Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper addresses our ability to analyse progression rates into UK Higher Education (HE) using a range of data available at the individual and neighbourhood levels. The then Department for Children, Schools and Families has recently released data which make it possible to profile national patterns of student educational progression from post-compulsory schooling through to university. However, the linked records lack detailed socioeconomic information, and thus a geodemographic classification is used to analyse the flows of students from different sociospatial backgrounds into the HE system. Rates of progression are shown to vary greatly between these groups, and a disaggregation of HE participants by courses of study demonstrates that the abilities of institutions to attract students from different backgrounds will be constrained by the mix of their course offerings.

As an increasing amount of manufacturing employment has relocated to the Global South, the developed economies of the Global North have sought new ways of competing within the global economy. In part they have done so through the promotion of the so-called ‘knowledge-based economy’ (KBE) constituted by innovations and new markets in high-tech industries like telecommunication, information technology, and the life sciences. A KBE discourse has become a central plank of policy at the national and European levels. This raises a series of questions, however, about the ability of less-favoured regions to compete for knowledge-based activities, given existing conditions of uneven development and the unequal distribution of knowledge assets between regions in the developed economies. In this respect, particularly critical to regional outcomes are the forms of economic coordination and governance that emerge in knowledge-based commodity chains. Engaging with recent debates concerned with global commodity chains, this paper builds on the idea that economic governance is increasingly alliance driven, entailing a diverse set of geographies and trust-based relationships between a variety of organisations that include small innovative firms, large multinational corporations, and national (and subnational) policy actors. These forms of governance open up new opportunities for less-favoured regions, although these continue to be constrained by already existing power relations between regions.

The capitalization of urban property markets intensifies the contradictions between housing as use-value affordability versus exchange-value asset accumulation, and exacerbates displacement pressures. Policies designed to deal with these contradictions—public housing and rent regulations—allow some low-income renters to resist displacement, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods. Unfortunately, the resulting empirical configuration has been interpreted in ways that cast doubt on the extent of displacement, its causal links to gentrification, and the necessity of protective policies. In this paper we present an alternative interpretation, using New York City as a case study to analyze the spatial evolution of displacement pressures amidst the restructuring of an embattled yet vital municipal welfare state.

This paper is a response to Valentine's recent suggestion that the family is an absent presence within geography. Persuaded by her argument, I explore other disciplinary approaches to theorizing families, and, in particular, how discursive appropriations of ‘the family’ and theories of family practices can enlarge our understandings of what families are and how they are done. I then argue that geographers can contribute to such studies by exploring the spaces and spacings that coconstitute family subjectivities. I put these ideas to work in the context of Birzeit, Palestine, where, I argue, particular family spaces and spacings offer more nuanced understandings of this place which challenge limited discursive constructions of the ‘Arab family’ and the ‘Western family’. I situate these theoretical maneuvers within broader geographies of intimacies, while arguing that there is still a great deal of work to be done to further spatialize our understandings of families.

Much research on racial desegregation in South Africa uses residential data to track how richer black South Africans are moving from apartheid spaces to higher income suburbs; how racial privilege is giving way to class privilege. Drawing on geographers' relational conception of space and anthropologist Sherry Ortner's notion of a ‘class project’, in this paper I show the importance of geographies of schooling to class formation. The study tracks how schools and two groups—township residents and poorer shack residents—affect and navigate access to schools in Durban. Of importance to class formation, the study finds that children of relatively poor, but not the poorest, township dwellers can commute very long distances to attend prestigious schools. Consequently, racial mixing is more evident in South Africa's schools than in its residential areas—the opposite scenario to that found in many other countries. Yet children born to very poor residents of urban informal settlements face considerable barriers when trying to access well-resourced schools: although they are legally entitled to attend prestigious schools located close to informal settlements, they can often live with extended families hundreds of miles away in rural areas. This new geography of schooling leads to the marginalization of some children but the perception of, and potential for, intergenerational class mobility among a quite significant group of black South Africans.

Environmental justice discourses have engaged far less with age as a significant factor associated with injustice than with other sociodemographic signifiers such as race and class. In this paper I explore material from an empirical study conducted with older people in three neighbourhoods in Scotland, using a framework based on environmental and social justice theory. The analysis highlights various means by which older people can be excluded from and within urban environments and links these with justice narratives of distribution, procedural inclusion, and recognition. Consideration of age enriches environmental justice theory, but also highlights how it needs to connect more fully with wider social justice theory.

Sweden is today an immigrant country with more than 14% foreign born. An increasing share of the immigrants comes from non-European countries. This implies that Sweden has been transformed from an ethnically homogenous country into a country with a large visible minority. In this paper we survey the effect of this change on school segregation. Building on Schelling's model for residential segregation, we argue that establishment of a visible minority has triggered a process of school segregation that in some respects can be compared with the developments in the United States. In order to test the validity of a Schelling-type process in Swedish schools we compare segregation levels in regions with different shares of visible minority students. We use data from the PISA 2003 survey in combination with register data on the ethnic composition of student population in different parts of Sweden. We find that school segregation is higher in regions with a large visible-minority population. We also find that, controlling for student background, there are smaller differences in performance across schools in regions with low shares of minority students.

A temporal structural path analysis of the Shetland Islands from 1971 to 2003 is used to describe the process by which two new sectors associated with the discovery of North Sea oil became integrated into the wider Shetland economy. The results confirm that it can take considerable time for incoming sectors to become integrated within an economy and that integration may increase when a sector is in decline. It is argued that structural path analysis provides complementary insights into the process of economic integration which are complementary to those gained from more standard multiplier techniques, and that both are useful to rural development analysts charged with maximising the benefits of incoming sectors and/or minimising the adverse effects of a sector in decline.

The ‘ideal deliberative procedure’ provides structure to the process of stakeholder deliberation, yet creates a tension with the formal processes of strategic plan-making. This paper examines process design by drawing upon communicative planning theory, and the rational comprehensive model and deliberative democracy literature. In the context of metropolitan strategic spatial plan-making, the aim of this paper is to examine how the knowledge interface between the process of stakeholder engagement and the process of plan-making enables or inhibits implementation of the plan. A retrospective study examining the development of two metropolitan strategic spatial plans: Greater Perth's the Network City plan and Greater Vancouver's the Livable Region Strategic Plan is provided. It is revealed that the engagement of the planners, the public and the politicians occurs within formal stakeholder engagement ‘events’ positioned at different stages of the plan-making process. This paper reveals that the deliberation among the professional planners and the politicians at the process design stage steers the plan-making process in a manner that retains its legitimacy and creates a more implementable plan.

Heat waves and cold spells pose ongoing seasonal risks to the health and well-being of vulnerable individuals. Current attempts to address these risks in the UK are implemented through fuel-poverty strategies and heat-wave planning. This paper examines evidence from the UK on whether heat waves and cold spells are addressed differently by public policy in the UK given that risks are mediated by similar perceptions that shape behavioural responses by vulnerable individuals. It is based on a review of UK policies and on a qualitative interview study of risk perceptions of elderly people as a primary identified vulnerable group to these weather extremes. The study involved in-depth repeat interviews with fifteen elderly respondents in summer 2007 and winter 2008 in Norwich (UK). Results suggest that neither heat risks nor cold risks are perceived as personal risks and therefore planned preventive measures by individuals are largely elusive. Cold risk policy reduces vulnerability; policy related to heat relies on early warning and public information programmes and does not reduce underlying vulnerability. Both types of policies largely ignore public perceptions of risks and could benefit from a more cohesive approach, supporting similar measures to reduce seasonal vulnerability.

Urban mobility problems, such as congestion, have been threatening the quality of life, competitiveness, and sustainable development of urban areas. The need for an integrated approach to land use and transport in mobility management has been widely recognised. Accessibility measures are believed to provide a useful framework to support this integrated approach. Some of these measures can also reveal the mobility potential created by urban structures. This paper introduces the concept of structural accessibility and a new planning tool—the Structural Accessibility Layer (SAL). This tool measures structural accessibility by comparing accessibility levels between different transport modes to a range of activities in a given territory. An application to Greater Oporto is developed in order to discuss the potential of SAL for planning practice. Results were assessed by a number of local experts discussing its applicability, robustness, and usefulness. This research produced sound evidence of the added value of the SAL in planning practice. Indeed, the SAL was found to deliver a good representation of location conditions for mobility providing interesting insights for policy design and for planning practice.

A new round of censuses is being held internationally in 2010–11 in the face of increasing challenges to the achievement of high coverage rates. Censuses are of enormous importance due to the extensive range of planning and analysis which is dependent on the accuracy of their results. Despite efforts to assess quality and make corrections, there is still evidence of population missing from published estimates. This paper uses administratively based data sources to assess probable undercount in the 2001 Census of England and Wales, specifically seeking to understand the differences between the census and alternative sources. It presents new evidence of strong social and spatial concentrations, only some of which have been addressed by official adjustments to the census. It is important both that these issues are taken into account in substantive research using published small area data and that the underlying processes are much more clearly understood by users and reviewers of the 2010–11 round of censuses.

Visions of the future pervade the development of computing technologies. This paper addresses the production of embodied anticipation inherent to video representations of technological futures. The focus of inquiry is videos produced by HP Labs and Microsoft to illustrate future worlds of technological experience. The principal concern is that these videos, as visual content and artefacts, are performative in their evocation of bodily attunement to prospective technology use. In the first section I analyse the visually oriented logics that situate the videos. In the second section I investigate the evocation of prospective interaction with technologies by drawing upon and developing conceptualisations of affect and the technological unconscious. I argue there is a politics of anticipation of technical futures, understood as the multiple ways in which technological futurity is encoded and, in particular, the relation this has to embodied understandings of the world.

This paper advances a theory of anxiety as social practice. Distinguishing between individual anxieties and anxiety as a social condition, the paper suggests that anxiety has not been subject to the same level of theoretical scrutiny as related concepts such as risk, trust, or fear. Drawing on the existential philosophy of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, the paper shows how contemporary anxieties involve the recognition of our own mortality and the destabilisation of established systems of meaning. The paper then turns to practice theory to show how social anxieties can be understood as events that rupture the fabric of everyday life, creating specific subjects and objects, ‘framed’ by different communities of practice, and becoming institutionalised to varying degrees. Focusing on a range of food-related anxieties, the paper explores the geographical and historical constitution of social anxiety, examining the process of anxiety formation and the factors that inhibit or enhance its social and spatial diffusion.