Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper examines the ethos of organisations providing emergency services for homeless people in Britain. Drawing on extensive surveys of nonstatutory organisations we present a discourse analysis of statements of ‘mission’, ‘values’, and ‘ethics’, arguing that, although care needs to be exercised in translating organisational ethos into likely practices of care, these overarching messages of ethos are significant waymarkers in the moral landscapes of caring for homeless people. Using Coles's rethinking of the politics of generosity, we interrogate ethos in terms of three ideal types—Christian caritas, secular humanism, and postsecular charity—concluding that the principal fault-line in current services divides organisations which expect particular behavioural outcomes from homeless people (including Christian ‘conversion’ and more secular assumptions of self-responsibility), and those which provide care regardless of individual response.

In this paper we connect existing work on rooming houses to literature dealing with the meaningful nature of ‘home’ and its impact on individuals' health and social well-being. We then examine the extent to which rooming houses provide low-income tenants with ‘homes’, drawing from in-depth interviews with rooming-house tenants living in Hamilton, a city of 450 000 people in southern Ontario, Canada. Our analysis raises concerns about the capacity of rooming houses to provide affordable and stable accommodation. Poor living conditions and poor relations with rooming-house landlords worked directly against the capacity of rooms to offer private, controllable spaces and a degree of ontological security. Analysis also raised concerns about rooming houses as sites for social relations. Many respondents saw rooming houses as unpredictable and sometimes unhealthy social spaces, forcing them to seek other environments to cultivate and sustain relationships with friends and family. In general, respondents' experiences point to the shortcomings of rooming houses as ‘home’ environments, with implications for the health and social lives of the tenant population. Conceptual and policy implications are discussed in conclusion.

Most research and initiatives relating to children's experiences of urban space have focused on the physical environment. Housing policies in Third World countries have also emphasised the provision of physical infrastructure and buildings, and urban aesthetics. In this paper the authors draw on the voices of young informants from Maseru (Lesotho), and Blantyre (Malawi), who, in discussions concerning moving house, chose to talk about social and economic aspects of life in the informal sector rented accommodation that is increasingly characteristic of these and many other African cities. The children offer insight into the peopling of urban space, mapping unruly environments characterised by disorder, gossip, and social contestation, far removed from the hard technocratic spaces imagined by planners. Their observations are important not only because children represent a very large and relatively neglected proportion of African urban dwellers but also because they offer a unique insight into the dynamic character of urban environments. As close observers of adult decisionmaking processes, children are informed commentators on motivations for moving house as well as the impacts of urban environments on their own lives. Not only do the children highlight the inadequacies of the informal private rental sector but they also offer a window onto why it is inadequate.

In this paper we examine the relationships between class and gender in the context of current debates about economic change in Greater London. It is a common contention of the global city thesis that new patterns of inequality and class polarisation are apparent as the expansion of high-status employment brings in its wake rising employment in low-status, poorly paid ‘servicing’ occupations. Whereas urban theorists tend to ignore gender divisions, feminist scholars have argued that new class and income inequalities are opening up between women as growing numbers of highly credentialised women enter full-time, permanent employment and others are restricted to casualised, low-paid work. However, it is also argued that working women's interests coincide because of their continued responsibility for domestic obligations and still-evident gender discrimination in the labour market. In this paper we counterpose these debates, assessing the consequences for income inequality, for patterns of childcare and for work–life balance policies of rising rates of labour-market participation among women in Greater London. We conclude by outlining a new research agenda.

Spatial decentralization is a common measure used by public planners to redistribute urban social and economic activities in order to resolve escalating problems such as crowdedness, pollution, and high cost of living in the central cities. Findings from studies assessing the changing rent gradient of cities, and probability of development around suburban centers, provide insights to the various impacts of spatial decentralization policies. The author makes use of global and local spatial auto-correlation statistics and seeks to explore the spatial clustering of property values in the context of polycentric urban development. Data were collected from the property sales transaction database in Singapore and analyzed employing geographic information systems and spatial statistics. Empirical results suggest that there was a remarkable redistribution among the planning regions as regards the number of condominium projects in the 1990s, which was in line with the polycentric urban development policy. A decline in the global Moran's I indicates a change from a strong to a relatively weak positive clustering. However, the local Moran statistics show that a spatial pattern of property-value clusters continued during the study period. Findings of this research capture a market signal indicating that the spatial distribution of property values may not readily follow planning guidelines, at least in a given short time frame.

Models of cinema demand have tended to employ aggregate data and focus on price and income as key variables. Surprisingly, the effects of travel time and location have not been formally investigated. The authors do so, following developments in the environmental economics literature, by presenting estimates of individual travel cost models for multiplex and nonmultiplex cinemas. A key finding is that travel time has a significant negative effect on nonmultiplex cinema trips, but that this does not hold for multiplex trips; reasons for this are advanced. In the case of multiplex cinema trips, a range of phenomena relating to minimising time-cost uncertainty are shown to be significant. The authors also contribute to an explanation for the ‘overscreening’ phenomenon observed in the United Kingdom and the USA, which has led to the closure of some relatively recently built multiplexes.

High-intensity crime areas are areas where high levels of violent crime coexist with large numbers of offenders, thereby creating an area that may present significant policing problems. In an earlier paper, the authors analysed police perceptions of high-intensity crime areas, and now extend that earlier work by comparing the police's perception of where such areas are located with offence/offender data. They also report on the construction of predictive models that identify the area-specific attributes that explain the distribution of such areas. By focusing on the city of Sheffield, the authors draw on a wider range of local area data than was possible in the original paper, and also question how widespread such areas may be in Sheffield.

Mixed-logit models are currently the state of the art in discrete-choice modelling, and their estimation in various forms (in particular, mixing revealed-preference and stated-preference data) is becoming increasingly popular. Although the theory behind these models is fairly simple, the practical problems associated with their estimation with empirical data are still relatively unknown and certainly not solved to everybody's satisfaction. In this paper we use a stated-preference dataset—previously used to derive willingness to pay for reduction in atmospheric pollution and subjective values of time—to estimate random parameter mixed logit models with different estimation methods. We use our results to discuss in some depth the problems associated with the derivation of willingness to pay with this class of models.

The aim of this paper is to gain a better understanding of the impact of simplification on a sequential model of activity-scheduling behavior which uses feature-selection methods. To that effect, the predictive performance of the Albatross model, which incorporates nine different facets of activity–travel behavior, based on the original full decision trees, is compared with the performance of the model based on trimmed decision trees. The results indicate that significantly smaller decision trees can be used for modeling the different choice facets of the sequential model system without losing much in predictive power. The performance of the models is compared at three levels: the choice-facet level, the activity-pattern level (comparing the observed and generated sequences of activities), and the trip-matrix level, comparing the correlation coefficients that determine the strength of the associations between the observed and the predicted origin–destination matrices. The results indicate that the model based on the trimmed decision trees predicts activity-diary schedules with a minimum loss of accuracy at the decision level. Moreover, the results indicate a slightly better performance at the activity-pattern and the trip-matrix level.