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.

Patterns of Metropolitan Development: What Have We Learned?

Abstract: Much of our knowledge about metropolitan development is still imperfect, but in the past 35 years a great deal of theoretical and empirical work has been carried out in cities and metropolitan areas in both industrial and developing countries with market-oriented economies. This work has produced empirical findings with remarkably strong regularities across countries and cities. Moreover, many of these empirical regularities are quite consistent with urban location theory and suggest the broad applicability of our basic theory to market-based cities. These regularities offer insights about development and growth pressures in many cities and indicate the directions future development is likely to take. The development pattern of cities in industrial and developing countries with market-based economies exhibit similar patterns of decentralization of both population and employment, with the largest metropolitan areas converging to similarly decentralized structures with multiple subcenters, highly decentralized manufacturing employment, and the central business districts' emerging specialization in service employment. Cities in developing countries typically have higher population densities than those in industrial countries, but the differences have been narrowing over time in the largest metropolitan areas. Decentralization of population and employment increases reliance on road-based transport for both passengers and freight. Industrial countries have experienced decreases in transit use as auto ownership levels have risen. Many developing countries show early signs of a similar pattern, although their transit ridership levels are still high and their transit systems often offer a rich mix of options in terms of vehicle size and level of service. Land markets are strong determinants of decentralization. Cities without land markets exhibit quite different development patterns from cities with even poorly functioning land markets. In market-based cities, land rents are closely related to development densities, although empirical work on land rents and values is relatively rare, for lack of data. Demand patterns in urban housing markets are similar across cities in developing and industrial countries for supply-side impediments vary widely -resulting in a wide range of ratios of housing prices to income. Similarly, the efficiency with which public infrastructure is provided varies widely across cities and across sectors within cities. In the coming decades global urbanization will increase, mostly in low-income countries (which in 1995 contained nearly 60 percent of the world's people). Many of those low-income countries already have large metropolitan areas, whose populations will continue to grow.

The Diffusion of Energy Efficiency in Building

Abstract: Awareness of global warming and the extent of greenhouse gas emissions has focused more attention upon energy efficiency in building. Moreover, the inventory of “green” office space in the U.S. has increased dramatically since the introduction of rating schemes that attest to the energy efficiency or sustainability of commercial buildings. In some metropolitan areas, the supply of certified office buildings has more than doubled in the last decade, and there are a few metropolitan areas where “green” office space now accounts for more than a quarter of the total office stock. In this paper, we analyze the diffusion of buildings certified for energy efficiency across US property markets. Using a panel of 48 metropolitan areas (MSAs) observed over the last 15 years, we trace the diffusion of green building practices across the country. We then model the geographic patterns and dynamics of building certification, relating industry composition, changes in economic conditions, characteristics of the local commercial property market, and the presence of human capital, to the crosssectional variation in energy-efficient building technologies and the diffusion of those technologies over time. Understanding the determinants and the rate at which energyefficient building practices diffuse over space and time is important for designing policies to affect resource consumption in the built environment.