Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper follows the trials and tribulations of a loose alliance of urban conservationists seeking to create and maintain spaces for brownfield wildlife in East London. It focuses, in particular, on the construction of living roofs—an innovative conservation strategy where wildlife habitat is created on top of new and old buildings in the city. The paper identifies three obstacles that have challenged the development of brownfield conservation, which relate to the urban geographies, lively temporalities, and inconspicuous forms of brownfield wildlife and wild-living. These obstacles differ markedly from those of the nonhumans prioritised in mainstream conservation. Brownfield conservationists have developed a novel and fluid model of practice, whose emergence and characteristics can be linked to wider developments in UK nature conservation. This model chimes clearly with new approaches to theorising human-nonhuman interaction that have been developed in nonequilibrium ecology and relational geography. Drawing together these empirical and theoretical innovations, the paper concludes by outlining the parameters of a fluid biogeography of UK wildlife conservation to help understand and guide future conservation practice.

We examine the mediating role of real estate agency in the residential housing market with reference to intraurban place meaning. Our focus is on real estate advertising because it is the central mediating technique used by sales consultants to incorporate and extend the market activities of a range of actors whose interests and needs are intertwined in the interpretation and representation of people's houses and homes, and those parts of the city in which they are located. We therefore discuss the process of making and deploying such advertising and the ways real estate sales consultants help continually to reinvigorate the meaning of suburbs and other urban localities.

The concept of heterotopia was introduced and immediately abandoned by Michel Foucault in 1966–67, but it quickly diffused across human geography, urban theory, and cultural studies during the 1990s. Notwithstanding the deserved impact of Foucault's overall work on these fields, there are some conceptual problems with the heterotopia concept. While the desire for a single term to probe spatial difference is understandable, the author takes issue with the kind of space envisioned in heterotopology. From a close reading of Foucault's notes, and with the help of Deleuze, Derrida, and Althusser, it is suggested that the spatiality of Foucault's heterotopology repeats certain flaws of the structuralism in vogue in 1960s France. In order for heterotopias to be ‘absolutely different’ from ‘all the rest’ of space, Foucault needs to posit a totality to society and to perform a ‘slice of time‘. The author ends by briefly examining how the structuralist tendency of heterotopology has pervaded some recent Anglophone adoptions of Foucault. As both geography and postcolonial theory have shown, slicing time often conceals particularist suppositions and is therefore inadequate to account for the multiplicity and unevenness of geographical change.

This paper draws on the emerging literature on diverse economies to analyse the everyday practices in a new type of finance organisation. Social finance organisations (SFOs), on the one hand, provide a mechanism for ‘ethical’ investors to invest money in line with their values and, on the other, provide loan finance sensitive to the needs of a variety of charities, and social enterprise and civil society organisations which have traditionally found access to finance difficult. They work through a mode of operation which emphasises partnership, reconnection, and association between stakeholders. Furthermore, social finance practitioners have developed a series of negotiation strategies for balancing social concerns with financial ones. The paper argues that there remain few analyses from inside organisations trying to practise economic relations differently. It demonstrates how theoretical debates on economic–social relationships are expressed on a day-to-day basis. The paper develops the concept of a sociofinancial narrative to highlight how social and financial organisational logics are hybridised within SFOs. This leads to a discussion on the integration of ethics into economic practice, in the context of neoliberalism as well as the entanglement of analysing alternatives through an ethnographic lens.

We examine the role of spatial proximity for venture capital (VC) investments in Germany. The main database is a survey of seventy-five personal interviews with representatives of different types of financial institutions. The analysis shows that spatial proximity is much less important for VC investments than is often believed. The results indicate that telecommunication cannot be regarded as a means of overcoming the problems of geographical distance. We find that VC suppliers frequently syndicate investments in distant portfolio firms with partners who are more closely located. The age of the portfolio firm does not affect the importance of spatial proximity. On the whole, regional proximity is not a dominant factor in VC partnerships.

Interviews with fieldworkers from the UK 2001 Census give voice to a unique, grounded view of the operational quality of census-taking. While the overall response to the census has been estimated at 94%, enumerators and their managers explain why differential undercount between social and geographical groups remained a problem. Fieldworkers subjected the census to criticism, from form design and quality checks to address-listing and management. Postal return of census forms caused unexpected difficulties for field staff and expense for the census offices. The subcontracting of various census operations and inflexible operational procedures made it difficult to find and implement timely solutions to problems that arose. A relatively high proportion of missing and inconsistent responses was expected by experienced fieldworkers and put extra burden on the editing and imputation procedures.

This paper contributes to the emerging body of literature examining the interregional income migration in the United States and offers explanations for why certain areas emerge as magnets for nonearnings income flows while other areas are losing this increasingly important source of personal income. By synthesizing ideas from contemporary understandings of life-course influences on migration and earlier work on income migration, the paper builds a theoretical model of factors shaping income migration across space and tests the model with evidence from Census 2000 by using both ordinary least squares and geographically weighted regression techniques. The analysis highlights the importance of life-course understandings of migration in shaping nonearnings income flows across space. Demographic factors such as concentrations of married couples with no children combine with quality-of-life and economic variables to explain nonearnings income migration. Other factors such as housing-market costs and immigration rates shape nonearnings income flows more powerfully in certain regions than in others. The results have important policy implications. With the baby boomers on the cusp of retirement, an understanding of the geographies of nonearnings income will be important for future regional economic planning and forecasting, as these income sources will become increasingly large components of total personal income.

Something new is happening to reverse the historical trend of skilled Scots moving to London for career progression. The Scottish population of London and the South East is falling and this despite Scots enjoying continued occupational success within the South East labour market. The authors ask why Scots are leaving the UK's main escalator region and then investigate how these migration changes can best be theorised relative to literature on the mobility of the ‘new service class‘. Building on Fielding's escalator region hypothesis, the authors report on recent research on longer distance flows out of the UK's main escalator region. They advance the critique of the escalator region hypothesis set out by Findlay et al and ask why people would leave a global city offering good opportunities for occupational mobility. Demographic regime change provides only a partial answer. Other explanations can be found in the changing mobilities of the new service class as they engage in what Smith has defined as ‘translocal’ and ‘transnational’ urbanism. The authors argue that Scotland's changing relationship with London and the South East may be representative of a wider set of changes in migration linkages between regional economies and global cities.

We define the urban field as the spatial organisation of urban densities according to decreasing gradients from centre to periphery. This urban field can be estimated from the encroachment of built-up areas. The CORINE Land Cover database enables the measurement of the gradient values for the spatial distribution of built-up areas in European cities. Instead of the exponential or power functions, which usually provide the best fit for the distributions of population densities, we find that two linear functions strongly differentiating a central and a peripheral gradient provide the best fit for built-up surfaces. The comparison between the 1990 and 2000 CORINE images demonstrates a convergence in the trend of urban spread between Northern and Southern European cities. However, it is still difficult from the data to decide which of the models of urban field is winning: will the steeper central gradient become diluted into the less dense periphery, or are the closer fringes of the central parts becoming integrated into the ordered pattern of the urban central agglomerations?

In this paper we address the related issues of retail innovation, changing shopping practices, and shopping geographies. We do so in relation to the spread of self-service grocery stores, and particularly the supermarket, in the postwar retail environment of Britain (1950–70), arguing that this juncture provides a propitious opportunity to study the relationship between changing practices of retailing and consumption. We highlight shoppers’ selective adoption of new self-service formats in relation to certain product categories and argue that this can be explained in part by reference to the socially embedded nature of women food shoppers’ behaviours and in particular the influence of contemporary notions of the ‘good housewife‘. We support our argument by reference to a wide range of contemporary documentary material relating to postwar shopping including market research reports, the publications of local consumer groups, and selected retailer and government archive sources.

The paper analyses from an evolutionary perspective how retailers respond and adapt to business-to-customer e-commerce. As such, the paper explores the diverse behavior of retailers with respect to the adoption of e-commerce. In particular, it empirically examines the extent to which the adoption of Internet strategies is affected by firm-specific features (eg habit of entrepreneur, routines of firms), network relationships, and geographical proximity. Logistic regression analyses of 643 independent retailers in the Netherlands suggest that geography matters, when other factors are controlled for. That is, the probability of having an Internet strategy increases significantly (a) when more relevant knowledge is locally available; (b) the more demanding local customers are; and (c) the less rivalry is present locally.

The changing modal composition and volume of work travel in London, Birmingham, and Manchester and their resultant energy consumption implications are considered in this research. Essentially, the mechanism is to calculate the passenger km travelled by mode and then to apply mode-specific energy consumption parameters to calculate energy consumption. By classifying work-travel trips according to their travel mode and their location and orientation (within, out of, and into town) it is possible to determine where the major forces for commuting change are and, more important, assess the implications of these forces for energy consumption. Average energy intensities per person trip are not the same everywhere or for every energy-consuming mode; furthermore, the magnitude and direction of change in average energy intensities are not the same either. Many of the trends seem to be moving rapidly away from positions of energy sustainability. The data are derived from the 1981 and 2001 special workplace statistics of the Population Census for small areas, and from fuel consumption technical parameters calibrated by engineers. One important objective of the paper is to understand the relative importance for energy consumption of changing travel modes for work journeys and changing trip orientation caused by urbanisation trends.

Classical economic theory following Bentham and Mill assumes decision makers are completely informed, highly sensitive to differences between alternatives, and above all rational in being able to rank order the possible alternatives and choose among them on some measure of welfare (utility maximization). In recent years, this view has been successfully challenged by empirical studies of decision making, and many alternative decision rules have emerged (such as lexicographic, elimination by aspects, counting, conjunctive, heuristic additive difference, affective, take the best, and so on). Despite thirty years’ work on boundedly rational and cognitive approaches, the classical view is still widely accepted in urban travel demand modeling. This paper develops a newer conceptual framework for shopping travel situtations—namely, choice of shopping place on different kinds of tour, for different orders of goods, and for regional malls and neighborhood centers. Hypotheses concerning the use of different kinds of decision rule are generated for the different situations or contexts. A statistical design is provided for tests of these hypotheses using fieldwork, verbal protocol analysis, and low-level t-tests. Fifty-five MIT students are interviewed, and their protocols for the shopping situations recorded and analyzed. The findings are that decision rules are multiple and vary with context. Although the specific hypotheses of the paper are not strongly supported, there is overwhelming evidence of the widespread use of simple heuristics. Implications of the findings are drawn for future work in the travel demand field and the preference and choice field. In addition, the contribution of this paper to behavioral decision making is noted, through the extension of work on choice heuristics to a different field (travel demand) and the use of a fieldwork qualitative methodology.