City Sector Model

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 2

Pete Saunders — Sat, 22 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

Planners know that architecture is a profession closely aligned with urban planning. Many architects might tell you that planning is a subset of architecture. Whether true or not, architects have had a lot of influence in the development of the planning profession.

One architect who fits that mold is Louis Sullivan. I don’t think he ever identified with being a planner, but his influence on urban design, by being one of the first designers of the modern skyscraper and a key leader in the formation of the Chicago School and Prairie School of architecture, which also influenced planning, links Sullivan to planning.

Sullivan was also famous for a quote that fits planning as well as architecture: “form follows function”. Sullivan made that statement when thinking about his architectural designs. However, he just as easily could have said the same about cities. In other words, how cities look depends on what they do.

The industrial cities in the Rust Belt took on the form they did because of the function they had. Many of them cared far less about how they looked or performed as cities and cared more about how they could house the factories that employed workers, the homes they lived in, and their commercial needs.

Gary, IN is a great example of this. When U.S. Steel employed more than 30,000 workers and nearly 200,000 people lived in Gary, few people put lots of thought into the city’s form; it served the function of an industrial city. Over the last half of the 20^th century, however, that function collapsed, leaving behind a city that was ill-prepared for the next step. As I wrote in Part 1 about the Notre Dame School of Architecture’s efforts to rebuild and revitalize Gary’s downtown, I liked the premise of relying on “mom-and-pop developer capital” and “patience and persistence” to establish a new urban form. But trying to establish a new form (or even an updated form) is not possible without knowing the function. That’s why I think Notre Dame’s School of Architecture in Gary is admirable, but flawed.

Gary’s existential moment

Gary must determine its new function first and establish the form that allows it to flourish. But how does it do that?

Let’s use the city typology from the Encie study I referenced in Part 1 as a starting point. Of the nine city typologies the report identified, the researchers are most gloomy on the prospects of industrial cities in highly-developed economies. We know now that manufacturing is no longer the kind of economic function that can support cities in the way they used to. That doesn’t mean it’s not financially viable anymore, it means it doesn’t fulfill the needs of people living in developed economies. Using the Encie study as an example, the researchers note that future prospects for existing industrial cities are dim in developed economies, but strong in developing or emerging economies. Let’s suppose the industrial city model is gone and never coming back into American cities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo: Indiana Dunes National Park — near the city of Gary, via Picryl in Public Domain.

Gary, Indiana and Urban Existentialism, Part 1

Pete Saunders — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 19:18:28 -0500

I recently saw a good story about Gary, Indiana on the CityLab website. The article highlights work being done by the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture through its Housing and Community Regeneration Initiative.

The HCR’s work in Gary noted that the city had been hurt by numerous one-off projects (Genesis Convention Center, museums, minor league stadiums, casinos) that created little spinoff impact. A quote explaining the HCR’s approach:

“They’re promoting traditional city-building as part of a wider critique. In too many cities, they say, corporate developers have sought a quick return on shoddy, suburbanized projects that were racially and economically segregated as well as unsustainable. Where this process has failed — like Gary — might hold the key to reclaiming a better way of creating urban community.”

I would agree that cities like Gary need to get back to city-building. But there are two big steps cities like Gary need to achieve before getting back into city-building. It must establish an economic future. But more importantly, cities like Gary need to establish a new reason for being.

Cities begin with a reason for being there

There are many cities that came into existence because of a certain quality that distinguished it from other locations. New York City, for example, was founded by the Dutch to serve as a port and trading center that had access to hinterlands via the Hudson River. The port, and the expertise gained from becoming a trading center, made the city a great location for global trade and finance very early on, and continues to this day. Chicago started as a fur trading post, but its location next to an easily transversed mid-continent watershed divide (between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River watersheds) made it a critical transportation link for the middle of a rapidly growing nation. The waterway connection soon grew into an extensive railroad network centered on Chicago, giving it easy access to food produced in the agricultural Midwest for national and global distribution.

In the best cases, cities pivot from one existential function to another, just as New York and Chicago did. Older cities like New York and Chicago aren’t alone in this. Orlando built on its Disney World tourism foundation to expand its role in film, television and entertainment industries, even giving it a foothold into the industrial and high-tech sectors. Legalized gambling made Las Vegas a tourist destination, and eventually into a prime convention destination that fuels its hospitality industry.

But cities founded on manufacturing, like Gary, have really struggled to find the next reason for being. There’s been tons of research on why this is the case. I came across a report written five years ago that explains cities’ reasons for their existence – and continued relevance.

Read Part 2 here.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Paul Sableman, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Demographia World Urban Areas - 2025

Wendell Cox — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

1: Introduction

Demographia World Urban Areas (Built-up Urban Areas or Urban Agglomerations) is the only regularly published inventory of population, corresponding land area and population density for urban areas with more than 500,000 population. Unlike some other regularly produced lists, Demographia World Urban Areas applies a generally consistent definition to built-up urban areas.

2: Defining Urban Areas

Urban areas are urban footprints, or expanses of urbanization on the natural environment. Urban footprint data is reported without regard to political boundaries that are generally associated with metropolitan areas or sub-national jurisdictions. A useful definition was supplied by Alex Blei, of the NYU (New York University) Stern Marron Institute Urban Expansion Project, who described urban areas as contiguous or mostly contiguous built-up areas that “function as an integrated economic unit, linked together by commuting flows, social and economic interactions.”
Combined Urban Areas

This edition of Demographia World Urban Areas introduces a broadened definition that combines adjacent urban areas, where nearby urban areas have become a single urban footprint. This revision has been undertaken especially in response to the spreading of continuous urbanization in China, the ultimate being in the Pearl River Delta (Guangzhou-Shenzhen) and the Yangtze River Delta, stretching from Shanghai to Changzhou, which are now shown as the first and second largest urban areas in the world.

In the United States, single labor markets can be either metropolitan areas (MSAs), or combined statistical areas (CSAs), which are, overlapping metropolitan areas or metropolitan regions, with somewhat weaker commuting interchanges. Where continuous urban footprints exist within a CSA. Demographia World Urban Areas combines them into a single urban area. For example, the New York built-up urban area stretches from New York to other US Census Bureau defined urban areas, such as Bridgeport-Stamford, New Haven, and Trenton and others (Table 1).

In addition, the US Census Bureau has retained some urban areas, despite their now continuous urbanization with other urban areas within the same metropolitan areas. Demographia World Urban Areas combines this into a single built-up urban area. Cleveland and Lorain, Ohio, as well as Orlando and Kissimmee, Florida are examples of this (Table 2).

Read the full report here.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985), which was a predecessor agency to the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro). Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Cities and Suburbs: Get it Together

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I’ve written some versions of this topic many times over the years. Now it’s time for the latest installment.

Every so often, there are people who want to cast “cities” (here I’m defining them as the core or foundational municipality of a larger metropolitan region) against “suburbs” (the non-core, usually smaller jurisdictions, that have an economic, social and cultural connection to a core city). Every so often, people want to use various metrics to demonstrate that either cities or the collective suburban areas are doing better or worse than the other.

Researchers of all types on either side of the city/suburb divide will cherry-pick data to prove a point about cities or suburbs. I could bore you with a long historical explanation of this divide, but the tl;dr version is that as cities were beset with economic and social issues in the mid-20^th century, and as “suburbs” had grown to a point where they had their own constituency and political representation at the same time, the line between the two was drawn. In the early 21^st century, many cities recovered and saw revitalization. However, those committed to suburbs were quick to suggest that not all is well with cities.

The Covid pandemic period had plenty of examples of this pushed forward by suburban advocates. Two examples stand out. When researchers saw a surge in city out-migration in 2021 and 2022, many were saying the pandemic was causing people to flee cities in favor of more spacious and pleasant suburbs, exurbs and rural areas. Suburbs offered more comfort and protection than the more-crowded cities. When downtown office buildings effectively shuttered because of the pandemic shutdown, and office workers finally took advantage of meaningful ways to work from home, many people were saying that office-centered downtowns that were reliant on office worker traffic were doomed; if a worker could work principally at home, one could live anywhere, potentially threatening the very existence of cities.

Of course, there were city advocates (I include myself) who pushed back on those narratives. For one, I maintained that cities had an “experiential advantage” over suburbs that would survive the pandemic. There are amenities and attractions that cities have that still bring people to cities, and there are people who will still choose to live in an amenity-rich environment.

On the other hand, there are city advocates who are priced out of expensive cities, and getting behind the YIMBY and/or abundance movements to increase the supply of housing in cities and suburbs. Many YIMBY activists have become deeply involved in zoning reform in large cities, promoting the elimination of exclusive single-family zoning districts and increased housing density in transit-accessible areas. To address the same issues in suburbia, many YIMBYs have taken to proposing statewide legislation at state legislatures, encouraging states to take a more direct role in shaping local land use and zoning policy.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Renee Silverman via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Unforgotten Cities: What Ancient Urbanism Teaches About America's Crisis of Place

Samuel J Abrams — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:28:38 -0400

What do cities reveal about us? Not just our engineering or art, but our longings—what we value, what we revere, how we choose to live together.

William Frej's new book, Unforgotten: Ancient Cities from a Distant Past, documents 130 ancient cities through hundreds of stark photographs. From Machu Picchu to half-forgotten ruins across 25 countries, these images capture not just what's broken or lost, but what these places once aimed to be: moral, spiritual, and social worlds made physical. These were not just places where people lived. They were places where people belonged. And that distinction may hold the key to addressing America's deepening crisis of social isolation and political polarization.

Consider the Peruvian cities that Frej documents—places like Ollantaytambo in the Sacred Valley. Their builders carved public plazas from mountainsides, designed amphitheater-like spaces that naturally drew crowds into circles, created stone seating that encouraged lingering conversation. The very topography was sculpted to inspire what sociologist Robert Putnam would later call "social capital"—the networks of relationships that make communities function. Walk through these ruins today and you can still feel the intention. The architecture itself was a technology of belonging, anticipating by centuries Jane Jacobs's insight about successful urban spaces generating "eyes on the street" and Christopher Alexander's "pattern language" of human-scaled design.

Compare this intentionality to most American public spaces. Where ancient builders created plazas that amplified human voices, we've constructed environments dominated by traffic noise and designed to move people through rather than bring them together. Peruvian mountain settlements fostered face-to-face interactions; American strip malls often explicitly discourage any interaction beyond commercial transactions.

The irony is that America once understood this wisdom. Charleston's historic squares, Savannah's grid of parks, and Philadelphia's original city plan remain among our most desirable neighborhoods precisely because they offer what contemporary development lacks: human-scaled design that fosters community and public amenities. Yet postwar America systematically abandoned these principles. Urban renewal programs demolished functioning neighborhoods in favor of superblocks that isolated residents. Euclidean zoning separated uses that had been naturally integrated for millennia, requiring residents to drive between home, work, and commerce rather than encountering neighbors naturally.

The result is what Putnam documented in Bowling Alone: Americans increasingly isolated from civic institutions and casual encounters that build social trust. We traded traditional urbanism's inefficiencies—mixed uses, narrow streets, shared spaces—for car-dependent development where neighbors drive garage-to-garage without meeting.

This isn't merely aesthetic loss. Research shows walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods with quality public spaces generate higher property values, support more local businesses, and correlate with better health outcomes. Ancient insights about beautiful public spaces serving economic functions prove empirically correct.

The stakes extend beyond urban planning to American democracy itself. In an era of increasing polarization and digital tribalism, shared physical spaces become crucial for the cross-cutting social ties that democratic theorists identify as essential for political stability.

When people encounter each other regularly in pleasant surroundings—at farmers’ markets, in neighborhood squares, playgrounds and dog parks, and on walkable streets—they develop civic engagement habits that strengthen democracy. Contemporary development patterns work against this democratic ideal. Gated communities and car-dependent suburbs sort people by income, minimizing the diverse encounters that build social capital across class and political lines.

This represents bipartisan failure. Conservatives who value tradition and beauty have allied with developers whose profit-maximizing strategies destroy the communities they claim to champion. Progressives who identify inequality as serious have sometimes embraced planning approaches that create sterile environments lacking organic neighborhood vitality.

Conservative intellectuals from Roger Scruton to Christopher Lasch have long argued that rootedness and beauty are essential human needs. American conservatism's alliance with suburban sprawl betrays these deeper conservative values. True conservatism should champion development that creates lasting communities rather than disposable environments abandoned each generation.

Fortunately, some American cities are rediscovering ancient wisdom. Charleston's design standards have created economic success while maintaining walkable, human-scaled character. Portland's urban growth boundary encourages dense, transit-oriented development. Bryant Park's evolution from crime-ridden wasteland to beloved public space shows how thoughtful design creates the civic life that ancient plazas fostered. The New Urbanism movement – despite its many failures and problems – catalyzed a change in thinking about the built environment that has now proven market demand exists for walkable, mixed-use communities when zoning permits.

Translating ancient insights into contemporary policy requires specific reforms. Form-based codes that regulate building character rather than just use can encourage pedestrian-friendly development. Zoning reform allowing corner stores and small apartments in residential neighborhoods can restore natural integration of daily activities. Transportation policy must prioritize pedestrians over cars—not from environmental ideology but because walkable streets create conditions for civic life. Complete streets design and transit-oriented development are essential infrastructure for rebuilding social capital.

Most importantly, cities must invest in beautiful, well-programmed public spaces. This isn't luxury but economic necessity in the experience economy. Amazon's HQ2 search explicitly prioritized locations with vibrant urban amenities. Companies recognize that knowledge workers value walkable neighborhoods and interesting public spaces. Traditional neighborhood design isn't just more beautiful than sprawl—it's more fiscally sustainable, generating more tax revenue per acre while requiring less infrastructure investment.

Frej's photographs remind us that the human impulse to create meaningful places isn't lost—it's been suppressed by zoning codes and development patterns that work against community formation. The ancient builders who carved gathering spaces into Andean mountainsides weren't operating with different human nature; they organized societies to encourage rather than discourage civic life. We can do the same. The policy tools exist: zoning reform, form-based codes, complete streets design, tactical urbanism. What's needed is political will to prioritize long-term community building over short-term development profits.

As Americans increasingly sort into ideological enclaves, shared public spaces become essential democratic infrastructure. The alternative to intentional community building isn't neutral—it's continued fragmentation with all the political pathologies that follow. If ancient cities still speak across centuries, it's because they reflect enduring truths: people need beauty, places to encounter neighbors, environments that signal civic investment and shared purpose. The stones they left behind aren't just ruins. They're blueprints for renewal.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and a scholar with the Sutherland Institute.

Photo: Gaillard Center, Charleston, Charleston County, South Carolina, by J. Pellgen Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

Building the Future: Fixing the Global Housing Crisis

Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox — Sat, 31 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

This is the second of a two-part series on the global housing crisis. Read the first part here.

The affordable housing crisis in America and many other advanced countries keeps getting worse because it is largely dominated by the wrong voices talking about the wrong places.

For years the YIMBYs and NIMBYs have debated development in urban centers: While “Yes in My Back Yard” advocates seek to “build, build, build” ever more density in urban centers for environmental reasons, the “Not In My Back Yard” forces want to limit development often to preserve property values and the existing character of neighborhoods.

Meanwhile, housing prices have continued to rise to often unsustainable levels from San Francisco to Seoul, putting the dream of home ownership out of reach for many who are forced to pay much of their salaries in rent. Both YIMBYs and NIMBYs rely on heavy-handed regulation and other policies that discourage and complicate home ownership. Their effects have been particularly severe in California, Canada, Australia, Britain, and other places where policies aimed at funneling more people into dense urban areas by making it expensive to build in the suburbs and exurbs are negatively distorting the market.

There is now a growing pushback to this approach. Even some long-time advocates of forced densification and urban growth boundaries are recognizingthat “sprawl” is not only here to stay, but that it offers a cohesive and market-friendly way to spur greater construction and lower prices. Given enough freedom, the market can do much to address the housing problem.

In the future, the shift from urban centers to suburban and exurban growth will likely be accelerated through the rise of remote work and new transport systems such as autonomous vehicles. A recent study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City noted that demographic conditions, the rise of online work, and migration to less expensive regions create conditions for a family-friendly housing boom. The issue is how to meet this burgeoning demand and build a society where the opportunity for home ownership becomes ever greater.

Market-Based Solutions

Trying to force people to live in dense urban areas against their wishes contributes to the continued outflow of people to suburbs and exurbs, and from highly regulated to less regulated states. It is not enough to simply call for building more houses as a solution to the crisis when regulation-heavy “urban containment” policies have increased land-related costs and made housing affordability impossible in many regions.

Thanks to market forces, peripheral development has long been the way cities have grown virtually everywhere in the world. Contrary to the claim that density represents social and economic progress, wealthier countries are producing ever more decentralized cities. Even in places like Tokyo, London, Paris, and New York, the vast majority of population growth takes place in the periphery. As one report put it, “human settlement has always tended to sprawl out from key urban centres.”

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Deane Bayas via Pexels.

The "Great Bones" of Rust Belt Cities

Pete Saunders — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I went to St. Louis over the weekend, and I was reminded how much I love the way St. Louis neighborhoods look. The city has wonderful vernacular architecture that leads to beautiful neighborhoods at a human scale. That’s not true everywhere, since St. Louis has lost a lot of character through abandonment and demolition, and the scars of highway construction exist throughout the city. But St. Louis is perhaps the quintessential city with “great bones”.

If you’re not familiar with St. Louis, take a look at the image above, and this one below:

A view of homes in St. Louis’ Shaw neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com

Over the years I’ve heard urbanists of all types say that Rust Belt cities were primed for a comeback, someday, because they have “great bones”. But how can we define “great bones” and make it a strategy for growth? This is an especially good question given the work-from-home era we live in now, and where we work and live aren’t necessarily connected anymore.

As for me, I view “great bones” as the quality of the built environment of a city. It’s subjective, yes, but there’s some agreement among people about community quality. Given a chance, people will choose neighborhoods (and I think we all choose neighborhoods or communities, not entire cities or metro areas) that provide us with the housing we like, good schools for our children, parks, shopping amenities, social gathering spaces, and a welcoming environment. The desire for public transit, walkability and multimodal accessibility, and the mix of housing will vary with each person, as would the level of public-facing or private-facing view wants to give.

I laid out my so-called “Big Theory” of American urban development several years ago, and brought it up again last month. I think how people look at whether a place has “great bones” or not falls somewhere into the Big Theory framing. Essentially, people prefer the kind of built environment of particular times in history, and the infrastructure and amenities that come from them, and I think they come in a general order. The strongest preferences are for new places among the public because they’re, well, new. Contemporary housing and commercial development designs, upgraded roadway and utility infrastructure that’s not in danger of deterioration. There’s also a preference for much older places that have a development character that’s difficult to replicate in our cities today. Lastly there’s a vast middle type of built environment. It’s new enough to be missing the character of older places, and old enough to be missing the contemporary comforts you might want.

For me, a good proxy for assessing development quality and character is looking at U.S. Census housing data. A table that’s been included in the Census and American Community Survey data for decades is Table S2504: physical characteristics of occupied housing units. I look specifically for Census estimates on when housing structures were built, and that gives me a sense of what kind of “bones” a place may have.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: A view of St. Louis’ Central West End neighborhood. Source: stlouisneighborhoodsguide.com, courtesy of The Corner Side Yard.

How Sydney CBD Became a Capital of Luxury Urbanity

John Muscat — Fri, 07 Feb 2025 20:28:38 -0500

With a great deal of success, urban development elites have been able to sustain the illusion that Central Business Districts or downtowns are still the functional metropolitan centres they were five decades ago. In The New City’s new feature report, Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD, we set out to explain how the truth is different. Opinion leaders seem content for people to assume CBDs have changed in only cosmetic ways, essentially the same but with taller skylines. But since at least the 1980s, they have drifted far from the standard functional definition proposed by geographer Raymond Murphy in 1971: a region “draw[ing] its business from the whole urban area and from all ... classes of people.”

The mid-twentieth century was a time of tensions between booming suburban peripheries, driven by mass motorisation, and stagnating post-industrial inner-cities. After the 1980s, however, these former industrial-mercantile junctions or ‘classic’ CBDs were fitted up as global high-amenity enclaves. Some call this a “shift from the city as a site of production to one of consumption.” Over recent decades Sydney CBD has evolved in a more exclusive and upscale direction, hosting around a tenth of metropolitan jobs compared to nearly half in the 1950s. The pandemic forced some belated acknowledgement of this reality but notions of natural centrality persist.

In today’s post-material economy, the CBD’s status comes from a disproportionate share of public infrastructure rather than any inherent productivity advantage. Where the spatial order of the old industrial-mercantile CBD was arranged around functions, the contemporary ‘centre’ is laid out for amenities. Called ‘luxurification’ by some scholars, the new urban logic takes form as an upward spiral of amenity enhancements feeding off surging land values, gentrification and ‘sustainable urbanism’. Scaled up amenities make premium grade development more feasible as they amplify the capital that developers can substitute for land on high-priced sites. Luxurification is thus sweeping through most features of the CBD landscape, including all types of building stock and the streetscapes in between.

Using concepts proposed by urban geographers, at least five internal trends have been converging to make Sydney’s ‘post-CBD’:

Breakdown of the unipolar ‘core-frame’ structure made up of service and industrial functions arranged in concentric rings, and rise of multipolar high-amenity precincts, each resembling a walkable resort-style campus.
Spread of the upmarket ‘primary retail core’ as a general feature beyond the ‘Peak Land Value Intersection’ into other functional zones.
Decline of the downmarket ‘secondary retail zone’ in conjunction with gradual restrictions on motor vehicle access and confinement of entry to passenger rail corridors and bicycle paths.
Reshuffling of workspace across emerging precincts, inside and outside the traditional office core, offering amenities like harbour views, landscaped foreshores, green-rated buildings and revamped streetscapes around transit-hubs.
Penetration of residential development into the CBD, even the former retail and office cores, from the peripheral ‘zone of transition’.

The classic CBD was functionally and socio-economically diverse

In the wake of advancing post-war suburbanisation, there was a surge of interest in the CBD amongst American geographers during the 1950s. Based on their field work in nine mid-sized US cities, researchers Raymond Murphy and James Vance conceived the Land Value Method of delimiting outer CBD boundaries. They pinpointed the district’s Peak Land Value Intersection (PLVI) and traced the values of lots or blocks spreading outwards in concentric circles until values declined to five percent of PLVI value. In most cases the PLVI was “located within a few hundred feet of the [district’s] geographic center”, and from there “land values decrease rapidly at first as one leaves the peak intersection.” A city’s “maximum pedestrian concentration and … greatest vehicular congestion” were typically found at the PLVI.

Read the rest of this piece at The New City Journal.

John Muscat is a co-editor of The New City Journal.

Eastern Europe's Thriving Talent Market

Nima Sanandaji — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:28:38 -0500

Modern economies are increasingly driven by talent supply, and talent is often associated with the level of formal education degrees. Yet, across the Atlantic there are large differences in the unemployment rates of highly educated people. Understanding these patterns is relevant, because it shows which countries are likely to thrive as the talent magnets of the future.

Having a higher education degree is often associated with a lower risk of unemployment, but the risk is not zero. Those with higher education can still face unemployment due to lack of job creation, because their education is not of good quality or not suited to the needs of the labor market, or because they are between jobs. It could also be that the unemployment pay is so good relative to the after tax income, that incentives are small to get a job quickly after losing the former position.

In the USA for example merely 2.4 percent of those with an advanced education are unemployed. Compared to Europe in general, this is a good outcome. The variation in Europe is, however, significant. While in Poland merely 1.3 percent of those with a higher education degree are unemployed, the same rate is 8.2 percent in Greece.

The lowest unemployment rates of talents are found in Poland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia. These countries have unemployment levels of 2 percent or less amongst the highly educated. A low unemployment of talents signals that the education model is functioning well, providing relevant knowledge of high quality. It also signals that the economic system is functioning well, providing dynamic job creation.

It is not a surprise that five Eastern European nations are at the top. Much of the growth of brain business jobs is happening in the capital regions of the Eastern European nations. These countries are characterized by growing talent pools, relatively low taxes and business friendly policies.

Malta, the EU member state that keeps having the strongest growth rate due to low taxes and business friendly policies, has just over 2 percent unemployment rate for those with advanced degrees. Germany, Norway, Iceland and the USA are also amongst the group of nations where the unemployment rate is below 2.5 percent.

The UK and the Netherlands, with moderate taxes and relatively business friendly policies, have an unemployment rate of nearly 3 percent. Ireland, Switzerland, Latvia and Estonia have promising free market based economic models, and relatively low taxes, yet despite this an unemployment level amongst the highly educated of around 3 percent or more.

Denmark and Sweden have just under 4 percent unemployment rate, these knowledge economies of Europe stagnate though due to high taxes and generous welfare states. High taxes not only crowd out talents, investments, entrepreneurs and businesses, but also lead to lower incentives for pupils, parents and teachers to pursue high standards in education. Why work with grit in the school system if high taxes remove much of the incentives. This attitude leads to less grit in the school system, which translates to lack of grit as young adults, and a correspondingly higher risk of unemployment. Grit in education is the key to why Estonia has surpassed Sweden in education results according to the international PISA test, as well as in share of the young population who are engineers or researchers.

Finland and Canada have around 4 percent unemployment rate among those with a higher education. These high rates represent a significant mismatch in the economy, lack of entrepreneurial activity and investments. Individuals who have higher degrees expect typically to be able to avoid unemployment, and those countries where this group struggles to find jobs can experience significant talent migration abroad. They may also experience difficulty attracting foreign talents.

Spain and Greece have the worst situation, with unemployment levels of around 8 percent for those with advanced degrees. Cyprus, despite otherwise being a successful entrepreneurial country, has 5.5 percent unemployment rate. Portugal with a 4.6 percent rate does better, but not good. In the Mediterranean region, Malta is unique in having low unemployment amongst those with advanced degrees. Thanks to low taxes and business friendly policies, Malta is the EU growth leader.

Economic dynamism is a key driving force for job creation, because it is often young firms that create new job opportunities. The more vital economy a country has, the more likely are talents to be able to find new jobs.

Since 2001, some countries have experienced a rise in unemployment of those with advanced degrees, while other nations have improved ability in the labor market for talent absorption. The countries characterized by the strongest reductions of unemployment rates are Croatia, Estonia, Poland, Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, followed by Romania.

While Eastern European nations top the league of improving their talent markets, also Germany Italy, Canada and Malta are moving in the right direction. In the USA, the unemployment rate of the highly educated has been reduced marginally by 0.2 percentage points since 2001.

Slight increases of the unemployment rates have occurred in France, Greece, Hungary, Denmark and the UK. The Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden and Austria have experienced more profound increases in unemployment rate of those with higher education. Cyprus, Luxembourg and Portugal have had significant increases in the risk of unemployment for those with higher degrees.

Overall, we can see that the USA has a better talent market than most of Europe, yet Europe has considerable variation. Numerous European economies, particularly in Eastern Europe, are doing better in terms of outcome as well as long-term trends. Canada is not doing as well as the USA, signaling that it is not quite as strong of a talent magnet.

Talents are likely to become increasingly mobile across the borders, and those countries with low unemployment levels amongst the highly educated are likely to continue growing with talents. Therefore, the unemployment levels of those with advanced degrees, as well as the long-term direction of change of this metric, can provide important insights into future economic progress.

As it stands, those with higher education degrees often will find higher wages, as well as lower risk of unemployment, in the USA. Yet, it is important to continue pushing for improving the situation instead of becoming compliant. Even the USA can learn from the Eastern European countries, many of which have significantly reduced the unemployment level of the highly educated since the beginning of the millennium.

Institutional competition suggests that the variation in Europe might decrease over time, as the countries which are struggling learn from those who are doing better. Those countries which have high or rising unemployment rates amongst talents risk becoming the losers in the talent war. The corresponding brain drain creates strong incentives for economic reform. The talent job market is also in this regard an important predictor of the future.

Nima Sanandaji, Director, European Centre for Entrepreneurship and Policy Reform (ECEPR)

Photo: Warsaw downtown, in Public Domain.

What's Great About Midwestern Cities

Pete Saunders — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 20:28:38 -0400

Anyone who follow me here knows I write quite a bit about Midwestern cities. They’re what I know best and love most. They’re chronically under-discussed in American urbanist discourse, where most of the talk is about the pros and cons of the coastal or Sun Belt cities. Fair enough. That’s where the money is made and the people are moving.

I write critically about Midwestern cities because they can be better. But every once in a while it’s good for me to remember why I do this. The Midwest’s cities have fabulous assets that are rarely recognized, at least on a national scale. And those assets are the fundamental pieces that can catalyze their revitalization. So let’s look at the assets that set Midwestern cities apart.

They are actual cities. you want a great downtown experience? It's here. You want cool neighborhoods? They're all around here. You want a fantastic restaurant scene? The possibilities are endless. You want music, concerts and events? We have them. And you want it all in a walkable environment? You can find it here, because they have a pre-WWII development foundation that gives them the real urban feel.

Wealth of cultural resources. Chicago has a wonderful collection of museums and other cultural amenities that allows it to compete with any large city on the globe. The city’s Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, Art Institute and Field Museum of Natural History are among the most visited museums in the nation, and are internationally recognized for their collections and research. Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Pittsburgh each have museums that rank among the largest in the world in exhibition space, a legacy of their industrial pasts.

Excellent architecture. This article from from iF Design captures the significance of the Midwest on 20th century architecture. Architect Josh Lipnik’s quote on Midwestern places to visit for architecture sums it up: “Chicago for the early skyscrapers, wealth of modernist architecture, and the works of Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Detroit for the early industrial architecture of Albert Kahn and the Art Deco skyscrapers. Cincinnati for the intact 19th century neighborhoods and Victorian streetscapes.”

Pleasant quality of life. You can take a U.S. News and World Report’s list of the "Best cities in the U.S. to Live for a Great Quality of Life" with a grain of salt. Be that as it may, it still highlights the Midwest for one thing that it’s well known for – a great quality of life. Its 2024 list of the 25 best cities by their quality of life metrics is topped by Ann Arbor, MI, with six other Midwestern cities – Madison, WI, Kalamazoo, MI, South Bend, IN, Grand Rapids, MI, Pittsburgh, PA and Green Bay, WI – making the list. Perhaps they’re smaller than many would urban-oriented people would like; on this list only Pittsburgh and Grand Rapids have metro areas with more than one million residents. However, some have easy access to nearby major cities (Ann Arbor is 45 minutes from Detroit, Madison is 75 minutes from Milwaukee, and South Bend is a 90 minute drive from Chicago, but also connected by commuter rail) that put you close to major city amenities.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: BF Kenney via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.