Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Many studies of long-distance family migration demonstrate that female partners are often disenfranchised in the labour market. One factor that has not been fully considered is the role of children. Heterosexual couples may be more likely to migrate in favour of the male ‘breadwinner's’ career if the couple have children, or are planning to commence childrearing in the foreseeable future. However, little work seems to have examined this empirically. The authors focus on the influence of ‘motherhood’ in different national contexts, using comparable census microdata for Great Britain and the United States. They test whether apparent ‘tied migration’ effects may in fact be influenced by family decisions related to childbearing/childrearing, and two sets of modelling results are provided. First, they examine whether the effects of long-distance family migration on women's labour-market status is influenced by the presence or absence of children of different ages. Second, they conduct the same analysis for women who have a high-status occupation. The results demonstrate that women in families with young children are most likely to be out of employment after family migration. A smaller, but similar, tied-migration effect exists for families with older children and families with no children. The same pattern exists for women in high-status occupations. Tied migration appears to influence women's labour-market status equally in Great Britain and the United States, regardless of the presence or absence of children.

As a consequence of the decline of central harbour sites and the relocation of port activities to the outskirts of cities, today waterfront redevelopment has become a key issue in the urban revitalisation policies of port cities. Although we are aware that city-port regeneration has strong links with the real estate market, our purpose here is very different. In particular, the contingent valuation method (CVM) has been applied in order to obtain the nonmarket benefits of the environmental and urban improvements derived from redeveloping some port-related areas for recreational and leisure purposes in the city of Castellón, Spain. To date, no previous study has attempted to apply this method to this policy issue. The result is that CVM provides useful information in this context, however, like any methodology, it has its limitations and it cannot provide a definitive answer to this policy issue. Finally, the estimated benefits are compared with the costs of the provision of such recreational and leisure facilities within a cost–benefit analysis framework, and the main finding is that benefits can plausibly exceed costs.

This paper reports the development of empirical models to explain spatial price variation in an urban area. Models are constructed for petrol price data collected in 1995 and 1997 in Sheffield, England. The 1995 data are modelled by using only supply-side predictors following the collection of supply-side information from field surveys of the retail sites, a site questionnaire survey, and interviews with site managers. The 1997 data are modelled by using supply-side predictors and demand-side predictors that relate to the economic characteristics of the population of consumers. This modelling is based on field surveys of the sites, a new site questionnaire survey, and a household survey. The purpose of this work is to assess supply-side and demand-side factors in explaining spatial price variation. Supply-side predictors are classified into site characteristics, location characteristics, and measures of spatial competition. We examine the relative importance of these different groups of supply-side variables in explaining price variation, with a particular interest in location and competition effects as these relate directly to the spatial and geographical aspects of the problem. Another contribution of the paper is to observe the stability of findings by contrasting the best-fitting models obtained for the 1995 price data to the best-fitting models obtained for the 1997 price data.

We find that no demand-side factors are statistically significant. For 1995 a spatial competition variable and a location variable (whether a site is attached to a supermarket) are the consistently important supply-side variables. For 1997 all three categories of supply-side variables are important.

The theoretical background of spatial interaction models is reviewed and used as a basis for the derivation of a novel approach for directly calibrating spatial interaction models concurrently with the main solution procedure. The analysis was prompted by a link with Fisher information. The new approach is compared with a number of earlier approaches, particularly that of Sen and Smith.

The authors advance a new approach to transportation and land-use planning: the transportation impact statement (TIS). Current planning practice suffers from a lack of understanding of and adequate tools to evaluate the complex relationships that exist between land use and transportation. Consequently, land-use development frequently overloads the transportation system. A TIS exposes the complex interdependencies with a multimodal and regional assessment of the impact of land-use development on the transportation system. The authors offer a theoretical background for this new approach and an empirical illustration of its potential use through a case study based on the city of Haifa in Israel. The objective of the study is to investigate the local and regional transport-related impacts of proposed land developments, thus improving the planning decisionmaking process. The impact of the proposed land developments on the transportation system was studied utilizing several transportation scenarios, including travel-demand management (TDM) strategies, using the metropolitan database and travel-demand modeling systems. The results show that the total number of trips generated by the proposed land developments is by far inconsistent with the capacity of the transportation network to accommodate all the forecasted demands under all transport scenarios. These results have a number of implications. First, TIS clearly improves our understanding of the impact of land development on the transportation system, and thus it should be utilized in decisionmaking regarding land-development strategy. Second, TIS stresses the importance of transit and TDM strategies as mitigation measures in the planning process. Third, TIS illustrates the need for a wider (that is, not site-related) planning perspective—including setting overall metropolitan goals and objectives.

Since the late 1980s the European apparel sector has witnessed a dramatic transformation. Driven by increasing costs in Western Europe, major Western apparel retailers and buyers have expanded their contracting of production into lower cost regions of ‘postcommunist’ Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean Basin. One consequence of these changes is a burgeoning of apparel producers in peripheral European and North African regions, locked into supply relations with Western buyers. Equally apparent is a dramatic growth in apparel trade between the European Union (EU) and the countries of East–Central Europe (ECE). For much of the 1990s these processes were driven by outward processing trade arrangements between EU countries and applicant states in ECE, along with the EU customs union with Turkey. Further liberalization of trade regimes during the 1990s removed these outward processing customs arrangements, but outward-processing forms of assembly production continue. The authors chart these transformations, and signal one part of the emerging architecture of trade relations between the EU and ECE after 1989. They explore the trade regulation changes that have provided a context for outsourcing and examine the different strategies of EU retailers and manufacturers in the governance of pan-European apparel production and trade.

From focus-group and survey research conducted in Istanbul between 1998 and 2002, I argue that the spatial practice of work is critical to the constitution of what it means to ‘be a woman’ in the Turkish context. My approach to gender and work makes use of Butler's theory of performativity in order to show how discourses and practices of work are not only implicated in the production of male and female gender identities but also provide a variety of routes through which different aspects of masculinity and femininity are performed. In my reading of the discussions and debates assembled by the focus-group texts, I try to show how work compels various performances, such as the ‘good woman’ or the ‘bad girl’ in Istanbul. Further, work not only calls forth different ways of being a woman in relation to the city but also produces differentiated female bodies. Finally, I argue that work is a spatial practice through which belonging, identity, and rights are staked in the urban environment.

This paper uses the case of the Khong-Chi-Mun (KCM) interbasin transfer project in northeast Thailand to explore questions of power and scale in the context of state intervention in river basins. The KCM project figures strongly in the Thai state's long-term aim of transforming its water-poor northeast region through large-scale irrigation works and agroindustrial development. The project has also become a key element in interstate negotiations over coordinated development of the Lower Mekong Basin. The early stages of the project have met with resistance in the form of both national and local Thai social movements arguing against it on social justice and ecological grounds. Proponents of the project in the Thai government are employing different scalar narratives to justify and legitimate implementation of the scheme. Scale and power are intimately related within complex environmental conflicts, and tracing their linkages through an array of actors and across a variety of scales, the approach associated with actor-network methodologies, can reveal a great deal about how power and scale are co-created.