Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

One of the trends marking neoliberalism and the attack on the welfare state from the right is the move toward the privatization of public services. Recent research in both the United States and Canada suggests that residents of the suburbs of large urban regions are more likely to vote for political parties on the right and to support neoliberal policies such as privatization, while the opposite is true for inner-city dwellers. However, the reasons why such a spatial division should occur have received little academic attention. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature by analyzing the relationship between residential location, spatial factors, and attitudes toward privatization, using survey data collected in the Toronto region. Results suggest that the way urban space influences residents' daily routines and personal experiences may then mediate their perception of the uses of public services and the efficacy of government spending, factors which are found to affect spatial disparities in support of and/or in opposition to privatization. Thus, there is some evidence that urban spatial form is important for understanding the geographic unevenness of support for neoliberalism, and thus ultimately for the production of ideology.

We build on the literature on population-density distributions, but translate the consensus cross-sectional progression into a three-dimensional and six-stage geographic information system (GIS) based ‘volcano’ model. Visual comparison and descriptive statistics show Toronto's recent density patterns to be very similar to those suggested by the model: the central density cluster has reversed its decline, while peripheral clusters have developed at increasing distances from downtown. Local autocorrelation (LISA) allowed areas of significant clustering and diversity to be mapped, and strong conformity was found between the model and Toronto's empirical patterns. Overall, density levels throughout the metropolitan area are homogenizing and randomizing, even while inner-city redensification and peripheral densification proceed.

Conflicts over the nature of and rights associated with public space have a long history and have prompted numerous regulatory responses. Perhaps nowhere in the USA has the regulation of public space been as far-reaching as in Las Vegas, Nevada, where the financial stakes associated with sidewalks are enormous. This study examines how local officials mediate among varied and competing uses of the sidewalk. In defining the function of the sidewalks narrowly and passively deferring questions of civil liberties, local officials have effectively controlled almost all aspects of public behavior. In recent years, cities have invested in major commercial realization projects. Evidence from this case study suggests that, if successful, these developments will engender more extensive regulation of public life and the further curtailment of the freedoms traditionally guaranteed to citizen activity in public places.

Now a recognised phenomenon in many British cities, studentification is the process by which specific neighbourhoods become dominated by student residential occupation. Outlining the causes and consequences of this process, this paper suggests that studentification raises important questions about community cohesiveness and that intervention may be required by local authorities if social and cultural conflicts are to be avoided. Detailing the social impacts of studentification in Loughborough, a market town in the English East Midlands, the paper accordingly considers recent housing policies designed to prevent the formation of exclusive ‘student ghettos’. The paper concludes by suggesting that the type of ‘threshold analysis’ utilised in Loughborough may well spread students more thinly across a city, but that the relationship between students and the wider community requires other forms of regulation if town–university tensions are to be effectively managed. Throughout, comparison is made between the Loughborough and other UK university towns where the challenges and opportunities associated with studentification have been differently addressed.

Despite the rise of relational and antiessentialist approaches to regional theory, many accounts of regionality continue to work with territorial conceptions of regions as bounded wholes or totalities. The author suggests that this tendency can be explained in part by the continuing effect of cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism on dominant understandings of regionality. The paper examines the relationships between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research. It concludes with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.

It is simplistic to think of the impacts of new information and communication technologies (NICTs) in terms of a single ‘digital divide’, or even a small number of them. As developments in what has been termed the ‘e-society’ reach wider and more generalised audiences, so it becomes appropriate to think of digital media as having wider-ranging but differentiated impacts upon consumer transactions, information gathering, and citizen participation. This paper describes the development of a detailed, nationwide household classification based on levels of awareness of different NICTs; levels of use of NICTs; and their perceived impacts upon human capital formation and the quality of life. It discusses how multivariate classification of individuals and households makes it possible to provide a context for detailed case studies, and hence to identify how policy might best improve both the quality and degree of society's access to NICTs. The primary focus of the paper is to describe how this bespoke classification is developed, but it also illustrates how it may be used to investigate a range of regional and subregional policy issues. As such, we illustrate how the classification provides a valuable context for study of the e-society and for people's engagement with NICT In more general terms, we anticipate the likely net benefits of combining the most appropriate methods, techniques, datasets, and practices that are used in the public and private sectors.

Prevailing perspectives on the impacts of globalization on urban form in large, globalizing cities in Asia hold that these cities are experiencing an inexorable process of ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization’. Yet this focus on convergence distracts us from the task of analyzing urban change and its causes, leading to analytical muddiness and awkward planning and policy implications. The author presents an alternative framework that focuses on actor-centered analysis, and the importance of understanding historical context. This framework is employed in a case study of recent trends in urban development in Metro Manila, based on interviews, government, private sector, and nonprofit sector documents, and newspapers. It is concluded that, in Metro Manila, a defining characteristic of contemporary urban development is the unprecedented privatization of urban and regional planning. Large developers have conceived of urban development plans on a metrowide scale, and begun to implement these with the assistance of government. This phenomenon has its roots in the historical development of social groups in the Philippines and their shifting interests with the globalization of the Philippine economy. The author concludes that the privatization of planning raises distinct issues for urban planning theory and practice.

The health and diet impacts of a large-scale food retail development within a deprived area of Glasgow (Springburn) are reported. The study used a prospective quasi-experimental design which compared changes in diet and psychological health in an area where a new hypermarket was built (the intervention area) with a similarly deprived comparison area in Glasgow (Shettleston). A postal survey was undertaken both before and one year after the hypermarket was built, to assess changes in diet, self-reported health, and perceptions of neighbourhood. Changes in the retail structure of both areas were assessed through a ‘before-and-(repeated)-after’ intervention shop count survey. Qualitative data on diet, the neighbourhood, and the impact of the store were collected through focus groups. The quantitative study found limited improvements in diet and health. There was weak evidence for the impact of the hypermarket on population diet. There was weak evidence that poor psychological health in the intervention area reduced. Amongst those who ‘switched’ to the new hypermarket there was weak evidence of a small improvement in mean fruit and vegetable consumption but good evidence of psychological health improvement. Qualitative and retail survey results reinforce this, identifying perceptions of areal improvement through redevelopment and a small positive impact of the new store on the retail structure of the intervention area.

This paper offers a sustained reflection on the nature of corporeal vulnerability as an inherent and noneliminable aspect of corporeal existence. One of the many remarkable things about the recent interest in embodiment, emotion, practice, and performance, in the body-in-action, in the social sciences is the general lack of thought that has been given to the fact of vulnerability. The paper suggests that thinking through the nature of vulnerability could have a considerable effect on how we think about embodiment as well as on wider processes of subjectification, signification, and sociality. However, because of the persistence of a primary role being given to intentional or auto-affective action in the theorisation of embodiment across a number of theoretical perspectives, vulnerability remains largely unthought of within much current work on the body within Anglo-American social science. Drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and reflecting on experiences of corporeal expropriation such as insomnia and exhaustion, I suggest how we may begin to think sensibility and the sensuous beyond their almost exclusive interpretation in terms of comprehension, purpose, or intention while retaining the irreducibility of corporeal life to a matter of social construction or contextual epiphenomenon. Thus, the paper develops an account of corporeal life as inherently susceptible, receptive, exposed, as inherently open beyond its capacities, and reflects on the implications of this realisation for thinking about the genesis of meaning and signification and the social relation.

This paper is a detailed study of the location history of eight software and information technology (IT) enabled service firms, with varying attributes such as age of firm, type of work undertaken, and ownership sited in the southern Indian city of Bangalore. These cases are used to relate urban restructuring occurring in the city of Bangalore to the strategic shifting of location of firms within the urban fabric. While IT firms cannot be strictly classified as producer services, it is possible to contextualise their location decisions in terms of other office-based economic activities, such as producer services. Findings from the case studies are examined in relation to urban growth theories of the 1980s and 90s, which were related to an expansion of the service sector in advanced economies. The literature discussed in this paper explains the role of growth in producer services in suburbanisation of office space and the development of ‘edge cities’ and ‘suburban downtowns’ as alternatives to and in competition with traditional city centres. Studies of office location and contact patterns indicate the retention of management functions in the CBDs, with a consequent relocation of routine office operations to these suburban office spaces. The findings from the firms studied in Bangalore indicate a reverse pattern of peripheralisation of control functions and a retention of routine production functions in the core urban areas. The limited need for face-to-face contacts with actors in the local urban economy and the export-related output of this offshore industry are contributors to this apparent reversal of location dynamics. The paper briefly concludes with directions for future research on such specialised service production activity that is often being located in cities of developing countries, and its impact on the urban structure of these cities.

Employment, unemployment, and inactivity need to be studied in real historical time, not in the context of theoretical, timeless, market-clearing equilibrium. Four data sets from the UK Census, the Labour Force Survey, the Department of Employment, and Social Security Statistics are used to show changes in employment, unemployment, inactivity, and permanent sickness between 1971 and 2001. The different sources confirm that unemployment becomes increasingly unreliable as a measure of labour market slack. In low-opportunity labour markets many potential workers are not part of the labour force; they are not looking for work or are classified as unemployed. Low levels of opportunity add to measured sickness. The general rule is the greater the degree of labour market slack, the less appropriate unemployment is as a measure of labour reserve.

In this paper we explore the dependence of vehicle emission profiles over a twenty-five year period on three factors: the rate of traffic growth (g), the fleet renewal rate (Λ), and the technology ‘gain’ (θ) following a step change in emission standards. Using analytic and numerical methods we determine the conditions relating to g, Λ, and θ which result in three types of emission profile. These consist of: type-I profiles, in which emissions continue to rise but at a reduced rate; type-II profiles which fall, attain a minimum, and subsequently rise from a lower base; and type-Ill profiles which continue to fall over a forecasting period. For all profiles we determine the total reduction in vehicle emissions arising from revised standards, and the sensitivity of the total emissions to changes in their determining factors. Data from the UK are used to illustrate the approach which is extended in a wide range of sensitivity tests to explore differences in emission profiles between advanced industrialised and rapidly developing countries. We show that while it may be necessary for all countries to rely on both technological and behavioural policy instruments to reduce emissions, in advanced industrialised countries it may be more effective to improve emission standards, while, in contrast, moderating the rate of traffic growth may be relatively more effective in the rapidly industrialising world. The profiles resulting from the change in emission standards accompanying the introduction of catalytic converters are used to illustrate the general approach.