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This paper presents the results of an analysis of the Audit Commission's local quality-of-life indicators dataset to compare reported outcomes amongst 208 urban-classified and 144 rural-classified English local authority areas. We contextualise the demarcation of the urban and rural by reference to the transformational politics of the previous Labour government and its establishment of the sustainable communities initiative, whose controversial 'place-based' revitalisation essence continues to shape local government policy. According to the collectivist sustainability interpretation of the 73 indicators analysed, our results reveal that not only do urban-classified English local authority areas register a significantly lower quality of life than their rural counterparts but that they are also subject to much greater statistical and spatial variation. En addition, we find that the community- related and economy-related indicators serve to distinguish the reported quality-of-life conditions of rural and urban localities most, whereas the scores for transport are uniquely superior for urban areas, especially London. En considering the policy implications of our results, we draw attention to Labour's much-trumpeted justice-based approach to sustainable development, and con- template the viability of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government's `Big Society' endeavour [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we review the current policy approach to skills and knowledge for sustainable communities. The aspatial and target-led nature of these approaches around the attainment of fixed skill sets is discussed and then contrasted with educationalist literatures which provide an alternative pedagogical approach to learning. That is, one that places a much greater emphasis on 'learners' as individuals and `learning' as achieved through experience. The role and influence of people in place are implicit within these `learner-centred' models. This reflects an understanding of the need to approach learning strategies in a way that relates to people's everyday lives. Drawing on ongoing empirical research conducted in the English town of Stroud (Gloucestershire, UK), we demonstrate some of the insights which can be gained from understanding skills and knowledge for sustainable communities in the context of these more experiential and process-orientated approaches. We do so by looking at the accounts and practices not of professionals, but of community members who are actively engaged with sustainable communities initiatives. We explore the relationships between their knowledge and understandings of sustainability and how they have sought to encompass and actively develop principles of sustainable communities as part of their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new round of censuses is being held internationally in 2010-11 in the face of increasing challenges to the achievement of high coverage rates. Censuses are of enormous importance due to the extensive range of planning and analysis which is dependent on the accuracy of their results. Despite efforts to assess quality and make corrections, there is still evidence of population missing from published estimates. This paper uses administratively based data sources to assess probable undercount in the 2001 Census of England and Wales, specifically seeking to understand the differences between the census and alternative sources. It presents new evidence of strong social and spatial concentrations, only some of which have been addressed by official adjustments to the census. It is important both that these issues are taken into account in substantive research using published small area data and that the underlying processes are much more clearly understood by users and reviewers of the 2010-11 round of censuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is ongoing concern as to whether ethnic communities in Great Britain are becoming increasingly spatially concentrated. This paper uses data from the 2001 Census of Population to explore the relationship between population concentration and ethnic net migration in London at ward level. The findings suggest that migration within London is acting as an agent of dispersal of non-White populations from areas of high ethnic concentration to areas of low ethnic concentration, whereas White migrants are leaving areas where they are underrepresented and moving to areas of overrepresentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a detailed examination of the marketing of Hadrian's Wall in northern England. The focus of this case is built around two themes which encapsulate the complexities and challenges of marketing such a place entity: (I) the Wall's existence as an historical monument of diminished materiality, and (2) its linearity and spatial diffuseness. These themes emphasise the fact that marketing Hadrian's Wall is different from usual place-marketing activity, which is typically focused on more tangible and easily delineated place entities. Hadrian's Wall, by contrast, represents a 'fuzzy' place, and the implications of this are explored in relation to jurisdictional, functional, and strategic 'fissures' in the place product. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author examines the materialization of geographical knowledges in relation to the ongoing neoliberalization of urban space where the latter is based on processes of compulsory land purchase. The specific context for the study is two recently planned commercial redevelopments for the south London borough of Croydon in the United Kingdom, and the arguments mustered in support of these proposals. The author identifies and discusses three principal sets of geographical knowledges, which he examines under the headings symbolic, biopolitical, and scalar. In each case, he shows that the knowledges have strong modernist overtones. The paper seeks both to understand and contextualize these historical connections, and to consider the contemporary political work performed by the knowledges in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The making private of hitherto public goods is a central tenet of neoliberalism. From land in Africa, Asia, and South America to the assertion of property rights over genes and cells by corporations, the process(es) of making private property matters more than ever. And yet, despite this importance, we know remarkably little about the spatial plays through which things become private property. In this paper I seek to address this imbalance by focusing upon the formative context of 18th- and early-19th-century England. The specific lens is wood, that most critical of all 'natural' things other than land in the transition to market-driven economies, It is shown that the interplay between custom, law, and local practices rendered stable and aspatial definitions of property impossible. Whilst law was the key technology through which property was mediated, the cadence of particular places gave these mediations distinctive forms. I conclude that not only must we take property seriously, but we must also take the conditions and contexts of its making seriously too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of social mixing has recently moved to the forefront of gentrification debate. In part, this has been stimulated by neoliberal urban policies promoting 'social mix' research showing the inability of gentrified neighbourhoods to remain socially mixed and attempts to rethink the association between gentrification and displacement. This paper draws upon a mixed-methods study that examined levels of social mixing between gentrifying and incumbent communities in three neighbourhoods undergoing new-build gentrification in London, UK. Little evidence was found for substantial interactions between populations, and there were few shared perceptions of community. The author claims that the particular character of new-build gentrification has played an important role in generating this socially tectonic situation. Husserl's concept of the lifeworld and Bourdieu's thesis on the relative structuring of class identity are drawn upon to provide an explanatory framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore and evaluate the concept of integrated rural tourism (IRT) by drawing upon a networks approach and the notion of best practice. By integrating the two an attempt is made to understand the processes that generate the sharing, exchange and transfer of knowledge and skills. The case examples of tourism-focused networks from the England-Wales border region highlight how the innovative practices of individual actors have shaped local resources into tourism products, providing a long-term focus for economic development and local restructuring. It is concluded that the development aspect of best practice, as a pathway to developing IRT, offers a tool to capture the 'intangibles' or noneconomic aspects of networking that promote economic growth and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore some of the ways in which people with visual impairments see landscape and participate in visual cultures of landscape apprehension. I draw on ethnographic and interview material, developed while acting as a sighted guide for specialist blind and visually impaired walking groups who visit the landscapes of the Lake District and Peak District in Britain. Through this research material I show how landscape is likely to become present for people with blindness or visual impairment through both their individual capacities for sight and a complex mix of discursive, material, social, and historical relations. Specifically, I argue that there is an intercorporeal, collective dimension to this emergence of landscape and this intercorporeality is evident at both a perceptual and a discursive level. I suggest that future research needs to attend further to how landscape emerges and becomes present through intercorporeal processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with geographical access to hospital services by public transport. By taking advantage of newly available public transport timetable data, a software tool is developed for the analysis of bus travel times under specified journey scenarios. The example of population access to Derriford Hospital in Devon, England, is used to illustrate the application of these methods, and the social and spatial pattern of accessibility by bus is explored. The analysis reveals substantial differences between access by public and private transport, and highlights the difficulty of combining conventional drive-time analysis with the discontinuous accessibility provided by public transport. There is a need for more attention to be paid to the incorporation of public transport in accessibility modelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changing modal composition and volume of work travel in London, Birmingham, and Manchester and their resultant energy consumption implications are considered in this research. Essentially, the mechanism is to calculate the passenger km travelled by mode and then to apply mode-specific energy consumption parameters to calculate energy consumption. By classifying work-travel trips according to their travel mode and their location and orientation (within, out of, and into town) it is possible to determine where the major forces for commuting change are and, more important, assess the implications of these forces for energy consumption. Average energy intensities per person trip are not the same everywhere or for every energy-consuming mode; furthermore, the magnitude and direction of change in average energy intensities are not the same either. Many of the trends seem to be moving rapidly away from positions of energy sustainability. The data are derived from the 1981 and 2001 special workplace statistics of the Population Census for small areas, and from fuel consumption technical parameters calibrated by engineers. One important objective of the paper is to understand the relative importance for energy consumption of changing travel modes for work journeys and changing trip orientation caused by urbanisation trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we report on a major empirical study of centripetal and centrifugal forces in the City of London financial services agglomeration. The study sheds light on (1) the manner and magnitude of firm interaction in the agglomeration; (2) the characteristics of the agglomeration that aid the competitiveness of incumbent firms; and (3) the problems associated with agglomeration. In addressing these issues, we use the data to (1) test emerging theory that explains the high productivity and innovation of agglomerations in terms of their ability to generate and diffuse knowledge; and (2) evaluate the ‘end of geography’ thesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My purpose in this paper is to provide a fuller account of the origins and nature of city-centre living in Manchester, England, by emphasising its too-often neglected `independent' and ‘countercultural’ underside. Some urban policy researchers have made too much of the ‘entrepreneurial turn’ in Manchester, which is said to have been a key catalyst of its city-centre renaissance and city-centre living. My own empirical work as well as that of some cultural geographers highlights the ‘counter- cultural’ origins of the city-centre renaissance and, later, city-centre living in Manchester. I argue that urban policy research in Britain tends to characterise city-centre dwellers as young, single, professionals as if this was a more-or-less undifferentiated social group. Yet this demonstrates an oversight towards work undertaken by some geographers and urban sociologists who have shown that gentrifiers moving into British and North American city centres and inner-urban areas over the last two decades are a complex and differentiated group of housing consumers. My own empirical work shows that Manchester city-centre dwellers are a similarly complex and differentiated group of housing consumers that occupy a number of distinct positions within the city-centre housing market, and that this can be seen more clearly when the origins and subsequent development of city-centre living in Manchester is more fully understood. Three typologies of Manchester city-centre dwellers are identified; ‘counter- culturalists’ tend to originate from within the ‘new’ middle class; ‘city-centre tourists’ tend to originate from the ‘service class’; and `successful agers' tend to be over the age of fifty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although economic-geographical research has recently been the subject of ‘cultural’, ‘institutional’, and ‘relational’ turns that stress the situated, relational, and embedded nature of economic activity, these concerns are usually elaborated through analyses of industrial, not financial, circuits of capital. In this paper I address the neglect of the financial elements of production networks by exploring the geographies of some of the financial practices of a group of microbusinesses in Birmingham's Jewelry Quarter. I argue that the Jewelry Quarter is an important financial space for these firms and illustrate how their production regimes are produced and reproduced through different spatiotemporal financial relationships with suppliers, customers, and financial intermediaries. By contrast with the undersocialised treatments of agency that predominate in firm finance literatures in economics and finance, I illustrate the situated, idiosyncratic, and often very personal nature of the financial knowledges, practices, and networks that reproduce these firms. This financial ‘cut’ through the Jewelry Quarter treats firm finances as integral to firm behaviours and strategy and uses this vantage point to assess the potentials and predicaments facing these firms that are regarded as strategically important for the future of the Quarter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For some geographers, the world has become imaginatively alive with arrays of new nonhumans. Yet how well these vocabularies actually adhere to personal practice is something which could be better explored. Recent accounts of consumption, meanwhile, are committed to closely observed contextual experience. Yet, physical things can seem somewhat subdued in these accounts. With these ideas in mind, in this paper I align a geographical embrace of material vitality and an in-depth approach to practised consumption. I report on a period of ethnographic work with seven garden centres in London to reconsider the ways in which contemporary urbanites encounter the items on sale there. In the London garden centre there are some different ways of approaching life and some changing cultures of control, as the rumbling agencies that certain products purvey are both openly enjoyed and nervously negated. Exploring the unease associated with this situation and its impact upon personal behaviour and physical format, I reflect, in particular, on the current experience of plants. The conclusion that follows is potentially perverse as, although we can benefit from being with life, it seems that, in certain city spaces at least, we now deal better with that which is more dead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I argue that gentrification, despite the many arguments over its continuing validity as a concept, retains its key importance in understanding processes of class change. For some it is a process of colonising the city, for others a manifestation of belonging; for some the concept can be used as a radical critique of neoliberalism whilst for others this very critique is an exemplar of the hegemonising tendencies amongst (often radical) North American urban scholars. I argue that the concept has grown somewhat middle-aged and overendowed with its own history. I suggest that it needs to retain a focus on the implications of macro social change for individuals and social groups. In particular, gentrification needs to decouple itself from its original association with the deindustrialisation of metropolitan centres such as London and from its associations with working-class displacement. Recently, gentrification has occurred across the spatial scale—in second-order cities and in hitherto suburban locations as well as in the countryside. Processes such as 'greentrification', 'gated communities', and 'studentification' often coexist in quite close proximity to each other; the influence London exerts over the southern half of England is a good example of this. I argue that the concept of gentrification functions as an important way of understanding the mediations between global processes and flows, on the one hand, and the construction of identities in particular localities, on the other. With the decline of social class as providing an overall explanation of cultural, social, and spatial behaviour, this notion of gentrification as a form of 'elective belonging' has considerable potential for uniting geographical and sociological approaches to agency and structure. I illustrate this by drawing on three recent studies on the relationship between people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is argued that many major Western cities have seen the conversion of centrally located commercial and industrial property to residential uses in recent years. This is seen as part of a wider process of change from industrial to postindustrial land uses and is a physical counterpart of the economic and occupational class transformation of these cities towards the growth of professional and managerial workers working in financial, business, and creative services. The paper focuses on loft conversions in Clerkenwell, adjacent to the City of London which are shown to be initiated by changes in the commercial property market, particularly the rise and fall of the secondary office market and the need to find alternative uses for commercial property. The apartments have been marketed in terms of their architectural distinction, their centrality and the social attributes of city-centre living. Their residents are professional and managerial workers with a strong orientation towards centrality, many of whom see themselves as pioneers of a new form of city-centre living. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical information systems (GIS) are increasingly used in England and Wales as a tool to monitor crime and aid community-safety planning. This is despite the widely known limitations of police-recorded data on crime victimisation, and concerns about the quality and specificity of available data on fear of crime. Meanwhile, improving streetlighting is a popular strategy both for improving community safety and for reducing fear of crime. In this paper we report on research carried out in Northumberland, northeast England, which aimed to identify locations most in need of new streetlighting. First, GIS crime hotspot maps and lighting coverage maps were analysed to identify potential areas to target. Qualitative rapid appraisal techniques were then used in these areas to explore local residents' perceptions and understandings of the relationships between streetlighting, victimisation, and fear of crime. The qualitative data were used to interpret the hotspot maps further, and to inform the location and type of streetlighting interventions. The research demonstrates that people's experiences of crime and fear, and their understandings of the relationships these have to streetlighting, are complex and reflective. At most, streetlighting was held to have a marginal and even then contradictory influence on the problems of crime and fear that people face. The implications are considered. We conclude that qualifying the outputs of GIS mapping was essential in this case, and has wide potential in critical policy research to promote more inclusive knowledge and more effective decisionmaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I explore elements of the relationship between deployments of cultural capital and neighbourhood change. Based on research in a gentrified neighbourhood of Bristol, England, I argue that for gentrifier households with children the need to reproduce (institutional) cultural capital in the education market can conflict with the desire to display (objectified) cultural capital via the gentrification aesthetic in the inner-urban neighbourhood. In the trade-off between aesthetics and education, education wins, resulting in a much more conventional suburban, exurban housing/neighbourhood career for onward-moving gentrifiers. I conclude by suggesting a more diffuse, provincial form of gentrification in which the different strands of cultural capital can conflict in urban space (rather than the smooth reproduction of cultural capital assumed by the idea of a gentritication habitus). It confirms that the intergenerational reproduction of an (urban) new middle class is likely to be confined to large metropolitan areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing realisation among scholars and policymakers of the role of local contextual factors and circumstances in influencing the behaviour of key economic agents, including the entrepreneur. This approach has stretched the boundaries of academic inquiry welt beyond mainstream conceptualisations of economic agency as isolated from its setting. An assumption that underpinned research and policymaking in the new learning is that economic activity is typically socially embedded, which is generally taken to imply local embeddedness. In our paper, drawing upon the findings of extensive research in rural Cumbria, we question this assumption. We argue that in the context of rural Cumbria, the conceptualisation of locality may go beyond territorial notions. This argument does not support a return to the notion of the isolated economic agent, but advocates a move forward to the detailed exploration of the interface between agency and context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK government has made the sustainable reuse of land a strong policy aim in its sustainable development and planning strategies. However, in this paper we present research into recent urban brownfield redevelopments in England that shows that many aspects of sustainability are currently not being considered in practice. To explain this, we focus on the role of different stakeholders involved in brownfield development and critically examine their actions and decisions. We establish which stakeholder types (for example, architects, planners, councillors, developers, investors) are more likely to attempt to introduce sustainability into development projects and which are more successful in meeting their agendas. We conclude by identifying five reasons for variation in the achievement of sustainability in brownfield development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising housing costs and lack of affordable housing in London are affecting labour recruitment and retention, particularly in the public sector—the ‘key-worker problem’ of recent government statements. But housing and labour-market problems are not confined to London. In this paper we highlight the extent and nature of affordability, recruitment, and retention problems in a high-cost location outside the capital: Surrey in South East England. We suggest that changes towards a more professional and managerial workforce have impacted on housing demand and hence prices. Planning and physical constraints have contributed to housing shortages and exacerbated rising housing costs. High housing costs are linked to recruitment and retention difficulties not only for public-sector employers but also for certain types of private-sector employers in Surrey. This raises problems for the sustainability of the local economy. Measures introduced to address these difficulties are helping ‘key workers’ to access housing locally, but this simply bids up house prices rather than increasing the overall supply of housing that is affordable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current round of local government modernisation in England, which commenced in 1997, has focused primarily on three main areas-new council constitutions, e-government, and performance. However, a fourth strand of initiatives relates to the power of well-being and the duty to prepare a community strategy, in partnership with a local strategic partnership. Academic commentators and planners, who have been focusing on the proposed UK planning reforms as contained within the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act (passed in 2004), have largely ignored the development of this strand. In this paper we explore these aspects of the local government modernisation agenda for planners and pull out some of the key issues for comparison in the ownership, role, and development of the new plans: community strategies and development plans. Opportunities and difficulties of ensuring that new development plans become the spatial expression of community strategies is assessed through an illustration of the relationship between the London Borough of Camden's community strategy and its unitary development plan. Following a review of the content of both documents, wider assessments are drawn out and we conclude by debating the implications of and challenges for a future reformed planning system at the local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I interrogate the relationship between environmental science and local governance in the United Kingdom. Effectively linking science and policy is critical to sustainable planning, and within the rhetoric of evidence-based policy it is often assumed that science conducted in a locality will feed linearly into the governance of that locality. This assumption is unpacked through the detailed study of an end-user-oriented environmental research project. I argue that the reproduction of separate scientific and political spheres prevented the research from being relevant to the governance of that locality. Theoretical and practical approaches to the spatialities of the research-policy interface are considered in order to politically reconstruct the local as a meaningful field of environmental governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we aim to assess critically the relationship between devolved government and democratic renewal through a focus on the potential for stakeholder involvement within elected regional assemblies. Drawing particularly upon evidence from North East England, we will consider how the creation of elected assemblies could reinvigorate democracy, given the constraints imposed (in regions such as the North East) by the unreformed and unrepresentative political terrain upon which any new assembly is likely to be superimposed. We conclude that existing arrangements and practices are a useful development but fall far short of the radical measures needed to overcome the exclusionary nature of traditional models of governance and government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A somewhat overlooked aspect of the geography of 'after-Fordist' regulation concerns the precise role of different branches of the state in managing tensions between local economic development and the collective provision of social and physical infrastructure. In the United Kingdom, the state's reluctance to manage or spatially redistribute growth in the South East has resulted in localised pressures on housing markets, the land-use planning system, infrastructure, and the environment, intensifying struggles between progrowth and antigrowth factions in certain places. In this paper the authors examine conflicts arising from the rapid growth of new economic spaces in and around the Cambridge subregion and explore various attempts by different branches of the state and locally dependent factions of capital to overcome barriers to further growth within existing and proposed frameworks for territorial management. A key arena of conflict in this instance centres upon land-use planning and provision of infrastructure. The Cambridge 'growth crisis' raises a series of issues about the ability of interests claiming to represent nationally important city-regions to detach such places from their formative local and national modes of regulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]