Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Three types of proximity are argued to be present in the research material in this paper. First, put simply, geographic proximity refers to two entities being physically next to each other. Second, cultural proximity refers to two entities being relationally close to one another, with geographic proximity often not being required. Third, network proximity refers to two entities being associated through or with a third entity, again with geographic proximity often not being required. Geographies of links between entities—people, enterprises, places, etc—trace networks of relations. Geographic proximity remains crucial, but the relational spaces of geographic networks that selectively connect entities in different ways around the world are just as important. In this paper some elements from actor-network theory are used to approach the investigation of multiple proximities. The argument is exemplified through a recent case study of the restructuring of trans-port logistics of newsprint manufactured in Australia.

Housing provision in China has undergone significant changes since economic reform. In the early stage of reform the objective was to solve the problems that are internal to the socialist economy, namely unrecoverable housing investment and housing shortages. The state adopted policies to ‘commodify’ and ‘decentralise’ housing provision. The mode of provision was transformed from a centrally allocated budget to shared investment contributed by state work-units, local governments, and individual households. Since the 1990s Chinese cities have seen increased foreign investment in real estate development and consequently experienced an unprecedented building boom. Little is know about the impacts of globalisation on housing development. The purpose of this paper is to examine the changes in housing investment and to highlight the dilemma of housing ‘commodification’ in the process of globalisation. Specifically, foreign investment contributed to initial capital formation in real estate development and more importantly helped to create a marketised housing segment. The buoyant market price demonstrated the profitability of real estate, thus attracting more capital into housing development. The combined effect of marketisation and globalisation has led to increasing social spatial differentiation and inadequate housing provision to marginal social groups.

The concepts of segregation and social distance have long been used to explain the social environment of stratified residential space. However, the social significance of occupation, though acknowledged, has rarely been applied spatially. In this study, we employed these three concepts to examine the social environment of the entire metropolitan employment space as defined by job location. Smallest space analysis was used to identify and compare the sociospatial segregation produced by workers' occupational distribution in employment and residential spheres. This empirical study focused on metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israel's largest urban area, using the latest available national census. Our findings show that the social milieu of employment differed from that of residence: blue-collar workers were segregated from white-collar workers; managers, clerks, and salespersons formed the core group; and gender and ethnic divisions characterised the sociospatial realm of employment. Overall, most employees changed their social environment when they went to work. The study indicates that spatial segregation, within each sphere and between the two spheres, is intrinsic to the capitalist – patriarchal order.

I attempt in this paper to conceptualize a notion of spatial justice in order to point to the dialectical relationship between (in)justice and spatiality, and to the role that spatialization plays in the production and reproduction of domination and repression. I argue that the city provides a productive ground for the formation of a spatially informed ethics of political solidarity against domination and repression. A ‘triad’ is articulated to inform such politics, which brings together three notions: the spatial dialectics of injustice, the right to the city, and the right to difference. The notion of spatial justice is employed as a theoretical underpinning to avoid abusive interpretations of Lefebvrian rights in a liberal framework of individual rights. The case of French urban policy is used for illustrative purposes. Finally, the notion of égaliberté is introduced as a moral ground on which the triad may be defended.

Debates about the relationship between globalization and state power have often relied on a static view of spatial scales as discrete stages for social interaction. Focusing instead on the ‘production of scale’, several researchers have argued that globalization leads to rescaling of the state, as regulatory powers are realigned both upwards to supranational regimes and downwards to regional, local, and urban governance structures. Although this perspective quite usefully treats scale as relational, this ‘glocalization’ argument remains somewhat schematic and does not allow for a full range of possible scalar configurations. Highlighting instead heterogeneity of scalar relations, in this paper I analyze the ways that United States' fishery development in the North Pacific produced both national power and transnational economic activity. After extending political jurisdiction over waters up to 200 nautical miles from shore, the United States implemented fishery development policies that emphasized the ‘Americanization’ of the Alaska pollock fishery at the expense of an international, particularly Japanese, fishery. The outcomes of these policies, however, have been international partnerships, foreign direct investment, and increased international trade, all of which have made the pollock industry simultaneously national and transnational. Efforts to assert and implement control over ocean territory produced both the national state and globalization, which were mutually reinforcing rather than antagonistic. Treating national states and the global economy as complex, contingent scalar configurations facilitates analysis of the causes of variability in state – economy relations.

There have been many claims that the introduction of parental choice for schools in the United Kingdom would lead to further socioeconomic segregation between schools. However, little evidence of this has actually emerged. Instead during the first half of the 1990s, in particular, the number of children living in poverty became more equally distributed between UK secondary schools. Part of the explanation for this lies with the prior arrangements for allocating children to schools, typically based upon designated catchment areas. In this paper we argue that the degree of residential segregation that exists in England ensured that schools were already highly segregated before the introduction of market reforms to education, and has continued to be the chief determinant of segregation since. We then suggest that the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, which advocates a return to the use of catchment areas and distance to school when allocating places in oversubscribed schools, may be leading inadvertently to increased socioeconomic segregation between schools.

After 1949 China's welfare system developed on the basis of a status division between urban and rural residents. Urban and rural societies were profoundly influenced by the respective organization of their welfare systems, which shared the feature of being fixed to specific places (rural) or enterprises (urban). Reform of core institutions is constrained by path dependency. Knowledge of those constraints, however, can aid efforts to shape new paths. In this paper we examine how institutional legacies of urban – rural status differentiation continue to structure economic and welfare reform. China's reform process has been characterized by an unusual degree of decentralization and local experimentation. As a result, the nature of change is not easily seen by examining only laws and policies related to welfare. Instead, broader changes in the economy and the loosening of controls on mobility have interacted with the locality/enterprise welfare systems to generate diverse local outcomes. After an overview of the welfare institutions and the reform process, we draw on field research in industrializing rural areas in Guangdong to describe a pattern we label ‘local citizenship’ where welfare benefits are elaborated for the locally born while excluding migrants.

This paper critiques the learning-region literature on two related points. The first is that the learning-region analysis of labour markets is theoretically underdeveloped, because it underestimates the difficulty of overcoming systematic skill mismatches, underinvestment, and free-rider practices which characterize unregulated labour markets. Second and relatedly, because it does not link the problematic nature of labour-market governance to the conflicts and contradictions of state policy, the learning-region literature effectively ‘depoliticizes’ policymaking. The paper draws on a case study of the development of local boards for training and adjustment in Ontario, Canada, and develops an alternative framework utilizing a critical governance perspective which stresses how knowledge and learning must be seen as part of state accumulation and hegemonic strategies. Such strategies are contingent on the representation of stakeholders, in particular business, and current attempts to develop decentralized associational networks are often part of what Jessop terms metagovernance. In the case of Canada, decentralization from the federal to provincial scales is viewed as crisis and cost driven and in many ways antithetical to stakeholder governance. Thus in Ontario, the development of a stakeholder-based form of labour-market governance has been marginalized by shifts in state-accumulation strategies and the inability and disinterest of business in representing itself in such stakeholder institutions. Furthermore, the local boards' generation of knowledge based on inclusionary networks and information is at odds with a state and business emphasis on knowledge derived from exclusive networks and geared to short-term profit maximization.