Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

There is a growing body of research relating to the ways in which digital code contributes to the production of space. In much of this work this issue is approached by first examining particular spaces and then considering the code and its effects on those spaces. In contrast, we explore the production of space from another angle, examining the ways in which an example of code—geodemographic classification—is constructed, and then questioning what it is about the emergent production of space that may feed back recursively into the production of that code.

Social life in Japan has been historically orientated towards hierarchical networks of social integration starting in the family home and extending to the neighborhood, company, and nation. In the postwar period, households and life courses were largely fixed, mediated by company society, a standard breadwinner family model and an ascent up an owner-occupied housing ladder. The bursting of the economic bubble two decades ago, and the subsequent ‘lost decade’, disrupted established flows into employment, family life, and owner-occupation. We examine recent restructuring of life courses around the home which has become characteristic of social changes and a medium of individualization. The home, once ingrained with notions of the eternal Japanese family, has become a conduit of atomization for younger generations who have experienced radical shifts in social and economic conditions. Since the 1990s numbers of single-only and couple-only households have ballooned while marriage and fertility rates have declined. Although homeownership norms have persisted, new patterns of renting and single living in the city, or remaining in the family home as a ‘parasite single’, are increasing. We consider how the reconstitution of ‘home’ under more insecure housing and employment conditions is embedded with the reshaping of life courses, housing pathways, and patterns of urban space and living.

This paper examines processes of social cohesion across sexual difference in ‘queer-friendly neighbourhoods’—localities that have a heterosexual majority in residential and commercial terms, but where a significant presence of gay and lesbian residents, businesses, and organisations are welcomed. This investigation advances a lineage of work on the development and maintenance of gay and lesbian neighbourhoods, and their role in residents' well-being. The findings also extend understandings of social cohesion, a key theme in neighbourhood and policy research across the West. The context of this study is Australia, where recent projects on social cohesion have focused on public order, economic benefits, and race tensions. However, given that gay men and lesbians are present in Australian social and political debates, sexuality should be integrated into studies about neighbourhood cohesion. To analyse processes of cohesion between heterosexual and same-sex-attracted people, we draw on data from case studies of two queer-friendly neighbourhoods in Australia—the inner-city suburb of Newtown, NSW, and the regional town of Daylesford, Victoria. We discuss the findings in three analytical categories to highlight common processes and characteristics of queer-friendly neighbourhoods: diversity and difference; symbolic landscapes; combating homophobia.

This paper aims to address the oft-mentioned dearth of research on the suburbs by examining processes of sociospatial segregation and middle-class disaffiliation in London's eastern suburban periphery. By drawing upon aspects of Bourdieu's theoretical framework, the paper shows how the home-owning, middle-class, largely white residents of the ‘Woodlands’ private housing estate attempted to shore up their threatened sense of exclusivity in relation to the nearby deprived ‘Eastside’ suburb. The empirical material is drawn from survey and interview research on incomers to Woodlands. For its affluent incoming residents, Woodlands' dominant place image was that of an ‘oasis’ within Eastside, an area dominated by a large council-built housing estate. Although the Woodlands incomers were physically resident in Eastside, they symbolically and practically disengaged from ‘local’ places, notably shops, pubs, and schools, and their lower class and not-quite-white populations. The author argues that the Woodlands incomers adhered to a spatially selective version of what Savage et al refer to as ‘elective belonging’. Such selective belonging denotes a spatially uneven attachment rooted in residents' schizophrenic relationship to the suburban area, embracing the Woodlands oasis whilst abjuring the ‘other Eastside’.

This paper asks how the material differences between suburban neighbourhoods influence parents' experience of place and their everyday practices of parenting. Building on a view of place as ‘becoming’, we examine how the accessibility of community amenities and the in-place production and maintenance of social practices contribute to the cohesiveness of neighbourhoods and the social capital resources available to parents. We draw on a 2002–03 study of experiences of Maori, Pakeha (European), and Samoan parents residing in six diverse Auckland neighbourhoods. Analysis of the parents' narratives highlight aspects of the neighbourhood environment that give meaning to participants' daily experiences of parenting, and foster or impede the social relations of place. Beyond purely locational issues, the nuanced relationships between material and sociocultural resources of neighbourhood profoundly influence local patterns of parenting practice. We conclude that place matters in parenting but the salience of the neighbourhood for accessing material and social capital resources varies for parents of different ethnic groups. ‘Jumping’ spatial scale to meet resource needs through the active creation of amenities was more common for minority ethnic groups.

Despite recognition of the fluid, interconnected nature of urban drivers and outcomes operating across a variety of spatial scales, the use of area-based initiatives in urban regeneration and renewal policy continues to fix space in order to identify scope, determine legitimacy, and clarify accountability. Even if multiple scales are acknowledged in policy discourse and strategy, actual boundaries defining a policy's geography of interest have typically focused on the neighbourhood. The emergence of citywide or subregional regeneration initiatives, such as England's Housing Market Renewal pathfinder programme and Philadelphia's Neighborhood Transformation Initiative, have been accompanied by different considerations as to how space is negotiated and enrolled both in strategic and in delivery terms. Using these ‘market shaping’ initiatives as a basis for discussion, I seek to add to debates regarding the tensions tied up in fixing space from the practical perspective of programme implementation. While a partial defence of boundary setting is offered, the influence and impact of scale arising from the delimitation of space are seen as crucial factors in determining how complex initiatives sustain their rationale and deliver in practice. Exploring the challenges created by the disjuncture between the spaces of strategic thinking and the impact of those policies as experienced on the ground, the paper concludes by offering some perspectives as to why the neighbourhood retains a pervasive hold within regeneration policy as the point of mediation between the local and global.

The subject of this paper is a new approach to multiperiod school location planning in urban areas. Most of the existing approaches in the field do not consider free school choice nor are they able to consider substitution effects between school locations. We minimize the location and transport costs with respect to students choosing the school with the highest utility. Since these school choice probabilities (determined by a mixed multinominal logit model) depend on the available schools, we have to consider two steps. First, we generate for each period a set of scenarios indicating which school is open and which is not. For each scenario we allocate the students to available schools according to capacity and utility. Second, we select for each period one scenario in order to minimize total costs. Problems with a long planning horizon and a large number of demand points are solvable. We apply this approach to schools of the City of Dresden, Germany.

The last decade has seen a growing turn toward New Urbanism in the redevelopment of urban neighborhoods. In October 2007 the City of Santa Ana released a draft Renaissance Plan to revitalize a transit-oriented district and government center supported by two neighborhoods. The plan exemplifies New Urbanist design principles which promote mixed income residential neighborhoods and respect local culture. Using a case study in two Mexican and working-class immigrant barrios and the adjacent downtown district, we investigate these principles. We describe different community-wide perspectives concerning ‘redevelopment’ and employ a textual analysis of the Renaissance Plan. One salient finding is that local planning codes reflect and support cultural and class beliefs that alienate Latino barrios. Another finding is that it is in the construction of a new science of form that the disciplinary gaze of New Urbanism reshapes places upon cultural-alien and class-alien norms. We conclude by suggesting research on the tensions between ethno-cultural-dominant city councils and ethno-cultural and economically marginalized neighborhoods while exploring how policy and discourse impact urban place.

Water has played a key role in the development of the Australian inland and the nation. For European colonists, the dry and variable landscape challenged ideas about nature imported from northern temperate regions. I argue first, that colonists brought with them ideas for ordering nature and tools for transforming landscapes that led to inappropriate and destructive water management and the silencing of local voices and knowledge systems. Secondly, colonial patterns of ordering and transforming landscapes are ongoing, but new ways of governing water, which challenge colonialism, are emerging. In the first section of the paper I discuss colonial relationships with water; in particular the methods of irrigation, river diversion, and bore drilling. In the second section I consider contemporary manifestations of colonial relationships between humans and water, focusing on the bureaucratic separation of land and water, the problematic definition of a river, and the ongoing desire to drought-proof the inland. In the third section I examine emerging ways of governing Australian water, which emphasise knowledge and interconnection, and in so doing challenge ongoing colonial relationships. I describe these two ways of governing water as existing in tension; a tension between engineering-based and knowledge-based approaches to water governance.

In this paper we reflect upon a particular, policy-oriented evaluation of a Sure Start Centre: a small element of a UK government programme addressing children's well-being in ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods. Specifically, and contra some chief social-scientific accounts, we seek to acknowledge how ‘policy’ and ‘emotion’ were inseparable in this project. We suggest that policy and media discourses, and much extant research, regarding Sure Start have been characterised by a particular apprehension of what matters, which constitutes a particular assumption about how policy interventions, in ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods and elsewhere, should be evaluated. In marked contrast we propound qualitative data wherein users of the Sure Start Centre articulated how this facility mattered to them. Our aim is not simply to reiterate a twofold truism: policy is always emotional; emotions are latently political. Rather, we consider how, in the wake of this truism, more combinative, open-minded encounters between bodies of social-scientific endeavours conventionally labelled ‘policy relevant’ vis-à-vis ‘theoretical’ might yield more careful apprehensions of the emotion and affect in policy, and the politics of emotions and affects.

In the relatively new field of social-activity travel behavior research, it has often been stated that social relationships have become increasingly physically dispersed in various contemporary societies. If so, this dynamic has enormous consequences on both travel behavior and social support. More explicitly, people have to travel some distance in order to meet, they need to plan their social activities further ahead of time, and, sociologically speaking, they are at risk of weakening their relationships to friends, immediate family, relatives, etc due to spatial distance. In this paper a binominal logit model was used to examine the characteristics of Swiss citizens who had named nonlocal strong-tie relationships in a nationwide representative survey. The empirical findings show various characteristics that increase the likelihood of having strong-tie relationships outside one's community, such as one-person households, higher education, younger cohorts, long-distance commuting, and, interestingly, people who want to spend more time with friends. I elaborate a discussion of these findings as they concern recent debates in the field of social-activity travel behavior.

The sustainability of rural development depends on the distribution of the social and environmental resources needed to maintain and improve the vitality of rural areas. Here we examine the complexity of measuring patterns of distribution using examples of socioeconomic data on rural poverty and affluence as well as data on environmental quality and species richness. We demonstrate how changes in the base spatial units used for analysis have different effects on different measures of inequality. The effects of such changes in spatial resolution also depend on the underlying processes that generate the data. The results of our investigations into the effects of scale on the assessment of inequality suggest that, where data come from both the social and natural science sources, the most appropriate level for analysis is that of the finest common resolution. This may result in redundancy of effort for some types of data but any such disadvantage is offset by the benefits of identifying inequalities that are masked at coarser resolutions.