The spatiality of trust in EU external cross-border cooperation

This paper argues that effective cross-border cooperation (CBC) networks closely interrelate with the building of ‘trust’ between actors. The aim is to contribute to the CBC literature by investigating the different forms of trust, their spatial attributes and impact on actor relations in the context of the Finnish–Russian European Neighbourhood Instrument (ENI) of CBC. The paper applies a specific spatial approach by identifying the territorial and relational aspects of four different forms of trust: rational-personal decisions, social-cultural understanding, general-personal interactions and the historical–institutional environment. The analysis, based on policy documents and semi-structured interviews with relevant Finnish ENI CBC actors, shows that the study of transnational cooperation networks benefits from a conceptualization of trust recognizing its spatial characteristics. The study concludes that sub-national actors are key agents in the formation and maintenance of trust. These actors negotiate with socio-cultural differences through the development of personal relationships which increase social capital in the actor–network. However, the cooperation network is vulnerable towards geopolitical circumstances affecting foreign relations. The paper demonstrates that Finnish ENI CBC actors are operating in a transnational network in which their activities are challenged by territorial constraints such as national border-crossing regulations.     

Territorial Capital: Theory,Empirics and Critical Remarks

Territorial capital has gained considerable attention in the past few years. The aim with this work is to throw light on some underlying aspects of territorial capital research. The study focuses on the theoretical and empirical issues of territorial capital and highlights some critical remarks related to the topic. On the one hand, the focus of the study is on the comparison of concepts and approaches in connection with territorial capital; then an in-depth look is taken at “capital frameworks” related to the research field. On the other hand, a comprehensive overview is presented of empirical investigations by comparing the applied methods, dimensions and variables of territorial capital. An argument is also made for a critical assessment concerning the topic with regard to the sense and function of territorial capital in regional economics and local economic development and highlights some further dilemmas concerning the “properties of capital” and “territorial capital paradigm”. Finally, some suggestions are provided for the future of territorial capital analysis. The main result of the study is an own belief in the concept of territorial capital.     

Interorganizational Collaboration Networks in Economic Development Policy: An Exponential Random Graph Model Analysis*

Regional economic development competition can be inefficient and destructive because decisions by one governmental unit can impose both externalities on its neighbors. Collaborative networks of multiple stakeholders within and across jurisdictions are an increasingly crucial component of regional economic development. In this article, we focus on the emergence of voluntary and self‐organizing network relationships among local governments to address economic development concerns. The motivations and decisions of local actors play a critical role in shaping and implementing regional collaboration. On a micro level, the collaboration choices are shaped by three primary factors: the transaction costs reflected in the configuration of relationships in which an actor is embedded; the organizational similarities (homophily); and the resource dependencies that shape the local actors' preferences for forming relationships with other specific actors. We utilize an exponential random graph model (ERGM) to test hypotheses regarding the most prominent observed patterns of network relationships within and across different organizational sectors. The results demonstrate that both reciprocity and social clustering structures are preferred by both government and nongovernment organizations. These results suggest that interorganizational collaboration for economic development requires more than simple exchange relationships. Rather, network actors may be better served by participating in a densely clustered network that is capable of maintaining credible commitments to collective solutions.     

Polycentricity and the Hollow State: Exploring Shared Personnel as a Source of Connectivity in Fragmented Urban Systems

The Ecology of Games (EoG) theory couples institutional rational choice with social network theory, articulating how transaction costs, social capital, and collective action dilemmas shape networks and network outcomes in polycentric governance systems. EoG literature has often focused on social–relational ties across organizational boundaries. However, jurisdictional fragmentation and increased reliance on private contractors in local public service delivery foster another source of network connectivity—shared personnel who work for multiple service providers. Drawing upon novel data of organizational personnel from more than 500 special purpose entities responsible for delivering drinking water to local neighborhoods in the Houston metro area in the state of Texas (United States), we examine how managerial, technical, and financial service delivery personnel connect otherwise independent organizations. We find that districts regulated by a common groundwater management agency and districts which contract with one another are both more likely to share technical and managerial personnel. By studying special districts that have overlapping personnel, we broaden the scope of the EoG framework to include additional layers of governance network complexity. As individual bureaucrats and service professionals play a key role in information transfer and innovation diffusion across organizations, shared personnel networks merit consideration as a mechanism for coordination and collective problem solving in fragmented urban systems.     

Territorially unequal rural development: the cases of the LEADER Initiative and the PRODER Programme in Andalusia (Spain)

This paper studies the territorial effects of the LEADER approach in Southern Europe, by analysing the region of Andalusia (Spain). Our research has revealed that, in many cases, projects were concentrated in the most dynamic, most populated areas, with a well-established business network with the financial and organizational capacity required to access European funding. In these areas, the economic leadership of the most dynamic municipalities has been reinforced at the expense of more depressed areas with little social capital and few businesses. These programmes have not, therefore, helped to mitigate territorial imbalances. In a minority of rural areas, however, this trend was not observed, which shows that although territorial inequality is a widespread problem in the practice of neo-endogenous rural development, it does not affect all areas to the same degree.     

Italian Industrial Districts: An Industrial Economics Interpretation

The Italian debate on industrial districts suggests that local development can be based on small and medium-sized firms, provided they work in teams and are embedded in a local system of social relations. If the availability of local public goods complements the private supply of local specialized services and goods, Marshallian external economies are engendered. When inner social and economic relations boost the supply of local public goods, and are reproduced by the consistent economic behaviour of local (economic and political) agents, they become local factors of economic development, or, in other words, the district's social capital. These propositions are considered within a three-layered framework comprising structure, conduct and performance. The relations among these levels allow joint consideration of three different processes of economic selection: competitive, strategic, evolutionary. This complexity is necessary if the conditions that foster significant Marshallian external economies are to be represented correctly.     

The cross-border reterritorialization concept revisited: the territorialist approach applied to the case of Cerdanya on the French-Spanish border

The aim of this paper is to bring new elements into the theoretical discussion so as to better understand the realities of borderlands. Our goal involves projecting a new conceptualization of the cross-border territory and cross-border reterritorialization by refining the analytical framework envisioned by the current literature on border studies. More specifically, we apply the so-called ‘territorialist approach’, an innovative and culturally oriented approach for territorial studies that is rooted in the Italian geographical school. Cross-border territories are conceived as complex territorial units, whereby geographical, socioeconomic and cultural patterns are affected and thus altered by the fixation of international boundaries and territorialization. Nevertheless, the persistence of local cross-border networks, both formal and informal, contributes to the maintenance of a shared local milieu. The European integration processes, especially in view of the European Territorial Cooperation programmes, represent an important framework for supporting local cross-border cooperation and boosting new territorial strategies for borderlands. From this perspective, we hypothesize that new cycles of local cross-border reterritorialization can be observed along the EU borderlands by creating new forms of cross-border territorial capital. The case study of Cerdanya (French-Spanish border) illustrates the application of the theoretical framework by analysing the enduring experiences of cross-border cooperation.     

集群社会资本对乡村民宿企业成长的影响研究——以丹霞山两村为例

采用质性研究方法,以丹霞山两村为例,探析集群社会资本对乡村民宿企业成长的影响机制。研究发现：集群社会资本由个体社会资本（企业纵向联系、市场网络和个人资源）和集体社会资本（社区合作网络和公共资源）构成。乡村民宿获取个体社会资本的存量取决于关系质量和关系数量,前者有利于降低成本、增加异质资源,后者能够补足企业综合性基础;乡村民宿吸纳集体社会资本的程度在于资源共享度和网络紧密度,前者决定了集体资源的存量,后者制约着民宿吸收转化集体资源的程度。个体社会资本影响企业的初创和生存,集体社会资本制约或促进企业的持续发展,两者相互作用共同影响企业成长。从集群社会资本视角可深化理解乡村民宿企业成长的机理,为我国乡村民宿业发展乃至乡村振兴路径提供指导。     

Capacity,scale and place: pragmatic lessons for doing community-based research in the rural setting

Community-based research (CBR) represents a particularly timely approach to rural research. Rural areas in industrialized nations are undergoing dramatic and rapid processes of economic, social and political restructuring. These forces, combined with a trend towards place-based development and territorial policy make CBR an appropriate rural method given its flexibility and sensitivity to local context. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the use and methods of CBR in the rural setting, drawn from our collective research experience in northern British Columbia. There has been increased attention paid to CBR, signalling a form of acceptance within the academy towards community-based and participatory methods. However, gaps exist in addressing the various approaches to conducting CBR and in considering the relevance of CBR in different contexts. Researchers also note the need for better training in the use of community-based methods. We reflect upon our rural CBR experience to offer insights and pragmatic lessons on effective methodological practices using a simplified framework of the key research process stages: preparing for community engagement, doing community-based research and after the fieldwork.     

Unsettled Rights: Afro-descendant recognition and ex-situ titling in Colombia

Ethnic recognition and collective titling have since the second half of the 20th century been promoted as ways of compensating for historical injustices and countering the destructive effects of capitalist development. While holding promise of autonomy, territorial rights, and resource control, they have also been seen as political technologies governing, spatially tying identities to place, and incorporating new areas into capital market relations. This paper draws on and contributes to these debates by exploring how the Colombian legislation for Afro-descendants ethnic recognition and collective titling is understood, employed and ‘reworked’ from below as well as from above. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and document analysis, the paper follows the case of an Afro-descendant sand-extracting community in the Cauca Valley Region, Colombia. Threatened by a competing mining claim, the villagers seek to gain ethnic recognition among other things to secure rights and control mining resources. In the process, the villagers are offered a land plot away from where they live and work to title as their collective territory; a mechanism that I term ‘ex-situ titling’. As the villagers have no prior relation to the land, nor intend to resettle there, I argue that the ex-situ land titling only serves as a procedural step in the process of ethnic recognition, which, nevertheless, contributes to the uncertainty and incertitude around the villagers' ethnic rights and resource control.     

基于社会资本理论的产业转移研究:江苏南北共建开发区模式解析

将社会资本的理论嵌入产业转移研究,拓展了传统产业转移研究的视野。阐述了基于社会资本的产业转移新内涵,认为产业转移是一个涉及主体、客体和载体的动态网络化过程;提出了基于社会资本结构维度、关系维度和目标维度的产业转移分析新框架;解析了江苏省南北共建开发区模式产业转移的典型经验,构建了企业、政府、开发区与规范、信任、网络的产业转移与社会资本互动的"三角模型",探讨了计量解析的方法;提出了相应政策建议。     

The Role of Territorial Capital in Local Economic Growth: Evidence from Italy

Territorial capital is defined as the system of territorial assets of economic, cultural, social and environmental nature that ensures the development potential of places. The potential of this concept resides in the recognition of possible interactions between factors of different nature. So far, however, very few studies have focused on the empirical verification of the links between territorial capital and economic growth. This work is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and territorial capital in Italian NUTS3 regions between 1999 and 2008. The distribution of territorial assets across regions points out the huge gap between Italian macro-areas. These divergences do not clearly reproduce the differentials in GDP growth. The second part of the analysis is focused on the joint effect of the territorial capital components on the regional economic performance. Our findings emphasize the role of some endogenous factors in explaining the differentiation of regional growth patterns. Moreover, they point out the importance of soft assets in correspondence of an external shock, as the one represented by the recent financial crisis.     

SOCIAL CAPITAL AND WORK AMONG RURAL-TO-URBAN MIGRANTS IN CHINA

This research provides a fine-grained analysis of the link between social capital and work-related outcomes among rural-to-urban migrants in China. Using data from the Shanghai Rural-to-Urban Migrant Worker Survey, the authors examine various kinds of social networks, the types of social capital they produce and their effects on migrant workers. While kinship networks and pre-existing social capital tend to provide migrants with job security and stability, they are negatively associated with migrants’ earnings and work satisfaction. By contrast, newly established friendship networks with local urbanites indicate new forms of social capital from the destination city, which are positively associated with higher satisfaction with income and work environment, and a higher likelihood of landing a permanent job.     

Workers' strategies to secure jobs,their uses of scale,and competing economic moralities: Rethinking the ‘geography of justice’

This paper considers workers' strategies to secure jobs, the justice of these strategies, and the spatial scales which they involve. It is argued that the justice of such strategies is strongly bound up with the scales at which they are enacted: the morality of social relations is intrinsically geographical. The paper discusses strategies within which workers compete individually or collectively for a given geographically-structured supply of jobs, including the use of social oppressions and territorial chauvinism in such competition. It contrasts these strategies with actions which challenge social oppression within employment, and which seek to know, contest and control flows of capital at large spatial scales. These latter strategies present a radical alternative to mutual competition, and embody different notions of economic justice. All of these strategies are analysed for the relations among workers and between workers and capital which they construct, the scales at which these relations are played out, the political ideologies they involve, and the moral notions generated and deployed. It is argued that to understand these different moralities, justice needs to be conceptualised not as rights understood as quasi-property of individuals but rather as a moral aspect of social relations. Accordingly, the ‘geography of justice’ is conceived as the geography of these social relations rather than geographical patterns of (dis)advantage. It is argued that the ‘interests’ of individuals and of collectives are not given objectively by social structure but are constructed through and between different feasible strategies of action; this has implications for the problem which selfishness poses to socialist economic strategies.     

European developments in strategic spatial planning

Strategic spatial planning which takes an integrated approach to the development of a territory seemed to go out of fashion, but now there are signs that it is being re‐established. This paper explores these developments using case studies from 10 European countries. The analysis uses an ‘institutionalist’ approach, which examines how the ‘agency’ of spatial planning practices responds to the ‘structure’ of contextual forces, at the same time influencing that structure. The ‘driving forces’ which are influencing strategic spatial planning are investigated, as are two aspects of the changes in spatial planning: institutional relations and policy agendas. The conclusions are that—at least in the case studies—there is a movement in the institutional relations towards horizontal articulation, territorial logic, and negotiative forms. Policy agendas too are changing, becoming more selective and using new conceptions of space and place. Those institutional developments, however, are not necessarily being translated into territorially‐integrated policy (as distinct from functional/sectoral policy). That translation appears to require simultaneous re‐framing of relational resources (trust, social capital), knowledge resources (intellectual capital), linked to strong mobilization efforts (political capital). The cases considered varied significantly in how far that had been done. Where it had, strategic spatial plan‐making practices were playing a key role in developing institutional territorial integration and re‐invigorating territorial identities.     

Social capital, environmental health and collective action: a Hamilton, Ontario case study

This article explores the relationships among environmental health, social capital and collective action in the industrial city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Survey results from 512 households are used to document intra-urban variation in levels of social capital (defined as norms, networks and trust) and collective action in the context of environmental health issues, and specifically air quality. Despite real differences between areas in terms of socio-demographic characteristics, little variation in either social capital or collective action by area was observed. Further, while social networks and community involvement were significant predictors of collective action, indicators of norms and trust were not. Hence, the conception of social capital as a unitary construct that produces place-specific benefits is not reflected in the example explored here.     

Local labour markets and socio-economic change: evidence from Danish towns, 2008–2013

The recent financial and economic crisis had substantial but spatially differentiated impacts on growth. However, there is still a lot left to be understood about the local aspects of the crisis. One of these aspects is its socio-economic consequences. This paper investigates local socio-economic change to Danish towns from 2008 to 2013, with a focus on the impact of local labour market (LLM) structures on change. Socio-economic change in towns is measured both directly as mean income and employment growth, and indirectly as population and human capital growth. The paper relies on micro-data and uses robust regression to generate results. Several findings are presented, but the two main conclusions are: first, the LLM structures of towns still influence local socio-economic development; and, second, towns experience better socio-economic development if they are in close proximity to a larger labour market and/or have a large ratio of commuters in the working population.     

地理学视角下的集体记忆研究综述

集体记忆植根于人、空间(地方、景观)、时间,是地理学研究人地关系的重要视角与手段。本文从理论渊源、研究内容、方法等对国内外相关文献进行梳理,提出地理学视角下的集体记忆研究框架。研究立足于集体记忆主体、载体和机制三方面,以空间、地方、景观、仪式、旅游等为主要研究对象,关注现象背后的政治性、竞争-协商性以及利益主体,个案研究为主,案例类型较为丰富,方法上定性为主,鲜有定量研究及相关模型构建。相比国外研究热潮与成果,国内研究仍处于萌芽起步与概念引入阶段,未来可拓展集体记忆载体形式的研究,深化集体记忆机制即人地关系层面,加强实证与量化方法应用。     

居民社区活动空间共享的公共接触潜力测度方法

社区内的日常活动空间共享有利于创造居民面对面的社会接触,进而增进理解、提升社区信任和社区融合。基于行为地理学理论与方法,提出“物质空间—活动空间共享—社会心理空间”的关系路径,揭示社区居民的活动空间共享的研究意义;从结构、层级、尺度和载体四个角度构建居民社区活动空间共享的公共接触潜力分析框架;从社区和个体两个层级构建公共接触潜力测度方法,基于共同活动的联系衡量社区居民空间共享的广泛程度和频繁程度。在理论框架与指标测度的基础上,使用上海市郊区调查数据进行实证检验,分析了活动空间共享的社区差异和个体差异。研究指出,提升居民空间共享对建设充满人气的活力社区具有意义,能够为郊区社区生活圈建设和社区治理提供支持。     

A Socio‐Geographic Perspective on Human Activities in Social Media

Location‐based social media make it possible to understand social and geographic aspects of human activities. However, previous studies have mostly examined these two aspects separately without looking at how they are linked. The study aims to connect two aspects by investigating whether there is any correlation between social connections and users' check‐in locations from a socio‐geographic perspective. We constructed three types of networks: a people–people network, a location–location network, and a city–city network from former location‐based social media Brightkite and Gowalla in the U.S., based on users' check‐in locations and their friendships. We adopted some complexity science methods such as power‐law detection and head/tail breaks classification method for analysis and visualization. Head/tail breaks recursively partitions data into a few large things in the head and many small things in the tail. By analyzing check‐in locations, we found that users' check‐in patterns are heterogeneous at both the individual and collective levels. We also discovered that users' first or most frequent check‐in locations can be the representatives of users' spatial information. The constructed networks based on these locations are very heterogeneous, as indicated by the high ht‐index. Most importantly, the node degree of the networks correlates highly with the population at locations (mostly with R² being 0.7) or cities (above 0.9). This correlation indicates that the geographic distributions of the social media users relate highly to their online social connections.