Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In the context of a wave of retail foreign direct investment and increasing recognition across many disciplines of the profound developmental implications of transnational retail within the global economy, this paper examines the institutional and economic factors determining the performance of transnational retailers via a comparative analysis of the two global leaders in the industry, Wal-Mart and Carrefour. A conceptual framework is offered for explaining the heterogeneity of retailer performance in international markets, and three types of explanation are considered: the timing and mode of market entry and subsequent expansion, factors that allow the exercise of upstream market power, and sensitivity to issues of labour organization and standards. The two retailers are found to be differentially impacted by those factors, indicating the need to consider a process of institutional hybridization as central to the explanation of transnational retail performance.

As everyday activities are increasingly carried out at least in part through digitally mediated remote interaction, researchers interested in the complex relationships between urban activities, spaces, and travel are running up against the limits of familiar forms of time geography. This paper argues that because information and communication technologies (ICTs) are loosening the traditionally close links between activity, place, and time, physicalist models such as the space–time path and prism of time geography may need to be reexamined in light of the new realities. An important part of these new realities is the fact that virtual communications depend on specific kinds of material means (computers and mobile phones, in particular). These now compete with and complement a fundamentally different kind of material means (of physical transportation) which have traditionally been at the basis of time-geographic analyses. The paper proposes a novel conceptual framework for time geography, whereby people's space–time behavior is modeled not just in a three-dimensional space but in a multidimensional space. The framework amounts to a primitive domain ontology for conceptualizing human activity in an ICT-rich world, and can naturally accommodate activity in cyberspace as well as in physical space. The objectives are: (1) to expand our ability to understand activities in space and time in the age of ICT by explicitly representing choices of means (here, transportation-related and communication-related means) to serve specific ends: to be most useful, this should be done within the same model that also tracks people's spatiotemporal trajectories; (2) more specifically, to improve our ability to represent and analyze the increasing variety of activities carried out with the help of ICT as these relate to time and place, and (3) to do so in a way that conserves the power of traditional time geography and is practical enough to be implemented. A few simple examples are discussed and illustrated with the help of parallel coordinates plots.

Mike Moore is a working-class boy from rural New Zealand who subsequently became Director General of the World Trade Organization. This paper uses his experiences and understanding to analyse the embodied forms in which neoliberalism travelled from nation-state to global settings. It shows that neoliberal discourses and techniques do not always emerge in the sites we assume, travel in the forms we expect, or move in the directions we anticipate. By analysing Moore's understanding of relationships between the global economy and nation-states, the reforms he made to WTO processes following the ‘Battle of Seattle’, and the implications these reforms had for broader conceptions of global spaces and subjects, the paper contributes to a conceptual argument that neoliberalism can be usefully understood as an assemblage which comes together in much more disjunctive ways than is often recognised, and that it should be theorised and researched as such.

On 21 September 2006 UK über-entrepreneur and Virgin Group Chairman Richard Branson pledged approximately £1.6 billion, the equivalent of all the profits from Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains for the next ten years, to fighting climate change. Since then, Branson has restated his commitment to action on global warming, including investment in technologies for sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In this paper, I critically examine and engage with Branson's announcements as a specific entrée into a dialog about so-called ‘green capitalism’. I am particularly interested in the role of the entrepreneurial subject in environmental policy and environmental action. There are glaring problems associated with green capitalism as a mash-up of environmentalism with capitalism. One of these is the tethering of environmentalism to a political economy whose mantra is growth for growth's sake, or, in Marx's terms, accumulation for accumulation's sake. This has been discussed by some as the problem of capitalism's ecological metabolism or ‘metabolic rift’. Yet, while accumulation for accumulation's sake may well be anathema to progressive environmentalism and sustainability, I argue that this is not only an objective, quantitative problem but also one of the qualitative dimensions of produced nature and the cultural politics of environmentalism. Appreciation of this can be gleaned by reexamining Marx's discussion of the role of the bourgeois subject in the relentless drive to reproduce and expand capital accumulation via anarchic, entrepreneurial investment. Green capitalist orthodoxy relies on this source of innovative dynamism, but in the process obscures or overlooks the fact that accumulation for accumulation's sake is by definition guided by the anarchic and amoral search for profitable realization of surplus value. Moreover, in order for green capitalism to succeed, its legitimacy must be secured. I argue that this legitimacy derives in part from specific performances of green capitalism by entrepreneurial elites, also made evident by Branson and his commitments to climate action. All of this raises questions about the political, cultural, and ecological character of green capitalism, issues brought to the fore by Branson's brand of climate activism.

Informality, understood either as an economic sector or as a form of shelter and service provision, dominates Southern cities, even as disciplinary divides dominate the study of informality and its impacts. The author seeks to move beyond these divides by focusing on the production of urban space under different structural conditions in two Indian cities, Delhi and Ahmedabad. Using a Lefebvrian theoretical framework, the author examines existing literature to unpack the mutually constitutive political and spatial practices of informality. The segregated spaces thus produced can be linked to a politics of informality that includes not just everyday resistance and creeping encroachments to achieve gains, but also episodic moments of open protest, collective mobilization, and violence. In highlighting these impacts, production of space theories also open up the question of generating knowledge for new sites of resistance.

Land development for nonagricultural uses in China's periurban areas has been driven by the rapid urbanization which has made the areas an intense mixture of urban and rural activities. The taking of land-rent differentials derived from land-use change is also a strong driving force for land conversion. In addition to formal land developments, informal and quasi-formal land developments have been induced by the institution of incomplete and ambiguously delineated collective land rights which facilitate disordered land-rent competition. Urban land uses permeate extensively into the agricultural territory of villages. Spatially uncoordinated land conversion and disorganized physical development result in substandard, inferior, and deteriorating habitations. Land utilization becomes suboptimal, and land values depreciate in a worsening environment. Land rents dissipate as a result. This mode of periurbanization is deemed unsustainable for a low-income developing country with high population density and scarce land resources.

This paper examines the relationship between migration and labor-market segmentation in the northeastern Chinese city of Dalian. Several authors have stressed the importance of institutional arrangements in shaping the opportunity structures confronting migrants to China's urban areas. In particular, the ‘insider status' defined by the differential hukou or household registration status has been implicated in differential access to housing, schooling, health, and other benefits, as well as employment. The examination of the role of the hukou system in shaping employment outcomes in three high-tech industrial sectors of Dalian does not challenge this general finding; however, important variations among the software, biotech, and digital manufacturing industries are found. In these industries, the increasingly decentralized decision making of local economic development policy and shortages of skilled workers are leading to a selective relaxation of the hukou system—at least for some migrants. The implications of these changes for labor-market outcomes and urban development are highlighted.

Arguments about sustainable urban form have generally been in normative terms without recourse to its practicality. The paper shows that the essential elements of urban form are outcomes of real estate markets. The focus of the research is to examine the economic sustainability constraints to the adaptation of the existing urban form via housing market development viability. To address the task a number of econometric models are linked together to estimate spatial patterns of viability in five cities. The results demonstrate a substantial difference between cities that can be attributed not to urban form per se but to socioeconomic factors. This demonstrates that in practice it is impossible to divorce the physical structure of cities from their economic and social structure. Viability is also influenced strongly by public policy through the location of social housing. The research suggests that a driving force/constraint for development viability is the level of neighbourhood house prices. Large swathes of negative viability are found even without accounting for the additional costs of brownfield development, suggesting that there are major constraints to the reconfiguration of housing markets in some cities in a piecemeal way.

In the quest to explain changing urban political economic conditions over the past thirty years urban researchers have naturalized capital mobility, to the point where challenging the mobility of capital appears either impossible, undesirable, or both. In this paper I aim to denaturalize capital mobility and to repoliticize the relationship between capital and place through a critical legal geographic investigation of corporate mobility rights in the United States. The overall goal is to help urban researchers to think critically about the politics of capital mobility and to ensure that the legal principles enabling capital mobility remain open to challenge from alternative political perspectives.

This paper applies insights from actor-network theory to extend our understanding of the influence of evaluation techniques in decision making. Rather than assuming that evaluation is influential because of the intrinsic methodological veracity of the technique—that is, because it measures ‘the truth’ of our environmental predicament—it is more useful to view the adoption of evaluation tools in terms of their contested translation into decision-making settings. This is demonstrated by the growing use of the ‘ecological footprint’ (EF), which has been presented as a methodologically robust yet intuitive tool for guiding decisions. By following the use of the EF within a UK local government setting (Cardiff Council), one can see that its influence depended only partly on claims to technical credibility; it also depended upon an array of other institutional and personal commitments. The extent to which the EF was translated into policy settings reflected the way in which it had been institutionalised as an ‘obligatory passage point’ (after Latour) in decision-making arrangements, and careful representation of the implications of footprint measures. Overall, the credibility of the EF—as with other evaluation techniques—can be seen as a complex product of internal properties and institutional settings, but also of wider network-building activities which seek to cement the status of footprint calculations.

Conflicts over the installation of wind farms constrain the potential to adopt an effective means for mitigating climate change. Although conventional wisdom attributes wind farm opposition to ‘not in my back yard’ attitudes, research shows that this explanation fails to incorporate the multiplicity of underlying motivations of opposition. Instead, distributional and institutional factors and procedural opportunities for public participation significantly influence support for wind farms. We consider the relevance of a political ecology explanation of wind farm conflicts by focusing on a case study in rural Catalonia, Spain. We argue that the conflict constitutes a recurrence of older and broader ‘centre’–‘periphery’ antagonisms and that two more explanatory elements are complementary to this political ecology explanation: the existence of alternative landscape valuations and the encouragement of instrumental rationality by the planning framework. We suggest that the absence of opportunities for meaningful deliberation in decision making and the predominance of decisional bottom lines curtail claims to fairer distribution of costs and benefits from locally hosted energy developments, as well as alternative landscape value claims, and that this fuels conflict.

This paper critiques the proposition that way-finding strategies can be differentiated by sex. We argue that way-finding is better understood as a function of gender differences where gender is understood as a lived social relation, a product of the interaction between an embodied habitus and a particular social field. The use of survey versus landmark way-finding strategies is linked to an individual's gendered experiences of urban life. The study examines way-finding strategies from a sample of 127 gay men and lesbians from the Tallahassee, Florida metropolitan region to explore urban habitation patterns. We find that different way-finding strategies (most commonly a survey or landmark approach) are influenced by the habitus and gendered experiences of fear and anxiety in urban areas. Both bivariate and multivariate analyses suggest that individuals who perceive that their own gender presentation violates gender norms (gender dissonance) experience higher levels of social sanctions (harassment, hostility, and discrimination). In multivariate analysis, the study finds that gender-dissonant men tend to navigate using the landmark way-finding approach usually associated with women, whereas gender-dissonant women navigate using the survey way-finding approach usually associated with men.

The authors investigate whether the percentage of green space in people's living environment affects their feelings of social safety positively or negatively. More specifically they investigate the extent to which this relationship varies between urban and rural areas, between groups in the community that can be identified as more or less vulnerable, and the extent to which different types of green space exert different influences. The study includes 83 736 Dutch citizens who were interviewed about their feelings of social safety. The percentage of green space in the living environment of each respondent was calculated, and data analysed by use of a three-level latent variable model, controlled for individual and environmental background characteristics. The analyses suggest that more green space in people's living environment is associated with enhanced feelings of social safety—except in very strongly urban areas, where enclosed green spaces are associated with reduced feelings of social safety. Contrary to the common image of green space as a dangerous hiding place for criminal activity which causes feelings of insecurity, the results suggest that green space generally enhances feelings of social safety. The results also suggest, however, that green space in the most urban areas is a matter of concern with respect to social safety.