Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Recent writing around urban political economy has highlighted the difficulty of representing multiple responses to local economic development strategies. It has been argued that it is conceptually important but nonetheless problematic to account for the multiplicity of individual, business, institutional, community, social and other groups' involvement in, interpretation of, or consumption of dominant city images and urban regeneration projects. This paper attempts such a project, presenting empirical case material from the UK city of Stoke-on-Trent, utilising the ethnographic grid–group theory conceived by Mary Douglas, and later developed with Aaron Wildavsky into a ‘cultural theory’ of political and economic change.

The literature on the theory of regional industrial success, including that focused on regional innovation systems, provides the conceptual foundation for this exploration of the extent to which firms in clusters of advanced technology industry depend on interregional sources for a wide variety of knowledge inputs to support innovation. The substantive focus is the electronics cluster of the Toronto region, Canada's largest manufacturing center. A small, stratified sample of establishments drawn from this cluster is used to verify the importance of external sources of material inputs, and other knowledge sources, and the strength of distant market connections. Interregional and local collaboration vary in importance as a result of scale-dependent resource differences between firms and in response to choices associated with foreign rather than domestic ownership. The results support the rejection of simple models of clusters and learning regions in which internal connections are privileged over interregional and international transactions operating either between or within firms.

As people living near forests in many parts of the world receive recognition of resource-management rights, questions arise about where forest boundaries should be set and who should legitimately receive these rights. Drawing on research conducted among forest-dwelling Kenyah communities in Kalimantan, Indonesia, during 1995 to 1998, I show that the realization of resource rights must be understood in the social context of how boundaries are interpreted and negotiated. Access to and control over forest resources is as much a matter of boundary keeping as of boundary setting. The analysis shows that boundary keepers assessed whether someone should be given access based on the potential user's entitlement, identity, and the potential for exchange. Understanding the ‘fuzziness’ of how seemingly clear boundary rules are applied should provide a more realistic picture of how groups gain and control access to resources in practice.

Geodemographic systems currently provide classifications of small areas based primarily on their demographic and socioeconomic characteristics. In this paper the authors aim to demonstrate the value of extending geodemographics by including new sets of variables. These have been selected to represent further dimensions of demand, workplace-based characteristics, and indicators reflecting the interaction between areas. A prototype regional system is constructed that is based on postal sectors in Yorkshire and the Humber classified into nine distinctive clusters.

A methodology is developed in this paper for evaluating and enhancing the performance of urban transportation systems in the aftermath of a disaster. A performance measure is proposed for assessing overall and distributional impacts based on the concept of accessibility. The methodology is demonstrated with two case studies. The first focuses on passenger railroad disruption in the catastrophic 1995 Kobe earthquake in Japan. An accessibility measure is applied to evaluate the loss of transportation service and, in particular, its attendant spatial disparities. Alternative repair and restoration strategies are investigated and shown, in hindsight, to be preferable to the actual sequence of repairs. The second case study focuses on the potential loss of road and highway transportation in Seattle, WA, after a hypothetical earthquake. A refined accessibility measure is applied that accounts for postdisaster detouring and congestion. Again, this brings attention to spatial disparities in loss and the spatial implications of alternative restoration priorities. It further demonstrates that restoration strategies should be designed from a systems perspective. The limitations and broader applicability of the approach are discussed.

The shopping mall as a part of the recent transformations in Turkish urban lifestyle is the focus of this research. Characteristics of the Turkish way of using shopping malls, and their social and spatial consequences, are investigated and analyzed through a case study in Ankara, the capital of Turkey. The field survey was carried out in Bilkent Shopping Center, a newly built shopping mall in a suburban area which was also established recently as a high-income housing settlement. This shopping mall is an appropriate example of spatial transformations under the influence of global forces, which may also give clues about changes in urban lifestyle. A field survey was carried out through user surveys, and various observations are used to enrich the analysis. The results indicate that the shopping mall as a postmodern site matched the changing shopping and consumption requirements of Turkish urban citizens. The development of the shopping mall turns out to be timely for the Turkish urban citizen searching for modernity through new identity components in consumption patterns. Some benefit from this development more than others, for example, working women, indicating the process of feminization of the flaneur. However, these sites simultaneously produce a new arena of negotiation and conflict as well, creating new forms of exclusion—particularly for the urban poor. Although malls appear more public and democratic than the streets for the time being, the potential for segregation is implicit in their private character.

Environmental decisions made by individuals, civil society, and the state involve questions of economic efficiency, environmental effectiveness, equity, and political legitimacy. These four criteria are constitutive of the economic, social, and environmental dimensions of sustainable development, which has become the dominant rhetorical device of environmental governance. We discuss the tendency for disciplinary research to focus on particular subsets of the four criteria, and argue that such a practice promotes solutions that do not acknowledge the dynamics of scale and the heterogeneity of institutional contexts. We advocate an interdisciplinary framework for the analysis of environmental decisionmaking that seeks to identify legitimate and context-sensitive institutional solutions producing equitable, efficient, and effective outcomes. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by using it to examine decisions concerning contested nature conservation and multiple-use commons in the management of Hickling Broad in Norfolk in the United Kingdom. We conclude that interdisciplinary approaches enable the generalisation and transfer of lessons in a way that respects the specifics and context of the issue at hand.

In this paper the author examines the development and causes of territorial inequalities in the postcommunist economies of East–Central Europe (ECE), with a specific focus on the Slovak Republic (Slovakia). He begins by examining the extent of regional economic differentiation in ECE, within the context of the European Union (EU) enlargement process, and argues that an EU of twenty-five or twenty-seven states will face enormous territorial inequality. Through a specific examination of the experience of Slovakia he then goes on to examine some of the determinants and trajectories of these territorial inequalities. Specifically, he focuses on the contribution of relative regional industrial productivity trends in the second half of the 1990s to the endurance of territorial disparities. A decomposition of regional productivity and employment across industrial sectors is provided to examine some of the reasons for the comparative performance of Slovakia's regional economies. Attention is paid to the role of key strategic inward investment projects in the upgrading of particular regional industrial sectors. In contrast, other forms of global integration through, for example, outward processing of clothing for the EU market have, in other regions, been unable to stimulate a positive upgrading of regional productivity. Indeed, it is argued that the challenge for transitional economies such as Slovakia in the early part of the 21st century is how to manage the process of increasing, yet geographically uneven, global and European economic integration at the same time as ensuring that territorial and social inequalities are reduced.