Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper examines the material intertwinings of fish and water. It discusses how the presence of water and fish is simultaneously material and immaterial and examines how the processes and tensions between narratives of fish and water are caught up and inform human encounters with waterscapes. In particular, the paper does three things: first, it highlights the tensions between the angling literature and the practices and performances of angling. Second, it examines how fish embody the material and imaginative aspects of waterscapes, highlighting how fish are shaped to fit in or adapt to ‘environmental quality’ and human expectations. Third, it examines how water may be thought through as ‘fishy’ as made animate by the creatures that dwell there.

The movements of the oceans, and the liminal margins of sea, land, and fresh water have profound implications for human/nonhuman life. Those movements and margins are rhythmically affected by tides which are thus a key means by which the forceful materiality of water is animated. Where salt water meets land and river mouths, ceaseless, varying, daily, monthly, and seasonal rhythms of sea level rise and fall occur. Complex patterns and rhythms of intertidal areas, currents, mixing of salt and fresh water, erosion, transportation, and deposition, and many impacts on human systems are created. Due to location, orientation, and sea/land topography, coastal areas around the world are subject to microtides, mesotides, or macrotides (4 m and higher). Particularly in the case of the last, the rhythms of the tides extend out into a range of intersecting ecosocial assemblages. This paper discusses tides and their rhythms, sets them in debates about temporality/nature, and introduces the idea of rhythmpattern which is timespace animated. It also considers dissonance and consonance within and between tidal rhythmpatterns and their overwriting by development.

In this paper we approach flooding as a socio–natural–technical assemblage, a phenomenon that comes into being in relation to the spaces that ‘bad water’ occupies. We use the case of the major flood in the city of Hull (UK) in June 2007, and the accounts of those who experienced it, to follow the water of the flood into homes and household spaces. We find that the spatial and temporal occurrence of the flood is not simply known and definable, but is instead emergent in specific local contexts. We show how the assemblage of the flood can be understood at different resolutions, moving from the flood as a city event; to the street-level processes and interventions which shaped how water flowed locally; and into the detail and materiality of the home, its transgression by water, and the process of the home becoming a flooded space. Through the analysis of data from two parallel projects examining the experiences of adults and children after the June 2007 event, we show that the boundaries of the flood remained open and contested, their spatial and temporal definition fuzzy and socially complex. Implications are explored in relation to the processes embroiled in producing flood status and the consequences for the actors involved. Wider conclusions for understanding the experience of disaster are also drawn.

With its rapidly flowing rivers and plentiful summer rainfall, 20th-century Japan has a history of frequent flooding. The effects on its densely populated flood plains have often been devastating. Japan also has one of the world's landscapes most heavily covered in concrete. In recent decades, however, the Japanese state has turned hesitantly to new techniques of releasing of water into the sea buttressed by a concern for ecological well-being. Its ‘nature-oriented’ river landscaping programme is an attempt to find a more sustainable balance between flowing water and the built terrain, allowing water to make space for itself. Our paper sets this programme in its historical context, relating it back to the premodern period and juxtaposing it to prevalent modernist 20th-century practice. Throughout this paper, we focus on the interweaving of discourse and practice, drawing attention to the ‘idiom’ of river landscaping as well as to the role of the state in defining this idiom. We argue that a sort of reconciliation is occurring between the contrasting discourses and practices of ‘hard’ and ‘green’ engineers.

At a time of increasing government concern with the economic health of UK town centres and high streets, and with an independent inquiry (led by Mary Portas) on Revitalising the High Street to report by the end of 2011, this paper seeks to make four contributions. First, to inject into an available evidence base, currently notable for its sparseness, new descriptive evidence on the differential performance of a sample of over 250 town centres/high streets in four regions of the UK as those centres adjusted to the shock wave of global economic crisis. Second, to address the task of theorising the nature of the complex adjustments underway by positioning the policy-significant findings provided in the paper within conceptualisations of ‘resilience’ in economic systems—particularly those which stress the anticipatory or reactive capacity of systems to minimise the impacts of a destabilising shock and which focus on resilience as a dynamic and evolutionary process. Third, to offer findings from theory-driven statistical modelling of the determinants of the differential resilience or fragility exhibited by that sample of centres. Fourth, to assess what the implications of those findings and a focus on ‘adaptive resilience’ might mean for the design of policy proposals and instruments aimed at revitalising UK town centres and high streets. Although some of the paper's empirical findings parallel those suggested by specialist commercial research companies which have emerged to fill the need to chart the posteconomic crisis malaise of UK retail centres, they also significantly extend available knowledge. In particular, they offer novel insight into the impact of two factors—‘diversity’ of a centre's preexisting retail structure and ‘town-centres-first’ policy-compliant ‘in-centre’ or ‘edge-of-centre’ corporate-foodstore entry. Although conventionally portrayed as polar opposites within popular debate in terms of attempts to protect and/or enhance the vitality and viability of town centres and high streets, our analysis suggests that this may not be the case. Indeed, the retail centres in our sample which proved most resilient to the shock wave of global economic crisis were characterised by both diversity and corporate-food-store entry.

Multinational corporations (MNCs) have increasingly been establishing regional headquarters in China. However, no study has systematically examined how MNCs make strategic decisions about where to locate Chinese headquarters (CHQs) in this transition economy. The paper makes the first attempt to investigate the issue by focusing on two questions. First, what are the location-specific factors that determine where MNCs locate their CHQs? Second, how do these factors influence making the decision between Beijing and Shanghai, the two largest cities in China? We integrate existing literature and assess the differential roles of (1) path dependency, (2) institutional support, and (3) proximity to superior information. Data were collected through a large-scale survey of MNC CHQs in mainland China. The empirical analysis supports the three-dimensional framework and the central role of proximity to superior information in the decision-making process. The results advance existing understanding of MNC location decisions in China by revealing the unique interplay between power and market in this transition economy, and between Beijing and Shanghai, the two promising cities toward world city status, in particular.

The paper examines how structural vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in Malawi is produced through a complex interplay of economic, cultural, and political factors operating over relational places within the country as well as in the wider Southern Africa subcontinental landscape. Based on empirical work on an impoverished community in the Chibavi township of Mzuzu City in northern Malawi, and drawing on disciplinary perspectives from social psychology and geography, the study does not only demonstrate how vulnerability to HIV/AIDS in this urban centre emerges from the immediate context of pervasive economic deprivation and ready availability of locally distilled highly potent liquor known as kachasu, but also shows how these social realities are intimately connected with an overlapping set of historic processes operating at various temporal and spatial scales. The paper provides a nuanced understanding of the geographies of vulnerability to the AIDS epidemic in northern Malawi and concludes with relevant policy recommendations.

Automated zone-design methods are increasingly being used to create zoning systems for a range of purposes, such as the release of census statistics or the investigation of neighbourhood effects on health. Inevitably, the characteristics originally underpinning the design of a zoning system (eg, population size or homogeneity of the built environment) change through time. Rather than designing a completely new system every time substantive change occurs, or retaining an existing system which will become increasingly unfit for purpose, an alternative is to modify the existing system such that zones which still meet the design criteria are retained, but those which are no longer fit for purpose are split or merged. This paper defines the first generic methodology for the automated maintenance of existing zoning systems. Using bespoke, publicly available, software (AZTool), the methodology is employed to modify the 2001 Census output geographies within six local authority districts in England and Wales in order to make them suitable for the release of contemporary population-related data. Automated maintenance of an existing system is found to be a more iterative and constrained problem than designing a completely new system; design constraints frequently have to be relaxed and manual intervention is occasionally required. Nonetheless, existing zone-design techniques can be successfully adapted and implemented to automatically maintain an existing system. The findings of this paper are of direct relevance both to the Office for National Statistics in their design of the 2011 Census output geographies for England and Wales and to any other countries or organisations seeking to maintain an existing zoning system.

In the UK, pubs are often the nodes and centres of the local social network. Particularly in villages and rural areas, pubs play an important role in stimulating community cohesion and social capital by enhancing socioeconomic activities, such as communal initiatives and business activities, within communities. Despite this, there has been a constant decline in the number of British pubs during the past decades. The factors influencing this decline are many and diverse: the rise of pub chains and theme pubs which target a more commercial type of custom, the result of progressively tougher drink–driving laws, rising prices and alcohol duties, the increased popularity of home entertainment, and the smoking ban. Since village pubs work as a network tier for the entire area, their disappearance often means the disappearance of major centres of social aggregation. This also has a significant impact on rural economies, given the importance of these businesses for local supply chains. The creation of Industrial and Provident Societies (I&PSs) in villages and small communities may represent a valid way to rescue a number of village pubs from closure. An I&PS is an organisation carrying on an industry, business, or trade, either as a cooperative or for the benefit of the community. This paper discusses the functioning of I&PSs and their potential with regard to pubs in rural areas by presenting original data obtained from primary research, including interviews held with owners, managers, and customers of village pubs. In addition, the paper provides case studies of communities who used an I&PS to save their local pubs and assets, and explores how this solution may help villagers to keep their centres of social aggregation economically viable and sustainable. It is concluded that I&PSs can represent a valuable solution for many rural communities. It is also concluded that the level of community cohesion among villagers, the investment required for setting up the I&PS, and the availability of financial grants and public sector support all have an important impact on their development.

This analysis of urban wetland restoration in the Netherlands examines how theories of distributed agency are changing the way planners approach city-building tasks. Illusions of a static, prehuman nature are falling by the wayside, and the negative environmental consequences of urban expansion are gaining notoriety. Green Design strategies that, among other things, espouse bringing nature back into the city alleviate many problems. But ecoconscious planners working on Amsterdam's IJburg neighborhood have set their sights higher by attempting to turn cities into nature's womb. And instead of making this nature directly through nurseries and fisheries, planners are instead working to create a field of action that will spontaneously create wild nature at a considerable distance from planners' hands. In reviewing these experiments, this paper shows how planners marshal lake currents, plant spores, and flying birds alongside bulldozers and cranes to build homes and make wetlands.

There is good reason to be interested in how older people in ageing societies organise their winter warmth. Winter mortality rates are highest amongst this group. Several initiatives have accordingly sought to alleviate the fuel poverty some older people experience at this time. Yet many older people are also wealthier than ever. This leads to alternative anxieties about how their potentially extravagant home heating could exacerbate wider climate change. This paper pursues the contention that future policies relating to both issues stand to benefit from a fuller appreciation of how current older person households relate to the private winter warmth practices of their generational peers. Building on studies that explore the dynamics of domestic thermal convention and consider how to engender new sustainable energy norms at home, it presents findings from a serial interview project with a diverse sample of older people in the UK. We consider whether these respondents connected their actions to the idea of a wider generational mode of managing domestic winter warmth and the reasons why they seldom did. We end with the implications of this situation for further research on domestic energy norms and interventions aimed at the winter practices of this growing sector.

The benefits that rigorous analysis can have for retail-store portfolio management in guiding and informing investment decisions (store expansion, closure, extension, refascia, and acquisition) is well established within the economic geography research literature. However, studies of retailers addressing location planning in practice have identified wide variation in the sophistication of techniques and resources employed as well as in terms of the credibility that such research and analysis receives from senior management within the firm. By drawing on a qualitative research project involving some forty location planning analysts, consultants, and managers at UK-based retailers, we differentiate between three approaches to store portfolio decision-making that differ in terms of resource allocation, sophistication, and legitimacy. We seek to explain those differences that are embedded within the context of intrafirm relations and social communities by drawing on theories from strategic management concerning core rigidities, lock-in, and legitimisation, and review the challenges that location planners face in gaining legitimacy within the organisation, along with strategies appropriate for increasing their acceptance and influence across the firm.

This paper explores the hitherto neglected combined contribution of automobility cultures and corruption to prevailing death and injury rates from road traffic, with an emphasis on developing countries. Automobility cultures are argued to be crucial to real-world death and injury rates. The paper then argues that indices of public corruption may be taken as a more general proxy for the extent of traffic rule observance and risky behaviours by all classes of road user. Data on relative corruption at the national level are compared with data on road traffic deaths—both reported and adjusted. The latter seek to account for potential underreporting and definitional differences. The paper concludes that policy needs to be sensitized to local cultures, and to extend beyond issues related to the engineering of cars or infrastructures if social attitudes are to be changed, and the rate of deaths and injuries reduced.