Urban Studies

Post-apartheid transition in South Africa's small towns has received little attention. Using the South African Property Transfer Guide, 2500 residential transfers were analysed in Margate. Spatial and temporal patterns in Black house purchase were interpreted through discussions with key actors. The findings indicate the importance of micro-dynamics in determining specific post-apartheid transitions and confirm the relationship between racial employment profiles and housing markets. Black in-movement to previously White areas has focused on Extension 3, where private building of low-cost housing has occurred, but the area is now becoming resegregated. Whilst peripheral housing need not imply exclusion from services in small towns, unpaid mortgage bills and municipal rates have led to repossessions and affected the credit status of new Black buyers.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of home-ownership on income distribution in Turkey. Making use of raw data from an official income distribution survey which provides information on cash and in-kind incomes of household members and imputed rents for home-owners, it is found that home-ownership has an equalising effect on income distribution in the urban areas of Turkey. This result is attributed to the fact that many low-income families reside in squatter housing built at the outskirts of large cities.

David Rusk, former Mayor of Albuquerque, New Mexico, has observed that "bad neighborhoods defeat good programs". This paper identifies the underlying causes of bad neighbourhoods along with their costs to local residents and residents throughout the region. It is a critical essay that traces recent patterns of uneven metropolitan development, the social forces generating these patterns, their many costs and potential remedies. It demonstrates how the interrelated processes of sprawl, concentration of poverty and racial segregation shape the opportunity structure facing diverse segments of the nation's urban and metropolitan population. In so doing, it draws on recent scholarly literature from various disciplines, government data and documents, research institute reports and the mass media. Topics addressed include income and wealth disparities, employment opportunities, housing patterns, access to health care and exposure to crime. While recognising the role of individual choice and human capital, the paper focuses on public policy decisions and related private-sector activities in determining how place and race shape the opportunity structure of metropolitan areas. Finally, the paper explores various policy options to sever the linkages among place, race and privilege in the nation's urban communities.

The paper presents the results from a study of whether road traffic changes can trigger segregation processes in accordance with Thomas Schelling's 'tipping-point model'. Based on register information of all persons who have lived in inner Oslo east in five neighbourhood types that differ with respect to road traffic development during the 1990s, it is concluded that there is a pattern of relocation quite consistent with the tipping-point model but only for some groups and in some neighbourhood types. There are more rapid and profound patterns of relocation in neighbourhoods with road traffic increase, than in neighbourhoods with traffic reductions and, in particular, families with children relocate in response to changes in the physical and social characteristics of the neighbourhood.

Housing affordability among low-to moderate-income private tenants has been declining over the past 10 years in Australia. This trend has intensified in spite of almost a decade of strong economic growth and low inflation in the Australian economy. An important factor here has been the continuing decline in the stock of rental housing at the low-rent end of the market, especially in the large cities like Sydney and Melbourne. This, in turn, has been associated with the peculiar pattern of private investment in Australian housing markets. Large professional and institutional investors have avoided the private rental sector, leaving a myriad of small individual investor-landlords as primary suppliers. Government housing, taxation and other policies have reinforced this pattern of development. This paper provides a conceptual framework for analysing these outcomes and develops an approach that identifies the key elements of public policy necessary to reduce barriers to widespread investment in the provision of affordable, low-cost rental housing. Two specific investment models are then outlined and analysed. The first model is based on renewed public borrowing from private investors. The second model introduces a stock exchange listed public company financed by a mix of government and private equity and corporate borrowings. The total net subsidy cost to government is identified in each model and sensitivity analysis outcomes noted.

Improvements in transport were commonly found to have a positive effect on the price of housing. As the construction of infrastructure often lasts for years, it is plausible to assume that investors will take expected improvements into consideration when pricing and trading neighbourhood properties. However, there have been few investigations of such effects. This paper is an empirical study of whether premiums were paid for the expected benefits offered by a new tunnel before its completion. The results showed that there were positive price expectation effects well before the completion of the tunnel. The expectation effects allow the government to finance infrastructure projects by selling land in the affected districts in advance.

The renter illusion hypothesis holds that renters underestimate their property tax burden and therefore support excessive levels of local expenditure. A number of studies have reached results that are consistent with the hypothesis. But so far empirical investigations have proceeded from the assumption that renter illusion is a fact and have investigated the implications of this fact. No-one has investigated renter illusion as such. In other areas of fiscal illusion, survey analyses of voter perceptions have yielded considerable insight into the validity of illusionary hypotheses. This paper follows this method and investigates a representative sample of 1000 Danish renters' and home-owners' perception of the local property tax system. The evidence raises doubts about the renter illusion hypothesis. The survey findings are corroborated by an analysis of property taxation in Danish municipalities.

This paper develops a set of quantitative variables to characterise urban forms at the metropolitan level and, in particular, to distinguish compactness from 'sprawl'. It first reviews and analyses past research on the definitions of urban form, compactness and sprawl, and corresponding quantitative variables. Four quantitative variables are developed to measure four dimensions of urban form at the metropolitan level: metropolitan size, activity intensity, the degree that activities are evenly distributed, and the extent that high-density sub-areas are clustered. Through a series of simulation analyses, the global Moran coefficient, which characterises the fourth dimension, distinguishes compactness from sprawl. It is high, intermediate and close to zero for monocentric, polycentric and decentralised sprawling forms respectively. In addition, the more there is more local sprawl, composed of discontinuity and strip development, the lower is the Moran coefficient.

How will advances in telecommunications technology affect urban development? In this paper, we develop a general model where individuals involved in relationships use two modes of interaction, face-to-face and electronic communication. Each individual chooses the amount of interaction of each type to maximise her net pay-off from the relationships. Improvements in telecommunications technology may increase or decrease the demand for face-to-face interactions, depending on whether the cross-price elasticity of demand between face-to-face interactions and telecommunications is positive or negative. Embedding the model within a simple spatial framework shows that city size increases with electronic communications if the cross-elasticity is negative. The model presented here is closely related to that of Gaspar and Glaeser, and its conclusions are virtually identical, but they are derived from a simpler and arguably more descriptively accurate representation of the interdependence between face-to-face interactions and electronic communications.