Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

When we think of policy as mobile, what is it we think is moving? Asking after the mobility of policy is important not least for the ontological questions it raises: what is policy such that it moves? Ordinarily, we might think of policy as existing in time and space while, given certain conditions, some policies move from one time and/or space to another. This paper, by contrast, begins by describing policy as resulting from movement, setting out a model or heuristic which takes its mobility as prior to its existence. For policy is made in communicative interaction, both oral (in meetings) and textual (in documents). We might think of it in wave form, which helps to explain both its mobility and its mutability. The paper illustrates this conception in a study of WHO activity in respect of mental health in Europe, exploring aspects of translation—understood as the generation of messages in interaction—and of iteration, as those messages are reformulated and repeated in different contexts. The policy concept reverberates, and it is in this way that collective sense is consolidated and reproduced.

The paper reflects on the methodological challenges involved in research on the movement and mutation of fast-moving policies, through globalizing networks and across translocal settings. Inspired by ‘follow the thing’ methods and by the global ethnography program, it outlines a distended case-study approach to the study of policy mobilities.

This essay takes up the challenge of global ethnography. Using the case of poverty expertise and development capitalism, it presents an analysis of what may be understood as an ethnography of circulations. Building on the emergent research on policy mobilities, it calls for an ethnography of the apparatus or dispositif and its constitutive relations and practices. Here ethnography departs from ontologies of immersion and is instead concerned with critique as a mode of defamiliarization. Against the lament of anthropologists that such global ethnography may entail the loss of the subaltern, the essay presents a different ethnographic muse: middling technocrats who negotiate the apparatus of development and who embody the contradictions of market rule.

Recent years have seen a challenge to the territorial orthodoxy in urban studies. An interest in policy assemblage, mobility, and mutation has begun to open up ‘the what’ and ‘the where’ of urban policy making. Unfortunately—but perhaps not surprisingly—theoretical developments and empirical insights have run ahead of significant methodological considerations. This paper turns to some of the methodological consequences of studying the chains, circuits, networks, and webs in and through which policy and its associated discourses and ideologies are made mobile and mutable. It focuses on three rubrics under which methodological decisions can be made: ‘studying through’ (rather than studying up or down), techniques of following actors, policies, etc, and relational situations in which mobilization and assemblage happen. The paper concludes with a brief reflection on how academic research design and writing assemble cities and urban policy making in ways that parallel the assembling practices of policy actors.

Segregation measures have been applied in the study of many societies, and traditionally such measures have been used to assess the degree of division between social and cultural groups across urban areas, wider regions, or perhaps national areas. The degree of segregation can vary substantially from place to place even within very small areas. In this paper the substantive concern is with religious/political segregation in Northern Ireland—particularly the proportion of Protestants (often taken as an indicator of those who wish to retain the union with Britain) to Catholics (often taken as an indicator of those who favour union with the Republic of Ireland). Traditionally, segregation is measured globally—that is, across all units in a given area. A recent trend in spatial data analysis generally, and in segregation analysis specifically, is to assess local features of spatial datasets. The rationale behind such approaches is that global methods may obscure important spatial variations in the property of interest, and thus prevent full use of the data. In this paper the utility of local measures of residential segregation is assessed with reference to the religious/political composition of Northern Ireland. The paper demonstrates marked spatial variations in the degree and nature of residential segregation across Northern Ireland. It is argued that local measures provide highly useful information in addition to that provided in maps of the raw variables and in standard global segregation measures.

This paper examines the cultural dimensions of production networks between Japanese and Taiwanese firms. Conceptually, we argue that, due to historical and cultural ties between the two countries, as well as long-standing associations with Taiwanese suppliers, Japanese lead firms have deepened their relationships as Taiwan has entered a more technologically based stage of development. Taiwan has also been pivotal in Japan–Taiwan–China relations because of its cultural as well as geographic proximity to the two economic giants. Empirically, the analysis draws on interviews with sixteen Japanese electronics companies in Taipei and Hsinchu Science City, as well as secondary data concerning Japanese trade and investment in Taiwan. We contend that Japanese lead firms have moved to a position of insiders and partners with their Taiwanese suppliers in the information, technology, and communications sector. In addition, Japanese electronics firms now see Taiwan as a viable bridge to production and markets in China, while corporate relations are moving towards heterarchical or matrix arrangements, away from the hierarchical flying geese model. The study notes that there are challenges and limits to these new forms of relations.

In this paper it is argued that the spatial segmentation of financial services in urban areas, generated by a combination of financial market characteristics, transnational movements of people and capital, cultural practices, ethnic resources, and social networks may produce, at the early stages of the home mortgage application process, a sorting of Asian borrowers into mortgage channels that may differ from those of other minority groups and may have, in the long run, a different impact on the exposure and vulnerability of borrowers to adverse lending practices and products. The study employs multinomial logistic regression and GIS analysis of annual Home Mortgage Disclosure Data and explores trends in home mortgage loan applications to different types of lenders by Asian, white, and other minority prospective borrowers in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area. Findings indicate that Asian applicants feature a greater propensity to apply for mortgage loans at very large mainstream banks and Asian-owned banks than at subprime lenders compared with other minority prospective borrowers. The larger presence of competing financial institutions in Asian immigrant markets may result in a greater access by Asian prospective borrowers to more options and, possibly, to higher quality and affordable mortgage products than other pools of minority applicants. At the same time, some of the social and cultural resources typically found in ethnic enclaves may affect how Asian applicants react to the outreach practices, sorting procedures, and products offered by different lenders.

Statistical modelling has superseded traditional methods of assessing character and trustworthiness through personal knowledge and face-to-face interaction. Advances in credit scoring allow lenders to extend loans to a wider proportion of the population in spatially disparate locations and simultaneously reduce losses associated with nonperforming loans. Contrary to scientific approaches to credit and risk assessment, cultural theorists maintain that risk should be understood through a richer reading of social and cultural analysis and interpretation. I focus on consumer lendingscapes in emerging markets as an example of understanding the social and cultural constructed nature of risk and credit scoring by assessing technological expertise, legal systems, culture, norms, beliefs, and social relations of financial institutions in specific places. There are significant problems with extending methods of credit scoring and networks of credit bureaus developed in advanced societies to emerging markets.

This paper examines whether differences in welfare regimes shape the incentives to work and get educated. Using microeconomic data for more than 100 000 European individuals, we show that welfare regimes make a difference for wages and education. First, people-based and household-based effects (internal returns to education, and household wage and education externalities) generate socioeconomic incentives for people to get an education and work which are stronger in countries with the weakest welfare systems, that is, those with what is known as ‘residual’ welfare regimes (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal). Second, place-based effects and, more specifically, differences in regional wage per capita and educational endowment and in regional interpersonal income and educational inequality, also influence wages and education in different ways across welfare regimes. Place-based effects have the greatest impact in the Nordic social-democratic welfare systems. The results are robust to the inclusion of a large number of people-based and place-based controls.

International trade poses a serious and growing threat to biosecurity through the introduction of invasive pests and disease: these have adverse impacts on plant and animal health and public goods such as biodiversity, as well as food production capacity. While international governmental bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) recognise such threats, and permit governments to protect human, animal, and plant life or health, such measures must not be applied in a way that is restrictive to trade. This raises a fundamental (but little-examined) tension between effective biosecurity governance and the neoliberal priorities of international trade. In this paper we examine how such tensions play out in the different political and geographical contexts of Australia and the United Kingdom. A comparative approach enables close scrutiny of how trade liberalisation and biosecurity are coconstituted as compatible objectives as well as the tensions and contradictions involved in making these domains a single governable problem. The comparative analysis draws attention to the policy challenges facing Australia and the UK in governing national biosecurity in a neoliberal world. These challenges reveal a complex geopolitics in the ways in which biosecurity is practised, institutionalised, and debated in each country, with implications for which pests and diseases are defined as threats and, therefore, which commodities are permitted to move across national borders. Despite efforts by the WTO to govern biosecurity as a technical matter of risk assessment and management, and to harmonise national practices, we contend that actual biosecurity practices continue to diverge between states depending on perceptions of risk and hazard, both to agricultural production and to rural environments as a whole, as well as unresolved tensions between internationalised neoliberalism and domestic concerns.

This paper explores the changing role and place of handicrafts in contemporary rural development processes. Building on fieldwork conducted in four settlements in northern Thailand and Vietnam, we discuss how a traditional sector is being reshaped under the forces of globalisation and what this means for the character of rural livelihoods. This empirical analysis permits us to reflect on wider areas of debate within development and economic geography. By examining the spatialities of production, we explore how the ‘place’ of handicrafts in the settlements is being reshaped. We show how, although handicraft production retains an image of being part of a traditional sector built around local skills and inputs, in reality the activities have become deterritorialised and are increasingly spatially dispersed. Nonetheless, handicraft production remains economically and socially embedded and is helping to sustain village economies both in situ and in distant locations.

In this paper I develop the concept of ‘technicity’ to theorise how technology shapes spatiotemporal perception. This concept of technicity is applied to the development of skilled play in the fighting videogame Street Fighter IV. Drawing upon a larger research project consisting of participant observation, interviews, and video ethnography with professional and nonprofessional competitive players, I develop an in-depth analysis of how information about the animation system for the game is compiled and used to develop new sensitivities to time. In doing so, I argue that this is one example of the ways in which a variety of technologies shape users' capacities to sense space and time through the habitual development of skill.

In this paper I provide a first-hand account of a trip designed to verify the existence of a carbon forestry offset in Costa Rica. In so doing, I reflect on how various actors become the stabilized calculative agents of scientists, state bureaucrats, indigenous leaders, GPS devices, trees, signs, and field reports that such trips require. In addition, I show how various articulations of these actors, and their emergent agencies, simultaneously maintains both the carbon offset as a commodity object as well as a field of action and communication that allows for such an object to be exchanged. In short, I consider the verification of an offset as a performance. Doing so, I examine the agency of some actors in this process, and account for the uneven power relations inherent in such a process. Specifically, I advance three arguments. First, the agency of actors is constituted, in part, by various calculative devices, which themselves simultaneously occupy an unstable position of being both a material object and an abstraction. Second, the normative power of the performance I witnessed derives from its relation to the abject: spaces and ways of being that are unintelligible to the logics of offsetting that nonetheless serve to further reiterate the need for an offset's calculative frame. Third, performing an offset is a self-reflexive process, and it is through the self-reflexivity of actors involved that the qualities of ‘the forest’ emerge in ways that confound the stability of an offset commodity. In this way, the biophysical qualities of the forest are not necessarily barriers to its commodification. Instead, it is the reflexive practices inherent in performing ‘the economic’ that can serve to confound the emergence of the commodified forest.

This paper draws on the literature on residential mobility in order to address the housing choice of gentrifiers and its different dimensions (profile, trajectories, and motivations). The gentrification literature is reviewed in regard to these dimensions. Empirical material is based on questionnaires sent to the inhabitants of new high-status developments (new-build gentrification) in two Swiss cities (Zurich and Neuchâtel). By pointing out some of the characteristics found in the Swiss context, the results contribute to an understanding of the attributes of contemporary gentrifiers, such as their diversity in terms of life-course position, the transitory stage that living in a gentrified neighbourhood may represent, and the predominance of the convenience of urban life (proximity and mobility) in their motivations.

This paper presents a computable general equilibrium model of a stylized linear city that simultaneously minimizes transportation costs while satisfying labor, and, and goods equilibrium conditions, in the tradition of Anas and Kim, while introducing a monetary balance. This model has structural similarity with Davis's design of an optimal transportation system under user equilibrium conditions. The model includes three industries: manufacturing, retail, and services. Their economic transactions are empirically modeled using national input–output data, which allows for the endogenous determination of import and export pricing and flows. Numerical applications show that more efficient transportation increases utility and leads to a centralization of the population, and that zoning, under various restriction scenarios, decreases utility, with the most detrimental effects on residents in unrestricted zones. Finally, a zero trade deficit scenario results in lower utility, a larger transportation system, and smaller residential lots, with higher CBD population density.