AESOP 2009 Liverpool

I've just returned from Liverpool where I attended the 2009 AESOP Conference. AESOP stands for the Association of European Schools Of Planning, but there were people there from all over the world, including Brazil, the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It was a very interesting, busy and enjoyable conference and was hosted by the Department of Civic Design at the University of Liverpool.

I presented some of my recent work on area-based initiatives and geographically-targeted policy interventions more broadly. The slide show of my presentation is below, via slideshare. In the meantime, it's back to writing and catching up with things I missed while I was away at the conference...

Rae Aesop09 Liverpool

View more presentations from Alasdair Rae.

'A New Vision for Urban and Metropolitan Policy'...

News of some very interesting urban policy developments from the White House blog. Yesterday, Monday 13th July 2009:

"The White House Office of Urban Affairs and the Domestic Policy Council hosted a day-long discussion about the future of America’s urban and metropolitan areas. Participants included policy experts from across the country, several cabinet members, and elected officials. Discussions covered the evolution of metropolitan areas, best practices in urban communities, and how the federal government can be a more effective partner in these communities."

A day-long discussion.

About the future of America's urban and metropolitan areas.

Are we seeing an true upswing of the policy pendulum? Will this impact on other nations? I expect the answers are 'yes' and 'yes', that's why I'm keeping a close eye on developments.

At the Roundtable Discussion some new initiatives were announced (transcript here) and during this time this happened (at 9 seconds in...):



So, some interesting developments in the US which will surely have an impact elsewhere...

Gilding the Ghetto

This post is all about a publication called Gilding the Ghetto that came out in 1977. It is something of a classic in the urban/social policy literature because of when it was written, who it was written by, and what is in it. It's also quite difficult to track down and even harder to get hold of a copy of your own (there are no more 85p copies available from The Home Office Urban Deprivation Unit!).

Since I'm currently writing about policy interventions in urban areas in the UK and elsewhere, I couldn't really overlook it; in fact, I've become quite taken with it. The report tries to make sense of urban interventions from the late 1960s to 1976 by looking mainly at the Community Development Projects (CDP) of which there were twelve, throughout Great Britain. The tone of the document is very critical but it does get to the root of the problem in many places and resonates with interventions in operation today...

"Their brief rested on three important assumptions. Firstly, that it was the 'deprived' themselves who were the cause of 'urban deprivation'. Secondly, the problem could best be solved by overcoming these people's apathy and promoting self-help. Thirdly, locally-based research into the problems would serve to bring about changes in local and central government policy." (p. 4)

Perhaps the balance between critique and solutions/recommendations could have been better, but overall this is a must-see piece of work for people working in this area. The section on 'Social pathology' on page 54 is particularly relevant in relation to how the problem is conceptualised at a national and local level.

Finally, I've scanned the front and back covers. If you click on them you will see them close to real size.

Isolated Entities or Integrated Neighbourhoods?

My paper on spatial context and deprivation is to be published in Urban Studies in August 2009. Since it is imminent I thought I'd do a very quick blog on the topic. In a nutshell, it's about looking beyond the attributes of individual locations and also considering the spatial location of neighbourhoods as an important contextual factor in how they operate. This paper is really just a baseline study in terms of data and a method of understanding spatial context, so more on this in future...

The front page of the paper is shown below, but for the real thing you'll need to see Urban Studies itself.

European Urban Knowledge Network

Where to go for information on urban policies in different European countries? The European Urban Knowledge Network website is a very good place to start.


There's information here on urban policies on a whole range of European nations, from Belgium, to Denmark, to Italy to the UK. It is interesting just to explore the different kinds of approaches and to see what is going on. Currently, 17 EU member states are involved, plus EUROCITIES, URBACT and the European Commission. That's all for now...

Mapping Commuting Patterns

Moving on from my earlier work on mapping migration with flow maps, I've now begun to think about mapping commuting. So, rather than look at residential mobility I'm focusing on labour market dynamics. Actually, I find this more interesting and there has been some good work on this recently - for example, by Nielsen and Hovgesen in 2005 and 2008.

Even more recently than this (May 2009), Killer and Axhausen of ETH in Zurich produced a paper on Mapping Overlapping Commuting Areas. It is very interesting and even mentions my 2009 paper on flow mapping (though I wrote about migration and not commuting)!



So, a new flow-mapping-related project is in the works... Look out for more in the future.

In Shock

I'm still reeling from the recent discovery (thanks to the legendary Ed Ferrari), that our trusty friend SPSS is no more. It has been 're-branded' with an even catchier title that just rolls off the tongue...

Yes, that's right, it is now called PASW. That is Predictive Analytics Software - surely this should be PAS. The main problem I have with this is the name - should we pronounce it 'pazwuh'?. I've been looking at their re-branding spin and it appears this change was simply 'essential'. However, the numbering has continued so this is PASW 17, with screencast demos available here.

Of course, this must all come as a bit of an annoyance to Andy Field (or an excuse for a new edition) and his excellent textbook on SPSS/PASW. Actually, I've just noticed that despite the name of the book, it has been 'fully updated with PASW Statistics 17'.

And so ends the most unnecessary blog post ever.