Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper the author is concerned with the relationship between mobility and practices of surveillance, examining their interconnections within the modern airport. Recent deliberations about airports define these spaces as free, empty of power and social relationships—open to mobility. The author questions these assumptions and explores the surveillance practices that work to control and differentiate movement, bodies, and identities within the airport. Four examples are discussed, ranging from techniques that ignore mobile passengers towards those that simulate them. The airport is argued to offer perhaps a blueprint for public space, intensifying the surveillance of movement through mobilised and combined forms of monitoring. The author concludes the paper by reflecting upon the implications for the mobility and identity of the passenger as spaces such as airports become increasingly reflexive.

A key question faced by practitioners trying to plan for sustainable development is: what can be done in planning practice to influence promotion of sustainable development? This research addresses that question by investigating three dimensions of the planning process (political support for the concept, participation, and resource commitment), the organization of local land-use plans, and state planning mandates to determine how they influence the support plan policies have for principles of sustainable development. We use plan content analysis as well as survey data for forty-two communities across the United States to analyze factors which influence such support. Our findings highlight that the presence of a state planning mandate, most applicable to US planning, as well as having a variety of groups participating in the planning process, are key factors that increase overall plan support for the sustainable development principles. Recommendations for planning practice are offered based on our findings.

This paper reflects on the conceptual issues involved in developing a methodology to study the role of computer-based technologies, and particularly farm planning and management software, in governing the practices of farmers. It represents the first stage of a larger project that explores how farm planning and management practices are governed through, and reconfigured by, such technology. In recent years, computer software has been encouraged by a range of government and nongovernment agencies and organisations as a useful technical means of supporting farm decisionmaking and improving farmers' managerial capacities, thereby improving their competitive position. The key question of this paper is how to conceptualise and study this link. Existing literature in the area tends to draw on either rationalist – technological determinist or social constructionist accounts which, we suggest, are limited in understanding such software as a type of governmental technology that has productive effects. We argue that a methodology drawing upon insights from governmentality and actor-network theory enables the role of software in programmes of agricultural governance to be more robustly explored as a sociotechnical process. Specifically, a ‘sociology of translation’ is outlined to demonstrate how computer software can be analysed as a material technology of government that constitutes and shapes the capacities of ‘users’ as calculable agents. In order to demonstrate how such a methodology might work in practice, we apply a translation methodology to decision-support software designed to improve the planning practices of dairy farmers in the State of Victoria, Australia.

Transboundary air pollution, popularly known as the ‘haze’, is a recent but significant environmental crisis in Southeast Asia, and is primarily the result of Indonesian forest fires. We identify that the fundamental motivation behind the practice of clearing forestland with fire by the polluters is economic in nature. We then argue that the major victims of the forest fires and haze are likely to play a vital role in the solution of the problem, at least by motivating the polluters, even if they cannot force them not to pollute. Thus, the polluters and victims can be regarded as the ‘stakeholders’ who would take interest and participate actively in the policy regime. A regional model is developed to analyze and specifically to take account of the states responsible for and affected by the haze. The problems of the affected resident population, the forest industries, and the role of the regional governments are modeled. The model also highlights the importance of key variables in determining the severity of the haze, namely the magnitude of the investment in fire fighting, risk mitigation, and scale of fire operations; including forecasting weather conditions. We argue that optimal policy options should simultaneously satisfy the economic needs of the key stakeholders to be effective.

The impact of views on property values has not been the specific focus of as much research as has the impact of other externalities on property values. When the impact of views is assessed, it is usually done by adding a single dummy variable to a hedonic regression equation. This paper provides a detailed literature review as well as an empirical analysis of the impact of a view on residential property values with a very rich database of nearly 5000 sales in Auckland, New Zealand. Several dimensions of a view are analyzed: type of view, scope of view, distance to coast, appearance of immediately surrounding improvements, average quality of landscaping in the neighborhood, and average quality of structures in the neighborhood. It is found that wide views of water add an average of 59% to the value of a waterfront property but that this effect diminishes quite rapidly as the distance from the coast increases. Attractive buildings in the neighborhood of a property on average add 37% to value relative to properties in neighborhoods with only average-quality structures. Particularly attractive improvements in the immediate surroundings of a property add another 27% to value on average. In contrast, properties in neighborhoods with only poor-quality landscaping on average experience a – 51% impact on price. Our results lead to the conclusion that aesthetic externalities are multidimensional and can have a substantial impact on residential property values.

Although most older people prefer to age in place, nonetheless many do relocate, with a small proportion moving to retirement villages, which provide a purpose designed and built residential and lifestyle environment. Using factor analyses, path analyses, and a push – pull framework, the authors model the decision process of retirees in Australia in order to identify relationships between push – pull factors and predictor variables, using data from a national survey of retirement village residents. The push factors relate to change in lifestyle, home maintenance, social isolation, and health and mobility, whereas the pull factors relate to built environment and affordability, the locational attributes of villages, and the desire to maintain an existing lifestyle. The survey data also identify village attributes considered desirable or undesirable, or important or unimportant. Overall, resident satisfaction with moving is high.

The coexistence of residential and agricultural activities within ‘periurban belts’ characterises many modern metropolitan areas. Unfortunately, few theoretical works in standard urban economics take this type of mixed space into account. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap: we present a residential location model (standard in urban economics) that is based on a support provided by fractal geography. More precisely, on the one hand, a Sierpinski carpet is used to render the nested hierarchies of the rural and urban sites within a metropolitan area. On the other hand, a household maximises, subject to a budget constraint, a Cobb – Douglas/constant elasticity of substitution (CES) utility function, wherein sub-CES functions portray the consumer's taste for variety in urban and rural amenities according to their hierarchical rank. As the household's optimum depends on accessibility to these various amenities, we propose a coding scheme of the sites on the Sierpinski carpet and a procedure for computing the distances between each site and each amenity. The urban equilibrium solution in the case of an open city is analytically determined. Numerical simulations are performed. They reveal the link between the rent gradient and the accessibility to the rural and urban amenities. In particular, we show that the rent is not always monotonous in distance from the origin (central business district) and that the structure of the fractal city is very different from that of the Thünian city when (1) commuting costs are low, (2) preferences for rural amenities are high, or (3) the substitutability of urban (rural) amenities is low.

In this paper the authors first examine the concept of the rural area and the related typologies and then analyse changes in the internal structure of rural areas in Finland by using georeferenced data. Rural areas seem to have been defined on the basis of land use and population density for as long as they have been a topic of research, but no unambiguous rural – urban dividing line has ever emerged. Statistical areal typologies based on administrative divisions, as employed by the OECD and Eurostat, together with the national classifications prevailing in various countries, are the most commonly used tools for comparisons of spatial structures, but sociocultural analyses can also be used for defining rural areas. The empirical part of this work demonstrates that georeferenced data can be used for studying matters internal to rural areas without recourse to administrative boundaries. The example presented concerns the serious economic recession of the early 1990s, which is studied using the coordinate-based georeferenced census data collected annually by Statistics Finland from population registers. The results indicate that major changes in demographic and occupation structure and in the formation of incomes took place in the rural areas of Finland over a short space of time (1989–97) and that these affected different areas in different ways. Short-term developments of this kind cannot be observed on the basis of traditional census data produced at ten-year intervals.