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Empirical evidence suggests that planning policies significantly impact on investment property market performance in the UK. It is less clear, however, how information about the planning policy environment feeds into investment decision-making. This paper seeks to explore this issue. It reports on interviews with the property investment community and focuses on the decision to invest in the retail sector. The paper uses a six-stage model of the investment decision-making process as a framework for analysing the way in which concerns about policy impact on behaviour. The results suggest that an understanding of the policy environment and the development of a relationship with local planning authorities are most important in the post-acquisition asset management stage of the investment process. The research also reveals variations in access to policy intelligence and that approaches to analysis of the likely effects of planning regimes vary with fund type and strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent years have seen an expansion in the work on the attitudes, beliefs and preferences of those middle-class groups that have accompanied the return of capital to many North American and western European city centres and their surrounding urban suburbs. Yet despite this, it is argued that there is little research linking gentrification to wider processes of social transformation, particularly debates over housing market decision-making, the balancing of work and life, and the gender division of labour within the household. It is to examining the interaction of these aspects of everyday life in a gentrifying area that this paper turns, using the example of Chorlton, a southern urban suburb of Manchester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of area-based deprivation indices is now a firmly established means of assessing which areas ought to be the focus of government policy, with separate indices of deprivation established for each constituent part of the UK. In England, the Index of Multiple Deprivation 2004 has been widely used to support decision-making for key urban policies and in more local assessments of deprivation. Implicit in the development and use of these indicators is the notion that area matters and that it can be an important influence on a whole range of different activities. However, there is also a sense in which contemporary measures of deprivation are spatially short-sighted since they are not able to account formally for the spatial context of individual locations. This paper therefore offers an alternative approach to the measurement of local conditions by combining spatial statistical approaches with a much-used deprivation index. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]