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Long-form link list

1. Another empirical paper claiming that anti-density zoning increases racial segregation: Previous research on segregation stresses things like urban form and racial preferences as primary causes. The author finds that an institutional force is more important: local land regulation. Using two datasets of land regulations for the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the results indicate that anti-density regulations are responsible for large portions of the levels and changes in segregation from 1990 to 2000. A hypothetical switch in zoning regimes from the most exclusionary to the most liberal would reduce the equilibrium gap between the most and least segregated Metropolitan Statistical Areas by at least 35% for the ordinary least squares estimates. 2. Wendell Cox, in a discussion about the relatively dispersed downtowns of the biggest mainland Chinese cities, notes that development along Beijing’s ring roads “resemble[s] more the post-World War II corridor form of Central Avenue in Phoenix than Manhattan, Seattle or Pittsburgh.” Interesting that the urban system that Cox makes a living defending is so popular in communist mainland cities, whereas the market-oriented Chinese cities of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong follow the more traditional dense downtown design. 3. The NYT reports that the mayor’s office runs a non-profit that organizes farmers markets in rich neighborhoods that already have good food availability, while throwing up barriers and red tape that prevent private groups from starting their own in poor neighborhoods. 4. One company wants to start building prefab skyscrapers, which they claim are quicker and cheaper than traditional construction, although apparently current building codes don’t allow them to build such structures more than six stories tall. In New York City, Forest City Ratner wants to build “the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure, a 34-story tower that would fulfill his obligation to start building affordable housing at the site,” though the building […]

Asian megacities, free and unfree: Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul

Guy Sorman has an absolutely fascinating article in the City Journal about Asia’s megacities, and I can’t bear to bury it in a link list. He takes a very negative view of Shanghai, citing its deputy mayor for finance’s candid admission that it’s a “costly facade to maintain,” and blasts Beijing for its never-ending ring roads, among other things. But halfway through the article, he takes up the issue of Seoul, and each paragraph is more interesting than the last. He describes the transition from military dictatorship to liberal democracy thusly: Democratization has helped transform Seoul into a more livable city in an extraordinarily short time. Before democracy, the authorities pursued economic growth at virtually any cost: real estate operated with little constraint, the number of private cars swiftly exceeded street capacity, public transportation was shoddy, and public spaces were basically nonexistent. But Seoul’s mayor during the 2000s, Lee Myung Bak—formerly the CEO of the Hyundai Construction Company—understood that Seoulites wanted a city center, plazas, gardens, and spaces to shop and stroll, and he led a dramatic reshaping of the city, preserving what was left of the past but making huge improvements in urban amenities. He won the nickname “Bulldozer” for good reason. Among the projects undertaken while he was mayor: the Han’s banks, formerly devoted to parking garages and freeways, became accessible to pedestrians; an ancient stream, the Cheonggyecheon, which once flowed through Seoul until buried by a freeway, was restored, helping vivify the central city; and rapid-transit buses joined the city’s transportation system. During his mayoralty, too, formerly abandoned industrial areas transformed into gentrified neighborhoods, Korean versions of New York’s Meatpacking District. These popular changes helped propel Lee Myung Bak to the South Korean presidency in December 2007. From there, it only gets better from a market urbanist […]

The economics of redevelopment and the shape of socialist cities

Earlier today I read an article by Daniel Garst about Bejing’s awkward population distribution that reminded me of a journal article about the general shape of socialist cities that I read a while back. Garst talks about Beijing being a “circus tent” when it comes to density, with population density increasing as you travel away from the city center, in contrast to the “pyramid” style of most cities, with high densities in the center and lower densities around the periphery (see chart for a visual representation). This immediately made me think of an article by Alain Bertraud and Bertrand Renaud called “Socialist Cities without Land Markets,” where they describe exactly this phenomenon, and explain it as a failure of administrative urban planning. Here’s an excerpt: As their economy and their population grow, cities expand through the progressive addition of concentric rings, similar to the growth of trees in successive seasons. New rings are added to the periphery as the city grows. With each ring, land use reflects the combined effects of demography, technology, and the economy at the time when the ring was developed. Wile this organic incremental growth is common to all cities, in a market city changing land prices exert their pressure simultaneously in all areas of the city, not just at the periphery. Land prices exert a powerful influence to recycle already developed land in the inner rings when the type and intensity of the existing use is too different from the land’s optimum economic use. Thus, changing land values bring a built-in urban dynamism as ceaseless variations in land prices put a constant pressure on the current uses of land and trigger changes to new activities and/or densities. Under the administrative-command economy, the absence of land prices eliminated the main incentive to redevelop built-up areas by […]

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