Showing papers on "Metropolitan area published in 2010"

The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply

Abstract: I process satellite-generated data on terrain elevation and presence of water bodies to precisely estimate the amount of developable land in U.S. metropolitan areas. The data show that residential development is effectively curtailed by the presence of steep-sloped terrain. I also find that most areas in which housing supply is regarded as inelastic are severely land-constrained by their geography. Econometrically, supply elasticities can be well characterized as functions of both physical and regulatory constraints, which in turn are endogenous to prices and demographic growth. Geography is a key factor in the contemporaneous urban development of the United States.

Urban Scaling and Its Deviations: Revealing the Structure of Wealth, Innovation and Crime across Cities

Abstract: With urban population increasing dramatically worldwide, cities are playing an increasingly critical role in human societies and the sustainability of the planet. An obstacle to effective policy is the lack of meaningful urban metrics based on a quantitative understanding of cities. Typically, linear per capita indicators are used to characterize and rank cities. However, these implicitly ignore the fundamental role of nonlinear agglomeration integral to the life history of cities. As such, per capita indicators conflate general nonlinear effects, common to all cities, with local dynamics, specific to each city, failing to provide direct measures of the impact of local events and policy. Agglomeration nonlinearities are explicitly manifested by the superlinear power law scaling of most urban socioeconomic indicators with population size, all with similar exponents (*1.15). As a result larger cities are disproportionally the centers of innovation, wealth and crime, all to approximately the same degree. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of U.S. metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.

The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China

Abstract: PROLOGUE PART I: REDEVELOPMENT OF THE URBAN CORE PART II: EXPANSION OF THE METROPOLITAN REGION PART III: URBANIZATION OF THE RURAL FRINGE

Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance of Complex Economic Systems

Abstract: This excerpt describes the intellectual journey that I have taken the last half-century from when I began graduate studies in the late 1950s. The early efforts to understand the polycentric water industry in California were formative for me. In addition to working with Vincent Ostrom and Charles Tiebout as they formulated the concept of polycentric systems for governing metropolitan areas, I studied the efforts of a large group of private and public water producers facing the problem of an overdrafted groundwater basin on the coast and watching saltwater intrusion threaten the possibility of long-term use. Then, in the 1970s, I participated with colleagues in the study of polycentric police industries serving U.S. metropolitan areas to find that the dominant theory underlying massive reform proposals was incorrect. Metropolitan areas served by a combination of large and small producers could achieve economies of scale in the production of some police services and avoid diseconomies of scale in the production of others.

The Complementarity Between Cities and Skills

Abstract: There is a strong connection between per-worker productivity and metropolitan area population, which is commonly interpreted as evidence for the ex- istence of agglomeration economies. This correlation is particularly strong in cities with higher levels of skill and virtually nonexistent in less skilled metropolitan areas. This fact is particularly compatible with the view that urban density is important because prox- imity spreads knowledge, which either makes workers more skilled or entrepreneurs more productive. Bigger cities certainly attract more skilled workers, and there is some evidence suggesting that human capital accumulates more quickly in urban areas. The connection between area size and per worker productivity and income is a core fact at the center of urban economics (Glaeser, 2008). The connection between urban density and earnings is understood to be a primary reason that cities exist. Understanding the connection between city size and productivity is a core task for students of agglomeration. This paper notes that the connection between city size and productivity does not hold for less skilled metropolitan areas in the United States today. In the least well-educated third of metropolitan areas, there is virtually no connection between city size and productivity or income. In the most well- educated third of metropolitan areas, area population can explain 45 percent of the variation in per-worker productivity. Why does productivity increase with area population for skilled places, but not for unskilled places? One hypothesis is that the connection between productivity and area size reflects a tendency of more skilled people to locate in big cities. However, even in the more skilled places, controlling for area- level skills can only explain a quarter of the measured agglomeration effect. If unobserved skills were explaining the correlation, then we would expect

Got green? addressing environmental justice in park provision

Abstract: We present a pragmatic approach to assist planners in addressing racial inequities in park access. Utilizing the Los Angeles metropolitan region as an example, we used Thiessen polygons to delineate a service area for each park, and described potential park congestion or ‘pressure’ in each park service area. Results show that Latinos, African-Americans, and low-income groups in general were likely to live close to parks with higher potential park congestion. On the other hand, predominantly White, high-income areas were typically located close to parks with lower potential park congestion levels. The park service area analysis presented here facilitates the identification of areas with greater park need and provides a pragmatic way to redress existing disparities in park access. Built into a set of web-based decision support tools, the approach fosters greater community participation and empowers local stakeholders in the process of park provision.

Revisiting the rural-urban contrast : Personal networks in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan settings

Abstract: To revisit the rural-urban contrast, we use data from non-metropolitan and metropolitan subsamples of the 1985 General Social Survey to test whether, compared to personal networks in urban settings, personal networks in rural settings contain ties of greater intensity and role multiplexity, are based more on kinship and neighborhood solidarities rather than on friendship, are smaller, are denser, and have greater educational, race-ethnic, and religious homogeneity, but less age and gender homogeneity Our results are generally consistent with these predictions We then present evidence for rural diversity by comparing data from residents of a two-parish nonmetropolitan area in southwestern Louisiana to the nonmetropolitan subsample of the GSS After discussing possible mechanisms for this covariation of spatial and aspatial communities, we conclude by commenting on the potential of network analysis to contribute to the resolution of these and other substantively important problems in rural sociology

Spatial Structure and Productivity in US Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: Recent concepts such as ‘megaregions' and ‘polycentric urban regions' emphasize that external economies are not confined to a single urban core, but are shared among a collection of nearby and link...

Why Has House Price Dispersion Gone Up

Abstract: We calibrate a dynamic general-equilibrium island model to investigate the 30 year increase in the level of house prices and their dispersion across U.S. metropolitan areas. The model is based on two main assumptions: households o w in and out metropolitan areas in response to local productivity shocks, and the housing supply cannot adjust instantly because of technological and regulatory constraints. The calibration reveals that the observed tightening of housing supply regulation cannot quantitatively account for the rise in the level and dispersion of house prices: in equilibrium, workers o w out of tightly regulated towards less regulated metropolitan areas, undoing most of the price impact of local supply restrictions. In contrast, the observed increase in wage dispersion across metropolitan areas does create the observed increase in the level and dispersion of house prices. Workers o w towards exceptionally productive metropolitan areas and drive house prices up. The calibration also suggests that the welfare eects of housing supply regulation are large when wages become more dispersed.

Socio-technical transitions in water scarcity contexts: Public acceptance of greywater reuse technologies in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona

Abstract: Greywater reuse systems are becoming more and more common in the new multi-storey buildings of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. A main driver of this trend has been the recent approval of ambitious local regulations aimed at saving water and using decentralised, alternative resources in a context of growing scarcity. Users must assume new responsibilities in water management and new capacities need to be developed at the very micro level to attain a successful implementation of these regulations. A survey of 120 greywater users and in-depth interviews with the main actors of the water sector was conducted in the town of Sant Cugat del Valles, in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The municipality's six years experience on greywater use provided an exceptional opportunity to assess community perceptions during the socio-technical transition process. Sant Cugat was the first municipality in Spain that enforced the installation of such systems in new buildings. Results show that the perception of health risks, operation regimes, perceived costs and environmental awareness are, in different degrees, significant determinants of public acceptance. The main institutional, technical, and economic challenges that need to be addressed during the ongoing socio-technical transition process are also explored. Improving the level of knowledge of these systems among users would reduce the risk of social refusal of the new technology. Public authorities and implementers need to stimulate social learning processes with specific actions and build trust among residents in the new governance network if decentralised and alternative water supply systems are to find a place in the everyday life of urban populations.

Zipf's Law for All the Natural Cities in the United States: A Geospatial Perspective

Abstract: This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define cities or city boundaries. Most of the investigations of Zipf's law rely on the demarcations of cities imposed by census data, e.g., metropolitan areas and census-designated places. These demarcations or definitions (of cities) are criticized for being subjective or even arbitrary. Alternative solutions to defining cities are suggested, but they still rely on census data for their definitions. In this paper we demarcate urban agglomerations by clustering street nodes (including intersections and ends), forming what we call natural cities. Based on the demarcation, we found that Zipf's law holds remarkably well for all the natural cities (over 2-4 million in total) across the United States. There is little sensitivity for the holding with respect to the clustering resolution used for demarcating the natural cities. This is a big contrast to urban areas, as defined in the census data, which do not hold stable for Zipf's law. Keywords: Natural cities, power law, data-intensive geospatial computing, scaling of geographic space

Driving and the built environment: the effect of compact development on motorized travel, energy use, and CO2 emissions

Abstract: The vast majority of the U.S. population-some 80 percent-now lives in metropolitan areas, but population and employment continue to decentralize within regions, and density levels continue to decline at the urban fringe. Suburbanization is a long-standing trend that reflects the preference of many Americans for living in detached single-family homes, made possible largely through the mobility provided by the automobile and an extensive highway network. Yet these dispersed, automobile-dependent development patterns have come at a cost, consuming vast quantities of undeveloped land; increasing the nation's dependence on petroleum, particularly foreign imports; and increasing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to global warming. The primary purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between land development patterns, often referred to as the built environment, and motor vehicle travel in the United States and to assess whether petroleum use, and by extension GHG emissions, could be reduced through changes in the design of development patterns (see Appendix A for the full statement of task). A key question of interest is the extent to which developing more compactly would reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and make alternative modes of travel (e.g., transit, walking) more feasible. The study is focused on metropolitan areasmore » and on personal travel, the primary vectors through which policy changes designed to encourage more compact development should have the greatest effect.« less

Spatial Variations of Single-Family Residential Water Consumption in Portland, Oregon

Abstract: Although water demand theories identify price structures, technology, and individual behavior as determinants of water demand, limited theoretical or empirical evidence suggests a link between urban development patterns and water use. To assess the role of urban development patterns on water demand, we used GIS and statistical models to analyze single-family residential water consumption in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. Our results show that residential water consumption per household at the census block group scale is best explained by average building size, followed by building density and building age, with low water consumption areas clustering together and typically located in high-density and older neighborhoods. Accounting for spatial dependence among residuals, explanatory variables explain up to 87% of variations in water consumption. Our results help to develop a water demand framework that incorporates existing factors with urban development policies to more effectively manage limite...

Urban Polycentricity and the Costs of Commuting: Evidence from Italian Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: Polycentricity at the metropolitan scale is perhaps the model of spatial organization that needs to be investigated more thoroughly as regards its effects on travel. The aim of this paper is to test the role of polycentricity—as well as other spatial characteristics, such as compactness, functional diversification and size—in the costs of commuting, taking into account an external cost component (per-capita CO2 emissions) and a private cost component (time spent on traveling). The degree of urban polycentricity was measured by adopting a dynamic approach based on commuting flows and on social network analysis tools. The analysis is carried out using a database of 82 Italian metropolitan areas (MAs). Results show that MAs with a higher degree of polycentricity are more virtuous both in terms of private and external costs of mobility, while the degree of compactness is associated with lower environmental costs but with higher private costs. Size is associated with both higher external and private costs, while the role of functional diversification turns out to be statistically insignificant. Socio-demographics also play a role.

Why Does a City Grow? Specialisation, Human Capital or Institutions?

Abstract: Why are there persistent differences in income between metropolitan areas? The answer to this question has evaded much of the scholarship on the topic. Some of the frameworks that drive empirical research in this field are based on ad hoc combinations of explanatory factors, ranging from natural climate, to business climate, to land and labour costs. Theoretical approaches emphasise economic specialisation: some activities have higher rates of growth than others and this translates into divergence in interurban growth and income. Yet specialisation itself needs to be explained. International economics explains different growth rates and income levels among countries by emphasising specialisation, human capital and institutions. This framework can be adapted to the analysis of metropolitan growth. The thorniest aspect of doing so is to consider recursive relationships among the three, as well as decisive events that might introduce irreversible path-dependent outcomes that differentiate cities.

Changes in Transportation Infrastructure and Commuting Patterns in U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1960-2000.

Abstract: Population decentralization has been a salient feature of the landscape of most U.S. urban areas since 1950. Nathaniel Baum-Snow (2007) documents that the aggregate population of central cities of the 139 largest metropolitan areas (henceforth, MSAs) declined by 17 percent between 1950 and 1990 while aggregate MSA population growth was 72 percent during this period. Expansion of the highway network in urban areas accounts for about one-third of the gap in central city and MSA population growth rates. While transport network expansions clearly generated urban population decentralization, there is little evidence to date on how this decentralization manifested itself as changes in employment locations and commuting patterns. In this paper, I present evidence indicating that employment decentralization occurred apace with residential decentralization between 1960 and 2000 such that their relative spatial concentrations remained remarkably unchanged. A byproduct has been that most commutes of MSA residents no longer involve central cities at all. Central cities as defined by their geographies in 1960 were the origin and/or destination of only 38 percent of commutes made by MSA residents in 2000, down from 66 percent in 1960. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, estimates reported in Section III indicate that urban highway construction played a pivotal role in generating this shift. New highways primarily increased the number and fraction of commuting flows within suburban areas at the expense of commutes within central cities. Because within suburb commutes are longer than other types of commutes on average, results are consistent with Gilles Duranton & Matthew Turner’s (2009) evidence that the elasticity of kilometers driven with respect to lane-kilometers of highways in urban areas is one.1