Land Use and Urban Spatial Structure
Paper Session
Friday, Jan. 3, 2025 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM (PST)
- Chair: Eunjee Kwon, University of Cincinnati
Fragmented by Nature: Metropolitan Geography, Urban Connectivity, and Environmental Outcomes
Abstract
Physical geography has long been identified as critical for urban development, land use, and environmental outcomes in cities worldwide. However, the extant literature has yet to provide comprehensive, quantitative analyses of the global extent and impact of urban geographic barriers. Our study introduces three novel indexes: the share of natural barriers, non-convexity (a measure of natural fragmentation), and the average road detour, to measure and study the practical reach and effects of natural barriers around global cities. We calculate these indexes for four separate global city-boundary definitions, further augmenting their original shapefiles with relevant additional variables. We find that natural barriers lead to more complex transportation environments and are associated to higher urban densities, smaller urbanized footprints, taller buildings, and less pollution, but also to lower incomes and smaller populations. To draw meaningful policy conclusions, comparative research about environmental, economic, and social outcomes across global cities should always account for their surrounding geographies.Build up a Metropolis: Land Use Regulations, Spatial Misallocation, and Welfare
Abstract
We examine the general equilibrium effect of land use regulations within a city using a novel inner-city structure model that integrates both endogenous benefits and costs of urban agglomeration. Utilizing this model alongside a newly constructed, spatially disaggregated dataset for Shanghai, we uncover spatial misallocations of floor space caused by the city’s land use regulations diverging from market demand. Allowing market forces to determine the land allocation between business and residential uses could improve welfare by 6.7%. An additional 2.4% could be gained by lifting height restrictions. These welfare gains primarily stem from improved production and consumption agglomeration economies and reduced housing costs. This paper also offers crucial insights for the future spatial development of expanding metropolises like Shanghai. While aligning regulations with market demands boosts efficiency typically, governmental interventions may be essential to address coordination failures resulting from a city’s historical layout that presents spatial misallocation. Specifically, regarding constructing an additional 270 million sqm of new floor space as outlined in Shanghai’s Master plan 2017-2035, we find that by prioritizing new land development in subcenters, welfare could be raised by 21.1%. This gain surpasses a citywide market-driven approach by 6.2%. The additional gains primarily result from enhanced productivity and residential amenities and reduced commuting costs.Work-from-Home and Urban Spatial Structure: An Elementary Model
Abstract
Attempts to capture the impacts of work-from-home on cities has generated a boom in both theoretical and empirical analysis. While the new theoretical WFH models are rich and complex, this paper develops a simpler, more-transparent framework. Its crucial features are a Leontief production function for CBD firms and a Leontief utility function for urban workers. On the production side, firms initially use labor (N) and land (L) in a fixed one-to-one proportion (so that L = N), but WFH reduces the share of workers that are physically present in the workplace to some fraction k < 1, which reduces the required land input to kN < N, shrinking the size of the CBD. On the consumption side, WFH reduces commuting cost by the factor k but requires extra space in the home, raising the land used by 1/k without affecting consumption utility. Three standard equilibrium conditions determine the CBD wage, worker land consumption, and the distance to the edge of the city, which in turn yield CBD and residential rents. The analysis derives the effect of WFH (which reduces k below 1) on the variables of interest. Illuminating results emerge from the analysis.Discussant(s)
Alexander Rothenberg
,
Syracuse University
Remi Jedwab
,
George Washington University
Andrii Parkhomenko
,
University of Southern California
Hoyoung Yoo
,
University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign
JEL Classifications
- R0 - General