Optimal City Size Research Articles

Location decisions under uncertainty and the urban model

Abstract This letter uses a simple urban model to analyze the impact of random transportation costs on residential location decisions of households. It is shown that such uncertainty steepens the fall of land prices with distance from the CBD and can, in a specific example, cause an increase in optimal city size.

CONTEMPORARY URBANIZATION AND AN OPTIMAL SIZE FOR SOVIET CITIES

This article is an English translation of the work cited in 46: 3092. The authors review the conclusions of Pivovarov (see 44: Title 3118) concerning the nature of the urbanization process and optimal city size in the USSR. The relationship between urbanization and the characteristics of a given socioeconomic system is examined, and the possibility of determining optimal size for cities of different functional types is evaluated

Aggregate Land Rents, Expenditure on Public Goods, and Optimal City Size

I. An example, 473.—II. The generality of the Henry George Theorem, 477.—III. On using land rents as a measure of the benefits from public goods, 490.—IV. Competitive attainability of a Pareto optimal distribution of economic activity, 496.—V. Concluding comments, 498.

Optimal city size in a spatial economy

Almost all previous theories of optimal city population size have suffered from two serious defects; they have been non-spatial in nature, and have not been embedded in a utility-maximizing framework. In this paper a spatial theory of optimal city size is developed which builds on recent work in residential location theory. Attention is focused on one of the necessary conditions for optimal city size, which specifies a relationship between economic aggregates in the city. In one case the optimal population rule is that expenditure on a Samuelsonian public good equal differential land rents. The minimum government intervention necessary to lead an otherwise competitive economy to the optimum is also discussed.

Optimum City Size: Fact or Fancy?

Before a policymaker can sensibly consider whether or how to control urban growth, he must first ask whether there is one city size that is optimal for achieving the highest level of overall welfare. If one city size is preferable to another, the next question is whether decision-making through decentralized markets will lead to the desirable city size, or, conversely, whether some affirmative interventionist strategy is necessary to achieve a more desirable size. Finally, if decentralized markets are likely to be unreliable in obtaining a socially desirable outcome with respect to city size, the problem is to identify strategies of government intervention that can effectively influence city size. This article will consider each of these questions in turn.'

Recent developments in planning the settlement hierarchy of Barbados: Implications concerning the debate on urban primacy

Abstract The topic of big-city growth is receiving increasing attention from geographers, economists, planners and environmentalists, particularly in relation to the likely social and economic impact of urban primacy, and the theoretical and practical implications of optimal city size. This short paper examines these issues in the context of Barbados, where Bridgetown, the chief port and capital city houses some 42% of the island's total population. Initially, the recommendations of the Physical Development Plan for Barbados, published in 1970 with United Nations technical assistance, are presented. In essence, the plan advocated the creation of a hierarchy of settlements within the island by the 1980s, in order to counter the perceived supremacy of Bridgetown. Subsequently, recent progress in promoting the decentralization of population and facilities from Bridgetown is reviewed; and in conclusion, the original proposals and recent developments are critically evaluated.

Individual Preference and Optimal City Size

The desirability of city size can only be judged in relation to the preferences of individuals for production and consumption economies and diseconomies of scale. A model based on plausible utility functions and the free migration of utility-maximising individuals generates a well-spaced city hierarchy, reasonably able to satisfy the population's tastes. It can adjust to population growth or change of taste without serious over-enlargement of cities. Minor interference with it would doubtfully produce net benefit. Rather than externalities in themselves, it is the combination of externalities with inertia that may create suboptimal city hierarchies.

Individual Preference and Optimal City Size

Individual Preference and Optimal City Size

The Urban Hierarchy and Urban Area Production Function: A Synthesis

Urban production functions, often used to indicate optimal city size, usually deal with one city in isolation. This paper introduces differing production and transport costs and demand intensities in order to generate an urban hierarchy of differing urban sizes and market areas. It then distinguishes between continuous hierarchies with a single production function and discretely stepped hierarchies with differing production functions. The model is then applied in order to generate a seven-level hierarchy for 464 urban centres in Saskatchewan, but this is outperformed by the corresponding continuous hierarchy model. The policy implications for self-sustaining urban growth and the potential non-viability of small communities are then discussed.

Spatial equilibrium with local public goods: Urban land rent, optimal city size and the Tiebout hypothesis

Abstract This paper extends the standard model of urban land rent to consider the spatial equilibrium conditions in a local public goods market as hypothesized by Charles M. Tiebout. An analysis is made of the spatial dimensions of public goods, their degree of ‘localness’ and their impact on land values. It is shown that the optimal population size of the community (Tiebout's sixth assumption) is simultaneously derived with the optimal supply of local public goods and local taxes. It is also shown that land rent is a poor output indicator of Tiebout's equilibrium conditions and that the capitalization assumption is not the appropriate test for his hypothesis.

Economic growth, lifestyle preferences, and urban size

Abstract Speculation on optimum city size has often resulted in conceptually elegant theoretical notions that have obscured the relationship between urban economic growth and development, and the resulting ecological effects. In addition, urbanites, upon realizing that development may preclude some aspects of their lifestyles, may become more interested in controlling growth. Before relationships between development and lifestyle may be operationalized, however, some means for predicting growth is necessary — input-output analysis is suggested here for that use. In addition, certain lifestyle expressions which present the relationships between growth in the sectors of the economy and land use, and air and water pollution are specified. For example, economic production may be limited by constraints in the natural sectors. In New Orleans, housing and industrial growth generally mean encroachment on wetland areas and therefore may be limited by the amount of wetland needed to support ecological systems. This can be expressed as a relationship between output in the sectors of the economy and land used in production, where land use is constrained by available land. This and other similar constraints involving air and water pollution are formulated. Although optimum city size is not specified, the paper uses a linear programming formulation of the input-output model including lifestyle constraints to show how optimum city size might be specified. Ecological relationships are useful in predicting the impacts of development on the environment. However, they provide very few limiting conditions. It is up to the community to realize the sensitivity of its environment to development and to limit growth, even though such growth usually represents some trade off between existing or preferred lifestyles and development with its resulting lifestyles. Unfortunately, it is unusual for the community to realize the interdependencies between lifestyle, development, and size. It is the hope of this paper that, as sophisticated models such as input-output become operational at the local level, the links between development, size, and lifestyle will become more specified leading to better informed citizens and decision-makers, and improved decisions. Input-output as part of the framework presented here is a useful device to identify appropriate places and points in time where intervention in developmental decisions by citizens is desirable.

On the political economy of urbanization in the Third World

Cette analyse de l'urbanisation d'aprés‐guerre en Afrique Occidentale est proposée comme un jalon pour l'économie politique de l'urbanisation dans le Tiers Monde. L'Afrique Occidentale est une des régions les moins urbanisées du monde qui cependant a récemment connu une urbanisation plus rapide que toute autre. Cette explosion urbaine est associée avec des inégalités sévères à trois niveaux: un déséquilibre profond dans les conditions de travail et de vie entre le secteur urbain et le secteur rural une forte concentration des ressources dans les capitales une énorme disparité économique à l'intérieur des villes entre les masses et une petit élite Si l'urbanisation en Afrique Occidentale est caractérisée par ces inégalités, il apparait qu'elle entraîne aussi des pertes économiques. Deux approches suggèrent que l'allocation des ressources est loin d'ětre optimale pour la croissance économique. D'une part des ressources sont gaspillées dans le chǒmage et le sous‐emploi urbain, dans la croissance des grands centres métropolitains, et dans la construction des ‘quartiers spontanés’. D'autre part la présupposition que la forme prise par l'urbanisation est le résultat d'une allocation optimale des ressources est mise en doute quand les facteurs qui affectent les paramètres économiques ou qui interferent directement avec les décisions d'investissement sont soumis à l'examen, et quand l'attention est dirigée sur le processus politique qui s'avère constamment dominé par les intérěts et les préoccupations d'un petit groupe de dirigeants.

Are There Returns to Scale in City Size?

A question central to the issue of optimal city size is whether scale economies exist in urban production. Over a third of all Americans who currently live in metropolitan areas live in one of the dozen largest. If it can be shown that these areas have a significant production advantage over the remaining ones, then welfare analysis could be applied to learn whether the extra output produced in these metropolitan areas outweighs the drawbacks of 'their greater disamenities. Economists have long recognized that wages and output per worker in large cities exceed those in smaller ones (Alonso, 1970; Fuchs, 1967; Hoch, 1972; and Izraeli, 1973). Workers have apparently known about this too, and as a result the size distribution of cities has been shifting in favor of the largest cities for much of the past century. But before one can pass welfare judgments about this trend it is necessary to have in hand an empirically-based theory of production and income in urban areas and of the role, if any, played by city size. Our main concern is to develop such a theory -to explain variation in worker incomes across a set of metropolitan areas. We do this for 58 areas using data for 1967. As a part of the study capital stock data were estimated for each of the areas. A marginal productivity theory of factor incomes is assumed and justified empirically. Two-thirds of the variation in gross metropolitan income per worker is explained. We found that the largest SMSAs-those with a population of two million or more had a return to factors 8% higher than the remaining SMSAs. The reason for this was not increasing returns to scale in production -we observed constant returns both across the entire sample and within several smaller city/larger city partitionings of the sample. Rather, there is an effect that seems to obtain for areas of more than two million -a change in the constant term causing a shift in the production function. The reason for this effect, apparently, is that economies exist in transport and communication in the very largest cities with the result that the benefits from agglomeration more than offset congestion costs. A marginal productivity theory of distribution in cities is developed briefly in the next section. This is followed by an empirical section which describes the data and relates the findings.

Optimal city size, land tenure and the economic theory of clubs

In this paper, a connection is made between urban population size in the presence of increasing returns to scale, and the economic theory of clubs. It is shown that under certain conditions, the optimal size of the population is finite and that collective action are transferable concepts from the theory of clubs. The model is also solved in a closed format, i.e., including rent payments as part of total income, under two redistribution schemes. It is shown that the optimal size of the population is independent of the mode of ownership of the urban residential land, when the transportation cost function is linear.

Optimal city size, the economic theory of clubs and exclusionary zoning

The analysis of a city of equals, while admittedly removed from the real world, does yield an important finding: in spite of the presence of increasing returns to scale, the optimal city size is finite. Moreover, the application of the theoretical developments of the theory of clubs to the concept of the co-operative city and to coalitions within the city seems difficult but possible. It may provide valuable insights into programs of public acquisition of urban land and the creation of New Towns, and into the analysis of the urban political process, respectively. Also, I might conjecture that, with this transfer, there is considerable scope for further development of the areas of inter and intra-urban migrations, and of a general theory of urban growth and decay.

"Optimum City Size: Some Thoughts on Theory and Policy": Comment

In Optimum City Size: Some Thoughts on Theory and Policy, Singell [1974] concluded that without adequate mechanisms for regulating growth, cities will not attain optimum population size, and resources will consequently be misallocated. While agreeing with the general conclusion, the purpose of this comment is to show that Singell's work is deficient on two grounds. First, the work is marred by technical errors. Second, by limiting the analysis to cost and income variables, a more basic approach was overlooked.

"Optimum City Size: Some Thoughts on Theory and Policy": Reply

I believe the major point made in Professor Blair's critique of my article Optimum City Size: Some Thoughts on Theory and Policy, is that the treatment is limited to that of partial equilibrium analysis (with respect to a particular hypothetical city). This limitation was clearly intended in all but one regard. That is, I chose to overlook the factors of topography, culture, preference for size per se, and other similar factors' because, while they are clearly important, I wanted to focus on what I believe are the undesirable by-products of political subdivisions within a metropolitan area attempting to limit growth because they can borrow city size. This phenomenon appears to be emerging in a large number of suburbs across the nation and is once again pressing the need for a national plan for urbanization. I did not, however, consider directly the issue of a migration policy which Blair's comment has convinced me is critical. Thus he argues that if a city expands to the size at which marginal cost (MC) and marginal benefit (MP) are equated, this may not be a national optimum if individuals elsewhere in the system could migrate and add less to the net disadvantage than they did in the city from which they came. This is, of course, a real possibility. In a nation experiencing population growth and where economic expansion requires a constant rearrangement of the population, some second-best optimum might be a necessity for long periods of time. Hopefully a national plan for urbanization would have a new town policy which might respond to these pressures. In any case, a national or local strategy for urban migration might be critical to achieving an efficient distribution of the population. The basic question, however, is whether Blair's approach of a market for residential openings provides an adequate framework for dealing with the problems raised in my paper. I think not, although it may be possible to combine the two approaches to conceptually arrive at such an objective. To demonstrate the inadequacy of this approach, consider the following case in which all cities in the national system are assumed to be operating at the optimum, defined as Co in Figure 1. Assume further that the urban population of the nation is completely allocated and the national economy is stable. Thus there is no current need for net migration between urban centers. I think Blair would agree that given these conditions, Co would define the optimal size (from a national point of view) for the city. Further, operating at this optimum size would require that the residents of each city define this size as the one at which the

The Theory of Optimal City-Sizes: Elementary Speculations about Analysis and Policy

The Theory of Optimal City-Sizes: Elementary Speculations about Analysis and Policy

Congestion and optimum city size

Congestion and optimum city size

The size distribution of cities and optimal city size

The size distribution of cities and optimal city size