Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies Series – serie

What factors lay behind the rehabilitation of central city districts across the world? Set against the contexts of international transformations in a post-industrial postmodern society, this book examines the creation and self-creation of a new middle class of professional and managerial workers associated with the process of gentrification. These are amongst the privileged members in the growing polarisation of urban society. The book examines their impact on central housing markets, retailing and leisure spaces in the inner city.Taking as its focus six large canadian cities, the author identifies a distinctive cultural new class of urbane social and cultural professionals inspired in part by the critical youth movements of the 1960s for whom old inner city neighbourhoods served as oppositional sites to assail the boureois suburbs. The study looks at their close links with reform movements, neighbourhood activism and a welfare state that often provided their employment, in a progressive aesthetisation of central city spaces since the 1980s. The New Middle Class and the Remaking of the Central City offers the first detailed and comparitive study of gentrification which locates the phenomenon in broader historical and theoretical contexts.

The significance of the relationship between culture and urban transformation in Asian cities is increasingly recognized. Culture and the City in East Asia is one of the first studies that illustrates and explains these complex processes as they occur in a wide variety of contexts. The book explores the role of culture comparatively across cities in the region before presenting major case studies of Hong kong, Singapore, Hanoi, Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul. Whilst sharing the common characteristics of `compressed development' and 'rapid urbanization', each society in East Asia has taken its own specific route. Although Western research methodology has been employed, chapters on specific cities contain the stories and interpretations of urban transformations by local scholars. Departing from the conventional functional or simple descriptive approach the book places primary emphasis on the cultural dimmensions of urban transformation showing how, for example, though the two city-states of Hong kong and Singapore were colonial creations, they have not followed the same developmental path. Investigating a part of the world with a long urban history, the book reveals both cultural change and continuity shows how an understanding of the influence of culture can help shape the future of Asia and its cities.

Homelessness, AIDS, and Stigmatization: The NIMBY Syndrome in the United States at the End of the Twentieth Century argues that it is the rise in community opposition across race, class, and region that should be considered in terms of the changing social construction of stigma, i.e. the ways in which people define those who are acceptable and those who are not. Three particular themes underlie the arguments made throughout this book: (a) the importance of economic, welfare state, and demographic restructuring in community response to homelessness and HIV/AIDS; (b) the significance of the social and spatial construction of stigma for ongoing and future community response; and (c) the role of institutions such as municipal governments and the courts in defining and adjudicating local facility siting disputes. To explore these themes the author uses both quantitative and qualitative data and methods. Oxford Geographical and Environmental Studies aims to publish the best original research studies in the related fields of geography and environmental studies. Its scope is international, presenting a broad and diverse range of scholarly approaches from across the world. Series Editors: Gordon Clark, Andrew Goudie, and Ceri Peach

Down the ages, war epidemics have decimated the fighting strength of armies, caused the suspension and cancellation of military operations, and have brought havoc to the civil populations of belligerent and non-belligerent states alike. This book examines the historical occurrence and geographical spread of infectious diseases in association with past wars. It addresses an intrinsically geographical question: how are the spatial dynamics of epidemics influenced by military operations and the directives of war? The term historical geography in the title indicates the authors' primary concern with qualitative analyses of archival source materials over a 150-year time period from 1850, and this is combined with quantitative analyses less frequently associated with historical studies.Written from the viewpoints of historical geography, epidemiology, and spatial analysis, this book examines in four parts the historical occurrence and geographical spread of infectious diseases in association with wars. Part I: War and Disease, surveys war-disease associations from early times to 1850. Part II: Temporal Trends studies time trends since 1850. Part III: A Regional Pattern of War Epidemics, examines grand themes in the war-disease complex. Part IV: Prospects, considers a series of war-related issues of epidemiological significance in the twenty-first century.

Recent years have seen a lively debate over the role of tacit knowledge and interactive learning in privileging the local over the global. Yet, our continuing inability to answer questions such as 'when and why is the local important in production and innovation processes?' indicates that our understanding of the firm and the forces that shape its managers' choices remains weak. Such a theory ought to be able to answer fundamental questions like: why do firms in particular places adopt particular production and innovation practices, and not others? What forces determine what a firm 'knows' and when it is able to act upon this knowledge? How easy is it to transfer this knowledge between places?This book presents a new conception of industrial practice and firm behaviour. It explains how the cultures that shape the practices of firms and the trajectories of regional and national economies are actually produced. The analysis shows how the internal and inter-firm organization of production, use of technologies, and the industrial knowledge underpinning these practices are strongly influenced by their social and institutional context. Routine forms of behaviour are not simply inherited from past practice. Instead, they are shaped and constrained - though not wholly determined - by a set of institutions that govern how work is organized, workers are deployed, and technology is implemented. Because of the slowly evolving nature of these institutions, distinctive national 'models' are not converging around a single global norm.

In a period of deep economic, social, and political transformation, regional disparities seem to be particularly resistant to change. The emergence of a global economy, the shift in production methods, and the greater mobility of capital, labour, and raw materials have not brought about a radical reshuffling of the prevailing regional disparities. There is a greater concentration of economic activity in core areas and very few peripheral regions are taking advantage of the process of global restructuring. The Dynamics of Regional Growth in Europe looks for the reasons behind this persistence in the social, political, and institutional arrangements of a large set of European regions, by trying to relate two scientific approaches concerned with regional economic performance, which share very little in common: the literature on socio-economic restructuring and structural change, and neoclassical and endogenous growth theories. OXFORD GEOGRAPHICAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES AIMS TO PUBLISH THE BEST ORIGINAL RESEARCH STUDIES IN THE RELATED FIELDS OF GEOGRAPHY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES. IT'S SCOPE IS INTERNATIONAL, PRESENTING A BROAD AND DIVERSE RANGE OF SCHOLARLY APPROACHES FROM ACROSS THE WORLD. SERIES EDITORS: GORDON CLARK, ANDREW GOUDIE, AND CERI PEACH

The state of Oaxaca has been studied intensively by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists, but this is the first comprehensive overview of rural communities in the twentieth century. The study is rooted in the colonial and post-independence periods; but the text concentrates primarily on the post-revolutionary period, and on the land reform which allowed peasantries to be reconstituted in the lowland areas of the state, as a complement to the traditional peasantries which still existed on communal lands at high altitudes. Peasant lifestyles and production systems are examined, in particular to distinguish between those activities which are subsistence orientated, and those which are geared to the market. In the last thirty years rural life has been transformed by improved communications, and by services provided by the federal state, but above all by migration to Oaxaca City, other Mexican cities, and the USA. The outcome has been the emergence of class differences at the level of the community; the development of ethnic identities, based on language and regional differences; and the emergence of opposition to the hegemony of the party of government, the PRI. The wide range of issues under discussion will make this volume of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, and those involved in development studies.

Taking as his case-study the city of Guayaquil in Ecuador, where 600,000 people lack easy access to potable water, Erik Swyngedouw aims to reconstruct, theoretically and empirically, the political, social, and economic conduits through which water flows, and to identify how power relations infuse the metabolic transformation of water as it becomes urban. These flows of water which are simultaneously physical and social carry in their currents the embodiment of myriad social struggles and conflicts. The excavation of these flows narrates stories about the city's structure and development. Yet these flows also carry the potential for an improved, more just, and more equitable right to the city and its water. The flows of power that are captured by urban water circulation also suggest that the question of urban sustainability is not just about achieving sound ecological and environmental conditions, but first and foremost about a social struggle for access and control; a struggle not just for the right to water, but for the right to the city itself.

The success of rural development schemes in Africa, particularly those involving land, is heavily dependent on understanding the local ecology. Any farmer knows this, yet rarely has development project design catered adequately for the vicissitudes of the African environment. Although environmental unpredictability was recognized in the temperate zone by the mid-nineteenth century, the ecological theory which was subsequently developed and most widely accepted, was based on concepts of norms and equilibria. History has shown that the application of such ecological assumptions to African environments is wholly inappropriate. This book argues that many methods used by West African smallholder farmers and pastoralists are properly adapted to the region's unpredictable physical environment. Field examples from the semi-arid and humid zones demonstrate the nature of environmental variability, and the skill of indigenous farmers and pastoralists in exploiting this. It is thus argued that development planners should, where possible, model development schemes on the more successful, ecologically sound methods of indigenous land management.

Attitudes in Britain to forests and trees are changing. Plantation forests - the product of the 'strategic reserve of timber' vision that held sway in the early twentieth century, and was turned into a physical reality by the Forestry Commission - are no longer fashionable. Today's forests are required to be sustainable, multi-purpose, and biologically diverse. They are expected to possess a 'spirit of place', be aesthetically pleasing, and help alleviate poverty and social exclusion in cities and remote rural areas. This book traces the changing fortune of forests and trees in Britain and people's changing relations with them. It investigates traditional woodland management practices, and considers how they came to be supplanted by scientific forestry knowledge and methods. It examines the development of the Forestry Commission and its body of foresters, looks at the symbolic function of forests and trees, and assesses the claim that present day forestry has become a postmodern phenomenon.A Critical Geography of Britain's State Forests will prove useful not only to foresters and nature conservationists, but to all those who are interested in how human beings socially and biophysically construct the environment, driven by a constant urge to find their place and meaning within it.

This edited collection provides a comprehensive overview of the dynamics of contemporary natural resource based livelihoods and implications for their sustainability in the context of the Kalahari environment of southern Africa, a region subject to marked spatial and temporal natural variability. Each chapter is written by an active Kalahari researcher and addresses, from an environmental or a social perspective, the implications of different policies for rural livelihoods and coping strategies. In each chapter one or more of the key tenets of environment, policy and structural land use change provides the central element around which the sustainable livelihoods theme is considered. Although the focus of the book is the Kalahari, introductory and concluding chapters, in turn, contextualise the research and discuss key enviro-development issues which resonate across the individual chapters with relevance for wider global debates.

Ever since Charles Darwin landed on the Galápagos islands in September 1835, small islands have had a special place in scientific history. In Island epidemics, the authors show that the complex warfare of invasion and extinction observed by Darwin for plants and animals applies today with equal force to the micro-organisms which lie behind many human diseases. Growing from their earlier studies of Iceland and the Fijian islands, they provide a broad world picture of diseases which range from the familiar (influenza and German measles) to the exotic (kuru and tsutsugamushi), and islands which range in remoteness from the nearby Faroes and Scillies to the inaccessible Tristan da Cunha and Easter island. A constant theme in the book is the way in which technical developments over the last 150 years, notably in vaccination and transport, are fundamentally affecting the ways in which waves of epidemic diseases circle around the globe. As Darwin argued, islands form natural laboratories in which processes can be observed which are too complex to track in the fast-interacting city worlds, which dominate the crowded continents. The arrival of Ross River virus in the Cook islands or the decline of motor-neurone diseases on Guam can be followed with a precision, which owes much to an islands small size and limited accessibility. The revolution in molecular biology at the end of this century is emphasising how an islands genome, with peoples less mixed than in mainland communities, can provide unique genetic insights into diseases and heredity; the book reports on several examples including the interest in Icelands DNA bank.

The nature and effects of globalization are coming under critical scrutiny across all continents. This book focuses on one aspect, the globalization of cities. It examines the claim that the state is powerless to influence events, and that history, geography, and culture have become irrelevant in the worldwide trend towards a uniform urban model; a model which features increased segregation, decline of the central city, and social polarization.The international team of contributors is well placed to put these claims in perspective. Drawing on their experiences of cities as diverse as New York and Warsaw, Istanbul and Sao Paulo, they demonstrate that states and cities have adopted widely varying approaches to the advent of globalization; and that its impact has been constrained by each city's history, physical layout, location, environment, role in the international economy, and demographic composition. The diversity of urban development and political response revealed is enormous, and provides ample practical examples of what might be done to bring about improvements for the increasing number of people who live in cities.

Basing their findings on four years of research during which they studied rural districts drawn from a variety of contrasting regions of European Russia, the authors discuss the place of rural households in Russia's agri-food production system. They show that far from being solely concerned with 'survival' household plots in contemporary Russia are increasingly used to produce crops and livestock products for the market. In the book they describe the rich variety of forms that small and independent farming takes today from highly localised clusters of cucumber or tomato producers to specialization in crop or animal husbandry at a higher spatial scale or associated with particular ethnic groups. The authors systematically examine the influence on past and present practices of distance and the environment, the state of the large farm sector, local customs, and ethnicity on what households produce and how they produce it often using case studies of people they have met (plot holders, farmers, local officials) to illustrate their point. They criticise the tendency of the household production to be treated as the agricultural 'Other' in post-Soviet Russia and argue with the right incentives it has the potential for further development.

Geopolitics and Empire examines the relations between two phenomena that are central to modern conceptions of international relations. Geopolitics is the understanding of the inter-relations between empires, states, individuals, private companies, NGOs and multilateral agencies as these are expressed and shaped spatially. This view of the world achieved notoriety as the scientific basis claimed by Nazi ideologists of global conquest. However, under this or another name, similar sets of ideas were important on both sides of the Cold War and now have a renewed resonance in debates over the New World Order of the so-called Global War on Terror. Geopolitics is a way of describing the conflicts between states as constrained by both physical and economic space. It makes such conflicts seem inevitable.The argument of the book is that this view of the world continues to appear salient because it serves to make the projection of force overseas seem an inevitable aspect of the foreign policy of states. This quasi-Darwinian view of international relations makes the pursuit of Empire appear a responsibility of larger and more powerful states. Powerful states must become Empires or submit to others seeking something similar. In its associations with Empire, the study of Geopolitics returns continually to the ideas of a British geographer who never himself used the term. Halford Mackinder is the source of many of the ideas of Geopolitics and by examining his ideas both in their original context and as they have been repeatedly rediscovered and reinvented this book contributes to current discussions of the ideology and practices of the US Empire today.

The growth of pension funds has been nothing short of astronomical. Pension funds now dominate the world's financial markets, affecting nations' wealth, community development, and industrial well being. Yet little is known about their structure and organization. Pension funds and their agents in the investment industry control enormous sums of money, profoundly affecting the structure and performance of nation-states and the global economy. At the same time, it is also apparent that many western governments are retreating from the provision of 'public good' once thought essential to the fabric of urban life. Clark agues that if we are to understand the long-term future of the western economies (in general) and our communities (in particular), we need also to understand how institutional investors allocate assets, mobilize funds, and make investment decisions. There are few studies of the relationship between pension funds and the financial services industry. Pension Fund Capitalism fills an important gap in the literature as well as the intersection between pension funds and public policy.

This book is the culmination of four years' research by the authors on European Union governance and agri-environment policy making. It is a timely contribution to the debate on Europe; it exposes the myriad processes underlying the European integration project, and demonstrates the implications for European rural economies of the emerging system of supranational governance. A range of contemporary theoretical approaches from political science writing is employed to respond to the complexities of the EU decision-making process, in the context of agri-environmental policy. The book fills an important gap in political-geographical studies of the EU.

In this book the author seeks to rebut the somewhat fatalistic argument that socio-economic prosperity in the cities can only be achieved by the application of global market-led policies. He argues that urban society and policy makers do have sufficient freedom of action to make local decisions on the economic and social development of deprived neighbourhoods. Drawing on evidence from six major European cities, he demonstrates that their 'Integrated Area Development' strategies, which rely on grassroots democracy and the empowerment of local communities, can deliver a social, economic, and cultural renaissance which meets the needs of the local population more effectively than the market-forces creed.

The human-environment conditions in the Americas on the eve of the sixteenth-century European conquest have of late attracted growing interest in both academic and public circles. Focusing on Middle America, this book completes a trilogy which has made the most comprehensive survey ever achieved of pre-Colombian agriculture and culture throughout the continents. It addresses the question of what lands were permanently occupied; how they were used; and what the environmental and social implications of this use were. The answers to these questions are central to such wide-ranging themes as indigenous land rights, the conservation and preservation 'ethic' of these native people, and the global carbon cycle. The kind, scale, and location of land use is documented and mapped in detail. The book not only demonstrates the sophistication of the agricultural landscapes and their local integration, but also investigates the omissions and land degradation of the native agriculturalists. Drawing on this wealth of data the authors make a stimulating contribution to the debate about resource, land, and population in the Americas.

The last four decades of human history have seen the emergence of an unprecedented number of 'new' infectious diseases: the familiar roll call includes AIDS, Ebola, H5N1 influenza, hantavirus, hepatitis E, Lassa fever, legionnaires' and Lyme diseases, Marburg fever, Rift Valley fever, SARS, and West Nile. The outbreaks range in scale from global pandemics that have brought death and misery to millions, through to self-limiting outbreaks of mainly local impact. Some outbreaks have erupted explosively but have already faded away; some grumble along or continue to devastate as now persistent features in the medical lexicon; in others, a huge potential threat hangs uncertainly and worryingly in the air. Some outbreaks are merely local, others are worldwide.This book looks at the epidemiological and geographical conditions which underpin disease emergence. What are the processes which lead to emergence? Why now in human history? Where do such diseases emerge and how do they spread or fail to spread around the globe? What is the armoury of surveillance and control measures that may curb the impact of such diseases? But, uniquely, it sets these questions on the modern period of disease emergence in an historical context. First, it uses the historical record to set recent events against a much broader temporal canvas, finding emergence to be a constant theme in disease history rather than one confined to recent decades. It concludes that it is the quantitative pace of emergence, rather than its intrinsic nature, that separates the present period from earlier centuries. Second, it looks at the spatial and ecological setting of emergence, using hundreds of specially-drawn maps to chart the source areas of new diseases and the pathways of their spread. The book is divided into three main sections: Part 1 looks at early disease emergence, Part 2 at the processes of disease emergence, and Part 3 at the future for emergent diseases.

For parents, few infections scored higher than poliomyelitis on the 'dread' factor from the early years of the twentieth century as each successive wave of the disease outdid its predecessor in the number of children it crippled and killed. But, from the 1950s, this picture abruptly changed when preventive vaccines were developed which have brought the disease to the edge of global eradication. Part I, Epidemic Emergence, 1881-1920, looks at the transition from endemic to epidemic poliomyelitis in Europe and the United States. Part II, Global Expansion, 1921-55, covers the pre-vaccination period of epidemic poliomyelitis at world, continental and island scales. Part III, Global Retreat, 1955-88, focuses upon the control of poliomyelitis by mass vaccination campaigns. Part IV, Global Eradication, concludes the book by focusing upon the road to eradication, to which the Forty-first World Health Assembly committed in 1988.And so, at the beginning of a new millennium, poliomyelitis looks set to be the first disease since smallpox in 1979 to be eradicated by direct human intervention, with the interruption of wild poliovirus transmission expected in 2005. The evolution of poliomyelitis to global epidemiological significance from the 1920s marks it out as one of the world's major emergent infections of the twentieth century. What causes diseases to wax and wane in time and space is a theme of contemporary scientific interest as we seek to understand the appearance of new conditions such as Ebola fever, Legionnaires' disease, and HIV, and this book contributes to our comprehension of likely causes.

Cultivated Landscapes of Native North America is unlike any other book dealing with native agriculture in North America. The book takes a geographical stance, focusing on fields, field features, and field systems. Grounded in the traditional landscapes of landscape studies, emphasis is placed on modifications of the biophysical environment, specifically vegetation, soil, slope, and hydrology. Four sections explore horticulture, and practices that took advantage of adequate rainfall, compensated for moisture deficits, and water surpluses. The author uses three types of data: documentary accounts of the early European inform of native practices; ethnographies from 19th and 20th centuries provide ecological understanding; and archaeological findings to shed light on the antiquity of various activities. Doolittle challenges established ideas and provides new innovative ones. Nearly 200 maps, drawings, and photographs richly illustrate the complexities of aboriginal American food production.

Privatization of water suply is an emotive and controversial topic. The 'British model' of water privatization is unique: no other country has entirely privatized its water supply and sewerage systems. This book analyzes the socio-economic and environmental dimensions of privatization in England and Wales. It examines the implications of privatization for consumers, environmental management, and the water supply industry.

We all now recognize the importance of talk today. In policy settings, there are more and more calls for consultation, collaboration, and deliberation. This is particularly the case in environmental planning, with its disputes over genetically modified organisms, power plants, and new roads. Rydin provides an in-depth and fully theorized account of the role of talk or discourse within environmental planning, combining theory, reported research, and original empirical case studies. She highlights the problem that planners and others face when trying to expand the space for talk within planning situations and provides a detailed assessment of the prospects for consensus-building and deliberative democracy. She also highlights the role that discourse plays in legitimizing institutions of planning and discusses how a rationality of sustainable development may be embedded within new institutional arrangements.

This book provides a grounded analysis of globalization and urban change in the late 20th century. Drawing upon multi-locale field work in Vancouver, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Paris, and London, the author highlights the role of two transnational cultures - ethnic Chinese property developers and 'brand name' architects - in the planning and development of urban mega-projects. Case studies from Vancouver and Shanghai are used to analyse the nature of the transnational practices and networks that facilitate the production of new urban spaces in the Pacific Rim. This reflexive, situated, and interdisciplinary account affairs an alternative perspective to the abstract and economistic analyses that dominate our understanding of globalization and urban change. It will be of value to human geographers, urban planners, sociologists, anthropologists, architects, economists, and political scientists; all with an interest in the processes that reshape the modern city.

The Andes and Amazonia are two of the harshest regions on earth. The opportunities for productive agriculture, even with modern methods, seem limited, given conditions of climate, terrain, and soils. Nevertheless, indigenous people, both prehistoric and more recent, have developed systems of cultivation that have been intensive, highly productive, and sustainable, reclaiming marginal lands and supporting large numbers of people and complex societies. This book examines Indian agriculture in South America. The focus is on field types and field technologies, including agricultural landforms such as terraces, canals, and drained fields, which have persisted for hundreds of years. The evidence utilized comes from abandoned fields, historical documents, and current practices. What emerges is a picture of mostly successful indigenous farming practices in rain forests, savannahs, swamps, rugged mountains, and deserts. And while this knowledge may not always be directly applicable to development today, it does provide us with some unique techniques and some basic principles for farming difficult environments.

This book explores the dynamics that have accompanied the implementation of large-scale Urban Development Projects (UDPs) in nine European cities within the European Union (EU). It contributes to the analysis of the relationship between urban restructuring and social exclusion/integration in the context of the emergence of the European-wide 'new' regimes of urban governance. These regimes reflect the reawakening of neo-liberal policy and the rise of a New Urban Policy favouring private investments and deregulation of property and labour markets. The selected UDPs further reflect global pressures and changing systems of local, regional, and/or national regulation and governance. These projects, while being decidedly local, capture global trends and new national and local policies as they are expressed in particular institutional forms and strategic practices. The large scale urban interventions were deliberately chosen as reflections of a particular hegemonic and dominant expression of urban policy, as pursued during the 1990s. The book provides a panoramic view of urban change in some of Europe's greatest cities. The nine case-studies include: The Europeanization of Brussels, The Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, the new financial district in Dublin, the science-university-technology complex 'Adlershof' in Berlin, the 1998 World Expo in Lisbon, Athens's bid to stage the Olympic Games, Vienna's Donau City, Copenhagen's Oresund project, and Naples' new business district. These case-studies testify to the unshakable belief the city elites hold in the healing effects that the production of new urban mega-projects and -events has on their city's vitality and development potential. The book also analyses the down side of this development in terms of social exclusion, the formation of new urban elites, and the consolidation of less democratic forms of urban governance. The principal aim is to show how the production of these new urban spaces is actually also part of the production of a new polity, a new economy, and new forms of living urban life that are not very promising for a socially harmonious and just future for metropolitan urban Europe.

Jim Glassman addresses the role of the state in the industrial transformation of what was, before the economic crisis of 1997-98, one of Southeast Asia's fastest growing economies. Approaching this issue from a different angle to those dominating 1980s and 1990s debates about the role of states in East Asian growth, Glassman argues that the Thai state has been both proactive and interventionist in encouraging industrial transformation - contrary to what neo-liberals have asserted - but at the same time has not been a 'developmental' state of the sort championed by neo-Weberian analysts of East Asia.Analyzing the Cold War period, the period of the economic boom, as well as the economic crisis and its political aftershock, Thailand at the Margins recasts the story of the Thai state's post-World War II development performance by focusing on uneven industrialization and the interaction between internationalization and the transformation of Thai labour.

Why do people living in different areas vote in different ways? Why does this change over time? How do people talk about politics with friends and neighbours, and with what effect? Does the geography of well-being influence the geography of party support? Do parties try to talk to all voters at election time, or are they interested only in the views of a small number of voters living in a small number of seats? Is electoral participation in decline, and how does the geography of the vote affect this? How can a party win a majority of seats in Parliament without a majority of votes in the country? Putting Voters in their Place explores these questions by placing the analysis of electoral behaviour into its geographical context. Using information from the latest elections, including the 2005 General Election, the book shows how both voters and parties are affected by, and seek to influence, both national and local forces. Trends are set in the context of the latest research and scholarship on electoral behaviour. The book also reports on new research findings.