Tall buildings are central to facilitating sustainable urbanization and growth in cities worldwide. We estimate average elasticities of city population and built area to aggregate city building heights of 0.12 and -0.17, respectively, indicating that the largest global cities in developing...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

Rezoning commercial and residential parcels to permit mixed-use and higher density development in cities is a potentially important policy response to a variety of pressing urban planning issues, including housing affordability and transit congestion. Yet, comparatively little is known about the...

Using data for 134 locations in New Zealand, we study the effects of crime and agglomeration on urban amenity. We find that crime has significant negative effects on the value of urban amenity, with elasticities of approximately −0.06 for firms and −0.09 for workers. To put this effect in...

Land is a scarce resource; hence, efficient land management techniques are critical for its procurement and development. The land readjustment (LR) mechanism is one such land assembly tool, which many countries, including Japan, have adopted, and is known as the Town Planning Scheme (TP Scheme) in...