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The literature on spatial mismatch often focuses on a mismatch within cities or local labour markets. This paper looks at the spatial mismatch between local labour markets. Using US data, we study the evolution of inter-regional mismatch between 1980 and 2010 and how this evolution varies across skill levels. Since we expect the spatial structure of supply and demand in the labour market to play a central role at this geographical level, we develop an extension of the spatial mismatch index, as the standard version does not take this spatial structure into account. Our results indicate that spatial mismatch has been increasing over the past decades, an increase that is largely attributable to spatial structure effects. The inter-regional spatial mismatch mainly affects low-skilled jobs and workers: our findings suggest that the degree of the spatial mismatch for low-skilled, relative to high-skilled workers, increased from a ratio of two in 1980 to almost four in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-based study examines the widely-used discourse marker well in Chinese-speaking learners' speech and compares its frequencies in native speaker data and Swedish learners. While Swedish learners overuse well, Chinese-speaking learners (predominantly at the upper-intermediate level) significantly underuse it. The positions and functions of well are further examined using a functional framework. One-fourth of the Chinese-speaking learners who use well manipulate its positions in utterances in a similar way to native speakers. In terms of functions, well is employed for speech management much more frequently than for attitudinal purposes. The greater use of the former does not generally create negative effects, but the under-representation of the latter may suggest that Chinese-speaking learners sound too direct in certain contexts. The paper concludes by considering pedagogical implications for different first languages and proficiency levels and their possible applications to the instruction of well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As recovery from the Great Recession continues, economic development scholars and practitioners are again focused on the pace and the sustainability of recovery, as well as on efforts to minimise the severity of future downturns. This paper contributes to the literature by exploring the relationship between industry diversity and economic resilience over time. Using fixed effects models with data from the Bureau of Labour Statistics and the Census Bureau, the paper examines the influence of industrial diversity and concentration on unemployment rate stability in Ohio counties between 1977 and 2011. Results indicate that while more concentrated counties had lower unemployment rates when times were good, counties with more diverse industry structures fared better during times of national or local employment shocks. The paper also finds that there is a relationship between concentration in particular industries and the ability to withstand a shock changes over the 35 years examined, thus highlighting the need to take care when interpreting findings over shorter periods and the need to consider the particular industry of dependence. While local policymakers have little ability to affect industrial concentration in the short run, the paper recommends that highly concentrated counties adopt policies that may help buffer their economies to effects of negative shocks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding employment opportunities for citizens has become an increasingly central goal of public policy in the United States. Prior work has considered that the inability of households to spatially access jobs may be a driver of unemployment. The provision of public transportation provides a viable policy lever to increase the number of job opportunities available to households. Previous research has yielded mixed results regarding whether household location is an important factor in determining employment status. Several papers have identified mobility as a limiting factor for obtaining a job, particularly in regards to private vehicle ownership. The location of economically developed neighbourhoods and the citing of public transportation are conceivably codetermined, presenting an endogenous relationship. It is therefore unclear if public transportation access is actually contributing to neighbourhood job market outcomes. This paper will use the incidence of Hurricane Sandy striking New York City on 29 October 2012 and the resulting exogenous reduction in public transit access to particular neighbourhoods as a natural experiment to test for the effect of public transportation on employment outcomes. This study identifies a significant causal effect linking public transportation access to neighbourhood unemployment rates, particularly amongst subgroups dependent on public transit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science and technology studies (STS) and critical cartography are both asking questions about the ontological fixity of maps and other scientific objects. This paper examines how a group of NASA computer scientists who call themselves The Mapmakers conceptualizes and creates maps in service of different commitments. The maps under construction are those of alien Mars, produced through partnerships that NASA has established with Google and Microsoft. With the goal of bringing an experience of Mars to as many people as possible, these maps influence how we imagine our neighbouring planet. This paper analyzes two attributes of the map, evident in both its representation and the attending cartographic practices: a sense of Mars as dynamic and a desire for a democratic experience of Mars in which up-to-date Mars data can be intuitively accessed not only by scientists but by lay users as well. Whereas a democratic Mars promises users the ability to decide how to interact with the map and understand Mars, dynamic Mars imposes a more singular sense of Mars as a target of continued robotic and maybe even human exploration. Because maps of Mars have a different (and arguably less complex) set of social and political commitments than those of Earth, they help us see how different goals contradict and complement each other in matters of exploration and state-craft relevant both to other worlds and our own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relies upon the 'what's the problem represented to be?' approach to policy analysis to interrogate key representations of human trafficking implicit in the UK government's anti-trafficking policy. It identifies six policy vectors, or representations, of human trafficking embedded within the policy, including organized crime, 'illegal' immigration, and victim assistance as three primary vectors; sexual exploitation/prostitution, poverty in countries of victims' origin, and isolated instances of labour law infringements as three secondary vectors. In addition, a series of assumptions, which underlie the current interpretation of trafficking, are also identified. By exploring what the problem of human trafficking is represented to be, the paper also provides an insight into what remains obscured within the context of the dominant policy frameworks. In doing so, it highlights the role of state-capital entanglements in normalizing exploitation of trafficked, smuggled and 'offshored' labour, and critiques the UK's anti-trafficking policy for manufacturing doubt as to the structural causes of human trafficking within the context of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of fiscal sustainability has become increasingly used over the last 20 years. However, much of the literature on fiscal sustainability at the sub-national level ignores the role of intergovernmental fiscal relations. To address this gap, this paper discusses a sufficient condition for sub-national fiscal sustainability and examines the importance of intergovernmental aid in determining that sustainability. Using panel data of counties and municipalities in the US, and using unit root and cointegration analytic techniques, this paper finds different levels of fiscal sustainability between counties and municipalities. We also find that intergovernmental aid plays an important role for fiscal sustainability for both counties and municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The movements against the Vietnam and Iraq wars gave rise to analogous resistance efforts, in the form of draft resistance and counter-recruitment, respectively. Despite their many similarities, the draft resistance and counter-recruitment movements emerged in distinct historical eras marked by very different ‘state imaginaries’ or assumptions about the nature of the state and people’s relation to it. Drawing on original archival work, this paper excavates these state imaginaries and examines how they conditioned activists’ subjectivities in each era. More specifically, this paper argues that the 1960s were marked by an imaginary of the state based on consent, which positioned draft resisters as complicit citizens and engendered a sense of personal responsibility for the war. This state imaginary was displaced in the neoliberal era by an imaginary of the state as an alien and invasive force, which positioned counter-recruitment activists (or their children) as potential prey and impelled efforts at self-defense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American cities today are simultaneously the same and different from Wilson's classic portrayal in The Truly Disadvantaged ([1987] 2012), first published over 30 years ago. Concentrated poverty and racial segregation endure, as do racial gaps in multiple aspects of wellbeing. But mass incarceration, the dramatic drop in violent crime, immigration, rising income segregation, the suburbanisation of poverty, and other macrosocial trends have transformed the urban scene. The paradoxical result is that cities today are both better and worse off. In this paper, I put forth a unifying framework on persistence and change in urban inequality, highlighting a theory of neighbourhood effects and the higher-order structure of the contemporary metropolis. I apply this analytic framework to examine: (1) neighbourhood inequality as an important driver and mediator of urban transformation; (2) racial disparities across the life course in compounded deprivation, poisoned development, and intergenerational mobility; and (3) how everyday spatial mobility beyond the local neighbourhood is producing new forms of social isolation and higher-order segregation. I conclude with a challenge to dominant policy perspectives on urban racial inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Planning for mega-events such as the Olympics is at a turning point. There has been a power shift in the relationship between cities and the International Olympic Committee towards the former. This shift is based on the emergence of anti-bid opposition movements; the increasing complexity of bidding; demands for locally relevant legacies; and a changing political economic relationship between citizens, city governments and sports federations. Our paper draws on a long-term study of Boston’s failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, based on an ethnography within the bidding corporation and interviews with pro- and anti-bid stakeholders. We lay out the reasons why the Boston bid failed, and conclude that bid failure involves factors that work against elitist powers and towards democratic beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographically and economically, there is an ongoing global shift that has resulted in the uneven development and distribution of monetary, human and knowledge capital. This paper first examines and consolidates economic, social and urban theories of growth and decline and demonstrates how globalisation has conceptually shifted the spatial scale and trajectory of urban change theories. The examination of the population trajectories of the 100 largest American cities from 1980 to 2010 demonstrates that the majority either grew or shrank continuously. This trend counters early cyclical models and supports the argument that globalisation has altered population trajectories. Second, conceptualisations of urban shrinkage trajectories are reviewed and a two-dimensional trajectory typology encompassing both economic and demographic change is presented. The diversity of urban shrinkage experiences is demonstrated through the application of the typology to the 20 largest shrinking American cities, 12 of which experienced overall population loss and simultaneous economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concentrates on universities as important actants in the neoliberal city, specifically through their engagement of development activities. The paper visualises universities as an entrepreneurial subject: a neoliberal institution which adopts the responsibility to redevelop. Towards that end, the paper situates the redevelopment activities of universities and their politics in the context of the neoliberal city. It subsequently identifies the causal structures that underpin the growth logic of universities, which form the condition for their engagement in redevelopment as entrepreneurial subjects. The paper argues that the pressures coming out of the accumulation process act as an impetus for universities to expand, for instance, to accommodate the increasing student enrolments that generate revenues for them. Given their size, specialised infrastructure and the localised logic of bringing students to campus, expansion often means expansion in situ. This puts the spotlight on universities’ politics of redevelopment and the challenges they face as it typically means destruction of existing living and workplaces. Being entrepreneurial, universities maximise their efficiency in the politics of redevelopment to produce minimal resistance. This they do through alliance-building by creating amenable subjectivities that facilitate redevelopment. This is constituted by drawing upon and exacerbating existing cleavages of class and race. The paper presents a case study of redevelopment activities of The Ohio State University, located in Columbus, Ohio. The case study will illustrate why this university became an entrepreneurial subject and how, that is, through what discursive-material mechanisms the politics of persuasion unfolded, producing subjectivities that created (non)acquiescence around redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an important aspect of the politicisation of contingent work: the evolution of grassroots organising strategies by immigrant day labourers, an allegedly ‘unorganisable’ class of contingent workers. The paper focuses on the ways in which repertoires of contestation – based in a philosophy of social transformation through radical democracy and Popular Education – have defused from mass-movement social struggles in Latin America in the 1980s to street-corner organising in US cities today. Through a series of in-depth interviews with day labour organisers, the paper: (1) follows the continental travels of Popular Education methodologies; and (2) explores how organising approaches from the global South have been adapted and recombined to meet the challenges presented by day labour markets in the US which are characterised by rampant violations of core labour standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To address the inadequacy of ambulance design standards, the Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and BMT Designers and Planners have collaborated to develop new design standards for ambulance patient compartments. This paper presents a simulation-based approach to evaluate and guide improving patient compartment designs that conform to developed requirements for better performance and safety of ambulance users. Those requirements address hazards stemming from (1) the inability of providers to remain safely restrained while treating patients, and (2) the musculoskeletal damage from awkward body postures. An initial design was developed through the axiomatic design approach with inputs from stakeholders such as emergency medical service providers and ambulance manufacturers. The design was imported into a human task simulation tool. It was tested for performance to identify areas for further improvements, which resulted in a second design concept. This paper shows how computer simulation was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the two successive design concepts in enabling providers to perform a range of medical care tasks while remaining seated and restrained. We also evaluated the musculoskeletal effect of these designs on the providers. The results showed that using a simulation-based evaluation produced patient compartments that better meet user requirements when compared with traditional designs. This research produced a set of requirements and recommendations that we believe will lead to better design standards and guidelines for the next generation of ambulances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most scholarship on informal housing focuses on developing countries and little research investigates how low-income populations in the US participate in homeownership through self-built and self-provided housing. Meanwhile, informally developed areas are increasingly being uncovered in the US, especially in the urban periphery of growing metropolitan regions. This paper documents and analyses largely unknown housing conditions and needs for the growing number of people that live in such communities. Data for this paper were collected through a survey of 133 households in two unincorporated low-income, self-help settlements in Central Texas. In this survey we address (1) household composition, (2) specific housing conditions, and (3) reported structural and infrastructural problems. Through regression analyses we identify factors that mitigate or aggravate the severity of overall housing problems and identify the most significant concerns for residents. Our results offer future lines of action regarding property titles, financing and dwelling upgrading. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this paper is to reflect critically on the current health promotion initiatives targeting overweight individuals in Western countries. The paper’s methodological approach is to draw on analytical findings from my and other sociologists’ empirical work on how the problems of overweight people are being defined in various settings in Denmark, England, Australia and the US. I try to illustrate how health promotion targeting overweight individuals can not only be seen as a project aimed at securing longer lives and fewer illnesses for people carrying excess fat but also a moral project that, in a more general sense, aims to tell people how they ought to live their lives. I link this moral aspect of health promotion to a) the medicalization tendency in current Western society (e.g. a growing pharmaceutical industry and its economic interest in transforming the human condition of being overweight into a treatable disorder) and b) the strong focus on individual risk today. One of the main arguments in the paper is that health in relation to overweight is primarily defined from a biomedical perspective that praises certain physical measurements of the body, as well as dominant societal values such as  self-responsibility and self-control, and that a combination of biomedicine and these dominating values can lead to health promotion becoming a problematic moral endeavour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The rise of the city-region concept has focused attention on the nature of territorial politics underpinning city-regionalism. This paper investigates the relationship between territorial politics, city-regionalism and the collective provision of mass transport infrastructure in the USA. It deploys a case study of the Denver region, examining the state and governance structures driving forward FasTracks, a long-term project to expand the Denver Regional Transportation District’s light and commuter rail system. FasTracks represents a programme to retrofit the Denver city-region for integrated mass transit but its funding has fostered tensions around new regionalist governance arrangements. The paper uses the findings of the case study to reflect upon the balance of bottom–up versus top–down geopolitical forces shaping the landscape of city-regionalism in the USA. It emphasises the variety of ways in which struggles around infrastructure provision shape the emergence of new city-regionalist structures inside the competition state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds on earlier data presented in an Urban Studies paper for a major household survey in 2002 that evaluated the impact of title regularization intervention among low-income homeowners in ten colonias in Starr County, Texas. In 2011 the research team returned to those low-income households, oversampling more than half of them in order to compare and analyse the extent and nature of housing improvement, levels of overcrowding and access to home amenities, and the methods of financing for home improvement and extension. Significant improvements and investments were observed totalling an average of almost US$9000 over ten years, mostly financed out of income and savings, although an increasing trend to seek loans from the formal market was observed. Correlation analysis explores how self-help and self-managed dwelling environments are adapted to family and household dynamics over the life course. Awareness of ‘green’ housing applications and sustainability is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on ‘world cities’ develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country’s scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987–2007. The author’s addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper demonstrates how print media sources frame the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street in ways that, consciously or not, support the prevailing status quo -- social, economic, and political elites. The study employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) as the analytic framework, investigating how print media (sometimes referred to as 'print capitalism') utilized framing techniques that disparaged the two political organizations but in very different ways. The analysis incorporates articles appearing in the New York Post and the New York Times from the inception of each organization, through six weeks after the 2012 Presidential Inauguration; articles were coded to uncover themes that defined both organizations as 'outsiders.' Tea Partiers are characterized as irrational demagogues, while Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activities are criminalized; both are dismissed as irrelevant, leaving the predominant 'mainstream' political rule intact. Findings identify tools of discourse used by media to limit the influence of competing movements while essentially protecting the status quo. Revealing these tools provides clues to unreliable discourse in media coverage of presidential candidates, which tends to quash open debate and threaten principles of participatory government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of the Great Recession on housing equity and homeownership have been well-documented. However, we know little about how rental households fared and the efficacy of housing subsidies in addressing affordability gaps. This paper examines the extent to which rental housing became less affordable for Extremely Low-Income (ELI) households – those earning less than 30% of the Area Median Income (AMI). I then run regression models to determine the local characteristics most strongly associated with larger affordability gaps, with a focus on whether housing subsidies are effective at combating such gaps. Rental affordability gaps became more pronounced during the Great Recession. In nearly 70% of the counties in my sample, there was an increase from 2007 to 2010 in the number of ELI households per affordable rental unit. Across the country, the increase was 17%, a dramatic increase in only three years. There is considerable variation across the country, with acute affordability crises often concentrated in the South, particularly Florida. Regression models provide compelling evidence that housing vouchers, public housing, and project-based Section 8 subsidies play an important role in limiting the extent to which large numbers of ELI households are competing for a shortage of low-cost rental units. However, these programmes do not respond quickly to local needs – such as those brought about by the Great Recession. A pilot study where local housing authorities had funding to be more agile and responsive would be an important step toward crafting better policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous literature on cheating has focused on defining the concept, assigning responsibility to individual players, collaborative social processes or technical faults in a game's rules. By contrast, this paper applies an actor-network perspective to understanding 'cheating' in games, and explores how the concept is rhetorically effective in sociotechnical controversies. The article identifies human and nonhuman actors whose interests and properties were translated in a case study of 'edge sorting' - identifying minor but crucial differences in tessellated patterns on the backs of playing cards, and using these to estimate their values. In the ensuing legal controversy, the defending actors - casinos - retranslated the interests of actors to position edge sorting as cheating. This allowed the casinos to emerge victorious in a legal battle over almost twenty million dollars. Analyzing this dispute shows that cheating is both sociotechnically complex as an act and an extremely powerful rhetorical tool for actors seeking to prevent changes to previously-established networks. Science and Technology Studies (STS) offers a rich toolkit for examining cheating, but in addition the cheating discourse may be valuable to STS, enlarging our repertoire of actor strategies relevant to sociotechnical disputes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is possible if Dayton became a city that intentionally welcomed immigrants? This question was the starting point for a community conversation about the wellbeing of and outreach toward immigrants in a midsize city in southwest Ohio – the City of Dayton. This paper examines the processes employed to support the emergence of an immigrant-welcoming initiative now called ‘Welcome Dayton’. Early conversations resulted in a formal plan, written by the community and endorsed by city commissioners, which realigned and crystallised local priorities, sparking a wide spectrum of efforts aimed at becoming a welcoming city. Using qualitative methods, primarily participant observation, we identified practices of creating spaces where both long-time residents and recent immigrants come together in a way that recognises and reveals the value of each participant’s perspectives and ideas. Herein we examine the practices of creating and sustaining Welcome Dayton, paying particular attention to the role of recognition in generating ‘resourcefulness’ in the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dual conditions of an early emphasis on context within terrorism theory and an existing familiarity of place as point or jurisdiction for hazards researchers led to a subsequent diminished role for place as a core explanatory concept in the study of terrorism. This condition is increasingly untenable. There is growing evidence within the environmental risk-hazards literature and theories of terrorism that holistic understandings of place beyond simply a point on the Earth will enhance knowledge of how individuals might respond to this hazard. Drawing on 93 interviews conducted in Boston, Massachusetts (USA) before the Marathon attacks in 2013, and a subset of additional interviews conducted after, I answer the following question: What role does place play in the way that ordinary people experience vulnerability to terrorism at a micro-scale? I demonstrate that people interpret their risk not simply through the media or representativeness of particular places – ideas which are commonly assumed to amplify risk and fear – but rather that subjective experiences of everyday, practical places actually attenuate such perceptions and emotions. This paper presents several contributions to public policy, including rethinking a place-based paradigm for how emergency managers communicate with the public, how to generate a politics of fear reduction based in place, and how to rethink future studies on terrorism to appreciate the practical places of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we propose a household sorting model for the 50 largest US metropolitan regions and evaluate the model using 2010 Census data. To approximate residential locations for household cohorts, we specify a Cohort Location Model (CLM) built upon two principle assumptions about housing consumption and metropolitan development/land use patterns. According to our model, the expected distance from the household’s residential location to the city centre(s) increases with the age of the householder (as a proxy for changes in housing career over life span). The CLM provides a flexible housing-based explanation for household sorting patterns in US metropolitan regions. Results from our analysis on US metropolitan regions show that households headed by individuals under the age of 35 are the most common cohort in centrally located areas. We also found that households over 35 are most prevalent in peripheral locations, but their sorting was not statistically different across space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concerns about the negative externalities of air transport suggest it is important to consider the sustainability of growth in demand for air transport. However, there is little agreement on how the sustainability of demand should be evaluated. In this paper, I draw on the extensive literature on allometric scaling in biology, which examines animals’ demand for calories, to provide a novel framework for evaluating the sustainability of cities’ demand for air transport service. Viewing cities as analogous to organisms and airline passengers as analogous to life-sustaining resources, I focus on two questions. First, at what rate do cities metabolise passengers, that is, how many airline passengers does it take to fuel a city of a given size? Second, does this metabolic rate differ for business and leisure passengers, which represent different kinds of urban resources? Using data on airline passenger movement between 103 US metropolitan areas in each year from 1993 through 2011, I find that cities demand airline passengers in proportion to their population size, but when viewed separately, demand for business passengers as a function of city size is much lower than for leisure passengers. Moreover, I find that these patterns have remained relatively stable over the last two decades. The findings suggest that considering passenger type is important in evaluating the sustainability of air transport and the capacity of the air transport system to support cities’ continued growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial and ethnic diversity in the United States is on the rise, as the country is projected to no longer have a racial majority by the mid-2040s. Much of this diversity is found in the United States’ large metropolitan areas, where it manifests itself unevenly. While some metropolitan neighbourhoods are growing highly diverse, others remain segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper introduces a framework for exploring the geography of neighbourhood diversity in US metropolitan areas, and defines the diversity gradient, a visual representation of how diversity varies with distance from the urban core. Analysis of the geography of metropolitan diversity from 1990 to 2010 reveals that the greatest increases in diversity are found in the suburbs and outlying areas, where diversity now peaks in many large metropolitan areas. Additional spatial analyses of neighbourhood diversity in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth show that clustering of highly diverse neighbourhoods has shifted to the suburbs from close-in urban areas, where many segregated and low-diversity neighbourhoods persist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dominant ideologies about poverty in the USA draw on personal responsibility and beliefs that a ‘culture of poverty’ creates and reproduces inequality. As the primary recipients of welfare are single mothers, discourses surrounding welfare are also influenced by dominant ideologies about mothering, namely intensive mothering. Yet, given the centrality of resources to intensive mothering, mothers on welfare are often precluded from enacting this type of parenting. In this paper, I conduct a critical discourse analysis of 69 interviews with Ohio Works First (USA) program managers to examine how welfare program managers talk about and evaluate their clients’ mothering. My findings suggest three themes regarding expectations and evaluations of clients’ mothering: (a) enacting child-centered mothering, (b) breaking out of the ‘culture of poverty’ and (c) (mis)managing childcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question has been posed whether current developments in American penal policy toward reducing prison populations and sentences for low level, nonviolent offenses might reflect the end of the mass incarceration era. Yet articulation of precisely what defines the present in American penal policy remains unclear. This paper identifies three distinctive features: a national-level program of comprehensive criminal justice reevaluation and reform in response to the excesses of recent policy; the distinguishing of groups for distinct treatments as a central principle and product of the reform program; and the fusion of previously distinct political and administrative logics that undergird the reform process. Rather than a full turn away from mass incarceration or an ambivalent mix of old and new, contemporary penal policy is better characterized as a bifurcation, responding uniquely, with new answers and new omissions, to the dilemmas and constraints of “late mass incarceration.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between smart growth policies and other social and physical characteristics and the supply of multifamily housing units in 202 core-based metropolitan statistical areas (CBSAs) in the USA. Data for this study were gathered from the GeoLytics Neighborhood Change Database for the 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 US Census. The smart growth characteristics of each CBSA are determined by a smart growth index and a catalogue of urban containment rankings, while other social and physical characteristics are obtained from the US Census. This allows us to examine potential differences in development patterns between CBSAs with varying levels of sprawl and growth containment policies. Two regression models are used to determine statistically significant relationships between multifamily development patterns and growth management policies, as well as other social and physical characteristics. The results indicate that high levels of sprawl are associated with relatively fewer multifamily units, especially in suburban areas. In addition, several population demographics that may potentially benefit from multifamily units, such as senior citizens, the population in poverty and smaller households, are less likely to live in areas with higher rates of multifamily units. These findings indicate that planners and policymakers should consider the needs of more diverse communities when planning for housing, especially in suburban areas, where housing diversity is constricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper links the rise of a punitive punishment regime that disproportionately targets poor, urban minorities and the increasing use of rural spaces to warehouse prisoners. Preliminary evidence from a unique dataset across three states suggests that housing large, institutionalized prison populations inflates population counts in otherwise shrinking rural areas and operates as a hidden subsidy for rural counties with prison infrastructure. Prisons contribute to the immediate economic viability of predominantly white, lower class rural areas, despite devastating costs borne elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I demonstrate that the adjudication of sexual orientation asylum is one of the processes made possible under what Jasbir Puar calls homonationalism. I make an analytical distinction between cases that employ a narrative of ‘the homosexual’ versus other less (homo)normative sexual identities. In the asylum system ‘the homosexual’ is a unitary and fixed identity characterized by visibility, coherence and linearity. These features, notably, are consistent with a homonormative identity construction, which privileges white, Western, gay male sexual politics. My analysis indicates that applicants that can adopt the narrative of ‘the homosexual’ have greater success than applicants’ identities that are not easily encapsulated by this single narrative. Moreover, applicants must also show an infliction of bodily harm to signify a need for asylum; the treatment of their bodies in their country of origin must vary significantly from the protection that the United States purports to offer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using crime data for the 48 continental and conterminous US states and the distribution dynamics approach, this paper detects two distinct phases in the evolution of the property crime distribution: a period of strong convergence (1971-1980) is followed by a tendency towards divergence and bimodality (1981-2010). Moreover, the analysis reveals that differences in income per capita and police can explain the emergence of a bimodal shape in the distribution of property crime: in fact, after conditioning on these variables, the bimodality completely disappears. This empirical evidence is consistent with the predictions of a two-region model, that stresses the importance of income inequality in determining the dynamics of the property crime distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In November 2010, WikiLeaks released over a quarter of a million US State Department diplomatic cables to the world’s media, exposing private communications between diplomatic officials at US embassies across the globe and the State Department at Washington, DC. This study analyzes the WikiLeaks controversy through institutional views of the US news media. Our analysis of 83 newspaper editorials found four prominent themes in US newspaper discourse: (1) The contrast between the “discretion and maturity” of traditional journalism and the rash actions of WikiLeaks; (2) The need for “old media” in a new media landscape; (3) The tension between the public’s right to know and national security; and (4) The invocation of the Pentagon Papers as a way of drawing clear lines of difference between journalism’s past and its possible future. Our findings indicate ongoing tension between “old” and “new” media at a time when definitions of journalism are increasingly diffuse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The request of Alibaba, China's largest e-commerce firm, to allow a self-selected group of its past and present management known as the 'partners' the right to nominate a majority of the directors in its negotiation with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange for an initial public offering has reignited a new round of debate over the one share, one vote policy, which has survived for 27 years in Hong Kong. This paper discusses the viability of allowing the dual-class share structure in the city. Although the United States has adopted dual-class share structures for decades, this paper identifies the major institutional differences between Hong Kong and the United States and argues that Hong Kong should not follow suit due to these differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the spatial and temporal patterns of green building in the commercial and institutional sectors in the US. While these buildings are becoming more commonplace, they have yet to reach a critical mass to affect the entire construction industry. Given the potential for green building practices to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, the paper seeks to understand the geography of green building. Using multiple metrics, it explains the patterning of geography of LEED and Energy Star certified buildings in the US. Strong evidence is found of clustering at the metropolitan and sub-metropolitan scales. This exploratory research serves as a foundation for future research aimed at specifying the nature of agglomerative processes in green buildings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars typically study affluent neighbourhoods resisting annexation by poorer adjacent cities. This paper focuses on the mirror image of this problem: municipal underbounding—the unwillingness of cities to annex poor neighbouring areas. In the paper, such local governments are called reluctant cities and it is suggested that urban studies scholars need to reach a better understanding of the practice. Here, a seemingly counter-intuitive case from California is documented where adjacent cities were convinced to annex poor neighbourhoods, designated as colonias. It is suggested that there may be opportunities for local co-operation leading to annexation. The important role of federal infrastructure funding is noted and the need for deeper involvement of residents of annexed neighbourhoods in decision-making is emphasised. Although race was not an issue in this case study, it is likely to be an important concern in annexations and the literature’s call for regional approaches and institutional reforms is supported. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper aims to explore the differences between Norwegian and US welfare state ideologies, and if or how they are reflected in the respective foster care systems and in the daily practices of foster parents. Our analysis combines a review of policy documents and legal regulations, with interviews in a sample of 141 exemplary foster parents (87 from the US and 54 from Norway). The paper identifies clear differences in how these two states take responsibility and provide services for families in general and foster parents in particular, examining distinct differences in the conditions foster parents have for exercising their parenting tasks. The findings from the interviews show how the conditions play out in real life for foster parents and foster children in relation to recruitment of caregivers, time and resources available to children, and how caregivers negotiate and advocate for children’s needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

James C. Knox’s 1977 paper “Human Impacts on Wisconsin Stream Channels,” published in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, was a key component of a suite of three papers by him defining the response of rivers to the introduction and management of agriculture and to climate change. In this paper he used the Driftless Area of southwest Wisconsin as a laboratory where he could define fluvial responses by their sedimentary signatures in floodplain deposits. Land-use records dating back to the early 19th century along with shorter climate records provided his understanding of the drivers of change. He found that floods increased as an outcome of land-cover change. Upstream tributaries became wider and shallower as coarse deposits limited their adjustments, while main stem channels became narrower and deeper. His paper reflected the influence of his graduate advisor and especially of prominent faculty colleagues at the University of Wisconsin from fields ranging from soils and climatology to geomorphology and history. The paper was the subject of considerable debate in the professional community, but it remains a much-cited example of Knox’s work in unraveling the Quaternary and Holocene history of rivers of the Driftless Area and by extension the upper Mississippi River system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The collection of perinatal data within Queensland, A ustralia, has traditionally been achieved via a paper form completed by midwives after each birth. Recently, with an increase in the use of e-health systems in healthcare, perinatal data collection has migrated to an online system. It is suggested that this move from paper to an ehealth platform has resulted in improvement to error rates, completion levels, timeliness of data transfer from healthcare institutions to the perinatal data collection and subsequent publication of data items. Worldwide, perinatal data are collected utilising a variety of methods, but essentially data are used for similar purposes: to monitor outcome patterns within obstetrics and midwifery. T his paper discusses current practice in relation to perinatal data collection worldwide and within Australia, with a specific focus on Queensland, highlights relevant issues for midwives, and points to the need for further research into the efficient use of an e-health platform for perinatal data collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between county-level urbanisation, natural amenities and subjective well-being (SWB) in the US. SWB is measured using individual-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) which asks respondents to rate their overall life satisfaction. Using individual-level SWB data allows us to control for several important individual characteristics. The results suggest that urbanisation lowers SWB, with relatively large negative coefficients for residents in dense counties and large metropolitan areas. Natural amenities also affect SWB, with warmer winters having a significant positive relationship with self-reported life-satisfaction. Implications for researchers and policymakers are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to study how women’s privacy needs are met through the physical form of public spaces in both old and new urban designs, using as a case study the city of Nablus, Palestine, which has been significantly influenced by the culture of gender separation. The findings will help develop a better understanding of the relationship between women’s privacy and the physical form of public spaces and will enhance the development of public spaces that women can use comfortably and actively to participate in the urban life. An environmental approach based on the concept of behavioural setting was used to examine women’s privacy issues in the chosen public spaces. Direct observations and questionnaires were used in the fieldwork, in addition to interviews with women and relevant people who influence the women’s privacy. Maps (GIS), sketches and SPSS techniques were used to interpret the data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on zoning typically assumes that city planners aim to maximise housing prices with their land use decisions, either explicitly for public choice reasons or implicitly through the approval of land uses that create local net benefits. Noncongruence of school district and municipality borders severs the link between costs and benefits in the eyes of the median voter, however, which could result in excessive residential development and fiscal externalities that lower property values. This paper uses a hedonic approach to indirectly observe the presence of these externalities. Border congruency between school districts and municipalities in Ohio is measured using GIS data and matched with a data set of 56,717 home sales. The hedonic results indicate that noncongruence is associated with lower housing prices, while the degree of noncongruence is positively related. For most school districts, the negative effect of noncongruency dominates. My results are robust and consistent across different model specifications and empirical approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars point to urban decentralisation as a key contributor to transit’s decline in the USA during the 20th century. This paper examines the link between decentralisation and transit by testing the scholarly argument that transit should decentralise. Using a case study of a smaller US metropolitan area whose transit service was restructured from a centralised to a decentralised model, the authors found that in this context the change involved making tradeoffs between improving service for some parts of the community and degrading it for others. While ridership increased in previously unserved suburban markets, the net result was not an overall ridership increase because of its decline in inner-city neighbourhoods. The authors argue that these results, which were unanticipated based on a review of the scholarly literature, suggest the need for more sensitivity to the importance of local context for scholars working in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban authorities and a range of private and civil society actors have come to view housing as a key arena in which to address climate change whilst also pursuing wider social, economic and environmental objectives. Housing has been a critical area for urban studies, but often considered in sectoral terms and work on urban responses to climate change has followed this positioning. By contrast, an Urban Political Ecology (UPE) perspective would position housing in more integrated terms as part of the metabolism of the city. Yet so far there has been relatively little written in UPE about either housing or climate change. This paper therefore seeks to bring UPE into dialogue with the emergent literature focused on governing climate change through housing. It does so through a detailed study of the ‘Retrofit Philly “Coolest Block” Contest’. We argue that this contest highlights the ways climate change is changing the way housing is embedded in the circulations of the city, pointing to changes in who is governing housing, how housing is being governed and who is able to access the benefits of (climate change-branded) action on housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper synthesises two models: Savitch and Kantor’s bargaining and the amenity led growth model. Using evidence from Oklahoma City’s recent revitalisation, the argument concludes that leadership serves as a pivotal link between the bargaining table and the construction of new amenities to attract productive labour and improve their bargaining position. The proposed unified model reprises the role for leadership to include providing amenities prerequisite for economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of transportation networks and the patterns of accessibility they give rise to are an important determinant of land prices, and hence urban spatial structure. While there is ample evidence on the cross-sectional relationship between location and land value (usually measured from the value of improved property), there is much less evidence available on the changes in this relationship over time, especially where location is represented using a disaggregate measure of urban accessibility. This paper provides evidence of this dynamic relationship using data on home sales in the Minneapolis-St Paul, MN, USA metropolitan area, coupled with disaggregate measures of urban accessibility for multiple modes, for the period from 2000 to 2005. Our investigation tracks the effects of marginal changes in accessibility over time, as opposed to static, cross-sectional relationships, by using an approach in which the unit of observation is a ‘representative house’ for each transportation analysis zone in the region. This approach allows us to control for changes in structural attributes of houses over time, while also isolating the effect of changes in accessibility levels. Results of this approach are compared with a cross-sectional model using the same variables for a single year to illustrate important differences. Empirical estimates indicate that while most of the models estimated using a cross-sectional specification yield positive and significant effects of accessibility on sale prices, these effects disappear when the models are transformed into first-difference form. We explain these findings in light of the state of maturity of urban transportation networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial heterogeneity and spatial dependence are two well established aspects of house price developments. However, the analysis of differences in spatial dependence across time and space has not gained much attention yet. This paper jointly analyses these three aspects of spatial data. A panel smooth transition regression model is applied that allows for heterogeneity across time and space in spatial house price spillovers and for heterogeneity in the effect of the fundamentals on house price dynamics. Evidence is found for heterogeneity in spatial spillovers of house prices across space and time: house prices in neighbouring regions spill over more in times of increasing neighbouring house prices then when neighbouring house prices are declining. This is interpreted as evidence for the disposition effect. Moreover, heterogeneity in the effect of the fundamentals on house price dynamics could not be detected for all variables; real per capita disposable income and the unemployment rate have a homogeneous effect across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the impact of ethnic segregation on the life chances of low-income African American and Latino children, focusing on whether it is the ethnic composition of the neighbourhood per se that matters or other, correlated aspects of the residential environment. The approach links the consequences of segregation and neighbourhood effects literatures by arguing that metropolitan segregation forces directly shape children’s intra-neighbourhood ethnic exposure and indirectly shape their exposure to non-ethnic aspects of neighbourhood. Associations between a wide range of neighbourhood characteristics and children’s health, exposure to and engaging in violence, educational and fertility outcomes are quantified using a natural experiment, thereby permitting valid causal inferences. Data analysed come from a retrospective survey of Denver (CO) Housing Authority (DHA) residents. The analysis avoids parental geographic selection bias because DHA’s assignment of households to neighbourhoods mimics a random process. Logit models stratified by ethnicity show that growing up amid concentrations of African American residents is associated with a variety of adverse outcomes for low-income Latino and (especially) African American children, though outcomes associated with concentrations of Latino residents are more mixed. Virtually all of the negative associations disappear, however, when other aspects of the residential context are controlled, and several positive ones persist. The adverse developmental consequences of ethnic segregation appear to be generated primarily in Denver by concentrating minority children in neighbourhoods with higher rates of property crime and lower occupational prestige. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]