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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]

The empirical literature examining the determinants of city size almost exclusively uses the closed city version of the Mills–Muth model, in which population is exogenous. The closed city approach is particularly useful in that it yields a single equation empirical framework easily estimated with ordinary least squares (OLS). The general theory, however, offers the open city as an alternative, where population and possibly income are endogenous. The open city, in contrast to the closed version, yields a system of equations that should be estimated with seemingly unrelated regression (SUR). This paper finds that population and income are endogenous for broad samples of small and large American urbanized areas and explores the extent to which the empirically preferred open city SUR approach yields empirical results that resemble the closed city OLS model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses whether high‐speed rail (HSR) construction in China promotes urban economic growth, and it uses social network analysis (SNA) and a panel threshold model. We provide robust evidence that HSR networks have non‐linear effects on the urban economy. Urban location and transportation hub status change as the density of HSR networks increases, and from 2008 to 2017, the national average annual growth rate of the weighted degree centrality (WDC) was 44.93%. We find the WDC and betweenness centrality (BC) have positive influences on urban economic growth. However, HSR network expansion reduces the economic benefits of HSR because the marginal contribution of new HSR lines to economic productivity decreases and there is a crowding out effect caused by excessive agglomeration. HSR networks can promote the economy of Western China to a greater extent and can promote the economy more in small cities than in large and medium‐sized cities. These findings can help the government rationalize its strategy for designing HSR lines in various regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The empirical urban sprawl literature uses the closed city urban model in which population and income are exogenous. This paper considers the open city model with endogenous population and income as an alternative. The tests for single‐county urbanized areas over 1970–2010 support the open over closed city models. While point estimates differ for open city instrumental variable (IV) models when compared with closed city OLS counterparts, the open city models offer broad empirical support for the underlying neoclassical urban land use theory. In that regard, support for the theory found in the existing empirical literature using closed city models is not likely to diminish when using empirically preferred open city models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to their often‐cited role as global service hubs, world cities are also global innovation hubs with their connectivity in knowledge networks crucial for the innovation clusters they harbour. While both aspects of world cities' global connectivity may allow their urban economies to grow, we argue that specialization in one of these two networks may increase economic performance. We provide systematic evidence of this substitution effect by examining the changing positions of 129 world cities in inter‐city innovation and service firm networks (2000–2012). Fixed effects panel analysis of city GDP growth confirm that the two networks are partial substitutes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Luis Bettencourt's book establishes the essential logic of a "science of the urban" built on cities articulated by processes that change in scale as cities change in size. As Bettencourt remarks, although cities are complex systems, they are "a different kind of complex system" unlike biological organisms, certainly not like machines which arguably are not complex systems at all. These sciences are integral to Bettencourt's book which is as much about how complexity theory itself changes its form as cities themselves change qualitatively as they grow in size and scale. [Extracted from the article]

Cultural heritage has been recognized as fundamental for local development. In particular, some recent works have highlighted the role of sophisticated transmission channels of this relationship, that is local creativity and cosmopolitan identity. Following a territorial perspective, the present work aims at combining the two approaches, in the belief that there could be a synergic interplay between creativity and cosmopolitan identity, reinforcing their individual effects. Accordingly, an original conceptual and operational taxonomy characterizing cultural cities is put forward. The contribution of the different identified patterns to urban and regional growth is assessed, as well as their capacity to valorize cultural participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the role of housing price risk in explaining the timing and the extent to which development sprawls at the urban fringe? Price risks create a real option, which incentivizes developers to delay development, thereby slowing down urban sprawl. We interpret satellite imageries of Toronto in 1986–2016 and match the changes in land‐use/cover with residents' socioe‐conomic status as well as price and risk data. We find that higher‐risk areas experienced 3–5 percentage points slower growth in urban coverage in 1986–2016; if policy is to stabilize price risk, urban coverage could have increased by 7.02–9.79%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]