Global Restructuring,the Welfare State and Urban Programmes: Federal Policies and Inequality within Australian Cities

This paper is a prelude to a theme issue in 2003 on Australasian city and regional problems and policies. It considers the impact of economic restructuring on the level of inequality and disadvantage within Australian cities. Evidence is presented that Australian cities have become more unequal over the past two decades and this greater level of inequality has found concrete expression within the built environment. These patterns of inequality are distinct to Australia. It is argued that the Australian Government's reliance on tightly targeted income support policies and market-based solutions to economic disadvantage has contributed greatly to the concentration of low income and vulnerable households within certain sections of Australian cities.     

Gender and Household Economic Strategies in Rural Appalachia

In recent decades, many Appalachian households have experienced declining incomes due to the loss of traditional male jobs in the mining and manufacturing sectors. One response to this decline has been an increase in female employment in formal sector activities. Another response is homework, or the home-based production of goods and services for sale in the formal and informal sectors. In rural Appalachia, where formal jobs are often unavailable or inadequate to support a household, many women are engaging in homework as an economic strategy. Consequently, economic restructuring cannot be fully understood without analyzing household strategies and gender relations. This paper examines the intersection of gender, households, and economic restructuring as it relates to women's homework and employment shifts in rural Appalachia. Research for this paper entailed qualitative interviews with 50 West Virginia women who are engaged in the home-based production of goods and services. The study analyzes the variety of homework activities done by rural women, their contribution to household incomes, and the effect of these activities on gender relations and divisions of labor in the home. The research forwarded in this study advances a conceptual understanding of household economic strategies and has some practical applications for women and economic development in underdeveloped regions .     

ARE IMMIGRANTS MORE MOBILE THAN NATIVES? EVIDENCE FROM GERMANY

Low rates of internal migration in many European countries contribute to the persistence of significant regional labor market differences. I use the Mikrozensus, a large annual sample of households living in Germany, to further our understanding of the underlying reasons. This paper makes two main contributions: first, the paper quantifies the disutility of migrating. To this end, I estimate conditional logit models of the migration decision across the German federal states. Second, I then focus on the differences between immigrants and natives. I find significantly higher responsiveness to labor market differentials in the immigrant population than in the native population. Unobserved moving costs for immigrants are estimated to be only about 31 percent of this same cost for natives. The findings bear on the assessment of the economic impact of immigration, and the paper contributes to the current immigration‐related policy debates that feature prominently in many European countries, and that likely will continue to be important in light of the ongoing EU expansion and the resulting east–west migration.     

Gentrification Interrupted in Salford,UK: From New Deal to “Limbo‐Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low‐income residents’ experiences of contemporary state‐led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state‐led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.     

Restructuring in the forest sector and the re‐shaping of women's work identities

This article explores how women forest workers’ perceptions of restructuring are related to their work identities. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 29 women working in subsidiaries of a multinational forest company in northern Saskatchewan, I describe how women workers selectively drew on traditional mill worker and flexible worker identities to legitimize and delegitimize restructuring. Women's understandings of themselves as workers were shaped by their paradoxical relationships to standard forest processing work. Some women with previous experience working in low‐waged service industries adopted worker subjectivities that legitimized restructuring and valued flexibility, individual empowerment, and mobility. Other women delegitimized restructuring, referencing traditional characterizations of forest work that valued community stability, collective resistance, and security. Many women, however, neither consistently legitimized nor delegitimized restructuring throughout their interviews. This last group's ambiguous portrayal of work and restructuring demonstrates the identity dilemmas faced by new entrants to declining industrial sectors. Restructuring interrupted women's narratives of having found a “good job” in forestry and prompted the renegotiation of their understandings of mill work. This article contributes to our understanding of restructuring in resource industries by drawing attention to how worker identities, gender, and industrial change are interrelated.     

Material Messages: A Reassessment of the Double Portrait of Mary Tudor and Charles Brandon

The double portrait of Mary Tudor, sister of King Henry VIII of England, and Charles Brandon, Duke of Suffolk, has traditionally been dated to 1515. This attribution has led the portrait to be widely regarded as the earliest depiction of the style of headdress known as a French hood being worn by a member of the English court. However, the date of 1515 does not take into account the circumstances surrounding the marriage of the two sitters, circumstances that would have prevented the portrait from being commissioned at this time. It also ignores features of the sitters’ attire, which display elements of later 1530s fashions. Using both documentary and pictorial evidence, this paper will seek to propose a later creation date of 1532, establish a different reading of the portrait and reassess our understanding of the French hood at the English court in the early sixteenth century.     

Planning and the National Assembly for Wales: Generating Distinctiveness and Inclusiveness in a New Political Context

The creation of the National Assembly for Wales in May 1999 was part of a series of constitutional reforms in the UK initiated by the Labour Government after 1997. The Assembly, that has been awarded policy-making powers only, is still in its infancy, and any assessment of the perceived success of the new forum would be premature. Nevertheless, there are signs emerging that could give rise to the view that the Assembly will carve out a degree of distinctiveness in its approach to governance and substantive policy areas compared to that operating in England generally, and to the land use planning system in particular. This review paper charts the birth of the National Assembly for Wales, outlines its responsibilities and functions in relation to planning, and assesses what has happened 'on the ground' in its first 18 months. Overall, the paper portrays politicians and officials in the new governance framework searching for distinctiveness, inclusiveness and policy ownership; the task is to offer something different compared both to the system existing previously and to the on-going processes of institutional restructuring underway in other parts of the UK. It situates planning within the crucible of decentralization and devolution, since planning has been awarded a central facilitating role within the governance and restructuring process as part of the Welsh Cabinet's determination to deliver sustainable development in the twenty-first century.     

基于制度转型的中国城市空间结构研究初探

1990年代以来全球范围内的众多国家发生了重大制度转型,以中国为代表的社会主义国家转型引起了国际学者的广泛关注。城市空间结构是城市社会、经济发展的空间投影,对其理解也必然要从制度转型的深刻层面去加以认识。文章系统回顾了西方城市空间结构研究经历的城市形态研究、实证主义方法、政治经济学分析等过程,揭示出其基本走向是转向对深层制度性因素的关注。继而文章着重分析了中国制度转型的三个根本方面,并概要性地阐释了其对城市空间的影响,最后列举了相应的一些重要研究领域和基本方向。     

Spatial-temporal trends in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) offices in Ontario,Canada

This paper assesses complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) from a spatial-temporal perspective; it would be of particular interest to those who evaluate health care resource accessibility over space. The analysis compares CAM supply (number of offices, employment, and sales) in Ontario by provincial district, metropolitan influence classification, and health care and social assistance employment quintiles using summary statistics, Kruskal-Wallis and median analyses, and local spatial autocorrelation evaluation. Metropolitan areas throughout Ontario, but especially in the southcentral part of the province, are well endowed with CAM supply and tend to be most important in terms of CAM change. CAM offices are increasing in size in the most populated parts of the province and shrinking in regions that are more peripheral. CAM supply per capita is highest in census subdivisions with moderate levels of health care and social assistance employment, a result that is not offset by significant temporal change. While CAM supply is restructuring in many of Ontario's most populated urban locations, the overall attraction of CAM resources to large and small metropolitan areas is clear. If current spatial-temporal trends continue, CAM spatial disparities will be exacerbated as accessibility to CAM in Ontario's most peripheral locations worsen.     

Feigning the market: Funding anthropology in England (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Impending changes to the funding of tertiary education in England (and, less directly, throughout the United Kingdom) pose particular challenges to small disciplines, like anthropology. From the perspective of students, potentially facing thirty years repaying educational debt, the new dispensation looks like ‘marketization’, with degrees conceived as private goods to be paid for at a rate that covers the costs of their provision. From the perspective of the universities, however, the same changes come with new layers of obligation, audit, assessment and regulation. The mismatch between students’ expectations and universities’ capacities is only likely to widen. These changes in undergraduate funding will take place concurrently with a reduction in all the other streams of government funding on which anthropology departments rely for the research of their staff and research students. Career paths in anthropology, involving progression through undergraduate and taught postgraduate studies, to postgraduate research and eventually a position in the academy, will become prohibitively expensive for all but a very few students. Departments of anthropology will be forced (by the logic of the new system and by their own universities) into exploiting their sources of comparative advantage; but the UK discipline as a whole will be the likely casualty of such behaviour if an already slender institutional presence is eroded further.     

The Politics of Spatial Policy and Governance in Post-1990 Hungary: The Interplay Between European and National Discourses of Space

There is now a wealth of literature discussing how regional development and spatial planning practices in Central Eastern Europe have been shaped through the alignment with EU policy frameworks. However, scholars have tended to study governance dynamics in terms of adaptation and learning, paying thus little attention to how spatial policy change is inherently interlinked with the political contestation of nation-state spaces. This paper proposes to address this lack by combining insights from political economic work on state spatial restructuring and discourse theory. From this perspective, the institutionalization of spatial policies is examined as a political process in which particular understandings of space become seen legitimate and stabilized depending on how well they fit existing discourses. The paper demonstrates the added value of this approach through a case study of spatial policy change in post-1990 Hungary, and argues that the approach is more generally applicable to examine shifts in spatial policies and to address concerns with the increase in uneven development at different scales.     

Capital,Labour and State Relations in the Analysis of Enterprises and Restructuring: An Australasian Debate

The paper arises out of the debate of a group of Australian and New Zealand geographers who attended a workshop in ‘Enterprises and Restructuring’ held in Canberra in September 1988. The paper outlines a framework for a political economy analysis of processes at the heart of economic restructuring and examines the units of analysis, concepts and approaches used by geographers bringing different philosophic positions to the investigation of economic restructuring. It explores how the three threads of production, accumulation and social relations are intertwined in the study of enterprise and restructuring and how an understanding of these dimensions provides a basis for reinterpreting the utility of many analytical categories. The discussion of the meaning, relevance and content of terms such as enterprise, industry, capital and the state confirms the validity and value of concepts derived from different theoretical positions and goes some way towards demonstrating that researchers from opposing positions can meaningfully communicate and cooperate.     

The SEM and uneven development: Automotive production and the ‘older’ peripheral regions of the UK

This paper examines the impact of the creation of the Single European Market (SEM) by exploring the restructuring of the automotive production sector in Europe and its effect upon the older industrial regions of the UK. The paper is divided into four sections. Firstly, the importance of automotive production as a key sector in understanding the true impact of restructuring for the SEM is outlined. Secondly, the directions and outcomes of restructuring in the sector are detailed. Thirdly, the specific impact of these changes on automotive production and the older peripheral regions of the UK is considered. Finally, some conclusions and future directions for policy are discussed in relation to the true shape and form of ‘the new Europe’. The paper argues that the SEM will reinforce and deepen the pervasive and divergent effects of industrial restructuring within its boundaries due to economic relations from without.     

The Crisis of the 1980s in Sub-Saharan Africa,Latin America and the Caribbean: Economic Impact,Social Change and Political Implications

The purpose of this paper, prepared as a background document for the UNRISD/University of the West Indies conference on Economic Crisis and Third World Countries, is to provide a framework for consideration of societal changes accompanying economic recession and restructuring in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean over the past decade. It is the central argument of the paper that adaptation to crisis should not be considered a temporary phenomenon, interrupting a single, lineal process of modernization which can be expected to resume its course once current difficulties are overcome. On the contrary, both crisis and adjustment have profoundly modified the structure of incentives within which individuals and households must attempt to ensure their livelihood, encouraging new patterns of behaviour with long-term implications for the nature of the economy, society and political practice. After a brief review of the macroeconomic background of crisis in each region, this central hypothesis is explored through a very preliminary analysis of the changing life chances of various kinds of upper, middle and lower income groups — emphasizing not only the costs but also the opportunities which have been associated with economic restructuring. Some individual and collective reactions to change are then considered, before raising a series of questions concerning the implications of crisis and adjustment for the state and civil society.     

ECONOMIC FUNDAMENTALS AND URBAN–SUBURBAN DISPARITIES

ABSTRACT This paper develops a spatially explicit model to examine how urban and suburban communities evolve differently with changes in local economic fundamentals such as rising income or falling commuting costs in the metropolitan area. The model highlights the importance of environmental amenities and the economy of scale in the provision of public services as determinants of urban spatial structure. Results suggest that urban sprawl, income segregation, and jurisdictional disparities are driven by the same economic conditions and thus tend to co‐exist. Rising incomes or falling commuting costs for high‐income households in a metropolitan area tend to increase land prices and public services in every community, while rising incomes or falling commuting costs for low‐income households can have the opposite effects.     

Restructuring of Sydney's Central Industrial Area: Process and Local Impacts

Since World War II Sydneys central industrial area has lost more than 80 per cent of its manufacturing workforce and no longer the dominant centre of manufacturing in Sydney, is now just one of a number of important centres. Unlike inner cities of the United Kingdom and United States, de-industrialisation in Sydney's central city has not caused a trapped population of displaced workers The first aim of this paper is to outline the restructuring of the central industrial area Two major periods of restructuring can be distinguished Up to the early I9 70s change in the industrial area was driven by intra- metropolitan forces. Since then international forces, and related major infrastructure developments, have substantially accelerated job bss. The second aim is to document the impacts which restructuring has had on the inner city workforce Jobs lost up to the early 1970s did not disadvantage inner city workers because employers as well as workers were moving to the suburbs Since then inner city workers in traditional blue collar occupations have been more strongly affected by de-industrialisation than the city as whole but the numbers involved have been too small to have been of much political interest Social problems in the inner city resulting from restructuring in the industrial area have been masked by strong gentrification.     

Father and Ford revisited: gender, class and employment change in the new millennium

In the last decade in Britain the combination of women's continued entry into the labour market and the restructuring of welfare provision has exacerbated the growing demands on individuals and households in their allocation of time between productive and reproductive labour and the contradictions between the two spheres, as well as time and income inequalities between the rich and the poor. Since the election of the new Labour government in 1997, the concept of work/life balance, as well as a range of other policies to address these divisions have been introduced. This paper addresses the nature of the changes in the last decade, through the perspective of gender and class divisions and critically assesses key debates about the changing nature of working life as well as current policy provisions to support the increasing individualization of employment.     

Imagining Britain: reconstructing history and writing national identity in Englands Heroicall Epistles

ABSTRACT

The idea that in the Tudor era the English people became proudly conscious of their national language and history, has been challenged by critical interventions that suggest how England as a nation had to be “written”: the act of writing can construct imagined boundaries, both to appropriate and exclude. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton replaces Ovid’s mythological figures in the Heroides with specific well-known English historical personas who provide, through their letters, different perspectives on English history. I will contend that Drayton’s assertion of national identity and patriotism is done verbally and semantically, while his allegiance to oppositionist politics is rendered generically and subversively by a remarkable manipulation of the genre of historical poetry in the Heroicall Epistles: this in turn reflects his deep engagement with ideas of history and the construction of national consciousness in early modern England.     

Regional Deindustrialization and Re-bundling: Evidence from the Merger of the Former German Hoechst and French Rhône-Poulenc Groups

large part of the work in economic geography and other social sciences has focused on new growth prospects due to the establishment of global production chains and the rise of new clusters of industrial activity. Much less attention has been paid to former growth industries and regions that have recently experienced shrinking processes due to internationalization. This paper will explore the cases of two chemical regions, i.e. southern Hessen, Germany and Rhône-Alpes, France. These two areas have both undergone drastic restructuring since the mid-1990s, due to the merger of the prominent chemical groups Hoechst and Rhône-Poulenc into Aventis. Instead of investigating the development of the core activities at Aventis, we will focus on the operations that were considered less important and consequently split off. In addition to the negative consequences produced by these activities, in our analysis we also emphasize regional opportunities which arise from competence building, reorientation and new firm formation. These processes can be viewed as re-bundling existing and new knowledge bases with other resources to help overcome economic crises and develop a new competitive edge. As such, the paper aims to contribute to a relational understanding of economic globalization and regional restructuring.