Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

Israel's settlement policy in the West Bank represents a crucial issue in the Israeli—Palestinian conflict. Through the examination of a single case study—the planning history of the Jewish settlement of Ma'ale Adummim, located in the eastern periphery of the city—the paper addresses the complex nexus between planning and state-building practices; building on Henri Lefebvre's theory of space, he offers an account of the role of Israel's settlement policy in the transformation of the material, symbolic, and political landscape of the metropolitan area of Jerusalem. My main argument is that the observation of the development of large suburban communities in the metropolitan area—a blind spot both in media and in academic discourse—is crucial for our understanding of the settlement policy as a whole, and its impact on Israeli—Palestinian relations.

Over the coming two decades Asia will be the main driver of a 40% increase in global energy consumption. Ambitions for a more sustainable future in the region are severely compromised by the widespread and rapid take-up of energy-intensive methods for cooling the built environment. For the majority of Asia's countries buildings account for more than 50% of all national greenhouse gas emissions. With around half that energy consumption typically associated with cooling or heating interior spaces, national carbon footprints have increased dramatically in recent decades through the introduction of electronic air-conditioning. This paper argues such trends are unsustainable and low-carbon alternatives for environmental comfort are required urgently. It traces shifts in how air has been ‘materially imagined’ over the last century or so in Asia and how this bears upon the future of sustainable urbanism. Air-conditioning is seen as pivotal to transformations in urban design and living, such that two phases of modernity are identified: preconditioned and conditioned. By foregrounding the need for low-carbon alternatives, the paper advocates for an alternative, low-carbon regime of thermal governance.

A large-scale residential-location model of the Greater London region is being developed in which all stages of the model-building process—from data input, analysis through calibration to prediction—are rapid to execute and accessible in a visual and immediate fashion. The model is structured to distribute trips across competing modes of transport from employment to population locations. It is cast in an entropy-maximising framework which has been extended to measure actual components of energy—travel costs, free energy, and unusable energy (entropy itself)—and these provide indicators for examining future scenarios based on changing the costs of travel in the metro region. Although the model is comparatively static, we interpret its predictions in terms of fast and slow processes—‘fast’ relating to changes in transport modes, and ‘slow’ relating to changes in location. After developing and explaining the model using appropriate visual analytics, a scenario in which road-travel costs double is tested: this shows that mode switching is considerably more significant than shifts in location—which are minimal.

The minority ethnic population of Britain has grown rapidly in recent decades, but the percentage of minority ethnic pupils has increased more rapidly. This is particularly the case in inner London where over 50% of secondary school pupils are now from minority ethnic groups. The paper examines the issue of schooling and ethnic mix in East London with a focus on parental perceptions of school ethnic mix and parental decision making. It draws on secondary data on school ethnic mix and in-depth interviews with parents. It shows that, while most parents are happy with some degree of ethnic mix, the mix found in many schools is far from their ideal mix, particularly for White parents, and influences their decision making, possibly intensifying the segregation of ethnic groups in schools. The situation is made more complex by an element of class avoidance and attraction to schools with a strong aspirational and attainment ethos, irrespective of their ethnic mix.

The author examines the determinants of the location choices of recent immigrants in England, using aggregate Department for Work and Pensions National Insurance Number registration data matched to ward and local authority district contextual data. Separate models are estimated for four recent immigrant groups, according to world area of origin, using a tobit regression modelling strategy. The results suggest that higher neighbourhood co-ethnic density and ethnic diversity levels, and higher deprivation levels, are associated with increased immigrant settlement. Most immigrants are more likely to settle in neighbourhoods with a higher availability of rented housing and lower access to employment. Compared with the other groups, EU Accession nationals and Africans are more likely to settle in deprived areas and African settlement is also more pronounced in areas with a higher availability of social housing. EU Accession nationals, unlike immigrants from more established immigrant groups, are found to be less likely to settle in large urban districts and more likely to settle in districts with lower unemployment levels.

This paper addresses how the composition of industry structures, skills, and human capital is related to regional development in peripheral and central locations. We do this by means of ordinary least squares models to analyse the relationship between growth in purchasing power and employment growth between 2001 and 2008 as well as a selection of variables constructed via register data of the total population in Sweden. The analysis demonstrates an evident spatial division of postindustrial development that larger regions benefit relatively more from than smaller regions do. The empirical findings indicate that a transition towards more knowledge-intensive sectors and a higher educated labour force has the strongest impact on development in the largest Swedish regions, while a transition from manual skills towards more creative skills shows a positive relationship only with development in medium-sized regions. Consequently, the paper argues that the recent appraisal of the knowledge-based economy benefits mainly the largest urban regions, meaning that regional size is an important parameter when discussing trajectories of regional development and the adaption to contemporary economic development paths.

The increasing integration of the world economy has demonstrated the critical need to identify industries and associated skill sets that could help regions maintain their competitiveness. The challenge is to align human capital with current and emerging trends of the regional economy. This study presents a framework to explore regional economic structural changes in terms of occupation—industry linkages and deciphers an array of economic signals that generate the dynamics of regional economic changes based upon an enhanced understanding of systematic occupation—industry linkages. Bicausative analysis and hypothetical industry extraction methods are adapted to serve these purposes, with applications to both state and national levels in the US between 2005 and 2008. The findings derived from these linkage studies offer insights into the spatially heterogeneous patterns of economic changes, and help overcome conventional, one-dimensional understandings of the dynamics of economic transformation.

The interface of a long-standing movement for sustainability at the urban scale and the imperatives of the carbon-reduction agenda are driving change in urban energy systems. This paper seeks to address the nature of that change and, in particular, to consider how different pathways of change are emerging. To do this it draws on the coevolution and pathways literatures to interrogate a database of current urban energy initiatives within the UK. This analysis reveals the multiple pathways of change though which new modes of energy production and consumption are being developed to deliver carbon reductions through the reconfiguring of urban energy systems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these changes for urban governance and for carbon reductions.

Do people care more about the environment as their income increases? In this paper we use a measure of subjective well-being to directly analyze whether the impact of a number of environmental amenities on self-reported life satisfaction varies with income. We find little empirical support for the marginal effects of environmental amenities being larger for the richest.

This study suggests a basis for the division of spatial housing submarkets in enhancing the understanding of housing markets. The theoretical background of the division is based upon the relationship between commuting patterns and the structure of house prices. An examination of the process of ‘expansion—overlap—merging’ between residential spheres, defined as a unit consisting of a centre of employment and the surrounding residential area, provides an overview of a probable form of merged residential spheres in large cities. In an empirical analysis of Seoul the spatial housing submarkets were identified on the basis of the hierarchies between the local authorities from commuting patterns. The relevance of the division was tested with three statistical procedures: hedonic price models, Chow tests, and weighted standard error tests. The statistical tests suggested that the housing market in Seoul can be divided into three distinct spatial submarkets, which supports the reasoning of the division method suggested in this study.

Over the coming decades the Highlands and Islands of Scotland will be transformed as new technologies and infrastructures are installed to exploit wind, wave, and tide power. However, interactions between the region—understood as a sociospatial category shaped by history, culture, and institutions—and these technologies are poorly understood and need to be appreciated in more detail before the changes gather momentum. In this paper we link and extend research around sociotechnical transitions and resource peripheries and use this framework to analyse wind energy projects on the island of Lewis. Our analysis draws attention to transition—periphery dynamics and the ways in which renewable energy projects and particular locations are coshaping each other through these. Building on this case study we suggest implications for the region as a whole, argue that the analytical—normative agenda of sociotechnical transitions should be recast, and highlight the need for more research on sociotechnical transitions and new resource peripheries.

Comparing each of the higher education institutions (HEIs) as a separate sector in the Scottish input—output table suggests that their expenditure patterns are homogenous and that any apparent heterogeneity in their conventional demand impacts depends primarily on scale. However, a disaggregation of their income by source reveals a disparity in their degree of dependence upon funding from the devolved Scottish Government. Acknowledging the binding budget constraint of the Scottish Government, and deriving balanced-expenditure multipliers, reveals large differences in the net-expenditure impact of HEIs upon the Scottish economy, with the source of variation being the origin of income. Applying a novel treatment of student expenditure impacts through identifying the amount of exogenous spending per student further increases the heterogeneity of the overall expenditure effects. These issues have particular importance for many governments facing increasing pressure to reduce their overall budgets.

Major arts and cultural institutions have expanded their exhibits and programs to reflect society's growing diversity, but we know little about potential neighborhood disparities in arts participation within metropolitan areas and how it varies across institutions and different forms of engagement. Unlike membership, which tends to be ‘market’ driven, museum school tour programs often target underserved schools to engage diverse communities. We provide the first assessment to our knowledge of whether school tours provide a counterweight to more expensive forms of participation and whether ethnic-oriented institutions have been able to overcome the distance that often separates disadvantaged communities from institutions. Our analysis of participation rates for five major institutions in Los Angeles, California, indicates that, despite progress, barriers persist. Although affluent areas provide an important membership base, school tours offer a valuable tool for attracting traditional and ethnic-specific audiences and communities. The results support greater integration of city and cultural planning and suggest that institutions should redouble efforts to overcome sociocultural and geographic barriers.