Land use externalities, open space preservation, and urban sprawl

Parcel data on residential land conversion are used to investigate how land use externalities influence the rate of development and modify policies designed to manage urban growth and preserve open space. Several “smart growth” policies are found to significantly influence land conversion, including a development clustering policy that concentrates development and generates preserved open space. In addition to directly affecting a parcel's hazard rate of conversion, this policy is found to affect neighboring parcels' conversion by generating a positive open space externality that hastens their development. The implication that the clustering policy could generate a more sprawled pattern of development is explored using spatial simulation.     

Mapping walkability. A subjective value theory approach

The analysis of urban walkability has been extensively explored in the last decades. Despite this growing attention, there is a lack of studies attentive on how citizens' values, individual abilities and urban environment favour or hinder the propensity to walk. Hence, there is a need to explore how preferences and values of citizens vary in space in order to design walkability policies able to improve the capability set of citizens. In this perspective, the design of spatial decision tools aimed to plann public policies for the development of walkable cities needs further investigation. We propose a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) method aimed to elaborate walkability decision maps for different groups of citizens that reflect their capability to walk in the urban environment. We tested the method in the city of Alghero (Italy). First, we analysed walkability under a normative model named CAWS; then we made a survey with 358 participants in order to study the driving values that influence their choice to walk and finalised to build an evaluation model attentive to individual differences. Cluster analysis was employed to group citizens into 11 groups based on their sociodemographic characteristics and preferences on spatial criteria of walkability. Finally, by integrating GIS with MCDA we built a set of decision maps representative of the walkability of the 11 groups of citizens. Results highlight the importance of citizens’ values for policy design, allow the interpersonal comparison among individuals and group preferences and give new suggestions for the formulation of walkability oriented urban policies. Moreover, the results confirm the usability of the general method as a decision support tool supporting the design of urban policies.     

Urban Operating Systems: Diagramming the City

A set of software/hardware packages developed by IT companies for the urban market is transforming the way in which cities are imagined and configured. These urban operating systems (Urban OS) embody important presumptions about what constitutes appropriate knowledge and forms of decision making, pointing to how novel forms of ‘smart' or ‘computational' urbanism may govern urban life. Arguing that an analysis of the interface between the urban and IT requires a broader historical and theoretical perspective, the article traces the ways in which the city has been diagrammed as a space of power since the nineteenth century and highlights the antecedents of Urban OS present across different domains of life—particularly in military and corporate enterprises. Relaying the urban as an efficient logistical enterprise, and operating as a piloting device (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), the Urban OS appears as an emerging urban diagram introducing an informational diagrammatic of control. We focus on five archetypal framings of how Urban OS envision the city, illustrating how a new corporate rationality of control based on functional simplification and heterogeneous reintegration seeks to take hold in the city (via re‐engineering, agility, modularity, flexibility and configurability).     

The Nature of Urban Land

A bstract . Considerations about land interpose into almost every aspect of urban life. They may not be the only factor determining a city's well-being but appropriate land policies are necessary to bring about prosperity and equity. Contemporary accounts of the 'urban crisis' and of urban problems reveal the pervasiveness of land issues. Use of one urban land parcel has bearing on the usability of neighboring sites, which makes land a community resource. Urban land may be defined as land used or expected to be used for urban activities. Its attributes include location, space, property, clustering, heterogeneity and immobility and indestructibility. Neo-classical theorists, by stressing accessibility and ignoring externalities and other attributes of land, achieved only an unrealistic understanding of it. Most land economists are institutionalists , their theory encompassing long-validated concepts about the nature of land. The neo-Marxian approach has many points of congruence with the institutionalist one. Empirically investigated, urban land is found to be different from economic goods and hence its production, allocation and disposition must proceed at least like other public goods.     

Sequential Decision-making in Interdependent Sectors with Multiobjective Inoperability Decision Trees: Application to Biofuel Subsidy Analysis

Decision-making involving large-scale systems often involves considerations for temporal changes, interdependencies in organizational structures, multiple competing objectives, and risk and uncertainty, among others. In this paper we develop a risk-based methodology, the Multiobjective Inoperability Decision Tree (MOIDT). It integrates several dimensions of decision-making processes associated with interconnected systems in terms of: (i) evaluation of sequential policies; (ii) analysis of interdependencies; (iii) treatment of multiple objectives and their tradeoffs; and (iv) characterization of uncertainties. To demonstrate the integration of these four components, we present a case study to analyze the impact of government policies towards mass-scale biofuel production. Using a multi-period decision framework, the analysis utilizes economic input–output data to model the probabilistic demand adjustments for sectors that will likely be affected by biofuel policies.     

Defensible Space on the Move: Revisiting the Urban Geography of Alice Coleman

This article traces the movement of the concept of ‘defensible space’ from New York City in the 1970s, where it was developed by the Canadian architect/planner Oscar Newman, to London in the 1980s and into design interventions in British public housing in the 1990s, through British geographer Alice Coleman, who acted as an especially powerful transfer agent. In focusing on this urban design ‘concept’ on the move we contribute to existing scholarship on policy mobility and city building in a number of ways. First, we explore an instance of the movement/mobility of a planning concept in a historical period (the recent past) largely overlooked to date. Secondly, we demonstrate that this movement was the result of a disaggregated series of expert knowledge transfers and localized translations of pre‐policy expert knowledge, generated through university‐based research work and networks. We theorize this instance of urban planning mobility by way of the interlinked insights offered by the sociology of science and policy‐mobilities literatures. As this is an instance of university research shaping public policy it also offers an opportunity to reflect upon the meaning of ‘evidence‐based policy’ and the impact agenda in contemporary higher education.     

Rethinking Urban Epidemiology: Natures,Networks and Materialities

How should we understand the relationship between urban environments and infectious diseases? This article addresses this question from three particular perspectives: that of the materialities of health, that of nature and that of networks. The first perspective analytically blends biological dynamics, environmental influence and social practice. The second perspective, mainly influenced by multispecies ethnographies, foregrounds the liveliness and unboundedness of cities. Finally, the third perspective analyses how health is drawn into the domain of security. The article argues that while globalization and urbanization are often discussed as having triggered the emergence and spread of pathogens, urban epidemics are not self‐evident and ‘natural' consequences of these pro‐cesses. They do not fall neatly into universal categories of space, modernity or risk; rather, they are produced and shaped by a range of social, political, biological and economic sites and scales. Accordingly, the emergence of pathogens depends on its articulation through specific analytical frameworks. This article suggests that a critical focus on how infectious diseases manifest themselves differently in different local contexts may not only provide insights into the manifold forms of urban life, but also into the multiple, complex and highly political constitution of health.     

The opportunity costs of commuting: the value of a commuting satellite account framework with an example from Lisbon Metropolitan Area*

Commuting affects regional and urban economies. It shapes urban areas, defines their relationships with neighboring regions, intensifies economic flows and exacerbates energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper sets out a proposal for an innovative commuting satellite account (CSA), integrated in a multi-regional input–output model. This framework combines commuting activities with regional distribution of income, distinct household consumption structures, real estate renting activities and the energy consumption and environmental flows incorporated in the different industries. To assess the opportunity costs of commuting, the CSA framework is applied to the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. The socio-economic-environmental impacts of a scenario in which commuters become non-commuters by moving their residence to the municipality in which they work are estimated. The analysis indicates that: commuting, in general, induces significant economic and environmental opportunity costs. Finally, the adoption of policy-oriented recommendations contributing to limit sprawling in metropolitan regions is discussed.     

The effects of higher education policy on the location decision of individuals: Evidence from Florida's Bright Futures Scholarship Program

Over the past two decades, numerous states have adopted merit-based aid programs to subsidize higher education for in-state students. One of the main objectives of these programs is to increase the stock of educated labor in the state by retaining those whose education is subsidized. This study provides evidence on the extent to which such a program in Florida has affected the location decision of college-educated Florida natives. The analysis utilizes a difference-in-difference approach and data from the Census and American Community Survey (ACS). The results indicate that those eligible for the program are significantly more likely to locate in Florida after completing their education than those who were not eligible. These results are robust to a number of alternative specifications, including a comparison with neighboring states.     

Practicing Openness: Investigating the Role of Everyday Decision Making in the Production of Squatted Space

By means of illegal occupation, squatters produce (urban) space. Previous studies have predominantly focused on the external dimensions of this process (e.g. squatters' negotiations with authorities), while the few studies that have analyzed the internal processes of producing squatted space have mainly focused on formal and explicit decision‐making processes. The effect of everyday practices and improvised decision making on the production of squatted space, however, has been overlooked. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature. It draws on five months of ethnographic fieldwork in two ‘entrepreneurial squats' (in the Netherlands and France) to analyze how, on an everyday practical level, squatters seek to reconcile a frame that advocates ‘open space' with contradictory practical or emotional needs. It finds that squatters regulate the openness of the spaces they occupy by putting into place spatial, temporal and social boundaries that define who and what is more or less in place. Based on a level of personal or ideological identification, then, the squatters establish a sense of community, distinguish between desirable and undesirable activities and create spatial meaning.     

Income taxes and urban spatial structure

This paper examines the impact of an income tax in a monocentric city where households equilibriate their allocation of time between work, commuting, and leisure. An increase in the income tax rate lowers the implicit value of time, and hence transportation costs. “Compensated equilibrium” comparative statics analysis shows that under certain conditions, this results in a larger, more dispersed urban area, with lower land rents at the city center and less population within any given distance from the center. The welfare effect of an income tax rate change is also studied, and an expression for the marginal excess burden is derived. The income tax produces welfare losses both because it induces substitution in favor of leisure and in favor of travel—the latter accompanied by excessive spatial dispersion and consumption of space. The marginal excess burden depends not only on the compensated demand elasticity for leisure, but also on that for space. Finally, the problem of benefit measurement for transportation projects in this tax-distorted spatial economy is examined. Benefit measures should be deflated to adjust for the fact that further transportation improvements lead to reduction of land use intensity, exacerbating the problem of spatial resource misallocation in an already excessively dispersed urban area.     

大学与社区互动机制及其对城市规划的启示

分析了大学成长与社区发展互动关系的模式与机制,阐述了这种互动机制的特征及其对城市空间的影响与重构,针对当前存在的一些问题,探讨了在城市规划中如何充分考虑与利用这种互动机制,对其进行合理引导与促进,并尝试在城市规划和相关规划中引入校园-社区界面的规划理念,以利于校园和社区的共同发展.     

Initial Shelf Space Considerations at New Grocery Stores: An Allocation Problem With Product Switching and Substitution

Managing limited display areas is an increasingly challenging task in the grocery retail industry, especially given the current high levels of product proliferation. The decision of how to best allocate and manage shelf space is critical to grocery retail profitability. Moreover, this decision is escalated for initial shelf space considerations at new grocery stores. Without loss to generality, this paper presents a new approach to the shelf space allocation problem that could be applied to new grocery stores for determining their initial shelf space consideration by incorporating consumer behavior actions based on the consumer’s decision process.     

High-speed rail network and urban agglomeration economies: Research from the perspective of urban network externalities

High-speed rail (HSR) has greatly promoted cross-regional economic activities, but few studies have been conducted from the perspective of urban network externalities (UNEs). Based on data from China from 2008 to 2019, this paper constructs an HSR operation network model to study the impact of the network position (NP) on urban agglomeration economies (UAEs) by jointly employing network and econometric analysis methods. The findings suggest the following: (1) Improvements to NP significantly enhance UAEs. Improving the comprehensive NP by 1% will increase urban output per capita by 193.5–226.8 RMB. The findings hold under several robustness tests. (2) The NP's facilitation of growth in UAEs is reflected mainly in national core cities, while the impact of peripheral cities reflects a “∽-shaped” curve as their distance from each nearest neighboring core city changes. (3) From the temporal-dynamic perspective, the NP's impact on UAEs appeared one year before the HSR line was opened and was fully realized three years after the opening of the HSR. (4) Investment agglomeration and expansions in borrowed size are the main mediating mechanisms whereby NP facilitates UAEs.     

Are poultry farmers willing to insure their farms? Empirical evidence from Ghana

The inherent risks in poultry business require that farmers insure their farms to relief them when they occur. This paper investigated the willingness of poultry farmers to insure their farms, using probit model. Primary data were collected from 180 farmers in two regions of Ghana. The factors that are more likely to influence poultry farmers' decision to insure their farms are credit access, diversification of income, tying insurance to technology, subsidizing insurance premium, and designing insurance to suit risk. Poultry insurance should be designed to suit risk faced by farmers, subsidized by government, and bundled with credit for uptake.     

企业员工培训流失风险分析与控制

"为他人作嫁衣裳"是企业培训工作的一种典型风险,让众多企业陷入员工培训的两难选择。从培训期望收益的角度出发,企业是否培训员工的决策,取决于受训员工的跳槽决策和其他企业的培训决策选择。员工跳槽率的高低是影响企业培训收益的主要因素,企业只要通过构建有效的"一个平台+两项制度+两项技术"的风险控制系统,控制员工流失风险,就可能从员工培训中实现预期收益。     

旧城改造与新区建设比较研究——基于政府视角

文章分析了在城市土地利用允许建新区的情况下,旧城改造与新区建设中相关主体的成本与收益,并对相关主体的成本与收益进行比较.政府作为城市的经营者和管理者,是旧城改造与新区建设的决定者及相关政策的制定者,其决策的决定主要取决于政府的成本收益,进而从博弈论的角度分析得出政府热衷建新区的结论.如何改变这种状况,需要由城市管理向城...     

The relationship between the migration experience and risk perception: A factor in the decision to become an entrepreneur

This study examines the proposition that the migration experience influences perceptions of risk and, as such, the ‘migrant condition’ is a factor in explaining relatively high rates of entrepreneurship among immigrants in many host countries. The study analyses data obtained from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Spain 2009 Survey with regard to perceptions of risk in beginning a new venture. The study finds that immigrants to Spain, irrespective of their origin or ethnicity, are less likely than native Spaniards to perceive business creation as a risky situation. Moreover, the findings suggest that the perception of risk has a significant impact on the decision to engage in business start-up activity.     

‘Chained to my work'? Strategies to manage temporal and physical boundaries among self‐employed teleworkers

It is accepted that teleworkers generally manage the balance between their home and working lives by establishing temporal and physical boundaries between the two along a continuum of role integration–segmentation. What is less understood is the nature of the relationship between temporal and physical boundaries, and how teleworkers control constituent elements of physical boundaries to secure their preferred location along the continuum. Based on 20 interviews with self‐employed teleworkers, this article examines the ways in which successful control of time depends largely on the successful control of space. It investigates in particular how teleworkers attempt to control space by breaking it down into constituent elements involving equipment, activities and ambiance.     

从分工视角解读城市产业空间结构的演变机理

城市产业空间结构是城市经济结构的表现形式,是城市空间结构最为核心的内容,它的演变历程是城市成长变迁的历程,其演变机理也折射出城市发展的内在动力。以分工为切入点,对产业成长和生产组织结构的演变以及其在空间上的表现———城市经济结构的变迁进行研究。撇开各行业的特殊性,将各个产业的区位选择联系起来,在一个统一的框架内研究城市各产业的区位选择及变迁,揭示城市产业空间结构演变的本质和机理,并分析其所体现出的普遍性规律。认为在分工深化的过程中,随着企业功能的不断分化,不同功能之间的联系成本决定了功能空间的结合或分离,联系成本和区位成本共同构成了企业的空间成本,而企业的区位决策即是要寻求空间成本的最小化。