‘Ageing in place’: experiences of older adults in Amsterdam and Portland

This article addresses the importance and meanings of formal and informal social support relationships and neighbourhood ties for older adults ‘ageing in place’ in urban neighbourhoods in two different welfare state settings: Portland (Oregon, the United States) and Amsterdam (the Netherlands). The rising number of people growing old(er) in urban environments raises new demands and pressing challenges for urban development. The majority of older adults are and will be ageing in their homes and communities, as opposed to institutionalized care facilities and settings. At the same time, the provision of formal and public care is being increasingly challenged by government cutbacks. On top of this, the formerly strong welfare states in many European countries have weakened. In-depth interviews with 40 older adults and key informants in two neighbourhoods in each city provide the empirical basis for this study. In Portland, there are widespread local civic initiatives related to care provision for older adults. The city has a long tradition both of individual responsibility and community culture, which has emerged from and appears to compensate for the overall lack of state services and support. Amsterdam has a long tradition of state provision, but is experiencing a policy shift towards a stronger reliance on private market-led services, and an emphasis on family and community as providers of support. Although a few emerging local initiatives for elderly care in Amsterdam were identified, it is unclear whether this form of community support can compensate for decreasing state provision in Amsterdam. This study raises concerns about the future of care provision for older adults living in unsupportive urban neighbourhoods, without financial resources or nearby relatives.     

The social housing sector in Prague and Warsaw: trends and future prospects

The paper provides an overview of trends and processes of change affecting new social housing provision in Prague and Warsaw. The local responses are reviewed within the context of changes to the national housing system defining the performance of municipal and non-profit housing sectors. The research analyses the mix of policy instruments implemented in three major policy domains—regulatory, fiscal and financial—to promote the production of new social housing in the two cities. The system of new social housing provision is examined as a dynamic process of interaction between public and private institutions defining housing policy outcomes. The outcomes are evaluated through a series of indicators related to housing output, stability of investment, differentiation of rents, affordability and choice. The overview demonstrates how significant shifts in regulatory and fiscal policy, coupled with decentralization of responsibilities for social housing, limit the opportunities for more efficient performance in the sector and its growth. This is particularly evident in Warsaw, where the sector operates as a social safety net. New social housing in both cities has better quality and remains affordable, but access is constrained and waiting times have increased. The research highlights the problem of declining output, dwindling financial resources, and lack of cost recovery due to universal rent control. This is eroding the sustainability of social housing, potentially leading to lower investment and subsequent privatisation. In Warsaw, housing allowances are a municipal responsibility making the liberalization of rents difficult, while Prague has moved in the direction of rent deregulation with a more robust system of means-tested housing support provided by the central government. Such policy choices map a different trajectory for the future of social housing.     

Social provision and service delivery: Problems of equity,health, and health care in rural Australia

A neglected area of Australian geographical research relates to the issue of how to ensure an equitable provision of services to inhabitants of rural areas. Equity, however defined, is a procedural concept, requiring the implementation of rules about how to allocate and distribute scarce resources. Equity, as a distributional principle, is an important consideration both in determining the actual amount and nature of resources available and in deciding who will get how much of what is available. Compared with other social goods, there is a particular insistence on equity with respect to health care services. This article outlines the problems characterizing health care provision in rural Australia. It evaluates fiscal equalization as one means by which the Federal Government attempts to ensure at least some equity in the provision and distribution of health care resources to areas of dispersed population. The findings reveal that fiscal equalization alone is unable to ensure equity. This is because of problems of how to assess the needs for and costs associated with providing health care services in areas of dispersed population, confusion between equality and equity, problems related to the differentiation of government functions in a federal system, and inadequacies associated with using hospital services as the basis for resource allocation. This article concludes that equity is more likely to be achieved when policy is oriented to health care rather than medical care and when provision and distribution of resources relates more to service outcomes than to service inputs.     

Employability and flexible retirement: Variations in academia in an age of austerity

With both declining and ageing populations, countries are addressing the threats to their competitiveness by attracting more highly educated workers and by investing in human capital, especially through policies to increase the rates of participation by young people in tertiary education. As the population is still ageing, there are concerns over the affordability of state support for the elderly, their roles in society and the economy. Active and flexible lifestyles extend healthy life expectancy, so extending the length of the working life is increasingly seen as a way to ease the transition to an economy where an ageing population is affordable.Senior academic staff, exemplars of such post-industrial flexibility, have long been accommodated beyond the statutory retirement age. Their benign conditions of work; high private and social returns to experience and knowledge; and their high levels of those skills, labour power and other capacities which do not degenerate with age, combine to prolong the length of their effective working lives. Against this, as in other sectors, redundancies, voluntary severance and other schemes to reduce staffing have encouraged early retirement. Increased demand for higher education has driven changes in the lecturing labour mix, with increasing use of a peripheral workforce of both early career and retiring staff. This has seen semi-retirement within higher education evolving to stretch the period over which withdrawal takes place.In this context, the exploratory work reported here considers the initial responses by employers and trades unions in Scottish Higher Education to the abolition of the default retirement age and the introduction of ‘The Employment Equality (Repeal of Retirement Age Provisions) Regulations 2011’.     

The origins and use of theory in urban geography: Household mobility and filtering theory

The paper looks in detail at one particular interpenetration of academic theory and state policy making — filtering theory in urban geography. While household mobility and turnover are important processes in the housing system, they are extended in filtering theory to form a universal explanatory model embracing the entire housing system. In this model idealised concepts of the operation of the housing market—valid only under conditions that do not occur in practice — are used to legitimate a laissez-faire natural-market view of how the housing system should operate. Translated into government policy, used to justify the dominant private interests in housing, and supported by academic explanation, the theory then comes to legitimate the persistence of gross inequalities in housing provision and to maintain the allocation of resources away from those most in need. This paper reviews this use of filtering theory both in Britain and the United States, and makes a variety of empirical and theoretical criticism of its validity.     

Longitudinal environmental justice analysis: Co-evolution of environmental quality and deprivation in England, 1960–2007

We describe contemporaneous changes in environmental quality and social deprivation in English local authority districts over four decades, using secondary source GIS modelled data on environmentally intrusive development. The distribution of this development is described with respect to the Townsend material deprivation score, corroborated against the Breadline Britain index. Spatial patterns of environmental intrusion and material deprivation change markedly over the period, although a clear environmental inequality remains throughout. However, it is not the most deprived who experience the greatest decline in their environmental quality, as most of the increase in environmental intrusion occurs in those districts whose population were amongst the most affluent in the early 1960s. We note that the environmental justice implications of these observations are dependent upon conceptions of justice held, and reflect on the challenge of testing, through empirical longitudinal analysis, the notion that environmental sustainability and social justice are incompatible.     

Short-term economic effect of the M7.0 Lushan Earthquake

To estimate the short-term economic effect of the 2013 M7.0 Lushan Earthquake, the constant mean return model and the market model of event study are adopted. On the levels of the whole stock market, some typical sectors, regional stocks, and the stock in the affected area, effects are measured. Three indices are adopted to measure the whole market. Nine indices are selected to observe the abnormal returns of the sectors, involving Energy, Materials, Industries, Consumer, Health care, Finance, Information technology, Telecommunication service, and Utilities. In Sichuan Province, there are 82 registered stocks with enough trading data, whose abnormal returns are calculated to test the short-term effect on the regional economy. And in the affected area, only one stock is registered. The result indicates that abnormal returns from the whole market, nine sectors, and the region are not significant at the level of 0.01 in the following 10 days.     

Social Mix and the `Balanced Community' in British housing policy – a tale of two epochs

In Britain, concepts of `social mix' and the `balanced community' provide an example of how policy discourses have adapted to changing conceptions of the role of the state in public provision, forms of social division and inequality, and housing market transformations. The recent development of a policy agenda by the Labour government in Britain devised to promote more socially balanced neighbourhoods is not new, and its lineage may be traced back to the origins of housing and urban policy. However, the manner in which this objective has been framed and the intervention it has provoked have varied considerably over time. One is struck more by the episodic and discontinuous nature of the application of mix and balance in British policy than any sense of a coherent set of strategies pursued through changing times. This paper contrasts the place of social mix and balance in the discourses of the immediate post-war period in Britain with the renewed emphasis on such ideas in the policies of the New Labour government elected in 1997. In the first period, the claims of social mix were infused with the language of national reconstruction and the post-war settlement and the development of universal state provision. More recently, interest in social balance has arisen partly as a response to increased management difficulties and the process of `residualisation' in social housing and partly in response to new concepts of the underclass, social exclusion and social capital. The promotion of social mix and balance in contemporary policy has been shaped by notions of the underclass, social exclusion and the development of social capital in poorer communities. Policy intervention is overtly premised on the assumption that more mixed communities will promote more positive social interaction for residents, despite the lack of evidence for this claim. In practice, much of the discourse has now taken on a stronger sense of discipline and control in order to manage social housing estates. The meaning of social balance remains confused, however, and the achievement of this objective through policy intervention is likely to remain fraught with problems.     

The role of NGOs in public and private land development: The case of Dhaka city

Through a series of case studies, this paper discusses the three stakeholders in land development for housing in Dhaka city: the public and private sectors, and NGOs. In a scenario in which urban planning merely serves to the fulfil formal requirements and benefit certain groups, in which the public sector is an accomplice to the private sector, and where NGOs have their own private interests; urban planning in the public interest is interlocked with private interests. NGOs are important tertiary stakeholders in planning and service provision. While they vary in their types and objectives, environment NGOs in particular often find themselves in an antagonistic position concerning public and private land development. However, the interventions to the public and private sectors placed by the NGOs can provide a platform for future negotiation and participation in policy formulation.     

Modelling the effect of deprived physical urban environments on academic performance in the Philippines

This study investigates how physical urban environments affect academic performance of urban public elementary schools in the Philippines by analysing the physical environment of school facilities and slum areas. Global, local, and semi-parametric regression analyses indicate that there is disproportionate provision of resources among the government schools and that lower academic performance is associated with the provision of fewer clinics rather than the proximity to poverty hotspots. Semiparametric, geographically weighted regression modelling outperformed global and local modelling, and estimated up to 30 % of the variation in math scores where the semi-parametric regression model is based on each school’s number of teachers and rooms, building conditions, availability of health clinics, and the location of slum areas near the school. On the basis of the research findings, it is concluded that the current state of school buildings is adequate and is a lower priority than the provision of health care support and smaller pupil–teacher ratios. Hence, government programs that aim to enhance the academic performance of children from the deprived physical urban environments should prioritize the provision of health clinics as well as maintaining few large schools with small pupil–teacher ratios.     

Ethno-ideological segregation and metropolitan development

The effect of ethnic residential segregation on metropolitan development and expansion is examined. The ethno-ideologically divided city is an extreme case of segregation and Jerusalem, an example of such a city, provides a good case study. Deviations from patterns of population change predicted by the theory of the urban population density gradient are analysed non-statistically using the available data. When the two ethnic sectors are treated as separate cities, these deviations do not seem to be very important and population change conforms to the model. This seen in the light of local patterns of segregation seems to imply that at the local ‘tactical’ level domination and exclusion of the other group seems to result, whereas on the regional strategic level power is shared more equally and economic and demographic factors play the major role in fashioning the distribution of population change.     

The vulnerability of the elderly to hurricane hazards in Sarasota, Florida

Although the elderly are commonly thought to be disproportionately vulnerable to natural hazards, the elderly populations of coastal communities are continuing to grow. Because there is little to no empirical hazards work specifically addressing the vulnerable elderly in coastal communities, this paper uses Sarasota County, Florida, as a case study to analyze how vulnerable the elderly are to hurricane hazards and whether all elderly people are equally vulnerable. To explore the spatial variations in degree and composition of vulnerability among this population, the analysis maps physical exposure to hurricane storm-surge inundation and precipitation-induced flooding and creates social vulnerability indices by applying principal components analysis to census block group data in a geographic information system. The results show that elderly inhabitants of barrier islands face a considerable physical threat from hurricane-induced storm surge and flooding but are less socially vulnerable because of their wealth; the elderly living inland are far less physically vulnerable but are poorer and consequently demonstrate high socioeconomic sensitivity and limited adaptive capacity to these hurricane hazards. The paper concludes that the elderly are not equally vulnerable: there are many different types of elderly living in many different locations, and their vulnerability varies by type and over space. Effective vulnerability reduction measures should account for these differences between the elderly populations.     

黑河流域中游地区国民经济用水投入产出分析——以张掖市为例

采用投入产出分析方法, 以黑河流域中游的张掖市为例, 将传统的价值型投入产出表和水资源利用的实物型投入产出表相结合, 构建了混合型水资源投入产出表, 并估算了张掖市各行业的直接用水系数、 用水乘数、 直接产出系数、 产出乘数以及综合用水特性. 结果表明: 张掖市种植业、 畜牧业和其他农业的用水效益和用水效率远低于其他行业, 直接耗用水程度均高, 而直接产出一般. 张掖市过度依赖种植业的产业结构特征造成该地区对水资源的过度依赖. 因此, 调整产业结构, 实施高效的节水措施, 适当降低农业尤其是种植业在国民经济中的比重, 是解决张掖市水资源危机的有效途径.     

The defence sector in British regional development

The aim of the paper is to provide an outline of the influence of defence expenditure on British regional development during the last one hundred years. This topic has not received much attention since defence expenditure on the armed forces is usually considered non-basic, whilst expenditure on equipment is concealed amongst many industries. There are also important spin-off effects from this expenditure. The paper shows that defence expenditure favours southern and eastern regions of Britain and thus reinforces spatial trends from other sectors of the British economy. In addition to these regional effects there are significant impacts on local economies.     

“Functional localities: an integrated spatial approach towards health care locality definition”

This paper demonstrates a spatial approach towards the definition of localities for health care planning. Recent international decentralisation of health care provision, and more specifically devolution within the United Kingdom, emphasises the need to develop a geographical focus in the delimitation of local structures for health care planning. Geographers, but most especially those applying Geographical Information Science (GIS) techniques, have made enormous contributions in this field and more generally in research related to health services. This paper considers some of these previous approaches and moves on in the light of new technologies, and more importantly the availability of appropriate data, to create localities that reflect dynamic spaces of social interaction, administration and policy. The paper’s focus is placed on the importance of flow data that reflects␣the spatial interaction between services and the population. This data, divided into three sub-groups of administration, education and health, allows us to identify the population’s allegiance to place and ultimately create spatially bounded functional localities that reflect this. Whilst the approach is largely technology driven, it also incorporates the expertise of local health care professionals thus recognising the importance of collaboration and multi-sectoral engagement. Although this combined approach impacted upon the way in which the final localities were defined, crucially it enabled us to incorporate features of both rigorous spatial analysis and a wealth of local knowledge.     

A composed index of critical accessibility (CICA) to healthcare services in a traditional African City

While empirical works that analyse rural–urban differentials in accessibility to health services are common in the developing countries, systematic studies focusing on intra-urban variations in accessibility to overall healthcare resources remain scant. Yet, many urban dwellers especially in the Sub-Saharan Africa have to travel long distances within the urban space to access basic health services. This study employs composed index of critical accessibility (CICA) to analyse differentials in access to health resources in Ibadan, a traditional African City. Data on healthcare centre location, ownership, doctors’ population were collected through field survey while spatial data on the administrative units and populated places were obtained from archival sources. Also, data on road networks was collected. Results show that the distribution of health facilities across local administrative units varies. In terms health facilities, Ibadan South West has 26 (36 %) of the total number while Ibadan South east has only 7 (9.8 %). The Doctor-Population Ratio also exhibits similar variations as Ibadan North has 20.5 as against 2.2, 1.9 and 0.3 for Ibadan SW, Ibadan NW and Ibadan NE respectively. The CICA analysis shows that 228,938 inhabitants are in high risk of negative accessibility while 49,234 are faced with condition of low risk of negative accessibility, which implies that a significant proportion of the population still finds it difficult to access basic health services as and when needed. The variations in the distribution of this deprived population are also noteworthy as the largest proportion of this group was localized in Ibadan NW. This has grave implication for the health and wellbeing of the population and raises once again the question of spatial equity in the delivery of urban public service. Curiously, these differences in the level of accessibility cut across administrative boundaries which brings to the fore the role of jurisdictional partitioning in ensuring equity in the delivery of urban public services. This opens a vista of research opportunity into the role jurisdictional partitioning in service provision in the urban centres.     

Small towns as ‘sub-poles’ in English rural development: Investigating rural–urban linkages using sub-regional social accounting matrices

This paper uses spatial economic data from four small English towns to measure the strength of economic integration between town and hinterland and to estimate the magnitude of town–hinterland spill-over effects. Following estimation of local integration indicators and inter-locale flows, sub-regional social accounting matrices (SAMs) are developed to estimate the strength of local employment and output multipliers for various economic sectors. The potential value of a town as a ‘sub-pole’ in local economic development is shown to be dependent on structural differences in the local economy, such as the particular mix of firms within towns. Although the multipliers are generally small, indicating a low level of local linkages, some sectors, particularly financial services and banking, show consistently higher multipliers for both output and employment.     

The changing spatial distribution of socio-economic groups employed in manufacturing in Great Britain, 1971–1981

In this paper an attempt is made to study the spatial division of labour in Britain, through an investigation of the changing structure of employment in the manufacturing sector between 1971 and 1981. The separate impacts of loss in the volume of manufacturing employment, change in the balance between production and non-production activities in the occupational structure and the spatial shift of the population employed in manufacturing upon spatial variations in manufacturing employment change are tentatively identified. Data on the socio-economic composition of the population employed in manufacturing from the Small Area Statistics of the Censuses of Population for 1971 and 1981 are used to measure the impact of these processes at the local labour market area (LLMA) scale and to draw conclusions for the future employment prospects of different parts of Britain.     

The Hungarian diversification strategy: Constraints and opportunities

Although agricultural work is declining in Hungary, farming remains an important source of employment. However, the agrarian population should not be regarded as homogenous because many small farms are worked only for subsistence and family income supplement. This is because of prolonged economic crisis which makes for a shortage of job opportunities in other sectors of the economy. Until economic growth accelerates there is a need for transitional solutions to the problem of unemployment. It is argued that the present farming system could be diversified through labour-intensive programmes to provide piped water and drainage in small towns and villages and simultaneously engage many of the long-term unemployed who are no longer entitled to benefit and lack the qualifications for jobs that require special skills. The environment could also be protected by the afforestation of 300–400 000 ha of arable land or its conversion to grassland. Light industry could also generate employment while stimulating the growth of local farm production and the improvement of the infrastructure. Training for unemployed young people should also be a priority if the erosion of rural labour resources is not to become irreversible. A much more proactive approach is needed from government to safeguard rural labour resources and achieve greater integration between forestry, farming and processing. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

A Historical Record of Coastal Floods in Britain: Frequencies and Associated Storm Tracks

This paper examines flood frequencies in three coastal sectors of Britain and analyses the associated storm tracks and their principal pathways. The results indicate that the east coast of Britain has suffered most floods over the last 200 years. The frequencies of flood incidents in the south and southwest coast of Britain have increased, particularly during the 20th century, whereas on the west coast flood frequencies have declined. Three distinctive pathways of storm track are identified, related to flood incidents in each coastal sector. A southern pathway in a corridor along the 55° N parallel is associated with flood incidents recorded on the south and southwest coast, whilst storms that are associated with floods on the west coast concentrate along the 60° N parallel. The relationship between the frequencies of floods and climatic variations needs to be explored further. However, the development of coastal settlements has certainly increased vulnerability, and hence the risk of flood disasters.