Showing papers in "Environment and Planning A in 2008"
TL;DR: The authors survey the literature about nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being "neoliberalised"? what are some of the princi...
Abstract: This and a companion paper examine a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about neoliberal approaches to governing human interactions with the physical environment. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. They are written for the benefit of readers trying to make some sense of this growing literature and for future researchers of the topic. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical studies of nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions posed, variously, in many or most of them: what are the main reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? what are the princi...
917 citations
TL;DR: There has been an explosion of scholarship around the concept of home as discussed by the authors, which shows how home is a complex field of feelings and subjectivity: an anchor for senses of belonging, a mechanism for living with, and in, the experience of transnationalism, and a site for constituting and performing selfhood.
Abstract: In recent years there has been an explosion of scholarship around the concept of home. Extending well beyond traditional social and cultural geographical concerns with the public ^ private divide, this recent wave of home studies has teased out the complex meanings of home and its relationship to identity and subject formation. Notable here is the trend set by the journal Home Cultures; exemplary in this vein is the recent book Home (2006) by Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, who also contribute to the themed essays that follow in this issue. Among other things, scholarship such as this shows how home is a complex field of feelings and subjectivity: an anchor for senses of belonging, a mechanism for living with, and in, the experience of transnationalism, and a site for constituting and performing selfhood. Like other social and cultural geographies, this interest with the meaning of home is not untouched by a material turn. There has been, for example, a new appreciation of the coconstitutive relationship between the formal features of actual dwellings and the social life that inhabits them. In good part inaugurating such scholarship, anthropologist Danny Miller (1988) wrote of the way residents worked to appropriate the design features of council estates in an attempt ``to transform alienable goods into inalienable culture' (page 353). More recently, geographer Mark Llewellyn (2004) has shown how the residents of Kensal House enhanced its liveability by renegotiating the dictates of modernist living embodied in its architecture. In a similar material vein is a growing interest in the deployment of objects in the home as a means of expressing and constituting the self. This approach challenges essentialised understanding of home and identity by illustrating how objects extend the reach of home through time and across space. Divia Tolia-Kelly (2004), for example, shows how British Asians use the physicality of `home possessions' (ornaments, souvenirs, and sacred objects) to draw the memory of homes left behind into their experience of dwellings lived in today. Greg Noble (2004) shows, too, how the accumulation of objects into home is simultaneously an accumulation of being and a quest for recognition. There are then already established traditions working with the materialisation of home, and we hope that the themed papers in this issue elaborate and extend that scholarship in new ways. As a means of framing these essays, which can really speak for themselves, we use this editorial to offer some suggestive thoughts on the direction and meaning of the intellectual work of rematerialising home. To do this we revisit an old materialism, engage with a new one, and conclude with an idea about what to do next.
832 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors synthesise theory from social learning and institutional aspects of multilevel environmental governance to help unpack the patterns of individual and collective action within organisations that can enhance or restrict organisational adaptive capacity in the face of abrupt climate change.
Abstract: Recent UK government policy on climate change, and wider policy movement within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, emphasise the building of adaptive capacity. But what are the institutional constraints that shape capacity to build adaptive organisations? The authors synthesise theory from social learning and institutional aspects of multilevel environmental governance to help unpack the patterns of individual and collective action within organisations that can enhance or restrict organisational adaptive capacity in the face of abrupt climate change. Theoretical synthesis is grounded by empirical work with a local dairy farmers group and two supporting public sector bodies that are both local actors in their own rights and which also shape the operating environment for other local actors (the Environment Agency and the Welsh Assembly and Assembly-sponsored public bodies). Providing space within and between local organisations for individuals to develop private as well as officially sanctioned social relationships is supported as a pathway to enable social learning. It is also a resource for adaptation that requires little financial investment but does call for a rethinking of the personal skills and working routines that are incentivised within organisations.
468 citations
TL;DR: The authors survey the critical literature on nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions: (1) what are the reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised'? (2) what were the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? (3)What are the effects of nature's privatisation? and (4) how should these effects be evaluated?
Abstract: This and a previous paper review systematically a new and fast-growing geographical research literature about ‘neoliberalising nature’. This literature, authored by critical geographers for the most part, is largely case study based and focuses on a range of biophysical phenomena in different parts of the contemporary world. In an attempt to take stock of what has been learnt and what is left to do, the two papers survey the literature theoretically and empirically, cognitively and normatively. Specifically, they aim to parse the critical literature on nature's neoliberalisation with a view to answering four key questions: (1) what are the reasons why all manner of qualitatively different nonhuman phenomena in different parts of the world are being ‘neoliberalised’? (2) what are the principal ways in which nature is neoliberalised in practice? (3) what are the effects of nature's neoliberalisation? and (4) how should these effects be evaluated? Without such an effort of synthesis, this literature could re...
437 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that to inhabit the world is to live life in the open, and that life is lived in a zone in which earthly substances and aerial media are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in weaving the textures of the land.
Abstract: In this paper I argue that to inhabit the world is to live life in the open. Yet philosophical attempts to characterise the open lead to paradox. Do we follow Heidegger in treating the open as an enclosed space cleared from within, or Kant (and, following his lead, mainstream science) in placing the open all around on the outside? One possible solution is offered by Gibson in his ecological approach to perception. The Gibsonian perceiver is supported on the ground, with the sky above and the earth below. Yet in this view, only by being furnished with objects does the earth–sky world become habitable. To progress beyond the idea that life is played out upon the surface of a furnished world, we need to attend to those fluxes of the medium we call weather. To inhabit the open is to be immersed in these fluxes. Life is lived in a zone in which earthly substances and aerial media are brought together in the constitution of beings which, in their activity, participate in weaving the textures of the land. Here, ...
408 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a case study of the development of an innovative approach to drug policy in Vancouver, British Columbia is used to deepen our understanding of what I call "urban policy mobilities".
Abstract: There is growing attention across the social sciences to the mobility of people, products, and knowledge. This entails attempts to extend and/or rework existing understandings of global interconnections and is reflected in ongoing work on policy transfer—the process by which policy models are learned from one setting and deployed in others. This paper uses a case study of the development of an innovative approach to drug policy in Vancouver, British Columbia to deepen our understanding of what I call ‘urban policy mobilities.’ It details the often apparently mundane practices through which Vancouver's ‘four-pillar’ drug strategy—which combines prevention, treatment, enforcement, and harm reduction—was learned from cities outside North America and is now increasingly taught elsewhere. In doing so it draws on a neo-Foucauldian governmentality approach to emphasize the role of expertise (specialized knowledge held by many actors, not just credentialed professionals) and the deployment of certain powerful tru...
317 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an actor-centered analysis of recent trends in urban development in Metro Manila, based on interviews, government, private sector, and nonprofit sector documents, and newspapers, is presented.
Abstract: Prevailing perspectives on the impacts of globalization on urban form in large, globalizing cities in Asia hold that these cities are experiencing an inexorable process of ‘Westernization’ or ‘Americanization’. Yet this focus on convergence distracts us from the task of analyzing urban change and its causes, leading to analytical muddiness and awkward planning and policy implications. The author presents an alternative framework that focuses on actor-centered analysis, and the importance of understanding historical context. This framework is employed in a case study of recent trends in urban development in Metro Manila, based on interviews, government, private sector, and nonprofit sector documents, and newspapers. It is concluded that, in Metro Manila, a defining characteristic of contemporary urban development is the unprecedented privatization of urban and regional planning. Large developers have conceived of urban development plans on a metrowide scale, and begun to implement these with the assistance...
271 citations
TL;DR: The authors found that the city's dysfunctional water infrastructure has its roots within the colonial era but these incipient weaknesses have been exacerbated in recent years by rapid urban growth, authoritarian forms of political mobilization, and the dominance of middle-class interests within a denuded public realm.
Abstract: The city of Mumbai is undergoing a complex social, economic, and political transition into an increasingly fragmentary and polarized metropolitan space. The tortuous flow of water through contemporary Mumbai presents one of the most striking indicators of persistent social inequalities within the postcolonial metropolis. We find that the city's dysfunctional water infrastructure has its roots within the colonial era but these incipient weaknesses have been exacerbated in recent years by rapid urban growth, authoritarian forms of political mobilization, and the dominance of middle-class interests within a denuded public realm. It is argued that the water and sanitation crisis facing Mumbai needs to be understood in relation to the particularities of capitalist urbanization and state formation in an Indian context.
263 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse patent citations and find that, after controlling for the existing distribution of knowledge-production activities, the proportion of local citations has increased over time, which reinforces the notion that in contemporary knowledge production and innovation the role for geographical proximity is increasing.
Abstract: Much literature suggests that knowledge-production activities are still heavily dependent upon geographically proximate sources of information, in spite of rapid development in telecommunications technology. Some analysts believe that the importance of proximity in knowledge production will eventually disappear with the continued development of telecommunications. The authors analyse patent citations and find that, after controlling for the existing distribution of knowledge-production activities, the proportion of local citations has increased over time. This finding reinforces the notion that in contemporary knowledge production and innovation the role for geographical proximity is increasing.
242 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address the dichotomy around 'proximate' and 'distant' learning processes by looking specifically at the characteristics of the knowledge-creation process.
Abstract: The authors address the dichotomy around 'proximate' and 'distant' learning processes by looking specifically at the characteristics of the knowledge-creation process. By way of suggesting an alternative conceptualization to the well-known tacit-codified knowledge dichotomy, they propose a distinction between 'analytical' and 'synthetic' modes of knowledge creation. Analytical knowledge creation refers to the understanding and explaining of features of the (natural) world. Synthetic knowledge creation refers to the design or construction of something to attain functional goals. By applying this framework to qualitative empirics from the Medicon Valley life-science cluster, the authors demonstrate the complementarity of globally distributed analytical knowledge creation and locally oriented synthetic knowledge creation. (Less)
240 citations
TL;DR: In this article, interaction terms are constructed with georeferenced attribute variables and spatial filter eigenvectors, and then used to compute geographically varying regression coefficients, which are analogous to geographically weighted regression coefficients.
Abstract: Interaction terms are constructed with georeferenced attribute variables and spatial filter eigenvectors, and then used to compute geographically varying regression coefficients. These coefficients, which are analogous to geographically weighted regression (GWR) coefficients, display preferable properties, and this specification is used to critique selected features of GWR. Comparisons are illustrated with the Georgia data appearing in the standard GWR tutorial.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India and argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions.
Abstract: This paper examines an ongoing intervention in sanitation in informal settlements in Mumbai, India. The Slum Sanitation Programme (SSP) is premised upon ‘partnership’, ‘participation’, and ‘cost recovery’ in the delivery of large toilet blocks as a practical solution to the stark lack and inadequacy of sanitation, and offers an opportunity to interrogate a growing consensus on sanitation provision among mainstream development agencies. In the paper, I argue for a more flexible approach to policy infrastructure, technical infrastructure, and cost recovery in urban sanitation interventions. I also consider whether the SSP, as the largest city project of its nature in Indian history, marks a shift in the relationship between the state and the ‘slum’ in Mumbai. I suggest that, despite constituting a change from ad hoc sanitation provision to a more sustained and universal policy, informal settlements in the SSP remain populations outside the sphere of citizenship and notions of the clean, ordered modern city.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a review of recent social science work on the issue of biosecurity and suggest ways in which geographers and social scientists can approach and intervene in current bioseCurity practices.
Abstract: In this paper we review recent social science work on the issue of biosecurity and suggest ways in which geographers and social scientists can approach and intervene in current biosecurity practices. Our argument is that it is both useful and necessary to locate and intervene at sites where the ordering of biomatters is open to doubt and/or contestation. We pitch discourses of biological immanence and emergence against forms of social science thinking which tend to trace overarching logics or seemingly unstoppable forces in matters of power and politics. While acknowledging the import of both literatures, our aim is to engage with the fraught empirical practicalities of making biomatters secure in order to bring to the fore the ways in which life matters are patterned by any number of processes and the ways in which these patterns are always conditional on sociomaterial contingencies.
TL;DR: In many British cities, studentification is the process by which specific neighbourhoods become dominated by student residential occupation as discussed by the authors, which is referred to as studentification in the literature as "studentification".
Abstract: Now a recognised phenomenon in many British cities, studentification is the process by which specific neighbourhoods become dominated by student residential occupation. Outlining the causes and con...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors offer a sustained reflection on the nature of corporeal vulnerability as an inherent and non-eliminable aspect of human existence, and suggest that thinking through this aspect of the human body could have a considerable effect on how we think about embodiment as well as on wider processes of subjectification, signification, and sociality.
Abstract: This paper offers a sustained reflection on the nature of corporeal vulnerability as an inherent and noneliminable aspect of corporeal existence. One of the many remarkable things about the recent interest in embodiment, emotion, practice, and performance, in the body-in-action, in the social sciences is the general lack of thought that has been given to the fact of vulnerability. The paper suggests that thinking through the nature of vulnerability could have a considerable effect on how we think about embodiment as well as on wider processes of subjectification, signification, and sociality. However, because of the persistence of a primary role being given to intentional or auto-affective action in the theorisation of embodiment across a number of theoretical perspectives, vulnerability remains largely unthought of within much current work on the body within Anglo-American social science. Drawing on the writing of Emmanuel Levinas and reflecting on experiences of corporeal expropriation such as insomnia ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the various and often complex configurations of comfort as a desirable corporeal sensibility and consider what corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility can do to theorisations of the sedentary body.
Abstract: Whilst to be comfortable is often equated with conservatism and complacency, this paper considers the various and often complex configurations of comfort as a desirable corporeal sensibility. Subsequently, this paper considers what corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility is and can do to theorisations of the sedentary body. The sensibility of corporeal comfort induced through the relationality between bodies and proximate objects is explored to trace through some of the affectual circulations that flow through the sedentary body. With this in mind, forms of subjectivity engendered through the fragility of comfort are at once both active and performed, and folded through the inactive susceptibilities that are beyond activity. Drawing on such an immanent materialism enables us to take more seriously these susceptibilities of the sedentary body and the new moments and spatialities that emerge.
TL;DR: In this article, a multilevel logistic regression model with cross-level interaction effects between individual and neighbourhood characteristics was used to estimate whether or not people wish to leave their neighbourhood.
Abstract: Little attention has been paid to date to the role of the neighbourhood as a factor influencing residential mobility and the residential choice process. The question addressed here is to what extent neighbourhood characteristics (percentage of rented dwellings, low-income households, and ethnic minorities in the neighbourhood) influence different categories of residents to wish to leave their neighbourhood. The answer to this question can enhance our understanding of residential mobility and of the mechanisms causing segregation by income and ethnic groups. We use data from the 2002 Netherlands Housing Demand Survey, enriched with neighbourhood characteristics. Whether or not people wish to leave their neighbourhood is estimated using a multilevel logistic regression model with cross-level interaction effects between individual and neighbourhood characteristics. The main result shows that, with an increasing percentage of people from an ethnic minority in the neighbourhood, more people have the wish to le...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the changing character of housing assets, owned homes, and perhaps owner-occupiers themselves, drawing from two studies of UK homebuyers, whose lives are entangled in the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money.
Abstract: This paper is about the changing character of housing assets, owned homes, and perhaps owner-occupiers themselves. It draws from two studies of UK homebuyers, whose lives are entangled in the materiality of housing, the meaning of home, and the mobilisation of money. This melange is facilitated by a new generation of financial services that render housing wealth interchangeable with the cash economy, turning owned homes into a hybrid of money and materials. In total 150 qualitative narratives are interrogated to document three key trends. First, a shift of households' disposition, from opting for ownership by chance to banking on housing by design. Second, a change of financial orientation as property-holding citizens illapse into asset-accumulating investors. Third, an ethically charged encounter between the governance of housing and the micropolitics of home, which is prompted by the growing tangibility of housing wealth as it inspires new styles of, and imperatives for, consumption.
TL;DR: There is a growing body of literature looking at the interplay between an individual's residential and other careers in the life course as mentioned in this paper and previous research has mostly studied the impact of partnersh...
Abstract: There is a growing body of literature looking at the interplay between an individual's residential and other careers in the life course. Previous research has mostly studied the impact of partnersh...
TL;DR: This paper investigated the relationship between decentralization and regional disparities in a set of European Union countries and found that the devolution of fiscal power to subnational governments is negatively correlated with the level of regional inequality within the sample countries.
Abstract: This paper investigates for the first time the relationship between fiscal decentralization and regional disparities in a set of European Union countries. Our findings reveal that the devolution of fiscal power to subnational governments is negatively correlated with the level of regional inequality within the sample countries. Therefore, the processes of fiscal decentralization may contribute to a more balanced distribution of resources across space, making up for the central government's loss of redistributive power. In fact, this result is robust to the inclusion of additional explanatory variables in the analysis, and to the choice of the measure used to quantify the degree of dispersion in the spatial distribution of per capita income.
TL;DR: The concept of heterotopia was introduced and immediately abandoned by Michel Foucault in 1966-67, but it quickly diffused across human geography, urban theory, and cultural studies during the 1990s as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: The concept of heterotopia was introduced and immediately abandoned by Michel Foucault in 1966 – 67, but it quickly diffused across human geography, urban theory, and cultural studies during the 1990s. Notwithstanding the deserved impact of Foucault’s overall work on these fields, there are some conceptual problems with the heterotopia concept. While the desire for a single term to probe spatial difference is understandable, the author takes issue with the kind of space envisioned in heterotopology. From a close reading of Foucault’s notes, and with the help of Deleuze, Derrida, and Althusser, it is suggested that the spatiality of Foucault’s heterotopology repeats certain flaws of the structuralism in vogue in 1960s France. In order for heterotopias to be ‘absolutely different’ from ‘all the rest’ of space, Foucault needs to posit a totality to society and to perform a ‘slice of time’. The author ends by briefly examining how the structuralist tendency of heterotopology has pervaded some recent Anglophone adoptions of Foucault. As both geography and postcolonial theory have shown, slicing time often conceals particularist suppositions and is therefore inadequate to account for the multiplicity and unevenness of geographical change.
TL;DR: The authors examined the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks, focusing on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions.
Abstract: The paper examines the ways in which citizens negotiate responsibility in relation to various environmental and technological risks. It focuses on the role of agency and the way that this figures in constructions of relations of responsibility between individuals and institutions. A central argument is that, across the different issue contexts, patterns of perceived agency are crucial to understanding the apparent contradiction in citizens’ attributions of role-responsibilities for the management of risk. The empirical basis of the paper is a series of twelve reconvened focus groups conducted at locations around England, giving a total of twenty-four meetings, in which citizens discussed six different areas of technological risk: genetically modified (GM) crops, genetic testing, mobile-phone handsets; mobile-phone masts; radioactive waste; and climate change. The authors highlight the problem of citizen ambivalence towards responsibility, tracing it to perceived tensions affecting both citizen and state performances of responsibility, and conclude by discussing the implications for policy and by outlining an agenda for further research.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe and explain the research design that supported a real-world application of the Delphi technique in an urban, regional, and ecosystem-based planning context, as well as demonstrate how this model has been or can be adapted to serve a variety of planning research or application tasks.
Abstract: Worldwide, metropolitan areas continue to be confronted by a growing number of increasingly difficult planning issues. It is our experience that planning practitioners have not taken full advantage of what the Delphi technique can contribute to making informed choices in a wide variety of decision and policy environments. The objectives of this paper are to describe and explain the research design that supported a real-world application of the Delphi technique in an urban, regional, and ecosystem-based planning context, as well as to demonstrate how this model has been or can be adapted to serve a variety of planning research or application tasks.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on how house prices vary systematically with respect to some general spatial structure characteristics in a Norwegian region, and suggest a distinction between an urban-attraction effect and a labor-market accessibility effect.
Abstract: Through a hedonic approach the authors focus primarily on how house prices vary systematically with respect to some general spatial structure characteristics in a Norwegian region. The introduction of a gravity-based labor-market accessibility measure contributes significantly to explain variation in housing prices, and is used in a model formulation where the distance from the city center is accounted for. Based on these results we suggest a distinction between an urban-attraction effect and a labor-market accessibility effect. Quantitatively, the two distinct effects are found to contribute about equally to intraregional variation in housing prices.
TL;DR: A study done for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change that takes a broader look at the potential role of a climate-friendly built environment including not only considerations of how buildings are constructed and used, but also how they interface with the electric grid and where they are located in terms of urban densities and access to employment and services.
Abstract: Energy-efficient buildings are seen by climate change experts as one of the least-cost approaches to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This paper summarizes a study done for the Pew Center on Global Climate Change that takes a broader look at the potential role of a climate-friendly built environment including not only considerations of how buildings are constructed and used, but also how they interface with the electric grid and where they are located in terms of urban densities and access to employment and services. In addition to summarizing mechanisms of change (barriers and drivers), the paper reviews a set of policies that could bring carbon emissions in the building sector in 2025 back almost to 2004 levels. By mid-century, the combination of green buildings and smart growth could deliver the deeper reductions that many believe are needed to mitigate climate change.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors describe how the residential mobility of couples is affected by family events and how fertility is influenced by residential mobility, and show that residential moves are particularly likely to happen in a short period preceding a wedding or during pregnancy.
Abstract: Using data from retrospective surveys carried out in the Netherlands during the early 1990s, we describe how the residential mobility of couples—that is, short-distance moves—is affected by family events and how fertility is affected by residential mobility. The results show that residential moves are particularly likely to happen in a short period preceding a wedding or during pregnancy, supporting the hypothesis that residential mobility is likely to occur in anticipation of family changes. Anticipation is also suggested by the fact that the likelihood of having a child is greater after a residential move, but only starting from some months after the move. Family events also have a hampering effect on residential moves. Starting from some months after the wedding, being married is associated with a lower propensity of experiencing a short-distance move, while the presence of children is associated with less residential mobility only when children are school-aged.
TL;DR: In this article, a mapping of the general nature and character of this emerging epistemic community provides the context within which to analyse how it has evolved and has begun to influence policy processes in the area of radioactive waste.
Abstract: Amid increasing interest in participatory forms of environmental appraisal and decision making, the actors shaping these new governance spaces remain understudied. This paper seeks to refocus accounts of public engagement in science onto these participatory appraisal experts, or ‘experts of community’, through drawing on in-depth empirical research that followed them through networks building up around participatory appraisal practice in the UK environmental-risk domain. A mapping of the general nature and character of this emerging epistemic community provides the context within which to analyse how it has evolved and has begun to influence policy processes in the area of radioactive waste. Prospects for studying networks of public engagement experts at the science – policy interface and wider implications for deliberative democracy under uncertainty are explored.
TL;DR: The authors adopts a perspective which views all cities as unique combinations of social, political, and economic configurations, and which sees cities as 'ordinary' and resists attempts to de-urbanize them.
Abstract: This paper adopts a perspective which views all cities as unique combinations of social, political, and economic configurations-which sees all cities as ‘ordinary’, and which resists attempts to de...
TL;DR: The authors examines the relationship between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research, concluding with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.
Abstract: Despite the rise of relational and antiessentialist approaches to regional theory, many accounts of regionality continue to work with territorial conceptions of regions as bounded wholes or totalities. The author suggests that this tendency can be explained in part by the continuing effect of cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism on dominant understandings of regionality. The paper examines the relationships between regional theory, different forms of totality and the cartographic impulse, and discusses possible reasons for the Eurocentric cast of some regional research. It concludes with a consideration of how regional theory might respond to cartographic anxiety and Eurocentrism.
TL;DR: This article developed multiple measures of the spatial context in which immigrants reside and assessed their contribution to the average earnings of immigrant individuals in the three large Swedish metropolitan areas, controlling for individual and regional labour-market characteristics.
Abstract: Differences in immigrant economic trajectories have been attributed to a wide variety of factors. One of these is the local spatial context where immigrants reside. This spatial context assumes special salience in light of expanding public exposure to and scholarly interest in the potential impacts of spatial concentrations of immigrants. A crucial question is whether immigrants' opportunities are influenced by their neighbours. In this paper we contribute statistical evidence relevant to answering this vital question. We develop multiple measures of the spatial context in which immigrants reside and assess their contribution to the average earnings of immigrant individuals in the three large Swedish metropolitan areas, controlling for individual and regional labour-market characteristics. We use unusually rich longitudinal information about Swedish immigrants during the 1995–2002 period. We find evidence that immigrant men and women paid a substantial penalty during 1999–2002 if in 1999 they resided in a...