This article asks whether industrialization raises intergenerational mobility within cities. I study Turin, a major Italian industrial hub, using repeated 5 per cent samples of the 1911, 1921, and 1936 population censuses digitized from household family sheets. I construct occupation-based earnings scores and measure relative mobility with the Information Content of Surnames (ICS). Citywide ICS falls by about one-half, and upward mobility from the bottom rises. These gains are sharply concentrated among residents of the industrial belt, where mechanical and metallurgical jobs expand. Area-level ICS measures surname-occupation sorting among current residents rather than childhood exposure to neighborhoods; the evidence indicates that industrialization operated through both local occupational upgrading and within-city reallocation toward the expanding industrial belt.
This article explains how temporally uneven polycrisis reshapes labour agency within apparel production networks. Developing a spatial–temporal analytical framework, it shows how interactions, amplification, and acceleration across crises reconfigure workers’ opportunity structures through legitimacy, profitability, and social reproduction pressures. This qualitative case study of Bangladesh’s apparel industry examines how the Rana Plaza accident, COVID-19, and the climate crisis interacted to produce cumulative effects that enabled openings and constrained mobilization, shifting labour agency across associational, coalitional, and micro-practices over time. The study advances labour regime analysis by demonstrating the temporal contingency and spatial situatedness of labour agency during polycrisis.
Proximity is traditionally viewed as crucial for overcoming the search and transfer costs associated with imperfectly codified knowledge. But does proximity still matter when formal standard publication jointly enhances the codification, certainty, and accessibility of technical knowledge? Evidence from the U.S. Information and Communication Technology industry shows that technological proximity drives substantial spillover gains, largely irrespective of location. Conversely, geographical proximity confers a compensating advantage when technological proximity is low. We reveal a nuanced interplay of proximity in knowledge spillovers: while formal standardization effectively flattens the world for the technologically proximate, co-location remains vital for their less proximate counterparts.
Abstract Where should we build new housing under growing climate hazards? This study develops a framework that balances the economic benefits of density against the geographically varying costs of climate adaptation. We apply it to the Netherlands, where demand for new housing is high, but much of the land lies in floodplains or subsidence-prone areas. Agglomeration benefits are proxied by land values, while adaptation costs are derived from engineering estimates of flood protection and soil subsidence. Combining these data allows us to map spatial trade-offs and identify where development remains welfare-enhancing. Our findings show that dense cities continue to generate strong net welfare gains, even in places with high costs, while low-density settlements generate a welfare loss for new housing. We identify density thresholds above which housing development becomes feasible. Many medium-sized Dutch cities already exceed these thresholds, making densification more beneficial than peripheral expansion. Climate adaptation thus strengthens—rather than weakens—the case for urban densification.
Abstract The global production networks (GPNs) literature, with the instructive concept of strategic coupling, has attended to commercial production, often bracketing out social reproduction. This leaves a conceptual and analytical gap around uneven outcomes emerging in strategic coupling processes. The paper therefore turns to global reproduction networks (GrPNs) and engages with the concepts of power and ambivalence, and with convention theory to develop the ambivalence framework. The framework builds on the co-constitution of production and social reproduction in which imperatives, such as price and efficiency, well-being, nurturing, and altruism, co-exist. It turns the conceptual-analytical focus to decision-making on training, where these imperatives are ranked and generate outcomes for training and beyond. The explanatory potential of the framework is sketched with a vignette of organic rice farming in Viamão, Brazil.
