Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Southern Africa's AIDS epidemic is profoundly spatially and temporally structured; so too are the lives of the young people whose families it blights. In this paper we draw on qualitative research with AIDS-affected young people in Malawi and Lesotho, and recent work theorising time–space in human geography, to examine how time–spaces of AIDS-related sickness and death intersect with the time–spaces of young people and, importantly, those of their relations with others to produce differentiated outcomes for young people. We also explore the time–spaces of those outcomes and of young people's responses to them. We conclude that a relational time–space analysis of the impacts of AIDS on young people helps explain the diversity of those young people's experiences and allows AIDS to be contextualised more adequately in relation to everyday life and young people's wider lifecourses and their relationships with others. Moreover, the research points to the significance of the time–space structuring of society in shaping the outcomes of familial sickness and death for young people.

Considerable policy action has focused on the social patterning of health, especially the health risks associated with low income. More recent attention has turned to transport, food systems, workplaces, and location, and the way their intersections with social position and income create health inequalities. Time is another dimension that structures what people do; yet the way in which time contours health has been neglected. This paper explores (a) how time might influence health, and (b) the way in which time scarcity complicates current understandings of health inequalities. Alongside other meanings, time can be thought of as a health resource. People need time to access health services, build close relationships, exercise, work, play, care, and consume—all activities that are fundamental to health. There is evidence that the experience of time pressure is directly related to poorer mental health. Lack of time is also the main reason people give for not taking exercise or eating healthy food. Thus, another impact of time scarcity may be its prevention of activities and behaviours critical for good health. We investigate whether time scarcity, like financial pressure, is socially patterned, and thus likely to generate health inequality. The experience of time scarcity appears to be linked to variations in time devoted to employment or caring—activities closely bound to gender, status, and life course. One reason that time scarcity is socially patterned is because of the way in which caring is valued, allocated, and negotiated in households and the market. Adding paid employment to caring workloads is now normative, transforming the allocation of time within families. But caring requires a close interlocking with others' needs, which are often urgent and unpredictable, creating conflict with the linear, scheduled, and commodified approach to time required in the workplace. We review the evidence for the possibility that these time pressures are indeed contributing to socially patterned health inequalities among people caring for others. We also explore the potential for time scarcity to compound other sources of health inequality through interplays with income and space (urban form, transportation networks and place of residence). People who are both time and income poor, such as lone mothers, may face compounding barriers to good health, and the urban geography of time-scarce families represents the embedding of time–money–space trade-offs linked to physical location. In Australia and the US, poorer families are more likely to live in mid to outer suburbs, necessitating longer commutes to work. These suburbs have inferior public transport access, and can lack goods and services essential to health such as shops selling fresh foods. We conclude with a tentative framework for considering time and health in the context of policy actions. For example, social policy efforts to increase workforce participation may be economically necessary, but could have time-related consequences that alter health. Similarly, if cities are to be made livable, health promoting, and more equitable, urban designers need to understand time and time–income–space trade-offs. Indeed, many social policies and planning and health interventions involve time dimensions which, if they remain unacknowledged, could further compound time pressures and time-related health inequality.

This paper explores the concept of collective housing, notably the North American model of purpose-built cohousing, to understand better the functions of space and time at the neglected scale of collective (colocated) interhousehold collaboration. The defining features of this form of intentional community typically include the clustering of smaller-than-average private residences to maximise shared open spaces for social interaction; common facilities for shared daily use; and consensus-based collective self-governance. This paper critically examines the infrastructures of daily life which evolve from, and ease, collective activity and the shared occupation of space. Discussion draws on observations from eight communities in the UK and USA, using selected ethnographic vignettes to illustrate a variety of alternative temporalities which coincide with a shifting and blurring of privatised dwelling. The resulting analysis exposes multiple temporal scales and innovative uses and meanings of time and space. The paper concludes by speculating on the contemporary significance of collective living arrangements and the role this might play in future sustainability.

This paper provides new insights into the ways in which urban youth draw upon and reference spatial concepts over the course of their participation in activism and organizing. The concept of the geographical imagination is the starting point from which to explore how young people's understanding of places near and far affects their political engagement. Civic participation is often conceived as voting and volunteering; however, this research suggests that young people who are collectively engaged in helping their community while extending their capacity to connect social forces to material outcomes are also civic and political actors. Furthermore, this paper shows how young people's experiences, perception, and attachment to different places inform the strategies and stances of their social and political activities. Drawing from a year-long investigation at a Harlem-based youth organization, the findings document how young people trace patterns of marginalization, neglect, and belonging in places near and far, which is an underexplored aspect of critical geography and youth participation. By showing how spatial concepts are embedded in young people's experiences with and narratives about their community's most pressing issues, an extended geographical imagination can help youth illuminate social and spatial injustice, and imagine progressive alternatives for change.

To date, analyses of long-term trends in the spatial distribution of poverty in Britain have been frustrated by a lack of consistency in definitions, data sources and measures, as well as by changes over time in census and administrative geographies. This paper draws upon a series of national poverty surveys in order to derive methodologically consistent estimates of breadline and core poverty. These models are then applied to census data in order to describe the changing geography of poverty in Britain over the 1968–99 period. The primary concern is to reveal the changing spatial distribution of poverty that lies behind the headline figures. These analyses suggest that not only has poverty become increasingly prevalent amongst British households, it also became increasingly spatially concentrated between 1968 and 1999.

This paper explores questions of sexual difference and religious belief in relation to recent debates in urban studies and geography on urban encounters. Although it has been widely suggested that increased contact between members of different groups is an important driver for tolerant and respectful intergroup relations, there is need for more careful consideration of the kinds of sites that actually facilitate ‘meaningful encounters’. Specifically, we draw on empirical research in Episcopalian churches in New York City and examine how straight-identified parishioners and clergy narrate and perceive their encounters with the city's LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) population. Moving beyond the traditional focus on public space in the literature on cosmopolitan urbanism, we examine how churches serve as ‘micropublics’ which organize, facilitate, and/or limit encounters with sexual difference. To capture the tension between orthodox theological understandings of human sexuality and lived experiences in a metropolitan context where homosexuality is expressed relatively openly, the discussion focuses in particular on an evangelical case-study parish, where the church leadership is opposed to full LGBT inclusion in the church.

This paper examines how intercultural relations are continuously developed, destroyed, and remade in the practice of everyday bus travel. Through an ethnographic study of one bus route across Birmingham, UK, the paper explores the formation of relational practices on the move and the bodily orientations, public codes of conduct, material cultures, habits and affects through which they are formed. In particular, this paper gives specific attention to the tacit obligations of public travel and how such obligations both produce and sustain tolerance of others across a journey, to further reveal the multifaceted nature and workings of multicultural intimacies on the ground. In so doing, the paper responds to recent calls to politically revalorise public mobility spaces as key sites of encounter and identity formation, to position the bus as a crucial site of everyday multiculture through which wider processes of differentiation and exclusion are experienced and further understood.

This paper examines the history of credit scoring in Britain, and how this technology was imported from the US and adapted by the British retail banking sector. It seeks to highlight the elites who develop the social codes embedded within credit scoring software, to offer insight into the complex techno-economic networks that produce the geographies of financial inclusion, exclusion, and differential risk pricing. It is argued that the scientific status of these systems is questionable, due to the social interactions involved within the statistical modelling. Finally, the paper suggests that the spaces of credit are fluid, based upon the frequent social recalibrations of these models.

This paper reports a study of the division of household and childcare tasks between partners from a time–space perspective. Data from the 2005 Netherlands Kinship Panel Study and the 2004 ABF Real Estate Monitor are used. The impact of the residential context on the division of household and childcare tasks is studied, taking into account the endogeneity of time spent in paid work for the division of unpaid tasks. The findings suggest that the residential context is an important factor explaining the intrahousehold allocation of unpaid tasks. We found an indirect effect of living in a large city and of job access on the division of household tasks, running via the number of hours worked by the female partner: women living in large cities work more hours, and this leads to a greater likelihood of a nontraditional division of household tasks. There is also a direct effect of living in a large city on the likelihood of a nontraditional division of household tasks, but not on the likelihood of a nontraditional division of childcare tasks.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the Audit Commission's local quality-of-life indicators dataset to compare reported outcomes amongst 208 urban-classified and 144 rural-classified English local authority areas. We contextualise the demarcation of the urban and rural by reference to the transformational politics of the previous Labour government and its establishment of the sustainable communities initiative, whose controversial ‘place-based’ revitalisation essence continues to shape local government policy. According to the collectivist sustainability interpretation of the 73 indicators analysed, our results reveal that not only do urban-classified English local authority areas register a significantly lower quality of life than their rural counterparts but that they are also subject to much greater statistical and spatial variation. In addition, we find that the community-related and economy-related indicators serve to distinguish the reported quality-of-life conditions of rural and urban localities most, whereas the scores for transport are uniquely superior for urban areas, especially London. In considering the policy implications of our results, we draw attention to Labour's much-trumpeted justice-based approach to sustainable development, and contemplate the viability of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition government's ‘Big Society’ endeavour.

In the UK, as in some other EU states, the focus of recent welfare reforms has switched from those on unemployment benefits to those receiving sickness/incapacity benefits (IBs), reflecting concerns around the large numbers falling into the this last group. The Labour government elected in 1997 introduced a range of measures to activate those on IBs, setting a target of a one million reduction in the number of claimants by the end of 2015. The Conservative Party similarly came to acknowledge that high levels of IB claiming represented a problem of ‘unemployment hidden as sickness’, and in coalition now proposes even more aggressive supply-side strategies. This paper provides an extensive review of the most recent evidence to identify factors driving the rise in the number of people claiming IBs and, in light of this analysis, assesses whether current policy is fit for purpose. An important conclusion is that any national ‘one-size fits all’ supply-side policy response is blind to the distinctive geography of receipt of IBs and the complex combination of factors that leave some people trapped on these benefits.

Despite increased public interest, policy makers have been slow to enact targets based on limiting emissions under full consumption accounting measures (such as carbon footprints). We argue that this may be due to the fact that policy makers in one jurisdiction do not have control over production technologies used in other jurisdictions. We use a regional input–output framework and data derived on carbon dioxide emissions by industry (and households) to examine regional accountability for emissions generation. In so doing, we consider two accounting methods which permit greater accountability of regional private and public (household and government) final consumption as the main driver of regional emissions generation, while retaining focus on the local production technology and consumption decisions which fall under the jurisdiction of regional policy makers. We propose that these methods permit an attribution of emissions generation that is likely to be of more use than a full global footprint analysis to regional policy makers.

Interconnections between crime prevention and local governance practices are increasingly evident through the involvement of local partnerships and local government in crime prevention. The microlocal workings and the political implications of these interconnections have, however, received far less attention. This paper uses a case study from South Africa to understand the microlocal experiences of the interconnections between what is described here as ‘crime management’ and local governance. It is argued that the extent of interconnection is beyond that captured by the concept of ‘partnership’, as multiple governance structures, including local political parties, engage in crime management. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how local governance is dominated by crime management and that this domination is explicitly tied to the party political ‘ambitions’ of the dominant ANC party. The interconnection is theorised as the criminalisation of governance within a context of state-building.