Impact of urban pattern on operating costs of public services: quantification through the economic weight of services ‘to property’

Francisco Javier Garrido-Jiménez, Francesc Magrinyà and María Consuelo del Moral-Ávila

International Journal of Urban Sciences, 2022, vol. 26, issue 3, 541-556

Abstract: Research has shown the existence of strong links between physical configuration of the urban settlements and the economic metabolism of public services. However, this relationship has a different intensity depending on the nature of each service, resting exclusively on the services ‘to property’, that is, those ensuring smooth functionality of the buildings and public spaces. In such services, the operating cost per unit developed area largely depends on representative variables of the urban pattern. For instance, the length of roads per unit developed area impacts the operating costs of linear services, such as street lighting, street cleaning and, together with housing density, on the operating costs of water cycle, waste collection and disposal. Moreover, the maintenance costs of pavements, parks, and gardens are directly proportional to the dimension of the public space. Therefore, the economic weight of services ‘to property’ in the current budget of public administration highlights how vulnerable these budgets are against changes in the urban pattern and determines the expected maximum economic impact of any measure adopted through urban planning. Thus, the main objective of this study is to define, from a theoretical perspective, an indicator representative of the economic weight of the operating cost of the services ‘to property’ upon public administration budgets, capable of delimiting the relationship between the budgets and urban patterns. In addition, to show its utility, this urban-economic indicator has been computed for a sample of medium-sized Spanish cities, showing that, on an average, a quarter of the operating cost of urban public services is directly linked to urban patterns, highlighting the potential impact of urban planning decisions on the economic sustainability of urban settlements.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/12265934.2022.2042364 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
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:taf:rjusxx:v:26:y:2022:i:3:p:541-556

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/rjus20

DOI: 10.1080/12265934.2022.2042364

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Urban Sciences is currently edited by Dongjoo Park and Mack Joong Choi

More articles in International Journal of Urban Sciences from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().