Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In the wake of the race disturbances in Oldham, Burnley, and Bradford in Summer 2001, the author explores the possibilities for intercultural understanding and dialogue. He argues that, although the national frame of racial and ethnic relations remains important, much of the negotiation of difference occurs at the very local level, through everyday experiences and encounters. Against current policy emphasis on community cohesion and mixed housing, which also tends to assume fixed minority ethnic identities, the author focuses on prosaic sites of cultural exchange and transformation, plural and contested senses of place, an agonistic politics of ethnicity and identity, and the limitations of the White legacy of national belonging in Britain.

As more and more young US adults attend college it has become an increasingly important filter in the process of becoming an independent household. Now for a large number of young adults living in the USA, living away at college is a first step in the process of gaining residential and economic independence. We analyze leaving home to go to college, the choice between returning home and becoming independent after living away at college, and the influence of experience with living away at college on becoming an independent household. We use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and multilevel event-history and logistic-regression models to show that the likelihood of leaving home for college is positively affected by the father's education and the parental income. Unlike in previous research, we find evidence for the ‘feathered-nest’ hypothesis, in that the likelihood of returning home increases with parental income.

In this paper I examine the circumstances under which proximity is important to assemblers and suppliers in the South Korean auto industry. In order to understand suppliers' locational calculus, I analyze the power relations between the national state, assemblers as the chaebol, and suppliers and offer a multifaceted causal analysis of suppliers' spatial patterns. I show that only more dedicated suppliers producing either bulky or modular components tend to be co-located with their assembly plants for economic benefits resulting from geographical proximity. I also show that suppliers who transact with several assemblers are relatively more powerful in their markets and thus freer in their location decisions than are dedicated suppliers and prefer remaining in the Seoul metropolitan area, the major agglomeration of R&D activities, markets, and government organizations. These findings challenge the assembler-centric spatial logic of the business network approach, which has the hypothesis of co-location between assemblers and suppliers.

The 1991 UK Decennial Census missed about 1.2 million people. These missing individuals present a serious challenge to any census user interested in measuring intercensal change, particularly amongst the most marginalised groups in society who were prominent amongst the missing population. Recently, a web-based system for accessing census data from the 1971, 1981, and 1991 censuses was launched (www.census.ac.uk/cdu/lct). The ‘LCT’ package also provides access to a set of 1991 small area statistics (SAS) which have been corrected to compensate for the missing million. The authors explain the methods used for adjusting the SAS counts, provide examples of the differences between analysis with the adjusted and unadjusted data, and recommend the use of the new data set to all those interested in intercensal change.

Spatial tessellation is one of the most important spatial structures in geography. There are various types of spatial tessellations such as administrative units, school districts, and census tracts. Spatial tessellations are often closely related to each other; school districts are determined by, say, administrative units and land uses; electoral districts are related to administrative units, local communities, census tracts, and so forth. Such relationships among spatial tessellations have drawn the attention of geographers; to what extent is the development of a spatial tessellation affected by a set of other tessellations? To give a clue to the answer to this question, in this paper I propose three methods for analyzing a spatial tessellation in relation to a set of other tessellations: the region-based method, the boundary-based method, and the hybrid method. They are all designed for exploratory spatial analysis rather than confirmatory analysis. The methods are evaluated through an empirical study, analysis of the administrative system in Ponneri, India, in the late 18th century.

The author investigates the innovative behavior of large and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises in China. It is revealed that in-house research and development (R&D) efforts, rather than imported technologies, are the primary sources of industrial innovation in China. Regarding in-house R&D efforts, it is found that in-house R&D laboratories are important sources for the creation of new products as measured by patents, though it is enterprise-wide R&D spending rather than the mere presence of in-house facilities that is more likely to lead to market success. Concerning importation of technologies, it is revealed that the limited nature of efforts to absorb imported technologies has become a serious barrier to fulfilling the potential of these technologies and to upgrading China's internal creative capabilities. In addition, domestic technology markets have not been effectively linked to large and medium-sized industrial enterprises, despite China's enduring efforts in this direction since the middle 1980s. It is therefore concluded that the organization of R&D activities in China's industrial enterprises is still fragmented, with only weak linkages between technology importation and assimilation, between industrial R&D and domestic technology markets, and between business and R&D activities within enterprises.

In recent years, the scale and pace of urban change have been associated with fine-scale fragmentation of the lifestyles of urban populations. One manifestation of this is that households of diverse means and circumstances may be found living in proximity to one another, particularly in urban areas. In this paper we argue that in these changed circumstances conventional deprivation indicators fail adequately to detect within and between small area variations in socioeconomic and environmental conditions. Using a case study of Bristol, England, we develop an analysis around Gordon and Forrest's Breadline Britain indicator in order to reveal the diversity of economic conditions that exist within wards that might be labelled as either affluent or deprived. We argue that adequate representation of diversity requires a greater sensitivity to difference at fine scales. In this context, we begin to evaluate the claims of marketeers who use commercial sources of data to model incomes at unit postcode and even household scales. We undertake an evaluation of such data and extend their application to calculation of Breadline Britain index scores. The results suggest some potential for using unconventional sources of data to ‘freshen up’ census information and provide direct, meaningful, measures of deprivation.

The authors consider the role of institutional networks in integrated and inclusive coastal-zone management in Trinidad and Tobago. Drawing on theories of social institutions, a framework for understanding the institutional prerequisites for participatory management is developed. In this framework, distinction is made between institutions at the community, formal-organisational, and national regulatory levels and the means by which institutions adapt to and learn about new issues in terms of networks of dependence and exchange are characterised. The immediate networks between actors (their spaces of dependence) are augmented by wider networks between institutions at various scales (their spaces of exchange). This framework is applied to a case study of resource management in Trinidad and Tobago. Semistructured interviews with key government urban and economic planners, fisheries regulators, and other agents in Trinidad and Tobago, and a participatory workshop for resource managers, are used to identify the perceived opportunities and constraints relating to integrated and inclusive resource management within the social institutions. The findings are analysed through an exploration of the spaces of dependence and exchange that exist in the various social networks at the different institutional scales. The prescriptive relevance of this approach is in the demonstration of the nature of change required in social institutions at all scales to facilitate integrated and inclusive resource management.

Until recently, political conversations between voters have been neglected by electoral analysts. But a growing body of work has shown the importance of conversation as an influence on voting decisions. The current paper takes that work a stage further by investigating a range of factors that might modify the impact of political conversations upon voting. Against expectations, most factors fail to alter significantly the operation of the conversation effect. But the content of the conversation is revealed as an important influence. The more individuals found themselves in agreement with their discussant's views, the more likely they were to change their vote to the party favoured by their discussant.