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Selected Land Use Theory

(http://faculty.washington.edu/krumme/450/landuse.html)

1. Introduction
   • Locational versus land use explanations of spatial structure
   • Three-dimensional 'space' versus two-dimensional 'land' (Kohl)
   • Land as a source of wealth: Population and urban growth (Henry George)
   • Rent & Utility: dependent variables in land use models (A. Marshall)
   • David Ricardo's fertility rent

2. Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783-1850)
   1819: first draft of "The Ideal State"
   1826: first edition
   1842: second edition

3. The Thunen Model
   1. (Initial) Assumptions
      • Objective Function: Maximization of rent (per unit of land)
      • Transportation & Transport Costs: linear transport cost/ distance function
      • Production/ cultivation: single products/ spatially uniform cost structures
      • Markets: at center only; given prices
   2. (Linear) location rent gradient for one crop: R=Y(p-c-fm)
   3. Several competing crops, all with linear rent functions
      • Conditions for zone/ring formation
      • Characteristics for center-proximic vs. peripheral land uses
   4. Several centers, boundaries of resource hinterlands, transport distortions
   5. Substitution among inputs, variable land use intensity (Found); disaggregating the cost function and allowing for transport costs and (spatial) price variations for inputs:
      • labor (wage rates)
      • monetary capital (interest rates variable in space?)
      • capital goods & material inputs
        1. purchased at center (or elsewhere)
        2. produced on premises (spatially variable opportunity costs)

   6. Farm size, scale economies, organizational considerations
   7. Multiple crops/ joint production; "interculture"; "intertillage" (Goodall)
   8. Technological change
      • in transportation
      • in production (intensity increasing or decreasing or neutral technological change)
        • Labor-saving, capital-saving, land-saving etc.
        • Technological change overcoming physical factors

   9. Population growth or decline, demand changes, price variations
   10. A dynamic von Thunen model with market uncertainty and recursive adjustments over time; (see Day & Tinney)
   11. Insights gained, principles derived, applications, critique

4. Readings in Agricultural Location & Land Use

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5. Urban Land Use, the Alonso Model
   1. Determinants of urban land use
   2. Basic indifference functions (Alonso, Ch.4, pp.59-61)
   3. Derivation of bid price surfaces for households (Alonso, pp.62ff)
   4. Location of urban businesses
   5. Third dimension, urban "space"
   6. Insights gained, applications, extensions, critique

Internet Sites Related to Land Use:

• The Land Institute The Land Institute has worked for over 20 years on the problem of agriculture. Our purpose is to develop an agricultural system with the ecological stability of the prairie and a grain yield comparable to that from annual crops.
• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a nonprofit and tax-exempt educational institution established in 1974. Its mission as a school is to study and teach about land policy, including the economics of land use. Integrating the theory and practice of land policy and understanding the forces that influence it are the major goals of the Institute. The focus of programs at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is on three broad areas of land and land-related tax policy. These are: Land values, ownership & property rights; taxation of land & buildings; land use & regulation.
• Agricultural Location and Land Use
• Three-Dimensional City
• Urban Economic Geography & Planning
• Sprawl Guide Home Page Problems: Land Consumption and Threat to Farmland. The agricultural landscape which surrounds most of our cities and towns is being converted to development at a still accelerating rate. Farmland is lost as subdivisions and malls with large parking lots are built. Asphalt replaces topsoil.
• Graduate Urban Economics Course Outline
  Urban Economics (Spring 1996) Course Outline. This course will treat the set of topics typically covered in a graduate urban economics course. (Bibliography!)
• Editorial: Soccer fields forever or farms for the future? Seattle Times, Sunday, April 6, 1997.
• No rosy sunset in the Growth Management Act [Seattle Times, Tuesday, March 11, 1997] House Bill 2244, the Legislature's look at the state Growth Management Act (GMA), gets too far ahead of itself with a recommendation that controversial hearings boards go out of business in December 1999

Literature:

Abrams, Charles. "The Use of Land in Cities," Scientific American, September 1965, pp.151ff.

Harrison S. Campbell, Jr., Residential Land Use [1998]

Fujita, M., "Urban Land Use Theory," in Location Theory (Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, Vol.5), (1986), 73-149, Section 1. (A good survey)

Platt, Rutherford H., Land Use and Society: Geography, Law, and Public Policy. Island Press, 1996. (Paperback, $30.--)

Basic Definitions:

Rent

A surplus (profit) or 'residual' accruing to a factor of production; here: accruing to land; resulting from some advantage, e.g. from a locational advantage.

Rent Gradient

A representation of the decline in rent with distance from market (center).

Intensive Agriculture

System of farming characterized by relatively high levels of factor inputs (capital [including fertilizer] and/or labor] per unit of land.

Bid Price / Bid Rent Curve/Function

A set of combinations of land prices and distances among which the individual (or firm) is indifferent; describes prices that the household (firm) would be willing to pay at varying locations in order to achieve a given level of satisfaction (utility/ profits). Bid price functions represent hybrid combinations of indifference surfaces and budget constraints.

Urban Economics, Urban Studies, Urban Planning (Courses & Programs)