The Aggregation Problem in Location-Allocation

Location-allocation solutions based on aggregate estimates of demand are subject to error because of a loss of locational information during aggregation. It is shown that any method to remove or reduce uncertainty must be solution-specific and therefore impractical, for both median and center classes of problems. The significance of the error is illustrated by simulation of solutions to a number of artificial and real problems. It is suggested that aggregation problems be specifically addressed in applications of location-allocation models, and possible methods are proposed.     

The Zone Definition Problem in Location-Allocation Modeling

Location-allocation modeling is a frequently used set of techniques for solving a variety of locational problems, some of which can be politically sensitive. The typical application of a location-allocation model involves locating facilities by selecting a set of sites from a larger set of candidate sites, with the selection procedure being a function of “optimality” in terms of the allocation of demand to the selected sites. In this paper we examine the sensitivity of one particular type of location-allocation model, the p-median procedure, to the definition of spatial units for which demand is measured. We show that a p-median solution is optimal only for a particular definition of spatial units and that variations in the definition of spatial units can cause large deviations in optimal facility locations. The broad implication of these findings is that the outcome of any location-allocation procedure using aggregate data should not be relied upon for planning purposes. This has important implications for a large variety of applications.     

Spatial Choice in Location-Allocation Problems: The Role of Endogenous Attraction

Spatial choice, a voluntary form of allocation of consumers to central services, is usually conceived as affected by two factors, distance and attraction. Although usually regarded as exogenous, attraction is in turn affected by the level of use a service receives, and thus by spatial choice. This paper explores the system defined by these relationships, largely by simulation. Proposals are made concerning the initiation and perturbation of the system, and attempts are made to generalize the results. Although it is difficult to connect form with process in such a system, it is possible to identify the factors responsible for system stability.     

Multiscale Continuous and Discrete Spatial Heterogeneity Analysis: The Development of a Local Model Combining Eigenvector Spatial Filters and Generalized Lasso Penalties

Two types of spatial heterogeneity can exist simultaneously: continuous variations across an entire space and significant changes that occur only in specific spatial units. Moreover, each of these can act across multiple spatial scales. To effectively detect both continuous and discrete spatial heterogeneity across different scales, this study proposes a novel approach that combines the random effects eigenvector spatially filtering-based spatially varying coefficient (RE-ESF-SVC) model and the generalized lasso (GL) technique. Additionally, a restricted maximum likelihood estimation (REML)-based two-step iterative algorithm is developed for parameter estimation. Simulation experiments and an empirical application using rental price data confirm the ability of the proposed model to identify multiscale continuous and discrete spatial heterogeneity.     

Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes: The Liberal Democrats in Bath

From the 1950s onwards, David Butler and a number of co-authors of the Nuffield studies of British General Elections stressed the perceived futility of local campaigns, dismissing them as ritual, irrelevant exercises. During the 1990s, a new orthodoxy emerged. Using their own surrogate measure of campaigning, three groups of scholars found that the more intense a party's campaign in a constituency, relative to its opponents', the better its performance there. The significance of campaigning appears to vary across the country's three main political parties; however, it seems to be particularly important to the success of the Liberal Democrats. These findings are entirely consistent with arguments regarding the role and efficacy of local campaigning, but there remains a need for more direct evidence. If the traditionalists are correct, then local campaigning will have no impact on either turnout or the electoral performance of the party involved. If the ‘revisionists’ are correct, then where a party campaigns intensively it should be better able to identify and mobilise its core supporters, ensure that they turn out to vote, and thus improve its performance relative to its opponents. To evaluate these two arguments require data on where and how a party campaigns intensively, at local scales which can then be linked to electoral turnout data for those small areas. Such an evaluation is reported in this paper, using a case study of one ward in the City of Bath at the 1999 local government elections there.     

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity

This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. A more thoughtful and nuanced use of performativity would allow geographers to map how concrete subjects (individual or collective) do identity in relation to various discursive processes (e.g. those that constitute race, class, sexuality and gender), to other subjects, and to layers of institutions and practices.     

The Spatial Search Problem: Structure and Complexity

The paper discusses structure and complexity of the spatial search problem. From a set of assumptions it derives a rather general version of the spatial search problem and investigates some of its fundamental properties. Most importantly, the paper shows that the decision problem corresponding to the spatial search problem in this general version is NP-complete.     

The Problem of Diffusion: Rejoinders

MYTH AND RELIGION OF THE NORTH, The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. By E. O. G. TURVILLE-PETRE. Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964. Pp. 340.50s. net. Reviewed by E. O. James.

HERBERT JENNINGS ROSE, 1883–1961. By W. L. LORIMER, Oxford University Press. 3s. net. Reviewed by E. O. James.

THE CULT OF THE CAT. By PATRICIA DALE-GREEN. London, William Heinemann. Pp. 189; 39 plates. Price 30s. Reviewed by Theo Brown.

DIE SAGEN DER MONATHLICHEN UNTERREDUNGEN OTTO VON GRABENS ZUM STEIN. Edited by W. E. PEUCKERT. Corpus Fabulorum I. Berlin, W. de Gruyter &; Co., 1961. Pp. xix, 327. Reviewed by E. Ettlinger.

GÖTTER UND GÖTTERTIERE DER MAYA. By WOLFGANG CORDAN. Bern, Francke Verlag, 1963. Pp. 75; 50 text figs. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

THE REGIONAL VOCABULARY OF TEXAS. By E. Bagby Atwood. University of Texas Press, 1962. Pp. 273, xiii. $5.75. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

LAPP LIFE AND CUSTOMS. By ØRNULF VORREN and ERNST MANKER, (translated by Kathleen McFarlane). London, 1962. Pp. 183.38s. Reviewed by W. R. Mead.

FOLK TALES FROM RAJASTHAN. Retold by L. N. BIRLA. Illustrated by PHANI BHUSHAN. London, Asia Publishing House, 1964. Pp. 60. 20s. Reviewed by L. P. Elwell-Sutton.

DRAMA AND IMAGERY IN ENGLISH MEDIEVAL CHURCHES. By M. D. ANDERSON. C.U.P., 1963. Pp. 248. 45s. Reviewed by Alex Helm.

BRETON FOLK DANCES. By JEAN-MICHAEL GUILCHER. Paris, School of Higher Studies, Sorbonne. Reviewed by Douglas Kennedy.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE SIOUX NATION. By ROBERT M. UTLEY. Yale University Press, 1961. Pp. 314; 24 plates. 56s. net. Reviewed by C. A. Burland.

STUDIES IN JAPANESE FOLKLORE. By RICHARD M. DORSON. Indiana University Press, 1963. Pp. 247. Reviewed by W. H. Hudspeth.

THE MEDIEVAL HISTORY OF THE COAST OF TANGANYIKA. By G. S. P. FREEMAN-GRENVILLE. Oxford University Press. Pp. 238; maps, plates. 50s. Reviewed by W. H. Whiteley.

DIE VOLKSERZÄHLUNG. By LEOPOLD SCHMIDT. Berlin, Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1963. Pp. 448; 4 maps. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

DEUTSCHES JAHRBUCH FÜR VOLKSKUNDE. Vol. ix. Berlin, Akademie Verlag, 1963. Pp. 468; Pls. 8, xvi; 9 text figs. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

BRÜDER GRIMM GEDENKEN 1963. Gedenkschrift zur hundertsten Wiederkehr des Todestages von Jacob Grimm. Marburg, N. G. Elwert Verlag, 1963. Pp. ix, 610; 16 plates. Reviewed by Ellen Ettlinger.

SONGS OF THE CIVIL WAR. Compiled and edited by IRWIN SILBER, Piano and Guitar Accompaniment by Garry Silverman. Columbia University Press, 1960; Oxford University Press, 1961. Reviewed by K. M. Briggs.     

Coordinated Credit Spaces: The Globalization of Chinese Development Finance

This article examines the emergence of Chinese development finance on the global stage and evaluates the extent to which it differs from, complements and/or competes with the Western‐backed development finance institutions. Whereas the new, China‐backed multilaterals are closer to the Western model, especially the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, this analysis finds that China's national development finance is significantly distinct along three parameters — the scale and business model of Chinese finance relative to its Western counterparts, the composition and approach of China's lending portfolio, and the governance of China's development finance institutions. These differences can be seen as complements to the Western‐backed system, given that much of Chinese development finance has flowed into countries and sectors in which Western development finance institutions have ventured to a lesser extent. However, the globalization of Chinese development finance, patterned on the international diffusion of what is coined in this article as the ‘coordinated credit space model’, contrasts with Western development finance, governance and business models, and has triggered a competitive stance from Western actors. Either contestation or convergence are possible trajectories for the future, and the outcome will be determined by whichever can produce conditions akin to the ‘politics of productivity’.     

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east England

Abstract:  In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.     

Spaces of Resistance,Spaces of Respite: Franchise housekeepers keeping house in the workplace and at home

As a contribution to a growing geography of domestic labour, I offer this micro-scale study as a glimpse into the lives of franchise housekeepers. This study sheds light on the ways women cope with their labour both in the workplace and at home. Scrutiny of the women's ordinary actions and reactions to their labour demonstrate how they devise coping strategies through mundane, common, everyday acts and forge spaces of resistance and respite. I discuss these strategies and spaces by drawing on in-depth interviews with 14 women employed in housekeeping services franchises.     

The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco

Abstract:  Recently a "mobility turn" has entered critical geographic discourse. This mobility turn recognizes that mobility is at once physical movement and contains social meanings that are manifested in a politics of mobility. In this paper I contribute to this emerging line of inquiry by exploring how the politics of mobility is manifested in localized urban processes. Mobility, as with the broader localized urban process, is political and ideological, and this is particularly true with contemporary debates about automobiles and parking in cities. I explore parking as an example of the broader contestation of urban space, using a case study of San Francisco, California. There are three broad factions in San Francisco's parking debates—progressives that advocate for less parking, neoliberals that advocate that market-based pricing determine the amount of parking, and neoconservatives that advocate for more parking. Throughout the paper, I provide thoughts on the relationship between parking, space, ideology, and the broader urban process.