Why do some cities grow economically while others decline? Why do some show sustained economic performance while others cycle up and down? InKeys to the City, Michael Storper, one of the world's ...leading economic geographers, looks at why we should consider economic development issues within a regional context--at the level of the city-region--and why city economies develop unequally. Storper identifies four contexts that shape urban economic development: economic, institutional, innovational and interactional, and political. The book explores how these contexts operate and how they interact, leading to developmental success in some regions and failure in others. Demonstrating that the global economy is increasingly driven by its major cities, the keys to the city are the keys to global development. In his conclusion, Storper specifies eight rules of economic development targeted at policymakers.Keys to the Cityexplains why economists, sociologists, and political scientists should take geography seriously.
Housing, urban growth and inequalities Rodríguez-Pose, Andrés; Storper, Michael
Urban studies (Edinburgh, Scotland),
02/2020, Letnik:
57, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Urban economics and branches of mainstream economics – what we call the ‘housing as opportunity’ school of thought – have been arguing that shortages of affordable housing in dense agglomerations ...represent a fundamental barrier to economic development. Housing shortages are considered to limit migration into thriving cities, curtailing their expansion potential, generating rising social and spatial inequalities and inhibiting national growth. According to this dominant view, relaxing zoning and other planning regulations in the most prosperous cities is crucial to unleash the economic potential of cities and nations and to facilitate within-country migration. In this article, we contend that the bulk of the claims of the housing as opportunity approach are fundamentally flawed and lead to simplistic and misguided policy recommendations. We posit that there is no clear and uncontroversial evidence that housing regulation is a principal source of differences in home availability or prices across cities. Blanket changes in zoning are unlikely to increase domestic migration or to improve affordability for lower-income households in prosperous areas. They would, however, increase gentrification within metropolitan areas and would not appreciably decrease income inequality. In contrast to the housing models, we argue that the basic motors of all these features of the economy are the current geography of employment, wages and skills.
城市经济学和主流经济学的分支(我们称之为“住房即机遇”学派)一直认为，密集集聚区经济适用房的短缺是经济发展的根本障碍。住房短缺被认为限制了向繁荣城市的移民，削弱了城市的扩张潜力，导致社会和空间不平等加剧，抑制了国家增长。根据这一主流观点，在最繁荣的城市放松分区和其他规划条例对于释放城市和国家的经济潜力以及促进国内移民至关重要。在本文中，我们认为大部分的“住房即机遇”权利主张都是有根本缺陷的，并导致了简单化和误导性的政策建议。我们认为，没有明确且无争议的证据表明，住房条例是城市间住房供应或价格差异的主要原因。分区的全面改变不太可能增加国内移民，也不太可能提高富裕地区低收入家庭的负担能力。然而，它们会促进大都市地区的绅士化，且不会明显减少收入不平等。与住房模型相反，我们认为所有这些经济特征的基本驱动力是当前的就业、工资和技能地理分布。
There has been a growing debate in recent decades about the range and substance of urban theory. The debate has been marked by many different claims about the nature of cities, including declarations ...that the urban is an incoherent concept, that urban society is nothing less than modern society as a whole, that the urban scale can no longer be separated from the global scale, and that urban theory hitherto has been deeply vitiated by its almost exclusive concentration on the cities of the global North. This article offers some points of clarification of claims like these. All cities can be understood in terms of a theoretical framework that combines two main processes, namely, the dynamics of agglomeration/polarization, and the unfolding of an associated nexus of locations, land uses and human interactions. This same framework can be used to identify many different varieties of cities, and to distinguish intrinsically urban phenomena from the rest of social reality. The discussion thus identifies the common dimensions of all cities without, on the one hand, exaggerating the scope of urban theory, or on the other hand, asserting that every individual city is an irreducible special case.
Kemeny T. and Storper M. Is specialization good for regional economic development?, Regional Studies. Debates about urban growth and change often centre on specialization. However, arguments linking ...specialization to metropolitan economic development contain diverse, and sometimes conflicting, claims. Is it better to be highly specialized or diversified? Does specialization refer to the absolute or relative scale of an activity in a region? Does specialization have static or evolutionary effects? This paper investigates these questions in theoretical and empirical terms. By analysing local agglomerations over time, it is found that growing absolute specialization is positively linked to wages, while changes in relative concentration are not significantly associated with wage dynamics.
This paper examines the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic and its related economic, fiscal, social and political fallout on cities and metropolitan regions. We assess the effect of the pandemic on ...urban economic geography at the intra- and inter-regional geographic scales in the context of four main forces: the social scarring instilled by the pandemic; the lockdown as a forced experiment; the need to secure the urban built environment against future risks; and changes in the urban form and system. At the macrogeographic scale, we argue the pandemic is unlikely to significantly alter the winner-take-all economic geography and spatial inequality of the global city system. At the microgeographic scale, however, we suggest that it may bring about a series of short-term and some longer-running social changes in the structure and morphology of cities, suburbs and metropolitan regions. The durability and extent of these changes will depend on the timeline and length of the pandemic.
Since the reform of the Structural Funds in 1989, the EU has made the principle of cohesion one of its key policies. Much of the language of European cohesion policy eschews the idea of trade‐offs ...between efficiency and equity, suggesting it is possible to maximize overall growth while also achieving continuous convergence in outcomes and productivity across Europe's regions. Yet, given the rise in inter‐regional disparities, it is unclear that cohesion policy has altered the pathway of development from what would have occurred in the absence of intervention. This article draws on geographical economics, institutionalist social science and endogenous growth theory, with the aim of providing a fresh look at cohesion policy. By highlighting a complex set of potential trade‐offs and interrelations – overall growth and efficiency; inter‐territorial equity; territorial democracy and governance capacities; and social equity within places – it revisits the rationale of cohesion policy, with particular attention to the geographical dynamics of economic development.
Much literature suggests that knowledge-production activities are still heavily dependent upon geographically proximate sources of information, in spite of rapid development in telecommunications ...technology. Some analysts believe that the importance of proximity in knowledge production will eventually disappear with the continued development of telecommunications. The authors analyse patent citations and find that, after controlling for the existing distribution of knowledge-production activities, the proportion of local citations has increased over time. This finding reinforces the notion that in contemporary knowledge production and innovation the role for geographical proximity is increasing.
Today, the Bay Area is home to the most successful knowledge economy in America, while Los Angeles has fallen progressively further behind its neighbor to the north and a number of other American ...metropolises. Yet, in 1970, experts would have predicted that L.A. would outpace San Francisco in population, income, economic power, and influence. The usual factors used to explain urban growth-luck, immigration, local economic policies, and the pool of skilled labor-do not account for the contrast between the two cities and their fates. So what does?
The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies challenges many of the conventional notions about economic development and sheds new light on its workings. The authors argue that it is essential to understand the interactions of three major components-economic specialization, human capital formation, and institutional factors-to determine how well a regional economy will cope with new opportunities and challenges. Drawing on economics, sociology, political science, and geography, they argue that the economic development of metropolitan regions hinges on previously underexplored capacities for organizational change in firms, networks of people, and networks of leaders. By studying San Francisco and Los Angeles in unprecedented levels of depth, this book extracts lessons for the field of economic development studies and urban regions around the world.
Interregional and intermetropolitan economic divergence is greater in many western developed countries than it has been in many decades. Divergence manifests itself in many ways, including per capita ...income, labor force participation, and the spatial distribution of skills and returns to education. At the same time, geographical polarization of political preferences and electoral choices has increased, with gains in populism and nationalism in some regions, and broadening of socially liberal, pro-trade and multicultural attitudes in other regions. The task of explaining these developments poses challenges to economic geography and regional and urban economics. These fields have already developed some of the building blocks of an account, but a number of important gaps persist. This article is devoted to identifying priorities for regional science and urban economics, the new economic geography and proper economic geography to tackle the key mechanisms behind divergence as well as to integrate them in a common overall framework.
New evidence shows that intergenerational social mobility—the rate at which children born into poverty climb the income ladder—varies considerably across the United States. Is this current geography ...of opportunity something new or does it reflect a continuation of long-term trends? We answer this question by constructing data on the levels and determinants of social mobility across American regions over the 20th century. We find that the changing geography of opportunity-generating economic activity restructures the landscape of intergenerational mobility, but factors associated with specific regional structures of interpersonal and racial inequality that have “deep roots” generate persistence. This is evident in the sharp decline in social mobility in the Midwest as economic activity has shifted away from it and the consistently low levels of opportunity in the South even as economic activity has shifted toward it. We conclude that the long-term geography of social mobility can be understood through the deep roots and changing economic fortunes of places.
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