Generations of scholarship on the political economy of land use have tried to explain a world in which tony suburbs use zoning to keep out development but big cities allow untrammeled growth because of the political influence of developers. But as demand to live in them has increased, many of...

Residents of Greater Boston located along the proposed Green Line rail extension have expressed concerns about potential gentrification and the resulting displacement of low-income residents. To assess these concerns, we examine the effects of the earlier Red Line extension on neighborhood...

Federal law requires metropolitan planning organizations in urban areas of more than 50,000 people to write long-range (20- to 30-year) metropolitan transportation plans and to revise or update those plans every 4 to 5 years. A review of plans for more than 75 of the nation's largest...

Defenders of suburban sprawl assert that sprawl is inevitable in affluent societies, based on trends in Western Europe. According to supporters of this Inevitability Theory, European cities have decentralized and become more car-dependent, thus proving that even where governments are more...

This paper attempts to explain two basic facts of segregation in the United States in recent decades. The segregation of blacks remains everywhere higher than the segregation of Latinos and Asians, but the levels are converging. Previous research stresses things like urban form and racial...

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...

This Inquiry final report brings together three separate research projects to examine the capacity of Australia’s smaller cities to assist in managing population growth, including international and national migration; and provides advice on which policy instruments and programs are most likely...

The terms governing land investments can shape whether host countries and local communities benefit from investment projects. Yet host governments in low- and middle-income countries often lack sufficient legal and technical capacity to prepare for, negotiate, implement, and monitor investments,...

Urbanisation in China has long been held back by various restrictions on land and internal migration but has taken off since the 1990s, as these impediments started to be gradually relaxed. People have moved in large numbers to richer cities, where productivity is higher and has increased...

In December 2017, the U.S. Congress passed into law the Opportunity Zone (OZ) program, offering significant tax benefits for property investments in designated low-income census tracts. As investors effectively gain from higher income, opportunity zones should affect property prices. In this...