Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper explores the impact of digitally mediated communications technologies on the fashion sector. It argues that material and virtual fashion worlds are perpetually intersecting social realities that coexist relationally, simultaneously, and in mutual connection. The paper explores these shifting fashion landscapes in three particular ways in order to understand how fashion worlds are being transformed, enhanced, and reproduced in space and time. Firstly, it is argued that emergent digital technologies are remediating and refashioning existing cultural forms of signification such as fashion magazines and photography. Secondly, the potential disintermediatory effects that the Internet is having on fashion markets and consumption are explored, questioning to what extent digital technologies are enabling the devolution of fashion authority from traditional power brokers such as magazine editors and designers towards a more diversified assemblage of participants, including fashion bloggers and consumers. Thirdly, the transformative effects that digital technology is having on fashion consumption are explored. The Internet has opened up new spaces of fashion consumption that are unprecedented in their levels of ubiquity, immersion, fluidity, and interactivity. Fashion spaces are increasingly portable, must follow us around, travel with us through time and space. The network effects made possible by the Internet are enabling the creation of always-on, always-connected consumer communities. Increasingly we are adrift without the Internet, not with it. This is generating new ways of being in space where the absence of physical presence becomes second nature. Taken together, the collision between virtual and material fashion spaces requires a fundamental rethink about the role of fashion production, consumption, knowledge, and the laws of markets.

This paper is an investigation into processes of becoming-stakeholder. It focuses specifically on strategic spatial planning where the stakeholder concept has become one of the linchpins of much contemporary theory and practice. Through drawing upon the sociology of attachments and scholarship on subjectification, it is argued that the enactment of stakeholders in strategic planning processes can be gainfully understood as the production of stakeholder subjectivities by way of practices of ontological choreography which can generate territorial attachments and rearticulate existing attachments into a specifically territorial format. From this perspective, stakeholderness is never an ontologically pregiven property to be uncovered by diligent analysis. Rather, we might come to see that stakeholder subjectification is a process through which actors learn to be affected, and where these affections further come to be articulated as territorial attachments engendering, or at least prompting, a ‘caring for place’. Still, as relational effects, subjectivities are always potentially precarious achievements and it is important not to take for granted that the subjectivities enacted in a specific situation or setting will be easily transposable to other contexts.

This paper examines the discourses of transportation and mobility surrounding the Grand Paris Express mass transit network announced in January 2011 as part of the broader Grand Paris urban renewal and agglomeration initiative. It argues that though Grand Paris Express has the potential to symbolically unify the Île-de-France region, and may provide much needed infrastructure to the peripheral suburbs of Paris, because of the neoliberal political rationality upon which it is based, it may likely entrench rather than relieve the problems of territorial inequality it sets out to address. An important tool of gentrification, mass transit is being used in metropolitan Paris to lead urban development in the creation of a polycentric region with functionally differentiated clusters of industry, finance, and technology around proposed transit stations. Following four main ‘mobilizing myths’ that dominate public policy debates, the proposed Grand Paris Express system fails to consider the broad social, economic, and political conditions upon which urban mobility is based, instead orienting transit toward a marketized logic of real estate development, urban rent production, and territorial competition.

UK regional policy has been advocated as a means of reducing regional disparities and stimulating national growth. However, there is limited understanding of the interregional and national effects of such a policy. This paper uses an interregional computable general equilibrium model to identify the national impact of a policy-induced regional demand shock under alternative labour market closures. Our simulation results suggest that regional policy operating solely on the demand side has significant national impacts. Furthermore, the effects on the nontarget region are particularly sensitive to the treatment of the regional labour market.

The relationship among trade liberalization, the environment, and socioeconomic development is marked by controversy, though it is well accepted that in practice economic interests often trump environmental concerns and that developing countries incur a range of costs to participate in, and comply with, multilateral and bilateral trade agreements. Politics and power dynamics in the rule-making process in liberalization negotiations are often implicated for generating these outcomes. To improve on this record, and in accordance with the rise in ‘market environmentalism’, World Trade Organization (WTO) members and advocacy groups have turned this rhetoric on its head and pushed for ‘synergy’ in which a single WTO rule to discipline fisheries subsidies at once liberalizes trade, generates an environmental improvement, and supports developing country aspirations—a much fêted ‘triple win’. We sketch the anatomy of the fisheries subsidies negotiations and explore how the triple win is used by blocks of states to justify different political—economic positions. This analysis sheds light on the challenges associated with seeking to use trade for the environment and for development and the dynamics that shape negotiations and the actually existing rules that emerge from the WTO.

This paper examines the import for fiduciary investors (pension funds, insurance companies, and mutual funds in OECD countries) of companies' environmental performance levels in light of existing and nascent energy-usage and environmental management policies. The study is based on an experiment using a sample of fiduciaries located mainly in Europe, North America, and Australia. Subjects are allocated to one of two groups: one group invests with reference to environmental considerations, while the other tracks a conventional equities index. Responding participants indicate the frequency with which they use nominated sources of information and rate the importance of nominated types of information in their decisions concerning the portfolio. The results suggest that the wider population of fiduciaries considers existing policy measures to be of limited value, yet, on liquidity grounds, might be prepared to take environmental considerations into account in the portfolio construction process. Another contribution of this paper is its framing and consolidating of literature on energy and environmental management policy, environmental investing, and decision psychology.

Concerns over British Muslim integration have been to the fore of public debate over much of the last decade, with Muslim segregation constituting a key issue. Recent analyses have usefully shown that current concerns over segregation levels in the UK are exaggerated. However, these analyses continue to rely on census ethnicity data, which are used as proxy for religion to draw inferences about Muslim residential phenomena. Focusing on Birmingham, this paper redresses this tendency by using religion data to explore religious segregation directly. Adopting established measures of segregation and Special Migration Statistics (SMS) by religion for the year 2000/01, the paper shows that, whilst Muslim segregation in Birmingham is high, there has been a significant if spatially constrained movement away from concentrated inner urban areas.

In June 2010 the Kyrgyzstani city of Osh was engulfed in three days of mass killing, arson, and looting. Accounts by journalists, academics, politicians, and organisations tend to either overdetermine ethnicity as a causal factor, or dismiss its significance as a social process. As a result, internal responses to the tragedy have been viewed by outsiders as mendaciously irrational. To overcome this impasse, this paper foregrounds the idea of Osh as national territory. Based on ongoing ethnographic study since 1995, plus an analysis of media reports, it shows the ways in which Uzbek and Kyrgyz residents of the city have narrated its ethnic past as one of divided or shared space. The resonance of these narratives can both help account for responses to the violence within Kyrgyzstan that have puzzled outsiders, and also uncover resources of hope. The paper highlights the importance of considering nationalism as a geographical phenomenon in explicating ethnic-based violence in contemporary Central Asia.

Social capital has remained relatively underexplored in innovation literature due to the lack of consensus on the most suitable operationalisation for the analysis of innovative dynamics. This paper aims to fill this gap by looking at social capital as propensity towards civicness and prosocial behaviour that facilitates the circulation of nonredundant knowledge among otherwise disconnected groups. The quantitative analysis of the innovative performance of Italian provinces shows that social capital—proxied by blood donations and participation into voluntary associations—is an important predictor of innovative performance after controlling for ‘traditional’ knowledge inputs (R&D and human capital). In addition, instrumental variable analysis makes it possible to identify clear causal links between social capital and innovation, suggesting that social norms play an important role in shaping the incentives for knowledge generation, circulation, and accumulation.

This paper introduces a model of localised competition and technological adoption that produces interesting geographical adoption patterns: persistent asymmetry, where nobody adopts; leapfrogging where only followers adopt; forging ahead, where only leaders adopt; and catching up, where everybody adopts a new technology. I study the conditions leading to the emergence of these adoption patters to interpret the rich and growing empirical literature on intradistribution mobility across and within regions. I consider a set of linked markets characterised by asymmetric initial technological conditions. I show that these different spatial adoption patterns may provide an interesting reference for the debate on regional convergence, as adoption is an essential engine of growth. I also assess both the impact of integration policy and of historical asymmetries on these spatial adoption choices and find some counterintuitive results: for example, that integration policies may increase regional asymmetries instead of reducing them, depending on the relevance of the initial technology gap between neighbouring firms. The model does not assume different learning abilities or adoption costs between leaders and followers. Indeed, they can all adopt, for the same cost, a new technology leading to global catching up and convergence. Notwithstanding this possibility, the emerging spatial adoption patterns may still be asymmetric. The main parameters driving the results of the model are the relevance of the innovation; adoption costs; consumers' preferences for quality; the initial, historically inherited, technology quality asymmetries; and transport costs, expressing the degree of within-market competitiveness and differentiation.

We adopt a stochastic actor-based modelling framework to present a longitudinal analysis of an intercity corporate network formed by 53 globalised advanced producer service firms across 107 cities for three different time points in the period 2000–10. Our longitudinal framework allows us to investigate the different processes underlying firm networks' dynamics. The observed network changes are explained by a combination of exogenous city characteristics (eg, GDP and population) and endogenous local network structures (eg, ‘star’ and ‘4-cycle’ structures). Our analysis contributes to an understanding of how interactions amongst cities and firms at the local scale give rise to the empirically observed network patterns at the global scale.

Research into business associations indicates that many associations suffer from very high levels of inactive members and fail to deliver significant benefits to members. In order to improve provision, the objective of this paper is to understand the determinants that drive or limit performance of rural business associations. Previous research has focused on the ratio of perceived costs to benefits as informing the decision to remain a member. However, in small associations, membership may be more influenced by social norms than the logic of rational choice. Using measures of satisfaction and willingness to pay for association survival as in-group measures of performance this paper finds that (1) for small associations, group size is critical, (2) associations are valued higher in communities where trust is lower, (3) funding by public bodies may be counterproductive to long-term development aims, and (4) the degree of rurality is insignificant in explaining association performance.

The majority of quantitative studies on the consequences of internal migration focus almost exclusively on the labour-market outcomes and the material well-being of migrants. We investigate whether individuals who migrate within the UK become happier after the move than they were before, and whether the effect is permanent or transient. Using life-satisfaction responses from twelve waves of the British Household Panel Survey and employing a fixed-effects model, we derive a temporal pattern of migrants' subjective well-being around the time of the migration event. Our findings make an original contribution by revealing that, on average, migration is preceded by a period when individuals experience a significant decline in happiness for a variety of reasons, including changes in personal living arrangements. Migration itself causes a boost in happiness, and brings people back to their initial levels. The research contributes, therefore, to advancing an understanding of migration in relation to set-point theory. Perhaps surprisingly, long-distance migrants are at least as happy as short-distance migrants despite the higher social and psychological costs involved. The findings of this paper add to the pressure to retheorize migration within a conceptual framework that accounts for social well-being from a life-course perspective.