Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper we examine how Colombian migrants participate in formal and informal political and civic activities in London. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research conducted between 2005 and 2009, we explore how gender regimes change as people move across borders and how this affects political and civic participation. Although the gendered patterns of participation partly reflect research elsewhere, in terms of men's stronger involvement in formal and transnational activities and women's greater participation in informal politics and immigrant politics, some important differences emerged. Not only do formal and informal activities overlap, but class position and life-course stage as well as immigration status affect these processes. Although middle-class women were able to take advantage of opportunities for formal political participation in London and transnationally, working-class women gained the most from changing gender regimes, exercising increased control over their lives through their disproportionate participation with migrant-community organisations. In both cases, however, women's political engagement was easier when demands on their traditional roles, as mothers in particular, were lessened later in the life course. Working-class men emerged as the least active politically and civically, and this was related to working patterns, feelings of disempowerment and a desire to return home. Conceptually, we further challenge an unreconstructed political opportunities structure perspective for explaining migrants' political mobilisation by arguing for the need to include not only a gendered approach but also one that explicitly integrates intersectionality into any analysis. For Colombian migrants in London, although political and civic participation is far from uniform, there is evidence that engagement in such activities is important in the lives of many migrants, and especially for working-class women who appear to have been the most active in challenging hegemonic gender regimes.

Feminist geographies of migration are often based on the assumption that migration brings about social change, potentially disrupting patriarchal structures and bringing about new spaces where gender relations can be renegotiated and reconfigured. On the basis of multisited research conducted with migrants from the same community of origin in Bolivia, I analyse how gender, class, and ethnicity are renegotiated through internal and cross-border migration. A transnational, multi-scalar, multisited, and intersectional approach is applied to the study of social change through migration, with the aim of investigating whether labour migration provides avenues for greater gender equality. At the individual level there are certainly indications that women achieve greater independence through migration. However, the multiscalar and intersectional analysis suggests that women trade ‘gender gains’ for upward social mobility in the class hierarchy. By doing so, they also contribute to the reproduction of patriarchal social relations.

The concept of citizenship, originally coined by Marshall, and synonymous with social rights and equality, is pivotal in understanding and overcoming the social injustices that many migrants experience. Marshall's notion of social rights, however, does not elaborate on economic rights. Feminist authors argue that women's equal access to sources of income outside family relations is key to their citizenship. Access to spaces of paid work is a significant aspect of migrant women's citizenship because their residence status and naturalization is often contingent on their employment. The author thus argues that economic rights should be central to debates on migration and citizenship. The proposed term ‘economic citizenship’ is used to examine experiences and strategies of fifty-seven skilled migrant women from Latin America, the Middle East, and South East Europe when trying to access positions in the Swiss labour market corresponding to their professional qualifications. The feminist and postcolonial perspectives of ‘intersectionality’ and participatory research are used to understand how and why inequalities in the labour market occur. It is found that traditional ideas about gender roles, discourses about ethnic difference, and discriminatory migration policies intersect to create boundaries for skilled migrant women in accessing upper segments of the Swiss labour market. Migration, therefore, does not always imply empowerment and emancipation, but also generates new forms of social inequality.

Through acknowledging migration as an embodied and gendered phenomenon, I problematise contemporary discourse on the migration of the highly skilled. With a focus on highly educated migrant Maghrebi women's life stories, I analyse the labour-market strategies of the women concerned and reflect these in light of macronarratives of skilled migration. I argue that the concept of intersectionality, which centres on the variety of axes of demarcation, is useful in understanding agency as conditioned by a variety of forces playing upon the individual both in enabling and in constraining ways. Paying attention to the life course via intersectionality is also helpful in understanding better the experiences of the (partially) privileged, and is necessary in order to avoid reproducing dominant representations of migrant women in positions of passivity and victimisation.

This paper examines the spatial dynamics and emerging locational hierarchies of the venture capital (VC) industry in China, largely as a result of the global expansion of VC investors from the US and other advanced economies. Based on a comprehensive database compiled by the author from the best available sources, this is the first systemic geographic study on the VC industry in an emerging economy. This study finds that the rising cluster of VC supply and demand in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen was enabled by the juxtaposition of spatial proximity effects, investment syndication, and interregional office networks within China's unique institutional environment. It further demonstrates that the spatial dynamics of the globalizing venture capitalism has to be understood in light of the geo-institutional mechanisms shaping the whole ‘VC cycle’ of fundraising–investing–divesting.

This paper uses social movement theory (SMT) as a theoretical ‘gymnasium’ to explore the limits and possibilities of climate activism in the UK. The core SMT concepts are used to explore why climate activism emerged when it did, and how conceptions of there being a problem were translated into arguments about what should be done. If something should be done, is contentious politics or policy change the most appropriate strategy? At what scale should action take place: a local politics of prefiguration, through direct action, or in more visible mass mobilisations? It is argued that climate activism takes place in a diverse range of political spaces and scales and works actively to produce knowledges about the dangers of anthropogenic climate change and responsibilities for it, but it is unclear that it has the motive power to move to more sustainable ways of organising human society.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the spatial pattern of knowledge links in traditional, long-established, and less-research-intensive sectors and to contribute to a better understanding of the role of the regional innovation system (RIS) as space for knowledge-sourcing activities in such industries. Departing from conceptual work on the science, technology, and innovation (STI) and the doing, using, and interacting (DUI) modes of learning, it is argued that the relation between mature industries and their RIS depends on the relative importance of these two innovation modes and their specific geographies of knowledge-sourcing activities. The empirical focus is on the food industry in the Vienna metropolitan region. Based on ten case studies of firms and ten interviews with research organisations and industry experts, it is suggested that innovation rests on a combination of the DUI and the STI modes of learning. This is related with a complex spatial pattern of knowledge links and a selective integration of innovative food companies into the RIS. The firms investigated use scientific knowledge available within the RIS and tap into extraregional pools of experience-based knowledge.

This paper suggests that computer simulation modelling can offer opportunities for redistributing expertise between science and affected publics in relation to environmental problems. However, in order for scientific modelling to contribute to the coproduction of new knowledge claims about environmental processes, scientists need to reposition themselves with respect to their modelling practices. In the paper we examine a process in which two hydrological modellers became part of an extended research collective generating new knowledge about flooding in a small rural town in the UK. This process emerged in a project trialling a novel participatory research apparatus—competency groups—aiming to harness the energy generated in public controversy and enable other than scientific expertise to contribute to environmental knowledge. Analysing the process repositioning the scientists in terms of a dynamic of ‘dissociation’ and ‘attachment’, we map the ways in which prevailing alignments of expertise were unravelled and new connections assembled, in relation to the matter of concern. We show how the redistribution of knowledge and skills in the extended research collective resulted in a new computer model, embodying the coproduced flood risk knowledge.

Between 1995 and 1999 the Flemish government succeeded in approving pieces of legislation intended to counter the spatial developments that had characterised the preceding periods, namely suburbanisation and urban decay. It passed a law to combat vacancy and slum housing (1995), a law to invest in social urban renewal (1996), a housing law (1997), a new law on spatial planning (1999), and the first comprehensive spatial plan (1997). Unfortunately, recent information and an evaluation of the spatial planning effort reveal that these initiatives have not been successful. The suburbanisation of native Belgians did not stop: on the contrary, it is accelerating again. And the population growth in the cities is due to people coming from abroad (through family reunification or formation or as asylum seekers). In this contribution I investigate suburbanisation and deurbanisation, asking why housing sprawl in Flanders is so persistent. I examine the structures behind sprawl, viewing them as the consequence of a longstanding dialectical process whereby physical artefacts interact with political choices and actions, cultural convictions, and economic possibilities that have reinforced each other in daily practice over and over again in one predominant direction. The basic argument is that Flanders' spatial planning and urban policies are locked into historical choices, making it difficult to implement new options successfully.

This paper analyzes the formation of a ‘social movement space’ through the case of France's immigrant rights movement. Rather than this movement developing on the head of a pin, the French immigrant rights movement displays a rich and varied geography that changed over time. The movement emerged through a series of urban struggles and Paris early on became a center of these mobilizations. The complex and empowering networks developed in Paris were later deployed in a new campaign to contest restrictive national legislation passed in 1993. As this movement shifted from the urban to the national scale, networks connected the Paris hub to local struggles across the country. This network configuration, with Paris playing a centralizing role, introduced powerful geographical cleavages between center and periphery. Thus, this movement is not only conceived as a form of contentious collective action but as a distinctive spatial entity in its own right (‘social movement space’). As a spatial entity, the paper examines the processes that intersected to provide it with its own unique features, the capacities to sustain its political momentum, and the internal cleavages that would later result in its slow demise.

How do seaports evolve in relation to each other? Recent studies in port economics and transport geography have been focused on how supply-chain integration has structurally changed the competitive landscape in which individual ports and port actors operate. Port regionalization has been addressed as the corresponding new phase in the spatial and functional evolution of port systems. However, these studies lack theoretical foundations that allow us to assess empirically the role either of the institutional context or of strategic agency in the competitive (spatial and functional) evolution of regional (integrated) port systems. The authors present an evolutionary framework to analyze the development of seaports in a regional context by making use of the concept of ‘windows of opportunity’. The role of seaport-based evolution in the processes aimed at positioning market players and ports on the container scene in the Rhine–Scheldt Delta is examined.

The paper explores the interconnections between legal and animal geographies as manifested in American zoos. On the one hand, law shapes not only the zoo's physical facilities, but also the very identity of zoo animals. On the other hand, the peculiarity of zoo animals—and of zoos as public spaces that display such animals—also translates into an anomalous state of zoo laws. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part demonstrates that, despite the numerous official laws that pertain to animals in various settings, exceptions and exemptions that apply to the zoo animal make it into an almost extralegal creature. The second part examines the laws that regulate the zoo's physical facilities, showing how—in this context too—the zoo is regulated mostly through variances and exceptions. The third part focuses on the zoo's self-regulating industry standards, arguing that they provide yet another reason for the peculiar legal state of zoos and their animals. Drawing on a set of interviews, conducted mostly with American zoo professionals, the paper explores the interstitial nature of law, space, and animals, offering a fresh perspective into, and a few interconnections between, the literatures of animal geography and law and geography.

Around the world, public–private partnerships (PPPs) have been widely promoted as a model to expand the provision of critical urban transportation infrastructure. This paper examines the extent to which PPPs have actually been used to deliver urban transportation infrastructure, and whether this model of project delivery has redressed historically uneven patterns of global infrastructure investment. Through an analysis of over 950 transportation PPPs worldwide over the past quarter century, it is shown that only one third were projects built in urban areas. Of these urban projects, PPPs have been concentrated in the largest and wealthiest cities in a small number of countries, largely supported road projects rather than public transit, and been an unstable source of funding during periods of economic volatility. These uneven patterns of project development are explained by three interrelated factors: overlapping jurisdictions in urban governance, project risk profiles, and market interest. The paper concludes by reflecting on the theoretical and policy implications of these findings.

In the framework of the geographically weighted regression technique, spatial homoscedasticity of the model error term is a common assumption when a spatially varying coefficient model is calibrated to explore spatial nonstationarity of the regression relationship. In many real-world problems, however, this assumption cannot be guaranteed. In this study we first present a residual-based test method for detecting spatial heteroscedasticity of a spatially varying coefficient model. Then, we suggest a local linear smoothing procedure to estimate the variance function of the model error when heteroscedasticity exists, on which a reweighting estimation of the regression coefficients is derived. Some numerical experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the test and the gain in accuracy of the coefficient estimates by using the reweighting estimation method. The results demonstrate that the test method is powerful and that the reweighting estimation can improve the accuracy of the coefficient estimates, especially when strong heteroscedasticity exists in the model error term. Finally, a real-world dataset is analyzed to demonstrate the applications of the proposed test and estimation methods.