This article reviews the implications for land use policy of Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Fifty years after its publication in 1961, Death and Life remains a clarion call for resistance to monolithic development and to the reigning paradigm of urban planning in the...

US post-war suburbanization has reshaped the spatial pattern of growth in many metropolitan areas, with population and employment shift toward the suburbs resulting in the urban decay of central cities. This being the case, the adoption of adequate anti-sprawl policies should lead to a reduction...

Demand externality generated by the agglomeration of commercial activities is a potential source of city formation. We study the impact of a large-scale urban redevelopment program involving the construction of a shopping complex at the center of Tokyo. The redevelopment program increased the...

The purpose of this chapter is to survey recent research on housing markets and policy in what used to be called the “second” and “third” worlds. We adopt the labels “transition” economies to refer to countries as disparate as Russia and Vietnam, and “developing” to refer to...

This paper develops a new approach for measuring the stringency of a major form of land-use regulation, building-height restrictions, and it applies the method to an extraordinary dataset of land-lease transactions from China. Our theory shows that the elasticity of land price with respect to...

Over the last decade and a half, the Smart Growth movement has matured in Canada. Early efforts to raise awareness on the need to better manage urban growth gave way to smart growth plans and policies adopted by municipal, regional and provincial governments. More recently, attention has shifted...

This is chapter 8 from my forthcoming book, "Zoning Rules! The Economics of Land Use Regulation," which will be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in 2015. This chapter addresses the metropolitan problems caused by local zoning, particularly its contribution to excessive...

The circumstances arising in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic indicate that outbreaks are inevitable and that new pandemics are quite likely. Cities, just like people, need to protect themselves from pandemics. Therefore, the existing urban and spatial practices should be reconsidered. The...

In the midst of urban policy institutions taking greater advantage of technological advances for generating data, this paper analyzes the current state of using satellite imagery to monitor informal settlement patterns. Using the issue of informal settlements in rapid urbanization, this paper...