Suchergebnisse

This dissertation studies whether cities enhance development in nearby rural areas in China. First, we recount the evolution of urban-rural relations since the Maoist period (Chapter 1). While rural areas were sacrificed in favor of cities for decades, since the early 2000s the government has indicated that cities should "support the countryside". Nowadays, a high number of investments have been realized to strengthen linkages between urban and rural areas with the aim of enabling cities to promote rural development. However, very little is known about the effective impact of cities on nearby rural areas in the specific Chinese context. The present dissertation aims at providing a detailed analysis of the role of cities on rural areas in order to assess whether strengthening urban-rural linkages is an effective rural development strategy. After having defined what we mean by urban and rural areas in China (Chapter 2), we provide a review of the literature on the role of cities in rural development (Chapter 3). The following three chapters present empirical investigations. The first empirical test focuses on the effect of cities on the agricultural sector of nearby rural areas (Chapter 4). We then study the impact of cities on the rural non-agricultural sector (Chapter 5). Finally, after having focused on the economic impact of cities, we investigate the effect of cities on rural development by testing whether urban proximity significantly increases rural pollution in China (Chapter 6). In the light of the results obtained, we consider whether relying on cities to enhance rural development could be an effective strategy (Chapter 7). ; Cette thèse étudie si les villes stimulent le développement économique des zones rurales voisines en Chine. Dans un premier temps, la thèse retrace l'évolution des relations entre zones urbaines et rurales depuis la période maoïste (Chapitre 1). Alors que durant des décennies entières les zones rurales ont été sacrifiées au profit des villes, depuis le début des années 2000 est ...

RESUME : Comme la plupart des villes africaines, Yaoundé, capitale du Cameroun, est confrontée aux phénomènes d'urbanisation croissante. Cette urbanisation rapide n'est pas accompagnée d'une croissance économique. En fait, le pouvoir d'achat extrêmement bas, le chômage, le sous-emploi, la pauvreté, voire la misère, ont amené une frange importante de la population à inventer de nouvelles solutions pour s'assurer un revenu. C'est alors qu'apparaît le phénomène d'agriculture urbaine et périurbaine. La caractérisation de cette agriculture a mis en évidence une interaction entre les catégories d'acteurs, les types d'espaces, les types de cultures, les produits obtenus et les revenus moyens générés. Il ressort de l'analyse des résultats que cette forme d'agriculture emploie près de 2000 personnes, pour la plupart des jeunes et, surtout, des femmes, dont la moyenne d'âge est de 35 ans. C'est une activité basée principalement dans les bas-fonds marécageux, le bas des pentes, les abords des routes avec une forte pression sur l'espace. Les cultures sont diversifiées et sont à dominance maraîchère, vivrière et floricole. Elles varient en fonction des trois espaces étudiés, à savoir l'auréole urbaine, la zone périurbaine et l'hinterland rural. L'analyse du système de commercialisation a mis en évidence trois types de circuits à travers lesquels les produits transitent des producteurs aux consommateurs. Ce sont notamment les circuits longs, les circuits courts et les circuits directs. Dans ces circuits de commercialisation, la régulation du marché se réalise au niveau de tous les intervenants. Cela signifie que les prix des produits ne sont pas fixés d'avance, mais varient en fonction de la demande. En ce qui concerne la rentabilité, l'analyse sur les comptes d'exploitation des cultures de céleri, de ndolé et de morelle noire indique que cette agriculture est rentable avec un gain moyen journalier de près de trois euros pour les producteurs. C'est la raison pour laquelle certains maraîchers estiment qu'à la place d'un ...

This text provides a concise, accessible and stimulating introduction to the relationships between cities and economies in both the historical and global contexts

This is the accepted version of a paper published as: Monchambert, G., & De Palma, A. (2014). Public transport reliability and commuter strategy. Journal of Urban Economics, 81, 14-29.This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. Access to the published version may require subscription.N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper ; International audience ; We consider the modeling of a bi-modal competitive network involving a public transport mode, which may be unreliable, and an alternative mode. Commuters select a transport mode and their arrival time at the station when they use public transport. The public transport reliability set by the public transport firm at the competitive equilibrium increases with the alternative mode fare, via a demand effect. This is reminiscent of the Mohring effect. The study of the optimal service quality shows that often, public transport reliability and thereby patronage are lower at equilibrium compared to first-best social optimum. The paper provides some public policy insights.

This is the accepted version of a paper published as: Monchambert, G., & De Palma, A. (2014). Public transport reliability and commuter strategy. Journal of Urban Economics, 81, 14-29.This paper has been peer-reviewed but does not include the final publisher proof-corrections or journal pagination. Access to the published version may require subscription.N.B. When citing this work, cite the original published paper ; International audience ; We consider the modeling of a bi-modal competitive network involving a public transport mode, which may be unreliable, and an alternative mode. Commuters select a transport mode and their arrival time at the station when they use public transport. The public transport reliability set by the public transport firm at the competitive equilibrium increases with the alternative mode fare, via a demand effect. This is reminiscent of the Mohring effect. The study of the optimal service quality shows that often, public transport reliability and thereby patronage are lower at equilibrium compared to first-best social optimum. The paper provides some public policy insights.

Information technologies are now being developed that transform the physical environment, and the human interactions within it, into a "digital skin" of the city. This skin consists of a sensored and metered urban environment. In concert with ubiquitous computing, and the increasing use of electronically-mediated interactions in general, the physical world is becoming a platform for generating much new data on the workings of human society, its interactions with the physical environment, and manifold processes in economics, politics, and social interactions. The city is a subject of this revolution, in the sense that the technologies are predicted to make it possible to manage the physical city in ways not previously possible, but also to make possible major changes in the political and social interactions of people within cities, and between citizens and government. The city is also an objective basis for the revolution, in the sense that it is the sensored and metered platform that can generate unprecedented "big data" for many new types of uses. This revolution opens up many questions for urban theory and research, and many new issues for public and urban policy, which are explored in this paper.

AbstractA discussion on urban development cannot be separated from a discussion of land and the environment. Property development must be carried out with a variety of socioeconomic and environmental considerations to prevent the paradoxical coincidence that Henry George observed between "progress and poverty." The purpose of this article is to discuss urban development issues related to land use and the spatial planning of settlements by considering the case of dense settlements on the Code riverbank in the city center of Yogyakarta, Indonesia. By drawing on the work of Anne Haila, a leading land economist who visited the settlements on the Code riverbank, my aim is to determine how changing urban land tenure can transform an area facing the threat of flooding and evictions. Haila's interviews with people who live in local apartments show that a change of orientation from commodifying urban land to viewing urban land as a commons helps to improve the social conditions of the urban poor, build urban community, and enhance wider urban ecological sustainability.

In this study we explore the possibility that any or all of three dimensions of the U.S. inner city, central location, relatively low income, and a relatively high percentage of minority residents, correlate with a relative lack of neighborhood retail services, the so-called retail gap. Our empirical analysis is based on zip code level data for 39 U.S. cities with populations from 50 to 225 thousand people. After specifying an empirical model based on hypotheses drawn from the urban economics, urban studies, and urban development literature, we test access to retail services using both geographical density and per capita retail measures. While several results from this study are worthy of discussion, our primary empirical finding is that neighborhoods with high percentages of African-Americans are systematically under-served by retail, all else equal, while Latino, low income, or otherwise centrally located neighborhoods are not. We then test a selection of product categories for retail density, finding some differing results by product category but verifying our more general conclusions for most products. Finally, we find that grocery stores have significantly smaller scale in African-American communities, a finding that provides partial support for the urban "food desert" hypothesis. These findings suggest that the inner city retail gap may be more of a racial than geographic issue, and that increased emphasis on racial composition is warranted in the retail development policies applied to smaller U.S. cities.

"Regardless of their size, all cities are ultimately agglomerations of people and institutions. Agglomeration economies make it possible to attain minimum efficiencies of scale in the organization and delivery of services. However, the economic benefits do not constitute the main advantage of a city. A city's status rests on three dimensions: (1) political impetus, which is the result of citizens' participation and the public administration's agenda; (2) applications derived from technological advances (especially in ICT); and (3) cooperation between public and private initiatives in business development and entrepreneurship. These three dimensions determine which resources are necessary to create smart cities. But a smart city, ideal in the way it channels and resolves technological, social and economic-growth issues, requires many additional elements to function at a high-performance level, such as culture (an environment that empowers and engages citizens) and physical infrastructure designed to foster competition and collaboration, encourage new ideas and actions, and set the stage for new business creation"--Page 4 of cover

We examine the impact of measurement errors in geocoding of property locations and in the assessment of Mountain Pine Beetle-induced tree damage within the proximity of a given residence on estimated losses in home values. For our sample of homes in the wildland-urban interface of the Colorado front range and using a novel matching estimator with Bayesian regression adjustment we find that both types of errors can lead to substantial biases in estimated losses. Our results confirm that the Forest Service's Aerial Detection Survey is generally too coarse to be informative for property valuation that depends on highly localized spatial data. ; United States Forest Service, Southern Research StationUnited States Department of Agriculture (USDA)United States Forest Service [12-JV-11330143-106] ; This work was supported by the United States Forest Service, Southern Research Station [cooperative agreement number 12-JV-11330143-106]. ; Public domain authored by a U.S. government employee