About the Green Belt

Last week I did a short piece for the Guardian about the lack of an open map of England's green belt. This morning CPRE published a map and short briefing about the green belt being under threat (extract below). There is a national PDF map and a more detailed briefing about particular examples but there is still no way to zoom in to local areas to see it in more detail. 

The map also cites the source of the data - not the government - so that's why it can't be open and shared. I think this is a bad situation but I've said that already. I just can't believe that such an important national dataset is not in the public domain. Rant over. Nice work from CPRE though. 

Is there a link between closed green belt data and attempts to open up the green belt for development? Probably not, but there might be a relationship between the two.

Public Spending in the UK

The Guardian have been doing some interesting things with data over the past couple of years, including setting up their data store. One of the most interesting visualisations they have produced relates to public spending in the UK. The most recent version of this graphic (produced in conjunction with the Institute for Fiscal Studies), for 2008-09 reveals some interesting things...

• Total spending was £620.685 billion, up 7% on the previous year
  
• Department for Work and Pensions (state pensions, housing benefit, etc.) spending was £135.7 billion
• £94.552 billion was spent on the NHS
• Interest payments on debt were £24.1 billion
• 'Financial stability' measures (i.e. bailing out the banks) was £85.5 billion
• More money was spent bailing out LTSB and RBS (£36.9 billion) than on the Department for Communities and Local Government (£36.8 billion)
• DCLG spending for local and regional government was £25.4 billion

There's a fully fledged article on all this, and links to the downloadable pdf on the Guardian pages relating to this analysis. There's also a related flickr page for visualisations.

Euro blogging...

Things have been quieter on the blog front recently because I've been in Lille from 1-5 April and then Leuven from 5-9 April at the Regional Studies Association International Conference 2009. The event brings together key thinkers (not that I think I'm amongst them!) in regional studies from across Europe and the wider world, though it tends to be mostly European. Papers given at the conference were varied and reflect the broad constituency of the field of regional studies itself. So, we find economists mixing with geographers, planners and those who transcend disciplinary boundaries.

Of particular interest for me here was the special session centred on DCLG (a government department in the UK, with responsibilities in England) and the establishment of the new spatial analysis unit, headed by David Wood (economist by training). There were three pleasing aspects about this for me. First, the fact that David Wood and Verity Morgan from DCLG were in attendance in the first place - very good. Second, the fact that there is a new unit within DCLG dedicated to spatial analysis - this is right down my street, as previous posts have shown. Finally, the fact that senior people in the Department are enthusiastic about this kind of work, and particularly work which I had a key role in - I've blogged on it before.

Finally, some visuals on the route from Sheffield to Leuven. I'm taking the Eurostar back...



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Area Effects - do they exist?

Much has been written in the academic literature about 'area effects', or how concentrations of poverty (or disadvantage, or deprivation, or whatever you want to call it) can act to create further disadvantage in terms of all sorts of things; from health to employment, to crime and so on.

Another issue here is the extent to which the geography of deprivation has largely remained the same in cities across the United Kingdom. So, if we look back in time and follow neighbourhoods through to the present day many of the areas that we target with policy today were seen as 'problems' decades ago. Despite lots of money being spent on them, things have not got much better.

The Department of Communities and Local Government's recently published Regeneration Framework has more to say on these issues but it also acknowledges the above two problems. But what can we do about it? Well, the Framework has three priority outcomes:

• improving economic performance in deprived areas;
• improving rates of work and enterprise in deprived areas; and
• creating sustainable places where people want to live and can work, and businesses want to invest.

Some good ideas but have we any reason to think it will be any more effective than previous approaches? Maybe. There is a growing realisation that, after 40+ years of area-based initiatives in England, something just isn't right in the approach we take.

The point of this post is to say that I concur with most of what's in the Framework but I don't there there is enough emphasis on the extent to which deprivation is a spatial phenomenon, as well as an attributional one. What I mean by this is that the spatial manifestation of deprivation also needs to be tackled head on. But first, it needs to be understood - and this is what my current research focus is on. I've blogged on this before, but I just wanted to re-emphasise it here since the Framework was on my mind. There's also a reference to a paper that I co-wrote (bottom of page 55) with some of the spatial context material in it.