Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In the face of growing competitive pressures, cities in Britain and elsewhere have been exploring new ways of promoting their distinctiveness in order to increase local prosperity. I analyse the main approaches used for this purpose and consider their underlying rationale. I argue that there is some justification for developing more specialised activities and sources of differential advantage that other cities cannot reproduce. However, many cities appear to be pursuing the same policy formula comprising one or more of the following elements: nascent industries, high-level occupations, signature buildings, and consumer identities. I discuss the limitations of each of these. I conclude with some constructive suggestions for what cities might do to develop more original and distinctive advantages.

This paper contributes to the debates on relational conceptualisations of space by focusing on how these notions are used by policy makers in particular governance contexts. It uses the example of Milan, where recent urban interventions and a particular fragmented governance structure demonstrate how overstated accounts of relationality can take hold in disempowering ways. It argues that, as Milan tries to become connected into the global flows of capital by ‘going up’ the city league, most Milanese are becoming disconnected from the democratic government of their city. As such, an excessive emphasis on connectivity and fluid conceptions of space risks losing sight of the particularities and uniqueness of places and the territorial nature of problems in cities today. It concludes that, theoretically, we still need a relational concept of space but one which denounces unevenness and spatial injustice.

This paper reports upon the development of a policy assessment tool designed to evaluate the outcomes of policies promoting increased accessibility to services in rural areas. Much public policy is now concerned with addressing issues (such as accessibility) that span traditional organisational responsibilities and boundaries and thus require ‘joined-up’ thinking. At the same time, public policy is also increasingly required to be ‘evidence based’. As a consequence, it becomes necessary to develop appraisal and evaluation tools capable of assessing the achievements of joined-up policy interventions and their broader impacts on decision making and delivery across a diverse number of stakeholders. The Accessibility Policy Assessment Tool has been developed as a way of focusing more on the wider impacts of policy initiatives and is based upon a realist synthesis and multimethod approach to policy assessment. Through this focus, it has the potential to contribute to broader evaluation practice.

The environmental management and planning community is struggling with a gap between knowledge and policy making. To bridge this gap, ‘decision support systems’, ‘planning support systems’, and other computer tools have been developed to make knowledge about complex issues more accessible for policy makers. However, the use of these systems in practice is limited. One major reason for this is that these systems are designed for well-defined problems, whereas in practice there is often a lack of stakeholder consensus on the problem structure. The aim of this paper is to present, and explore the potential of, a new approach for decision and planning support. The Quasta tool aims at facilitating participatory problem structuring through computer-supported cognitive mapping. The tool, allowing qualitative exploration of scenarios and simultaneous forecasting and backcasting, is tested in four participatory problem-structuring workshops, in which various environmental issues have been discussed. Evaluations of these workshops show that this approach (1) helps stakeholders to become aware of causal relationships, (2) is useful for a qualitative exploration of scenarios, (3) identifies the need for further (in-depth) knowledge, and (4) has a low threshold for nontechnicians.

How can societies ensure urban residents' access to health-promoting green spaces while also pursuing the benefits of densification? Evidence of a relationship between leisure home ownership and health can inform efforts to resolve this dilemma. Using longitudinal register data, we assessed the prospective association between ownership of a leisure home and early retirement for health reasons among 42 588 adults residing in high-density Swedish urban municipalities. The research design included controls for ‘drift’ of unhealthy people into particular residential circum-stances, and other potential alternative explanations for the association of focal interest. After adjustment for age, socioeconomic position, and type of primary housing, logistic regression analysis revealed that men with a leisure home had lower odds of early retirement for health reasons than men who did not own a leisure home. Among women, leisure home ownership interacted with socioeconomic position; in contrast to nonowners, women who owned a leisure home had higher odds of early retirement for health reasons if they also had higher levels of education and employment income. The associations we have uncovered provide additional insight on the relationship between access to natural environments and health, and they warrant consideration in efforts to resolve the densification dilemma.

We report findings from a choice experiment survey designed to estimate the economic benefits of policy measures to improve the rural landscape in the Republic of Ireland. Using a panel mixed logit specification to account for unobserved taste heterogeneity we derived individual-specific willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates for each respondent in the sample. We subsequently investigated the spatial dependence of these estimates. Results suggest the existence of positive spatial autocorrelation for all rural landscape attributes. As a means of benefit transfer, kriging methods were employed to interpolate WTP estimates across the whole of the Republic of Ireland. The kriged WTP surfaces confirm the existence of spatial dependence and illustrate the implied spatial variation and regional disparities in WTP for all the rural landscape improvements investigated.

Postapartheid South Africa has been plagued by an increase in crime across all categories. While a significant amount of criminological research has been undertaken in the country, the spatial analysis of crime and offenders, a basic prerequisite for a functional crime management strategy, has not been adequately addressed at a sufficiently fine scale of aggregation. This paper reports on the geodemographic development of offender risk profiles for neighbourhoods in the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality in South Africa. Geodemographics is a relatively new geo-analytical technique that is being increasingly used in policing applications to complement law enforcement techniques and provide further insight into offenders and their offences. Findings of the study indicate that neighbourhoods at a high risk for offender development are amongst the most socially and economically deprived in the municipality and are disproportionately occupied by black Africans. The results highlight a need to reassess the current law enforcement approach to crime reduction in the country and return to the crime prevention initiatives that were part of the National Crime Prevention Strategy of the 1990s.

Globalization is expected to benefit developing country manufacturers through exposure to quality-demanding markets and global buyers. Yet, its contribution to the process of local upgrading depends on the ability of these manufacturers to have access to and learn from global transactions. Growing awareness of the exclusion of smaller sized manufacturers from buyer-driven upgrading arrangements has led development scholars to document alternative strategies for global market insertion that are locally coordinated. But what happens when these alternative upgrading paths are themselves hindered by development-inhibiting relational dynamics at the local level? What options exist for unlocking entrenched social roles and practices in order to promote regional upgrading and with it the repositioning of an established manufacturing district? This paper explores this policy challenge within the context of a historic apparel-making district in West Central Mexico. It looks at the innovative steps taken by development practitioners to promote relational deepening between established manufacturing elites and their traditional subcontractors and, in turn, to encourage joint upgrading as a regional strategy for new market access.

In this paper we discuss two distinct sets of advantages which have helped Turkey to become the world's second-largest clothing exporter: the competency-related advantages of the last decade; and the trade-and-currency-related advantages of the earlier decades. In the late 1980s and 1990s, some fortunate developments in the international currency markets, together with an unofficial trade with Russia following the collapse of the Soviet Union, resulted in windfall trade gains for Turkey. During the last decade, a shift in the culture of fashion, from ready-to-wear to fast fashion pushed Turkish suppliers to upgrade into higher value-added activities such as design. While our focus is on the latter advantage, we point out that both sets of advantages have a commonality: namely, a sustainability problem.

The concept of ‘multifunctionality’ has developed partly in response to the threat which trade liberalisation presents to European agriculture. In this paper we outline different approaches to multifunctionality and consider whether, and to what extent, the concept may be applied more widely outside its home of origin in Western Europe, and specifically whether it is relevant to liberalised agricultural economies, such as Australia. The focus is on government agricultural and rural policies which contribute to the maintenance or enhancement of the multifunctional characteristics of agriculture and other land uses. We suggest that, despite differences in views of the importance of farming and rural areas, a convergence is appearing between Australia and European countries in the development of policies aimed at the promotion of multiple outcomes from agriculture.

The disparity of accessibility between cars and public transit provides important information about the degree of auto orientation in urban spatial structure. Using spatial data from 1990 and 2000 and a geographical information system, the present study examined the degrees and spatial variations of accessibility disparity between commuting by car and public transit as well as the temporal changes in this disparity in the metropolitan areas of Boston and San Francisco. In both metropolitan areas there was a considerable disparity in job accessibility in a comparison between users of cars and public transit, which turned out to differ substantially by location. Between 1990 and 2000 regional levels of this accessibility disparity lessened in the two metropolitan areas, but the temporal changes in the accessibility disparity varied considerably among different locations within the metropolitan areas. The accessibility disparity decreased in the majority of central areas and in a number of suburban zones near rail stations, whereas the accessibility disparity increased in a number of suburban zones near major highways. Improving accessibility for public transit, relative to that for cars, should be a key strategy for redressing auto-orientation urban spatial structure, an important objective of sustainable development.

This paper illustrates the design and implementation of a choice modelling experiment to determine the spatial distribution of environmental benefits of Kings Park (Western Australia). The objective is to understand which environmental change produces benefit spillovers, and whether this information can help to determine the appropriate form of funding for conservation policies. Results indicate that distance effects vary across the choice attributes, and can take very complex forms, according to the use-value/non-use-value ratio implicit in each attribute. For policy purposes, the results suggest that funding for the park should be a mix of local, state, and federal resources.

There is an extensive literature on various aspects of segregation in Northern Ireland (NI). However, there are no census-based analyses of population change and residential segregation that cover the entire 1971–2001 period using consistent geographical units through time for all NI. This shortcoming is addressed in this paper by an analysis of changes in (i) the spatial distribution of population and (ii) residential segregation between 1971 and 2001 using the NI Grid-Square Product comprising data for a set of 1km2 cells that cover all populated areas in NI. The substantive issue of whether NI has become more segregated through time is addressed as are questions about measuring change through time using the census and the importance of spatial scale. One important conclusion is that NI indeed became more residential^ segregated between 1971 and 2001, but that residential segregation in 2001 remained approximately at its 1991 level according to most indicators.

The author presents a multistate model for projecting regional populations by Indigenous status. Previous methods employed to project the Australian Indigenous population did not model interaction between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations, in large part because of serious data deficiencies. Improvements in data coverage and quality, particularly in the Northern Territory, now permit the effective use of conceptually preferable multistate methods. The multistate model presented in this paper explicitly incorporates identification change and, in contrast to previous modelling which has assumed all offspring of mixed Indigenous/non-Indigenous couples to be Indigenous, permits babies born to mixed couples to be ascribed either Indigenous or non-Indigenous identities. A hybrid directional–net-migration approach is taken to the modelling of internal migration. Illustrative projections are presented for the Northern Territory.