Urban economics dictate that cities must grow to maintain their vitality. Small cities increase their population and economic base, thereby expanding their city limits. Large cities manage growth so that expansion is controlled, avoiding real estate and economic depressions. Former Albuquerque Mayor David Rusk argues in Cities Without Suburbs that cities with aggressive growth strategies prospe...

S ince the 1990s, China has undergone astonishing economic growth, and its extensive urbanization has become one of the most striking development signatures anywhere in the world. With the world's largest urban population, China's urbanization experience provides meaningful insights on future urban development in other countries. 1 Because China has an extremely low per-capita land area, constr...

Cities are hubs of human activity; the everyday actions of myriad households, businesses, and industries located within a city’s geopolitical boundary. Measuring greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with cities is confounded by the relatively small spatial scale of cities compared with the large-scale engineered infrastructures in which they are embedded; that is, the electricity grid, tra...

Despite the composed ‘predict and provide’ attitude displayed in the National Urban Policy Paper towards change in Australian Cities, our cities have been more vulnerable to an increasing range of events and trends. The experience of the last year alone is a clear indicator that prediction along traditional lines is an increasingly unreliable way of managing cities. Instead, planning policy and...

This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf’s law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define cities or city boundaries. Most of the investigations of Zipf’s law rely on the demarcations of cities imposed by census data, e.g., metropolitan areas and c...

How does isolation affect the economic activity of cities? Transport costs are widely considered an important barrier to local economic activity but their impact in developing countries is not well-studied. This paper investigates the role of intercity transport costs in determining the income of sub-Saharan African cities. In particular, focusing on fifteen countries whose largest city is a po...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...

Economic theories of systems of cities explain why production and consumption activities are concentrated in a number of urban areas of different sizes and industrial composition rather than uniformly distributed in space. These theories have been successively influenced by four paradigms: i) conventional urban economics emphasizing the tension between economies due to the spatial concentration...

This paper reports results of a study that explored the relationship between the local environmental actions of Healthy Cities programs and the adverse health impacts of climate change. The analysis is primarily based on a limited literature review of climate change and health, with particular attention to the relationships between Healthy Cities and climate change, and on documentary analysis ...