Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

A systems, holistic, or ecosystem approach is often advocated for water management, and has led to the emergence of integrated water resource management, or IWRM. Such an approach can be interpreted as ‘comprehensive’ or ‘integrated’, and analysts, planners, and managers need to understand the difference. Edge or boundary problems always are encountered when applying a holistic approach, and design of institutional arrangements cannot eliminate these problems but can minimize them. IWRM often does not have a statutory basis, which can lead to implementation challenges. By linking IWRM to land-use planning and official plans at the local level, IWRM can be given credibility, as well as be systematically connected to land-based issues.

Despite more than four decades of efforts to integrate the two fields, the place of land-use models in planning remains problematic. The expanding possibilities afforded by today's planning support systems (PSS) invite a rethinking of the relationship between land-use models and planning in the context of new approaches, tools, and techniques that can amplify the positive synergies between the two domains and enhance the ability of spatial planning to prepare for the future. This paper addresses one vitally important area in which the contribution of models to planning practice could be greatly improved. This is the neglected area of strategic planning, which is inextricably linked with the future-oriented mission of the field. The paper begins with an examination of the continuing tensions between modeling and planning, tensions that need to be reconsidered in light of the growing sophistication of land-use models intended for use in a planning context. It then outlines three interrelated roles for land-use models that would help support the mission of planning as a visionary and future-oriented process. These roles are based on approaches discussed in the planning literature (and in the ‘futures' literature more generally) as scenario writing, visioning, and storytelling. Although scenario writing (or development) is a notion familiar to land-use modelers, not every form of scenario development commonly proposed by modelers is useful to planners. Visioning is a goal-oriented process that focuses the community on desired ends and helps sort out the means for reaching these ends. Finally, good storytelling can help to clarify the implications of different alternatives and to build consensus by presenting particular desired or feared future developments in terms meaningful enough to be credible to nonspecialists. The paper presents examples of land-use models that seem well suited to one or the other of these roles. Although no single model is likely to satisfy all three roles, a well-designed PSS can provide the context for their seamless integration and mutual reinforcement.

New forms of representation at a fine spatial scale, in which units of space are conceived as cells and populations as individual agents, are currently changing the way we are able to simulate the evolution of cities. In this paper I show how these new approaches are consistent with traditional urban models that have gone before, with the emphasis no longer being on spatial interaction but on development dynamics and local movement. I first introduce ideas about urban simulation based on spatial evolution as reaction and diffusion, showing how problems conceived in terms of cells and/or agents enable new implementations of this generic model. I sketch the rudiments of cellular automata which emphasise rules for development transition, and agent-based models which focus on how individuals respond to environmental attributes encoded in cellular landscapes. I illustrate these exemplars through models of residential location. Three applications are then presented at very different spatial scales: pedestrian movement at the building scale, the evolution of systems of cities at a regional scale, and urban growth at the city scale. I conclude with proposals that formal policy analysis in this domain should always be informed by more than one approach.

The Government Offices for the English regions were established in 1994 to coordinate the regional activities of three central government departments. A decade on, regional government in England is greatly expanded, and two other institutions of regional governance, the Regional Development Agencies and the Regional Assemblies, have also been created. In 2002 the Labour government proposed that this ‘triad’ of regional governance should be further reformed and strengthened, in some places being brought to democratic account. In this paper, we argue that academic research on the English regions has generally focused on the Regional Development Agencies and to a lesser extent the Regional Assemblies, to the exclusion of the Government Offices. This focus has led some to overstate the extent to which regional government represents the real decentralisation of power. Focusing on the role of the Government Offices, we argue that central government retains a great deal of power over the ‘triad’ institutions, which in their current form may be unable to challenge the structure of power in the English state.

To what extent are people of different incomes and housing tenures engaged in social relationships in new mixed-income, New Urbanist HOPE VI communities? In Seattle's NewHolly Phase I, neighboring relationships are generally more frequent than in other mixed-income situations. Yet systematic differences among housing tenures by language, family composition, and patterns of local facility use and community involvement curtail social interactions. Most important, lack of proximity curtails relations among public housing residents and others on site, implying that the level of physical integration of housing units for the various tenures and incomes in a mixed-income development has repercussions for social interactions.

Recent research has provided very strong circumstantial evidence of the existence of neighbourhood effects in voting patterns at recent UK general elections. The usual reason adduced to account for these spatial variations is the neighbourhood effect. This hypothesises that people are influenced in their decisionmaking and behavioural patterns by their neighbours, with interpersonal conversation being the main means of transmitting such influence. Although there is an increasing body of evidence showing the impact of such conversations—that people who talk together, vote together—relatively little of this has grounded the geography of such conversations in the individuals' local neighbourhoods. Those who interact locally should show more evidence of ‘neighbourhood-effect-like’ patterns than those who do not. To inquire whether this is indeed so, this paper extends recent work on voting patterns in the United Kingdom by investigating the behaviour of individuals with different levels of participation in their local milieux—what we define below as neighbourhood social capital.

The authors analyse the determinants of the commercial container recycling behaviour of small and medium-sized companies in the retail-distribution sector of a representative Spanish city. A conceptual model is proposed, based on the literature on the incentives for and barriers to participation in selective collection programmes. By application of structural equation model methodology to a sample of 245 retail-distribution establishments, the main determinants of recycling were ascertained to be the perceived importance of the environmental problems and the perception of good management by public authorities. However, the free-rider attitude represents a barrier to participation.

The effect on rural communities of shifts in US agriculture toward a system dominated by large-scale industrial production is a central problematic in the sociology of agriculture. Despite the importance of agriculture structure and practice to US society, most research on this topic has been confined to specialized journals. And though research in this area has found negative effects on rural communities from agricultural industrialization, there is a dearth of inquiry into public policy remedies. Using data on 433 agriculture-dependent counties in the USA, we find that counties in states with laws that limit nonfamily corporate entry into farming score higher on important welfare indicators, and that the laws mitigate negative impacts on rural communities from industrial farming.

The critique of indigenous forest management in New Zealand in this paper contextualises the discussion in light of recent Eurocentric debates on the transition towards ‘postproductivist’ and ‘multifunctional’ agricultural and forestry regimes. The research findings confirm recent criticisms of Australian writers with regard to the direct transferability of the notion of a transition towards postproductivism developed by European researchers and also lend support to Holmes's (2002) notion of productivist and postproductivist occupance. Long-standing productivist demands continue to be made on New Zealand's indigenous forests, especially from economically marginalised stakeholder groups who depend on the continuation of logging for economic survival. We argue that the tension between the recent adoption of a ‘postproductivist’ conservation policy at government level and the continuing ‘productivist’ attitudes among some stakeholder groups explains why the protection of remaining indigenous forests continues to be contested. The New Zealand findings also provide further evidence for those persons criticising the implied linearity and dualism inherent in the Eurocentric postproductivist transition model. We argue that processes at the New Zealand forest–farmland interface support Wilson's (2001) notion of a territorialisation of productivist and postproductivist territories into a ‘multifunctional’ territory. From a social constructionist perspective, the results highlight the fact that a clear separation into productivist and postproductivist occupance may not be easy to conceptualise as our view of agricultural land as ‘productivist’ territory and unlogged or sustainably managed indigenous forest as ‘postproductivist’ territory is largely based on a Euro–American ‘deep green’ view of unaltered ‘nonhuman’ nature. This supports Mather's (2001) suggestion that postproductivism should be cast as part of a shifting mode of social regulation of forestry with particular stakeholder groups constructing images of nature according to their interests, and where western ideas of nature as a (postproductivist) wilderness embody cultural politics which arguably serve to marginalise the interests of indigenous communities.