Hi everyone,
My background is in Architecture and Urban Planning, and I am currently considering a PhD in Urban Studies. To keep it to the point, my field of interest is the relationship between urban form and structure, real estate markets and productivity/ economic performance. If I finally undertook the program, I would like to focus on how well are different planning approaches doing at creating urban structures that foster innovation, growth and economic resilience.
Because of my background I am familiar with “canonical” literature of urban theory, from the architecture/ urban design perspective. I also have some graduate-level knowledge on urban economics and real estate finance. I am very interested in the work of Edward Glaeser and I have read several papers by him and others about the correlation between education and city prosperity, the rise of the cities as places for consumption of amenities and other topics.
Within the pure “urban form” discipline, I am also interested in parametric/ organic urban models, such as those of Christopher Alexander.
My general idea would be use relatively new ways of studying and parametrizing urban structure, with GIS and 3D modelling software to come up with improved measurements of urban form, which are typically absent from most of the “urban economics” papers. It seems like a very interesting approach to me, and also consistent with my background (I mean, how can an architect/ planner contribute to this field? Maybe with a better understanding of city form issues).
So, my questions are:
- Is it reasonable to try to find correlations between urban form (measured with detail, let’s say block level), the planning that produces it and the economic performance of the city? Does it make sense?
- In your opinion, what scale of study do you thing that makes sense? Maybe a two-scale approach, such as in Cervero, 2000?
- I am European. Is it interesting to conduct this research in European cities, versus looking somewhere else in the world (maybe areas with stronger urban growth, but with more difficulties to get data from? Would it be reasonable to study a number of cities from different contexts, to capture the effect of different planning systems (e.g. one American, one Western European, one Chinese?
- Any personal advice? In your opinion, is there any particularly interesting research area that is related to my main interests that I may have disregarded?
Thank you so much for your generous attention and your time. I hope I can go on with this and join soon the global community of researchers. Best,
Carlos
Peter Gordon and colleagues have done many studies on this topic. They are at least one side of the debate on the relationship between urban form and economic performance of the city.
I think comparing cities in different regions (such as European, American and Chinese cities) is going to be very challenging because you need to control for many social, political and cultural factors that are difficult to quantify and grasp. A better approach is to focus on cities in the same region (the macro scale) or even just one metropolitan area (the micro scale).
Dear Mr. Deng,
Thank you so much for your answer! I have checked some of Peter Gordon's papers, and I'm pretty sure that they will be a valuable reference. Thank you as well for giving me some advice on the possible approach to the scale of the research.
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