Metropolitan area

About: Metropolitan area is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 26029 publications have been published within this topic receiving 385648 citations. The topic is also known as: metro & metro area.

What Are Cities Worth? Land Rents, Local Productivity, and the Total Value of Amenities

Abstract: This paper models how to use widely available data on wages and housing costs to infer land rents, local productivity, and the total value of local amenities in the presence of federal taxes and locally produced nontraded goods. I apply the model to U.S. metropolitan areas with the aid of visually intuitive graphs. The results improve measures of productivity and feature large differences in land rents. Wage and housing cost differences across metropolitan areas are accounted for more by productivity than quality-of-life differences. Regressions using individual amenities reveal that the most productive and valuable cities are typically coastal, sunny, mild, educated, and large.

A review of the solar city concept and methods to assess rooftop solar electric potential, with an illustrative application to the city of Seoul

Abstract: Energy economy restructuring at the city level is an essential prong in any strategy that aims to address the dual energy and climate change challenges. Cities form hubs of human activity that are accompanied by high levels of energy consumption and emissions but also contain existing resources and infrastructure to transition to a greener energy economy. This paper reviews efforts to date to define the ‘solar city’ concept and assessment methods for estimating the solar electric potential of an often neglected but vital city resource in energy matters – its rooftop real estate. From this review, an application of the solar city concept is formulated and an assessment method is offered for its investigation. An illustrative case study is provided, using the City of Seoul, South Korea. Representing nearly one-quarter of South Korea’s population and a one-third of its economic activity, the application of the solar city concept to the city can have significant consequences for the future energy development pathway of the municipality and the country (the metropolitan area of Seoul encompasses nearly one-half of the national population). The research demonstrates that a technical potential equivalent to almost 30% of the city’s annual electricity consumption can be supplied by widespread deployment of rooftop-based distributed photovoltaic systems. Using the methodology developed in the paper, we estimate that sixty-six percent of the annual daylight-hours electricity needs of the City of Seoul can be served by distributed solar power systems on a typical day. It is additionally found that considerable peak shaving is possible, lessening the pressure on the city’s electricity grid. These findings can be expected to extend to other large cities when the solar city concept is thoughtfully applied.

Measuring urban polycentrism: a European case study and its implications

Abstract: New models of urban structures have emerged based on the assumption that metropolitan areas are increasingly decentralized, central business districts becoming less important in terms of employment and new subcentres emerging at the edge of cities. This article presents a method of identifying subcentres in suburban areas. This method is then applied to the question of whether subcentres exist on the periphery of medium-sized European cities and, if so, what kind of activities are located there. This is done by empirically describing and explaining the spatial structure of four urban regions in Belgium. Several spatial analysis techniques are used at different levels of data aggregation. Local autocorrelation is particularly appropriate for detecting clusters of employment, while shift-and-share analyses are useful for looking at the developmental trends. We show that, despite an overall trend to decentralization, polycentrism is still weak.

Community Susceptibility and Resiliency to COVID-19 Across the Rural-Urban Continuum in the United States.

Abstract: PURPOSE: This study creates a COVID-19 susceptibility scale at the county level, describes its components, and then assesses the health and socioeconomic resiliency of susceptible places across the rural-urban continuum. METHODS: Factor analysis grouped 11 indicators into 7 distinct susceptibility factors for 3,079 counties in the conterminous United States. Unconditional mean differences are assessed using a multivariate general linear model. Data from 2018 are primarily taken from the US Census Bureau and CDC. RESULTS: About 33% of rural counties are highly susceptible to COVID-19, driven by older and health-compromised populations, and care facilities for the elderly. Major vulnerabilities in rural counties include fewer physicians, lack of mental health services, higher disability, and more uninsured. Poor Internet access limits telemedicine. Lack of social capital and social services may hinder local pandemic recovery. Meat processing facilities drive risk in micropolitan counties. Although metropolitan counties are less susceptible due to healthier and younger populations, about 6% are at risk due to community spread from dense populations. Metropolitan vulnerabilities include minorities at higher health and diabetes risk, language barriers, being a transportation hub that helps spread infection, and acute housing distress. CONCLUSIONS: There is an immediate need to know specific types of susceptibilities and vulnerabilities ahead of time to allow local and state health officials to plan and allocate resources accordingly. In rural areas it is essential to shelter-in-place vulnerable populations, whereas in large metropolitan areas general closure orders are needed to stop community spread. Pandemic response plans should address vulnerabilities.