Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space

This paper proposes dialogue between postcolonial theory and the analytical frameworks of global value chains (GVCs) and global production networks (GPNs). It does so in order to open up more culturally sensitive accounts of global supply networks and exporting localities than those provided by prevailing political-economic approaches. Particular focus is placed on Zein-Elabdin's postcolonial notion of economic hybridity to advance understanding of the institutional contexts shaping production networks. The value of applying this concept to GVC/GPN studies is illustrated in the case of a sustainable wildflower harvesting supply network in South Africa's Western Cape, which supplies ethically promoted bouquets to domestic and European markets. Transnational cultural politics, including those associated with colonial encounters, are shown to shape the hybrid institutional context of this production network. It is suggested that such a perspective on institutional hybridity offers just one fruitful conversation between postcolonial approaches and GVC/GPN frameworks.

Although scholars agree that nationalism remains an important aspect of the new vocabulary of neoliberalism, little is known about how these discourses operate on the ground and in particular contexts. In this paper, we investigate how a specific adaption of national identity, one that underscores the values of cultural integrity, is used to naturalize neoliberal shifts in the tequila industry. Tequila has long circulated in the images and myths of Mexican identity. However, in the last two decades, the Mexican government has increasingly relied on tequila's reputation as the nation's ‘spirit’ to obscure changes in tequila regulatory policies that are linked to broader neoliberal changes in Mexico. Extralocal actors—in particular, multinational companies—have more influence over the direction the industry is taking and the institutions that regulate it, while tequila production is increasingly untethered from the communities and traditions that make it distinct. Here, we examine how private and public actors mobilize the language of authenticity, place, and quality to justify the adoption of neoliberal measures in the tequila industry.

This paper investigates a moment of shift in urban neoliberal governance strategies under the purview of a new municipal Chief of Government of Buenos Aires at the end of the 2000s: the introduction of a regime of public space that has had implications for the waste management sector (and particularly informal recyclers or cartoneros). I document government attempts to re-represent the city as a modern, hygienic centre that is receptive to investment and tourism, drawing on discursive framings of public space that seek to redefine legitimate users and uses of the city. Such framings are exclusionary of cartoneros and other marginalized urbanites. As with most forms of actually existing neoliberalism, this regime is contradictory and unstable, both containing and provoking challenges to its coherence. This case study of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ in Buenos Aires encourages analytical focus on moments of shift and renewal in urban processes of neoliberalization. In this case the shift marked by the introduction of the regime of public space reveals the priorities and agendas of urban elites as championed by municipal governments, makes visible the paradoxes and contradictions inherent to neoliberal urbanisms, and also exposes openings for resistance, opposition, and renegotiation of urban neoliberal agendas (including protest, discursive reframings of the city and its uses, and the forging of indeterminate alliances).

Contemporary cities are thick with infrastructure. In recognition of this fact a great deal of recent work within urban studies and urban geography has focused on transformations in the governance and ownership of infrastructural elements within cities. Less attention has been paid to the practices through which urban infrastructures are inhabited by urban dwellers. Yet in all sorts of ways infrastructures are realised through their use and inhabitation. This paper argues for the importance of attending to the ways that infrastructures are reinterpreted through use. Focusing on a case study of commuter cyclists in London, it explores the ways in which cyclists accommodate themselves to (and are in turn accommodated by) the infrastructural orderings of London's streets. Confronted by the obduracy of a road infrastructure designed primarily for motorised traffic, cyclists show a diverse range of approaches to negotiating movement through the city on bikes. The paper describes how this negotiation can be understood in terms of the more or less skilful processes of navigation, rule following, rule making, and rule bending. This involves a polymorphous mix of practices, some common to driving, others to walking, and yet others unique to cycling. In conclusion, the paper suggests that transformations of infrastructures found within cities need to be understood as much through emergent changes between their elements, and that close attention to how infrastructures come to be inhabited offers productive avenues for thinking about ways to improve them.

Grassroots innovation literature proposes that ‘intermediately’ situated community-based projects—those which are neither too radical, nor too embedded in the mainstream—play an important cross-contextual bridging role in processes of innovation for sustainable development. This paper explores this intermediacy claim by comparing how three established ecovillage projects engage outsiders and diffuse their lessons learned. Employing comparative case-study methodology, I find that while all three projects successfully replicate alternative practices outside their boundaries—for example through education, outreach, and on-site activities—one project has partnered with municipal planners to translate ‘ecovillage concepts’ into a new zoning category that will facilitate similar development by mainstream actors. The argument is made that the landscape for grassroots innovation is uneven, and that niche-to-regime translation occurs through projects that position themselves as part of two action domains at once.

Cross-border cooperation to promote economic development and political integration has been among the EU's key themes since the 1990s, and contemporary policy networks are considered useful organisational solutions. Focusing on transport policies in the border regions of Basel and Luxembourg, we analyse the persistency of national preferences among policy actors, mapping their perceived ‘policy spaces of action’ and conceptualising these policy spaces as relational. We discuss that the networks’ various actors on either side of the border appear to perceive the actual ‘policy spaces’ very differently. Therefore, and due to the networks’ terminability, these policy spaces are highly contested and frequently negotiated between the actors. Based on a combination of in-depth interviews, sketch maps, and social network analysis, we show that large spatiocultural differences still prevail among network actors, potentially impacting on the decisions taken in cross-border policy networks.

This paper draws on a detailed empirical study of the implementation of the EU's Drinking Water Directive in Estonia and Lithuania in order to understand the factors shaping the Europeanisation of risk regulation regimes in Eastern accession states. Adopting a ‘whole-regime’ methodological approach, the paper explores the key drivers and constraints shaping the transposition as well as the practical implementation of the law. The study shows how ‘conditionality’ pressures to adopt the EU acquis in order to access European economic and financial support networks have reinforced, rather than overcome, historically entrenched regulatory cultures. Going beyond well-known typologies of Europeanisation, the paper identifies a distinctive ‘blind-eye’ style of Europeanisation in which conditionality pressures have favoured selective compliance with ill-suited EU rules at the expense of tackling significant drinking water risk problems. The paper shows how such symbolic policy practices have been shaped through a combination of the countries’ shared Soviet legacies of elite-centred and legalistic governance cultures, the active coping strategies of street-level inspectors, as well as wider sociopolitical contexts that have limited the impact of civil society actors such as scientists, NGOs, and the general public in strengthening risk regulation in the Baltic states. The paper also shows, however, that the different post-Soviet ideological orientations and administrative reform programmes of Eastern European accession states can override their common Soviet legacies and lead to significant national variation in risk regulation processes and outcomes.

Using comparative methods of policy analysis, this paper explores the institutional factors shaping the transfer and adaptation of risk-based approaches to regulation within and between the regimes for occupational health and safety (OHS) and food safety in the UK. Over the past two decades successive governments have enthusiastically promoted risk as a key concept for regulatory reform and ‘better regulation’. Rather than trying to prevent all possible harms, ‘risk-based’ approaches promise to make regulation more proportionate and effective by using various risk-based metrics and policy instruments to focus regulatory standard-setting and enforcement activity on the highest priority risks, as determined through formal assessments of their probability and consequences. But despite facing similar external pressures and sharing many historical and structural features as OHS, food safety regulation has proven much less receptive to risk-based reforms of its organizing principles and practices. To explain that anomaly, we consider a range of explanations highlighted in the policy transfer and mobilities literatures. We find that coercive drivers for the adoption of risk, in the form of top-down political pressure for deregulation or hard EU mandates, are much less influential than voluntary ones, which reflect both normative (ie, shared commitments to proportionality, resource prioritization, and blame deflection) and mimetic (ie, imitation of private sector corporate governance models) isomorphism. We conclude with wider reflections about the significance of our cases for policy transfer and mobilities research and for the limits to risk as a universal principle for organizing, and accounting for, governance activity.

British regions are becoming increasingly culturally diverse, with migration as the main driver. Does this diversity benefit local economies? This research examines the impact of cultural diversity on the entrepreneurial performance of UK regions. We focus on two largely overlooked factors: the measurement of diversity and the skills composition of diverse populations. First, more than demonstrating the importance of cultural diversity for entrepreneurship, we show that the type of cultural diversity measured is a decisive factor. Second, the skill composition of diverse populations is also key. Diversity amongst highly skilled workers exerts the strongest impact upon start-up intensities. The empirical investigation employs spatial regression techniques and carries out several robustness checks, including instrumental variables specifications, to corroborate our findings.

The influence of airports on the distribution of employment within fifty-one large US metropolitan areas is measured in the context of three important elements of urban spatial structure: centers, corridors, and clusters. Analysis of tract-level census data for 2000 using spatial regression models for each metropolitan area revealed that central cities have a varying, but generally strong, effect on the distribution of metropolitan employment, as do highways and employment subcenters; favored quarters had less certain impacts while the airport influence was weaker and more variable among regions. Regressing metropolitan airport-anchored distance-decay parameters on a series of regional explanatory factors suggests that airport cities develop primarily as cities expand outward rather than as a direct consequence of air transportation. These results inform plans relying upon airports to help shape and perhaps accelerate regional development.

There is a long lineage in neighbourhood research that has underpinned sustained academic and policy interest in the UK centred on understanding how spatial ‘clusters’ of neighbourhood-based deprivation might be destabilised. This has seen the privileging of composite indices in the analysis of deprivation, which have been criticised for fostering a common perception that deprived neighbourhoods are homogeneous in terms of their compositions and underlying structures. Such indices have also been criticised for being ineffective at capturing temporal change, providing only static snapshots of deprivation at particular points in time. This paper focuses on patterns of deprived neighbourhood change in the Greater Manchester city-region between 2001 and 2007. It develops a typology of neighbourhood change that is triangulated with three complementary typologies capturing the socioeconomic and demographic compositions of deprived neighbourhoods; the functional roles played by deprived neighbourhoods in redistributing population through migration; and the spatial contexts in which deprived neighbourhoods are located. The analysis reveals that an overreliance on static indices to measure deprivation has long served to conceal complexities in the ways in which deprived neighbourhoods change, owing to their variable structures and contexts. It illustrates the danger that lies in treating all deprived neighbourhoods in the same way.

The home visit—when professionals work in service users' homes—is a growing phenomenon. It changes the configuration of home—both for home living and for those who go to work in other people's homes. In this paper we advance recent discussions of the emotional and political geographies of home through a focus on the home visit worker and her or his experience of other people's homes as sites of uncertainty. For such workers the home visit is played out as an interface between the private and intimate and the regulatory occupational safety and health frameworks of policy and corporate interests. It disrupts existing academic definitions of home and defines the regulatory interests of institutions. An examination of the home visit, we propose, has implications for theories of home and the search for certainties that is embedded in regulatory guidelines.

This paper presents a preliminary empirical evaluation of the strategic importance of infusing Twitter social media data into classifications of small areas, as a way of moving beyond the nighttime residential geographies of conventional geodemographic classifications. We attempt an empirically based critique of the merits and drawbacks of the use of social media data, in which the value of high spatial and temporal granularity of revealed activity patterns is contrasted with the paucity of individual attribute information. We apply new and novel methods to enrich the profiles of Twitter users in order to generalize about activity patterns in London, our case-study city. More insidious problems in the use of social media data arise from the as-yet-unknown sources and operation of bias in their user bases. Our contribution is to begin to identify and assess the biases inherent in social media usage in social research, and use these to evaluate their deployment in research applications.

Tenure security is widely believed to contribute to low-income settlement development by encouraging investment in housing improvement. However, in spite of consensus about its importance, it is still unclear what tenure security exactly entails and few studies have examined how it relates to housing improvement. Using survey data from six informal neighborhoods in Buenos Aires, Argentina, we empirically test a model that specifies how the different types of tenure security that feature in academic and policy debates relate to each other, and the extent to which each predicts investment in housing improvement. We find that legal tenure security and de facto security of tenure influence investment in part through increases in perceptions of tenure security. We conclude that the hypothesized model accurately predicts investment in housing improvement and discuss how these findings inform current debates on tenure security and informality.