Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

We are concerned at one level in this paper with the debate over car-boot sales and their regulation. At another we are concerned with making connections between this and broader debates on retail regulation. After outlining briefly the literature on retail regulation, we argue that this work could benefit from thinking about spaces of exchange which are not dominated by ‘big’ retail capital. Car-boot sales represent one such space. We proceed by charting briefly the growth of the car-boot-sale phenomenon in Britain before going on to examine in detail the content of this debate, in which car-boot sales are represented as an enterprise culture out of control, as highly successful, characterised by a cast of petty criminals, and in desperate need of tighter regulation. In the remainder of the paper we argue that this representation, although it touches base with certain facets of car-boot sales, serves to legitimate the case for greater car-boot-sale regulation, and is intrinsically linked to political debate over deregulation and contracting out, particularly to the current monopolistic market operating environments enjoyed by many metropolitan authorities. We show that, although problematic to implement, the current regulatory environment is one which allows many local authorities both to exclude car-boot-sale operators from their area, and to exert a degree of control over their activities. Drawing on a number of case-study examples, we show that many local authorities have been exceedingly proactive in car-boot-sale regulation—using market law, planning law, partnerships, and ‘the market’ to control car-boot-sale operations. We then return to debates over retail regulation, maintaining that although this literature offers some conceptual purchase on the debate over car-boot-sale regulation, it has notable and important lacunae, particularly in terms of the conceptualisation of regulatory power. Moreover, we argue that the same literature would benefit from engaging with debates over exclusion and displacement: we argue here that the debate over car-boot-sale regulation needs to be interpreted more broadly as yet another instance of excluding ‘undesirable others' from certain spaces and spheres of exchange, and that such ideas could usefully be applied within the arena of conventional retail spaces.

In this paper we examine recently completed research in the Scottish housebuilding industry as it emerges from recession. A regionally differentiated downturn in construction activity has hit Scotland less severely than parts of England but the Scottish experience may nonetheless be able to shed light on prospects for the future. In the paper we use a structure-conduct-performance paradigm to classify the industry and to see where and by how much it departs from competitive market behaviour. It is clear from the evidence that the industry is restructuring and experiencing problems in a number of areas. With this in mind we discuss a range of short-run and medium-term policy directions that might change the future path of the sector. We conclude with a call for further industrial organisation research in this area, utilising the neoinstitutional economics insights of transactions costs, etc.

Sharecropping is neglected in the analysis of land use and rural change in modern western economies. Notwithstanding the Marxist classification of sharecropping as a form of wage labor, it is conceptualized in this paper as simple commodity production, based on the unity of household and enterprise. The organization of sharecropping is examined with the use of this conceptualization, although the review incorporates economic and other perspectives. Sharemilking in New Zealand is used to evaluate this framework at two scales, on representative dairy farms of average size and on large dairy farms owned by corporations. It is found to be a mutually beneficial relationship that promotes efficient production and high output. It also facilitates intergenerational transfer, provides a rung on the dairying ladder, and contributes to the reproduction of family-based dairying in New Zealand. Sharemilking is also the preferred means for recent corporate entrants to the industry to operate their large dairy farms. Currently, sharemilking is playing a role in the penetration of agriculture by capital.

In this paper, we attempt to contribute to the growing environmental justice debate by exploring environmental equity in the forty-nine counties of Ontario, Canada. We use multiple regression analysis to address a central research question: what variables predict the location of pollution emissions? Data were extracted from the 1993 National Pollutant Release Inventory and the 1991 Census of Canada to assess relationships among socioeconomic class variables, industrial and land-use variables, and pollution emissions. The results agree with the findings of recent US studies. Manufacturing employment, urbanization variables, dwelling value, and household income were all significantly related to pollution emissions. These relationships took the same direction as in most of the US studies. In total, the four variables account for about 63% of the variation in pollution emissions (adjusted R² = 0.626, p< 0.0001). Contrary to a hypothesis of environmental inequity, the household income variable displayed a positive relationship with pollution emissions. A conceptual model of the development process is formulated to explain the positive relationship between pollution emissions and income levels. We conclude the paper with suggestions for future research.

Like most European and North American metropolitan regions, that of Paris has for several decades been subject to a set of transformations. These have concerned urban spatial structures (population deconcentration, dispersion of employment, and the growth of new economic poles in the peripheral area), but also the sociodemographic structure of the population (rise in female labour participation rates, increasing importance of a highly qualified high-earning population, etc), and individual behaviour (desire for homeownership as well as the renewed interest of affluent groups for city-centre living, etc). Increased daily mobility in general and commuting in particular cannot be explained without reference to these different phenomena operating at both the microlevel and the macrolevel. For example, the sociodemographic characteristics of individuals have a considerable influence on the probability of the individuals being able to work near their home (or to live near their workplace). Account also has to be taken of the residential strategies of individuals, which are in turn linked to social position and life-cycle stage: choosing a place of residence in the urban periphery, in particular, has an impact on commuting patterns. But we can only understand the effects of residential strategies on commuting by analyzing the structures of the Île-de-France region (and in particular the housing market and sociogeographical pattern of employment).

Conjoint models of housing preferences typically derive preference functions from consumer responses to profiles of housing attributes generated experimentally. It is not readily evident how such housing preferences can be used to simulate actual housing choice. In this paper we provide conceptual considerations to link conjoint preferences to actual behaviour and discuss the principles of a simulation model. We illustrate the approach using as our example the effects of a rental subsidy on potential mobility.

In this paper we examine the potential contribution of time-space diaries to the analysis of tourism behaviour. We pay particular attention to how such diaries can provide insights into activities and tourism activity spaces which are not available from tourism ‘snapshot’ questionnaire surveys. These arguments are illustrated by the results of a time-space diary survey undertaken in Newquay, Cornwall, with which we explore differences in activities and activity spaces related to the types of accommodation used, occupational and family structures, diurnal and intradiurnal variations.

Recent studies of the ‘greening’ process in contemporary agricultural policy have been focused chiefly on its outcomes, rather than on an assessment of the public policy significance of the underlying process. We address this question by conceptualising how greening has been mediated by agricultural policy precepts of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union (EU). We examine how farmers' responsibilities pertaining to environmental protection and nature conservation were formalised by policy elites at the supranational level to be supportive of the core principles of the CAP. We suggest that this formalisation, culminating in 1992 with the EU's agri-environment Regulation, has enabled farming interests to use their new environmental management brief as a key element in the industry's struggle to legitimise its historic policy entitlements in the postproduction area. The theoretical basis of this paper draws upon Majone's discourse model of policy change, founded on political science and social learning literatures. We use the explanatory concepts of this model to clarify the evolution of the agri-environment initiative through textual analysis of published and confidential EU agriculture documents from the period 1973–91. Documentary evidence is corroborated by responses from semistructured interviews with senior European Commission officials in the agriculture Directorate, Directorate-General VI, involved in the policy's initiation. The core principles of the CAP emerge as crucial in shaping evolution of the EU agri-environment policy. We define the most important of these principles as occupancy of agricultural land with the aim of ensuring rural stability; and the perceived centrality of the small-scale and family farmer to the (re)structuring of rural space.