Local space for local people? Trends in the provision and management of urban outdoor recreation in the UK

This paper examines the growing trend in the UK towards the effective privatisation of formerly public open space and the relationship of this trend to the recent shifts in public sector management. A case study of Reading, England, illustrates the growing cultural and spatial dysfunction, particularly in terms of the declining knowledge and use of the town's urban gardens by the local population. Where once the gardens were a focus of social activity, therefore, they are now a largely irrelevant site of urban decline. In contrast to central urban space, it is clear that other types of open space in other areas can still assume a significance in peoples' lives. In many cases the use of these areas illustrates a counter cultural position in which the consumerism of the city management is actively being resisted. The paper concludes that while there appear to be ways in which local space could be reclaimed for local people, the power to achieve this lies predominantly in the same hands as those responsible for appropriating central space to the imperative of the market in the first instance

Recreational access to private land in England and Wales: public good; private interest

Since the Eighteenth Century the protection of public recreational access to private land has been maintained by the state through a mixture of legal rights of passage and the safeguarding of certain de facto access rights. While this situation has been modified in the last fifty years to facilitate some formalisation of access arrangements and landowner compensation in areas of high recreational pressure and low legal accessibility, recent policies indicate that a shift from public to private rights is underway. At the core of this paradigm shift are the new access payment schemes introduced as part of the restructuring of the European Common Agricultural Policy. Under these schemes landowners are now paid for 'supplying' recreational access, with the state, as the former upholder of citizen rights, now assuming the duplicitous position of further underwriting private property ownership through the effective commodification of access, while simultaneously proclaiming significant improvements in citizens' access rights.

Recent trends in UK Government policy on the provision and management of leisure facilities

Since the first election victory of the Thatcher administration in 1979, Britain has witnessed a cultural transformation from the municipal socialism of the post-World War 2 Welfare State to a form of post-industrial entrepreneurialism. This has had a profound effect on all aspects of civil society, not least the redefinition of the role of active leisure from the 1950s evocation of 'Sport For All' to the market rationality of the 1980s. The transformation has signalled a shift from government support for active leisure as an element of citizen rights to the use of leisure to promote the government's interest in legitimating a new social order based not on rights but on means. Thus access to active living is no longer a societal goal for all, but a discretionary consumer good, the consumption of which signifies 'active' citizenship. It furthermore signifies differentiation from the growing mass of 'deviants' who are unwilling or unable to embrace this new construction of citizenship and are, therefore, increasingly denied access to active living and, hence, active citizenship.

Sustainable land management and development: the role of the chartered surveyor

Despite the growing intensity of the debate about environmental management, it is only recently that rural practice surveyors have become aware of its significance and potential. Consequently, few surveyors are yet in a position to offer professional advice, despite evidence from the RICS's client needs survey that nearly half of all existing clients require more advice on environmental matters. As a prerequisite to becoming involved in environmental management, it is clear that chartered surveyors have to develop new skills alongside new perceptions of their work. Rather than being conterminous, however, the alignment of these attributes reflects a fundamental tension. This is focused on the dichotomy between the strategic construction of the environment as a basis for realigning corporate policy and the more limited evocation of environmentalism as potential new business. This paper seeks to explore the nature and policy context of sustainable development, in the process examining its significance for rural chartered surveyors. In doing so, the paper will seek to contrast the essentially anthropocentric utilitarianism of surveyors' current attitudes with the radical agenda inferred by a more ecocentric, sustainable development approach to professional management and advice. The paper will conclude with a discussion about how far the principles of sustainable development can be incorporated into the management of surveying businesses, and what this implies for the future of the rural practice chartered surveyor as land manager.

Keeping Hertfordshire green: the implementation of strategic environmental policy 1983-1993

This paper evaluates the implementation of environmental policy in the County of Hertfordshire during the 1980's and early 1990's. It emphasises that the recent growth of interest in environmental policy and sustainable planning initiatives should not cause researchers and practitioners to ignore the long history and experience of environmental policy implementation in local government. By looking at the experience of strategic environmental policy in Hertfordshire, the paper identifies the successes and failures of a range of implementation tools utilised by the County and district planning authorities to progress policies concerned with the conservation and improvement of urban and rural environments. It concludes that the planning authorities of Hertfordshire have stabilised the deterioration in the County's environment and have established some programmes which provide good examples of coordinated action in environmental policy implementation. These types of mechanism will need to be built upon in the new policy epoch where environmental sustainability and capacity planning take centre stage.

Property company performance and real interest rates: a regime-switching approach

Linear models of property market performance may be misspecified if there exist distinct states where the market drivers behave in different ways. This paper examines the applicability of non-linear regime-based models. A Self Exciting Threshold Autoregressive (SETAR) model is applied to property company share data, using the real rate of interest to define regimes. Distinct regimes appear exhibiting markedly different market behaviour. The model both casts doubt on the specification of conventional linear models and offers the possibility of developing effective trading rules for real estate equities.

PPG13 and the residential developer

This paper reviews the evidence in favour of the compact city and considers whether it is a viable policy option. Environmentalists, acadenics and politicians have all expressed strong support for the compact city as a basis for sustainable development. A review of the literature broadly confirms the claims made on its behalf, in particular that it is energy efficient and that it plays a crucial role in preventing rural land loss. It is further shown i) that there is nothing inevitable about the established pattern of urban dispersal, and ii) that although urban land is charaterised by a number of contstraints on development,it could in principle satisfy much of the projected demand for housing. Yet urban sprawl continues. Some of the reasons for this in the case of residential development are examined by comparing the residential development process with the principles of sustainable development. The general conclusion of the paper is that proposals for urban containment are likely to be strongly resisted by housebuilders.

The compact city and the residential developer

Although the compact city is widely promoted as a sustainable form of urban development, little attention has been paid to the feasilibity of its implementation in practice. This paper addresses this isse by presenting the findings of a questionnaire study into the viability of the compact city from the perspective of the volume housebuilder. The study shows that, although well aware of the inherent problems witht the compact city, most were generally positive about the need to redirect more development back into urban areas. In addition, they suggested a large number of strategies for change, including i) a role for public sector agencies in overcoming the condstraints on urban sites; ii) the need for an upward reveision of acceptable densities in local plans and design guides; and iii) the creation of a separate, or revised, Use Class Order to enable mixed use development to compete on a level playing field. It is concluded that the residential developer could be engaged in the process of urban containment provided proposals for implementing the compact city of devised. The need for continuing research to test the actual effects of specific schemes is emphasised.

Rights, citizenship and access to the countryside

This paper presents a reading of current UK Government policy on recreational access to the countryside of England, in terms of its citizenship and rights agenda. Given the continuity of traditional forms of land tenure and occupation, it is argued that the policy is less of recognition of the changing needs of a tranisitory society than it is a revisionist menifesto for resisting external influence and change. This is particularly so in terms of recreation, where the underlying organisation of the physical environment has been appropriated to reproduce a reflection of the social order which increasingly descriminates between culturally legitimate and illegitimate uses of rural space.

Changes in the relative importance of sector and regional Factors: 1987-2002

A stylised fact in the real estate portfolio diversification literature is that sector (property-type) effects are relatively more important than regional (geographical) factors in determining property returns. Thus, for those portfolio managers who follow a top-down approach to portfolio management, they should first choose in which sectors to invest and then select the best properties in each market. However, the question arises as to whether the dominance of the sector effects relative to regional effects is constant. If not property fund managers will need to take account of regional effects in developing their portfolio strategy. We find the results show that the sector-specific factors dominate the regional-specific factors for the vast majority of the time. Nonetheless, there are periods when the regional factors are of equal or greater importance than the sector effects. In particular, the sector effects tend to dominate during volatile periods of the real estate cycle; however, during calmer periods the sector and regional effects are of equal importance. These findings suggest that the sector effects are still the most important aspect in the development of an active portfolio strategy.

The uncertainty of valuation

Valuation is often said to be “an art not a science” but this relates to the techniques employed to calculate value not to the underlying concept itself. Valuation is the process of estimating price in the market place. Yet, such an estimation will be affected by uncertainties. Uncertainty in the comparable information available; uncertainty in the current and future market conditions and uncertainty in the specific inputs for the subject property. These input uncertainties will translate into an uncertainty with the output figure, the valuation. The degree of the uncertainties will vary according to the level of market activity; the more active a market, the more credence will be given to the input information. In the UK at the moment the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) is considering ways in which the uncertainty of the output figure, the valuation, can be conveyed to the use of the valuation, but as yet no definitive view has been taken. One of the major problems is that Valuation models (in the UK) are based upon comparable information and rely upon single inputs. They are not probability based, yet uncertainty is probability driven. In this paper, we discuss the issues underlying uncertainty in valuations and suggest a probability-based model (using Crystal Ball) to address the shortcomings of the current model.

Testing the statistical significance of sector & regional diversification

The question as to whether it is better to diversify a real estate portfolio within a property type across the regions or within a region across the property types is one of continuing interest for academics and practitioners alike. The current study, however, is somewhat different from the usual sector/regional analysis taking account of the fact that holdings in the UK real estate market are heavily concentrated in a single region, London. As a result this study is designed to investigate whether a real estate fund manager can obtain a statistically significant improvement in risk/return performance from extending out of a London based portfolio into firstly the rest of the South East of England and then into the remainder of the UK, or whether the manger would be better off staying within London and diversifying across the various property types. The results indicating that staying within London and diversifying across the various property types may offer performance comparable with regional diversification, although this conclusion largely depends on the time period and the fund manager’s ability to diversify efficiently.

A multinomial model of applying recognition to judge between multiple alternatives

Proponents of the “fast and frugal” approach to decision-making suggest that inferential judgments are best made on the basis of limited information. For example, if only one of two cities is recognized and the task is to judge which city has the larger population, the recognition heuristic states that the recognized city should be selected. In preference choices with >2 options, it is also standard to assume that a “consideration set”, based upon some simple criterion, is established to reduce the options available. A multinomial processing tree model is outlined which provides the basis for estimating the extent to which recognition is used as a criterion in establishing a consideration set for inferential judgments.

Asymmetric response of demand-supply mismatch to investor's sentiment

We look through both the demand and supply side information to understand dynamics of price determination in the real estate market and examine how accurately investors’ attitudes predict the market returns and thereby flagging off extent of any demand-supply mismatch. Our hypothesis is based on the possibility that investors’ call for action in terms of their buy/sell decision and adjustment in reservation/offer prices may indicate impending demand-supply imbalances in the market. In the process, we study several real estate sectors to inform our analysis. The timeframe of our analysis (1995-2010) allows us to observe market dynamics over several economic cycles and in various stages of those cycles. Additionally, we also seek to understand how investors’ attitude or the sentiment affects the market activity over the cycles through asymmetric responses. We test our hypothesis variously using a number of measures of market activity and attitude indicators within several model specifications. The empirical models are estimated using Vector Error Correction framework. Our analysis suggests that investors’ attitude exert strong and statistically significant feedback effects in price determination. Moreover, these effects do reveal heterogeneous responses across the real estate sectors. Interestingly, our results indicate the asymmetric responses during boom, normal and recessionary periods. These results are consistent with the theoretical underpinnings.

Dynamic analysis of house price diffusion across Asian financial centres

The aim of this paper is to explore effects of macroeconomic variables on house prices and also, the lead-lag relationships of real estate markets to examine house price diffusion across Asian financial centres. The analysis is based on the Global Vector Auto-Regression (GVAR) model estimated using quarterly data for six Asian financial centres (Hong Kong, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, Taipei and Bangkok) from 1991Q1 to 2011Q2. The empirical results indicate that the global economic conditions play significant roles in shaping house price movements across Asian financial centres. In particular, a small open economy that heavily relies on international trade such as – Singapore and Tokyo - shows positive correlations between economy’s openness and house prices, consistent with the Balassa-Samuelson hypothesis in international trade. However, region-specific conditions do play important roles as determinants of house prices, partly due to restrictive housing policies and demand-supply imbalances, as found in Singapore and Bangkok.