There is now a sustained interest in measuring geographical variation in social and economic circumstances in order to guide urban policy resource allocation decisions. The most recent attempt to measure local area deprivation in England has come through the government's Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD). The authors aim to consider the degree to which the IMD provides a reliable mechanism for doing so and to suggest the ways in which its successors might best be refined. They argue that although the IMD, in many respects, represents a commendable advance in terms of the development of techniques to quantify deprivation, there remain significant limitations that future approaches could profitably address.

While some geographers have embraced active learning as a means to engage students in a course, many others stick to conventional teaching methods. They are often deterred by suggestions that it can be difficult to implement active learning where students have no prior knowledge of a subject, that active learning requires too much work of lecturers and students, and that there are significant institutional constraints to implementing active learning. In this article the authors draw on their experiences of utilizing active learning in five different countries before dispelling myths which continue to constrain the uptake of active learning methods. Finally, they provide simple guidelines for successful integration of active learning in geography courses.

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Recent years have seen the establishment of numerous spatially bounded regeneration agencies in the United Kingdom, prominent amongst which have been urban development corporations (yDCs).Attempts to evaluate such agencies have so far focused almost exclusively upon the impacts within formally delimited areas and have neglected to consider the effects on surrounding nondesignated areas. In this paper, an attempt is made to address this by devising a technique for assessing the wider effects of spatially bounded regeneration agencies and programmes. Drawing from a government-commissioned evaluation of UDCs at Leeds, Bristol, and Central Manchester, we explore the extent to which government intervention in delimited areas has generated a net beneficial impact on the wider local economies of the three cities. By use of data on the nature of vacancy chains for commercial properties in the three UDCs and in their respective surrounding areas, an attempt is made to measure the degree of displacement or additionality engendered by UDC activities.