Industry Clusters and Sydney's ITT Sector: northern Sydney as ‘Australia's Silicon Valley’?

This paper examines the claim that the North Ryde–North Sydney arc is Australia's ‘Silicon Valley’, seeking firstly to identify the empirical validities behind the claim, and secondly to ask how the documented patterns might be explained. The paper evidences the fact that this area indeed provides the pre-eminent site for Australia's information technology and telecommunications (ITT) sector. However, examination of this industry suggests that its expansion in Sydney has been motivated primarily by the increasing centrality of advanced producer services within the high-order business sector. It is Sydney's attributes for multinational business, as opposed to the propulsive dynamics of local clustering per se, which appears to explain the spatial concentration of these activities. Thus, it is the urbanisation economies of Sydney more than the localisation economies of the ITT sector which account for the growth of this sector in the city. Nevertheless, localisation economies are sporadically significant, suggesting that Sydney's ITT sector is to a certain extent a hybrid product of the two types of economies.     

Choosing the Right Battles: how independent bookshops in Sydney,Australia compete with chains and online retailers

The emergence of multinational retailers has induced shifts in the spatial distribution of retail capital. Furthermore, the advent of shopping centres has led to a reconfiguration of consumption spaces. These trends have particular consequences for independent retail businesses. This paper investigates the impacts of rationalisation and consolidation in retailing on independent bookshops in Sydney. There is a view that independent bookshops are in decline, and this is particularly true when you look at the independent bookshops in the UK and the USA. However, this research reveals that the perception of the demise of the independent bookshop in Australia is exaggerated. Despite the challenges they face, there are counterbalances to the trends of shopping centres, chain shops and online retailing that have carved a niche for the independent bookshop. Independent bookshops differentiate themselves from chains by designing unique shops, carrying a wide range of inventory, and providing personalised customer service. In this way, they have successfully distinguished themselves from other types of booksellers and maintained a stable position in Australian book retailing.     

Locational Factors in the New Textile Industry: Focus on the U.S. South

Abstract

After a brief examination of the geographic shift in the U.S. textile industry from New England to the South in the early twentieth century, this article focuses on the location of contemporary textile mills, which continue to be heavily concentrated in the U.S. South. The industry is analyzed cartographically by types of mills and number of mill workers. The new dynamics of the industry are expressed through modern corporate management strategies that recognize increased integration between manufacturing and markets, especially apparel and home furnishings retailing. Electronic technology, substituted for traditional low-cost labor, has led to the growing importance of localization economies in accounting for the spatial concentration of the industry in the core state of North Carolina and its extensions along the Piedmont into Alabama to the south and Virginia to the north. Economies of scope, flexible production, and quality output characterize the contemporary U.S. textile industry, which operates under increased global competition.     

How many seasonal workers from the Pacific have been employed in New Zealand since the RSE scheme began?

This Research Note provides the first reliable figures on the numbers of seasonal workers from the Pacific Islands who participated in the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme between July 2007 and June 2022. The method for deriving these figures is explained briefly before examining the frequency of return by men and women for employment in subsequent seasons from the nine participating Pacific states. Clarification of the numbers of seasonal workers involved in the scheme, as distinct from work visas issued each year for RSE employment, is timely for two reasons. Firstly, the RSE scheme is under review in March 2023 by Immigration New Zealand. Secondly, the three major sources of Pacific seasonal labour are raising questions in 2023 about the impact of the scheme on their domestic labour markets and economies. Robust data on numbers of Pacific seasonal workers during the scheme's first 15 years contributes important information in both these contexts.     

Commercial Possibilities for Stranded Conventional Gas from Alaska’s North Slope

Stranded gas resources are defined for this study as gas resources in discrete accumulations that are not currently commercially producible, or producible at full potential, for either physical or economic reasons. Approximately 35 trillion cubic feet (TCF) of stranded gas was identified on Alaska’s North Slope. The commercialization of this resource requires facilities to transport gas to markets where sales revenue will be sufficient to offset the cost of constructing and operating a gas delivery system. With the advent of the shale gas revolution, plans for a gas pipeline to the conterminous US have been shelved (at least temporarily) and the State and resource owners are considering a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export project that targets Asian markets. This paper focuses on competitive conditions for Asian gas import markets by estimating delivered costs of competing supplies from central Asia, Russia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Australia in the context of a range of import gas demand projections for the period from 2020 to 2040. These suppliers’ costs are based on the cost of developing, producing, and delivering to markets tranches of the nearly 600 TCF of recoverable gas from their own conventional stranded gas fields. The results of these analyses imply that Alaska’s gas exports to Asia will likely encounter substantial competitive challenges. The sustainability of Asia’s oil-indexed LNG pricing is also discussed in light of a potentially intense level of competition.     

基于全球生产网络视角下的零售供应链升级与转型——以鲜奶和大豆油为例

在过去的10年中,快速的零售业全球化进程已经在经济地理学研究中引起了强烈的关注。依托全球生产网络分析框架,通过阐述权利与价值在两个食品供应链（鲜奶和食用油）中发生的迁移与更迭,揭示出跨国零售企业进入中国市场前后,本土供应链发生的转型与升级。同时,就供应链转型所具有的五个普适性特征,包括集中化采购、专业批发商的涌现、物流与信息系统升级、执行企业标准和发展自有品牌,在选取的案例产品中进行分析与比较,以此来解释供应链重组过程中的影响因素。结果表明：应采用动态的视角来研究零售供应链中的权利与价值,以此才能更好地揭示新兴市场中供应链网络转型升级的复杂性和不均衡性。     

Revealing Materials: plastics in alternative food economies

This article draws upon recent geographical work on assemblage to reconsider how we understand alternative food economies. In particular it brings attention to the devices upon which these economies rely—specifically plastics. Since the mid-twentieth century, plastics have developed close and complex relations with our agrifood systems; they facilitate commodity valuation and product circulation worldwide but are also recognised as problematic due to their environmental and human health impacts. Despite this paradox and the attention plastics increasingly receive, we know little of their relations with alternative food initiatives (AFIs). How do plastics inhabit alternative food economies? What associations and circulations become performed? What do these markets look like from a device-oriented perspective? To address these questions, the paper draws on fieldwork undertaken in Brisbane (Australia) with two AFIs—a weekly organic market and an online box program/wholesaler. Using visualisation and an assemblage approach discloses the presences, flows, functions, and tensions of plastics in AFIs. In this way, plastics are revealed but also act to reveal alternative food economies. This analysis steps away from evaluations of AFIs’ (in)effective challenge to neoliberalisation to consider them as complex, processual, sometimes ambivalent efforts that not only distribute ‘good food’ but engage in important ways with things like plastics.     

Chinese Trade in Latin America Compared to the European Union and the United States: The Case of Technology-Intensive Exports

Using trade data submitted by United Nations member states from 1995 to 2013, this article contributes to understanding China's trade with Latin America. By employing and building on the TECH score methodology, this project highlights China's growing economic connectivity with nine large and important Latin American economies. The analysis conducted here shows that compared with exports originating from other, more traditional foreign investors (i.e., the United States and the European Union member states), Chinese exports to these Latin American countries—although growing in sophistication over time—are relatively less technologically sophisticated during the study period. This work clarifies that in spite of these Latin American economies being highly complementary (for their natural resources and consumer markets) to China's manufacturing-intensive economy and despite the rapid growth in bilateral and biregional trade, China's displacement of traditional foreign actors, in terms of its technology-intensive exports to the region, is not supported by the data to date.     

The Locations of Wal-Mart and Kmart Supercenters: Contrasting Corporate Strategies

Wal-Mart and Kmart, the two largest American discount retailers, have begun to utilize a supercenter retailing format that combines a full-service grocery store with a discount department store. Supercenters are expected to be the major format for future expansion of each of these firms. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the spatial expansion strategies of each firm for the locations of its supercenters. Wal-Mart is quickly expanding its number of supercenters in modest-sized communities clustered around its grocery distribution centers, especially in Southern states. Conversely, most Super Kmart Centers are located inthe suburbs of widely scattered major metropolitan markets, and Kmart has yet to develop a grocery distribution network. Kmart currently has major financial problems that severely restrict the expansion of the Super Kmart Center format.     

A rockfall avalanche in a sandstone landscape,Nattai North,NSW

Rockfall avalanches are commonly associated with the alpine regions of Europe, South America and north‐western Canada, but modern examples have only been reported very recently in Australia (Pells et al. 1987). The Nattai North rockfall avalanche is located on the Burragorang Walls escarpment in the sandstone landscape of the Sydney Basin. The volume of rock involved in the failure had sufficient magnitude to enable the resulting mass of debris to flow in the manner of a semiviscous fluid. The conventional models of rockslope evolution, involving undercutting followed by blockfalls, do not apply at this site. Indeed these models do not apply to most of the large‐scale rock collapses in the Sydney Basin. All such rockfalls have occurred in the vicinity of underground coal mines. Coal mining has affected the stability of nearby escarpments by altering stress distributions within the rock mass. The subsequent failures are typically larger and of a different form than those occurring naturally.     

国外商业地理学研究的近期进展及趋向

运用文献分析法,对近10年来国外商业地理学研究的主要进展做简要评介,并展望其发展趋向。分析表明：商品交换、流通和消费的新商业地理学,零售业国际化,购物中心的吸引、扩张与竞争,市场接近性、市场规模与产业区位,商业空间重构与消费者选择行为,市场潜力与区域经济发展,商圈与集聚经济等已成为近期研究主题;创意商业、低碳商业、伦理商业与贸易、商品流及市场网络系统、定量分析和模拟是商业地理学发展的新趋向。     

The informal Australian city

In recent years, a vibrant literature on urban informality has emerged in urban geography. A key claim of this literature is that informality is not only present in cities in the Global South, and that the concept can be usefully applied to understand important dimensions of urbanisation in cities in the Global North. In this paper, we apply insights from that literature to an examination of informality in Australian cities, as a means of deepening our understanding of changes currently underway in urban governance and politics. Drawing on that literature and our own research into informal practices in Australian cities, we examine the forces that help to produce informality, the diverse forms and agents of informality, the forms of authority that they enact, and their relationship to formal economies, regulations and politics. We use examples of informal housing, informal labour, do-it-yourself music venues, graffiti and its regulation, food foraging, and queer community building in Sydney to illustrate our arguments. We conclude by reflecting on the lessons learnt across these diverse cases for our understanding of urban governance and politics in Australia, and offer an agenda for further research on this issue.     

Property speculation,global capital,urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom,Sydney Bust redux

In this ‘Thinking Space’ essay we revisit Maurie Daly’s 1982 book Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust, fuelled by concern for how Australian cities are being transformed by financialised real estate. Daly's insights remain highly relevant to Sydney and other cities around Australia and the world today. Poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, and housing poverty are all outcomes of the (global) capitalist intersection of finance and land in Australia. The overwriting of Aboriginal country with colonial-capitalist systems of land ownership set in train a process of land and housing booms, bubbles and busts that are better understood by their circular continuity rather than as a set of ephemeral ruptures. It is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduces unequal and alienating social relations. Researchers investigating property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation, we argue, ought to revisit this key text to inform their contemporary analyses. Moreover, those wielding power over Australian urban affairs would do well to read it too, lest its lessons be ignored for another generation.     

Gleaning from Gluttony: an Australian youth subculture confronts the ethics of waste

As part of the global ‘rights to the city’ movement and mounting concern over food waste, results are presented here of an ethnographic study of young people in Australia who choose to glean food from supermarket ‘dumpster bins’ and open markets primarily for political reasons. These youth form part of an international ‘freegan’ subculture: the belief in ‘minimising impact on the environment by consuming food that has literally been thrown away’ (Macmillan English Dictionary Online 2002). The study explores the emergence of two related subcultures: ‘Dumpster Diving’ (the act of procuring food from a supermarket dumpster bin for individual consumption) and ‘Food Not Bombs’ (a global-spanning group who collect left-over food from markets to cook and serve to people on the street). The analysis focuses on the ethics embedded within their alternative consumption diets. These findings are analysed in terms of the creation of their alternative identities performed on temporal–spatial terrains, exemplifying the role of the contemporary activist's use of space, place and culture in relation to social issues.     

Industrial sulfur demand: Analysis and prospect

Weak growth in industrial (nonagricultural) U.S. sulfur demand has slowed the growth of total sulfur demand. Evaluating prospects for trend reversal is hampered by inadequate detailed data published by industry, and the lack of an easily measured demand component that reliably depicts total demand. In this article, I try to overcome this data deficiency by constructing an industry-by-industry breakdown of published data on total industrial sulfur consumption. Industrial sulfur consumptions were estimated from data on consuming industry activity, characteristics of relevant industrial processes, and analyses of the conditions affecting choice among alternative industrial processes. Subjective projections of the industry detail data are presented.In addition to cyclical factors, past declines in industrial sulfur demand were due to replacement of sulfur-using industrial processes with alternative processes that use less or no sulfur to achieve production cost economies. In some, but not all, cases, changeovers of process were in response to impositions of environmental-related requirements. The demand for industrial sulfur has good prospects for positive growth as shrinkage of some markets reaches natural limits and total market growth comes increasingly to be dominated by markets with positive growth prospects. Positive growth has been generated by environmentally related regulation in several markets, such as petroleum alkylation and copper production.     

广州市零售商业中心消费活动时变模式及其影响因素

利用2016年在广州典型大型零售商业中心进行的客流量监测和居民消费行为问卷数据,分析基于客流时间变化的广州大型零售商业中心消费活动时变模式,构建多项Logistic回归模型,从消费者社会经济属性、消费活动特征和商业中心建成环境3方面探讨该时变模式的影响因素。结果显示：① 广州不同的大型零售商业中心内消费活动存在明显的时变特征差异,可分成稳定型、下午高峰型、傍晚高峰型和不规则波动型4类时变模式;② 这种时变模式受到消费者社会经济属性、消费活动特征和商业建成环境等变量的影响。其中,消费者社会经济属性和消费活动特征影响有限且影响差异较大,以稳定型为参照组,在广州居住时间、居住区位和家庭月收入等社会经济属性,以及消费结构、出行路径、交通方式和出行距离等消费活动特征能区分稳定型和下午高峰型商业中心,但只有在广州居住时间和出行距离、交通方式3个变量能显著地解释稳定型和傍晚高峰型商业中心的差异;建成环境是影响零售商业中心时变模式的首要因素,商业网点密度、用地混合度、公交与地铁站点密度、商业中心区位特征、到市中心距离等变量均对各个类型商业中心的形成作用显著。期望为城市零售商业中心的分类和评价提供一个新思路,为预测商业中心可能的消费活动时变模式、消费者属性和活动特征提供理论依据,对城市商业规划和商业中心开发运营有一定的现实指导意义。     

基于POI数据的西安市零售业空间格局及影响因素研究

基于POI数据,利用核密度估计、缓冲区分析等方法刻画西安零售业空间集聚状态,确定零售业分布核心范围,并利用双变量空间自相关分析、近邻分析等方法探究零售行业之间的空间集聚关系,以及零售业与居住小区、交通因素的空间关系。研究表明： ① 西安市零售业呈“中心-外围”结构,以钟楼为中心连片集聚分布,在距离钟楼16 km范围内为零售业分布核心区,在阎良、高陵、临潼、鄠邑4个郊区呈“孤岛”状集聚。② 文化、体育用品及器材零售,纺织、服装及日用品零售业更倾向于在内城分布,而汽车、摩托车、零配件和燃料及其他动力销售业,五金、家具及室内装饰材料零售集中在租金低但交通方便的城市中心外围。③ 集聚效应、人口分布与路网影响零售业的空间分布。与居民日常生活关系密切的零售行业如综合零售,食品、饮料及烟草制品零售,纺织、服装及日用品零售等在空间上集聚以接近消费者,分享消费市场和空间场地,而耐用品零售行业如汽车、摩托车、零配件销售业,家具及室内装饰材料零售等倾向于自身集聚,以共享品牌效应。交通干线尤其是城市二级道路明显影响零售网点的空间分布。     

Competition and co-operation in the semi-periphery: closer economic partnership and sectoral transformations in Chile and New Zealand

The signing of a strategic economic partnership (the Trans-Pacific SEP or P4) between Chile, New Zealand, Singapore and Brunei Darussalam in 2005 reveals the emergence of a new generation of trade agreements that seek to promote longer-term synergies and cooperation. This is in marked contrast with a purely competitive, market-based model of agreements whereby economies are opened up to oligopsonistic capital. The orientation is clearly more neostructural and strategic in construction, emphasizing the opportunities within the global economy of improved relations with similarly positioned economies within the semi-periphery. This article analyses both the basis for and implications of the P4 for Chile and New Zealand by looking at three sectors in which both countries are competitive in export markets: dairy, wine and fisheries. By assessing similarities and differences, and the ways in which competition or co-operation might be established, the potential impacts of the agreement can be posited. Within a global context of bilateral and multilateral commercial agreements, it is this type of agreement that perhaps best fits the needs of smaller economies in the periphery that seek to establish greater competitive space for their exports in core economies without engaging in a mutually destructive war of competition in similar sectors and products.     

长春市大型零售设施空间可达性绩效测度

对传统的空间可达性测度模型进行改进,并引入营业面积,人口数量,消费者偏好等变量,对长春市大型零售设施进行研究,通过ArcGIS平台对零售设施的分布特征进行分析后表明:① 零售设施主要分布在城市三环路以内,在一环路传统商业区集聚程度最高;快消零售设施空间分布的向心性显著,呈单中心的集聚特征;耐消设施分布的离心化相对明显,呈双中心的集聚特征.② 综合,快消设施可达性绩效高值区集中在一环内,绩效指数向外递减时存在阶梯性,南北方向递减速度高于东西方向,城市南部三环路以外绩效水平最低;耐消设施绩效高值区在空间上分散分布.③ 快消设施绩效低值区是近年来长春市居住空间扩散的主要区域,零售设施的空间配置严重滞后于城市的空间拓展与人口的郊区化趋势.零售设施空间可达性绩效测度是一种关联了供需双方面因素,测量零售设施服务分配到单位消费者水平的方法.     

Scenarios for the Future Population of Sydney

The period 1996-2001 has witnessed a refocusing of population growth on Sydney and Melbourne as both cities have developed significant concentrations of so-called 'new economy' jobs and taken on, to greater or lesser extents, the characteristics of global cities. The consequence of these trends, for Sydney most particularly, is population growth. This paper establishes this demographic reality by describing recent demographic trends in Sydney and possible future scenarios for Sydney's population, given differing levels of fertility, internal migration and international migration. A related future trend is also traced--that the number of households in Sydney will grow more rapidly than the population due to changes in household structure. This raises the issue of how and where these households will be accommodated, given the relative land shortage in the Sydney Statistical Division and given that there is no doubt that planners in New South Wales will be attempting to maintain and enhance Sydney's status as a global city. In sum, the paper argues that Sydney planners should be preparing for growth of around one million people in the next 20 years and a further one million in the following 30 years. To maintain that potential future residents of Sydney can be redirected to other parts of New South Wales is a vain hope.