Volume 31 (2012): Issue 2 (June 2012)

This paper addresses new trends in quantitative geography research. Modern social science research - including economic and social geography - has in the past decades shown an increasing interest in micro-oriented behaviour of actors. This is inter alia clearly reflected in spatial interaction models (SIMs), where discrete choice approaches have assumed a powerful position. This paper aims to provide in particular a concise review of micro-based research, with the aim to review the potential - but also the caveats - of micro-models to map out human behaviour. In particular, attention will be devoted to interactive learning principles that shape individual decisions. Lessons from cognitive sciences will be put forward and illustrated, amongst others on the basis of computational neural networks or spatial econometric approaches. The methodology of deductive reasoning under conditions of large data bases in studying human mobility will be questioned as well. In this context more extensive attention is given to ceteris paribus conditions and evolutionary thinking.

Urban growth and fractality is a topic that opens an entrance for a range of radical ideas: from the theoretical to the practical, and back again. We begin with a brief inventory of related ideas from the past, and proceed to one specific application of fractals in the non-Euclidean geometry of Manhattan space. We initialize our discussion by inventorying selected existing knowledge about fractals and urban areas, and then presenting empirical evidence about the geometry of and movement in physical urban space.

Selected empirical analyses of minimum path distances between places in urban space indicate that its metric is best described by a general Minkowskian one whose parameters are between those for Manhattan and Euclidean space. Separate analyses relate these results to the fractal dimensions of the underlying physical spaces. One principal implication is that theoretical, as well as applied, ideas based upon fractals and the Manhattan distance metric should be illuminating in a variety of contexts. These specific analyses are the focus of this paper, leading a reader through analytical approaches to fractal metrics in Manhattan geometry. Consequently, they suggest metrics for evaluating urban network densities as these represent compression of human activity. Because geodesics are not unique in Manhattan geometry, that geometry offers a better fit to human activity than do Euclidean tools with their unique geodesic activities: human activity often moves along different paths to get from one place to another.

Real-world evidence motivates our specific application, although an interested reader may find the subsequent "prospect" section of value in suggesting a variety of future research topics that are currently in progress. Does "network science" embrace tools such as these for network compression as it might link to urban function and form? Stay tuned for forthcoming work in Geographical Analysis.

This paper discusses, first, the concepts of fractals and power laws in relation to the street patterns of the city of Dundee, East Scotland and, second, the results of the measurement of 6,004 street segments in the city. The trends of the street segments are presented through rose diagrams and show that there are two main street trends in the city: one is parallel with the coast, the other is roughly perpendicular to the coast. It is clear that the coastline largely regulates the street trend, because both the main street trends change along the city so as to be nearly coast-perpendicular and coast-parallel everywhere. The lengths of the street segments follow power laws. When presented on log-log plots, however, the result is not a single straight line but two straight lines. At the break in line slope, the fractal dimension changes from 0.88 to 2.20. The change occurs at the step length of about 100 m, indicating that the short streets belong to a population that is different from that of the longer streets.

The power of today's computers allows us to perform computation on massive quantities of data on the one hand and produces enormous amounts of analysis output on the other, as noted by Griffith in his 2003 book. Besides, visualisation and spatial filtering (the core of considerations in Griffith's book) have a chance to be widely used in research practice, especially in geosciences and, more precisely, for georeferenced data. Following the idea proposed by Patuelli et al. (2006, 2009), we analysed the labour market in Poland, focusing on metropolitan areas and their surroundings. The analysis was performed on a data set for the unemployment rate in the 2,478 Polish communes. We took into account spatial autocorrelation and used spatial filtering techniques to construct components of an orthogonal map pattern. As shown in Tiefelsdorf & Griffith (2007), the spatial filtering techniques could be employed in both, parametric and semi-parametric approaches. In this paper we adopted a parametric one.

Studying the internal structure of cities is one of the traditional topics of geographical research. The aim of this article is to show a possible approach to the study of an objective dimension of the quality of life in an intra-urban environment focusing on detailed studies of selected indicators of the quality of life. There exist many approaches to evaluating the quality of life because it is an interdisciplinary term; we are going to focus on this issue in terms of the quality of living conditions. Using multivariate statistical methods, we are going to try a typology of an urban area in just those terms, and the results will be confronted with the perception of the quality of life by residents themselves. The area studied will be the city of Olomouc.

The article deals with the question of the social construction and assessment of physical urban objects (such as trees, gardens, parks) which are perceived as natural. The society perceives nature ambivalently. Nature describes "the primary and the good (…) that contrasts with society as the artificial and even the destructive". Nevertheless nature means "the wild and the threatening which is domesticated to protect society" (Groß 2006: 5). In the city, nature exists in a domesticated form (e.g. as a park) or in a less domesticated condition (e.g. as sparse flora). Modernity and postmodernity have different implications in the perception and assessment of urban nature. Especially the less domesticated nature contradicts the modern aesthetic scheme. It is assumed that the antagonism of legitimated and trivial culture is a substantial characteristic of modernity, which incorporates itself in a series of fundamental dichotomies like nature and culture (Fuller 1992). A typical characteristic of the modern dichotomy is the construction of order and disorder. By contrast, postmodern aesthetics challenges and deconstructs these dichotomies (Sloterdijk 1987, 1988). Unlike modernity, postmodernity tolerates the less domesticated nature in cities which includes new possibilities of the composition of the cityscape, especially for ruined buildings and areas. Postmodern landscape planning and architecture do not mean ‘anything goes’, but rather including the pluralism of citizens' interests, belongings and needs, especially because they are the sovereigns in democratic societies. In consequence, the postmodern perspective on planning can be an integral part of the sustainable development of cities.

The article consists of two parts. Part one offers a diagnostic description of the current spatial-economic structure of Poland in which regions are divided into core and peripheral ones. The division rests on a systemic measure of the level of economic development, viz. the income potential / population potential ratio. Part two is an analysis of changes in Poland's spatial-economic structure over the years 1998-2008 where an attempt is made to determine how far those changes coincided with visions of the country's spatial structure presented in planning conceptions.

Industrial restructuring processes associated with the transformation of the system taking place in Poland and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe bring about structural changes in manufacturing intended to develop intellectually-intensive industries based on the implementation of the latest research and development (R&D) results. The purpose of this article is therefore to present changes in the role of industry in the economy of Poland based on its share in employment and gross value added in comparison with other eastern EU countries, as well as structural changes in the industrial sectors (NACE divisions). The comparison will assess the competitive position of Polish industry on international markets, particularly against the other states transforming their economies. The analysis will seek to establish to what extent the structural changes in Polish industry indicate positive effects of the country's economic transformation.

Romania's local administrative-territorial organisation shows a high degree of fragmentation. The situation tends to worsen as some villages break away from the parent communes and form new administrative-territorial structures. Since their area is fairly small and adequate financial resources to sustain some coherent, long-term development programmes are missing, a solution would be for them to associate freely into inter-communal cooperation structures, which is a basic prerequisite for attracting European structural funds. Such a type of cooperation practice was experienced in this country at the beginning of the 20th century. Today, inter-communal cooperation could be achieved in two ways: by an association of local communities patterned on historical ‘lands’ (after the French model) and by the establishment of a town, of the metropolitan type, to polarise cooperation structures.