European Urban and Regional Studies

Students have been little studied as a mobile population, despite their increasing importance among human flows in the contemporary globalizing world. This article examines changing mobility patterns, attitudes and behaviours of UK higher education students who spend a part of their degree programme studying or working abroad. The research was stimulated by perceptions that UK students were turning away from international mobility, especially to Europe. Using a multi-method approach, based on further statistical analysis of existing data sources, notably the UK Socrates–Erasmus student dataset, and on a range of questionnaire and interview surveys to staff and students in selected UK higher education institutions, the article explores the changing patterns of student movement and the drivers and barriers to mobility for UK students. We find that UK students's decreasing mobility to Europe is more than compensated by rising flows to other world destinations, especially North America and Australia. Questionnaire and interview data reveal the prime significance of language and financial factors as barriers to European mobility. Evidence also points to the embeddedness of personal mobility in relation to social class and the ways in which the varied practices of a socially differentiated higher education system may reproduce relative social advantage and disadvantage through access to international mobility opportunities. The article concludes with further attempts to conceptualize student mobility and to draw out policy aspects.

The results of this study indicate that during the 1990s urbanization was the dominant process in inter-regional migration, and residential suburbanization prevailed at the intra-metropolitan level.These tendencies are new and different from the trend existing during the Soviet era.These urbanization and suburbanization trends correspond closely with the expectations of the city life cycle and the differential urbanization models, indicating that patterns in Estonia during the 1990s follow those experienced by capitalist countries. The evaluation of urbanization and migration trends by age, education, gender and ethnicity, using 2000 census data, indicate that young people, females, migrants with a higher education, and Estonians accounted for the national urbanization trends. Also, in contrast to the Soviet era, Estonians participated fully in the urbanization trends of the 1990s. Suburbanization was the predominant direction of movement within metropolitan areas, and this trend was similar for all population subgroups. Yet people with a higher education and those in the family ages were most likely to suburbanize. Estonian migration trends for the total population were similar to many countries of the former Soviet Union, but different from East Central European countries.We believe that the main reason for such a contradiction stems from the compositional differences of the populations in these two groups of countries. Migration trends of population subgroups,however,seem to be similar across countries in transition. In addition, this study develops a Migration Concentration Index (MCI) to measure concentration and deconcentration processes in inter-regional migration.

There is currently strong political desire at both European and national scales to ‘relocalize’ food production and supply. While advocacy remains high, few studies have interrogated the form of these ‘new’ food chains. This article provides an analysis of such chains in the Scottish–English borders. It traces supply links between small-scale ‘specialist’ food producers and associated intermediaries for three product sectors. Linking the two stages of the food chain together, the analysis shows differences within and between, as well as similarities across, sectors in terms of spatial and economic organization. It also reveals the ‘hybrid’ nature of specialist food chains in the region; local producers have created their own ‘niche spaces’ within the food system.The article thus contributes to debates on new agro-food geographies and regional economic geography and argues that local (specialist) small-scale enterprises do not usually establish food chains which are ‘independent’ of the wider food supply system.

This article explores the relationship between regional inequality and economic development level in 14 Western European countries for the period 1980–2002. The results, which were obtained by means of a semi-parametric methodology, indicate the presence of a process of regional divergence once a certain level of development has been reached. Nevertheless, in contrast to the available empirical evidence for the United States, our estimates show that the increase in regional disparities is purely transitory. Indeed, beyond a given level of per capita GDP, regional inequality can be seen to decrease, ultimately leading to a stabilization of territorial imbalances in the later stages of the development process.These findings are robust to the inclusion of additional variables in the analysis and to the choice of the measure used to quantify regional disparities.

Alan Latham criticizes recent Anglophone writing on Berlin for reflecting a consensus position, which explains urban development with the help of a template defined by globalizing neo-liberalism. In some respects the points he makes are helpful. Berlin has been actively repositioned and re-imagined through an ambivalent process of ‘normalization’, which cannot be reduced to the rolling out of some global norm. However, there is a danger in this approach that Berlin is presented as somehow immune from the pressures of neo-liberalism and as providing the template of an alternative (European social-democratic) model.

This essay is a brief reply to Cochrane (2006b). It reiterates the ways in which the existing Anglo-American consensus within urban studies allows only a narrow reading of the possible futures of European cities.