Urban Studies

In current theoretical and policy debates concerning social cohesion, the neighbourhood has re-emerged as an important setting for many of the processes which supposedly shape social identity and life-chances. It is in this context of a renewal of interest in local social relations and particularly the deployment of notions of social capital that this paper offers a critical review of a wide-ranging literature. The paper explores initially and briefly the idea that societies face a new crisis of social cohesion and outlines the key dimensions of societal cohesion. The core of the paper is then devoted to an examination of where the contemporary residential neighbourhood fits into these wider debates, particularly in relation to the interaction between social cohesion and social capital. In this context, some of the key debates around the concept of social capital are outlined. In moving beyond abstraction, the paper also shows how social capital can be broken down into relevant domains for policy action at the neighbourhood level and how concepts such as social cohesion and social capital can be operationalised for research purposes.

The paper analyses the concept of the smart city in critical perspective, focusing on the power/knowledge implications for the contemporary city. On the one hand, smart city policies support new ways of imagining, organising and managing the city and its flows; on the other, they impress a new moral order on the city by introducing specific technical parameters in order to distinguish between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ city. The smart city discourse may therefore be a powerful tool for the production of docile subjects and mechanisms of political legitimisation. The paper is largely based on theoretical reflections and uses smart city politics in Italy as a case study. The paper analyses how the smart city discourse proposed by the European Union has been reclassified to produce new visions of the ‘good city’ and the role of private actors and citizens in the management of urban development.

This paper introduces a Special Topic on social innovation in the governance of urban communities. It also seeks to widen the debate on the meaning of social innovation both in social science theory and as a tool for empirical research on socioeconomic development and governance at the local level. This debate is organised around ALMOLIN-i.e. alternative models for local innovation as utilised in the SINGOCOM (social innovation in governance in (local) communities) research. The first section explains the role of social innovation in neighbourhood development and how it is best addressed from theoretical, historical and experience-oriented viewpoints. The second section provides a survey of the definitions of social innovation in a variety of social science fields, while the third section mobilises various strands of literature that will be of use for the analytical refinement of ALMOLIN. Section four illustrates how ALMOLIN is used as an analytical tool for empirical research. The final section shows some avenues for future research on social innovation.

This paper reviews 20 years' worth of empirical evidence on the 'spatial mismatch' hypothesis. After briefly surveying the relevant models from urban and labour economics and recent trends in employment and population suburbanisation, the empirical evidence on spatial effects is examined. This literature includes evidence on the effects of residential segregation, residential suburbanisation and employment suburbanisation, and direct measures of 'access' (such as travel times). The most recent evidence suggests that spatial mismatch is relevant for explaining black/white employment differences, though the magnitudes of these effects remain unclear.

Planners are increasingly viewing land-use policy as a way to manage transport demand. Yet the evidence on the link between land use and travel behaviour is inconclusive. This paper uses travel diary data for southern California residents to examine the link between land-use patterns at the neighbourhood level and non-work trip generation for a sample of 769 individuals. The number of non-work automobile trips that an individual makes in a two-day period is modelled as a function of socio-demographic variables and land-use characteristics near the person's place of residence. The land-use variables are statistically insignificant in all but one of the specifications. The results suggest that choices about how to measure the variables and how to specify the regressions can influence the conclusions from these studies in potentially important ways. This underscores the need for continued careful attention to these research issues.

Contemporary provision of open spaces within cities rests largely on professional assumptions about its significance in the lives of residents. This paper presents results from the Greenwich Open Space Project which used qualitative research with four, in-depth discussion groups to determine the design of a questionnaire survey of households in the borough. The research shows that the most highly valued open spaces are those which enhance the positive qualities of urban life : variety of opportunities and physical settings; sociability and cultural diversity. The findings lend some support to the approach of the urban conservation movement but present a fundamental challenge to the open-space hierarchy embodied in the Greater London Development Plan. The Project identifies a great need for diversity of both natural settings and social facilities within local areas and highlights the potential of urban green space to improve the quality of life of all citizens.

The shift from government to governance in recent years has created significant new opportunities for people from disadvantaged communities to participate in the decisions that affect them. However, the weight of evidence over the years suggests that these communities have remained on the margins in partnerships and other initiatives. Governmentality theory helps to explain the ways in which state power persists even when governing is increasingly devolved; however, it also allows for the possibility of 'active subjects', who can shape and influence the new spaces into which they have been invited. This article draws on a range of evidence from the literature and from the author's own research in the UK to consider the challenges for communities of 'governing beyond the state'.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the construction of a set of data that can be used to measure intercity relations. Building on a specification of the world city network as an 'interlocking network' in which business service firms play the crucial role in network formation, information is gathered from global service firms about the size of their presence in a city and about any 'extra-territorial' functions of their offices. This information is converted into data to provide the 'service value' of a city for a firm's provision of its service in a 316 (cities) X 100 (firms) matrix. These data are used to measure the global network connectivity of the cities. In an initial analysis, the paper concludes with a simple correlation exercise that shows New York and London to be `exceptions' rather than 'exemplars' amongst contemporary world cities.

Using a 1996 national survey of housing in China and a multilevel modelling technique, we examine housing tenure choice in transitional urban China where households have been granted limited freedom of choice in the housing market since the housing reforms of 1988. We find that both market mechanisms and institutional forces affect households' tenure choice in urban China. While some socioeconomic factors such as age, household size, household income and housing price have similar effects on tenure choice as in the West, others such as the number of workers and marital status have rather different effects. In addition, factors characterising institutional relationships among the state, work units and households, such as hukou, job rank and work unit rank, still play important roles in tenure choice.

Social capital has been used extensively in recent years to examine issues of social exclusion. Following Bourdieu, the concept is reintegrated into social theory alongside cultural and economic capital to examine the variations in the upgrading of gentrified areas of inner London. Three neighbourhoods in south London are compared and it is argued that their differences can, to a limited extent, be understood in terms of the differential deployment of cultural, social and economic capital by their middle-class residents. These neighbourhoods have acquired distinctive characters as a result and it is argued that the gentrification process in inner London is leading to heterogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods which contrasts with the perceived homogeneity of the traditional suburban area.