Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

The author examines the development of the notion of the field experiment in High Arctic environmental sciences during the period 1958–70. After a discussion of the philosophy and sociology of experiment, the author considers a set of field practices conducted under the auspices of the Canadian Government's Polar Continental Shelf Project. Drawing on archival and oral historical research, he argues that field scientists had to deal with a number of logistical, corporeal, and epistemic difficulties in the High Arctic. It is demonstrated that these obstacles hindered attempts to develop a scientific literature based upon experimental practices during fieldwork. In doing so, the author attempts to set new agendas for historical geographers of science around the analysis of the geographical sciences, whilst also contributing to discussions about the epistemic status of variegated field practices.

The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extrascientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’.

In this paper I examine the rise of corporate finance boutiques in London's financial district from the early 2000s onwards. These small firms, typically employing no more than 25 people, specialise in a single corporate finance client sector (such as telecommunications or the media). It is argued that the growth of these boutiques is best understood with reference to the changing circumstances faced by London's established investment banks. Boutiques grew both in number and in size whilst well-known investment banking brands suffered significant decreases in profit margins, and redundancies were made across the financial services sector more widely. Two related theoretical perspectives are deployed to understand the growth of corporate finance boutiques in London within a ‘relational marketplace’. First, the concept of a marketplace is developed by spatialising recent work in new economic sociology on markets. Second, a relational perspective is used to conceptualise the coconstitutive networks that exist between corporate finance boutiques and investment banks within this marketplace.

In this paper we analyse how young East Germans come to be differentially placed in global network space through their socioeconomically and culturally specific engagements with globalised mediascapes and ethnoscapes. We call for greater awareness of the power differentials which shape globalisation, and draw on the theoretical work of Pierre Bourdieu to show how unequal access to social and cultural capital influences and is reflected in the ‘glocal’ connections through which young people develop and perform their identities. Further, we seek to understand how these differential engagements impact on young people's future trajectories through the development of different competencies. We contend that, precisely how young people are positioned in networks of global–local connectivity matters profoundly, both for the performance of their present identities, and for their future life chances.

We discuss how global production networks interact with local institutions to shape the ways in which economic development occurs within a region; the region concerned being the Suzhou municipality in China. We argue that the development of Suzhou's information-technology industry has largely resulted from (1) the transformation of global production networks in the 1990s, in which Taiwanese firms played an important role; (2) the local states' active role in transforming local institutions to fit the needs of foreign firms; and (3) Taiwanese investors' engagement in mediating and transplanting related institutions into the locality to meet the demand of global logistics for speed and flexibility. All these have resulted in Suzhou municipality's rapid growth in the information-technology industry and its embeddedness in the fusion of the global and local contexts. However, we will also demonstrate that the power asymmetry of global players and local states in this area has resulted in the creation of industrial clusters that are institutionally embedded but technologically delinked from the localities.

The offshore outsourcing of software-production services to places outside of the established networks in well-developed core economies is a dynamic and topical aspect of contemporary reorganizations in the software-development industries. Software production and related information technology services are outsourced to firms offshore or, more specifically, to places where labor skills appropriate to these industries are available at lower costs. Notable offshore destinations include: India, Russia, Ireland, Israel, Romania, and Ukraine, among several others. The offshore outsourcing of software production involves complex introductions, reorganizations, and compositions of production chains and management structures in the continuing negotiation of how relations and work processes will be governed across spaces. The author documents the roles of certification—ISO 9000 and CMM—as new governmental forms that shape understandings, perceptions, and strategies for becoming recognized within the offshore. Drawing on field research with over twenty firms in St Petersburg, Russia, the author proposes that certification is an emergent form of governance that embodies specific processes of globalization.

In this paper I aim to develop a relational geographical interpretation of energy poverty in the postsocialist states of Eastern and Central Europe, through a field-based study of inadequately heated homes in the Macedonian cities of Skopje and Štip. According to the reviewed evidence, domestic energy deprivation simultaneously shapes, and is shaped by, the institutional relationships between policy actors at different levels of governance, and the day-to-day interactions between vulnerable households and the built environment. It is contingent on three sets of processes: the socioeconomic implications of energy reforms in postsocialism, the inadequate energy efficiency of the homes of energy-poor households, and the mismatch between housing needs and heating systems at the household level. As a result of such interdependencies, households may become ‘imprisoned’ in particular types of sociospatial arrangements that contribute to the emergence of poverty.

This paper analyzes the relationship between state-oriented and neoliberal approaches to environmental regulation by examining simultaneous efforts to protect the endangered Steller sea lion and to privatize the fishery for Alaska pollock. Because these policies were designed and implemented at the same time and for the same industry, this case offers a unique opportunity to explore in detail not transitions from one type of policy regime to another but, rather, how these different policy regimes articulate. Rather than focusing on reregulation which occurs when neoliberal restructuring shifts away from traditional regulation while simultaneously developing new, market-oriented forms of regulation, this paper focuses on a different kind of reregulation which occurs when state-oriented and market-oriented approaches must coexist. Analysis of how regulators themselves write about the conjunction of these policies reveals that the two forms of regulation can be complementary. To the extent that neoliberal restructuring has environmental benefits, these are mediated through traditional environmental protections, and although restructuring is presented as a means of mitigating the negative economic effects of state-oriented regulation, these effects are quite consistent with the goals of restructuring. Further, this analysis also reveals the power of neoliberal discourse. Despite their own statements about the complex articulation of the policies, regulators attribute benefits to privatization and problems to state-oriented regulation. This case highlights the inability of neoliberalism to subsume its outsides—alternatives are already existing—but also highlights that these outsides can themselves come to support what they seem to oppose.

Although the outdoor environment provides older people with various opportunities to enhance their quality of life (QOL), few studies have investigated the extent to which this environment is influential in practice. In order to enable empirical research on this topic, in this paper we propose and examine the concept of environmental support. On the basis of a review of recent literature in gerontology, public health, environmental psychology, landscape architecture, and urban design, we argue that the supportiveness of neighbourhood environments that make outdoor activity (eg, walking) easy and enjoyable is conducive to a better QOL for older people. We introduce three ways of conceptualising environmental support focusing on the following: personally meaningful outdoor activities, environmental attributes found relevant to people's activities, and unmet needs for daily activities. Several conceptual frameworks that incorporate environmental support, QOL and other potentially salient constructs are also presented. We suggest possible future research directions employing this concept.

The public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) research agenda has explored the issue of equitable access and use of geographic information systems (GIS) and spatial data among traditionally marginalized citizens, in order to facilitate effective citizen participation in inner-city revitalization activities. However, prior research indicates that PPGIS is a complex process, with uneven outcomes. The author contends that such unevenness can be explained by use of a new theoretical framework drawn from the literature of politics of scale and networks. The author contends that the PPGIS process occurs in ‘spaces of dependence’, containing localized social relations and place-specific conditions. The politics of securing this space leads to the creation of ‘spaces of engagement’ at multiple scales. Within these spaces, networks of association evolve to connect multiple actors from public and private sectors with community organizations. Such networks can contain structural inequities, hierarchical dominance, and fluctuating resources. But these networks also transcend political boundaries and are dynamic and flexible, enabling individuals to manipulate and modify them. In trying to control the revitalization agendas and the material resources required, the actors and community organizations construct politics of scale. For some community organizations, such scalar politics and creative alliances with critical actors allow them to navigate territorially scaled networks of power skillfully in order to gain an effective voice in decisionmaking activities. But other community organizations lag behind, and are not able to form relationships in order to secure their urban space. By the use of new empirical data, coupled with a new theoretical framework, the author aims to contribute both to greater theorization and to better understanding of the uneven and contradictory nature of PPGIS processes.

The authors examine factors that influence the propensity of a firm to take up external business support across four large English towns, using random effects nominal probit regression analysis to capture sector heterogeneity. The results suggest a strong positive association between the orientation of the firm towards growth and its propensity to use external business advice. ‘Push’ factors, including the existence of recruitment difficulties, are identified as key triggers to use business advice. These results provide valuable guidance to public policy organisations concerned with business development and competitiveness, and suggest a number of avenues for future research.

For urban transportation planners these are challenging times. Mounting practical concerns are mirrored by more fundamental critiques. The latter comes together in the observation that conventional approaches do not adequately account for the irreducible uncertainty of future developments. The author's central aim is to explore whether and how an evolutionary approach can help overcome this limit. Two core hypotheses are formulated. The first is that the urban transportation system behaves in an evolutionary fashion. The second hypothesis is that, because of this, urban transportation planning needs to focus on enhancing the resilience and adaptability of the system. Changes in transport and land-use development patterns and policies, and in the broader context of the postwar period in the Amsterdam region, are analysed in order to illustrate the two core hypotheses. More general implications are also drawn.

Structural decomposition analysis, which is usually used within an input-output framework, allows changes in economic variables to be broken down into their determinants. Structural decomposition techniques can also be applied in social accounting matrix (SAM) models, which provide a complete representation of circular flow by adding factor-income generation and household-income distribution to the intersectorial transactions. The author uses structural decomposition analysis to reveal the factors that contribute to the changes in SAM multipliers over time. In particular, she analyses how modifying the patterns of intermediate demand, private consumption, and factor-income distribution modifies the income-generation process. Two SAMs are used, one for 1990 and one for 1994, in an empirical application for the Catalan economy. The results show that the regional multipliers in 1994 were smaller than in 1990, mainly because of a reduction in the structural coefficients of the model.