The Economic Gains from Cities
"There are many types of agglomeration economies in consumption and we really know very little about them still but my assessment is that cities are the most welfare enhancing human innovation in history: they empowered the division of labour, the invention of money, trade and technical inventions like the wheel – let alone government, the arts or culture."Why Land is Regaining Importance in Economic Analysis
"Classical economists devoted far more effort to trying to understand the returns to land than they did to labour or capital: it was both the most important asset and the most important factor of production. When Adam Smith was writing only about 12 percent of Europe’s population lived in cities and even in the most industrialised country, Britain, the value of agricultural land was about 3 times that of annual GDP. But as the value of other assets increased, interest in land diminished so that by about 1970 really only agricultural economists and a few urban economists were interested in it: and they did not talk to each other. But by 2010 residential property, mostly the land on which houses sat, was worth three times as much as British GDP. By the end of 2013 houses accounted for 61 percent of the UK’s net worth: up from 49 percent 20 years ago. Land, now urban land, is valuable, so there is renewed interest."Urban Policy Often Misses the Problems of the Modern City
"Luckily cities are so resilient because urban policy is generally so bad! ... Policy has been dominated by physical and design ways of thinking: great for building those fantastic innovations of the 19th Century – sewers or water supply. But not useful for facilitating urban growth and offsetting for the costs of city size. We know cities keep on getting more productive the bigger they are but some costs – the price of space, congestion, for example – also increase with city size. So urban policy should offset for those costs. Instead it mainly increases them. Popular policies of densification and containment restrict the supply of space, increasing its price as cities grow so we forego socially valuable agglomeration economies. Another popular policy – height restrictions – reduces gains from ‘vertical’ agglomeration economies."
