Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The institution of the family is changing in complex and inscrutable ways. Ideally, it continues as a space of intimacy, love, and morality within which young children may find care and nurturing. This mythic conception of the institution belies the complex gendered realities of parenting. This paper focuses on the institution of fatherhood and the work of fathering. Much of our understanding of what it is to be a father hinges on an ‘idea’ that does not embrace the ‘fact’ of fathering as a daily emotional practice that is negotiated, contested and resisted differently in different spaces. Our enduring myths of social reproduction do not seem to support forms of masculinity that encompass a sense of self that is nurturing and domestically orientated. The paper derives from a series of discussions with new fathers and mothers in San Diego, California. I focus explicitly on constructions of fatherhood and the work of fathering with a focus on fathers who called themselves ‘househusbands’ and ‘Mr Moms’. Although many of the heterosexual parents in the San Diego study thought of motherhood and fatherhood as ‘natural’ categories that gave meaning to their emotions and behaviors, further scrutiny suggests that emotions and behaviors are complexly woven, unraveled and sometimes detached from the work of parenting. The paper's main contribution is to demonstrate that even the most active fathers tend to see their role as ‘helping out’ their partners rather than taking the main responsibility for child-care themselves.

At the turn of the 20th century, children's play came under new and heightened scrutiny by urban reformers. As conditions in US cities threatened traditional notions of order, reformers sought new ways to direct urban-social development. In this paper I explore playground reform as an institutional response that aimed to produce and promote ideal gender identities in children. Supervised summer playgrounds were established across the United States as a means of drawing children off the street and into a corrective environment. Drawing from literature published by the Playground Association of America and a case study of playground management in Cambridge, MA, I explore playground training as a means of constructing gender identities in and through public space. Playground reformers asserted, drawing from child development theory, that the child's body was a conduit through which ‘inner’ identity surfaced. The child's body became a site through which gender identities could be both monitored and produced, compelling reformers to locate playgrounds in public, visible settings. Reformers' conviction that exposing girls to public vision threatened their development motivated a series of spatial restrictions. Whereas boys were unambiguously displayed to public audiences, girls' playgrounds were organised to accommodate this fear. Playground reformers' shrewd spatial tactics exemplify the ways in which institutional authorities conceive of and deploy space toward the construction of identity.

Geographers' renewed interest in institutions reflects traditional concerns with the way institutions can shape geographies and a more recent interest in the ways geographies are important in shaping institutions. In this paper the authors build on this second strand of work and are specifically concerned with children's use of new information and communications technologies in schools. The authors suggest that multilayered institutional cultures, which are shaped by official school policy, teacher practice, and pupil culture, are exceedingly important in shaping distinct cultures of computing in (and within) the case-study schools. The highly gendered character of these institutional cultures is reflected in the very different attitudes of male and female pupils to computers and in the patterns of use which generally favour boys rather than girls. These are negotiated through competing masculinities and femininities in the classroom context, gender identities which are played out through normative understandings of heterosexuality. The authors conclude that we may indeed characterise institutions as ‘precarious geographical achievements’, as suggested by Parr and Philo. Schools are embedded within wider places, are important sites for the negotiation of gender and sexual identities, and, as spaces, are in part shaped through our notions of gender and sexuality. This achievement is only precarious as institutions are not forever solidified in their current form but are open to change, both inadvertently and through the concerted actions of individuals.

The focus of this paper is the significance of an urban high school in the process of gender and sexual identity construction for a group of adolescent Latinas in Los Angeles. I explore multiple discourses of adolescent femininity, masculinity, sexual morality, and achievement conveyed through consecutive, in-depth group discussions with friendship groups of young Latinas. I argue that for these young women, studenthood is not a generic stage in the life course, but one that is embedded in society's expectations of and anxieties about young women. In and through dominant discourses and institutional practices they are constituted as vulnerable and as out of control in terms of sexual desire (their own as well as others' for them). In a ‘spatiality of protection’ they are positioned, precariously, as singularly responsible for both their academic diligence and their bounded sexuality in order to succeed as young women in high school and realise their goals as adult women beyond high school.

The volatility of commercial property markets in the United Kingdom has stimulated the development of explanatory models of ‘price’ determination. These models have tended to focus on the demand-side as the driver of change. A corollary of this is that, despite the fact that construction lags are known to exacerbate cyclical fluctuations, the supply-side adjustment mechanism has been subject to relatively little research effort. In this paper the authors develop a new model of commercial property markets in the United Kingdom. The model is adapted from Poterba's two-equation asset-market approach to modelling the housing market. The first equation is an arbitrage relationship where the return on property is made up of rent, as determined in the user market for property services, and the capital gain, which is dependent on the return on alternative assets. This can be interpreted as a ‘stock’ demand equation. The second equation explains that ‘flow’ supply is determined by real capital values. The long-run empirical generalisation of the two-equation model allows the authors to estimate two key behavioural parameters required in explaining supply-side adjustment to market change. First, the authors interpret the coefficient on the capital value variable in the supply equation as an estimate of the long-run ‘price’ elasticity of supply. Second, from the demand equation, they estimate the extent to which new supply can act as an ‘automatic stabiliser’ on property values. It is argued that although increases in demand drive up property values, new development is also initiated and will, in turn, dampen down the growth in real capital values. The equations are estimated for the office, industrial, and retail sectors. Although there are no comparable estimates of supply elasticities in the real estate economics literature, the results are generally consistent with prior knowledge. Estimates of the stabiliser effect are also plausible and, taken together, the supply-side parameters help provide insights required in understanding property market dynamics in the last twenty-five years.

Egocentric economic voting models are widely used in studies of voting behaviour in Great Britain: they suggest that people whose standard of living has risen recently as a perceived consequence of government policies are more likely to vote for the government's return to office than are those who blame government policies for a decline in their living standards. But many people whose living standards have increased vote against the government. Analyses reported here, using specially constructed bespoke neighbourhoods around the homes of respondents to the 1997 British Election Study, show that the latter group mainly live in areas of high local unemployment. This suggests a pattern of altruistic voting, of people who are prospering personally, but whose neighbours are not, voting against the incumbent government—a pattern confirmed by statistical analyses of both egocentric and sociotropic voting.

Fertility in rural areas such as the Governorate of Menoufia in Egypt may be influenced both by spatial factors (including the diffusion of innovations) and by essentially nonspatial factors (such as the availability of education for women and the percentage of adult women who are currently married). The nonspatial variables are available directly from censuses but the spatial component requires an accurate location of the villages to which the census data refer and then appropriate decomposition of the data into spatial and nonspatial components. We use IRS satellite imagery to classify the built area in a rural governorate in Egypt and then assign village-level census data to the centroids of those polygons and incorporate the data into a GIS. We then employ measures of global and local spatial statistics to conclude that in 1976 the combination of female illiteracy, proportion married, and spatial clustering accounted for 39% of the variation in fertility in Menoufia. In 1986 those same factors explained 51% of the variation in fertility. In 1976 about one third and in 1986 about half of the explained variability was due to the spatial component (‘diffusion’) and the other half due to a combination of demographic characteristics. Furthermore, between 1976 and 1986 there was a clear north-to-south drift of fertility, with lower fertility being clustered in the north and higher fertility clustered in the south.

Privatisation is one of the key elements of the package of neoliberal reforms in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe which collectively constitute the ‘sharp shock’ strategy. In this, privatisation is ascribed the role of redistributing and clarifying property rights, which is an assumed precondition for efficiency improvements in individual firms. In practice, the transformation is characterised by path dependency, cultural and political legacies, and uneven and partial reform of market institutions and of regulation. We contribute to the debate on the link between property rights and firm-level performance in three main ways. First, we analyse the tourism sector as a counterbalance to the emphasis in the existing literature on manufacturing and financial services; particular emphasis is given to the roles of ‘operators’ and the ‘nomenklatura’, and to complex, nonlinear shifts in property rights. Second, we assess the performance of tourism firms created by different forms of creative and distributive privatisation; this emphasises the diversity of property rights, market segmentation, and the capital and debt structures of firms. Third, the value of the concept of ‘recombinant’ property for analysing the complex and changing forms of property rights is critiqued. These arguments are illustrated through a case study of tourism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

The authors consider the definition and measurement of deprivation and of rurality in the context of health-care research. Parallels are drawn between the methodological issues involved in the measurement of deprivation and of rurality. An empirical study of the South West of England reveals the extent of disagreement between standard rurality measures; in particular, the authors suggest that rural deprivation will be poorly represented by the conventional approaches. They argue for the development of new approaches to the measurement of deprivation in rural areas, in which advantage is taken of contemporary data sources.