Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper I propose a model of gentrification based on the notion that gentrification closes a gap between the flow of housing services fixed in a particular vintage of the housing stock and those available from the most modern properties. This gap is not a rent gap, therefore, but an investment gap. Modelled in this manner, gentrification appears as a problem of maximization under constraint and a subsubset of general home improvements. It is a transient and historically unique (noncyclical) phenomenon. Similarly, these constraints and the opportunities currently available to overcome them exist only in a particular historical context, the peculiarities of which must also be taken into account if gentrification is fully to be explained. In particular, these include the development of domestic technologies and the 19th-century conditions of supply of the housing available currently for gentrifying. I concentrate on the supply-side issues in gentrification, but deny that the demand-side issues can be handled via explanations based on postindustrialism, postmodernity, or the rise of a new middle class.

The Hoover index, calculated across counties and larger spatial units, is again declining—signalling a renewal of population deconcentration in the United States. After increasing for several decades, the index declined in the 1970s when nonmetropolitan population growth surged past metropolitan-area growth, but the index rose in the 1980s as metropolitan population growth recovered and surpassed nonmetropolitan growth. We update these trends, introducing careful controls for changes in metropolitan-area boundaries, and we incorporate a ‘functional urban region’ approach. Although the nonmetropolitan population growth rate is still below the metropolitan rate, we conclude that in the 1990s some features of the ‘turnaround’ of the 1970s have returned.

In this paper I rethink some of the premises in industrial-era social ontologies by rethinking how hybridized agencies, like cyborgs, actor networks, or humachines, decenter anthropocentric modernist conceptions of ‘man and the environment’. By using postmodernist claims that we now operate after ‘the end of Nature’ or ‘the death of Nature’, I build this paper from such conceptual hyperbole to explore how cyborg life-forms or humachinic social formations are reshaping the natural and social environments of contemporary fast capitalism on a global scale. These terms of analysis, in turn, could improve our understandings of the built and yet to be built environments in advanced technological economies and societies.

During the postwar long boom, the economic, political, and cultural configurations adopted to regulate the crisis tendencies of capitalism in New Zealand were broadly those of social democracy. Key features of social democratic policy in this period were the assistance of primary production through subsidies, the protection of domestic industry, a well-developed welfare state, and the promotion of economic development in marginal places and regions. These regulatory arrangements found expression as a distinctive geography of the long boom. In small towns this was typified by clusters of agencies associated with the state's intervention in production and its provision of infrastructure. Local employment was often concentrated in these agencies. We examine the nature of such a geography during the long boom in Reefton, a small town on the West Coast of the South Island, and its subsequent reworking during the restructuring of the 1980s. This reworking is explored through a focus on the major state and private sector workplaces within the town's economic base and their employees. As key influences upon the newly emerging geography of the town, the forms of local governance that are being adopted in order to attract the spending and investment lost during restructuring are examined.

In this paper I endeavour to show that town planning in Britain, although placed within the ‘public domain’, is largely operating in accordance with the principles of private law. I also argue that town planning is an integral part of the land and property market which itself is conditioned by the definition of the rights in land and property. These rights are shown to be grounded in the traditions of the private land law as evolved over centuries from the feudal system of land and property relations. I therefore begin with an examination of development under the leasehold system in London during the 18th and 19th centuries and find that landowners, in their efforts of maintaining the value of their estate, conducted a form of environmental control very similar to what planners do nowadays as part of their activities in development control. It is then shown how the old system was unable to cope with the pressures of industrialisation and rapidly expanding urban areas. Politicians, royal commissions, and expert committees sought to adapt the leasehold system and to reform existing property rights to accommodate a newly emerging property market. These efforts finally culminated in the 1925 Property Statutes. At the same time governments pursued efforts of devising new structures of urban governance. However, these measures generally were piecemeal and their implementation was fraught with difficulties. A new approach, recognising the interdependence between market processes, market regulation, and ‘public improvement’, were championed by the radical Liberals towards the end of the 19th century. This philosophy is reflected in the enactment of the first planning statutes of 1909 and 1919. Both Acts made provisions for the retainment of development value for reasons of social justice and the funding of urban infrastructure. Subsequent enactments have tended to isolate town planning not only from housing but also from the land market and the issue of betterment, and thus from urban governance. The reason, it is argued, is that property as well as planning legislation are still hemmed in the strait-jacket of the private land law. I conclude that the isolation of town planning within a fragmented ‘public domain’ bodes ill for the future of our cities.

In this two-part paper we examine some of the market characteristics of urban child-care services. Part 1 is concerned with theory. In it we review the contemporary child-care and preschool education service issue; consider questions of market efficiency and equity, and formulate these in a general equilibrium model which generates testable household labour-supply and service-supply functions. In part 2 we report on an empirical study in which aggregate versions of these functions are calibrated for the supply of labour from mothers with young children and for the supply of childminding services. We focus on the childminder sector, which is of interest as a personal social service that has traditionally been left to the private sector and as a private service with relatively easy entry and exit. These models yield interesting results which indicate on the one hand that access to child-care services is a binding constraint on female labour-market participation and on the other, that the supply of child-care services is quite unresponsive to demand.

In this paper we use data from the 1% British Household Sample of Anonymised Records (SAR) to examine coresident households which have been formed by the movement of people under the age of sixty five into the homes of elderly people. The SAR does not give information on why such moves have taken place. However, an examination of the characteristics of the movers and their elderly receivers, and the relationships between the two, sheds some light on the issue. Analysis shows that most movement into the homes of elderly people is by people who are related to them—mainly their children and their children's partners and/or children. It is often assumed that coresidence between elderly people and their younger relatives is driven by the care needs of the older generation. However, in this paper we cast doubt on this simple assumption, arguing that it is equally necessary to look at the characteristics and circumstances of movers in order to understand coresidence in the elderly households under examination.

In this paper I examine the policies of leading multiple retailers in the UK with regards to property development, ownership, and investment. The discussion is set in the context of recent work by Clark and Wrigley in which they seek to relate locational decisions and other elements of corporate strategy to the economic concept of sunk costs. This concept is shown to be relevant to the recent experience of some British retailers which have incurred irrecoverable costs through overpayment for ‘premium’ sites for grocery store development. More generally, property development and ownership have in recent years become important activities for leading retail firms. Policies to separate property ownership and management from the mainstream retail trading function appear to have been successful, but some companies have lost money through overambitious programmes of property development. The conclusion is that, though retail development inevitably incurs sunk costs both at entry and exit, these are for most companies outweighed by the long-term growth of land and property values in the United Kingdom. Sunk costs may therefore be of less significance than in other types of private enterprise.

A number of incentive schemes have recently been established which pay farmers and landowners for the provision of additional public access to the countryside. In this paper these schemes are subjected to a value for money (VFM) appraisal as a means of assessing the public benefits from government and agency expenditures. The evidence indicates that such schemes typically produce variable but limited VFM, reflecting deficiencies both in the quality of the access experiences provided and in the information flow to the public. Mechanisms for increasing efficiency are discussed. The current expansion of public expenditure on access, despite evidence of limited benefits to users, is analysed by examining the positions of actors and interest groups within the policy process.

The law of retail gravitation (LRG) and the economic law of market areas (LMA) both seek to define the market-area boundary between two competing centres. Each law is reviewed and then characterised in terms of the principal dimensions of the market-area boundary. It is shown that under certain conditions the two laws correspond exactly, so that the LMA is able to lend some economic support for the LRG. If, however, approximate correspondence between the laws is permitted, this support is considerably greater. The two laws are also viewed within the broader framework of an hierarchically structured urban system. Exact correspondence between the laws is again possible under particular circumstances, but the descriptive capacity of the LMA is greatly increased when approximation is allowed. Finally, consideration is given to the possibility of modifying the LMA in order to take account of the effects of nonprice competition.

The author critically examines the Single Regeneration Budget (SRB)—the latest urban initiative to be introduced by the British government—through the use of urban regime theory. Set against the backdrop of the shift from government to governance, the SRB is read as a mechanism through which those occupying ‘spaces of governance’ are further empowered. With the real costs of the competition hidden, the author seeks to unpack the bidding partnerships, seeing the SRB as a dynamic process. Grounded in the USA, urban regime theory seeks to explain the rise and management of coalitions. In conclusion, the author suggests that the discourses surrounding the SRB, which emphasise empowerment, the role of the ‘community’, and the importance of coalitions in procuring discretionary funding, outweighs the monies available and that instead it is participation in the competitive process that is important.