Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

It has been argued in the feminist literature that the state often contributes to patriarchal constructions of women's subordinate positions by providing political space for women's incorporation into civil society not as individuals and citizens but as members of a family belonging to the private sphere. In this paper the authors explore this question in the broad context of international labour migration in the Asia Pacific region, where migrant women are moving as paid reproductive labour in large numbers from less-developed countries to rapidly industrialising urban nodes in the region. The authors ground the ensuing issues in the specific case of Singapore, a country currently engaged in constructing a sense of nationhood among its people. Even as there is now some debate on the emergence of civil society as part of the nation-building project and possibly a larger role for social agencies which lie outside the rubric of state parameters, there are groups of women who are excluded from this embryonic discourse. One such group is the more than 100 000 female migrant domestic workers (from the Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and a number of other South and Southeast Asian countries) who, as women, domestics, and noncitizens, are identified with the confines of the private sphere and proscribed from public space in the dominant (and emerging) discourses. With use of a questionnaire survey, as well as in-depth interviews with foreign domestic workers, their employers, and a number of social organisations, the authors examine the politics of exclusion at the margins of society. The aims are to explore the types of social organisations which have opened up some ‘space’ within their structures for foreign domestic workers, as well as interest groups which have certain claims to represent these women, and to clarify the roles these marginal spaces play. This helps illumine the way these women interact with mainstream Singaporean society beyond the confines of the domestic sphere and broadens the understanding of the boundaries of civil society in Singapore and the politics of being ‘inside’ and ‘outside’.

Significant differences exist between national, regional, and local housing markets in the extent to which land is available for new housing development and in the planning regime which regulates the supply of land. The author examines the impact of different levels and forms of planning restraint on the process of market adjustment, including effects on house and land prices, on quantity of new housing supplied, and on density and related characteristics. The emphasis is on modelling the process of response in the medium term in a way which illuminates the interaction with demographic processes of household formation and migration. Use is made of a simulation model developed on the basis of cross-sectional data for local areas in England.

An examination is made of how the development of the Internet in Japan is likely to affect civic rights and the relationship between citizens and their government. This was undertaken to determine if the trajectory of Internet development in Japan, with its distinct locational and corporate biases, has followed the predictions of two prominent Japanese commentators: the visionary Kumon Shumpei who espoused an expansive international perspective that citizens will be transformed into ‘netizens’ in a virtual community; and the media analyst Kogawa Tetsuo, whose pessimistic views were targeted primarily at a national audience and concerned the adaptability of the Japanese to the ‘permanent autonomous zones’ created by information technology. The observations of these commentators on the relationship between the Internet and civil society are tested in an examination of the degree to which the social and political uses of the Internet have followed their conjectures by means of two case studies: the protest movements over United States bases in Okinawa, and the Nibutani Dam in southern Hokkaido—an area with a predominantly indigenous Ainu population. Although the authors report evidence that the Internet has extended the sphere of grass-roots political activity, they believe its effect is likely to be limited until there is a restructuring of Japanese political organisations and attitudes.

In this paper microlevel politics and conflict associated with social and economic change in the countryside and linked changes in rural governance are explored with a focus upon research carried out on a recent rural policy initiative aimed at local ‘empowerment’. This acts as a touchstone for a wider theoretical discussion. The paper is theorised within a conceptual framework derived and extended from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others in order to explore case studies of the English Countryside Commission's Parish Paths Partnership scheme. The micropolitics involved with this scheme are examined and used to highlight more general issues raised by increased ‘parish empowerment’ in the ‘postrural’.

In this paper I consider the issue of identifying the effects of spatial structure and the origin and destination attributes on interregional migration. A decomposition approach is developed based on migration models. The interprovincial migration data in China over the period 1985–1990 are used to estimate a gravity migration model, an extended gravity model, a Poisson gravity model, and a multilevel Poisson model, which are then used to decompose the various effects on migration in China.

The question to be addressed in this paper is that of the agglomeration and dispersion forces that are likely to account for the location of people and jobs in rural areas and the way these forces explain spatial patterns in rural areas depending on urban influence. Economic geography models may provide suitable tools with which to investigate the organization of rural areas. We first review these models, focusing on dispersion forces, which rest on land consumption and transport costs. We then suggest a set of hypotheses concerning the main forces at work in rural areas. Intensity of agglomeration economies is hypothesized to be related to urban size, which in turn induces increasing land rents and finally agglomeration diseconomies. Such diseconomies encourage population spread around the city and in a second stage a possible partial decentralization of population-serving firms, which seek proximity to households because of shopping transport costs. The consequences in terms of spatial patterns are that beyond a certain threshold of city size, decentralization of population-serving firms occurs, giving rise to secondary service centers, whereas services remain concentrated in the center for smaller cities. Empirical results concerning population densities, labor-force exchanges, and distribution of residentiary services in labor-market areas surrounding cities in six French regions are presented.

Shifts in job accessibility reflect, in part, the degree to which land use and transportation decisions help bring job opportunities closer to labor forces. In this paper we argue for the wider use of accessibility indicators as part of the long-range transportation planning process. As a case example, changes in job accessibility indices are traced for the San Francisco Bay Area from 1980 to 1990, computed for 100 residential areas and the region's 22 largest employment centers. Indices are refined based on occupational match indicators that weigh the consistency between residents' employment roles and labor-force occupational characteristics at workplaces. The analysis reveals that peripheral areas tend to be the least job accessible. Moreover, employment centers that are home to highly skilled professional workers are generally the most accessible when occupational matching is accounted for. This is thought to reflect the existence of housing markets that are more responsive to the preferences of upper-income workers. Our analyses also show that residents of low-income, inner-city neighborhoods generally face the greatest occupational mismatches. Through a path analysis, the variable ‘race’ was found to be far more strongly associated with unemployment than was job accessibility, however, even after controlling for educational levels and other factors. We conclude that an important purpose of tracking changes in accessibility is to provide feedback on the degree to which resource allocation decisions in the urban transportation field are helping to redress serious inequities in accessibility to jobs, medical facilities, and other important destinations.

It is widely held in the social sciences that behaviour patterns can be predicted from knowledge of peoples' attitudes. Electoral studies in Great Britain largely accept this, but there has been little formal testing of the general hypothesis. In building on work reported in a previous paper, we discuss formal tests of the predictive link between attitudes and voting behaviour, and use voting intentions, strength of party identification, and changes in each as the dependent variables in a series of discriminant analyses. These are reasonably successful, but not overwhelmingly so.

The author examines how business associations legitimate their input to environmental policy as ‘rational’ and how they exclude others from the policy debate by characterising them as ‘nonrational’. This is compared with the theories of reflexive modernisation, such as Beck's, and with ecological modernisation. With the aid of an empirical case study of business associations and their environmental lobbying, the author shows how business associations both draw on and shore up a rhetoric of ‘expertise’ and ‘rationality’ in an attempt to legitimate their own ‘subpolitical’ role whilst evading the accountability attached to more politically visible groups.

Building upon a detailed empirical analysis of the local understanding of hazards in one geographical area, in this paper we offer a critique of both the psychometric and ‘risk society’ approaches to the relationship between lay and scientific groups. Specifically, we explore the connection between lay understandings of risk and the contexts of their development and application with regard to one industrial hazard site in northeast England. Rather than presenting local knowledges as fixed or separable from cultural practices and social worldviews, we examine the relational and active construction of environmental understandings—noting the significance of such factors as local memory, observation and evidence, definitions of expertise, risk and credibility, and moral discourses. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relationship between knowledge, understanding, and context. We also consider the wider significance of this case study both for environmental policy and for more theoretical treatments of science and its publics.