Linear City Research Articles

Optimal zoning of managerial duopoly

This paper investigates optimal zoning of two managerial firms in an unconstrained linear city. Comparing with the case in which firms are not managerial type, the strategic delegation increases the incentives of one firm to locate farther from the rival. Then, a welfare function is introduced to highlight zoning regulation as an influential competition policy tool. Depending on the regulator's objective function and the timing of location choice, we provide a new mechanism that allows the regulator to attain the optimal locations of managerial firms and can lead to strong or weak competition.

Exploring the effectiveness of China's dual credit policy in a differentiated automobile market when some consumers are environmentally aware

This paper analyzes how China's dual credit policy affects electric vehicle market penetration and energy efficiency improvement in a Hotelling's linear city model, when there exists a proportion of green consumers who are environmentally aware. We consider a model where the two firms produce electric vehicles and gasoline vehicles respectively, and compete in prices and R&D investment which has an influence on energy efficiency of vehicles and thus perceived consumer utility. Our result shows that the adoption of electric vehicles would be facilitated with the increasing number of green consumers and rising price of new energy vehicle credits. The fall of standard new energy vehicle credits might speed up electric vehicle adoption significantly if it helps eliminate the credit surplus and raise the credit price effectively. Surprisingly, the growth of new energy vehicle credit percentage requirement may not play an important role in promoting electric vehicles. Meanwhile, we find that fuel efficiency improvement of gasoline vehicles may be slightly hampered.

The Linear City: illustrating the logic of spatial equilibrium

Linear cities where activity is spread out along a transportation line, aim to offer the highest levels of accessibility to their adjacent populations as well as to the countryside. These city forms are popular amongst architects and planners in envisioning ideal cities but they are difficult to implement as they involve strict controls on development which often ignore human behaviour associated with where we locate and how we move. We briefly explore the history of these ideas, noting the latest proposal to build a 170 km city called Neom in north west Saudi Arabia, a plan that has attracted considerable criticism for its apparent ignorance of how actual cities grow and evolve. We use a standard model of human mobility based on gravitational principles to define a set of equilibrium conditions that illustrate how a theoretical city on a line would, without any controls, successively adapt to such a new equilibrium. First, we represent the city on a line, showing how its population moves to an equilibrium along the line, and then we generalise this to a bigger two-dimensional space where the original line cutting across the grid evolves as populations maximise their accessibility over the entire space. In this two-dimensional world, we simulate different forms that reflect a balance of centralising versus decentralising forces, showing the power of such equilibria in destroying any idealised form. This approach informs our thinking about how far idealised future cities can depart from formal plans of the kind that the linear city imposes.

Nash Equilibrium, Heterogeneous Preferences, and the Extended Hotelling Linear City

Nash Equilibrium, Heterogeneous Preferences, and the Extended Hotelling Linear City

Lessons from the strategic design of a bimodal public transport system on a linear city

A new microeconomic approach for the strategic design of public transport systems considering two technologies (subway and bus) is explored using a stylized linear city where all possible lines structures can be described and analyzed, and where demand is completely represented with three parameters: total volume, the proportion starting at the periphery, and the proportion of these ending at the CBD. Using Santiago-like data and three levels of total demand the social cost minimizing systems are presented in the trip distribution space. Different bus-based structures are superior for most demand distributions (with a pattern rather insensitive to total patronage), except when the capacity of the bus system is reached in some section of the city or when the total number of long trips is very large. A sensitivity analysis confirms the importance of these elements, particularly in the role of the subway and in the conditions that make the feeder-trunk scheme convenient. Policy and methodological lessons emerge for extensions to a more general description of a city where lines structures enumeration is not possible.

Pipes, Taps, and Vendors: An Integrated Water Management Approach

This paper applies a microeconomics-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. Based on an assumed linear city, we calculate the optimal modal split of water supply. Not all water users need to be connected to a centralized, pipeline-based water supply network from an economic perspective. We calculate the optimal tap density and the optimal spatial range of households served by non-mobile or mobile water vendors for the area with unconnected households. The analysis is made for the case of water requirement (totally inelastic water demand), and afterward, the research will be extended to the case of an elastic water demand based on a Stone–Geary utility function to incorporate price and income effects. The result, an “optimal modal split” between network-based water supply and other supply options, has main implications on water tariffication. While the volumetric elements of the tariff are based on the marginal costs, the level of the access fee mainly depends on the subsistence level of water.

SCREENING IN SPACE: RICH AND POOR CONSUMERS IN A LINEAR CITY

Unlike standard models of monopolistic screening (second-degree price discrimination), we consider a situation where consumers are heterogeneous not only vertically, in their willingness to pay, but also horizontally, in their tastes or "addresses'' a la Hotelling's Linear City. For such a screening game, a novel model is composed. We formulate the game as an optimization program, prove the existence of equilibria, develop a method to calculate equilibria, and characterize their properties. Namely, the solution structure of the resulting menu of contracts can be either a "chain of envy'' like in usual screening or a number of disconnected chains. Unlike usual screening, "almost all'' consumers get positive informational rent. Importantly, the model can be extended to oligopoly screening.

Linear location-dependent parking fees and integrated daily commuting patterns with late arrival and early departure in a linear city

This paper extends the work of Zhang et al. (2008) to investigate the daily commuting patterns allowing both late arrival in the morning and early departure in the evening in a linear city. Given the fixed parking locations of morning commuters, the Nash equilibrium principle is employed to formulate commuters’ departure time choice in the evening and the user equilibrium principle in terms of daily travel cost is adopted to formulate the departure time choice of morning commuters. A combined regime of linear location-dependent parking fee and time-varying road toll is then proposed to reduce the total social cost (TSC) for the linear city. All the possible equilibrium traffic flows are analytically derived. The analytical results show that (1) commuters, who arrive at work early in the morning, may not depart early in the evening, but their evening trip costs must be lower; (2) when the parking spaces become denser, the evening commute starts earlier and the morning commute starts later; (3) a linear location-dependent parking fee could either advance or postpone the earliest departure time in the morning; (4) three parking modes, distinguished by the order in which commuters park, occur successively as the parking fee rate increases; and (5) an appropriate parking fee can always improve the system efficiency, but no matter how the parking fee is changed, it is impossible to completely eliminate the efficiency loss in the morning. Furthermore, a parking reservation regime joint with time-varying road toll is designed to minimize the TSC for the linear city. Finally, a set of numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the model's properties and these proposed regimes’ performance.

Modeling and managing the morning commute problem with park-and-ride-sharing

In this paper, park-and-ride-sharing (P&RS) is proposed to manage morning peak hour congestion in a monocentric linear city, where there is a multilane highway with a single bottleneck connecting the residential area and the central business district (CBD). To realize ride-sharing matching, a ride-sharing parking lot (RSPL) and a ride-sharing meeting point (RSMP) are set up somewhere between the origin and the bottleneck. To encourage ride-sharing participation, the lanes of the highway are physically divided into high occupancy vehicle (HOV) and general purpose (GP) lanes for only ride-sharing vehicles and non-ride-sharing vehicles, respectively. The user equilibrium principle in terms of generalized travel cost is adopted to formulate commuters’ mode choice and arrival time choice at the RSMP. It is demonstrated that there exist three possible equilibrium ride-sharing matching patterns and three possible equilibrium traffic flow patterns. All possible equilibrium ride-sharing matching and traffic flow patterns are analytically derived. In addition, to minimize total system cost (TSC), three break-even parking charge schemes are designed under the case that all parking lots are managed by the government. The optimal allocation scheme of bottleneck capacity to HOV lanes under each parking charge scheme is analytically derived. Finally, numerical examples are provided to illustrate the properties of the proposed bottleneck model with P&RS and the effectiveness of the designed parking charge schemes.

Optimal strategies of mobile targeting promotion under competition

This paper aims to investigate the optimal strategies of mobile targeting promotion (MTP) between two competing firms. MTP is a marketing tool that pushes personalized promotion to apps embedded in mobile devices based on consumers' real-time geographic locations. This paper examines competing firms' MTP and pricing decisions in the classic Hotelling's linear city model with a more realistic setting of round shopping trips. It simultaneously incorporates consumers' real-time geographic location and cherry-picking behavior into the analysis. The model also factors in the unit production cost asymmetry in a competitive environment and demonstrates to what extent the low-cost advantage can be realized, as well as under what conditions the high-cost disadvantage can be remedied. Analyzing three subgames of MTP, we obtain the following findings. First, firms' optimal MTP and pricing strategies are influenced by the fraction of strategic consumers and the unit targeting cost of MTP. Second, a firm may not benefit from a lower unit production cost if the MTP cost is too high. Subsequently, the firm with a cost disadvantage may not suffer a profit loss. Finally, we derive the boundary conditions under which the disadvantageous firm can avoid profit loss, and find that a higher fraction of strategic consumers in the market will alleviate the risk of profit loss for the firm if only one firm adopts MTP.

Low rise residential construction as the basis of building industry innovative development

The article analyzes the current situation in Russian construction industry associated with the low innovation activity at all levels of construction sphere. Among the many reasons for the technological low innovative ability to technological change in construction industry, the authors outline reasons that might radically and positively influence the situation in domestic construction within the first half of the 21st century. The object of the study is the "construction system" concept, which is proposed to be identified as a main link of building innovations that promotes or, accordingly hinders construction objects production. When considering this concept, it becomes obvious that the critical link of innovation is concentrated in the concept of "structural framework" and related technologies for the production of construction objects. It is concluded that the main obstacle to the construction industry innovative development is the conservatism of building frames structural solutions and the corresponding technologies of the construction systems which are oriented to multi-storey housing construction and the main priorities of such construction are concentrated in mega-cities. The requirements for living environment, architectural diversity, residential building layouts, «green building» principles, energy efficiency, economy and internal comfort of housing are being raised. The paper emphasizes that existing building systems, especially in megacities, is not able to solve demographic problems and promote a healthy and safe life for people. The authors suggest that in the near future the turn to other priorities of housing construction and the transition to a new technological order with the help of industrial innovative low-rise residential construction systems for development of the Eurasian space of the country on the "linear city" concept base.

Le Corbusier y la Ciudad Lineal. A propósito de un doble centenario

<div data-canvas-width="297.494060630767">Hace cien años, en octubre de 1920 aparece en París el primer número de la revista<em> L’Esprit Nouveau</em>, donde Charles-Édouard Jeanneret toma por vez primera el nombre de Le Corbusier, que no le abandonaría nunca. Pocas semanas después, el 6 de noviembre, fallece en Madrid Arturo Soria, creador e impulsor de la Ciudad Lineal. Ambos centenarios pueden ponerse en relación intencionada. Una relación entre dos genios del urbanismo: Soria y Le Corbusier, que venía por lo menos de 1913-15, cuando éste, preparando su estudio La Construction des Villes, calca con trazo decidido una serie de dibujos de la Ciudad Lineal de Madrid y que se prolongaría durante casi cincuenta años, hasta 1958-60, cuando defiende ante André Malraux las Cités Linéaires en lo que probablemente sean sus últimas propuestas sobre Paris. A ese medio siglo de relación entre Le Corbusier y la Ciudad Lineal vamos a dedicar el presente estudio.</div>

The World as an Architectural Project by Hashim Sarkis et al. (review).

Reviewed by: The World as an Architectural Project by Hashim Sarkis et al. Abby Spinak (bio) The World as an Architectural Project By Hashim Sarkis and Roi Salgueiro Barrio, with Gabriel Kozlowski. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019. Pp. 576. It is nice when the title of a book tells you precisely what it is about, and even better when the book's argument surprises you despite the title. The World as an Architectural Project asks, literally, how architects have viewed the planet as a site and reconceptualized globality through speculative design. By reframing "the world" as a design prompt, the authors de-construct it as a historically situated idea that has changed over time and been harnessed to different politics. They invite readers to "disentangle the conception of globes from the imposition of the global," a dichotomy they name mondialisation (following Jean-Luc Nancy, the ongoing project of world-forming) versus globalization (the hegemonic imposition of homogeneity) (pp. 9, 526). The book can therefore be read both as an archive of the changing relationship between the design professions and "the world," and as an activist call to designers for more pluralistic and less anthropocentric engagements with space. The authors begin by asking: "what does architecture do for the world? And, conversely, what does the world do for architecture?" (p. 7). In answer, they present a catalog of fifty visions from 1882 to 2019, drawing this periodization generally from Giovanni Arrighi's long twentieth century, and specifically from Spanish urban planner Arturo Soria y Mata's proposal of a "linear city" (la ciudad lineal) that would "fill the earth" (p. 21). The catalog goes beyond the usual suspects in the history of design (Geddes, Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier) to include more theoretical and narrative explorations of the production of space—for example, the Urban [End Page 1250] Theory Lab's "planetary urbanization" and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy's extractivism-focused Geostories (pp. 463, 492–3). The discussion intentionally slips between the literal-tangible and the conceptual-theoretical: for example, showing how the scale of "the world" has inspired new methodologies, as well as how collective imaginaries of globality have shifted. In this capacity, the authors define architecture as akin to "other artistic practices that use documentary procedures, analysis, and fiction in-distinctly to produce visions of social totalities" (p. 7). They invite readers to engage with these projects as situated texts, their world-forming aspirations as artifacts of the evolution and limits of the "architectural imagination" at different historical junctures (p. 527). Commendably, they observe that their catalog reflects "imbalances of class, race, and gender" that have unequally empowered men in the global North to imagine, design, and be heard at the scale of the world—inequalities that "are still pervasive in the profession of architecture" (p. 16). As itself an artifact of mondialisation, this book may be of interest to historians for its attention to architecture as an environmental act. The authors situate their catalog—briefly but incisively—as an intervention for the Anthropocene and conclude with a sense of urgency: "There is no time left and there is no other place to go" (pp. 4, 521). Given recent attention to the origins and periodization of the Anthropocene (and its many etymological alternatives), historians may find the book's optimism intriguing as a field-specific appropriation of Anthropocenic narrative. "Architects reject the closure of the future," Sarkis writes in the epilogue, and are therefore committed to "a necessity to heal the world starting from little architectural acts up" (pp. 522–3). The catalog can thus also be read as a politics of methodological experimentation with alternative "geo-visualizations" (pluralistic, non-anthropocentric). In this framing, the book intersects with other recent calls to reimagine architecture as a field in the face of climate change—including Elisa Iturbe's critiques of "carbon form" as a violent spatial logic that is sufficiently entrenched to endure beyond decarbonization; Charlotte Malterre-Barthes's "A Global Moratorium on New Construction" initiative, which calls for a reorientation of architecture towards reuse and redistribution; and Damian White's critical material design politics for a democratic Anthropocene—all of whom ask what the tacit assumptions of mainstream...

Port choice problem in a linear city: Application to Manila and Batangas ports in the Philippines

Global maritime container trade has increased during the past two decades. In many developing countries, secondary ports have been developed to complement primary ports. However, primary ports are still being used even after the development of a secondary port, notwithstanding heavy congestion at the former. Construction of new port infrastructure demands several important decisions such as port capacity and number of gantry cranes and berths, which significantly affect shippers’ port choice. This study aims to develop a port choice model in a multiple-port region as a linear city and observe the improvement in port-related factors, that is, container allocation and catchment areas of the two ports. We present a spatial model in which the hinterland is expressed as a linear city to describe the behaviors of shippers and shipping lines. As a case study, the model is applied to the Manila metropolitan area (i.e., the Manila and Batangas ports) where secondary port utilization is not as expected. Three significant insights are obtained: (i) hourly container handling volume of gantry cranes at the port is the most influential factor regarding container allocation, (ii) port-related factors affecting shipping lines are more effective than those of shippers for increasing the container volume at the port, and (iii) geographical disadvantages are limiting the increase in container volume at the Batangas port.

Geographic Pooling of Hospital Resources: Data-Driven Trade-off between Waiting and Traveling

(1) Problem definition: Using patient-level data from 72 MRI hospitals in Ontario, Canada from 2013 to 2017, we find that over 60% of patients exceeded their wait time targets. We conduct a data-driven analysis to quantify the reduction in the Fraction Exceeding Target (FET) for MRI services through geographic resource sharing while controlling for the cost of patient driving. (2) Academic/Practical Relevance: Grouping hospitals in the same geographic region into resource-sharing pools can reduce waiting time but increase travel costs. We prove analytically that partial pooling typically dominates complete pooling and no pooling for a simple linear city model with homogeneous patients. We present a data-driven method to solve the generalized (practical but more difficult) geographic pooling problem of 72 hospitals with heterogeneous patients with different wait time targets located in a two-dimensional region. (3) Methodology: We propose a geographic resource sharing model that groups hospitals into clusters to reduce the FET while controlling for patient driving distance. For any given geographic cluster, using forecasted data generated by a neural network, we propose an advance scheduling mechanism that informs the patient of her service time when she requests an MRI scan, an ``augmented-priority queuing that ranks the patient based on her priority and waiting time target, and a routing algorithm that determines at which hospital she will receive the MRI scan. We then optimize clusters using modified K-means clustering and Genetic Algorithms. Lastly, we conduct a counterfactual analysis to determine the minimal capacity expansions needed to achieve the desired 10% FET. (4) Results: Our resource pooling model lowers the FET to 34% while limiting patients' driving time to maximally two hours. In addition, our model and method show that only eight additional scanners are needed to achieve 10% FET while 50 additional scanners would be needed without resource sharing. (5) Managerial Implication: Our paper provides a practical, data-driven geographical resource-sharing model that hospitals can readily implement. Our solution method achieves a near-optimal solution with low computational complexity. Using smart data-driven scheduling and routing, a little extra capacity placed at the right location is all we need to achieve the desired FET under geographic resource sharing.

The organic language of Arturo Soria: the antecedent of ecological urban planning

Between 1881 and 1883, Arturo Soria y Mata published a series of articles on urban issues in the newspaper El Progreso, in which he exposed the roots of his urban theory and outlined his proposal for a Linear City. In these first writings, the organic vision of the urban phenomena developed by Soria integrates the processes of consumption of matter and energy necessary for urban life in a concept of the city that is both unique and complex. The development of this organic metaphor entails the recognition of urban metabolism as an opportunity for improving living conditions. The parallelism between the urban organism and the human body is the key of this operational methodology, through which the author conceives advanced supply, communications or waste collection systems based on the potential of new technologies to organize and improve the cities of his time. It was from this vision that his definitive proposal for urban growth was born, the Linear City, which was fated to establish a residential network that connected the core of the existing cities, preserved as business and leisure centers. Soria’s organic thinking is an important historical precedent to the consolidation of an urban ecology. The purpose of studying and advocating it is to reconcile contemporary urban challenges and aspirations with an underrated chapter of the foundations of modern urban theory.

Pipes, Taps and Vendors: An Integrated Water Management Approach

This paper applies a microeconomic-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. We assume a linear city, with some plausible assumptions on income and willingness-to-pay, and then calculate the optimal tap density, leading in turn to an optimal modal split between piped and unconnected water consumption. From an economic perspective, not all water users need to be connected to a centralized, pipeline infrastructure, and the non-connected households should be served by non-mobile or mobile vendors. The analysis is firstly made for the case of totally inelastic demand functions for simplification reasons and afterwards the analysis becomes more complicated and realistic by addressing elastic demand functions which are based on a simplified version of the Stone-Geary utility function. In terms of policy implications, the paper suggests a role for decentral, offgrid solutions to generalized water supply, with a certain role for water vendors.

Urban transportation planning in the linear city

The paper discusses the transportation system planning based on problems and requirements of urban transport system by linear city form. Planning form has an important impact on urban transport characteristics, and urban road network structure. The object under study is the transport infrastructure of Volgograd city (formerly called Tsaritsyn and Stalingrad), the largest industrial center in the South of Russia. The city stretches along the Volga River for almost 100 km. The authors identify the main promising directions for the development of transport infrastructure: development of high-speed transport modes, which will link remote areas of the city with its center; development of radial transport infrastructure directions and the complexity of urban plan morphology from a linear form to a more complex one; establishment of combined transport and engineering corridors; development of pre-railway areas.

Dispersão urbana e empresas urbanizadoras na cidade industrial: a atuação da Compañia Madrileña de Urbanización, da Garden City Pioneer Company, da First Garden City Ltda. e da Cia City

Este artigo tem como objetivo problematizar o fenômeno contemporâneo da dispersão urbana dentro do campo da história do Urbanismo. Este exercício historiográfico foi construído com base em uma análise crítica da atuação de empresas urbanizadoras de reconhecida importância na historiografia do Urbanismo: a Compañia Madrileña de Urbanización, empresa urbanizadora fundada pelo madrilenho Arturo Soria y Mata para implementar sua ideia de ciudad lineal; as empresas Garden City Pioneer Company e First Garden City Ltd, fundadas, respectivamente, para levantar fundos e gerenciar a construção de Letchworth, na Inglaterra, primeira cidade-jardim construída, cujo esquema teórico Ebenezer Howard havia concebido em 1898; e a empresa City of São Paulo Improvements and Freehold Company Ltd, que implementou os primeiros bairros-jardim de São Paulo. Na narrativa sobre cada empresa, destacam-se os dois conceitos urbanísticos propagados por essas empresas, relacionados com a ideia de urbanização dispersa e com as estratégias empresariais desenvolvidas para viabilizar empreendimentos ligados à dispersão.

The Territory of the Grand Tetouan as Linear City: Between Description and Project

This article, based upon pedagogical experimentation in development in a master-level architecture studio at the ULB School of Architecture (Brussels), focuses on the concept of a linear city in a metropolitan context. This concept is proposed by the Grand Tetouan (North Morocco) spatial development scheme as a framework to think about the future of this territory. The interest of the concept lies in its being both a descriptive and project-oriented tool, which allows working with students on the intricate relationship between these two moments of urban design. The coastal region has been the subject of a proposal for a “linear garden city” by a follower of Soria y Mata, Hilarión González del Castillo (1929), a project that left traces on the “palimpsest” (Corboz, 1983/2001) of the actual territory. The idea of the linear city, which has been, throughout the 20th century, a recurrent thematic in urban planning theory and practice dealing with the issue of industrial development of the modern city can be, in the specific case of the Grand Tetouan region, re-examined through the lens of tourism as an industry. The exploration is based on an analytical approach by the use of the notion of urban material (Boeri, Lanzani, & Marini, 1993; Viganò, 1999), an approach that creates the conditions of understanding (describing/designing) the existing territory through the mapping of its physical elements, a description that can then be used to develop an analysis of the forms of production of these elements and the complexity of their uses: how the city is, formally and socially, built (Secchi, 1989).