Urban Studies

Despite official policies aimed at restraining large-city growth, the urban population of the USSR is becoming increasingly concentrated in such cities. The various growth control measures instituted by the government are reviewed and the relative ineffectiveness of such policies investigated in terms of the continued preference for industrial investment in the larger urban centres. A final section attempts to isolate the Soviet-specific factors that explain such investment preferences; five categories of factors are presented in this explanatory framework.

Two experimental surveys are employed in order to identify the subjects' preferences amongst a group of attributes of their residential environments. From these a number of implications for general improvement area policies are drawn. Differences in responses between subjects could not be explained by personal or household characteristics and were attributed to individual differences in tastes and requirements. The quality of the dwelling is found to be the principal determinant of subjects' preferences with environmental considerations relatively unimportant except for proximity to industry and dereliction.

The 118 basic equations of Forrester's urban dynamics model are analysed by forming them into qualitative structural matrices. It is concluded that the endogenous dynamics of the system are determined by only 42 of the 118 stock variables, thus enabling the majority of the equations to be discarded. In the urban dynamics model, city growth behaviour is found to depend essentially upon an attractiveness-mobility base which conditions labour and unemployment change rates and these in turn influence change rates in housing and management and finally new and mature business growth rates.

The paper makes use of the concept of chains of movement to develop a recursive model of the housing market in which prices and the value of transactions at each 'level' are determined sequentially. The model is then used to examine the effects of changes in the allocation of Building Society lending on the value of transactions in the housing market, and on the value of new house sales. Finally, it is argued that both new and existing house prices display considerable short-run rigidity, and hence, in the short run, changes in the allocation of lending will be reflected primarily in changes in the physical volume of movements, and in the real level of activity in the housebuilding industry.

Israel's housing market differs from other countries in that most of the urban population lives in owner-occupied apartments in multi-family buildings. This paper is concerned with the implications of this situation for housing preferences. The study is based on the prices of a sample of apartments offered for sale in the Tel Aviv metropolitan area. Using multiple regression analysis hedonic price indexes were obtained for a large number of characteristics of the apartment, the building, adjacent properties, the neighbourhood and the location in the metropolitan area. It was found that a premium is paid for characteristics which facilitate maintenance and for features which serve as indicators for the social composition of the neighbours and their attitudes.

The relationship between the level of income and the population of an urban area is a familiar concern in urban economics. Existing models of this relationship assume a homogeneous labour force and hence no inequality in the size distribution of income within an urban area. In this paper we determine what happens to the degree of inequality in money incomes as urban population increases if there are two classes of workers and if each class is compensated for the higher costs associated with larger urban size. We conclude that the primary determinant of the relationship between changes in inequality and changes in urban size is the change in the skill mix of the area.