Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper the causes and consequences of the property boom of the late 1980s are considered that in one way or another affected most developed economies and several industrialising ones. It is suggested that technical change in key service industries caused an upsurge in building demand from the mid-1970s onwards. Shifts in employment patterns then generated repercussions in housing markets. The classic conditions were created for a ‘Kuznets style’ building cycle. The detailed effects of these changes in specific countries depended on the responses by agents involved in the process of building provision, which in turn were affected by the changing economic and institutional contexts that they faced. Property development, financial liberation, housing markets, property taxation, and land-use planning are all considered in this context, with examples drawn from several countries.

In this paper, the nature of property and the growing links between property and financial markets are addressed. It is argued that property must be viewed as a commodity with use-value and exchange-value aspects. Property has been affected by two developments in the 1980s: the shift to services (especially financial services) and waves of deregulation. The increase in demand during the 1980s boom stemmed both from investors such as property companies and from end users, especially those engaged in or expanding into securities business following Big Bang. As property markets, including the housing retail finance circuit, became increasingly intertwined with wholesale financial markets they became more susceptible to the vicissitudes of these markets and tendencies toward crisis. The exchange value of property became disengaged from its use value as property took on the attributes of a quasi-financial asset.

In this paper, a ‘weak’ test of the capital-switching argument developed by David Harvey is offered. With data on construction investment activity for the USA and on various alternative investments, a temporal analysis was used to assess whether evidence exists for the movement of capital from the primary to the secondary circuit. The investigation is focused specifically on the building boom of the 1980s, as that expansion has been the focus of recent theoretical and empirical work centered on the relation between urbanization and the restructuring of capital. Little support was found for the claim that capital switching has occurred, but the data do point to a delinking of real-estate investment from nonspeculative investment criteria and use-value considerations.

Research on the changing geography of metropolitan corporate headquarters (CH) influence has pointed to a decrease in importance for national centers and an increase in the importance of regional centers throughout the country. Theoretical explanations of this change have posited a linear evolutionary sequence from spatial and hierarchical concentration to dispersal. In this paper, the nature of change in metropolitan CH influence between 1974 and 1989 is examined, with a focus on three aspects of this process. First, the detailed sequence of dispersal within types of metropolitan region is explored. Second, the issue of how metropolitan CH influence changes over space is examined. Third, the impact of the recent restructuring of the US economy on metropolitan corporate influence is investigated. The results suggest that the linear evolutionary sequence model needs some modification. The major proportional shifts in CH influence are from New York to a select set of diversified regional centers that may be emerging as national centers in their own right. Dispersion of CH influence is not simply a matter of shifts from one level of the hierarchy to another, rather it is the outcome of a continuous struggle by existing and new corporations in metropolises among and within all levels of the hierarchy to capture new growth opportunities as older opportunities decline. Finally, the impact of restructuring was twofold. Among some metropolitan regions dominated by sectors that declined during the period 1974–89 the consequences were a dramatic decrease in influence. The CHs of the new growth sectors were concentrated among national centers and hence contributed to increased influence at the apex of the hierarchy.

In this paper a conceptual model of the individual decision to telecommute is presented. Key elements of that decision, including constraints, facilitators, and drives, are defined and the relationships among them described. The major types of constraints (if negative) or facilitators (if positive) include external factors related to awareness, the organization, and the job, and internal psychosocial factors. The major types of drives are work, family, leisure, ideology, and travel. It is argued that the absence of constraints is a necessary but not sufficient condition for telecommuting to be adopted by an individual. The presence of one or more drives, assumed to be associated with some dissatisfaction, is necessary to activate the search for a solution to that dissatisfaction.

The choice set contains those alternative solutions perceived to be feasible by the individual. It may or may not contain telecommuting (depending on whether all constraints are nonbinding or not), and probably contains other alternatives having nothing to do with telecommuting. Each alternative is evaluated in terms of how effectively it satisfies the drive, and the individual's attitudes toward it. The alternative (or bundle of alternatives) which maximizes individual utility becomes the preferred behavioral pattern. However, short-term constraints may prevent the preferred behavior from being chosen. The process is a dynamic one, in which previous choices affect attitudes and constraints and alter drives. Work directed by the authors is under way to operationalize the conceptual model.

Study of the initial stages of HIV transmission along a ‘sociogeographic network’—a large, complex, spatially focused social network with possibly fractal geometry—is extended to include interaction between a low-dimensional ghettoized ‘core group’ within which the disease spreads very rapidly and a higher dimensional, more loosely structured ‘general population’ in which spread is relatively slow. A mathematical modeling exercise suggests that contextually modulated interaction between them can be highly nonlinear and may greatly increase the initial rate of disease transmission within the general population. This work contributes to a growing body of literature which suggests that programs to control HIV infection within the majority heterosexual population of the United States will fail spectacularly without particular focus on the coupled physical and social stabilization and rehabilitation of the urban ghettoes of marginalized populations which are the present, and rapidly expanding, disease epicenters. Evidence suggests their continued disintegration can both increase disease rates within the epicenters and increase the coupling between core groups and general populations by creating large numbers of spatially or economically displaced refugees.

In this paper it is argued that more attention should be paid to the role of supply-side factors in accounting for the spatiotemporal evolution of urban office building cycles, particularly during the recent boom of the 1980s. Urban office building dynamics are critically related to changes in the structure and operation of finance capital, the development industry, and state intervention; changes which in turn are related to shorter term macroeconomic fluctuations and longer waves of economic and political restructuring at different geographic scales. A comparative analysis of the timing, periodicity, and magnitude of booms and slumps in downtown office construction activity between 1963 and 1986 in major metropolitan areas of the United States reveals a convergence in the timing of booms and slumps in downtown office construction between individual cities and on the national trend in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and a persistence of important differences in the relative volume of downtown office construction between cities. The convergence in timing can be traced to an increased degree of national and international integration of capital markets and the development industry, and the increased flow of capital into commercial real estate. Analysis of interurban differences in the volume of building activity suggest ways in which powerful international and national trends are mediated by locality-specific local economic and political structures and conditions.

Land conversion is a difficult issue to resolve at either a theoretical or a practical level. By virtue of the range and diversity of information there are problems in synthesising data to obtain accurate models. It is argued that as a result many models of the conversion process are partial. With data obtained from studies in Basingstoke and Deane District, Hampshire, a new model, based on realist perspectives such as those of Lévi-Strauss, is proposed. It is argued that such a perspective offers a more accurate insight into land conversion.