On the Morphology of a Growing City: A Heuristic Experiment Merging Static Economics with Dynamic Geography

Justin Delloye, Dominique Peeters and Isabelle Thomas

PLOS ONE, 2015, vol. 10, issue 8, 1-17

Abstract: In this paper, we aim at exploring how individual location decisions affect the shape of a growing city and, more precisely, how they may add up to a configuration that diverges from equilibrium configurations formulated ex-ante. To do so, we provide a two-sector city model merging a static equilibrium analysis with agent-based simulations. Results show that under strong agglomeration effects, urban development is monotonic and ends up with circular, monocentric long-term configurations. For low agglomeration effects however, elongated and multicentric urban configurations may emerge. The occurrence and underlying dynamics of these configurations are also discussed regarding commuting costs and the distance-decay of agglomeration economies between firms. To sum up, our paper warns urban planning policy makers against the difference that may stand between appropriate long-term perspectives, represented here by analytic equilibrium configurations, and short-term urban configurations, simulated here by a multi-agent system.

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0135871 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 35871&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: On the Morphology of a Growing City: A Heuristic Experiment Merging Static Economics with Dynamic Geography (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0135871

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0135871

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().