Behaviour, Preferences and Cities: Urban Theory and Urban Resurgence

Abstract

The resurgence of big, old cities and their regions took urban theory by surprise. A great deficiency of much urban theory is that it is static, partial, and backward-looking. As such, it has few tools to understand large-scale, medium-term change in complex systems such as cities. Explaining such changes requires realistic assumptions about the behaviours that make cities. Did resurgence occur because the preferences of firms changed, and thus their locational behaviour did as well? Or was it the preferences of skilled, "creative" workers? Or households? We are unable to tell a theoretically consistent and evidence-based story about why old, cold and dense cities revived and why certain new cities emerged and grew, while others continued to decline. Likewise, the ways that the intra-metropolitan arrangement of work, residence, and transportation have been changed by the forces that gave rise to resurgence and emergence is still poorly understood. Measuring the after-the-fact price and locational adjustments of agents to these forces is not the same as explaining why they occurred and how current restructuring of cities is unfolding. Most importantly, in the absence of credible theories that weave together realistic views of how agents' preferences form and how supply structures respond to them and hence how they make their choices, urban theory will be condemned to documenting change after the fact, when policy errors in the name of untested theories and ideas will already have been made.

Realising the Diversity Dividend: Population Diversity and Urban Economic Development

“…At its worse this has encouraged "bandwagon" urban development, poorly adjusted to the specificities of particular city contexts (Musterd and Murie, 2010;Storper and Manville, 2006). What research findings demonstrate is that population diversity is rarely a determinant of economic outcomes but does play a role -sometimes a highly significant one -in developing the conditions for urban economic growth whether in relation to the development of human capital, innovative capacity, trade linkages or the openness and stability of the urban environment.…”

“…Instead the emphasis within traditional economic growth theory is upon factors such as the presence of highly skilled workers, open economies, a stable political environment and technology and innovation. Whilst all of these may be influenced by levels of population diversity and migration flows, diversity itself is either seen as a largely neutral factor, or at best a necessary but not sufficient condition for urban growth, contributing to rather than driving, urban economic growth (Storper and Manville, 2006).…”

“…Indeed the majority of ethnic neighbourhoods are never colonised or visited by those working in high skill occupations, yet they do perform a critical role in the competitiveness of the urban economy in terms of providing low cost living environments for low wage workers (Sassen, 2001). In reality individuals and groups live, work and use the varied spaces of large, multicultural cities in multiple and often contradictory ways (Keith, 2005;Storper and Manville, 2006), so the role that diverse urban districts play within particular economic processes is similarly varied and evolving and not reducible to simple relations of cause and effect.…”

Factors Explaining the Spatial Agglomeration of the Creative Class: Empirical Evidence for German Artists

“…In this sense, Florida's hypotheses are confronted with concepts emphasising regional productions systems, local labour markets and externalities (see Storper & Scott, 2008;Storper & Manville, 2006). The paper focuses on the following four questions:…”

New Approach to Analysis Public Preferences for Local Financial Reforms: Greater Tel-Aviv Metropolitan Area as a Case Study

“…Therefore, local authorities, mainly central municipalities (CMs), need time to adjust to the new realities (Storperand & Manville, 2006). So far, most of the taxes collected in CMs come from local residents and businesses.…”