Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The recent devolutionary trend across the world has been in part fuelled by claims of a supposed ‘economic dividend’ associated with the decentralization of authority and resources. The capacity of devolved administrations with greater autonomous powers to tailor policies to local preferences, to generate innovation in the provision of policies and public services, and to encourage greater participation and be more accountable is supposed to deliver greater economic efficiency. There is, however, little empirical evidence to substantiate these claims. In this paper we assess the horizontal link between devolution and regional economic growth in six national contexts (Germany, India, Italy, Mexico, Spain, and the USA). Regression analyses are used in order to test whether changes in cross-regional differences in growth patterns within each country can be attributed to changes in levels of regional autonomy. The results suggest that, contrary to the expectations of devolutionists, the degree of devolution is in most cases irrelevant for economic growth and, when it matters—as in the cases of Mexico and the USA—it is linked to lower rather than greater economic efficiency.

We discuss two contrasting discourses of environmental management for the management of rivers and floodplain environments in the United Kingdom. Through the 1990s a long-established flood defence discourse gave way to a new discourse of river and floodplain restoration. We draw on qualitative interviews with river managers to set out these discourses, and consider the engagement between them. We consider particularly the way in which flood defence engineers have resisted and gradually been won over to aspects of the new restoration discourse, and the role of champions in that discourse transition.

Appraisal—defined here to include a variety of ex ante techniques and procedures that seek to predict and evaluate the consequences of certain human actions—has been afforded an increasingly important role in environmental policy. We argue in this paper, however, that both the nature of appraisal and its role in the political process have been inadequately conceptualised. Exploring a literature that has tended to polarise ‘technical’ and ‘deliberative’ models, we identify a need for sensitive selection and combination of approaches, taking account of both the object and the objective of appraisal in particular contexts. We suggest that an important role for appraisal (by design or by default) may be that of providing spaces for dialogue and learning in the making of policies and decisions. A better understanding of such processes requires further research, particularly well-designed longitudinal work involving retrospective and ‘real time’ studies of appraisal in practice.

In most traditions of spatial planning in Europe, planning policy documents involve a symbolic representation of the territory in the form of icons, diagrams, and maps. There are, however, significant national and regional differences in the use of cartographic visualisations in strategic spatial planning in European countries, which can cause problems when several countries come together to discuss policy options for a transnational territory, as for the preparation of the European Spatial Development Perspective. In an attempt to understand better the differences in visualising spatial policy in different planning traditions, this paper reports on findings from an analysis of the form of cartographic visualisations in strategic spatial planning documents in England and Germany. In particular, differences in the written and visual representations of spatial policies, and the ‘scientific’ or ‘artistic’ representation on policy maps are considered. The findings show that, although the function of plans in the planning system ultimately determines the form and style of visualisations, traditional and ‘scientific’ representations seem to dominate planning at regional level in these countries, and experiences with an ‘artistic’ style of visualisation are limited. The paper concludes with a discussion of the relevance of these findings for transnational spatial policy processes, where a communication-oriented use of cartographic visualisations appears most appropriate.

During the last few years, Swedish municipalities have become increasingly engaged in competition to attract in-migrants. An important element of these efforts has been the use of place-marketing campaigns and promotion. Very little is known, however, about these attempts in terms of the number of municipalities involved, economic efforts, ways of marketing, target groups, etc. Furthermore, and more importantly, as for place-marketing studies in general, there have been few attempts at evaluation. The author's purpose is to provide an overview and to evaluate the effects of place-marketing efforts made by municipalities in Sweden to attract in-migrants. The empirical material is based largely on survey responses from 220 municipalities, and provides data for a general overview as well as for the evaluative approaches employed in the study. Among other findings, the results suggest that, although this kind of marketing has definitely become more important over the last few years, there is little evidence of any significant effects on interregional migration flows.

This paper combines recent advances which appreciate the ontological intricacies of scale; with the (re)turn of institutional perspectives on social and economic life and its governance. The authors use these perspectives to understand better questions of contingency, difference, and indeed convergence when comparing the historical process of scale construction and political governance (both institution building and image/narrative building) in two European cities. The paper thus reveals contrasting scalar strategies of interurban competition in two city case studies. The authors first outline the main theoretical and conceptual developments in the now burgeoning literature on scale, adding that in their opinion the perpetual construction and reconstruction of scale is not only an example of socially instituted process, but also one of constructed variety. The authors go on to propose a musical metaphor—a keyboard of scale—to capture the properties of simultaneity, elasticity, and multiplicity in scale construction, and use this metaphor to frame the discussion of the two cases. The authors conclude that when comparing cities—indeed all superficially commensurable territorial units—we must be sensitive to the specificity of scale construction in each and every instance. For example, the cases reported here demonstrate that a range of meanings shelter under the umbrella of the ‘urban’. Moreover, these meanings are reconstituted and reconfigured through history.

This paper analyses the spatial heterogeneity of labour demand. Our main assumption is that for each location there is a combination of factors which is the most efficient, given the endowment of the location in terms of technology access and the relative cost of factors. We estimate our model using a panel of more than 1000 industrial firms over a six-year period. The contribution of skilled labour is emphasised in the firms located in urban areas, unskilled labour in rural firms, and capital in periurban units. The functional distribution of jobs also plays a discriminating role: direct production and similar functions seem to be more concentrated in periurban and rural areas, whereas tertiary functions are clearly assigned to urban units. We then make conclusions as to the existence of different technical paths of growth, with high productivity growth and a dramatic decline of demand for unskilled labour in urban areas, and the maintenance of a labour-intensive method of production in rural areas.

As a consequence of the ongoing growth in demand for houses in the Netherlands over recent decades, the fraction of the total surface used for residential purposes has expanded rapidly. The location patterns of new residential construction are the result of various forces: government intervention aiming at the preservation of open space via zoning, new-town, and ‘compact-city’ policies, and market forces reflecting preferences on the demand side (households and real-estate developers). The main factors influencing the location of residential construction are analysed by means of a statistical analysis. The most significant variables appear to be the proximity of a location to existing residential areas, location in new towns receiving government support, the accessibility of workplaces, distance to railway stations, and, to a lesser extent, the accessibility of nature, surface water, and recreational areas.

Britain's passenger rail services were privatised in 1996/97 to reduce public subsidies and produce customer benefits through the private sector competing for medium or long-term franchises. Private sector franchisees were committed to investment in rolling stock, services, and infrastructure and were expected to deliver more market-oriented and cost-effective services whilst subsidies decreased on an annual sliding scale. The author analyses why some franchisees have been unable to achieve the annual financial improvement required to match tapering subsidies. The greatest challenges are identified in Regional franchises outside southeast England, where contracts were let towards the end of rail privatisation when competition was fiercest. Some contracts have been terminated or renegotiated. Reasons are investigated for record levels of passenger traffic across the rail network, privatisation's major, and unexpected, achievement. Traffic growth slowed, and was confined to the London and South East sector, after the Hatfield accident in October 2000. Reasons are identified for delays in refranchising and the sudden policy change from long-term investment-led franchises to short or medium-term contracts. The comparative financial and customer benefits of refranchising are analysed. Finally, the achievability of the government's Ten Year Transport Plan target of 50% growth in passenger traffic is questioned.