Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Recent US welfare-form initiatives affecting employment and housing assistance have promoted more flexible applications of assistance as well as devolving the responsibility of care for the poor from federal levels to the individual. Implicit in these policy changes is the assumption that individuals enter labor and housing markets where open access is the norm and a ‘level playing field’ exists. In this paper, we use the analogy of seeing labor and housing markets as public spaces to analyze how the ideals of democratic capitalism in labor and housing markets exist normatively, but are always violated in practice. We argue that the influence of neoliberalism, and the devolution of welfare responsibility to the individual in particular, have led to policy changes that neglect issues of unequal access connected to hierarchies of race and gender and their spatial manifestations. Welfare reform in the specific areas of employment and housing assistance has promoted the primacy of private markets as essential components to ensuring social welfare. These reforms have super-ficially opened more options to recipients of public assistance while simultaneously allowing to continue the instruments, institutions, and structural forces that constrain practical access to the full range of jobs and housing. We argue that efforts to maintain these markets have not been distributed to measures ensuring fair play of participants. As a consequence, some problematic contradictions between policy and practice call into question the suitability of the private market as a strategy of providing welfare for the poor.

This paper presents a way of looking at welfare as a realm of affective well-being, which challenges dominant liberal and rationalist views of welfare as unemployment compensation or support on the route back to ‘work’. With reference to welfare-to-work reform in Britain and, the United States, I examine liberal feminist and neoliberal policy discourses on women, work, and welfare. The rationale underlying these discourses is argued to effect an erasure of meaning and feeling from conceptions of care, with serious consequences for the caring choices of poor working-class mothers. The potential of a nonreductive feminist ethics of care, to oppose the work-centric notion of welfare promoted in prevailing approaches to reform, is considered. Ethical thinking is shown to promote an expanded concept of welfare based on caring interrelations and interdependencies, and a way of seeing the emotional geographies of welfare reform. I conclude by arguing the need for labour politics to engage with the emotional geographies of welfare reform.

The term ‘community’ is an integral part of the discourse regarding social-service and human-service delivery in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Yet, there are a host of meanings and goals that are part of the project of community; these meanings reflect the ambiguous position of community with respect to ideas of publicity and privacy. In this paper I explore some of those meanings and goals through the use of interviews with women who work in nonprofit, community-based organizations that support human and social services. The focus is on the ways in which the women frame the concept of community and the ways in which these may be part of a strategy to create political and material spaces for caring, empowerment, and justice.

The purpose of my paper is to offer an understanding of home hospice from a perspective of political geography. Informed by critical political theories of care, and recent work on the geographies of public and private spheres, I explore one set of consequences of the spatial shift towards home death in metropolitan Seattle, Washington. Terminal hospice care done in the home creates an especially paradoxical home space. By blurring public–private boundaries, hospice care produces a political geography of home interpretable through four spatial paradoxes: a normative paradox of home being a good and bad place to die, a territorial paradox of control itself changing the home, a constitutive paradox between heart and welfare politics, and a relational paradox between autonomy and dependency. The implications for political and health geography, as well as political theory and hospice work itself are discussed as a consequence of recognizing these spatial paradoxes.

Geographies of care and welfare have neglected to consider a group of interrelated practices including counselling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis, which are found in many different settings within modern welfare systems. In a number of influential studies, these psychological therapies have been described as self-oriented, narcissistic, and intensely individualistic. However, these commentaries fail to consider the specificity of particular practices. Counselling, for example, is a situated practice, shaped by particular contexts and values. The views of people just beginning a counselling training programme can be read as describing the practice as a relational means to individualistic ends. However, analysis of their stories about themselves suggests more complex understandings of self as shaped and reshaped in relation to others and as illustrating the feminist concept of relational autonomy. Their accounts suggest that counselling offers the promise of a practice through which both practitioners' selves and clients' selves may be reshaped and resituated.

The 1980s was a significant decade in the demography of Inner London. Population increase replaced decades of decline, and household numbers grew even faster. One-person households accounted for most of the growth in household numbers, and the greatest increase was among younger and middle-aged adults. The authors examine the characteristics and changing geography of one-person households in Inner London, particularly between 1981 and 1991, within the context of broader demographic and socioeconomic changes during the decade. In particular, the characteristics of those people who migrated to live alone in Inner london are examined, and questions raised about the relationship between household changes, residential mobility, occupational structures, and housing markets. Reference is also made to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets to explain some of the processes underlying household change. One-person households are an integral part of wider economic and social processes underway in large urban areas and form a leading edge of new ways of urban living.

During the 1990s the UK temporary staffing industry experienced almost unbroken year-on-year growth. Alongside this quantitative expansion the type of business performed by some UK temporary staffing agencies has begun to change, as some larger agencies have attempted to move out of the clerical and light industrial segments and into higher value-added markets. Other agencies have sought to add human resource services to their more-traditional recruitment and placement functions. All in all, the UK industry—the second largest in the world after the United States—has undergone widespread restructuring in the last decade. I argue that the recent growth in the UK industry constitutes a regularisation of flexible employment, as casual and fixed-term contracts are replaced by more formal arrangements involving a third party—the temporary staffing agency. Drawing upon global and national data and forty semi-structured interviews with agency owners and managers in the United Kingdom, I analyse the multidimensional growth and restructuring of the UK temporary staffing industry. I argue that as the UK industry ‘matures’ we are witnessing a degree of deepening in relations between temporary staffing agencies and client firms. More broadly, I argue that the growth of the temporary staffing industry has conceptual implications for how economic geographers theorise ‘the firm’ and explore the globalisation of service activities.

This paper presents the results of the first national study of air quality in Britain to consider the implications of its distribution across over ten thousand local communities in terms of potential environmental injustice. We consider the recent history of the environmental justice debate in Britain, Europe, and the USA and, in the light of this, estimate how one aspect of air pollution, nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) levels, affects different population groups differentially across Britain. We also estimate the extent to which people living in each community in Britain contribute towards this pollution, with the aid of information on the characteristics of the vehicles they own. We find that, although community NO _x emission and ambient NO₂ concentration are strongly related, the communities that have access to fewest cars tend to suffer from the highest levels of air pollution, whereas those in which car ownership is greatest enjoy the cleanest air. Pollution is most concentrated in areas where young children and their parents are more likely to live and least concentrated in areas to which the elderly tend to migrate. Those communities that are most polluted and which also emit the least pollution tend to be amongst the poorest in Britain. There is therefore evidence of environmental injustice in the distribution and production of poor air quality in Britain. However, the spatial distribution of those who produce and receive most of that pollution have to be considered simultaneously to see this injustice clearly.

Many facilities have negative impacts on neighbouring areas, and an obvious social and political concern is therefore to assess and minimise such impacts. The authors address this type of problem in relation to the dispersion of aircraft noise near airports. The approach involved brings together two basic components. First, two spatial models are presented. These are developed from existing concepts in location theory and modelling, but the authors attempt to overcome some of the limitations of previous models. Second, a geographical information system is used to obtain a better representation of the spatiotemporal processes involved in the dispersion of aircraft noise and to evaluate the functions of the two models. A case study is used to illustrate the methodology and helps to indicate how this approach could facilitate improved spatial decisionmaking.