This study examines the long-term demographic implications of the SkyTrain, a light-rail rapid transit system, on surrounding neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada.  Using demographic Census data from 1981 and 2006, shift-share analysis shows the residents characteristics change over time.  Results demonstrate that SkyTrain neighborhoods near stations have become physically denser, wealthier and more educated compared to vancouver as a whole.  From these results, the article explores the contextual reasons why denser development occurred around the SkyTrain stations and the effect on residential demographics in the area.

Ren Thomas (2010, forthcoming).  “Why can’t we get around?” Travelling under constraints in Metro Vancouver." Canadian Journal of Urban Research.19(1), Supplement, 89-110.

In recent years, many researchers have studied the decreasing prevalence of walking and cycling among children and youth. Little research has focussed on young adults, however, and studies of younger age groups tend to ignore public transit ridership even though young people show high public transit use in Canadian cities. How, where, and why do young people travel? This small-scale, exploratory study examined the non-work, non-school travel patterns of youth (17-21) and young adults (22-25) in Metro Vancouver. Focus groups and social mapping revealed several constraints upon young people’s social travel, but also demonstrated participants’ awareness of larger issues around transportation planning (including the high costs of gasoline and the environmental consequences of driving). The research suggests that in large cities with viable public transit systems, young people may delay car ownership, which could have positive implications for urban regions.

Markus Moos (2010, forthcoming).  "The Globalization of Urban Housing Markets:  Immigration and Changing Housing Demand in Vancouver."  Urban Geography 31(issue to be determined).

The effects of the flow of residential capital through immigration on the internal structure of cities and housing markets have become of increasing importance. This paper examines the effects of immigration on Vancouver's residential housing market as the city became increasingly influenced by global processes and the arrival of skilled and wealthy migrants. The changing determinants of housing demand are analysed for recent immigrants and the rest of the population using Statistics Canada data in two time periods. Intra-urban spatial dimensions of the changes in housing demand are examined using tract data. The analysis reveals a de-coupling of local housing from labour markets as recent immigrants' housing consumption became less tied to their local labour market participation. Labour market income measured in national datasets becomes less instructive in explaining housing market outcomes and neighbourhood change if immigrants arrive with established wealth and continue to earn unreported income outside the country.

Noah Quastel (2009, forthcoming).  "Political Ecologies of Gentrification."  Urban Geography 30(8).

This article explores the possibilities for a political ecology of gentrification.  Gentrification research, while firmly rooted in materialist social science, has not yet broadened its interests to consider ecological aspects of, or the role in gentrification of, discourses, social movements, and state policies of the environment.  Understanding the political ecologies of gentrification involves recognizing the ways in which material relations and uneven resource consumption, concepts of nature, and the politics of urban environmental management affect gentrification processes.  By synthesizing diverse literatures in urban studies, political ecology, urban environmental governance, consumption studies, and gentrification, this study argues that Vancouver, British Columbia represents a well-developed urban crucible for the new political ecologies of gentrification in North America.  New developments in Vancouver increasingly contribute to gentrification using languages of sustainability and green consumption in a process of ecological gentrification.

The worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression has drawn worldwide attention to America's subprime mortgage sector and its linkages with predatory exploitation in working-class and racially marginalized communities.  During nearly two decades of expansion, agents of subprime capital fought regulation and reform by 1) using the doctrine of risk-based pricing to equate financial innovation with democratized access to capital, 2) appealing to the cultural myths of the 'American Dream' of homeownership, and 3) dismissing well-documented cases of racial discrimination and predatory abuse as anecdotal evidence of rare problems confined to a few lost-cause places in what is otherwise a benevolent free-market landscape.  In this article, we challenge these three tactics.  Properly adapted and updated, Harvey's (1974) theory of class-monopoly rent allows us to map and interpret the localized, neighborhood exploitations of class and race in several hundred U.S. metropolitan areas as they were woven through Wall Street securitization conduits into global networks of debt and investment.  Understanding the structured inequalities of class-monopoly rent is essential for analysis, organizing, and policy responses to the crisis.

This paper asks whether age at arrival matters when it comes to home-ownership attainment among immigrants, paying particular attention to householders' self-identification as a visible minority. Combining methods that were developed separately in the immigrant housing and the immigrant offspring literatures, this study shows the importance of recognising generational groups based on age at arrival, while also accounting for the interacting effects of current age (or birth cohorts) and arrival cohorts. The paper advocates a (quasi-)longitudinal approach to studying home-ownership attainment among immigrants and their foreign-born offspring. Analysis of data from the Canadian Census reveals that foreign-born householders who immigrated as adults in the 1970s and the 1980s are more likely to be home-owners than their counterparts who immigrated at a younger age when they self-identify as South Asian or White, but not always so when they self-identify as Chinese or as other visible minority. The same bifurcated pattern recurs between householders who immigrated at secondary-school age and those who were younger upon arrival. Age at arrival therefore emerges as a variable of significance to help explain differences in immigrant housing outcomes, and should be taken into account in future studies of immigrant home-ownership attainment.

The current economic crisis (2008-09) is threatening to cripple U.S. automobile production, jeopardizing the last major manufacturing industry in North America.  Current economic decisions made by the U.S. government with respect to industry bailouts are more completely understood by analysing the period of stagflation experienced in the USA between 1973 and 1982.  Using industrial sector employment data from the U.S. Department of Labour, I conduct a shift-share analysis on two case study cities, Youngstown, Ohio, and Dallas, Texas, to emphasize how geographical location and economic specialization led to the growth of the service industry in the South at the expense of the manufacturing belt region in the north-eastern USA since the 1970s.  Interpreting the effects of this economic shift provides a glance into past U.S. economic change, through which the economic values of the current U.S. government can be better understood.

The reform process doi moi (Engl.: renovation) in Vietnam has brought profound changes for the Vietnamese economy. Most notably the opening of a formerly centrally planned economy to the capitalist world market has made the country more accessible to foreign direct investment and integrated the country more strongly into the capitalist world system. Part of the overall modernisation and global integration strategy in Vietnam is the development of the Internet. However, the Internet in Vietnam is not a ubiquitous and widely available technology, rather it is a piece of infrastructure that is unevenly available across social and regional spaces. Aided by a regulatory environment that presents itself as providing opportunities for all, the Internet provides a business tool for a transnational capitalist class and its local affiliates to access the resources of Vietnam's periphery type economy. The Internet has contributed to a shift in economic control functions away from the state territorial level to a network of dispersed actors. The paper suggests close links between dependency and world-systems theories and Internet research and argues that the theories remain valid in their principal argument, but that the level of analysis needs to be shifted away from the state territorial unit to these dispersed sets of actors.

This study examines the changes in residential property value in Canada’s three largest metropolitan areas by using shift-share and regression analysis with census tract data. The results show that the tracts that increased their share of the metropolitan areas’ real estate value in one decade tend to lose that share during the next decade. After accounting for the effect of new additions, the main transfer of wealth is from the older suburban ring to both the inner city and the new suburbs. The largest variation in the growth of property value is not between the new suburbs and the inner city but across the inner-city census tracts. The shifts and cycles of investment across broad city sectors predicted by neoclassical and Marxist theory are overwhelmed by local factors.

Access to adequate, suitable and affordable housing is an essential step in immigrant integration. Immigrants first seek a place to live and then look for language and job training, education for their children, and employment. Housing is also an important indicator of quality of life, affecting health, social interaction, community participation, economic activities, and general wellbeing. This report provides a detailed analysis of the housing situation of immigrants in the Vancouver metropolitan area and complements similar reports on Montréal and Toronto. Drawing on a wealth of new information about the housing situation of immigrants, we examine four themes: the history of immigration in the Vancouver metropolitan area and recent trends in the Vancouver housing market; the housing conditions of immigrants currently living in the metropolitan area, focusing on the intersections between immigration, income, and ethno-cultural origin in the housing market; a detailed analysis of Vancouver residents who are experiencing affordability problems; and the housing circumstances of newcomers six months after landing in Canada, based on the Longitudinal Survey of Immigrants to Canada (LSIC). In the last of these themes we are able to make direct links between immigrant admissions policy and outcomes in the housing market, since LSIC, in contrast to the census, includes information about the class of entry of immigrants.

Research and policy debates in the United States have focused on the dramatic growth of mortgage lending in the risky subprime sector, which serves consumers with weaker credit histories, and its concentration in racially and ethnically marginalised communities. Evidence linking the subprime boom to the proliferation of predatory abuses, however, is often dismissed as anecdotal or isolated in a few unique places. In this paper, we undertake a geographical analysis of the central justifications for deregulated risk-based pricing: the proposition that subprime credit serves those who would otherwise be excluded, and reduces exclusionary credit denials. Multivariate analyses of metropolitan- and individual-level processes across the US urban system provide evidence suggesting that subprime mortgage segmentation exacerbates rather than reduces traditional inequalities of denial-based exclusion.

Theories of growth machines and urban regimes have informed the study of urban political economy for more than three decades, but these theories remain focused on intra-urban processes. Using a case study of the bidding process and the planning of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver, we explore the transnational dimensions of the urban growth machine and explore common aspects between the growth machine and regime theory literature and the literatures on the entrepreneurial city and transnational urban policy transfers. Through its evolving networks with other urban regimes, Vancouver's growth machine provides a ready forum in which local elites can acquire specialized knowledge on new urban entrepreneurial strategies elsewhere. Actors situated in different parts of the local growth machine are establishing various connections with urban regimes in other cities, in what is best understood as a nascent growth machine diaspora. Growth machine and regime theories remain valid in their basic conceptualization and maintain their strength through their adaptability to various contexts, but can be enriched by analyses of policy circuits, travelling theories and learning networks.

To develop and implement public policy requires work. In this paper, we examine some of the work involved in a pathbreaking climate change policy adopted in Portland, Oregon. Seeking to address shortcomings in existing studies of local environmental governance, we focus particular attention on how climate change became a political priority in Portland, how a particular representation of local carbon dioxide emissions was developed in the process of public consultations, and how the local state attempted to achieve its adopted policy objectives by enlisting the self-governing capacities of its residents. To carry out such an analysis, we draw on both actor-network theory (ANT) and governmentality. The first approach offers an understanding of how collective priorities emerge as different actants learn how to move toward their goals by working together, and also suggests how subjects and objects are reshaped by their enrolment in such configurations. The second approach offers a more precise understanding of how the state attempts to achieve its objectives—once they are established—by conducting the conduct of its citizens. Brought together, we argue, ANT and governmentality provide an incisive approach to questions of local environmental governance, and to broader political concerns as well. As each approach addresses well-cited shortcomings of the other, the combined approach developed in this paper could be deployed in many studies that examine the emergence of political priorities and the capacity to achieve them.

Information and communication technologies in general and the internet in particular are often praised as a means for enhancing democracy and providing new spaces for the development of an egalitarian civil society, in which all members of society can participate equally. However, there are various possibilities to monitor, manipulate and control cyberspace, of which the internet is an essential part. This paper examines the efforts of the Vietnamese government and the Vietnamese Communist Party to control cyberspace as well as the physical spaces through which the virtual world is accessed. There are attempts to control the internet in a similar fashion as the traditional print and broadcast media. Any such control is neither absolute nor without effect. Instead control is exercised in a highly flexible manner, allowing for some officially unwanted or illegal activity to occur. At the same time authorities can apply internet regulations, if it serves their political objectives as for example strengthening the Party’s official monopoly on political power. The paper traces the development of the internet as well as the regulatory environment surrounding it and analyses the inconsistent enforcement of regulations. The analysis is framed in the theoretical works of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas.

American mortgage markets, once arenas of discrimination by exclusion, now operate as venues of segmentation and discrimination by inclusion: credit is widely available, but its terms vary enormously. One market segment involves sophisticated predatory practices in which certain groups of borrowers are targeted for high-cost credit that strips out home equity and worsens the risks of delinquency, default, and foreclosure. Unfortunately, it has become more difficult to measure inequalities of predatory lending: race – ethnicity and gender are ‘disappearing’ from the main public data source used to study, organize, and mobilize on issues of lending inequalities. In this paper, we present a mixed-methods case study of statistical representation of homeowners and homebuyers marginalized by race, ethnicity, and gender. A theoretical examination of official data-collection practices is followed by a discussion of alternative meanings of racial – ethnic and gender nondisclosure. Interviews with a sample of homeowners and homebuyers in the Washington, DC, area reveal some respondent ambivalence about the details of data-collection practices, but provide no consistent support for the idea that nonreporting is solely a matter of individual choice. Econometric analyses indicate that nondisclosure is driven primarily by lending-industry practices, with the strongest disparate impacts in African-American suburbs. Predatory lending is producing ambivalent spaces of racial – ethnic and gender invisibility, requiring new strategies in the reinvestment movement.

The past 50 years have brought massive changes in the patterns of economic activity around the world. Not only has global trade increased, but, precisely because of this, many scholars suggest that local (and regional) networks of production and exchange have become more prevalent and important. The nature of local economic development has, as a result, changed quite substantially. And yet theoretical approaches to it largely have not. Fifty years after Douglass North introduced economic base theory - asserting that economies grow only through increased exports - it remains the familiar refrain, if not the basis, of local economic development theory. We think it is about time to reassess the merits of base theory as an approach to, and explanation of, local economic development. Accordingly, in this article, we review briefly North's argument for base theory and the debate it stirred up early on. Then we present two evaluations of its current relevance. The first is theoretical: we consider whether changes in the patterns of economic activity in the global north, including the emergence of local/regional networks of production and exchange and the growth of consumer services, have made it possible to achieve economic growth without increasing exports. The second is empirical: using the minimum requirements method, we examine whether the economies of Canada's cities have become more locally oriented and, if so, whether they have grown. Both evaluations indicate that economic development is indeed possible through increased local activity (although exports remain important). We conclude that it is time to consider more nuanced models of local economic development that accommodate the multiple ways in which development can be achieved.

This study analyses the distribution of home workers across the three largest urban regions in Canada and shows how they differ across sex of home worker, household type, income level, occupation and industry. The highest proportion of home workers is in art, culture and recreation occupations followed by management, the field dominated by men. Women home workers make the financial, secretarial and administrative occupations the third-largest group of home workers. The spatial distribution of home workers follows a sectoral form. While the characteristics of inner-city and suburban home workers differ, the differences are the same as for commuters. Rather than creating a completely new locational pattern, home work appears to reinforce existing urban forces of centralisation by professionals and continued decentralisation by the middle classes and those seeking larger estates, such as those in management occupations. The study suggests that the increasing trend towards home work is not dispersing cities, but allows greater locational flexibility within already-existing urban spatial patterns.

This article presents a critique of prevailing left-of-center journalism and academic scholarship on the revelation of torture of Iraqi prisoners of war by United States military personnel at Abu Ghraib in the spring of 2004. We argue that the resulting discourse suffers from a certain critical bankruptcy in its failure to think about the nature of imprisonment as such. This failure is an effect of two procedures: (1) a narrowing of the field of inquiry that relies on the metonymic reduction of imprisonment through and as the practices of torture, and (2) a reification of the prison that both relies upon and displaces the racialization of imprisonment as an institution of black spatial containment and social control. In response, we call for a renewed understanding of and appreciation for the singularity of racial slavery and its afterlife in future research on carceral formations in and beyond the US.

This paper provides a comparative environmental analysis of three subdivision designs for the same site: an ecovillage, a new-urbanist design and an up-scale estate subdivision. The comparison is based on ecological footprints (EF). Based on built form alone, the higher-density subdivisions resulted in lower EF. Consumption data were limited to the ecovillage, since this is the actual use of the study site, but comparisons were made with regional US averages. The study suggests that consumption contributes more to the overall footprint than built form. Qualitative information was used to explore how consumption is influenced by urban design and self-selection. Despite the challenges associated with data collection and conversion, it is argued that EF has utility for planners and urban designers because it enables assessment of built form from an environmental consumption point of view.

This paper demonstrates the importance of a comprehensive framework to assess how telework affects sustainability. Sustainability-policy evaluation rarely considers substitution effects despite broad recognition that overall lifestyles must be analyzed to gauge how policy-induced behavioral changes translate into net environmental impact. Case-study data indicate that telework has far-reaching, complex, and varied effects on lifestyle practices, with potentially important environmental implications. Because adjustments occur across numerous consumption categories, the assessment of telework’s environmental dimensions must move beyond single-issue studies and single-dataset analysis. Ecological-footprint analysis, in combination with qualitative data, can suggest solutions to sustainability problems.

Much of Vietnam’s recent economic growth is based on the industrial sector as well as service industries. This paper briefly analyses the overall economic development of Vietnam since the introduction of the reform process doi moi (renovation) in 1986 and the position of the capital Hanoi in the national and regional economy. The paper also examines clusters of advanced services in the city of Hanoi and explores the development of a small New Economy sector by analysing the locations of software development companies in the city. In addition to the Ancient Quarter, the French Colonial Quarter and the Ba Dinh Area, which have long been identified as distinct areas of administrative and commercial activity in the city of Hanoi, a number of areas away from the city centre could be identified as distinct zones through location analysis and landscape interpretation. Location decisions by the service sector seem to be highly influenced by the built environment and character of an area as well as – of course – property prices, but current planning paradigms are not suited to respond to these developments adequately. Planning still focuses on large scale projects rather than smaller local investments.

The strategic mobilization of images, visual metaphors, and other forms of graphical rhetoric has always been central in place promotion. Images of place have assumed even greater importance, however, with the rise of locational tournaments of cities bidding for the "right" to host high-stakes transnational spectacles. In this paper, we adapt Harvey Molotch's pioneering theory of the urban growth machine to illuminate the contemporary enterprise of city bids for the Olympic Games. Taking Vancouver's successful bid for the 2010 Winter Games as a case study, we use a visual methodology framework to analyze the manifest (explicit, surface) and latent (implicit, subtle) visual narrative strategies used to craft a carefully considered representation of the city. Our analysis of the official Bid Questionnaire and the video presentation to the International Olympic Committee documents the sophisticated process by which a city is constructed to embody pristine urban nature, multicultural social harmony, and vibrant local cultures of sport in keeping with the spirit of Olympism. Whether imagined cities like this are effective is irrelevant: cities understand that half of their advertising budget is wasted (they just don't know which half). The expanding symbolic economies of tourism, conventions, and hallmark events require that urban growth machines develop and operate a full suite of image creation machines, each attuned to the real and perceived desires of an elusive transnational audience in a perpetual movable feast of locational consumption.

This paper explores the implementation of facial recognition surveillance mechanisms as a reaction to perceptions of insecurity in urban spaces.  Facial recognition systems are part of an attempt to reduce insecurity through knowledge and vision, but, paradoxically, their use may add to insecurity by transforming society in unanticipated directions.  Facial recognition promises to bring the disciplinary power of panoptic surveillance envisioned by Bentham -- and then examined by Foucault -- into the contemporary urban environment.  The potential of facial recognition systems -- the seamless integration of linked databases of human images and the automated digital recollections of the past -- will necessarily alter societal conceptions of privacy as well as the dynamics of individual and group interactions in public space.  More strikingly, psychological theory linked to facial recognition technology holds the potential to breach a final frontier of surveillance, enabling attempts to read the minds of those under its gaze by analyzing the flickers of involuntary microexpressions that cross their faces and betray their emotions.

Mass communication, perception, and mental maps are pervasive themes in human geography.  Yet the role of globalization on our collective mental maps remains poorly understood, raising critical questions of theory and policy as flows of capital, people, and ideas continue to blur the boundaries between local and international events.  This paper analyzes these themes in the context of sub-Saharan Africa, focusing specifically on the civil war in Sierra Leone.  The nature of armed conflict in Africa has evolved considerably in recent decades, and the globalization of Western media has altered the way the region has been portrayed.  As publishers, editors, and journalists search the globe for material to fill the continuous, 24-hour news cycle, Africa has been portrayed as an arena of incessant crisis and irrational violence -- even as coverage has remained selective and partial.  To document the paradox of this narrow global outlook, we present a content analysis of the New York Times' coverage of the civil war in Sierra Leone.  We suggest that human rights abuses in African wars demand a clearly-articulated, theoretically-grounded set of principles for media accountability in a world of globalized information flows.

Gentrification is often equated with the residential and consumption preferences of young, white, native-born professionals.  The link between gentrification and "yuppies," however, does not seem adequate to capture the complexity of trends currently underway in many city neighborhoods.  In this paper, census data and fieldwork are utilized to develop a case study of Russian immigration and neighborhood revitalization in Brighton Beach, New York City.  "Russification" has revitalized housing demand and retail activity by altering the class composition of the neighborhood, while also increasing inequality and inducing displacement similar to that observed in other gentrifying districts.  Nevertheless, important cultural and policy-related factors distinguish immigrant-driven neighborhood change from more conventional forms of gentrification.