Urban Studies

This paper investigates the long-run convergence of regional house prices in the UK. Existing studies have failed to reach a consensus on whether or not regional house prices exhibit long-run convergence with each other. The application is proposed of a new test involving unit root testing of the first principal component based on regional—national house price differentials. Using mix-adjusted quarterly data for 1973—2006, it is found that the first principal component is stationary. This suggests that all UK regional house prices are driven by a single common stochastic trend. Further analysis suggests that those regions that are more distant from London exhibit the highest degrees of persistence with respect to deviations in house price differentials.

The affordability of housing is a major policy issue that has increasingly become a concern for UK government as house prices have risen dramatically in recent years. This is partly because of the importance of affordability for the recruitment and retention of key workers, many of whom are on national pay scales and earning salaries that do not fully reflect the differences in prices that exist, in particular between London and the South East and the rest of Great Britain. Government policy is to increase the supply of housing in order to improve affordability in the greater South East. However, assuming that this expansion in housing supply is also to be accompanied by an expansion in employment, the outcome is that there will be both an increase in supply and in demand for housing, with the counter-intuitive result that, under one of the scenarios set out in this paper, in some areas affordability will worsen rather than improve.

Recognition of the limitations of traditional hedonic models to account for spatial effects has led in recent years to the development and use of spatial econometric and statistical techniques in real estate applications. It seems appropriate, as the number of applications grows, to evaluate the relative ability of some newer approaches in terms of producing accurate spatial predictions. This article compares a selection of techniques to assess their performance. The focus is on moving window approaches that can be conceptualised as sliding neighbourhoods (i.e. soft market segmentations) and that can incorporate spatial dependency effects. Comparison of moving windows regression (MWR), geographically weighted regression (GWR) and moving windows Kriging (MWK) sheds light on the relevance of different spatial effects. Results using Toronto as a case study indicate that market segmentation may be more important than spatial dependencies. The findings suggest practical guidelines with regard to the use of the models investigated.

Research into land use—transport relationships through the lens of the jobs—housing balance and the closely related excess commuting framework continues to draw substantial interdisciplinary attention. There have been several recent research efforts aimed at extending the excess commuting framework and its GIS-based spatial models to more prescriptive, policy-relevant situations. This paper puts forward the idea of a theoretical `optimal' urban jobs—housing balance and proposes a new spatial model for finding it. The developed model treats the region's theoretical minimum commute as a baseline indicator of the jobs—housing balance. Alternative patterns of workers and jobs are simulated in order to improve this indicator. The model is demonstrated in several scenarios using data from the decennial US census (2000). Results demonstrate the model's capability for finding `optimal' spatial distributions of jobs and housing, as well as pointing out inefficiencies in existing urban structure. Summary remarks and suggestions for future research are provided.

As land conversion has led inevitably to socioeconomic dislocations in China, a variety of bottom—up reforms have been designed to mitigate and contain the resultant conflicts. This evolves the creation of a mechanism both to allow peasants to benefit from the increase of land value in the urbanisation process and also to redistribute interests to individual rural villagers. This paper focuses on on-going shareholding reforms which aim to clarify villagers' property rights under the current structure of collective ownership. Three cases best exemplify these issues: Wusha village in Guangdong, Qunyi village in Jiangsu and Daliushu village in Beijing. The comparison reveals divergent experiences of reform among landless farmers and how the adoption of property rights reforms has restructured the concept and organisation of rural collectives.

This paper questions the hyper-globalist orientation among some leading analysts of the global city and their tendency to define it in functional terms, accounting for its presence by the agglomeration of talents and therefore to underexamine the global city's actual linkages. It argues that an examination of the linkages (geographical scope as well as capital, knowledge and labour-mediated) will alert one to the changing configurations of a global city. It will also facilitate an exploration into factors other than the agglomeration of talents that have made for the changes. The paper examines Hong Kong's changing configuration as a global city from the mid 1980s to the early 2000s. It starts with an overview of three sets of trend data and goes on to examine the capital, knowledge and labour mediated by two types of producer service and the circuits they support.

In 1957 Chicago enacted a Comprehensive Amendment to the Chicago Zoning Ordiance of 1923. In contrast to the hierarchical zoning of the 1923 ordinance, the 1957 ordinance made each zoning category exclusive and mandated the removal of non-conforming uses. This study examines land parcels at the borders between residential and non-residential (commercial or manufacturing) zones, and finds that land values in non-residential zones enjoyed a one-time jump in growth over the time-period 1955—58 during which the 1957 ordinance was adopted. No significant change is detected in land value growth in residential zones. These results suggest that non-residential landowners valued the insurance that the 1957 ordinance provided against mixed land uses more than the value of the option to change land use that was terminated.

The main objective of this paper is to explore relations between competitiveness and social cohesion in Istanbul. It mainly questions whether it is possible to expect a positive change in socio-spatial inequalities if increasing competitiveness generates not only international business and high-level services, but also traditional low-cost production activities. The findings show that competition in different types of activities has generated large numbers of jobs, but has not been able to overcome existing income disparities. The increasing income differences, however, do not mean an increase in socio-spatial segmentation, since the non-market processes and policies related to education, gender and the urban land and housing markets have played important roles in the redistribution of different social groups within urban space, in addition to the endogenous dynamics of labour markets.

The deindustrialisation of Johannesburg has taken a particular spatial form. Service-sector businesses are increasingly located in the mostly White northern suburbs, whereas the mostly Black southern suburbs bear the brunt of unemployment and increasingly resemble an excluded ghetto. Some authors argue that Johannesburg's post- apartheid spatial order is just as racially unequal as it was during apartheid. This study tests this argument by using the results of the 2001 population census to examine the extent to which edge city development in Johannesburg is characterised by racial residential desegregation. The results show that the northern suburbs are undergoing fairly substantial desegregation. To the extent that this trend continues, the geography of apartheid racial divisions will be eroded and Johannesburg's racially mixed edge city will become an exception among world cities.

The Australian public housing sector has undergone significant change in recent years. The public tenant profile has changed and public housing infrastructure has become largely unsuitable. At the same time, the Australian government has retreated from funding public housing infrastructure. The results of these changes are fewer public dwellings, fewer tenants housed and a stock mismatched to the needs of public tenants. Urban regeneration allows housing providers to trade unsuitable and run-down housing for fewer better-quality dwellings, but necessitates forced public tenant relocation. This paper explores residential choice among Australian public tenants and describes the development of a novel application of spatial technology—a tenants' spatial decision support system (SDSS)—to improve tenant outcomes in forced relocation.