URBAN AND REGIONAL ECONOMICS

3. Desarrollo urbano, vivienda y mercado inmobiliario. Proyectos: * La vivienda cooperativa en Zurich ¿un modelo replicable? Individual. Beatriz García Peralta. * Vivienda social en Berlín: historia y actualidad. Individual. Beatriz García Peralta. * Política de vivienda en México: relación con desarrollo económico e impacto urbano. Individual. Beatriz García Peralta. * Estructura y dinámica del mercado habitacional en el área urbana de la ciudad de México. Individual. Manuel Perló. * Sismos, reconstrucción de vivienda y mercado inmobiliario en la ciudad de México. Individual. Manuel Perló. * Ciudades competitivas: sobre la competitividad urbana y la cohesión social en el proyecto colectivo Competitividad de las ciudades mexicanas. Hacia una nueva agenda del desarrollo. Colectivo externo. Alicia Ziccardi.

Sustainable development or 'sustainability' is a relatively new challenge for societies from the local to the global level. At issue is whether mainstream neoclassical economics can guide us towards sustainability or if there is a need for new thinking in economics. This book by Peter Söderbaum, author of Ecological Economics, is a critical examination of the failings of mainstream economics and the resultant environmental problems we are facing. Most importantly, it articulates what an economics for sustainability, as an alternative to mainstream economics, would look like in both theory and practice if we are to pursue a truly sustainable future. A main point raised is that fundamental issues such as the theory of science and role of science in society, paradigms in economics, ideological orientations and institutional arrangements need to be critically examined rather than assumed to be given in any serious attempt to come to grips with unsustainable trends. Among its features, the book provides a brief history of economics and looks at the intersection between politics and the often hidden values embedded in economics. Also covered are the roles of individuals and organizations, political structures and institutions and democracy, environmental decision-making, sustainability assessment and a vision of a future underpinned by sustainability economics. The theory is underpinned by case studies, explanatory figures, further reading sections and discussion questions to facilitate debate and learning. The result is a highly readable text that presents a serious critique of the mainstream economics threatening the plane

On the 'Nobel Prize in Economics' and the monopoly of neoclassical theory at university departments of economics February 12, 2010pesodLeave a commentGo to comments from Peter Söderbaum,  peter.soderbaum@mdh.se Early in October 2009 a journalist from a French business journal, Challenge, called me to discuss the so called Nobel Prize in Economics. He referred to a translated version of my critical article in Dagens Nyheter from 2004. I hope that the result from the interview was meaningful but at the same time I felt that I need to consider once more where I stand in relation to these issues. In what follows, there is a 'socially constructed' interview with myself in both roles; the person asking questions and the one responding. I hope this will clarify my position. At the final stage of writing these pages I heard of the new winners of the Economics Prize, Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson. A short comment on this is made as a postscript. Is economics a science as you understand it? I have nothing against thinking of economics as a science. Economics is one of the social sciences, such as political science, sociology, psychology, management science. There are also important relationships to the humanities, such as a possible focus on individuals as actors and their subjectivity. I am skeptical to the attempt to emphasize similarities between economics on the one hand and physics, chemistry, medicine on the other. The latter disciplines are too limited to positivism as a theory of science (standing outside, watching ecosystems and nature, looking for regularities in a value neutral way, making experiments etc.) You are skeptical to, if not against a Nobel Prize in economics; why is this so?For me, it is the combination of two states of affairs or facts that make me question the economics prize in its present form:  There is a dominance and monopoly for one kind of economics, 'neoclassical economics' at university departments of economics in

Climate change is one of the most challenging issues of our time. As key sites in the production and management of emissions of greenhouse gases, cities will be crucial for the implementation of international agreements and national policies on climate change. This book provides a critical analysis of the role of cities in addressing climate change and the prospects for urban sustainability. In the post-Rio era, international organizations and transnational networks have promoted the need for local action on global environmental issues. Part I considers the implications of these developments for understanding global environmental governance and urban sustainability. It outlines international and national responses to climate change, and documents the evidence to date on local responses to climate change, examining in detail the international Cities for Climate Protection programme. Part II presents a series of case-studies drawn from this transnational network in the UK, USA and Australia. Each case-study examines the development and implementation of local climate change policy, focusing on the issues of energy conservation, planning and transport. Part III compares the experience of the case-study cities in addressing climate change, and assesses the implications of these findings for urban sustainability and global environmental governance. Cities and Climate Changeis the first in-depth analysis of the role of cities in addressing climate change. The book argues that key challenges concerning the resources and powers of local government, as well as conflicts between local goals for economic development and climate change mitigation, have restricted the level of local action on climate change. These findings have significant implications for the prospects of mitigating climate change and achieving urban sustainability. This book provides a valuable interdisciplinary analysis of these issues, and will appeal to students and researchers interested in sustainability

'World Development Report 2010' explores how public policy can change to better help people cope with risks, how land and water management must adapt to better protect a threatened natural environment while feeding an expanding population, and how energy systems will need to be transformed. Table of Contents - Overview - Changing the climate for development; Chapter 1 - Understanding the links between climate change and development; Chapter 2 - Reducing human vulnerability; helping people help themselves; Chapter 3 - Managing land and water to feed nine billion people and protect natural systems; Chapter 4 - Energizing development without compromising the climate; Chapter 5 - Integrating development into the global climate regime; Chapter 6 - Generating the funding needed for mitigation and adaptation Chapter 7 - Accelerating innovation and technology diffusion; Chapter 8 - Overcoming behavioral and institutional inertia.

In May 2007, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi suddenly banned cooking street foods, with Supreme Court endorsement. Public health concerns overrode implications for the livelihoods of food sellers or Delhi's food culture. This article interprets the ban through an analysis of municipal policy against a backdrop of economic reforms, restructuring retail systems, emerging food safety awareness and growing middle-class claims to the city. It argues that the ban's sudden emergence obscures a regulatory history that consistently privileged particular types of retail, through policy design, formulation and differential implementation. Ostensibly addressing public health, the ban's significance hence lies in reflecting a spatial politics between competing claims of the poor and the middle classes to urban public space.

ntellectual property rights have become an integral part of the modern economy. This article analyzes some of the contradictions of intellectual property rights and suggests a direction for the integration of intellectual property into classical value theory

This special issue addresses the problematic nature of space, whether psychic, symbolic or material, from an inter-disciplinary standpoint. The diverse articles are concerned with legal, psychical, cultural, social and political boundaries. Spaces with legal meanings are the product of such boundaries, and the relation of law and space as explored by the legal geography literature underpins this collection, which investigates these issues at a range of spatial scales, from the scale of the self to the global. In considering the continuum of tension between fear and desire manifest in individuals' internalized boundaries, we need also to make use of theories developed in psychoanalysis and social psychology. Kleinian 'splitting', for example, offers an explanation of law's role in the creation and maintenance of strong boundaries which exclude 'othered' groups. Law's power as a discourse is challenged by internal contradictions at the international scale, when human rights arguments confront state territorial jurisdiction; while at the other end of the scalar spectrum, regulation of conduct depends both on accepted legal notions of the self-governing individual and on assumptions of shared moral values. Other articles in this issue emphasize the nature of boundaries as liminal spaces full of attendant ambiguity, which, although legally established and enforced, prove in fact to be remarkably permeable. The interdisciplinary perspectives developed in this issue demonstrate the need to further problematize boundaries and to acknowledge the complexity of material, social and mental spaces.

Although considerable research has been conducted into the dynamics of commons in rural settings, we still know very little about common property within cities. Given the hegemony of certain models of property, the urban commons has been overlooked and ignored. Urban commons do not look like property to us. This can lead, I argue, to real injustice. Based, in part, on empirical research in Vancouver, I attempt to map out the urban commons of the poor, particularly in relation to the dynamics of inner-city gentrification. This commons, produced through intensive patterns of use and collective habitation, is fiercely moral, reliant upon political claims and the exclusion of interests that threaten enclosure. For inner-city activists contesting displacement, the commons is real. As such, gentrification, and related dynamics, can usefully be thought of as forms of enclosure, or what David Harvey terms `dispossession by accumulation'. I conclude by asking what urban policy, political praxis and property theory might look like if they acknowledged the collective property interest of the poor in the inner-city commons.

As we move further into the 21st century, the prominence of regions can no longer be taken for granted. A certain skepticism has developed with regard to the feasibility of marginal regions achieving self-sustained growth and states have maintained their role as regulators of economic and social activities. Thus, the notion of the region and its significance is currently much debated and contested. Illustrated with a wide range of European case studies, this volume brings together the main strands of these contestations, as economic, political and social actors attempt to institutionalise their vision of their region as the dominant form of territorial governance. It questions both the external delimitation and the internal constitution of regions and critically analyses the societal processes circumscribing ways in which regions are created, maintained and undermined.The volume provides a wide range of analytical perspectives to enable an understanding of the current mosaic of regionalism in Europe

This article employs an actor network approach to the empirical analysis of knowledge networking in a case-study region in order to investigate the structure and properties of regional innovation networks in a detailed and nuanced way. Knowledge networks in terms of innovation-related cooperative interlinkages between firms and research establishments can be regarded as a relational component of regional innovation systems. The basic assumption is that connectivity in a regional knowledge network can positively contribute to a region's innovation capacity. The use of a social network analysis approach might enhance our understanding of knowledge networks in a regional context. This article presents the findings of a detailed network analysis of innovation-related cooperative interlinkages between public research establishments and private sector firms in a metropolitan region in Germany.

Fruitful new avenues of theorization and research have been opened by recent writings on the production of geographical scale. However, this outpouring of research on scale production and on rescaling processes has been accompanied by a notable analytical blunting of the concept of geographical scale as it has been blended unreflexively into other core geographical concepts such as place, locality, territory and space. This essay explores this methodological danger: first, through a critical reading of Sallie Marston's (2000) recent article in this journal on 'The social construction of scale'; second, through a critical examination of the influential notion of a politics 'of ' scale. A concluding section suggests that our theoretical grasp of geographical scale could be significantly advanced if scaling processes are distinguished more precisely from other major dimensions of sociospatial structuration under capitalism. Eleven methodological hypotheses for confronting this task are then proposed.

Globalization is the new master concept beloved of media commentators. But already there is great discontent among social scientists with the content and use of this concept. In the space of less than a decade globalization discourse and research has moved well past the stage of invocation of a 'buzzword', of obeisance to the power of the internet and global finance, or of predictions of the demise of the state. These are all features that can readily be discerned still in the press and among politicians and hyperglobalizing advertisers and finance-sector 'gurus'. These groups seem still to be locked into the first wave of globalization euphoria consequent upon the supposed 'triumph' of capitalist neoliberalism after the collapse of communism and the slightly later advent of the internet. Second and third waves of enquiry have since arisen in which scepticism about globalization (in the second) is giving way to more detailed empirical enquiry into the actual processes and transformations that might or might not be occurring. We need a new critical perspective that is able to place globalization as the latest form of an older discourse on modernity and capitalism and which is able to move well beyond the over simplification of the present. Through a critical realist perspective we can begin to develop a more empirically powerful criticism of geopolitics and political economy and begin to see the possibilities of local empowerment in the face of the rhetoric and politics of the hyperglobalizing project.

Since the classic work of Castells (1972), the 'urban question' has been a focal point for debate among critical urban researchers. Against the background of contemporary debates on globalization and urban restructuring, this article argues that the urban question is currently being redefined as a scale question. The first part of the essay reconstructs the diverse scalar assumptions that were implicit within earlier rounds ofdebate on the urban question and argues that, since the early 1990s, urban researchers have confronted questions of scale with an unprecedented methodological self-reflexivity. Under contemporary conditions of 'glocalization' scholars are systematically rethinking the relations between urban spaces and supraurban processes of capital accumulation, political regulation and social struggle. The second part of the article explores the urban question as a scale question through the lens of Henri Lefebvre's writings on space, scale and state power. The author argues that three aspectsof Lefebvre's work are particularly relevant to the task of reconceptualizing the urban question as a scale question in the current period: (1) his notion of an 'implosion-explosion' of urbanization; (2) his theorization of state spatiality; and (3) his analysis of the politics of scale. The urban remains a fundamental arena of capitalist spatiality, but its social, political and economic dynamics hinge increasingly upon its relations to a wide range of supraurban geographical scales. Lefebvre's approach to sociospatial theory provides a particularly useful source of methodological insights for decoding the scalar dimensions of the urban question in the current era of global, national and local restructuring.

This paper begins from the premise that a number of now fashionable institutionally focused accounts of urban and regional political economy often begin at a point that is analytically flawed (or at least partial) in that the institutional ensembles themselves-whether analyzed as an urban 'regime', regional 'thickness' or a local 'regulatory mode'-are automatically assumed to be a pre-given part of the explanation. However, the authors contend that for a deeper analysis of urban and regional political economy to be advanced, these institutions themselves need to be explained. In order to proceed with such an explanation three key factors require more serious consideration. These are: (1) the need to outline one's chosen research object of enquiry, and all that this entails in terms of research methodology, theory selection, and an uncovering of the 'constitutive properties' of causation; (2) a greater readiness to analytically interrogate the relational interplay between economic development, political governance and scale; and (3) an obligation to pay due respect to the politics of representation and active processes of state restructuring and political strategizing through and around which economic development is itself constituted. In order to explore these themes, the authors draw, variously, on a methodological (re-) reading of the regulation approach, recent theoretical innovations on the 'politics of scale', Jessop's state-theoretical writings and his recently developed neo-Gramscian methodology for analyzing urban economic governance, alongside Jenson's political sociological approach towards the 'politics of representation'. Where appropriate, they explore, briefly, ways in which these theoretical themes may be deployed in empirical research, by considering certain restructurings in and of the political economy of Britain during recent decades. Author Keywords: Explanation; Politics of scale; Local dependence; Political strategy; Hegemonic p

Knowledge Economies: Clusters, Learning and Cooperative Advantage Philip Cooke London, Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-16409-5 The rapid growth of technology-based industries, most visible first in California's Silicon Valley and along Route 128 in Boston, and subsequently followed by Silicon Glens, Prairies, Alleys and Valleys throughout the world, has drawn lots of attention to industry clusters and networks. Often without being able to define or identify the process very precisely, economic development professionals and policy makers quickly grabbed on to the idea that there seemed to be an opportunity for a whole new round of proximity-based synergy and economic development. This synergy appeared to be much stronger than the effects of agglomeration which economists and planners had known about for decades, perhaps well over a century. It is not just based on companies jointly taking advantage of a large labour force, reducing their transaction costs by co-locating, and attracting specialized suppliers to the concentration of potential customers, but it appeared to facilitate the basic invention, application and growth process itself. Furthermore, somewhat to the surprise of those who thought that computer and other communication technology would make distance irrelevant, these new business networks continue to have a strong spatial component.

This book addresses the problem of how to make a large-scale socio-technical transition to renewable energy, so as to realize an environmentally sustainable economy in the long run. Transition thinking has in a short time managed to occupy a central position in the policy debate on sustainable development. The transition approach offers an innovative view on the role and content of public policy, compared with traditional views from economic, administrative and political sciences. The main motivation for using this notion is that while it links up with the system-wide approach of sustainable development, it has the advantage of shifting the attention from a vague end goal (blueprint) to the processes leading towards this goal. These processes in turn provide a concrete basis for thinking about appropriate public policies, taking account of the complex relations between technologies, institutions and behaviours. This book offers perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, addressing macro, regional and local scales. Contributions come from mainstream economics, evolutionary economics, sociology, political sciences, innovation studies, spatial economics and decision theory. Important lessons are also drawn from historical transitions. Managing the Transition to Renewable Energy will appeal to academics and researchers in environmental science and economics, environmental and technological policy advisors, evolutionary economists and researchers on technological innovation

Modern societies face several structural problems such as transport congestion and greenhouse gas emissions due to the widespread use of fossil fuels. To address these important societal problems and achieve sustainability in the broad sense, major transformations are required, but this poses an enormous challenge given the complexity of the processes involved. Such transformations are called 'transitions' or 'system innovations' and involve changes in a variety of elements, including technology, regulation, user practices and markets, cultural meaning and infrastructure. This book considers two main questions: how do system innovations or transitions come about and how can they be influenced by different actors, in particular by governments. The authors identify the theories which can be used to conceptualise the dynamics of system innovations and discuss the weaknesses in these theories. They also look at the lessons which can be learned from historical examples of transitions, and highlight the instruments and policy tools which can be used to stimulate future system innovations towards sustainability. The expert contributors address these questions using insights from a variety of different disciplines including innovation studies, evolutionary economics, the sociology of technology, environmental analysis and governance studies. The book concludes with an extensive summary of the results and practical suggestions for future research. This important new volume offers an interdisciplinary assessment of how and why system innovations occur. It will engage and inform academics and researchers interested in transitions towards sustainability, and will also be highly relevant for policymakers concerned with environmental issues, structural change and radical innovation.

* What makes some cities less vulnerable and more resilient in the face of natural disasters? * Examines the factors involved and draws invaluable lessons from case studies and analysis * Major contribution to urban studies, social development and disaster management When disaster strikes in cities the effects can be far worse than in other human environments. But which factors determine how vulnerable a city is to such events, and how resilient it will be in recovering from them? Focusing on cities in the global South, this book examines the conditions that lead to high losses from urban disasters and the factors that enable some households and communities to withstand disaster more effectively. Through a range of detailed studies, it shows that strengthening local capacity'through appropriate housing, infrastructure and livelihoods'is crucial to improving resilience, and that effective community or municipal government is essential if cities are to cope with disasters successfully. This book marks a significant advance in our understanding of what works and what doesn't when cities are faced with extreme conditions, and how this can be applied when dealing with other events and stresses.

In 1871, the city of Chicago was almost entirely destroyed by what became known as The Great Fire. Thirty-five years later, San Francisco lay in smoldering ruins after the catastrophic earthquake of 1906. Or consider the case of the Jerusalem, the greatest site of physical destruction and renewal in history, which, over three millennia, has suffered wars, earthquakes, fires, twenty sieges, eighteen reconstructions, and at least eleven transitions from one religious faith to another. Yet this ancient city has regenerated itself time and again, and still endures. Throughout history, cities have been sacked, burned, torched, bombed, flooded, besieged, and leveled. And yet they almost always rise from the ashes to rebuild. Viewing a wide array of urban disasters in global historical perspective, The Resilient City traces the aftermath of such cataclysms as: --the British invasion of Washington in 1814 --the devastation wrought on Berlin, Warsaw, and Tokyo during World War II --the late-20th century earthquakes that shattered Mexico City and the Chinese city of Tangshan --Los Angeles after the 1992 riots --the Oklahoma City bombing --the destruction of the World Trade Center Revealing how traumatized city-dwellers consistently develop narratives of resilience and how the pragmatic process of urban recovery is always fueled by highly symbolic actions, The Resilient City offers a deeply informative and unsentimental tribute to the dogged persistence of the city, and indeed of the human spirit.