Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Employing an historical perspective, the author mounts a quantitative and theoretical assessment of population loss in the large cities of the United States. Three periods are considered: one prior to 1920 when large city population loss was aberrant; a second which captures the severe decline of the decades after World War II, and a third that encompasses the more recent shrinkage of cities. Population loss is measured in terms of prevalence, severity, and persistence and is also analyzed geographically. The author further identifies factors affecting population loss which are common and unique to each period. Although population loss has diminished, a number of cities are locked into trajectories of chronic loss, suggesting that a new phase of urbanization has yet to materialize.

Wilderness and multiculturalism are frequently invoked as central features of the official national imagination in Canada, but seldom are these foundational ideas recognized as genealogically proximate. Instead, both are routinely made to occupy discrete cognitive spaces, with the effect being that they are reified as distinct zones of Canadian life, and imagined as having emerged at two very distinct moments in the Canadian national narrative. Against the grain of this conventional interpretation, this paper offers a counterreading of wilderness and multiculturalism in Canadian political culture—one that seeks to disrupt their presupposed autonomy by rendering them simultaneous moments in a particular racialized historical geography. The paper elaborates this proposition by critically examining two popular works by Canadian landscape painter Lawren Stewart Harris. It concludes with some remarks on the political implications of the argument.

This paper investigates the normalization of military institutions through narratives of global cooperation—a phenomenon that I call cosmopolitan militarism. Empirically, I analyze how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) uses globalist spatial imaginaries to frame military approaches to political problems as enlightened and good (as well as necessary). In particular, I examine how this framing is effected by nonstate actors in the civil society—for example, through educational and entertainment events organized for young people by nongovernmental organizations. Theoretically, I illuminate the multiple scales, sites, and agents of militarization in Western liberal democracies. I foreground the production of a particular kind of normative space for Western military force. This is an expansive and open space in which the outsiders are gradually pulled into NATO's networks of cooperation. To understand how it operates, we need to examine not only institutions of the nation-state but also transnational networks of cooperation.

The contemporary rise of China in the new geo-economy is increasingly pressurising the spatial distribution of financial activity in mainland China and Hong Kong. With the reemergence of Shanghai, many people foresee the future demise of Hong Kong as the most important financial centre for the Chinese mainland. This paper shows that this conviction seems rather premature. From an examination of the regional distribution pattern of the mainland-China-based companies listed on the stock exchanges of Shanghai and Hong Kong it appears that both financial centres have relatively distinct hinterlands. Furthermore, it is shown that the exchanges of Shanghai and Hong Kong differ strongly in terms of sectoral specialisation. These results indicate that both centres reveal a considerable amount of complementarity.

Using data from a survey conducted in 2003 and employing multilevel modeling, this paper examines the impact of migration and urbanization on drug abuse and casual sex in China. The results suggest that being a migrant predicts significantly higher odds of having casual sex but lower odds of drug abuse. Living in an urban place is a significant risk factor for both illicit drug use and casual sex. There are significant cross-community (primary sampling unit) variances in the random intercept component, suggesting that the likelihood of drug abuse and casual sex is influenced by where one lives. After controlling for differences in individual demographic and psychosocial characteristics, social influences, and community factors, the intracommunity correlation is higher for drug use (0.32) than for casual sex (0.11). The results of random coefficient models further suggest that the impact of migration on drug use and casual sex also varies across communities.

Little work has been done on long-term trends in support for British political parties because of the absence of comparable data over more than four elections. Using a dataset of estimated vote percentages for each party over fifteen elections for a constant set of 641 ‘pseudo-constituencies' (based on those used for the 1997 and 2001 general elections) this paper uses a recently developed inductive procedure for identifying spatially varying temporal trends to identify variations in party support since 1950, enabling hypotheses regarding their nature to be formally tested. Whereas varying trends in Conservative support were predominantly regional—supporting the concept of a north–south divide—there was greater variation by functional type than geographical region in the patterning of support trends for the other two parties.

This paper examines the changing practices of spatial planning, critically engaging with state theory to argue that a new generation of ‘soft spaces’ and ‘fuzzy boundaries' occupies a key position in the emergent planning system. In the process we question whether privileged scales and sectors can meaningfully be identified in current state-restructuring processes. We use interviews with key national policy makers and a case study of the Thames Gateway to test our ideas.

We identify and explore the parallels and differences between gated communities and land invasions as forms of residential territory in cities of the South. Using the case of Cape Town, South Africa, the parallel narratives regarding the reasons for invading or gating land are analysed and placed in contrast with an inconsistent state response. For while both ‘gaters' and ‘invaders' are driven by similar desires for a secure home and private autonomy, the state responds very differently, regulating the former as rational residents, and disparaging the latter as unreasonable criminals. Thus, we explore the legitimacy of the two territories, challenging traditional responses to gated communities and land invasions, and arguing for an understanding of both as reflective of citizens' desires for secure homes. Although gated communities and land invasions represent diverse housing types, we suggest that it is useful to analyse them in direct empirical relation. In doing so, we do not narrowly conceptualise Southern cities as slum nuclei or divided postcolonial citadels (Robinson, 2003), but as complex and contradictory sites in which diverse residents and urban processes function in the context of state (dis)engagement.

Travel across national borders is growing rapidly as a consequence of greater ease, and access to fast means, of transport, but also due to the reorganization of society and the stretching of social relations over large distances. Much recent writing on transnational mobility has argued that long-distance travel is increasingly a normal and sometimes a necessary part of ordinary life for many people in richer countries. This paper investigates differences in the extent of transnational mobility between groups of Swedish youth with different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds. The study includes eight groups (162 individuals) of students in the last year of senior secondary school (16–19 years old). Comparisons are based on the respondents' mobility biographies—information about all trips abroad taken during childhood and adolescence. One important finding of the study is the very large difference in transnational mobility—in particular, aeromobility—between the most mobile group and the other groups. Those in the most mobile group attend a privately run school in a central urban location; the majority of students in this group have at least one parent in a managerial position. The study also finds that there is a substantial difference in transnational mobility between youth living in an urban versus a rural environment. Taken together, the results confirm the idea of transnational mobility as a critical differentiating factor. Furthermore, the results presented here do not assign transnational social relations a prominent role in shaping the distribution of mobility between youth belonging to different social groups in Swedish society. Of overwhelming importance in this respect is the extent to which holiday leisure travel is available and prioritized.

The utopianization of ‘creative work’ is a pronounced feature of postindustrial societies. The author analyzes the attendant promotion of ‘creative leisure’, and its role in supporting discourses and practices of creative work. Through an analysis of Richard Florida's influential text The Rise of the Creative Class, it is argued that, while creative leisure is offered up as a means of free and autonomous expression, it may be leading, paradoxically, to the erosion of freedom as the terrain of critical and disinterested leisure is pervasively colonized by discourses of economic rationality. Secondly, it is contended that whereas, traditionally, capital has always sought to regulate and administer leisure ‘from above’—with workers variably ‘resisting’ below—such a model may no longer apply since (according to Florida) creative-class subjects now appear to be actively choosing to perform (rather than being coerced into) economically directed leisure.

The author disentangles the age sex, spatial, and temporal structure of mortality in the Czech Republic during the period 1987–97 for a selection of cause-of-death categories and investigates possible socioeconomic and other causes for the mortality differences uncovered. The clarification of the major effects, as well as possible interactions between them, verifies whether causes of death should be modelled separately, and which interactions should be tested in the explanatory analysis. For instance, it was considered inappropriate to incorporate district-level time-series data in the analysis when spatial mortality differences did not show significant variation between 1987 and 1997—as occurred with cancer and digestive system diseases. In this case, the exogenous variables would take on the average for the study period.

Laos is a poor country in the world's most economically vibrant region. I provide a historically embedded interpretation of Laos' contemporary economic geography through three lenses: dualism, spatiality, and scale. I propose that, while the patterns of change in the country are familiar, the meaning of those patterns is linked to a series of spatial associations, scalar disjunctures, historical contingencies, and cultural incongruities which are place based and country or region specific. I draw a distinction between national and transnational governmentalities on the one hand, and ‘village governmentalities' on the other hand, offering these as alternative, but not mutually exclusive, ways of viewing and interpreting Laos' economic geography.

In the field of spatial analysis, the interest of some researchers in modeling relationships between variables locally has led to the development of regression models with spatially varying coefficients. One such model that has been widely applied is geographically weighted regression (GWR). In the application of GWR, marginal inference on the spatial pattern of regression coefficients is often of interest, as is, less typically, prediction and estimation of the response variable. Empirical research and simulation studies have demonstrated that local correlation in explanatory variables can lead to estimated regression coefficients in GWR that are strongly correlated and, hence, problematic for inference on relationships between variables. The author introduces a penalized form of GWR, called the ‘geographically weighted lasso’ (GWL) which adds a constraint on the magnitude of the estimated regression coefficients to limit the effects of explanatory-variable correlation. The GWL also performs local model selection by potentially shrinking some of the estimated regression coefficients to zero in some locations of the study area. Two versions of the GWL are introduced: one designed to improve prediction of the response variable, and one more oriented toward constraining regression coefficients for inference. The results of applying the GWL to simulated and real datasets show that this method stabilizes regression coefficients in the presence of collinearity and produces lower prediction and estimation error of the response variable than does GWR and another constrained version of GWR—geographically weighted ridge regression.

The author considers complementarity and substitutability among container ports located in a single gateway region. The level of substitutability from a shipping line's perspective is assessed by means of an analysis of revealed preferences in the port-calling pattern of vessels deployed on different trade routes. The author also identifies and analyzes the factors contributing to levels of port substitutability as perceived by shipping lines. The methodology is applied to the Rhine–Scheldt Delta, a major European multiport gateway region. It is demonstrated that the large load centres in the Delta are increasingly acting as substitutes, while each of the smaller container ports functions more as a complement to one of the large load centres.