Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The unilateral militarism of the George W Bush administration has rekindled interest in imperialism within geography and elsewhere in the social sciences, leading some authors to refer to a new imperialism, or neo-imperialism. This paper critically interrogates the notion that the foreign policy of this administration represents a significant break from past US practices, with the use of concepts from Gramsci and Poulantzas to analyze the class and class-fractional bases of US foreign policy both during and after the Cold War. It is argued that there are certain important continuities in contemporary US imperialism and that there are also differences that owe to the present, post-Cold-War context. It is suggested that if this analysis of continuities is correct then the problems and dangers posed by the “new imperialism” may not be as readily resolvable within a capitalist framework as is suggested by various contemporary commentators.

Resources are crucial for the technological and economic development of firms in spatial perspective. In this paper we contrast two ways of conceptualizing resources, and argue that a conventional, substantive understanding implies a number of shortcomings which can be overcome through the application of a relational conception of resources. In examining four types of resources—material resources, knowledge, power, and social capital—our argument is that resources are constituted in a relational way in two aspects. First, resources are relational in that their generation, interpretation, and use are contingent. This depends on the particular institutional structures and social relations, as well as on the knowledge contexts and mental models of the agents involved. Second, some types of resources, such as power and social capital, are also relational because they cannot be possessed or controlled by individual agents. They are built and mobilized through day-to-day social practices. Individuals or groups of agents may appropriate the returns, but not the resources themselves. We conclude that a relational concept reflects the contextual and interactive nature of the selection, use, and formation of resources. This offers new insights into the explanation of heterogeneity in firm strategies and trajectories, as well as regional differences in the development of localized industry configurations, such as clusters.

Community currency originated as a means to empower the economically marginalized. This paper studies the US population of community currency systems using locally printed money. Eighty-two systems are identified that have been attempted in the United States since 1991. Internet searches and contact with system coordinators indicate that only 20.7% of all systems are active. Regions in which they occur are described; more than one quarter are in Pacific states. City-level Census 2000 data are employed in analyses of environmental conduciveness to determine in which types of social environments local currencies emerge and survive within. Social movement theory is engaged to identify general, population-based resources for local movements. Economic marginality and labor-market-independence hypotheses are also formulated and tested. The major findings indicate that cities with local currencies are characterized by populations with lower household incomes, higher poverty rates, higher unemployment rates, and larger self-employment sectors. Evidence is also presented indicating that community currencies tend to survive in places with younger populations, higher educational attainment, fewer married people, and less residential stability. Implications concerning the future of the community currency movement and its ability to empower the marginalized are drawn.

Geographers have increasingly recognised that communities are not homogeneous social formations but contain great diversity and are meaningful in a variety of material, relational and political ways. This has resulted in the apparently contradictory notion of “community with difference”; that community may be performed even while heterogeneity and disagreement are present. But geographers have yet to address satisfactorily the question of why communities continue to be the subject of fascination and study when attempts at definition have proved so problematic. Following on from Young's critique of community, this paper first engages the work of Nancy and Secomb to consider Nancy's conceptualisation of ‘singularity’ as a way to explain the human construction of—and possible need for—notions of community. In short we address the why community? question. Using a rural Australian case study, we demonstrate that meanings of community reflect many differences. This case also illustrates the role of human singularity in the negotiation of these differences, defining the manner in which individual perspectives of community are articulated as well as underpinning people's responses and struggles when ideas of community are challenged.

Many advanced economies have an aging population that relies heavily on government pensions, social security, and privately held investment-based income. In the United States the geography of social security and investment income (collectively called nonearnings income) is uneven. Furthermore, the ways in which migration serves to redistribute such income across space remain unstudied. This paper highlights regions in the United States that are becoming increasingly attractive to nonearnings income through migration. Overall, there is a consistent Rustbelt-to-Sunbelt shift in nonearnings income due to migration. These income shifts, however, are quite distinct between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Starting in the late 1980s, nonmetropolitan portions of the Rustbelt enjoyed net gains in nonearnings income through migration processes. Therefore, it appears that the migration systems which drew income away from the nonmetropolitan north during the 1970s are now shifting to some degree. Analysis further indicates that migration contributes to greater levels of economic disparity across space. Whereas flows of social security income are highly influenced by the aggregate level of migration, flows of investment income are more influenced by differentials in migrants' per capita income levels. Regions such as the Plains are attracting migrants with relatively low per capita nonearnings income whereas the Rocky Mountain and New England regions are attracting individuals with high per capita income. Destinations such as the Rocky Mountains and New England are likely to enjoy significant economic benefits as new sources of income arrive which are tied to migration, but the Plains region is left with less-well-off populations, which pose significant social and economic problems in such sending regions. As the population in the United States and other advanced economies ages, these processes of nonearnings income migration become increasingly important in shaping local and regional economic conditions.

There have been relatively few attempts to construct local housing market models in the United Kingdom—particularly models with an explicit treatment of land supply. In this paper we report the results of a pilot study designed to test the practicability of estimating a system of equations which describe housing market dynamics at the local level. Former district council areas in Central Scotland are used as a proxy for local housing markets within a region, thereby providing a panel dataset. A simple supply — demand system with separate equations for inward and outward household migration is modelled using two-stage least squares. The empirical results are varied, with some equations and coefficients performing more closely in line with prior expectations than others. House price levels are explained largely with reference to household income, socioeconomic status, and past levels of house price growth. Higher price levels and higher deprivation diminish inward migration. There are also suggestions in the results that higher rates of new-build supply partly cause higher inward migration. The rate of outward migration increases with ethnicity and wealth and decreases with deprivation. The empirical performance of the new-build supply equation is poor although the results do yield some interesting insights. House building output generally decreases as the proportion of ‘small’ sites in the land supply increases. There is also evidence that house building output decreases as land supply in neighbouring areas increases. We conclude the paper by outlining further directions for modelling prices, supply, and migration at local housing market level. In particular, the case is made for further work involving the collection of wider and longer panel datasets and for extending the pilot study work beyond Scotland.

Large-scale redundancies have been a common feature of the UK industrial landscape in recent years and a changing labour market and institutional context supports the need for ongoing research into this important area. In this paper the authors examine the postredundancy experience of workers who were made redundant from Harland & Wolff in Belfast in 2000 to identify the factors that affected the employability of those workers and to consider some aspects of state intervention. These workers might be regarded as being potentially disadvantaged with high risks of long-term unemployment and so provide a stiff test for policies for successful postredundancy transitions into the new economy with its demands for employability and flexibility. Employability is usually associated with supply-side measures, but the role of labour demand also needs to be explored, and the adjustment process is thus considered against the background of overall labour-market change that has occurred in Northern Ireland in recent years. The authors suggest that state intervention through the provision of job-related training can be a successful response to redundancy but that general skills training is questionable because of low uptake and perceptions of irrelevance. Job-specific training was not sufficient on its own to explain the relatively high rates of reemployment in this case. The presence of a group of engineering employers provided both the conditions for job-related training and then the vacancies for the redundant workers to fill. In debates about employability it is important that the demand-side of the labour market should receive sufficient attention. The authors also suggest that there are wider merits in taking a geographical approach to labour-market policy even if only restricted to the supply side. They suggest that employability should be developed in ways specific to local conditions and groups of workers. The differences in the characteristics of the workers who followed different postredundancy paths led to the conclusion that interventions could be precisely targeted to clearly defined groups of workers.

The author's aim is to analyse the role of suburbanisation and employment change in commuting in the Tallinn metropolitan area, Estonia. The author analyses changes in commuting compared with the late Soviet period, and clarifies the compositional differences between commuters and noncommuters. Data analysis is based on anonymous, individual, 2000 Census records, and bivariate and multivariate methods are employed. The major conclusions are that the commuting field of Tallinn enlarged and the intensity of commuting from the suburbs to Tallinn increased in the 1990s. Commuters differ from noncommuters both in Tallinn and in the suburbs in regard to most of the social, demographic, and housing variables studied. People who suburbanised in the 1990s were more likely to be commuters than were people who already lived in the suburbs at the end of the Soviet period; high-unemployment areas did not send more commuters to Tallinn than did low-unemployment areas.