Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Given recent developments in retheorising the spatialities of memory, in this study I move beyond established foci upon monuments and fixed sites of memory to consider some of the more ordinary places where memory erupts. In contrast to the high-profile, waterfront regeneration projects that often draw academic attention, I focus upon one of the more routine docklands that are less regularly analysed—namely ‘Victoria Dock Village’ in Hull. I discuss the ways a maritime-heritage aesthetic was employed by the developers to brand and market this site. Thereafter, I discuss how residents negotiated these aesthetics and a sense of local heritage through two planning debates. To do this I adapt recent reconceptualisations of kitsch in critical and material culture studies. These reconceptualisations take a category that academics have dismissed traditionally as vulgar, banal, ‘low’ culture, and suggest that the repetitive familiarity, reassuring predictability, and nostalgic sentimentality of kitsch prove comforting in an increasingly uncertain, disembedded world. I explore the degree to which residents engage with these kitsch landscapes, and whether they feel more rooted as a consequence. I also suggest that a greater emphasis upon everyday understandings of more ordinary places may contribute to wider analyses of how place identities are constructed and continually remade by the quotidian practices and negotiation of social memory.

In this paper I draw on my experience, in the context of the UK higher education sector, of trying to be ‘useful’. Specifically, I discuss cultural policy work, and contextualize this through debates in both cultural studies and geography concerning relevance and engagement beyond the academy. In a confessional tone, I argue that the translations that occur in the policy environment can result also in ‘mundanization’, in the emptying out of applied research as it is repurposed to suit the pressing needs of a public sector, fast-policy audit culture.

This paper is based on the premise that mundanity is not so much a quality inherent in an object or event as an appearance or affordance generated at the intersection of object, subject, and location. Assuming that a single object will appear banal in one context and different in another, we focus our attention on cases in which a single object is encountered as both banal and different—visible and invisible at the same time, marked out by its ability to blend in. In this paper we explore the mundane and distinctive by reference to marketing and products of the Japan-based company Muji, and in particular through relating the two contrasting aspects of the Muji image to the different ways in which the objects are located in presentation-marketing contexts and in wear-use contexts. In order to explore the usefulness of this distinction between display space and use space we perform a tactical erasure of the commonsense distinction between the textual and the material, thereby enabling the collapsing together, into the single category of display space, of the textual spaces of Muji catalogues and the material spaces of Muji shop floors. The distinction between the en-masse presentation of new objects in highly controlled display spaces and the mundane wear and use of purchased objects in the various and variously encountered spaces of everyday life is explored through the hybrid display-use space of Muji show homes known as Muji-Infill. We conclude by proposing that this display-use distinction can be used strategically to articulate the way in which skilled consumers are able to encounter objects imaginatively and practically in two different contexts simultaneously. In other words, we speculate that, when skilled consumers encounter a superficially mundane Muji object in the literal and disorganised context of use space, they are able to recognise it as stylish and desirable in part by referring to an acquired understanding of the ways in which that object-in-use evokes a Muji marketing space of massed objects-on-display.

Fifteen years after the collapse of communism, post-Soviet Russian remains a ‘high-imprisonment society’, second only to the USA in the relative number of people held in prison (570 per 100 000 population compared with the USA's 714 per 100 000). This gives a total prison population of around 800 000 people. These people are detained in penal facilities built during the Soviet era, the majority of which are in peripheral locations. Because the peripheries have been selected as ‘sites of punishment’, Russia's distinctive ‘geography of penality’ makes the maintenance of social contacts of prisoners difficult and undermines attempts to reduce the rates of recidivism in Russia. Women are drawn into the penal complex by virtue of their relationships with the majority male prisoner population, a process which transforms them into ‘quasi-prisoners’ and reproduces gender stereotypes.

As the ideas of the relational and relationality become part of the everyday conceptual make-up of human geography, in this paper I seek to recall the insistent and incessant importance of the nonrelational. In dialogue with nonrepresentational theory, as well as its critics, I suggest that any thought or theory of relationality must have as its acknowledged occasion the incessant proximity of the nonrelational. The occasion for this discussion is a consideration of the relationship between suffering, pain, or passion and the thematising actions of representation, communication, narrativisation, and theorisation. Such affections, it is claimed, present social science with a particular problem, a problem which revolves around an irreducible nonthematisability within these dimensions of corporeal existence. Drawing on the writings of Butler, Derrida, and Levinas I offer an account of how this problem or impasse allows for a rethinking of the ethical within social analysis and of the nature of representation, corporeality, and intersubjectivity.

Evidence suggests considerable variation among British ethnic groups in their performance at different stages of their educational careers. Many members of those groups are concentrated in particular parts of certain cities, and as a consequence many attend ethnically segregated schools. Using pupil-level and school-level data from the Pupil Level Annual School Census in England, we explore the relationship between performance and various student and school characteristics in Bradford (which has a large Pakistani population) and Leicester (with a large Indian population). We find evidence of a correlation between school ethnic composition and performance in Bradford but not in Leicester.

In this paper we revisit the excess-commuting technique and its links with urban form. The uncertainty in measurement is highlighted, as are the problems relating to changes in excess commuting over time. The measure of the theoretical maximum commute is proposed and added to the traditional excess-commuting measure so that the use of both the minimum and maximum levels can capture the concept of commuting potential. This measure is what we call the ‘extended excess-commuting measure’. These concepts are tested through the use of a simulation exercise. As well as arguing for the inclusion of socioeconomic variables in analysis, we demonstrate that decentralisation in urban spatial structure can lead to either an increase or a decrease in average commuting distance. Some of the inconsistencies in the use of excess commuting can be reduced through the use of actual commutes together with the commuting range, as these factors in combination lead to a clearer understanding of commuting efficiency.

This paper addresses interagent interactions, an issue that has received limited attention in travel behavior research. Drawing upon the theory of externalities and the sociological notion of social networks, we develop a discrete choice model that incorporates elements of social influence in addition to more conventional factors such as the attributes of alternatives and the characteristics of decisionmakers. Using simulation, we apply the model to the case of telecommuting—that is, the decision to telecommute or not—over two waves. The experiment suggests that some marginal adopters of telecommuting are influenced heavily in the second wave by the decisions of others in the first wave. Furthermore, the example illustrates the importance of social influence on new adopters of telecommuting in the second wave.

My purpose in this paper is to provide a fuller account of the origins and nature of city-centre living in Manchester, England, by emphasising its too-often neglected ‘independent’ and ‘countercultural’ underside. Some urban policy researchers have made too much of the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in Manchester, which is said to have been a key catalyst of its city-centre renaissance and city-centre living. My own empirical work as well as that of some cultural geographers highlights the ‘counter-cultural’ origins of the city-centre renaissance and, later, city-centre living in Manchester. I argue that urban policy research in Britain tends to characterise city-centre dwellers as young, single, professionals as if this was a more-or-less undifferentiated social group. Yet this demonstrates an oversight towards work undertaken by some geographers and urban sociologists who have shown that gentrifiers moving into British and North American city centres and inner-urban areas over the last two decades are a complex and differentiated group of housing consumers. My own empirical work shows that Manchester city-centre dwellers are a similarly complex and differentiated group of housing consumers that occupy a number of distinct positions within the city-centre housing market, and that this can be seen more clearly when the origins and subsequent development of city-centre living in Manchester is more fully understood. Three typologies of Manchester city-centre dwellers are identified; ‘counter-culturalists’ tend to originate from within the ‘new’ middle class; ‘city-centre tourists’ tend to originate from the ‘service class’; and ‘successful agers’ tend to be over the age of fifty.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate in the ‘new’ economic geography over the dialectic between the cultural and the economic, and in which the study of the geography of consumption is a prime example. The consumer behavior of culturally distinct immigrants is an intriguing and complex economic and cultural inquiry. In this paper we explore the grocery-shopping behavior of suburban middle-class Chinese immigrants in Toronto, where the group's ethnic economy has become full-fledged. Using a mixed approach combining focus groups and logistic modeling, we examine the preferences of Chinese immigrants between the fast-growing Chinese supermarkets and competing mainstream supermarket chains. Attention is focused upon the interplay of ethnic identity and accessibility in determining store patronage. The findings suggest a stronger effect of ethnic affinity on immigrants' choice of shopping venue than that of economic rationality. Grocery shopping, a most mundane and taken-for-granted activity, is practiced with sociocultural meanings by immigrants, and the social use of ethnic shopping spaces indicates that immigrants are not only consumers in ethnic shopping places but coactors in producing the unique ethnic retail environment.

In this study I tested the elastic-city hypothesis within a nonmetropolitan environment. Elastic cities are defined as employing aggressive annexation strategies that result in more effective planning control over the city-region, higher population increases, stronger tax bases, and healthier urban-regional economies than those of nonelastic cities. Principal component analysis was used to analyze and model the elasticity of British Columbia's approximately 100 municipal governments for a thirty-year period, 1971–2001. The findings do not completely support the correlation between a municipality's elastic boundary and growth or development. In fact, the picture is more complex than suggested by Rusk's elastic-cities concept. Annexing municipalities do not exhibit stronger population growth, newer dwellings, or economic development when compared with nonannexing municipalities. Annexation may be contributing to rural-urban sprawl rather than more-compact development patterns.

In recent years, increased attention has been paid to intermediate zones, especially medium-sized and small-sized areas, which have witnessed new sociospatial dynamics. We discuss a theoretical approach for updating the analysis of the structuring and the functioning of these areas which are searching for an identity. We assume, in particular, that they would express a new spatial model, which is qualified as re-urbanity. We present our arguments by combining rural and urban features and values, enabling us to constitute a comprehensive framework for these emergent sociospatial dynamics.

In this paper I extend regional multiplier analysis by incorporating both spatial (neighbor) and geographical (place-contained) effects. Multipliers, taken as elasticities, are estimated by regression analyses of the associations between retail trade earnings by place of work and total income by place of residence (from earnings, property, and transfers) across New England's counties in 2002. The multiplier analyses are conducted in two basic forms, both estimated using a simultaneous autoregressive specification and both incorporating a spatial neighbor income variable. In one, geographical effects are treated as dummy variables alone, so their impact on a particular income multiplier coefficient is read only indirectly. In the other, geographical effects are allowed to interact with property and transfer income so that their multiplier coefficients in the region vary from county to county depending upon particular geographical characteristics. The spatial effect of neighboring county income is consistent across the two forms, and suggests a competitive effect in the region's retail sector. Further results indicate that the region's property income and transfer receipts tend to offset each other in geographical context in their impact on retail-trade income.