The term urban sprawl is often used to describe apparent inefficiencies of spatial development, including disproportionate growth of urban areas and excessive leapfrog development. In Switzerland, where open space is a scare resource, sprawl takes place all over the country. It goes at the...

I study the welfare consequences of land use regulations for low- and high-skilled workers within a city. I use detailed geographic data for Cook County and Chicago in 2015-2016, together with a spatial quantitative model with two types of workers and real estate developers who face regulations....

Residential development is a dynamic process, as changes in housing stock vary substantially over space and time. These spatiotemporal dynamics are expected to differ in various hierarchical levels of urban areas. Urban cores, peri-urban areas and predominantly rural areas are likely to...

This is chapter 8 from my forthcoming book, "Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation," which will be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2015. This chapter addresses the metropolitan problems caused by local zoning, particularly its contribution to excessive...

Today more than half of the 7 billion inhabitants of the planet live in urban areas, with this share expected to keep rising. Whereas in developed countries urbanisation has been a long and slow process, in developing countries this process is now characterised by a really fast pace and a high...

"Beyond the Megacity connects and reconnects the global debate on the contemporary urban condition to the Latin American tradition of seeing, considering, and theorizing urbanization from the margins. It develops the approach of “peripheral urbanization” as a way to integrate the theoretical...

For decades, rapid urban expansion has led to concerns over the loss of cultivated land in rural China. This contrasts sharply with another salient feature of the Chinese land policy reform landscape that has gone on largely unnoticed - the addition of newly cultivated land in China through land...