Do Suburbs Need Cities?

In this paper I examine the relationship between city and suburbangrowth over the last three decades for a sample of U.S. metropolitan areas. I develop a structuralempirical model relating city income growth to suburban growth in income, population, andhouse values. The model allows for bidirectional effects of cities on suburbs and suburbs oncities, as well as for unobserved factors affecting both city and suburbs. The simultaneous,latent-variable model is identified using a combination of exclusion and covariance restrictions.Instrumental estimation results indicate that income growth in large cities enhances suburbangrowth; but income growth in small cities has little effect.     

HOW DO DIFFERENCES IN PROPERTY TAXES WITHIN CITIES AFFECT URBAN SPRAWL?*

ABSTRACT We develop a duocentric‐city model and show that the ratio between the property tax in the suburbs and in the center has an ambiguous impact on the size of the city. We test this model by using a dataset of effective property tax rates which we developed using GIS techniques for central cities and suburbs in 445 urbanized areas. Results from the empirical analyses suggest that a lower property tax rate in the suburbs as compared to the central city is associated with more expansive urban growth and a greater level of decentralization of population and employment.     

SPREAD AND BACKWASH EFFECTS FOR NONMETROPOLITAN COMMUNITIES IN THE U.S.

Few studies empirically estimate the effects of metropolitan growth on nonmetropolitan communities at a national scale. This paper estimates the growth effects of 276 MSAs on population in 1,988 nonmetropolitan communities in the United States from 2000 to 2007. We estimate the distance for growth spillovers from MSAs to nonmetropolitan communities and test the assumption that a single MSA influences growth. We compare three methods of weighting cities’ influence: nearest city only, inverse‐distance, and relative commuting flow to multiple cities. We find the inverse‐distance approach provides slightly more reliable and theoretically supportable results than the traditional nearest city approach.     

Central Cities as Engines of Metropolitan Area Growth*

The paper analyzes the role of central cities as engines of economic growth in their metropolitan area. We wonder if there are increasing returns to central city growth at the metropolitan level arising from the positive externalities associated with the unique features of central cities. To answer this question we analyze the causality between the economic growth of Spanish central cities and the growth of the other jurisdictions belonging to their metropolitan area (i.e., the suburbs). The analysis uses population and economic activity data for a sample of 28 Spanish metropolitan areas during 35 years. We use a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) framework to estimate long‐run equilibrium relationships between the growth of central cities and their suburbs. The combination of panel data and a VECM is an innovative approach that is still being developed in econometrics. The results suggest that central city growth has a long‐run positive effect on the growth of the suburbs. We also inquire as to whether or not this positive effect depends on the size of the central city. The results suggest that the effect is much higher in the case of the largest cities, but that it is also important in the case of the smaller ones.     

美国大都市区尺度上的工业区位研究

工业化和城市化之间的互动关系体现在都市区尺度上的工业区位上。本文在新经济地理学和城市地理学所揭示的产品差异化和城市集聚效应相互关系的基础上,通过区位熵分析、赫芬达尔-赫希曼指数,对美国工业区位与大都市区间的耦合关系进行实证研究。结果显示:集聚于大都市区核心区的往往是产品个性化和定制化程度较高的行业;位于大都市区外围区的大都是产品依赖于城市市场,但标准化程度较高的行业;传统制造业则往往位于非大都市区。多数都市工业的市场集中度较低,而大部分传统工业的市场集中度较高。这不仅印证了新经济地理学的理论推演和城市地理学的行业分析,而且对包括中国在内的转型国家城市及其产业发展具有重要的参考意义。     

The changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector in metropolitan and rural regions, 1976–1997

This paper documents the changing geography of the Canadian manufacturing sector over a 22‐year period (1976–1997). It does so by looking at the shifts in employment and differences in production worker wages across different levels of the rural/urban hierarchy—central cities, adjacent suburbs, medium and small cities and rural areas. The analysis demonstrates that the most dramatic shifts in manufacturing employment were from the central cities of large metropolitan regions to their suburbs. Paralleling trends in the United States, rural regions of Canada have increased their share of manufacturing employment. Rising rural employment shares were due to declining employment shares of small cities and, to a lesser degree, large urban regions. Increasing rural employment was particularly prominent in Quebec, where employment shifted away from the Montreal region. The changing fortunes of rural and urban areas were not the result of across‐the‐board shifts in manufacturing employment, but were the net outcome of differing locational patterns across industries. In contrast to the situation in the United States, wages in Canada do not consistently decline, moving down the rural/urban hierarchy from the largest cities to the most rural parts of the country. Only after controlling for the types of manufacturing industries found in rural and urban regions is it apparent that wages decline with the size of place .     

Mapping schools' NAPLAN results: a spatial inequality of school outcomes in Australia

This article identifies spatial dimensions of educational outcomes using maps of the 2016 Grade 5 reading results for Australia's National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy for all Australian schools. A geographical information system (GIS) was used to overlay schools' results onto suburbs' advantage or disadvantage to visualise spatial patterns. We then examined the extent to which school results “cluster” in socio‐economically advantaged and disadvantaged suburbs and considered the consistency of spatial patterns for results across major cities. That work illustrates both how GIS can foreground educational inequality and how “the spatial” is more than corollary for student socio‐economic status. Results show substantial differences between urban and remote areas and towns of different size. Maps of cities visualise spatial “clustering” patterns of school results, with most schools in advantaged suburbs having high results and almost no schools in disadvantaged suburbs having high results. Educational outcomes strongly align to local socio‐demographic characteristics, and parallel host communities’ levels of advantage or disadvantage. Differences between public and private schools are less significant than within‐sector differences for schools in advantaged or disadvantaged locales. Patterns in all cities are consistent—schools in advantaged suburbs predominantly have high results, whereas non‐government schools generally perform better than government schools in disadvantaged suburbs. Most concerning is the persistent and increasing trajectory of results in advantaged, and more so in disadvantaged suburbs, of all cities since the first National Assessment Program–Literacy and Numeracy in 2008. Ameliorating spatial inequality between primary schools is one of the greatest challenges for Australians.     

DO METROPOLITAN AREAS MEAN ANYTHING? A RESEARCH NOTE*

This note analyzes whether central cities and suburbs of a metropolitan area relate to each other in a meaningful way. Specifically, it analyzes whether there is a factor specific to the metropolitan area in central-city and suburban growth once national and regional factors have been taken into account. Data are analyzed for growth of metropolitan areas from 1960 to 1980.     

Applying Policy Termination Theory to the Abandonment of Climate Protection Initiatives by U.S. Local Governments

A considerable amount is known about the factors that influence policy adoption and implementation across different issue areas. Less is known, however, about the factors that influence governments to abandon programs or policies prior to reaching their stated objectives or originally specified end‐points. This article applies termination theory to local climate protection initiatives and examines cities’ withdrawal from the dominant sustainability organization facilitating these efforts. In the face of national government inaction, large numbers of U.S. municipalities voluntarily committed to reduce their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and joined the ICLEI's Climate Protection program. After steady membership increases for nearly a decade, ICLEI attained its largest size in 2010 with 565 city members. Over the next 2 years, this number plummeted by 20 percent. Positioned in the literature on policy change, we empirically test three hypotheses for why a substantial portion of cities ended their affiliation with this organization and terminated the explicit climate protection objectives associated with it: (1) political ideology and interest group pressure, (2) fiscal constraints, and (3) perceived program ineffectiveness. Analytical results support the first and third hypotheses. We identify factors that influence the termination of local GHG reduction initiatives and discuss theoretical implications of these findings.     

AN EXAMINATION OF POPULATION-GROWTH-MANAGING COMMUNITIES

This paper examines the fiscal, social, economic and environmental characteristics of 228 cities and counties. Using cluster analysis, 210 communities were classified into eleven types of communities. The empirical typings appear to support the proposition that communities control population growth to avoid adverse fiscal and environmental impacts and maintain the social and economic character of the community.     

Equitable Approaches to Local Economic Development

Central city economic development during the 1980s and 1990s resounded with the theme of "public-private partnerships" putting together new downtown hotels, sports stadiums, and festival marketplaces. Yet, as city after city proclaimed its "renaissance" and "rebirth," poverty and unemployment increased in many of the same cities. Economic disparities also increased between central cities and their suburbs. These contrasting patterns of growth and decline were often reflected in local economic development struggles over downtown versus neighborhoods, economic development as job generation versus real estate development, and the rich and powerful versus the poor and marginalized. In some cities, these concerns often were articulated by African-American, Latino, and blue-collar communities and their activist supporters. They led to new development strategies designed to balance more equitably the costs and benefits of local economic development. The new strategies included opening government to previously excluded constituencies, linking downtown development to neighborhood development managed by community development corporations, and balancing development across economic sectors. This article reviews efforts in several cities to implement redistributive urban planning and local economic development policies. It concludes with three possibilities for improving broader equity outcomes in future local economic development.     

中国企业家成长路径的地理学研究

通过建构中国786位企业家四个成长阶段空间信息数据库,本文运用地理空间分析方法和复杂网络模型,在对企业家成长时空规律分析的基础上,对中国207个城市在企业家成长中发挥的作用进行了研究,并着重对在企业家成长中发挥重要作用的30个城市的角色进行了精准识别,得出以下结论：①中国企业家成长在空间上呈现出分散-集中-分散的演化过程,长三角地区是中国企业家成长最为依赖的空间载体;②企业家成长视角下的中国城市创新网络等级层次明显,北京市以绝对优势成为中国城市创新网络的核心;③在30个扮演重要角色的城市中,只有北京与宁波两市同时身兼两个角色,其中北京为成功兼创业型,宁波为成功兼奠基型。     

URBAN GROWTH EXTERNALITIES AND NEIGHBORHOOD INCENTIVES: ANOTHER CAUSE OF URBAN SPRAWL?*

ABSTRACT This paper suggests a cause of low density urban development or urban sprawl that has not been given much attention in the literature. There have been a number of arguments put forward for market failures that may account for urban sprawl, including incomplete pricing of infrastructure, environmental externalities, and unpriced congestion. The problem analyzed here is that urban growth creates benefits for an entire urban area, but the costs of growth are borne by individual neighborhoods. An externality problem arises because existing residents perceive the costs associated with the new residents locating in their neighborhoods, but not the full benefits of new entrants which accrue to the city as a whole. The result is that existing residents have an incentive to block new residents to their neighborhoods, resulting in cities that are less dense than is optimal, or too spread out. The paper models several different types of urban growth, and examines the optimal and local choice outcomes under each type. In the first model, population growth is endogenous and the physical limits of the city are fixed. The second model examines the case in which population growth in the region is given, but the city boundary is allowed to vary. We show that in both cases the city will tend to be larger and less dense than is optimal. In each, we examine the sensitivity of the model to the number of neighborhoods and to the size of infrastructure and transportation costs. Finally, we examine optimal subsidies and see how they compare to current policies such as impact fees on new development.     

HISTORY,INSTITUTIONS, AND CITIES: A VIEW FROM THE AMERICAS*

ABSTRACT Every nation, formally or informally, defines and establishes the lines of political and fiscal authority among its national, regional, and local governments. Historically, centralized governments tend to restrict the power and autonomy of provincial and local governments. In this paper, we exploit the quasi‐experimental distribution of political institutions in the Americas caused by variation in European colonial experience to examine the impact of institutions on urban and local development, specifically on the degree of urban primacy, the size distribution of cities, the number and density of local government units, and the fragmentation of metropolitan areas. We argue that centralization of political power at the national level, as experienced in many countries in Latin America, contributes to urban primacy and a size distribution of cities favoring large cities. Additionally, even in more politically decentralized countries such as Canada and the U.S., variance in political centralization at the provincial (state) level over local governments led to significant divergences in urban primacy, the distribution of city sizes, as well as the form, number, and density of local governments. While we cannot rule out the importance of other factors, our findings suggest that political centralization affects spatial economic development.     

Policy Responses to Urban Shrinkage: From Growth Thinking to Civic Engagement

More and more European cities are confronted with population decline in a structural sense. This development of “urban shrinkage” has different causes, but similar effects: the city's hardware, software and mindware deteriorate. In this paper, we explore and assess policy strategies to respond to urban shrinkage in a European context. Four strategies are identified: (1) trivializing shrinkage, (2) countering shrinkage, (3) accepting shrinkage and (4) utilizing shrinkage. We suggest that accepting shrinkage by improving the quality of life for the city's existing residents is the most suitable and sustainable strategy. Dealing with shrinkage is a complex urban governance process that asks for a mental transformation from growth to shrinkage as well as regional rather than local thinking. Moreover, due to the fiscal burden of shrinkage, city governments will be increasingly dependent on the willingness of citizens to help. Civic engagement, however, is not something that can be simply dictated. Therefore we conclude that the authorities of Europe's shrinking cities should first enable their citizens to care for their community before asking them to do so.     

Gibrat Revisited: An Urban Growth Model Incorporating Spatial Interaction and Innovation Cycles. 再评吉尔布瑞特：顾及空间相互作用和创新周期的城市增长模型

We designed a geographical model for simulating the distribution of urban growth in systems of cities. The model incorporates the hierarchical and spatial diffusion of innovation cycles through gravitational interactions within a set of cities. Using theoretical simulations, we demonstrate that this model is able to reproduce the observed properties of urban systems for the log‐normal distribution of city sizes as well as the observed distribution of growth rates. Our experimentation was performed on a large harmonized historical database that includes a few hundred French urban agglomerations between 1831 and 1999 (Pumain‐INED database). Both spatial interaction and innovation cycles are necessary ingredients to explain the evolution of urban hierarchies. We suggest that Gibrat's generic stochastic growth model based on independent entities should be replaced by a more relevant model of spatially and temporally interdependent geographical entities.     

Determinants of Residential Location Choice: How Important Are Local Public Goods in Attracting Homeowners to Central City Locations?*

Abstract. A hybrid conditional logit choice model is estimated using data on the characteristics and destination of homeowners who engaged in intrametropolitan moves among 17 school districts within the Columbus, Ohio area in 1995. The model is used to test the relative influence of local fiscal and public goods versus household‐level characteristics in determining household location choices across central city and suburban school districts. Results provide evidence of both a “natural evolution” of households to the suburbs, due to job location, residential filtering, and household income and lifecycle effects, and “flight from blight,” due to lower school quality, higher crime levels, and lower average income levels in the city. In comparing the magnitudes of these variables, we find that school quality exerts the strongest influence: a 1‐percent increase in the school quality of the city district increases the probability of choosing a city residence by 3.7 percent. In contrast, the effects of household income and other individual characteristics are relatively modest. The findings provide support for a “flight from blight” suburbanization process that is dominated by differences in neighborhood quality between the city and suburbs. An implication is that investments that promote central city development and reduce suburbanization are justified on efficiency grounds if negative externalities are generated by increased concentration of poverty, crime, and low school quality.     

A PATH ANALYTIC EXPLORATION OF INCOME CLUSTERING AND LOCAL INEQUALITY

This article explores relationships among income status, economic resources, service needs, and taxing policies for municipalities and schools in 39 metropolitan suburbs of the Milwaukee SMSA. The results indicate some modest support for those who are concerned about the impact of class and income clustering, as well as government fragmentation, on inequalities regarding local tax policy. Use of path analysis to explore some of the possible alternative linkages that account for patterns of fiscal inequality among suburban municipalities shows that fiscal disparities resulting from income clustering by jurisdiction is only partially attributable to resourse and need inequities. It might also be that income status, reflecting differing service preferences, operates directly to generate inter municipal fiscal disparities.     

制度变迁与中国城市的发展及空间结构的历史演变

我国的城市发展水平同经济发展水平的偏离,说明对城市发展及其空间结构演变分析不能仅局限在物质经济领域,需要我们寻求影响城市发展及其空间结构变化的新因素一制度因素,把制度作为影响城市发展及其空间结构的一个主要的变量,来对此加以解释。为此,本首先构建了“制度变迁一城市发展变化”的理论框架,然后用该理论从宏观和微观两个方面来检验1949-1998年间制度变迁对城市发展及其空间结构的影响。与西方国家的以市场经济为主要动力驱动型的城市发展模式不同,中国城市的发展及其空间结构的演变在很大程度上是制度变迁而诱致的结果。但不同的制度对城市数量增长、组织体系及空间布局和对城市空间结构演变的作用力度又不尽相同。改革开放后,由于制度变迁带来的激励作用,中国城市获得了快速发展,城市空间结构快速变化。但与此同时,中国城市化的发展水平与相同发展条件下的世界城市化水平的差距却在拉大。而且随着市场经济体制的逐步完善,影响城市增长及空间结构的演变力量的因素越来越趋于分散化,制度变迁对城市发展所带来的激励作用正在弱化。为适应新世纪我国城市发展的战略目标,需要进行体制创新,为中国城市的发展及其空间结构的演变提供新的制度支持。     

AGING NATIONS AND THE FUTURE OF CITIES*

ABSTRACT We investigate whether an aging population may challenge the supremacy of large working cities. To this end, we develop an economic geography model with two types of individuals (workers and retirees) and two sectors (local services and manufacturing). Workers produce and consume; the elderly consume only. As a result, the mobility decision of workers is driven by both the wage gap and the cost‐of‐living gap, unlike the elderly who react to the differences in the cost of living only. We show that the return of pre‐industrial urban system dominated by rentier cities does not seem to be on the agenda. Quite the opposite, the future of large working cities is still bright, the reason being that today's urban costs act as a strong force that prevents a large share of local services and manufacturing firms from following the rentiers in the elderly cities, while the supply of differentiated b2c services impede their complete separation.