Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The concept of urban deprivation has emerged as an important theme in urban geography and urban studies. In light of the significant problems and issues affecting cities in North America and Europe there is a growing need for researchers to acquire a better understanding of the process of urban social change. In this paper the author proposes a model of urban deprivation change and applies it with the use of census indicators to East Montréal, a section of the central city, and the Montréal Urban Community. The changing spatial structure and nature of urban deprivation is examined at the neighbourhood level in this study area over the period 1986 – 96. The author finds that urban deprivation is largely an economic problem, with declining conditions apparent throughout a large part of Montréal's central city and in several inner-suburban municipalities. The model, selection of indicators, and statistical techniques presented in this paper can be used as a guide for further research into urban deprivation change in other urban centres.

Global migration is transforming not just urban populations, but the nature and economic roles of ethnic banks—that is, banking institutions owned and operated by minorities. Academic research on ethnic banks has until now focused on the circumstances of African-American-owned banks. This paper explores the rise of a new set of ethnic banks—the Chinese American banks of Los Angeles County. These older and newer ethnic banking communities occupy very different roles in the banking market. African-American-owned banks arose largely because mainstream banks' inadequate services in minority communities left unoccupied market ‘niches’. Despite similar origins, the newer generation of Chinese American banks, by contrast, has prospered for two additional reasons. The first is economic globalization. These ethnobanks' resources have grown tremendously both because of migration and cross-border money flows, and also because they have maintained networks extending across national borders. The second is these banks' ability to tap into their communities' extensive social capital—that is, the networks of information, norms, and disciplinary mechanisms that crisscross the Chinese American community. This social capital permits ethnobanks to mobilize resources and direct development in a way that nonethnic banks cannot imitate. We conclude by considering whether the Chinese ethnobanks are a transient phenomenon, and whether other minority banks can adopt their model.

This paper reviews the automated zone-design procedures adopted for the creation of 2001 Census output geography in the United Kingdom. A microsimulation approach is used for the creation of household records to populate actual postcode and enumeration district boundaries, and a series of output area design scenarios are applied to these data, allowing the effects of the new design constraints to be evaluated. The authors identify the advantages of using an intra-area correlation measure for the maximization of social homogeneity within output areas, and explore the differences between the 1991 and 2001 approaches to output geography.

A five-state origin and destination competing risk labour-market model is formulated and applied to some individual-level labour-market data obtained from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS). The BHPS used a multistage stratified clustered sample design for selecting households and individuals. The primary sampling unit was the postcode sector. 250 out of a population of 8951 postcode sectors were selected. A test for the informative nature of the primary sampling units for labour-market behaviour is developed and applied to the BHPS labour-market data. The results suggest that the sample design is not completely ignorable for male and female labour-market behaviour.

This paper reports the results of a survey of business attitudes to current transport problems and their likely responses to the introduction of road user charging (RUC) and workplace parking levies (WPLs). A sample of 152 responses from private sector businesses in three UK historic cities is analysed. Businesses perceive traffic congestion and inadequate public transport provision as key problems. Businesses typically expect the introduction of RUC and WPLs to lead to some non-economic benefits to the city but negative impacts on the urban economy and their own business performance. It is also found that there is a significant threat of businesses relocating away from the urban economy as a response to traffic demand management policies.

It is well appreciated that demographic trends threaten the integrity of continental European systems of social security. For France these trends imply a long-term financial crisis as well as a crisis of confidence in national economic and social institutions. The payment of social security entitlements is a recurrent and largely unresolved political issue; proposals for comprehensive reform are heavily contested, involving political interests willing to go to the streets. At the same time, governments' incremental changes in benefit formula and accounting have discounted the expected value of future retirement benefits. In this paper, I begin by sketching the logic of pay-as-you-go social security, identifying the basic economic principles and social institutions that sustain such systems. One goal of the paper is to articulate the economic and philosophical roots of social solidarity and the importance of the state as the custodian of the social contract between generations. In doing so, I sketch out the French ideal: a coherent social security system based upon self-reinforcing mutual obligations and institutions. A second goal of the paper is to show how and why the French social security system became unsustainable. Demographic trends have been exacerbated by the use of the retirement system as a form of labour-market compensation policy, thereby undercutting both its financial and its political legitimacy. The third goal of the paper is to indicate how and why global financial markets may play a significant role in resolving the crisis of social security. Basically, I dispute the argument that national systems of social security will persist into the future; internal inconsistencies and the possible defection of those not served by such institutions combined with external opportunities may overturn the past. By making this argument, I do not mean to suggest that the Anglo-American model is necessarily superior to social security systems based on social solidarity. Rather, my point is entirely argumentative: solemn incantations that defend the past, whatever their best intentions, may simply reinforce the nature and significance of the pending crisis.

The disposal of household waste has become a major problem for all industrialised countries. Public policy has focused on changing household attitudes by information campaigns. However, the link between environmental attitudes and actions is a very complex one. The authors develop a conceptual framework with three predictors: environmental values, situational variables, and psychological variables. This framework can be used to formulate both questionnaire design and data analysis. The paper demonstrates its utility with a report on recent research that has used the framework to provide important new findings about different attitudes and actions to waste minimisation, waste reuse, and waste recycling. These findings have clear implications for public policy as well as lending considerable empirical support to the original conceptualisation offered by the

Increasingly, geographers are adopting so-called ‘new institutional’ approaches in order to examine scalar processes of socioeconomic and political restructuring. The authors build on this development by showing how a new institutional analysis of policy implementation transcending different politico-geographic scales might be undertaken. Using contemporary public policy theories, they show how new institutional analyses can be fine-tuned to identify common scalar themes for detailed examination at local through to supranational scales. Drawing on a case study of agri-environmental policy implementation in central Spain between 1992 and 1998, the authors use this nuanced new institutional approach to elucidate the flows of knowledge, territorial representation, and power between multiscalar policy elites. They demonstrate how the interplay between the political strategies of these scalar elites, and the presence of ‘historically sedimented’ institutional forms in the central Spanish region of Castilla la Mancha, have shaped local agri-environmental policy outcomes.

Most studies of ethnic segregation in cities use relative measures to create residential area classifications. We argue that absolute measures are better suited to testing theories of spatial separation, and introduce a classification procedure which provides a robust approach to comparative studies, directly linked to the homogeneity – heterogeneity continuum which underpins all studies of segregation. The procedure is illustrated by analyses of the five main ethnic groups in each of the largest cities of Australia, New Zealand, and the USA (Sydney, Auckland, and New York). There are substantial differences among those cities in their ethnic residential patterns, to the extent that these can be clearly established given the other difficulties in cross-national comparative studies (data comparability and the spatial scale of the data units): New York is segmented, Sydney is integrated, and Auckland occupies an intermediate position.