Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The issue of social mixing has recently moved to the forefront of gentrification debate. In part, this has been stimulated by neoliberal urban policies promoting ‘social mix’, research showing the inability of gentrified neighbourhoods to remain socially mixed and attempts to rethink the association between gentrification and displacement. This paper draws upon a mixed-methods study that examined levels of social mixing between gentrifying and incumbent communities in three neighbourhoods undergoing new-build gentrification in London, UK. Little evidence was found for substantial interactions between populations, and there were few shared perceptions of community. The author claims that the particular character of new-build gentrification has played an important role in generating this socially tectonic situation. Husserl's concept of the lifeworld and Bourdieu's thesis on the relative structuring of class identity are drawn upon to provide an explanatory framework.

Using data from a 2005 survey of rural–urban migrants in Shenzhen, we investigate the intentions of two groups of migrants. We use the birth years from 1970 to 1980 as a reasonable range of dividing lines to separate the two groups. For each year we divide the sample into those born before that year and those born in or after that year. These are referred to as the old generation and the new generation, respectively. Three possible development trajectories are considered: settling in cities, returning home to seek a nonagricultural job, and returning home to farm. We find that members of the new generation have stronger desires to do nonfarm work, and that returning to seek a nonagricultural job has become the most important planned trajectory for this generation. Sharp differences exist between the two generations in the reasons that underlie their intentions. For the old generation, conditions such as age, family responsibility, and type of job are important determinants of intentions, while other conditions such as initial migration motives, social capital, and socioeconomic conditions of origin areas are important for the intentions of the new generation. Thus the new generation is more likely to view migration as a form of investment with the accumulation of human capital and social capital. Those migrants from the old generation who have higher education levels also intend to seek a nonfarm job. However, because of the combined effects of life cycle and the market transition in China, these intentions are not as strong as those of the new generation. We discuss economic and policy implications of our findings.

Despite the advantages of polycentric structure and its rich literature drawn from cities in industialized countries, little attention has been paid to the study of polycentric urban development in developing countries based on land-use information. With Hangzhou used as a case study, the authors investigate polycentric urban development through an analysis of directions of urban expansion, urban–rural gradients, and growth types. The multidisciplinary methodology employed, based on theories and methods in remote sensing, geographic information systems, and landscape ecology, has been proved to be useful in the morphological study of polycentric urban development. It was found that Hangzhou has expanded in different directions at various speeds, shifting to a polycentric urban pattern through radial expansion. Along the main transportation corridors, the values of the mean patch sizes of urban patches displayed multiple peaks, and the landscape-shape index maintained a horizontal trend in urban fringes, reflecting the formation of polycentricity. Further, as edge growth and spontaneous growth accounted for 40%–50% and 30–40% of urban growth, respectively, and infill growth was responsible for only a small proportion of urban growth, it is suggested that dispersed urban patches have been increasingly agglomerated into big ones, especially along road corridors. Hangzhou's polycentric urban development was shaped both by the planning efforts of the government and by market forces. The municipal government guided the polycentric development through drafting and revising master plans, annexing nearby districts, and establishing development zones. Nevertheless, market forces played an increasingly important role in Hangzhou's polycentric development through the implementation of an urban land market, the inflow of migrant workers, and the relocation of industries.

It has been suggested that ‘ethnic penalties’ exist in British labour markets, whereby members of ethnic minority groups fail to get into occupations commensurate with their qualifications. Often these analyses of occupational attainment by education treat minority groups as homogeneous, not recognising that in several there is substantial heterogeneity on other criteria, such as religion, which may also influence occupational attainment. We argue that there are significant variations among these ethno-religious minorities regarding their labour-market performance, which is measured using a continuous scale of skill-level distances—a measure of returns to education.

We use microsample data from the 2005 (1%) National Population Sample Survey in southeast China and examine the relationship between the effect of hukou status on income and return to education under China's rural–urban divide. For labor-market return we find that: (1) the influence of hukou status is deeply rooted in an indivdual's other key features (occupation, years of schooling, and working location) in the labor market, and (2) hukou status affects labor-market return primarily through its influence on people's return to education. Assisted by spline regression models, we find that the gap of return to education among people with different hukou status increases as years of schooling decrease, and reaches its peak in primary education. The data overwhelmingly suggest that individuals' human capital was largely determined by the place (rural versus urban) where they were born and received their compulsory education, which highlights the role of China's rural–urban divide in shaping people's labor-market return.

Planners use symbolic markers in order to frame processes of urban change and to mobilise actors. How can we explain the fact that in some cases the symbolisation of new urban spaces manages to enhance and enlarge the meaning of social change while in other cases the symbolic markers remain powerless and might even have a reverse effect? The authors doubt whether the sophistication of symbolic markers as such has much impact. The explanation for the success or failure of symbolic communication is sought within the framework of institutional embedding. This conceptual paper attempts to elaborate institutions' transformative potential through their use of symbols. To this end, it undertakes a reappraisal of institutional thought in order to conceptualise institutional transformation, the establishment of a conceptual linkage between the transformative potential of institutions and symbolic markers, and the design of an operational model of research for the institutional investigation of symbols in the planning of changing cities.

Whilst St Petersburg is not usually considered as a command-and-control centre in the organisation of global capitalism—a key characterisation of world cities to some proponents—I reveal how Russian political elites have been inspired by a world-city vision for St Petersburg and have begun pursuing specific spatial strategies to accommodate this vision. In order to explain this experience, I attempt to establish a firmer conceptual link between ‘world city’, ‘urban entrepreneurialism’, and ‘state rescaling’ by articulating the concept of world-city-entrepreneurialiset. World cities are argued to be a political modus operandi and one possible layer in the multilayered and interrelated matrix of urban entrepreneurial strategies under neoliberalism. Four dimensions of world-city-entrepreneurialism are considered (with specific sociocultural reference to St Petersburg): (a) remaking the city as an international hub for circulatory capital and production, (b) making the city as a capital of corporate power, (c) reinventing the city character and tradition through globalist megaprojects, and (d) the role of central government. The evidence of emerging world-city-entrepreneurialism for St Petersburg is seen as part of the process of reorganising the principles of postsocialist spatial governance further away from the Soviet ‘scalar etiquette’ of administrative subordination and redistribution, and towards a neoliberal geoinstitutional regime of uneven accumulation.

In Southern Africa the last ten years have seen a rather dramatic shift in donor and state interest and funding from ‘community conservation’ to ‘transfrontier conservation’. The new trend broadens the aim of conservation–development interventions to also include interstate cooperation. The article critically analyzes this development within a wider shift in neoliberal politics. It is argued that this broader shift helped create the right ‘enabling environment’ for the transfrontier conservation discourse to be presented as an all-embracing and unifying ideological ‘model of meaning’. Moreover, underlying neoliberalism's contemporary political conduct is a strong reassertion and the actual neo-liberalisation of the state. It is this move that has truly enabled the ‘transfrontier’ to revive the telos of conservation in Southern Africa.

With this paper we aim to analyse how new entrepreneurial strategies are emerging in the field of agricultural cooperatives within the Region of Valencia (Spain), and how these strategies are characterised through the lens of the agrarian-based rural development model. Initial results show that these strategies have the potential to strengthen the role of cooperatives in rural economic development as they add value to specific territorial resources, create new ties with other local and nonlocal actors, and diversify the economy of rural areas. Nevertheless, the cooperative (collective) nature of these organisations can also create decision-making and investment problems, as they can divide the interests of their social base.

This paper investigates the roles of gender and natural capital (defined as land and associated environmental services) in out-migration from a rural study area in the southern Ecuadorian Andes. Drawing on original household survey data, I construct and compare multivariate event history models of individual-level, household-level, and community-level influences on the migration of men and women. The results undermine common assumptions that landlessness and environmental degradation universally contribute to out-migration. Instead, men access land resources to facilitate international migration and women are less likely to depart from environmentally marginal communities relative to other areas. These results reflect a significantly gendered migration system in which natural capital plays an important but unexpected role.

This paper explores the active roles that domestic consumers might play in different transition pathways to a lower carbon electricity economy. It begins with a review of psychological and sociological perspectives on the drivers for everyday energy-use patterns, situating these in the context of the body of research on transitions in sociotechnical systems. On the basis of the review, a social-science-based framework is proposed for analysing the active ways in which domestic actors might facilitate or support the transition to a lower carbon economy. Applying the framework to an analysis of centralised and decentralised transitions pathways suggests that domestic actors can play an active role in transition through establishing new routine and conventional uses of energy in everyday life. Domesticating lower carbon technologies such as smart meters and microgeneration equipment supports the disruption of unsustainable energy-using routines and could help to make energy consumption and energy costs more visible and relevant to the everyday lives of domestic users. The findings call attention to the need to consider the wider effects of energy-system transition within and around consumer-oriented lifestyles.

By the late Carboniferous period, the continents that today make up North America and Europe collided with the southern parts of Gondwana to form the western half of the last super-continent Pangea. From this moment on, North America and Europe have steadily been drifting apart, as was initially described by Alfred Wegener in 1915. In this paper a cognitive counterpart of this continental drift is described—which progresses much faster than the phenomenon of plate tectonics. Distance estimations between cities of Europe and the USA were strongly modulated by an interactive effect of the social attitude towards the Iraq War in 2003 and towards US citizens in general, letting America and Europe drift apart hundreds of kilometers for those who disliked the war but were meanwhile sympathetic to US citizens. Possible implications for the relationship between Europe and the US are discussed and perspectives for a cognitive rapprochement of Europe and the USA are provided.

The relationship between development and religion is an uneasy one. Since the invention of modernisation theory in the 1950s religion has been marginalised—seen as something that would fade as secularisation increased. Although this has not occurred, religion is still considered a taboo subject which falls outside the gamut of development, despite the religiosity of many faith-based development organisations, donors, and recipient communities. In this paper I emphasise the importance of religion to development by tracing religious influences within transnational development networks operating in Aceh, Indonesia, after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Religious influences are analysed amongst donor communities in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa; within the activities of religious NGOs in Aceh; amongst recipient communities; and in the physical landscape of Aceh, where the rebuilding of sacred spaces has been slow and difficult. It is argued that the current approach to religion within development, and much development research, is outdated and inappropriate, reflecting and enforcing particular Western divisions between church and state. For more effective aid which attends to local concerns and priorities, transnational development networks need to acknowledge, incorporate, and involve religious spaces and institutions rather than continue to promote a culture of secularism.

The making private of hitherto public goods is a central tenet of neoliberalism. From land in Africa, Asia, and South America to the assertion of property rights over genes and cells by corporations, the process(es) of making private property matters more than ever. And yet, despite this importance, we know remarkably little about the spatial plays through which things become private property. In this paper I seek to address this imbalance by focusing upon the formative context of 18th- and early-19th-century England. The specific lens is wood, that most critical of all ‘natural’ things other than land in the transition to market-driven economies. It is shown that the interplay between custom, law, and local practices rendered stable and aspatial definitions of property impossible. Whilst law was the key technology through which property was mediated, the cadence of particular places gave these mediations distinctive forms. I conclude that not only must we take property seriously, but we must also take the conditions and contexts of its making seriously too.