A Crowded City: Agglomeration and Mobility in Urban Development

This paper examines whether interventions that improve density, mobility and connectivity can release a city’s potential

Abstract

When agglomeration economies are low and commuting costs are high, employment and residence within cities is matched at a very local level – giving rise to a featureless “Crowded City” in which neighborhoods look alike and all have mixed land use with both jobs and homes. This structure motivates the authors’ analytic framework, which examines whether mobility and connectivity are constraining today’s rapidly growing developing country cities and whether interventions that improve density, mobility, and connectivity can release a city’s development potential, including in terms of environmental quality and climate.

The paper also examines both formation of neighborhoods across the city as well as land use and size within a neighborhood.

This paper is an output of the Research on Growth and Urbanisation in Low Income Countries programme

Citation

Gunnar S. Eskeland and Somik V. Lall (2015) A Crowded City: Agglomeration and Mobility in Urban Development.

A Crowded City: Agglomeration and Mobility in Urban Development

Updates to this page

Published 20 August 2015