Urban Studies

Many post-industrial cities have reinvented themselves both physically and imaginatively in strikingly similar fashion. Yet a vital element of place marketing remains the attempt to advertise each city's `uniqueness'. Here the deployment of historically longstanding attractions and `brand essences' often play a central role, as this case history of one city's destination branding hopefully illustrates. It explains how different tourism sites, and thus particular tourist gazes, were constructed in Cape Town from the late 19th century onwards. One key question is why no new `Africanist' vision predominated after 1994. Answering this question is not merely a matter of understanding the nature of the city's contemporary political economy, although this is certainly important; it also requires some knowledge of past historical processes, including the historical accumulation of attractions. Place-selling experts market modern cities, but not entirely in circumstances of their own choosing. History matters, yet existing literature for South African urban tourism has focused largely on contemporary developments.

The paper investigates the notion that homeownership affects poverty perception. This is investigated by utilising a logit model to analyse various characteristics of homeowners in 11 different European nations. Overall, the analysis fails to reject the notion that homeowners throughout Europe are less likely to perceive themselves as living in poverty, but no evidence is found that homeownership is more valued in nations with high owner-occupancy rates. However, support is found for the notion that homeownership is used as a form of security in countries that experience greater income inequality.

The UK has had a long history of market provision of household insurance. Recent years, however, have seen a decline in the traditional insurance market distribution channels aimed at low-income and/or rented-sector households. The products, pricing and method of payment currently offered by insurers have exacerbated the exclusion of many in social housing from this important financial services product. Research suggests that only 50 per cent of people living in rented or local authority housing insure their contents, compared with 93 per cent of homeowners. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the degree to which tenants in public-sector housing participate in low-cost household insurance schemes promoted by their landlord and to assess the reasons behind this level of participation. This study suggests that, despite value-for-money schemes being available, the take-up rates by tenants are low and that the providers of social housing need to be more vigorous and imaginative in their promotion of low-cost insurance schemes if this form of financial exclusion is to be tackled successfully.

Community social organisation brings individuals together, providing opportunities for collective responses to perceived neighbourhood issues and concerns. This paper considers how rates of neighbourhood mortality influence levels of community organisation. Certain types of mortality may actually enhance, not disrupt, the level of social organisation. Because urban neighbourhoods experience dramatically different mortality rates, the paper examines whether the relationship between mortality and community social organisation varies based on the causes of death and the ages of those dying. Analyses from Chicago neighbourhoods suggest that the rate at which children die from preventable causes such as homicide, suicide and accidents results in an increased likelihood that residents join neighbourhood watch organisations and participate in actions to address community problems. The effect of youth mortality is shaped in part by dense network exchanges among residents.

The use of area-based deprivation indices is now a firmly established means of assessing which areas ought to be the focus of government policy, with separate indices of deprivation established for each constituent part of the UK. In England, the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 has been widely used to support decision-making for key urban policies and in more local assessments of deprivation. Implicit in the development and use of these indicators is the notion that area matters and that it can be an important influence on a whole range of different activities. However, there is also a sense in which contemporary measures of deprivation are spatially short-sighted since they are not able to account formally for the spatial context of individual locations. This paper therefore offers an alternative approach to the measurement of local conditions by combining spatial statistical approaches with a much-used deprivation index.

Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socioeconomic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic identity as a potential influence on the homeowner-ship decision, using a two-dimensional composite index of ethnic identity that incorporates attachments to both origin and host cultures. In the case of Germany, the evidence suggests that immigrants with a stronger commitment to the host country are more likely to achieve homeownership for a given set of socioeconomic and demographic characteristics, regardless of their level of attachment to their home country.

This paper examines the residential mobility behaviour of immigrants and natives in The Netherlands using a rich administrative individual data file. The inclination to move and the choice of destination neighbourhood are estimated, correcting for the selection bias of movers. Subsequently, the role of preferences and discrimination in the mobility behaviour is implicitly derived from regression estimates. The analysis shows that the percentage of natives in the destination neighbourhood is predicted to be about 18 percentage points lower for non-Western immigrants than for natives. About 65 per cent of the differential is explained by their observable characteristics; the remaining part can largely be attributed to preferences and discrimination. No indication is found of the spatial assimilation of second-generation non-Western immigrants. On the other hand, the mobility pattern of the second-generation Western immigrants is similar to that of natives.

Within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in China, farmers' de facto rights to collective land, including farmland and housing plots (zhaijidi), are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers, to facilitate urban-based economic growth. Deprived of a secure livelihood, some landless farmers become trapped in poverty. Others find that the property rights restructuring in urbanised villages gives them an opportunity to earn rental income. However, the opportunities are not equally distributed and the processes are, in general, stacked against the interests of villagers. This paper analyses the impoverishment of farmers caught up in China's relentless urban expansion programme, using the perspectives of property rights and entitlements. It presents case studies of two villages in Xi'an to illustrate how farmers' entitlement sets and vulnerability to poverty have changed as a result of changes in land rights.

This study empirically examines the connections between urban form and travel demand at the aggregate level using traffic analysis zone data from Taipei, Taiwan, for the year 2000. Nine latent variables and 26 observed variables were analysed using structural equation modelling. By clarifying the direct and indirect effects, the empirical evidence indicates that density is positively related to trip generation and negatively associated with private mode split; mixed land use reduces trip generation and indirectly increases private mode split and a pedestrian-friendly built environment significantly reduces private mode split. Empirical evidence indicates that land use density, diversity and design affect travel demand in urban areas both directly and indirectly.

This paper analyses the performance of provincial Spanish wages during the period 1985—2003. Using both traditional and recent analytical approaches, related to spatial econometrics, non-parametric and semi-parametric techniques, the paper reveals that a process of wage convergence has taken place. However, this does not preclude that mobility within the provincial wage distribution is small. The paper also shows that the degree of provincial wage flexibility is very low, which is in accordance with the institutional framework of wage formation in Spain.