Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In recent years there has been growing interest in the use of computers within qualitative geography. In this paper we review the types of software packages that have been adopted and outline some of their distinctive features. We discuss the intellectual and institutional reasons for the interest in the software and highlight the ways in which such reasons have shaped the use made of these packages. We argue that only a contextual account of how packages are adopted, adapted, and used can explain the situation in geography. Furthermore we suggest that the archaeologies underlying the packages—their theoretical presuppositions—are remarkably homogeneous and need to be clearly understood before deciding how the packages might be used. We outline how some of these presuppositions have affected the ways in which the packages have been used, and develop—from our own experiences—some points about informal networks of adoption and institutional contexts. The point of this is to suggest the minimal role played by formal software guides and manuals in choosing whether and how to use a package. The paper outlines the current ‘state of play’ and raises issues of future use to be addressed in a second paper on this theme. Our intention is neither to sell a particular package, nor to say “to do X, use package Y”, because such recommendations are often misleading. Rather, our aim is to provoke discussion about the use of software packages in qualitative geography.

We adapt recent perspectives on the resilience of ecosystems in a stochastic environment to analysis of the effects of public policies of ‘planned shrinkage’ on stressed US urban minority neighborhoods. The ‘synergism of plagues’—a self-reinforcing, interactive mix of contagious urban decay and deterioration in both public health and public order—emerges in the course of a sudden ‘phase transition’ from community-spanning geographically focused social networks within ghetto neighborhoods to a condition of fragmented and isolated subnets. This transition occurs because instabilities inherent in the marginalization of ethnic ghetto neighborhoods synergistically amplify externally imposed stressors, most notably public policies of disinvestment. The amplification, a short-time version of stochastic resonance, may be quite large.

Our work implies that continued subjection of marginalized US urban minority neighborhoods to public policies of ‘planned shrinkage’ can trigger similar but larger scale—regional and national—transitions in patterns of public health and public order, ultimately placing much of the three quarters of the country's population living in or near central cities at significantly increased risk.

Recent research has examined the relationship between certain indicators of environmental quality and income, concluding on the basis of econometric estimation that in some cases an inverted-U relationship, which has been called an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), exists between these variables. There has been speculation on the implications of this for economic and environmental policy. In this paper I examine this research as a whole and find that unequivocal evidence for an EKC relationship is very scant; that there are important indicators which show a monotonically increasing relationship; that even where there may be an EKC relationship, most of the world's population is still on the section of the curve that is increasing, so that growth in income on the basis of this relationship would result in considerable further environmental damage; and that reviews of overall environmental quality even in the richest countries show that it is still declining. I conclude that from the point of view of environmental sustainability the income—environment relationship is still very problematic and that determined environmental policy will be required if future income growth is to be compatible with sustainable development.

In this paper I assess the value of regulation theory for studying transformations in governance at the local level, focusing on the issue of local economic development. Adopting a third-generation approach, regulation theory is recognised as having varied success at theorising local governance. More advanced third-generation approaches offer some useful concepts that require integration through mid-level concepts. This is to be contrasted to approaches which ‘read off’ local transformation from broader macroeconomic change. Both approaches are, however, trapped in the regulationist enigma, defined in the paper as the difficulty of employing regulation theory to theorise local transformations in local governance. In order to solve the enigma, I utilise concepts from Jessop's strategic-relational state theory. This approach stresses, amongst other things, the political nature of state intervention. Jessop's approach is, however, not sufficiently sensitive to space and I introduce the notion of spatial selectivity to understand adequately the dynamics of local change. Spatial selectivity implies that the state has a tendency to privilege certain places through accumulation strategies, state projects, and hegemonic projects. The process of geographical privileging, which is implied by the notion of spatial selectivity, takes on both material and ideological forms. This tentative concept is explored through a reworking of theoretical approaches to Thatcherism. I conclude by highlighting issues that spatial selectivity needs to address, namely uneven development and structure—strategy—agency dialectics.

The San Francisco Bay Area has taken on a distinct polycentric metropolitan form, with three tiers of hierarchical employment centers encircling downtown San Francisco, the region's primary center. In this paper it is found that polycentric development is associated with differentials in suburban and urban commute trip times: commute trips made by employees of suburban centers are shorter in duration than commute trips made by their counterparts in larger and denser urban centers. Differentials were even greater, however, with respect to commuting modal splits. Lower density, outlying employment centers averaged far higher rates of drive-alone automobile commuting and insignificant levels of transit commuting. Smaller, outlying centers were also the least self-contained, with a large number averaging twenty or more times as many external as internal commutes. The effects of housing availability and prices on the residential locational choices of those working both in urban and in suburban employment centers are also investigated in this paper. Locational choices are stratified by occupational class and type of center. High housing prices in and around employment centers were found to displace workers to residences in other subregions, except in the case of professional workers in fast-growing, outlying centers. These workers were attracted to higher-priced nearby housing. In the empirical analysis, significant segmentation in housing choices among workers in fast-growing suburban centers was found. This could be partly due to selective land-use policies implemented by local governments in these areas.

Though it is widely recognized that the producer services are among the fastest growing industries in advanced economies, there is little research documenting development experiences of establishments within these industries. In this paper we address this topic by illustrating types of strategic behaviors exhibited by producer service firms and the effectiveness of these behaviors, developing a taxonomy of firm segments, and relating types of strategic behavior to this taxonomy. The paper is based on results from 444 in-depth interviews. Key variables addressed in the analysis are drawn from the industrial sociology and business strategy literature and include organizational structure, age, dynamics of client and geographic markets, and changes in services supplied.

In most countries the taxi industry is highly regulated and in cases where deregulation has been attempted, positive outcomes have not always been evident. The taxi industry was one of the very last to be deregulated by the New Zealand government as part of its sweeping restructuring of the country's industry in the 1980s. The author looks at the impact of that 1989 Act. The 1989 legislation, which removed the quantitative controls (deregulation), has been followed by a tripling of the number of companies in the metropolitan centres and a massive increase in the number of taxi cabs. A much wider range of taxi services now exploit different market segments and offer a wider geographic coverage. These changes have been accompanied by a decline in fares in real, if not nominal, terms. As expected, the influx of new players has necessitated the imposition of additional quality controls. Customers have benefited from greater numbers of cabs, shorter waiting times, and a greater range of services. Many more driving jobs have been opened up, although this is widely believed to have been accompanied by reduced incomes and longer hours until the market expanded. The larger firms which existed prior to deregulation have attempted to consolidate their market share in the face of increased competition from newer taxi organisations. There has also been increased competition between taxi and public transport operations as a variety of taxi companies tender for selected routes.

Earlier economic models of city size have either focused on urban agglomeration effects while ignoring the spatial structure of the rural hinterland, or made unrealistic assumptions (for example, uniform rural population distribution) so as to simplify the problem. Following the classic von Thünen framework, we present a two-sector spatial equilibrium model of a city located at the center of an agricultural hinterland. The city produces industrial goods, and the rural area produces agricultural goods. Both goods are consumed both by urban and by rural residents. Market equilibrium for these goods determines: (1) the spatial size of the region, (2) the urbanization ratio (urban to total population) and the population size of the city, and (3) the rural spatial structure (wage, population distribution, land rent, and agricultural yield). Given various sets of exogenous parameters pertaining to the industrial, agricultural, and transportation production functions and to population preferences, the model is solved numerically, and response functions are estimated and analyzed.