Urban performance at different boundaries in England and Wales through the settlement scaling theory

The relationship between transport-led agglomeration and economic performance is evaluated in an English and Welsh context. We examine the effects of scale, i.e., inter- versus intra-city mobility infrastructure, on urban size–cost performance. An additional contribution of this paper lies in its use of power-law scaling models of urban systems, enabling an assessment of optimality in the trade-off between economic output and mobility costs accounting for ease of access within cities coupled with their built density. Findings suggest economic underperformance coincides with inadequate mobility at both inter- and intra-city scales, while overperformance is accompanied by overgrown urbanized area and escalating mobility costs

EU Mainstreaming of the Information Society in Regional Development Policy

Information and communication technologies are seen as representing one of the most fundamental changes of our time, and from the perspective of the European Union the promotion of an information society provides enormous opportunities for all of the regions in Europe. In this article the process by which the European Union attempted to mainstream this highly normative and deterministic agenda within regional development policy in the late 1990s is critically assessed. The article concludes by identifying four discourses which are likely to underpin future policy analysis in this field: market regulation; the nature of technological change within models of regional development; the information society paradigm; and the changing nature of time and space.Information Society, Regional Development Policy, European Union,

Spatial Justice and the Translation of European Strategic Planning Ideas in the Urban Sub-region of South Yorkshire

This paper analyses urban planning practices in South Yorkshire to reveal how EU strategic spatial ideas and values are reproduced. Specifically, the paper examines how the notion of spatial justice was interpreted as the organising concepts within the European Spatial Development Perspective became situated within a territory severely affected by deindustrialisation in the 1980s, but subsequently a major beneficiary of EU Structural Fund programmes. The analysis reveals how policy-making at this scale used a construct of polycentric urban development that reasserted a model of economic growth based on the indigenous assets held in city centres at the expense of more redistributive measures targeted at the former coal-mining communities in the sub-region.