The notion of compact city has become an important planning agenda to achieve a sustainable urban future. Although there is no universally accepted definition of a compact city, in terms of land use, the concept generally focuses on high-density and mixed-use development along with the promotion...

Beijing has undergone rapid urbanisation from 1950-2010. The main built-up area expanded concentrically from 100 to 1210 km2. Its urban fringe became popular for new developments, some placed haphazardly. The government concentrated efforts in "stopping concentric fringe expansion". E.g. on...

This paper reconsiders the evolution of the growth of American cities since 1790 in light of new theories of urban growth. Our null hypothesis for long-term growth is random growth. We obtain evidence supporting random growth against the alternative of mean reversion (convergence) in city sizes...

Accumulation of education and geographic concentration of educated people in cities are expected to generate urban income growth. New economic geography predicts income divergence across regions. We investigate the dynamic process of accumulating tertiary education and regional income growth in...

This paper presents a theoretical approach to solve the main problems faced to explain the relationship between aggregate economic growth and the urban structure. The most significant conclusion reached is that there is a theoretical relationship between aggregate economic growth and urban...

This paper analyses in detail the features offered by a function which is practically new to Urban Economics, the q-exponential, in describing city size distributions. We highlight two contributions. First, we propose a new and simple procedure for estimating their parameters. Second, and more...

There is a large literature on the existence of agglomeration economies, as shown in the surveys by Moomaw (1983) or Gerking (1993). The benefits of these economies arise from multiple sources, but some negative externalities might also emerge. Within the hierarchical urban system, cities at...

This paper presents a comparative assessment of two distinct urban growth modeling approaches. The first urban model uses a traditional Cellular Automata methodology, based on Markov transition chains to prospect probabilities of future urban change. Drawing forth from non-linear cell dynamics,...

The urban structures between the Member States of the European Union is very different for historical, geographical, economic reasons. However, the population is spread across geographic areas in a way that, although continuously changing, is not possible to define as random. Indeed, countries...