European Urban and Regional Studies

This commentary documents the spatiotemporal distribution of financial and business services (FABS) production in Poland, by using location quotients for employment and gross value added. Considering the growing prominence of Warsaw in the central European and international network of financial centres, one could expect increasing spatial concentration of FABS in the country. Our findings confirm the undisputed primacy of Warsaw, but also show a dynamic development of FABS in Wrocław, Poznań, and Kraków, suggesting a growing division of labour. Overall, there is little evidence to suggest consolidation of FABS in Poland.

The rapidly expanding stream of path development studies recognises that translating observations from past paths to conscious path creation requires conceptually linking agency to path development frameworks. Actors frame issues about and for the future, coordinate their actions in the present and make sense of what may have transpired in the past. The main objective of the paper is to explore the roles that actors play in green path development by answering the following main research questions: (a) Who are the core actors in green path development in the Nordic regions, ie. in industrial development around products, solutions or technologies that make regional economies more sustainable? (b) What are their main roles in relation to other actors? (c) What are the differences and similarities between the regions in terms of agency? The paper explores whether similar actors take on different roles in different regions and whether different actors may assume similar roles. For the empirical analysis, we identified seven roles in change agency. The empirical results showed that institutional entrepreneurship was the core of change agency in conjunction with innovative entrepreneurship and place-based leadership. The other four roles supported path development efforts. The results also show that institutional entrepreneurship is not a solo activity but a collective form of agency and that well-functioning shared institutional entrepreneurship may have a chance to change institutions for green path development.

The global or planetary reach of gentrification has become a mainstream in critical urban studies. Yet, the ‘travels’ of a concept originated in specific places and times have often brought about a loss of explanatory and strategic power. In this article, we argue that another concept, that of articulation developed by Laclau and Mouffe, is particularly adequate to help gentrification, touristification and financialisation to travel among places and levels of abstraction. In order to make this argument, we focus on Southern Europe, whose cities had long been considered scarcely gentrifiable and where, more recently, critical urban scholarship has made large use of gentrification, touristification and financialisation to explain the impacts of crisis, austerity and afterwards economic rebound driven by real estate and tourism. We explore from a multi-scalar perspective the trajectory of Mouraria, a historical neighbourhood in Lisbon – and particularly the dimensions of housing and local politics. We show how Mouraria, during the last decade, shifted from being a ‘deviant’ case – capable of taking advantage of neoliberal regeneration policies in order to keep its social diversity and most of its long-term residents – towards one ‘paradigmatic’ of urbanisation-as-accumulation and contentious urban politics. We explain this shift by focusing on its multi-scalar determinants, concluding that present urban change in many Southern European cities should be understood as the articulation of various processes, which include gentrification, touristification and financialisation.

This paper presents a study about studentification in the medium-sized university town of Goettingen, Germany. While many studentification studies focus on the transformation of owner-occupied houses into houses of multiple occupation, this study is about displacement in the rental housing market. I argue that within this context, the displacement of marginalised social groups takes place through rental prices and private landlords’ preferences for students of higher education. Hence, I focus on how landlords extract high rents from their property without making serious investments and investigate landlords’ strategies for increasing their return on investment via higher education student tenants. I explain their strategies, grounding this research in semi-structured interviews with landlords, property managers and real estate agents, complemented by statistical data. I show that different rental strategies landlords apply lead to the separation of different social groups. Hence, this paper argues that the strategies of landlords have an important impact on urban segregation and urban development in cities. Therefore, a deeper investigation of these strategies would help us achieve a better understanding of how the process of studentification proceeds and how displacement takes place.

In a context of growing socio-spatial polarization and of restructuring state–market relations in urban governance, a new phenomenon is emerging in Swedish cities, that is, partnerships for urban regeneration inspired by the Business Improvement District (BID) model. Through an empirical case study research on one of the most long-standing BID partnerships in Sweden – that is, BID Gamlestaden in Gothenburg – the article critically assesses whether the BID model as it has been applied in Sweden represents a socially and politically sustainable tool for urban regeneration. Namely, the study analyses the complex constellation of power entrenched in the BID, with a focus on the relations with urban governance actors ‘above’ (city planning department, public housing, real estate companies, media, politicians) and ‘below’ (residents and local businesses). Despite general claims around BIDs as successful tools for uplifting distressed neighbourhoods, BID Gamlestaden presents shortcomings regarding issues of urban social justice in terms of democratic participation and representation (democracy), disciplining and sanitizing strategies (diversity) and gentrification risks (equality). In fact, while BID partners notice improved attractiveness and sense of security and higher estate values, this improvement is based upon the removal of the most socio-economically vulnerable residents and the disciplining of residents’ and businesses’ behaviours and aesthetics. This study warns about the risk that BIDs as they are currently implemented in Sweden are used as a ‘neoliberal fix’ to move social problems elsewhere rather than solving them, which might lead to new landscapes of exclusion and gentrification.

Market and institutional shocks and upheaval, brought about by political, economic and social changes, have the potential to generate significant corporate restructuring. Foreign subsidiaries are particularly vulnerable to such impacts given the embeddedness of parent companies in their home countries, with the potential for disinvestment and regional decoupling. This paper examines the impact of the Brexit vote and negotiation period on UK-based foreign subsidiaries in the software and software-related sectors in Scotland and South East England. This firm-centric approach follows recent evolutionary thinking that restates the importance of examining the firm as a means by which to understand how regions respond to such disturbances. Rather than simply examine impact, the paper is concerned with why the scope and scale of impacts are mediated by particular corporate and global production networks (GPN) processes. Key to this is the examination of the importance of the value creation corporate role and degree of replication within the corporation (specificity), the GPN spatial configuration, and the markets that subsidiaries are mandated to serve. The paper concludes that a variety of impacts are evident, but that notable negative consequences have arisen for subsidiaries with low corporate specificity, working through European Union (EU)-configured GPNs, and serving European markets. These negative impacts are more notable in Scotland, compared with South East England where a large minority have experienced no detrimental impacts.