Entrepreneurship and Social Capital: Examining the Association in Deprived Urban Neighbourhoods

Spatial approaches to examining entrepreneurship have increasingly built on theories of social capital. However, the nature and extent of local social capital in less successful deprived communities remains under researched and inadequately understood. This article examines the association between social capital and entrepreneurship in a deprived urban neighbourhood in the city of Leeds, UK as a means of contributing to an improved theoretical understanding of how space moderates this association. It is found that social capital has a strong association with patterns of entrepreneurship in deprived urban neighbourhoods, with the potential impacts being both positive and negative. The forms of social capital are found to differ from that found in more affluent localities, with a prevalence of bonding social capital as the key facilitator of entrepreneurship, which may help in the early stages of venture development, but which over time may become a constraint. Also, a lack of the bridging social capital associated with entrepreneurial success is found within the locality. From a policy perspective, it is recommended that policymakers responsible for entrepreneurship in deprived urban neighbourhoods should seek to enhance initiatives for developing social capital which incorporate local businesses, residents and local government agencies.     

关于取消我国经济适用房政策的思考

经济适用房自上世纪90年代提出特别是1998年房改政策实施以来,得到了较大程度的发展,成为中低收入家庭的首选。但是从近些年的发展来看,经济适用房政策虽然解决了部分中低收入家庭的住房问题,但围绕经济适用房的出现的问题也屡见不鲜。因执行政策的偏差和固有的局限性没能完全发挥其社会保障功能,并孕育了潜在的风险、滋生了一些社会问题。文中认为在当前严厉打击房地产泡沫以及我国十二五规划严格控制房价的前提下,是时机取消经济适用房政策,这将更有利于社会的发展。     

‘Many Rivers to Cross’: Suburban Densification and the Social Status Quo in Greater Lyon

Urban research often considers densification from the perspective of sustainable development and social mix. This essay focuses instead on the social and political stakes involved in densification through the example of a large French metropolitan area. It shows that the densification policies put in place in the Lyon agglomeration cannot be said to succeed in breaking down the historical segregation between its residential and affluent western suburbs (banlieues) and its industrial and working‐class eastern ones. The political manoeuvres executed by the institutions implementing densification, and the search for consensus characterizing France's intercommunalities, block any possibility of redistributing functions and social classes at the metropolitan scale, and hence of ending the social specialization of Lyon's suburbs. Moreover, municipalities subjected to pressure from suburban areas carefully assess the profile of residents selected to occupy new housing units—i.e. individuals already residing in the commune in the case of western suburbs, and middle‐class individuals hailing from the eastern part of the agglomeration in the case of eastern suburbs. Densification does not foster social mix at the metropolitan scale, neither does it improve the housing conditions of disadvantaged populations.     

土地政策和城市住房发展

本文首先分析了北京的住房市场 ,然后对住房价格的构成及其变化进行了分析 ,结合微观经济学理论 ,总结出北京市房价高的原因 ,即 ,(1)房地产开发过程中没有不变成本 ,因而没有规模经济 ;(2 )根据基准地价系统 ,容积率决定地价 ,这一方面与西方城市经济学理论相悖 ,另一方面使房地产商没有经济利益驱动 ,资源没有得到合理强度地利用。最后 ,本文提出了进一步改革的建议和对策。     

英国住房保障政策的体系、进展与反思

英国是世界上最早实施政府干预住房市场的国家,早在1919年颁布的《住房和城镇规划法》中就明确规定居民住房问题为公共事务,政府对此负有义务。经过不断的摸索和改进,英国的住房保障政策从起初的政府直接供给公共住房,逐渐向政府以财政、金融等手段鼓励扶持社会化公共住房的建造与运营转变。本文对英国20世纪90年代以来的住房保障体系演变与发展现状做了介绍,并重点对扶持政策、资助项目、主管机构、融资方式等方面进行了详细阐述,以期对今后我国住房保障相关政策的研究制定有所启示。     

Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

各国多元租赁房供给模式与启示

在各国的住房市场上，租赁住房具有不可或缺的地位。它既可满足消费者多样化选择，促进人口劳动力的合理流动，平抑售房市场价格，还可减轻政府公共住房的压力。为培养租赁住房市场，各国政府无不运用财税、金融、法律等多种政策鼓励民营资本进入租赁市场，使得非盈利组织、住房合作社、房地产信托基金、保险公司和私人业主成为租赁住房的主力军。借鉴国外经验，遵循《政府工作报告》中“建机制、补短板、兜底线”的精神，补好住房政策中租赁市场欠发达的短板，鼓励民营资本进入，更有效地解决大城市住房难的问题。     

‘Gentrification Without Displacement' and the Consequent Loss of Place: The Effects of Class Transition on Low‐income Residents of Secure Housing in Gentrifying Areas

The increasingly disputed concept of gentrification‐induced displacement is combining with the argument that the poor benefit from social mix to produce a theoretical case for ‘positive gentrification'. The notion that new middle‐class residents not only attract more investment but bring opportunities for ‘upward social mobility' to low‐income people who manage to stay in gentrifying areas has become policy orthodoxy. While there are scholarly challenges to the extent of these benefits, the disadvantages of imposed social mix on low‐income communities even where they are not physically displaced remain under‐researched. This article helps to fill this gap by reporting on research into the experience of long‐term low‐income residents of gentrifying neighbourhoods who managed to stay put. The research explores notions of social mix, place and displacement among residents of secure community housing in Melbourne, Australia (the equivalent of small‐scale social housing in Europe and North America) with the object of establishing whether the absence of physical displacement is sufficient to ameliorate gentrification's negative impacts. The findings demonstrate that transformations in shops and meeting places, and in the nature of local social structure and government interventions, cause a sense of loss of place even without physical displacement.     

Breaking With Neoliberalization by Restricting The Housing Market: Novel Urban Policies and the Case of Hamburg

Hamburg currently exemplifies the departure from a straightforward neoliberal urban track. The city's neoliberal path only moved into full swing in the first decade of the 2000s. During this period, urban development was primarily subject to property market mechanisms—with projects being granted to the highest bidder—prompting effects such as rapidly rising rents, deepened social segregation and increased property‐led displacement. Since 2009, however, the city's entrepreneurial urban policy encountered comprehensive resistance movements that eventually led to the rediscovery of a political will for a new housing policy and interventionist policy instruments. This article focuses on the turning point of neoliberal policies and examines the wider scope of the contemporary urban agenda in Hamburg. We first conceptualize potential limits of the neoliberal city in general and then discuss three momentous local policy experiments—the International Building Exhibition, promising ‘improvement without displacement'; the rediscovery of housing regulations through the ‘Social Preservation Statute'; and the ‘Alliance for Housing', aiming to tackle the housing shortage. We discuss these approaches as funding, regulation, and actor‐based approaches to limiting the neoliberal city.     

How Did Finance Capital Infiltrate the World of the Urban Poor? Homeownership and Social Fragmentation in a Spanish Neighborhood

When working‐class localities in developed countries are in question, social fragmentation is often analyzed along ethnic lines. Instead, this article claims that it is more critically fruitful to explore fragmentation in terms of people's relations with the state and different forms of capital. It does this by considering housing in Spain as a key resource that connects state policies both with the forms of reproduction and (dis)organization of the disadvantaged, and with the development of real estate and finance capital. First, it unfolds the historical formation of the Spanish ‘homeownership culture’ and the construction–finance complex. Second, starting from an in‐depth ethnography of a peripheral neighborhood in Barcelona, it emphasizes the embeddedness of recent financialization in the livelihood strategies of poor households. Finally, it shows how the process led to a commodification and erosion of those social relations on which it partially depended, thereby exposing problems for class reproduction and fracture lines among the urban poor.     

Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare-State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

Welfare-state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.     

Respectability,Roughness and ‘Race’: Neighbourhood Place Images and the Making of Working‐Class Social Distinctions in London

Housing has come to play an important role in demarcating the contours of social polarization in inner London, notably via the widening socio‐spatial divide between an impoverished working class located in council housing estates and affluent home‐owning gentrifiers. In mass media and policy discourses, the former are routinely represented as an unruly urban ‘underclass’, a representation that homogenizes council tenants and marginalizes their voices. This article aims to move beyond a narrow underclass perspective by providing an in‐depth analysis of neighbourhood place images and social identity based on interviews with white working‐class council tenants in the inner London Borough of Camden. Drawing on debates around social distinction and place, the article illustrates a complex set of neighbourhood images rooted in narratives of urban decline as well as notions of belonging and knowing people. The article examines these place images in relation to the longstanding status distinction between respectability and roughness, as well as ‘race’. In conclusion, the defensive and exclusionary elements of neighbourhood images are related to processes of social deprivation and insecurity that have affected working‐class council tenants in Camden.     

Negotiating the Politics of Exclusion: Georges Candilis,Housing and the Kuwaiti Welfare State

In the early stages of welfare planning, the Kuwaiti state restricted equal access to its housing programs in neighborhoods outside the city. The subsequent demographic shift, caused by a Kuwaiti exodus to the ‘suburbs' and non‐Kuwaiti urban labor migration, prompted calls for housing schemes to encourage city living for citizens. Georges Candilis's proposal for a residential neighborhood in Kuwait City emerged from this context. This article examining Candilis's unrealized project also offers a critical perspective on Kuwait's unbalanced housing policies. From this analysis, it draws observations on the role of architects and their limited impact on policies established by decision‐making networks within the welfare state. Seen from this perspective, the Candilis project bears witness to broader socio‐economic agendas that privileged some groups while marginalizing or excluding others.     

Assisted Self-help Housing in Mexico: Advocacy, (Micro)Finance and the Making of Markets

This article examines forms of housing finance that offer poor households opportunities for sourcing resources for construction work through non-mortgage microloans. In Mexico, these housing microfinance schemes have recently been incorporated into national housing policies. On a global level, the past 10 to 15 years have seen the emergence of institutional investment in microfinance. I reflect on these processes in this article by bringing critical accounts of financial inclusion in development studies and the debate on financialization within urban studies and beyond into dialogue. I combine micro- and macro-scale perspectives to examine how households become financial clients and how finance gains influence by expanding capitalist markets into the informal housing sector. This discussion is based on policy review and document analyses and an empirically grounded account of an assisted self-help housing case study. In the article I draw on three focal concepts—risk, debt and marketization—to highlight the ambivalences of the expanded access to finance for poor households engaged in self-organized building practices. These ambivalences emerge from the multiplicity of operational logics and motivations in the field of housing provision for the poor, and the profoundly conflicting rationalities of financial- and social-sector actors.     

福利国家英国的住房政策

本文分析了英国住房福利体系的构成与其居民的居住方式。通过对英国住房福利体系的分析和近年来住房制度的改革 ,指出英国住房政策对我国的启示     

Class diversification,economic growth and urban sprawl: evidences from a pre-crisis European city

Economic expansion indirectly promotes class diversification at the neighbourhood scale with a consequent reduction of social divides at the regional scale. To verify this working hypothesis, the present study investigates class diversification at both spatial scales in a Mediterranean city (Athens, Greece) using the European Socioeconomic Classification based on population census data referring to 1991–2001, a phase of economic expansion and intense urban sprawl preceding the 2004 Olympic games. Results of multivariate analysis and diversity indexes outline a local-scale social mix associated to suburban expansion, and regional-scale class segregation, reflecting an increasing polarization in affluent and economically deprived urban districts. The contrasting pattern at the two spatial scales results in a complex social geography with class diversification and moderate changes over time in the economic spatial divide between urban and neighbouring rural areas. These findings contribute to design scale-dependent policies reducing social inequalities and improving quality of life in urban areas. Future paths for socio-spatial processes were delineated for sprawling metropolitan regions under economic expansion and discussed in the light of future demographic trends in both developed and emerging countries.     

Politique du logement de l'état

This article is based on the initial results of research in progress on state housing policies for workers, and notably on a study of policies implemented in Paris and London between 1890 and 1939. The perspective employed is that state housing is an essential means of consumption for the reproduction of a labour force, and it is posited that while public housing relates to a consumption process different from that of the private or ‘assisted’ sectors, all housing policies affect the use-value of a dwelling unit, its con. sumption cost, and mode of occupation. These effects are examined in terms of the historical relationship between housing policies and the productive demands of developing capital. In turn, this relationship is considered within a perspective of class struggle during this period.     

战后美国城市改造对社会公正的侵蚀

战后美国的城市改造,主要在住房建设和城市更新两个方面展开,目标是兼顾城市的经济发展和社会公正.然而,在实施过程中,由于联邦住房政策二元结构的形成,首先是联邦政府的住房政策偏离了建设公共住房的初衷,基本上没有达到政策的目标;其后是城市更新运动在强势利益集团的主导下,漠视了低收入家庭的住房需求,侵蚀和损害了社会公正.     

Energy footprint of the city: Effects of urban land use and transportation policies

Urban land use and transportation policies have dramatic effects on the density and spatial distribution of residences in large cities. Effects of these policies have been analyzed using numerical urban simulation models. At the same time, the US Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey has allowed researchers to investigate the relation between household energy consumption and characteristics of housing units.This paper links these two lines of inquiry by demonstrating how simulation results on the implications of land use and transportation policies for the spatial form of cities can be used to compute implications for energy consumption. The resulting Urban Energy Footprint Model, “UEFM,” allows one to trace the implications of a change in land use zoning or transportation policy through its effects on housing markets and residential location to the resulting changes in energy use for residential and commuting purposes – i.e. to understand the energy footprint of transportation, housing, and land use policies. Accordingly, the UEFM provides, perhaps for the first time, a link between urban and energy economics, and can allow measurement of rebound effects of energy policies in a more general equilibrium context.     

经济适用房不同补贴方式的效果

通过数学模型,分析政府对经济适用房生产商或购买者实施补贴对购买者的效用影响、对生产商行为的影响、对政府补贴成本的影响,及至对经济适用房成交量、成交价格和净社会福利的影响。研究结果表明：对经济适用房生产商采用降低土地价格的补贴方式不如对其按单位价格补贴或按成交价的一定比例补贴,这后两种方式都更有效率,能够降低政府补贴成本,减少政府腐败行为,促进房地产商开发适合低收入者所需要的住房并提高销售效率。