Population and employment densities: structure and change

"We examine spatial patterns and their changes during the 1970s for the Los Angeles region, by estimating monocentric and polycentric density functions for employment and population. Downtown Los Angeles is clearly identified as the statistical monocentric center of the region, and it is the most consistently strong center in the polycentric patterns. Polycentric models fit statistically better than monocentric models, and there was some shift in employment distribution toward a more polycentric pattern. These findings verify the existence of polycentricity in Los Angeles and demonstrate for the first time that employment and especially population follow a polycentric pattern based on exogenously defined employment centers. The results confirm that both employment and population became more dispersed during the 1970s."     

SPATIAL INTEGRATION OF URBAN WATER SERVICES AND ECONOMIES OF SCALE

This research attempts to analyze economic effects of spatial integration of urban water service markets in Korea, employing the notion of economies of scale in terms of cost-effectiveness. The economies of scale are measured by the elasticity of supply with respect to the production cost from the translog cost function of urban water supply enterprises. It was found that the economies of scale in most urban water utility firms of Seoul Metropolitan region have continuously increased during the period 1989–1994. While the economies of scale would be hardly influenced by the changes in population density, they would tend to decrease marginally in response to the rise in employment density. If the urban water markets of the Seoul Metropolitan Region were consolidated into a single water service market without any changes to the current spatial network of water supply and regional economic attributes, the production cost would be reduced up to 47.1 percent of the actual cost in 1994. Those savings would be enough to make up for the financial deficit of the water production of the Seoul Metropolitan Region.     

The topography of metropolitan employment: Identifying centers of employment in a polycentric urban area

While it is well recognized that US metropolitan areas are polycentric, there is little consensus as to the appropriate method for identifying concentrations of employment within them. Existing methods suffer from strong assumptions about parametric form, misspecification, or reliance on local knowledge to calibrate model parameters. This paper introduces a new nonparametric method for identifying subcenters. Results indicate that this, more flexible, nonparametric approach yields greater accuracy with regard to both urban and suburban centers compared with other approaches. This approach should provide better data for the numerous topics that depend on the spatial accounting of employment within metropolitan areas.     

HUMAN CAPITAL AND URBAN GROWTH IN ITALY, 1981–2001

Over the last decades of the XX century, human capital has emerged as a critical source of agglomeration economies fueling urban growth in advanced economies. Focusing on the Italian case, this paper assesses the contribution of human capital to urban growth, the latter gauged by employment growth between 1981 and 2001. A 10% higher share of college‐educated residents prompted a higher growth in employment in the 0.5–2.2% range. These results hold controlling for a wide set of urban characteristics and using an instrumental variable approach. By exploiting a spatial localization model, we disentangle the estimated effect into two components related to higher productivity and to higher life quality, respectively. We found that the former contributed to more than 60% of the effect at municipal level, and to over 90% at the wider local labor market level.     

首尔的扩张与韩国的城市发展政策

分析了20世纪60年代以来韩国首尔和首尔都市区快速增长的驱动力,回顾了韩国政府的城市增长管理政策,并通过比较数据评析其政策成效.研究韩国的城市增长经验教训,可以为其他快速增长的国家和城市提供有益的启示.     

Spatial mismatch: An equilibrium analysis

The spatial mismatch hypothesis, first stated by Kain (1968) argues that job decentralization in US cities has contributed to low incomes and high unemployment rates for black Americans. Decentralization relocates job sites to white suburban communities far from the CBD, and housing segregation prevents blacks from relocating their residences near the new workplaces. The purpose of the paper is to analyze an urban equilibrium with spatial mismatch. Despite the existence of a suburban employment center, blacks in the model are forced to live in the central zone they occupied in the original monocentric city, commuting across the white residential area to access suburban jobs. This ‘mismatch’ equilibrium is contrasted with an unrestricted equilibrium where blacks are free to locate wherever they choose.     

Spatial changes in labour market inequality

We study spatial changes in labour market inequality for US states and MSAs using Census and American Community Survey data between 1980 and 2010. We report evidence of significant spatial variations in education employment shares and in the college wage premium for US states and MSAs, and show that the pattern of shifts through time has resulted in increased spatial inequality. Because relative supply of college versus high school educated workers has risen faster at the spatial level in places with higher initial supply levels, we also report a strong persistence and increased inequality of spatial relative demand. Bigger relative demand increases are observed in more technologically advanced states that have experienced faster increases in R&D and computer usage, and in states where union decline has been fastest. Finally, we show the increased concentration of more educated workers into particular spatial locations and rising spatial wage inequality are important features of labour market polarization, as they have resulted in faster employment growth in high skill occupations, but also in a higher demand for low wage workers in low skill occupations. Overall, our spatial analysis complements research findings from labour economics on wage inequality trends and from urban economics on agglomeration effects connected to education and technology.     

经济适用房空间布局分析——以北京市为例

经济适用房的建设和布局对城市空间结构和居住者出行具有重要影响。首先采用Kernel密度估计方法计算了北京不同时期经济适用房在不同空间上的建设规模密度,分析其空间布局特征;其次,从经济适用房与地价、交通和主要就业地的相互关系分析经济适用房空间布局的演变。研究表明,北京经济适用房空间布局经历了逐步调整的过程,前期主要分布在城市北部城乡结合地带,后期考虑居民交通出行和到工作地方便等因素,在城市四周较均匀的配置和建设。总体来说,北京市经济适用住房基本分布在城市郊区,就业地与居住地相距较远的矛盾依然突出。建议今后经济适用房空间布局应更加注重主要就业地和居民交通出行的最佳匹配。     

THE REGIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF U.S. BUSINESS SERVICES GROWTH, 1977–1987: EVIDENCE AND POLICY IMPLICATIONS

Regional analysts and policy makers have long struggled with problems arising from the uneven development of industrial systems. Most efforts have focused on manufacturing even though the business services sector continues to gain importance as a source of employment. This paper provides rigorous analyses of the regional organization of business services employment growth in the United States and discusses some implications of regionalism for the development of industrial policy. The analyses use chi-square goodness-of-fit tests and spatial statistics to examine regional structure. State-level employment data in ten business service industries for two periods, 1977–1982 and 1982–1987, are used in the analyses. The results show that although employment growth varies across the United States, it does not exhibit consistent regional organization. Instead, growth is organized more around metropolitan complexes. The lack of regional organization suggests that industrial policy should focus on the urban concentration of growth, telecommunications infrastructure and urban-rural linkages.     

Firm suburbanization and urban subcenters

The theory of firm location within an urban area is extended to consider a city in which firms can export their output via a suburban terminal as well as via the usual CBD terminal. Firms benefit from suburbanization since freight transport costs are reduced and since they can pay lower wages, but labor may be scarce in the suburbs. This forces suburban firms to readjust their wages, causing some workers to out-commute and giving all workers an incentive to relocate. The existence of an employment subcenter under labor scarcity conditions is shown to cause household utility levels to rise, the size of the metropolitan area to increase, and overall urban land value to change indeterminately. Finally, determination of the optimal location for a suburban terminal is considered.     

就业与居住的空间匹配——基于城市经济学角度的思考

城市发展中就业与居住的空间匹配问题是国际上城市空间结构研究的前沿课题.综述了就业与居住空间关系的城市经济学基本理论,并对国际学术界有关本问题的研究思路和成果进行了系统的归纳总结,从中提炼关键的科学问题,并结合目前我国城市中就业和居住空间分布演变的现状,提出进一步研究的前景和方向.     

Commercial Real Estate Capital in the Restructuring of Downtown Baltimore

Along with the suburbanization and international division of labor, downtown Baltimore has been declining as a center of commerce in Maryland since the beginning of the 20th century. Government-led interventions have intended to stop vicious cycles of the city towards a despairing state, in the context that deconcentration of service jobs seemed irreversible due to the arrival of an "auto-air-amenity epoch." However, in an uncertain time when the city is undergoing restructuring, commercial real estate capital, playing a determinant role in shaping urban landscape, has contributed significantly to the formation of uneven temporal and spatial urban development. This paper finds that the rising of new premier waterfront locations for offices created by high-order capital precipitates the falling of the old Baltimore CBD, and thereby polarizes downtown Baltimore.     

城市公共服务设施空间分布分异调查——以广州市为例

社会经济体制综合转型以来,市场机制逐步取代行政命令成为我国城市公共服务设施配置的主体方式,其空间分布形态也由空间均衡趋向社会分异。以广州市为例,基于3954份有效问卷和城市公共服务设施专项调查数据,对城市公共服务设施的空间分布进行了社会生态学分析。研究结果表明,广州城市公共服务设施空间分布的社会分异特征显著,中心城区116个街镇单元可以划分为6个类型,不同阶层社会群体居住单元的公共服务设施配套及可达性存在显著差异;受旧城区社会经济持续繁荣及历史沉积效应影响,社区地位与城市公共服务设施供给及可达性之间呈非完全一致性,体现出类似西方国家城市公共资源配置过程中的"城市生态法则"的作用特征。     

Congestion in a city with a central bottleneck

We consider dynamic congestion in an urban setting where trip origins are spatially distributed. All travelers must pass through a downtown bottleneck in order to reach their destination in the CBD. Each traveler chooses departure time to maximize general concave scheduling utility. We find that, at equilibrium, travelers sort according to their distance to the destination; the queue is always unimodal regardless of the spatial distribution of trip origins. We construct a welfare maximizing tolling regime, which eliminates congestion. All travelers located beyond a critical distance from the CBD gain from tolling, even when toll revenues are not redistributed, while nearby travelers lose. We discuss our results in the context of acceptability of tolling policies.     

Urban household behavior in a model of completely centralized employment

The following results are obtained from an urban residential model of completely centralized employment, first expounded by Richard Muth: Housing price falls at a decreasing numerical rate with distance from the CBD; the CBD-employed household's housing consumption and location (distance from the CBD) are positively related to preferences for housing, but negatively related to housing price (level and rate of decline with distance) and transportation costs (level, rate of increase with distance, and rate of increase with value-of-time). Some of these results are new and others are generalizations, corrections, or clarifications of Muth's original results.     

德国大都市区结构的特征与发展趋势

首先简要界定了多中心都市区的概念.从国家层面分析了德国大都市区的空间结构特征及其发展变化,阐述了联邦政府引导大都市区发展的具体政策和建议,并以莱茵鲁尔和柏林为例,从城市区域层面具体说明了德国大都市区的特点、问题和发展战略.     

Industry Agglomerations and Employment Change in Non-Metropolitan Areas

The purpose of this study is to determine the role of industry agglomerations on industry-level employment change in non-metro areas of the United States. Regression analysis of cross-sectional data is used to estimate the determinants of non-metro 1981–1992 employment change for ten two-digit SIC manufacturing industries. Industry agglomerations in metro and non-metro areas are identified using cluster analysis. Area characteristics included in the regression equations are diversity of the local economy, industry mix, average plant size and availability of urbanization economies. The findings indicate that industry agglomerations were associated with both larger employment gains in areas with growing industry employment and larger employment losses for areas with declining employment. Neither regional specialization in the industry nor nearby metro agglomerations were significant determinants of employment change in non-metro areas.     

Population suburbanization in Barcelona, 1991–2005: Is its spatial structure changing?

The aim of this article is to determine whether population suburbanization is occurring in Barcelona and, if so, how it is organized spatially. This issue is addressed through an analysis of the spatial structure of the population of the Barcelona Metropolitan Region and its evolution between 1991 and 2005. The ultimate aim is to determine whether there is a process of population suburbanization during these 15 years and, if this is the case, whether it arises according to a dispersed or a polycentric model. The results are consistent with a polycentric model for 1991 and 2005. However, this spatial structure is changing because of the process of suburbanization, which is affecting both the central business district and subcenters. During this same period, it is found that the role played by transport infrastructure in determining the spatial structure is becoming stronger. Without considering this latter result, it would appear that the dispersed model would best describe the next spatial stage. On the other hand, if the role played by transport infrastructure is taken into consideration, the next spatial stage would be an accessibility model in which population concentrates along freeways and highways.     

武汉城市圈多中心城市—区域结构及其协同共生

多中心城市集群是我国"十二五"规划空间发展战略模式,是实现区域协调与持续发展的重要路径。武汉城市圈作为我国重要的都市区经济体,是中部崛起战略的重要战略支点,是实现湖北区域弯道超越、拐点跨越的重要城市集群。多中心城市—区域结构是武汉城市圈重要空间特征与发展模式,利用区域关联系统、共生思想从定性与定量角度分析了其多中心城市—区域结构、多中心关联关系、多中心协同共生等机理、路径、模式,并从体制、经济与社会维度提出了多中心城市—区域关联与协同共生思路。     

Times and Spaces of Homeless Regulation in Japan, 1950s–2000s: Historical and Contemporary Analysis

Since the late 1970s, Atlantic Fordism has seen rising homelessness and ghettoization as the ‘new urban poverty’ (NUP) (Mingione, 1996). Despite some similarities, the NUP in Japan has a unique rhythm and spatial pattern. In order to explore Japanese NUP, this article develops an interpretation of Japan's strategies to regulate poverty and homelessness during the last 50 years, paying particular attention to the spatial consequences of such strategies within major Japanese cities. First, I theorize long‐term economic growth patterns as a basic parameter of poverty and homelessness regulation and present a periodization of Japanese trends since the 1950s. Second, I analyze poverty in Japan and the transformation of national strategies of spatial regulation in the 1990s, when homelessness grew. Third, I examine the multi‐scalar processes through which new regulatory spaces of homelessness were produced in the 1990s and 2000s, when failures of post‐bubble crisis management ballooned in Japan. I argue that, through a dialectic between national/local rule‐setting and homelessness, the Japanese state fragmented the dominant scale of poverty regulation, rescaled the site of homeless regulation and contained homelessness in relatively autonomized cities. I conclude that, from the 1990s until the late 2000s, Japan's homelessness and its contradictions tended to be transferred to the spheres of urban workfare and urban policing, which I call new regulatory spaces of homelessness, that lie around the fringes of national social rights.