Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper deals with the relationship between decentralisation, regional economic development, and income inequality within regions. Using multiplicative interaction models and regionally aggregated microeconomic data for more than 100 000 individuals in the European Union (EU), it addresses two main questions. First, whether fiscal and political decentralisation in Western Europe has an effect on within-regional interpersonal inequality. Second, whether this potential relationship is mediated by the level of economic development of the region. The results of the analysis show that greater fiscal decentralisation is associated with lower interpersonal income inequality, but, as regional income rises, further decentralisation is connected to a lower decrease in inequality. This finding is robust to the measurement and definition of income inequality, as well as to the weighting of the spatial units by their population size.

In this paper we provide an account of the property-led boom and bust which has brought Ireland to the point of bankruptcy. Our account details the pivotal role which neoliberal policy played in guiding the course of the country's recent history, but also heightens awareness of the how the Irish case might, in turn, instruct and illuminate mappings and explanations of neoliberalism's concrete histories and geographies. To this end, we begin by scrutinising the terms and conditions under which the Irish state might usefully be regarded as neoliberal. Attention is then given to uncovering the causes of the Irish property bubble, the housing oversupply it created, and the proposed solution to this oversupply. In the conclusion we draw attention to the contributions which our case study might make to the wider literature of critical human geographies of neoliberalism, forwarding three concepts which emerge from the Irish story which may have wider resonance, and might constitute a useful fleshing out of theoretical framings of concrete and particular neoliberalisms: path amplification, neoliberalism's topologies and topographies, and accumulation by repossession.

Transnational regionalization has become a popular development policy among East Asian countries since the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Expanding upon Brenner's theory of state rescaling, this paper focuses on China's transnational regionalization projects and how the Chinese state rescales to implement these projects. Specifically, this paper has two objectives. First, by comparing two projects of transnational regionalization in which Yunnan participates—the Greater Mekong Subregion program and the Bangladesh—China—India—Myanmar forum—the paper critically probes the actual mechanisms (upward collaboration, downward implementation, and outward corporatism) deployed by the Chinese state to facilitate cross-border initiatives. This emphasis on the actual mechanisms thus theorizes back to Brenner's work, showing that regulatory restructuring entails complex power relations of competition and collaboration among various forces. Second, this paper examines how the Chinese state handles the territorial geopolitical relations which have emerged during the process of transnational regionalization. I seek to broaden the theoretical framework of state rescaling beyond the narrow confines of domestic city-regions to international political economy.

The paper examines changes in UK regional employment during the period of the New Labour administration, 1997–2010, with the Blair and Brown administrations considered separately. The paper employs a shift-share analysis of workplace employment data by industry and subregion, using annual data from the UK Labour Force Survey. The results reveal significant regional shifts, with interesting spatial dynamics in and around the capital and resilient employment growth in the provinces.

This paper analyzes the impact of political and fiscal decentralization on regional inequalities, using a unique dataset which covers fifty-four countries at different stages of economic development. Cross-section and panel data estimations show that decentralization decreases regional inequalities in general. However, estimations using an interaction-variable approach imply that the effect depends on the level of economic development. While rich countries benefit from decentralization in that they achieve a more equal regional income distribution, decentralization may lead to higher regional inequalities in developing and emerging economies. The results point in the same direction for measures of fiscal and political decentralization, implying that autonomy in both decision making and fiscal authority are decisive in this context. Thus, when fostering decentralization in developing countries as proposed by international development agencies, the potential negative redistributional consequences should be taken into account.

The authors draw on the concept of a ‘sustainability fix’—a political discourse which allows development to proceed by accommodating both profit-making and environmental concerns—to analyze how municipalities muster support for development in the face of worries about negative environmental impacts. The case of Whistler, British Columbia, a tourist resort with an official orientation toward sustainable development, is used to illustrate the politics of balancing economic and environmental commitments. The authors deepen the sustainability fix concept by addressing: first, how such a fix is achieved through the assemblage of local and extralocal resources—specifically, ‘imported’ policy models which direct attention to certain definitions of problems and legitimate specific types of policy solutions; and second, how the politics of municipal policy-making is about more than contention and how it involves the sort of ongoing and broadly defined learning that has been largely undertheorized in the local politics literature. A key point is that local politics and policy making are always also extralocal in various ways. They involve a local politics of policy mobility. The authors expand on this premise to show how Whistler's model of sustainability planning has recently been circulated to other municipalities with similar social, economic, and environmental conditions.

There remains only limited understanding of perceptions of travel behaviour in relation to short journeys in urban areas and, in particular, the perceived role that walking and cycling for personal travel can realistically play in contemporary society. This paper reveals discourses surrounding the practice, performance, identity, conflicts, and visions relating to walking and cycling in English cities. These were derived from a large-scale study that utilised a comprehensive mixed-method approach using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Q methodology was used as an additional tool to investigate subjectivities on walking and cycling in the city in a structured, interpretable format and it is this approach that is the focus of this paper. The paper concludes with a discussion on the implications of these discourses for policy makers interested in encouraging a shift from car use to walking and cycling for short journeys in urban areas.

During the 1990s and 2000s understandings of urban politics have become dominated by narratives of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism. Considerations of, and even interest in, the diversities that exist in the specific politics that shape place developments have often been relegated to a matter of secondary interest when understood in relation to broader structural global forces. This is particularly significant as urban development projects have become increasingly bound-up with cultural programmes, many of which are embedded in the social relations of places, yet are often dismissed as subservient to global, fast-track development logics. This paper draws on a study of the politics surrounding the development of one of Asia's largest culture-led urban development projects, the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. It explores the complex relationships between contemporary development discourses and historically embedded postcolonial subjectivities and policy legacies. It uses the evidence to argue for more nuanced interpretations of change, and calls for a stronger focus on the concrete relations in and through which policy abstractions are formed.

Current controversies regarding uranium mining in the American West are about more than competing legal requirements; they are about competing conceptualizations of space that are grounded in different ontologies. Laws—in this case the General Mining Law of 1872 and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966—play a performative role by enacting and materializing these ontologies. The occupation of New Mexico's Mt. Taylor both by ‘old’ and by ‘new’ legal forms provides an opportunity to examine their corresponding spatiality. The National Historic Preservation Act, in particular, creates an interesting ‘new space’ that may have the capacity to challenge Eurocentric notions of ownership.

This study jointly examines two distinct ICT choice behaviors—telecommuting and teleshopping—along two different dimensions: adoption and frequency. The linkages between two adoption models, or the two frequency models, are obtained by adopting a flexible copula-based approach that accommodates dependency (results from unobserved factors) between individual's telecommuting and teleshopping adoption (or frequency) choices. Rather than preimpose restrictive assumptions regarding dependence, a copula-based approach affords unique flexibility in testing different forms of dependence between telecommuting and teleshopping choice behavior. As a result, the most appropriate form of dependence is obtained. This study relies on data drawn from the 2009 National Household Travel Survey, which provides several different individual/household demographics, work/commute-related factors, attitudinal/behavioral characteristics, and residential neighborhood variables. Several intriguing findings arise from the joint modeling of telecommuting and teleshopping frequency choices as well as the analysis of the interrelationships between adoption and frequency choices for a specific ICT behavior. The positive and asymmetric form of the best model data fit (obtained both for adoption and for frequency models) also demonstrates the clear presence of unobserved factors influencing the underlying process of telecommuting and teleshopping behavior. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining the behavioral linkages between telecommuting and teleshopping choice behavior using the flexible copula modeling approach.

The increasing prominence of faith-based organisations (FBOs) in providing welfare in the UK has typically been regarded as a by-product of neoliberalism, as the gaps left by shrinking public service provision and the contracting out of service delivery have been filled by these and other Third Sector organisations. In this way, FBOs have been represented as merely being co-opted as inexpensive resource providers into the wider governmentalities of neoliberal politics. In this paper we critically question how the concept of neoliberalism has been put to work in accounts of voluntary sector cooption, and argue instead for a recognition of different manifestations of secularism and religion, and their connections to changing political—economic and social contexts. Using the illustration of one particular FBO in the UK, we trace how neoliberalism can be co-constituted through the involvement of FBOs, which can offer various pathways of resistance in and through the pursuit of alternative philosophies of care and political activism.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of the significance and implications of being a subprime homeowner in the UK. The results indicate that subprime individuals represent a mixture of socioeconomic groups, predominantly included in the light adverse and near prime categories of subprime lending, for whom credit adversity is generally a temporary phenomenon, which is likely to represent a transitory event in their lives. These borrowers have been at the heart of the UK subprime mortgage market, actively targeted not only by specialist lenders but also, more crucially, by mainstream players. Whereas for some individuals this market has provided an opportunity to experience the emotional and financial aspects of homeownership positively; for others becoming a subprime mortgage holder has increased the difficulties in their lives, affected their financial capability, and worsened their standards of living. Thus, the impact of the risk—reward mechanisms of subprime products has proved to be a difficult reality for certain socioeconomic groups. Furthermore, given the progressive deterioration in the transparency of the financial services industry, a significant proportion of subprime individuals has, unsurprisingly, struggled to appreciate the reasons why they faced problems in obtaining credit or a mortgage.