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The impact of autonomous vehicles on the spatial size of cities remains ambiguous, as the future is highly uncertain. This paper uses counterfactual analysis techniques to examine the effects of autonomous vehicles on urban expansion for metropolitan areas in the United States if autonomous vehicles had been introduced before. We argue that distance cost and congestion cost, which are the two components of transportation cost with different effects on urban expansion, should be addressed in autonomous vehicle research. By coupling historical data with hypothetical scenarios of introducing autonomous vehicles to cities, we find that urban expansion, rather than urban densification, would have been the dominant effect if autonomous vehicles had been introduced into cities. The finding indicates that if autonomous vehicles are widely adopted in the future, they are likely to have similar, or even larger, effects on future urban expansion than in the counterfactual past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various institutional and cultural settings have shaped spatial planning systems with comparable features; however, such systems have been adapted to specific cultural, normative and spatial conditions. In line with the growing demand for international knowledge exchange in urban and regional planning, planning cultures have recently come into sharper focus. Moreover, it has become widely acknowledged that many cities in Europe and the USA have to deal with challenges posed by long-term demographic and economic changes. This also holds true for Japan. The objective of the research presented here is to comparatively investigate changes in planning cultures in view of shrinking cities in the USA, Germany and Japan. The findings will allow us to detect interdependencies between changes in planning cultures and societal changes in the wake of shrinkage, and finally to derive hypotheses for both the future-oriented development of shrinking cities, and the development of planning cultures based on the comparison of cultural settings. In this respect the paper concludes with the hypothesis that there might be planning cultures that are not framed by geographic entities (nations, regions, cities), but rather by topics along shrinking cities. This could offer insight into a new research sphere of 'topical planning cultures'. While lasting effects and successes of policies and strategies applied in shrinking cities remain to be seen, their influence on a broader knowledge exchange, contextualisation and innovation in the sphere of planning cultures is evident. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between income inequality and property crime using Census block group data from three US cities: Nashville, TN, Portland, OR and Tucson, AZ. This paper is one of very few to examine this relationship at such a fine geographic level, which is typically less than one square mile in size. We find that income inequality across block groups plays a key role in determining the level of property crime. As the income gap with one’s poorest neighbouring block group widens, the level of property crime in the richer block group increases. Also, the poorest block group in an area tends to experience less property crime, holding all else constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on spatial mismatch often focuses on a mismatch within cities or local labour markets. This paper looks at the spatial mismatch between local labour markets. Using US data, we study the evolution of inter-regional mismatch between 1980 and 2010 and how this evolution varies across skill levels. Since we expect the spatial structure of supply and demand in the labour market to play a central role at this geographical level, we develop an extension of the spatial mismatch index, as the standard version does not take this spatial structure into account. Our results indicate that spatial mismatch has been increasing over the past decades, an increase that is largely attributable to spatial structure effects. The inter-regional spatial mismatch mainly affects low-skilled jobs and workers: our findings suggest that the degree of the spatial mismatch for low-skilled, relative to high-skilled workers, increased from a ratio of two in 1980 to almost four in 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demographically and economically, there is an ongoing global shift that has resulted in the uneven development and distribution of monetary, human and knowledge capital. This paper first examines and consolidates economic, social and urban theories of growth and decline and demonstrates how globalisation has conceptually shifted the spatial scale and trajectory of urban change theories. The examination of the population trajectories of the 100 largest American cities from 1980 to 2010 demonstrates that the majority either grew or shrank continuously. This trend counters early cyclical models and supports the argument that globalisation has altered population trajectories. Second, conceptualisations of urban shrinkage trajectories are reviewed and a two-dimensional trajectory typology encompassing both economic and demographic change is presented. The diversity of urban shrinkage experiences is demonstrated through the application of the typology to the 20 largest shrinking American cities, 12 of which experienced overall population loss and simultaneous economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concentrates on universities as important actants in the neoliberal city, specifically through their engagement of development activities. The paper visualises universities as an entrepreneurial subject: a neoliberal institution which adopts the responsibility to redevelop. Towards that end, the paper situates the redevelopment activities of universities and their politics in the context of the neoliberal city. It subsequently identifies the causal structures that underpin the growth logic of universities, which form the condition for their engagement in redevelopment as entrepreneurial subjects. The paper argues that the pressures coming out of the accumulation process act as an impetus for universities to expand, for instance, to accommodate the increasing student enrolments that generate revenues for them. Given their size, specialised infrastructure and the localised logic of bringing students to campus, expansion often means expansion in situ. This puts the spotlight on universities’ politics of redevelopment and the challenges they face as it typically means destruction of existing living and workplaces. Being entrepreneurial, universities maximise their efficiency in the politics of redevelopment to produce minimal resistance. This they do through alliance-building by creating amenable subjectivities that facilitate redevelopment. This is constituted by drawing upon and exacerbating existing cleavages of class and race. The paper presents a case study of redevelopment activities of The Ohio State University, located in Columbus, Ohio. The case study will illustrate why this university became an entrepreneurial subject and how, that is, through what discursive-material mechanisms the politics of persuasion unfolded, producing subjectivities that created (non)acquiescence around redevelopment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most current scientific policies incorporate debates on cities and the geographic organisation of scientific activity. Research on ‘world cities’ develops the idea that interconnected agglomerations can better take advantage of international competition. Thus, the increasing concentration of activities in these cities at the expense of others could be observed by certain scholars using measures based on scientific publications. Others, however, show that an opposite trend is emerging: the largest cities are undergoing a relative decline in a country’s scientific activities. To go beyond this seeming contradiction, this paper provides a global analysis of all countries with papers in the Web of Science over the period 1987–2007. The author’s addresses were geocoded and grouped into agglomerations. Registering of papers was based on the fractional counting of multi-authored publications, and the results are unambiguous: deconcentration is the dominant trend both globally and within countries, with some exceptions for which explanations are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Concerns about the negative externalities of air transport suggest it is important to consider the sustainability of growth in demand for air transport. However, there is little agreement on how the sustainability of demand should be evaluated. In this paper, I draw on the extensive literature on allometric scaling in biology, which examines animals’ demand for calories, to provide a novel framework for evaluating the sustainability of cities’ demand for air transport service. Viewing cities as analogous to organisms and airline passengers as analogous to life-sustaining resources, I focus on two questions. First, at what rate do cities metabolise passengers, that is, how many airline passengers does it take to fuel a city of a given size? Second, does this metabolic rate differ for business and leisure passengers, which represent different kinds of urban resources? Using data on airline passenger movement between 103 US metropolitan areas in each year from 1993 through 2011, I find that cities demand airline passengers in proportion to their population size, but when viewed separately, demand for business passengers as a function of city size is much lower than for leisure passengers. Moreover, I find that these patterns have remained relatively stable over the last two decades. The findings suggest that considering passenger type is important in evaluating the sustainability of air transport and the capacity of the air transport system to support cities’ continued growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial and ethnic diversity in the United States is on the rise, as the country is projected to no longer have a racial majority by the mid-2040s. Much of this diversity is found in the United States’ large metropolitan areas, where it manifests itself unevenly. While some metropolitan neighbourhoods are growing highly diverse, others remain segregated by race and ethnicity. This paper introduces a framework for exploring the geography of neighbourhood diversity in US metropolitan areas, and defines the diversity gradient, a visual representation of how diversity varies with distance from the urban core. Analysis of the geography of metropolitan diversity from 1990 to 2010 reveals that the greatest increases in diversity are found in the suburbs and outlying areas, where diversity now peaks in many large metropolitan areas. Additional spatial analyses of neighbourhood diversity in Chicago and Dallas-Fort Worth show that clustering of highly diverse neighbourhoods has shifted to the suburbs from close-in urban areas, where many segregated and low-diversity neighbourhoods persist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars point to urban decentralisation as a key contributor to transit’s decline in the USA during the 20th century. This paper examines the link between decentralisation and transit by testing the scholarly argument that transit should decentralise. Using a case study of a smaller US metropolitan area whose transit service was restructured from a centralised to a decentralised model, the authors found that in this context the change involved making tradeoffs between improving service for some parts of the community and degrading it for others. While ridership increased in previously unserved suburban markets, the net result was not an overall ridership increase because of its decline in inner-city neighbourhoods. The authors argue that these results, which were unanticipated based on a review of the scholarly literature, suggest the need for more sensitivity to the importance of local context for scholars working in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the course of the past two decades, bicycling has become increasingly popular in the USA. Although the rate of bike trips made in the USA has more than tripled since 1977, it is relatively low compared with many European cities (Pucher et al., 2011a). In urban areas throughout the USA, bicycling is increasingly being touted as an environmentally friendly way to enhance transit choice as public transportation budgets are slashed and automobile infrastructures remain congested. Discourse around the proliferation of bicycling infrastructure development in American cities often obscures complex aspects of community-level choice regarding transit, including the placement and implementation of bike lanes.This paper seeks to explore the dynamic ways that community members and city planners make sense of bike infrastructure development in Chicago, Illinois. Qualitative interviews and participant observation were employed to clarify the community context of bike lane development in a gentrifying area of the city. We find that community engagement is a critical component of promoting the acceptance and use of bike infrastructure and discuss the role of a community bike shop in facilitating community engagement around bicycling in the neighbourhood of Humboldt Park, home to the second largest Puerto Rican community in the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simple method for calculating deviations between actual city size and the size which would correspond to it with a Pareto exponent equal to one (Zipf’s law). The results show two differentiated behaviours: most cities (80.25 per cent) present a greater size than that which would fulfil Zipf’s law, while small cities (19.75 per cent) tend to be too small. The aim of the paper is to analyse the distribution element by element, using data about city characteristics from all American cities in 2000, and to explain the deviation between the size predicted by Zipf’s law and the actual size of each city. To do this, a multinomial logit model is used. The most important variables affecting the probability of a city presenting a negative or positive deviation are per capita income, human capital levels and the percentage of the population employed in some sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates the social dimensions of gated communities (GCs) in US western metropolitan areas and how they contribute to segregation. We use geographically referenced data of GCs, and introduce a local metric based on social distance indices (SDI). This multivariate spatial analysis investigates homogeneity in three aspects: race and ethnicity, economic class and age between 2000 and 2010 census. The results indicate contrasting effects given different levels of geography. GCs significantly contribute to segregation patterns at a local level, and this has been locally reinforcing. Although socioeconomic segregation and ethnic status yield the most prevalent structure of local distance, gated enclaves are also significantly structured by age. The findings are considered in the context of a metropolitan decline in levels of segregation. Data also show that GCs are likely to be located within large racially homogeneous areas, and do not significantly contribute to racial segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes four metrics to measure sprawl in metropolitan regions as marginal changes in land use over time. The metrics (change in urban housing unit density, marginal land consumption per new urban household, housing unit density in newly urbanized areas and percent of new housing units located in previously developed areas) are computed for all 329 metropolitan areas in the continental USA for 1980 and 2000. Regression analysis is used to explain variations in sprawl metrics across metropolitan areas, incorporating variables representing market, geographic and policy factors. Changes in development patterns reflect interactions of market and geographic structures. States with a substantial state role in planning accommodate a higher percentage of new housing units in previously developed areas and with lower marginal land consumption, suggesting that policy can mitigate sprawl development. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper tests the common belief that subsidised housing contributes to higher crime rates. To do this, panel data on over 200 US cities are used and fixed effects models are estimated to control for unobserved differences between cities that may affect both voucher use and crime. Additionally, models are estimated that focus on the suburbs, to see if the steady increase in vouchers there has had any effect on crime. In cities, it is found that vouchers have a weak, negative relationship with violent crime rates, although these estimates are not particularly robust. In suburban areas, there is no observed relationship between vouchers and crime, suggesting that controversies in those communities blaming voucher households for elevated crime rates are misguided. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Public transit improvements could cause more clustered and higher-density employment and enable urban growth, giving rise to agglomeration economies by improving labour market accessibility, increasing information exchange and facilitating industrial specialisation. Using data on US metropolitan areas, this paper traces the links from transit service to central city employment density, urbanised area employment density and population; and from these physical agglomeration measures to average wages and per capita GMP. Significant indirect productivity effects of transit service are found. For example, in the case of central city employment density, estimated wage increases range between $1.5 million and $1.8 billion per metropolitan area yearly for a 10 per cent increase in transit seats or rail service miles per capita. Firms and households likely receive unanticipated agglomeration benefits from transit-induced densification and growth, and current benefit–cost evaluations may therefore underestimate the benefits of improving transit service, particularly in large cities with existing transit networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite growing interest in the study of intercity networks, researchers routinely lament the difficulties involved in obtaining the necessary data. This paper introduces and demonstrates a new programme, AIRNET, which generates intercity networks from publicly available data. Specifically, AIRNET processes airline traffic data from the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics (BTS) to produce networks among US cities and airports. These data and networks are restricted to US cities, but nonetheless offer two major benefits to researchers seeking intercity network data. First, AIRNET produces four types of network—route, origin–destination, business and leisure—that can be used to explore distinct research questions and which can be customised using adjustable parameters that alter how the network is created. Secondly, it can produce each of these networks at multiple time points beginning in 1993, thereby providing researchers access to one of the only sources of longitudinal, dynamic intercity networks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, the urban competitiveness of 23 major US cities is examined. The methodology allows the obtaining of results that are not available to other methodologies. Several determinants of urban competitiveness are identified that are statistically verifiable and it is possible to show how both these determinants and the competitiveness of 23 US urban economies have changed during the past two decades. The results are presented in a manner that will be of use to urban decision-makers and planners. This study follows up on two earlier studies of this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the impacts of different types of urban containment policies (UCPs) on the spatial structure of US metropolitan areas, with a particular focus on UCP tightness. These UCPs include state-mandated urban growth boundaries (UGBs), locally adopted urban growth boundaries and urban service areas (USAs). Population and employment density gradients, taken as concentration measures, are estimated for 135 metropolitan areas and are then used in a simultaneous equation model to assess the impacts of different UCPs on metropolitan spatial structure. The results suggest that state-mandated ‘strong’ UGBs more effectively promote growth within the boundaries than locally adopted UGBs or USAs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies have found that knowledge production grows faster in cities lagging behind than it does in traditionally leading cities, which implies convergence in knowledge production. On the other hand, there is also evidence that larger cities are more efficient in knowledge production—i.e. agglomeration economies—which is likely to cause divergence. This paper attempts to reconcile these two seemingly contradictory findings by estimating a simple econometric model, using the US patent records between 1975 and 2005. It is found that convergence occurs among cities of similar size (horizontal convergence), while divergence occurs between larger cities and smaller cities (vertical divergence). The former dominates the latter, leading to the net effect of overall convergence. It is also found that the divergence is attributable to the fact that the agglomeration economies that previously existed have become even larger over time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Simpop2 is a generic multi-agent model designed for simulating any system of cities. From an evolutionary theory built upon the observation of networks of cities in different parts of the world and over long time-periods, it has been possible to identify stylised facts that characterise their main features and properties. This paper presents data-oriented simulations of two kinds of system: in early settled countries (Europe, 1300—2000) and in countries more recently settled (the United States, 1650—2000). The model can simulate properly the general dynamics of urban systems, at different scales of observation (general configuration and trajectories of individual cities). The simulations help to identify some dynamic properties that are shared by both systems: a general growth trend and spatial expansion (produced through interurban competition which generates emulation towards innovation that explain the persistency of the hierarchical configuration); a dramatic increase of contrasts in city sizes since the first industrial revolution linked to the increase of communication speed; and, a differentiation of urban economic functions produced through interactions between cities and innovation cycles, as industrial revolution. The model also puts forward the necessary integration of a new urban function in the model, which represents the early emergence of global cities. Yet, beyond these similarities in the evolution of all urban systems, when they are fully integrated, the model also measures to what extent the observed peculiarities in their contemporary spatial and functional configuration depend on differences in the early space-filling process between the two kinds of system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite embracing the concept of networks to help explain the organisation of modern urban systems, measurement has presented an overriding challenge to researchers: how can linkages between cities be operationalised ? Airline traffic data have been proposed as a promising solution, but these data introduce their own complications. In this paper, the Airline Origin and Destination Survey is used to refine this approach, distinguishing first between hub/spoke and origin/destination networks and, secondly, between networks of business-oriented and leisure-oriented travel among 115 US metropolitan areas in 2006. After illustrating the importance of these distinctions with employment data from the American Community Survey, the resulting and more narrowly focused business network is used to test a model of urban economic flows. Results suggest that the volume of business exchanges between US cities is a function of the cities' own attributes and as well as relational factors including economic similarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial residential segregation remains a topic of interest due to its impact on broader racial stratification. However, scholarly inquiry into the subject often ignores metropolitan racial diversity and the hierarchical nature of urban space. This paper proposes a multigroup, multilevel framework to assess the shifting racial and geographical structure of segregation in US metropolitan areas. It is found that overall declines in segregation are due almost entirely to the erosion of White/non-White bifurcation within large cities. The divide between the urban core and suburban ring remains a substantial if not defining component of segregation and racial distinctions between suburban communities are increasing. There is less evidence that Black, Latino and Asian metropolitan residents are fragmenting into homogeneous enclaves and segregation among these groups generally accounts for less overall segregation than would be expected given their relative population size. All told, urban and suburban municipalities are replacing neighbourhoods as the central organising units of metropolitan segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]