Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In Canada, paid domestic work is often associated with (im)migrant women from a variety of countries of origin. We critically analyse Canada's foreign domestic worker programmes, noting the shifting definitions of which nationalities should participate. We note how gendered, racialised, and classed constructions of national identities infuse these programmes. We then turn to an empirical analysis of how foreign domestic workers are constructed in Toronto, where demand is the highest in Canada. In particular, we investigate how the practices of domestic worker placement agencies reinforce images about which national identities supposedly have qualities that make them best suited to certain types of domestic work. Finally, we explore how domestic workers' constructions of their occupation are interwoven with their own national identities, the (partial) internalisation of others' images of them, and how they define themselves in relation to other domestic workers.

Since the Second World War, large-scale immigration has been promoted by successive Australian governments as vital to national development. Most accounts of the content and implementation of the resulting immigration policies, particularly until the demise of the White Australia policy in 1972, have emphasised their racism. The ideal immigrant under these policies, however, was not merely of particular birthplace and ethnicity, but also had specified gender and age characteristics. The author proposes that selection of immigrant settlers in Australia since World War 2 has been gendered as well as racialised, often combining particular sexisms with particular racisms and specifying the ways that ethnicity and gender should coexist in immigrants of different age groups. She notes implications for immigrants once in Australia (especially women) of the category under which they have entered the country. And she suggests that a new phase relating immigration to redefinition of the Australian nation, in which the temporary migration of skilled workers is preferred to their permanent migration, may be beginning; a phase whose modes of regulation and outcomes are as distinctively gendered as were those of their predecessors.

In this paper I consider issues of transnational sexual citizenship. I examine the issue of international migration of lesbians and gay men. For lesbian and gay prospective migrants, obtaining citizenship rights is difficult owing to the laws affording status being based on bloodlines and marriage. This immediately excludes lesbian and gay relationships, which are generally not recognised for the purpose of obtaining rights of residence. I explore these issues in the context of the different policies towards the migration of lesbians and gay men in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.

The aim of this paper is to develop and test a theoretical model for the explanation of moving plans among elderly persons. This model of moving behaviour of the elderly is more or less similar to the ‘residential satisfaction model of relocation’, developed by Speare, and consists of three sets of variables: (1) background characteristics (personal characteristics, discrepancies with regard to several housing and neighbourhood characteristics, and social bonds); (2) level of housing and neighbourhood dissatisfaction; and (3) moving plans. The main feature of this model is the intervening role of the two dissatisfaction variables: it is assumed that the background characteristics influence the levels of housing and/or neighbourhood dissatisfaction, which in turn affect the moving plans.

In order to test this model, covariance structure analysis is utilized among a sample of elderly residents in two districts of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Although the results support the residential mobility model to a large extent—the levels of housing and neighbourhood dissatisfaction act mostly as intervening variables—some unexpected findings emerge. In addition, the percentage of unexplained variance in moving plans is relatively large. For this reason, a number of suggestions are given to extend the theoretical model towards a better explanation of moving plans of elderly persons. One of these suggestions, that is, including the appropriateness of the dwelling in the near future as an intervening variable, is tested. It is shown that this factor plays an important intervening role, which implies that the elderly do not consider to move only because they are dissatisfied with their living conditions at the moment, but that those who expect their house to be inappropriate in the short term are more inclined to move. Therefore, in future research on the moving behaviour of the elderly it is necessary to take this anticipatory behaviour into account.

Techniques from population and community ecology and from conservation biology are applied to the growing tuberculosis (TB) epidemic now focused in many US urban minority communities. Modification of a simple spatial model of TB to include the effects of recurring social, political, economic, and other catastrophes shows that a sudden increase in the rate of such factors can markedly and synergistically lower the threshold area density of susceptible population needed for transmission of the disease from an epicenter into surrounding regions, triggering a sudden outbreak of disease from previously endemic or declining epicenters. Detailed application is made to New York City, where a recurrent process of fire, housing abandonment, and forced population displacement affecting poor minority communities threatens to spread multiple drug-resistant strains of the disease throughout a twenty-four-county metropolitan region containing nearly twenty million people. Our work is to be contrasted with that of Blower et al, who concluded that improvements in social conditions were a relatively minor factor in disease control because of the long relaxation time of the infection process.

The adaptation of urban spaces to cope with increased automobile traffic has been called the ‘building of automobile cities’. This is a vague and otherwise politically naive interpretation of these important changes in capitalist societies. Cars do not run on their own and one has to ask who is behind the wheels, and for what purposes. I argue that these spatial transformations are definite economic and political undertakings related to capitalist modernization processes, in which the middle classes, as preferential partners of ruling classes, play the most important role. In these contexts, the automobile turns out to be an essential means for the reproduction of the middle classes in their pursuit of social mobility. Therefore I argue that these large transformations should instead be seen as the ‘building of middle-class cities’.

This paper is about how São Paulo was transformed into a middle-class city. In it I emphasize the period from 1960 to 1980, when the city population increased from 3.6 million to 8.5 million, and 1.6 million new automobiles were put into circulation. In this period Brazil experienced a highly dynamic capitalist modernization process, with high rates of GNP growth, under authoritarian (and often repressive) political rule. New middle-class sectors were generated, supported by the concentration of income and by their ideological commitment to the new regime. The city space was physically transformed to allow for a new pattern of circulation which was directly related to the new economic activities and the new lifestyle of these middle-class sectors, for whom the automobile became a vital means of social reproduction. The middle classes were represented, inside the state, by transportation planners who promoted the ideology of modernization. The space was then reshaped in a way which favored the circulation needs of the middle class population, in its prime role of driver, rather than the needs of the majority of the population, in their primary roles of pedestrian and captive public transportation user. Moreover, the mobility and fluidity needs of these selected middle-class sectors were pursued regardless of the safety and environmental consequences of the new circulation pattern.

Similar processes can be identified in the developing world where other middle-class cities have been created. In spite of social and political differences, these processes share the objective of readapting space to ease the circulation of the social sectors which are relevant to economic accumulation and political legitimation.

In this paper, I seek to explore how the circulation of water is embedded in the political ecology of power, through which the urbanization process unfolds. I attempt to reconstruct the urbanization process as simultaneously a political-economic and ecological process. This will be discussed through the exploration of the history of the urbanization of water in Guayaquil, Ecuador. As approximately 36% of its two million inhabitants has no access to piped potable water, water becomes subject to an intense social struggle for control and/or access. Mechanisms of exclusion from and access to water, particularly in cities which have a problematic water-supply condition, lay bare how both the transformation of nature and the urbanization process are organized in and through mechanisms of social power. In order to unravel the relations of power that are inscribed in the way the urbanization of nature unfolded I document and analyze the historical geography of water control in the context of the political ecology of Guayaquil's urbanization. In short, Guayaquil's urbanization process is written from the perspective of the drive to urbanize and domesticate nature's water and the parallel necessity to push the ecological frontier outward as the city expands. I show how this political ecology of urbanization takes place through deeply exclusive and marginalizing processes that structure relations of access to and exclusion from access to nature's water.

In this paper the concern is with the increasing number of methods which are available for the georeferencing of population and socioeconomic data. The majority of routine users of such data will tend to treat georeferencing of a transparent process, and will not question the impacts which georeferencing methods may have on substantive applications. In this paper four levels of geographical resolution in England and Wales are considered, between the most detailed census geography and individual property locations, and the potential for the creation of hybrid georeferences by the combination of existing data products is explored. With examples from a study area in Cardiff, South Wales, the interrelationship of the major data products is explored, with reference to basic household counts and incidence data. On the basis of these experiments, the use of hybrid georeferencing systems is reconsidered, highlighting potential applications as well as problems of data standards, confidentiality, and comparability.

The study of manufacturing—service linkages emerged as an important research theme in economic geography during the 1980s. However, it is arguably becoming marginalised. Some recent contributions have begun to criticise the approach, calling instead for the development of a more ambitious research agenda which illuminates the nature and role of all services, whether they are producer or consumer oriented, and supplied to manufacturers, to other service organisations, or to the general public. In this paper I contend that the analysis of manufacturing—service linkages remains a valid focus of study, but argue that future research needs to be accompanied by a philosophical change. A realist conceptual framework for the analysis of manufacturing—service linkages is developed which, it is suggested, improves significantly on the positivist and Marxist approaches hitherto employed. I conclude with an assessment of the main strengths and weaknesses of the realist approach and a brief consideration of its wider potential for research involving services.