The urban area of Beijing has sharply increased during the last decades. To better understand the mechanism and the nature of the metropolitan evolvement, this study explores and elucidates the evolution of spatial and functional patterns of Beijing, and investigates the relationship between urban spatial and functional patterns throughout this evolution process. In the thesis, spatial pattern ...

This report provides a comprehensive overview of 1990 and 2000 neighborhood dissimilarity indices measured for Blacks and Whites, Asians and Whites, and Hispanics and Whites among the nation’s 318 metropolitan areas, as well as 1220 places with populations exceeding 25,000 in 2000. Unlike most earlier studies which measure segregation on the basis of census tracts, this study measures segregati...

The purpose of this report is to discuss the economic performance of the Richmond metropolitan area and to explore some of the drivers of regional growth. The Richmond metropolitan area is compared to a peer group of metropolitan areas of similar size based on population in 2010. In addition, a second exercise for benchmarking Richmond focused on other state capitals. Although this summary does...

U.S. metropolitan neighborhoods have become increasingly segregated by income over the past thirty years. The metropolitan areas with the largest rises in income segregation include a number of distressed cities in industrial decline, as well as a subset of rapidly growing metropolitan areas. I propose a simple model based on the notion that rising income inequality creates market pressure (or ...

There has long been debate on the extent to which the structure of government in metropolitan areas helps or hinders income growth. Polycentrists contend that numerous local governments lead to competition that streamlines government, produces services at least cost, and leads to higher incomes. Centrists argue that large, multiple service governments have scale economies leading to more effici...

This paper examines the impact of government guaranteed small business loans on economic growth, and whether government guaranteed loans crowd out new businesses financed through the market. OLS estimates indicate a significant and positive relation between the Small Business Administration’s (SBA) guaranteed loans and metropolitan growth between 1993 and 2002. However, endogeneity hinders caus...

Urbanisation patterns in the United States have taken some unlikely turns over the past quarter of a century. After following fairly predictable trends in the 1950s and 1960s towards increased urban growth and westward movement, the nation experienced a 1970s 'counter-urbanisation' similar to that which occurred in many other developed countries (Champion, 1989; 1992). In the US, counter-urbani...

Using longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics linked to three decades of census data on immigrant settlement patterns, this study examines how the migration behaviors of native-born whites and blacks are related to local immigrant concentrations, and how this relationship varies across traditional and nontraditional metropolitan gateways. Our results indicate that regardless o...

Urbanization is the most drastic form of land use change affecting biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and services far beyond the limits of cities. To understand the process of urbanization itself as well as its ecological consequences, it is important to quantify the spatiotemporal patterns of urbanization. Based on historical land use data, we characterize the temporal patterns of Phoenix...