Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The paper analyzes the effect of railway investment on land prices and land use in a polycentric city under various regulatory regimes of land markets. The introduction of a fast mode of transport (train), accessible in discrete locations, leads to an increase in city size. The stations of the fast mode induce dense residential settlements in their vicinity. As a result, the average residential and commercial land rents increase in both competitive and segmented land-market situations, compared with the unimodal transport case. When rail investments serve only one particular centre, this leads to the growth of the advantaged centre at the expense of the other centre. An investment in the fast mode results in city growth and an increase in rent receipts. However, the effect of the investment for individual centres and their corresponding residential areas depends on the underlying land-market conditions. Restrictions on commercial land use lead to increases in commercial rents, but this is more than offset by the decrease in residential land rents.

Transit-oriented development is shown to produce an appreciable ridership bonus in California. This is partly due to residential self-selection—that is, a lifestyle preference for transit-oriented living—as well as factors like employer-based policies that reduce free parking and automobile subsidies. Half-mile catchments of station areas appear to be indifference zones in the sense that residents generally ride transit regardless of local urban design attributes. Out-of-neighborhood attributes, like job accessibility and street connectivity at the destination, on the other hand, have a significant bearing on transit usage among station-area residents. The presence of self-selection, shown using nested logit modeling, underscores the importance of removing barriers to residential mobility so that households are able to sort themselves, via the marketplace, to locations well served by transit. Market-responsive zoning, flexible residential parking policies, location efficient mortgages, and adaptive reuse of parking lots are also promising tools for expanding the supply of transit-based housing.

Accessibility is often seen to be an important determinant of the location of economic activities. This paper focuses on the specification of accessibility indicators for modelling the location choices of offices, with particular application to the upcoming implementation of a high-speed railway line in the Netherlands. Potential accessibility indicators are formulated, whereby attention is given to the shape of the impedance function and to the role of competitive transport modes in a transport mode's accessibility effect. These indicators are then tested in a discrete choice model on the location of office employment. Finally the accessibility indicators are used to explore the effects of the upcoming domestic high-speed train services in the Netherlands. The analyses show that a Box–Cox impedance function performs best for this application and significantly better than the exponential and power functions. The derived potential accessibility indicators have much explanatory capability for location attractiveness at a regional level, but at an intraregional level connectivity measures become more influential. Finally, it has been found that the accessibility effect of the future high-speed train connection is larger for business travel than for commuting, the value of time of travellers being a dominant factor.

This paper reports the results of a stated preference study investigating the willingness-to-pay (WTP) of employees at the Amsterdam Zuidas for the presence of nonshopping and shopping facilities. The Amsterdam Zuidas area, surrounding the current train–metro–tram station Amsterdam Zuid World-Trade-Centre, is the largest multifunctional land-use project currently under development in the Netherlands. For nonshopping facilities, the results show that employees have the highest WTP for the presence of day-care centres and public transport facilities, and the lowest for public and recreation facilities. The average WTP for the presence of nonshopping facilities amounts to approximately €29 per month per employee. The WTP for the presence of shopping facilities is estimated at €25 per month per employee on average, and is in absolute value highest for supermarkets and lowest for flowershops and dry cleaners.

Privatization of transit and roads is gaining increasing interest. This paper develops a model in which infrastructure pricing and optimal capacity are analyzed under both public and private regimes. It compares optimal outputs (number of passengers) and capacities of public and private operators of rail transport. A crucial aspect of the paper is competition between modes: for instance, how are optimal outputs and capacities of the private railway operator influenced by the strategic decisions on the road capacity and tolls for the private (car) alternative?

American mortgage markets, once arenas of discrimination by exclusion, now operate as venues of segmentation and discrimination by inclusion: credit is widely available, but its terms vary enormously. One market segment involves sophisticated predatory practices in which certain groups of borrowers are targeted for high-cost credit that strips out home equity and worsens the risks of delinquency, default, and foreclosure. Unfortunately, it has become more difficult to measure inequalities of predatory lending: race–ethnicity and gender are ‘disappearing’ from the main public data source used to study, organize, and mobilize on issues of lending inequalities. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods case study of statistical representation of homeowners and homebuyers marginalized by race, ethnicity, and gender. A theoretical examination of official data-collection practices is followed by a discussion of alternative meanings of racial–ethnic and gender nondisclosure. Interviews with a sample of homeowners and homebuyers in the Washington, DC, area reveal some respondent ambivalence about the details of data-collection practices, but provide no consistent support for the idea that nonreporting is solely a matter of individual choice. Econometric analyses indicate that nondisclosure is driven primarily by lending-industry practices, with the strongest disparate impacts in African-American suburbs. Predatory lending is producing ambivalent spaces of racial-ethnic and gender invisibility, requiring new strategies in the reinvestment movement.

We map the distribution of environmental grants provided by selected California foundations in 2000 and the degree of dependency of the grantees on foundation support to test theoretical claims about foundations' role in contemporary environmentalism. Contrary to assertions by critics of elitism, there is no consistent favoritism of the so-called ‘mainstream’, ‘flagship’, national environmental organizations as recipients of foundations' grants. Instead, donors support a variety of causes with varying levels of funding based on recipients' perceived expertise and needs—a finding consistent with pluralist and resource-dependency arguments. On the receiving end, we find that the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that have greater reliance on foundation money are those which are younger, have fewer paying members, and are not involved in local-level or toxics issues. Overall, we find that no single theory can adequately explain the trends in giving and in dependency. Future research building on these findings can proceed along two directions: a theoretical path in search of a more universal theory of foundation giving; or an empirical path focusing on clarifying different types of NGO grantees, the longitudinal patterns of environmental giving, and the impact of foundation funding on NGO grantees.

This paper examines the relation between technical possibilities, liberal logics, and the concrete reconfiguration of markets. It focuses on the enrolling of innovations in communication and information technologies into the markets traditionally dominated by stock exchanges. With the development of capacities to trade on-screen, the power of incumbent market makers has been challenged as a less stable array of competing quasi-public and private marketplaces emerges. Developing a case study of the Toronto Stock Exchange, I argue that narrative emphasis on the performative power of sociotechnical innovations, the deterritorialisation of financial relations, and the erosion of state capacities needs qualification. A case is made for the importance of developing an understanding of: the spaces of encounter between emerging social technologies and property rights, rules of exchange, and structures of governance; and the interplay of orderings of different institutional composition and spatial reach in the reconfiguration of market architectures. Only then can a better grasp be gained of the evolving dynamics between making markets, the regulatory powers of the state, and their delimitations.

In this paper we identify some sources of resilience in regional production districts (RPDs) faced with external shocks. We analyze Madrid's electronics district, which has managed to survive and prosper even after the turbulent period of the early 1990s when Spanish telecommunications services and product markets were liberalized. The study of structural changes alone in RPDs as they respond to external shocks may not sufficiently account for other important sources of some districts' resilience. Also playing important roles may be the conscious strategies of districts' leading firms. We study changes occurring after shock with quantitative data coming from surveys performed before and after telecommunications reform was implemented. Most other recent studies of change in RPDs compare instead the current situation with a qualitative description of the previous situation. We also build on previous empirical work, provide recent regional statistics, and compile information from the daily business press published over more than a decade. Anticipating the end of its various monopolies well in advance, the Spanish carrier Telefónica began searching for new growth opportunities as early as the mid-1980s. With Madrid's electronics district having evolved from a state-anchored district to an emerging high-technology district, Telefónica benefited from its production and development linkages there which confered a competitive advantage in winning foreign markets, especially in Latin America. Since the crisis, a process of reagglomeration has occurred in the district. Several large multinational suppliers of telecom equipment have relocated some of their production to Madrid and assigned greater importance to their R&D laboratories there.

Environmental performance is a matter of major concern both for policy makers and for firm managers. In this paper we interpret firms' environmental performance as their ability to reduce polluting wastes while maintaining observed levels of inputs and desirable outputs. Making use of data envelopment analysis techniques, we compute waste-specific environmental efficiency measures for a sample of ceramic-tile producers located in the eastern Spanish region of Valencia. Our results show that there exists substantial room for improving environmental performance, which would have highly beneficial consequences for the local environment. In a second stage of analysis, we find that affiliation to the regional Technological Institute, ITC, which aims to promote technological innovation within the ceramic-tile industry, improves tile firms' environmental efficiency. In addition, firms located in the local industrial district of the Plana Baixa enjoy what we have broadly defined as ‘environmental spillovers’, which enhance their environmental performance. Also, ceramic-tile firms which outsource the management of wastes show better environmental performance.

The author develops a multiregional growth model with endogenous amenity and capital accumulation for any number of regions. The simulation results demonstrate that the national dynamics have a unique equilibrium. Comparative statics analysis shows that, if environmental improvement occurs in the technologically advanced (less advanced) region, the national output rises (falls). As a region improves its technology, the other two regions' aggregated output levels fall—not only in relative, but also in absolute, terms. This implies that if any region has a high rate of technological change and the other regions remain technologically stationary, then economic activities will tend to be concentrated in the technologically advancing region. It is also shown that technological differences appear to play only a small role in accounting for spatial wage disparities and endowments.

The authors draw on historical evidence, recent public inquiry documentation and maritime port-capacity forecasts to examine the logic and consistency of British seaport infrastructure development. In light of the rejection of the Dibden Bay (Southampton) container-port proposal, the authors counterpoint the UK government position with the views and evidence presented by key players in the port and shipping industry. The respective standpoints are shown to be markedly divergent in a number of key respects. The principal conclusion is that market forces are of critical importance in determining the nature and location of port developments. Consequently, unless shippers are provided with sufficiently flexible facilities in the locations they prefer, Britain could, as in the 1980s, find itself in danger of becoming little more than an appendage to the major North European continental ports. The delicate balance between interventionist and market-led port development is an issue that will inevitably be encountered in other geographical contexts.