Showing papers on "Metropolitan area published in 2013"

Economics of Agglomeration: Cities, Industrial Location, and Globalization

Abstract: 1. Agglomeration and economic theory Part I. Fundamentals of Spatial Economics: 2. The breakdown of the price system in a spatial economy 3. The von Thunen model and land rent formation 4. Increasing returns vs. transportation costs: the fundamental trade-off of spatial economics 5. Cities and the public sector Part II. The Structure of Metropolitan Areas: 6. The spatial structure of cities under communication externalities 7. The formation of urban centers under imperfect competition Part III. Factor Mobility and Industrial Location: 8. Industrial agglomeration under monopolistic competition 9. Market size and industrial clusters Part IV. Urban Systems, Regional Growth, and the Multinationalization of Firms: 10. Back to von Thunen: the formation of cities in a spatial economy 11. Globalization, growth, and the geography of the supply chain.

Does Size Matter? Scaling of CO2 Emissions and U.S. Urban Areas

Abstract: Urban areas consume more than 66% of the world’s energy and generate more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion by 2100, nearly 90% of whom will live in urban areas, a critical question for planetary sustainability is how the size of cities affects energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Are larger cities more energy and emissions efficient than smaller ones? Do larger cities exhibit gains from economies of scale with regard to emissions? Here we examine the relationship between city size and CO2 emissions for U.S. metropolitan areas using a production accounting allocation of emissions. We find that for the time period of 1999–2008, CO2 emissions scale proportionally with urban population size. Contrary to theoretical expectations, larger cities are not more emissions efficient than smaller ones.

Urban Form, Air Pollution, and CO2 Emissions in Large U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: In this article we explore the relationships between urban form and air pollution among 86 U.S. metropolitan areas. Urban form was quantified using preexisting sprawl indexes and spatial metrics applied to remotely sensed land cover data. Air pollution data included the nonpoint source emission of the ozone (O3) precursors nitrogen oxides (NOx) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), the concentration of O3, the concentration and nonpoint source emission of fine particulate matter (PM2.5), and the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) from on-road sources. Metropolitan areas that exhibited higher levels of urban sprawl, or sprawl-like urban morphologies, generally exhibited higher concentrations and emissions of air pollution and CO2 when controlling for population, land area, and climate.

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros are Fixing our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy

Abstract: Across the US, cities and metropolitan areas are facing huge economic and competitive challenges that Washington won't, or can't, solve. The good news is that networks of metropolitan leaders - mayors, business and labor leaders, educators, and philanthropists - are stepping up and powering the nation forward. These state and local leaders are doing the hard work to grow more jobs and make their communities more prosperous, and they're investing in infrastructure, making manufacturing a priority, and equipping workers with the skills they need. In The Metropolitan Revolution , Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley highlight success stories and the people behind them. New York City : Efforts are under way to diversify the city's vast economy Portland : Is selling the "sustainability" solutions it has perfected to other cities around the world Northeast Ohio : Groups are using industrial-age skills to invent new twenty-first-century materials, tools, and processes Houston : Modern settlement house helps immigrants climb the employment ladder Miami : Innovators are forging strong ties with Brazil and other nations Denver and Los Angeles : Leaders are breaking political barriers and building world-class metropolises Boston and Detroit : Innovation districts are hatching ideas to power these economies for the next century The lessons in this book can help other cities meet their challenges. Change is happening, and every community in the country can benefit. Change happens where we live, and if leaders won't do it, citizens should demand it.

Confronting Suburban Poverty in America

Abstract: It has been nearly a half century since President Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty. Back in the 1960s tackling poverty "in place" meant focusing resources in the inner city and in rural areas. The suburbs were seen as home to middle- and upper-class families --affluent commuters and homeowners looking for good schools and safe communities in which to raise their kids. But today's America is a very different place. Poverty is no longer just an urban or rural problem, but increasingly a suburban one as well. In Confronting Suburban Poverty in America , Elizabeth Kneebone and Alan Berube take on the new reality of metropolitan poverty and opportunity in America. After decades in which suburbs added poor residents at a faster pace than cities, the 2000s marked a tipping point. Suburbia is now home to the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country and more than half of the metropolitan poor. However, the antipoverty infrastructure built over the past several decades does not fit this rapidly changing geography. As Kneebone and Berube cogently demonstrate, the solution no longer fits the problem. The spread of suburban poverty has many causes, including shifts in affordable housing and jobs, population dynamics, immigration, and a struggling economy. The phenomenon raises several daunting challenges, such as the need for more (and better) transportation options, services, and financial resources. But necessity also produces opportunity --in this case, the opportunity to rethink and modernize services, structures, and procedures so that they work in more scaled, cross-cutting, and resource-efficient ways to address widespread need. This book embraces that opportunity. Kneebone and Berube paint a new picture of poverty in America as well as the best ways to combat it. Confronting Suburban Poverty in America offers a series of workable recommendations for public, private, and nonprofit leaders seeking to modernize poverty alleviation and community development strategies and connect residents with economic opportunity. The authors highlight efforts in metro areas where local leaders are learning how to do more with less and adjusting their approaches to address the metropolitan scale of poverty --for example, integrating services and service delivery, collaborating across sectors and jurisdictions, and using data-driven and flexible funding strategies. "We believe the goal of public policy must be to provide all families with access to communities, whether in cities or suburbs, that offer a high quality of life and solid platform for upward mobility over time. Understanding the new reality of poverty in metropolitan America is a critical step toward realizing that goal." - from Chapter One.

Sprawl, blight and the role of urban containment policies. Evidence from us cities

Abstract: US post-war suburbanization has reshaped the spatial pattern of growth in many metropolitan areas, with population and employment shift toward the suburbs resulting in the urban decay of central cities. This being the case, the adoption of adequate anti-sprawl policies should lead to a reduction in city blight. Availability of detailed blight measures at the city level enables us to undertake a novel empirical analysis to test this hypothesis. The empirical specification presented here identifies the specific impact of more stringent anti-sprawl policies adopted at the metro-level, proxied by the adoption of urban containment policies, on city blight. Results indicate that the adoption of such policies have effectively contributed to the reduction of downtown deterioration.

Governance and Opportunity in Metropolitan America

Abstract: 1 Front Matter 2 Executive Summary 3 1 Introduction 4 2 Central Cities, Suburbs, and Metropolitan-Area Problems 5 3 Disparities in Outcomes 6 4 Strategies for Reducing Disparities 7 5 Recommendations for Research and Policy Choices 8 References 9 Does the American Way of Zoning Cause the Suburbs of Metropolitan Areas to Be Too Spread Out? 10 Spatial Stratification Within U.S. Metropolitan Areas 11 The Geography of Economic and Social Opportunity in Metropolitan Areas 12 Metropolitan Limits: Intrametropolitan Disparities and Governance in U.S. Laboratories of Democracy 13 Regionalism in Transportation and Air Quality: History, Interpretation, and Insights for Regional Governance 14 Biographical Sketches of Committee Members and Staff 15 Index

Sequential City Growth in the US: Does Age Matter?

Abstract: We provide empirical evidence of the dynamics of city size distribution for the whole of the twentieth century in U.S. cities and metropolitan areas. We focus our analysis on the new cities that were created during the period of analysis. The main contribution of this paper, therefore, is the parametric and nonparametric analysis of the population growth experienced by these new-born cities. Our results enable us to confirm that, when cities appear, they grow very rapidly and, as the decades pass, their growth slows or even falls into decline. This is consistent with the theoretical framework regarding mean reversion (convergence) in the steady state and with the theories of sequential city growth.

The “New Urban Europe”: Global Challenges and Local Responses in the Urban Century

Abstract: Modern cities in the open European space-economy are powerhouses of creative ideas, smart technologies, sustainable developments and socio-economic wealth. They play a pivotal role in the future of an urbanized Europe, but they are also confronted with grand challenges, notably far-reaching demographic transformations, environmental decay and climatological change, unequal social participation and ever-rising mobility trends. The challenges for urban environments may be turned into new opportunities, in particular, in such domains as advanced infrastructure and logistic systems, environmental and climate-neutral facilities, creative and knowledge-intensive strategies for socio-economic prosperity and well-being. Cities—and in particular metropolitan areas—may thus act as spearheads of sustainable economic growth for European countries. These observations call for appropriate long-range policy strategies for metropolitan areas—and networks of cities—in the highly diversified European space-economy. Such po...

The Social Interaction Potential of Metropolitan Regions: A Time-Geographic Measurement Approach Using Joint Accessibility

Abstract: We put forward a method for measuring the social interaction potential of a metropolitan region based on the time-geographic concept of joint accessibility. The metric is sensitive to prevailing land use patterns and commuter flows in the metropolitan region, time budgets, and the spatial distribution of joint activity locations. It is calculated via a geocomputation routine in which a representative subset of after-work, space–time prisms are intersected with each other. Decomposition of the metric gives rise to social potential metrics for each employment and residential zone in the city, for specific commuter flows, and for locations of potential social interaction, such as bars, restaurants, sports fields, and so on. The method is demonstrated via a scenario-based experiment that explores the impact of residential and employment land use patterns and varying levels of commuter flow dispersion. The findings indicate that the metric is adequately responsive to each of the scenario input parameters, as w...

The Role of Residential Segregation in Contemporary School Segregation

Abstract: Inaction to address housing segregation in metropolitan areas has resulted in persistently high levels of residential segregation. As the Supreme Court has recently limited school districts’ volunt...

Infrastructures, Lock-In, and Sustainable Urban Development – The Case of Waste Incineration in the Göteborg Metropolitan Area

Abstract: This article explains how infrastructures with a sustainability record may evolve over time into a lock-in that slows the emergence of more sustainable urban infrastructures. A study of waste incineration in the Goteborg Metropolitan Area, Sweden, serves as an illustrative case. Taking leads from Unruh (2000; 2002), four rationales of lock-in are identified in the case: institutional, technical, cultural, and material. The article describes how these rationales, one by one and in collaboration, lock-in waste handling in the Goteborg Metropolitan Area to incineration. The article also suggests that these four rationales could serve as a program to unlock urban infrastructures. Asking the question “Are we in a lock-in?” is featured as a practical starting point for planning changes in urban infrastructure governance that contribute to sustainability.

Comparing Cross-border Metropolitan Integration in Europe: Towards a Functional Typology

Abstract: This article analyses the process of spatial integration in ten European cross-border metropolitan regions by comparing three indicators, relating to flows of cross-border commuters, differentials of gross domestic product per capita and residents’ citizenship. Our results allow, firstly, confirmation of the hypothesis that the greater the economic disparities, the greater the level of interactions measured by cross-border commuting. Our work also allows confirmation of the hypothesis that strong economic interactions have an impact on the cross-border integration of communities, measured by the proportion of residents based on the other side of the border. Finally, this article leads to a typology based on three models of cross-border integration being proposed: by specialization, by polarization and by osmosis.

Economic Geography: A Review of the Theoretical and Empirical Literature

Abstract: The uneven distribution of economic activity across space is one of the most striking features of economic life. Perhaps the clearest visual manifestation of this is the emergence and growth of cities. The share of the world’s population living in cities grew from less than one tenth in 1300, to around one sixth in 1900, and to around one half today. Even more striking is the emergence of large metropolitan areas. By 1980 there were more than two million cities with more than a hundred thousand inhabitants, and by 1995 15 cities had a population of greater than ten million.1

The Airport City Phenomenon: Evidence from Large US Airports:

Abstract: As air transport for leisure trips, business travel and goods shipment increased rapidly over the past several decades, the emergence of airport cities has been hypothesised. Busy commercial airports may be emerging as central transport nodes in large metropolitan areas, much as ports and rail terminals were in the past, anchoring employment servicing passengers, facilitating frequent travellers and providing a spatial focus for unrelated firms. An analysis of small-area employment data for the areas surrounding 25 major US airports and the related central cities reveals the concentration of employment within 2.5 miles of these airports to be substantial—approximately half that within 2.5 miles of the central point of the corresponding CBDs—and growing. The analysis refocuses a question about the nature of spatial differentiation within metropolitan regions supporting multiple employment nodes.

Residential Segregation, Spatial Mismatch and Economic Growth across US Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: Numerous studies have demonstrated the detrimental influence of residential segregation on poor inner-city residents. This study examines the impact of residential segregation on the welfare of populations in US metropolitan areas using economic growth as the indicator. Panel data of US metropolitan areas spanning 25 years, 1980–2005, are used to analyse the effect of segregation on economic growth. The results show that both racial and skill segregation have a negative impact on short- and long-term economic growth, which have increased over time. Further, the negative impact of the variables associated with spatial mismatch is also revealed. The results clearly point to the need for mobility policies that favour non-White households and comprehensive strategies that promote economic opportunities in low-resource communities in the US.

Transit Service, Physical Agglomeration, and Productivity in U.S. Metropolitan Areas

Abstract: Public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher-density employment and enable urban growth, giving rise to agglomeration economies by making labor markets more accessible, increasing information exchange, and facilitating industrial specialization. Using data on almost all metropolitan areas in the United States, the authors explicitly traced the links between transit service and multiple physical measures of agglomeration, and hence to wages and gross metropolitan product per capita. Doubling transit service levels (using measures such as total seat capacity) is associated with large increases in central city employment density and consequent wage increases ranging from 1.1 to 1.8 percent, or between $7 million and $12 billion yearly per metropolitan area depending on the size of the workforce and the starting average wage. Firms and households likely receive unanticipated benefits from transit-induced agglomeration, and current benefit-cost evaluations may underestimate the benefits of improving transit service.

Best Practices in Urban Freight Management: Lessons from an International Survey

Abstract: Freight movement is essential to the function of metropolitan areas, yet generates many externalities, including congestion, air pollution, noise, and greenhouse gas emissions. Metropolitan areas around the world are seeking ways to manage urban freight and its impacts. This paper presents the results from a comprehensive international survey of urban freight management strategies. The objective was to examine the effectiveness of alternative strategies and assess their transferability for U.S. implementation. Three categories were used to describe urban freight strategies: last-mile or first-mile deliveries and pickups, environmental mitigation, and trade node strategies. Many possibilities were found for the improved management of urban freight and its impacts; these possibilities included labeling and certification programs, incentive-based programs for voluntary emissions reduction, local land use and parking policies, and more stringent national fuel efficiency and emissions standards for heavy-duty ...