BOOK REVIEWS

Book Reviewed in this article: Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States 1820–1920. Bernard Aspinwall. Studies in Russian Historical Geography. James H. Bater and R. A. French, eds. Water and Sanitation: Economic and Sociological Perspectives. Peter G. Bourne, ed. Green Politics. Fritjof Capra and Charlene Spretnak. The Southern Cone: Realities of the Authoritarian State. César N. Caviedes. Women in Third World Development. Sue Ellen Charlton. Land Management: New Directions. David Chiddick and Alan Millington, eds. Geography and Ethnic Pluralism. Colin Clarke, David Ley, Ceri Peach, eds. Geomorphological Hazards in Los Angeles. R. U. Cooke. Regional Impacts of United States-Mexico Economic Relations. Alfonso Corona and Lay James Gibson. eds. Patterns of Jobs and Geographic Mobility. Torvald Gerger. Cities and Sickness: Health Care in Urban America. Ann Lennarson Greer and Scott Greer, eds. Neighborhoods: Their Place in Urban Life. Howard W. Hallman. Development and the Rural-Urban Divide. John Harriss and Mick Moore, eds. Patterns of Undocumented Migration: Mexico and the United States. Richard C. Jones, ed. Central Place Theory. Leslie J. King. The Geography of Western Europe: A Socio-economic Survey. Paul L. Knox. Regions and Resources: Strategies for Development. David T. Krisge, Daniel A. Seiver, Oliver S. Goldsmith and Michael J. Scott. Geography of Crowding and Human Response. A Study of Ahmedabad City. K. M. Kulkarni. Haciendo Pueblo. The Development of a Guadalajaran Suburb. Kathleen Logan. The Imperial Lion: Human Dimensions of Wildlife Management in Central Africa. Stewart A. Marks. Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal History, 1550–1850. Michael C. Meyer. Imlil: A Moroccan Mountain Community in Change. James A. Miller. Tourism in Canada: Selected Issues and Options. Peter E. Murphy, ed. David Harvey's Geography. John L. Paterson. Raster Scanning, Processing and Plotting of Cartographic Documents. Donna J. Peuquet and A. Raymond Boyle. The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy. Yaacov Ro'i, ed. Environmental Perception and Behavior: An Inventory and Prospect. Thomas F. Saarinen, David Seamon, and James L. Sell. Incised channels, Morphology, Dynamics, and Control. Stanley A. Schumm, Michael D. Harvey, and Chester C. Watson. The Gap Between Rich and Poor: Contending Perspectives on the Political Economy of Development. Mitchell A. Seligson, ed. Twentieth-Century Richmond. Planning, Politics and Race. Christopher Silver. Land Conservation and Development: Examples of Land-Use Planning Projects and Programs. F. R. Steiner and H. N. van Lier, eds. Biogeography: Recent Advances and Future Directions. J. A. Taylor, ed. Late Quaternary Environments of the Soviet Union. A. A. Velichko, ed. H. E. Wright, Jr. and C. W. Barnosky, eds.     

西安市商品住宅价格空间格局的演化研究

针对目前城市住宅价格空间格局演化研究不足,尤其是内在驱动机制研究较少的现状,利用2000年、2004年、2008年及2013年4年节点数据,采用空间自相关指数并结合空间变异函数,分析西安市商品住宅价格空间格局演化特征及其驱动机制,为城市住房政策的制定提供参考。结果表明:住宅价格呈现出显著的空间自相关,热点和冷点区发生转移;住宅价格的空间变异程度不断加大,空间分异格局中的随机成分不断降低,结构化分异越来越显著;住宅价格高值区呈现出由双中心向多中心、多圈层演化的趋势;从城市规划引领、居住空间扩张和交通条件改善3个方面探讨住宅价格空间格局演化的驱动机制。     

Beyond affordable shelters: Subsidized housing and surrounding environments for pedestrian safety

Beyond the provision of affordable housing itself, planners and policymakers have raised concerns as to whether subsidized housing developments provide “suitable living environments” for the nation's poor. Despite numerous concerns regarding unfavorable living environments and the neighborhood context of subsidized housing, we have limited understanding as to whether built environments around subsidized housing ensure pedestrian safety. This study addressed this gap by examining how built environments around Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) sites affect pedestrian-vehicle crashes in Austin, Texas. We employed the two-level negative binomial regression to clarify the impacts of street segment-level and neighborhood-level built environments on pedestrian crashes around LIHTC complexes. We found that higher speed roads, traffic-generating land uses, higher transit stop densities, and higher four-or-more-leg intersection densities may hinder pedestrian safety. Conversely, local roads as well as single-family residential parcels and connected sidewalks along street segments may enhance pedestrian safety around LIHTC complexes. Our results may inform planners and policymakers on how to enhance pedestrian safety for subsidized housing by modifying surrounding environments and how to provide better site selection considerations for subsidized housing to ensure pedestrian safety.     

Wholesale funding and the increase in construction bank-owned real estate in the US financial crisis

The housing crisis left some metropolitan areas littered with partially constructed subdivisions and developments. Most of these failed developments were built by small construction firms reliant on small banks for finance. Failed construction projects became bank-owned real estate (REO), prolonging the crisis and contributing to an uneven recovery. But there is little research on the spatial distribution or financial processes driving construction REO. I use a finance-as-spatial fix theorization to describe increasing interrelation between construction lending and global capital markets through wholesale funding, and the subsequent buildup of construction REO. Wholesale funding allows small banks to access money markets. Controlling for economic growth, the home price bubble, and financial institutions, I use a national panel regression to identify key factors associated with high levels of construction REO in urban areas. Consistent with a finance-as-spatial-fix analysis, the strongest determinant of construction REO was the type of capital flows into small banks.     

House broken: homelessness,housing first,and neoliberal poverty governance

Housing First (HF) is the new orthodoxy when dealing with the small, long-term, visible and recalcitrant fraction of the greater homeless population. Unlike more traditional, “treatment first” models that expect “self-sufficiency” before clients should achieve housing, this markedly cost-effective program/policy rapidly places homeless people who “consume” the most state resources into their own subsidized apartment. Many conclude that such an upending renders HF an exceptionally progressive program that ousts the disciplinary, paternalist traditions of poverty governance. Using evidence from two programs in metropolitan Phoenix, AZ, however, I argue that housing indeed comes first, but paternalism is right there behind it. Further, I argue that the program’s apartment lease – in what remains commodified housing – is no benign social relationship. It is, rather, a lever of market discipline. In HF, the abstract compulsions of the market significantly but incompletely replace the older, more paternalistic and personal models of disciplinary case management. As such, HF exemplifies a form of neoliberal poverty governance despite its relatively “progressive” platform.     

Seeing ghosts: parsing China’s “ghost city” controversy

Controversy has arisen in recent years over the creation of so-called “ghost cities” across China. The ghost city term tends to describe large-scale urban areas, sometimes planned as new towns, featuring an abundance of new built space and appearing to also have extremely low tenancy. This article examines key questions related to the ghost city phenomenon, such as: what is a ghost city? Are ghost cities driven by a tendency toward over-supply in housing? How are local-level political incentives aligned to foster the production of ghost cities? Are ghost cities temporary anomalies or structural features of China’s urban-led economic growth model? We discuss recent scholarly research into ghost cities and present original findings to show how an excess of urban space may plague certain Chinese cities.     

Public perceptions of foreign and Chinese real estate investment: intercultural relations in Global Sydney

Moving foreign human and financial capital through landed property is not a new phenomenon in Sydney. It is a recurring geopolitical strategy that is replete with intercultural tension and deep colonial roots. In contemporary Australia, there is an assumption in public policy and media rhetoric that there is a high level of public concern about foreign investment. However, there is little empirical data that examines public perceptions. In this study, we are interested in whether the dominant voices in this debate represent broad public views about this issue. We sought to fill this gap by conducting a survey of almost 900 Sydney residents, looking at their perceptions of foreign and Chinese investment. We find high levels of public concern and discontent about foreign investment amongst Sydneysiders, with Chinese investors being a key target of this discontent. In the context of high housing prices in Sydney, there were widely held concerns about housing affordability. Survey respondents had a sophisticated understanding of what influences house prices, but with an overemphasis on the role of foreign investment. There is a general lack of support for policy that encourages foreign investment, and a lack of confidence in how the government is regulating foreign investment. Half of our participants reported that they would not welcome Chinese foreign investment in their suburb.     

Residential mobility trajectories and integration in Douala and Bafoussam,Cameroon

Abstract

This study examines how migrant households relocate their homes in two Cameroonian cities over the course of lifetimes or even generations. The central claim is that homeownership is the ultimate sign of integration into city life. Using qualitative and quantitative research methods (218 interviews, 30 focus groups and a household survey, sample size 686), the study argues that three key factors explain why people move: the quality of housing they can affords, the proximity to a workplace and the potential for homeownership. Three residential model trajectories are identified. The first describes a journey from being a new migrant who is a guest of family or friends in the city centre to being a married family with kids owning a home in the urban periphery. The second model continues that journey by returning back to the city centre in pursuit of more convenient, high-status home location (if finances permit). A third model describes moves to sites all over the city later in life as older individuals seek to maximize family income in the way they use multiple properties. Understanding residential mobility patterns has the potential to lead to a better public policies and more effective private investments in the housing sector.     

Understanding the dynamics of sustainability transitions: the Home Insulation Program

The Home Insulation Program (HIP) in Australia is an outstanding example of a contemporary attempt to intervene in a socio-technical regime. The program, implemented in 2009 under the then Australian Labor Party government led by Kevin Rudd, was targeted at stimulating the retrofit insulation industry. The objective was to both improve the energy efficiency of homes and thereby contribute to Australia’s emissions reduction targets by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and to stimulate the Australian economy at the time of the global financial crisis. The program ended early following a number of economic issues and health and safety concerns. Despite previous investigation into the HIP reviewing its design and implementation, the focus has been on economic issues and health and safety concerns. To date there has been no investigation of the HIP as a sustainability transition. This article integrates socio-technical transition theory (STTT) and political ecology (PE) approaches to analyse the HIP and identify lessons for future sustainability transition initiatives. This is achieved by illustrating the effect of regime management (RM) on the orientation of niche governance (NG) which highlights the importance of considering the RM and NG aspects of STTT with a PE approach in symmetry, in order to adequately account for political and economic contest and power relations, which are ubiquitous in environmental management governance.     

中国城市房价对生育率的影响——基于长三角地区41个城市的计量分析

房价与人口的关系是人文经济地理学研究的热点领域,本文选取长江三角洲地区作为研究区域,利用区域内41个城市11年（2008—2018年）的数据,分别采用差分GMM模型及LSDVC法,从整体和分组的层面分析城市房价与生育率的关系。整体模拟结果表明,城市房价上涨的速度对于生育率有着显著的负向作用：房价上涨得越快,生育率下降得越快。同时,以房价收入比衡量的居民购房能力对生育率也有着显著的影响,居民购房能力下降得越快,生育率也下降得越快。分组研究的结果表明,不同房价水平的城市,生育率受购房能力影响程度不同,中等房价水平及较低房价水平的城市,其生育率更容易受到购房能力波动的影响。基于以上研究结果,提出严控房价涨幅速度、适当提高购房补贴、提高居民收入等政策建议,以期提高区域内居民整体生育意愿,促进人口增长。