Intrametropolitan variation of urban structure and housing price: the case of Chongqing, China
- PDF / 1,248,057 Bytes
- 17 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 75 Downloads / 188 Views
Intrametropolitan variation of urban structure and housing price: the case of Chongqing, China Feng Deng1 Received: 3 September 2019 / Accepted: 31 January 2020 © The Japan Section of the Regional Science Association International 2020
Abstract The debate on urban spatial structure and economic efficiency has largely ignored intrametropolitan variation of urban structure. Chongqing, a mountainous metropolis in Southwestern China, is a good case for studying the economic effects of intrametropolitan difference in urban structure. Population density and center density of each urban district are calculated to capture the two dimensions of urban structure: centralization–dispersion and monocentric–polycentric. Based on average housing price data for micro-districts sampled through multistage stratified sampling, hedonic analysis is conducted that includes the two urban structure variables. Empirical results show that population density is negatively associated with housing price while center density is positively associated with housing price. This finding provides indirect support to the view that dispersion and polycentricity are efficiency enhancing. Keywords Urban structure · Housing price · Intrametropolitan variation · Dispersion · Polycentricity JEL Classification R14 · R32
1 Introduction There has long been a debate on the relationship between urban spatial structure, or more generally urban form, and economic efficiency, as summarized in Gordon and Richardson (2011). That debate is intertwined with the debate on urban sprawl (e.g. Ewing 1997; Gordon and Richardson 1997), suggesting the importance of that topic I thank Yong Liu for providing GIS data of Chongqing metropolitan area. * Feng Deng [email protected] 1
School of Tourism and Land Resource, Chongqing Technology and Business University, Chongqing, People’s Republic of China
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Asia-Pacific Journal of Regional Science
to urban planning or urban studies at large. As admitted by many participants in the two debates, which are mostly limited to cities in North America and Europe, there has been no consensus yet. It is then interesting to explore what empirical evidence Chinese cities could add to the debates. So far in the debate, almost all researchers concentrate on intermetropolitan variation of urban structure. That is a natural choice, because urban structure is often meaningful only at the scale of the whole metropolis, but it introduces significant problems to empirical studies, because differences in many socio-economic variables cannot be controlled for in the analysis. However, districts or subareas in some metropolitan areas may exhibit significant variation in urban structure for reasons such as geography or history. In this sense, they could be regarded as good cases in which many macro-variables such as urban governance, urban planning and local policies and laws are the same and need not to be controlled for in empirical analysis. “As long as the land market is recognized in the analysis … all realized ex
Data Loading...
