Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Where do musicians locate, and why do creative industries such as music continue to cluster? This paper analyzes the economic geography of musicians and the recording industry in the US from 1970 to 2000, to shed light on the locational dynamics of music and creative industries more broadly. We examine the role of scale and scope economies in shaping the clustering and concentration of musicians and music industry firms. We argue that these two forces are bringing about a transformation in the geography of both musicians and music industry firms, evidenced in a shift away from regionally clustered, genre-specific music scenes, such as Memphis or Detroit, toward larger regional centers such as New York City and Los Angeles, which offer large markets for music employment and concentrations of other artistic and cultural endeavors that increase demand for musicians. We use population and income to probe for scale effects and look at concentrations of other creative and artistic industries to test for scope effects, while including a range of control variables in our analysis. We use lagged variables to determine whether certain places are consistently more successful at fostering concentrations of musicians and the music industry and to test for path dependency. We find some role for scale and scope effects and that both musicians and the music industry are concentrating in a relatively small number of large regional centers.

Many social science disciplines suffer from a tradition of tolerating vaguely formulated theoretical claims. The authors report a case study of the explanatory claims made in an emerging knowledge-based theory of clusters proposed by the economic geographers Malmberg and Maskell. In doing so they reinterpret and reconstruct Malmberg and Maskells's theory by applying what is called the ‘contrastive approach’ to explanation from contemporary philosophy of science literature. This approach is proposed as a means of enhancing explanatory clarity and thereby of fostering explanatory progress. The contrastive approach is useful in specifying the exact explanation-seeking questions, and answers to them. Specifying the explanatory claims of a theory also makes it easier to identify questions that are not posed and hence remain unanswered; those constitute a challenge for further theorizing. The case study supports the argument that the precise formulation of explanatory questions promotes explanatory progress.

This paper presents an argument and empirical case study to draw out additional nuance in the social construction of institutions. Adapting the conceptual work of political scientists Mark Bevir and Roderick Rhodes to recent accounts in economic geography of institutional change we present an ‘interpretative analysis’ of recent policy changes in the regulation of land use in competitive global regions in London and the South East, UK. The paper examines the appeal to tradition, the construction of policy dilemmas, and the affect these have on what we think of as neoliberal policy reform.

The great majority of theoretical and empirical writing on economic globalization continues to focus on urban and semiurban regions, while largely ignoring the vast rural and peripheral spaces of the world. This paper uses research with small and medium-sized enterprises in remote regions of British Columbia, Canada, to develop a way of understanding the unique practices involved in ‘performing’ global economic action from the rural periphery. Specifically, a framework based on insights from three theoretical approaches is advanced—relational network theory, an actor-network approach to distance, and complexity theory in economics—that, in combination, allow the capture of what is unique about efforts to ‘go global’ from marginal geographies.

The author examines the materialization of geographical knowledges in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of urban space where the latter is based on processes of compulsory land purchase. The specific context for the study is two recently planned commercial redevelopments for the south London borough of Croydon in the United Kingdom, and the arguments mustered in support of these proposals. The author identifies and discusses three principal sets of geographical knowledges, which he examines under the headings symbolic, biopolitical, and scalar. In each case, he shows that the knowledges have strong modernist overtones. The paper seeks both to understand and contextualize these historical connections, and to consider the contemporary political work performed by the knowledges in question.

Most analyses of ethnic residential segregation in cities rely on single-number indices that pay no attention to the degree of spatial clustering of the areas in which a group is either underrepresented or overrepresented. Recently, local statistical measures have been proposed as a set of approaches to overcome this deficiency. One such method—the Getis–Ord G*—is used to portray patterns of segregation in Auckland, New Zealand. That procedure requires analysts to make a number of judgments about the parameters of the statistics deployed, but also offers greater insights into scale effects in the measurement and delineation of segregation. We examine the information that can be derived from changing two of those parameters—the distance band used to define spatial proximity and the statistical significance of the local statistic—using data on two ethnic groups (Asians and Pacific Islanders) in Auckland. The procedure is also combined with a recently developed approach to measuring absolute segregation levels, thereby giving a fuller picture of both the extent of residential clustering and its intensity for those two groups.

This paper looks at factors explaining gentrification using the neoclassical economic framework. The risk inherent in a move to a lower class neighbourhood is seen as a component of the rent gap that helps preserve working-class neighbourhoods until a tipping point is reached. The factors that affect risk perception and encourage gentrification are placed the context of Ulrich Beck's risk society. The ‘reflexivity’ attribute, the ‘end of fate’—the ‘writing of one's own biography’—bridges the changes in preferences, life style, family formation, and work that contribute to the rise of gentrification.

The concept of accessibility has long been theorized as a principal determinant of residential choice behavior. Research on this influence is extensive but the empirical results have been mixed, with some research suggesting that accessibility is becoming a relatively insignificant influence on housing choices. Further, the measurement of accessibility must contend with complications arising from the increasing prevalence of trip chains, nonwork activities, and multiworker households, and also reconcile person-specific travel needs with household residential decisions. With this paper we contribute to the literature by addressing the gap framed by these issues and present a novel residential choice model with three main elements of innovation. First, we operationalize a time–space prism (TSP) accessibility measure, which we believe to be the first application of its kind in a residential choice model. Second, we represent the choice sets in a building-level framework—the lowest level of spatial disaggregation available for modeling residential choices. Third, we explicitly examine the influence of nonwork accessibility at both the local and the person level. This residential choice model is applied in the central Puget Sound region using a 2006 household activity survey. The model estimation results confirm that accessibility remains an important influence, with individual-specific work accessibility as the most critical consideration. By using the TSP approach we establish that nonwork accessibility in a trip-chaining context does contribute to the residential choice decision, even after accounting for work accessibility. Empirical tests also reveal a useful aggregation method to incorporate individual-specific accessibility measures into a household-level choice model.

‘The public’ are potentially implicated in processes of sociotechnical change as political actors who welcome or resist technology development in general, or in particular places and settings. We argue in this paper that the potential influence of public subjectivities on sociotechnical change is realised not only through moments of active participation and protest, but also through ‘the public’ being imagined, given agency, and invoked for various purposes by actors in technical–industrial and policy networks. As a case study we explore the significance of an imagined and anticipated public subjectivity for the development of renewable energy technologies in the UK. We use interviews with a diversity of industry and policy actors to explore how imaginaries of the public are constructed from first-hand and mediated experience and knowledge, and the influence these imagined public subjectivities may have on development trajectories and on actor strategies and activities. We show how the shared expectation of an ever present latent but conditional public hostility to renewable energy project development is seen as shaping the material forms of the technologies, their evolving spatiality, and practices of public engagement involved in obtaining project consent. Implications for the actors we are interested in and for broader questions of democratic practice are considered.

Travel to and from school is a regular part of life for most children. Such movement can also have important social, economic, and environmental implications, both for individuals and for wider society. This paper uses innovative methods to examine the complexity of the school journey, and to relate it to exposure to air pollution and engagement with the environment through which children pass. Some thirty lower secondary school pupils used mobile phone and global positioning system technology to record their routes to and from school in four study periods. They were asked to take photographs and write text messages relating to their route, and these data were then linked to modelled air pollution on the routes through which pupils travelled. Results demonstrate that for most children the journey to and from school is highly variable and contingent on other factors. Pupils who travelled independently (on foot, by bicycle, or by bus) were most likely to engage with their immediate environment, and small variations in route choice had significant effects on their cumulative exposure to air pollution. It is argued that the results shed new light on the everyday experience of the school journey, and have implications for health promotion and transport planning in towns.

After rapid urban growth and industrialisation, the postwar era has seen counterurbanisation become a dominant demographic trend in the UK. Much has been written about the residential patterns of counterurbanisation, but the associated growth of rural business has attracted less attention. The author proposes the term ‘commercial counterurbanisation’ to describe the growth of rural economies stimulated by inward migration. In the North East of England, in-migrants own over half of rural microbusinesses, they are more growth-oriented, and they are responsible for considerably more employment than the whole of the agriculture sector. In arguing that commercial counterurbanisation is more than just a spatial decentralisation of business activity, the author explores the social as well as the economic motivations of ‘counterurbanising’ business owners. Commercial counterurbanisation can be a two-stage process, as the decision to work in a rural area or run a rural business may occur several years after a residential move. Where this time lag exists, in-migrant business owners will be influenced by different factors in different locations. In the context of neoendogenous development, the balance of local and extralocal forces is particularly significant. This leads to the conclusion that in-migrant business owners need to become embedded into the rural community for the wider rural economy to realise the maximum benefits from commercial counterurbanisation.

The growing establishment of protected areas incorporating profitable economic activity and conservation initiatives has been characterized by the exacerbation of existent conflicts and the emergence of new ones around them. Over the last two decades the participation of ‘civil society’ in protected areas governance under the mutual goal of sustainable development has become increasingly key to resolving natural resource conflicts. Schinias Greek Natura site, simultaneously national park and Olympic canoeing centre, provides a case study to investigate the roots and outcomes of natural resource conflicts within the context of the coexistence of development and conservation agendas and collaborative governance. Following a grounded-theory approach and drawing on insights from political ecology and environmental governance literature we have been able to reveal the political, socioeconomic, and conservation conflicts arising during implementation of state development and conservation policies. It appears that governmental political handling exacerbated these conflicts, leading to political manipulation to justify policy failure and promote nature privatization. We conclude that conflict resolution compatible with nature protection and social justice cannot occur in isolation from resolving crucial socioeconomic problems, strengthening transparency, and an accurate scientific analysis of the particularities of local communities to guide the formation and implementation of state policies.

The author argues that power is being exercised by rural elites to prevent much-needed new housing being built in the English countryside. Evidence is presented from five case-study local authorities in rural England, via analysis of interview data and policy documents produced at the regional and local plan-making level. Technocratic explanations for the ongoing failure of the planning system to deliver more housing in line with the well-established need/demand for such are rejected. Drawing on the three dimensions of power presented by Lukes, the author explores how the exercise of power effectively subverts planning processes and leads overwhelmingly to decisions being made which favour the exclusionary preferences of certain groups.