The role of historic amenities in shaping cities

Miquel-Àngel Garcia-López and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal ()
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Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal: Universitat de Barcelona & IEB

No 2022/08, Working Papers from Institut d'Economia de Barcelona (IEB)

Abstract: The existence of amenities matters to understanding people’s residential choices. Our theoretical model extends the standard urban model by introducing exogenous amenities to explain population allocation within cities. To estimate the model predictions, we focus on historic amenities using detailed geolocated data for 579 European cities. We analyze how the shape of city centers endowed or not endowed with these amenities is affected. We measure històric amenities with the location of buildings from the Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance-Baroque periods. Our results show that cities with historic buildings in their centers have steeper population density gradients, are more compact and centralized, and have been less affected by the suburbanization processes caused by transportation improvements. Heterogeneity analyses show that the quantity and the quality of historic buildings also matter. Several robustness checks controlling for natural and modern amenities and testing for the spatial scope of these amenities verify our main results.

Keywords: Amenities; History; Buildings; Density; Transportation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O4 R2 R4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2022
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his and nep-ure
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Journal Article: The role of historic amenities in shaping cities (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2022-08

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