Urban Economic And Planning Models

Urban models can be divided into explanatory or policy-oriented classifications. Explanatory models are usually systematic attempts at explaining urban form; operational models, on the other hand, rely on either social physics or behavior principles. Explanatory models focus on the tradeoffs between the cost of the site itself and the costs of travel, the analytic problems caused by the unique quality of each location, the effects of transport congestion on city form, and the consequences of welfare emphasis on equity. The social physics form of operational models tries to replicate statistical regularities observed in the activities of people within a city. Economic models based on behavioral principles are the easiest to understand because their structure is drawn from behavioral relations derived from behavioral analysis. The characteristics of operational and explanatory models overlap. Two operational and two explanatory models are presented as exemplary techniques for modeling urban areas in developing countries. Useful explanatory models are likely to require large sets of disaggregated data in order to provide the building blocks for the operational models.

This volume embodies a problem-driven and theoretically informed approach to bridging frontier research in urban economics and urban/regional planning. The authors focus on the interface between these two subdisciplines that have historically had an uneasy relationship. Although economists were among the early contributors to the literature on urban planning, many economists have been dismissive of a discipline whose leading scholars frequently favor regulations over market institutions, equity over efficiency, and normative prescriptions over positive analysis. Planners, meanwhile, even as they draw upon economic principles, often view the work of economists as abstract, not sensitive to institutional contexts, and communicated in a formal language spoken by few with decision making authority. Not surprisingly, papers in the leading economic journals rarely cite clearly pertinent papers in planning journals, and vice versa. Despite the historical divergence in perspectives and methods, urban economics and urban planning share an intense interest in many topic areas: the nature of cities, the prosperity of urban economies, the efficient provision of urban services, efficient systems of transportation, and the proper allocation of land between urban and environmental uses. In bridging this gap, the book highlights the best scholarship in planning and economics that address the most pressing urban problems of our day and stimulates further dialog between scholars in urban planning and urban economics.

This book focuses on the relationship between the state and economy in the development of cities. It reviews and reinterprets fundamental theoretical models that explain how the operation of markets in equilibrium shapes the scale and organization of the commercial city in a mixed market economy within a liberal state. These models link markets for the factors of production, markets for investment and fixed capital formation, markets for transportation, and markets for exports in equilibrium both within the urban economy and the rest of the world. In each case, the model explains the urban economy by revealing how assumptions about causes and structures lead to predictions about scale and organization outcomes. By simplifying and contrasting these models, this book proposes another interpretation: that governance and the urban economy are outcomes negotiated by political actors motivated by competing notions of commonwealth and the individual desire for wealth and power. The book grounds its analysis in economic history, explaining the rise of commercial cities and the emergence of the urban economy. It then turns to factors of production, export, and factor markets, introducing and parsing the Mills model, breaking it down into its component parts and creating a series of simpler models that can better explain the significance of each economic assumption. Simplified models are also presented for real estate and fixed capital investment markets, transportation, and land use planning. The book concludes with a discussion of linear programming and the Herbert- Stevens and the Ripper-Varaiya models. A fresh presentation of the theories behind urban economics, this book emphasizes the links between state and economy and challenges the reader to see its theories in a new light. As such, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of economics, public policy, public administration, urban policy, and city and urban planning. >

This book was first published in 1977. Urban economics is a relatively young field of economics; hardly existing except perhaps in real estate and land economics curricula-before the 1960s. Within the last few years, especially after 1 971, there has been a growth of interest in urban economic theory, strong enough even to attract the attention of general economic theorists. These new theoretical writings have been named the 'New Urban Economics'-NUE for short. The aim of this monograph is to survey and assess NUE, to evaluate its contribution to urban economics, to offer a few extensions and to say something about the future direction of the subfield.