Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper offers an interpretation of the role of emotions in animating housing markets which complements more traditional economic and behavioural studies of locally based house-price inflation. Looking to debates within social psychology and cultural studies we suggest that emotions permeate the materiality and meaning of housing markets as well as the experience of individuals acting within them. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted in Edinburgh, with households who bought in a rising market, we argue that housing transactions are emotional as well as economic affairs. We reconsider the fears that underpin what might appear to be ‘irrational exuberance’ and we argue that housing markets are propelled by a search for returns on emotional as well as financial investments.

The author examines the BBC's plans to move some of its key activities to Salford in the northwest of England. He develops a critique not so much of the plan to move, but of the specific proposals for that move (particularly as advanced by local parties in Salford) and of the economic-geographical claims assembled around them. To make these arguments, the author first identifies parallels between the proposals and Richard Florida's ‘creative class’ formulations. He then draws on a range of critiques of the ‘creative class’ concept to contest the substance of the BBC-Salford plan—which, he argues, reproduces an entrenched neoliberal urban development agenda—and to question the premise that the move will create regional economic value more broadly. Framed against international research into creativity-led development agendas which has typically privileged metropolitan or regional actors, the author argues that, ultimately, the BBC's proposals, while locally situated, are tightly bound up with national economics and politics.

This paper examines everyday living room interactions in which teenage household members conduct ‘tactical’ play in order to temporarily gain access to, and disrupt, the dominant, domestic codes of living room media. The practices of individuals are interpreted, through Michel de Certeau's language of ‘tactics’, as struggles or a series of opportunistic actions which can often reforge these codes of living, precisely because the house ‘rules' are not fixed or deterministic in practice. In these tactical performances of self, the use of media is enmeshed in a host of situated and symbolic action, reaffirming how media and face-to-face interactions are multiply and closely entwined in everyday living room life. This video ethnographic work examines such instances of teenagers appealing to ‘house’ rules and demonstrating domestic helpfulness in order to gain access to media, and the tethering of media to objects through the routine practice of ‘markers' and ‘stalls’.

This paper examines the increasing use of geographic information systems (GIS) to support the project of ‘collaborative’ planning. Specifically, I explore the ways in which the use of GIS in collaborative planning programs works to counteract and/or reproduce patterns of marginalization always present in local political struggles. Through a review of the literature and an analysis of a case study of the use of GIS in rural water resource management, I argue that the discourse and practices of collaboration can often lead to a problematic depoliticization of GIS. Furthermore, I show how this depoliticization can normalize both uneven power dynamics and the marginalization of alternative and oppositional perspectives. I employ this case study as a backdrop to propose an alternative practice of participatory GIS motivated by Mouffe's notion of ‘agonistic pluralism’. This practice of agonistic participatory GIS is designed to foreground, rather than obscure, the politics of spatial knowledge production by explicitly juxtaposing alternative understandings of space and spatial problems. I conclude by discussing the importance of this work to the critical and participatory GIS research agendas.

To compete in global markets, winegrowers must balance the seeming contradictory needs for territorial reputation and differentiation. This paper examines how the Bordeaux wine territories of St-Emilion and Blaye construct self-governance to achieve that balance, and looks at the extent to which their efforts influence the regulatory and supply chain structures of the industry. I adapt common pool resource theory (CPR) as a framework for analysis because it posits a collectively generated asset that must be maintained through mutually agreed rules. I extend CPR by focusing on reputation rather than physical assets and by incorporating the need for differentiation. The co-evolution of collectivity and differentiation is traced to establish differing institutional structures. The mechanisms of cooperation—democracy, legitimacy, fairness, monitoring, enforcement, cost reduction—are analyzed and compared for effectiveness in integrating collectivity and differentiation and for achieving territorial ambitions.

The ideal of environmental justice is a far reach for Israel, a country with severely limited land area, an overriding concern with security, and a significant minority population. Nevertheless, it is urgent that policy makers take steps in that direction, both for the health of the nation and for moral rightness. After a survey of theoretical approaches to environmental justice, the author offers an operative definition and theory appropriate to the Israeli situation. This approach, embodying all facets of the theory, is applied to a case study of the Arab town of Sachnin, and the policy implications that it indicates are explored. Specific steps that could help progress toward the ultimate goal of environmental justice are suggested.

Democratization entails the political incorporation of pollution victims whose subsistence rights have been sacrificed in the single-minded pursuit of economic growth. Newly democratized regimes have instituted mechanisms of environmental governance with varying degrees of success. This paper analyzes the process in which pollution disputes are channeled through legal procedures, by looking at Taiwan's Public Nuisance Disputes Mediation Act (PNDM). This system was enacted in 1992 to reduce the disruptiveness and politicization of protests after the failure of preemption and repression strategies. Contrary to the official claims, I find the PNDM produced limited absorption because its restrictive design was unfavorable to pollution victims. The institutional failure led to the widespread implementation of good-neighbor policies by business. With this undemocratic system of material payoffs to affected communities, business succeeded in reducing protest potentials by co-opting community leadership.

Following increased attention being paid to the importance of labour-market processes in relation to knowledge diffusion and learning, this study addresses the influence of agglomeration economies (localisation, urbanisation, and scale) on the propensity to change jobs between and within local labour markets. From the use of longitudinal individual data (1990–2002), controlling for factors such as age, sex, income, and social relations, the results show that the composition of regional economies influences labour-market dynamism. We identify two cases of intraregional agglomeration mobility, that is, positive effects on job mobility, due to the concentration of similar activities (localisation economies) and the size of the labour market (urbanisation economies). The results also show that localisation economies compensate for regional structural disadvantages connected to small population numbers, as localisation effects in small regions have a significantly positive effect on intraregional job-mobility rates, even compared with localisation effects in large and diversified metropolitan areas. The results indicate that the concentration of similar activities may be useful for small regions, if high levels of job mobility are crucial for the transfer of knowledge and the performance of firms.

Recent debates emphasize the role of collective learning as a major factor in facilitating and maintaining competitiveness for clusters of small enterprises in developing countries. However, few studies on learning in industrial clusters in developing countries have analyzed the benefits from learning by looking at improved workers' positions and conditions in the cluster. This paper fills this gap in the existing literature by focusing on whether workers in the furniture cluster in Metro Cebu (the Philippines) have access to upward mobility within employment in the cluster, based on their formal and informal learning. This paper demonstrates that their ‘embodied expertise’ is rewarded only to a small extent and labour movements are more the result of job insecurity than of pursuing opportunities for upward mobility within employment.

In many countries a very important fraction of public expenditure is managed by regional authorities. However, in a world where economic life has quickened and become more turbulent, subnational institutions rarely have a timely regional macroeconomic picture at their disposal. The authors propose a guide to a method for estimating quarterly accounts of regions from the national quarterly and annual regional accounts, by the use of a temporal structure which eliminates possible spurious jumps. The robustness of the process and suggested practicalities are tested, and the proposal is also shown to produce better estimates than other uniregional methods often used in this framework.

Through a hedonic approach the authors focus primarily on how house prices vary systematically with respect to some general spatial structure characteristics in a Norwegian region. The introduction of a gravity-based labor-market accessibility measure contributes significantly to explain variation in housing prices, and is used in a model formulation where the distance from the city center is accounted for. Based on these results we suggest a distinction between an urban-attraction effect and a labor-market accessibility effect. Quantitatively, the two distinct effects are found to contribute about equally to intraregional variation in housing prices.

This paper is concerned with geographical access to hospital services by public transport. By taking advantage of newly available public transport timetable data, a software tool is developed for the analysis of bus travel times under specified journey scenarios. The example of population access to Derriford Hospital in Devon, England, is used to illustrate the application of these methods, and the social and spatial pattern of accessibility by bus is explored. The analysis reveals substantial differences between access by public and private transport, and highlights the difficulty of combining conventional drive-time analysis with the discontinuous accessibility provided by public transport. There is a need for more attention to be paid to the incorporation of public transport in accessibility modelling.

In this paper we propose a structural equation model (SEM) with latent variables to model spatial dependence. Rather than using the spatial weights matrix W, we propose to use latent variables to represent spatial dependence and spillover effects, of which the observed spatially lagged variables are indicators. This approach allows us to incorporate and test more information on spatial dependence and offers more flexibility than the representation in terms of Wy or Wx. Furthermore, we adapt the ML estimator included in the software package Mx to estimate SEMs with spatial dependence. We present illustrations based on Anselin's Columbus, Ohio, crime dataset.