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As UK cities and towns become increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, researchers have tuned into how people inhabit multiculturalism. Ethnographic approaches have focused on the kind of togetherness that people generate as they go about their everyday lives, observing the affective textures of interactions and happenings of the here and now in granular detail. Missing from these accounts is what crowdsourced data might add to understandings of how multicultural places are experienced. What is vital about this kind of data is that it is 'big', involving a diversity of voices similarly intent on messaging their experiences, presenting opportunities to scale up the affect of encounters and to quantify what is difficult to qualify. This paper brings Digital Geographies into conversation with research on everyday multiculturalism to examine qualitatively and quantitatively how social media use folds into and expresses various practices of sociality and connection. Our paper involves Twitter, Nando's and the city of Leicester in the UK to challenge and advance ways of understanding everyday multiculturalism in an era of global migration and ethnically complex populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider whether the UK government's levelling-up governance model of Combined Authorities and metro-mayors is the most appropriate solution for beyond the metropolis. We draw on case study research from the Mersey Dee area between North East Wales and North West England. The paper addresses three propositions. First, that the underlying distinction between agglomeration-driven and place-based policy centres on assumptions regarding the homogenous and heterogenous character of place. The paper shows how, in the UK context, the city-region concept has evolved as an agglomeration-driven territorial construct with practical limitations. Proposition two focuses on how a distinctive character of place reflects its particular mix of firms and their resulting combined processes of agglomeration. Proposition three suggests that this mix of firms presents choices for the appropriate design of institutions locally and regionally. Finally, the paper illustrates why the present agglomeration-driven framework is a barrier to enabling levelling-up. Progressing 'levelling up' involves recognition that heterogenous local governance contexts are shaped by history, culture, and geography, where the success of place-based policies is not aided by the top-down imposition of governance models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore digital consumer activism through a spatial lens, in order to understand how digital and place-based consumer activism intersect and interact. The empirical context is provided by Fairtrade Towns activism in the UK, investigated through netnographic methods. Three main spatialised tactics of digital consumer activism emerged from the analysis: emplacing the digital space; territorialising ethical consumption; and materialising digital activism. Building on these, we theorise hybrid consumer activism as a form of consumer activism whereby activists display belonging and identity both in physical and digital 'places' draw boundaries around spaces of ethical consumption through localised and digital collective action, and form hybrid digital ties. This study contributes to existing scholarship by taking into account placed and spatialised dimensions of digital consumer activism and by questioning the dichotomy between digital and place-based activism through the concept of "hybrid consumer activism". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between public houses or pubs, and crime rates in England and Wales. The impact of pubs on local communities is generally studied and investigated within the context of third places, thus physical places that facilitate the accumulation of social capital within communities. We estimate Poisson Fixed-Effects (PFE) and a frontier Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) model on a unique panel dataset for 375 local authorities in England and Wales between 2003 and 2018. Results from the analysis indicate that the presence of pubs progressively relates to a higher incidence of major crimes when transitioning from rural to urban areas, mainly due to weaker level of community cohesion and a lack of resources to support formal policing in more urbanized centres. These findings highlight the importance of place-based strategies in tackling rising incidences of crimes, indicating that recent pub closures may have contributed to severing community ties that act as a deterrent to crime in certain areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disruptions associated with health and energy crisis have emphasized the need for hyperlocal cities. However, in Europe, a tool to measure the efficiency of land use and accessibility planning for localizing urban mobility is missing. In this paper, we construct a comparable 15-Minute-Walking City (15-MWC) index that assesses the walking performance of 121 European metropolitan areas and seven amenity types. The data are combined equally following the PROMETHEE II multicriteria approach to assign a final score and to present a ranking of 15-Minutes cities. The main visualization demonstrates European-level disparities and indicates that most of leading cities are in Germany, while most of the worst performers are in the UK. We also reveal a statistically significant difference in 15-MWC performance due to their GDP per capita disparities. The empirical results may serve as a referencing tool for cross-city comparisons and may support policymakers when designing transport and city-planning strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study explores the relatively new potential of places to ethically enhance their branding through accreditation under the Fairtrade Towns (FTT) scheme. It presents insights from a qualitative study of marketing practices across eleven UK FTTs, focussing on the activists who establish these initiatives to facilitate and promote FT consumption within their communities. FTT accreditation is revealed as a grassroots local branding initiative that can work symbiotically with the place brand through connections to other fundamental aspects of a place's identity and character, or even by playing a 'redemptive' role. FTT status encourages a less introspective approach to place branding by connecting with distant producer communities and encouraging tourists and residents to reconsider their consumption in the context of the socio-environmental realities of global supply chains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Around the world, local innovations in the management and development of urban space are often significantly shaped by national government competitions. This article argues that the competition is a characteristic but underdiscussed feature of contemporary national policymaking on urban innovation, and considers how such competitions might be more constructively implemented in the future. It does so by closely tracing the outcomes of one paradigmatic example: the UK's Future City Demonstrator competition, launched in 2012, which awarded funding to four cities (Glasgow, Bristol, Peterborough, and London) to implement their proposals. The analysis offers lessons for similar competitions by highlighting six factors which co-determined the implementation and outcome of this initiative: asserting the need for speed; conflating export opportunities with local benefits; focusing on the need for institutional reform; reliance on cross-sectoral collaboration; positioning the city as a platform for digital solutions; and a lack of integration at the national level. Relatedly, we urge commentators to adopt a critical distance from justificatory assertions of urgent urban crisis and local governments being straightforwardly in need of reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British grocery retail sector is experiencing rapid growth in online ordering for home delivery, resulting in considerable supply side investment in delivery and fulfilment infrastructure. For retailers with a physical store network, investments typically utilise larger format stores as delivery and fulfilment hubs. Proximity to the store network and delivery infrastructure capacity thus drive the availability and choice of online groceries provider at the neighbourhood level. We aim to assess the geographical extent of online groceries coverage at a small-area level in Great Britain (GB). We carry out a nationwide assessment of the provision of online groceries, revealing generally excellent coverage within urban and suburban areas, including those neighbourhoods that may have once been considered urban food deserts. However, rural–urban inequalities are evident, with the most remote and rural catchments experiencing comparatively poor online groceries provision. We argue that these inequalities give rise to a new form of food desert: remote and rural neighbourhoods with the compounded effects of poor access to physical retail provision (akin to 'traditional' food deserts) and the additional disadvantage of poor coverage by online groceries providers. Many of these neighbourhoods are already the most remote from physical store provision and may also be faced with withdrawal of physical (retail) services. We make a number of recommendations that could support the provision of online groceries services in these areas and reflect on the tremendous potential for ongoing research into widening inequalities in access to grocery retailing driven by the geography of online groceries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Promoting entrepreneurial activities is crucial for regions to facilitate innovation and economic development. Yet, becoming an entrepreneur is not aspired by all people, and regions may differ considerably in their entrepreneurship potential. Assessing and providing accurate estimates of the entrepreneurship potential across fine-grained spatial scales is thus crucial to inform regional policymakers, but it still remains a major challenge due to data availability. Here we used the lab data set from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) covering 368,364 individuals and providing highresolution data about their residences to map the entrepreneurship potential across 9271 postcode sectors in Great Britain. We used a novel mapping approach that relies on a spatial smoothing function based on distance weights to utilize the most fine-grained spatial level available in the data. Our detailed maps show substantial difference in entrepreneurship potential across postcode sectors in Great Britain and within the largest cities: London, Birmingham and Manchester. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]