Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Economic geography is fundamentally concerned with describing spatial variation in the economic landscape and explaining the processes through which this geography takes form. Firms are the primary units through which these processes operate. I reinterpret portfolio theory to provide a novel way of explaining and modeling the spatial implications of control structures and organizational decisions within and between firms. In this paper, I argue that each activity of the firm is like an asset with an expected rate of return and a level of risk. Firms implement spatial strategies to manage risk that trade profits for reductions in risk. These strategies encourage geographic switching and perpetuate regional disequilibria in production technology and employment. Risk management and the structure of control in a production chain explain the geographic distribution of economic activity better than do transaction costs, flexible specialization, or agglomeration economies.

By referring to language-pragmatic versions of action theory, I attempt in this paper to introduce a perspective which overcomes a series of modernistic legacies of earlier action theories in human geography. Such a development allows a nonessentialist stance while preserving the conceptual richness and consistency of action theory. The concept of speech acts will be interpreted as a blueprint for the analysis of interactions in general—not only human communications but also those involving nonhuman entities and physical conditions—and is a perspective that is particularly attractive for human geography. However, one of the consequences is that the notion of space and its role for the identity of the discipline need to be reconsidered.

Against the backdrop of a perceived ‘crisis’ within the field of Anglo-American regional science, in this paper we offer a brief overview of the early engagement of regional science with the regional concept, while placing its theoretical formulations within the wider sociohistorical context of the Cold War period and the rise of positivist social science. With regard to the development of regional science as a field of enquiry with its own theoretical and empirical postulates, attention focuses on what David Harvey has referred to as a “utopianism of spatial form”, defined by the idea that spatial constructs can serve to control social processes in positive ways, thus using space to evade historical change. In building bridges from the Isardian promise of the past of regional science to its multiple futures, we suggest that the field today may break out of its current ‘isolated state’ by entering into creative dialogue with the metaphors animating three research streams: (1) an ‘analytical turn’ in Marxist economic geography; (2) a Marshallian ‘New Regionalism’; and (3) a ‘cultural turn’ perceived to be occurring within the field of radical political economy. Each stream, addressed here as a successive and broader departure from the more orthodox “utopianism of spatial form” in spatial and regional science, is briefly surveyed in turn. Drawing on the metaphor of borders and border-lands, we conclude by arguing that rather than view each research strand as an ‘improvement’ on its predecessor they should be viewed as the grounds for a potentially rich cross-fertilization between spatial science and various fields of nonorthodox economics.

This study focuses on the population changes in the countryside and in urban centres within the municipalities of Sweden outside the metropolitan areas, between 1990 and 1997. Overall, the countryside showed a higher population increase than the municipality centres. Smaller population centres suffered a population decline. The increase in population in the countryside was strongest in areas surrounding the metropolises and around regional centres. Statistical analysis showed that population change outside population centres mainly varies with the average income, labour-market access, and taxation values or housing costs in the municipalities. This process of change has run directly counter to the policy that was formulated for small municipalities from the end of the 1960s onwards. The growth in rural population was spontaneous for the most part, and more or less in conflict with the plans of the municipalities.

In this paper I address two issues of general relevance to contemporary debates in economic geography: first, the organisational and spatial implications of new information technologies for the economic landscape; and, second, the enduring role of place to digital capitalism. Specifically, I examine the organisational evolution of multichannel retailing in Toronto from a geographical perspective. Bricks-and-mortar retailers are increasingly pursuing a multichannel strategy by operating an Internet-based web store alongside the existing network of physical retail outlets. I therefore evaluate the organisational implications of the adoption of business-to-consumer e-commerce (e-tailing) technology for six Canadian bricks-and-mortar retailers based in Toronto and assess how the associated changes in business structure have been inscribed upon the urban landscape. The argument is developed in three sections. First, I discuss how the formula for competitive advantage in the new (r)etail markets of the developed world has shifted from a pure play to a multichannel organisational paradigm. Second, I provide a background to the development of Canadian e-commerce and an overview of the empirical methodologies employed during the research. Third, the focus of the paper moves ‘behind the web store’ to spatialise the physical places that constitute the fulfilment infrastructure of e-tailing as sequentially linked stages in Internet commodity chains. I evaluate the impact of the Internet commodity chain upon the geographical organisation of each retailer, and, in particular, consider whether the unique logistical requirements of e-tailing have stimulated spatial processes of disintermediation and reintermediation. It is argued that, when read through the lens of Toronto, e-tailing has incurred limited organisational disruption and is characterised by a distinctive geography of integration between online and offline retailing services within the urban space of the city. I conclude the paper by contextualising the findings within themes for conceptual debate in economic geography.

Remote sensing technology has great potential for acquisition of detailed and accurate land-use information for management and planning of urban regions. However, the determination of land-use data with high geometric and thematic accuracy is generally limited by the availability of adequate remote sensing data, in terms of spatial and temporal resolution, and digital image analysis techniques. This study introduces a methodology using information on image spatial form—landscape metrics—to describe urban land-use structures and land-cover changes that result from urban growth. The analysis is based on spatial analysis of land-cover structures mapped from digitally classified aerial photographs of the urban region Santa Barbara, CA. Landscape metrics were calculated for segmented areas of homogeneous urban land use to allow a further characterization of the land use of these areas. The results show a useful separation and characterization of three urban land-use types: commercial development, high-density residential, and low-density residential. Several important structural land-cover features were identified for this study. These were: the dominant general land cover (built up or vegetation), the housing density, the mean structure and plot size, and the spatial aggregation of built-up areas. For two test areas in the Santa Barbara region, changes (urban growth) in the urban spatial land-use structure can be described and quantified with landscape metrics. In order to discriminate more accurately between the three land-cover types of interest, the landscape metrics were further refined into what are termed ‘landscape metric signatures’ for the land-use categories. The analysis shows the importance of the spatial measurements as second-order image information that can contribute to more detailed mapping of urban areas and towards a more accurate characterization of spatial urban growth pattern.

This paper uses a continuing dispute over the management of Białowieża Forest, Poland to raise concerns over the power of representation and myth to sideline minority interests or to prioritise one social perspective over another. It is felt that this inquiry is particularly relevant in the context of European unification. It poses the question: to what extent does state power adequately protect its people against the specious but powerfully presented claims of local actors (in this case biological scientists) who employ potent representational practices and Internet networking to pressurise the state in an attempt to impair inclusive democratic processes?

The literature on the association between residential context and travel concentrates on distance traveled and modal choice, as these variables are the most important from an environmental perspective. Travel time has received less attention—an unfortunate oversight in our view, as people's travel decisions are determined by time rather than by distance. By using data from the 1998 Netherlands National Travel Survey, we have considered travel time associated with trip purpose and transport mode, and have shown that sociodemographic factors and residential context influence daily travel time. Gender, number of workers in the household, age, and education all have a significant impact on travel time. The effects of car ownership and household income are only indirect, operating through mode choice and activity participation. Travel time for car drivers tends to rise with the degree of urbanisation of the residential environment. Further, in the polycentric metropolitan region of the Randstad, travel times by car are greater than in the monocentric regions of the country. It is also shown that in the Netherlands cycling and walking are still important travel modes, especially for shopping purposes. These results may be attributed to the long history of urbanisation and to planning policy in the Netherlands.