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In this paper, we draw on insights from economic theory on urban growth, large shocks and spatial dynamics to assess COVID-19 flow-on effects and potential disruptive legacy in urban-regional dynamics. Urban dynamics in Australia are assessed at national, regional and intra-urban scales. Long-term and short-term urban dynamics are analysed against random growth, locational fundamentals and increasing returns theories of urban growth and adjustment. A focus in Australia and elsewhere is the potential effect of COVID-19 on where people want to live, enabled in part by technological connectivity that releases some workers from proximity to work constraints when choosing a home. Our results suggest that urbanisation trends and adjustments to shocks differ for capital cities and noncapital cities. At the inter-regional migration level, Australia?s largest urban system, Sydney, is characterised by a cointegration relationship between outmigration and Sydney property prices relative to other housing markets. At finer spatial scales, COVID-19 had a negative impact on house prices within Sydney and may, for some micro-geographies and/or towns and regional centres, lead to significant change. However, typically this effect on houses (not units) began to dissipate in the period June-November 2020, when also controlling for housing policy pre- and post-COVID-19.

This study investigated how filtering contributes to market-provided low-income housing in Australia. It critiques the conceptualisation of filtering as a source of housing for low-income households, tests for the presence of filtering dynamics in housing markets (using Melbourne and Sydney as case studies) and considers policy options for enhancing (if so desired) filtering as a policy tool. Filtering is a market-based process whereby the supply of new, higher quality dwellings for higher- and middle-income households may also lead to additional supply of dwellings for lower income households. As properties age and their perceived quality drops, over time they move down the economic hierarchy through successively lower market segments or sub-markets, becoming a supply of ‘naturally occurring affordable housing’.Research into Melbourne and Sydney market dynamics found filtering is incompatible as a reliable source of additional affordable housing for low-income households in Australian cities. To enhance the role that filtering can play in the provision of affordable housing for low-income households, both more supply and more responsiveness of new supply to market signals are needed. In addition, Policy options to better enable filtering to generate a supply of affordable housing for low-income households are likely to be impractical and politically undesirable.

COVID-19 and its restrictions have had widely documented negative impacts for private and social rental sectors, internationally. Limited evidence exists about how the pandemic effects were experienced in alternative forms of renting such as housing cooperatives. Rental cooperatives, recognised for their principles of democratic control, education and training and concern for community, may offer different outcomes for members than more individually-oriented rental forms. This paper seeks to explore whether and how COVID-19 was responded to within cooperative rental housing models, and if the pandemic posed a challenge to cooperative principles. Using a social practices approach, the analysis first identifies cooperative members' formal and informal responses to COVID-19, and second explores the meaning of such activities in the pandemic context in Australia and Honduras cooperatives. The continuity of usual housing cooperative practices and pandemic measures were analysed via in-depth interviews with 15 residents. Findings indicate that cooperative responses acted to reduce negative impacts of the pandemic or to find effective solutions. Rental housing cooperative residents' lived experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic, invite us to reflect on the role of housing cooperatives in the housing sector, the importance of collaborative housing models and the relevance of housing-based community resilience.

This report analyses how evaluation and learning from public housing renewal is informing policy development and delivery to maximise financial returns and socio-economic outcomes. The research was conducted pre-COVID-19. • Public housing renewal provides an opportunity for policy makers to give direction to urban reconfiguration processes. Since the 2000s public housing renewal has increasingly become part of a policy discourse that places emphasis on 'unlocking' under-utilised sites (i.e. public housing estates) for jobs, investment and urban renewal. In this intersection with urban renewal processes, mixed-tenure public housing renewal, in practice, becomes public housing urban renewal. • This research highlights a consistency of views across stakeholders (often on pragmatic grounds) regarding 'how public housing renewal works'. It is thus possible to conceptualise learning and evaluation in public housing renewal policy-making within an advocacy coalition framework (ACF). • An ACF framework focuses on the alignment of the beliefs, actions and interest of a range of stakeholders with respect to how policies work, or can work. Our use of the ACF is grounded in a consistency of views about 'how public housing renewal works', given the prevailing institutional and financial constraints, and the implication of this for the role of evaluation and learning, rather than any suggestion of a formal or informal actual coalition, or collusion, in agenda setting or public policy objectives. • Interviewees perceived evaluation to be one of several integral parts to the policy formation process. However, evaluations have frequently been summative, rather than formative in nature. In addition, stakeholders also relied on personal and institutional experience to inform policy development and decision-making. These learning dynamics have, over time, reinforced key aspects of the policy core belief within the advocacy coalition. • The policy core belief guiding public housing urban renewal is characterised by a shared belief in the instrumental role of land values and land value change as a means of reconciling multiple asset- and people-based outcomes, while controlling the cost of public policy to public budgets. Mixed tenure, housing density and the strategic leveraging of land are policies that also extract land value for public housing reinvestment and other public policy goals. • The central role of land and land value has raised concerns amongst tenants, groups external to the advocacy coalition, but also some of the interviewees that public housing renewal is increasingly driven by asset-based viability considerations and reduced government exposure to risk. While risk related to physical reconfiguration (public housing stock renewal) in this respect is reduced, other objectives (such as wider social and economic benefits for tenants) increasingly become shaped by - rather than shaping urban reconfiguration processes. • Core members of the public housing renewal advocacy coalition are state governments and private developers. Additional members are (in some cases) community housing providers (CHPs) and local governments. Policy formation within advocacy coalitions is shaped by multiple factors. This includes evaluations, but also reacting to external events and internal stakeholder dynamics. • In the contextual analysis in this research, change in relative income is used as an indicator of social and economic reconfiguration. Apart from Adelaide, census collection districts (CCD) subject to public housing renewal experienced little improvement in relative income status (1996-2016). • Citywide drivers (such as economic restructuring, urban sprawl containment, population growth) and neighbourhood drivers (such as economic obsolescence, relative incomes) are specific drivers of social and economic reconfiguration. These are evident in all three capital cities, leading to the potential to 'unlock' value through mixed tenure and public housing renewal. • Policy options exist that can unlock more inclusive c nceptualisations of value, and shift the reliance on land value in the program logic of public housing renewal. The design of public housing renewal tenders, and strategies for implementation, offer considerable opportunity for policy experimentation;identification and evaluation of assumed causal relationships and benefits. A social infrastructure perspective provides a framework for 'unlocking' additional and renewal project-specific values. A number of tools already exist to estimate the (equivalent) monetary value of wider social and economic benefits. © Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute Limited 2021

Each year the proportion of Australians who rent their home increases and, for the first time in generations, there are now as many renters as outright homeowners. Researchers and policy makers, however, know very little about housing conditions within Australia’s rental housing sector due to a lack of systematic, reliable data. In 2020, a collaboration of Australian universities commissioned a survey of tenant households to build a data infrastructure on the household and demographic characteristics, housing quality and conditions in the Australian rental sector. This data infrastructure was designed to be national (representative across all Australian States and Territories), and balanced across key population characteristics. The resultant Australian Rental Housing Conditions Dataset (ARHCD) is a publicly available data infrastructure for researchers and policy makers, providing a basis for national and international research.

Addressing the world’s environmental challenges demands the sustainable transformation of existing production and marketing processes. By adopting green marketing as a corporate strategy, businesses can achieve their organisational goals while also driving the sustainable development of host countries. However, given the unique socio-economic and political challenges of less-developed economies, businesses may encounter the risk of enabling unsustainable consumption and promoting greenwashing. To successfully implement a green marketing strategy, this chapter posits that businesses in emerging markets should move beyond attempting to influence people’s attitudes, choices or behaviour to consider the social practices that constitute organisational and socio-economic processes. By conceptualising people as carriers of social practices, this chapter further examines how the interaction of materials, meanings and competences create everyday consumption and routines. From a social practice perspective, the green marketing strategies corporate organisations in emerging markets can adopt to promote people management and sustainable development include influencing social practice performance, promoting the emergence or dissolution of social practices, enabling communities of sustainability practices and addressing the socio-economic consequences of conflicting social practices.

This Collection offers insights from twenty of Australia’s leader academics and thinkers into the survey results of 15,000 Australian rental households. The Collection draws on data from The Australian Rental Housing Conditions Dataset funded by the Australian Research Council in partnership with six Australian universities as well an additional AHURI funded COVID-19 module.

The research examines the growth of home ownership and its tenure dominance in Australia after the Second World War, together with its fading, most notably for younger households (ages 25–44) over the last four decades.

Planning for and implementing multifunctional nature-based solutions can improve urban ecosystems’ adaptation to climate change, foster urban resilience, and enable social and environmental innovation. There is, however, a knowledge gap in how to design and plan nature-based solutions in a nonanthropocentric manner that enhances co-benefits for humans and nonhuman living organisms. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review to explore how an ecological justice perspective can advance the understanding of nature-based solutions. We argue that ecological justice, which builds on the equitable distribution of environmental goods and bads, social–ecological interconnectedness, nature’s agency and capabilities, and participation and inclusion in decision-making, provides a transformative framework for rethinking nature-based solutions in and for cities. A qualitative analysis of 121 peer-reviewed records shows a highly human-centred worldview for delivering nature-based solutions and a relationship to social justice with no direct reference to the dimensions of ecological justice. There is, however, an underlying recognition of the importance of nonhumans, ecosystem integrity and well-being, and a need to consider their needs and capacities through multispecies nature-based solutions design and planning. We conclude with a discussion of the critical aspects for designing and planning ecologically just cities through nature-based solutions and future research directions to further integrate these fields. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13280-021-01553-7.

Recently, a literature has emerged using empirical techniques to study the evolution of international cities over many centuries; however, few studies examine long-run change within cities. Conventional models and concepts are not always appropriate and data issues make long-run neighbourhood analysis particularly problematic. This paper addresses some of these points. First, it discusses why the analysis of long-run urban change is important for modern urban policy and considers the most important concepts. Second, it constructs a novel data set at the micro level, which allows consistent comparisons of London neighbourhoods in 1881 and 2001. Third, the paper models some of the key factors that affected long-run change, including the role of housing. There is evidence that the relative social positions of local urban areas persist over time but, nevertheless, at fine spatial scales, local areas still exhibit change, arising from aggregate population dynamics, from advances in technology, and also from the effects of shocks, such as wars. In general, where small areas are considered, long-run changes are likely to be greater, because individuals are more mobile over short than long distances. Finally, the paper considers the implications for policy.

Social-ecological justice is an emerging field that argues for nature’s agency, social-ecological awareness, recognition of nature’s capabilities, and participation in decision-making processes. A social-ecological justice perspective lifts the analysis out of a distribution of environmental impacts to humans, to a recognition of social-ecological complexities. However, bringing this perspective to urban planning requires a suite of methods and tools in coordination with existing planning methods that do not address issues of social-ecological justice, or, justice for nature. Drawing from existing methods and tools, this paper presents a novel methodology to define, identify, and map social-ecological injustices in urban landscapes. Three dimensions of social-ecological justice (distribution, recognition, and participation) are operationalised into a set of indicators, which are added to create a Social-Ecological Injustices Index that identifies place hotspots. A fourth dimension, capabilities, is discussed, but not operationalised in the paper. The urban region of Melbourne, which has been undergoing intense urbanisation processes, is used as a case study to test the applicability of this index. The geospatial analysis reveals various degrees of social-ecological injustices across the Melbourne Metropolitan region and unveils the location of the most deprived areas. This methodology can be applied as a systematic and effective way for urban planners and decision-makers to identify and target social-ecological injustice hotspots as areas of prioritisation for urban regeneration with nature-based solutions.

By using 360\(^\circ \) renderings, it is possible to create virtual reality experiences without having to render potentially complex 3D geometry with complex shading for every frame. Applying pixel reprojection to the 360\(^\circ \) renderings can enable 3D movement of the user, which introduces motion parallax effects. The proposed pixel reprojection method employs nine camera views that are used to reconstruct an output from an arbitrary camera position within the space between the nine cameras. Each of the nine camera is supplied with a unique 360\(^\circ \) rendering, generated from the position of the camera. Thereafter no 3D geometry is needed. Two variations of the algorithm are proposed. Evaluation of the two variations showed that only considering the four closest cameras resulted in a shorter render time, but also more visible errors in the reprojected image, when compared to considering all nine cameras.

Much of mainstream economic analysis assumes that markets adjust smoothly, through prices, to changes in economic conditions. However, this is not necessarily the case for local housing markets, whose spatial structures may exhibit persistence, so that conditions may not be those most suited to the requirements of modern-day living. Persistence can arise from the existence of transaction costs. The paper tests the proposition that housing markets in Inner London exhibit a degree of path dependence, through the construction of a three-equation model, and examines the impact of variables constructed for the 19th and early 20th centuries on modern house prices. These include 19th-century social structures, slum clearance programmes and the 1908 underground network. Each is found to be significant. The tests require the construction of novel historical datasets, which are also described in the paper.

This chapter goes behind aggregate spatial population distributions and models the moving decisions of individuals in London and Melbourne since the nineteenth century. Newly constructed panel data sets for the two cities are central; in both cities, most moves were short distance, a feature that remains in place today. Again, in line with the modern era, socio-economic and demographic factors affect mobility and the chapter shows some evidence that social interactions between individuals, in terms of social classes, were important contributors to the persistence of segregation patterns in London. However, the chapter also argues that, over long periods, conventional variables cannot fully explain mobility or the places where people choose to live. This suggests that more attention has to be paid to structural changes to the neighbourhood, including the development of transport networks and housing.

This chapter is concerned with the initial development of cities and neighbourhoods. The descriptive case studies from Chap. 2 provide insights, but the analysis is widened here to consider the extent to which modern distributions of property values still reflect the underlying geology and topography. Both London and Melbourne are analysed and empirical estimates are also made for England as a whole. Unsurprisingly, given the major changes in industrial structure and technology over time, modern house price distributions cannot be fully understood in geological terms alone, but differences in rock formations are still capitalised into property prices. This is partly attributable to the path dependent nature of development and the longevity of the housing stock.

LC policies can be controversial. The authors’ distinction between market-creating, sustaining and efficiency LC policy provides a broad taxonomy of different articulations of LC policy, but at the implementation level national policies will frequently be a combination of each of these. In this chapter the emergence and articulation of LC policies in each of the case countries is examined. The cases illustrate the evolution of LC policies and learning over time. Several of the policies implemented by emerging economies today draw on policies developed by the North Sea countries in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the cases also illustrate important variations in the initial economic and social conditions that influence subsequent LC policy development.

This chapter engages with a number of macro-economic, micro-economic, geographic, geological and institutional conditions that affect LC policy development in each of the case countries and co-determine the degree to which LC policies enable sectoral and/or economy-wide catching up. Variations in these conditions influence the necessary trade-offs between competing objectives relating, more narrowly, to LC, and wider objectives relating to the balance of payments (BoP), demand-side management and monetary policy. It also structures the trade-offs between state control over downstream development/supply-chain operations and IOCs’ access to rent and operational autonomy. Finally, the chapter analyses the role of LC policy in generating wider social and economic benefits through the respective NIS’s ability and capacity to deliver innovation-driven growth and economic diversification.

The authors analyse competing definitions of LC and offer a broad LC taxonomy related to industrial policy and economic processes--market creating, sustaining and efficiency LC. LC policies are related to economic development and prospects for catching up. A distinction is drawn between static and dynamic development trajectories and the implications for industrial and trade policies. This chapter also provides an overview of key characteristics of the NISs in each of the case countries in order to situate LC within the broader functioning of the economy and the ability to deliver innovation-led growth. Overall, market-creating and efficiency LC policies can contribute to sustainability of economic growth and welfare: creating new value networks, building new capabilities and incentivising economic diversification.

This chapter turns to an issue that remains at the forefront of policy today—housing supply—but set in a long-run framework. Public sector involvement in the provision of housing expanded after the Great War, but the proportion of GDP devoted to housing has exhibited little evidence of an upward trend since then. High levels of building have rarely consistently taken place, except following times of national emergency or when the wider economy was in recession. Controversially, this raises the question of whether the building industry would respond fully to the commonly-acknowledged current major housing shortages, even if planning controls were to be relaxed. This national level analysis is complemented by local London analysis and considers the relationship between building and rail and underground developments in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rail construction had a major impact on population outflows from cities towards the suburbs.

This chapter develops the more technical concepts that are necessary to formalise the later analysis. These include residential density, segregation, agglomeration, social interactions, random walks, path dependence, mean reversion and institutions. It concentrates on three strands of the literature, beginning with elements of standard neo-classical residential location theory. The chapter, then, discusses models of neighbourhoods and social interactions and how spatial residential structure is an emergent property of the interdependent decisions of heterogeneous agents, leading to patterns of segregation. In addition, the chapter discusses path dependency and the role of historical development caused by the nature of institutions. Both of these are particular important in long-run studies.

This chapter is concerned with nineteenth and twentieth century Glasgow, a city that had worse health outcomes than even the poorest parts of London and large parts of the Empire. It demonstrates the key characteristics of the medieval-based property law system in operation in Scotland and also discusses the collapse of the City of Glasgow bank in 1878 and its impact; subsequently, no other major bank failures occurred in the UK until the Northern Rock during the Global Financial Crisis. This introduces the issue of housing volatility and cycles. In addition, this chapter considers the development of social housing in twentieth century Glasgow. Finally, the chapter discusses the extent to which distinct submarkets have persisted across Glasgow, by modelling the relationship between modern local house prices and rental values in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The world has still to emerge fully from the housing-triggered Global Financial Crisis, but housing crises are not new and the long-run social progress should not be forgotten; conditions for ordinary households are now vastly superior to those a hundred years ago. In contrast to most housing books, the authors develop a longer-term economic perspective on macro and urban housing issues, from the Victorian era onwards. A historical perspective sheds light on modern problems, the constraints on what can be achieved and possible alternatives for housing supply, affordability, the spatial distribution of migrant communities, mortgage markets, household mobility and housing policy. The authors weave local case studies with city-wide and aggregate analysis. Three sets of issues are addressed: the underlying reasons for the initial establishment of residential neighbourhoods; the processes that generate growth and decline and patterns of integration/segregation; the impact of historical development on current problems and the implications for policy.

This chapter discusses the controversial topic of international migration. The themes are: first, the reasons why migrant groups choose certain locations in which to live; second, the extent to which migrant groups are concentrated; third, the extent to which groupings persist and the factors that bring about change. The chapter provides insights into the relative roles of conventional economic variables—employment opportunities or housing costs—and networks, which are particularly important for new arrivals. This is aided by the availability of country-of-birth data in the UK population censuses from 1861 to the current day. The location and persistence of local migrants matter because of their potential effects on domestic population displacements and on housing costs, which the international literature suggests are significant.

This chapter concentrates on tenure and, particularly, on the changing long-run trends in home ownership and the associated measures of house prices and affordability in the UK. Although affordability had been an issue for working-class households from the nineteenth century and before, two issues receive particular attention since they represent two of the most important structural changes of the twentieth century. These are the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and the deregulation of mortgage markets that occurred primarily in the 1980s. The mortgage market changes of the 1980s represented a major structural change with far-reaching consequences that are still being experienced today. Liberalisation led to an explosion of credit, such that the ratio of mortgage debt to household income is, today, approximately four times higher than in the 1970s. The chapter also reconsiders the causes of the long-run rise in real house prices in the UK and decomposes the trend into demand and supply-side causes.

This chapter is concerned with long-run changes in poverty and segregation, starting with the pioneering work of Charles Booth in the late nineteenth century. Despite the major overall reductions in poverty since then, the relative spatial distributions have been remarkably persistent, at least in London, consistent with some of the theories explored in Chap. 3. Models of social interactions, for example, indicate the importance of non-linearity; this, in turn, implies that only large policy interventions are sufficient to bring the most deprived areas to self-sustaining take-off points. As an example, the chapter looks at the influence of one particularly large change, the London Olympic Games. Although it is too early to assess fully the legacy, so far, there appears to have been little effect on relative property prices in the districts where the Games took place. This leads on to a wider discussion of area regeneration initiatives.

This chapter introduces the local case studies, which are taken from areas of London, Glasgow and Melbourne, which were the largest cities in the British Empire towards the end of the nineteenth century. Small, insignificant streets are chosen that few readers will recognise, but they are still able to demonstrate important ideas, which are explored on a larger spatial scale in subsequent chapters. The case studies demonstrate the importance of geology and topography to the initial establishment of the neighbourhoods, how the social structure of the streets exhibit a high degree of persistence over long periods of time, but how the streets are subject to irregular large innovations that change their structure. The innovations arise from wars, government policy, migration, and changes in technology. In some cases, processes of change were gradual, but in others change occurred quickly in response to chance events.

This chapter considers urban dynamics in response to external disturbances (notably wars and epidemics) and the contribution of early policy development, related to sanitation and slum clearance. Wars, although temporary, are found to have permanent effects on local population distributions, although the nineteenth century cholera and 1918 influenza outbreaks did not. The Second World War had particularly large effects. However, adjusting for age, the relative spatial distribution of health outcomes across London has changed little since the mid-nineteenth century, despite the large London-wide fall in death rates over this period. The most likely cause is residential sorting of the population, rather than intrinsic features of the areas.

This paper considers the impact of existing land use patterns on housing supply price elasticities in local areas of England, under existing planning policies. The paper demonstrates that, despite common national planning policies, local supply responses to market pressures vary considerably, because of differences in historical land uses. The study area covers the Thames Gateway and Thames Valley, which lie to the east and west of London respectively. However, whereas the latter is one of the wealthiest areas of England, the former includes some of the highest pockets of deprivation and was a government priority area for increasing housing supply. Due to differences in historical land use and geography, the price elasticity in the least constrained area is approximately six times higher than the most constrained.

This paper analyses the interlink between resource revenues and financial sector management in Russia and Kazakhstan. In the absence of a well functioning private financial sector the governments can substitute for the actions of the private actors by introducing dedicated financial vehicles. Specifically, these instruments allow the governments of Russia and Kazakhstan alternatives to direct ownership in their pursuit of national economic priorities. The focus of the paper is on two examples of dedicated state investment vehicles with clear industrial policy remits and roles as agents of their respective governments. The paper distinguishes between crisis management and systemic role of these institutions.

Since the mid 1980s, the UK has experienced a prolonged period of net international migration with debate as to its impact on economic benefits and costs. A third of projected new households in the next 15–20 years are expected to come from net migration. This article examines international migration and housing demand in light of the conventional understanding of British housing markets and the extent to which there are differences in demand and access to homeownership across international migrant groups. Demographic and socioeconomic factors as well as length of residence are found to be significant determinants of homeownership. However, there are also differences in homeownership attainment that may be related to ethno-cultural differences or unobserved wealth effects and mortgage market institutional factors. The role of socioeconomic factors has implications for skills-based migration to the UK if a policy concern is house price pressure and migration.

Tetrathiocyanoplatinate(II), Pt ( SCN ) 4 2 - , isolated in vacuo was subjected to a range of experiments. From storage ring measurements the dianions were found to be stable on the seconds time scale. At another instrumental setup, ions were photoexcited with UV light, and the dominant decay channel was electron detachment. The yield of Pt ( SCN ) 4 - monoanions as a function of wavelength provided the action spectrum. Maximum absorption occurs at ∼240 nm, and the spectrum is similar to the absorption spectrum of Pt ( SCN ) 4 2 - in methanol solution, which implies that a solvent perturbs the ground state and the electronically excited state in the same manner.

This paper analyses the connection between resource nationalism and financial sector intervention in the FSU countries. We consider recent financial development in the FSU and the special features of energy rich emerging economies (Russia and Kazakhstan, in particular) which are influencing recent credit expansions. We find that the hydrocarbon sector has boosted boosting domestic credits through a number of direct and indirect routes. Recent decline in oil prices may change government attitudes to a continued resource nationalist strategy. Sovereign wealth funds that were established in a majority of energy rich emerging economies may, to the extent that they enable the selection of winners in specific economic sectors, create path dependency or exacerbate longer term allocative inefficiency arising from the governance structure associated with resource nationalism.

Income segregation across Melbourne’s residential communities is widening, and at a pace faster than in some other Australian cities such as Adelaide. Back in 1996 Australian Taxation Office data show that average taxable income in Melbourne’s 10 postcodes with the highest taxable incomes was 2.1 times that in the 10 postcodes with the lowest taxable incomes. By 2003 this multiple had widened to 2.7, but in Adelaide it remained unchanged at 1.8 over the same time period (Nygaard, Wood and Stoakes, 2006). The widening gap between Melbourne’s rich and poor communities raises fears about concentrations of poverty and social exclusion, particularly if the geography of these communities is such that they and their residents are increasingly isolated from urban services and employment centres. Social exclusion in our metropolitan areas and the government responses to it are commonly thought to be the proper domain of social and economic policy. The role of urban planning is typically neglected, yet it helps shape the economic opportunities available to communities in its attempts to influence the geographical location of urban services, infrastructure and jobs. The location of these dimensions of the urban environment plays a pivotal role in determining a community’s access to public transport, employment, and services and hence the wellbeing of its residents. Melbourne 2030 is a strategic plan for the metropolitan area that has as its overarching aim the creation of a more compact city contained by a growth boundary. Urban services and transport infrastructure are to be concentrated within Principal Activity Centres spread throughout the metropolitan area (there are 25 in total); each centre is expected to support a mix of land uses and densities of development. Since Principal Activity Centres will become increasingly important there is recognition in state government circles of the importance of affordable housing that offers all Melbournians, including lower income households, ready access to these activity centres. In his

Following a decade of transition in the Former Soviet Union (FSU), governance of the oil and gas sectors has evolved to economic nationalism. In the newly independent states this has manifested itself through greater (direct) state ownership or participation in oil and gas production, at the expense of both domestic (in the case of Russia) and international oil companies, as well as legislative developments that increase the flow of oil and gas value to the state. Here we analyse some of the dynamics giving rise to economic nationalism within a model of a state capacity and the ability to implement policy and extract value. Our analysis is based on the institutional and economic functioning of the oil and gas sector. We analyse a vector of institutions and examine Production Sharing Agreements and National Oil Companies.

Retrenchment of the public sector as a direct provider of rented accommodation has been accompanied by a growing reliance on housing associations as alternative providers of below‐market rented accommodation in the UK. The most successful vehicle to date (in terms of transferred ownership of units) for growing the not‐for‐profit sector has been so‐called “large‐scale voluntary transfer” of dwellings formerly owned by local authorities. Since the turn of the century this has been accompanied by the rapid expansion of “arms‐length management organizations” in England. Notably though, for a process concerned with the transfer of legal entitlements to property, the literature on stock transfer and social housing reform is marked by a curious absence of any discussion of a property rights dimension of this process and, particularly, how degree and form of ownership is capitalized through the prevailing (and changing) governance structures. The point of departure for this article is an examination of how stock ...

Social housing policy in the UK mirrors wider processes associated with shifts in broad welfare regimes. Social housing has moved from dominance by state housing provision to the funding of new investment through voluntary sector housing associations to what is now a greater focus on the regulation and private financing of these not-for-profit bodies. If these trends run their course, we are likely to see a range of not-for-profit bodies providing non-market housing in a highly regulated quasi-market. This paper examines these issues through the lens of new institutional economics, which it is believed can provide important insights into the fundamental contractual and regulatory relationships that are coming to dominate social housing from the perspective of the key actors in the sector (not-for-profit housing organisations, their tenants, private lenders and the regulatory state). The paper draws on evidence recently collected from a study evaluating more than 100 stock transfer organisations that inher...

The advent of the ‘buy to let’ (BTL) phenomenon in the UK, apart from producing a new wave of individualized rental market investment, has been widely judged to be a speculative and destabilizing force in the housing market. This paper provides a detailed empirical investigation of new residential investment in one city (Glasgow) where BTL has made a relatively large impact. In seeking to overcome data problems, the study employed qualitative (expert interviews and a landlord survey) and quantitative methods (census, the Register of Sasines, standardized house price information and modelling thereof) in order to assess the nature and scale of BTL, the motivations of investors and its impact on the private housing market. The evidence suggests that while Glasgow is in many respects different to rental markets elsewhere in the UK and although the investment has thus far largely occurred in a benign environment, the context for future investment, on balance, looks sustainable (i.e. favourable change...

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A complete understanding of the physics underlying the varied colors of firefly bioluminescence remains elusive because it is difficult to disentangle different enzyme-lumophore interactions. Experiments on isolated ions are useful to establish a proper reference when there are no microenvironmental perturbations. Here, we use action spectroscopy to compare the absorption by the firefly oxyluciferin lumophore isolated in vacuo and complexed with a single water molecule. While the process relevant to bioluminescence within the luciferase cavity is light emission, the absorption data presented here provide a unique insight into how the electronic states of oxyluciferin are altered by microenvironmental perturbations. For the bare ion we observe broad absorption with a maximum at 548 ± 10 nm, and addition of a water molecule is found to blue-shift the absorption by approximately 50 nm (0.23 eV). Test calculations at various levels of theory uniformly predict a blue-shift in absorption caused by a single water molecule, but are only qualitatively in agreement with experiment highlighting limitations in what can be expected from methods commonly used in studies on oxyluciferin. Combined molecular dynamics simulations and time-dependent density functional theory calculations closely reproduce the broad experimental peaks and also indicate that the preferred binding site for the water molecule is the phenolate oxygen of the anion. Predicting the effects of microenvironmental interactions on the electronic structure of the oxyluciferin anion with high accuracy is a nontrivial task for theory, and our experimental results therefore serve as important benchmarks for future calculations.

DGNB is an abbreviation of Deutsche Gesellshaft für Nachhaltiges Bauen, a German sustainability standard and certification system that has operated for a decade and that was appointed as the official Danish system by Green Building Council (GBC) Denmark in 2009. In 2012 GBC Denmark launched a second DGNB standard, now focusing on urban districts. This certification standard is currently still in the process of being adjusted to Danish standards. DGNB Urban Districts (DGNB(UD)) pleads for using their system as design ‘tool’or guideline for the very early design stages. This process has not been investigated or described well. In this paper, the effect of DGNB(UD) on design is investigated in a case study using DGNB(UD) as a ‘design tool’.The effects on the design process is observed and compared to well established methodologies of integrated energy design (IED) and traditional beaux- arts architectural design. The case study addresses the design of anabandoned harbor area to be re-inhabited and to provide new functions.