Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The Cities for Climate Protection campaign, an effort to lower greenhouse-gas emissions at the city scale, operates within the neoliberal state. Two features characterize the interaction of the state and the public via this campaign: a lack of public involvement, and the construction of the citizen as a passive consumer. The author emphasizes a tension that exists between two readings of the consumer citizen: the pliable figure who listens to neoliberal bottom-line arguments, and the political economic actor who identifies not with consumerism but with political change. Citizens thus cannot be wholly embodied by constructions such as the consumer, and consumerist activism has potential. Citizens, though often interpellated as consumers, can position themselves as reasoning publics who see climate change, their cities, and themselves in relational perspective. The author enlists Foucauldian and deliberative-democracy theory to explore the making of citizens through the Cities for Climate Protection campaign.

This paper presents a linear programming model that allocates the waters of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers to irrigation, urban consumption, and on-stream hydroelectricity production in the three riparian countries (Turkey, Syria, and Iraq), by maximizing the aggregate net benefits from water uses while accounting for water-conveyance costs. The model represents, in network form, the system made of the two rivers and their various consumption, supply, and transshipment nodes, and accounts for evaporation and return flows. The constraints include water-conservation balances and maximum and minimum water consumption. The model is used to assess the economic consequences of various cooperation and noncooperation strategies that may be adopted by the riparian countries. Cooperative game-theory concepts (core and Shapley value) are used to identify stable water allocations, under which all three countries find it beneficial to cooperate. The results suggest that an allocation of the total benefits exists, under various scenarios of future energy prices and agricultural productivities, that makes this global cooperation attractive to all countries. Various research extensions are outlined.

This study developed small-area health-related environmental indices for England and Wales in the context of an investigation into socioeconomic inequity in the distribution of environmental risk. Selection of environmental hazards, relevant datasets, and their attribution to standard small-area geography using a geographic information system are described. Four indices for 1991 Census wards are proposed, relating to ambient air quality, atmospheric chemical releases from large-scale industrial processes, landfills, and sites registered under Control of Major Accident Hazard regulations. Ecological measures of association between these indices and the Carstairs material deprivation index and its components are presented in the context of variations by urban–rural status. Based on these analyses, the study generally supports previous findings of environmental inequity in England and Wales, but highlights that associations are dependent on the environmental and deprivation measures under consideration, and urban–rural context. It is proposed that environmental indices such as those described here should be included in considerations of area deprivation, could assist with equitable environmental decisionmaking and planning, and that measures of environmental inequity could be considered as indicators of progress towards sustainable development.

Since its release in the mid-1990s, close to 37 000 facilities have been certified to ISO 14001, the international voluntary standard for environmental management systems. Yet, despite claims that the standard can be readily adapted to very different corporate and geographic settings, its take-up has been highly geographically variable. This paper contributes to a growing body of work concerned with explaining the uneven diffusion of ISO 14001 at the global level. Drawing from the existing theoretical and empirical literature we develop a series of hypotheses about how various economic, market, and regulatory factors influence the national count of ISO 14001 certifications. These hypotheses are then tested using econometric estimation techniques with data for a panel of 142 developed and developing countries. We find that per capita ISO 14001 counts are positively correlated with income per capita, stock of foreign direct investment, exports of goods and services to Europe and Japan, and pressure from civil society. Conversely, productivity and levels of state intervention are negatively correlated. The paper finishes by offering a number of recommendations to policymakers concerned with accelerating the diffusion of voluntary environmental standards.

This paper draws on theories of new institutionalism to examine the consequences of partnership working for the community sector. Three normative practices which are associated with partnership working—representativeness; consensus-based decisionmaking; and bureaucratic styles of working—are examined in relation to the experiences of two UK case-study localities in receipt of Single Regeneration Budget funding. The findings reflect a complex interaction between acceptance and noncompliance with these norms by community organisations which leads to a variety of outcomes for individual community representatives and for relations between community groups and regeneration partnership boards. In conclusion, it is argued that protecting the independence of local organisations can allow for opposition to partnership-based decisions but that this risks undermining holistic or strategic approaches to social problems. The actions of some community organisations in these two localities suggests that, although some aspects of partnership working are increasingly institutionalised within community sectors, organisations remain alert to opportunities to subvert these norms to further their own aspirations.

Over the last few decades a certain fragmentation of economy and society has taken place on a global scale. A related observation is that the marketplace for landed property has become more complex, involving more actors and informal networks. The consequence is a cultural and behavioural reorientation of the conceptual model of property-value formation, which traditionally is anchored in equilibrium economics. This postulate is especially relevant for the residential sector as households and their preferences, as well as external factors forcing their mobility, are factors that contribute to the formation of house prices. However, from the early 1970s there was literature that pointed to a multidimensional theoretical framework on aesthetic and other values that ‘make the place’. Using more multiple and idiosyncratic perspectives of value conceptualisation is therefore not a completely new trend, only a neglected line of research. With these potentially powerful formulations as the background, this contribution presents evidence of property-value formation from the 1990s Helsinki housing market. Using the analytic hierarchy process, quality ranks for different bundles of locational attributes were generated based on interactive data, and compared with actual market-outcome data. Both the theoretical and the empirical material compiled for this paper suggest that, to remain a valid concept, equilibrium needs to be treated at the level of market price together with stated actor choice—not just on the level of the first concept.

This paper investigates the determinants of at-home and out-of-home labor supply in the Netherlands in the 1990s, focusing on the presence of information and computer technology (ICT) in households—in particular modem possession. To investigate these determinants, a sequential hurdle model is estimated in which people first decide to work and then decide to divide total labor supply in at-home and out-of-home labor supply. To correct for possible endogeneity, the modem variable is estimated by means of instrumental variables. When we consider only office hours, possession of ICT facilities at home stimulates both at-home and out-of-home labor supply. Thus, the two may be called complements from the ICT perspective. However, outside office hours, modem possession leads to less work out of home. During this part of the day the time worked less on the job is partly substituted by work at home. Thus, during this part of the week we find that substitution dominates. However, because labor supply during office hours dominates labor supply during the rest of the week we find complementarity as the main feature of overall labor supply. These results underline the importance of timing issues.

The entropy-maximixing model has been applied with varying degrees of success in the analysis and planning of origin – destination types of spatial interaction. Although theoretical underpinnings and solution methods have been developed over the years, there are still outstanding problems that need to be thoroughly investigated. From the practical point of view, solving this model directly and in real time has high theoretical and pragmatic value. In this paper we propose a neural network for solving the dual problem of this model in real time. The size of the proposed network is very small and its structure is very simple, so it can be implemented in hardware. From the theoretical perspective, we solve the seldom investigated issue of convergence to the optimal solution of the entropy-maximising model. We strictly prove that the proposed dual neural network is Lyapunov stable and that each of its trajectories can converge asymptotically to an exact solution of the dual problem. The validity and transient behaviour of the proposed neural network are demonstrated by numerical examples. It is also demonstrated that the proposed network approach renders for the first time a tight integration of an entropy-maximising model and a neural network, and offers a general representation and solution to a large variety of entropy-maximising models.

Transport plays an important role in sustainable development because it uses a lot of energy. In order to plan for sustainable transport development, there is a need to develop indicators for assessing and monitoring transport development. In this paper we develop a sustainable transport development indicator by making use of the concepts of accessibility and geographical information systems. A modal accessibility gap index is proposed, which is calculated by finding the difference between the accessibility indices of public and private transport, which are in turn determined by accessibilities to opportunities such as the number of population, jobs, shops, and schools by public and private transport. Considering energy-efficiency, public transport will achieve sustainable transport more than private transport. A higher accessibility gap may mean more sustainable development. In the present study, the accessibility gap of Hong Kong in 1991 is compared with that in 1996 to examine whether transport development has been more sustainable. We also discuss how to use the accessibility gap indicator to test land-use and transport-development policies and scenarios to determine the more sustainable ones.

Unlike traditional impact analysis, that measures the influence of a sector, or a set of like sectors, on the overall economy, we present in this note a simple reverse procedure that attempts to quantify the impact of activity changes in the overall regional economy over a specific subset of firms. We apply the procedure to a specific enclave of the chemical and basic industry sectors, which has been and still is of special significance for the development of the region. Because we feel that interdependency effects should be adequately captured, we rely on a 1995 regional social accounting matrix (SAM) of Andalusia, Spain, to establish the empirical structural support for the analysis. We proceed by setting up a linear SAM model to obtain extended multipliers, then we decompose them in three categories of effects (direct, indirect, and induced) under different hypotheses about the classification of endogenous and exogenous sectors. The decomposed multipliers are then apportioned to measure and distinguish the effects on the economic enclave. The results are seen to be quite robust to the exogeneity assumptions.