Urban Economy

Political economy constraints for urban development

Urban Political Economy Beyond the ‘Global City’

This paper examines the relationship between urbanisation and globalisation beyond the so-called global cities that have been the focus of so much contemporary urban research. The paper argues that there is a problematic polarisation in urban studies between research on ‘global’ cities and work on presumably ‘non-global’ cities. The existing geographical literature on scale, place and uneven de...

The Political Economy of Urban Transport-System Choice

This paper analyzes the political economy of transport-system choice, with the goal of gaining an understanding of the forces involved in this important urban public policy decision. Transport systems pose a continuous trade-off between time and money cost, so that a city can choose a fast system with a high money cost per mile or a slower, cheaper system. The paper compares the socially optima...

Buzz: Face-To-Face Contact and the Urban Economy

This paper argues that existing models of urban concentrations are incomplete unless grounded in the most fundamental aspect of proximity; face-to-face contact. Face-to-face contact has four main features; it is an efficient communication technology; it can help solve incentive problems; it can facilitate socialization and learning; and it provides psychological motivation. We discuss each of t...

Beyond night-time economy: Affective atmospheres of the urban night

This paper develops the use of the concept of atmosphere in an ‘assemblage urbanism’ approach, as a way of reevaluating how we understand the night-time city. In doing so, this paper rejects what it sees as an overuse of the term ‘night-time economy’ as a synonym for ‘urban night’. Instead, it seeks to describe the night-time city center as an affective atmosphere, emerging from the arranging o...