Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

In this paper I consider Zelizer's theory of money in a market setting. Do people create and use market money to express social values? Local currencies, which circulate in competition with national currencies in local economies around the world, provide the case studies. I survey the research literature on local currencies and find important limits on Zelizer's theory for market money. While people create and use local currencies for both economic and noneconomic reasons, most people stop using them when economic benefits are not realized. Sustained use of local currencies is uncommon. The few successes are limited in scope, and such successes cannot simply be credited to commitment based on social values. I briefly discuss policy implications of this finding for community currency as a development alternative.

In this paper I explore some of the ways in which people with visual impairments see landscape and participate in visual cultures of landscape apprehension. I draw on ethnographic and interview material, developed while acting as a sighted guide for specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups who visit the landscapes of the Lake District and Peak District in Britain. Through this research material I show how landscape is likely to become present for people with blindness or visual impairment through both their individual capacities for sight and a complex mix of discursive, material, social, and historical relations. Specifically, I argue that there is an intercorporeal, collective dimension to this emergence of landscape and this intercorporeality is evident at both a perceptual and a discursive level. I suggest that future research needs to attend further to how landscape emerges and becomes present through intercorporeal processes.

I posit that a comprehensive picture of transport-related social exclusion can be drawn only by a simultaneous examination of place-based, people-based, and infrastructure and system-based exclusionary mechanisms. The overlap of these three factors has been examined here through the case study of non-Western immigrant women in Norway. It is known that immobility serves the aim of segregating roles and household responsibilities in different sociocultural domains. But what happens when these roles are operated in a society with a varying outlook? For example, how are the immigrant women of non-Western cultures dealing with constrained mobility in a modern society like Norway? Is it leading to their social exclusion? Following a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, this paper furthers the discussion on constrained mobility as a constitutive factor of social exclusion.

Residents of dense, mixed-use, transit-accessible neighborhoods use autos less. Recent studies have suggested that this relationship is partly because transit-preferring and walk-preferring households seek and find such neighborhoods. If this is so, and if the number of such households is small, policies to alter the built environment may not influence auto use very much. I argue that many of these studies are inconclusive on methodological grounds, and that more research is needed. A purpose-designed survey of households in two urban regions in California is investigated, with the aid of a new methodological approach. I find that most surveyed households explicitly consider travel access of some kind when choosing a neighborhood, but that this process of residential self-selection does not bias estimates of the effects of the built environment very much. To the extent that it does exert an influence, the bias results both in underestimates and overestimates of the effects of the built environment, contrary to previous research. The analysis not only implies a need for deregulatory approaches to land-use and transportation planning, but also suggests that there may be value in market interventions such as subsidies and new prescriptive regulations.

Chinese cities are undergoing massive transformation. One after another, inner-city neighbourhoods of pre-1949 origin and work-unit compounds built in the socialist period are being torn apart, giving way to glossy office towers and luxurious condominiums. Millions of people have been uprooted and forced to be relocated. Mass media and research based on case studies generally convey a message of widespread grievance among the displaced residents. Based on a survey of 1200 households conducted in Shanghai in 2006, the present study provides a systematic account of the profiles of the displaced residents, juxtaposed against other resident groups of the city. The major conclusion is that, irrespective of all the criticisms concerning unregulated demolitions and forced evictions, the housing conditions of displaced residents are somewhat better than those of other Shanghai residents, both objectively and in terms of subjective evaluations.

I examine the relationship between student mobility associated with open enrolment and student sorting in public schools in Los Angeles County and find that open enrolment provides Latino students who attend outside their neighbourhoods access to higher quality, more integrated, schools than those who remain enroled in their neighbourhood schools. However, attendance at majority-white schools continues to be highly segregated. Therefore, while open enrolment may provide some minority students with the opportunity to avoid attending a majority-minority school, it does not undo the mechanisms through which white students remain socially and spatially segregated from their minority counterparts. The lack of meaningful interracial and cross-cultural exchange during the school-age years is a worrying trend that could lead to increased polarization and social exclusion in Los Angeles and other multiethnic cities and communities.

This paper investigates the relationship between devolution and regional disparities by looking at the case of Italy. By integrating the relevant quantitative and qualitative evidence, it attempts to answer two questions. Did the devolutionary process exert a positive influence on regional convergence in Italy? And, if so, why have its beneficial economic effects been concentrated in the Mezzogiorno? A clear historical link between the upsurge of devolution and the reduction of spatial inequalities is identified. However, this relationship plays out in a rather indirect way, and is strongly influenced by a series of exogenous factors which are thoroughly analysed.

This paper examines the global trend of total factor productivity, efficiency, and technological change in the European Union regions over the period 1986–2004, using the Malmquist index computed by data envelopment analysis. The results reveal the important role played by technical efficiency in explaining total factor productivity growth in the European Union. For this reason, in a second stage, we investigate existing regional disparities in efficiency levels across the European regions, using a nonparametric methodology that allows us to study the dynamics of the entire cross-sectional distribution. Estimates show the presence of a process of convergence in efficiency levels over the sample period, despite a relatively low degree of intradistribution mobility. In order to complete these results, factors such as the geographical location of the various regions, country-specific characteristics, or the sectoral composition of economic activity were examined for their role in explaining the observed disparities.

In a recent paper in this journal it was suggested that the conventional knowledge practices of disciplines are the fundamental obstacle to mutual understanding between academic experts. Such a position, we argue, underplays the institutional relationships that recreate expert and disciplinary divides. To demonstrate our case we discuss how in the UK the evolving relationship between the government and research councils has crucially altered the context for efforts to stimulate interdisciplinary research. Our analysis highlights the scope for changes in institutional structures and practices that would facilitate broader and more encompassing research into complex sustainability problems.

Procedures for the ex ante assessment of public policies are currently in vogue across the OECD. Their design is typically informed by a rational-instrumental model of problem solving, which assumes that knowledge is collected, evaluated, and then translated straightforwardly into ‘better policies’. But this model has been little affected by more than three decades of academic research which has demonstrated that the reality of everyday policy making is far messier. In this paper we analyse whether the uptake of ex ante assessment of policies is nonetheless capable of creating opportunities for policy deliberation and learning informed by new assessment knowledge. Drawing on an analysis of policy assessment procedures in three countries and the European Union, we find that there are several ways in which assessment knowledge is used in the policy process. Moreover, we argue that policy learning occurs despite, rather than because of, the instrumental design of new assessment procedures, which tends to act as a barrier to open deliberation and knowledge utilisation.

Coordinated (or ‘joined-up’) approaches to policy making are said to be an immensely important ingredient in the effective governance of sustainable development. There are, however, few detailed empirical studies of how well different policy coordination instruments perform in relation to this task. This paper identifies the United Kingdom as a critical test of how to achieve better policy coordination because it has been regularly identified as an exemplar of best practice in international benchmarking exercises. Specifically, it examines the integration of the environment into mainstream policy making through the application of policy appraisal in the strategically important areas of energy, defence, and public spending. Overall, it finds that the UK's much vaunted approach to coordinating the governance of sustainable development has struggled to tame the forces of departmentalism. While deploying carefully packaged combinations of coordinating instruments may address some causes of non-joined-up behaviour, perfectly coherent policy making is always likely to remain tantalisingly out of reach.

The aim of this paper is to explore the role of regional innovation systems and clusters in the economic recovery of old industrial regions. We draw a distinction between three types of cluster-based renewal: an innovation-oriented adjustment of mature clusters (incremental change); the emergence of new agglomerations in established industries (diversification); and the rise of knowledge-intensive and high-technology activities (radical change). In the empirical part of the paper we compare cluster-based recovery processes in the regions of Styria and the Saarland. It is shown that Styria rebuilt its regional innovation system more successfully, enabling the innovation-oriented adjustment of a mature cluster, the rise of a new cluster in an established industry, and the emergence of knowledge-intensive activities. In the Saarland, in contrast, the regional innovation system has been more specialised, which has resulted in weak performance with respect to incremental change and diversification and high performance regarding radical change.

Cooperation within urban restructuring processes is now a normal course of events in Western countries. Local government works together with other parties to reach the set goals of urban restructuring in targeted urban areas. Partnerships are formed and forces joined. Most parties involved consider cooperation in urban restructuring necessary; it is not, however, an easy process. Theoretical ideas and ideals about policy networks and governance are difficult to put into practice. We critically evaluate cooperation in the urban restructuring process in the city of Breda, the Netherlands. The findings indicate that the ideals of network theory are still far removed from practice, owing to role conflicts between neoliberal ‘new’ managerialism and interorganizational networking on the one hand and role conflicts between and within the hybrid organizations of the privatized housing associations on the other.

Simulation models are increasingly used in applied research to create synthetic micro-populations and predict possible individual-level outcomes of policy intervention. Previous research highlights the relevance of simulation techniques in estimating the potential outcomes of changes in areas such as taxation and child benefit policy, crime, education, or health inequalities. To date, however, there is very little published research on the creation, calibration, and testing of such micro-populations and models, and little on the issue of how well synthetic data can fit locally as opposed to globally in such models. This paper discusses the process of improving the process of synthetic micropopulation generation with the aim of improving and extending existing spatial microsimulation models. Experiments using different variable configurations to constrain the models are undertaken with the emphasis on producing a suite of models to match the different sociodemographic conditions found within a typical city. The results show that creating processes to generate area-specific synthetic populations, which reflect the diverse populations within the study area, provides more accurate population estimates for future policy work than the traditional global model configurations.