Estimating Rapidity of Change in Complex Urban Systems: A Multidimensional,Local‐Scale Approach

This study illustrates an exploratory approach based on a Multiway Factor Analysis (MFA) to estimate rapidity of change in complex urban systems, based on “fast” and “slow” variables. The proposed methodology was applied to 18 socioeconomic indicators of long‐term (1960–2010) transformations in 115 municipalities of Athens’ metropolitan area (Greece), including demography, land‐use/planning, and urban form and functions. Athens was regarded as a dynamic urban area with diversified structures and functions at the local scale, expanding through a self‐organized pattern rather than a centralized planning strategy. Athens’ urban system was described using nine supplementary (topographic and territorial) variables and 30 independent indicators assessing the local context in recent times. Exploratory data analysis found an increasing connectedness and redundancy among socioeconomic indicators during the phase of largest urban expansion (1960–1990). Only the rate of population growth was classified as a “fast” variable for all five decades investigated. The overall rapidity of change was higher in 1960–1970, 1980–1990, and 2000–2010, decades that coincided with specific phases of urban expansion driven by migration inflow, second‐home suburbanization, and Olympic games, respectively. Rapidity of change was high for functional indicators during all five decades studied, while demography indicators changed more rapidly in the first three decades and land‐use/planning indicators in the last two decades. Rapidity of change was highest in peri‐urban municipalities with a highly diversified economic structure dominated by industry. Our methodology provides a comprehensive overview of the transformations of a complex urban system, quantifying low‐level indicators that are rarely assessed in the mainstream literature on urban studies. These results may contribute to design policies addressing complexity and promoting resilience in expanding metropolitan areas.     

Policy Instrument Choices for Growth Management and Land Use Regulation

What factors account for local government land use practices and their choices among specific growth management policy instruments? We apply the political market framework to examine how land use policy choices in Florida are shaped by institutional features of county governments and the demands of organizations and interests in a community. Local policy decisions reflect a balance of the conflicting interests and responses to economic and political pressures. The results demonstrate that county government structure and election rules play critical roles in the adoption of urban service boundaries, incentive zoning, and transfer of development rights programs. We report evidence consistent with the argument that these “second‐generation” growth management policies are motivated by exclusionary goals.     

Making Space for Energy: Wasteland Development,Enclosures, and Energy Dispossessions

This paper analyzes why and how wasteland development narratives persist through an evaluation of wasteland development policies in India from 1970 to present. Integrating critical scholarship on environmental narratives and enclosures, I find that narratives of wastelands as “empty” spaces available for “improvement” continue because they are metaphors for entrenched struggles between the government's shifting visions of “improvement” and communities whose land use practices contradict these logics. Since the 1970s, “improvement” has meant establishing different types of tree plantations on wastelands to ostensibly provide energy security. These projects have dispossessed land users by enclosing common property lands and by providing forms of energy incommensurate with local needs, a trend I term “energy dispossessions”. Factors enabling energy dispossessions include the government's increased attempts to establish public–private partnerships to carry out “improvement” and a “field of observation” constructed to obscure local livelihoods. Unveiling these logics will help to problematize and contest future iterations of wasteland development.     

Coordinating Transport and Urban Planning: From Ideologies to Local Realities

In Europe, the idea that coordinating transportation and urban planning is a necessary condition for setting sustainable urban development into motion has spread throughout academic and professional circles. While this concern is not new, the objectives underlying transport and urban planning coordination have deeply changed over the last decades. How have local authorities translated the requirements and objectives of national laws? How have they accounted for the evolution of these global objectives? What factors explain innovation and continuity in the relationship between land use planning and transport policies? In a comparative research between Switzerland and France, we addressed the question of political change by reconstituting the “trajectories” of four urban areas: Geneva and Bern in Switzerland and Strasbourg and Bordeaux in France. We have described the policy paths of these urban areas since the end of the 1960s by focusing on the contents of master plans, the principal technical solutions and projects that have been implemented, and the means of inter-sectorial coordination used. For each case, factors of change or inertia have been identified by focusing on three main variables that are often studied alternatively in public policy analysis: ideas, institutions and interests.     

THE EFFECT OF LAND‐USE CONTROLS ON THE SPATIAL SIZE OF U.S. URBANIZED AREAS*

ABSTRACT On a sample of U.S. urbanized areas in 2000, we test theoretical hypotheses of the effect of land‐use controls on the spatial size of urban areas. We find that minimum lot‐size zoning and maximum FAR restrictions expand the urban area, while maximum lot‐size zoning, urban growth boundaries, minimum square footage limits, maximum building permit restrictions, minimum person per room controls, and impact fees contract the urban area. All of these findings are consistent with theoretical predictions although the effect of urban growth boundaries and minimum square footage limits are not statistically significant.     

Governmentalities of Urban Crises in Inner‐city Athens,Greece

Through the notion of “conjuncture” this paper explores the interplay of urban crises that have been unfolding in the city of Athens during the past 7 years (2008–2014). By focusing on specific “critical moments” that have significantly influenced the narratives, discourses and subsequent policies concerning “Athens in crisis”, it examines a number of intertwined approaches and tactics that shaped the governmentality of such crisis. These approaches and tactics, that work in tandem, include emergency‐driven policies and politics; politics of fear that occasionally transform into geographies of fear; processes of defining the “public” and “public enemies”; and redefinitions of (il)legalities. Yet, they have repercussions on people, places and politics. In this context, certain issues are deemed critical or urgent while others do not or are even obscured.     

Neoliberal Urbanization in Europe: Large–Scale Urban Development Projects and the New Urban Policy

This paper summarizes the theoretical insights drawn from a study of thirteen large–scale urban development projects (UDPs) in twelve European Union countries. The project focused on the way in which globalization and liberalization articulate with the emergence of new forms of governance, on the formation of a new scalar gestalt of governing and on the relationship between large–scale urban development and political, social and economic power relations in the city. Among the most important conclusions, we found that: ?Large–scale UDPs have increasingly been used as a vehicle to establish exceptionality measures in planning and policy procedures. This is part of a neoliberal “New Urban Policy” approach and its selective “middle — and upper–class” democracy. It is associated with new forms of “governing” urban interventions, characterized by less democratic and more elite–driven priorities. ?Local democratic participation mechanisms are not respected or are applied in a very “formalist” way, resulting in a new choreography of elite power. However, grassroots movements occasionally manage to turn the course of events in favor of local participation and of modest social returns for deprived social groups. ?The UDPs are poorly integrated at best into the wider urban process and planning system. As a consequence, their impact on a city as a whole and on the areas where the projects are located remains ambiguous. ?Most UDPs accentuate socioeconomic polarization through the working of real–estate markets (price rises and displacement of social or low–income housing), changes in the priorities of public budgets that are increasingly redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment and the restructuring of the labor market. ?The UDPs reflect and embody a series of processes that are associated with changing spatial scales of governance; these changes, in turn, reflect a shifting geometry of power in the governing of urbanization.     

A CONSOLIDATED MODEL OF MONOCENTRIC CITIES AND AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF URBAN SCALES AND LAND PRICES IN CHINESE CITIES*

ABSTRACT Motivated by the newly established Chinese urban land markets, we develop a theoretical model that unifies the “closed” and “open” features of the classical monocentric city model. The model features interactions between permanent urban residents and migrants and exhibits a distinctive equilibrium pattern. The theoretical model is tested empirically, using recent Chinese city‐level data. The empirical findings indicate that market forces now play an important role in urban expansion and land price formation, while various forms of government planning are still influential. Our results show that migrants exert a less pronounced impact than the classical “open” city model has suggested.     

An Institutional Analysis of Property Development,Good Governance and Urban Sustainability

It can be argued that creating a reputation for sustainable development for the benefit of a competitive advantage resonates with institutional theory. In principle, this opens up the possibility to relate a given sustainability agenda with theoretical frameworks based on old institutional economics (OIE) and/or new institutional economics. This is particularly true in arenas where qualitative factors cause a discontinuous change from the previous structure, such as amid urban regeneration. Using empirical evidence from three very different European cities, Budapest, Amsterdam and Trondheim, it is shown that OIE has plenty to offer for a “patchy” and evolving problem area such as the analysis of planning and property development in an urban setting. The position taken here is that good community governance needs the support of the private sector too. Smart policies, regulations and especially incentives set at the local and regional levels are an imperative to meet the sustainability goals set out in the Rio-1992 agenda. This international comparison attempts to provide some guiding answers to the empirical question as to how sustainable the three cases of country- and city-specific governance are in terms of their property development.     

Recent Theoretical Paradigms in Urban Growth

The aim of this article is to present a critical view of the theoretical toolboxes developed in urban economics to explain urban city size. The article starts with the consideration that, during the 1960s and 1970s, the question of optimal city-size tended to be expressed in a misleading way. The real issue is not an “optimal city size” but an “efficient size”, which depends on the functional characteristics of the city and on the spatial organization within the urban system. Economies of scale exist up to a certain city size. However, urban development generates conditions leading to structural readjustments which lead to new economic advantages. These structural adjustments may be either sectoral transformations towards higher-order functions, or the emergence of external linkages with other cities. The article provides recent empirical evidence of the role played by urban functions and city networking in explaining urban equilibrium size. The empirical analyses reported here witness the importance of the structural adjustment of cities needed to achieve a higher equilibrium size.