Private sector involvement in urban governance: The case of Business Improvement Districts and Town Centre Management partnerships in England

Although it has many merits, the voluminous literature on urban governance gives scant attention to the actual involvement and positioning of business elites and businesses within Public-Private Partnerships. There is also little consensus among academics as to why the private sector become involved in such schemes. This paper begins to address these issues through a critical empirical examination of how and why the private sector is involved with three English Town Centre Management (TCM) partnerships and the Business Improvement District (BID) subsidiaries all three partnerships have recently developed. In order to do this, the empirical study is guided by a conceptual framework that foregrounds the relationship between (a) the opening up and monitoring of ‘institutional space’ by partnerships and the state, and (b) the motivations and ‘constrained agency’ of the business elites. The paper demonstrates that the positioning of the private sector is more multifarious and fractured than previous studies of urban governance have suggested. It also reveals that business elites and businesses view their participation as an ‘investment’ that needs to accrue significant financial returns and that partnership and state officials are highly selective in their choice of ‘who governs’.     

Water and power networks and urban fragmentation in Los Angeles: Rethinking assumed mechanisms

Los Angeles is often described as the epitome of urban fragmentation, a notion which in this context is frequently connected to, or even conflated with urban sprawl. At the same time, the city features integrated water and power networks which have been under public ownership for over 70 years. We thus have an apparent paradox in the context of the debate on ‘splintering urbanism’, between socio-spatial fragmentation and the integration of networks. In discussing the idea that deregulation of infrastructural networks exacerbates urban fragmentation, the authors use the case of Los Angeles in order to highlight the central role of private interests in management decisions concerning infrastructure networks. The authors carry out their analysis in an historical perspective, revealing that network integration and universal access can often serve private interests more than the public good. Urban fragmentation in Los Angeles, they conclude, is the result of a complex process of instrumentalisation of network development and management.     

Changing poverty distribution in Bolivia: the role of rural–urban migration and urban services

Bolivia is a country with high levels of poverty and inequality among its peoples and regions. For the nation and its urban and rural areas, trends in the social and spatial distribution of poverty (and extreme poverty) are identified from 1976 to 2003 using UBN data with minor support where appropriate from poverty lines. The main survey between 1992 and 2001 uses composite and selected UBN to track detailed poverty change for the country’s nine departments, its ten largest cities and a selection of other smaller urban and rural municipalities. Because of rising background increases in population in the various surveyed administrative units, many instances of relative reductions in poverty are accompanied by rising absolute increases. Marked spatial variations in poverty and development in the country over the last several decades are identified as the main driver for the country’s quickening pace of rural–urban migration. As a result, the paper concludes by assessing two different but closely related views. One investigation tests the notion that because more poor people have been living in Bolivia’s cities than in its rural areas since the mid to late 1990s, rapid rural–urban migration has simply shifted the locus of poverty from the countryside to the cities in a process called, the ‘urbanisation of poverty.’ A second, more challenging, investigation assesses the view that the flow of poor rural people to the better serviced urban areas of Bolivia has actually acted to alleviate national poverty levels.     

城市化过程中都市农业景观变化及其生态安全评价——以西安市为例

快速城市化过程中都市农业景观变化及其生态安全研究是城市化区域生态安全和可持续发展研究的重要课题.构建都市农业景观生态安全评价指标与方法,探讨城市化对都市农业景观生态安全的影响具有重要的科学意义.以西安市为例,应用GIS和RS技术方法,结合"压力-状态-响应"(PSR)模型建立了都市农业景观生态安全综合评价指标体系,通过提取1999、2006和2013年的农业景观类型信息,定量分析了都市农业景观变化特征、动态评价了都市农业景观生态安全过程.结果表明:1999-2013年西安市农业景观结构变化剧烈,景观斑块数量增加、平均斑块面积减小,聚集度变差,景观趋于复杂化、破碎化,耕地、林地面积显著减少,园地面积增加.城市化的快速发展导致都市农业生态安全压力指数由0.43上升为0.59,生态安全状态指数由0.73降至0.28,生态安全响应指数则由0.26上升为0.77,生态系统服务价值下降;城市化过程带来的景观压力指数上升以及景观状态指数下降,使得都市农业景观生态安全综合指数由0.56先下降为0.4,后上升到0.48.城市化过程中的都市农业景观生态安全评价可以为都市农业可持续发展、土地可持续利用管理和科学决策提供依据.