Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The Parliamentary Boundary Commission for England will soon be producing provisional recommendations for new constituencies for Greater London, which stands to lose as many as thirteen seats. In tackling this task, the Commission faces a substantial problem if it sticks to the previous practice of allocating seats separately to each London borough, and not being prepared to cross borough boundaries in the creation of constituencies. It is shown that the resultant underrepresentation and overrepresentation of boroughs will be greater than at previous reviews, and a procedure is suggested which will substantially overcome it, with as few as five pairs of boroughs created for purposes of constituency allocation and constituency definition.

Cities in eastern Africa have been growing at an unheralded pace, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Despite this rapid urbanization, very little research has been focused on energy and the environment in urban eastern Africa. This paper contains a review of what little work has been carried out to date. Several conclusions are pointed out. First, cities throughout the region remain small and have formed largely without industrial development. ‘Urbanization without industrialization’ means that the existing urban environmental problems are attributable to inadequate provision of service and not to the industrialization-linked problems found in more developed countries. Even if economic growth improves, action will be necessary to alleviate existing environmental problems. Second, the expected rapid pace of urban growth will impose tremendous costs at all levels. Increased user costs, either through reliance on private-sector alternatives or through public-sector tariffs, must be increasingly relied upon to defray the fiscal impacts of rapid urbanization and to assure the sustainability of urban infrastructural systems. Third, as the anticipated urban growth and industrialization take place, the focus of energy and environmental planners working on cities in eastern Africa will shift from basic service provision to increasingly complex problems. These shifts will require labor and financial resources far exceeding those currently found in these countries. Fourth, although energy and environmental needs may differ according to the size of the city, there has been little or no attention paid to problems outside of the primate cities. As a result, it is unclear how the problems and solutions will differ across the urban hierarchy. Clearly, urban planners need to consider the importance of energy and the environment. At the same time, energy and environmental researchers must pay greater attention to urban areas.

The growing prominence of service activities in the advanced economies poses a substantial challenge for studies of urban and regional development. This paper is a review of different approaches to the analysis of service growth. Studies directed specifically at the development of producer or information services have contributed a valuable sense of the way in which services are leading economic change. They are, however, constrained by the predominantly sectoral nature of their approach, which plays down the diverse character of services and the intimate links between services and other sectors. The conceptualisation of structural change is also too narrow, viewed almost solely through the lens of changes in the service sector. In contrast, a number of Marxist-inspired analyses provide a broader interpretation of the character of structural change, emphasising the role of services in changing phases of capitalist development. They also provide a more sophisticated analysis of the diverse character of services and the types of development they provide. However, they have generally so far been constrained by the limited and derivative role given to services in the dynamics of the economy. The authors argue for a ‘service-informed’ view of structural change which contains a broad analysis of the dynamics of the advanced economies and a sense of the significance of individual service activities in change.

A spatial interaction methodology is developed for modeling flows in a hierarchical system. A competing and intervening destinations framework is employed to model and predict US state-to-state labor migration. This analysis is used to assess the importance of geographic variables in explaining variations in regional labor flows. Empirical findings suggest that US labor migration is largely explained by Newtonian and systemic forces—size, distance, locational accessibility, and intervening opportunities in a spatial hierarchy. It is also suggested that lagged migration or migrant stock is a product of the combined effect of these forces.

A reevaluation of cross-sectional versus longitudinal models of residential mobility confirms the general results of earlier cross-sectional analysis and casts doubt on the study by Davies and Pickles in 1985 in which it was argued that cross-sectional analysis is inadequate and that cross-sectional analysis in behavioral geography “must be viewed with suspicion”. However, it is true that the results from models of time-series data reveal additional complexities not obvious in cross-sectional analysis of mobility and migration.

In this paper, the changing pattern of manufacturing employment within the American Midwest for 1977–86 is examined as a function of four hypothesized trends in the US space-economy: national decline of industries concentrated in the Midwest; interregional shift in the focus of production within the USA; intraregional shift in the focus of production within the Midwest; and demetropolitanization of manufacturing. The degree to which each of these processes affects manufacturing employment change is treated here entirely as an empirical question and is examined by using an extended probabilistic shift-share model along the lines suggested by Theil and Gosh, and Knudsen and Barff. Results of the analysis indicate that change in manufacturing employment within the Midwest can be accounted for by interregional shift, intraregional shift, and the national decline of industries concentrated in the region, in that order. Once these other factors are accounted for, demetropolitanization of manufacturing played only a negligible role in changes in manufacturing employment within the region during the study period.

Homeless people are popularly portrayed as highly mobile, but their migration behavior has never been systematically analyzed. In this paper a conceptual model of homeless migration is developed that links migration behavior with the coping status of homeless individuals. The model is evaluated by using data drawn from a recent random probability sample of men surveyed in Skid Row, Los Angeles, CA. Results indicate that homeless migrants tended to be young, never married, white, mentally disabled, and either newly or cyclically homeless individuals. Long-term residents, in contrast, were apt to be older, physically disabled or suffering from a health-related problem, and had been homeless for some time. The dominant reason given for moving was to find a job or improve life opportunities in some other way. Findings also indicate that the majorty of homeless men in the sample were ‘stayers’ rather than ‘movers’. This obviates a common political strategy by localities of attempting to avoid obligations to provide support to homeless individuals on the basis of their transiency.

Uncertainty pervades policy analysis in ways that transcend classical concepts of probability. To benefit policy analysis, the concept of probability must be considerably broadened. It is argued that probability can be conceptualized with respect to the characteristics of policy problems that produce inherent uncertainty. Problems that encompass uncertainty can be characterized according to their: (1) fundamental requirements, for example forecasting, knowledge creation, fact establishment; (2) system properties such as disorderly versus orderly systems; (3) problem-solution strategy, for example subjective judgement, model-based analysis, data analysis; (4) problem-solution data requirements—from numerous and hard-to-measure variables to few and easy-to-measure variables, and (5) problem-solution frame—ranging from unbounded solution spaces to small and discrete solution spaces. The theory of lower probability is presented as a generalization of classical additive probability that can handle this generalized conceptualization of probability. Information-theoretic methods for integrating the two generalizations of probability are considered.

There is little point in making comprehensive comparisons of ESA (Environmentally Sensitive Areas) and SSSI (Sites of Special Scientific Interest) protection arrangements as Hodge et al contend, as the two approaches are not substitutable. In contrast, and despite Hodge et al's strictures, comparisons of payment rates may be instructive. Indeed the payment rate analysis in the author's previous work may provide support for Hodge et al's contention that a substantial number of ESA entrants have no intention of pursuing environmentally damaging practices.