HOUSE PRICE IMPACTS OF RACIAL,INCOME, EDUCATION,AND AGE NEIGHBORHOOD SEGREGATION

We study housing prices and neighborhood segregation. We advance the literature by (1) studying not just racial segregation like previous studies, but also segregation by age, income, and education level, (2) using a finer unit of geography to construct segregation measures, (3) incorporating spatial statistics, and (4) separating segregation effects from underlying population level effects. We find race segregation is positively related to house prices, with an elasticity of 0.19. In contrast, income and educational segregation reduce housing values, with elasticities of ?0.23 and ?0.21. By comparison, house age has an elasticity of ?0.15. Age segregation is not generally capitalized.     

Cultural brownfields in European cities: a new mainstream object for cultural and urban policies

This paper develops the concept of ‘cultural brownfields’ and discusses how organic cultural projects developed in derelict sites have been progressively included in mainstream cultural and urban planning strategies and policies over the last 10?years. To do so the paper assesses the transformation of three mature cultural brownfields in Berlin, Marseille and Lausanne and their distinctive internal and external dynamics. It develops a typology of cultural brownfields which stresses the diverse nature of these spaces and their differential role in cultural and urban planning policies. The paper concludes by highlighting a series of policy lessons for urban planning and cultural strategies.     

Urban Policies for the Creative Industries: A European Comparison

Abstract

Although the development of creative industries (CI) has formed into extensive and significant phenomenon in European cities, the conceptualization and generalization of these practices and policies is still rather weak. In addition to the attempts to explain the formation of these kinds of practices in the cities and discuss the path-dependent character of CI policies, the challenging task is to identify the main alternatives and inherent logic of CI policies, especially due to the existing rich and diverse experiences of European cities. This article aims to build a typology of the policy practices relating to CI. We make use of an “ideal types” approach, which focuses on determining a limited number of parameters to characterize alternative CI policies in different (European) cities; this is based on how one kind of CI policy practice can be distinguished from another. The article examines how the CI policies in four post-socialist cities (three of which are located in the Baltic region) contrast with the policies found in a range of other cities in Europe.     

Viking stranger‐kings: the foreign as a source of power in Viking Age Scandinavia,or, why there was a peacock in the Gokstad ship burial?

Drawing on both written and archaeological evidence, this paper investigates the significance of the foreign, and in particular the concept of the ‘stranger‐king’, in Viking Age Scandinavia. Focusing on the case of the Danish Jelling dynasty, the monumental complex at Jelling is reinterpreted as a materialization of a stranger‐king myth: the ship‐setting reproduces the narrative of the founding of the dynasty by an immigrant forefather, and the earthen burial mounds convey the idea of the foreign king taking possession of the locals' land. In a broader perspective, the stranger‐king concept and the special association of the king with the foreign is identified as an integral element of Old Norse myth and a Scandinavian archetype of rulership. The embracing of the foreign in many different forms is seen as a political strategy whose aim is to illustrate a king's special connection to the forces of the distant and unknown world beyond direct human control, and which clothes him with an aura of the strange and the exotic. In this way, and closely related to the concept of sacral rulership, the foreign emerges as a source of power and a presupposition for the formation of early states in Scandinavia.     

The territorial dynamics of innovation: a Europe United States comparative analysis

The United States and European Union differ significantly interms of their innovative capacity: the former have been ableto gain and maintain world leadership in innovation and technologywhile the latter continues to lag. Notwithstanding the magnitudeof this innovation gap and the political emphasis placed uponit on both sides of the Atlantic, very little systematic comparativeanalysis has been carried out on its causes. The empirical literaturehas emphasized the structural differences between the two continentsin the quantity and quality of the major ‘inputs’to innovation: R&D investments and human capital. The verydifferent spatial organization of innovative activities in theEU and the US—as suggested by a variety of contributionsin the field of economic geography—could also influenceinnovative output. This article analyses and compares a wideset of territorial processes that influence innovation in Europeand the United States. The higher mobility of capital, populationand knowledge in the US not only promotes the agglomerationof research activity in specific areas of the country but alsoenables a variety of territorial mechanisms to fully exploitlocal innovative activities and (informational) synergies. Inthe European Union, in contrast, imperfect market integrationand institutional and cultural barriers across the continentprevent innovative agents from maximizing the benefits fromexternal economies and localized interactions, but compensatoryforms of geographical process may be emerging in concert withfurther European integration.     

RESEARCH BRIEFING: A Regionalization Strategy to Promote Integrated Local Development: The Comarcal Development Plan of Galicia

This paper reports on the administrative innovation for promoting integrated sectoral and spatial planning, based on the designation of Comarcas, by the Galician regional government in Spain. The region has suffered from peripherality and a heavy bias towards low productivity agricultural, fishing and food processing industries. Traditional regional policies had led to urban expansion but rural desertification. The Galician government embarked in 1991 on a radical new approach to development planning based on building new administrative entities based on urban and village networks. The new planning delivery system now exists and is already active in promoting more balanced and integrated planned development.     

An information-theoretic approach to the analysis of location and colocation patterns

The study of location and colocation of economic activities lies at the heart of economic geography and related disciplines, but the indices used to quantify these patterns are often defined ad hoc and lack a clear statistical foundation. We propose a statistical framework to quantify location and colocation associations of economic activities using information-theoretic measures. We relate the resulting measures to existing measures of revealed comparative advantage, localization, specialization, and coagglomeration and show how different measures derive from the same general framework. To support the use of these measures in hypothesis testing and statistical inference, we develop a Bayesian estimation approach to provide measures of uncertainty and statistical significance of the estimated quantities. We illustrate this framework in an application to an analysis of location and colocation patterns of occupations in US cities.     

‘Singing oneself into a nation’? Estonian song festivals as rituals of political mobilisation

This article argues that Estonian song festivals were a powerful ritual of political mobilisation. Throughout their history, however, they had to be accommodated to narratives of ruling regimes. Taking Patrick Hutton's concept of such events as a ‘moment of memory’ with which images of the past are being reconstructed in a selective way, song festivals are on each occasion made to suit present needs. During the history of Estonian nationhood, these needs have been guided first and foremost by forms of political authority: during years of independence, the festivals were to serve different purposes than under imperial or Soviet Russian rule. Thus, the concept of ‘singing oneself into a nation’, popular in Estonian history textbooks, is only partly true. Although the performance of the festival changes only slightly through the years, its political significance changes enormously.