Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this short and deliberately provocative paper I reflect on what seems to be a yawning gulf between the potential contribution of the social sciences and the typically restricted models and concepts of social change embedded in contemporary environmental policy in the UK, and in other countries too. As well as making a strong case for going beyond what I refer to as the dominant paradigm of ‘ABC’—attitude, behaviour, and choice—I discuss the attractions of this model, the blind spots it creates, and the forms of governance it sustains. This exercise provides some insight into why so much relevant social theory remains so marginalised, and helps identify opportunities for making better use of existing intellectual resources.

A capture option is an option contract where the option holder can exercise a contract to retrofit an existing fossil fuel plant to capture carbon dioxide (CO₂) on or before a fixed date. We suggest that new thermal power plants, particularly those in developing countries, consider issuing capture options at the design stage, because the sellers—the owners of newly built thermal power plants—may then invest in making these plants CO₂ capture ready (CCR) to optimise returns from selling capture options. In a detailed case study on a 600 MW ultrasupercritical pulverised coal-fired power unit a potential storage site in Guangdong, China, the value of a capture option and CCR investment is evaluated using the backward deduction option pricing method through a stochastic cash flow model with Monte-Carlo simulations. If the power plant is retrofittable without CCR investment, then for an 8% discount rate the value of a capture option is US $11 million before CCR investment. Investing US $3.8 million in CCR increases the value of the capture option by an estimated US $12 million. Perhaps more important from a policy point of view, CCR investment can reduce the odds of early closure by 20% and also increase the chance of retrofitting to capture by 43%. If the power plant is not retrofittable in the absence of CCR design modifications, CCR investment to avoid ‘carbon lock-in’ is not only important for climate policy but is also economic from an investment point of view. We also conduct sensitivity analyses on a range of key assumptions to test the robustness of the findings.

The sister cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua form one of the largest manufacturing complexes in the world, and provide a unique context in which to examine transnational patterns of environmental injustice. In this paper, we explore residential patterns of environmental injustice related to the location of industrial facilities (ie maquiladoras and facilities regulated by the Toxics Release Inventory) in the El Paso–Juárez metropolis, taking a comparative approach. Our results indicate a striking injustice in the raw level of industrial hazard confronted by residents on the Mexican side of the border compared with those on the US side—a direct result of location within the global economy. In terms of multivariate spatial regression results, patterns of exposure to residential hazards diverged between the two cities. In Mexico, generally marginal neighborhoods (based on low social class and higher proportions of migrants to the city) were located farther away from industry, whereas they were located closer in the US. We explain these findings on the basis of sociospatial differences in urbanization, social marginality, and industrial development between El Paso and Juárez, which reflect the two cities' juxtaposition vis-à-vis global political–economic dynamics. Future research is needed to test relationships between social marginality and industrial hazards in transnational and Southern contexts to determine if similar or divergent patterns exist.

We explore how political struggles influence innovation policy through a Norwegian case study on the formation of a state-funded research and development program for utilizing natural gas feedstock from the North Sea. Despite the apparent dominance of business, specialized branches of the state, and R&D institutions in the realm of innovation policy, the key argument is that labor unions and regional interests exert considerable influence in shaping national innovation policy, in particular when reflexively exploiting new forms of state accumulation strategies while retaining a defensive stance against deindustrialization. First, we argue that the struggle for state funding to natural-gas-based R&D was particularly effective because appropriate strategic political networks and alliances were mobilized. Second, the construction of strategic arguments to accommodate the social corporatist heritage of state intervention on the one hand and the competition-oriented language of flexible specialization on the other, proved crucial for acceptance as a state strategy. We engage a strategic–relational approach to state theory and argue that this is a useful starting point when studying how particular contexts affect how and why certain innovation policies emerge. In so doing, we also address the lack of political analysis in innovation studies.

This paper examines an example of a community currency system, the Argentine ‘barter clubs' developed from 1995. The term ‘barter club’ denotes a place of market exchange, within which economic transactions are paid for using an internal paper currency, the credito, issued by the founders of these clubs and not convertible to the official currency. The author's starting point is to wonder whether this micromonetary system could operate in an insular and independent manner, or if it was necessary to establish some kind of relation with the official macromonetary system. This was investigated by: an analysis of the discourses expressed by the key actors involved in ‘barter clubs’; a field survey conducted in a score of clubs in the province of Buenos Aires, and a case study of one of these; and comparing these results and conclusions with those of other researchers obtained at different times and in different places across the whole of Argentina. It was found that despite the barter club founders' desire to create an independent monetary system, the community currency owes its conditions of existence and acceptance to the official currency. The micromonetary credito system is fundamentally tied to the official macromonetary peso system.

This paper provides a detailed examination of the marketing of Hadrian's Wall in northern England. The focus of this case is built around two themes which encapsulate the complexities and challenges of marketing such a place entity: (1) the Wall's existence as an historical monument of diminished materiality, and (2) its linearity and spatial diffuseness. These themes emphasise the fact that marketing Hadrian's Wall is different from usual place-marketing activity, which is typically focused on more tangible and easily delineated place entities. Hadrian's Wall, by contrast, represents a ‘fuzzy’ place, and the implications of this are explored in relation to jurisdictional, functional, and strategic ‘fissures’ in the place product.

Recent concepts such as ‘megaregions' and ‘polycentric urban regions' emphasize that external economies are not confined to a single urban core, but are shared among a collection of nearby and linked cities. However, empirical analyses of agglomeration and agglomeration externalities have so far neglected the multicentric spatial organization of agglomeration and the possibility of the ‘sharing’ or ‘borrowing’ of size between cities. The authors take up this empirical challenge by analyzing how different spatial structures, in particular the monocentricity–polycentricity dimension, affect the economic performance of US metropolitan areas. Ordinary least squares and two-stage least-squares models explaining labor productivity show that spatial structure matters: polycentricity is associated with higher labor productivity. This appears to justify suggestions that, compared with more monocentric metropolitan areas, agglomeration diseconomies remain relatively limited in the more polycentric metropolitan areas, whereas agglomeration externalities are to some extent shared among the cities in such an area. However, it was also found that a network of geographically proximate smaller cities cannot substitute for the urbanization externalities of a single large city.

The past decade has seen a rapid growth in the use of a spatial perspective in studies of crime. In part this growth has been driven by the availability of georeferenced data, and the tools to analyze and visualize them: geographic information systems, spatial analysis, and spatial statistics. In this paper we use exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) tools and Bayesian models to help better understand the spatial patterning and predictors of property crime in Seattle, Washington for 1998–2000, including a focus on built environment variables. We present results for aggregate property crime data as well as models for specific property crime types: residential burglary, nonresidential burglary, theft, auto theft, and arson. ESDA confirms the presence of spatial clustering of property crime and we seek to explain these patterns using spatial Poisson models implemented in WinBUGS. Our results indicate that built environment variables were significant predictors of property crime, especially the presence of a highway on auto theft and burglary.

Recent debates have suggested that increasing social diversity within Western economies is associated with adverse social consequences such as loss of community and decline of civic society, including an erosion of collective efficacy (ie shared expectations of and mutual engagement by residents in social control). In the UK and US, these debates have been given impetus by concerns about the effects of growing ethnic heterogeneity on community life. Here there is an assumption that heterogeneity undermines social cohesion and makes the established population less willing to share resources, trust fellow citizens, so that it eventually ‘hunkers down’ and withdraws from collective life. To date there are few studies that have examined this in detail across England at the small-area level. The research presented here explores this terrain by exploiting information from the British Crime Survey on two recognised dimensions of collective efficacy: namely, social cohesion and trust, and informal social control. Multivariate, multilevel models were used to determine the importance of individual and area characteristics in the possible explanation of these outcomes, and particular attention was paid to the relative importance of neighbourhood disadvantage over and above neighbourhood diversity. Results suggest that both diversity and disadvantage are statistically associated with reduced levels of social cohesion and trust, and informal social control, but greater substantive importance is attached to neighbourhood disadvantage.

There is ongoing concern as to whether ethnic communities in Great Britain are becoming increasingly spatially concentrated. This paper uses data from the 2001 Census of Population to explore the relationship between population concentration and ethnic net migration in London at ward level. The findings suggest that migration within London is acting as an agent of dispersal of non-White populations from areas of high ethnic concentration to areas of low ethnic concentration, whereas White migrants are leaving areas where they are underrepresented and moving to areas of overrepresentation.

In view of recent changes in both migration patterns and urban labour market conditions, the permanent settlement migration paradigm has become insufficient to guide our understanding of rural-to-urban migrant workers in China's market transition. Using Shenzhen City as a case study we consider migrant workers as enabling agents who interact with the urban labour market. We therefore examine the ways that migrant workers' social capital accumulation, migration experience, and job mobility influence urban labour market dynamics. In painting a picture of migrant workers we complement existing institutional and labour market analyses. As we demonstrate, by frequently changing jobs and destination cities, migrant workers accumulate social and human capital so as to improve their opportunities in the urban labour market. This is evidenced by migrants' improved occupational positions and increased wage earnings.

Over the last few years, there has been a devolutionary tendency in many developed and developing countries. In this paper we propose a methodology to decompose whether the benefits in terms of efficiency derived from transfers of powers from higher to municipal levels of government (the ‘economic dividend’ of devolution) might increase over time. This methodology is based on linear programming approaches for efficiency measurement. We provide an application to Spanish municipalities, which have had to adapt to the European Stability and Growth Pact as well as to domestic regulation seeking local governments' balanced budget. Results indicate that efficiency gains from enhanced decentralization have increased over time. However, the ways in which these gains accrue differ across municipalities—in some cases technical change is the main component, whereas in others catching up dominates.

We examine the development of self-service grocery shopping from a consumer perspective. Using qualitative data gathered through a nationwide biographical survey and oral histories, it was possible to go beyond contemporary market surveys which pay insufficient attention to shopping as a socially and culturally embedded practice. We use the conceptual framework of the life course to demonstrate how grocery shopping is a complex activity, in which the retail encounter is shaped by the specific interconnection of different retail formats and their geographies, alongside consumer characteristics and their situational influences. Consumer reactions to retail modernization must be understood in relation to the development of consumer practices at points of transition and stability within the life course. These practices are accessed by examining retrospective consumer narratives about food shopping.