The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has just published a free book called, The Next Urban Renaissance: How Public-Policy Innovation and Evaluation Can Improve Life in America’s Cities.
Here’s an excerpt from the foreword:
This collection of essays brings together the best ideas from scholars with expertise across a broad spectrum of urban issues. The common theme of the papers is to innovate, evaluate, and leverage the remarkable private talent that is so abundant in America’s great cities. Public capacity is sharply limited; the ingenuity of urban entrepreneurs seems practically boundless. Local governments should be more entrepreneurial and do more to use the talents of the entrepreneurs around them.
As a further preview, two of the ideas suggested in the book include: 1) reducing or eliminating parking requirements for new developments (which is something I’ve written about before on ATC) and 2) implementing a split-rate property tax for land and its improvements.
If you’d like to download the free PDF, click here.
Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas.
The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller urban centers (perhaps connected by high speed rail). As countries like China rapidly urbanize, this is something that many people are thinking about.
In China, there is a lively urban planning debate about whether to facilitate the increased expansion of the vast agglomerations of Beijing and Shanghai or whether to focus on creating networks of cities that are smaller, albeit still much larger than almost all of the cities of Western Europe. The current government policy favors networks, in the hope that connected smaller cities may be free of the extreme downsides of mass agglomeration, such as extreme congestion, pollution and high housing costs.
Like most things, there are real trade-offs.
In the paper, they assume that larger cities lead to more urban amenities, which in turn serves as an important magnet for skilled workers. However, for unskilled workers who may not care/benefit from the same urban amenities, it is possible for them to dislike the bigger cities. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives of urban expansion and an urban divide is created (rich/poor).
One of the potential negatives is housing.
The attraction of denser, not larger, mega-cities is determined also by the elasticity of housing supply. When it is easy to add extra homes on a narrow plot of land, as in Texas, then density becomes more attractive. European urban networks may well be the right answer because history and regulation makes it so hard to build in Europe’s older cities. Even though China has usually been quite friendly towards skyscrapers, the sheer scale of the Chinese population may still make the case for urban networks.
If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a section (#2) in the paper on the history of urban networks that you might like.
I’m planning a trip to Detroit this month.
Some of you might be wondering why on earth I would do that, but I’m actually super excited. Why? Because I’m fascinated by the city. Detroit is such a dramatic example of how the fortunes of a city can change. I think some people forget what places like New York City and South Beach were like in the 1980s.
But more importantly, I’m interested in the future of Detroit and the opportunities that might lie ahead. In many ways, the city feels like a clean slate. It’s a city that’s trying to completely rebuild and reinvent itself. And there’s a lot of smart (and rich) people, like billionaire Dan Gilbert, putting their weight behind its renewal. Through his company Bedrock, he has quickly become one the largest private landlords in the city. I also have a good friend who’s working in Detroit on strategies for the Midtown area. He’ll be my “tour guide” during the trip.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in media headlines and so I want to see what’s happening first hand on the ground. Detroit has a long history of entrepreneurialism and so the eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it can come back.
One of its big challenges, however, is education. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser put it in his book, the Triumph of the City, one of the greatest things about the Detroit of yesterday was its ability to create a lot of high paying jobs for people with little education. Now the city has to deal with that legacy and few jobs.
I’ll have more to say after my trip but, in the interim, what are your thoughts on Detroit? Can it come back? Will it ever be the economic powerhouse that it once was?
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research has just published a free book called, The Next Urban Renaissance: How Public-Policy Innovation and Evaluation Can Improve Life in America’s Cities.
Here’s an excerpt from the foreword:
This collection of essays brings together the best ideas from scholars with expertise across a broad spectrum of urban issues. The common theme of the papers is to innovate, evaluate, and leverage the remarkable private talent that is so abundant in America’s great cities. Public capacity is sharply limited; the ingenuity of urban entrepreneurs seems practically boundless. Local governments should be more entrepreneurial and do more to use the talents of the entrepreneurs around them.
As a further preview, two of the ideas suggested in the book include: 1) reducing or eliminating parking requirements for new developments (which is something I’ve written about before on ATC) and 2) implementing a split-rate property tax for land and its improvements.
If you’d like to download the free PDF, click here.
Ed Glaeser, Giacomo Ponzetto, and Yimei Zou recently published a new academic paper called, Urban Networks: Spreading the Flow of Goods, People and Ideas.
The paper looks at whether it’s more advantageous to build huge and consolidated mega-cities or build connected networks of smaller urban centers (perhaps connected by high speed rail). As countries like China rapidly urbanize, this is something that many people are thinking about.
In China, there is a lively urban planning debate about whether to facilitate the increased expansion of the vast agglomerations of Beijing and Shanghai or whether to focus on creating networks of cities that are smaller, albeit still much larger than almost all of the cities of Western Europe. The current government policy favors networks, in the hope that connected smaller cities may be free of the extreme downsides of mass agglomeration, such as extreme congestion, pollution and high housing costs.
Like most things, there are real trade-offs.
In the paper, they assume that larger cities lead to more urban amenities, which in turn serves as an important magnet for skilled workers. However, for unskilled workers who may not care/benefit from the same urban amenities, it is possible for them to dislike the bigger cities. In this case, the benefits do not outweigh the negatives of urban expansion and an urban divide is created (rich/poor).
One of the potential negatives is housing.
The attraction of denser, not larger, mega-cities is determined also by the elasticity of housing supply. When it is easy to add extra homes on a narrow plot of land, as in Texas, then density becomes more attractive. European urban networks may well be the right answer because history and regulation makes it so hard to build in Europe’s older cities. Even though China has usually been quite friendly towards skyscrapers, the sheer scale of the Chinese population may still make the case for urban networks.
If you’re interested in this topic, there’s a section (#2) in the paper on the history of urban networks that you might like.
I’m planning a trip to Detroit this month.
Some of you might be wondering why on earth I would do that, but I’m actually super excited. Why? Because I’m fascinated by the city. Detroit is such a dramatic example of how the fortunes of a city can change. I think some people forget what places like New York City and South Beach were like in the 1980s.
But more importantly, I’m interested in the future of Detroit and the opportunities that might lie ahead. In many ways, the city feels like a clean slate. It’s a city that’s trying to completely rebuild and reinvent itself. And there’s a lot of smart (and rich) people, like billionaire Dan Gilbert, putting their weight behind its renewal. Through his company Bedrock, he has quickly become one the largest private landlords in the city. I also have a good friend who’s working in Detroit on strategies for the Midtown area. He’ll be my “tour guide” during the trip.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in media headlines and so I want to see what’s happening first hand on the ground. Detroit has a long history of entrepreneurialism and so the eternal optimist in me wants to believe that it can come back.
One of its big challenges, however, is education. As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser put it in his book, the Triumph of the City, one of the greatest things about the Detroit of yesterday was its ability to create a lot of high paying jobs for people with little education. Now the city has to deal with that legacy and few jobs.
I’ll have more to say after my trip but, in the interim, what are your thoughts on Detroit? Can it come back? Will it ever be the economic powerhouse that it once was?
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