This book is devoted to fill the ‘urban economics niche’ and conceptualize a framework for valuing the urban configuration via local housing market. Advanced network analysis techniques are employed to capture the centrality features hindered in street layout. The author explores the several effects of urban morphology via housing market over two distinct contexts: UK and China. This work will appeal to a wide readership from scholars and practitioner to policy makers within the fields of real estate analysis, urban and regional studies, urban planning, urban design and economic geography.
This powerful new theoretical approach to analyzing urban housing problems and the policies designed to rectify them will be a vital resource for urban planners, developers, policymakers, and economists. The search for the roots of serious urban housing problems such as homelessness, abandonment, rent burdens, slums, and gentrification has traditionally focused on the poorest sector of the housing market. The findings set forth in this volume show that the roots of such problems lie in the relationships among different parts of the market—not solely within the lower-quality portion—though that is where problems are most dramatically manifested and housing reforms are myopically focused. The authors propose a new understanding of the market structure characterized by a closely interrelated array of quality submarkets. Their comprehensive models ground a unified theory that accounts for demand by both renters and owner occupants, supply by owners of existing dwellings, changes in the stock of housing due to conversions and new construction, and interactions across submarkets.
This important work brings together a range of perspectives in contemporary urban analysis. The field of urban analysis is characterized by the multiplicity of approaches, philosophies, and methodologies employed in the examination of urban structure and urban problems. This fragmentation of perspectives is not simply a reflection of the multifaceted and complex nature of the city as subject matter. Nor is it a function of the variety of disciplines such as geography, planning, economics, history, and sociology. Cross-cutting all of these issues and allegiances has been the emergence in recent years of a debate on fundamental issues of philosophy, ideology, and basic assumptions underlying the analysis of urban form and structure. The notion of urban analysis Robert W. Lake discusses focuses on the spatial structure of the city, its causes, and its consequences. At issue is the city as a spatial fact: a built environment with explicit characteristics and spatial dimensions, a spatial distribution of population and land uses, a nexus of locational decisions, an interconnected system of locational advantages and disadvantages, amenities and dis-amenities. Beginning with landmark articles in neo-classical and ecological theory, the reader covers the latest departures and developments. Separate sections cover political approaches to locational conflict, institutional influences on urban form, and recent Marxist approaches to urban analysis. Among the topics included are community strategies in locational conflict, the political economy of place, the role of government and the courts, institutional influences in the housing market, and the relationship between urban form and capitalist development. This is a valuable introductory text for courses in urban planning, urban geography, and urban sociology.
The field of urban economics is built on an analysis of housing prices, land rents, housing consumption, spatial form, and other aspects of urban residential structure. Drawing on the journal publications and teaching notes of Professor John Yinger of Syracuse University, Housing and Commuting: The Theory of Urban Residential Structure presents a simple model of urban residential structure and shows how the model's results change when key assumptions are made more realistic. This book provides a wide-ranging introduction to research on urban residential structure. Topics covered range from theoretical analysis of urban structure with different transportation systems or multiple worksites to empirical work on the impact of local public services on house values and the impact of racial prejudice and discrimination on housing choices. Graduate students and scholars who want to learn about research in urban economics will find this book to be a good starting point.
This book re-examines the role of urban policy and planning in relation to the housing market in an era of global uncertainty and change. The relationship between planning and the housing market is a contested problem across research, policy, and practice. Problems with housing supply and affordability in many nations have been linked to planning system constraints, while the global financial crisis has raised new questions about the role of urban planning regulation and processes in responding to housing market trends. With reference to international cases from the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Hong Kong and Australia, the book examines how different systems of urban planning and governance address complex and dynamic housing market trends. It also offers practical guidance on how urban planning can support an efficient supply of appropriate and affordable homes in preferred locations. A detailed study, which explains and decodes the workings of the planning system and housing market, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of human geography and urban planning, as well as housing policy makers and practitioners. To view Nicole Gurran’s related TEDx talk please visit: Housing Crisis? How about housing solutions. TEDx Sydney 2018 (http://bit.ly/2psfpMw)
Since the start of the twenty-first century, urban communities have faced increasing challenges in housing affordability, with environmental issues causing additional concern. It is clear that changes to urban housing are needed to enhance the resilience of cities and improve the economic, social and physical well-being of residents. This book provides a comparative cross-national perspective on urban housing and sustainability in Europe, exploring the key barriers and drivers associated with sustainable urban development and community regeneration. Country-specific chapters allow for easy comparison, with each summarizing how sustainable housing operates in the country in question, before going on to discuss the key barriers and drivers at play. This book brings a sustainability perspective to the comparative housing literature which frequently fails to integrate the social, economic and environmental pillars of sustainability. The book outlines many of the changes that professionals and residents will need to make to their practices and cultures in order to enhance housing resilience. Students, researchers and professionals with an interest in sustainable housing creation and regeneration will find this book an invaluable reference.
The housing market, like every market, is the product of thousands of interacting buyers and sellers driven by different interests. But unlike other markets, the housing market is able to profoundly transform the socioeconomic structure and the image of a city. Very often, changes in urban space are the result of the imperceptible operation of a multitude of micro-transformations which act with such great energy and decisiveness that they can transform the ‘DNA’ of entire urban neighborhoods. These qualitative novelties, unpredictable and non-deducible on the basis of the previous properties, are defined emergences. Namely emergence means a ‘pattern formation’ characterized by a self-organizing process driven by non-linear dynamics. This book explores housing market emergence in light of three different phenomena: search for housing, social polarization, and gentrification. The book is divided into two parts. The first part presents contributions on modelling emergence of different phenomena, formalised in multi-agent systems. The second part gathers empirical research and analyses aimed at supporting the findings of the models.
An argument that operational urban planning can be improved by the application of the tools of urban economics to the design of regulations and infrastructure. Urban planning is a craft learned through practice. Planners make rapid decisions that have an immediate impact on the ground—the width of streets, the minimum size of land parcels, the heights of buildings. The language they use to describe their objectives is qualitative—“sustainable,” “livable,” “resilient”—often with no link to measurable outcomes. Urban economics, on the other hand, is a quantitative science, based on theories, models, and empirical evidence largely developed in academic settings. In this book, the eminent urban planner Alain Bertaud argues that applying the theories of urban economics to the practice of urban planning would greatly improve both the productivity of cities and the welfare of urban citizens. Bertaud explains that markets provide the indispensable mechanism for cities’ development. He cites the experience of cities without markets for land or labor in pre-reform China and Russia; this “urban planners’ dream” created inefficiencies and waste. Drawing on five decades of urban planning experience in forty cities around the world, Bertaud links cities’ productivity to the size of their labor markets; argues that the design of infrastructure and markets can complement each other; examines the spatial distribution of land prices and densities; stresses the importance of mobility and affordability; and critiques the land use regulations in a number of cities that aim at redesigning existing cities instead of just trying to alleviate clear negative externalities. Bertaud concludes by describing the new role that joint teams of urban planners and economists could play to improve the way cities are managed.
