Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Ecotones, such as advancing treelines, have been examined as complex self-organizing systems. Frontiers of human settlement may share some of their spatial characteristics, because they too include feedbacks between spatial pattern and process. Advancing frontiers of three study areas in the Amazonian region of Ecuador are analyzed with the aid of Landsat imagery to detect change. Power-law distributions of advancing deforestation are found, which are indicative of possible complexity. Alternative approaches in self-organized complexity, including self-organized percolation and the inverse-cascade model, and an approach to complexity involving optimization—highly optimized tolerance—are considered. Some combination of these, based on their common ancestry in percolation theory, might provide insights into population–environment interaction at settlement frontiers.

There are similarities of form between urban system models and models of ecosystems. These are systematically explored and a general model formulation which embraces both kinds of model is presented. Some insights are gained by using ideas from ecosystem modelling in urban modelling. The biggest gains, however, are for ecosystem modelling. It is demonstrated that urban techniques can be used for incorporating spatial competition effects into such models in novel ways, and that the complex dynamics can then be effectively interpreted. Urban systems have contributed significantly to complexity theory in the past—because they are complicated enough to be interesting but simple enough to be solvable. These insights can now be transferred to complex (spatial) ecosystems. The possibility of joint eco-urban models is explored.

Since the early 1970s, the notions of space and place have been located on the two sides of a barricade that divides what has been described as science's two great cultures. Space is located among the ‘hard’ sciences as a central term in the attempt of geography to transform the discipline from a descriptive into a quantitative, analytic, and thus scientific, enterprise. Place, on the other hand, is located among the ‘soft’ humanities and social philosophy oriented social sciences as an important notion in the post-1970 attempt to transform geography from a positivistic into a humanistic, structuralist, hermeneutic, critical science. More recently, the place-oriented geographies have adopted postmodern, poststructuralist, and deconstruction approaches, while the quantitative spatial geographies have been strongly influenced by theories of self-organization and complexity. In this paper I first point to, and then explore, structural similarities between complexity theories and theories oriented toward social philosophy. I then elaborate the thesis that, in consequence, complexity theories have the potential to bridge the geographies of space and place and, by implication, the two cultures of science. Finally, discuss in some detail conceptual and methodological implications.

The authors argue that narratives—the plural being very important—are crucial for the representation of complex urban spaces. They do this by drawing on first-hand empirical examples from a previous examination of people's understanding of ‘postindustrial transformation’ from the past through the present to the future, and earlier work on children's understanding of their own places in the present and the future. In so doing, they propose that the use of narratives must be part of the repertoire of approaches used to represent complex urban systems. This does not imply an abandonment of interest in or search for causal generative mechanisms in system change. Rather, it is a recognition that narratives enable human actors to express the meaning that underlies their own agency as part of their account of the trajectories of places.

Researchers across disciplines apply complexity theory to issues ranging from economic development to earthquake prediction. The breadth of applications speaks to the promise of complexity theory, but there remain a number of challenges to be met, particularly those related to its ontological and epistemological dimensions. We identify a number of key issues by asking three questions. Does complexity theory operate at too general a level to enhance understanding? What are the ontological and epistemological implications of complexity? What are the challenges in modeling complexity? In answering these questions, we argue that, although complexity offers much to the study of place and space, research in these areas has a number of strengths that enhance complexity research.

In this paper we compare periods of low-paid employment between urban and rural areas in the United Kingdom. Using the British household panel survey, we estimate the probability that a period of low-paid employment will end, followed by a number of possible outcomes, namely a higher-paid job, self-employment, unemployment, and leaving the labour force. The results show that there are statistically significant differences in the dynamics of low pay across urban and rural labour markets, particularly in terms of exits to higher pay and out of the labour force. After controlling for different personal and job characteristics across markets, urban low-pay durations are somewhat shorter on average, with a higher probability of movement to a higher-paid job. The results suggest that any urban–rural differences in the typical low-pay experience are concentrated among certain types of individuals, such as young workers and women without qualifications.

In this paper we focus on the dynamic effects under which the regional economic growth processes are accomplished, breaking them down into two broad types: neighborhood and economy-wide effects. By means of a proposed dynamic space–time empirical model, the competition structure within a multiregional economic system is developed. Cointegration and error-correction modeling techniques are used to support the existence of this competition structure over both the short and long term. As an application, we show the dynamic effects on the evolution of the regional performance of Spanish regions over the period 1972–2000. Our results indicate that some macroeconomic forces are operating through time on this Spanish system because positive and negative effects are detected both at economy-wide and at neighborhood levels. Further, the findings show that a new taxonomy of the Spanish regions could provide some guidance for the development of appropriate measures for regional economic policy.

Mobility, especially for car traffic, is a contested spatial phenomenon in contemporary cities. It contributes to processes of segregation and inequality, and the power-geometry of mobility is an integral part of the conflicting rationalities inherent in contemporary urban space wars. Internationally, Copenhagen is often seen as a successfully planned city. However, a case study of a participatory planning initiative in Copenhagen reveals inert and unequal power relations. It illustrates how residents experience their living conditions as being reduced by heavy car traffic, and how they oppose the multidimensional side effects caused by traffic overload. To increase the welfare of everyday life, urban policies thus ought to focus much more on the spatial distribution of mobility and the ways that mobility influences place-bound living conditions. Integrating bottom-up initiatives and participatory planning processes oriented towards empowerment could be a vital part of democratic urban planning.

Researchers are divided on the trends and causes of internal migration in postsocialist Central and Eastern Europe. Theories run in opposite directions: some scholars argue that increasing similarities with Western market economies are explaining the migration processes, whereas others claim that specific developments during the postsocialist socioeconomic restructuring are playing a major role. In this paper we contribute to the existing discussion by providing an analysis of personal and contextual determinants of migration to urban and rural destinations in post-Soviet Estonia. We base our study on the data of the Estonian Labour Force Survey from 1995. Our research population consists of 8480 people aged 15 years to 68 years in early 1989. We analyze the intensity of urban-bound and rural-bound migration from January 1989 to December 1994, using the techniques of multilevel event-history analysis. We show that personal characteristics (age, marital status, employment status, education, and ethnicity) and contextual factors (unemployment level and the share of ethnic minorities) are both important in shaping the intensity of migration to urban and rural destinations in post-Soviet Estonia. Although the differences in migration behaviour by demographic characteristics in Estonia are in line with universalistic explanations, the regionally varying effect of socioeconomic status on migration is specific to developments in postsocialist countries, as a result of general economic hardship during the socioeconomic transition.

Conventional population projections regard individuals, rather than households, as population units of reference. Such an approach has been questioned on both methodological and empirical grounds. Furthermore, in applications to smaller populations, conventional population projections have repeatedly yielded poor results. The simultaneous projection of population and households, on the other hand, regards households as population units of reference, but, in applications based on the notion of the household composition matrix, it has occasionally yielded analytically infeasible results. In the present study I examine the simultaneous projection of population and households in a etropolitan area, under feasibility constraints. A housing-market specification is expressed as a feasibility condition against multipliers of the household composition matrix, extracted here for the Cleveland Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Area (CMSA), 1990. The feasibility condition is shown to function as a gateway to exogenous considerations regarding the transfer of headship in households, and is exemplified in a forecast of population and households for the Cleveland CMSA.