stage strategy that identifies clubs by a mapping analysis and estimates a club convergence model with spatial dependence. Since estimation of this class of convergence models in the presence of regional heterogeneity poses both identification and collinearity problems, we develop an entropy-based estimation procedure that simultaneously takes account of ill-posed and ill-conditioned inference problems. The two-step strategy is applied to assess the existence of club convergence and to estimate a two-club spatial convergence model across Italian regions over the period 1970 to 2000.
31-2418
Europe. Government. Innovation. Institutions. Quality. Regions.
This article aims to shed light on how institutions shape innovative capacity, by focusing on how regional government quality affects innovative performance in the regions of Europe. By exploiting new data on quality of government, we assess how government quality and its components (control of corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness and government accountability) shape patenting across the regions of the European Union (EU). The results of the analysis—which are robust to controlling for the endogeneity of institutions—provide strong evidence of a link between the quality of government and the capacity of regions to innovate. In particular, ineffective and corrupt governments represent a fundamental barrier for the innovative capacity of the periphery of the EU, strongly undermining any potential effect of any other measures aimed at promoting greater innovation. The results have important implications for the definition of innovation strategies in EU regions.
31-2419
Cities. Consumerism. Economic theory. Spatial model.
This article measures restaurant variety in US cities and argues that city structure directly increases product variety by spatially aggregating demand. I discuss a model of entry thresholds in which market size is a function of both population and geographic space and evaluate implications of this model with a new data set of 127,000 restaurants across 726 cities. I find that geographic concentration of a population leads to a greater number of cuisines and the likelihood of having a specific cuisine is increasing in population and population density, with the rarest cuisines found only in the biggest, densest cities. Further, there is a strong hierarchical pattern to the distribution of variety across cities in which the specific cuisines available can be predicted by the total count. These findings parallel empirical work on Central Place Theory and provide evidence that demand aggregation has a significant impact on consumer product variety.
31-2420
Case studies. Clothing industry. Global economy. Retail industry. Supply chains.
In this article, I reassess the undeserved reputation of Inditex’s Zara as a ‘home-sewn exception to globalization’ for supposedly keeping manufacturing at home despite larger trends; and I use the occasion to make a case for rigorous, evidentially strong single-firm case studies. In the process, I draw attention to the manner in which the value-adding qualities of scholarly work are being judged in economic geography; and argue that the prioritization of novelty over unenhanced readings of realities may encourage case studies to be presented as more unique and exceptional than they actually are.
31-2421
Clustering. International economy. Manufacturing. Spatial analysis.
This article examines home bias in U.S. domestic trade in 1949 and 2007. We use a unique data set of 1949 carload waybill statistics produced by the Interstate Commerce Commission, and 2007 Commodity Flow Survey data. The results show that home bias was considerably smaller in 1949 than in 2007 and that home bias in 1949 was even negative for several commodities. We argue that the difference between the geographical distribution of the manufacturing activities in 1949 and that of 2007 is an important factor explaining the differences in the magnitudes of home-bias estimates in those years.
31-2422
Europe. Evolution. Globalization. Institutions. Law firms. Transnational corporations.
Questions remain about the factors that influence the ability of transnational corporations (TNCs) to shape processes of institutional change. In particular, questions about power relations need more attention. To address such questions, this article develops a neo-institutional theory-inspired analysis of the case of English law firms and their impacts on institutional change in Germany. The article shows that the shaping of the direction of institutional change by English legal TNCs was a product of conjunctural moments in which local institutional instability combined with the presence, resources and strategies of the TNCs to redirect the path of institutional evolution. This draws attention to the need to go beyond the TNC and its resources and to consider the way a diverse array of local actors and their generating of instability in existing institutional structures influence the ability of TNCs to become involved in processes of institutional change in particular, conjunctural moments in time.
31-2423
Diversity. Economic analysis. Ethnic minorities. Neighborhoods.
This article aims to test whether geographical factors have an important role in explaining ethnic inequalities in transitions between economic activities. It is based on the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study, which links together results from successive censuses in England for a random sample of respondents. It allows us to estimate the probability of transition into and out of employment and the labour market. Our analyses reported that ethnic minorities were, more likely than their White peers, to become unemployed and less likely to become employed. Living in a deprived neighbourhood was associated (positively) with transitions to unemployment and (negatively) with transitions to employment, especially among men. Ethnic diversity was negatively associated with job loss among employed women, but also for homemaking women and their chances of finding employment. Deprivation partially explained the ethnic minority disadvantage in the English labour market.
31-2424
Currency. Europe. Money.
The economic recession in Europe, triggered by the financial crisis of 2008–2009, has rekindled the debate over whether Europe constitutes a viable single currency area. A key issue concerns the relationship between regional economic cyclicity and monetary union: in the absence of a common automatic fiscal stabilization mechanism and with limited geographical mobility of factors, the greater the asymmetry of shocks across the regions making up a currency area, the more that area departs from an optimal single currency space as far as monetary policy is concerned. Our aim in this article is to investigate whether the regions in the Eurozone have become more or less similar in their vulnerability and resilience to economic shocks since the monetary union. Using predictions based on a spatial panel model with random effects, an endogenous spatial lag and spatially autoregressive errors, we find that a common contractionary shock across the Eurozone has its biggest impact on the most geographically isolated regions, which are precisely those peripheral regions in Euroland that are suffering the most acute sovereign debt crisis, and which are among the lowest productivity regions of the European Union. The implications of these results for the debate over European monetary and fiscal integration are discussed.
31-2425
Collaboration. Global economy. Globalization. Innovation. International planning. Networks.
Using data on 418 Norwegian firms, the results confirm the hypotheses that innovative/radically innovative firms tend to be more involved in international personal and formal networks than non-innovative/incrementally innovative ones. While regional and national networks are much more widespread than international ones, they are not significantly positively associated with innovation. International personal networks and international links with suppliers and customers and with universities and research institutions, as well as global buzz with strangers, are positively related to innovation. This suggests that innovation management and policy, in particular in countries with a limited national innovation base, could benefit from facilitating certain international networks.
31-2426
Economic modeling. Financial crisis. Foreign direct investment. Taxes.
While most research on foreign direct investment (FDI) focuses on the ‘real’ economy, at least 30% of global FDI stock is intermediated through tax havens. Using 2010 IMF data on FDI stocks, this article sheds new light on geographical, historical and political determinants of offshore FDI. Despite its intangibility, offshore FDI is as sensitive to physical distance as real FDI. Offshore FDI links are particularly strong between colonial powers and their current and former colonies. The OECD, while officially leading an agenda against tax evasion, internalizes significant offshore FDI within its membership. Indeed, offshore FDI is pervasive, affecting wealthy economies as much as developing countries.
31-2427
Economic development. Farmers. Government assistance. United States.
Placed-based development theory assumes that assets and liabilities within a geographical context matter for community development. Drawing on this framework, this article argues that the United States Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) at farmers markets is an underutilized asset for community development. Therefore, community developers should explore this asset to better develop sustainable farmers markets. The authors utilized the US National Farmers Market Directory and the SNAP Data System to determine if SNAP beneficiaries had access to use Electronic Benefit Transaction (EBT) cards at farmers markets in Mississippi. The findings indicate that SNAP accessibility at farmers markets remains an underutilized resource for capturing consumer spending and capitalizing on the local multiplier effect. The authors recommend that policy-makers and community developers enact and implement public policies that will: (1) assist farmers and farmers markets with enhancing SNAP accessibility by installing EBT card readers, (2) establish local coordination that will assist in supporting the utilization of SNAP benefits at farmers markets, and (3) incentivize SNAP beneficiaries to shop at local farmers markets by initiating “matching dollar” programs.
31-2428
Cities. Cultural differences. Diversity. Innovation. Migration. Small- and medium-sized enterprises.
The growing cultural diversity caused by immigration is seen as important for innovation. Research has focused on two potential mechanisms: a firm effect, with diversity at the firm level improving knowledge sourcing or ideas generation, and a city effect, where diverse cities help firms innovate. This article uses a dataset of over 2000 UK small- and medium-sized enterprises to test between these two. Controlling for firm characteristics, city characteristics and firm and city diversity, there is strong evidence for the firm effect. Firms with a greater share of migrant owners or partners are more likely to introduce new products and processes. This effect has diminishing returns, suggesting that it is a ‘diversity’ effect rather than simply the benefits of migrant run firms. However, there is no relationship between the share of foreign workers in a local labour market or fractionalization by country of birth and firm level innovation, nor do migrant-run firms in diverse cities appear particularly innovative. But urban context does matter and firms in London with more migrant owners and partners are more innovative than others. Firms in cities with high levels of human capital are also more innovative.
31-2429
Corporate responsibility. Global economy. Labor markets. Manufacturing. Production.
This article examines the circumstances under which corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives facilitate and/or constrain labour agency in global production networks (GPNs). Using a case study of Nike’s CSR approach in the football manufacturing industry of Pakistan, we explore the extent to which the measures advocated in a new, emerging policy paradigm on CSR in GPNs enabled labour agency at Nike’s main football supplier factory in Pakistan. We argue that while such CSR policies can create enhanced space for labour agency, that potential agency is also shaped (i) by wider economic forces within the global economy and (ii) relationships with local/national actors and regulatory frameworks. Understanding the intersection of these dimensions becomes vital to interpreting the potential for, and activation of, labour agency within CSR-influenced GPNs.
31-2430
Economic geography. Innovation. Institutions. Politics.
Underlying the crisis affecting peripheral European countries is their structural, long-term loss of competitiveness (Hadjimichalis, 2011, European Urban and Regional Studies, 18: 254–274). This article will focus on the Portuguese case and discuss the institutional constraints that hindered its economy from transitioning towards the production of higher-value added goods and services. It will discuss institutions as the product of a political process laden with power asymmetries and argue that the dominance of a relatively small community at the heart of economic and political life in Portugal has conditioned the development of the economy as a whole. Using this framework, this article will then contribute to the literatures on innovation and technological modernisation and argue that alongside a technical process of catching up there is a political process that can enable or constrain development.
31-2431
Agglomeration. Business services. Economy. Manufacturing. Regional policy. Spatial model. Technological innovation.
The article accounts for the determinants of sectoral specialisation in business services (BS) across the EU-27 regions as determined by: (i) agglomeration economies (ii) the region-specific structure of intermediate linkages (iii) technological innovation and knowledge intensity and (iv) the presence of these factors in neighbouring regions. The empirical analysis draws upon the REGIO panel database over the period 1999–2003. By estimating a Spatial Durbin Model, we find significant spatial effects in explaining regional specialisation in BS. Our findings show that, besides urbanisation economies, the spatial structure of intermediate sectoral linkages and innovation, in particular Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), are important determinants of specialisation in BS. The article contributes to the debate on the global versus local determinants of regional specialisation in BS by restating the importance of the regional sectoral structure besides that of urbanisation. We draw policy implications by rejecting the ‘footloose hypothesis’ for BS.
31-2432
Innovation. Knowledge. Local economy. Patents. Spillovers.
The article investigates whether the patenting activity of the most inventive companies has any causal effect on the number of patents granted to other local inventors in the same metropolitan area in USA. Economic theory predicts that positive agglomeration economies may be counterbalanced by upward pressure on wages, which are stronger within technological classes in the short term. The empirical analysis exploits the panel structure of the dataset to account for various fixed effects, and adopts an instrumental variable approach to prove causality. The results show that the effect is overall positive and stronger with a time lag. In addition, the effect is not bounded within narrow technological categories, suggesting that Jacob-type knowledge spillovers across sectors tend to prevail over other source of agglomeration economies within sectors, including sharing and matching mechanisms. The implications for local development policy are discussed.
31-2433
Input-output analysis. Measurement. National economy.
Much aggregate social-science analysis relies upon the standard national income and product accounts as a source of economic data. These are recognized to be defective in many poor countries, and are missing at the regional level for large parts of the world. Using updated luminosity (or nighttime lights) data, the present study examines whether such data contain useful information for estimating national and regional incomes and output. The bootstrap method is used for estimating the statistical precision of the estimates of the contribution of the lights proxy. We conclude that there may be substantial cross-sectional information in lights data for countries with low-quality statistical systems. However, lights data provide very little additional information for countries with high-quality data wherever standard data are available. The largest statistical concerns arise from uncertainties about the precision of standard national accounts data.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
30. Housing and Real Estate
31-2434
Affordable housing. Land use policies. Zoning.
Affordable housing development in suburban locales is often constrained by zoning and other municipal land-use restrictions. This article explores experiences in four states that have been recognized for exemplary interventions that address “exclusionary zoning.” Using quantitative and qualitative methods, the article examines overall production levels resulting from the specific program, the extent to which such production is occurring in locales with more White residents and more higher-income residents, and the levels of compliance with state-specified goals, where such goals exist. When possible, cross-state comparisons are provided. Although there are clear signs of progress, with municipalities increasing their affordable housing stocks and with some of this production occurring in locales that probably would not have developed such housing without such state (or county) intervention, the pace has been slow. A number of recommendations are offered for these and other states contemplating strategies to address exclusionary land-use practices.
31-2435
Housing policy. Housing vouchers. Mobility.
The federal Housing Choice Voucher Program currently serves as one of the nation’s predominant strategies for providing affordable rental housing for low-income households. The program is designed around two goals: first, to uphold the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s mission to provide safe, decent, and affordable housing; and second, to facilitate household residential location choices, with the idea that such choices can leverage other types of nonhousing opportunities for assisted households. While scholarly research has described a range of positive and negative household outcomes associated with the voucher subsidy, less is known about how those outcomes are produced on the ground. This research describes findings from 72 in-depth interviews with Illinois landlords and other voucher program stakeholders regarding their experiences with the program, with the goal of linking landlord practices to tenant outcomes. Findings of this research underscore the substantial influence that landlords have on assisted-household residential location choice and tenure, and show the potential for voucher program design to more actively engage with landlords as providers of supports that extend beyond the housing unit.
31-2436
Market analysis. Real estate. Rental housing.
The collapse of the housing bubble and the ensuing wave of foreclosures have led to a dramatic increase in investor activity in distressed single-family markets, particularly in high-foreclosure areas such as Las Vegas, Nevada. Using a case study of investors in the Las Vegas market as the starting point, supplemented by research in the Detroit, Michigan, area and elsewhere, this article analyzes the strategies being followed by investors and the relationship between investor behavior and market conditions, presenting a market-based typology of single-family property investors and assessing the effects of investors on markets and neighborhood conditions.
31-2437
Education policy. Human capital. Public housing.
Despite clear implications for human capital accumulation, there has been little research on the postsecondary educational experiences of students living in public housing. While there is significant and growing research exploring outcomes for public housing tenants, even in the education sphere, little of this work focuses on postsecondary outcomes and what role, if any, public housing plays in human capital accumulation. Our case study, New York City, is home to both the nation’s largest urban public university system and the largest public housing authority. In this work, we use matching techniques to identify and describe the residential characteristics of students at the City University of New York. We explore how students who live in public housing developments differ from their peers in terms of characteristics associated with success in college, including demographics, neighborhood poverty, and high school preparation. We use regression techniques to test the relation between public housing residence, neighborhood income, and two indicators of early college performance: successful completion of credits attempted and one-year retention. In a naive model (including only residence and high school characteristics), public housing residence is negatively associated with our outcomes of interest, but less so when we control for other factors, including neighborhood income. Specifically, for students pursuing an associate’s degree, we find a negative relation between public housing residence and credit completion and a less pronounced negative relation with retention. We find no significant relation between public housing residence and either baccalaureate outcome.
31-2438
Community. Community development. Housing policy. Urban policy.
After 40 years, it is hard to remember the context in which the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) was created and became an established program. Proposed by a Republican president, it was enacted by a Democratic Congress that was in the process of impeaching him. It replaced a program that had been in existence for 25 years and had strong political supporters, as well as half a dozen other categorical programs, each with its own constituency. This paper will describe the policy process by which the CDBG program came into existence in the early 1970s, identifying the major concerns and their resolution.
31-2439
Community development. Discrimination. Housing policy.
The U.S. Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act in 1968. It contained a cryptic provision stating that the secretary of housing and urban development was to administer programs and activities relating to housing and urban development in such a manner as to “affirmatively further fair housing.” Congress enacted the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program in 1974. This article describes the halting steps of HUD and the courts to interpret “affirmatively furthering fair housing” as it applies to the CDBG program.
31-2440
Housing. Housing policy. Housing subsidy. Rental housing.
Despite the well-documented benefits of stable housing, there are myriad barriers that preclude low-income and homeless individuals from accessing housing support. This article examines which individual characteristics predict greater or more limited access to supportive housing and rental subsidy programs in Hartford, Connecticut. Although individuals with HIV/AIDS are most likely to access housing, options are limited for other vulnerable populations, including those with substance use disorders and mental illness.
31-2441
Housing. Income. Work.
This study uses journey-to-work data from urban census tracts across the United States to investigate whether people living and working in the same area is related to job–worker balance or to the income from jobs. The results indicate that more people live and work in the same commute shed if there is job–worker balance and income matching.
31-2442
Housing. Housing policy. Rural areas.
The stated goal of U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program is “to develop viable urban communities by providing decent housing and a suitable living environment and expanding economic opportunities, principally for persons of low and moderate income.” While it may be perceived that CDBG exclusively assists urban or inner-suburban communities, the program also makes funds available to many smaller and less populated portions of states under the rubric of “nonentitlement” areas. Some research suggests that CDBG is the largest community and economic development program in rural America. Overall, there has been very little study of the CDBG program in terms of rural geography or funding.This research explores several basic questions. (1) To what degree do nonentitlement CDBG service areas actually comprise rural population and land (as opposed to suburban and exurban communities)? (2) What proportion of nonentitlement CDBG funds reaches rural communities and, in particular, economically distressed areas? The results indicate that a majority of the nation’s nonentitlement service areas are largely rural in nature. On the other hand, over 40% of the population in nonentitlement areas actually reside in the suburbs. Similarly, most CDBG nonentitlement funds go to rural and small-town communities, with over a third of funds supporting projects in high-poverty communities. However, the degree to which these awards are large enough to make an important and sustainable impact within a rural community is difficult to assess.
31-2443
Capitalization. Community development. Europe. Public services.
Applying the hedonic approach to land prices, this article investigates the capitalization of public services and pure amenities in a cross section of German communities. Possible spillover effects from neighboring municipalities are explicitly included in the analysis and prove to be of considerable importance. Estimates of the impacts of local attributes on land prices are obtained taking into account the spatial structure among unobserved variables. The results confirm that differences in land prices are largely attributable to local conditions and policies. This implies a significant degree of mobility as well as high estimation of local attributes on the part of German households.
31-2444
Gated communities. House prices. Suburban areas.
Housing prices being one factor thought to contribute to segregation patterns, this article aims at differentiating gated communities from non-gated communities in terms of change in property values. To what extent do gated communities contribute to price filtering of residents, and do patterns of price differentiation favor gated communities in the long run? The article provides an analysis of the territorial nature of gated communities and how the private urban-governance realm theoretically sustains the hypothesis that property values within gated communities are better protected. In order to identify price patterns across time, we elaborate a spatial analysis of values (price distance index) by identifying gated communities with real estate listings in 2008 and matching these with historical data at the normalized census-tract level from the 1980, 1990 and 2000 census in the greater Los Angeles region. We conclude that gated communities are very diverse in kind. The wealthier the area, the more it contributes to fuelling price growth, especially in the most highly desired locations in the region. Furthermore, a dual behavior emerges in areas with an over-representation of gated communities. On the one hand, gated communities are located within local contexts that introduce greater heterogeneity and instability in price patterns. In this way, they contribute to a local increase in price inequality that destabilizes price patterns at neighborhood level. On the other hand, gated communities proliferate in contexts that show a very strong stability in terms of price homogeneity at the local level.
31-2445
Foreclosure. Housing. Property. Real estate.
Previous research has shown that housing abandonment contributes to neighborhood decline by depressing nearby property values. However, most past research estimated the impact of abandonment through cross-sectional analysis without controlling for nearby foreclosures or local housing market trends. Therefore, it remains unclear whether abandoned properties reduce nearby property values or whether abandonment is more common in areas with already lower-valued properties. Prior research also has not explored how the duration of abandonment influences nearby property values. Therefore, to extend the current level of understanding of the impact of abandonment, this research examines the impact of abandoned properties on nearby property values in Baltimore, Maryland, from 1991 to 2010 using longitudinal data sets while simultaneously controlling for both nearby foreclosures and local housing market trends. This research finds that as properties are abandoned for longer periods of time, the impact on nearby property values not only increases in magnitude but also is seen increasingly farther away.
31-2446
Hedonics. Property values. Soil. Soil contamination.
Proper design and quality of soil play an important role in the functioning of soil-based septic systems. Septic systems with traditional leach fields are not suitable for treatment of domestic wastewater in Ohio due to shallow soils. Along with other adverse health effects, untreated or partially treated wastewater could lead to a loss of property valuation. The assessed value of 549 randomly selected properties in Licking County, Ohio was analysed using hedonic pricing method to isolate the effect of poor site selection on the value of the properties. Results indicate that properties sited on soils that are deemed optimal for wastewater treatment are valued 6.2% to 6.8% higher than those sited on sub-optimal soils. The results from this study can help the property owners in making better private decisions regarding installation of septic systems, but can also guide policy decisions that affect public health and common waters.
31-2447
Canada. Financial crisis. Housing. Mortgages. Security.
Canada’s experience during and after the financial crisis appears to distinguish it from its international peers. Canadian real estate sales and values experienced record increases since the global financial crisis emerged in 2008, rather than declines, and Canada did not witness any bank failures. The dominant trope concerning Canada’s financial and housing markets is that they are sound, prudent, appropriately regulated and ‘boring but effective’. It is widely assumed that Canadian banks did not need, nor receive, a ‘bailout’, that mortgage lending standards remained high, and that the securitization of mortgages was not widespread. The truth, however, does not accord with this mainstream view. In fact, the Canadian financial and housing markets reveal marked similarities with their international peers. Canada’s banks needed, and received, a substantial ‘bailout’, while federal policies before and after the financial crisis resulted in the massive growth of mortgage securitization and record household indebtedness. This article documents the growth of Canada’s housing bubble, the history of mortgage securitization, and of government policies implemented before and after the crisis. Instead of making the Canadian financial and housing sectors more resilient and sustainable, the outcomes of state responses are best understood as regressively redistributive.
31-2448
Affordable housing. Cost-effectiveness. Family. Housing subsidy. Rental housing.
The metric commonly used in debates and research concerning the cost-efficiency of multifamily rental housing production, total development cost per unit, sacrifices too much analytical power in return for its ease of computation. This article proposes a replacement metric, the subsidy per housing affordability equivalent (SHARE) ratio. This measure is applied to a set of 399 nonprofit-sponsored rental housing developments completed in California over the past decade. Evidence suggests that the use of SHARE would evaluate deeply subsidized family projects and mixed-use projects with commercial space more favorably than total development cost per unit would. The reverse is true for projects restricted to seniors and for those financed with Low-Income Housing Tax Credits.
31-2449
Economic crisis. Foreclosure. Mortgages. Rental housing.
In the wake of the U.S. foreclosure crisis, the magnitude of homes flowing into investor ownership since 2007 has been unprecedented. Based on interviews with investors and other key informants active on the south and southwest sides of Atlanta, we describe the key aspects of the business models of such investors, including their methods of identifying properties, determining acquisition prices and renovation costs, and managing properties for rent. We also examine their expectations for financial return, including the sensitivity of returns to market and property uncertainties. We conclude with key findings and some recommendations for policymakers.
31-2450
Disaster. Housing policy. Natural disasters.
The Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program has played an important role in the federal government’s response to natural disasters, providing a tool for delivering disaster recovery assistance to affected states and localities. This article provides an overview of the CDBG program’s role in disaster recovery. It then examines the use of CDBG funding to support housing recovery in Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We use FEMA damage assessments, state administrative program data, and on-site observation of properties’ rebuilding outcomes to examine the coverage and sufficiency of CDBG grants as well as the rebuilding outcomes of grant recipients’ properties. We find that a substantial share of CDBG recipients faced rebuilding or repair costs that exceeded their total funds from insurance, CDBG grants, and other sources. We also find that reception of a CDBG grant does not guarantee that a homeowner’s property is rebuilt. Depending on the program option, anywhere from 7% to 48% of grant recipients who opted to rebuild had not done so as of early 2010. Finally, the results provide limited support for concerns about the use of compensation grants to provide CDBG assistance. Homeowners’ responses to a telephone survey indicate that some grant recipients used CDBG funds for purposes other than rebuilding and that the use of compensation grants may have exposed homeowners to higher rates of contractor fraud. The article discusses the implications of these findings for the future use of the CDBG program for disaster recovery.
31-2451
Children. Homelessness. Policy. Prevention. Welfare.
The Family Unification Program—a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development initiative to facilitate interagency collaboration between the child welfare and public housing service systems—aims to stabilize families at risk for parent–child separation by addressing housing needs. Findings from a randomized controlled trial suggest that families referred to the program experienced lower risk for homelessness and out-of-home placement compared with child welfare services as usual. The findings suggest that housing services offer an effective alternative to foster care.
31-2452
Community development. Housing. Poverty. Universities.
Much of the research on housing policy over the past generation has focused on its relationship to affordability and the spatial demography of poverty. Here, I focus on a particular sector of the market that has largely gone unnoticed in the academic literature: college housing. I examine the relationships among college undergraduates residing off-campus, poverty rates, and housing cost and affordability measures. Using first-difference models of tract-level data from 2000 to 2008, I find robust, positive associations between off-campus populations and poverty rates, and more modest but still visible relations to housing outcomes. The results suggest that demographers should pay attention to the presence of college students in urban areas, and also hold implications for policy related to grant provisioning and housing.
31-2453
Housing. Housing vouchers. Mobility. Segregation.
In theory, housing choice vouchers provide low-income families with increased neighborhood options. However, previous research is mixed regarding whether the program promotes integration. Examining the 50 most populous U.S. metropolitan areas, I find that households using vouchers are more economically and racially segregated than an extremely low-income comparison group. However, voucher households in areas with source-of-income protection laws are less racially segregated than voucher households in areas without such laws.
31-2454
Development policy. Gentrification. Housing. Low-income housing.
The Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) encourages bank lending in low- and moderate-income areas. We use a regression discontinuity design that exploits the relative-income threshold that distinguishes CRA-eligible from ineligible neighborhoods (census tracts) and find little evidence that CRA has contributed to neighborhood changes associated with gentrification in eligible areas. Over the 1989–1999 period, we find that eligible tracts had greater increases in mean income relative to ineligible tracts, but we find little evidence that the CRA caused decreases in the proportion of long-term residents or increases in the proportion of White or college-educated residents.
31-2455
Community development. Economic development. Housing policy.
The Section 108 program operates the loan guarantee portion of the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program. Specifically, Section 108 allows CDBG grantees to transform a portion of their CDBG funds into federally guaranteed loans large enough to pursue physical and economic revitalization projects that can renew entire neighborhoods. This article presents findings from an analysis of Section 108 projects funded in fiscal years 2002–2007, including financing details, funded activities, and project outcomes. The study is designed to answer the following three core issues: (1) What types of projects are being funded, and what is the nature of those projects? (2) How are Section 108 projects funded, and how are they repaid? (3) What outcomes did the investments produce? In sum, the study team found that Section 108 is an important tool for community development because it allows jurisdictions to pursue larger projects with outcomes that cannot be funded through annual CDBG grants; yet, the complexity and size of Section 108 projects mean that local capacity and support are vital to the successful planning and completion of these projects.
31-2456
Government assistance. Homelessness. Housing choices. Housing subsidy.
Because homelessness assistance programs are designed to help families, it is important for policymakers and practitioners to understand how families experiencing homelessness make housing decisions, particularly when they decide not to use available services. This study explores those decisions using in-depth qualitative interviews with 80 families recruited in shelters across four sites approximately six months after they were assigned to one of four conditions (permanent housing subsidies, project-based transitional housing, community-based rapid re-housing, or usual care). Familiar neighborhoods near children’s schools, transportation, family and friends, and stability were important to families across conditions. Program restrictions on eligibility constrained family choices. Subsidized housing was the most desired intervention, and families leased up at higher rates than in other studies of poor families. Respondents were least comfortable in and most likely to leave transitional housing. Uncertainty associated with community-based rapid re-housing generated considerable anxiety. Across interventions, many families had to make unhappy compromises, often leading to further moves. Policy recommendations are offered.
31. Energy
31-2457
Demand pull. Energy conservation. Structural change. Urban renewal.
This study analyses the structural change in the energy system. By focusing on different green technology industries in Germany, it is of particular interest how policy-induced demand stimulates innovation. Taking the market size as well as the change in the market size as a proxy for increasing demand and patent counts as a proxy for innovation, there is support that the presence of institutions enabling diffusion of green technologies (GTs) is correlated with innovative activity. However, when the different GTs are treated separately remarkable differences can be observed. We also investigate the role of public expenditures for research and development. It is controlled for a structural break by comparing the two institutional settings incorporated into the legal system in Germany, namely the Electricity Feed Law and the Renewable Energy Sources Act. We find evidence for the role of public expenditures for research and development, and no evidence is found for the structural break.
32. Environment
31-2458
Australia. Risk. Uncertainty. Values. Wildfires.
Following the unprecedented series of bushfires in Victoria (Australia) over the past decade, public debate is fierce over the use of prescribed burning to reduce wildfire hazard. These deliberations are full of uncertainties over effectiveness and consequences, reflecting a lack of high level evidence-based debate, and appear polarised between people prioritising asset protection and others prioritising biodiversity. Using a textual analysis of submissions to a parliamentary inquiry, we investigate how people frame the risks of prescribed burning, the certainty of its outcomes and what values they evoke in order to justify their views. We find that differences do not necessarily arise from divergent priorities about nature, people or assets, but instead from contrasting views about whether humans or nature are voluntarily or involuntarily exposed to wildfire risk.
31-2459
Benefits. Choice model. Cost-benefit analysis. Recycling. Willingness to pay.
Domestic waste policy in Australia has a strong focus on kerbside recycling. In this paper mixed logit choice modelling is used to estimate the willingness to pay of households in Brisbane, Australia, for kerbside waste collection services including recycling. Respondents were found to have a positive willingness to pay for the fortnightly kerbside recycling and would be willing to pay an additional amount to increase the frequency of this service to weekly. The utility of respondents was, however, found to decline if general waste collection increased from weekly to twice a week.
31-2460
Conservation. Environment. Environmental management. Environmental policy. Rural areas.
Governments are seeking to reduce levels of expenditure. In the reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) it will be important to deliver the environmental objectives of agricultural policy more cost-effectively. This paper reviews the different agri-environmental mechanisms and their relative scale and performance. Likely reductions in the Single Farm Payment (SFP) imply a need to shift resources from payments for the reduction of intensity towards payments to prevent abandonment. More cost-effective policies may be achieved by shifting funds from the SFP into more targeted mechanisms, changing standards currently achieved by cross-compliance into regulations, and increasing targeting and competitive allocation mechanisms.
31-2461
Ecosystem. Environmental modeling. Land use changes. Urban areas.
Land use change is one of the main stress factors on ecosystems near urban areas. We analysed land use dynamics within Xochimilco, a World Heritage Site area in Mexico City. We used satellite images and GIS to quantify changes in land use/land cover (LULC) from 1989 to 2006 in this area, and a Markov projection model to simulate the impact of different management scenarios through to 2057. The results show an alarming rate of urbanisation in 17 years. LULC change runs in one direction from all other land use categories towards urban land use. However, changes from wetland or agricultural LULC to urban LULC frequently occur through transitional categories, including greenhouse agriculture and abandoned agricultural land. While urbanisation of natural land is often indirect, it is also effectively permanent. Active management aimed at protecting ecologically valuable habitats is urgently needed.
31-2462
Public policy. Sustainability. Sustainable development. Urban environments. Waterfront redevelopment.
Kuala Lumpur owes its beginnings to the two rivers that transect its historic core but it lost its waterfront as a public place due to rapid urbanisation. The rivers were used as flood mitigation measures with limited visual and physical access to the public. This paper traces the effects of policies on the waterfront development of the city by focusing on the factors that contributed to its disappearance. It employs a qualitative approach by analysing the riverfront physical conditions based on old maps and photographs as well as government documents and in-depth interviews with local authority officials, architects and developers.
31-2463
Africa. Land use. Management. Models. Participation. Uncertainty.
A multi-level participatory process tested in Senegal allowed local and national stakeholders to model their own perceptions of the environmental challenges theyface. This ‘self-design’ process led to a very subtle but qualitative model of uncertainty that could be used by decision makers and other stakeholders to share their different points of view on land use and land tenure policy challenges and then to design better adapted environmental management policies.
31-2464
Agriculture. Geographic information systems. Land use.
In our research we investigated the optimal utilization of land resources for agricultural production in Tabriz County, Iran. A GIS-based Multi Criteria Decision Making land suitability analysis was performed. Hereby, several suitability factors including soils, climatic conditions, and water availability were evaluated, based on expert knowledge from stakeholders at various levels. An Analytical Hierarchical Process was used to rank the various suitability factors and the resulting weights were used to construct the suitability map layers. In doing so, the derived weights were used, and subsequently land suitability maps for irrigated and dry-farm agriculture were created. Finally, a synthesized land suitability map was generated by combining these maps and by comparing the product with current land use SPOT 5 satellite images. The resulting suitability maps indicate the areas, in which the intensity of land use for agriculture should increase, decrease or remain unchanged. Our investigations have revealed that 65676 hectares may be suitable for irrigation and 120872 hectares may be suitable for dry-farm agriculture. This indicates a substantial potential to satisfy the significantly increasing regional demand for agricultural products. The results of our research have been provided to the regional authorities and will be used in strategic land use planning.
31-2465
Asia. Canada. Economic modeling. Europe.
Using a bioeconomic model that explicitly accounts for inventory and treatment expenditures, we carry out benefit-cost analyses of management strategies for three invasive plants in British Columbia: hawkweed, Scotch broom and Eurasian watermilfoil. For hawkweed, a province-wide biocontrol programme could achieve greater benefits than a conventional control programme, while for Scotch broom a small-scale mechanical treatment programme applied in a transport corridor was not economically viable unless it prevented spread into the surrounding area. Mechanical treatment of Eurasian watermilfoil in regional lakes generates net benefits to society, but inventory should be a key component of a control programme. Based on these analyses, we recommend continued development of successful biological control programmes for hawkweed and other invasive plant species.
31-2466
Diffusion process. Energy resources. Neighborhood effects. Peers. Technology.
The diffusion of new technologies is often mediated by spatial and socioeconomic factors. This article empirically examines the diffusion of an important renewable energy technology: residential solar photovoltaic (PV) systems. Using detailed data on PV installations in Connecticut, we identify the spatial patterns of diffusion, which indicate considerable clustering of adoptions. This clustering does not simply follow the spatial distribution of income or population. We find that smaller centers contribute to adoption more than larger urban areas, in a wave-like centrifugal pattern. Our empirical estimation demonstrates a strong relationship between adoption and the number of nearby previously installed systems as well as built environment and policy variables. The effect of nearby systems diminishes with distance and time, suggesting a spatial neighbor effect conveyed through social interaction and visibility. These results disentangle the process of diffusion of PV systems and provide guidance to stakeholders in the solar market.
31-2467
Africa. Disaggregate. Spatial analysis. Violence.
Our article contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflicts by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan between 1997 and 2009. Temperature anomalies are found to strongly affect the risk of conflict, whereas the risk is expected to magnify in a range of 24–31% in the future under a median scenario. Our analysis also sheds light on the competition over natural resources, in particular water, as the main driver of such relationship in a region where pastoralism constitutes the dominant livelihood.
31-2468
Cities. Ecological planning. Green areas. Urban areas.
Eco-city projects are becoming increasingly prevalent throughout the globe and are often marketed as ‘new’ urban environments focused on achieving sustainable urban living while promoting environmental–economic transitions towards a low-carbon technological and industrial base. The article argues for the need to consider the thermal aspects of urban metabolism, while at the same time focusing on the link between individual buildings and eco-city master plans and wider economic development strategies at a state level. In so doing, the article encourages critical analysis of eco-city design and planning, while keeping a focus on the role of specific building structures within eco-cities as examples of the intermeshing of what can be termed a ‘political ecology of scale’ which stretches from specific buildings’ climatic characteristics, to the metabolic master plan for eco-cities, to provincial, regional and state-level plans for the integration of eco-cities within wider economic and political development trajectories. The article focuses on Masdar, in Abu Dhabi, an eco-city under construction at the time of writing.
31-2469
Affordable housing. Carbon dioxide. Housing. United Kingdom.
This article explores an agenda towards post-carbon cities, extending and deepening established debates around low-carbon, sustainable cities in the process. The label post-carbon builds upon issues beyond those of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy conservation and climate change, adding a broader set of concerns, including economic justice, behaviour change, wellbeing, land ownership, the role of capital and the state, and community self-management. The article draws upon a case study of an embryonic post-carbon initiative completed in early 2013 called Lilac. Based in Leeds, Lilac stands for Low Impact Living Affordable Community and is the first attempt to build an affordable, ecological cohousing project in the UK. Its three aspects each respond to significant challenges: low-impact living and the challenge of post-carbon value change; affordability and the challenge of mutualism and equality; and community and the challenge of self-governance. I conclude the article by exploring six lessons from Lilac that tentatively outline a roadmap towards post-carbon cities: the need for holistic approaches that deal with complex challenges, prioritizing self-determination rather than just participation, engaging with productive political tensions, adopting a process rather than an outcomes-based approach, developing strategy for replicability, and finally, embracing a non-parochial approach to localities.
31-2470
Action theory. Climate change. Mitigation. Regional development.
In the 1990s, regionalisation in England held out the promise that regions could forge their own unique policies to address climate change. This paper considers the Yorkshire & Humber region’s climate change action plan. The study uses critical discourse to analyse the plan and a series of interviews with those who helped develop the initiative. It shows that in the case of Yorkshire & Humber, the Regional Development Agency was a key player in shaping the policies. This resulted in a focus on un-proven large-scale technological projects to mitigate climate change and create significant economic development for the region. Little came of this. The need to maintain economic growth seriously undermined the drive to reduce carbon emissions. The findings suggest that the proposed new sub-national governance arrangements will face similar problems in which short-term economic drivers outweigh efforts to reduce carbon emissions.
31-2471
Development. Infrastructure. Urban water supply.
Based on the analysis of impervious surface cover and water balance studies, it is argued that conventional, separately-sewered first-generation and alternative second-generation sustainable drainage systems (SUDS) cannot provide a fully sustainable surface water management approach for urban catchment planning. An extended approach based on the introduction of micro-and meso-vegetative SUDS systems into a wider green infrastructure (GI) framework is advocated to effectively address on-site and catchment urban surface water issues. The approach is based on the integrated planning implementation of street ‘greening’, with optimisation of existing biofiltration SUDS solutions, together with green roofs, downspout disconnection and sub-catchment riparian corridors to achieve a minimum 25–30% canopy cover level. A ‘leaf-out’ inventory procedure using GIS and satellite imagery can be employed to assess potential vegetative SUDS locations and types, and their likely impact upon the urban water cycle and receiving water health. However, there is a need to ensure that GI elements are incorporated into planning approaches and protocols for urban drainage infrastructure provision.
31-2472
Networks. Performance. Performance measurement. Sustainability.
Academics and practitioners have not yet developed an adequate method to evaluate the social performance of organisations that includes a robust and comprehensive approach of sustainability and uses the most relevant data sources. However, sustainability rating agencies are evaluating the social performance of organisations according to their own methodologies, which are not always clearly explained to stakeholders; and the evaluations they provide are being used as a reference in markets. This study contributes to research on the evaluation of social performance in organisations, by means of an innovative methodology that combines the use of neural networks and fuzzy logic for the development of expert systems suitable for classifying organisations according to their performance on Corporate Social Responsibility. The methodology has been validated in a simplified scenario and results indicate that it is suitable for replicating the classifications provided by sustainability rating agencies.
31-2473
Asia. Boundaries. International planning.
A World Heritage (WH) designation requires that international obligations to protect and conserve pre-eminent natural and cultural heritage properties be implemented at a local level. As part of this obligation to protect, each WH property needs to be demarcated in space (or bounded). While there is a large literature relating to the efficacy of protected area management from a wide variety of perspectives which include, but are not limited to, tourism, livelihood and dislocation issues, this paper argues that further studies that specifically assess the significance and/or relevance of WH property boundary-making from a local perspective are required to aid WH site management. Using the Angkor Archaeological Park WH property in Cambodia as a case study, this paper documents local perceptions about WH boundaries, and demonstrates that, in this example, there is a discrepancy between local expectations and the official designation of the spatial extent for the heritage property. Moreover, it is argued that the unique circumstances surrounding the listing of Angkor resulted in rigid boundaries that lack local resonance and that continue to create challenges for local people and the management authority. Although Angkor’s circumstances are inimitable, there are wider lessons that can be drawn from this example about the efficacy of WH and protected area ‘boundary-making’.
31-2474
Design panels. Economic development. Emissions.
This paper explores the relationship between economic development and environmental pollution by using panel data for 97 countries for the period 1950–2003. Various econometric techniques are applied to a sample of European Union (EU) countries and to a full sample including both EU and non-EU countries. For the full sample, cross-country variation in the estimated slopes is observed with extremely heterogeneous parameters, making aggregation not useful. These findings do not hold for the EU countries, implying that policies to control pollution must consider both the specific economic situation and the structure of the industrial and the business sectors of each region.
31-2475
Ecological planning. Environmental justice. United Kingdom. Urban areas.
This article explores the potential of Urban Political Ecology analyses to reveal the nuanced relationships produced by nature and social relations in urban forests. A critique of the Urban Political Ecology forest literature, it focuses on the assumption in much of the literature that people in urban spaces perceive themselves to be advantaged by the presence of trees and disadvantaged by their absence. This critique leads to a call for an increased emphasis on the importance of different urban forest contexts and on the differential insights produced. The article constructs a narrative of the complex relationships, both historic and current, between communities, forest and the regulatory authorities in the governance of the urban forest of the valleys of south Wales. It then draws on recent research to reveal tensions in capitalist production and consumption relations, and identifies specific issues. Analysing these relationships and comparing the south Wales valleys case with other examples in Urban Political Ecology literature, the article seeks to promote the utility of Urban Political Ecology as a concept and to advance theoretically both Urban Political Ecology and, by extension, environmental justice.
31-2476
Culture. Land. Land reclamation.
Land subsidence attributable to the overuse of groundwater has resulted in severe damage in both urban and rural areas and in developed and developing countries. By incorporating the externality of groundwater use in aquacultural farming, we analyse how the government can mitigate the land subsidence levels without reducing the farmers’ profits, by both reusing the retired aquacultural land and through adjustments in the locations of the species currently being farmed in Tong-shi Township, Taiwan. The simulation results indicate that if the species with high profit can be sustainably raised and moved to aquacultural lands that are less sensitive to groundwater extraction, the total profit could exceed that without the regulation.
31-2477
Environmental impact analysis. Environmental planning. Evaluation. Impact. Methodology. Urban areas. Urban development. Urban form.
The functioning of urban systems involves high levels of resource consumption and a complex web of energy, water and material flows. The fundamental aim of this paper is to understand how future urban systems could be designed to be consistently less damaging to the environment. Its main contribution is the proposal of a methodology for evaluating the urban development process from ametabolic perspective, the Metabolic Impact Assessment (MIA). After a brief introduction to evaluation in environmental planning, the paper describes the main influences of MIA, presents a set of principles for a metabolic assessment, and describes in detail the methodology’s evaluation procedure.
31-2478
Environmental planning. Environmental quality. Institutions. Organization. Planning participation. Social transformation.
This paper explores the scale and scope of transformations in the environmental planning field, and the factors that may advance or impede their widespread adoption. A conceptual model is offered which examines scope (defined as type, breadth and structure of the transformation), and the scale of its impact (categorized as stakeholder, organizational, institutional or societal) and applies it to the analysis of several cases in Israel where environmental transformations, affecting the way in which planning is conducted, have been adopted. Conclusions include identification of conditions for facilitating and advancing transformations, including knowledge of innovative alternatives, initiative, willingness to adopt new practices, and identification of policy windows that emerge during conflict, reform, or crisis. The fostering of relations between environmental non-government organizations and planning systems and leadership roles are also significant in catalyzing environmental transformation.
31-2479
Management. Sustainability. Textiles.
In the textile industry, a large number of potentially harmful chemicals are used during production. This raises the importance of communication about chemical risks between different actors in the supply chain and therefore this study aims at describing the flows of chemical risk information up- and downstream in an international textile supply chain. The outcomes show that the main communication between retailers and suppliers is through a list of restricted substances. Information most often only reaches the next tier up- or downstream in the supply chain. However, different approaches exist, of which one is described in further detail.
31-2480
Communication. Environment. Land use. Recreation. Restoration. Risk analysis.
With more people working or recreating in the countryside, there is a need for land-based organisations to manage potential risks. We explore the role of risk communication as a tool for preventing staff or the wider publics contracting Lyme disease. Through interviews with representatives of land-based organisations and content analysis of information they provide, we focus on the relationship between organisational attitudes towards Lyme disease and the information they provide. While there is an appetite for a consistent approach to communicating about Lyme disease, we found that there is currently no clear agreement over the level of information that should be communicated, how and to whom. Moreover, how organisations approach risk communication in practice is variable. A potential solution would be an accessible resource base which provides accurate and consistent information that can be tailored to different audiences.
31-2481
Afforestation. Carbon dioxide. Deforestation. Reforestation.
Forestry is at the centre-stage of global climate change negotiations as it is a low cost carbon mitigation option. Forests have the potential to be a source as well as sink for carbon emissions. The main aim of this paper is to provide a useful snapshot of the carbon value of India’s forests, and give a glimpse of the potential of India’s forests to offset both India’s and the world’s carbon emissions. This paper also highlights the initiatives taken by India towards the implementation of REDD+ and the status of REDD+ in a few other countries.
31-2482
Ecological mapping. Environmental impact analysis. Indicators. Local governance. Sustainable communities.
We propose that community assessments of environmental impact are increasingly more relevant to planners and policy makers when reported at finer scales of analysis. Using the Town of Oakville, Ontario, as an example, we calculate neighbourhood level ecological footprint values for 241 neighbourhoods. Ecological footprint results range from 5.4 global hectares per capita to 15.2 global hectares per capita, with an average ecological footprint for Oakville of 9.0 global hectares per capita. Our results highlight variability in energy and material flows within a community, providing planners and policy makers detailed information to prioritise programme delivery, allocate limited resources, and support policy development. The lower range of neighbourhood ecological footprint values suggests a potential footprint floor for Oakville of around 5 hectares per capita. The notion of a footprint floor has implications for setting community footprint targets and understanding the magnitude of change needed for significant ecological footprint reductions.
31-2483
Climate change. Ecology. Infrastructure. Urban areas. Urban policy.
Climate change governance is increasingly being conducted through urban climate change experiments, purposive interventions that seek to reconfigure urban sociotechnical systems to achieve low-carbon and resilient cities. In examining how experiments take effect, we suggest that we need to understand not only how they are made and assembled, but also how they are maintained within specific urban contexts. Drawing on literatures from urban political ecology and the specific debate on urban repair and maintenance, this article examines maintenance in two case studies of climate change experiments in housing in Bangalore (India) and Monterrey (Mexico). We find that maintenance is a crucial process through which not only urban obduracy is preserved, but also the novel and innovative character of the experiment is asserted and reproduced. The process of ‘maintaining’ experiments is a precarious one, which requires a continuous external input in terms of remaking the experiment materially and discursively. This process causes further reconfigurations beyond the experiment, changing the patterns of responsibility attribution and acceptability that configure the urban fabric.
31-2484
Conservation. Governance. Integration. Watersheds.
Integrated environmental management and related approaches have been widely endorsed for emphasising interconnections between water, land and related resources and placing them within a broader social and institutional context. Yet there has been limited application of those approaches to wetland conservation. This paper introduces an integrated wetland conservation (IWC) framework for analysing and identifying opportunities for integration within state (subnational) wetland programmes. The authors apply the IWC framework to an evaluation of the state wetland programme in Wisconsin. The framework identified limited current integration in Wisconsin, although the state programme has opportunities to improve IWC by increasing watershed-scale planning and mechanisms for interaction and co-ordination between stakeholders.
31-2485
Automobile use. Entrepreneurialism. Retail market. Urban governance. Urban planning.
Local decision-makers face a wide range of pressures over questions of urban development. Among these is to pursue urban economic growth, while simultaneously responding to environmental demands to reduce car usage. There is, however, a lack of empirical studies analysing urban entrepreneurialism in conjunction with car-use reduction. This paper focuses on city-centre development and regulation of retail trade in two Norwegian cities. The underlying logic is that while compact city development and concentration of commerce in the urban core are ways to reduce car usage, there are also pressures drawing shopping to the city outskirts. The paper highlights the conflicting spatial interests involved in policies for car-use reduction, as evident in discussions as to how to regulate parking throughout the urban area. The paper also shows how municipal policy for car-use reduction is affected by private actors and neighbouring municipalities. Ultimately, the cases illustrate how local decision-making is influenced by the balance of pressures for and against environmental policy. In this way, analysis of inter-municipal competition over retail trade, inhabitants and investments, provides important insights into urban policy and practice.
31-2486
Climate change. Flooding. Floods. Land use.
Although climate change appears to be a relatively new public issue, it has not emerged onto a tabula rasa; it affects ‘traditional’ policy sectors. How, then, does this ‘new issue’ interact with established organizational processes, and how is climate change ‘operationalized’ in local practice? Since major events linked to climate change include such things as desertification, climatic migrations, floods and landslides, one might assume that one of its main implications would be a substantial change in land use, or at least a transformation in land organization and management. This article explores the implementation of a ‘flood control area’ as an adaptation practice in the face of climate change. What theoretical and empirical tools should analysis adopt to account for the multiple actors, types of knowledge, artefacts, socio-technical systems and governance configurations engaged in developing such practices? In other words, to what extent does climate change become a reorganizing category? This article adopts a theoretical approach inspired by actor-network theory and considers adaptation practice not as a standardized top-down solution, but as the result of specific local connections among actors, materials and discourses. The analysis suggests that climate change is indeed a reorganizing category, but one that depends on the specific local materializations of the adaptation measure.
31-2487
Cities. Floods. Risk management. Urban planning.
Climate change and continuous urbanization contribute to an increased urban vulnerability towards flooding. Only relying on traditional flood control measures is recognized as inadequate, since the damage can be catastrophic if flood controls fail. The idea of a flood-resilient city – one which can withstand or adapt to a flood event without being harmed in its functionality – seems promising. But what does resilience actually mean when it is applied to urban environments exposed to flood risk, and how can resilience be achieved? This paper presents a heuristic framework for assessing the flood resilience of cities, for scientists and policy-makers alike. It enriches the current literature on flood resilience by clarifying the meaning of its three key characteristics – robustness, adaptability and transformability – and identifying important components to implement resilience strategies. The resilience discussion moves a step forward, from predominantly defining resilience to generating insight into “doing” resilience in practice. The framework is illustrated with two case studies from Hamburg, showing that resilience, and particularly the underlying notions of adaptability and transformability, first and foremost require further capacity-building among public as well as private stakeholders. The case studies suggest that flood resilience is currently not enough motivation to move from traditional to more resilient flood protection schemes in practice; rather, it needs to be integrated into a bigger urban agenda.
31-2488
Community development. Natural disasters. Planning practices. Recovery.
This article takes as its focus the contribution of community development to disaster recovery. It examines the experiences of community development officers employed in response to a series of devastating natural disasters within the state of Queensland, Australia. Utilizing the lens of the “dilemmatic space,” the article reveals three practice dilemmas for community development workers in disaster recovery: the struggle over discourse, the difficulties of dual accountabilities, and the challenges of legitimacy in intervention. The article concludes by examining the implications of these findings and the need for what is called ecological or organic practice to be applied to the disaster recovery context.
31-2489
Climate. Consumption. Households. Sustainability.
The research problem addressed concerns the interplay between households as consumers, and local governments as policy makers and service providers. Mainly based on interviews with selected households, the paper explores the activities, results and potential long-term gains of a climate dialogue project undertaken in two Swedish towns. The findings are interpreted in terms of Spaargaren and Oosterveer’s ideal types of the consumer as ecological citizen, political consumer and moral agent. The main finding is that although the immediate gains in terms of GHG reduction are small, such projects may function as triggers of future change towards more sustainable policies and everyday practices.
31-2490
Carbon dioxide. Greenhouses. Private sector. Public sector. Sustainability.
Sustainable and carbon management practices are becoming prominent considerations in international business, particularly in developing economies that are still forming their economic foundations. Saudi Arabia is one such an economy and is pivotal because of its key position in international petroleum production. This study analysed secondary and primary data pertaining to sustainability and carbon management practices in Saudi Arabia and its business enterprises. A questionnaire was distributed to approximately 150 Saudi Arabian middle-managers. Surveyed Saudi enterprise managers reported a desire to see the Saudi government take an active role and establish well-defined carbon management policies in the country. The Saudi Arabian government has been serious in tackling the environmental problems, but the current governmental position is based on a distributive justice philosophy and pursuit of national interest. Primary data revealed private sector enterprises were better prepared to deal with sustainability and carbon management problems compared to public sector enterprises. Surveyed Saudi mangers reported hope that their employers would start rewarding positive carbon management actions and focus on educating managers about carbon management practices. Findings from this study can assist Saudi Arabian policy makers and leadership of public and private sector enterprises to formulate future sustainability and carbon management policies.
34. Transportation and Communication
31-2491
Design panels. Europe. History. Land use. Transportation.
To analyse the mutually dependent relationship between local economic performance, demand for and supply of transport services, we employ the structural panel VAR method that is popular in the macroeconomic literature, but has not previously been applied to the modelling of the within-city dynamics of transportation. We focus on a within-city panel of Berlin, Germany during the heyday of the construction of its dense public transit network (1890–1914). Our results suggest that economic outcomes and a supply of transport infrastructure mutually determine each other. We find a short-run (long-run) elasticity of property prices with respect to transport supply of 2% (8.5%). Both transport demand and supply seem to be driven more by firms than by residents.
31-2492
Global economy. Globalization. Public-private relations. Transportation.
Around the world, public–private partnerships have become increasingly popular to deliver large-scale transportation infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges, railways, subways, seaports and airports. The aim of this article is to provide a framework to understand the global geography of projects built through this market-driven procurement model, which have been predominantly concentrated in a small number of developed countries and emerging markets. As is shown, within many countries, a governance and regulatory environment has been established that supports public–private partnerships over other alternative procurement approaches. Nevertheless, the production of public–private partnerships worldwide has been dominated by a relatively small number of highly globalized construction contractors, engineering firms, financiers, accountancies and consultants from developed countries, who have focused their activities in a narrow set of regions. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of the high level of industry concentration, and emerging trends showing greater involvement from firms from developing countries.
31-2493
Airports. Cities. Employment. Spatial planning. Urban areas.
Using Census 2000 CTPP tract-level data for the 51 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, airport cities—agglomerations of employment anchored by airports—are placed in the context of metropolitan spatial form in order to understand their emergence and function. Major airports anchor significant concentrations of employment which average one-third to one-half the size of the respective CBDs, depending upon the operationalization, while 80% of the airports anchor employment agglomerations. Airport cities are anchored by airports but not driven by aviation. The relationship between spatial form and economic function suggests that need for airport access determines the location of transportation-providing employment while spatial employment filtering, based on urban land costs and agglomeration benefits, are responsible for the presence of transportation-supporting and transportation-using employment, such as producer services.
31-2494
Automobiles. Built environment. Walking.
Built environment audits, part of the “toolbox” for planning multi-modal urban transport systems, are used to evaluate the walkability of streets. Whereas the methodological features of audits have attracted attention from planning research, little attention has been paid to the institutional contexts where audits are developed and used. Drawing on literature on audit culture in contemporary institutions and on expert interviews with audit developers and professionals in Australia and New Zealand working with walking audits, three questions are addressed: Who uses walkability audits? How are they used? What substantive changes emerge from auditing practice? The knowledge of practice of auditing the built environment for walking is underdeveloped. While planners, engineers and advocates consider built environment audits useful in different ways, of concern is the use of audits to rationalise limited resources already devoted to infrastructure for walking, rather than produce substantive changes to the quality of the built environment for walking.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
31-2495
Cemeteries. Community. Nature. Religion. Spirituality. Values.
In the contemporary political context, religion is rarely out of the news, usually postulated as a regressive force, battling against modern liberal Western values. However, in everyday life, and specifically with regard to place value, the situation is more complex. This paper addresses the challenge this context and the attendant notion of postsecularism bring to planning practice. It argues that religious and spiritual values can be rearticulated as concepts which add a substantive positive dimension to planning and its conceptualisation and constructions of place. This is done by developing the notion of municipal spirituality, which draws on the theological conceptions of transcendence and the common good to redefine the value of places whose worth cannot easily be made in instrumental terms. In so doing, it challenges the current antagonistic opposition of religious and liberal democratic values, repositioning religious and spiritual concepts in an inclusive way. The idea of municipal spirituality illustrates how planning could have a role in defending and promoting such places. Further, it demonstrates the importance of engaging in agonistic rather than antagonistic debate, rearticulating the criteria on which places can be valued by planning practice.
31-2496
Community. Ecology. Well-being.
Community wellbeing, from a field theoretical perspective, derives from the interaction of three core elements reflecting different levels and units of analysis – individual, social, and ecological. These facets of community, and their related concepts, come together in a powerful way to shape relationships, opportunities for agency, and local adaptive capacities that lead to wellbeing. Unfortunately, much of the extant community literature moves across and among these three dimensions without regard to how efforts at one level impact another. The literature lacks a theoretical framework that links the individual, social, and ecological levels of wellbeing and community into a coherent whole. Here, we conducted a meta-study of data drawn from within the field theoretical approach to community literature and included a series of theoretical papers, books, journal articles, and community studies spanning from 1959 to 2013. We found that community, from a field theoretical view, contributes to and impacts wellbeing at the individual, social, and ecological levels. Further, we provide a framework, based within the field theoretical approach to community, which can be applied to the study of community and wellbeing at all levels. Practical applications and areas of further research are discussed.
31-2497
Design. Neighborhood effects. Neighborhoods. Program evaluation. Quality.
This article reports the health impacts of the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration Program for the subset of participants who were most likely to spend more time in low-poverty neighborhoods. Using the methodological approach developed by Peck, we find that children whose profiles predict that they spent more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods experience higher neighborhood and housing quality, improved mental health outcomes, and better general health relative to their control-group counterparts. Moving to Opportunity’s impact on these likely “high-dosage” participants is larger in magnitude than intention-to-treat impact estimates produced by prior studies. Further, while prior work found no evidence that neighborhoods affect overall child health, we find that parents who are likely to spend more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods are significantly more likely to report very good or excellent child health. In contrast, those who are not likely to spend more time in lower-poverty neighborhoods show some evidence of unfavorable health impacts.