Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Recent processes of European integration have influenced profoundly the fortunes of cities across Western Europe. Although some cities have benefited, others have been impacted adversely. Income inequalities result from economic growth differentials occurring between different cities over time. The theoretical literature differs on whether increased integration promotes or reduces income disparities. The European Union (EU) assumes that rising inequalities will impair EU growth and lead to even greater disparities. Empirical analysis has concentrated on the EU-defined regions because of problems of urban data availability and comparability. Using regional data, I identified that the overall level of inequalities changed little for the metropolitan regions between the early 1980s and the early 1990s. Urban disparities were cyclical—decreasing during strong EU growth and increasing in slower growth years. Factors outside direct local government control, including relative location within Europe, reinforced the traditional strong-core—weak-periphery spatial pattern of development. I argue that additional factors specific to cities, such as limited EU urban policy and funding, contributed to overall higher and more sharply rising inequalities since the late 1980s for cities compared with regions. The positive linear relationship between levels of national income and urban disparities has implications for economic polarization within richer member states and for EU efforts to reduce inequalities by raising the level of development in poorer countries.

This paper provides a description and analysis of the clustering behavior of the commercial Internet content industry in specific geographical locations within the United States. Using a data set of Internet domain name developed in the summer of 1998, I show that three regions—San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles—are the leading centers for Internet content in the United States in terms both of absolute size and of degree of specialization. In order to understand better how the industrial structure of a region impacts the formation of the Internet content business, I provide an analysis of how the commercialization of the Internet has changed from 1993 to 1998 and explore the relationship between existing industrial sectors and the specialization in commercial domain names. Over time there appears to be a stronger connection between Internet content and information-intensive industries than between Internet content and the industries providing the computer and telecommunications technology necessary for the Internet to operate. Although it is not possible to assign a definitive causal explanation to the relationships outlined here, this paper provides a first step in theorizing about the overall commercialization process of the Internet.

In this paper we report on the development of a microsimulation model of daily activity patterns in the context of a regional planning model. One of the aims of the simulation model is to predict traffic flows on a transportation network for various times of the day by using available statistical data sources as input. We first discuss the general conceptual underpinnings of the model, and against a brief discussion of existing activity-based models of transport demand we outline the major differences between these models and the current one. Next, major operational decisions, data input, and model architecture are discussed, followed by an illustration of the model for the Eindhoven region in the Netherlands. We conclude the paper by critically discussing its basic assumptions and identifying avenues of future research.

In this paper we examine the implications of technology uncertainty for production location in a general setting, in which the location and production decisions are determined ex ante and a general specification of technology uncertainty is adopted. In addition, to examine the endpoint optimality issue, we also provide comparative static results which are novel in the literature. Moreover, the exhaustion of information contained in the second-order optimal conditions in deriving the conditions for endpoint optimality differentiates our analysis from previous works.

The interrelationship between state, capital, and space is central both to the debate on globalization and to various interpretations of the changing nature of the Chinese political economy. This study of China's economic performance against the recent Asian financial turmoil suggests that the Chinese central state has played a crucial role in the growth and restructuring of the national economy. The immediate impact of the financial crisis on China has been limited although the long-term effects remain uncertain. China has so far narrowly escaped the crisis primarily because of a state-led capital injection in mid-1998 to stop economic downturn, an austerity program that led the overheated economy to ‘soft-land’ prior to the crisis, and stringent state control of capital flow into and out of the country. Contrary to the ‘end of the nation-state’ claim made by many globalization prophets, the Chinese socialist state has remained an active agent interacting with global market forces. The interplay between the socialist state and transnational capital has been a place-specific phenomenon despite the pervasive assertion of ‘the end of geography’. A dialectical approach is needed for analyzing the triangular nexus of interaction between the central state, local state, and global market forces in China in the current age of volatile globalization.

Developments in the provision and quality of digital data are opening up possibilities for more detailed measures of the form of urban areas. This paper begins with a review of some of the new data sources that are available in the United Kingdom, specifically the Ordnance Survey's ADDRESS-POINT product. The authors go on to develop a fine-scale data model of population densities, and fractal measures of the way in which urban development fills space. The research findings are compared with those of previous research that used less detailed data models.

The relationship between local government officers and elected members is central to the decisionmaking processes associated with planning, as with many other areas of public policymaking. Legal responsibilities and issues of accountability and legitimacy lie at the heart of the relationship between officers and members, with interaction mediated and constituted through ritualised communicative encounters such as committee meetings and associated reports, and less formally through ad hoc contacts. Given the importance of this relationship it is striking that there has been relatively little research into the influences on officers and members within everyday planning practice. In this paper we will explore the extent to which a consideration of the language used in planning practice can inform our understanding of the relationship between planners and politicians. Thinking within the planning field about the role of language as a mechanism for reflecting and constituting power has been dominated by the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michel Foucault. However, despite the increasing attention focused on the importance of language and communication, work within the planning community has tended to concentrate on normative issues of how planning ought to operate in society rather than situating these theories within the ‘real’ world of practice. The objectives behind the case study research evaluated in this paper are therefore twofold. First, to explore the role of language and discourse in reflecting and constituting relations of power in a planning authority on the south coast of England and, second, to explore the value of Foucault's and Habermas's ideas as tools of research in planning. On the basis of this study we conclude that there are some important theoretical and methodological difficulties in connecting the ideas of Habermas and Foucault to the world of everyday planning practice.

A perennial problem of urban industrial growth is spillovers into adjacent governmental jurisdictions. The resulting intergovernmental conflicts provide a window, as a part of urban governance, into conflict management. This paper focuses on such conflicts and the several ways of resolving them that have been attempted in southeastern Korea, centred on the country's major port of Pusan. In one way or another, conflicts with neighbouring Kyungnam Province have been festering since the administrative separation of Pusan as a metropolis, coequal in rank with the province of which it had been the capital. Three approaches of solving the region's problem were tried, all involving the central government in Seoul: aggressive annexations by Pusan of Kyungnam territories; a bland form of nonbinding mediation through an administrative device called ‘association’, and, most recently, a tripartite collaborative form of interregional planning involving Pusan, Kyungnam Province, and the national Ministry of Construction and Transportation. Based on enabling legislation, the collaborative planning approach appears to be working and has been adopted by a number of other conflicted regions in Korea.

The authors contribute to the developing literature on call centres by providing detailed empirical evidence on the spatial unevenness in the distribution of call centre activity. They argue that the driving forces of call centre growth, whether as the rationalisation of back-office functions or as entirely new entities, have been corporate strategy and the pursuit of low-cost competitive advantage. Thus, although technological developments at the heart of call centre operations render them relatively ‘footloose’ in locational terms, the search for specific characteristics makes certain regions (and parts of regions) more attractive than others. By using a sample database of call centres, the authors describe the characteristics of call centres in the United Kingdom in terms of size, sector, and spatial distribution. They then attempt to explain the determinants of call centre location at the county level through a multiple regression analysis. The results indicate that there is a propensity to site call centres close to existing concentrations of allied activity, with preferences for densely populated areas mediated by needs to maintain employee access and avoid staff turnover problems. This has important implications for the spatial division of labour, with call centre growth likely to reinforce existing spatial unevenness in employment in key service activities. The authors conclude by considering the implications of these findings for contemporary urban and regional development, as well as providing a number of suggestions for future research.

In this paper, explicit grain production and demand models were used to analyze changes in national and regional grain production in China over the period 1990–97 and the future grain supply and demand up to the year 2087. A decomposition approach was developed on the basis of the grain production model to estimate the impacts of various input factors on grain production in China. National grain production, demand, and import in the future were modelled. This modelling framework allows projections of the future food situation of China on the basis of various scenarios. The results are fairly transparent and can be traced to the conditions of input factors and the level of consumption.