Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Markets are mechanisms for distributing goods and services according to people's ability to pay. They are also investment vehicles which can be used to secure financial gains as economies expand. Housing markets embrace both these features, and are popular in Britain as a way of maximising residential choice at the same time as protecting and enhancing personal wealth. All markets create winners and losers, but no systematic social differences in either risks or gains are expected. However, this paper shows that, as home ownership has become the British housing norm, people experiencing ill-health are one social group who can struggle to reap its benefits, either as a consumption good or as a financial asset. The way housing markets (currently) work may therefore tend to reinforce the health divide, though this is neither a necessary nor inevitable state of affairs.

Speculative housebuilding in the United Kingdom faces an ever tighter regulatory environment owing to the increasing impact of the sustainable development agenda. For example, 60% of all new homes in England are now expected to be constructed on previously developed land or provided through the conversion of existing buildings. As speculative housebuilders are responsible for about 80% of all new dwellings built in the United Kingdom, the achievement of this important government target is critically dependent on the ability and willingness of the private sector to respond to public policy. By exploring the main components of the residential development process, the author investigates how far speculative housebuilding will need to change to ensure the successful implementation of the government's brownfield housing target. He suggests that those speculative housebuilders that are enthusiastically building up core competencies in brownfield housing are likely to emerge as the market leaders of the future whereas those companies that continue to rely on past practices and technologies will face an uncertain future as greenfield development opportunities begin to reduce.

In this paper we explore the relationship between knowledge, trust, and space in the production and consumption of retail financial services as part of a wider enquiry into processes of financial exclusion. We argue that the relationship between knowledge and trust helps to explain the evolution of financial services and the production over time of distinctive ecologies of financial service production and use. We discuss the changing scales of financial knowledge and trust in relation to the evolution of the UK financial services industry. We identify two idealised ecologies and networks of retail financial services. The middle-class suburb represents an ecology and network of privilege within the contemporary retail financial services market. It displays relatively high levels of aggregate knowledge about the financial system and constitutes an important part of the retail financial services network, with strong and frequent connections to the financial services industry as a whole. Poor inner-city areas and peripheral local authority housing estates, meanwhile, have very different financial ecologies. Areas of relative deprivation and poverty, they constitute ‘relic’ financial ecologies that have been bypassed and mostly ignored by the mainstream financial services industry. They are colonised by a distinctive set of financial institutions that include firms that operate door-to-door. We look at the formation and evolution of these ecologies over time and discuss the potential of enriching the ecology of the poor inner-city and peripheral local authority housing estate through public policy.

Since the late 1970s retail parks have developed in the United Kingdom to become a substantial element of the process of retail decentralisation. From an early focus on ‘bulky-goods' retailing, they have grown and evolved into a variety of unplanned and planned forms, the largest of which can be characterised as ‘hybrid regional centres’. The more recent addition of typical ‘high-street’ retailers to their functions has earned the epithet ‘fashion parks’. Intermittent concern has been expressed at the likely negative effects that these phenomena are having on the traditional system of city, town, and district shopping centres in British cities. In these circumstances it is surprising that little of the recent retail impact research has focused on the larger retail parks. Partially to redress this deficiency, the authors investigate the impact of a large unplanned retail park on the retail system of the Greater Swansea area. The evidence suggests that the greatest impact continues to be focused on the middle-order district and local town centres. The relationship is now ‘strongly competitive’ rather than ‘benignly complementary’. At the same time, the growth in scale and functional diversity of the retail park suggests a strong ‘competitive erosion’ of the status of the city centre. Thus, local authorities concerned for the future of their city, town, and district shopping centres should view processes operating within the shopping centre development industry in association with the location and marketing strategies of the principal ‘high-street’ multiple retailers with considerable caution.

The author examines the growth of multiple retailing during the ‘golden age’ in Britain. The growth of real turnover is used as the dependent variable in a quantitative analysis of the growth in large-scale multiple retailing from 1976 until 1994. The author examines for the first time the determinants of this growth against a variety of supply and demand variables. It is found that the importance given to capital investment in previous studies of the golden age is not justified by the data.

In this paper we examine the ways that traditional definitions of masculinity are challenged within the domestic space of the volunteer firehouse. Our aim is to blur the dichotomies of public–private, masculine–feminine, heroic–weak, and moral–immoral. By examining practices associated with being a volunteer firefighter we present deeper and expanded notions of what it means to be a man in this context. Volunteer firefighters create a private space within the firehouse that offers escape from the public demands of masculinity. It is within this space that they can receive and give comfort and experience bonding, friendship, and a deep sense of belonging by embracing emotions normally off limits to men, including self-disclosure, familiarity, and affection. Although acknowledging the masculine hegemony that constructs men's involvement in firefighting and the firehouse, we also highlight the emotional work done by men as they engage in their public and private firefighting roles.

Tudor Hart's 1971 study, based in Wales, was the first to hypothesise the existence of an inverse relationship which often prevails between those communities with the most pressing health needs and the lack or poor quality of health services provided locally. Over the last thirty years there have been many demonstrations of the validity of Hart's ‘inverse care law’ in relation to the provision of, and access to, particular services in the primary and secondary health care sectors. In this paper we provide a direct test of the relationship between an aggregate measure of quality of general practitioner (GP) services and a measure of health need of local populations. We examine the variation in quality of GP services, derived from eligibility for sustained quality payments, over the 131 practices of the former Bro Taf Health Authority in South Wales. Using logit regression analysis we have explored the extent to which the local deprivation of practice populations and the size of practice account for the variation in the quality of provision within the authority. The analysis supports the conclusion that the ‘inverse care law’ is a strong feature of provision. Both the eligibility of GP practices for quality payments and the availability of training practices are significantly higher in the least deprived wards than those in the most deprived ones.

This paper deals with the use of gravity models to examine journeys to work. The purpose of the paper is to study very simple examples demonstrating that gravity models may be subject to serious misspecification in aggregate systems. As an outcome of the theoretical analysis, the paper has several implications to empirical work. It suggests a variety of modifications, experiments, and testing regimes that can be carried out to examine the performance of gravity models for journeys to work.

We investigate the impact of local and foreign forms of knowledge spillover on productivity growth inequalities in Spanish regions. In each sector and region such inequalities will depend on the innovative capacity of the region and on local spillovers emanating from proximity to innovation producers and from the composition of economic activity in the region. Foreign spillovers will be mainly from trade with other regions or countries. Panel estimation results indicate that local sector human capital and specialisation patterns, public-R&D efforts—both local and from other regions—and international technological imports reduce these growth differentials. The regional level of development and sector technological characteristics will qualify these results.