The fate of Chinese urban villages (chengzhongcun) has recently attracted both research and policy attention. Two important unaddressed questions are: what are the sources of informality in otherwise orderly Chinese cities; and, will village redevelopment policy eliminate informality in the...

Based on the polluter pays principle, construction waste disposal charging schemes (CWDCS) have been deployed by various economies as one of the most effective ways of managing construction waste. Nevertheless, a means of rationalizing these schemes has not been well documented. Using the...

This paper considers the order that emerges in cities as individuals exchange and pool rights over resources in pursuit of individual and mutual gain. In his 1937 article The nature of the firm, Ronald Coase explained the existence and size of firms in terms of transaction costs. Neighbourhoods...

Modern computational techniques offer new horizons for urban economics in the form of agent-based simulation frameworks. This paper reports on a cellular automata (CA) simulation in which urban land transforms on the basis of locally optimal bargaining between developers and local communities...

Within the process of urban expansion through land requisition in China, farmers' de facto rights to collective land, including farmland and housing plots (zhaijidi), are forcibly acquired by the state and thereafter redistributed to private developers, to facilitate urban-based economic growth....

This paper investigates historical changes in economic structure and the spatial distribution of jobs and commuting patterns during a period of consolidating suburban decentralisation in US cities. The analysis of selected US metropolitan areas is based on data drawn from the 1980 and 1990 PUMS...

C<sc>séfalvay</sc> Z. and W<sc>ebster</sc> C. Gates or no gates? A cross-European enquiry into the driving forces behind gated communities, <italic>Regional Studies</italic>. This paper addresses one of the biggest gaps in research on gated communities: why is the phenomenon so strong in some countries, but absent in others?...

Gated communities are often seen as steps towards the privatization of the public realm. This is too simple a characterization, however: privately and publicly governed infrastructure and services exist and adapt symbiotically. There is little empirical research focusing on the co-evolution of...

In this study we conduct an exploratory spatiotemporal analysis of recent UK housing-market data 2000–06, fine grained both in space and in time. We present firstly the exploratory technique itself, and secondly an overview of patterns found in the dataset. A broadly scoped metamodel is...