Comparative statics analysis of a fully closed city

This paper extends the existing comparative statics analysis about open or semiclosed cities, notably that of W. Wheaton [J. Econom. Theor., 9 (2), 223–237 (1974)], to a fully closed city, where urban land rent is redistributed to the city population. Specifically, we examine the effects on changes in exogenous variables, such as population size, agricultural rent, and initial endowments, on endogenous variables such as welfare level, city size, and rent schedule. Most, but not all, of the existing results are reestablished. Surprisingly, it is shown that, in contrast to the existing literature, and perhaps to intuition, the city area may shrink when the city population increases. The paper also extends the existing literature by analyzing the effect of the exogenous variables on the endogenous income and the demand for transportation. It is shown that, under plausible assumptions, the quantity of transportation demanded declines with its price.     

A new interpretation on the optimal density regulations: Closed and open city

Optimality of urban density regulations differs between a closed city and an open city. We demonstrate, by examining optimal floor area ratio (FAR) regulation, how to control building size to mitigate traffic congestion externality in a monocentric city. Results show that a closed city requires not only downward adjustment to the market density at boundary locations using maximum FAR regulation but also upward adjustment at central locations using minimum FAR regulation. On the other hand, an open city requires only the former. The common practice of imposing only maximum FAR regulation is thus insufficient for closed cities although it is effective for open cities.     

An extension of Mohring's model for land rent distribution

In an early paper Herbert Mohring (J. Pol. Econ., 49 (1961)) presented a model for land rent distribution yielding the well-known result that the price of land must fall with the distance from the city center to offset transportation costs. Our paper is an extension of Mohring's model in which we relax some of his drastic simplifying assumptions. This extended model has been incorporated in a method for economic evaluation of city master plans which has been applied to a Swedish city. In this method the interdependence among housing, heating, and transportation, the durability of urban structures, and the uncertainty of future demand are explicitly considered within a cost-benefit approach. Some empirical results from this pilot study concerning land rent distributions are also presented here.     

Job Decentralization with Suburban Housing Discrimination: An Urban Equilibrium Model of Spatial Mismatch

The spatial mismatch hypothesis, with its roots in the work of Kain (1968,Quart. J. Econ.82(2), 175–197), has received much recent attention from empirical researchers. Its basic premise is that differences in job access between black and white workers have contributed to increasing racial inequality in urban labor markets. While the initial evidence was ambiguous, recent studies have established that differences in job accessibility have worsened the labor market outcomes of minority workers. This paper develops an urban equilibrium model which allows for the analysis of the impact of job decentralization and suburban housing discrimination on the welfare of workers in a city.     

The short-run comparative statics of a rental housing market

This paper examines the short-run effects of changes in exogenous variables (including several government policies) on the schedule relating market equilibrium rent to quality level. The basic model differs from Sweeney (Econometrica, 42, 147–167 (1974)) by use of a bid rent closed city approach rather than a supply and demand (partially) open city approach. The mathematics changes completely, the analytics simplify, and the results change somewhat. Housing is treated as a durable quality differentiated good, but frictional forces and the multidimensionality of the housing package are ignored. The exception is an extension to a monocentric city context, so that housing units vary in both quality and location.     

THE SINO-BRITISH JOINT DECLARATION, 1997, AND THE LAND MARKET OF HONG KONG*

In September, 1984, Britain and China concluded the Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong. The Joint Declaration guarantees the continual practice of capitalism and a high degree of autonomy for Hong Kong for a period of 50 years after 1997. It helped to rebuild confidence and caused property prices to rise. However, Annex HI of the Joint Declaration places severe restraints on the present government, limiting its ability to respond to market trends and generate funds from land sales. This paper seeks to look at some of these effects. It is argued that there is very little room for the present government to maneouvre and that even now the constraints imposed by the Joint Declaration are affecting the land market in Hong Kong. Higher land prices, a slower rate of horizontal expansion of the city and a greater intensity of land use are likely consequences of the newly imposed contraints. The recent emphasis on inner city development and redevelopment vis-a-vis a new town development strategy is in part attributable to the Joint Declaration.     

Urban Ecological Enclosures: Conservation Planning,Peri-urban Displacement,and Local State Formations in China

Across contemporary China, city governments are unevenly territorializing peri-urban villagers’ land and housing by creating new urban ecological conservation sites. I analyze this emerging form of what I call ‘ecological territorialization’ through three interrelated spatial practices: comprehensive urban–rural planning, peri-urban ‘ecological migration’, and the distribution of institutional responsibility for conservation site financing, construction and management. Detailing this triad of territorializing practices renews attention to the relationship between conservation classifications that justify state intervention, uneven displacements of people from rural land and housing, and site-specific capitalizations that collectively consolidate urban government control over rural spaces. These practices emerge stochastically as state, private, and semi-state institutions capitalize on conservation projects in the context of legally and constitutionally underdefined land use rights and ecological land designations. In the current post-socialist moment of urban ‘greening’, these practices are key to producing frontiers of land-based accumulation and extending local state control across the peri-urban fringe. Urban ecological enclosures not only remake city-level state power but also shape rural people's relationships to land, labor and housing.     

Accessing the Urban Commons Through the Mediation of Information: The Eliana Silva Occupation,Belo Horizonte,Brazil

This essay demonstrates how mediations (called Dialogues) between the University of Belo Horizonte and the residents of the Eliana Silva Occupation in that city have secured not only the right to urban land and constitutional rights that have been historically violated in Brazil, but also the right to that which is of common interest. The essay speaks to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's contention that what is common goes far beyond the provision of public services. This starting point allows us to see that urban occupations are politically empowered, to the extent that poor people consciously violate the Brazilian law governing the right of possession and ownership over urban land through creative and cooperative actions that are undertaken and extended across networks. This essay will focus on the centrality of the struggle to build a common communication platform serving to nourish social ties and sociability among those social actors who share the same human deprivation—lack of access to what should be widely available to all citizens. On the theoretical side, the essay takes Pierre Bourdieu, Bruno Latour and Milton Santos as its guides to understanding how social actors act in the struggle for socio‐spatial coexistence and urbanity.     

Book Review Essay

Book reviewed in this article: Urban change and conflict: Open University 1982: Urban change and conflict (Course D202). Block 1 The urban perspective : Unit 1 The capitalist city (R. Mellor), Unit 2 Images of the city: their impact upon policy (R. Mellor), Unit 3/4 The scope of urban studies in social science (P. Dun-leavy). Block 2 Market processes I: forces in urban and regional development : Unit 5 City development in a hinterland (M. Bateman), Unit 6 Migration and urban change (R. Wilson), Unit 7 The emergence of a system of cities (C. Brook), Unit 8 The evolving metropolitan area (N. Spence). Block 3 Market processes II: the internal structure of the city : Unit 9 Urban land use and the property development industry (B. Colenutt and C. Hamnett), Unit 10 Industry and employment in urban areas (W. Lever), Unit 11 City centres: condemned or reprieved? (P. Daniels), Unit 12 Urban housing markets (L. McDowell). Block 4 Conflict and stability in urban society : Unit 13 Class, status, location and lifestyle (L. McDowell), Unit 14 Community and the city (A. Cochrane), Unit 15 Race, ethnicity and urban change (C. Lambert and J. Lambert), Unit 16 Is there an urban crisis? (A. Cochrane), Unit 17 Urban government and public services (K. Newton), Unit 18 Political issues and urban policy making (P. Dunleavy). Block 5 State intervention I: planning and market processes : Unit 19 The British planning system (E. Reade), Unit 20 Finance and planning in land and property development (A. Blowers), Unit 21 Regional planning (C. Brook), Unit 22 Local planning (J. Raine), Unit 23 The effects of town and country planning in Britain (E. Reade). Block 6 State intervention II: urban public services and state investment : Unit 24 The state and collective consumption (C. Pickvance), Unit 25 The state as investor (P. Saunders), Unit 26 Public housing (P. Dunleavy), Unit 27 The transport policy crisis (S. Potter), Unit 28a The new town experience (S. Potter and R. Thomas), Unit 28b The inner-city crisis (M. Loney).     

Lively Lands: The Spatial Reproduction Squeeze and the Failure of the Urban Imaginary

This article argues that the theoretical invisibility of non-privatized land tenures constitutes a failure of the urban imaginary, which restricts the ability to forge less commodified urban futures. The article explicates two attributes of non-privatized land—fungibility and combinatoriality—that produce an urban land nexus capable of fostering pro-poor agglomeration economies and generating socialities that exceed the model of the separative self that is hegemonic in more propertied settings. Fungibility, it shows, externalizes supportive economies of production and reproduction into surrounding neighborhoods by shifting the boundaries and terms of usufruct without cadastral oversight or regulation. Combinatoriality—a hybrid formulation of combined territories and combined territorialities—describes overlapping forms of access to land or demarcations of legitimate land use, either competitive or reciprocal. Together, these two attributes of non-privatized land systems produce a propinquity requirement for economic production, or a social density and liveliness more limited in privatized land markets. Through a diagnostic analogy with the simple reproduction squeeze characteristic of subsistence agrarian settings, it charts how an urban spatial reproduction squeeze—felt globally in dense, rising-rent environments across the global North and South—generates subsistence needs that mixed-tenure environments are uniquely capable of fulfilling and that can provide inspiration for radical housing struggles elsewhere.     

Sister Communities: Rejecting Labels of Informality and Peripherality in Vanuatu

Some labels have dire consequences. This article takes issue with the labels commonly used to describe the physical and social location of communities living on the edge of Port Vila, Vanuatu—labels that position communities for eviction by entrenching tropes of informality and peripherality into how they are seen and represented. Such terms include informal, settlement, informal settlement, squatter and peri-urban. Based on interviews with around 100 people and two years of ethnographic engagement with urban communities in Port Vila, Vanuatu, I critique the language of policy against the lived experience of those at the urban edge. I use Bourdieu's articulation of power as an accumulation of symbolic capital that enables one to speak the world into being. I conclude that the language of policies and plans is reflective of a dominant discourse in urban studies and international aid, and non-reflective of the experience and identities of people living at the urban edge. My interviewees and interlocutors maintain their identities as sister communities—as places grounded in the formality of customary tenure, and as part of the city rather than outside it.     

On Modernizing Local Public Finance

Abstract . Urban economists tend to agree that land value taxation is both equitable and efficient. Then why won't American urban areas reform their property taxes into a land value tax? One explanation may be that the climate of opinion is that the taxation of wealth is wrong. This may be another of the legacies of the Great Depression. In the 20 years preceding, levels of property taxation increased very substantially; this was associated with rapid urbanization and big increases in public expenditures. Even with the collapse of property values urban governments extended expenditures and hence taxes on real property—as they did again with inflation in the 1970s. But in the 70s residents were predominantly owner-occupants—a result of counter depression policy. Their hostility to taxing unrealized capital gains is the obstacle advocates of land value taxation have to overcome.     

从"城市蔓延"到"理性增长"——美国土地利用方式之转变

从美国郊区化与城市蔓延的典型特征入手,简要回顾了理性增长产生的背景.在此基础上,从内城贫困、居住隔离、空间失衡和公正健康四个层面分析了城市蔓延引发的社会及经济后果.随后就若干论点介绍了城市蔓延与理性增长之间的理论之争.最后借鉴美国经验教训,对我国城市化道路和土地利用模式展开思考,认为要转变方式,树立科学的区域发展观;借鉴西方城市健康的分析框架,努力探索"健康城市规划";充分发挥规划政策在应对城市土地利用问题的综合调控作用;公平公正,追求社会稳定和谐,发挥政府力量对市场扭曲的矫正作用.     

Congestion,agglomeration, and the structure of cities

Congestion costs in urban areas are significant and clearly represent a negative externality. Nonetheless, economists also recognize the production advantages of urban density in the form of positive agglomeration externalities. The long-run equilibrium outcomes in economies with multiple correlated but offsetting externalities have yet to be fully explored in the literature. Therefore, I develop a spatial equilibrium model of urban structure that includes both congestion costs and agglomeration externalities. I then estimate the structural parameters of the model using a computational algorithm to match the spatial distribution of employment, population, land use, land rents, and commute times in the data. Policy simulations based on the estimates suggest that congestion pricing may have ambiguous consequences for economic welfare.     

Beyond a Liberal Critique of ‘Trickle Down': Urban Planning in the City of Malmö

This article scrutinizes the much used, but less examined, concept of ‘trickle down' in an urban setting. We make a distinction between the production of and distribution in the city, and argue that trickle down in contemporary urban policy could be regarded as the liberal link between production and distribution. Based on interviews with key figures and document analyses, we look at the transformation of the Swedish city of Malmö from an industrial to a post‐industrial city, where, during the last two decades, we have found three concurrent components: the ideology of trickle down; several urban policy programs and governmental policies to ‘make' money and resources trickle down; as well as increased economic polarization and segregation. A liberal critique of trickle down would argue that market mechanisms cannot by themselves solve distribution, and that government policies therefore are needed. We argue for the need to go beyond a liberal critique of trickle down and stress how unequal distribution is built into the unequal production of the city.     

Grounded Speculations on Theories of the City and the City of Theory

Books reviewed in this article: G. LeClerc, R. Villa and M. Dear, (eds.) La vida Latina en L.A.: urban Latino cultures M. Featherstone, and S. Lash (eds.) Spaces of culture: city — nation — world M. Dear, The postmodern urban condition B. Meyer, and P. Geschiere (eds.) Globalization and identity: dialectics of flow and closure S. Lash, Another modernity, a different rationality R. Beauregard, and S. Body‐Gendrot (eds.) The urban moment: cosmopolitanessays of the late‐20th‐century city     

谈当前中国城市发展中的一些问题

盲目大城市化的后果是土地利用率低下,过度超前的基础设施闲置,城市人气不足,经济效益不显著.把旧城改造简单地演变为城市重建或新建,其后果是破坏城市历史文脉、割断城市发展机理、丢弃原有城市特色.为了遏制住宅住房价格的非理性上涨,有必要改革现行的土地使用管理制度.城市政府必须采取有效措施,使每一个城市居民都能够得到必要的住房,不能由于少数人把住房用于投资或投机.而影响、妨碍弱势群体居住的权利.     

Land Pooling for Resubdivision and New Subdivision in Western Australia

Abstract . Land pooling is a technique for the unified subdivision of separate private landholdings in urban-fringe areas. Pooling projects are self-financing and the costs and profits of each project are shared between the participating landowners. It provides local governments with a powerful tool for implementing their municipal land use plans and for ensuring an adequate supply of urban land. Local governments in Western Australia began using land pooling in 1951, first to redesign and service old, undeveloped subdivision estates (development projects), then to install special infrastructure works in new suburban areas, and later for the progressive development of their municipalities. By 1982 a total of 56 pooling projects ranging from 1.5 to 250 hectares had been undertaken in metropolitan Perth. The technique and its use in the state of Western Australia are described and discussed and improvements 3re proposed. A case history of a typical pooling project is presented in the appendix. The West Australian experience shows that land pooling could be adopted to improve urban development and land supply for housing in the U.S.A. and Canada, and in other mixed-economy countries.     

Is This What The Democratic City Looks Like? Local Democracy,Housing Rights and Homeownership in the Portuguese Context

This article analyses the creation of a normative framework for the democratic city during the regime change in Portugal in 1975—the answers that were given to the question, ‘What should a city be like in a democratic regime?’ While I critically discuss post‐democracy and its use of post‐foundational contributions, I review the post‐revolution Portuguese constitutional debate, contending that the call for democratization brought by urban popular organizations was answered with a political compromise that exchanged expectations of a participatory city for a commitment to a social rights city, enhanced with a promise of homeownership for urban popular segments. In light of this, in this article I question post‐democratic proposals, arguing that when this approach implicitly establishes equivalence between democracy and ‘the political’, it has difficulties in interpreting how the grammar of democracy is ‘organized’ in conflictual and contingent processes of democratic institutionalization. As an alternative, I contend that a critical debate concerning democracy and the urban must address how democratic expectations of emancipation have been translated into institutions and rights through interwoven and situated processes of politicization and depoliticization that allow both politicization of the urban and the production of consent .     

The energy implications of city size and density

This paper develops a new open-city urban simulation model capable of showing the urban form and energy consumption effects of variation in city size. The model is able to consider city size differences caused by wage and amenity differentials, both with and without housing and land use regulation. The surprising conclusion is that per-capita energy use is relatively invariant to city size when growth is driven by wages but falls modestly with growth induced by rising amenity. Common land use policies, specifically density limits and greenbelts, can positively or negatively affect both city welfare and energy use.