Urban systems emerge as distinct entities from the complex interactions among social, economic and cultural attributes, and information, energy and material stocks and flows that operate on different temporal and spatial scales. Such complexity poses a challenge to identify the causes of urban environmental problems and how to address them without causing greater deterioration. Planning has tra...

Urban goods movement modelling is a popular subject in urban logistics research. However, most models remain under-used because practitioners have difficulties to apply them to simulate urban policies and their impacts on transport flows, mainly when the assessed situations are different from the initial usage of the mode. This paper aims to answer to that issue by proposing a methodology of sc...

Santiago, Chile has the distinction of having among the worst urban air pollution problems in Latin America. As part of an atmospheric pollution reduction plan, the Santiago Regional Metropolitan government defined an environmental policy goal of using urban forests to remove particulate matter less than 10 microm (PM(10)) in the Gran Santiago area. We used cost effectiveness, or the process of...

  There is a significant relationship between economic growth and the degree of urban concentration, as measured by primacy or the share of the largest city in an urban system. In accordance to urban economic theories, there is an inverse-U shape relationship between urban concentration –urban primacy- and economic growth. That is, as economy grows, urban concentration increases, approaches a...

Smart cities are emerging fast and they introduce new practices and services which highly impact policy making and planning, while they co-exist with urban facilities. It is now needed to understand the smart city’s contribution in the overall urban planning and vice versa, to recognize urban planning offerings to a smart city context. This chapter highlights and measures smart city and urban p...

Contrary to the conventional diagnosis of urban problems, this article argues that these problems do not arise from the long-term trends in the decentralization of employment and population in metropolitan areas. Instead, the most important fiscal problems confronted by central-city governments and the most significant social and economic problems of central-city residents arise from increased ...

Since the 1950s, China has had a very wide coverage of healthcare service at the local level. In urban areas, the employment-based healthcare-insurance schemes (Government Insurance Scheme and Labour Insurance Scheme) worked hand in hand with the full employment policy of the Government, which guaranteed basic care for almost every urban resident. However, since the economic reforms of the earl...

Nowadays, an area-based approach seems to be common for urban policies in Western Europe. Policies are directed towards spatially defined areas in order to be more efficient in solving problems in cities. Yet, besides solving problems in the targeted area, an area-based approach has an in-built danger: it might lead to a displacement of problems. This so-called spatial knock-on effect is an eff...

Search, Migration, and Urban Land Use: The Case of Transportation Policies We develop a search-matching model with rural-urban migration and an explicit land market. Wages, job creation, urban housing prices are endogenous and we characterize the steadystate equilibrium. We then consider three different policies: a transportation policy that improves the public transport system in the city, an ...

China’s economic inequalities between rural and urban regions were high but stable during the centrally planned period. Since the inception of reforms in 1978, the disparities have exhibited a marked cyclical pattern: the declines in early years were followed by a period of increases and then by renewed declines. We find that the sharp sectoral divide in the planning episode was a result of ind...