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The advent of 4.0 technologies allows a footloose location for firms and people, apparently suggesting a "flat world." In this perspective, cities lose their attractiveness and undergo an urban decline. The aim of this paper is to reflect on urban growth opportunities provided by 4.0 technologies, detaching the analysis from a narrative and speculative explanation. The paper revisits the well‐known Baumol model on urban crisis, and all its criticisms and refinements, introducing the adoption of digital technologies in the theoretical reasoning. Expectations arise in favour of a re‐launch of urban economies in a spatial income distribution setting. An econometric analysis on Italian provinces proves the validity of the expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the quasi‐experimental setting of the 2004 EU enlargement, as well as town‐level data along the affected German border, to estimate the effect of economic integration on border town population development. Using a difference‐in‐differences approach, we find that the accession has had a significant positive effect on the rate of population change after 2004. However, this does not offset the, generally, poorer population development of border towns compared to interior towns. Moreover, the integration effect appears to strongly depend on initial local conditions. No effects were found for Polish towns on the opposite side of the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the recent decades, debates about urban sprawl have increased strongly in Iran. Literature review shows that there are few studies about causes of sprawl in urban areas of Iran. This paper analyses driving forces in creation or intensification of urban sprawl in Iranian cities. The methodology of the research is based on documentary and survey method. Results indicate that the most important drivers of urban sprawl are 22 factors in Iran. By using exploratory factor analysis, 22 factors are summarized in eight main factors. These factors include population growth, land value, political fragmentation, land speculation, transportation policies, exterior pressure, management system and land use. The eight main factors are able to explain an average of 76.9% of the urban sprawl phenomenon in Iran. The analysis of variance indicates that none of them can be effective in explaining urban sprawl alone in Iran that they were explained by each factor on urban sprawl. The population growth has the highest impact by 13% and land use has the lowest impact by about 7%. The margin of discrepancy between variance was explained by factors that suggest all of the eight extracted factors play a key role in the urban sprawl of Iran. Policies for controlling and reducing consequences of this phenomenon should be initiated by the government by considering the influential role of government in the urban sprawl of Iran. In particular, it can be helpful to establish integrated urban management, a compilation of comprehensive law about urban land and pay attention to worn‐out textures and brownfield development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cities are not only connected through conventional infrastructure, but also through digital infrastructure. This paper tests whether digital connectivity patterns follow traditional ones. Using a generalized spatial interaction model, this paper shows that geography (and distance) still matters for an extensive set of world cities. With a view to the rapidly rising urbanization, the attention is next focused on the emerging large cities in China to test the relevance of distance frictions − next to a broad set of other important explanatory variables − for digital connectivity. Various interesting results are found regarding digital connectivity within the Chinese urban system, while also here geography appears to play an important role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, Duranton and Turner estimated the impact of interstate highways on the average growth of US cities between 1983 and 2003. By estimating a structural model, one of their striking points is that increasing a city's initial stock of highways by 10 per cent leads to a 1.5 per cent positive respond of the city's employment over the sample period. This note mainly argues that their investigation leaves out potential spillovers of labour input from neighbouring growth centres/cities in the steady-state directly implied by the open city assumption. More specifically, this contribution readily extends Duranton and Turner's work by a general equilibrium effect induced by the urban system's labour market fluctuations which is a direct consequence of the open city assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]