Since the 1980s, the promotion of heritage values has gradually become a relevant issue for urban planning. Together with the emergence of new peripheries, inner-city areas and particularly old historic centres, affected by deterioration due to the recession of the last decades, have been the...

I have been asked to write a paper over “my urban idol 2050” to be the foundation for a presentation at a session at the ERSA congress in Bratislava in August 2012. No special instructions were given, so I have chosen to write a kind of scenario for the possible future development in the...

This paper provides a synthesis of the state of knowledge on the economics of skyscrapers. First, we document how vertical urban growth has gained pace over the course of the 20th century. Second, we lay out a simple theoretical model of optimal building heights in a competitive market to...

Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the...

Place names, or toponyms, provide insight into the initial geographical characteristics of settlements. We present a unique dataset of 3,705 German toponyms that includes the date of the first historical record mentioning the settlement and the date it was granted city rights. We show that the...

We study distributive politics inside cities by analysing how local governments allocate investment projects to voters across neighbourhoods. In particular, we ask whether politicians use investment to target their own supporters. To this aim, we use detailed geo-located investment data from...

China's urbanization is significant world-wide. This process is characterized by under-urbanization of population and fast urban land expansion. The driving forces behind this expansion and their rationale are not fully understood and empirically tested. This study fills this gap by analyzing...

City planning in America began as a Progressive Era exercise, intended to pre-serve property values and implicitly incorporate the social norms of officials and planners. Over time, rigid zoning was replaced by flexibility, accompanied by opaque bargaining between localities and developers....

A common urban mobility plan for Prague and its metropolitan region as well as the creation of an integrated transport system coordinated by a central transport body are the main assets Prague can leverage to enhance accessibility. However, weak links to land use plans, the lack of...