Scott Orford – författare

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.tandfebooks.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license.Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into ‘place-making’ and ‘locality-making’ in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political geography of Wales.This book looks at the economic, social and political geographies of Wales, which in the context of devolution and public service governance are hotly debated. It offers a novel ‘new localities’ theoretical framework for capturing the dynamics of locality-making, to go beyond the obsession with boundaries and coterminous geographies expressed by policy-makers and politicians. Three localities – Heads of the Valleys (north of Cardiff), central and west coast regions (Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and the former district of Montgomeryshire in Powys) and the A55 corridor (from Wrexham to Holyhead) – are discussed in detail to illustrate this and also reveal the geographical tensions of devolution in contemporary Wales.This book is an original statement on the making of contemporary Wales from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) researchers. It deploys a novel ‘new localities’ theoretical framework and innovative mapping techniques to represent spatial patterns in data. This allows the timely uncovering of both unbounded and fuzzy relational policy geographies, and the more bounded administrative concerns, which come together to produce and reproduce over time Wales’ regional geography.

This book critically assesses the hedonic pricing technique as a method of imputing monetary values for the implicit attributes of housing. The hedonic technique is widely used, particularly in the US, but increasingly in Europe and Asia and has proved to yield important results and influence cost-benefit analysis. Scott Orford breaks new ground in this volume by exploring hedonic house price models within a geographical rather than purely economic context. He reevaluates the microeconomic theory of housing markets and concludes that only by treating housing market dynamics as inherently spatial can empirical results conform to the theory that underpins them. He also makes conclusions with respect to locational externalities, which have important implications as to how the built environment is valued.