Geographical Perspectives on Resource AllocationAuthor(s): Robin FlowerdewSource: Area, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Jun., 1993), pp. 168-169Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20003262 .

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168 Annual Conference

assessment of its environmental impacts for ' sustainability ' objectives. But the planning system needs to rethink its goals, methods and processes to address the new agendas and relationships. Susan Owens (Cambridge) on the other hand, suggested that effective environmental policy requires integration in a number of different senses. Most crucially, an environmental dimension

must be integrated into policy making in all areas; this is widely advocated but nowhere achieved. Andrew Blowers (Open University) argued that environmental inequality is an outcome of

social inequality. The powerful are able to resist unwanted land uses which tend to become more and more concentrated in what can be termed peripheral communities. Such communities are characterised by remoteness, marginality, powerlessness and environmental degradation. John Thornes (King's College, London) stressed that it is generally assumed that environmental conflicts are played out against a static physical background. Historical and contemporary examples illustrate that this is rarely the case and the lack of understanding of the physical system, coupled with the related uncertainty, adds a further dimension to theoretical perspectives of this problem.

In summarising a stimulating day, Edmund Penning-Rowsell (Middlesex) stressed the need to analyse power relations within policy making, and the way that this power is exercised.

Conflict differed in different circumstances, but fundamentally concerned a clash of values or power, or both. Only with a correct understanding of the dynamics of the ways that power relations operate will we understand the way that policy evolves, and be able-at the margin-to influence that evolution.

Edmund Penning-Rowsell Middlesex University

Geographical perspectives on resource allocation This four-module session was convened by the Quantitative Methods Study Group to draw attention to a number of very practical issues concerned with how central government allocates resources to local government, with particular reference to Standard Spending Assessment (SSA). SSA is the method used by the British government to assess the needs of local govern

ment and hence to determine the levels of grant paid to the different local authorities. The study of spatial variations in spending needs is an excellent example of a very important public issue which is clearly geographical, and where appropriate analytical methods can contribute a great deal to the policy debate.

M Senior, T G Powell, R D Knowles, E K Grime (Salford) and T Fairclough (Wigan Metropolitan Borough) described the basis of the SSA system and examined how it worked out

in assessing the needs for education, personal social services and other services provided by district councils. Their analysis suggested there were inconsistencies in how the methodology was applied, that some of the indices used as measures of need were of questionable relevance, and that there were clear and consistent regional trends in the parts of England and Wales that gained and lost. Brian Francis (Lancaster) concentrating on SSA for children's social services, showed how several of the need indicators used by the Department of the Environment did not

meet the DoE's own stated criteria. He also argued that conditions in London were so different from those in the rest of the country that it was misleading to apply the same model to London and the shire counties. Harvey Goldstein (Institute of Education, London) pointed out the sensitivity of SSA calculations to the specific statistical model used, showing in particular that the failure of DoE to consider transformations of the variables used in regressions resulted in unnecessarily inaccurate models being used, with important effects on resource allocation.

Martin Charlton, Mike Coombes, Jacqui Nicol (CURDS, Newcastle) and Stan Openshaw (Leeds) discussed SSA for fire services, concentrating on how the effect of population distri bution on service needs could be more accurately assessed. Robin Flowerdew (Lancaster) reviewed the calculation of SSA for district-level services, criticising the decisions to exclude economic indicators and to include sparsity of population despite the evidence of the DoE's own analyses. Bob Chilton (Audit Commission) suggested that a system that was easy to understand

might be more politically acceptable than one that was technically more correct, and discussed

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Annual Conference 169

the Australian system of resource allocation as an alternative approach from which Britain can learn.

The balance between local spending and central government grant must largely be met by local taxation, and Gary Higgs (Cardiff), Paul Longley (Bristol) and David Martin (Southampton) discussed their use of GIS methods to compare the local incidence of the poll tax and Council Tax, using Cardiff as a case study. Peter Bancroft (LSE) also compared the incidence of the two tax systems using a large database provided by the Nationwide Anglia Building Society, illustrat ing the implications for different types of household and similar households in different parts of

England. Stan Openshaw (Leeds) and Mike Coombes (CURDS, Newcastle) presented another paper,

'Alternative ways of ranking areas', in which they identified several technical problems fre quently encountered in attempts to identify areas which are ' worst ' or ' best ' in some way. In particular they discussed the effects of spatial heterogeneity, which could often, for example, hide an area of bad social conditions if they occurred in a zone which also had areas of good conditions, discussing methods for identifying these effects. A Hirschfield, P Brown, J Marsden, P Batey and P Todd (Liverpool) described their work in developing a GIS-based crime analysis and mapping system using ArcView; this project is intended to evaluate central government's funding of a range of projects in Merseyside under the Urban Crime Fund Initiative.

Paul Densham (Buffalo) was visiting the Conference under the Young Research Workers scheme; he discussed spatial decision support for locational planning, including routing and location-allocation problems, notably the rationalisation of education offices in Iowa. The systems he discussed required a restructuring of existing algorithms to integrate them with GIS software, but resulted in an environment where decision-makers could inspect map displays and explore the effects of altering or fine-tuning the locational patterns displayed.

As convenor, I may be biased, but I felt that this set of papers set a good standard of technical competence, methodological innovation and direct relevance to important policy issues. This was reflected in lively discussion, but it was disappointing that the attendance averaged only twenty or so.

Robin Flowerdew Lancaster University

Towards the new economic geography of retailing This 10-paper session represented something of a departure from the conventional IBG Annual Conference model. It was not arranged by a Study Group. Neither was it a loosely connected ' submitted papers' session. Rather it represented the drawing together of a group of georgra

phers who share a similar agenda. Like Ducatel and Blomley (1990), all the speakers in this session believe that 'within the " new " economic geography, retailing has not received the attention it deserves'. They reject the marginalisation of an industry which in the USA accounts for virtually the same percentage of total employment (17 per cent) as the entire manufacturing sector, and wish to develop theoretically informed accounts of the transformation of retail capital. Their aim is to demonstrate that retailing cannot be treated as tangential to the ' real ' world of production, but rather that it is an industry at the ' leading edge ' of many developments-eg in labour practices and the social relations of ' production '-and one which has complex and contradictory relations with the regulatory state. Moreover, they believe that a re-emergent geography of retailing must build both its economic and cultural research agendas and that, via concern with the interactions of consumption, gender, power and space, the study of retailing can be positioned within broader theoretical debates on services, consumption and capital.

The shared agenda of the speakers made for an unusually focused set of papers. Moreover, several sub-groups of papers debated similar themes. In particular, the retailer-manufacturer interface was discussed in four papers. Sophie Bowlby (Reading) and Jo Foord (North London) outlined the results of their ESRC-funded studies of buyer-supplier relations in the food and clothing sectors, and developed arguments about supply chain manipulation and the extraction

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