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.