Urban Geography and Planning

City regions and economic geographies

Session organiser: Brita Hermelin, Dept Human Geography, Stockholm Univ Fast regional enlargement in Sweden - a phenomenon missing an explanation Jan Amcoff, Institute for futures studies, Stockholm, Sweden Since the early 2000s regional enlargement ("regionfrstoring") has become an important objective in the Swedish regional policy. Smaller regions are intended to be functionally integrated into larger neighbours through intensified commuting. This strive is facilitated by the fact that the coveted process seems self-propelled and already running. The number of functional regions is reported to have halved during the three last decades of the 20th century and are expected to half again until 2030. However, it has been difficult to confirm this fast development in other data. In this paper a set of explanations to this seemingly contradictory condition are suggested. The conclusion is that the Swedish regional enlargement partly might be fictitious, an effect of flaws and errors in the data and the way used to measure the process. The unfortunate message is that regional enlargement might not be such an easily practicable way to regional development it seems to be and that the assumption of a future Sweden of only 55-60 functional regions might have defective grounds.

Swedish cities in the space of flows: National, European and Global Networks Brita Hermelin, Department of Human Geography, Stockholm University Cities are internally related to the outside via interconnections, which involve flows of information, persons, and goods. The idea about the importance of the situation of cities is widely acknowledged and discussed by a large number of authors. A major trend in this discourse is that the geographical scale in focus has changed from the national to the international and global scales (cf. Robinson 2005). Concepts such as world cities (Friedmann 1986), global cities (Sassen 2001) and globalising cities (Marcuse and van Kempen 2000) have emerged. This paper presents a literature overview of studies about Swedish cities in national, European and global networks of interconnections and flows. The analysis will primarily consider flows related to the economic sphere and the endeavour is designed to contribute to the body of existing knowledge on the development of Swedish cities. The paper also comprises a pilot study of the advertising sector and how firms in this sector involve flows to and from cities in Sweden. The study develops on the basis on quantitative as well as qualitative data.

Good news for cities? The economic impacts of an aging population

Peter Kresl, Dept Economics, Bucknell Univ., Lewisburg, PA, USA The growing age dependency ratio is a powerful factor facing all industrialized economies for the foreseeable future - especially in Europe and Japan. For national governments this is a "ticking time bomb" of fiscal consequences of rising retirement and health costs. But I argue that for cities or urban regions there is the potential for a very positive impact. This conclusion is based on analysis of the seniors themselves - in the coming years they will be healthier, wealthier, more mobile and more educated than ever before, as well as their decisions about place of residence many chose to move into the city center for its amenities and convenience, and about how they will spend both their time and their money. The 45 and older cohort is disproportionately committed to cultural events and activities and to education - both of which are "urban functions." In my presentation I will discuss the issue itself and what policies some municipal governments are introducing so as to capture this potential for revenues and audiences. I will discuss cities in both North America and the EU.

Mobiles all around: Changes in everyday practice of urban youth Eva Thulin and Bertil Vilhelmson, Dept Human and Economic Geography, School of Business, Economics and Law, Gteborg Univ. Eva.Thulin@geography.gu.se, Bertil Vilhelmson@geography.gu.se This paper explores how young peoples everyday patterns of social communication are affected by the increased use of mobile phones. We discuss three areas in which there are potential implications: (i) contact patterns and face-to-face interaction; (ii) other forms of spatial mobility; and (iii) individual planning and use of time. Empirically, we rely on an indepth, three-wave panel study of forty young persons living in Gteborg, Sweden, supplemented by national ICT-use survey data. Results show that young peoples total interactions with their social environment increase as the mobile promotes a flexible lifestyle of instant exchange and constant updates. Thresholds regarding space, time, and content for communicative action are reduced. A more impulsive practice of decision-making evolves and people become more careless about timekeeping. With the reduction in the constraints of time and space, the instant access of the mobile becomes difficult to refuse, and perceived dependency on mobiles increases. Yet, relationships are not uniform. Among more frequent mobile users the mobile seems to generate additional out-of-home interaction. Less frequent mobile users stay at home more, but spend more time socialising on the Internet. Gender differences in mobile use become less apparent over time.

Office development in Dublin: Out to the edge and back ? Sunnhild Bertz, Dept Geography, National Univ. Ireland, Maynooth Postal address: 22 Cambridge Road, Rathmines, Dublin 6, Ireland E-mail: sunnhild.bertz@nuim.ie The rapid emergence of large-scale office development at Dublins edge was a defining feature of the citys growth during the period 1996 2001 (which represents Dublins fourth office development boom), accounting for around 70 per cent of office space completions compared to less than 15 per cent during 1960 1995. This geographical shift, with serious implications for sustainability, occurred within the context of a highly favourable suburban planning environment, driven by inter-local authority competition for commercial rates income and, in some cases, tax incentives for developers, investors and occupiers. The limitations of a planning-driven approach to office development quickly came to the fore during the office market downturn after 2001, with the tide of new office development swiftly retreating from Dublins edge. Dublins office property market is currently experiencing a fifth major phase of expansion (since 2004). While edge urban locations have so far been largely by-passed in terms of further new development, the paper considers the potential of these peripheral sites for being incorporated into the current boom and highlights some of the key factors impacting on office development outcomes over the next couple of years.

Reassembling the urban. Creating and destroying contemporary city landscapes

Session organisers: Mauro Cannone, Royal Holloway Univ. London, and Sara Fregonese, Newcastle Univ.

ALL THAT IS SOLID DOES NOT MELT INTO AIR: SOCIAL CAPITAL, POWER, AND TRUST IN VENICES URBAN DEVELOPMENT. Mauro Cannone This paper examines the dynamics of urban regeneration in the specific context of Venice, a city in which the complex strategies of development has had to face the challenges of a built environment constrained by the exceptional presence of water and history. The present analysis focuses on the redevelopment of the Arsenale, a vast semi-abandoned area formerly hosting industrial and military activities, and now lying at the heart of Venice as a problematic urban void. In particular, the paper addresses the processes of the creation of a Maritime Technologies Centre (Thetis) located in the Arsenale. This redevelopment initiative, besides contributing to the rejuvenation of the area, crucially shows an interesting example of how to revitalize the socioeconomic life of a city jeopardized by the permanent loss of residents and functions. Rather than framing Thetis as the result of a coherent strategy put forward by urban administrators and business leaders, its constitution is re-narrated here through a closer description of a more precarious network of actors mobilized around the project. Woven by both social and material threads, the network is configured by often undistinguishable relations of friendships, business, acquaintance etc., able to draw on and effectively put into action various resources embedded in the local milieu of Venice. In this account, social capital that is, the mobilization of resources through social relations emerges as the key element flowing within a network which crucially takes and holds its shape according to the modalities in which power and trust are able to assemble the associations between different actors. In highlighting the role of these two dimensions, the article aims at enabling new possibilities of addressing the dynamics of socioeconomic growth, suggesting that local development depends also on how potential resources rooted in place are effectively enacted by means of social relations.

Rebuilding a Troubled Past The political geography of urban redevelopment in Germany. Dr. Jan Henrik Nilsson Department of Service Management, Lund University. Box 882, 251 08 Helsingborg, Sweden.

Town planning has increasingly been forced to take history seriously when city centres are redeveloped. Preservation, conservation and finding new use for degraded buildings and areas has gained importance, politically and publicly. Some environments that previously have been

destroyed have even been reconstructed from scratch. This is most common in East-Central Europe and in Germany, due to war damage and widespread neglect during the communist period. This particular use of history may be controversial because of the traumatic history in this part of Europe, the past has serious symbolic value. During 2006 and 2007, the authorities in Berlin and Potsdam have made the final decisions to rebuild the city castles in the neighbouring towns. The two castles, dating back to the electorate of Prussia-Brandenburg, were seriously, but not totally, damaged during the Second World War. Instead, the GDR authorities finally raised them in 1950 and 1960 respectively. The decisions to rebuild them are controversial. One reason for this is the symbolic meaning inherited in the buildings. They may represent Prussia, German militarism and even Nazism. On the other hand, the modernist developments that came in their place during the GDR regime may symbolize communist dictatorship. The debate over these buildings, and places, also concern practical and financial issues along with discussions on the cityscapes surrounding the castles and the place of the castles within the cities. This paper will analyze this redevelopment process and the political and public debate that has led to the decisions to rebuild.

Infrastructural violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip: the politics of creative destruction Omar Jabary Salamanca The destruction and construction of infrastructural networks has become a particularly salient aspect of contemporary warfare. Yet the ways in which these networks direct and reflect patterns of conflict are rarely considered. This project calls attention to a politics of creative destruction that takes shape around struggles for control of, and access to, the infrastructural networks that sustain life, movement, and communication in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. While stressing the ways in which infrastructural destruction and construction are integrated into broader technologies of government and war, the project also highlights how Israeli efforts at control are constantly contested and subverted, ultimately leading to the articulation of counter-infrastructures that support life and sustain resistance. Invoking a theoretically informed single case-study methodology (Gerring 2004; Tsing 2000) grounded in interviews, the study of planning documents, the mapping of infrastructural projects and patterns of conflict, critical ethnographic techniques, etc, the paper promises to introduce new perspectives and points for comparative exploration, both with regard to the specific case study, and to the wider literature on contemporary conflicts.

Urban planning and the banality of morality Jonas R Bylund, PhD Human Geography, Dept. of Human Geography, Stockholm University

What are suitable tools to investigate contemporary urban planning practice? The discourseanalysis approach has been widely popular in studies on urban planning practice. However, one problem with the approach is a conceptual limitation in the focus on words and verbal interchange. The outcomes of negotiation and discourse are many times quite visible, but the path towards it obscured by this limitation. By treating planning as a case of materially manifesting morality, it is possible to recast the old issue of the disciplining and discursive urban planners in a new light. Even if it is self-evident in human geography that the builtenvironment regulates behaviour and flows of humans and nonhumans, it is still not very well understood or explained in planning theory how planners in practice produce these spaces. Due to the tendency in this field towards crafting normative procedural models, the innovative character of planning is left in the dark. In human geography, on the other hand, the vexing problem has been (and still is to some extent) one of how to reconcile social and physical planning in theory and investigative practice. The proposition in this paper is that one way to keep the fruits of a discourse approach but extend the range of investigation is to develop a generalised discourse analysis and a geography of projects. Central to this endeavour is a focus upon the delegation of provisional allowances and scripting.

Urban planning, image construction and toponymic landscaping: the case of Vuosaari, eastern Helsinki Jani Vuolteenaho, Department of Geography, University of Helsinki Abstract: It is nowadays a commonplace to say that cities in Western countries (and beyond) are experiencing a 'global', 'postindustrial' or 'post-modern' era a phase of urban development in which worldwide economic processes, cultural globalization and image construction are remorselessly remoulding and fragmentizing local landscapes. As a specific manifestation of these processes, many critics have argued that the power of economic actors in influencing the local toponymies has increased. That is, whereas affixing 'official' names to streets, squares, parks, districts et cetera has been historically interwoven with the institutionalization of the rationalistic practices of urban planning, the distinction between officially authorized toponyms and commercial names is getting more and more blurred in contemporary cities. This paper, based on over 1000 locally given institutional and commercial names in 19662004, presents a case study on the dramatic transformation of onomastic landscape of Vuosaari, a seaside suburb on the eastern outskirts of Helsinki.

Processes of place reinvention in regional towns

Session organiser: Karl Benediktsson and Magnfrur Jlusdttir, Dept Geology and Geography, Univ. Iceland

Modernities and materialities: Place reinvention in East Iceland Karl Benediktsson Department of Geography and Tourism University of Iceland Places are repositories of cultural meanings, both for their inhabitants as well as for others indeed that is part and parcel of the concept of place in human geography. Yet these meanings are malleable and fluid. They are increasingly put to work, as it were, for local development, in an economic system that is ever more suffused by cultural concent. This is, in short, what the concept of place reinvention stands for. Much of this, such as town planning projects and place branding, is explicit and intentional. In other cases, reinvention is an unintentional result of particular intersections of capital, culture and diverse actors over time. In the presentation, I first discuss the concept of place reinvention in more detail and then make use of it in a description of economic, social and cultural processes in two small towns in East Iceland. The work stems from a recent comparative research project where selected regional towns in Iceland, Norway, Sweden and Finland were compared. Qualitative data were collected through focus group sessions and interviews with key actors. Of the East Iceland towns, one Reyarfjrur is undergoing wholesale identity transformation, from a small fishing place to an industrial locality where a single large aluminium plant dominates. The other town Egilsstair is on the other hand making a concerted effort to position itself as a major inland service town that is attractive to new settlers. A new plan for the town centre projects meanings of proper urban space through various design features.

Wild nature, global art and gendered images in place-marketing the new reindeerland in East Iceland Magnfrur Jlusdttir Department of Geography and Tourism University of Iceland In line with the dominant neoliberal discourse towns and regions in Iceland are defining and developing their growth potential in a competitive global marketplace. These trends are increasingly expressed in place promotions to attract investments, desirable tourist or migrants and new forms of governance, emphasizing public-private partnerships. The twin processes of emphasising the unique character of a place and its openness to the outer world, touches up on central questions of difference, power and contestations in choice of development paths in place reinvention. The paper focuses on the gendering of these processes in the creation and use of a new image for a regional service town in an agricultural area in East Iceland, Egilsstair. Wild

reindeer have recently been discovered as markers of uniqueness in the region and are increasingly used in marketing the area, especially to tourists and sport-hunters, but also to potential migrants and an international community of artists. Through the case of the invention of the reindeer image, the study analyses representations of gendered images, nature-culture relations and belonging to a place, in interviews with local actors, promotion material and policy documents.

The audience of place-marketing images: encounters with Trieste a real multicultural city. Annalisa Colombino Geography, Open University, UK When investigating place-marketing images, geographers and urban scholars have focused on analysing their manifest and latent meanings and emphasised how they often misrepresent real places. By privileging the past as their main analytical concern, they have also discussed how this temporality is manipulated by marketing for crafting representations that do not mirror residents views of the history of their place. Common is the claim that placemarketing images are fictitious representations of places that foster the opposition of local communities. This paper discusses how residents encounter their places marketed image in order to explore whether these images are always unfaithful and unwanted representations of places. It also questions whether people always read the meanings inscribed by marketers in these representations, and whether it is the past that is the main temporality that people evoke when articulating their views about the marketed image of their place. Using Trieste (Italy) as a case study, I discuss how a group of 32 residents perceived the citys multicultural character that was marketed during the bid for the 2008 World Expo. Henri Lefebvres theory of lespace and discourse analysis provide, respectively, the theoretical framework and the analytical strategy through which I tackle this issue. I illustrate that despite the fact that marketers sense of Triestes multiculturalism was not decoded by the informants, Triestes advertised image was mainly supported by the interviewees. I point to how evocation of specific temporalities (historical past, present, and timeless temporality) affected how the informants constructed their views about Trieste. I finally illustrate how and why Triestes multicultural image can be envisaged as a real representation of the Italian city.

Constructing a new image for an old town Liv Mari Nesje and Jens Kristian Fosse Agder Research N-4604 Kristiansand S Norway Arendal, the largest town in the County of Aust-Agder, was way back an important town in the southernmost part of Norway. Its position was due to shipbuilding and international trade,

but in 1886 a collapse in these two businesses resulted in an economic slump causing new challenges. Nevertheless, for a long time it seemed that Arendal happened to be stuck in the representations of the good, old days, with sailing ships and the connections the trading had given to important ports and cities worldwide. While Arendal still understood itself as an important town in the two counties of Agder and in the country, the eternal competitor Kristiansand experienced large growth, and soon caught up with Arendals earlier position as the most important town in Agder. Realising problems of negative images caused by among other things a negative economic situation and television comedians of the 1990s, the public administration and the politicians started a turnaround for a new image as response to these challenges. A place-making project with broad citizen participation, including physical regeneration, economic and social development, and a reinvention of internal images, was launched. Based on an evaluation of the place making project in Arendal, the paper addresses the question whether, and eventually how, such projects can contribute to reinvent representations of an old regional town. The paper discusses the double-edged blade of such participatory planning processes in urban development.

Image and Identity in Times of Structural Change A Telecom City on a Naval Base Mareile Walter Centre of Innovation, Research and Competence in the Learning Economy (CIRCLE) Blekinge Institute of Technology / Lund University The local identity of cities can be expected to be challenged when the cities go through a process of comprehensive industrial structural change. The traditional economic base and its competences, values and physical structures that make out part of the base for local pride are loosing in importance. At the same time, the need to attract investments, firms and people for the development of new industries demands a globally competitive image standing for innovativeness, openness and distinctiveness, which even more depreciates the industrial past. These challenges also apply to the case of the Swedish city of Karlskrona, a naval base seeing a miraculous growth of ICT-industries in the 1990s and since then promoted as Telecom City. The paper tries to describe in which way image and identity in Karlskrona relate to each other by comparing the image of the place as it is communicated in the promotional material of the ICT-cluster network TelecomCity with expressions of local identity derived from a debate on an inner-city redevelopment project in Karlskrona that finally failed due to local opposition. The basis for the latter is an analysis of interviews, newspaper articles and municipal documents. The results can be interpreted so that locally there exist competing ideas of for which kind of people the city is, partly excluding exactly those the image of TelecomCity wants to attract. This leads to the conclusion that regional policies promoting innovation to a larger degree should be directed also to the wider public trying to influence local culture.

Local Sustainability
Session organisers: Huei-Min Tsai (Taiwan), Chun-Chieh Chi (Taiwan), Eric Clark (Lund)

As globalization continues to bring places in more interdependent and enmeshed relations with one another and environmental issues become increasingly acute, agendas for sustainability at local scales have become crucial for local communities and gain ever more attention from researchers and policy makers (e.g. Local Agenda 21 and Local Action 21). At the same time, sustainability discourse remains largely oblivious to strong research traditions in geography and social sciences that persuasively reveal how socio-ecological systems are historically and currently ridden with structural problems of power, conflicts of interest, inequalities, polarization and large scale displacement. Habitat destruction has implicitly been associated with natural habitats rather than communities. Focusing on local sustainability may provide one path towards bringing together social theory and what with a certain amount of authority is called sustainability science. This session brings together papers on a broad array of topics local knowledge, political ecology, social dimensions, scale and appropriateness, biocultural coevolution, lessons from local experiments and strategies, the political economy of sustainability, among others sharing in common the theme of local sustainability issues. The aim is to submit a collection of papers for publication in a theme issue of a peer-reviewed journal. Session organizers: Huei-Min Tsai (National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan) hmtsai@ntnu.edu.tw Chun-Chieh Chi (National Dong-Hwa University, Taiwan) jjjih@mail.ndhu.edu.tw Eric Clark (Lund University, Sweden) eric.clark@keg.lu.se

Local sustainability indicators: from global issues to local concerns

Huei-Min Tsai Graduate Institute of Environmental Education National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan hmtsai@ntnu.edu.tw

Based on experiences in developing local sustainability indicators for a few municipalities and small islands in Taiwan, this paper argues that sustainability indicators for local areas need to reflect local concerns for sustainable futures and should not be limited to indicators prescribed by a global sustainability agenda. First the paper gives a brief review of the tasks involved in Local Agenda 21 planning and various approaches to selecting sustainability indicators at different scales. Then three sets of local sustainability indicators based on three different geographical contexts in Taiwan (rural, industrial, and small islands) will be compared. The study suggests that selection of local sustainability indicators should extend beyond those employed on the national or global scale, limited as they are to available and easily measured data. Public involvement of local communities in identifying their own important issues is crucial to the utility and efficacy of sustainability indicators and to the long-term success of policies aimed toward sustainable development. The process of developing local sustainability indicators needs to reflect local concerns and build on the local knowledge and local norms upon which consensus can build. Key words: local sustainability indicators, Local Agenda 21, local knowledge, Taiwan

A future for Baltic Sea islands? EU maritime policy meets local concerns for sustainable development

Peter Billing, Director, PhD Centre for Regional & Tourism Research, Bornholm, Denmark billing@crt.dk

In 2006 the European Commission presented a Green Paper on a future maritime policy for Europe. The Green Paper embraces an integrated and holistic approach to policy making, and puts sustainable development at the core of its focus. In addition, the Commission has invited to a one year long consultation process. During this consultation, public authorities, interest organisations and business associations have been engaged at local, regional, national as well as at pan-European level, generating a wave of critical remarks and constructive contributions. In this way, the Green Paper serves as a political means to bring the global threats and challenges environmental, economic, and social facing Europes maritime world into direct interaction with local issues and concerns on islands and coastal regions. A number of critical questions arise from this: How are the local concerns for sustainable development translated into the European policy level? What are the local priorities and who formulates them? Are there any vested interests that contribute to filtering out certain issues? In order to deal with these questions, this paper examines the intervention in the Green Paper process made by the B7 Network, a co-operation between seven island regions in the Baltic Sea Area. Keywords: policy, maritime regions, islands, sustainable development, B7 Network

Tourism development as a means toward local sustainability in a globalizing world a case study of Hualien Coastal Valley, Taiwan

Chun-Chieh Chi, Professor, Graduate Institute of Ethnic Relations and Culture, National Dong-Hwa University, Taiwan jjjih@mail.ndhu.edu.tw

Located on the sparsely populated east coast of Taiwan, Hualien has long been an economically peripheral area focusing on primary resource production. It is also famous for its natural beauty in coastal areas as well as access to a mountain range. However, in accordance with the national economic plans of the 1980s, Hualien started its decade-long industrial development process. Having attracted only environmentally harmful cement production factories, local government gradually redirected its development agenda and redefined Hualien County as a tourist county that would attract international as well as domestic tourists. In the mean time, local communities and some nature tourism organizations, benefited from tourist arrivals in recent years, also eagerly involving themselves in pursuing community development through tourism-related activities and establishments. Many issues need to be properly dealt with if tourism development is to be successful in terms of sustainability and benefit to most local people. These include: the cultivation of alternative images of local development amongst government officials as well as the general public; the development of mechanisms to control and manage tourist development; debates about the proposed superhighway; and coordination of tourism related projects and policies between central and local government, and among different agencies within the local government. This research applies the ideas and vales of local sustainability in studying the above-mentioned issues, and provides policy recommendations for Hualien to better achieve local sustainability through tourism development.

Keywords: local sustainability, sustainable development, tourism, globalization, Hualien

e-Local Sustainability Map Jehng-Jung Kao, Tze-Chin Pan, Yu-Nong Wong, and Kun-Hsing Liu Institute of Environmental Engineering, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan E-mail: jjkao@mail.nctu.edu.tw Tel: +886-3-5731869 Fax: +886-3-5731759 http://jjkao.ev.nctu.edu.tw/weboffice/eindex.php

This paper describes a long term grassroots project to improve sustainability of the Hsinchu area in Taiwan through the practice of making electric local sustainability (eLS) maps. eLS maps are designed to link local natural, cultural, and environmental assets, including green spaces, cultural sites, eco-resources, etc. The process of making these maps provides an effective technique for promoting community participation and influencing the general public to increase consciousness regarding sustainability. The major goal is to attract the attention of teachers, students, organizations, and the general public to improve the local sustainability of the areas where they live. Three types of eLS maps are being developed: school-based, community-based, and enterprise- or organization-based. Currently, various groups, including school teachers and their students, parents, and residents from local communities are teamed up to develop Hsinchu eLS maps. The information collected for producing eLS maps will also be used to establish various spatial and temporal indicators to measure and reflect progress in improving local sustainability. Besides increasing sustainability consciousness among the general public, the eLS maps are intended to show and analyze spatial and temporal change of sustainability aspects and issues. Implementation of the plan for developing various Hsinchu eLS maps is described and illustrated. The making of eLS maps is expected to markedly improve the local sustainability of the Hsinchu area in an effective manner.

Glocalized sustainability in a cultural context: a case of island and urban Taiwan

Chin-Shou Juju Wang, Ph.D Professor of Environmental Sociology, National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan IHDP and DIVERSITAS, Taiwan Committee Member juju@mx.nthu.edu.tw

This paper will first address the East-West "sustainability gaps" in terms of conceptual and contextual insights, particularly those gaps raised through different cultural luggage and social grammars. The Taiwan case is appropriate to exemplify this issue of sustainability gaps. Then, "amplifying factors", such as the island factor and the urban factor, will be identified in justifying or adjusting sustainable gaps between the East and West. Integrating concepts mainly from island culture, risk society, cultural luggage and social grammars, this paper aims to identify spatial and socio-cultural characteristics in amplifying positive or negative sustainability. For instance, does an Eastern father-son axis or a Western husband-wife axis make any difference in amplifying sustainability of a society? In addition, vertical zoning in the east, compared with horizontal zoning in the west, has treated land use as intense as possible and further created various forms of friction of space. More examples will be discussed in order to promote east-west dialogue and to conclude this paper with glocalized perspectives.

Key words: glocalized sustainability, sustainability gap, cultural luggage, social grammars, island Taiwan

Island studies of ecosystem social system coevolution for local sustainable development

Eric Clark Dept of Human Geography

and

Huei-Min Tsai Graduate Institute of Environmental Education National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan hmtsai@ ntnu.edu.tw

Lund University, Lund, Sweden Eric.Clark@keg.lu.se

This paper presents a case for island studies of sustainable development from the perspective of ecosystem social system coevolution. First the concept of ecosystem social system coevolution is situated in relation to the broader field of thought on sustainable development. Then a case is made that characteristics of ecosystem social system coevolution render island studies especially appropriate in developing a research agenda on and for local sustainable development. Finally, an island studies research agenda on local sustainable development is outlined, drawing on previous and ongoing research.

Model based development planning

Session organisers: Birgit Kopainsky, Dept Geography, Univ. Bergen

Simulation for development planning: how system dynamics models can help make better strategic decisions for long-term development Matteo Pedercini1, 2, Birgit Kopainsky2 1 Millennium Institute, Arlington VA, United States 2 System Dynamics Group, Department of Geography, University of Bergen, Norway National development planning is a decisional process at the central government level that defines the strategic plan for a countrys long-term development. This paper provides an overview over the existing system dynamics models that support national development planning. Such models can be useful in this process in several ways. First, the participatory process of model development provides insights into the coherence and consistency of objectives, hypotheses and data used for policymaking in different sectors in a country. Second, the base run simulations of the models offer an outlook into the key development issues a country might face in the future. Third, alternative scenarios provide an understanding of the potential impact of development policies across a wide range of sectors and reveal how different strategies interact with one another to achieve planned goals and objectives. Fourth, the resulting national development plans provide a clear basis for action in the various sectors, as well as for monitoring and evaluation of performance. In the first part of the paper, we describe how system dynamics models can help making better decisions in national development planning. In a second part we provide an overview of the best-known applications of system dynamics to development planning. Reflecting on the experiences made with the application we draw a number of conclusions about the contribution of simulation models for national development planning.

Modeling U.S. Energy with Threshold 21 (T21) Andrea M. Bassi Millennium Institute, Arlington, VA, United States The United States is about to face years of major, interrelated policy issues. Energy transition, peak oil, and the threat of global warming, together with heightened fears of terrorism, environmental and social issues are largely crowded out of public dialogue. What is needed is an analytical tool that addresses these issues in an integrated and transparent way. The Threshold 21 (T21) model customized to the USA, is such a tool. The purpose of this study is to analyze T21-USA, by highlighting its flexibility and transparency. The analysis shows that T21-USA is a good tool for understanding and analyzing validity, effectiveness and outcomes of complex energy policies, such as the Advanced Energy Initiative -follow up of the State of the Union Address. Despite its complexity, T21-USA is transparent and a user-friendly interface makes it an intuitive instrument that can be used by a broad audience, ranging from students to policy makers.

Modelling Public Expenditure and Human Development in Pakistan Muhammad Azeem Qureshi, System Dynamics Group, Dept Geography, Univ. Bergen, Muhammad.Qureshi@student.uib.no mazeemqureshi@gmail.com This paper examines the impact of public expenditure on human development in Pakistan. It develops a system dynamics model to estimate population, primary education rate and access to basic health care given exogenous gross domestic product (GDP) and public spending on education and health. It predicts development path of population, primary education and access to basic health care. The results show that high economic growth may not result into better human development indicators. On the contrary, high spending on education and health will improve human development indicators even if the economy grows at a relatively lower rate. It suggests a threshold of 3% of sustained economic growth rate as a pre-requisite to plan for human development in Pakistan. With that in place this paper suggests anchoring of public policy to human development by allocating more public funds for human development. Key Words: Human Development, Public Policy, Public Expenditure, System Dynamics. JEL Codes: H51, H52.