Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper analyzes comparatively the role of planning policy and practice in the diffusion of the neoliberal competitiveness agenda to improve the position of the Dutch and Colombian cut-flower agroindustries in world markets. The Netherlands seeks to meet national competitive aims by deploying an infrastructure approach to planning, coupled with a framing concept to generate cross-scale coordination. The Colombian government seeks to diffuse the competitiveness agenda through the formation of institutional arrangements at the national scale and processes of decentralization, yet it meets resistance from municipal governments through their land-use plans. The findings indicate that national governments rely on context-specific mechanisms and endogenous planning tools to diffuse the competitiveness agenda across scales. While this partially accounts for variation in its diffusion, the findings point to the significance of the social organization of commodity chains in the uptake of the competitiveness agenda subnationally. The analysis draws from field research in the Netherlands and Colombia, and the critical examination of planning policy and practice in both sites.

Despite growing interest in the geographies of death, loss, and remembrance, comparatively little geographical research has been devoted either to the historical and cultural practices of death, or to an adequate conceptualisation of finitude. Responding to these absences, in this paper I argue for the importance of the notion of finitude within the history and philosophy of geographical thought. Situating finitude initially in the context of the work of Torsten Hägerstrand and Richard Hartshorne, the notion is argued to be both productive of a geographical ethics, and as epistemologically constitutive of phenomenological apprehensions of ‘earth’ and ‘world’. In order to better grasp the sense and genealogy of finitude, I turn to the work of Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, and Georges Bataille. These authors are drawn upon precisely because their writings present powerful conceptual frameworks which demonstrate the intimate relations between spatiality, death, and finitude. At the same time, their writings are critically interrogated in the light of perhaps the most important aspect of the conceptual history of finitude: the way in which it has been articulated as a site of anthropocentric distinction. I argue for a critical deconstruction of this anthropocentric basis to finitude; a deconstruction which raises a series of profound questions over the ethics, normativities, and understandings of responsibility shaping contemporary ethical geographies of the human and nonhuman. In so doing, I demonstrate the geographical importance of the notion of finitude for a variety of arenas of debate which include: phenomenological understandings of spatiality; the biopolitical boundaries drawn between human and animal; and contemporary theorisations of corporeality, materiality, and hospitality.

An exclusive focus on external forces risks the production of an overgeneralized account of a ubiquitous neoliberalism, which insufficiently accounts for the profusion of local variations that currently comprise the neoliberal project as a series of articulations with existing political economic circumstances. Although the international financial institutions initially promoted neoliberal economics in the global South, powerful elites were happy to oblige. Neoliberalism frequently reveals opportunities for well-connected officials to informally control market and material rewards, allowing them to line their own pockets. It is in this sense of the local appropriation of neoliberal ideas that scholars must go beyond conceiving of ‘neoliberalism in general’ as a singular and fully realized policy regime, ideological form, or regulatory framework, and work towards conceiving a plurality of ‘actually existing neoliberalisms' with particular characteristics arising from mutable geohistorical outcomes embedded within national, regional, and local process of market-driven sociospatial transformation. What constitutes ‘actually existing’ neoliberalism in Cambodia as distinctly Cambodian is the ways in which the patronage system has allowed local elites to co-opt, transform, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework which asset strips public resources, thereby increasing people's exposure to corruption, coercion, and violence. It is to such an ‘articulation agenda’ that I attend to here as, in seeking to provide a more nuanced reading to recent work on neoliberalism in Cambodia by outlining some of its salient characteristics, a more empirical basis to theorizations of ‘articulated neoliberalism’ is revealed.

Two key forces are likely to impact on the retail profile of London's high streets. First is the increasing expansion of London's retail sector across both affiliated and independent sectors, paralleled with economic volatility associated in part with the global crisis in 2008. The second is the political shift, at both national and city scales, towards the recognition of small independent shops and local high streets, as signalled in The Mayor's Draft Replacement London Plan, 2010. This brings us to a third consideration: the growth of ethnic retail, evidenced particularly in London where national levels of immigration and ethnic diversity are at their highest. The 2010 High Street London report commissioned by the Mayor's Office emphasises ‘the local’ role of London's high streets for a local’ populous, reflecting a larger national policy emphasis on Localism as outlined in The Localism Bill in 2010. This paper explores what forms of planning are best suited to recognise a rapidly evolving retail landscape together with the crucial differentiations inherent in the local landscape. The focus is explicitly contextual: it is London centric in its scope, and relies on detailed survey and ethnographic data of a south London high street located within an area with high Indices of Deprivation. The context sits in contrast to the notions of the village high street and the upmarket high street, which encapsulate cultural notations of vitality and viability which frame much of the literature and policy around the value of high streets. By analysing the adaptive practices of the ethnically diverse, independent retailers on the Walworth Road, socioeconomic measures of high street values are explored. Further, the paper conceptualises adaptation as the strategic adjustments made by independent proprietors in recognition of large-scale economic forces, national regulatory frameworks, and local cultural nuances. The paper reframes ‘the local’ as ‘the particular’ and emphasises the need for disaggregated, fine-grained research on retail practices in high streets which reflect crucial contextual differentiations. Finally it explores what a planning framework and stewardship mechanism for high streets in London's urban margins might comprise.

We address the issue of moving from the joint home on the occasion of separation. Our research question is: To what extent can the occurrence of moves related to separation, and the distance moved, be explained by ties to the location, resources, and other factors influencing the likelihood of moving of persons who separate and their ex-partners? We use data from the unique ASTRID micro database for Sweden, based on administrative information about the entire Swedish population. The methods are logistic regression analysis of moving, and OLS regression of the log-distance moved, for people from two-gender couples who separated during the period 2004–05. We find marked negative effects of local ties to parents and siblings, work, and the location in general on moving and moving distance. The results concerning resources and other factors influencing moving were less pronounced. Particularly striking was the absence of an effect of education level.

We propose a decomposition of residential self-selection by understanding the process of its formation. We take a life-course perspective and postulate that locations experienced early in life can have a lasting effect on our locational preferences later in life. In other words, what was experienced spatially is a key factor contributing to our residential self-selection, and our preferences in residential locations are formed long before the onset of our self-selection. We further hypothesize that this prior-location influence is modified by the duration and recency of the prior stay. Using a dataset collected in the New York City Area, we estimated a series of multinomial logit models to test these hypotheses. The results confirm the prior-location influence and demonstrate that this precedes residential self-selection and is impacted by its own properties such as duration and recency. Furthermore, the analysis separating child-bearing households from non-child-bearing households shows an interaction between prior-location influence and the presence of children.

By estimating bivariate panel vector autoregressions, this paper analyses the relationship between the revenue autonomy of Spanish regional governments and the regional growth experienced in Spain during the process of fiscal decentralisation from 1984 to 2008. The key finding is the presence of a significant, but marginal, positive effect of regional governments' revenue autonomy on regional growth during the period considered. The small size of the effect can be attributed to the fact that Spanish regional governments have not made extensive use of their important regulatory powers acquired in the 1996 review of the regional financing system or, alternatively, to the fact that the policy of increasing revenue autonomy might have reached saturation point during the period studied, with regard to its effect on economic growth. Both arguments are supported by the identification of an apparent breakpoint, in 1999, in the relationship between revenue autonomy and regional growth in Spain.

Stillness occupies an ambivalent position in a world of flows. Opening up space required for reflective, contemplative thought, stillness is often posited as a vital supplement to movement. Yet, in spite of its reverence as a cornerstone of moral responsibility and a key technic of modernity, reflective thought is now taken to be just one modality of thinking amongst many others that compose the body. This paper explores what happens to the capacities of reflective thought when gathered into a vitalist diagram of the body. It does this by tracing how different forms of stillness participate in the constitution of differently susceptible bodies. It considers how habit works to both hold still and move the body in different ways which helps to disrupt an understanding of a body that has a particular capacity for wilful, reflective sovereign thought. As such, and parallel to suggestions that we currently inhabit an era of thought maximisation, this paper argues that reflective thought itself might be better understood as enrolled into a particular diagram of habit that allows us to consider how reflection and contemplation might function not as a redemptive force of liberation from habit, but as the turbulent reverberations of the shock of the outside that can become debilitating.

The withdrawal of the welfare states from pensions underscores the need for a better understanding of the spatial characteristics of adoption processes in the case of financial innovations. In 2001 the German pension reform reduced publicly provided pensions, and introduced subsidised, voluntary occupational plans to replace the loss in retirement income. This paper looks at the spatial and temporal adoptions of the newly created occupational pensions by analysing a unique, proprietary database, containing data on 12 000 employers and 286 000 employees working in the German metal and electric industry. The study identifies metropolitan/nonmetropolitan, East–West, and further geographical differences in the employers' timing to adopt, which in turn influences employees' decisions to enrol. Differences are identified among employee-level adoptions depending on the employers' timing and further, individual-level factors. The results emphasise the importance of geography in the transformation of old-age finances in the German welfare state.

Participation has become a mantra in environmental governance. However, there are signs that the participatory agenda has started to lose its momentum and justification because of disappointments about actual achievements. Rather than focusing on improving participatory processes or articulating best practices, in this paper we seek to understand the more fundamental reasons why difficulties are encountered. In our interviews with professionals involved in participation in environmental governance we found varying and potentially conflicting rationales for participation, with instrumental and legalistic rationales dominating. We contend that the institutional and political context in which this participation takes place is an important explanation of this prevalence. This includes the provisions for participation in EU directives, failing policy integration, institutional and political barriers, and failing political uptake of results from participation. We conclude there is a need for more reflexive awareness of the different ways in which participation is defined and practised in contemporary environmental policy making and for a more realistic assessment of possibilities for changes towards more participatory and deliberative decision making.

This paper hitches a ride with young car enthusiasts to explore how their vehicles catalyse a unique form of vernacular creativity, in a seemingly imperilled industrial city setting. While television and print media regularly demonise young drivers for street racing and ‘hoon’ behaviour, this paper purposely adopts a different perspective, on circuits of production and qualitative aspects of the urban custom-car design scene that constitute forms of vernacular creativity. Beyond moral panics little is known about movements, networks, and linkages between custom cars, young enthusiasts, and urban spaces from which their activities emerge. Utilising responsive, in-depth ethnographic methods in Wollongong, Australia, this paper interprets custom-car design as vernacular creativity, valued by young people and located across unassuming and unheralded urban spaces. The possibility that custom-car designers possess skills that are assets for ‘blue-collar’ industrial cities is contrasted against a backdrop of wider discourses depicting such cities as economically vulnerable, as ‘victims' of restructuring—and even ‘uncreative’. Insights relevant to future research on the politics of planning, creative industries, and class identities are also discussed.

For administration efficiency most countries subdivide their national territory into administrative regions. These regions are used to delineate areas which are internally well connected and relatively cohesive, especially compared with the links between regions. Hence, many countries seek to delineate local labour markets (LLMs): geographical regions where the majority of the local population seeks employment and from which the majority of local employers recruit labour. LLM boundaries are often based on functional regions, which represent the aggregate commuting patterns of the local population. A number of regionalisation procedures for objectivity delineating functional regions have been suggested, though many of these procedures require the use of ad hoc parameters to control the size and number of regions. Recently, a range of network-based alternatives have been developed in the literature. One of the most successful such methods is based on the concept of modularity: the extent to which there are dense connections within functional regions, but only sparse connections between functional regions. In this paper we maximise the modularity of a network of commuting flows to produce a regionalisation that exhibits less interaction than expected between regions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this type of regionalisation procedure on a simulated geographical network, as well as using commuting data for the Republic of Ireland. We suggest that this new method has specific advantages over existing regionalisation procedures, particularly in the context of disaggregate commuting patterns of socioeconomic subgroups.

Residential mobility theory proposes that moves are often preceded by the expression of moving desires and expectations. Much research has investigated how individuals form these premove thoughts, with a largely separate literature examining actual mobility. Although a growing number of studies link premove thoughts to subsequent moving behaviour, these often do not distinguish explicitly between different types and combinations of premove thoughts. Using 1998–2006 British Household Panel Survey data, this study investigates whether moving desires and expectations are empirically distinct premove thoughts. Using multinomial regression models we demonstrate that moving desires and expectations have different meanings, and are often held in combination: the factors associated with expecting to move differ depending upon whether the move is also desired (and vice versa). Next, using panel logistic regression models, we show that different desire–expectation combinations have different effects on the probability of subsequent moving behaviour. The study identified two important groups generally overlooked in the literature: those who expect undesired moves and those who desire to move without expecting this to happen.

This paper explores the links between spatial mobility and job-related well-being for young Italian graduates. Theoretically it posits that mobility and job satisfaction can be related indirectly, as migration may provide access to new or better job opportunities, and directly, as mobility generates expectations on the outcome of the move. Methodologically it applies sample-selection ordered logit to a survey of graduates conducted by the Italian National Statistical Institute (ISTAT). The paper investigates how personal characteristics and employment features, together with migration behaviour, impact on several domains of job satisfaction, comparing the graduates from Southern regions—ie, the backward Mezzogiorno—to those of the Centre-North of Italy. Our most novel results indicate that, whilst indirect effects are qualitatively similar for both Southern and Centre–Northern graduates, direct effects are not. This highlights that geography affects satisfaction by shaping individual expectations, adding another dimension to the long-standing debate on Italian spatial inequality.