Urban Studies

Comparisons of the costs of private and public production of the same service are of interest because governmental services do not have to be produced by public institutions. The production may be contracted out to private companies. The paper presents an empirical analysis of costs of private and public provision of fire protection in Denmark. Strict state regulation of municipal fire protection services makes the costs of public and private production more comparable than is often the case. The findings show substantial cost differences in favour of private production. In the discussion, this difference is primarily attributed to economies of scale and competition from alternative sources of supply related to private production of fire protection services.

France possesses an increasingly rich and diverse experience of new towns, following their planning and development over fifteen years. Growth rates vary between the towns, bat in all cases expansion has been slower than anticipated. Various social, economic and political problems have arisen, not least the untimely launching of the new towns just prior to an extended period of recession. However, in certain instances their size and influence are now considerable, reflecting a substantial base of employment and services. In assessing progress, discussion is centred upon the issues of demographic and economic expansion, financial and administrative constraints and the varying attitudes amongst those responsible for managing the new towns.

Objective indicators suggest that numerous aspects of the quality of residential environments decline with increasing size of place. As human responses to the environment are based in part on perceptions and evaluations of conditions rather than their objective status, subjective indicators should also be considered in assessing the quality of residential environments in different-sized places. A series of subjective response measures for a full range of urban places in the United States show that (1) the perceived overall quality of neighborhoods declines with increasing size of place, even when controlled for subjective responses to individual local conditions, (2) most of the surveyed local deficiencies are reported to be more widespread in larger cities, (3) the intensity of responses to conditions depicting deterioration of the built environment and public safety increase more rapidly with city size than do responses to traffic-transportation conditions, (4) there appears to be a breakpoint in the general decline of neighborhood quality between large and extremely large urban centers, and the suggestion that residential quality in the smallest urban places is not as good as in places of over 10,000 population.

The paper develops a typology of reasons for residential mobility and systematises the many survey analyses of reasons for moving. The relative importance of life cycle and housing adjustment mechanisms for explaining household relocations are evaluated. The analysis re-emphasises the role of housing adjustment in local moves and clarifies the theoretical links between stimulus (for move) and adjustment.

A survey of 410 plant relocations and branch plant creations in the Turin Metropolitan Area is used to formulate a model of the timing and spatial incidence of manufacturing change. Entrepreneurs' expectations about growth or decline are seen as determining the rate of anticipated movement but land use policies and the state of industrial relations may act as constraints on the process. The actual rates of movement over the period 1961-77 are regressed against a measure of entrepreneurial optimism or pessimism, the rate of change of national consumption and the rate of investment.

Anthony Downs argues that most government bureaus follow an eight stage developmental life cycle including such steps as: (1) birth of the agency, (2) early dominance by 'advocates' or 'zealots', (3) a struggle for autonomy followed by (4) a struggle for support, (5) rapid growth, and (6) a 'decelerator effect' ending in (7) a 'crisis of continuity' and rarely — (8) death. The present article applies Downs' life cycle explanation of bureaucratic agency behaviour to an elected public body and argues that elected bodies exhibit characteristics similar to nonelected and long-term bureaucratic organisations.