Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

‘Rightsizing’ is a planning paradigm currently being applied to shrinking cities in North America and Europe. The central idea is to avoid the trap of growth-oriented planning by restructuring the urban landscape around mixed-income, mixed-use clusters. By replacing the current sprawling inefficiency, proponents argue, environmental, equity, and infrastructure efficiency goals can be achieved. Some have worried however, that rightsizing is merely a newly packaged version of urban renewal. I argue that both framings are misplaced. Through a careful consideration of rightsizing plans in five US cities—Detroit, Flint, Rochester, Saginaw, and Youngstown—I argue that austerity urbanism is the more apt way to characterize actualized versions of the idea. Actualized rightsizing lacks the utopian modernism and Keynesian interventionism of urban renewal, and the progressive equity-oriented environmentalism idealized by its proponents.

This paper analyzes an urban growth strategy revolving around port logistics. The growing significance of port economies is linked to the larger process of globalization and the increasing geographic distance between the points of production and consumption. Transportation and logistics emerge as a potential growth scheme for cities and regions that seek to develop ‘logistics clusters’. The analysis is based on the case of Jacksonville Florida, and the effort by public and private officials to identify and promote the maritime port as an engine of growth. This case study considers the efficacy of the growth machine model in understanding this urban development process as well as the limitations of this approach when applied to a development strategy based on the ‘strategic coupling’ of the urban economy with global supply chains under conditions of intense interport competition. The requirements of the port logistics sector for large-scale publicly financed infrastructure projects and the modification of the natural environment for commerce pose unique challenges and uncertainties for this development strategy.

Just over forty years ago, Italo Calvino's masterpiece Invisible Cities was published in English. In the book, through a series of prose poems, Marco Polo describes the cities he has explored to Kublai Khan. Invisible Cities has been noticeably influential in urban studies. This paper examines the well-known playfulness, fabulism, randomness, and disorder as well as the often less acknowledged structure and order in this classic. It suggests that the conventional interpretation of Invisible Cities in urban studies literature underappreciates the complementary importance of structure and order in this novel. Based on my reading of Invisible Cities and Calvino's work, I speculatively call for emphasis on the interplay and dialogue of order and disorder in the design of cities.

Israel's dominant position within the homeland security (HLS) and counterterrorism field is now quite widely acknowledged within academic literature and beyond. While existing accounts of Israel's HLS industry have made a number of critical contributions to understanding its rise, they fail to readily address how Israeli HLS approaches have come to be understood as mobile and universal strategies to be applied worldwide. They also negate the extent to which Israel's security ‘solutions’ are (re)invented as they move geographically. I argue that Israeli claims to HLS dominance are realized through their encounters beyond Israel/Palestine in ways that stabilize their practices and technologies as global exemplars. Building on policy mobilities scholarship, I suggest that bound up with the development of an Israeli HLS ‘model’ is the constitution of an audience, which is central to giving these approaches their global appeal and respective political force. In developing these claims I explore the role of geographical imaginations in the constitution of mobilities and argue for the need to move from a framework of discourse to one of performativity.

This paper examines how a new highway in Belize will change a tropical forest landscape. Since the end of British colonialism (1981), the Maya communities in Belize's Toledo District have struggled with the state for control of the lands they have customarily used to produce a livelihood. We were approached by some Maya leaders, who recognize that the paving of a new highway through their villages could transform Maya agricultural practices and thus land use and cover change (LUCC), and asked to produce an analysis that could assist them in managing their lands. We braid together historical, social, political, economic, and satellite data to answer two questions: (1) How has land cover changed since 1975 in areas with Maya customary versus noncustomary land-use practices? (2) What will be the consequences of paving the new highway through this region for the landscape and the Maya communities? Using a multifaceted LUCC/political ecology analysis we found that forest clearing is greatest where noncustomary farming practices are employed. Noncustomary practices are spatially concentrated along the Belize-Guatemala border; the shift to noncustomary practices resulted from inmigration by war refugees who maintained close ties to Guatemalan markets. The paving of the highway promises to reduce the functional distance to Guatemala's markets, which could change land use in other villages to the detriment of the forests because of the likely diffusion of noncustomary farm practices. Forest change will be shaped by the region's complex political geography.

A vibrant literature has emerged in recent years exploring moves towards neoliberal forms of conservation, with a reduced role for the state and an enhanced role for markets and private and civil society actors. Yet there is a need for studies which explore how and why this trend has emerged, and what impact it has on both people and nature. The author provides a detailed examination of private protected areas, which are often associated with neoliberal approaches to conservation, in Chile—a country which has had a long and deep engagement with neoliberalism. It is found that private protected areas demonstrate a broad range of attitudes towards the use of markets in conservation, from enthusiasm to hostility. Yet all have been made possible, indeed incentivised, by Chile's liberalised property markets and individualistic political culture—products of earlier neoliberal reforms within Chile's society and economy. As such, they provide only a limited challenge to the social and environmental consequence of the integration of southern Chile's natural resources into global neoliberal economic chains. The author emphasises the importance of considering how broader neoliberal economic, political, and social reforms have allowed certain forms of conservation to emerge and thrive.

East Africa has traditionally been characterized by stark barriers to nonproximate communication and flows of information. It was the world's last major region without fibre-optic broadband Internet access, and until the summer of 2009 had been forced to rely on slow and costly satellite connectivity. This all changed when the first of four fibre-optic cables was connected in Kenya: bringing with it the promise of fast and affordable Internet access for the masses, and the ability of the country to move towards a knowledge-based economy. Within the context of this moment of change, this paper explores the ways that managers of outsourcing firms envisage ‘connectivity.’ Over the course of forty-one interviews, contradictory spatial imaginaries were discovered. When describing their perceptions of the country's new technomediated positionalities, many interviewees repeated visions that allowed geographic frictions to evaporate. But when managers were asked about their actual mediated positionalities, they presented a very different world: one of barriers, frictions, and the very real role that distance continues to play in the world's economic peripheries. The goal of this paper is to interrogate why we see such stark disconnects between perceptions and practices of connectivity. The contradictions could be seen as an exposition of a scalar schism between internationally operating regimes of truth (ie, powerful discourses that have their origin nonlocally) and local experiences and practices in Kenya. Alternatively, we can think about the contradictory accounts of connectivity as emergent from strategic spatial essentialisms that are practised to achieve particular goals. By focusing on the contradictions embedded into the ways in which people speak about connectivity in the Kenyan outsourcing sector, we can learn much about how arguments about the entanglement of connectivity, growth, and development are operationalized. ‘Connectivity’ is offered as a necessary, and sometimes even sufficient, condition from which growth and economic development can be brought into being: a set of spatial imaginaries that conveniently support a national development strategy of remaking Kenya in the contemporary knowledge economy.

The changing international division of labour presents opportunities for developing countries to attract foreign investments and generate employment in the offshore service sector. This paper focuses on developments in the Philippines, which has become a large exporter of business process outsourcing services over the past decade. The sector employs close to 800 000 highly educated young workers, the majority of whom work night shifts in call centres. Where do offshore service firms invest in the Philippines, which spatial transformations occur as a result, and why? This paper maps the location of offshore service investments on a national and regional level and traces the genesis of service-based special economic zones (SEZs), which combine functions of service delivery for global markets with increasingly globalised consumption patterns. These service-based SEZs arise due to location choice factors of foreign investors in services offshoring, who require skilled labour and prefer modern and secure environments, modelled according to their home country. Changing government policies on spatial zoning facilitated the rise of these SEZs in central business districts in Metro Manila and existing powerful real estate developers not only enabled this development, but are also the primary local beneficiaries of this feature of contemporary globalisation.

A predictable byproduct of any ‘successful’ mobility system is the breakdown and destruction of once desired, fashionable, shiny, and useful objects, yet mobilities scholars have largely ignored such issues. In this paper we document and analyze ethnographically neglected and ‘half-dead’ bikes in Copenhagen as we encounter them in racks, on the pavement, and when the municipality attempts to clear them out or recycle them. We are theoretically informed by ideas that see consumer objects as having a social and material life beyond their initial production and sale. They are constantly in a process, (un)becoming, and marked by that life. Where cycling is normally conceived of as a sustainable and environmentally friendly practice, this study shows that many bikes are ill treated and quickly become waste, and ‘matter out place’.

Due to the increasing spatial dispersion of social networks, the association between neighbor relationships and quality of life has become more uncertain. Our analysis used instrumental variable modelling to reduce bias associated with residual confounding and reverse causation, in order to provide a more reliable examination of the effect of interaction with neighbors on subjective well-being than previous work. While the frames of reference for individuals' socialising may have shifted outside the neighborhood, our analysis provides robust evidence that interaction with neighbors still matters a great deal for subjective well-being. A further important question to ask is if neighboring does affect well-being, then are there certain groups in society for whom contact with neighbors matters more? Our analysis suggests that there are, namely for those in a relationship, unemployed or retired. This means that while fostering contact with neighbors has the potential to significantly improve individual well-being, such policy efforts are likely to matter a good deal more in neighborhoods with relatively large numbers of geographically constrained social groups, such as the elderly and the unemployed.

With the graying of populations across the world, the travel behavior of seniors has become a topic of growing interest in planning and research. Most attention in the field of transportation has been devoted to motorized travel. However, the use of various modes of transportation, including nonmotorized travel, remains to be fully investigated. In this paper the multimodal trip generation of seniors in Montreal Island is studied. Personal, mobility tools, neighborhood, and accessibility variables are considered in a trivariate ordered probit model of three modes: car, transit, and walking. Geographical analysis of the walking component of the model helps to identify locations within the region where walking is more or less prevalent among older adults.

The existence of ethnic penalties in the operations of the UK labour market is well established, although many studies have focused upon only unemployment and income as measures of labour-market performance. Few have looked at changes in those penalties over time, especially during a period including a major recent recession, and whether they were experienced widely throughout the population—whether people were ‘all in it together’ according to the government's rhetoric defending its post-2010 austerity programme. This paper evaluates that claim's validity by exploring differences among eighteen separate ethnoreligious groups across a wider range of labour-market performance measures: it assesses not only whether there were ethnic penalties throughout the period but also whether they were exacerbated during the recession that began in 2008. Statistical modelling shows that many were indeed exacerbated—in the percentage employed part-time rather than full-time, the percentage overqualified for their chosen jobs, the percentage of older adults who become economically inactive prematurely, and income levels—but not unemployment levels. Muslim groups, especially those from Asia, suffered the most extensive penalties, and the greatest exacerbation of them during the recession.

Using individual records from a large and geographically detailed national research opinion survey, this paper uniquely adopts a multilevel cross-classified statistical framework to demonstrate the relative importance of individual and simultaneous origin/destination contextual (neighbourhood and city region) variations in the distance moved by residential migrants in England and Wales. The model results confirm distinct microlevel variations in the distance moved according to certain key variables such as household income, educational attainment, and housing tenure whilst simultaneously revealing the importance of substantial origin and destination place-based macrogeographic variations. More specifically, the results indicate the extent to which those out-migrants from the main metropolitan cores, together with those in-migrants to the rural/coastal (amenity-rich) destinations, move over considerably longer distances than the average distance of move.