Neighborhood as Spatial Project: Making the Urban Order on the Downtown Brooklyn Waterfront

This article argues for a reconceptualization of one of the most basic concepts in urban studies: the neighborhood. Traditionally neighborhoods have been understood as clearly bounded, quasi‐Westphalian containers or as ‘natural areas’ of urban community. But this approach is widely acknowledged to be under‐theorized. And it fails to account for the ways in which the production of neighborhood is inherently political and often conflictual. After reviewing the ways in which neighborhood has been used in urban sociology and urban planning, this article offers a critical conception of neighborhoods as ‘spatial projects’ on the submetropolitan scale. This approach captures the ways in which neighborhoods are not abstract spaces on a city map, but the uneven, unequal products of complex, ongoing struggles between various groups and institutions. This approach is developed through an ethnographic and historical case study of neighborhood formation in one part of Brooklyn, New York. The article concludes with a discussion of how the language of spatial projects refocuses urban research on the political and economic forces that produce neighborhood in the contemporary city.     

Tourism agglomeration and urbanization: empirical evidence from China

Tourism-driven urbanization presents a new way of exploring the construction of a new-type of urbanization. Consequently, the relationship between urbanization and the frequent agglomeration of tourism activities has attracted much research attention in recent years. This paper empirically investigates the influence of tourism agglomeration on urbanization using China’s provincial panel data for years 1999–2012. A panel data model with a fixed effect model and a two-step system generalized method of moments estimation is constructed to explore that influence. Results show that tourism agglomeration positively influences urbanization, and there exists a U-shaped relationship between these two variables. After capturing the dynamic nature of urbanization, we estimate the long-term tourism agglomeration elasticity in China as 0.4566. This paper provides theoretical and practical implications on urbanization of China in view of tourism agglomeration.     

DEFINING RELEVANT MARKETS FOR PHARMACEUTICALS

To identify the relevant product markets for Swedish pharmaceuticals, a spatial econometrics approach is employed. First, we calculate Moran's Is for different market definitions and then we use a spatial Durbin model to determine the effect of price changes on quantity sold of own and competing products. As expected, the results show that competition is strongest between close substitutes; however, the relevant product markets for Swedish pharmaceuticals extend beyond close substitutes down to products included in the same class on the four‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system as defined by the World Health Organization. The spatial regression model further indicates that increases in the price of a product significantly lower quantity sold of that product and in the same time increase the quantity sold of competing products. For close substitutes (products belonging to the same class on the seven‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system), as well as for products that, without being close substitutes, belong to the same therapeutic/pharmacological/chemical subgroup (the same class on the five‐digit level of the Anatomic Therapeutic Chemical system), increased competition is also visible after 1 July 2009 when the latest policy changes with regards to pharmaceuticals have been implemented in Sweden.     

A Framework for the Simultaneous Measurement of Spatial Variation and Temporal Movement in Prices in a Heterogeneous Country: The Dynamic Household Regional Product Dummy Model

This paper contributes to the growing literature on spatial prices in large heterogeneous countries. While the literatures on spatial variation and temporal movement in prices have grown in parallel, this study marks a departure by providing a unified treatment and proposing a comprehensive framework that allows both approaches. The proposed model is based on twin extensions of the household version of the “country product dummy model” by allowing for a dynamic stochastic specification and interdependence of spatial prices of geographically adjacent regions. Tests of temporal stability and regional independence of the estimated spatial prices are proposed and applied in this paper. The paper shows that the introduction of an autoregressive error process of order one, AR(1), improves the efficiency of the estimates of parameters, urban‐rural and temporal price indices under certain conditions. The Indian application points to a rich potential for using the proposed framework in cross country comparisons such as the International Comparison Program (ICP) exercises.     

Land price diffusion across borders – the case of Germany

ABSTRACT

Land market regulations are often justified by the assumption that activities of foreign and non-agricultural investors drive up prices in domestic land markets. However, empirical knowledge about the dynamics of agricultural land prices across borders is sparse. Using the German reunification as a natural experiment, we study the effect of the former inner German border on the dynamics of agricultural land prices in East and West Germany. We apply a land price diffusion model with an error correction specification to analyse spatial agricultural land markets. A novel feature of our model is its ability to distinguish price diffusion within states and across state borders. We provide evidence for a persistent border effect given that the fraction of spatially integrated counties is larger within states than across the former border. Moreover, we observe non-significant error correction terms for many counties along the former border. From a policy perspective, it is striking to realize that even 25 years after German reunification, pronounced land price differences persist. It is quite likely that price diffusion through existing borders within the EU would take even more time given language barriers, different institutional frameworks, and information asymmetries between domestic and foreign market participants.     

Polycentric development in the Cape Town city-region: Empirical assessment and consideration of spatial policy implications

The concept of the ‘polycentric urban region’ has been popularised both as a theoretical concept for understanding regional urban systems in an era of reduced transport and communication costs, and as a normative policy objective in its own right. This paper explores its relevance to the rapidly urbanising Cape Town city-region. First, empirical evidence for the emergence of polycentric regional development patterns was considered. Shifts in relative settlements sizes (morphological polycentrism) over the period 1991–2011 were examined using population data, and patterns of inter-settlement interactions (functional polycentrism) were explored by analysing commuting information. Contrary to expectations, trends toward polycentric development were found to be weak. Second, the paper considers the relevance and value of polycentric development thinking for regional economic and spatial planning policy, concluding that there are insufficient grounds for policy intervention aimed at encouraging polycentric regional development or countering the dominance of Cape Town in the region.     

金融集聚能缓解中小企业融资约束吗？——基于非线性和区域异质性的视角

以2009—2017年上市中小企业面板数据为样本，应用现金现金流敏感性模型分析了金融集聚对中小企业融资约束的影响。研究发现：整体上金融集聚可以一定程度缓解中小企业融资约束，但存在地区性差异，且门槛效应明显。金融集聚对低金融集聚水平地区的中小企业融资困境有明显改善，但其影响随着金融集聚水平的增加而减少。当金融集聚水平超过高门槛值时，这一作用非常微弱，总体上呈现非线性特征。这说明当金融资源高度集中时可能产生挤出效应。     

昆山花桥梦世界飞天影院单层球面网壳结构整体稳定性分析

对于球形单层网壳结构进行考虑初始缺陷的几何非线性的有限元分析即荷载-位移全过程分析。