Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Consumption involves knowledge acquisition and act-ual usage—not simply shopping and purchasing—and therefore is intricately bound up with the practices, power relations, and discourses of everyday life. Widely accepted observations about the fluidity and multiple dimensions of identity do not adequately link situated practices with the repeated (re)constitution and destabilization of identity elements. Moreover, it is not only through the use of purchased goods to produce individual and collective difference that consumption and identity are connected. Circumstances in contemporary commodity societies demand that critical human geographical studies of consumption and identity unconventionally couple ethnography and political economy, that the practices of ‘safe’ geography and ‘safe’ representation be forsaken.

In this paper we consider practices of shopping in early modern (17th- and 18th-century) England, and various features of the spaces in which it occurred. We emphasise the density of retail shops in England; the reflexive relationships among ‘consumers’, shopkeepers, and consumption sites; and the inability of current theorisations based on the semiotics of advertising to address questions about consumers' understandings and identities in an age prior to widespread product advertising, department stores, and mass retail outlets. We contend that, then as now, peoples' interpretation of objects and identities involved practical, embodied knowledges rather than the sorts of explicit, intellectualised understandings central to most contemporary accounts of consumption. Such practical knowledges have been underresearched, and we point to some concepts in recent work which can assist in their theorising.

Increasingly attention is being paid to the ways in which consumption is a geographically constituted process. In this paper the notion of ‘displacement’ is used to reflect on these constitutive geographies, and in particular as a way of understanding contemporary consumption neither as a homogenising nor a locally bounded social activity. Two aspects of the geographies of displacement within consuming worlds are highlighted: the representations of origins, travels, and destinations—or geographical knowledges—that surround and in part comprise commodities; and the juxtapositional character of the arenas in which consumption takes and makes place. These geographies are illustrated and critically analysed through examples of commodities that deploy representations of the ‘global’, the ‘ethnic’, and the ‘hospitable’.

This is the second of two papers in which multiple criteria location problems (MCLPs) are discussed. In this paper two major approaches to locational decisionmaking are overviewed: optimizing decision rules (utility-function-based methods) and satisficing decision rules (goal-programming methods). Their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. From these two concepts a quasi-satisficing decision rule is developed and operationalized through a reference point method. A framework for an interactive decision support system (DSS) for tackling MCLPs is proposed. The system integrates a network model with the quasi-satisficing approach. It is argued that the DSS data and analytical components can be effectively integrated by means of the interactive decision support concept that involves a feedback exchange of information between a decisionmaker and a computer-based support system. This concept allows for the exploration of the locational decision problem and the alternative solutions both in decision space and in criterion outcome space.

This paper is set within the context of growing opiate use, and in it we develop and apply a modelling framework that is designed to forecast HIV prevalences and AIDS incidences that are consistent with various control scenarios related to the medium-term behaviour of the epidemic in Ireland. This task involves, first, fitting a process-based HIV model to AIDS incidence series for both Ireland and the United Kingdom to estimate national variations in the force of infection between the major risk populations. Second, these results are used to calibrate extended models which employ time-dependent parameters to imitate the effects of changed behaviours and other preventative actions. Third, the impacts of such interventions on the size and duration of the epidemic are illustrated by altering the values of the epidemiological or behavioural parameters at some time during the simulation interval. These results are then presented as control charts which record both the magnitude of the preventative action (such as a reduction in the number of sexual or needle-sharing partners) and the timing of its implementation. Last, in the discussion the implications of these findings for the development of health policy for HIV/AIDS in Ireland are considered. In particular, a comparison of the control charts suggests that, if it has not already taken place, the need for stringent interventions amongst intravenous drug users would appear to be imminent, whereas the position for gay men is less critical.

Over recent years the housing market has experienced a severe and prolonged recession. Doubts about the reliability of indices indicating housing-market trends have exacerbated the difficulties of actors in the market and have impeded appropriate policy responses by government. In this paper the differences both in data and in methodology are examined, differences that may go some way to explaining why the different series may seem to indicate different trends.

The transition from the state socialist model of development to one based upon a form of market capitalism is being met with a profound restructuring of the space-economies of Central and East European societies. This paper is an examination of the experience of this ‘transition’ in Slovakia. It is argued that, whereas a process of regional convergence took place under state socialism, we are presently witnessing the regional economic fragmentation of the Slovak economy. New forms of regional uneven development result from the combined effects of the collapse of the national economy, the globalisation and marketisation of economic life, and the interaction between local economic and industrial structures and strategies. By focusing upon the comparative dimensions of change in different regions we can begin to unpick some of the causal mechanisms underlying this trajectory of fragmentation. Of particular importance are the uneven development of new firm formation, foreign direct investment, and the expansion of trade with capitalist markets. The author examines the ability of regions in Slovakia to engage in these dual processes of marketisation and globalisation and finds that integration into the capitalist world economy is highly uneven.

During the postwar period as a whole homeownership in Britain has been generally considered to be a desirable form of tenure. For many observers the present, since 1989, downturn in the market—characterised by high levels of arrears, stagnant or falling prices, negative equity, and so on—is a temporary blip from which sooner or later the enthusiasm for owning will recover. In the first part of this paper we analyse the British Social Attitudes Surveys for 1989 and 1991 in order to identify which groups in the population have most reduced their support for owning. The main conclusions are that the largest reduction has been amongst those groups who were already most marginal to the tenure and can be related to experiences in and expectations of the future of the economy as well as to specific, rather than general, characteristics of the tenure. In the second part of the paper we suggest that the basis of these attitudinal changes is to be found in the changing nature of work in Britain with there being a contradiction between the long-term commitment of ownership as it is currently organised and the insecurities of the labour market.

Stated preference and choice models currently used in urban planning are focused on predicting single choices. In this paper the intention is to extend these modelling approaches to the case of sequential choice behaviour. Design strategies and model specifications that allow one to predict sequential choice are discussed. The approach is illustrated in a study of sequential mode and destination choice behaviour for shopping trips. The research findings suggest that the proposed approach may be a valuable extension of currently available stated preference and choice methods to analyse more complex forms of decisionmaking.