Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Much of the recent worldwide trend towards devolution has been driven by the belief that fiscal decentralisation is likely to have a positive effect on government efficiency and economic growth. It is generally assumed that the transfer of powers and resources to lower tiers of government allows for a better matching of public policies to local needs and thus for a better allocation of resources. These factors, in turn, are expected to lead to an improvement in regional economic performance, if subnational authorities shift resources from current to capital expenditures in search of a better response to local needs. In this paper we test these assumptions empirically by analysing the evolution of subnational expenditure categories and regional growth in Germany, India, Mexico, Spain, and the USA. We find that, contrary to expectations, decentralisation has coincided in the sample countries with a relative increase in current expenditures at the expense of capital expenditures, which has been associated with lower levels of economic growth in countries where devolution has been driven from above (India and Mexico), but not in Spain, where it has been driven from below. We hypothesise that the differences in legitimacy between the central or federal government and subnational governments in top-down and bottom-up processes of devolution may be at the origin of the diverse capacity to deliver greater allocative and productive efficiency and, eventually, greater economic growth by devolved governments.

The Competition Commission's analysis in 2007 of entry and exit conditions among small stores across more than one thousand British high streets provided a landmark piece of research on a topic in which debate and policy recommendations had moved significantly, and arguably dangerously, ahead of the available evidence base. Within a general context of a continuing long-term decline of specialist small stores in British town centres and high streets, it cast considerable doubt on the popularly held view that a broad-based decline of the independent convenience store sector was taking place across the UK, or that Britain's high streets were experiencing an accelerating decline in their small and specialist stores. Additionally, and even more controversially, the Commission's analysis was able to demonstrate that competitive entry by larger format corporate food retailing was not inevitably and uniformly associated with negative impacts on the small store sector. It is known that the Commission's research was paralleled by an identical analysis conducted on behalf of one of the main parties to the Groceries Market Inquiry by the University of Southampton. The first component of the Southampton analysis, which both corroborated and extended the Commission's findings, is available in the public domain. This paper now presents the second component of the Southampton analysis, which similarly both corroborates but also extends the vitally important ‘conditional entry’ dimension of the Commission's research—focusing directly on the extent to which entry into the small store sector during the early to mid 2000s might have been constrained by, and exit from the sector accelerated by, the competitive impacts of larger format foodstore openings by the major corporate retailers. The paper shows: (a) that there is an important missing regional dimension within the Commission's analysis, and (b) that entry and exit into the small store sector in the UK during 2000–06 was constrained and/or accelerated by the competitive impacts of supermarket opening in a different fashion within ‘London and prospering southern England’ than elsewhere in the country. That is to say, in the region of the UK in which arguments about the threat of corporate retail to the diversity of the small store sector had often proved particularly heated, the Southampton analysis shows small shops in town centres and high streets to have been more robust to the competitive opening of larger format corporate foodstores than elsewhere in the UK. In that context, the paper suggests that the findings represent an ‘inconvenient truth’ which deserves consideration both in policy debate and in future processes of planning regulation reform. Discussion of the relevance of the findings in respect of the proposed changes to Planning Policy Statement 6 released for consultation by the Department for Communities and Local Government in July 2008 is presented.

This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, technical signifiers of global participation and urban economic progress: as the ‘new cultural icons’. Appropriated in different contexts, island projects, however, can be (and are) also resignified. They thus change in form, meaning, and use. While islands have been objects of renewed interest in cultural and historical geography, surprisingly, these new man-made landforms seem to have gone largely unnoticed. This paper suggests a research agenda to engage with artificial islands as a new ‘metageographical’ category of emergent, yet historically resonant, social space.

In this paper I develop a nonrepresentational spatiality of screened images, in which space does not refer to the way space is represented in images or the spaces in which images exist. Instead it focuses on the spaces that images themselves produce. Drawing upon the technology of the screen as a contemporary site at which images are experienced, I argue for a dual conception of the ‘space’ of screened images: an existential space constructed through the background context of a user's relation with an image; and an ecological space constructed through the expressive relationship between body and screen. I use video games as an exemplar of these spaces to show how screened images reconfigure the relationship between touch and vision and how this alters users' spatial awareness of the world.

Planning and urban policies emphasise ‘sustainability’, but claims that ‘compact cities' are more socially sustainable and acceptable have been controversial and subject to limited empirical testing. After a brief review of the concepts and debate, we set out new empirical evidence based on household surveys linked to neighbourhood physical, map-based, and sociodemographic data for five British cities. Statistical models are developed to account for systematic variations in the main social sustainability outcomes. The results are considered both in terms of the role of particular urban form and locational measures, but also in terms of the broader patterns of effects of packages of measures. Outcomes relating to residential satisfaction, stability, neighbourhood environment, and safety are all shown to be lower in higher density/central places, but it is also shown that a good deal of this apparent effect is due to social and demographic factors. Interaction with neighbours and participation in groups is better at medium densities, controlling for other factors, while use of local services is, as expected, greater in denser, more central locations. These findings indicate that compact cities are not ‘win-win’ on all dimensions of sustainability but, rather, that reductions in transport emissions will have to be weighed against social criteria. In addition, urban form has different aspects, which have differing social effects, and this knowledge could inform the future design of ‘smarter’ urban environments.

The author supports the argument that a focus on the spatiality of economic mechanisms can be a valuable way to address the issue of interurban housing markets, a theme which has not yet been adequately addressed by academic research. Developments are based on a theoretical framework in which two factors are considered central to the structuring of markets: (i) the possibility of choice between substitutable supplies (spatially related to the territory prospected by the consumer), and (ii) the availability of information on the state of the market (spatially related to the use of local sales references when market participants prepare their negotiations). This theoretical framework is empirically applied to the case of building sites prepared for self-built housing, with a modelling methodology elaborated for Belgium. The modelling methodology, based on cross-sectional regressions, develops a spatial autoregressive specification and incorporates a multiscale comparison. By highlighting the importance of information availability and demand substitutability, this exercise confirms that a focus on interurban market spatiality can be helpful to housing researchers. In fact, the results suggest that such a focus is particularly appropriate to the analysis of the impact of planning regulations on market outcomes.

Moving intentions are likely to be affected not only by whether or not residents are satisfied with their neighbourhood, but also by how they think that other city residents assess their neighbourhood: the perceived reputation of the neighbourhood. The place where one lives is a reflection of one's position in society and therefore people may want to leave neighbourhoods with a poor reputation even if they are satisfied with their residential environment. Using data from a specifically designed survey in twenty-four Dutch neighbourhoods we tested the hypothesis that, in addition to neighbourhood satisfaction, perceived neighbourhood reputations are an important predictor of the intention to leave a neighbourhood. The results show that perceived neighbourhood reputation is indeed a significant predictor of moving intentions, even after controlling for neighbourhood satisfaction and neighbourhood attachment. This finding suggests that neighbourhood regeneration policy should focus not only on improving residents' neighbourhood satisfaction, but also on improving the perceived reputation of neighbourhoods.

Time spent on work and commuting within dual-earner households is often analysed separately for individuals, but this does no justice to the reality of dual-earner households where decisions on work and commuting are made in a household context. This paper reports on a quantitative study of the impact of the residential context on working arrangements and commuting arrangements of partners in couple and family households. Using multinomial logistic regression, we analysed data from the 2002 Netherlands Housing Demand Survey and the 2004 ABF Real Estate Monitor. The results show a (gendered) effect of residential location in terms of degree of urbanisation and job access on both working and commuting arrangements. Good access to jobs makes it more likely that couples have a symmetric full-time working arrangement and also more likely that both partners work far away from home. Those in symmetric full-time working arrangements are also those most likely to be in symmetric close commuting arrangements. This finding reflects the substantial time pressure on such households.

Model simulations of residential segregation have shown that even modest levels of social homophily (or wishing to live near residents with similar social characteristics) gives rise to distinct spatial patterns of residential segregation. However, this proposition has been contested where social homophily is modest. This paper contrasts two explanations for urban sociospatial patterns (socioeconomic and demographic spatial patterns) in a region where social homophily is modest-South East Queensland (SEQ). The research question is whether sociospatial patterns are better explained by social homophily or by structural homophily. In other words, are they better explained by residents wishing to live in neighborhoods with similar people (social homophily), or by residents with similar social characteristics finding similar neighborhood physical attributes important, and thus moving to neighborhoods with similar people (structural homophily). SEQ residents were asked how important various reasons were in choosing their neighborhood. The survey data were linked to neighborhood social characteristics from census data with the aid of geographic information systems. Six neighborhood social characteristics in SEQ were investigated. Social homophily explained a small, though statistically significant, level of spatial variation in socioeconomic and ethnic (non-Western) environments. However, it did not explain any variation in the other four neighborhood social characteristics which related to household structure: that is, younger nonnuclear household environments; nuclear family environments; and older nonnuclear household environments, or disadvantaged environments. Moreover, structural homophily explained much more variation than did social homophily in all six neighborhood social characteristics. In regions such as SEQ, spatial patterns can largely be explained by structural homophily. Thus, modest levels of social homophily are not necessarily important in explaining sociospatial patterning.

Census microdata have become an extremely valuable source of information in social sciences research. These data, however, must have very coarse geographic resolution in order to protect respondent anonymity. Thus the geographic scale of these microdata sources is drastically different from the scale of many spatial processes—particularly neighborhood-scale processes. It is suggested that this difference in geographic scales creates a problem of conclusion validity for regression models which use anonymized microdata: measures of statistical significance are biased in these models. A correction to this problem in which small area data and population-density maps are used to estimate the effects of spatial dependence is presented. Monte Carlo evidence is presented which demonstrates that the conclusion-validity problem may be severe in practice. Further, this evidence shows that the suggested correction with small area data restores conclusion validity to statistical tests.

The increasing integration of the Thai automobile industry into the global economy throughout the last three decades has been influenced by a number of factors. Although the general increase in demand has created the basic precondition for global automobile firms to serve this particular market, the way in which these automobile firms operate in the Thai economy is subject to regulatory frameworks operating at different geographical scales. Indeed, the exercise of institutional power at the national and macroregional scale, regulating automobile production and trade within Thailand and the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) has a significant impact on the way in which firms embed themselves into, and how value is created within, the Thai economy. However, the network configurations of the lead firms operating in Thailand vary significantly. The way and extent to which lead firms create and enhance value within this national economy are strongly dependent on the manufactured product.

In this paper we explore and evaluate the concept of integrated rural tourism (IRT) by drawing upon a networks approach and the notion of best practice. By integrating the two an attempt is made to understand the processes that generate the sharing, exchange and transfer of knowledge and skills. The case examples of tourism-focused networks from the England–Wales border region highlight how the innovative practices of individual actors have shaped local resources into tourism products, providing a long-term focus for economic development and local restructuring. It is concluded that the development aspect of best practice, as a pathway to developing IRT, offers a tool to capture the ‘intangibles’ or noneconomic aspects of networking that promote economic growth and development.

In this paper we discuss relations between kinship, law, and property enactment. A recent revision of The Norwegian Act Relating to Concession in the Acquisition of Real Property is designed to influence the relation between subjects (property owners) and objects (properties) through ceasing the obligation of residency and cultivation on certain properties, which in turn is intended to increase sales prices of the respective properties. Drawing upon empirical research conducted in four Norwegian local authority districts, we argue that responsibility for past, present, and future generations of family or kin is highly important in property enactment. Although relations between subjects and objects are powerful and inform policy actions, relations between social subjects might be just as influential and powerful. When enacting properties, people may live in more complicated worlds than is often assumed. We assert that further research in legal geography and the emerging field of ‘geographies of relatedness’ might profit from seeing kinship and property as coconstituted.